The Daily Beast Podcast - The One Time We Should Have Believed Marjorie Taylor Greene

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, when we should have taken Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene seriously. Plus! Semafor’s National political reporter, Dave Weigel, expands on the Republican party’s fresh new hell. Then, author Jonathan Metzl joins the show to talk about the MAGA mentality, and how we got here. 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. What an excellent show we have today.

Sebofor's national political reporter Dave Weigel is here to talk about the Republican Party's obscene amount of TV and internet ads that express a whole lot of anti-trans sentiments. And why voters may not respond the way the GOP is hoping for. Then we'll talk to dying of whiteness author Jonathan Metzel, but the magmintality that the right wing is embraced in just how we got here. But first, let's have some fun. So as we record this, Florida is still dealing with the remnants of Hurricane Milton, which hit it pretty damn hard, but thankfully appears not to have achieved the worst-case scenario that a lot of people were afraid of. And for that, I think we're all grateful.

And also that does not minimize the incredible destruction that it did wreak throughout the central and north of the state. I guess we talked about this, Daniel, a little bit on our last episode. But the disinformation and misinformation and misinformation and the attacks on meteorologists has been unbelievable in the last couple weeks, I guess, to the point where some meteorologists are getting death threats for reporting the news of the storm. We're seeing anti-Semitic attacks on officials at FEMA and Homeland. Security and elsewhere, because apparently we now live in a world where the old conspiracy theory, the Jews control the weather, is now pretty damn close to mainstream Republican ideology.

And, you know, we talked last time about Marjorie Taylor Green, tweeting out, of course, they can control the weather. You're a fool if you think otherwise. And it is truly unbelievable how much this has become part and parcel of Republican thought. And, you know, it got to the point where there were Republican officials who had to go out there and debunk these theories. And among the most sort of ironic of these was Christina Peshaw from the Ron DeSantis administration, having to post and talk about how harmful these conspiracy theories were and how all this misinformation is bad. And it was like, you know, lady, these are your people. Look in the mirror.

like this is what you've spent your career pushing. But it is truly, it's unreal. Again, what we've seen in the last week is unreal. And unfortunately, I think as we get closer and closer to the election, and even after that, I don't see this going away anytime soon. I think that the reality here is that we really need to make it clear that none of this was happening before Donald Trump came down that escalator. Yeah.

We were not seeing attacks on meteorology. attacks on librarians, attacks on politicians. We were not seeing the kinds of threats and violence that Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans have ushered in over the last nine years at all. It was infrequent at best. I'm not saying that we never had, obviously, we've had assassinations in this country.

Obviously, our history is a violent one. But what made America and separated America in terms of our elections, in terms of our information infrastructure was the fact that we had faith in our institutions and in our leaders. And Donald Trump and the Magua Republicans have undone that over the last nine years. The site of Joe Biden sitting in the White House to explain to Americans that hurricanes are not manmade was probably, and this is saying a lot, one of the lowest moments of his administration. because you would think that coming in and having to clean up after Donald Trump killed nearly half a million people because of COVID, because he told people to inject bleach and light and not wear masks, that that would be the lowest point of the Biden-Harris administration.

But no, you would think that, you know, it would be January 6th. But no, having the president of the United States in front of all the world, Explain that hurricanes are not manmade. Explain that FEMA is not going to take your land if in fact you take the emergency $750 that they are providing for immediate assistance is so incredibly insane and dangerous to the point where you have even had Fox News of all networks. fact check Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans to say, actually, you're talking about the fact that the vice president hasn't been in North Carolina. She's there right now. Oh, actually, you're talking about the $750, but that is for emergency relief, immediate relief. It is not the only relief. It is not enough to just laugh at these things anymore and say, oh, Marjorie Taylor Green is absolutely insane because she is. But when she told us, a couple of years, ago that she was not the fringe of the Republican Party, but the mainstream of the Republican

Party, we needed to believe her and take that seriously. Because what it is that they are saying and doing is altering our country and putting countless people in life-threatening danger because of their lives. It's beyond wild at this point. It stopped being comical because I don't know who the fuck thought Donald Trump was funny because he's not a fucking comedian. So Republicans have tried to convince us that any time that he says something, it's a joke as if he's doing fucking stand up. None of this is funny. No, none of it is remotely funny and it's killing people. I've brought this up before, but I used to have friends say to me, you know, who listen to the podcast and they say, oh, why are you talking so much about people like Marjorie Taylor Green?

She's a, you know, she's a fringe congresswoman. And I kept saying, yeah, you're wrong about this. And I felt a little like Morpheus in the Matrix saying, you think that's air you're breathing? And it's just like, this is the Republican Party. And obviously that has been borne out. I talked to someone yesterday living in Florida. She said, I hope those stories about FEMA in North Carolina taking people's things and not letting people in and stuff like that. She's like, I have heard all these stories.

And I said, well, they're completely not true. And her response was, well, I hope not. And, you know, I will say that she is of an age where I know she was getting. all of this from Facebook. I know that's her source on this. And it is just incredible the amount of energy and time that has to be expended by, like you said, by Joe Biden wasting valuable moments at a press conference about an imminent danger having to take time out of that to talk about how, no, the government's not controlling the weather and didn't create this storm. It's utterly shameful, not on Joe Biden's part, obviously, on the part of the people.

that are forcing all this to happen, that are forcing meteorologists to spend their time debunking idiot conspiracy theories while they're trying to alert people to, again, an imminent threat, a danger of potentially life-threatening danger that is coming in a day or two. And the people who push these theories, there are some who know they're lying. I mean, Donald Trump knows he's lying when he talks about the $750 from FEMA as if that's all they're getting. And when he says, things like the money's going to immigrants instead of disaster relief. He knows he's lying when he says stuff like that. But there are a lot of people who honestly believe this stuff. And, you know, a Rolling Stone piece had an unbelievable story about a meteorologist who corrected a male

commenter, I think on Twitter, who was saying that, well, a category five hurricane can turn into a category six and then it becomes a tornado. And it's like the fact that a meteorologist had to sit there and go, A, there's no such thing as a category six. B, tornadoes and hurricanes are two different things. Hurricanes can produce tornadoes and we saw that, unfortunately, with Milton. But they're not the same thing and it's got nothing to do with the categories. The worst of this is that, you know, instead of this person then saying, oh, I must have had bad information, they stick to what they quote unquote know to be true. And they kept going back at her saying anything above a category five would be a tornado. And this meteorologist, Katie Nicolao, A, has to keep dealing with this. And then she ends up getting messages saying things like, stop the breathing of those that made them and their affiliates.

Talking about the made them there is, I assume, the hurricanes. And this was basically a death threat. It sucks so much that this is the world we live in. And as you put it perfectly, it's not that this shit didn't exist before 2016. It did. But you would have to, except a pamphlet from someone that they had, you know, mimographed in their basement to hear these bizarre theories about weather control and harp and all that stuff. And now all of this is just out there. It's on Facebook.

It's on social media. It's Republican candidates. It's Republican actual office holders saying all this stuff. All of that, that escalation traces exactly back to, like you said, to Donald Trump descending that escalator. He's ground zero. Like he is ground zero for disinformation. and for the destruction of our faith in institutions.

That is what Donald Trump has done over the last nine years. You want to talk about Project 2025 and his desire to dismantle our democracy. He's been doing it brick by brick ever since he came down that fucking escalator. Like logic and sense have gone completely out of the window. We have a Republican Party, right? This mogified Republican Party that doesn't believe in science, that doesn't trust doctors that threatens meteorologists, librarians, and teachers, what does that all come back to? Is that for them, education is kryptonite. Critical thinking is their Achilles heel. And they will do

anything and everything to distort us from the reality that we are seeing and hearing with our own eyes and ears. It is like just being locked inside of a fun house of crazy mirror. and you don't know and can't find your way out. Like, that's what they have created. And so for me, it's like, as a former educator, I'm thinking to myself, like, did the person that is debating tornado versus hurricane category six versus category, did they take earth science? Like, was that a requirement?

Because I also go back to the fact that Ron DeSantis in Florida removed all mention of climate change. has changed what science curriculum is allowed to be taught. And oh, by the way, this state that has been rocked over the last two weeks by two historic hurricanes and a flurry of tornadoes, he denied $11 billion of federal aid from the federal government because he wanted to look tough to Donald Trump and the Maga Republicans. He turned it down. So I'm like, this is so much deeper than I think that we ever thought that it would go, that again, it was look at him, he's clickbait, he sells papers and does all these things as it

pertains to Donald Trump. And I said this the other day on social media. I'm like, I think that these people actually hate their constituents. Because I really genuine believe that they're trying to kill them. You tell folks not to wear masks during a global health pandemic. The one thing before we had testing, oh, by the way, that Donald Trump was fucking sending to Russia for the hoax that he didn't believe in, but he was certain to sell off and not even sell.

Just give, give COVID tests to Vladimir Putin to Russia when he was telling his own followers don't wear a mask and liberate Michigan and liberate Florida. And then on top of that, it's just like, oh, don't get out of the harm's way of these hurricanes. Hunker down. I saw a video, Andy, of this fucking idiot with a Trump flag in the midst of the hurricane trying to plant it. Like, you can't make this shit up. We could go on and on about this. I mean, it's at the point where FEMA has set up.

They have a webpage devoted to responding to rumors. And like, here's rumor. FEMA will only provide $750 to disaster survivors to support their recovery. Then it has to say this is false and explain why. The list is very long. It's two pages and it's obscene that they have to do this. But let's talk more about this, what you brought up about with Putin. And I want to make it clear because a lot of the news reports, particularly initially,

but even now I'm still seeing, keep referring to this as sent COVID tests to Putin. I want to make it clear. We're not talking about the tests that you. have in your little cardboard box in your home. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We're talking about the testing equipment, the equipment that hospitals use to run PCR tests and

stuff like that. The stuff that back then, when he sent them to Putin, hospitals were begging for. And Trump decided he needed to send them to his buddy Vlad instead of sending them to hospitals here, which is absolutely wild, particularly when you think about how there's nothing Maga likes more than to say, we're giving too much money to Ukraine or to immigrants, and it should be given to Americans. And here's their God emperor sending these testing machines to Vladimir Putin in Russia instead of sending them to hospitals here in America. So this is absolutely disgusting. And the best part of this is that Stephen Chung,

who is the Trump spokesperson who, he will say anything. he feels like, I was going to say, whether it's true or not, I'm not sure he's ever said a true thing in his life. He called these stories made up and referred to Bob Woodward, who broke this news in his new book, referred to him as a truly demented and deranged man. I have words for Bob Woodward. Yeah, I mean, that's a separate story. That's a separate issue. But Russia has actually gone ahead and said that the denials from the Trump campaign are not true. A Kremlin spokesperson said that, yeah, he did send us those machines. So it's just absolutely wild.

He got thrown under the bus by Putin. I mean, who doesn't? And I mean that literally. I know. Usually it's out a window. I want to make that. Right. And I was just going to say that.

I was just going to say that. Like, excuse me, I meant out of a window. Or I meant like accidentally, you know, being poisoned. You know what is wild and I'm sorry that I interrupted you. I need to say this about Bob Woodward. What the fuck? This is the man who became famous for breaking the story about Nixon. He didn't wait then to publish a fucking book in order to tell the American people what was happening at the time that it was happening.

But nowadays, I mean, how much shit is Bob Woodward sitting on? Because this isn't not his first fucking book where he, I don't know, I guess, forgot to tell the American public things that he was learning as he was writing his first book on Donald Trump and the Trump administration. And now we learn this. And it just comes in time for his October 15th release. Like what the fuck happened to your journalistic integrity, dude? Like it's just you need to sell books. Like, fuck about democracy. I'm so sick of these people. I'm so sick of. all of them, whether they worked inside of the Trump administration and then they wait until they get out so that they can write their tell-all, make a couple of million bucks, and then screw the rest of us. Like, I wanted to believe that legacy journalists like Bob Woodward were better than that, but evidently they are not. I'm outdone. I'm out-fucking done. Fuck that guy. I said it. So I generally don't watch a lot of network television, which means I'm spared the onslaught

of political ads that inundate the airwaves every election year. But I've been watching a lot of sports on your Fox, your NBC, etc. lately. Let's Go Mets. Sunday night football, things of that nature. So I'm getting bombarded with Trump ads, including anti-trans ones that end with the tagline, Kamala is for they, them, President Trump is for you. And this seemed to me like a bit of a fresh new hell. So when I saw that Semaphores National Political Reporter Dave Weigel wrote that over the past few weeks he had heard from voters in swing states that they were also getting bombarded with ads

about sex reassignment surgery and biological males, quote unquote, playing women's sports. I wanted to talk to him about it, and he joins me now. Dave, thanks so much for being here. Oh, thank you for having me. I really love this kind of story, no matter what, the impact of it is because one of those things where I was not obvious, a lot of people were not advertising that they put these ads out, but everyone I was talking to in swing states that started seeing them in the last week. Well, that's the thing. Like, I guess it's sort of when I saw your article and then I saw a couple others, New York Times, whatever, it's kind of nice to know that I'm not crazy and that this anti-trans push is something that's happening. And I'm in New York, so I'm not seeing swing state ads, obviously,

but it's not just Trump running these kinds of ads, right? Yeah, I noticed the Trump ones and my friends noticed that Trump ones first, and you describe them. They refer both times to an actual Harris policy. And so I'll put the table there. There are many ads. that go after trans people, trans issues, we'll get into a couple. The Trump ones on the air specifically go after Harris for favoring taxpayer-funded, sex reassignment, gender medicine, surgery, et cetera, for prisoners. And this is a policy in California. She presided over it when she was attorney general. Was there a little bit of controversy? Sure. It was not a big national hair-on-fire story that she did this. It was more attention-geting when CNN reported,

hey, when the ACLU is asking people if they supported these treatments for immigrants, who would be people in detention specifically, that she said she did support that too. So it's based on real things that Harris has supported. The first ad is just about the questionnaire, the immigrant part of this. The second one points to a prisoner who got this surgery. And I noticed, for example, when this prisoner in California got this surgery in 2017, this is a convicted murderer in the California pantatentiary system. The whole issue is, okay, this person who is identifying as a different gender,

what should be done before they were moved to perhaps a different prison, different cells related to her identified gender. That was a New York Times story in the front section, but on page 20 or something. It just wasn't a huge deal, and it's coming back to be an issue for the Trump campaign now. That's where they're going with this. And the they, them tag, that's our important part of this. I feel we're just describing the 30-second ads longer than takes to watch them. Sure. But it splices in footage of drag queens, of people who have been, I think, demonized by Republicans for the last four years or longer.

and then ends with Trump at a factory at a kind of campaign stop saying he's for you. What they're trying to do with it, and I talk you talked to the Trump folks, is say, Harris is just this crazy California liberal who's obsessed with these people, scare quotes in the air, while Trump is focused on jobs and the economy and interests like yours. And they think, election's not over yet, this cuts across to just all kinds of voters who say, why work hard? I want my taxpayer dollars going to that. I wish they focused on me instead of that.

The idea here is no matter what Harris actually supports economic terms, that you can just say, Yeah, well, she doesn't really care about that. What she cares about is these people. Right. And I just want to clarify, unless I'm wrong, like, basically her stance is, yes, we provide health care for prisoners and for people in detention camps or whatever you want to call them. And this is part of health care. So yes, that goes along with that. Am I describing that correctly? Yeah, you are. Actually, I remember 2021, I think. I went to Tijuana and wrote about an activist who was helping trans people who are. fleeing Central America, fleeing abusive homes, trying to get asylum, I should say, in the United States. And yeah, that was the issue. I'm not normally an immigration reporter with all of these things.

This is an issue that affects a very small number of people at edges of the system. And the idea from Republicans is, well, we want immigrants out. We want more people and we want criminals in prison and we don't want any benefits for them at all, especially this stuff. Right, exactly. So tell me about these swing state ads. You talk about ads in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Montana, I think it is. Yes. So the Senate Leadership Fund, which is the main Mitch McConnell super PAC, he has one nation two, but SLF does most of the advertising. They, a week ago, started running these ads, not with a they-them tag, but about trans. And I'll keep saying, I don't, I'm not trying to mangle the term. I keep saying anti-trans or transgender, just ads related to trans rights, period. They were running them against Sherrod Brown in Ohio and John Tester, Montana. And Tammy Baldwin, who significantly is the only openly gay member of the Senate, the first openly, openly, member of the Senate. Not that this is in her campaigns, it has come up, but rarely do Republicans try to remind people that she's gay. They've done a lot more in this race. So these Democrats haven't supported that policy is the thing. And some of these ads have been fact check, because for example, one of the ads accuses Brown of favoring quote unquote sex changes for minors,

which is illegal in Ohio, which he does not say he supports. It's based on him just not coming out hard against it. And all these Democrats have supported the Equality Act, which is a priority of LGBTQ groups that would basically prevent discrimination. This is like a lot of updates to the Civil Rights Act. It would say, okay, well, we know what the Civil Rights Act covers where it's also going to cover non-discrimination against gender identity, sexual preferences. And because the gender identity part, the way that Republicans interpret that is, well, they support a law that would make it illegal for you to say, I can't have biological men in a women's bathroom. I can't have biological men in women's sports. Therefore, you can just, you can extrapolate from there. And so the ads are based on that.

They're a little, I think in the little understatement. They're flimsier than the Harris had. And they're much more broad. And they've drawn, I wouldn't say a backlash, but they have been dinged in these states were saying, look, this is not true. These Democrats are not campaigning on that. The truth of it is, though, yeah, they support the idea that gender identity should be protected status in the law.

And Trump does not. And Republicans do not. This is one of Trump's promises he did this when he was president, which is where a lot of the backlash and a law of the questions of Democrats came from. The context for, for example, Harris, signing this ACLU questionnaire was that when he's president, Trump is rolling back this idea of gender identity as protected status. He is against, for example, military health care playing for any sort of gender medicine, sex reassignment surgery, et cetera. And Democrats say, well,

you're taking people's rights away. We're for that. This is the flip side of that. The ads do not say, and if elected, Republicans will ban this. They really just go after the Democrats. And all this, I want to repeat myself about the message being they care more about they, them than you. But that's the underlying thing. And this is also, I should say, we'll get into. to this. But this is in some places, states where this has been tried and just not been very effective. I mean, in Ohio, ads like this were run saying that the abortion rights amendment that passed 2023 was going to lead to sex changes for minors. And that passed by a landslide. It was a big story. That actually does lead to my next question, because for those of us who were old enough to remember

2022 and 2023, it feels like Republicans did try this sort of messaging. And it kind of failed them and maybe even worked against them, right? Yeah, and this is when you talk to, I'd say, Democratic campaigns and also the gay rights groups, the human rights campaign, victory fund, the groups that have been working on this, they're exasperated because I'd start the clock in 2019. For quite a long time, the social conservatives have been running ads about this. It starts really 2019 in Kentucky.

Andy Bashir is running for governor. It is a close race. He's got a big lead in some polls, but it's the theory of the American Principles Project, which is a social conservative group is that if people realize that he's not for defining sex as two genders and keeping trans, for example, what's mostly about keeping male to female trans women women's sports, that's going to wake people up. This is a conservative state. We're going to run ads about that. They run the ads he wins. In 2023, there are more ads about that topic.

And actually, Republicans in Kentucky who run both houses legislature passed this kind of omnibus gender bill, which includes this ban on exactly what the ads talking about. And Bashir vetoed it explains why he vetoed it, and he wins again. He wins by a bigger margin as an incumbent. In between, this is happening in lots of states and all these groups, the progressive LGBTQ rights groups say, every time this happens, we are told that this is going to be a problem for Democrats, and every time it isn't. So what is going on here?

The other part of it that they'll say is, look, there are trans people, some of them very young, watching TV in these states, and this is year after year of them being told that they are gross and they shouldn't exist. What does that do to them? is not a message that gets to Republicans. There are no Republicans saying, you know what, good point. This seems a little bit mean. Right. That is coming from some of these groups, yeah. So one of the things you say in your piece is that there's been sort of a shift in Republican thinking and in Republican strategy around this. And you say that this says a lot about how voters got

information five years ago and how they get it now. What do you mean by that? Right. This is the theory of conservatives is that it's not that they're trying something that's always bouncing off of voters' heads, it's not going to ever work. It is that every year there is more reporting on this. There are more stories about this. There are a few people watching the nightly news reading their paper, more people online and seeing, I didn't mention TikTok in the piece, but mention that kind of thing, saying so. And this, I don't think they're misled on this, that there are people who in 2019, you'd say, hey, boys might be playing girl sports that say, what? Or I don't care. What's that about? And then after hearing about Leah Thomas and

maybe refreshing Twitter, refreshing Facebook, seeing memes about Leah Thomas, you know, the male to female swimmer University of Pennsylvania competing there, listening to podcasts. I'm a big YouTube watcher, which I guess a lot of people are, but as a guy on YouTube who watches political content, I'm constantly getting these YouTube interviews of gender critical activists, interviews with each other, interviews with Joe Rogan, talking about the harm of this. They're pretty confident that just the culture is moving on this because of the overall revolution and how people get news and what media they pay attention to. The evidence for that, there's not a ton of polling on this.

And the New York Times is polling, especially in swing states, it said people just don't, they don't mind if people are identified by a different gender than the one they were born with. Gallup's polling when they've asked people about some of these issues. It has been dipping. It's not like a gay marriage where it was really increasing year to year for about a decade. And then it was legal thanks to Supreme Court, et cetera. There has been a backslide.

And there are people who say, oh, you can be a different gender than you were assigned at birth. Or, oh, trans athletes should be allowed to play in these sex segregated sports. That has been falling and they're just confident, yes, everyone laughs at us. You're going to laugh and laugh at us and then we're going to win. One of the people you quote in your piece, and you mentioned him earlier, is the, in my mind, absolutely repellent Terry Schilling, president of the, again, in my mind, despicable and transphobic American Principles Project. And one of the things he specifically said that he thinks is different now is he said,

Elon Musk bought Twitter. Yes. Yeah, that came from a conversation with him about this. I was asking, what wasn't the change? And I mentioned, is it that in 2022, or I should say 2020, Jack Dorsey owned Twitter, and there were a lot more engineers at Twitter who censored anti-trans speech or racist speech. And now Elon doesn't want to do that. Elon, for example, people have experimented in this, if you use the word cis, if you're referring to cisgender or CIS,

it sometimes will get censored. Elon personally, who's taken a very heavy hand in what Twitter is like, is very anti-trans, anti-gender identity, calls it the woke-mind virus, blames the woke-mind virus. That's his term for one of his children identifying as female after being born a son. He just personally is very invested in this. And it was one idea very clearly, and he's talked about this, why he bought the site, is because the Babylon B made a joke about Rachel Levine, the Biden administration health official who mailed to female trans woman. They made a joke about Rachel Levine. They were suspended from Twitter because of the restrictions on anti-trans hate speech. And Elon didn't like that. That's the thing

that got him rolling to buy the site. So what does Twitter look like now? Yeah, it is not stopping. Let's say you go on there right now and misgender or a bunch of people or talk about child mutilation, et cetera, et cetera, things that you might have not done because Twitter would have stopped you. You do them now. And Donald Trump does them. Trump is the bigger player in all this because like we were talking about this. Trump implemented policies to reverse the Obama definition of gender, et cetera. But then he didn't talk a lot about in 2020. He did in 2021 as he was ramping up. He got obsessed with especially the sports part of this. And he, in the last few months, I was at the Mom's for Liberty event where he said, he said this few times since then, oh, kids are going to

school and then they come home and they've had a gender surgery. I'm not trying to give him too much credit. What he's referring to, I think I can translate it, is yes, there is a controversy over whether a school, maybe a kid shows up at school and they identify as trans and at home they might feel unsafe. They might feel abused if they did so. Does the school have a responsibility to tell the parent, hey, your kid is identifying with a different name, different gender? That's kind of what he was referring to. In the usual Trump fashion, he just turned it into the most R-rated, crude version that wasn't really true. But he's just gotten more obsessed with it. So you have the Republican candidate, and a lot of it, media flows from him and what he says. You have the biggest social media discourse

site doing this. You have, I mean, a big story the last couple of years has been this Republican rearguard effort after 2020 to say we need less censorship on social media, even if that means people are being harassing, even if that means people are posting lies. This is some of the the fruit of it that you can now say things that would have been stopped before. And they do think the culture is changing because people don't feel afraid to say it. The culture changing back, I should say maybe to 2015, right? If you're in 2015, 14, and you're saying, well, Caitlin Jenner, you know, misgendering or something like that, that's kind of the norm in social and speech that they're returning to. The goal, of course, is just ending this because conservatives,

like Schilling, think that gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. It was misclassified when psychiatrists said it's not a mental mental disorder. You need to treat it like one. I mean, and I've talked to Schilling in the past and say, what's your, what's your future look like for, let's say I'm a trans person in America in 10 years. If you win, what's my future look like? And he's like, well, I hope you get a big settlement from the lawsuit from suing the people who gave you gender surgery or gave you a puberty blockers. Like his principle, which is shared by Elon Musk and apparently Don Trump, is that, no, this is not real. This is a disorder and we need to stomp it out. So I only have like a minute left, but I want to ask you, what did Democrats say about all this?

Are they doing anything? Do they seem interested in countering any of these ads? Yeah, that's a great question because this is what made Republicans confident this is working, is they didn't see Democrats getting up and fighting back. Let's say I run an ad. I'm a Republican. And I say my opponent wants to defund the police. Democrat will come out and say, no, I'm not going to defund the police. I never did.

Here's me and a cop. And they've not been running response ads on this. Some of the reporting on this, I wrote one of several stories this week. The Times wrote one. NBC wrote one. And the NBC story quoted some Democratic strategists anonymously saying, oh, this is pretty effective. I was in Texas writing my story and talked to Colin Allred, the Democratic nominee there.

And he's saying, like, just I'm a father and I don't think we should meddle in this. My position is that we shouldn't have the government meddling in this. We shouldn't be putting a thumb on the scale about how this is covered or how families treat their kids. And not to get too much in the weeds, but one thing that Ted Cruz in Texas is attacking him for is the defense budget passed with a bunch of Republican riders that, for example, prevent military health care from funding gender medicine. And all reds against that. And he's saying, yeah, I'm against that because I just don't want that to be a social goal of the defense budget. I think I'm more interested in funding the military than adding some social

pressure some conservative goals. Like they, they will defend it when you ask about it. They're just not going on the air about it. And their overall position is, look, it's just like abortion. You have bodily autonomy. We're not going to get in the way of certainly adults. We're not going to get in the way of parents. They have not gotten to the point where British politics, I'm getting even in a

further feel, but this is important. In UK, this happened over the last few years. And the Labor Party was very, was very pro. The idea of gender identity, protections for trans people. It was a conservative government that expanded and passed this. And they rolled it back because in the UK, you have natural health insurance. And the controversy became, wait a minute, we're all paying for these sessions that kids are going to where they're getting medication that halts puberty or pauses puberty, labor back down from that. That's kind of what Republicans want to happen here, but we don't have national health care.

So it's moved in a different direction because it's a lot more about the government preventing things that some people are going to be doing with their own money or their own health insurance they pay for. And Democrats are pretty comfortable defending that. I would say Harris has not come out and said, no, I was wrong to support this policy in California. And that's why Republicans are going to keep attacking here. They won't get in their chance of debate or something. But on these TV ads are saying, nope, no, she's on the record. She wants to spend your tax money on this. And yeah, the Democrats have not said, here's an ad about how wonderful this policy is.

They're just kind of, and there's a few of these balls that they're letting go past their heads this cycle. They're not respond to everything. Republicans do think, aha, if they won't respond to this, if they're not going to put their own money behind it, that means we're right. And that is the, you could say, pretty cynical theory behind why they're going to keep running these ads. I just have to hope that they are wrong and that the results from 2020, 2020, 2022, 2023, etc., continue. Dave, thank you so much. This was extremely illuminating. And I appreciate you coming on.

No, thanks for talking about it. I appreciate it. Folks, I am so happy to welcome back to the new abnormal, my friend, Dr. Jonathan Metzell, who is the author of Dying of Whiteness as well as what we've become. He is a brilliant mind on topics such as gun reform, on topics such as race relations in this country. And I'm so happy to welcome you back. Thank you. It's great to be here. So Jonathan, you and I get to talk every week on Woke AF. It is one of the highlights of my week on that show. And one of the conversations that we had last week I wanted to bring here, which is what I'm going to refer to as the Maga mentality. I think that nine years ago,

we laughed at Donald Trump. We laughed at this idea that this buffoon of a man could develop such a following, such a cult following. We thought that it was impossible. And here we are where just this week as yet another hurricane was barreling down on Florida that the president of the United States, President Biden, in the White House, had to get on camera and tell people that hurricanes are not manmade. He had to get on camera and tell folks that FEMA is not going to take your land, that the $750 of emergency relief is just that immediate emergency relief. but it is not all you will receive from the federal government. The president was forced to debunk all of the disinformation that is coming from Donald Trump,

Marjorie Taylor Green, and the entirety of the Republican Party. And I am just left shaking my head or banging it against the wall wondering how the hell did we get here, Jonathan? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think there are a couple ways to think about this that I think are important right now. And maybe relevant, maybe not. But I do think that, you know, we talked last week about whether it's useful or not to talk about Trump leading a personality cult. And I do think that, you know, there's a not insignificant amount of literature about this from political science, from sociology, from other academic fields that show how, at least for, you know, what we call the kind of Trump's core base,

that there is a kind of cult of personality, people who are very susceptible to honestly, whatever he says, but particularly when it's us against the establishment, us against the world, we're being oppressed in a particular ways, that in a way, his particular form of kind of victimization plus populism does lead people to, in effect, kind of believe whatever he says. And that's not everybody. Half the country supports him right now. But in terms of just this core base, I do think that it's been called either a charismatic leader or a cult leader or something like that. But you do see at times like this that you're leading people kind of off the gangplank and into the shark-infested waters. It makes in no concrete sense, except to say that this role of,

I guess you could rightly call it charisma, is in tension with what other people outside that framework might think of as well-being. And so these are really scary moments because it's not buffoonish. It's not funny at this time. You see the limitations of the arguments that Democrats often make, which is based in reason or facts or data or well, being things that we think are motivating people. But that's, I think Trump is showing that that's not motivating some segment of his, of his base. In 2021, the Netflix satire, don't look up, came out. And it captivated audiences, one, because we were in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So a lot of people were home and were watching this play out where they were living in areas, like many of us were in New York, where we were seeing refrigerator trucks that were holding literal dead bodies because there was no more room for them in the morgue. We were sheltering in place and being asked, you know, being told, I should say, not by the president of the United States to wear a mask. He told everybody to inject bleach. And don't look up was a satire, but it's where I see Maga right now, where you will deny aid, you will deny health care, you will deny relief, because Donald Trump and the Republican Party are feeding you lies. And so essentially, you're just going to choose not to look up. And we know right now, Jonathan, that it is half of the

population. Half of the population is locked inside of this mindset. And they are hurting themselves in order to follow along with this cult leader. And I just don't know if you think that there is any way that Democrats other than the president getting on television and saying that the lies are not true and please get the aid that you need for your own well-being and for your family is enough. Like what is it that you think would break through this mindset, this Q&ONN conspiracy theorist, like mindset that the Republican Party has a lock on right now. Yeah. I mean, Democrats, I think, have failed to recognize more recently the importance.

I mean, I think we're doing okay now, honestly, in the face of this. But I would say that the importance of a charismatic leader, as opposed to the leader who has all the right answers and the policy and the data and things like that. It's a moment right now where there's a lot of uncertainty. The world is a very uncertain place. We've got all of these events that feel biblical, you know, wars and hurricanes and frogs and locusts and all these kind of things. And so it's a moment where like people are looking for some kind of devotion. I do kind of feel that. And so the idea of somebody like Trump who comes in and says, you know, I can fix it and it's us against them and I'm your champion.

It's not true for all GOP supporters by any stress, but the people who are in this smaller subset that we talk about a lot who are not going to. to leave no matter if their own pants are on fire and Trump is saying your pants aren't on fire. It's kind of these moments, people who are in the hurricane disaster zone who are not seeing reality in front of themselves. So it's, again, it's not everybody in the GOP. But I would say that in moments of uncertainty, people are looking for a charismatic strongman, somebody who will answer their questions, give them a feeling of purpose in a particular way. And there are historical precedent. So it's not like, what does it take? What did it take? What did it take? to overturn Mussolini.

What did it take to overturn Hitler? It takes losing in a way. But I think it's important to note also that there are other people who have Trump's message, like DeSantis or other people who have not broken through because they don't have that mix of, you know, I hate to sound like a psychiatrist talking about people I don't know. But aren't you a psychiatrist? Yeah, well, I'm a psychiatrist. Armchair, because he's not your patient.

Got it. It's a mix of charisma, racial resentment, sociopathy. So it's not like everybody could get up and say what Trump is saying. There's a certain core characterological issue that leads to this particular kind of fever that doesn't work for everybody who it's not just his populist message. In fact, the message is often secondary to the psychology. But again, I've seen this very close when I was doing my dying of whiteness book. And we all thought that people would just embrace their own free health care under the Affordable Care Act. But when you play to these themes of victimization and resentment and racism and history,

that in a way it'll lead people to act in ways that from the outside seem to be against their own, what we would kind of call self-interest. But in the inside, their self-interest are living in a different planet, honestly. I love how you started your response with this notion of what is happening right now, around the globe in this country, whether it is the hurricane, the tornadoes, the fires, you know, the wars, that it does feel biblical. If that is a scripture and a belief that you follow, you know that there are points in there where they say, well, what will it look like? It'll look like the locusts coming. It'll look like this. It'll look

like the storms. It'll look like the fires. What pains me is that people are looking, it seems that those that follow Donald Trump are looking for a simple response to complicated issues. There is something about this desire to just follow rather than understand your own autonomy, your own level of critical thought and your own, frankly, responsibility of how we get into these places. And I wonder what it means then for a group of people to just want to be essentially sheepal, just these sheep that are following behind this man, who, who is the Pied Piper of Lies literally playing them over a cliff, but they're just willingly following,

thinking that he's going to throw them a parachute at some point. I was laughing because sheep, I haven't heard that since high school, so I'm happy to. I literally just heard it the other day. And I was just like, oh, this was so good. I haven't heard this in so long. So I had to say it. For me, it was like wearing my bell bottom pants and stuff.

So I'm glad the word is coming back. I'm bringing it back. Okay, cool. But I think it's important to ask you. yourself because there are other versions of charisma taking the front seat to policies that might be against people's interests. So it's not like any way a correlate, but think about like how excited we were on our side about, you know, when Obama was first coming and things like that. And if you weren't inside of our party or our feeling or something, you were like, why is everybody doing that?

So it's not like there's no role of charisma in politics. In fact, often it's the opposite. Bill Clinton was very charismatic leader. So this is just a. It's a pornographic extreme of things that in other contexts are seen as good things for politicians to have, which is being persuasive and being able to lead people and things like that. But when I ask this question because I interview a lot of people, it's not just like, oh, this person is screwing over and leading off a cliff, which often they are. I mean, these false promises. A lot of people still have Trump stakes in their freezer that they're waiting to law or buying these, you know, Trump coins or Trump watches or Bibles or whatever. And so it does feel from the outside kind of like a Ponzi scheme or a shell game. But I think it's important when you interview people to say, what is being promised?

What is the benefit that people see? It's not like they're just all zombies. And so part of what I think people feel, and, you know, again, it's varied. He has many different kinds of supporters is a connection to power, to winning, to making your enemies pay for their transgressions. There is a promise of the opposite of weakness. He's promising people victory in power. And I think that's very palpable for people. I mean, it'll be interesting to see with this coming election how many different kinds of people

who may or may not have voted for Trump in prior elections are either repulsed by this or are joining the Trump brand because he's promising power over your enemies or payback or things like that. And so I think the important thing to think about in this is what do people in the inside of this framework feel like they're getting from this system because materially it's not promising them. The things that you might think from a logical standpoint, you know, health or safety or well-being are benefits, but you could argue that that's often what certain forms of religion often promise people, which is a belief system, not a material gain.

That is so important for us to really think about because when you bring up the political leaders on the left, when you bring up Obama and Clinton, in particular. What I most remember about Clinton, for instance, which was like a hundred years ago, was this idea of empowering people. And Obama then expanded upon that in such a huge way. But it was this idea that we are what makes America great, that it is this can-do attitude. It is the people, we the people, the yes we can of Obama, that had us feel this sense of patriotism and pride in our country and in ourselves and our responsibility as citizens. Donald Trump actually does the complete and total opposite. He is telling his people that just vote this one time, this last time, and then

you never have to vote again. You never have to worry about having any power. Oh, women, you don't have to be, don't worry a little pretty little head about abortion. I took care of that. You don't have to worry about these things. And so what does it say, just like I guess the psychological breakdown of this idea that on one hand, you have a party that is trying to empower people into believing and understanding their personal power and their personal ambition and our interlocking fates as citizens, where on the right, you have a figure who is like, You don't need to have any power. You don't need to worry about anything.

I got it under control. Well, the irony. And I think about this a lot because disclosure, it's the book I'm writing right now about this very question, which is what is being promised here. And what's being promised is not building. It's dismantling. And so the power that people feel and the irony, of course. So he's saying, I mean, there's a ton of different forms of mistrust of government, mistrust of elites, mistrust of all these things that Trump on one hand embodies.

their hand attacks. And so he's kind of promising, it's not like I'm going to build anything for you, but I will take things apart. And so he's promising destruction, chaos, dismantling. Now, the irony, of course, is he's proposing to replace that with much more government, much more authoritarianism, much more control. And so it doesn't make any coherent logical sense, except that it plays to this deep need to people who he's saying, I'm standing up for you because, as he said to the NRA, I alone can fix this or I will protect you or these kind of things. The extreme irony is it's an anti-government populist platform that if implemented is going to lead to exponentially more government, more power, more control for this centralized leader. But again, it's just there's so much resentment right now about, you know, let's own the libs, the pro or anti-Palestinian Gaza people, the pro or anti-anyi-everything.

And so it's just incredibly, incredibly tribal moment. For me, from a psychological standpoint, it's not surprising that people are looking for a tribal leader or a warlord or somebody right now who feels like he's going to defeat the other tribes, people are against. But of course, again, this whole conversation is highlighting the ironies. The tribalization is what Trump created in the first place. Yeah, it's just I think that while I'm excited for your next book, because I think that the psychological remit. of cultism, of this disempowering figure who wants to disempower everyone around him while absorbing all of their power and centralizing all of their power in himself is incredibly frightening. And I think that when I look at it in the shadows of this moment where we have

one natural disaster coming after another that is more impactful, more damaging than the last one and people like who normally would come together at this time of great trauma have instead gone into their corners. It just shows that he's succeeding. And you know, you said like, what will it take, you know, the toppling of Mussolini and Stalin? And I'm like, but Donald Trump lost the election in 2020. And yet here we find ourselves. And final word. Yeah, Hitler lost and then he won. I mean, there's plenty of examples of fascists who lose and then go back and regroup and then come back kind of like, you know, Ghostbusters or something. They come back as the State Puff marshmallow man. And so in a way, having lost once was, you can just see it. It led to

even more consolidation. The threat is actually greater right now than it was before. And so one important thing is we're taking the threat more seriously now than we did in 2016. And so that's one thing to rally around is we know what we're up against. Well, we will leave it there today. my friend, Dr. Jonathan Metzell, always appreciate your insight and analysis. Thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal. Anytime. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody.

Andy, how are you closing out this, oh, God, week with your fuck that guy. Yeah, I guess it's sort of a, I don't know, maybe a group fuck that guy. Hmm. A fuck that guy, orgy, I guess. Oh, dear. So remember Brett Kavanaugh, Danielle? Is the name ring a bell? I can't ever forget him, but please, go ahead.

He's the Supreme Court Justice who faced a lot of grilling about a sexual misconduct and that really what we're talking about is rape. So back while he was being vetted and back while the hearings were going on, the FBI did an investigation. And Donald Trump, who was president at the time, obviously, said that the FBI would have free reign to look into these claims. and according to a new report issued by Democratic Senator Sheldon White House, and I know you're going to be shocked by this, Daniel, Donald Trump was not telling the truth.

Hmm. So weird. In fact, the FBI was directed to conduct a very limited inquiry, and they were given one week to do it, and they were never authorized to independently probe the sexual misconduct allegations. Instead, any messages that were sent to the FBI tip line about Kavanaugh were forwarded directly to the White House and never probed, as Beth Reinhardt at the Washington Post writes. The FBI was given no written protocols for this investigation. The FBI was instructed by the White House to talk to 10 potential witnesses and was not given the leeway to pursue corroborating evidence. And then, of course, the fact that they didn't find any corroborating evidence because they were not allowed to look for

was then used by senators to vote to confirm Kavanaugh because they got up there and said, see, the FBI didn't find any corroborating evidence. So all of this is just, I know we're at the point where we're supposed to say, oh, and you're surprised. And it doesn't matter if we're surprised or not. What matters is that it keeps happening and it needs to stop. And obviously, you know, if we have another four years of Trump, all of this is going to seem like a drop in the bucket compared to what's going to be coming down the pike.

But yes, you get tired of looking at one outrage after another and having to say, we can't let this happen and saying, look at this. Look what they're doing. It becomes really easy to just sort of consign it all to the status of like white noise and just, you know, background stuff. But it is so important. I mean, particularly now we're a month away from less than a month away from the election. It's absolutely unbelievable that all this stuff is going on and continues to go on. And I just feel like it needs to keep being pointed out, even though sometimes it really does feel like you're banging your head against the wall. I don't mean that with regard to our listeners, of course, who, as I may have said before, are some of the smartest and most attractive people in the world.

But I have to feel that our listeners probably feel this way, too, trying to talk to people who are either voting for Trump or who are on the fence or whatever. I'm so sick of all of this. I'm sick of having to point it out. And so I'm sick of the fact that it's happening. So fuck those guys. Andy, you mentioned that, you know, if Donald Trump gets another four years. The fact is, is that like Donald Trump, if he becomes president again, is not just going to get another four years. And all of the things that were buried, that were hidden, that we're still trying to dig ourselves out of now and understand what his government was doing.

what happened with Kavanaugh and what was hidden and what was lied about is just the tip of the iceberg. And so if Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans get hold of the White House and get hold of government again, it's done. We will just be, it will be a banana republic. There will be no laws. There will be no rules. Everything will be done in order to cover up their criminality until they get to the point where the American people are just so. beaten down, they don't even have to cover it up anymore. And they just do it blatantly in front of our faces. Like, Kavanaugh should not be sitting as a Supreme Court justice. And they know that. Just like

fucking Connie Barrett shouldn't be there. All of these things came from lies and deceit and we just kind of sit with them like they're normal. And they're not. For the sake of quote unquote preserving institutions, we just allowed the Republicans to run roughshot over the Supreme Court. But they will. do so and continue to do so over the entire country if they're ever allowed back to have power again. And they'll never, never give it up. So fuck those guys. Danielle, before we get to your fuck that guy, I want to ask you a question. If you are saying that these things are not normal, then what are they? The new abnormal.

Thank you very much. You're welcome. So who is your fuck that guy to officially close us out for this week? Yeah, I don't even know what we call it anymore. Right now, you have a bunch of Republicans that are going on their lie toward a force with regard to hurricane relief that are talking about how FEMA doesn't have any money. They're not receiving the aid in their red states, yada, yada, yada. And there is one person who is responsible for that, which is Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson, when President Biden, asked him to hold a vote to increase the aid for FEMA, for hurricane relief, ahead of the hurricane season, he said, nah, I'll wait until after the election.

As if these storms were going to wait until after the election to kill over 200 people, destroy millions of homes, wipe out whole entire towns. And so now a group of just Democrats, because apparently they're the only ones that actually care about America and Americans, have written a letter to Mike Johnson to say that before they head out on yet another fucking holiday break, we need to come back and vote on FEMA funding to increase the aid because hurricane season now extends way into November. Mike Johnson, nah, I'll wait until after the election. Because after the election, if Donald Trump becomes president again, guess what they're gutting. FEMA. Guess what else they're gutting? Noah. They're going to gut every agency and everything that would actually help in dealing with the type of climate change supercharged storms that are now becoming our norm.

Mike Johnson is nothing more than a lackey of Maga, who is just trying so desperately to hold on to one of the worst jobs in America, which is wrangling a bunch of like, I don't know, Maga cats in heat, and going to screw the American people in the meantime. It's just like, I don't know how these people have jobs. I don't know how they keep getting voted in. I know that voter suppression and gerrymandering are real, but the fact that anyone would vote against their own best interests over and over again just to screw people that they don't like, but they don't care that they're getting screwed in the process is fucking wild and I will never understand it. But for that reason, Mike Johnson, Fisher Price Speaker of the House Part 2 is my fuck that guy.

Yeah, I just have two things to add to that. First of all, Danielle, Mike Johnson is a man of deep faith. we have to be respectful of that. I think that's very important. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes, please, please treat that with all the seriousness I meant it. And the second one is, man, I got to say,

Noah is going to turn out to be the most aptly named federal agency if we don't get a handle on climate change and start doing something about it. 100%. 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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