The Daily Beast Podcast - The Real Reason Mark Robinson's Staff Quit in Droves

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy react to North Carolina gubernatorial campaign of Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and his pornography bombshell. Plus! Blake Chastain, host of the Powers and Principalities podcast and writer of the Post-Evangelical Post newsletter is here to tell us all about his new book and the rise in power of white evangelical Christians inside the Republican party. Then, activist and recovering addict Ryan Hampton joins us to tell us all about his new book, “Fentanyl Nation: Toxic Politics and America's Failed War on Drugs.” 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 Campbell 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 a great show we have for you today. Blake Chastain, host of the Powers and Principalities podcast and writer of the Post-Evangelical Post-Newsletter, is here to tell us all about his new book, Ex-Fangelical and Beyond, how American Christianity went radical in the movement that's fighting back. Then, author and activist Ryan Hampton joins us to tell us all about his new book, Fentanol Nation, toxic politics and America's failed war on drugs. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, I know it was a tough weekend for you, one of your favorites, North Carolina

Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who is running for governor of that state on the Republican ticket. A big report came out from CNN on Thursday after we recorded Friday show, naturally. But basically, they found a bunch of comments. that he had left on a porn forum called nude Africa, because of course it is. And among other things, he referred to himself as a black Hitler. He called himself a black Nazi. He thought that the bringing back slavery would be a great idea.

And he said he would like to own some. He said he enjoyed watching trans and talked about a time that he spied on women in a locker room. The list went on and on, and all of it, with the exception of watching trans porn, which is nobody's business, except that he is as anti-trans as it gets. But with the exception of that one, all of it horrible stuff. And he's trying the old, it wasn't me, defense. Mm-hmm. And the shaggy defense, yes. Exactly.

And nobody's buying it. and pretty much all of his campaign staff has now quit. So go ahead, Danielle, defend him. He's fucking insane. Like, honestly, there is nothing that one could say, although J.D. Vance has tried, that is redeemable about Mark Robinson. The minute you as a black man,

regardless of the things that you say would try to escape your skin as much as possible, guess what, my friend, they bring back slavery, you're not going to be in the house. I just want to let you know that. And that all of those friends that want to pat you on the back and say that you're one of the good ones or one of the good blacks or whatever Trump does when he points out the limited amount of pepper and the sea of salt that is his rallies, it is obscene. It is depraved in so many different ways. And the reason why I say depraved is because the way that Mark Robinson has speaking so.

disgustingly about the LGBTQ community, so disgustingly about trans people. And then to turn around and have the fucking audacity, the audacity to make the comments that he did with regard to sexualizing trans folks, but not humanizing them. Mark is the absolute problem. And like I keep saying, I did not think that it was going to be possible for there to be a worst black Republican candidate for any office outside of Herschel Walker. But Mark said, hold my beer, okay, and came in hot and strong. The fact that there are people still left at his campaign, what? There were no job wanted signs anywhere on your street, anywhere in your community that you could go. Because this on your resume, this ain't going to be it. This is not going to be it. Yeah, I just, the fact again that

J.D. Vance, when asked directly about, about him, tried to say that, oh, he didn't, Mark says he didn't say those things and I don't not believe him is what his response was. Sir? English major, you are not, but also not that bright. Yeah. And again, let's not forget. This is a guy that Donald Trump, not only endorsed, but called, I think the phrase was Martin Luther King on steroids? Yes. And- Yes, that was the- Yeah, and tried to hype him up, despite the fact that, of course, Mark Robinson hates Martin Luther King and referred to him as a communist. And look, all these people who resigned, let's be honest.

Mark Robinson has a history of making, as you said, anti-LGBQ remarks. He has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks. And none of that bothered these people. Clearly, the only reason they resigned is that they figured out that he ain't going to win. And this has nothing to do with morals, nothing to do with ethics, nothing to do with anything because if you're supporting a guy and working for a guy who has said just the most vicious things about Jews, about queer people, and that's an incomplete list, you're not suddenly. upset about something like this, unless, of course, the fact that he actually said he liked watching

trans porn was too much for them, which I suppose is possible. There's new billboards up in North Carolina that are paid for by the Democratic National Committee, and they say various things. One of them says Trump on Mark Robinson, we have to cherish Mark. He is an outstanding person, an incredible gentleman, which is just great that the DNC and the Harris campaign are doing this. And Robinson is who he is. He's always been this person. He's horrible. The fact that he's even the Republican nominee for governor is, speaks volumes about the North Carolina Republican Party and about the people that voted in that primary.

But he has to be tied to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance every time because he is tied to them. And so I think it's great that the DNC is not running away from this. Why run from it? Like run through the tape on it because there is nobody that expresses the Republicans' ideology and point of view. And it's always funny that there never seems to be a bottom until it comes to like some type of sex. Then all of a sudden it's like, oh, we don't know this guy. But all of the things that you listed before, they were okay with. But that, this was a step too far.

Miss me with it. I'm excited for his election day. Let's just say that. However, I guess to what I'm not excited about for election day is the kind of shit that is being polled right now in Georgia, among other places, because my God, there's just a list of red states that are really trying to rewrite the rules less than 50 days to go into the election. But I think that Georgia right now takes the cake with wanting poll workers to hand count millions of ballots to slow walk the results of the Georgia race, to add more obstacles, to add more injury, to insult in the way that they have pulled polling stations from black districts where they have black every year, every election year.

There are lines that are hours and hours long. What was it in 2020, they pass laws that. that made it a criminal act to supply people with water and snacks in line and now this. It is just like I'm, I don't understand, again, where Merrick Garland's Department of Justice is. I don't understand why this state is not dragged into court over and over again. Like, this is exactly what Chief Justice John Roberts wanted when he overturned and gutted parts of the Voting Rights Act. where he gutted the pieces that would have disallowed states that were under preclearance to change their voting laws because of their history and patterns of racism and obstruction and obstructing the civil rights and civil liberties of black voters. And so this is where we are.

So it is just like we know human era. And what I see, Andy, is that Republicans want a remake. of 2000. They want this to be kicked up to either the Supreme Court, which we know is Mogafide, or to the House of Representatives, which right now is in the hands of Republicans. But what they definitely do not want is the people of this country deciding this election. 100% all of that. We're already seeing shenanigans in other states. I think it's in West Palm Beach. Tim Walz's name was misspelled on the ballots. It was spelled as Tom. Walls, and we're seeing stuff going on in Ohio.

This is absolutely strategic, and it's absolutely all of this is aimed at sewing chaos and throwing doubt and anything they can do to avoid a victory by the Harris Wall's ticket. And it's at the point where you've even got the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensberger, And the Georgia Attorney General raising concerns about this, the Attorney General says he doubts that this move will withstand legal challenges. And Raffinberger has stated straight up that they have, you know, this is unnecessary and has nothing to do with preventing fraud. Because that's the excuse they always use. They always claim that it's going to prevent fraud when in reality what they want to do is help. fraud. And yeah, it is absolutely a strategy and it's being played out in more than a handful of

states. And I really hope that the federal government does, takes as close a look as it can at what's going on here. It's just obscene. Do you know what I'm saying? Like I was reading reports recently where they were talking about the timeframe of 2019 to 2022 and how democracies around the world have backslid. And one of the ways to test the strength a country's democracy or a state in terms of their policies is voting. How hard or easy is it for people to vote? And we live in a country where we do not, we have one party, only one party, in a two-party system that does not want Americans to vote. And it still baffles my mind that people vote Republican

and believe that somehow some way their Republican vote should count more than mine as a Democrat. And I just wish that we lived in a normal country where, guess what, the person with the most votes wins. That we didn't have a racist electoral college that was only created. in order to give southern states and rural states the same amount of weight as those that are heavily populated. Go back to like the three-fifths compromise.

Like there is no validity to having the electoral college still exist. When every other election that we have is, how many votes did the mayor's race get? The person with the most votes wins. It's easy and simple math. But the reason why Republicans fight tooth and nail is because they know that they will never, ever win an election again if everyone's vote counted the same. And so they do shit like this, all of the gerrymandering, all of the voter restrictions, all of the voter suppression.

And guess what? Donald Trump's still fucking lost in 2020. But we should not have to produce a Herculane effort each and every election cycle just to have our voices heard. That to me is obscene. Yeah, it's insane. The electoral college is insane. It's been a pet peeve of mind for decades. The fact that we have 50 plus elections for president in this country is nuts. It just, none of it makes any sense.

I just want to quote Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, who said he called the Georgia hand-counting rule. He said, it's an effort to turn the democracy on its head. And I think that's 100% right. And that's what we've been saying, too. but I think it's so important that someone like Senator Warnock is out there saying that and warning people as to what's going on. And I just want to vaguely correct something I said earlier. It's not West Palm Beach, where Tim Walz's name was spelled as Palm Beach County in Florida. It's the county.

And I guess it was only done with 257 electronic ballots and they caught the mistake, whatever. I would like to remind people that Palm Beach County in Florida was where we had the hanging chads in 2000 to bring it back to. what you were saying earlier. And speaking of the election, which we are now well under 60 days away from, over the weekend, Kamala Harris agreed to a debate on CNN on October 23rd, and surprise Donald Trump has said no. He gave some weird excuse where he said it's too late. Voting will have already started. Yet he's still campaigning. Yeah, right, exactly. Is he going to stop campaigning now that early voting is starting in places? No, he's not. Again, the DNC, which, look, I don't know if this is because of the replacement of Biden with Harris on the ticket,

that the DNC seems to be a lot more nimble and a lot more open about its campaigns, but they are putting up billboards featuring Trump's face on a chicken. And basically, going out there and just calling him a coward for refusing to debate. Again, I'm happy to see it. But I do feel like this is some kind of huge change going on here with the DNC. You mean them actually calling people out and doing? Yeah, exactly. I think that the change has come ever since the top of the ticket changed and they have new energy and are not hiding. I don't think anyone thought that after the first vice president

and twice impeached sexual assault or matchup, that we were going to see Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage again. Like, that was not going to happen because he, there is no way that he would do better. Like, there's no way he was going to turn that around. She would do better. Like, I think that the Zingers would be harder.

I think that the looks would be sharper, all the things. But like, do we really think that Donald Trump, for a second debate, was going to stay on message and task and do anything other than walk out screaming they're eating cats and dogs? I don't think so. But I love this energy. Keep it up. I love this energy.

DNC. It's nice to see. So let's, before we get out of here, let's talk about the bizarre story that came out Thursday night. specific. I know. The other bizarre story. Thursday night, Danielle and I were talking before this, and we got screwed because we always record the Friday podcast Thursday afternoon. And the Mark Robinson stuff broke after that. And then there was this. There was the revelation by Oliver Darcy at his newsletter status that journalist Olivia Nutsi had been engaged in a some kind of

crossing the line affair with presidential candidate RFK Jr. And it eventually got to the point where it was like, it wasn't a physical thing, but there was the sending of nudes, perhaps. And it became a huge thing among the journalist and the journalist adjacent people that I know. And I was saying before the show, I've never been in so many different text conversations across so many different apps at the same time as I was Thursday night. It was absolutely insane. So, yeah, it's salacious and whatever.

But there's an important thing in here, and that is that Olivia Nutsuio is adjourned. And first of all, R.K Jr. is a garbage person. And he has repeatedly cheated on wives. He has been accused of sexual assault. And his defense was basically that, yeah, he got up to a lot of shit. when he was younger. So that's him. What Olivia Nutsi did was really bad. And I think it's important to say that because we've been seeing now some journalists defending her or trying to minimize this. I'm thinking of, in particular, Ben Smith, who runs semaphore, wrote a piece that was absolute

garbage, basically saying this is no big deal, that journalists do a lot of things to get close to sources. He threw something in there about the fact that he's heard from a lot. of British journalists who are saying, why is this even a big deal, as if that counts for anything? And no, that needs to be pushed back on. What she did was completely unethical. She got involved with someone that she wrote a story about. And whether or not she wrote another piece about that particular person, she certainly made

comments about that person and about how it was a three-man race for the presidency. and every step she took in this was unethical. From a journalistic perspective, again, we can leave out the morals, the fact that she was engaged to someone while this was going on. That's not our business. Again, it's the journalistic improprieties here, the unethical conduct here should not be minimized, I think. Yeah, I will echo what many women journalists said on social media, which is this like any other industry is extraordinarily hard for women. And the damage that she did, particularly for young women journalists at this point, cannot be underscored. And we already have issues these days as we talk about often with journalistic integrity.

And this was just another example of that lacking in extraordinary fashion. Like, it's embarrassing. Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal for the very first time. Author, fellow podcaster, Blake Chastain, who is the author of a new book that is out now, Ex-Vangelical and Beyond, how American Christianity went radical and the movement that's fighting back. Blake, welcome. Thank you very much. for having me. I am so excited to talk to you because I feel like I have been talking about

the rise in power of white evangelical Christians inside of the Republican Party, probably for as long as I've been podcasting. And we've seen it play out. We're seeing it play out in terms of Donald Trump's numbers and popularity within the community. We're seeing it bear out in terms of of the conservative members on the Supreme Court and the decisions that they are making based on their own religious proclivities. And I want to give you an opportunity to talk to us about, for those that don't know, tell us in like, you know, a 101 kind of classroom style.

What is evangelicalism? And what is the difference when we're talking about white evangelicalism? Yeah, that's a great question. and actually it's one of the sort of favorite pastimes of evangelicals themselves is deciding who does and doesn't count, so to speak, as an evangelical. So oftentimes you'll ask someone or you'll ask a group of evangelicals and you'll get a number of different responses. For a long time, what evangelicals have really tried to use to distinguish themselves from other forms of Christianity is a theological tenets. And since the 80s, the sort of ghost,

to quick thing to reference in a lot of more academic circles or more high-minded places is what's called the Bebbington Quadrilateral. And that is really this belief within four different types of tenets of Christianity. One is conversionism, meaning that you have some sort of born-again experience. Another is cruciscentrism, which means you highlight the crucifixion and the resurrection. Another is activism, just meaning you are evangelical about your faith, and then a high opinion of Scripture. Now, this is what a lot of evangelicals, especially those who want to distinguish themselves from people who may be behaving badly at a given time in history.

That's what they tended to look to to reference and define evangelicalism. But there are other lenses that you can bring to define what an evangelical is. And you can look at sociological markers and cultural markers, and especially since the 80s and 90s, an entire consumer marketplace has been created that you can listen to only Christian music and only go to Christian schools and only read Christian books and all these sorts of things. And so there are a number of people who have been looking at it more from that angle in recent years. Probably most well known is Jesus and John Wayne by Christian Cobus Dume, which really does encapsulate a lot of those cultural elements in addition to all of those other.

things like denominational affiliation and things like that. So evangelical is often sometimes you will get people who love to display hairs about what evangelical means, but oftentimes you can also sort of, to reference the old Supreme Court adage, you can also know it when you see it. That can also apply to evangelicalism. You had another point there, which was what is it about white evangelicalism. The reason why it's important to add that modifier, is that there are multiple strains of evangelicalism.

There is a strong historic black evangelical tradition. And it is distinct in a number of ways from white evangelicalism. And white evangelicalism needs to be highlighted in order to really show the places that it's complicit with things like white supremacy. And you can also use that as a lens to see people within the history of evangelicalism who may have been abolitionists, whether or not they had limits to their abolition, that, you know, that can be measured based on that person. But whiteness is a significant part of evangelicalism,

especially white evangelicalism, even if it's not explicitly the focus. It is a normative part of a lot of evangelical spaces. Yeah, and I think that it's, you know, it's important to make the distinction for those that are listening to because I am always very clear that when I am speaking about the role that religion has in politics, when I'm speaking about white evangelical Christians, it is a very different sect. And I will go so far, and I'm not putting words in your mouth, this is me, will go so far that

white evangelicalism has made peace with white supremacy, has made peace with misogyny, transphobia, homophobia. To the extent that they can get their greater desires met, they will both either ignore, or for those that are more radicalized, uplift the types of demeaning and dehumanizing rhetoric that comes from a party that they have created an allegiance with in order to gain power in our judicial and political systems. And I wonder for you, as the person who coined ex-Vangelical, what were some of the reasons for that coining that you did on social media, it is also the title of your of your podcast. What did what did it mean then to leave and the reasoning and the kind of the why for yourself, but what you're also seeing

in the greater movement of those that are finding more solace as ex-vangelicals than they are inside of the current church? Yeah, that's a great question. And to answer that, I would I will talk a little bit about my own story, then sort of expand into how that is reflected in broader patterns. I'll sort of start with college. So I was really deeply invested in the 90s, early 2000s in youth group culture, which was that was like, if you were on fire for God, there were a lot of great bands and all sorts of other stuff. And it was like this sort of zenith of, at least it felt like that to me of like Christian culture. And at the ripe old age of 17, I felt a call to ministry and made my choices of college and everything accordingly with the thought that I would go to seminary

and become a pastor. My freshman year was in 2001 and 9-11, sort of changed the entire trajectory because what really became part of my experience was that this cognitive dissonance between what I was learning in a lot of my religion classes as a Bible major and what I was learning in my history classes as a history major. I was a double major. And the things that I was learning in those spaces were in such direct conflict with one another. At least that's how it felt to me is that I was learning about this figure, who Jesus of Nazareth, who we call the Prince of Peace. And in other circumstances, there was this steadfast support for, well, become the war in Iraq. And those things were hard for me to reconcile.

They didn't feel like they could be reconciled. And as time went on, I sort of went away from involvement and came back and tried to find other ways to engage within more progressive parts of evangelicalism. But a lot of progressive evangelicalism has an uphill battle, even historically. A number of progressive evangelical movements have tried to reform evangelicalism from within and really seen their influence either diminished or just, run up against the steadfast conservatism of those who maintain the most amount of power and influence in these spaces. Whether it's a religious space or a social or political space, the conservatives are the ones who sort of rule the day. And that's been the case for decades. And over time, as more people sort of began to explore other parts of their identity, whether they're queer or a person of color,

they find that they cannot be fully affirmed in evangelical spaces because of beliefs are within evangelicalism that do not fully affirm those parts of their identity, but that part of themselves. They often lose community and lose their sense of belonging, but they have to leave in order to maintain that sense of self. And that's why a term like ex-vangelical is valuable because it shows that you had a formative experience in these types of spaces. and you are no longer in them, but they had a significant part of your life.

It wasn't that you just happened to attend, you know, once or twice a year. The people that use this term, even for a little while, are usually the people who were deeply invested, then ran into the boundaries and limits of what evangelicalism affirms and then have had to find other places to belong because they couldn't find it within the evangelical church. You know, and that is just unfortunate. My hat comes off to people who really do try and do the work to reform systems from the inside out. But then I feel a sense of empathy, I guess Blake would be the right term, for those that are pushed out of a church and a religion that they felt connected to and wanted to be a part of.

I'm glad to hear that folks in their sense of looking for reform can connect with one another. What does it say then about evangelicalism where so many people are leaving in droves to the point where the Republican Party is wanting to take it upon themselves to then make you a convert by force, where you have senators like Josh Hawley, who have said things to the extent of America is a Christian nation? That to me is, well, if we can't willingly recruit people because society is changing and ideologies are changing and shifting, then we're going to force feed it to you. Yeah. And that is the part that I think can become very difficult to track when you, especially are talking about someone's individual faith, someone who they were either born into a faith tradition or they converted at some point in their life after some meaningful events.

And then something occurs in which they run into the spoken or unspoken orthodoxies of their evangelical environment of their community. And then they find themselves on the outside. That's a deeply grievous, personal, individual sort of process. And even though you will see a number of broad patterns, the ones that I've alluded to before, or whether it's a matter of not being affirmed in your queerness or being fully seen and affirmed as a person of color

and you've experienced racism, whatever those situations might be, that is really a lot of very personal, vulnerable work that someone has to do in order to find a new sense of community. And then at the same time, as you've said, there's a number of major institutions that are trying to legislate a very particular type of, Christianity and enforce it on the American public. And that's where these, those stories,

those histories, they intertwine in and out of evangelicalism into other related movements, ones that, ones that have a vested interest in litigating and legislating morality and belief. And that is inconsistent with the American ethos, with, with pluralism and democracy. And that's why you actually, as a result of evangelicalism, so routinely rejecting moderating forces, that's why more extreme beliefs have had an opportunity to develop more of a stronghold within those spaces and also leans towards supporting authoritarian politicians like Donald Trump. and his support by the majority of white evangelicals has been consistent since 2016. Even a recent ABC poll still puts it right at 79 or 80%.

But a number of the things that we now often will use language like Christian nationalism to speak about specifically, a lot of those things are very well represented within the more conservative evangelical spaces. With just a couple of minutes that we have left, Blake, please tell us, what can folks expect from your book, Ex-Vangelical and Beyond? For those that may be leaving the faith, questioning the faith, what can they anticipate? Yeah. So my book, I hope, will provide readers with an opportunity to see the reason why it's so hard to leave a faith like evangelicalism. And the reason why evangelicalism has so much power and influence in American

society is because these movements didn't start in the 1970s with the rise of the religious right. A lot of these factors go back to the 1870s, not to the 1970s. So what you're working against is very, very entrenched institutions and beliefs and cultural practices. But at the same time, we can look at the history of people who have tried to reform from within and who were repudiated. And we can also look now at the example of so many people who, thanks to the internet, thanks to social media, now have the ability to contextualize why they left. And it's not just me, just one white guy telling you this. You can find any number of, any number of people online who have built platforms talking about their lived experience. And that is the difference that we're in now is that there's now a counterpublic that can respond to,

the white evangelical dominant perspective. Because even though they like to often say that they're persecuted or that they are the minority, they still are very, very highly represented, especially by one of the two major parties in the United States. So the capacity to speak back to that is very, very powerful. And then there are more opportunities to explore what it might mean to create different types of belonging or community, as well as opportunities to make new political alliances with people who want to counteract the most authoritarian sort of aspects of this strain of American Christianity, which really does try to legislate things.

That's my hope is that people from reading my book will see examples of people who have struggled with these same sort of issues in their own life and as they have in their own life and have the courage to realize that they're not alone and that there is a new type of possibility, a number of new ways to sort of live in both either be in community or pursue meaning or to work politically as well. Yeah. Well, Blake, I thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal, but more importantly for writing this book that I think comes at such a critical time, both in our politic and also just in our examination of self and what it is. means to be in community, whether that be religious community, political community, social

justice-minded community. I think that it's really important. Folks, the book is ex-vangelical and beyond how American Christianity went radical and the movement that's fighting back. Blake, thank you so much and would love to have you back on again. Thank you very much, Daniel. I'd love that. Opioid deaths are preventable. They're not natural. They are the consequences of policy failure combined with misinformation and life-threatening stigma, discrimination, and prejudice. What we don't know is killing us. In his new book, Fentanyl Nation, toxic politics and America's failed war on drugs, activist and recovering addict Ryan Hampton takes a tough look at the failed war on drugs and a compassionate view of the addicts who have been needlessly hurt by it. The book comes

out today and he joins me now to talk about it. Ryan, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So in the book, you refer to yourself as one. of the millions of people who are considered disposable because of addiction. Talk about what you mean by that. Sure. I mean, I struggled on and off for well over a decade with opioid addiction. And by the time I entered treatment in November of 2014 and my recovery date, it's actually February 2nd, 2015.

I missed the fentanyl crisis. It came just crashing down on the west side of the country, literally by inches. In my journey, I had so many barriers to getting help. eventually ended up on the streets. And, you know, knock on wood, thanks to Medicaid, I was able to access buprenorphine, which is the gold standard of addiction treatment, but is still widely under prescribed these days. And, you know, when it comes to getting help, we have long talked about addiction, substance use disorder, as a public health crisis and as a chronic health disease. Yet we treat it as an acute health crisis. We don't offer the long-term supports.

There are millions of Americans across the United States right now who need treatment, who need help, roughly up to 40 million if you're to look at the SAMHSA numbers. Yet the treatment gap in this country has remained stagnant for so long. It's still at 90% meaning or 10% meaning that 90% of folks who need treatment actually don't access it. Now, later on top of that, just this toxic world because I talk a lot about toxic politics and how that plays in, you know, this narrative today, you know, folks think that the only way, you know, the only way to get ourselves out of this crisis is to focus on supply reduction. And I argue that it is a careful balance and a delicate balance between supply and demand. Because if we don't address the demand as a high priority, which means getting people treatment, it means getting people housed, it means having,

you know, appropriate recovery housing, it means getting folks jobs. It means, you know, setting people up for the best success to coming back into society. You know, today it is fentanyl. Tomorrow it will be something else because we're in this different world, right? We've had three waves of this crisis. The first wave, which is what I got caught up in in the 2000s, which was around prescription opioids. And I've written about that a lot.

Purdue Farm and the Sacklers. And the second wave being when we started to reduce opioid prescriptions and moved into the illicit heroin market. And now we're in this third. most deadliest wave, which is fentanyl, which is in the synthetic era, right? Synthetics are completely different. These are drugs that, you know, we call it the bathtub gin of opioids. With a few chemical precursors, these new synthetics can be manufactured in literally in

someone's bathroom and enough to supply, you know, an entire town or region. So the long gone are the days of, you know, having to harvest crops and armies that are, you know, protecting those crops. These things can be made here in the United States. They're made, obviously, in Mexico precursors coming from China. They can be bought on the internet. It's a whole different world that we live in these days. And it really deserves a different response as well. And one of the things you say is that fentanyl has completely replaced oxycotton and heroin. Right. That is correct. Oxycott and heroin is still around. Sure. But fentanyl is the number one killer right now, and particularly around our youth population, because this is just a catastrophe,

and I write about it extensively in fentanyl nation. Kids who are experimenting with drugs, right? Like when we were kids, and some kids do experiment with drugs, you would get a pill and you would know it's whatever it says on the pill. These days, kids are getting pills off the internet that end up having fentanyl in them and they die. You know, they die in their dorm rooms. They die in their bedrooms. And it is really sad, but it also calls to the need for a more robust evidence-based prevention and awareness campaign. I believe it should be rooted in science and also delivered by peers, as opposed to some of these war on drugs, you know, dare scare tactics that we have seen over the years. I have to mention, you know, there's been some news lately. There's a glimmer of hope

that overdose deaths have been on the decline in 2024, some of the preliminary data. We saw about a 10% decrease in the preliminary data, and I would argue strongly, but that's because of a lot of the things that I have written in this book and a lot of the work that's being done on the ground in terms of naloxone distribution and making sure that people have access to evidence-based medications when they do need treatment, play a role into that. And I'm not alone in thinking that. Dr. Noro Volkow from NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, agrees with that. But let's not forget that since 1999, more than a million Americans have died of an overdose. We in the United States by far have the highest drug overdose death rate in the world. By 2022, we were looking at about an average of 300 Americans dying of overdoses every day. Wow. In 2020, you know, we allocated $4.07 billion for the border, but 2 million people were arrested crossing the southern border.

And the number of illegal Canada crossings tripled. And more than a million people are. arrested for drugs each year. 50 million adults are about, you know, 20% of all Americans also experience daily chronic pain, right? And I write about the impact that some of these draconian policies have had on the pain community. Five to eight million of these chronic pain patients regularly rely on opioids and we can't

leave them behind. That is really, really important. Yeah, one of the things that you say in the book, I actually can't recall you may have been quoting someone else, is you described fentanyl as, I think it's great medicine, horrible drug? It's a good medicine and a horrible drug. You know, we need to remember that there is a big difference between illicit fentanyl that is being, you know, made in shady chem labs or coming to us from Mexico or the precursors coming from China and folks making the drug here in the United States. And, you know, legally prescribed fentanyl, which has been a staple of Western

medicine, as long as I can remember. Fentanyl is legal and it is used in a hospital rooms every single day and there are people whose lives depend on it and sadly you know I think because of some of the media narrative that we have heard and not really getting too deep on the nuances between the two doctors are more hesitant to use it when it's actually necessary in certain surgical procedures and folks are suffering as a result of it and the suicide rate within the pain community is astronomical and unacceptable because of some of these myths that we hear in the media. Look, we're right around the corner from Halloween. I can guarantee you that there will be some fantastical news story that's going to come out any day now, warning

parents that there's fentanyl that's being wrapped in their kids candy. That is not true. That is not happening. That's just another one of the myths that's wrapped up in this toxic culture of politics that we live in today. Look, fentanyl is scary enough on its own to be creating more myths and fables and fiction about it. Yeah. We need to be dealing in facts, not fiction, when it comes to this crisis. It's, you know, overdose to fentanyl, I believe it's just this nuanced issue. It destroys divisions between red and blue.

There's no party line when it comes to it. If you look at a map, every state, city, rural, urban, suburban is impacted by fentanyl use, addiction, and overdose. And, you know, never before has a drug crisis in American history really reached this level. We're truly living through a public health disaster, but, you know, there's been so much ink filled about who's to blame for this, right? And what Fetanol Nation, I'm an author, right? I wrote this book. I've written a few books, but really my daytime job and what I do for because I'm an advocate. I run a nonprofit that is, you know, dedicated to ending overdose and

supporting recovery. I'm somewhat in a recovery myself. I've lost a lot of people I love to preventable drug overdoses, even as recently. as last week. And I argue that every system is partially responsible. This is a massive policy and regulatory failure between healthcare, certain drug enforcement agencies, our justice system, drug policy, the entire medical system. We have been looking at this backwards for so long, and we've actually been here before, right? That's one of the, I think, the striking points that I want people to take from fentanyl nation is that we have been in this place before. What we do right now, what we do over the course of the next year or two, specific to fentanyl and drug policy,

I believe will dictate policy for the next two decades on this issue. So it's important that we get it right. Well, and one of the things you say in the book and talk about a lot is that many of the new laws that are aimed at illicit fentanyl have been or are being passed, and they repeat the same mistakes of the 1980s crack epidemic. And just how you said earlier that the addiction and the overdose issue cuts across red and blue states, the problem seems to cut across Republican and Democratic politicians in that they all want to still somehow frame this as a war on drugs. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, the so-called war on drugs really kicked into high-gear during Reagan's presidency and the crack crisis.

Every single president since then, Democrats and Republicans have kept this drug war alive. The approach to cocaine in the 80s and 90s, as we know, devastated black communities with the passage of a law that resulted in crack being punished 100 times harsher than powder cocaine. Powder cocaine was viewed as this rich white people's party drug, and it wasn't really punished as harshly as crack.

A person that was caught with just five grams of crack was punished at the same level as someone with more than a pound of powder cocaine, even though the two were pretty much the same exact drug. And here we are with fentanyl, some 40 years later, it's become another political weapon wielded to capture the fears of a lot of Americans, and it's fueled by these fantastical stories, and it's really generating this ferocious backlash to alternative strategies that now we know are working just based on the data that was released yesterday, strategies that are rooted in medicine, public health, and compassion.

And the main difference between crack and fentanyl is that the latter is actually quite lethal and dangerous. It's dangerous enough, yet there's just all this hyperbole, all this exaggeration that clouds judgment. And it's pushed aside, you know, calmer heads from, I believe, actually assessing the reality of the problem. And instead, we hear that fentanyl is akin to anthrax and it's a weapon of mass destruction that just by touching, It can kill you. You know, being in the same room as it poses this biohazard. And this inflated level of threatened danger has fueled bad ideas and ineffective strategies. And, you know, we're headed into a really contentious election.

And politicians are just tripping over each other, you know, to look tough. And you're right. In over 43 states, you know, last year, last legislative session, mostly in state houses, we saw hundreds of pieces of legislation around fentanyl, but very few of them actually got to the demand side of the problem, the public health side. I'm not saying that law enforcement doesn't have a role to play because law enforcement does have a role to play. Public safety is super important. Passing the bipartisan border security bill is important because it includes technology that will help us be able to see when fentanyl is coming across the border because most folks don't know

that over 80% of the fentanyl that is coming into the United States is coming through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens for U.S. citizens and these huge cargo trucks, you know, and trade between the United States and Mexico, you know, will always happen. So we need more technology there. But these bills that were passed were lopsided on the approach. It was really looking at just the supply side. And it was looking at things like drug-induced homicide laws, right? things that look good on paper and sound good in the media, but don't necessarily solve the problem or get to the root of the problem. I argue we need much more balance, which is something I think a lot of folks right now are yearning for in this country. So compare this the way we handle

this epidemic or endemic, as you call it. Compare it to countries like Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. Right. So I think Portugal specifically had an interesting model that has been going on for some time. And it really had an approach that coupled demand and supply reduction. They were very keen on making sure that they do what we here in the United States have been talking about for a long time, which is we can't arrest our way out of an addiction crisis or an overdose crisis. And they really steered people instead of going to jails as treatment centers or detoxes, which is what they're not. They steered people whose only violation was, you know, personal use of drugs and personal possession of drugs into treatment. They steered them into

peer support. They had mobile crisis clinics. And we saw in Portugal a decline, a significant decline in overdose deaths. Now recently, there's been a lot of talk around the Portugal model not really working. And that's really not completely accurate because what happened in Portugal was the public health side of their model was essentially defunded. Right. It was defunded substantially. So when you defund the public health side, of course there is going to be a larger problem. You have to have parity and equity on both sides of the enforcement, but also the public health side. And you might ask just to swing it back here to the United States, why do we keep falling down on treating addiction here in the U.S., right? So I was just looking at a

swing state's poll the other day, showing the top issues for voters included expanding Medicaid coverage, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, expanding safety net benefits, storing up our funding for health care. These issues are quite popular here in the U.S. And they directly touch the crisis of overdose and addiction that so many folks are struggling with. People want quality affordable health care, which includes addiction treatment and actually works. When people suffer a mental health crisis, when they need therapy, when a loved one needs treatment, people want access to that without this massive financial burden. Questioning if their insurance is going to cover it or not, our system here has definitely come a long way, but there's still so much

further to go to make sure folks can access quality care, which for opioid addiction definitely entails medication treatments and ongoing psychotherapy, counseling, and social support. You know, again, this is super popular stuff in a political no-brainer. And I lay out, fentanyl nation, was about opening hearts and minds. It was about talking about this crisis through real human impact and stories. And folks, by the way, from the entire political spectrum, red, blue, green, whatever their party stripes may be who are impacted, to show the human toll of inaction,

but also to show the human toll of the politicization that has happened as a result of this crisis. And at the end of the book, I lay out what I believe are, are nine practical unifying what should be bipartisan steps to ending it if we could only get out of our own way. Yeah. And speaking of the politicization of all of this, one thing I took from the book is you are not a huge fan of J.D. Vance. I will say about Senator Vance that I think, especially coming from Ohio, a state that has just historically been struggling with this for some time. and I'll also say about Ohio, John Kasich, a Republican from Ohio, did some of the greatest best work, I think, on ending the overdose crisis when he invested nearly a billion dollars in Medicaid money to help fix it and they've come a long way. But Senator Vance, I would love to sit with him any day and have this conversation if he's willing to be serious about actually ending overdose deaths. Yeah, my guess is he's not.

The book is, as you said, it's filled with just so many powerful stories of recovering addicts. and of the family members of those who were lost to overdose. It's just, it's an incredibly powerful book and one that seems vital in terms of, as you say, reframing the entire debate to make it clear that it's not a war and there needs to be, it needs to be thought of as more of a health care issue, it seems to me. The book is Fentanyl Nation, toxic politics, and America's failed war on drugs. Ryan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me.

Andy Levy. Daniel Moody. Are you kicking off this week with your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is a sheriff in Portage County, Ohio. And he decided to post on his Facebook. When people ask me, what's going to happen if the flip-flopping laughing hyena wins? That's Kamala Harris, in case you didn't know. And he went on to say, I say, write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards.

When the illegal human locust, which she supports, he's supposed. referring to immigrants there, need places to live, will already have the addresses of their new families who supported their arrival. Okay, first of all, grotesque, not uncommon behavior from a sheriff, unfortunately, but a little bit surprising is that this sheriff in particular actually faced a tiny bit of consequences in that the local election board in that county voted to remove the sheriff's office from providing security during in-person absentee voting. This was after the Ohio Secretary of State's office said that his post didn't break state election laws, which makes me wonder about your state election laws.

Yes. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Okay. Yeah. And an emergency meeting was called by the NAACP chapter in Portage County. and the communications chair of that party, according to the Ravina Record Courier, said that people told him, quote, they're afraid to vote, they're afraid to put signs in their yard. This, of course, is exactly what he was trying to do, this sheriff.

He was trying to intimidate voters and make them scared of expressing their opinions, their political opinions, which, again, you would think might violate some kind of election law, but Ohio says no. And Kowalski didn't quite apologize. In fact, he did pretty much the opposite. He then posted on Facebook. Recently, I placed a post on my personal Facebook page that may have been a little misinterpreted with two question marks. He said, I as the elected sheriff do have a First Amendment right, as do all citizens. If the citizens of Portage County want to elect an individual who supported open borders and neglected to enforce the laws of our country, then that is their prerogative. He then went out to say, I am a lawman, not a politician. You shouldn't be either,

but okay. You shouldn't be either. Anyone who knows anything about sheriffs knows that they are very much politicians because they are elected officials. And this guy is absolutely insane. There's so much going on with sheriffs across the country here. I just last week interviewed journalist Jessica Pischko, who wrote a great new book called The Highest Law in the Land, How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatened Democracy. If you haven't listened to that interview, go back and listen to it now because she really lays it out. The entire history of how sheriffs operate in this country, it is absolutely frightening. And it is, and this guy, Zikowski, is completely of a piece with all these other sheriffs who think of themselves as really not bound by the law.

They're overwhelmingly white men and they act like it. And it's just, I thought it was important to highlight this sheriff's activities because it is such a small part of, or a small example of what sheriffs are doing nationwide and more people need to know about it. Sheriff Sikowsky, to you, I would say, fuck that guy. He shouldn't have a job. I just, the reason why these law enforcement officials, these politicians, make disparaging, disgusting, racist, vile remarks that are threats of terrorism. The reason why they do that is because they know that they won't receive any repercussions, that they won't be, they won't be held to account. He won't lose his job. There'll be no call for removal. And this is why these people, these people, double and triple down in their racist rhetoric. This is why it becomes bigger and more and more viral because nothing ever happens to them.

How you say something like that, refer to people in a manner like that and then threaten your own constituents with putting their names on a list like we're living in some type of land of Gestapo's. I just, it is, it's so disgusting. And again, I ask, like, where are investigations into people like this? Where are lawsuits against people like this? I don't know. Fuck that guy.

Yeah. Okay, Danielle, close us out for the day. Who is your fuck that guy? I hope it's a little more fun. It's, I don't even know if it's more fun, but I can tell you that it is wholly disappointing and just like, and just sad. It was one of those moments where you recognize that. your childhood heroes were playing a character and who they are in real life. And as adults now,

and as an adult now, you recognize that you just, you don't align with values or positions. And that is what happened with Janet Jackson over the weekend. So Janet Jackson was interviewed by The Guardian and said this about. Vice President Kamala Harris. Mind you, Janet Jackson is 58 years old. I'm pretty sure knows how to use the Internet. And this is what she said. That's what I heard, that she's Indian.

Her father's white. That's what I was told. I haven't watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white. Who is she talking about? Right. She thinks that she is talking about Vice President Kamala Harris. and that she is not black and that she is Indian and that her father is white.

First off, Google is free. And when you Google Kamala Harris's dad, guess what shows up? A picture of a black man from Jamaica, okay? First picture to show up. Not a bunch of other pictures, just first picture. The fact that a 58-year-old woman, her role. response to not like to clearly being woefully uninformed is that quote that's what I was told are you a fucking child how at 58 years old do you take what you're just quote unquote told as if you don't

have a brain inside of your own head and don't have the ability to look up information also that's the thing that you say about Kamala Harris? Not the fact that, oh, you know what I do know is that she's pro-choice, pro-democracy, pro-voting rights, pro-the-environment, and Donald Trump is a 34-time felon, sexual assaulter, and has been impeached twice. But her response is, oh, I don't think she's black. As if that gives some type of weight in your decision. making process as to who you should vote for in this upcoming election. Then an apology was issued after outrage sparks all over the internet from her fans. And guess what?

The apology actually wasn't even from her. And the person who issued the apology that said that they were acting as her manager was not authorized. and Mo El Mara. Mo El Masary, Janet Jackson fired me due to disagreements between me, her and Randy, Randy being her brother. After her meeting with the Guardian and her unbalanced statements, that's all I can say. I'm receiving an overwhelming amount of phone calls. And when the apology was issued, people were basically, I think, wanting to give their childhood icon, a pass. To say, okay, I'll say stupid things,

but she quickly wanted to make up for her mistakes and her lack of knowledge. But come to find out that not only does she not apologize, but she fired the person who was trying to clean up her PR nightmare. It's just embarrassing. It's disappointing. It just shows you how, like,

and this is why people say, when celebrities... go out on and go out on these conspiracy theories and these tangents that they're like, just stick to what you're good at. Just sing, just dance, just do whatever. Because you get moments like this where you're just like, really, Jana Jackson, 58 years old? Really? This is what you're coming up with? For that reason, for the bullshit apology, for the rescinding of that apology, for firing her manager. Yeah, I never thought that I would say this. But fuck that girl.

Fuck Jenna Jackson. Like, wow, my heart hurts. I also, I think you need to cut her a little bit of slack. She said herself, she hadn't watched the news in a few days. Look, I just, I can't with these people. And then this whole thing with this manager, who, it turns out maybe never was her manager, though he's apparently given statements in the past on her behalf. but her team told TMZ that this guy is not her manager,

that her brother Randy is in fact her manager. This is just the whole thing. It's just a sea of weirdness. But yeah, it just sucks to hear her out there saying stuff like that. It's not 1814, Janet. And you are in control of Google. So you should. You can indeed control that.

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