The Daily Beast Podcast - The Yachts, the Private Jets, the Safaris: NRA Grift Exposed

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

National Rifle Association boss Wayne LaPierre rails against the elites trying to take real Americans’ guns Meanwhile, the NRA is taking gun-owners donations—to fund LaPierre’s ultra-lux lifestyle. That’s the crux of New York Attorney General Tish James’ landmark lawsuit against the NRA. “And it looks like they're in a ton of trouble,” The Beast’s Harry Siegel tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Tish has the receipts”—from the 107-foot yachts to the complimentary safaris to the private charters to the gazillion-dollar wardrobe. Then! Rebekah Jones, the former Florida state government data geek and whistleblower, talks about how she was pushed to juke the COVID stats by Ron DeSantis’ cronies. “We changed how we count cases. We changed the criteria itself. So pneumonia was originally one of the surveillance criteria—we had ER, data for pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-like illness. And one of the first things they did was cut out pneumonia. It was too high,” she says. Jones is convinced a similar game is going on throughout the country. “We really don't know how many COVID cases we have in America; we’ll probably never really know.” Plus! Molly rolls out a new campaign slogan: “Vote for Trump, even if we kill you.” Rick opines on drool buckets. And Alexa orders a rat stick for Molly. Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, an editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers.

Hi, Molly, Dr. Drogfast. Hey, Molly. Yeah, Rick. When we set out to Make America Great again, where did you think we would rank in terms of, like, misery index in the world? Do you think we'd be above or below Russia or Mexico? I have a question about the misery index. What exactly is it? Well, it's a combination of inflation, unemployment, and other scores in the economy. And right now, the countries with the lowest misery index in the world are playing like Switzerland, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Japan.

So our misery index has fallen. So we're now the 25th most miserable country in the world. I feel like making America great was supposed to move that number the other direction. You know, it's becoming clear to me that not controlling a pandemic may not be the best tact. Not controlling a pandemic may lead to misery. It is a shocking revelation. It's going to just go away. It'll disappear like mad.

By Easter. Yeah, by Easter, remember that? Easter. And then by July, the economy's going to be rockin. Yeah, that is Jared Kushner. And by the way, hearing Jared Kushner say the phrase, rockin, it bothers me so much. I can think of him like digging his dad's old Perry Como albums out and saying, Ivanka, these are going to be rocking. You know what's delightful about Jared Kushner?

Nothing. As a Jew, it is so, every time I see him on television, I'm like, oh, so bad for the Jews. Not our best. You know, not great. Well, I think, again, Molly, being an android, Jared doesn't technically qualify. Oh, is it Jew? Yeah. Can you be a robot Jew?

I think you can. I'm pretty sure you can. Okay. Well, maybe I'm wrong. I'm going to have to get an AI expert in a Talmudic scholar together to score it out where Jared falls. I think we'd have to find, like, a robot rabbi to tell us what really is going on. A robie, if you will?

A robot, yes. So the United States. is miserable as fuck. The Bloomberg Misery Index, folks, check it out. You'll find that America has not been made great again. It has been made dramatically worse in the world. And if you're proud of being ranked worse than Mexico and Russia in the Misery Index, raise your standards. I have a question for you about this. So when a candidate wants more debates, does that mean they're doing well? Anytime a candidate asks for additional debates, it is a sign they are worried.

It is a sign they are behind because they look at debates as a moment that could catalyze something in their campaign to break them out of the doldrums or break them out of a shame spiral or put a crisis in the rearview mirror or some other crazy thing,

some externality that changes the narrative dramatically. But Donald Trump asking for a fourth debate is a sign that he is looking for a chance to go out on stage and whip his dick out and dance around and yell and try to do something

that will distract people from the absolute catastrophic job he's done as president. But you know what's interesting to me? It's like you'll remember in 2016, or as I like to call it, the moment when this all went horribly wrong, that Trump lost all his debates. Yeah, of course. I mean, look, one of the things about debates is they don't matter as much as people think. They can have an effect, but they don't have a lasting effect in terms of what we know from voter data research. In this case, Donald Trump is trying to land.

a haymaker of some kind on Joe Biden at a debate and say, see, I told you he was senile and dementia. Not like me, where am I? Who is this? Yes. How do you do ramp? Can you hold my hand on ramp? Can you ramp? Can you ramp? I would love for Joe Biden to just say, you know, Don, I'm happy to do push-ups here on stage and see which one of us goes first. You want to try that? But yeah, look, Donald Trump trying to insist on debates is a sign of profound. nervousness in their operation. Right. I mean, it feels like they're just trying to change the narrative as much as possible. That's right.

That's right. And because they're scared. Now, I have a question for you, which is, if your best hope is debates and you're Donald Trump, what does that say about the position you're in? Well, Donald Trump is a creature of the media. He's a cunning, feral media creature. He recognizes that if you get, you know, a fourth debate under the docket and something happens, he'll try to whip up the Fox O-A-N-N online machine and drive up the perception among his people that he's winning, that things are coming back.

Because right now, a lot of Trump voters, their intensity is dropping off a little bit at a time. The more he thinks he's going to lose, the more it seems like they're going to lose, the worse those people are going to feel. And as those things decline, it's hard for them to get juiced up again. But he's going to try to get them juiced up again by some either proclaimed or imagined win in the debates. I have owned the lips by telling Joe Biden that he's a stinky pants. You know, they'll come up with some juvenile weird Trump nickname or something. And all the sort of echo chamber of Trumpism will ride with it as hard as they can. It doesn't change the fundamentals in the States.

Do you remember when there was an article, and I think it was by Maggie in the Times about how Trump was calling Joe Sleepy Joe, and someone in the Trump administration was like, I would kill to work for someone sleepy? Right. Yes, I remember that. You know, like, Sleepy Joe, that's what, you know. And I do think it's interesting, like, if you look at it in 2016, Crooked Hillary stuck. Remember, he killed Jeb with two words. Low energy. Yeah. I mean, he killed. an entire Republican dynasty with two words. I remember talking to one of the Jeb people the minute that low energy thing came on board. And I said, look, in the next debate, Jeb needs to walk over and put a finger in the guy's chest.

Because Jeb's a strong guy. Jeb's not a small guy and he's not a weak guy. And the physical countervailing image of Jeb basically going over and giving Trump a ration of shit would have been a powerful visual import. Very much so. But none of these guys would stick with. with an attack on Trump. That's always been the problem for Trump's opponents is that they attack him once and they think, I've got him now, he'll be ashamed that he'll change his behavior. Well, obviously, he does not and cannot change his behavior. Yeah, that never happened.

So, you know, when he tries to nickname Biden's Sleepy Joe or China Joe or whatever, Biden's response needs to be, go fuck yourself. The good news I think with Biden is that Biden is very pissed off. And so when they asked him if he'd take a cognitive test, even though Trump won't take a cognitive test, even though he brags about taking the dementia, you know, whatever, the dementia test they made him take was. Just spot the rhinoceros test. Right. Man, woman. Woman. Dementia. TV. Drulbucket. We're all going to die. Actually, I think the Trump one would be president, straightjacket,

drool bucket, asylum, future. Some of those words are two words. You know, Molly? Drewl bucket is not one word. Is it? No, it's not. No, it's not. But I suppose it could be something alliterative. Two of the phrases could be spittle and sluice.

It's sort of alliterative and evocative at the same time. Speaking of the president's powerful, great brain and all his many-englishing, he gave an interview to Axios. And how did that work out for him, Molly? You know, what's interesting to me about the president on being interviewed is just how incredibly moronic he is. What were your takeaways from that Jonathan Swan interview? Well, if the president was offered a choice between being thrown into a pit of wolves covered in barbecue sauce or interviewed by Jonathan Swan again, he should accept the barbecue sauce wolf pit option. That interview was a catastrophe for him. That interview was a industrial shit show. Nothing about that helped this president at all. Look, there are some people at the White House who, for the whole four-year run, that's their one dream date. They've got to get the personal interview with the president. He went into that. But he's done other interviews with the president, hasn't he? Sure. I think he has. And what I'm saying is Trump did not go into, this was not like an interview with David Korn. This was not like an interview with Mother Jones. This was an interview with not someone who's not liberal. And he just completely.

hung himself on his own Patar, almost. The thing about Swan in this interview was, Swan didn't approach it with any kind of political agenda. Swan approached it by going at the weakest thing in Donald Trump's world. Well, I mean, the second weakest thing in Donald Trump's world, which, you know, it's just facts. He went in and asked Donald Trump fact-based questions, and it shows you how bad Trump is at this,

because when he's not at the podium where he can either stop off or look at the OANN girl and have her asked the softball pre-gamed question, or when he's not in a position where he's absolutely, you know, not going to get touched by anybody, all those things are not good for the president. In that interview, one of the things Swan did, which he's getting a lot of praise for, is that he had, like, actual facts. So when Trump said something, he had the facts to sort of dispute them.

And that also led to some pretty great gifts and memes, as you can. As one does in this era. That's right. And one of the most interesting things, I thought it was totally fascinating. One of the most interesting things was that Jonathan Swan said, you know, a thousand people a day are dying from this disease. And Trump said, it is what it is. It is what it is. A thousand people.

Of course, I expected him to just say, to quote Joseph Stalin, one death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. But then I realized Donald Trump has never heard of Joseph Stalin. He's probably seen him on a t-shirt somewhere. Maybe. Perhaps. Who wears Stalin T-shirts? I mean, all the progressives wear their...

Che Guevara T-shirts. Killer of homosexual Cubans, Che Guevara, I'd like to point out. I think woke teenage son may have a Stalin t-shirt. You know, my grandfather won the Stalin Peace Prize. Yeah, you mentioned that. You mentioned that. Way past when it was cool. You know, woke teenage son really needs to read Robert Conquest,

The Black Book of Communism, about Stalin's murder of 65 million people. I think woke... has moved past his communism phase, and he's classing it up these days. Oh, really? But I would have to check in with him on that. Is he like an Elon Muskian techno-futurist now? Well, the hope is we'll get him to the lib, normal Rachel Maddow watching Lib. Okay.

That's the goal. Does he still consider Rachel Maddow to be insufficiently dedicated to the cause? I can see him in his little dark gray camouflage-style jacket rubbing his hands together, saying, yes, we shall take it the accommodationist like Maddow to the wall. One million door knocks. The Trump administration or the campaign, it's hard to tell which is which, because they're basically the same at this point, with Kaylee, the press secretary, tweeting out campaign

stuff. They knocked on one million doors, they say, the Trump campaign. Do you believe that, Rick Wilson, and what are your thoughts? I don't believe that for a minute. I think the people that are telling the senior management of the Trump campaign that, Timken Villaging them and telling them how beautiful the small town is that they're about to ride through with Princess Donald. Because in the time of COVID, I don't think people are doing door knocking. I mean, I would like to not get COVID from a campaign volunteer.

Like, you would think that would be pretty good way to spread it. Right. And the airborne virus, you know? The campaign plague bearers, if you will. Yeah, exactly. Answer your door so we can give you coronavirus. Vote for Trump, even if we kill you. which is basically the campaign slogan at this point anyway.

Vote for Trump, or you won't experience the delights of a pandemic, followed by the starving years, followed by the Trump towns, gathered. Oh, yeah, Trump towns. We can call Hoover Towns Trump Towns. Yeah, Hooverville can be Trump towns. People huddled around small guttering campfires made out of old newspapers, shivering in the darkness, cooking rats on sticks, talking about the before times. Oh, Jesus.

Rats on sticks will haunt me for the day. Thank you, Rick Wilson. How else are you going to cook the rat, Molly Jong Fast? I am not cooking a rat. I plan to starve. In the post-apocalyptic Hellscape, you need to have a stick on which to cook your rats. I am not liking this part. I'm just going to stay in my hotel.

Alexa, order a rat stick for Molly Jog Fast. Jesus Christ. Oh, no, you got Alexa going. Now Alexa's going to be on our podcast. Make her shut up, Rick. Alexa, cancel. Cancel. you bleep him out that's uh you know harry seagull is the senior editor as well as the opinion editor for the daily beast and host of the podcast f aq n yc and we're so excited to have him here today harry isn't my editor and also i think rick's editor right a lot of the time most of the time i got a slice in the cuss words when we look good it's harry's doing right exactly and we're big fans of his but he's also a person who knows everything about

about New York. What do you think of this Tish James announcement? And can you just talk to us about this? Sure. When Tish James was running to be the attorney general, she said on the campaign trail, I'm going to go after the NRA. And sure enough, she has with this big, juicy civil suit, basically saying this organization is so corrupt that it needs to be dissolved. The NRA is screaming and crying that, hey, this is politically targeted because she said that. But, but, but, this thing is like 160 pages. And let me tell you, Tish has the receipts. A lot of those receipts are about a whole host of shady characters, but a whole lot of them are about Wayne LaPierre, who's run the place for 30 years, and it's got in the habit of taking private flights, having his family take private flights,

having private flights so his niece and his grandees can get dropped off that he's not even on, a yacht that he likes to stay on. Oh my, thousands and thousands for very nice, fancy clothes. he's just a regular man who loves guns. So for all the targeting stuff, it really looks like they have the goods here. And the little bits from LaPierre, when he got interviewed by their office, are hilarious. It's him explaining how it's really hard

to get commercial flights back from regular airports. So there were just absolutely no choice to do it and lots of stuff like that. So this organization that hates the elites and the whips and the city people and so on, it reads, allegedly, just like an incredible, incredible series of gifts with the board that's just been completely checked out, signs off on Bocker's expenditures, was back signing 15-year-old contracts after realizing

the AG was going after them, and it looks like they're in a ton of trouble. One more thing adding to that trouble is they burned something like 50 million in legal fees in the last two years prior to this and are hundreds of millions of dollars in the whole. So this just looks like a hustle that's gone wonderfully for a generation for folks. Wow. that now has hit really serious trouble. Clearly, Trump and the NRA now are going to use this to politic and to fundraise and say, see, we're being singled out for our insane grift. The gifts from Neiman Marcus to all LaPierrez's friends that were expensed and the tens of thousands, stuff like

that. The only reason we're being targeted for cheating and allegedly breaking the law is because we're a gun loud. But that's not much of a offense when you are fairly clearly allegedly cheating and breaking the law all the goddamn time. And then the last thing here, this is a civil suit, right? Because the attorney general, despite that name sounding like, you know, law enforcement, queen of all things or king, like is basically in New York State a civil position with incredibly strong civil powers. And I think their implicit argument is the reason they're saying, we shouldn't just find

these guys, we shouldn't just boot this leadership. We need to dissolve the organization as well as potentially refer criminal charges and already refer this to the IRS. it's almost like with the house, right? Or real estate, like some places are just a tear down. Like none of the rooms work. The bathroom is broken. The kitchen is deteriorated.

There's mold in the walls. And as you start reading through these 160 pages, you can really get to how they got there with the NRA. And it's many, many, many alleged grifts. Well, I spoke to a former NRA board member today. And this person said to me, I left in your X after three or four years of asking why Wayne, you know, lived like he was a billionaire.

when, you know, his salary package is a certain level. And this person indicated to me that there were a lot of people well aware inside the organization of just what a machine, what a money machine it was, and that there was a fear that eventually other gun advocacy groups would start marketing against Wayne. And a few of them had over the years. But this is a lesson in politics that everybody needs to remember. Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. This had, right, he's been summering in the Bahamas.

He gets there every year on a private charter. He stays on a 107-foot yacht owned by an NRA vendor. I mean, he's not there. He's safariing. Complimentary in Africa. I mean, it's wild. I mean, as one does. Don't tell my way.

I do think, however, and I'm actually not defending the NRA on this, but I do think there are two things that James may have underestimated. The Second Amendment folks are the last bastion inside Trump world where they don't have a lot to really complain about. And I think this will catalyse some of those people where Trump can come out and say, they're trying to destroy the Second Amendment. And in the minds of a number, of a meaningful number of voters who vote based on the Second Amendment, the NRA is sort of their thing.

But I do think the irony of him with the custom suits and the jets and the yachts, all that shit, that is so not your average NRA member. Trump today, he said the Biden hates guns and God. He pointed to the suit to say they're just going to take away all your guns right away. no police, no warnings, no nothing. You know, the NRA put out their own tweets, calling this an affront to democracy, freedom. They say they're well-funded and ready for the fight. So whatever your gun politics, really the issue here, I think, is two things.

The one, James appears to have the receipts. And this is early on. Like, we haven't had discovery yet in this suit. So presumably, there are even more receipts coming if and as this proceeds. And the issues here really don't have to do with gun ownership and gun advocacy. they have to do with alleged corruption and graft obey a really, really a weak sort. I think if James handles the case with that being the angle, because if it becomes perceived as we're going to blow this org up because we hate the Second Amendment,

it first off gives the NRA a series of defenses to mount both politically and legally. Then you end up in a First Amendment fight, not a Second Amendment fight. But if it goes into this as these guys are corrupt, these guys are lavishly raping and pillaging inside this organization, where they're taking the small dollar donations of people who think they're fighting for the Second Amendment, but instead they're fighting for the second seat on a G650 down to Grand Bahama, it's a different flavor of battle. To that point, do you guys have any insight? The Free Beacon obviously came out today with the thing that NRA was about spent record money yet last election. There was all this talk that apparently the NRA was having foreign money funneled in. Is there any insight on that either of you two have?

I will say that Tim Mack of NPR and formerly of The Daily Beast has done some really interesting reporting on that. I think in the course of this 18th month, 18 month investigation, that his reporting, like Carol Lending at the Washington Post, Danny Hakem at the Times, and I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name, Mark at the Journal, that a lot of what's in this civil suit, that at least does its frame there. And we'll see what James says in the days and weeks to come publicly and politically. Really his frame is just a corruption and governance issue, right? Like this is a nonprofit that have to have a board. You can't just be kicking money under the table. You can't have these verbal contracts. You can't be paying people millions after they've left and they're doing all these things.

But a lot of what's here seems to be just following some very publicly reported breadcrumbs that have been there for a long time. And obviously, if you want to say this is maybe political from James, like the IRS could have looked at this. You have all sorts of other authorities here as this has come out. And I want to do with the Civil War with Ali North when he tried to take over. Like God, it's a time war. Before we get into things today, we have a fun little treat rolling out soon. There are so many insane things happening in the world right now. And two episodes each week just aren't enough to cover it all.

So the new Abnormal is going to start releasing a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks for Beast Inside members only. Starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully. Only Beast Inside Members will have. have access to these. So head over to new abnormal.thedailybeast.com to become a beast inside member. That's new abnormal.com. We promise it'll be worth it. Today we have a very special guest. Rebecca D. Jones is an American whistleblower and geographer. And she is the founder of the COVID tracking project. And she's going to talk to us today

about what happened when she tried to tell the truth about the COVID data in Florida. So Rebecca, as the Florida man on this podcast today, welcome. Thank you. And I want to just first off say, congratulations on being the person that has driven Ron DeSantis around the bend for the last four months because you've done something that's unforgivable in the world of the Trump Republicans, which is tell the truth about numbers. So tell us a little bit about how you got started and about your COVID dashboard for the state of Florida and how everything went terribly wrong. Okay. Well, that is a long story, but the basic gist of it is that I was the manager of Geographic Information Science for the Department of Health, the entire Department of Health, including all of our counties, when I first started hearing murmurs of the virus in January. On January 23rd, the Johns Hopkins dashboard launched, and at the time, it was this kind of unprecedented mission to,

to collect all this international data, consolidate it, standardize it, and make it easily accessible and understandable to the public. I saw it actually on the 23rd, because, you know, that's my area of expertise, so I was plugged into it. And the next day, I said to my supervisors at DOH, hey, Johns Hopkins is doing this thing, and this virus is going to make it over here eventually. So why don't we just start building something now? And we had been at the Department of Health getting CDC updates regularly throughout January

warning us that this was likely going to be a pandemic. And so we knew internally that it was on its way here if it wasn't here already, which we would later find out it already was. And we needed to get prepped. But my suggestion was just, no, no, no, we don't need that. And I said, okay, well, you know, let me know if you change your mind. About a week later, as the numbers on the dashboard kept going up and up and up, I was like, hey, I really think we're. We should be on top of this thing that is killing lots of people and spreading crazy fast in one of the most densely populated places in the world. And the CDC keeps sending us emails saying, hey, get on top of this thing.

I was told, no, no, no, we didn't need it. By mid-February, we were in Florida monitoring hundreds of people that we thought were potentially positive. We were testing people who would eventually come back positive. And I remember on February 14th, because it was Valentine's Day, I was planning on going out with my husband. When I saw the data, I canceled our plans. That's how bad it was. And then I started to push a little more and say, look, even if it's just internally, epidemiology is inherently geographic.

And at that point, I was told, well, we don't want to start a panic. If people knew that we were monitoring hundreds of people, we would start a panic. Now, Rebecca, can I jump out for a second? Who told you not to do that? Was it Courtney Coppola? No. I didn't first encounter her until, like, mid-March. Who is Courtney Coppola?

She is the chief of staff, the DeSantis person of hench in the Department of Health. Okay, I do have to say this. I know she's probably trying to publicly destroy me. I liked Courtney. I had been dealing with by the time I got around to her people who were very obstructionist in what I was trying to do. You know, at first it was we didn't need it. And then it was too scary.

And then it was just some of the serious reason that I wasn't given for a couple of weeks. And then when I was asked directly by the Department of Emergency Management to try to come up with an alternative voting plan for the primaries, and DOH stepped in my way for reasons that I still don't fully understand. Courtney was somebody who, if something needed to get done, at least for the time period that I knew her, and in the limited capacity that I knew her, she got shit done. And I appreciated that. Even though she, you know, hates me now. I know that now, because I have, you know, people at DOH who still talk to me and they're like, God, you just really make her life help by being so successful with this stuff, you know, because she's getting yelled out.

by Ron DeSantis and everybody else. And I'm like, you know, I don't mean it to be that way. I don't want it to be that way. I don't want to have to do this on my own. The whole reason I left or was pushed out was because I wanted to do these things there and they didn't want to do it. I would be so relieved if DOH was like, you know what, Rebecca, we think you're right. We're going to start pulling in all these different data and consolidating it and make it easy to understand for the public and publish it authoritatively. I'd endorse it and, you know, we could all be on our happy Mary way, but that's not going to happen. I could get a day off. I still work, you know, seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, just like before. But that would be fascinating,

but unfortunately, that's not in their interest. And DOH has had a really rough few weeks. You think? I don't see them coming to me for anything anytime soon, but I just, I honestly just wish they would do it right. And then I wouldn't have to do it. And I wouldn't be bothering anybody. And tell us the story, though, about what, how it went down. So I had a lot of faith in what I was doing when I was there. Our dashboard was crazy successful, I think, more than my wildest dreams. You know, we hit 100 million views on April 26th. And Dr. Deborah Birx was going around, touting it, telling everybody to go to it. There were a whole bunch of articles written about me and how I created this thing by myself, and it was crazy complicated, but, you know,

I was never resting trying to get this stuff done. Actually, one of the articles, Dr. Rifkes, did an interview for talking about how proudly was of the work that I was doing. Dr. Rivke's for everyone is the Florida Surgeon General. Yes, who I had worked with much closer in the past during our hurricane exercise last year, which it used to be that every April slash May, early May, the state would get everybody together from the whole state,

everybody who basically would be involved in a hurricane response. And for a whole week, we basically ran through all the motions that we would do if a major hurricane were to make landfall. Each year, it's a different storm. It hits a different place. Last year, it was Tampa. We were thinking at like a category three hurricane landfall in Tampa and the whole state for five days straight did the whole exercise. They didn't do that this year. There was no hurricane exercise this year for the state. I was told that the activation that we had been in since March met the criteria that was required of us for whatever state law mandates that they do some kind of activation exercise.

But now there's all this new staff because there's a lot of turnover at the state because they don't pay people and they treat people like shit. And now there's coronavirus. Wait, the state of Florida government? No way. Yeah. So I was actually shocked when they told me this because first of all, I love the hurricane exercise. I think it's fun. And actually Jared Mascoitz, who's the director of DEM, recently reached out to me as well. privately. You know, he said they're doing the best to have their team ready. And I have faith in his team. I loved working with his team. It's not them I'm worried about. It's DOH. Isn't he like 16, though? No. He's older than me. So you found yourself doing this dashboard and then

what, what happened? So we're riding on the success. Florida's been shut down for about three weeks and it looks like we've plateaued, which is what all of our hope and prayers were. And we, we, worked our asses off. I never had a day off. For six weeks straight, no day off. And the people I worked with never took a day off, not till pretty far into it. Because partly there were no backups. We were horribly understaffed. My developer was in India when this started and then when he finally was able to come back, had to self-quarantine, so I had no help. And we're all basically exhausted and tired and hoping that there was a light at the end of the tunnel soon because of how well Florida was doing, despite expectations. So around three and a half weeks into April,

the reopening task force meets. And this is a group of about 100 people and a whopping five doctors on the panel. The director of disease control Dr. Blackmore wasn't even on the panel. It's mostly business people, which was the first thing I noticed. And I thought, who are these people? Why do they get to decide why we're reopening? They have nothing to do with this. It's like they have no medical expertise. They haven't been knee deep or neck deep into this since January, they should have no say in what we're doing, but they had all the say. And a few days after that meeting, I got a call from Dr. Blackmore saying, hey, they're going to start reopening in about a week, and we need to come up with the criteria, a way to measure the criteria, and a way to publish

the criteria to the public by Sunday. And this was a call I got Friday afternoon on what was supposed to be my first weekend off in six weeks. So obviously I didn't get my day off. I spent three days talking to the epi people about which criteria we were going to use, how we were going to define it, how we were going to explain it, where the data was going to come from, how we were going to use it. And then I did the analysis, and Epi did their own analysis too. You know, we always cross-check. Could you explain to Epi? Oh, Epi is the epidemiologist's team.

And so three of the five people have quit. So, you know, that's great. But at any rate, so I was called down there to show it to them. And I basically was told that they didn't like it. While I was showing them the data that they were supposedly seeing for the first time, the plan was being stapled right in front of me. So it was already done. and when the data didn't match the plan, the short end of that story is that they asked me to change the data.

And I said no. And at the time, I have to say, I didn't. They asked you to change the data? How could you change the data? Well, they changed a lot of things. And it's super, like, super technical and nitty gritty. How we calculated percent positivity was changed. We stopped monitoring by days and instead did it by week.

We stopped reporting twice a day, went down to months a day so that leadership, and quote, could review all the data before we made it public. We changed how we counted cases. We changed the criteria itself. So pneumonia was originally one of the surveillance criteria. So we had ER data for pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-like illness. And one of the first things they did was cut out pneumonia. It was too high. And if we looked at the pneumonia, you know, admissions and things like that, it would be terrifying. And so they just cut it out. We were supposed to either have below 10% positivity overall, which they changed the positivity calculation. so that didn't matter, and decreasing positivity for at least two weeks. And they changed it to instead of being and both of those, it was or, either decreasing or below 10%. And once they diluted the percent positivity, pretty much every county was below 10 percent, so that one didn't even matter. They decided to exempt all rural counties. About 40 percent of the counties were immediately exempted from the criteria. They just decided to exempt all the rural counties because, and this is a quote from Courtney, telling Jackson and Franklin or Washington and Franklin that they can't

reopen, but Dade or Broward can would be a nightmare. So they just exempted the rules. And when the Suburans didn't match, and they wanted the suburban ones open, and all that massaging didn't make it happen, they told me to just open up the data and change it, to just change the numbers. So to lie. Yes. And you said, no. Not only no, but fuck no. Actually, I laughed. I didn't. This is the thing. It was such a preposterous. suggestion to me that I laughed, right in her face. She said, well, that one's just 18, just 18% positive, just changed it to 10. Wow. And I literally had that same laugh. What?

Yeah. Then she looked at me and she said, you know, I once had a date of person who said, you tell me what you want the data to show and I'll make it happen. What? And then I realized it was serious. And then I said back, well, I bet they didn't have a PhD either. And yeah, they left. I didn't hear back from them for two days. And I asked Leah in the Epi office, you know, what was happening. I told her what they asked me to do. And she said, oh yeah, they called me last night for all the raw data. They hired a vendor. It's like a private company to do the analysis. And she said, they called me at some insane hour. I just gave it all to them, you know, like they don't have a data key or anything like that. She just dumped it

all to them. And the next day, the plan was finalized, presented, sent to the public. And it had the exact results that they were asking me to do. So they have gone after you pretty hard. I've tried, yeah. They dumped an opo file on you, which is, you know, not something you expect your government to do. For a health employee who's not a public person. Yeah.

I had not even, like, spoken to the press when that happened. I was telling everybody who called me that I wasn't doing interviews. I hadn't said anything to anybody when DeSantis went on his crazy little tirade that now is the, you know, butt of all jokes with his arms raised out. Like, it didn't happen. Well, guess what, Ron? It fucking did. May I quote Rich Lowry from National Review.

I knew this was coming. From early June. Where does Ron DeSantis go for his apology? Yeah, where do I go to get mine? I feel like Ron is not getting an apology anytime soon. Yeah, no. Can I guess hard to the know on that? So you'd quit, right?

No, I didn't quit. I didn't quit. I said I wouldn't do that. Then I got some other requests to do things that I said no to, one of which was to delete it all. Oh, wow. I said, I need to get that in writing from my boss before I'm going to do that. I was like, we have 100 million people who have looked at this.

100 million. The state, this is the only real public source of information for coronavirus for our state. A day later, I got it in writing. I said, this is the wrong call, but I did it. Everything broke. We broke the internet. And an hour later, they said put it back up. And the next day I was taken off the dashboard.

So what would you like to see happen here? That's a lot. that's a lot. So first, I have to do my plug and say, I wish every Floridian would go to my site, Florida COVID Action.com. It's extremely easy to use. I recently launched, or I guess, relaunched, a better version of the dashboard. Say it's Florida COVID Action. Florida COVID Action.com. You can get to the dashboard and all the data straight from there. You can find testing locations near you. You can find our community map, which has, you know, your local Red Cross Chapter. It has information about summer feeding sites from the USDA where you can get meals for your kids. And I'm going to be launching

a violations survey and map soon too because I've been getting a lot of emails from people saying, you know, I'm at the store and nobody, the people here are not enforcing any of the policies or, you know, people aren't listening here or the store has a reputation for doing this. I have to be very careful about that because I don't want people to go on there and just trash, you know, competing stores. So that's still something that's very much in development. But I've really built this site centered around community. I have now broken down cases by city by day. I am the only place you can get all of that information, the cities, the zip codes, the prisons, the pediatric cases, the changing cases over time, deaths, all of it, all of it. I put all of it up there. That's awesome. That's very impressive.

Do you worry that people in this government, in other state governments, are changing the numbers to fit the narrative? Yes, of course they are. It would be almost absurd to think that they worked. I have heard a lot of things about, I think there was a person in a similar position to me in either Arizona or Georgia who faced the same issue and made the same choice I did and then was fired. And I've known that South Carolina has had some serious issues with its data for a while now. I keep getting asked, hey, can you do this nationally? And the truth of the matter is that that's not possible. You could easily consolidate all of the data that's being reported, the way that Johns Hopkins does. I mean, they have a national map that just reports cases, and that be it.

But if you want people on the inside who know what the data caveats are, who know what the pitfalls are, who know that you can't use this data in that way because it doesn't really mean this, then you're not really presenting data in a complete picture. You're just dumping figures that aren't really comparable. So one of the things that I see people talk about on Twitter is how the death rate in Florida is super, super low. That's not true. It's not super low. And if you look at some of the factors that are being considered in that kind of analysis, it's not really analysis, it's just kind of crude. You can't just take the number of deaths divided by like the number of people in your state.

One of the reasons is that in April, the CDC advised states to start counting probable cases and deaths. So people that had a doctor diagnosis of COVID-19, but for whatever reason, we're not able to get a test. And so New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, other states started doing that. Florida didn't. We said, fuck the CDC. We're not counting probable people who have, you know, had cases or died based on a doctor, a physician diagnosis. And that's why our numbers have been so low. And you also can't just divide it because New York's peak was months ago. So the bulk of the people that are going to have died from the first wave in New York is long over. And ours isn't. We haven't even reached the peak of deaths yet. And the average time from case diagnosis or the test coming back positive to hospital. hospitalization to death, to DOH reporting the death, is about four to six weeks. So this is not an appropriate comparison. And if we added probable cases and deaths into that, it would be a completely different picture of not just where Florida is now, but where it has been throughout

this whole process, but we're not following the CDC. That's really scary. It's really, really scary. Is it fair to assume that a lot of these red states may not be reporting accurately? Well, most of those red states aren't reporting the probable cases or deaths. They're the states that decided not to follow CDC guidance back in April to do that. So we really don't know how many COVID cases we have in America? Well, probably never really know. If we had a testing strategy that was based on randomized sampling or some other logical process, it was free and widely available everywhere, then we could approximate how many cases and deaths there were in the population based on statistical modeling. The problem is not only did DOH stop releasing testing data, which for some

reason nobody seems to notice or care about, but they stopped reporting it, we don't have that kind of availability. Like if I wanted to get tested for free, I'd have to drive basically 40 minutes across Tallahassee over to the stadium over there and then wait in line for a long time to maybe get a test. And one out of five of them are false positives. 20% of the people who got a test who were actually positive got a negative result. Wait, still? Yes, that is the false positive rate for the molecular, the diagnosis, like no swab test is 20%. Is that true everywhere or just in America? That's an epi question. I just know what the rate is, how it works. You know, you can also get the false negative rate for the antigen test, like the rapid results, is crazy high. It's like

70 to 80%. And now DOH dumps those results into their percent positivity calculation, but doesn't tell you how many of those are antigen. And it doesn't report it anywhere else. So they're basically putting a huge amount of rapid negative tests into their percent positivity now to dilute it even further. And the saddest part is that with all that work, we still have an average, like, state positivity rate of like 20 percent. With the 20 percent fail rate, of the PCR tests and the crazy high percent rate of antigen tests, the way they change the way that it's calculated, how they've been basically dumping tons of negative tests the same day they get tons of positives, it's still high.

Right, even though they're trying to goose the numbers. Deborah Cleaver is the founder of Vote America and has been working to get people out to vote by mail since 2008. Today she's going to talk to us about voting by mail. So thank you so much for joining us, Deborah. We're so excited. to have you and we have so much to talk to you about and all of a sudden you're the expert and the thing that the president is obsessed with. So will you talk to us a little bit about how you got involved in voting by mail and how your vote by mail journey started? Sure, that's a fun and nerdy question. Well, I'm always curious like how people figure out what it is they do, you know,

because I never have. So, yeah, that's pretty funny. So I have been starting. So I have been starting. Voter Turnout Organizations as a hobby since 2004, kind of a weird hobby. And way back in 2004, I ran an organization with a friend called Swing the State, and people volunteered with us online. And we helped them travel to swing states to do voter registration and voter turnout work. And this was an overtly partisan organization. We were like, George W. Bush cannot be reelected to office. I remember feeling that way.

Yeah, right? guy. Remember when it seemed like he was as bad as life would get? And so anyway, we were part of this nationwide effort to register millions of new voters in George W. Bush would reelected to office anyway. And I was like, I don't understand this mathematically. Like, we outregistered them three to one and we still lost. And I was like, I wonder if we have a voter turnout problem, not a voter registration problem, which was like sacrilegious to stay, remain sacrilegious to say, even though it turns out 85% of America, are registered to vote. So that's actually what's going on. It's like, it's a really leaky funnel.

All these people register and they don't vote. And so I was with a group of friends in Vegas in 2006, tending the first Netroots conference because I'm old. And I was like, you guys, I want to start a new project, which is online only. I don't like talking to people face to face. I don't like people. I'm from New York. And I was like, and I want to target already registered voters who have some sort of of roadblock that I could clear using the internet. Like, who's registered to vote and wants to vote and just needs help? And someone was like, what about people who vote absentee? Like, is anyone doing anything for them? And I was like, no. And he's like, so why don't we start something to help people vote absentee? And, you know, foolishly, we're like, oh, yeah, we'll build a website.

It'll take a weekend. It will be like, no problem at all. We came up with the name, long-distance voter. And then we started working on it. And we found out it was not going to take a weekend. It was enormously complicated. But we built this website. We launched really early 2008, which just guided people through voting by mail. And we had our first half million visitors within six months. And so just kept running long-distance voter as a hobby for the next seven years, maybe in my spare time. And along the way, accidentally built one of the biggest voter registration groups in America as well. And then eventually turned long-distance voter into vote.org, which is another. project of mine that went pretty well.

Question, I got involved in vote by mail way back in 2008 because no one else was doing it. And it was so clearly a group of people who were highly motivated to vote and just had, you know, it was a complicated process. And that's where I like honed something that I now know on a cellular level to be true, which is that Americans don't need to be convinced to vote. They need to be able to vote. And it's just really hard to vote in the U.S. Making that point for me now, there's this whole pandemic.

thing going on, which is going to make it really hard. Yeah, so I don't know if you guys have heard. I don't know what media you consume. Yeah. But, you know, it's not a scam. There's this, like, really deadly virus going around, and it's going to make voting in person a thing that doesn't happen. So we're all going to need to vote by mail this year,

which, as you says, really setting Donald Trump off. He, like, he hates this idea, even though he votes by mail. And a lot of members didn't Kaylee McEnany also vote by mail? I mean, Republicans vote by mail. mail. It's literally, you know, I used to run the country's like only vote by mail project. And so I would like regularly talk to the RNC because they sent so much traffic my way. And it's because they've spent well over a decade investing in getting registered Republicans to sign up to vote by mail. So it seems like Trump is cutting off his nose to spite his face. What's going on there? Yeah, that's such a great question. Like why is the president of the United States engaging in a disinformation? campaign? Yeah, I just don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I mean, me as a person, I think about the fact that he contested the 26 election, even though he won that election. That's true. Probably not a great sign. Not a great sign. And I think that he has concerns

about his ability to win the 2020 election. He wants to undermine the election and cast doubts on the result because he personally fears the result. Why he has decided to glom on to vote, by mail. That one, I think that just boils down to the fact that people are going to vote by mail and he wants to cast out on the integrity of the election, however it happens. Like, if we were all going to vote in person, he would be attacking polling places as insecure. I don't think it's vote by mail itself. I think it's voting that he has a problem with. I think he would like to live in a country where politicians choose their voters as opposed to citizens choosing their leaders. So Yeah, that seems about right.

Right. So tell me, what are the, like, biggest fallacies that you see for voting by mail? I mean, I think the funniest one, the one that makes me laugh the most is the idea that voting by mail and absentee ballots aren't the same thing. Yes. That one makes me laugh, like, constantly. He's like, vote by mail is an abomination, but absentee ballots are fine. And I'm like, literally the same thing, buddy. Voting by mail is the process and absentee ballot is the piece.

of paper, but you're referring to the same thing. But on a more serious note, the idea that somehow vote by mail isn't secure is worrisome. It is more secure than voting in person because it takes place on paper. And we've had so many compromised voting machines that anyone who actually cares about election security would want the entire country to vote by mail. So that would be a fallacy that somehow it's not secure. This was really funny. I don't know if you guys remember a few weeks ago he's talking about people printing ballots at home or or sending in old ballots as if we've all been hoarding our ballots for years and years and then we're going to send them all in at once as if that would be relevant that doesn't even make any sense it doesn't make any sense but he's the

president of the United States and I refuse to believe that he's just talking nonsense Molly that doesn't make any sense yeah I think he's talking nonsense my money's on nonsense talking. I could be wrong, but my sense is nonsense talking. What is your big hurdle with getting people to vote by mail? How do people find you? And how do you help them? Sure. So the biggest hurdle is that in most states, you need to sign up to vote by mail. So first you register to vote, and then you sign up for vote by mail. So there's an extra step there that not everyone knows about. And then within that step, you know, almost every state will let you register to vote online, but only 14 or 15 let you sign up for vote by mail online.

Oh, interesting. Right? So you're expected to print and mail this sign up form, except that no one owns printers. Home printer has been in the low single digits since, like, 2011. So literally, people don't have printers. Because printers are just awful. They're awful.

And every so often, someone will be like, I have a printer, and I'm like, just it have ink in it? And then they're like, oh, good point. So in order to sign up for vote by mail, people need to, like, print and mail a piece of paper, but they don't have printers, they don't have stamps. They don't know where the mailbox is. Do you know the USPS website doesn't have a mailbox locator? Do they seem like weirdly stubbornly uninterested in your help?

Because something is wrong with USPS. Listen, if there's anyone who has faith in mail delivery, it's USPS, I think that they are legally prohibited from getting involved too much in this. I know the letter carriers union, they're like definitely friends of ours. Okay. We're like, they're great. The U.S. postal system is the best in the world. Like, that's another thing.

That's right. It's true. It's really frustrating to me. It's like, suddenly everyone's like, oh, you can't trust the post office. Yeah, you can't. And yeah, we do. And not only can they deliver ballots, but they deliver all the forms of ID that you bring to the polls. Like, we trust the post office to deliver our life.

licenses, our passports, our legal documents, our financial documents. So this like undermining of the post office really bizarre to watch. And it's very damaging. People are like, oh, we should privatize it all. And I'm like, well, the reason UPS and FedEx make money is that they don't deliver to non-profitable addresses. So if we didn't have the post office, rural America would never get mail again. Right. Oh, that's really depressing. Now I'm sorry you get really. really depressed. So we have a lot of memes going around Facebook saying that we should vote very early, that we should really be worried about it. I know with New York, with the primary and me and a lot of my friends, we got our absentee ballots, even though we've registered early two days after they

came and had to go vote in person. What is your advice on what we should be doing in this selection since we all want to have our votes counted against Mr. Trump? Sign up for vote by mail as early as possible because the states are just not prepared to process the applications. They're not prepared for the volume of applications that are coming. And since in so many places, it's literally a paper form, like there's someone opening the mail and typing from the form into a database. So I think we just need to accept much like our crumbling healthcare system that we're going to overwhelm the local election officials and to borrow sort of dark analogy. We need to flatten the curve of vote by mail application. So people should sign up as quickly as possible. You can actually go

to vote America.com and we have a tool that will help you sign up in any state and D.C. But sign up now. Let's just get this going. Wow. Can I give a second answer to that? Do you know what would really help this if the clerks just proactively mailed the ballots to registered voters? That would just really solve a lot of the election administration problems in 2020. Hasn't that happened in some places? That'd be a damn miracle. Yeah, it would be a damn miracle. But we have like, I'm in California. And California was just like, fuck it.

We're just going to move to all vote by mail. There's already five states that were already all vote by mail, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii. I know that there are a bunch of states that are trying to move all vote by mail. Part of me is like, you know, there's nothing actually stopping you. Yeah. Is there anything something about it? No. Is there any place you want to direct people to, Deborah?

Yes, everyone should visit VoteAmerica.com, and we have what you need to participate in this election. And also, sign up for vote by mail. Vote by mail is awesome. It's literally awesome. In a civilized country, we would all vote by mail.

Rick Wilson. Molly Chong Fast, do you know that we have a segment every show? No. Tell me more. It's a segment that comes up with every show. Perhaps you're familiar with it. No, I'm not. It's called that guy. Is it a negative segment? Would you happen to have a candidate for Fuck That Guy today?

My Fuck That Guy is a Mercedes Schlapp. And that's not because the last time I went to her husband's horrendous conservative political action corporation or conference. I got exposed to COVID and have been stuck in my house ever since. I believe it's the conservative political cuckolding conference. Yes, I'm pretty sure it is. Hi, Matt. It is not because Mercedes is married to me.

Matt and Matt, Mercedes works for the Trump administration, and Matt is a lobbyist, and they have all sorts of incredibly sketchy conflicts of interest. That is not why she is my fuck-that guy of the day. Why is Mercedes your fuck-that-guy today? So Mercedes-Schlapp was on with Breonna Keeler and CNN, and she was saying she was just spreading a lot of misinformation. She was on Trump TV. Trump TV is like the dregs. It's what makes O-A-N-N look good. TV makes O-A-N-N look like the BBC. That's right. And you had, it was a segment with the president's daughter-in-law,

the president's son's girlfriend, Mercedes, and also Katrina Pearson, who was arrested for shoplifting. Not on the show, but prior. Not on the show, but had prior had arrests for shoplifting. She said Biden's advisors are saying, don't even go to the debate, just skip the debates. They're nervous the man is going to be one gaffe after the next. Of course, Biden had agreed to the debate.

debates in June, and this is just made up stuff, because Team Trump is filled with liars. I wouldn't say it's filled with liars, Molly. That would imply that there was some sort of container in which to hold the liars. Would you say it's chock? And that container would hypothetically comprise non-lier content. The Trump campaign is entirely liars. Would you say it's chocka block with liars? I would say it's chock-full. I would say it's up to the brim. That's a heartwarming metaphor. It is. Who is your fuck that guy? So my fuck that guy is this group of folks. And you know what? One of them is so vain. I'm not going to say his name on the podcast. Because I'm not kidding you, he is one of those guys with the biggest love me wall in America. In politics, people have what

people have what they call a love me wall. And the love me wall are pictures of you with a candidate, shaking hands or smiling or, you know, in front of the flags with your spouse, your girlfriend. And those people who have the Love Me Wall want people to think, oh, you're so powerful. Look at you. Man, that's amazing. Whereas most of the time they were staffers at an event, they got to go do a grip and grin in the same room with the fundraisers, right? Grip and grin, folks, for the term of art in politics, is that picture of you with congressman, the senator, or the president, whoever, both of you smiled at the camera while you're shaking hands, as if you're good buddies. And if he remembers you five minutes later, it's a miracle. One of the guys involved is a huge

love me wall guy. His Instagram is basically like, I'm the Prince of the Dark Arts. Look at me, me, me. And so I'm not going to give him the ego satisfaction of saying his name on the on the pod, but this is a guy who used to work for match lap, and this Kanye situation stinks on ice. And look,

I've warned Democrats this was this was probably going to happen. I thought it might have been another Jill Stein 2.0, you know, another Green Party boost, but they've decided to go for the Kanye play instead. So fuck those guys. I think that's a reasonable one. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science, who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFest and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on. the next episode.