The Daily Beast Podcast - There Is a Way to Take Down Fox News (And It’s Not a Boycott)

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Amidst hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from COVID-19, countless pleas from health officials and the CDC to wear maks and social distance, and a recent report from Lancet that put the cherry on top of the “this was basically Trump’s fault” sundae, Fox News has decided to do what Fox News does: Go against all of that. This time, their “poison pill” of choice, as Media Matters’ President and CEO Angelo Cursone calls it in this episode of The New Abnormal, is vaccine skepticism. “What Fox is doing with the vaccines right now is similar to the role that they played at every step of public health measures,” Cursone tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast. “They dismissed social distancing early on. They were sort of skeptical about the masks and Jeanine Pirro was warning her audience. That the only reason people wear masks is to do bad things.” Now, they’re telling their viewers they’re not sure about taking the “George Soros Kool-Aid.” (Rick Wilson is already seeing this play out with “MAGA moms” on Facebook). But Fox has a reason for this, adds Cursone, who shares his theory. It has to do with your cable bill—and it’s also the very way the network could be destroyed. The more outrage they get, the more viewers, the more negotiating power they have against cable companies to get them to charge cable watchers more for their channel. “Fox News, now, for every person that has cable news pays Fox news between $2 and $2 and 50 cents a month, whether or not you ever watched the channel and what they're trying to do, because they've lost so much, advertising [wants to] get that number up from about $2, a person to $3 to $3 and 50 cents over the next year,” and if there’s a way to hit them where it hurts, explains Cursone, it’s here. Of course, it’s not a New Abnormal episode if there isn’t talk of impeachment, especially the hearings going on right now involving the Capitol insurrection. Rick is particularly furious at Rick Scott and Marco Rubio: “They're basically just saying, ah, yeah, our little plot failed. Our little coup failed. So we're just going to hang out here and be the dick kids in the back of the room, throwing at the teacher.” Speaking of dicks, Molly tells the fun little tale of Marjorie Taylor Green and the Tantric Sex Guru and Daily Beast congressional reporter Sam Brodey talks about his experience witnessing the trial in person. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks. This is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, a left-wing pundit, and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at Large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, bestselling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. We take the issues seriously. Ourselves, so much. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we get ourselves out of it. Hi, Rick Wilson. Hi, Molly Junkfast. How are

you? I am feeling emotionally very exhausted. I am feeling emotionally very angry, but that's just my sort of default emotion these days. Watching this impeachment and watching these videos and watching Jamie Raskin, who just lost his son, it is so hard. I don't think I thought it would be so hard. The idea that we were going to have these videos being revealed and these new revelations about the coordination between certain Republican members of the Senate and Congress with the mob, with Trump's role in it, I kind of priced that in. I kind of felt that was coming. But what really just made me so freaking furious yesterday, so fucking furious yesterday, was watching the contempt from Josh Hawley, leaning back, kicked his feet up on the desk, just reading papers.

Rick Scott, bringing a book to read onto the floor. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio both, just like, yeah, it's a waste of time, whatever. These people prove to me every goddamn day that they are below the office that they currently hold, that they are people who don't ever let them fool you for one second, that they love the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the rule of law. and the corpus of American law and our traditions and institutions, they're basically just saying, yeah, our little plot failed. Our little coup failed.

So we're just going to hang out here and be the dick kids in the back of the room throwing shit at the teacher. Yeah. It is despicable. It is horrific. It is to the point where I was watching a C-SPAN clip yesterday, or a clip of the impeachment yesterday from C-SPAN, and I'm glad the cameras were stuck to the front of the room.

Because every time I heard or saw another cutaway from other people, or from other photographs, I just felt this sense of their contempt. I keep saying this to people, and I don't know if they get this. If that mob, by the way, had found Marco Rubio, they would have killed him too. Or Mike Pence, or Mitt Romney, or Nancy Pelosi,

if they recognize them, mobs do what mobs do. And mobs are not conscious creatures. They move because they've been pushed a certain way. They've been motivated a certain way. and these people would have all these smart asses, Lindsay Graham, all these smart asses. That mob would have said,

Lindsay Graham, he one time called Trump crazy. Let's kill him. Yeah. And you know what's interesting to me is like what we learned yesterday and the way this case has been litigated, it has been very, very concise and very clear and everything has been labeled. And what we learned yesterday was really that they were 58 steps from Mitt Rom.

We were like a hair away from a bloodbath, and the Capitol police really saved all these people's lives. And you saw Eugene Goodman. He said, come attack me so that I can keep these other people safe. Now, I understand that this is the job, but we spend so much time talking about police doing the wrong thing. And here are police behaving so bravely, and African American police largely, behaving so bravely and really saving lives. And you do have to wonder if these Republicans can't stand up for not being murdered in their workplace, then what can they stand up for? Officer Siknik, who was murdered, murdered. Murdered, I say again, murdered on the spot at the order of Donald Trump.

He said, go fight for what you want. Go attack. Go to the Capitol. Take it. The sack and an invasion of the Capitol led to the immediate death of Officer Siknick. Yeah. It led to his murder. We had two more cops commit suicide because of what they felt was their failure.

There were over a hundred police officers injured. We have a cop there who lost an eye because of this mob. And these fuckers sitting on the floor of the Senate with their feet up on the desk, these people acting like this is just an annoyance so that they can get back to trolling and get back to going on Tucker and talking about Antifa again. They are despicable. They are low. They are vacant.

They are people who do not deserve the trust of the American people, and I pity the states, including my own, because both of my U.S. senators, both Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, are now full-on sedition caucus. They're full on, whatever, no big deal. Sorry about the mob. I hope they clean up the mess. Nice know when your officer's sick, Nick. These people deserve the utmost contempt from the American people at every level. And they're showing us just how contemptuous they are. of this country. This is the non-Republican party. They don't believe in anything right now except the trolling and keeping Trump happy still. I also think that we should just take a minute and talk about the people who had to clean up, who had to literally clean up the broken glass and the blood

and the feces. Because, you know, we don't talk enough about the people who are stuck with the mess. And that, I think, is really a profound and upsetting. I can't believe. leave how upsetting this is to me. And I was pretty upset by the first impeachment just because I was so horrified. But this is a whole other level. If you can't say no to violence, what can you say no to? Right? If you can't say, but the peaceful transfer of power is basically the building block of democracy. Without that, you have no democracy. And so what I thought was really good today was one of the impeachment managers made the case that it's not about what Donald Trump did. It's about not having this happen again, which I agree. I mean, the fact that Republicans are

covering so hard for Donald Trump makes me think that they're waiting for him to run again in 2024. Yeah. Yeah, I think we should say the Jamie Raskin quote, which was, is there any political leader in this room of believes that if he's ever allowed by the Senate back into the Oval Office, Donald Trump would stop inciting violence to get his way? Would you bet the lives of more police officers on that? They know what Trump did. Okay? This isn't a secret. Okay? This is, and a person called me today, who was a survivor from an abusive relationship. And she said to me, she was, I'm having PTSD about this because my husband's friends knew what he was doing. They bragged about it. He laughed about it. He thought it was funny. He talked about it with them. Not one of them stood up. And she goes,

when I finally got out of it, when I finally got away from it, when I finally broke the chain on it, you know, everyone was shocked that I didn't know how everyone seemed, everyone in our circle seemed to know he was an abusive bastard because I kept it a secret because I was ashamed of it. These fuckers are in an abusive relationship with Donald Trump and they don't care. They welcome it. They're masochistic. They have reached the point where their desire to to play in this space defined by Fox and Trump and OAN and Newsmax and the Federalists and all this and Breitbart, all these other places,

to feed that machine that raises their money now, they don't care. They know they're an abusive relationship. They're practically bragging about it. It's disgusting. I just find it to be one of the worst moments of a party that has become deeply evil. They don't care that that cop was murdered, beaten to death with flagpoles. They don't care. They don't give a fuck.

Rick Scott, we put out an ad yesterday called Blood with Blood on their hands, and, oh, man, they were pissed off. Well, guess what? Fuck you. Fuck you. If you're sitting in the back of the room like a goddamn wayward schoolboy now, rolling your eyes at presentations of violence in the Capitol and saying, it's a waste of time, man, I don't want to be here. Fuck trigonometry. I don't need it. I'm never going to use algebra.

You know, acting like you're a bunch of, like, school kids, when you are seeing the evidence put before you that Donald Trump ordered his mom. to invade the Capitol, they did so with murderous intent, and had they found Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi or Mitt Romney or anybody else that they didn't fully recognize as a full-on Trumper, they would have killed them. And I am legitimately pissed off about this in ways. This is not just political at this point. These people are crossing a Rubicon. They are pushing beyond the boundaries of where civilization exists because, you know what? They're going to say, yeah, so what? They killed that reporter. He was a libtard. It was a libtart anyway who didn't like Trump. So what? They took out that activist. Oh, well, they killed that judge. This thing slides down a goddamn slope pretty fucking quickly if we're

not careful as a country. Yeah, I would say we're pretty far down that slope right now. I think they're doing a really great job. And Joe Nogh, he's just a superstar. So I'm very excited about that because he had sort of been on my radar just a little bit. And what's kind of amazing about these impeachments is they really do create I mean, they managed to spotlight some of these young Democrats who are really the future of the party. So I was very excited about that. I thought they did a really good job picking the impeachment managers. I thought it's been really, they've been great.

Let's be honest. Your worst nightmare was Jerry Nadler 2.0 because it was certainly mine. Yeah, he's not great. During the last impeachment, it was not as persuasive as it could have been in a number of junctures. Yeah, exactly. But I think they just made a really tight case. But it also is. The stakes are much higher. This is democracy here. The Republic was threatened on January 6th by a mob that sought to overturn the election. In the course of doing so, that mob murdered people. In the course of doing so, they put at risk the structure and continuity of this nation. and they shit on the peaceful transfer of power for all time.

There is nothing here where you spin your way out of it and say, oh, it was just the enthusiasms of the crowd. Trump never ordered anything. What? But I also think it's more about this issue that, so the rioters are going to be held accountable, maybe not held accountable in the way they would if they were a person of color or if they were a Democrat. But they were definitely being arrested and being booked, and some are. being held on larger charges. So those people will be held accountable, but Donald Trump will yet again skate. And I think that is profound. They're letting Donald Trump get away with the murder

that he inspired. No, they're letting him get away with it. Yeah, if you were in a bar, okay, and there were a bunch of people who loved this one guy who was really popular in the bar, and he said, go kick the fuck out of that guy across the room. Go beat the shit out of them. And the gang that loved this guy in the bar, went over there and kicked the shit out of this guy and beat him to death of the pool queue. When the police came and rounded them up, I promise you they would have taken that guy too. They would have arrested him too. He would face charges. He incited the mob to do this. It's over a month now since this happened. And for me, watching this testimony and seeing this testimony, it makes it very clear what the stakes are. And it makes it

very clear who the people who are the collaborators with this particular dangerous path we're on are in this equation. Can we talk about Marjorie Taylor Green's tantric sex guru? You had me a tantric sex guru. Go on. I feel like we cannot do an episode of the new abnormal where we don't talk about Marjorie Taylor Green's tantric sex guru. Now, let me just say... Wait, are you saying Marjorie Taylor Green is a tantric sex guru? She actually does. Now, I had been told about this story a couple weeks ago, but I didn't want to put it in my piece about her because it just seemed so lurid. I wasn't sure that it was appropriate, and I didn't. But luckily, the Daily Mail has no such worries about luridness exclusive.

And battled Qaunong Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green openly cheated on her husband of 25 years with a polyamorous tantric sex guru and then moved on to another phase. with the manager of her gym. So this story is pretty amazing, and it involves her dad is very, very rich, I don't know if you know this, and he's a developer, and one of the things he did for her was get her these CrossFit gyms,

as one does for their children, when you love them. I just did the same for my daughter today. During it, she met two lovers who worked at the gym in 2012, and insiders say she was so brazen about her affair. She believed her marriage was on the rocks, but appears the couple has put the infidelity behind them.

And there are many, many, many pictures of the tantric sex guru in very tiny shorts. As I'm wearing right now, Molly. Basically the booty shorts I'm wearing right now, they're jorts, technically, I suppose. They're their shorts. I am putting. this in the chat.

I'm not putting it in the show notes because I don't want to upset anyone, but I'm putting it in the chat. I have to say, Molly, I thought this was your B. You wrote about sex gurus at a book. I did, and I do. And I just didn't like the idea of maligning another woman with her infidelities. But now that it is out, I feel that we must talk about it. Also, he wears tiny, tiny shorts and has odd facial hair.

He calls himself the tantric warrior, and he describes himself as living a warrior lifestyle while finding tantric love. He also participates in reenactments of medieval battles and teaches swordfighting. Once again, who among us doesn't have a tantric sex guru medieval battle instructor? My question is, since she's so QAnon, do you think she hooked him up with the QAnon shaman guy? I can not. He's polyamorous, after all. Maybe he's who's bringing him his organic food in prison. I cannot begin to describe to you how tacky this is, but, you know, that is where we're at.

Am I going to get in trouble for making this joke? Yes. If you think yet, then yes. No. No. Rick wasn't, if in your mind you're thinking, am I going to get in trouble for it, the answer is always yes. Well, it combines chakras and adrenochrome, but because of that, you will all have to just guess what it meant. Right. We were in Georgia. Let's talk about Georgia. Georgia is going to sort of try criminal charges against Trump for his. Can't you find me a couple more votes?

As they should. What do you think about that? State charges are a bitch. Ain't nobody getting pardoned on those, Don. And from what I can see, and I'm no attorney, but I hire many election lawyers, as you. you well imagine. My election lawyer friends are like, oh, this ain't good. Oh, really? They don't look too good. He made the ask. And, you know, the idea of he had to explicitly say, I will give you a dollar if you change these votes for me. It is not the standard of proof. You know, the mob boss who says, you know, that guy, I don't like him anymore. Go take care of him. That guy can still get knocked for murder. That one hour of lunacy filters down to a few key lines. but he's asking them to, quote, give him those votes, to find them for him. When they've already said they don't exist, we can't change them.

They're not there. And look, I think there's always going to be a giant hesitation to go after Trump directly and to charge him directly because everybody's afraid of the political downside, including the people that would be the prosecutors on this case, I promise you. The Attorney General of Georgia is going to go, oh, shit, don't these people at my house? Like everything else, people are scared to death of Donald Trump, and they're going to whist out of it, and that's that. So you don't think it'll work? I don't think it'll work, but I think they'll try.

Fox has increasingly been ratcheting up anti-vax sentiment. What do you guys make of that? I promise you, fish-tick boy Tucker Carlson will go out and be vaccinated. Right, everybody will. The polls that he amuses himself with every night will not. Why do you think that Fox News is pushing anti-vaccing? It's the gentry version of Q&ON. It lets their people think, yeah, those guys with their science and their medicine, supposed medicine.

They never tried hydrochloroquine because, you know, Trump knew more than the doctors did and the scientists. They want to feed that audience that is pre-programmed to believe that nothing is real except what Fox tells me. And these people are going to get people killed. Just as Fox spent weeks saying, election was stolen. It was stolen, man. Totally stolen. Trump knows it's stolen. That conception that the election was stolen fed the audience for the riots and for the killings.

It fed those people. It told them, you're right. The thing you think is right is right. The thing you believe is correct. And the same thing is going to happen with these people who listen to. to Fox and say, no, I'm not going to get vaccinated. I mean, there might be, there might be Jew nanobots in there from Bill Gates and George Soros that'll make me a target of the space laser. And by the way, just dive in. Somebody sent me a bunch of screen caps from a Facebook

group the other day. And it was Magas, but it was like Maga Mommies or something like that. And it was like, my kids never having the Bill Gates nano vaccine. No way, they're being tracked. They'll listen to everything my kid does growing up. These mind control things. will turn my kid into a slave. There's no virus. There's no corona. It's not real, man. I'm sorry.

If you were doing anything to promote anti-vax, people will say, I don't want to get the vaccine, man. Tucker said it's dangerous, and we can't know what it. I'm just asking questions. You know, we're already at 500 fucking thousand people because Donald Trump's fuckery.

Do we really, really, really, really want to add to that by encouraging people not to get vaccinated? You saw this new information that says that, like four out of 10 people did not need to die from COVID and that if Trump had just been more on it, much of the death that happened was because of malfeasance. Absolutely no question about it. Three months of denial on the front end, okay? Three months of denial.

Remember that. It's going away. It's nothing. It's only in China. If we let the ship ashore, then we'll have double the cases, but there's nobody else here infected. and then months of hydroxychloroquine and other voodoo bullshit. And then Jared having his own little sort of viral one-sate conference at the White House where they said, eh, we're going to, the blue states are on their own.

Fuck you. You don't like us. You're not nice to Trump. So we're not going to do the testing there. All these things added up to a perfect storm. And then, of course, President's Super Spreader for months on end, mocking mask wearing. His people taking mask wearing as a sign of masculinity or not wearing a mask as a sign of masculinity and vigor and independence. And then the mass rallies over and over again where nobody was wearing a mask and nobody was taking precautions.

All of this is a parcel. And this parcel is one more example of Donald Trump's psychosis and ego leading this country into a position of danger, death, peril, and destruction. Sam Brody is the congressional correspondent for The Daily Beast, and he's going to talk about the unique things he's been seeing in the impeachment trial today. So there's not much going on these days, right? Pretty quiet. No, no, I'm not tired. What the hell is going on inside the chamber? I wish more people could see it because it is so interesting.

I was in there for about two hours yesterday of the proceedings, and it's kind of weird because it's like being on an airplane. You like can't. I mean, it's like being on an airplane, if you couldn't take out your laptop and the Wi-Fi is broken, like, you're just kind of in there stuck. You can bring in a notepad and take like long-hand notes. Side note, what was really depressing for me was I was like searching for a notepad when I got out there yesterday. And I literally like found one. I was like, great. And it turned out to be my notebook from the last impeachment. Wow. Which I haven't touched because a pandemic happened afterwards. And it's a notebook, yeah. So you're not allowed to bring a computer. You're not allowed to bring a phone?

Nope. What? Yeah, and there's no photography allowed. And do they make you sort of take turns because of COVID? It's like a first come, first serve thing. It's like really, really spaced out. Normally you could probably put, I don't know, 30 reporters. up there in the gallery, 40, and now it's like maybe 10 at a time.

I am very interested in what it's like. You have to get there at a certain amount of time, sign up. Yeah, basically, we all have like a special like badge that clears us for to go in. And obviously, like the security has been really, really intense since the sixth. And it has remained so. I mean, the, you know, the National Guard perimeter is still there. The barbed wire, lots of people with guns walking around, continues to be the case. And then they have all these special rules for impeachment, which they had last time around too, like really, really kind of like stuff that they implement and you're like, okay, like, in the, there's a hallway that the senators use that they come from their offices to get up to the elevators to take them to the floor.

And there's like a little escalator. It's like the most photographed escalator like in the world because senators are always coming up it. And during impeachment, like you can't interview them on the escalator. When it's not impeachment, you can interview them on the escalator. You can interview them on the escalator. But during impeachment, no escalator. So, yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

But you got to get there in time and then go to the gallery with your badge. To get into the actual chamber, you have to go through a metal detector, put your phone and stuff in a little cubby, and then you get in, and you can take a seat if there is one available and watch the senators sitting and taking in the presentations, which is like the most interesting part, and the part you don't get to see on TV. What have you been seeing? because I've read reporting that said that Josh Hawley is basically just acting out.

I don't know what his deal is necessarily. So, like, I had been wondering how they were going to do this because of social distancing. I guess I should say that I think all of them are vaccinated at this point. But obviously, like, the staffers, like, who are on the floor, I don't know if they are, too. But they have tried to make this, like, somewhat COVID-safe. And what they've said is there is a visitor's gout. that's on the second floor. It's on the same level as the press gallery. It's above the actual Senate floor. And they're like senators and whatever, you can sit up there if you want to.

The only senator who has been taking advantage of this is Josh Hawley. And I was in there as the trial started yesterday at noon. And I look up and like sitting directly across from me like kind of in the bleachers, so to speak, is like, is Holly. And he's like reading some stuff. And he's got his leg draped over the row in front of him. And he's just kind of like doing his own thing up there. And he was up there for several hours before he went downstairs. It is interesting to me. This is the first time you've ever had a group of jurors, some of whom are victims and some of whom are theoretically anyway, possibly co-conspirators, right? It's just so bizarre on so many levels. I mean, I interviewed Ted Cruz after the trial broke yesterday.

And yeah, it's a very, it's a very strange experience to be talking to the various people who were there and the people who endorsed, you know, the objection to the election after everything that happened. You know, I think all of us were watching their faces during the really, really powerful

moment of the trial where they played all that video, some of which was new, some of which was not, but I think all of it was immensely powerful no matter what. Did you see anything? I mean, the things I read were like Lankford cried

right or started welling up. Did you see that? I wasn't able to see him from where I sat, but I think, I mean, lots of senator. I mean, what was really striking to me was not so much the facial expressions because they weren't really striking. What was striking to me was how quiet the chamber was. I mean, it was dead silent the entire time. That's so, so unusual. I mean, when the trial opened and they were going to the arguments, which, you know, were very well delivered, I mean, I think Raskin comes after the first day where he just relayed that gutting experience of his day on January 6. And he comes to the podium yesterday with, I think, a lot of buy-in and credibility from senators on both sides. But still, they're like doodling.

They're reading stuff. They're looking around. You know, they're doing random stuff. And when the video portion of it began, I mean, every eye in that group of senators on the floor was. on the screens watching what happened. No cross talk. I mean, it was completely, completely silent. It was pretty eerie because, and the last impeachment,

which I also saw how things unfolded on the floor, I mean, people were just totally distracted, falling asleep, milling around. I mean, this was riveted to them. And I think, I mean, they were all there. I mean, so much of this footage was brand new to people. Do you think they were actually interested or do you think they were actually arrested by what they saw the screen

when they walked up? I think all of the above. I think a lot of them were really surprised. I asked a few afterwards, you know, if they learned anything. And I talked to Chris Murphy, who was like, he, you know, he basically said, I knew it was bad, but I didn't know, I had no idea it was this bad. You know, not only the near misses for a lot of people, but which were captured just chillingly on the video, but Murphy said, like, I had no idea how long the violence went on. You know, when they're showing video of the police and the mob clashing, I mean, that's happening late into the afternoon at a point where I think a lot of senators had thought that it was over. And it clearly wasn't. And I think a lot of them were shook up by that.

It was interesting to watch some of them. The only times where they seem to be not totally focused on the video, they seem to be talking to each other kind of like, I saw a few make hand motions as if they were kind of using their hands to like make directions and say, oh, like, that's this hallway. like, oh, this is where that is. I mean, this is a building that all of them are intimately familiar with. They're intimately familiar with how to, you know, maneuver so as to avoid, for example, us in the press on a regular day up there. And so I think a lot of them were also processing it themselves and making sense of what was happening and when. I think the managers

did a phenomenal job in situating all this in the building. They had, you know, you probably saw the little kind of diagrams of where things were happening. The dots. That was quite effective. And, yeah, again, it's just another layer of how weird it is to have people as jurors here who were there that day and were kind of piecing together. And involved intimately in one way or another. Can we talk about Bill Cassidy? I feel like that has been the most sort of interesting and profound thing. Can you explain a little bit? I know he's a doctor. I know he treated uninsured people. But I also know he's a serious Republican from a Ruby Red State who voted to try to repeal Obamacare. So I'm curious to know what your take on him and what's happening with him is. Yeah, no, it's a very good question. He's definitely, he's definitely the odd man out a little bit in that other group, you know, the five who also voted to call the trial constitutional.

I mean, I think the thing about Cassidy is like everything that you said is correct. He is quite conservative. Comes from a conservative state believes in things like repealing Obamacare. is not a, I would not classify him as a moderate. I think what he is is somebody who appears interested in trying to get things done. He is somebody who's on the Senate Health Committee, which is usually a more bipartisan committee. He's opposed to Obamacare, but he's also, you know, worked on policy discussions about shoring up Obamacare. He is actually interested in getting legislation pass. And I think an interesting lens through which to view his actions and maybe the

of some of the other Republicans here is that they know that they are out of power right now. The Democrats control the Senate in the House and the White House. Will they get a black mark from the Biden White House if they vote to acquit? I'm not so sure. However, I think expressing openness to what I'm sure the Biden White House and every Democrat on the Hill believes, which is that Trump is insanely culpable in this, I'm not sure it's a calculation, but I do think that someone like Cassidy surely knows that his moves are being closely studied by Democrats right now.

And I think they may view him at the end of this as a more credible partner in legislation. Because I do think Cassidy is somebody who is quite conservative and committed, but also probably would like to see some stuff get done. And I think a lot of them are tired. Even McConnell allies are tired of what has happened over the last four years when they just kind of dig judges and the tax bill, and that was it. I think some of them would like to see some more get done. Thank you so much. Thank you. This is fun. Hey folks, if you haven't heard every single week, we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Solanad O'Brien.

Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner. And sometimes it's just Molly and I shooting the shit. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you'll support the Beast Fearless Journal. as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal. dot the dailybeast.com. That's new abnormal. dot the dailybeast.com.

Angelo Corrasoni is the president's CEO of Media Matters for America, as well as a hashtag dump Trump organizer. And today he's going to talk to us about the plague of Fox News. Let's talk about the landscape getting scarier, because it feels like there was a moment and January 6th where Fox could have done the right thing. Yeah. They chose very consciously not to.

Yeah, I think that they made the calculus. The way Fox News sort of dealt with the January 6th coverage was a deliberate calculus. They could have at that moment, if they genuinely wanted to sort of unshackle themselves from the binds that they were in with Trump and that part of the right-wing landscape, you know, there was so much consensus that that was like not an acceptable thing to do. do, that they could have taken a really sharp position and tried to move themselves, not even necessarily to the center, but just to a place that was a little less dangerous. Yeah. But instead, you know, the seeds of it were actually sown that day. So while the riots

was still happening, while the attack was still going on, Laura Ingram called in and started blaming the antifa. And that was during their news programming. And so what I think ultimately happened is that it's sort of two things. One, I really can't. emphasize how important it is that, I can't over-emphasize, and I know that's used a lot, but it's true here, how important it is that Lackland Murdoch is actually the CEO of the company, because Lackland is deeply connected to Tucker, and he's a nihilist, and he really believes a lot of this stuff. Like, this is not... Can I stop you for one second? When you say he's a nihilist, a lot of people will be like, okay, that's a hell of an accusation. Can you explain why you say

that? I say that Lackland Murdoch is a nihilist because he doesn't care about the institution. of Fox. He's not an institutionalist. He believes basically that everything is broken. And most of his business decisions and his behavior over the last few decades has aligned with that. So the sniping at his family members, every time Rupert Murdoch has been in the worst possible positions in the company, Lackland has been the one to sort of swoop in and be like, ignore the external pressures. Who cares if we hack the dead girl's phone and sort of like mess with their family? Like it's going to be fine, dad. Like he, I mean, these are his moments. He has been sort of the in a strange way, the saving grace whenever Rupert Murdoch has even had his own confidence shaken

into the trajectory that News Corp and Fox had sort of gone in. At their worst moments, he has been the one to basically come in and remind Rupert Murdoch that nothing matters in effect. And it's terrifying. The other thing is, you know, the thing that's not, I mean, the thing that is very clear is that he's close with Tucker Carlson. You know, when Tucker was, you know, during the worst moments of Tucker Carlson's controversies. It has been Lackland, who has privately reached out to him and let him know that and reassured him that they had his back and, you know, to continue doing what he was doing. So I think one is that there's just an alignment there. And then the second thing is that they made a business decision. You know, Fox ultimately, what happened as a result of

Roger L. is not being there anymore. And Trump is that Trump was able to capture the Fox News audience. And what that means is that if they deviated, even a little bit, in a way that felt soft or not fully aligned with the worldview that Fox had actually built, the audience would cannibalize Fox and get mad. And in the past, there was nowhere else for them to go. So you could complain, you know, but what are you going to do? You're not going to go anywhere else. So you can't. So they were impervious to some of that backlash. And what was different this time is that Newsmax is on every single cable. box, just like Fox News. They have full distribution. One American News is out there in the landscape. And starting the day before the election, Newsmax attacked Fox News. They said, Chris Reddy, the CEO of Newsmax, said, if Donald Trump loses this election, it will be Fox News's fault. And so they knew that there was competition in a way that meant that they had to walk the line. So what they tried to do was take this sort of weird posture of not going all the way in and going full pro-attack, which they certainly could have done, but certainly not saying,

hey, this is a moment of reckoning where we need to recalibrate. And that's ultimately a combination of the business decision, a calculation about their audience and a reflection that they don't have as much control over them as they had in the past. Now the audience is controlling Fox News and a reflection of Lackland Murdoch being sort of a terrible person. So one of the things they've done is they've gone way more opinion at Fox. Yeah. And they've sort of, there used to be a kind of, I mean, there are still people who are respected Fox News people, though it's only like probably one, right?

Chris Wallace, right? Yeah, I mean, that's it. Who doesn't work for Fox News? He works for Fox Television Group, actually. That's my favorite thing about it. But he doesn't work for Fox News. Jesus Christ. He works for the company that owns the broadcast license.

Ah. And they fire, can we talk about them firing their decision desk? Because that seems important. Yeah. One of the things that Fox did is they obviously let go of virtually all the people inside their decision desk, which in the lead up to the election, one of the things that they had made very clear was that their decision desk was sort of free, right? That they were unconstrained, that they were able to operate independent from any of the

editorial concerns or other aspects of the network, that they weren't going to get any pressure and that they were in total control. And they used that to reinforce this fiction that Fox News has a separation between their news and opinion side. And that was actually something that they were telling advertisers, that they were telling other business stakeholders, some of their cable companies that they're renegotiating contracts with. Like it's a good marketing play. And it's also true. And so what happened, though, is that their decision desk, and this is the part that I think is really interesting, is that Fox News was the only company out there, the only news station that bought this new data set. Explain what the new data set is. Yeah. So basically, you know, when these news

stations make projections, they're working mostly off of the little bit of results that come in, and then they have their own formulas, and then they input data about past actions, and then also some of the exit polls. What happened this time around is that the Associated Press was selling this new data set that they were compiling. And what they did was interview hundreds of thousands of voters. So it's like, it was like the best representative sample that you could possibly get. And they were selling it for a lot of money. Anyone could buy it. Any place could get it. And what it would do was give you a better way to make projections that would be much more accurate because you'd have much more information. Fox was the only news station that bought this. And so what that

meant is that they were able to see things sooner than everybody else. Because they had, Uh-huh. So insane. So they actually knew what was going on, and so they fired their guys for knowing it. That's exactly it. And so when they made the Arizona call, the part that I find interesting is that not only did they make the Arizona call very early, but if you were listening to other parts of right-wing media, people like Steve Bannon were going hair on fire because they were hearing from people inside Fox News that the decision desk was gearing up to call Georgia. Right. And he was losing his mind on election night saying that the Fox News decision desk is about to call Georgia. We need to make sure they don't. Ultimately, the decision desk didn't call Georgia. But the reality is they knew. They knew. And they called the Arizona early. And what they did is they shifted and disrupted Trump's ability as a result of that early call. To say it was stolen. That's right. And to declare victory that night and to start to mess with the narrative. And so what the decision desk became. for a lot of right-wing media consumers, and in particular the Fox News audience, was it became

a source, a lightning rod for Fox News's betrayal. And so when they fired that decision desk, it was part of this larger recalibration that was saying, we're clearing out these people that did this bad thing. Oh, and we're also expanding our opinion programming. And now they call them standing up for what's right. They don't call them opinion program anymore. They say, are people that are standing up for what's right. That's how they describe what used to be called their opinion hosts, which is very clunky.

They need to invest some marketing money into something that's a little punchier. But if you notice, it's a signal to the audience, right? That they are reassuring them that these people, Hannity, Tucker, Ingram, are standing up for what's right. And we are expanding their presence on the network, while simultaneously clearing out the people that did that betrayal. And that is ultimately the story of their decision desk is not that they were a scapegoat,

it's that they were actually a lightning rod for a lot of Fox News's audience, and in some way they needed to get rid of them to at least start to reestablish themselves with Fox's audience. But ultimately, they're making the wrong bet because the audience doesn't care. That's not enough. They want much more blood than that.

Yeah. Exactly. Angel, so with the most disturbing thing right now on Fox, in my opinion, is that Tucker seems to be going against the vaccines when Rupert Murdoch's vaccinated and all this stuff that seems to be like truly one of the most rotten things when there's so many already. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think that what Fox is doing with the vaccines right now is similar to the role that they've played at every step of public health measures.

So they dismissed social distancing early on. They were sort of skeptical about the masks. Janine Piro was warning her audience that the only reason people wear masks is to do bad things. What does that mean? That's the thing. She said, you know, you think to yourself, when you think of a mask, who is it that wears masks? Criminals. And now they're trying to turn all of us into criminals.

This is back early on when the debate about masks had not been settled yet, right? where people were just being socialized to it. And what they did is they just dropped in a couple poison pills, right? Which of course then makes it harder to build the case around it. And now what they've done, and Tucker is the, I think the clearest illustration of this, is to elevate and promote vaccine skepticism, the idea that there could be something wrong there. And it's because it fits into his larger narrative that what they're trying to do is

control you. And there's something in these vaccines that they're going to try to force you to take them, that experts can't be trusted. And what he's doing is elevating a lot of stuff that is typically marginalized to the fever swamps. But I would underscore that it's not just Tucker. That actually Hannity last week said that he was waffling on taking the vaccine. Even just saying that in casting doubt, Janine Piero last summer, said that she will absolutely not take the vaccine. These people, their audience hears that, and they think, okay, that's, what do they know? They're on TV, right? They know, they must know something.

And they understand that about their audience. And so being able, you know, what Tucker's doing is mobilizing the fringe into something that is, you know, power is increasingly being organized on the fringe, and Tucker recognizes that. So being able to cross-pollinate anti-vaxxers with sort of the, his core white genocide audience actually gives him more political power because he can turn them against individual Republican officials to say, look at them. They're the ones that are now enabling

the forcing of your children to take these poisonous vaccines that Anthony Fauci is injecting in you with chemicals. And so you see the connection there. And the others are doing it in large part because they know that that's where a big chunk of their audience is. And so they're trying to make it clear that they have not fully, drank the George Soros Kool-Aid.

But it's so tasty. I know. What do you think the end game here is? Fox right now, you know, it's always been sort of like a meteor coming at us, you know, an asteroid right on collision course with us. And I think right now we're at the point where it's reached our atmosphere and it's starting to burn up. What that means is that it is hotter and brighter,

and there's a lot of risk that it could hit a place where people are. I think it's unclear where it goes. I think a lot of that's going to depend over the next few months. months because they're losing their audience and they're going to continue to do so. The result of that, and this is what I've heard indirectly from Fox executives, because I've heard from media buyers that have had meetings with them over the last couple weeks, is that, you know, what Fox executives are assuring people is that we're going to get our footing back because we will cement ourselves as the voice of the opposition.

And that at the end of the day, we'll go back to a place that we were in 2009 because we're the best chance of standing up to Joe Biden. And what they just need to do is whether these last little loose ends and controversies and that if you just project out six months, that they will be the voice of the opposition. The problem with that is getting there means that you're going to do what Tucker did recently, which is to again repeat the idea that George Floyd wasn't murdered by the cops, but that in fact had overdosed and dismissed the idea and the narrative about what happened on the attacks on the Capitol on January 6th and sort of present an alternative version. of that, they're going to get worse. They're going to lie even more because they're trying to, in some ways, preempt any additional attacks from their competitors while simultaneously making their audience really passionate. And this is the dirty secret about Fox. They need their audience, even if they don't gain any more audience. They desperately need their audience to be as engaged

and passionate about Fox News as they always have been, because over the next year, Fox is renegotiating all their cable fees. And traditionally, the way that they won these negotiations is actually by engaging their audience to help them in pressure campaigns. Well, if everybody's mad at you, they're not going to do you any favors. So what they need to do is make them happy. And that's where I think in the short term, where I think it goes is they get a lot, a lot worse. Can you talk about the cable fees? Because that's really the only way Americans can fight back against Fox News, right? It is. Fox has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue. over the past few years. It's significant. It's not an insubstantial amount of money. I mean,

they used to have, their primetime shows used to have 30 or so commercials show. They average 14 now. They've lost so much advertising that Fox is one of Fox News's largest paid advertisers. Last year, they started buying up ads that they traditionally used to run as free promos because their inventory was so dry. And clearly, that wasn't enough to get them to recalibrate. And the reason being is that Fox News does not need a single commercial. They could have $0 in advertising revenue and they would still have a 90% profit margin. And that's because they're about the second most expensive channel on everybody's cable box right after ESPN. They are more than twice the cost of CNN. And with CNN, you get three channels. They're five or six times what MSNBC gets got paid. And what I mean by these costs is that every cable company

pays Fox News a couple, a certain amount per customer that the cable company has. These are called carriage fees. And so these fees are negotiated between the channel and the cable company as a part of, you know, when they give you your bundle. And what Fox has done over the years is say, this carriage fee that is traditionally sort of a very nominal fee, most of them are typically, you know, 15 cents or 50 cents. What Fox News has said is, no, we're going to use our audience during these negotiations to attack the cable companies and to get them to raise the rates. And that's what they've done. So Fox News now, for every person that has cable news,

pays Fox News between $2 and $2.50 a month, whether or not you ever watch the channel. And what they're trying to do, because they've lost so much advertising, is get that number up from about $2 a person to $3 to $3.50 over the next year. And that's going to radically increase their revenue. so that they will continue to have big profits,

and they will be entirely impervious to any blowback, because who cares if people are mad at us? Whether or not they watch, we still collect the money. And so the only thing we can do is actually do what the Fox audience has done, ironically, is they've advocated to cable companies to raise everybody's bills. There are 90 million cable customers. There are, on average, 3 million Fox viewers. That means there are 87 million other cable customers

that are just sort of sat idly by, while Fox has sort of built this engine that gives them mass profits without any commercial viability. And that's the real plan, is to, I think, if people really want to engage on this, the best thing to do is we need to target the cable companies. Aside from unbundling Fox,

which I think is a worthwhile fight, the big thing is getting them to hold the line and even reduce the rates of Fox News. If they do that, Fox falls apart. So it's really the cable company. That's it. Yeah. And so that's like the Cox family.

I mean, right, aren't there a lot of these cable companies that are privately owned? That's right. Some of them are privately owned. Some of them are just huge, right? Like Comcast and Xfinity spectrums out there, direct TV and Dish. And even if they're not privately owned, there's usually a disproportionate owner amongst them. And the truth is, it's in their self-interest. I mean, when we were gearing up for this on Foxx by Cable Box campaign, which we started doing research on in late 2019 and early 2020,

we actually met, I met with cable executives that had done these negotiations 10 years ago and basically was asking them, what's it like, what happens? And the part that really struck me was that, you know, basically their point is everybody hates us, right? Everybody hates their cable company. So we're not a sympathetic figure. And he's like, the problem is that for us, one of our biggest metrics is our quarterly turn rate is how many customers we gain and lose a quarter and Fox News was able to move thousands of people and affect our turn rates. And his point is if we were at the table and just a fraction of the non-Fox viewers had said, hey, don't raise our rates, we could have at least come with more leverage. But his point and all the other

negotiators ultimately boiled down to that Fox came with all the leverage and everybody else did nothing. And that's why Fox gets paid such high cable rates. That's exactly it. And it was a strategy. They understood it was really smart. They understood that as time went on, they started doing this in the mid-2000s, that as time went on, they would start to lose commercial viability. And that really became a big piece of their strategy when Glenn Beck was on the channel. Because while he was wildly popular, once he started to hemorrhage advertisers, what had told them was that we'll get great ratings, but we will have trouble with advertisers long term. We need a plan. Otherwise, our shareholders will hit us for not maximizing their investment. And this

was really the way to unaculate themselves against any meaningful accountability on the advertiser front. And it's really bad. I mean, you know, Fox did this thing the, a few days after the attack on January 6th, they did this presentation for some of their major media buyers. And the presentation was, we're safe to advertise on because, and then they showed charts. And they said, look at the brand sentiment around Boeing after their second 737 plane crash. Look how high. high it is. Look how much negative sentiment it is. Now look at Fox News's negative sentiment. They said, honestly, the presentation was, we are not as bad as Boeing was after their second 737 plane crash. And that is why it is safe to come back and to continue to scale your advertising on Fox News.

I mean, they recognize how bad their pitches these days. And so this is it. In a weird way, they have to get worse, not only because it aligns with their interests. And it's, you know, it's essential to stave off these attacks from competitors, but because it's the only way to engage their audience sufficiently to ensure that they're prepared to help them raise their own cable bills, strangely enough. That's where we're at. And, you know, I will say that I'm not, I'm not an optimistic person. I mean, I live in the right-wing fever swamps most of the time. But I will say that it feels like it's insurmountable, but the truth is the pieces have already, the structures have been late. Boxes genuinely wedged between a rock and a hard place right now. They really don't have many maneuvers.

And I remember back in 2012, I was working on a campaign, she's my boss at the time, Elise Hogue, she was campaigning on this news corp watch thing to sort of go after News Corp because of all the phone hacking. And all of a sudden, one day, news of the world shut down, one of the biggest tabloids ever, and the company announced that they were splitting into two pieces. Right. Right. And it's something that seemed impossible out of nowhere, right? It's just one day the dominoes fell. And I feel like we're in a similar position right now that the rubber band has been stretched so much that it's going to snap in one direction. And I think that it is that this actually has a genuine opportunity to force Fox News to change. Because think about it, even if they don't get off the cable bills, even if they just soften themselves a little to help build their credibility during these negotiations, their audience will cannibalize them even more, which is going to have the effect of weakening them.

Right. No, they're, they've radicalized their audience and now they can't keep them because they can't be radical enough for what they created. Thank you so much. This was amazing. Thank you.

My pleasure. So we are at Fuck That Guy. My Fuck That Guy today is all of the Republicans who are not taking impeachment seriously. The Josh Holley's and the Ted Cruz's. I actually think Ted Cruz is like oddly worse. because he was like, well, they did a good job, but, you know, it's unconstitutional to use impeachment on a president. What's impeachment for? I mean, Madison Croft Field or Crawford

or whatever his name is was like, next they're going to want to impeach Jesus. And I'm like, well, was Jesus president? Because you just can't impeach people unless they hold elected office. That's kind of what it's about. So all of those Republicans who are sitting there watching people die on video and being like, yeah, but it's unconstitutional, yeah, but, yeah, but people will get mad at me. You guys are real profiles and cowardice, and you are my fuck-that-guise. Rick, if you want to share the people that's... I took all of them. I would like to jump right into my fuck-that guy. And my fuck-that guy is Tucker Carlson,

because Tucker has become the boss of Fox News in every way. He's clearly, clearly Rupert Murdoch's balls are in Tucker's pocket now. Clearly, Lachlan's balls are in Tucker's pocket now because he goes on his show and says whatever the fuck he wants, no matter how pernicious it is. Tucker Carlson could go out there tonight with a swastika on a brown shirt with a fancy little mustache and declare the new Reich. And Rupert Murdoch will go, I don't know. I don't really know. He's a great talent. This is a network that is out of control. Tucker is at the tip of the spear. He's spreading anti-vax craziness. He is trying to pretend still at this moment that BLM and Antifa were the secret sauce of the capital invasion. This man is, he is a weapon in the hands of the most extreme part of the modernist, populist, national socialist movement that's rising up in this country on the right.

He is the Julius Stryker of this organization. So Tucker Carlson is today's Fuck That Guy. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. episodes will be talking with smart folks in 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. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm at Molly Jongfast and he's at the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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