The Daily Beast Podcast - This Group’s Vote Will Ultimately Decide the Midterms

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

The upcoming midterms will depend on the voices and votes of those in the suburbs, according to hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy on this episode of The New Abnormal. After a key win for Democrats in New York’s 19th Congressional District, where Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in Tuesday’s special election, Levy says that despite the bad news for the party, the Dems still need the suburban vote to get them across the line. Then, Dahlia Lithwick, who writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus, talks former President Donald Trump’s little dust-up with the National Archives. This week, Politico revealed that the Archives had recovered more than 700 pages of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago in January and that federal investigators were concerned “by Trump’s resistance to sharing them with the FBI.” Also, Max Fisher, who writes The Interpreter column for The New York Times and is the author of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World, discusses how social media “is distorting you in ways that you are probably not quite aware of.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What a fantastic show we have today. First, we're going to talk to Dahlia Lithwick, who writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus. And she's going to talk to us both about Trump's little dust up with the National Archives and the world in a post-Dob's decision.

Then we're going to talk to Max Fisher, who writes the interpreter for the New York Times, as the author of The Chaos Machine, the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. We're going to have a fantastic conversation with him. But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Johnfest. Another day in paradise. Student loans, $10,000 forgiveness for people who are not on Pell Grants, $20,000 for

Pell Grant recipients. I'm thrilled, though I would like to see more for Pell Grant recipients because The people who get Pell Grants are really the people who need this money more than anyone. But I think this is promises kept, baby. Promises kept. Yeah, or at least close to it. I think they promised sort of more than this. Yes, but they are politicians.

Yes, no, exactly. As far as politicians go, this is as close to a promise kept as you're probably going to get. Yeah, this really has, boy, conservatives are not happy about this. They really are not. I love to drink some conservative tears. I'm loving it. Yeah, they need a big old plate of cope, I think. More importantly, is Ben Shapiro going to be okay?

I don't know that he's going to be okay, although he does have all the PPP loans he took out and never repaid to keep him comfortable. There seemed to be a very big trend of people who were highly upset at student loan forgiveness. And then we saw on Twitter yesterday, or I guess Wednesday. and Thursday, a lot of this you tweets with links to those same people's in some cases, tens of thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven. And I know they're not exactly the same thing. And PPP loans are sort of made to be forgiven if you could, you know.

Fuck that. It's money. It's free money. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. No, I agree.

Yeah, I agree. And it's just, and we have given Biden. his fair share of shit on this podcast. Oh, yeah. But he has had a couple of pretty good weeks now. It's nice that this is coming not long before the midterm elections. And it's just nice. And it's nice to see Dark Brandon just in full effect.

You just said Dark Brandon. I will use this to make fun of you later. Please do. But yes, I agree. I mean, I think, look, it's funny because this guy who works at Facebook, best known for causing genocide in Myanmar, was saying that P.P. loans were never meant to be repaid, but student debt was meant to be repaid. Fuck you. I mean, fuck you. Like, you know, I say this as someone who didn't go to college because I had a misspent youth. But had I gone to college, I came from a very privileged background and my parents would have delighted in paying for all of my college. And you know what? I'm telling you, This is, you know, the people who are complaining about student debt are, you know, this is, America is increasingly unfair and it's not fair that some of us had wealthy parents and that some of us

didn't. And fuck them. Like, you know, student debt, this is the floor, $10,000 in my mind. No, I agree. Look, I had student loans and I, I guess, if I remember correctly, I got a deferment because I went into the military, but I still had to pay them. Because I'm dumb, and so I went into the military after college, so I didn't go on the GI bill. Oops. So the GI Bill did nothing for me because I didn't go to grad school or anything like that.

So I deferred my student loans, and then I was just very, let's be honest. I was very bad about paying them back, and they went into default. It was this whole thing. The bottom line is I ended up paying, like, I think three to four times more than I should have. and I went through all of that and I keep seeing these things saying it's so unfair that I paid mine back and other people didn't have to. I don't want

people to have to go through what I went through. And it's worse now because college is so much more money so you're taking out even more loans. I mean, I went to college in like the 1890s, you know? It was like it was 25 cents a semester. Right. And there's reporting Mitch McConnell went to college when college

cost $800 a year or $300 a year and adjusted for inflation. That's $2,000. not $80,000. So, I mean, it's fucking ridiculous. I think that student debt forgiveness is great. I think that Biden should have done more, but I understand why he didn't because I think he was worried about.

Look, I mean, he may still have trouble in the courts. We have a Supreme Court that believes they're the final authority on everything and their goal in life is just to crush all democratic dreams. So we may still, you know, this may not be the end of this. But Biden is working to do. what he said he would do, and that's good. No, absolutely. And we love to see it. And we love to give credit where credit is due.

And all the people who yelled at us for saying that Biden was not doing a great job, we are now saying he's done a great job over the past couple weeks, because we are nothing, if not fair, here on the new abnormal. Exactly. That's how we were all very fair on the new abnormal. So we had some elections this week, too. There was a midterm election that was a midterm primary and a special election in New York's 19th, which is a bellwether, not unlike Guam. No, I'm just kidding, Guam is not a bellwether, bellwether, but was a bellwether.

And this bellwether said that Democrats could theoretically keep the House, or at least that's what Steve Kornacki told me. Well, if anyone is going to know, it would be Steve Kornacki. But this is a, yeah, this is a, this was an election with, you know, that had a pretty good public and candidate in terms of popularity. Right. And not a Nazi. Right, exactly. You know, which is not always the case.

No, you can't assume that. In fact, you can generally assume they are unless proven otherwise at this point. But this was a guy named Mark Molinaro and he lost to Pat Ryan up in the Hudson Valley area of New York. And this was one of those weird districts. It went for W. It went for Obama. It went for Trump. And then it went for Biden. Yeah. So there's apparently a large contingent of the schizophrenia up in this division. I'm kidding, of course. I'm not being ableist. I'm not making fun of neurodivergent people. There's nothing wrong with mental illness. In fact, we like it a lot. And some of us even have it. Yes, all of us. All of us. But I do think that that's a good point.

They're rich. They're white. And they are not swinging back to Donald J. Trump, which I think is ultimately where this goes. It's such an interesting and strange little district of rich white people. I think because we do this podcast, we think of the teams as being so entrenched in their particular affiliations. You know, part of me, I think in the back of my head, I always think of, like, Republicans as everyone be. I mean, I don't because I have Republican friends. But there certainly is a feeling that some of these Republicans,

will defend anything Trump does. But clearly that's not necessarily true. And I think it's worth thinking about now, you know, there's been such pundant malpractice first with Dobbs, then with the Senate. Now you've got these terrible Trumpy Senate candidates. Now we're looking at the House. You know, most people you would get on this podcast who work in the sort of punditry field would say, you know, Democrats are going to lose the House. But it seems like this is starting. to show a different narrative. Yeah, look, I think the Democrats are still going to lose the House. I don't think it'll be as big a loss as we all thought, you know, even a couple months ago.

I think it's going to be really tough for the Dems to hold the House. You know, maybe not impossible, but it's going to be tough. And it looks like it's all going to be sort of decided by the suburbs. I think, am I right on that? Because like you said, you know, not everyone is firmly entrenched, but basically in the broad strokes, the urban areas are generally blue, rural areas are generally red, but I think it's the suburbs where there's sort of this mix of people that are maybe more red on economics, but you know, you start banning abortions and a lot of people in the suburbs are like, hey, this is not what I signed up for

when I voted for a Republican. I voted for lower taxes. And, you know, I didn't vote for a 10-year-old girl who was raped to be told she has to carry that baby to term or she has to be spirited away to another state. Like, that's not what I want. So I do think that, you know, a lot of this is going to be decided in the suburbs. And there were some other special elections in the recent past that the Dems didn't win in suburban areas in like, I think it was Minnesota and a couple other places, but they outperformed Biden. Right. I think the suburbs are going to be interesting in these upcoming midterms. Now, Molly, please tell me why I'm wrong. I'm not going to argue with you about that. I would just say that I think that Biden is not tied to candidates the way Trump is tied to candidates.

So one of the things the Biden White House has done intentionally or not intentionally is that they don't demand fealty. And so Biden can have a lower approval rating and still candidates like John Fetterman can run 10, 15 points ahead of him, which is good. And it's very good when you have a president who has a lower approval rating. Right now he's at Reagan, which is better than what he was before. I do think it's interesting that you have the converse with Donald J. Trump, which is that you cannot be a Republican candidate without swearing fealty to him. And ergo, that's going to be a big fucking problem for these people. Because remember, Glenn Yonkin won by pretending not to be Trumpy. And you're going to have a situation where you have these people who have just, you know, weeks ago,

been like every woman should be forced to carry a baby until 5,000 weeks, and we should not teach anything in schools, and we should jail all Mexicans, to now those people have to appeal to normal, more moderate, financially, you know, fiscally conservative, but socially liberal suburban women who are like, what the fuck is happening here? And so, yeah, I think that's going be a problem. I hope it's going to be a problem because quite a lot rides on that. No, I think you're exactly right. And it's, you know, the Republican Party right now, as, you know, we've said and everyone has said, it's a cult and it's a Trump cult. And the Democratic Party, for all its many, many flaws is not a Biden cult. I mean, I cannot imagine Joe Biden

leading a cult. And that's a good thing. I don't, I don't want a cult leader running a political party and it sucks that that's happening on the Republican side, but I think you're right. And there's, like, there's really no way for candidates like Oz and Masters and, and, and J.D. Vance to untether themselves from all the stuff you just mentioned. It's too late. And no one, you know, they, they, they picked their horse and, you know, in J.D. Vance's case, he, like, like, they made up these personas. And that's what they're stuck with now. And, you know, we'll see what happens. But right now, it's not looking good for Oz. It's not looking good for Blake Masters in Arizona. It's not looking particularly good for J.D. Vance, I don't think, in Ohio. And, or it's at least within the... Borderline. Yeah, it's borderline

there. It's, you know, close to the margin of error. And I think you're right. I think there is a decent chance that they are being tied to Trump, which is sort of what the RNC didn't want. And, you know, we've seen stories bubbling up about how they didn't want Trump to declare for the presidency before the midterms and a bunch of other things because they don't want candidates to be tied to him. but they are being tied to him. And in most cases, they've tied themselves to him. And it doesn't even matter what he does. Like, they got so, the RNC got so invested in stopping Trump from doing things,

they forgot to tell their own candidates not to sort of to self-identify as Trump cultists. Yeah, I hope you're right. And, you know, I hope we're both right. And I hope that that turns out to be a net negative for the Republicans. I still don't think the Dems can hold on to the House. But I would love to be wrong. Believe me, I would be the first person in line to shout, yay, if I'm wrong about that. My favorite thing, though, I have to say, is Trump fighting with McConnell.

Because what you really want in the run-up to a midterm election is the head of your party fighting with your Senate minority leader. That is the thing. Like Rhonda McDaniels is in her room weeping into her pillow. Mitch McConnell is not in opposition leader. He's a pawn for the Democrats to get whatever they want. Mitch McConnell is a broken down hack politician. So, I mean, I have to say, like, Trump versus McConnell into the midterms, I love it.

Nothing is more fun than Trump and McConnell feuding. look, McConnell's been pretty, you know, he's been out there basically saying that the Republican senator, senatorial candidates aren't their best. Right. On the other hand, he is also throwing money at Oz. And also J.D. Vance. Right. But I guess he has no choice. You know, he's sort of stuck with the hand that's been dealt. Well, you know, McConnell's not wrong. And McConnell is bad. He's a bad guy. And we all know that. And more than anyone else, he bears the blame for the current Supreme Court makeup, I think.

Oh, yeah. He is a legitimate politician. Like, he knows how things work in a way that Donald Trump just doesn't. And he knows that running these guys, there's a very good chance that this is going to cost the Republicans what looked like was going to be a Senate majority after the midterms. And that's not such a sure thing anymore. And the Senate, I would not be surprised if the Democrats kept the Senate. the 50 seats, you know, or kept the narrow majority. And McConnell knows this. And he knows exactly

why. He knows it's because the Republicans nominated people like Oz and Masters and Vance and and people like that. So he's out there for once in his life. He's speaking the truth. And so obviously Trump doesn't like that. And those are all his guys. You know, those are all his guys he's talking about. So this is a straight up McConnell Trump fight. And it's the internet meme of the guy staring at the window saying, yes, ha-ha, let them fight, let them fight. Yes. Because it's just a beautiful thing. Sickos.

Sickos, thank you, yeah. Love to see it. Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and law for Slate and hosts the podcast, Amicus, and is the author of the upcoming book Lady Justice. Welcome to New Abnormal. Thank you for having me. It's a real honor and a treat. Well, the feeling is mutual.

We have a lot to talk about. But I think of you as a court person. among other things. And so I wanted to first start by talking about Dobbs because, like, it feels like finally, it feels in my mind, like the pundit world has finally caught up with the rest of the world on Dobbs, which is like, holy shit, this was a big fucking deal. Yes, this was a big deal. And it wasn't, the narrative wasn't, hey, this will really goose the vote in November.

The narrative is, like, people will die. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I agree. When Dobbs happened, I mean, you have a long history of, you know, being a court person. Were you just shocked that it actually happened? I've gotten to the point, Molly, where my answer to that is that, like, Schadenfreude is not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be.

Like the 14 seconds that I got to just, like, sit in the smug satisfaction of, I told you this was coming, wasn't nearly as nourishing as I believed it to be. I think most court watchers would have told you and probably did tell you that after SB8 happened in Texas on the shadow docket in the September before, that was the so-called vigilante bill that allowed people to collect $10,000 bounties if they civilly sued anyone in Texas who had an abortion. And the Supreme Court was like, oh, this is so complicated. I guess we'll let it go into law. And then they heard it again and they said, oh, it's so complicated. like, we'll let it go into law. And then, you know, we had the oral arguments in Dobbs. It was very clear from the arguments in Dobbs that John Roberts was alone trying to kind of forge a compromise position, that there were going to be five votes for overturning row.

And then in case you missed all those, you know, road signs, there was the leak. So I think we all knew it was coming. I think, I guess what I can say surprise me was that in light of the leak, in light of, Justice Alito's massive fact checking, history checking, actual historians saying like maybe don't like cite the witch burner. He changed nothing. He changed nothing in the opinion or virtually nothing other than to, you know, take some pokes at the dissenters and some of the concurrences. And so I guess I was only surprised by the meta picture, which is that the court given ample opportunity to pump the brakes, if not just on, you know, this wholesale reversal of row and imperiling the lives of women and writing an opinion that didn't seem to give a damn about women, none of that.

No pumping of brakes. And in fact, I think hitting the accelerator and just the utter lack of regard for the outcry that, as you say, I think the pundits were missing all year, but that was happening on the ground, I think that surprised me that the court didn't look around and say maybe it would be better for our legitimacy not to be, you know, cruel and vicious. Yeah. It's so interesting to me because the reason why they passed Roe in such a broad way back in 1973, almost 50 years ago, was really because you had these doctors who didn't want to operate on patients or even treat them because they didn't want to go to jail. And you're seeing exactly the same thing, which I think is so interesting because it's like

none of us. I mean, even I who wrote like five million pieces on abortion, I didn't see that this was actually going to ultimately be these doctors who refused to treat as like the thing that really moves the needle. But it's interesting now to see like a new court season coming up soon and they have a whole docket of ways they want to remake the world again. They're these partisans and they're killing their party. I mean, isn't that sort of interesting?

It is. I guess I would say just to your first point, it's really, really interesting that, you know, both Justice Alito promising us in the majority in Dobbs that, oh, we're returning this back to the states, right? And now all controversy goes away. And then the just incredible fatuous attempt to make that same point by Brett Kavanaugh, who, you know, assures us we will all sleep easier at night post Dobbs. And then just in the last, you know, two days we've seen Idaho. and Texas come out with these just totally clashing rulings about the exact issue you just described, which is, you know, the Biden HHS issued this guidance under EMTALA, you know, this emergency medical treatment act that said that essentially ERs cannot refuse if they take Medicare money to provide stabilizing treatment. And now we've got doctors who are like, I have someone with sepsis. You know, I have someone who is bleeding out. I have an ectopic pregnancy, but there's still a heartbeat. And as you're saying, these are physicians who at least theoretically are there to provide emergency care who are going to lose licensure or be sued by some lunatic who wants a bounty.

And so I think just in the last two days, we've seen Idaho and Texas come to vastly different conclusions on whether the states can just essentially eviscerate a federal statute. And that's going to go to the court. I suspect we're going to see that on the shadow docket in the next couple of months. The court's going to have to resolve that. But to your larger point, and I think this is really the guts of it for me, is that the same court that has worked to open the floodgates for dark money, right, in Citizens United and that has restricted the vote in Shelby County and restricted it again in Bernovich and done everything they can to sort of choke off democratic processes is going to do it again.

And big time, I think, with this independent state legislature case, which we can talk about it or not. But this is an absolutely existential case about voting and how we vote. And I think that your larger point is exactly right, which is how does a court that has 30% approval ratings pass these crazy, crazy sweeping doctrinal changes, whether it's abortion or guns or voting or vivisecting the. EPA, all the stuff they do, that the public freaking hates, like by huge margins. Right. And then turn around and say to us, as Justice Alito said in Dobbs, well, if you don't like it, vote. Well, and they don't like it, and they are voting. And they hate it.

And, you know, I think that we just need to be very, very clear that the kind of perpetrators of the crime are also the beneficiaries of the crime here. and that it's really, really dispiriting and cynical, I think, in the extreme when Justice Alito says, if you don't like it, vote when he has devoted his career, as has so much of this supermajority to making voting harder and harder. But I do think ultimately what they're seeing, at least so far, and again, we're not psychics. And if anything we've learned that when pundits try to predict the future, it's really ugly, is that people don't like it. and they will vote. And if Democrats manage to eke out keeping the House and the Senate, they're going to have to fucking fix the court because that's why they will have been given

that power. That's exactly right. And it's exactly why I started where I started, which is if we had been having this conversation one year ago right before SB8 was blessed in Texas, I would have said to you, the conventional wisdom among court watchers is that, yes, you get a lifetime appointment. and yes, you can't be removed unless you commit high crimes and misdemeanors. And even then. Right.

And as a consequence, the court is exquisitely attuned to public opinion because the only power they have, right? This goes back to the Federalist Papers, is public legitimacy. And I always would have said in the face of absolutely just, you know, cratering, cratering public support for the institution. And by the way, like leaks and death. threats to the justices, that the justices would tend to kind of rein it in and at least pretend like they care. And the shock to me this year, and this is, you know, we could just call this the Clarence Thomas and Ginny Thomas portion of the show, but given the opportunity to rain it in, they just double down. And my friend Leah Lippman from the scrutiny podcast called

this the hashtag YOLO court because they're just all in for everything and they don't care how bad it looks. And so I think you're really correct descriptively to say the only check them on that. It isn't protests, right? It isn't even voting because they're making it harder to vote. The only check has to be massive structural court reform. The kind of stuff we have refused to talk about for decades. And I think the kind of stuff, by the way, that the Biden commission was like, oh, someone should do something about this, but not us. I think like at this point, we have to talk about term limits and jurisdictions tripping and adding seats in all that stuff. Yeah. And again, we don't know. But if they managed to keep the House and the Senate,

Biden is going to be really miserable because he's going to have to do something because the people will have given him a mandate and he will not want to. And so it will be a weirdly uncomfortable and horrible position for him to be in. But he won't be able to keep power unless he does it. I think that's right. And I also think, and this is again, what you're going to start to see in this Idaho versus Texas Smackdown about how you enforce, you know, on the one hand, these just like vicious state trigger laws on abortion and how you kind of balance that against, you know, a federal HHS mandate to treat patients in the emergency room. And I think you're going to see just further fracturing of blue state law and red state law.

And we're already seeing, you know, that in red states, we've got prosecutors who are refusing to prosecute, you know, folks who are involved in abortion providing. I mean, I just think that the nullification that you're going to see on the grounds in the states is so, on the one hand, none of this gets solved by anything that the Supreme Court can do. We've got the Supreme Court just saying, you know, I think at every level last year, so many of the cases, you know, that we haven't talked much about the gun case, Bruin, but like I just read Bruin as a, as a license for vigilantism and a license for the idea that you can just walk around with your gun on the New York City subway shooting people because Justice Alito thinks that makes you safe.

And so I think one of the things that I think Biden has to think about, you know, when he gets the House and the Senate, and it's, we should just flag this because it's interesting. The number one concern we're hearing this week are like democracy and violence concerns, like over the economy. And I think one of the things that the court has, on loose is this kind of choose your own ending legal structure where the states can do what they

want and I think that that's really something that the administration, the House and the Senate need to think about how to rein in vigilantism. Can we talk about the National Archives? I want to have a long conversation with you about states rights. Whatever. I'm not going to do it because Jesse will kill me. Can we talk about the National Archives?

We can. I'm a little worried about the nature of this relationship, but yes, we can. It's interesting to me. because there are so many people coming after Trump. It's hard for his people to defend him because all they want is this narrative that Biden is going after Trump

and there are so many different elements that are actually going after Trump. Can we talk about that? Yeah, I mean, there's something sort of uniquely and beautifully American about the fact that the hero this week is the like national archivist, Deborah Wall, right? Like, in the end of the day, it's a librarian

that's like sticking it to Trump. But I think that's right. I mean, I think for all the ways in which they tried to turn the Mara Lago search into a referendum on, you know, defunding the FBI and the deep state, once you've got the national archives involved, it just doesn't look quite as deep state. It looks like the dorks are on the ramparts. So bless the archivists wherever we find them. And she's been looking for these papers for a long. time. Right. And I guess we should also just talk about how it's a Trump person who leaks this, like the letter from Deborah Wall that gets, you know, to Trump's attorney who's trying to just like resolve this quietly and discreetly in the face of just flagrant, flagrant, like, lies from Trump and like claims that, you know, by his lawyers, that now you've got everything. And she's still trying to sort of like tidily and without drama get this. And the Trump response is, we should leak this because this is going to make Trump look better.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that in some sense, what you're saying is true, which is this is part of the walls closing in, right? It isn't just the FBI. It isn't just Merrick Garland. Now we've got, you know, a long, long, long effort on the part of the archives to get these documents, which, you know, we should be cleared, like top secret, unbelievably classified. you know, we're hearing now from the New York Times and the Washington Post that some of the secrets that have been exposed are just unbelievably existential. So this isn't like, you know, he took some stamps and ashtrays and a like bobblehead. He just really has imperiled national security. And that, you know, I think that the narrative that has come out is that at every turn, given the opportunity to comply, they just like waved their hands like Will Ferrell and,

didn't comply and now, you know, here we are. And so it's really, really, I don't see any way that this is good for Trump. And at the same time, I guess, you know that, because you're this cynical too, what reality dictates doesn't always matter. They just double down on whatever bonkers thing they're saying. And, you know, millions of people believe them. So I guess what I'm saying is if we look at this like rational people, this is incredible. incredibly damning the events of this week, not to mention the Bill Barr letter that we just saw, but whether it has any actual salience for a population that is probably willing to say, well, those archivists are part of the, you know, deep state too.

Deep state, yeah. I don't know. It is so interesting that we are in a situation where the Trump, whatever it is, the campaign mechanism that continues, has decided that they're just going to leak everything, right from the FBI agent's names who searched Mar-a-Lago that was in Breitbart to the, you know, they just decided they're just going to leak, you know, whatever they leak is going to make them look good. I mean, John Solomon published that letter, which also, I mean, they, I feel like they leaked the stuff before reading it. I think it's that and I think I'm going to say dispiritingly that it a little bit is also that vigilante point, that I think that there is, I wrote just a like despondent piece at the end of last week about there is a way in which this is just classic stochastic terror, right?

This is classic, you know, get the names of the FBI agents out there, get the name of the archivist out there, make sure that the judge who signed the warrant, you know, can't go to Friday night services at his synagogue. And I think that there is undergirding this a real callback to what we saw around January 6th, which is, you know, if we can terrorize the Ruby Freeman's of the world, if we can terrorize the Brad Raffensburgers of the world,

we can effectuate what we want through like violence and intimidation. And I don't say that with any joy, but I do think that sometimes when I ask myself, you know, what is the strategy here? Because like you say, it makes no sense for their side to be leaking things that damn their side. I often think the strategy is rile up, you know, people who are already scared and angry

and predisposed to believe conspiracies so that somebody does something violent. I hope I'm wrong, but it just feels like sometimes all roads lead there. I mean, again, I don't mean to think this through. But wouldn't domestic terrorism be bad? Not to go out on a limb here. Bad in that it kills people, also bad in that it's actually bad for the people who encourage it, ultimately? You know, you would think so. And I love, I don't mean to think this through here.

that should be your album. But like I think that like when I try to sort through January 6th and all the ways in which domestic terror not only was so bad, but like quite literally imperiled the life of the vice president and Josh Hawley and whose office did we see yesterday that they were in? Mitt Romney, I mean Nancy Pelosi. I mean, everybody, yeah. It's crazy.

And so I think again, as a. a tactical matter, does it make sense to be such a nihilist that you want to bring the country to its knees? No, because you and I think rationally. It does no good in the world to have a bunch of vigilantes running around enforcing what they think the law is. But look at, you know, the resignations, mass resignations of, you know, nonpartisan election officials because they're terrified. Look at the mass resignations of school teachers because they're terrified. Look at the mass departure from health care because people were terrorized. I mean, I do think that in some very, very scary authoritarian worldview,

having everybody afraid to show up and do their jobs to vote, to provide services, is kind of the endgame, and I hate saying it because it's so grim. But I think that if that kind of Steve Bannon type of high-level chaos really does serve your long-term goals, which is just destabilize everything, it makes a kind of dark, certain kind of sense. Thank you, Dahlia. Please come back. You will never invite me to your party again.

I would love to come back. I would love to come back. Max Fisher writes the interpreter for the New York Times as the author of the chaos machine, the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. Welcome, Max Fisher. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be chatting with you. We're excited to have you, the chaos machine,

the inside story of how social media rewired our minds and our world. I'm worried that I have that my brain has been so rewired that I can no longer focus. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, good. There's a reasonably good chance if you are listening to this podcast, you were probably spending enough time on social media, which is to say, any, virtually any at all on a regular basis, that it is, it is distorting you in ways that

you are probably not quite aware of, in addition to the ways that you are aware of. There's no question. I think that I'd like to add that if you're listening to this on one and a half time, which I am very guilty of, you're even worse off. So explain to us a little bit about your theory here. So the book for me really started with a question that I think, a lot of us had, and I know that I had, coming out of the 2016 election, when there was this sense that social media had played some kind of role in the Trump phenomenon and maybe

something that went beyond, like just the kind of, either Russians on the platform or Breitbart news is on there, or, you know, sometimes your aunt might post some memes about politics that turned out not to be correct, but that there was some deeper influence happening. And that If you're on it, you feel angrier, you feel a little bit more polarized. People on it seem to have more tenuous grasp on the truth. And presumably this is having some sort of effect on our politics in society writ large, but nobody is really sure what that was. And it was something that I didn't really consider my remit because I write for the New York Times

in the international section and I cover mostly conflicts and global politics and things like that. But it was something that I started really thinking about like a year into his, presidency, first of all, because these manifestations of social media weirdness kept popping up. Of course, you remember the Charlottesville riots, which seemed, again, like something that had emerged out of social media, but it wasn't quite what. But then also the genocide in Myanmar, which I don't know if people remember, which there's just explosion of communal violence. But it was something that Facebook systems had played such an aggressive role in spinning of racial hatred and conspiracy theories that even the United Nations accused the platform of playing

a, it called it a determining role in the genocide, which at that point, it sounded crazy that a social network could be driving an entire country into this level of violence and unrest. But it was something I was thinking a lot about because I was traveling around a lot at that time, and I kept hearing these stories everywhere I went that sounded a lot like social media's role in American politics or its role in Myanmar or maybe a little bit of both and suggested that maybe they weren't actually so different. It would be like a village in Sri Lanka that had suddenly burst into violence or a conspiracy theory that was whipping through schools in Germany and seemed to be making all the parents crazy. And it just felt so uncanny how it was the same

pattern over and over again, but no one really understood what was connecting it or how got a social media website. Just a little app on your phone. actually be doing all of this anyway. And that was when I started this now, four or five year project to answer this question of, what does social media actually do to us? What does it do to us as individuals? What does it do to our behavior and our cognition?

And what does that mean when you pull it out to a grand scale to our politics and society? And it was something that I investigated or tried to investigate as best I could by, you know, traveling around to all these different places and countries or these things were happening to try to tell the stories of individuals who were grappling with radicalization, misinformation, communities that were torn and part but in parallel to it, the part of the story that felt really important to me was to basically try to understand and nail down the science of social media's effect on us. And that meant spending a lot of time, and this was really fascinating.

I really enjoyed this part of it, a lot of time with neuroscientists who were tracking social media's effect on our brain, behavioral psychologists who are tracking how it affects our sense of right and wrong and how that might work. Evolutionary biologists who are kind of talking about how the human animal developed in these ways that had these kind of cognitive shortcuts in it, that social media learned how to exploit and turn against us, political scientists, network analysts, and even a lot of dissidents and whistleblowers within Silicon Valley and within these companies themselves. And that brought me around to final. pulling together with a lot of their help, what I hope is the kind of first fully comprehensive

and rigorous and scientific assessment of how social media has changed us and the world and where that's taking us. I want to go back to the Myanmar question. Can you just talk a little bit more about that for our listeners? The first time I went to Myanmar was in 2014 when the country was just opening up and you could not find a smartphone. I mean, literally, it was this authoritarian military dictatorship and SIM cards were basically illegal. You could get them, but they were many thousands of dollars in Myanmar is a very poor country in Southeast Asia, so nobody could afford them. There were really nothing in the way of personal computers, no ATMs. And then as a result of this opening up process, which was driven partly by the

Obama administration, the country was democratizing, but also Silicon Valley played a huge role in. Eric Schree from Google was one of the first people to kind of be on the ground and saying that by bringing Google and Facebook and Twitter to the country, it was going to kind of cement its opening as a liberal democracy and be the kind of testing ground for Silicon Valley's dream of wiring everyone through this enlightened, totally free digital ecosystem. And it was going to be so great for Myanmar in this free society. And then I went back three years later and that was not how it had turned out. The entire country was wired to Facebook. I mean, everywhere you went, people would have a smartphone. They would have their nose in it. People spent hours a day on Facebook, as well as on Twitter and some of the other platforms

and WhatsApp. But it was Facebook that had completely dominated the media ecosystem. It had dominated the way that people message with and therefore relate to one another. I mean, interpersonal relationships, which is, something that maybe an American listener can identify with as well. And it had done this through this thing called zero rating, where they basically offer their service functionally for free in a country where cellular data is otherwise prohibitively expensive.

So it just completely captured this market. And the effect of taking an entire country and suddenly plugging it into Facebook, writing the entire society through this platform, ended up becoming this kind of horrifying experiment in what actually. actually happens in changes. And there were a few changes, again, I think all of which will actually sound really familiar to an American one, was that hardline extremist voices who had had maybe some kind of reach, but just within their kind of narrow niche, suddenly became like the biggest voices and the biggest media platforms in this country. It would be like, you know, the Osama

of Myanmar suddenly became the New York Times, CNN and every YouTube influence are wrapped into one, because the platform found that as opposed to really engaging, pushed him out to tons of people. Misinformation, especially ones that tapped into this kind of simmering, pre-existing racial resentment, would just run rampant because the algorithms on Facebook knew that if you put this in front of people, it would tap into something in their brains that would just be irresistible and they would share it, share it, and that would make it feel true to everybody else because it seems like there's this great consensus of the country's Muslim minority, this group called the Ranger, are out to get us. And this built up over a few years, despite repeated calls from rights groups in the country,

some of whom visited Facebook's headquarters in California to say, please, please shut down, or at least slow down your algorithm, or at least moderate the platform better because it's going to cause a genocide. And in fact, before the genocide started in 2017, the platform had spun up a few really horrific mob incidents, riots that look actually in retrospect a lot like what happened in Charlottesville. But of course, Facebook, if they did anything at all, it was not something that was evident to any of the rights groups who were tracking this in the country. And through a number of forces, not just Facebook's fault, but also the military trying to stir things up, also some pre-existing violence between a couple minority groups on the country. This spun up into just

all against all communal genocide that drove the bulk of this pretty significant minority group, basically out of the country, in this really horrifying orgy of violence. And throughout all of this, Facebook just refused to shut the platform down. There was this moment that really sticks with me where a reporter asked Adam Masary, who at that point was the head of Facebook's newsfeed, which is like the most important part of the platform, it decides what you see and what you don't see. Why don't you just shut down the platform in Myanmar until you can sort this out and until you're not maybe potentially driving a genocide that is seeing whole villages raised?

And Massari responded that he thought the platform was doing too much good in Myanmar to shut it down, which just really said it all to me, I thought. Yeah, I mean, I have to say like every time, you know, we interview five million people a week for this podcast. Any time I have anyone on about social media, the first thing they tell me is some horrendous story about Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook doing something just beyond the pale. Like, you know, I had known, I mean, in Myanmar, actually, the Rohingya are suing Facebook, right? Yeah, there's an attempt to bring some kind of liability. I don't know what kind of prospects it has, but it's, yes, I mean, the UN saying Facebook did this is, is helping their case for sure. Yeah, I mean, I just, it's such an incredibly, you know, I grew up, I mean, I don't know, maybe we're the same age. If you're younger than we are, then we hate you. But how old are you? 37.

Great. All right. That's okay. But, you know, I grew up with like, you know, Exxon as the evil company that was ruining the world, you know, and it really seems like that has shifted to Facebook. So talk to us more about the book, though. What really surprised you? I'll tell you, but I think that Exxon comparison is actually. actually a really interesting one that speaks to one of the examples that I'll give you. Because, I mean, first of all, the size of these companies, it's a little staggering and it's easy to kind of lose sight of how big they are. But I think the big ones are still, even after their difficulties financially in the last year, are still multiples larger than ExxonMobil, than the world's largest oil company in terms of their market capitalization. And the effect that

oil companies have is really significant. But in the world. It's unless you're in a place like in Indonesia where they're oil companies trying to, you know, push a village off their land, the effect is mostly kind of environmental. And I mean that literally in the sense that it's climate change, but also environmental in the sense that it kind of drifts into you from the outside world. But these platforms are, they're in your life. They are mediating in ways that the companies and the platforms try to make invisible. They don't want you to see it. But they are mediating your relationship to the outside. world to news and information to your peers and your friends and even and maybe most powerfully to

your own identity. And that that is what I think makes it so important to understand the incredible influence they will. Then I'll give you, like you asked an example, the automated systems, let me put it this way. You think when you open up your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed that you're seeing what your friends or colleagues or your family members are saying and thinking, But that's not true, because that your network produces far more content that you could see. And also the platforms increasingly pull in lots of content from people outside of your network. So what you're really seeing is choices made by automated systems, by what we kind of shorthand as the algorithm, even though in some ways it's much more complex and much bigger than that, that choose what we see,

that choose what goes viral, doesn't go viral, it doesn't go viral, it choose how to present to us. And these turn out to be, and this was something that I was really struck by talking, especially to the scientists who researched this, that these algorithms turn out to basically be the most powerful experiment ever designed at doing what social scientists do, at identifying our instincts at identifying how we really work because they iterate billions and billions of times. But they're not just an experiment. They're also trying to surface and to exaggerate beyond what is possible in the offline world. The instincts and the impulses that will get us to not just scroll, not just to spend a lot of time online, but to keep posting more and more ourselves because that feeds the beast. It hooks in other users and it further exacerbates the platforms effects in our community as a whole by kind of filtering those tendencies through one another. And there's one example that I think of a lot because I think it's one that is really significant, but I don't know has actually been reported before it appeared in the book. And it's something that will not immediately sound relevant to American

listeners, but I promise it. it hits home really hard really quickly. So in Indonesia, in this big country and Southeast Asia that I reported in a long time ago, there was this incident where seven villages in different parts of the country with no connection to another whatsoever, all simultaneously rose up in this spontaneous mob violence, always against some innocent guy from another village who just happened to be traveling through and lynched it and killed them.

And I was looking into this when this happened in, I think early 2018, working with an Indonesian woman and activists who had been tracking this as it was happening. And it turned out that in every case, it traced back to a single viral rumor that it appeared on Facebook and WhatsApp and balance between the two platforms. And that rumor had initially come from this really small account with no real audience, no real reach, but the platform had picked it up, identified it correctly and with almost this like spooky level of precision that it would be just freakishly engaging to people by hitting on exactly the kind of of conspiracy and identity panic and call to collective outrage that we now know from a lot of research are what best drive engagement on the platforms. And so these systems, automated systems of Facebook, had pushed this conspiracy out to so many users, so aggressively and so quickly,

and in a way that was designed to so powerfully hook into those users' instincts for collective action, because that's what the platform wants out of us, wants us to act by posting in response to things, that users in those seven villages all rose up into violence at once. And a few months after this, I went to Facebook to interview a bunch of their senior people for a different unrelated story. And in a meeting with a couple of the folks at Facebook

who are meant to lead the response to exactly this sort of re-rolled crisis, I told him about what I had found. And not even to ask about it as a reporter, but just, you know, one person to another, hey, you should know about this. This seemed really significant. And you were in a position to do something about it,

so I'm passing it along. And they just kind of shrugged and said, okay, and didn't ask any follow-ups, didn't ask the names of the places, the woman who identified it, and said, I hope someone looks into that one day. And here's the part where I'm bringing it back around to what will feel relevant to the rest of us. The rumor that had caused all this chaos is something that is going to sound familiar. It claimed that a shadowy group of elites were in league with minorities to kidnap kids and to harvest their organs and their blood.

The reason that might sound familiar is that a few months later, the exact same rumor got promoted in America at Facebook and YouTube as QAnon. And around the same time, just before it became really big as Q&on, I had found an identical rumor or nearly identical being pushed by the platform in a few other countries around the same too. And it was this weird thing that the system was so smart and so powerful that it had converged on this one particular combination of words as something that was going to electrify users.

much and pull them into the platform so much that it would do what Facebook wanted and what YouTube wanted, which is to get them to spend a lot of time online, but that also had these really horrendous consequences for the rest of it. And I also think about this story a lot because it's a reminder, not just of the power that these systems can wield over us, which is easy to lose sight of that it's not like reading a headline. It really does have an effect because it's participatory because it's social and communal, but also because there's no one at the wheel. There was no one at Facebook headquarters who plugged this into the system and said, please do a Q&on in every country. It was just these systems that are automated, that kind of run out on the road to figure out what's going to hook us in and then do it.

And then maybe someone catches it on the back end or maybe not. Or in this case, someone did catch it, but nobody cared enough to stop it. And they don't care because it's helping the business. So Facebook is basically where Q&ONN began. Facebook was an important vector for it to kind of. blow it out, but it really started, yeah, on 4chan and 8chan, yeah, which I spent a decent amount of time on 4chan and 8chan and a couple of the other like old style social networks in the book because I think it's important to understand that they, we don't think about them a lot because

they're not big companies. Some of them don't even make any money. They don't feel like these huge forces in our lives, but they're still out there. They're still driving a lot of the, you know, what we call internet culture that think it's, yeah, exactly. and that gets filtered up into the bigger platforms. And I also wanted to spend time on them to show that, obviously I just told a long story about the power and importance of algorithms, but a lot of the most powerful and affecting and significant things that Facebook do, or not just Facebook, I'm sorry, but that social platforms as a whole do

come from much simpler mechanisms that you can find on a Reddit or a 4chan where it's, you know, upvoting and huge numbers or it's posting things anonymously. Is Facebook the most? evil of the platforms, it sure sounds like it. I mean, of the big platforms. Fourchan and A. Chan are obviously the really evil platforms. So I'm going to give you a weasily answer. Sticking to, I tried to make every claim in the book really rooted in rigor and empiricism. There's, you know, three trillion footnotes at the end of it. Most evil is something that I don't feel I can assess empirically, but I will say that, even though I know I've talked a lot about Facebook today, that a very

large number of the people who I spoke to who studied this and who were really deep into it, including people in the Valley, would say, you know, Facebook gets a lot of attention and they gets a lot of the headlines, but YouTube's influence and their apparent disregard for the consequences arguably go far, far beyond Facebook, even it is not always as immediately apparent. I felt it was important because of that to spend a really big chunk on YouTube's influence and the way. ways that it is driving a lot of things that we might not even immediately think of as coming from social media, much less from YouTube itself. Thank you so much, Max.

Andy Levy. Molly Jungfest. Incredible, incredible week of fuck that guyism. Who is your fuck that guy? Yeah, you're right. It was not an easy call this week. I'm going to go with, I don't know if you heard about this. There was a thing where the FBI went into a place called Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

a Trump-owned property. And they recovered a bunch of documents that apparently the former president took with him when he left the White House, even though he shouldn't have. And they've been sort of all over the place with excuses for this. One of them is that, you know, and the ultimate excuse for Trump is that they're mine, they're mine, because he's a five-year-old. And now some emails have come out to show that Trump's own lawyers agreed that the files need. needed to be returned. This is Pat Cipollone, who was the one of the, it was White House counsel to the former president, said that he agreed with an email that he received from the National Archives at Record Administration that these documents should be returned to the government. So you've got

the White House counsel saying, yeah, these are not his property. They should be returned. But, you know, Trump don't care. And he's going to keep going on this. And there's, I have lost track of the number of different excuses they've given for having these documents up and two, including, you know, nuclear stuff. He talks about how this is all a political plot against him and all of this. And now we've got emails from his own attorneys saying that, yeah, you're right, these documents should be returned. So the fuck that guy here is not Pat Cipollone, but is, of course, the former president of the United States, not the current president of the United States. Donald J. Drumpf. That's right. I called him Drumpf. I'll go there. I'll go there.

All right. You want to know who my fuck that guy is? Please. I don't know if you know this, but I'm old enough to remember when he was known as client number three. Hmm. I'm not that old, so I don't remember. Please. Sean Hannity. A Michael Cohen client for his rental properties. I'm using the word rental properties because I don't want to get sued by Sean Hannity. Sean Hannity, very mad. One of the things I love about him is he'll get so mad. Like, he's like a little, you know, he's like a little doll. He gets furious.

I guess dolls don't really get furious. But Sean Hannity, very mad. I don't know if you know this, but John Federman said he's a big liar, which he is. It's kind of the brand of the Fox News opinion host. John Hannity said he's going to sue John Federman. Good luck. enjoy as one of my children says, let's go. Does one of your children really say that?

Yes, but ironically. Andy, I can't wait till you have children and come and interrupt the podcast. That is funny. Yeah, I am not really clear other than Hannity saying he may be hearing from my lawyers very shortly. I'm not really clear about what he's upset with. The weird thing to me is this is such a conservative. mindset thing, Hannity is mad that Federman won't debate him. You're not running for office, Sean.

It's not Federman's job to debate you? But you know what? I would like to say, I think Federman would crush Sean Hannity. Of course. Sean Hannity is a real fucking idiot. Not a question, but just the utter like this privilege and just like how dare this man not come on my show as if that's part of his job. No, fuck that guy. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science.

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