The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Contemplates Jailing Opponents Amid Legal Trouble

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

On this episode of The New Abnormal, hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie discuss how crazy it is that Donald Trump keeps talking about jailing his political opponents and everyone has just accepted it as normal. Dare we say, the new abnormal. Plus! Blowback Podcast hosts Brendan James and Noah Kulwin pop in to talk about their newest season covering the ins, outs, and random stars of the crisis in Afghanistan and the US' involvement after 9/11. Then, Author, historian, and culture critic Ruth Ben Ghiat is here to answer the question Danielle Moodie thinks nobody is asking, what stage of the facist takeover are we in right now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse 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 some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

Blowback podcasts, Brendan, James, and Noah Colwyn join us to talk about their new riveting season of their podcast, where they delve into the invasion of Afghanistan. Then we'll talk to strongman author Ruth Ben Giot about identifying fascism and where America is on the timeline. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, we are dealing with, I guess what we like to call around these parts the new abnormal. Mm-hmm. But the new abnormal in this case is we have a former president who is the leading candidate to be the Republican nominee for the presidency, Donald Trump. And this is a guy who loves to talk about jailing his political opponents. And you and I and Jesse were talking about this off-air, or we were just talking in

general, and you said, you know what, we need to talk about this because we've sort of normalized it. And I think you're absolutely right, because this is something he does. It's not a one-off. He does this a lot. And he did it most recently. He was on Glenn Beck's show. And they talked about how the whole lock her up thing was going on in 2016. But Beck basically asked him, do you regret not locking her up? And if you're president again, will you lock people up? and he said Trump's response was, the answer is you have no choice because they're doing it to us. So it's just unbelievable, first of all, how he turns everything around because you're the one doing the felonies and the criming. But now he makes it, oh, now I have to do it as revenge when he's

the one that, not to get all playground about it, but he started it. Facts. So here's the thing. This is why I think that it's really important to not just look at this as, oh, Donald Trump says a lot of things and we just can't believe him and you kind of do that in the way that you treat a toddler who tells you tall tales and you're just like, oh, it's just her imagination. That's not what the fuck this is. Donald Trump talking about jailing his political opponents, the Republican field talking about dismantling the Department of Justice, dismantling the FBI, dismantling the CIA,

which they refer to as the quote unquote deep state so that they are able to crime. without any type of consideration for any fallout, there's an entire project, Project 2025, that is being put together by the Heritage Foundation, that is their plan, not only for to finish the job that Mitch McConnell has done with just leveling the judicial field to only install right-wing authoritarian judges,

but it is also about dismantling democracy and all of our agencies and social safety nets. They are investing a billion dollars in this project. So when you have their frontrunner talking about jailing political opponents and media is just like, that's just Trump being Trump, this is not fucking locker room talk. This is not off the dome type shit. They are putting together full plans to continue with the coup that started on January 6th.

2021 to finish the fucking job. And so I want people to understand that when he says these things, it isn't just oh, ha, ha, ha, Trump being Trump. The Republican apparatus, this white supremacist Christo-nationalist movement has put together an blueprint for how they plan to finish the job of destroying our democracy. Yeah, 100% agree. It's funny, I was, after you brought it up, I did a little bit of research, and I found there's a really good ABC news piece from June of this year, listing 27 people that he's previously said should be indicted or jailed. It's Hillary Clinton. It's Huma Abedene. It is Marco Rubio, he said, should be jailed during the 2016 primaries. Tim Kaine, he thought should be indicted. Adam Schiff deserves to be thrown in jail. Andrew Kuo. Well, okay, he's right about that one. But it's a whole list. And then, of course, it's the Robert Mueller, James Comey, Loretta Lynch.

Just, it's an unbelievable list. And this goes back, obviously. This goes back years. At a minimum, it goes back to 2016 and 2015 around that time. And here he is pretending that, oh, well, they're doing it to us. So we have to do it to them. This is not something we would ever do. This is what you've been calling for for years. And you're absolutely right, though, Danielle, to sort of situate this in a bigger piece. picture and a bigger picture of as close to outright fascism as you can get without, I guess we're not supposed to, oh, you can't call them a fascist. Well, I mean, yes, we can. But even if you don't want to go that far, I don't know what you call it when you just straight up want to jail your political opponents. And it's, of course, we say all the time that

every accusation that they make is actually, they're telling on themselves. And every time they pretend that Joe Biden personally is going after Trump, which he's not. And I don't even have to explain why not our listeners aren't stupid. But every time that they say something like that, it's just, and it's not just him. It's the every Republican says that now. But all they're doing is telling you on themselves because that's exactly what they want to do. They want a weaponized department of justice. They just want it in their control. They want to be the one pushing the So I just want folks to take a look, right? Because again, you have the Washington Post that says democracy dies in darkness, right? This shit is not happening in the dark. It's happening in broad fucking daylight. And so folks that are listening can go over to theheritage.org because I want you to see the four pillars of their presidential transition project, which by the way, they're not just talking about Donald Trump. It's any Republican at the top of the ticket. And so just to give you like a brief over. of what their fucking plans are and what they put what they're putting billions of dollars backing

like with this project the first pillar is the policy book the mandate for leadership which is they say represents the work of more than 350 leading conservatives and outlines a vision of conservative success at each federal agency during the next administration what i want folks to take in that write up is how to do dismantle each federal agency from the inside out. That's the policy book that they're putting together a mandate for leadership. The second pillar is a database, which they're referring to as the conservative LinkedIn that is going to launch in March of 2024.

And that will give just readily available. Here is every white supremacist, fascist, resume so that they can be considered for top jobs inside of a Republican administration. The funny thing about this one is that they say this pillar will bring Mr. and then in parentheses and Mrs. Smith to Washington because apparently unmarried women aren't allowed. The third pillar is a presidential administration academy. When conservatives do finally make it into an administration, they often don't know what to do or how to seize the gears of power effectively. So this is going to be a boot camp that they are putting together so that they can dismantle all.

of the federal agencies that are about checks and balances within the first 100 days of a Republican presidency. And then the fourth pillar and the final pillar is their playbook, which will take the policies ideas expressed in the mandate for leadership and transform them into an implementation plan for each agency to advocate to the incoming administration. Folks, they are not playing fucking games. And so when Donald Trump talks about jailing his opponents and we say, oh, but that can't happen. It can't happen because we have agencies and currently checks and balances in a constitution. You don't have those things when you allow these people inside the fucking agencies and give them the power to do whatever the fuck they want. Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes we forget how close we

came on January 6th and that there were numerous sitting senators, for example, example, who were willing to delay the count of the electors and who wanted this slate of fake electors put in their place. And all of that is as anti-democratic as you can possibly get with, that's democratic with a small D, not Democratic Party, democracy. But I think people forget and there's a, I don't know, there's sort of, look, the right obviously wants to downplay what happened on January 6th. But I think even people in the middle and even maybe some people on the left. It's sort of like, yeah, these guys suck, but they were just a bunch of thugs and storming the capital and whatever. But they forget that at the same time, there were actual

elected officials who were on the same page as these thugs. And all of this is all seeped down into every aspect almost of the conservative world. You've got Nate Hockman, writing for National Review, being profiled or writing for the New York Times, and then working for Ron DeSantis, and then getting fired because, oh, what a shock. He used Nazi imagery in a video. Richard Hananya, who also sort of becomes this accepted establishment conservative. And then it's revealed that, hey, guess what? Under another name, he wrote the most vile, racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic shit that you can think of.

Libs of TikTok sits there and posts her little tweets and whatever else talking about, oh, this school is doing this and this school is doing this. And guess what? Those schools get bomb threats. the next week. This is all of a piece, and it needs to be treated all of a piece, and it shouldn't be treated. It's sort of like what we were talking about the other day with the shooter in Jacksonville. Yes, they're lone wolves in the sense that they commit their acts alone, but they are part of a larger whole and a larger ideological movement. And it fits right in with everything else that I just said,

and we have to start treating it all as one discrete thing. Absolutely. And I think that by making light of these things, by just saying, oh, Donald Trump is unhinged when you see this parade of videos by looking at these people and saying, oh, they're fringe and they're ridiculous and their idiots and blah, blah, blah. No, because the people that are out front doing the talking to draw in voters, to draw people into their cult, those are the entertainers. But the architects and the strategists are behind the scenes like a Leonard Leo, like a Mitch McConnell, like all of these folks that are preparing, because they weren't prepared. We have to understand when Donald Trump became president.

It was a fucking fluke and a shock to them that they won. And just side note, I don't think that they actually did. But that's a conversation for another day. Nonetheless, they were not prepared. So now that they've tested the fence like one did in Jurassic Park and they realize where the weak points are, they're ready this second time around. which is why we have to be a lot more ready than they are. And I think that we're still behind the eight ball.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, we've seen over the last month, really, these rumblings about Trump himself maybe not being qualified to be on the presidential ballot for 2024. This is based on a theory that has been put forward. It's been put forward in the past, but notably now it's been put forward by two very conservative Federalist Society members, law professors, who are saying that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment

prohibits Donald Trump from being on the ballot for president because he took an oath to uphold the Constitution when he was sworn in as president, and then he participated in an interruption. And Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was put into the Constitution after the Civil War and was used, I think, I want to say six times, it might have been four times, to actually prevent people from taking office. And now there is a lawsuit that has been officially filed in New Hampshire on these actual grounds. So look, my feeling on this, and then I'll turn it over to you, Daniel, is my feeling on this is this is not a hairbrained theory. I talked to Chris Gardner on this show about it. I've done a shit ton of reading about it. And it's a theory that makes perfect

logical sense. I also don't think it's going anywhere and it's never going to happen, but I don't think it's some crackpot lunatic theory. No, and I actually, I agree with you because this isn't like Sidney Powell and Giuliani's crackpot theory on how to overturn an election. This is actually using the merits of the Constitution and saying that inciting an insurrection bars you from being able to run for the presidency. And because he's been indicted on those very charges, unless Donald Trump is cleared of them, I do think that this bears actually digging into and the lawsuit is legitimate. To your point, though, do I think that it's going anywhere? No. Maybe it'll start a domino effect with other blue states deciding that they're going to look into whether or not they should

have Donald Trump on the ballot if in fact he becomes the Republican nominee. But I think that we need to be utilizing both and, meaning we need to use whatever legal mechanisms there are in order to rid ourselves of the cancer that is Donald Trump. But we need a resounding win. We need a resounding win at the ballot box. And I mean from the local level all the way up in 2024. that says the Republicans' agenda and ideology is anti-American. And unless we have that resounding death-nil, I think that we are not going to get to a place

of getting rid of Trumpism, even if Trump isn't at the top of the ticket. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And I would say even on this case or this type of case alone, look, if you just game out the legal process, let's say this lawsuit is somehow successful, it's going to be appealed the way up. And this is only in one state, by the way. So even just timing-wise, there's no way this works for the 24 election. There's just absolutely no way. And this is, you're talking, I don't know, if other states wanted to jump in on this, or you don't even need lawsuits for this. A secretary of state can make a determination that this ex-person is on the ballot unconstitutionally and does not

qualify for the ballot. And they can simply say, I will not certify any ballot that has this person's name on it. But of course, then the numbers of cans of worms that this opens is, I can't even think of a number big enough. And I suspect there are a lot of people out there. I am not one of them, but I suspect there are a lot of people out there saying, ah, this feels a little, it's like a tic-y-tack foul in sports. Like, I don't know. It's like a Super Bowl being decided on a pass interference penalty. And you get people who say, you lost me completely. I know, I understand, but I trust our listeners. But no, what happens is you get people saying, just in general, oh, let the players play

and the refs shouldn't be determining the outcome of the game. And then the other people say, look, it's the refs job to call penalties. And if a guy commits a penalty, you have to call it. It's the same exact argument here. And there is a big split for people like that. So I just think procedurally, practically, there's no way it can work. I just also don't think it, as I said it, I don't think it's a crackpot theory at all. I think it's actually a good theory.

I think the hardest part would be, and you pointed this out, Trump's been indicted. He hasn't been convicted. And the law professors who put this forward said, this is completely separate from any criminal trials. I don't know how it is because the whole thing hinges on whether or not Trump incited a coup or rebellion, whatever, and tried to basically overthrow the will of the people. And that has yet to be determined in a court of law. So right now it's just kind of, I think he did. I'm sure you think he did. But honestly, legally, constitutionally speaking, that's just our opinion. Yeah, we will see.

But I do think, I agree. I think it's valid. It's not a crackpot theory. I think that it faces a lot of challenges moving forward, but you have to run both tracks because that's what we're up against. So you need every single type of strategy available. in order to rid ourselves and secure our democracy, rid ourselves of Trump, Trumpism, and secure our democracy.

The podcast, Blowback, has become known for producing riveting narrative histories of American Empire. And after three seasons covering the Iraq War, the Cuban Revolution, and the Korean War, co-hosts Brendan James and Noah Cullen are back with season four and a look at American involvement in Afghanistan over the last 50 years or so. They join me now.

Guys, thanks for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Episode one of the podcast is called Snake Eater, and it's a great overview of what season four will bring. I'm curious why you gave it that title. To me, it means someone in Army Special Forces, aka a Green Beret. And early in the Epp, you talk about the Arorboros, the World Snake, depicted as eating its own tail. And I realized, oh, so it actually kind of works both ways.

That was the hope. We got into a little bit of a, I hope, fun mashup this season. with the imagery and lore of Metal Gear Solid for those out there who know any bit about that. They know that one of the games is called Snake Eater. And one of the games also takes place in Afghanistan, which might have led to our initial, you know, cheeky reference. But we started to, for fun's sake, name some of the episodes that sounded like they corresponded to certain titles.

But then the Auroboros idea I had originally thought was like a good theme for the season, for reasons that will become terribly clear. if you listen to it. And so then realizing that snake eater could also mean Ouroboros sort of clicked into place near the end. And I retitled the first episode, Snake Eater. But it's a rich text that Snake Eater. Yeah. No, that's awesome. I may or may not have an Oroboros tattoo on my back. But I don't need to get into that. So early in the app, you say that 1988, Rambo 3 ended with the title card. This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan, but that this was changed after 9-11 to this film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan. And you say

that's everything you need to know regarding the American vibe toward foreign policy in Afghanistan, which I thought, oh, that's really cool. And then you explain that it's not factually true, which I thought was just darkly hilarious. Yeah, I think that that actually, both the fact that the spiritual truth that that sort of photoshopped image evokes is very real. And the fact that it is photoshopped and that everybody believes it in it anyway is also very real in its own way. Yeah. Yeah, it ends up being almost more of a perfect metaphor that it's false. As one of our friends said, you don't need to put a postscript at the end of that movie

to convey that the film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters, who of course would go on to become the Al-Qaeda and Taliban-adjacent guys. The film is very clear on that point. And as we kind of try to get at, it's one of many examples that Hollywood, just quite apart from the politics and the CIA of it all, Hollywood had a field day with the Soviet Afghan war in the 80s and sort of flipped the script on all these gloomy Vietnam movies America had to answer for, you know, and now it could be the Soviets turn, whether or not everything we projected onto them was totally matched up with what was going on over there. So Rambo 3 is very sort of iconic in that regard.

Yeah, I was thinking that when you brought it up on the pod and the idea that Afghanistan was Russia's Vietnam and how that was sort of fed to the American media to make us all sort of feel good about being anti-imperialists for once. That actually made me think that this was like sort of right after we had movies like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, not exactly feel-good America Vietnam movies. Well, it's also, I think, you know, Red Dawn was directed and written by John Millius, who also co-wrote Apocalypse Now. It is pretty telling that a lot of the people who's, you know, like the archetype of people who's paying like the wounded soldier or whatever of the 1970s or the veteran coming home from Vietnam, then sort of has this, you know, sort of

successor cultural archetype in the figure of, you know, the Mujahideen. And then, you know, in the case of these movies, or, you know, in the case of Red Dawn, a bunch of American teenagers, or in the case of Rambo 3, an American guy who is helping them out. Yeah, absolutely. And John Millius, of course, is only slightly to the right of Pinochet, I think. Yeah, he's in interesting case. I always say I have a soft spot for Red Dawn. I think it's trying to say something more interesting than, you know, Russia bad. But I think that definitely the way it was read by many people explains itself. And of course, one of the producers was Reagan's ex-secretary of State Alexander Haig of that movie who was definitely trying to jush it up into a kind of call to arms.

Oh, yeah, also a former general himself. Indeed. And in fact, another great 80s stand-in for the Soviets in Afghanistan was Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren. We have a bonus. episode, by the way, where we talk about these movies at length with the Slezoids podcast, who were great guys. But Red Scorpion takes place in an African country, sort of unstated, but is supposed to stand in for Angola. And it was another movie where the Soviets are doing imperialism in Africa. Dolf Lundgren plays a KGB guy who flips. The thing about that movie is it was funded by apartheid South Africa and produced by Jack Abramoff. And in fact, the example it's using, it's sort of colliding Afghanistan with Angola, which was a war in which, was a war in

which the CIA in South Africa were trying to overthrow progressive forces in Africa. So it wasn't exactly another good Vietnam metaphor, but we just kind of choked it down, you know? I have to say also, I think that's the first time I've ever heard Alexander Hague's name mentioned in the same sentence as Juj. That was my goal today, so. Yeah, no. And it worked. I think we're going to make some headlines here, I think. I have notes here, and it's 1979 Invasion Day, Juj, and Alexander Hague. Okay, well, before I end up spending the entire podcast talking about movies and get yelled at by my producers, let's talk about some of the people you mentioned in episode one, whom we'll hear more about in later Epps.

One of the things you said was that as you were researching this season, there was one name that kept coming up. Who was Mr. Ali Muhammad? Oh, sure. So Ali Muhammad is kind of the most interesting kind of figure, I think, to emerge from this sort of, you know, Mujahid. you know, warrior background. He was originally from Egypt, but he was trained extensively by the Americans. He spent a lot of time with special forces at Fort Bragg, even serving with Green Berets. And then in the 1990s, he ends up participating. His name comes up in the investigation into the first suspected assassin of Mayor Kahana, the right-wing rabbi. And Muhammad is found to be, oh,

he's the guy training these radicals who are now in New York, having come from, you know, the Afghanistan battlegrounds of the 1980s, he's the one that's, you know, seen training them. And then he's also the one who is, you know, describing to the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan once he's there about, you know, how to, you know, like do things with planes, commercial airliners. And box cutters, literally, and box cutters. Yeah. So he's got, you know, he's a, you know, so I think that that sort of is a pretty tidy summary. But the thing is, is that he's, you know, this, again, like, he's a guy that we, you know, at minimum, we trained. He was an FBI informant, a CIA asset, and somebody who,

everything he pretty much knew from the time that he left Egypt about, like, how to, you know, do ops, so to speak, was something that happened because of the Americans. And so, you know, we, we mentioned him a bit later in the season and talk a little bit about the context in which he comes up, but he's just a great example of all of the different ways, you know, all of the different levels in which American policy in Afghanistan can be reflected throughout the years. Yeah, it's unreal. There were some familiar names to those of us who've seen the movie Charlie Wilson's War. There was Charlie Wilson himself, who in the movie was played by America's dad, Tom Hanks,

and CIA operative Gus Avricados, who will always be Philip Seymour Hoffman in my mind. I'm just going to assume that you won't be as kind to them as the movie was. So we talked about this the other day. I haven't seen the movie recently, and I was stunned to hear that, like I assumed that the movie would sanitize the eponymous war, Charlie Wilson's war. I kind of just took that for granted. And, you know, if it's a good movie, it's a good movie. I don't remember loving it, but whatever.

But the thing that surprised me is that Charlie Wilson was known as a debauched playboy, which they kind of represent in the movie by him just getting laid a lot and like having a hot tub. But in reality, he was known as cocaine Charlie. He was like, by his own admission, picked up five times for cocaine, constantly under suspicion. And of course, the fact that he was a sitting congressman got him out of a lot of that trouble. But it kept cropping up. He loved doing rails all throughout the 80s. And in fact, one time did a hit and run.

I don't know if he was on Coke in that exact moment, but that's not in the movie either. And he actually, after getting into the hit and run in DC, jumped on a plane to Pakistan to go on a fact-finding mission at a very convenient moment for him so that he wasn't picked up by the cops. I don't think any of that, I'm told, is depicted in the film. And Avricotos, you know, the immortal Philip Seymour Hoffman,

I mean, that's like the most evil thing that's happened is he's made this CIA thug quite likable. Yeah. But he was a friend to junta's and warlords everywhere. But I'll say this, even he described to his biographer and in his reports how creeped out he was by the brutal character and goings-on with the Mujahideen. So if your allies are freaking out guys like that, it might be time to pull back. But of course, that's the opposite of what we did. Yeah, of course. Then there's CIA Chief Bill Casey and Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, Big New Brzynski, who is reported to have bragged about using the Mujahideen as a trap for the Soviets?

Yeah, so it's a pretty contentious subject in history, in Cold War history, because Brzezinski gave an interview to a French newspaper in the 1990s in which he supposedly talked about, you know, he claimed credit for having tricked the Afghans, having got the Soviets to bite on an Afghan trap. And he later said that, you know, that was mistranslated. I was taken out of context. not what I said. But we found, and we talk about in the show, how there is just, there's a ton of evidence explaining that actually no. There was from well before the Soviet invasion throughout

the 1970s, there was an active American policy of trying to cultivate the Islamic radicals in Afghanistan as a potential destabilizing force against a government that was, if not at that time, communist was, you know, strategically sympathetic, for reasons of geopolitics, sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Right across their border. Yeah, exactly. Like, there were neighbors. You know, it kind of made sense. It wasn't like Vietnam where we go halfway around the world.

You know, they were right there. Right. Brzynski is, I think, given a bit of short shrift in the history books or in the popular imagination just because he was soft old Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, also a misconception. But Brzezinski really was, I think our show sort of makes the argument over the course of its episodes much more significant and involved in, you know, making sure that this policy to get the Soviets more and more bogged down in Afghanistan, lead them on the negotiating table and so forth,

to make sure that actually became the policy blueprint, basically right up until the expiration of the Soviet Union itself. And as far as Bill Casey goes, I mean, he's just one of the craziest. I'll let Brandon say more about him, but he's one of the craziest people that we've ever let work in federal government. We don't even have enough time. This would have to become a Bill Casey podcast about four seasons. You'd have to rebrand everything. But he was amazing. I mean, he was a devout Catholic, a knight of Malta. He got the Saudis to let him have Catholic mass inside of their Islamic theocracy just by asking because he was he was a power player. He would go over and kind of giddily recruit other countries, these, you know, Gulf dictatorships or or anyone to support.

Not only the Mujahideen, but also the contras, because that's one more thing that people might be interested in is that the, as this entire season is going on, the, contra operation in Nicaragua is happening, which becomes Iran-Contra, of course, a great intersection of our policy in Central America and the Middle East. And while the contras became a kind of dirty word that all the Democrats in Congress hated the policy under Reagan, the Majahedin were this lovely cause-seleb. And in fact, you look at the two groups and they're really, it's hard to find the ways in which they're so different. For PR reasons, one got a much better time in the press and in the public imagination. And Bill Casey had every

everything to do with that. He was also a mumbler. So Reagan apparently never had any idea what he was talking about after he gave a presentation, which might explain how he got away with green lighting certain things. God, Seinfeld foreign policy. That's fantastic. Boomhauer is how someone put it the other day. Oh, that's great. CIA director, boomhauer. God. You talk about the Mujahideen themselves. A thing you say that I thought was interesting was you say, the so-called holy warriors were less of your traditional religious figures and more of your typical mafia bosses. And yet, if you do any reading, you see that they spent a hell of a lot of time fighting each other as opposed to the Soviets. Yes. It really is sort of important to think of them as like, you know, really just kind of

competing criminal gangs who are in lieu, you know, because they're, they dominate and they ruled and exercised authority in the countryside where there just was not the presence of the state. They were the state, you know. I mean, that's, that's basically what, you know, the mafia is. It's this, you know, imitation state that rules by violence. And they were constantly fighting over territory, constantly fighting over who had, you know, drug trafficking, drug production. Because heroin became over the course of time, because Afghanistan was not that heavily industrialized.

Over the course of time, whatever self-sustaining agriculture did have was eradicated in favor of extremely profitable opium production. This is not, by the way, I think, you know, yes, there's an Islamic dimension or bent to all this, but like, you know, what? I've just laid out is really not all the difference from other places where America has, you know, made substantial policy interventions in Latin America, for example. This is, I think, that we've shown over the four seasons of our show, not that new of a story, even if every place has its own, you know, particularities. Yeah, absolutely. In episode one, you refer to the U.S.

Saudi axis. Explain what you mean by that and tell me why I can't help but think that you guys are going to really get into that as the season goes on. The Saudi relationship with America, which goes back all the way to the 30s, recognizing their immense potential as an oil producer. The Saudis are by far the most influential, back then and today, they're the most influential state due to their oil wealth. They can get away with a lot of stuff in creating and spreading radical Islamic politics and the movements that espoused that. Wouldn't you know it in the middle of the 1970s, right after Watergate,

when we were supposed to be cleaning up the CIA, you know, the church committee, famously, the Pike Committee in the House, George H. W. Bush was the head of the CIA. And much like Brzynski, he kind of, that's not a period of his career that many people focus on, actually. He was the vice president and then he was the president. And of course, the father of the other guy. But when he was the head of the CIA, he intentionally began to outsource, if you like, the dirtiest aspects of CIA policy that were under scrutiny at that moment to other places. He brought America's intelligence much closer to Saudi intelligence. Why that might be is because, he was an oil man, as Daniel Plainview says in the beginning of there will be blood. And he had a longstanding business relationship with many Saudi families, the royals, the Saudi royal family, and a little family called the bin Laden's. And that conditioned, that relationship, both the personal relationship of the Bush family and America's relationship with Saudi Arabia, as you, as your question implies, that's going to condition everything in this story from the way the Soviet jihad, anti-Soviet,

Chahad goes to the rise of the Taliban who the Saudis liked and who we liked at first, to 9-11 itself. And then what happens after that? So you're really not going to get off on the right foot as a country dealing with all this stuff if you're always covering for this friend of yours. And however, you know, contentious it was, their former Sion, Osama bin Laden. Yeah. It's very clear just even the way you just, you set it up in the first episode that this

is going to be a recurring theme and that it's going to be unbelievably important. And, you know, I've only listened to the first episode so far as I was telling you guys before we started recording because I was dealing with some fun COVID. But I am ready to predict now that by the end of this true crime podcast, it will turn out that America did it. Did what? I don't know, but I just have a feeling that that's going to be. No one go on to Wikipedia and read the synopsis before you to finish it. You know, I hate when people do that with movies. So just, you know, listen first, and you'll all become clear. Before I let you guys go, I want to ask, because I'm curious, how do you do the work division? Does Brendan do everything and then Noah shows up and just read some

script, or is it the other way around? That's how we did today, for example. And it shows. No, no, no. We split the work. We both go off and do research for many, many months, and then put together notes that we show each other, and then we start to write the scripts. And I do have a couple other duties of I compose the music for the show. And I produced the show like I recorded and edited it. But I have an assistant editor who's wonderful. Shout out to Jesse Groscia. I don't want to interrupt you just to say that the soundtrack is fantastic.

And I believe it's out September 25th. That's correct. Wow. Thank you. Yeah. I was struggling to remember when I should say it's out. Yes, September 25th. So we split the work up until we get to the microphones.

And then I try to just, you know, punch it up and lay everything out and give it some atmosphere after. We should also mention we have a great fact checker named Matthew Giles, who keeps us honest and always allows us to feel secure in the stuff we're putting out because it's important to us that we're not trying to lecture. We're not trying to browbeat. We really want to make a compelling story that feels almost kind of cinematic that you can follow along with. Not unlike the true crime, as you said. We've been lucky enough to get some really good interviews this season and the last few seasons. This season, you know, in the bonus episodes, we have Cy Hirsch, who broke

a lot of the stories that we talk about in the course of the show. We also talked with journalist Ahmed Rashid, who is one of the world's foremost authorities on these issues, including the rise of the Taliban in particular. Brennan spoke with and interviewed an Afghan politician Malala Ijoia, who actually, you know, directly confronted on camera a lot of these warlords in Kabul in the 2000s. So I think that that's sort of what I would say sort of rounds out what it is that we do in the course of actually making this thing. Yeah.

And look, as I said earlier, I've only listened to the first episode, but I have listened all of the first three seasons. It's one of the best podcasts out there. You can listen to the first episode of season four for free now wherever you get your podcast. But to become a subscriber and get instant access to the entire season, go to blowback.com. Make sure your credit card is up to date, unlike me who had to re-enter everything. It's a fabulous podcast. I highly recommend subscribing to it. Get all the bonus episodes. The bonus episodes are great, too. Brendan James, Noah Cullen, thank you so much for being here. I'm excited for Blowback Season. in five already. Thank you, Andy.

Thank you. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal American historian and culture critic, Ruth Ben Giott, who has, I mean, if you want the messenger, the writer, the person to talk about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism, Ruth is your person from books like Strongmen, from Mussolini to the president, Italian fascism, and person. Pire Cinema and Onward and her newsletter, Lou said, this is where you come. And so Ruth, I'm not feeling good these days. I watched as everyone else did the Milwaukee Republican debate, as if we are living in normal times with normal candidates running for office. And so you are

the person, the expert on this issue and where we are. So I'm going to ask you a question that I don't think is being asked at all, which is what stage of the fascist takeover are we in right now? That is a good question, and I'm so happy to be speaking with you. The way I see the GOP now is it is an autocratic entity. It is a political party, but an autocratic party. It is enthrall to its leader, who has a leader cult. Many things, most things going on right now are about that. relationship. And so authoritarian dynamics are the only way to make sense of many things, including January 6th and importantly how the party reacted to that. So in terms of where we are, the party had already been, it's called hollowing out, when a leader just kind of takes all the

life and identity apart from himself out of a party. And that had already happened by the time the 2020 election came around. So that was one phase. And in fact, so pathetic. In 2020, the Republican Party couldn't even come up with a platform beyond supporting Trump. So that was a sign that they had been hollowed out. And then, of course, the whole state of exception, that's what I call it, happened between November and January 6th. And this was a testing ground for Meadows and many who are indicted, many who are not indicted, who should be, about illegality. What were they going to do for the leader? And so January 6th hugely radicalized the party because they saw that they could get away with the ultimate crime, trying to overturn an election, having a violent coup attempt. So

things have accelerated since then. We're two years out. And now hands of justice are moving for the head of the coup and the elite enablers. So we're in a weird stage where, as you say, the media and many people are still caught in the last gasps of trying to pretend that things are normal, that these candidates on stage are normal. But the party has been transformed into fanatics and criminals. And that's why Fannie Willis' indictment, you know, all but called it a criminal organization. So that's kind of where we are now. It's very scary and sad time for America. Ruth, one of the questions that I'm asked often, and I can't imagine what your inbox and comment sections look like, but one of the questions that I get asked, and most recently actually

from my mother, is, are we going to make a way through this? And I think that we have, and I say 30% of the population that is not returning to democratic values and normal. I don't believe that it's 50%, I believe that it's 30%, which leaves 70% of the population, the majority. And I'm wondering if you think with the 70% given what we are seeing take place in places like Tennessee, where you have the House Speaker that is wielding a gavel and power to silence not only his own members, but the constituents in the gallery for there to be transparency and viewership of the decisions that are being made that affect their daily lives, the decisions that you're seeing in Florida by DeSantis and taking away the vote of the people to elect their DAs and their prosecutors.

Do you see a path through this? Because I, for one, no one will ever accuse me of being Pollyanna-ish. That is not a name that I would be called. So I want to get your thoughts. One could say the same for me because writing strong men, it was difficult because I had to be in the heads of like some of the worst people who have lived and be able to predict how they're going to behave. And that's what's helped me make sense of our situation, even though I don't have any background in American history or politics. I've been right about almost everything because I understand power dynamics. So all this to say, one might not expect me to be optimistic, but I also wrote in Strongman

and elsewhere about the resistance and the reaction that comes when you have parties that are so egregiously devoted to repressing our rights. And part of the cycle we were talking about before is that the GOP has nowhere to go but becoming more extreme. That's why you have fanatics like Ramoswami up there reviving new conspiracy, conspiracy theories. And they also have to hide from the public. This is like they're getting into the bunker stage. That's dictators get into their bunker stage. So they can't have transparency. We already saw episodes during the pandemic and stuff of GOP legislators running away from their constituents. So all of that will increase. And that's going to cause a reaction. And it already is.

So I am optimistic. And the other reason I'm optimistic is we don't hear about this in but there's a global renaissance of nonviolent protests going on all over the world, even places like China, Iran, Belarus. There's protests in the last years that have been bigger than sometimes bigger than those countries have ever had. And we, again, it's not presented to us like this. This will be my next book, too. We had the biggest nonviolent protest in our history in 2017, the Women's March

surpassed only by Black Lives Matter protests, which involved around 20 million people, multiracial, multigenerational. So this is really important. I think we are ripe for another round, whatever it would look like, because when a party is so out of step with popular desires, as the GOP is now, like Republican women don't agree necessarily with gun policies, with abortion policies. And I agree with you, it's only 30 percent. of the hardcore who will never desert. So I think as things get more dire, also denying climate change in the middle of hurricanes and other natural disasters, none of this is going to benefit the GOP. This is why what Trump calls the final battle, they're going to try no matter what to get back

into the White House so they could shut down democracy because they know that otherwise they won't ever be able to to legally win again. They already didn't win the popular vote. And now being so extreme, they'll alienate more and more Americans. So I think that I don't have a time frame for it. It has to happen before 2024. But we will get through this. And our democracy will be strengthened as a result. One of the things that concerns me, and there are so many, But one of the things that concern me is that while you and I both agree that it is only 30% that are lost, I call them the lost ones, right? That they're not going to return is that they also, that 30% wield a lot of power and have an echo chamber that makes them seem more powerful than they are. So when we are looking at quote unquote moms for liberty, which is the women's group,

aligned associated with the oathkeepers and the proud boys and the way that they've been able to manipulate school boards and libraries and shut down critical thought. When we look at city councils and state houses that are relinquishing votes, they still are at the levers of power. And so for people who are feeling hopeless in the places that you have covered and written about, What do the people do when the hopelessness is suffocating? It's interesting because I've been writing actually about hope and how it can seem to some people to be just like foolish idealism. But in fact, all over the world, dissidents who have been resisting in far more difficult

conditions than we have all underscore the importance of hope. Because hope is essential to resistance and to thinking, you can change things because it presents the horizon as open, that history can go in a different direction. Just as we can have elite, a small number of people who, like the Moms for Liberty, who have a big impact, so can a few people make a difference and cause a mass movement to grow. And so it's very important that we reach out to that 70%, those undecided voters, those Republican-leaning independence and talk to them about outcomes, about the future, what do they want America to look like, talk about the economic fallout of Republican policies, show them the charge of life

expectancy in red versus blue states. So outcome arguments are important because they're very important to getting people on board. But the question of hope is related to this because if you see things as hopeless and you only believe the negative, you will never change anything. And so we just had the anniversary of the March on Washington and the much quoted, you know, I have a dream. Authoritarians are very wary about dreaming because you're not allowed to dream. You're not allowed to have not only critical thinking, but aspirations because it's dangerous because dreaming is very powerful, hope is very powerful.

So it's really important that we don't lose hope because this is not just hope. It's hope in ourselves and hope in our own agency and what we can do together. And that's why I think every day about the Black Lives Matter protests. Those energies are still there and we need to revive them. I want to take a step back from America for a minute. And I know that you alluded to the protests that we've seen around the globe in Iran and in parts of China and in other subjugated areas of the world. What worries me and what I haven't really understood about this moment, Ruth, is that

what has happened to create this domino effect in the rise of authoritarianism at this time? In the United States over the last eight years and globally, we have seen this extraordinary pushback to what the Obama era ushered in in America. And if folks remember, I remember when Barack Obama, I believe that it was in Germany, the people that traveled all across Europe to see him and he was a candidate at the time,

it was extraordinary. And it seems that not only did we experience and are we in the midst of the white lash that is happening from the election of the first black president in this country, but somehow it triggered something globally, as well. What's your analysis of what was or is the cause of how we're in this moment right now? That's one of the reasons I wanted to take a step back over 100 years, actually, which I did in

Strongman and look for patterns. And one of the main patterns is societies are attracted to authoritarian when there's been a lot of social progress. It could be workers' rights. That's how it was originally after original fascism or in Spain in 1931, when you started a very progressive period, could be women's emancipation. We were primed for a Trump because in 2016, we had eight years of the first African-American president. Many people didn't accept him. This was like, as you said, the white lash. What happened during his time in office, we had the legalization of same-sex marriage. We had women admitted to combat. Other countries had women in combat for a long time. We did not. Women admitted special forces. All of these

things caused this kind of backlash. And this has happened in other areas too. But the United States was in the middle of this wave. It didn't, you know, strong men influence each other. And it can seem like one comes up and now another one comes up, right? They influence each other in their style. But this wave of authoritarianism was already kind of going on, in part because of the enormous progress that's been made in many societies, toward racial emancipation, gender and racial equity. But the other thing that we can think about is many people have found democracy is unfulfilling.

And for example, allying with kind of neoliberal social programs as social benefits have been restricted, for example, where people feel there's an epidemic of loneliness which is in democracies as well as autocracies. So we need to think about that too. That's a broader problem. And it's why people become susceptible to these populist and authoritarian parties that promise community. They traffic in tribalism, in scapegoating.

But they also promise things that people think of as positive. Now, these communities, of course, are founded on excluding and hating others. But they see them, people feel that they've found a sense of belonging. And democracy and liberal democracy in particular has not been as forthright in providing that. I look to experts like yourself and I see you as a guidepost as a light during what is becoming a really dark and perilous time. And just to try and end on a lighter note, I look to you for light. Where do you look for light? I look to you and to all those who are using their platforms to call things out in blunt language.

I think that the language we use is really important. And I also have found that a lot of people are in denial because they're scared or they don't have the frame of reference to interpret what's going on. And that's where I can use my expertise. But they're not ready to hear certain things because they're kind of myth of it can't happen here. or America's always been a democracy, whereas I come in from a perspective of foreign history, and I'm like, from where I sit, this has only been a democracy since the 60s. What kind of democracy can it be when there's no civil rights for like a large part of the population? So I think speaking truth in a blunt way is over and over again, as you do, as others do,

is so important to getting the message and starting to help others to wake up. to what we face. Well, Ruth, I thank you so much for your work and for making time for the new abnormal. And I hope that you will come back and visit us again very soon. I appreciate you. Anytime. Danielle Moody. Andy Leapy.

So Danielle, start us off this week after a glorious Labor Day and give us your fuck that guy. Yes, I'm going to pick up where I left off at the end of last week, which is the, I guess he is minted in our hall of assholes in our hall of fuck that guy. Ron DeSantis, I swear to God. It's like this man can't be presidential if he fucking tried. And by the way, this is him trying. So we all know about the hurricane that hit Florida. And in one of the speeches or that or press conferences that have been covered,

Ron DeSantis decides to show once again his alpha dog. And again, I have to say this because you know who posted a meme of all things? Ice tea. And Ice tea is like, if you find yourself having to say that you're an alpha dog, a boss, a badass, chances are you're not. And this is fucking Ron DeSantis. So he says in his press conference that I want to read the entire quote. So let me just find it.

Okay. This part of Florida, you got a lot of advocates and some proponents of the Second Amendment And I've seen signs in different people's yards in the past after these disasters. And I would say it's probably here. You loot, we shoot. What in the entire fuck? First of all, there has not been a case of anyone looting. Second of all, we also remember back in Katrina when police officers, when white people were

going in to get the goods that they needed. oh my God, these poor and fortunate people, black people going into a store to get the things that they need. Oh my God, these looters, and they shot them from on top of a bridge. Those people were brought up on criminal charges. To advocate just, oh, I don't know, days

after a white supremacist shot and killed three black people in Jacksonville, Florida. To shoot, to advocate in this type of way, it's like this fucking Android, has the glitch of all glitches. And I swear to God, I wish Ronda Santis would just go the fuck away. And people have said,

oh, he's pausing his campaign so that he can deal with Florida. Ain't nobody want him there. Every time I post a video about Ronda Santos on TikTok, I swear to God it goes viral. Why? Because everyone that lives in that state hates him, right? Except for the people inside of the bubble

who tell him that he is great and he's the second coming. The second coming of what? I don't fucking know. But I got to, to tell you that for that reason and he's going to be my fuck that guy, I think, for all of 2024. This is a preview.

Yeah. I mean, these people want the purge. Like, they watch the purge and think, oh, that's a really good idea. Yes. And it's just, you loot, we shoot. Like, you're advocating for people, as you said, to break the law. Mm-hmm. Like, I don't care how stand your groundy you are.

You can't just randomly shoot somebody because you see them. carrying case of water or whatever. Are you sure? Because apparently you can. Well, I, you know what? I could be wrong. Yeah. It's particularly for Florida.

I could be wrong. So, yeah, I'm going to retract that. But fuck that guy. So, Andy, how are we starting out this good, good week on your end? Well, I'm going to go off the board and go with sort of a radical pick for me and for the show, I think. And I'm going to go with Florida governor, Ronda Santos. There's a 15-year-old kid named Quinn Mitchell, and he goes to primary events, and he asks the candidates questions.

And so he's been doing it again. He's, according to Jake LaHoot at the Daily Beast, he's seen at least 35 presidential candidates since 2019. And back in June, he went to a town hall event that Ron DeSantis had, and he asked him, he said, do you believe that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power, a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold? And as Jake reports, DeSantis completely dodged the question, because that's, that's what Alpha Males do. And then he asked Mitch, he said to Mitchell, he said, are you in high school? And some of you may have seen this. The video went viral. And it was basically mocking DeSantis. Like, he can't even answer a 15-year-old's question. But Mitchell, the 15-year-old kid, has now talked to Jake

at the Daily Beast, he says that at two subsequent campaign stops, he was grabbed and physically intimidated by DeSantis's security. And at a Fourth of July parade, he was physically restrained after a brief interaction with DeSantis. And it got to the point where the kid's mom was so alarmed that Casey DeSantis, Ron's wife, talked to her directly, but all she said was that her son was being dishonest. Oh. Yeah. And then a couple weeks ago,

Mitchell went to another event, and the Daily Beast is told by a source that they saw at this event, a staffer for DeSantis's Super PAC, which is called Never Back Down, took a photo of the kid, and then typed out a caption of it, Got Our Kid.

And it's just, this is a 15-year-old kid who is asking civil questions, and this is how he is being treated by the DeSantis' case. campaign because they are clearly terrified of him because he dared to ask a question, I guess, about Donald Trump that Desandis didn't want to answer because he's a fucking coward. And I was dissuaded from using a different word for the good, for the good, I think.

But this is, again, we talked earlier about this sort of fascist mentality. And this is exactly that. Oh, a kid asks a question you don't like, have security, rough him up. It's just, it's absolutely insane. and this campaign cannot fail fast enough and just fuck that guy at infinitum. I just want to say this. That kid, Quinn, this is the reason why Ron DeSantis wants to basically defund public education. This is why he wants books, bans, and curriculums change.

And this is what he calls, quote unquote, brainwashing, critical thinking. And the fact that Ronda Santas can't answer a question from a fucking 15 year old, but we're supposed to believe that he can go toe to toe with world leaders, give me a fucking break. He needs to sit down as well as his wife, which I struggle because there are so many other words that I want to refer to them as, and I don't because I'm a better fucking person because of meditation. But fuck that guy.

You're so calm and just so zen about everything to Edel. Right. Yes. Clearly just a poster child for meditation. For meditation. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going.

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