The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Is Playing Russian Roulette

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

A planned rollback of environmental protections is yet another example of how the Trump administration is playing Russian roulette with American lives, warns co-hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy on this week’s episode of The New Abnormal. Plus! The Washington Post columnist and author Philip Bump on why young men are politically shifting to the right, and GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis discusses growing attacks on LGBTQ rights 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.

Washington Post columnist and How to Read This Chart author, Philip Bump joins us to break down his latest piece, the story behind the rightward shift of young men, challenging the common narratives about why young voters are moving right and what the data really says. Then we'll talk to Glad President's CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, who's here to discuss the relentless attacks on LGBTQ plus folks by the current administration and the power of media and shaping public opinion and what's at stake in this fight for equality. But first, let's have some fun. So a little while ago, Danielle, we did sort of a, not a segment, but we just put together a bunch of stories under the heading, they want to kill us. And guess what? It's back.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency, or at this point, I assume they're going to have to change their name, announced via the administrator of the EPA Lee Zeldin, what he calls the most consequential day of deregulation in American history. And what he means by that is they are set to roll back a ton of environmental regulations. And he says that the agency's mission is, in his mind, is to make it cheaper to buy cars, cheaper to heat homes, and cheaper to run businesses. That is not the mission of the EPA. The mission of the EPA is to protect the environment and to keep Americans safe from things like pollution and chemicals and poisons being put into our water by unscrupulous businesses, but he clearly sees it a little differently,

and they are now about to, as the New York Times reports, they are going to unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution, overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths, and they're going to roll back restrictions on emissions of mercury, which is a neurotoxin. So I don't think it's too much of a leap, Danielle, to say, once again, they are trying to kill us. They want to kill us. I'm going to push back on you, Andy, which I never do, right? Right. And here's the thing. I think that the word, I think that the word try is doing too much work in your sentence. Fair enough.

not trying to kill us. They are, I'm going to replace that word with going to kill us. I don't know why anyone would celebrate dirty water, thick, chewable air, and more mercury in our bodies. I don't know why that is a celebration. I don't know why companies who have for the last, I don't know, 30 years, been functioning by cleaning their polluting ways would celebrate this. I don't get it. I don't get what fucking planet these people live on. We're all on the same planet. And I guess maybe they're equipping themselves to be able to walk around with oxygen tanks

because what we know is that unlike the Jetson era, we still have not built those homes that are going to go above the pollution. We actually are just going to all exist in science. of it. And so I think that people are looking around and for those that voted for this administration, the 80 million people that voted for this regime are looking around and they are really locked into the find out part of the fuck around. The find out part being that there are a number of ways. I mean, this is this regime is like playing Russian roulette. Like will it be the deregulation of the EPA that kills you? Will it be the wildfires that kill you? Will it be

measles that kills you? Will it be polio? Like, you just don't know because there are so many avenues to walk down because one thing is for sure. This regime does not care about Americans, does not care about our lives, our livelihoods, patriotism, anything. And so Godspeed to them, because they're going to need some type of prayer. Because, again, this is one Earth that we're on. I don't care how many rockets Elon Musk wants to blow up in his attempt to get to Mars or the moon. But we're still just here. Yeah, a smattering of reaction to Lee Zeldon's announcement.

Gina McCarthy, who was the EPA administrator under President Obama, called this the most disastrous day in EPA history and said, rolling these rules back is not just a disgrace. It's a threat to all of us. Jackie Wong, who is the senior VP for climate change and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says that this is going to lead to an increase in asthma, heart attacks, and other health problems. I think that's objectively true. And the one saving grace, I guess, here is, well, we'll see. But hopefully the one saving grace here is that Zeldin's announcement does not have the force of law.

and at least under the law, there is supposed to now be a, what the New York Times calls, a lengthy process of public comment and that the EPA has to develop environmental and economic justifications for all these changes. I think we've seen in the past couple months that not having the force of law and something having to undergo a bunch of steps hasn't really been the case with this administration who just, you know, which just sort of says things and then does them without caring about the law or the Constitution or pesky things like that. But look, all of this is a sop to big business. That's obvious.

And once again, I'm sitting here thinking of all these people who, you know, have said, going back to 2016, that Trump fights for us. He cares about us. Again, I look at this and I'm like, how. it was bad enough that you thought this in the first place because it was very easily seen as to be not true. But if you still think that now, after everything that has happened in the last few months, I don't know what to tell you. I'm out of words to try to explain to you how wrong you are because you are just, you're willfully putting your head in the sand and you're sitting here while the EPA is throwing the hugest bone ever to big business at the expense of your health and at the expense of the

climate of this planet. And we had, I think it was 27 disasters in this country last year, natural disasters caused by weather or fire or whatever, that each cost over a billion dollars. And to sit here and to think that rolling back all the protections we have, which, by the way, are not enough. Like, this should be going in the other direction. Mm-hmm. But to sit here and think that Donald Trump cares about you or cares about this country or cares about anything other than making himself and his cronies richer, you need a 24-hour

assistance. Also, I'm not 100% sure this isn't all happening on purpose, but I'm not an economist. It's so hard to manage in the intangeloven. of all of this news right now. So a couple of weeks ago, we had Donald Trump and his fascist regime hailing the fact that they were going to put mothers, fathers, laborers, sisters, brothers, cousins, you know, people just trying to make a way, make a better life into Guantanamo Bay. The notorious prison detention that is for known and unknown terrorist.

where the rules of humanitarian rights and, like, democracy are suspended in this part of the world. It's atrocious, and for so long it has been said that it was going to be shut down, but apparently no administration has been able to do it. And Donald Trump has seen this as a growth opportunity. So over the last several weeks, he has said that his administration was going to be building a bigger, better facility to hold those that. he is deporting out of the country in this awful limbo, anti-humanitarian nightmare called Guantanamo Bay. And evidently, the administration has spent already, and by the way, it's only been seven weeks, $16 million on and housing is just doing light work in this sentence is too much.

$16 million in detaining, oppressing and persecuting migrants in Guantanamo Bay. Well, this has been, the plan here has been to have the ability to detain 30,000 immigrants at one time. And again, folks, no crime being committed here. But now, as it turns out, the $16 million, much like everything else Donald Trump touches, just was flushed down the toilet because da-da-da-da-da, the migrants must be returned to the United States. Andy? Yeah, I mean, look, I used to think that we should shut down Gitmo, and now I'm of the mind that we should keep it open because I do think that there are a bunch of people who should be put there.

Like actual criminals? Yeah, like after the trials that I think we're going to need after this administration. But this is just unbelievable. I mean, they spent all this money constructing, and like you said, housing is an overstatement. They're tents. They constructed tents, basically, and with beds in them. And they didn't even meet ICE's requirements for detention. And I think we all know those requirements ain't very high.

But, you know, certain things like they didn't have air conditioning, which I would imagine is kind of a big deal in Guantanamo Bay and a whole bunch of other things. So all of these people have now been flown to Louisiana, again, at taxpayer expense. Like you said, everything they do is just in addition to being, you know, just wildly immoral and unconstitutional and just plain wrong, they're just bad at it. They're really, really bad at it. And I guess in a sense, that's a good thing. But sometimes it's not a good thing. And in the case of this, it's like putting 30,000 people in. in a detention facility with no air conditioning and no anything.

And as you said, none of these people are hardened criminals. They're people who came here trying to make a better life. And whether you think, you know, even if you think, well, they didn't do it the right way, they should be gone. They don't deserve to be treated like this. And, you know, they deserve to be treated like human beings. And everything is just grotesque these days. Like, I don't know that I use the word grotesque a lot in my life, but I find myself saying it more

and more and more these past couple months. The idea that they claim they wanted to port anywhere from like, what is it, two million to 20 million people, they can't even deal with 30,000, which we knew was going to be the case. Like everyone said, look, you're lying. You can't do this. It just, it can't be done. But again, there were plenty of people who believe them.

And so this is where we are now, Danielle. Yeah. As of last week, I guess, what was it, 41? 41 migrants were at Guantanamo Bay. Oh, God. Awaiting deportation since those 41, 41, 41, 4-1, they've all been flown to Alexandria, Louisiana on a non-military aircraft on Tuesday, Wednesday, this week. Do you know what this regime is good at?

It's like the only thing that they are good at. It's the fucking spin. It's the storytelling. It's the media. Like, they're good at the storytelling, the fear-mongering, and the weaponization of the media. That's what they're good at. Everything else that requires like, I don't know, details, research, analysis, thoughtfulness, they can't manage. Yeah. And you see it time and time again as like all of these court cases are happening. And I know that in a fascist regime, who are the courts,

they have no military enforcement, no law enforcement. You either choose to follow the rule of law or you don't. But at the end of the day, as you're seeing all of these judges stall their shit, because you have like, it's not even bond villains. You have Scooby-Doo villains. Yeah. Right? That are manning the ship here. And they honestly don't know what the fuck they're doing.

They just like talking tough and like projecting, you know, toxic masculinity because they need to overcompensate and I don't need to go into it. But the fact is, is that just like, oh, we're going to deport millions of people. people and dude you rounded up 41 people and now they're all back in the states. Bravo. You're so amazing. And then you know what? Just side note like shout out and by shout out I mean a fuck you to Senator Mark Warner who wanted to congratulate Donald Trump ahead of the joint sessions about his immigration stance and plan. How's he looking now? Fucking idiots. Yeah. And I mean just to point out how bad all this stuff is there's a family down in Mexico.

Well, they're in Mexico now because they were kicked out of the U.S. where their daughter was undergoing treatment for brain cancer. A 10-year-old girl, she gets her treatment in Houston, because that's where her specialist doctors are located, according to NBC News. I guess the parents came to Texas in 2013. They are undocumented. They have five children.

Four of them were born in the U.S., which, like it or not Trump administration, makes them U.S. citizens. they were deported when they tried to go to the doctors who were treating the 10-year-old's brain cancer. They were all deported together, including the children who are U.S. citizens. The things that we are seeing in this administration are just, at this point, Adam Serwer is famous, The Cruelty is the Point Thing, has become a trope. You know, it's become very overused because it was 100% accurate.

But you look at this and you just think, how do you do this to people? then go home to your family at night. And when your partner or whoever says, you say, how is your day, you say, oh, it's good. You know, I stopped a 10-year-old girl from getting treatment for brain cancer. Like, that's the life you want. That's the life you chose. I think of this, and it just boggles my mind. It boggles my mind how you can do things like this and then go home and get a good night's sleep.

And then go home and play with your own kids. And then go sit at a bar and have fun with your friends, whatever. There's something wrong. There's something missing in these people. And it's just, it's frightening. It's absolutely frightening because they are the people who are now in charge. Yeah, to that point, in order to have empathy, Andy, honestly, you need to be able to actually see other people that don't look like you, love like you, pray like you as actual human beings. And I think that what we have to understand is that the people that signed up to be a part of this regime, do not see non-white people, non-seudo-Christians, non-siss and straight folks as human beings.

And so it is the dehumanization that we have seen over the last decade plus that allows them to not even flinch, to not even care whatsoever. And it is something that actually should really be called out because that's the type of people that 80 million Americans put in charge. Honestly, it's sickening, and it should be. Philip Bump is a Washington Post columnist and author of The Post's fantastic weekly newsletter How to Read This Chart. He's been one of the best journalists around it covering Donald Trump and America in the MAGA age, and he recently wrote a piece called The Story Behind the Rightward Shift of Young Men, which takes issue with the way this phenomenon is usually characterized.

He joins me now. Philip, thanks so much for coming back. Of course, happy to beer. So as you point out in the piece, one of the prevailing explanations for the Harris, Wallace, Wall's tickets loss, is that young men shifted to Trump because of Joe Rogan

and other podcasters and streamers. And we've certainly heard the frequent lament that there's no Joe Rogan of the left. But you crunched a lot of data, what we in the business call a shitload. And you say, and I believe this is a direct quote,

hold on there, Sparky, not so fast. So are you saying that young men didn't shift to Trump? No, I'm not. I am saying that the shift to Trump among young men was not by itself exceptional, right? that we saw, for example.

And, you know, let's back up by saying that I did look at a shitload of data in part because the data that we have are relatively unsatisfying and tend to be incomplete. Part of that's because we're talking about subsets of subsets of people, which means we're looking at small and smaller numbers of people, and therefore you tend to get higher margins of error. Part of it is that we are still aggregating data from the 2024 election and trying to figure out what we actually learned from that election. And part of it, too, is that we tend to operate.

in this universe where as soon as an election happens, we try and figure out what happened really quickly. And we establish narratives like the one that you just described. So what I did is they took the available data. I looked at voter registration data. I looked at poll data. I looked at poll data. And tried from that to figure out, did we actually see the shift? And so what I found is that no, we did not see an exceptional shift among young men to Donald Trump in the 2024 election with a very, very important exception, which is that among non-white, Americans, black and Hispanic and Asian Americans, but primarily Hispanic Americans, we did see a big shift that was particularly striking among younger people that helps account for the ways in

which younger people shifted to the right over the course of the past four years and not just four months. So that's really interesting because that's not what you hear. What you hear is it's young white men, it's that shift that really put Trump over the top or that's the shift that Democrats have to worry about. But you're saying that actually it's not to disregard the fact that young men did shift to Trump, but that it's a much bigger deal than just saying young white men shifted to Trump. That's right. Yeah. So there are a number of different factors here that are worth pulling out. The first is that young men and young women, if you look at what's what's called the vote cast, which is a relatively new sort of exit poll mechanism. And I think a better one, if you look at the

vote cast, you see the young men and young women both shifted to Trump by the same amount. Young men were already more predisposed to support Donald Trump than were young women. And so they ended up being more supportive of Trump than young women. But the actual shift between 2020 and 2024 was equivalent, right, between those two groups. So one of the things that we do, too, is we tend to fixate upon the things that we see. And so we have seen for some time this pattern of, you know, these young bros who are into, you know, MMA and like listen to these terrible podcasts. unlike the quality podcast that you host, of course. But, you know, we listen to this garbage.

And so we look at that we see that present in our culture and present as a change in the way from how things used to be. And then you overlay the pre-election coverage driven heavily by the New York Times poll with Sienna College, which showed that young people were sort of soft on Joe Biden in particular. And they're developed even before the election, this narrative that this is what was shifting. And so then we go back and actually look at the numbers. One of the things that I did immediately after the election is I used the exit polls to figure out what Trump's actual coalition look like. So not just talking about shifts, but the constituent elements of the people who voted for him. And one of the things I found is it actually was slightly older than his 2020 constituency because he, you know, because of who turned out and who didn't, you know, the splits between them.

And so there are a lot of ways to look at this. And most of them do not reinforce this broader narrative that was already existent by the time election day rolled around. So one of the things you say in the piece is that the problem for Democrats is more that black and Hispanic voters have not been voting like their parents. So when we talk about, because we'll hear this a lot that, oh, well, black support for the Democrats is down, Hispanic support for the Democrats is down, is what you found that that is pretty much, or that is in a large part driven by younger black people, younger Hispanic people? Yeah, yeah. It certainly is the case that we saw bigger shifts among younger non-white Americans than among older non-white Americans, right? And, you know, there are a lot of really interesting analyses that have been done on this. For example, is it the case that because younger black Americans are less likely to go to church,

that they are therefore less ingrained in the community that reinforces particular political worldviews and political voting patterns, right? You know, one thing, too, that I have been harping on for a long time since, you know, the book that I wrote that came out in 2023 dealt heavily in this. But people under recognize the extent to which younger Americans tend to be less heavily white. And so part of the big shift that we saw among young Americans too was the fact that more young Americans are non-white than older Americans. And as such, if you see a big shift among non-white young Americans, that's going to be

a bigger constituent portion of the younger population, right? So yes, it is very much the case that this shift among younger Americans, which still leaves them very heavily Democratic. It's important to note, right? You know, when we're talking about a change between, and these numbers are made up, but, you know, between a 90-10-REP split and an 80-20-dem rep split, that's still a very heavily Democratic constituent group, but it is a much less densely democratic one than the 90-10 one. Right. And that goes, I would assume both overall, and again, when we're talking about when you break it down into white, black, Hispanic, whatever, those numbers are still majority Democrat. it's just that they're less of a majority than they have been.

That's right. It is very safe to argue that this is not a negative for America over the long term, right? It is not great that there was for a long time this association between black Americans and Democrats, right? I don't mean not great for the Democratic Party. I mean not great because a large part of what we see in the response to black America and in things like, you know, eradicating DEI and all that. there is a partisan element to that because Republicans understand that black Americans are not people who vote for them. And beyond issues of racism, which of course exists and of course are undergirding some of this, there is an element of, well, let's punish them anyway because they don't vote for us.

You see this in things like voter ID laws. They don't really care if there's a disproportionate effect on black Americans. And in fact, often highlights that we should have voter ID laws because, you know, even if they do disproportionately affect black Americans, because that means fewer Democratic votes. And so over the long term, having it not be the case that black Americans are associated with one political party in an moment of sharp political partisanship probably is good. But for the Democratic Party and for winning elections, you know, for that party to win elections, it obviously over the short term is bad. Gotcha. And when we talk about the parties and the shifts, so one of the things you get into in the in your piece is, and I'll phrase this as a question, is there a difference between young people's views of Trump and young people's partisanship or which.

party they identify with yeah absolutely you know when joe biden was still running for president last year i think part of i have to correct you here i think that was 20 years ago right right yeah back when he was 80 one of the things that i think accounted for the lack of enthusiasm among young people was the distinction between biden and the policies that they supported right young people are less likely to be members of political parties than are older people and it means they have less of an ingrained habit of voting for democrats and so They didn't vote for Joe Biden simply because he was a Democrat, and they honestly didn't particularly like Joe Biden. And so when you consider that that's how a lot of people vote in young people in particular, when they make this distinction between candidates and parties, and then when they make a distinction between candidates and policies or parties and policies, you see a lot of different ways of getting at this.

There has been data from Pew Research Center, for example, which finds a much more modest effect of younger people shifting to the right. But that's in part because they had been looking at voter registration data. And if you look at non-voter registration data, meaning if you look at everybody, if you look at adults overall, Gallup found a big shift among young people and people of color between 2020 and 2024 because they weren't just looking at voter registration. And so the one thing that you can take away from that is that young people who are not registered to vote are more likely to be supportive of Republican candidates. But then you also have the distinction to you drew between Trump and regular Republicans. There's a lot of people who are really enthusiastic about Trump. And I think everyone is curious, you know, what happens in 2028 when Trump is presumably not on the ballot, right? And hopefully not on the ballot simply by virtue of the existence of the Constitution.

You know, what happens at that point? Is there a constituency? Is it Donald Trump Jr.? Is there someone else able to pick that up? And I think that part of the challenge that we have is in viewing how people look at presidential politics through the lens of Donald Trump, which is obviously inescapable, but is necessarily then also colored by Trump, who is a unique character. Yeah. And there was an interesting quote. from a guy you talked to named Brian Schaffner, who is the principal investigator for the cooperative

election study. And he said that even though there was a shift to Trump among younger people, he said there's not a ton of evidence of a rightward shift among 18 to 29 year olds. Right. And he's looking primarily through the lens of policy. So it is not the case, for example, that in the data of cheeses, which is this biennual survey that's conducted around federal elections and really has an enormous amount of data that you can explore and actually is linked in the piece. But it is not the case, for example, that if younger Americans, white and non-white, are shifting to the right and younger men in particular, it is not the case, though, that they are therefore

all of a sudden anti-same-sex marriage or anti-other issues that are associated with more left-wing politics. And that's an important distinction, too, because it means that a lot of this is centered potentially on the candidate himself and offers hope for Democrats who hold policies that these young people still agree with. Yeah. And then there was, you got into some recent polling by the post, a question about Trump's efforts to exceed his authority. What was, what did you find there? When we're talking about Trump, there are always questions that arise that are, they're hard to answer through polling because they are unusual, right? They have never come up

before. You can't track a lot of Trump trends over time, I think it's safe to say. But one of the things that we found was that when we consider the extent to which Americans are willing to let Donald Trump be autocratic, that young people were not more likely to say that they thought that he should be able to do that. And that in fact, it was this mid-tier group, you know, not the oldest Americans, but, you know, Gen X is sort of the narrative that's out there, that they were the ones that were most likely to say, yes, we think it's okay if he takes those sorts of actions. So it is not the case that even if younger Americans do like Donald Trump more than might have been expected. It's not the case that they then want him to be an autocrat.

And I think this is important too. All of this conversation should be considered through the lens of Americans everywhere. Like all Americans were more supportive of Trump in 2024 than they were in 2020. And one of the analysis that I did after the election also showed that part of this was simply the pendulum swing the other way, that the pendulum swung hard of the left in 2020 relative to 2016 and then swung back to the right. And that I think about half of states were basically about where they had been in 2016 on the issue of Donald Trump. It was a swing to the right from 2020, but it was not that different from when Donald Trump had first run in 2016. That's so interesting.

And first of all, we're going to edit the part out about you blaming Gen X because I don't need to hear that kind of Gen X phobia. It's generation bashing. That's all it is. Yeah. It's opportunity on my part. I won't stand for it. I believe you me. I guess this next question takes us out of the realm.

of data and into sort of speculation, but I'm curious what you think about this. Why are so many people, including many who are high up in the Democratic Party, convinced that A, there was this, you know, sort of unusual rightward shift among young men, and B, that the primary cause of this was Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughn, the whole podcast and crew and things like MMA. I think there are a few reasons. One is that not very many people actually pay attention to what the data say because it takes time. And it takes, you know, you got to figure out it takes time both in the sense of it takes time to have the data actually accrue so that you can look at it and it takes time to actually sit down and consider what it says. That, you know, we're talking about people who are their careers

or politics. And these are not people who are known for being particularly attentive to reality and or careful and cautious in the in the pronouncements that they make. The second is that, you know, we saw a very quick effort to try and figure out who to blame. And so we saw even on the left a lot of people blaming wokeism and yada, yada, yada. And when you have decided that what is to blame is that your own party is too far left, then that means you are willing to embrace a scenario in which the salvation would have been something that is not far to the left. And when you also see a shift among young people and you have noticed the existence of Joe Rogan,

like those things all sort of combine into, okay, then what we need is a Joe Rogan. So that way we're not being these woke losers that nobody likes. And at the same time, we're appealing to young people. But it's not based on anything. It is vibes based. And, you know, look, no one has ever lost money shorting the willingness of career political actors to overestimate their own sense of what's happening in the world. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, look, I think it's odd that we look at these people who have been fairly consistently wrong. Sure. And James Carville, excuse me. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And suddenly we think maybe they might be right about this. Like that doesn't really make much sense to me either. Yeah, but I mean, look, politics is exactly the same as like a 1950s baseball team where

if you keep winning games because no one's washing their socks, you don't wash your socks, right? Like this is the, you know, candidates do this too. If they won an election by running on X, they're going to try and run every single election ever by running on X. And part of that's just like you have a small sample size and it worked once. And so, you know, why would you rock the boat? But this is how party politics works and, you know, on both the left and the right. And you end up with people like Carville and these other folks who just have decided they know

what the answer is. And then that's the answer that they offer. And, you know, you cannot dissuade them from that position even after losing 18 times in a row. Yeah. And oddly, their explanation is always the same exact thing as it was in the 1990s, which on the face of it is absurd. With a gloss of whatever's popular at the time.

Right, exactly. So, yes. Yeah. You wrote a piece that came out just today on Thursday as we're recording this. And I think it kind of feeds in a little bit to this sort of same topic about young people. And the headline for this piece is a quarter century ago we were idealists. What are we now? And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

And I'm curious what you, when you looked into this, what did you find? Why do Americans and maybe even particularly young people, why are they less idealistic now than they were 20 years ago, maybe even 30 years ago? Is it simply world events? Is it 9-11? Is it the 2008 economy crash? Is it just that simple? Yeah. I mean, I think it is all of those things, right? You know, so that piece is an unusually personal piece for me looking at my own shift and those of people who I worked with. with, you know, 25, 30 years ago doing actual national service, public service, working in schools and things along those lines, and how our idealism has shifted. And I think that the answer is, and I summarize this in a piece, that there has long been this tension between viewing one's role in the world as either being part of a community and reinforcing the communal betterment or being in it for yourself and maximizing your own wealth and well-being. And I think that that tension at the end of the Clinton era in the late 1990s, we had sort of seen one way.

And there was, there was cause to be optimistic and the United States was doing well. And one could see oneself as part of a broader, successful thing. And then, you know, from 9-11 through the Great Recession, particularly sharply, acutely, with the advent of COVID, we saw that change. We really saw, to use the pendulum example, again, the pendulum swing back. And that the solipsism and this isolationism and this everyone out for his own good really became the dominant way of viewing the world. I think that Donald Trump didn't drive this but benefited from it, although I think he very strongly stoked it during the COVID era. And I think this

is the world that we're in now. I think it is very obviously in that negative. It is a sharp change from the way things were back in the late 1990s. You and I are both Gen X. All this is colored by we are now old men and we look back grumpily at the way the world has changed and how great things were on your kids. It just happens that for our generation, that's mostly true. Yeah, no, 100% we'll leave that in. I do just want to close because you quote this in that piece. And this to me is one of the more chilling quotes from Elon Musk, and that's saying a lot, is when he said to Joe Rogan, the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. And to me, that is just a world without empathy, which is basically what we're living in right now, at least among the leadership of America, is not a good place to be.

This is the richest man in the world. And that is an incredibly gross thing for anyone to say, no matter the context. It is a particularly an acutely gross thing for the richest man in the world who has the year of the president to say. Yeah, couldn't agree more. Philip, thank you so much for coming back on. People, if you're not subscribed to how to read this chart, you're really, really missing out. There's probably no one better at breaking things down and explaining the data that underlies reality than Philip. Thanks again for coming on, man.

You bet. Thanks. Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal. Sarah Kate Ellis, who is the CEO and president of Glad, an organization who directs their work towards the positive representations of LGBTQ people in media and advocacy on our screens and everywhere from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Sarah Kate, it has been just seven weeks. into this new administration, this regime that has decided to dedicate itself to the destruction

not only of our democracy, but to the criminalization of LGBTQ plus people, but particularly with specific attention to the trans community. I just want to get your overall reactions on where we are and how quickly things have devolved and what you are feeling right now as ahead of of the largest national LGBTQ organizations at a time when the community is under attack. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. And it is brutal for the LGBTQ community right now. There's no way to say it any other way. If you're trans in America, you are under a daily attack by the government of your country. If you're married and have kids, your marriage is on the line as well. And so it is broad, it is constant, and it is purely a distraction.

They actually really don't care about us because most Americans are with us, right? Most Americans are for equality and for the LGBTQ community. And I think this administration is focused on stirring up fights internally, spreading lies so that we're not focusing on what they're really doing. And what they're really doing is hoarding money for themselves and power. That's all that this is about. We are just the casualties in their money grab and their power grab. Here's the thing is that it turns out that this administration doesn't discriminate.

It is going to wipe out Americans. at any cost. I mean, except for the 1%, they don't care. They're going to take out American farmers. They're now challenging how we are no longer going to be an innovative, competitive country as they wipe out our education system. Welcome, China. I mean, who's this for the benefit of? making sure that we have a less educated next generation by wiping out the education system. So I think this is, even though it's very painful and it has real casualties tied to it, it is all a distraction to a much bigger, sinister plan on their part. And so my strategy has to keep my head above water and respond to the day-to-day-day

skirmishes, but keep a larger view in mind and a larger win in mind. Because I think if they're going to burn it all down, we're going to be there to build it back better. I agree with you wholeheartedly that what is being done at the hands of this regime and targeting LGBTQ people is largely a distraction because what they are doing is an entire smashing grab grift of looting our country, looting our tax dollars, and that is everyone, you know, regardless of the group that they are part of. However, I want to know where you see work that needs to be done, because when we look at the numbers, trans people in comparison to the LGBT community are still a largely unknown community, meaning that you're able to turn them into the boogie people, into this scary

entity person because the numbers are not there. Where do you think the work needs to be done so that this community isn't constantly being weaponized? That's a really great question. And I have two answers to that. One is when you look at the trans community, 30% of Americans say they know someone who's trans, meaning that 70% of society is learning through media. through these politicians who are just spreading misinformation and lies about trans people. So that's a really large swath of people.

I'm going to give you another statistic. We did a pretty deep dive into this tectonic shift that we've seen happen in the media ecosystem. The day after the election, I asked the team to go and dig in and get me what is happening. Where is media now? 60 years ago, we had four networks. 20 years ago, we had cable and we had about 75. And now we have over 200 places to consume media. The average of Americans spends more time a day on media than working, sleeping, and working out.

Damn. Uh-huh. That's the average American. Now, here's more information. When we did our study, what we learned was on a weekly basis, The right wing media has a hundred million relationships with people in a week. The progressive media talks to 30 million. Say that again because people really need to understand the ecosystem that has been built on the right versus what has been built on the left.

That's right. So on a weekly basis, the right wing media speaks to 100 million people in America. The progressive media speaks to 30 million. And we trade in facts and they trade in outrage. And outrage is a currency that goes viral, that gets eyes, that gets people engaged because it's feelings. We are talking about facts and they are tapping into people's feelings. So we have two major mountains to overcome here. One is just the basic audience size, when you think of that 70 million people that they are talking to more a week than progressive media.

And then how are we talking to them? Because it's great that we rattle off facts. And that is an important piece of this all. But that is not breaking through. We're like at the starting line tying our shoes, researching and message testing. They're at the finish line of this marathon, getting their gold. metal. And I think we really have to adjust the way we think about media. We think about who delivers the media, what platforms, but what is influence? Also, their largest influencers in right-wing media

started out as a comedian, Joe Rogan. One of them is the bar stool guy. That started out as a sports platform and now has turned into a right-wing ideology push. And so we really have to think about the way I'm glad you think about what is our messaging. I also think at a messaging perspective, we're playing defense for obvious reasons. Defense doesn't win games. Offense wins games. And we need to get on offense. And the only way that we're going to get on offense, We have to recognize what's happening, but then we have to elevate the conversation so we bring more people into it. So a great example is what's going on with DEI in corporate America, right? Like DEI, that's all the headlines.

DEI, corporate America, rolling it back, rolling it back. If you look at the Fortune 500 companies, it's like over 490 are not rolling back DEI. But the media, our media, is not rolling with that. they're rolling with the couple that have. And also, I think that corporates have to get much smarter about the way that they talk about this. Because DEI is actually a growth strategy. And so what this administration is doing is handicapping corporations by not letting them grow. If you want to get really dark, why are they taking the largest growth segment for companies?

companies both in talent and in consumers and going after it. And why isn't corporate saying, this isn't DEI, you can name it whatever you want. I don't care. That's where they want us to be is fighting about DEI and the acronym. Screw it. Move on from that. It is time to talk about corporations can't grow without black and brown audiences, Latin A audiences, and LGBTQ.

It is trillions of dollars of disposable income. It is the largest growing segment in the United States, and they can't grow without us. And so now why is this administration trying to rewrite that? I think we have to think differently about how we're approaching our work, how we're thinking about it, and how we're putting it out there. I agree wholeheartedly because I think that, you know, look, initially movement work, whether it be the LGBTQ movement, social justice, racial justice organizations, repo rights, et cetera, et cetera, had always been around, quote, changing hearts and minds. You don't change hearts and minds through facts and figures to the point that you're making.

You change hearts and minds by connecting people to their feelings, emotions. And this is where the left progressive Democrats as a whole have consistently fallen behind. This is about storytelling. This is about telling the story of American possibility and desire that is separated from a place of fear, fear, which is easy to sell. But so is joy and love. And the only person who I can think of that was successful in doing so was Obama. Because he was able to, in two different terms, utilize this idea of, yes, we can.

We are possible. And so I'm wondering how you think that in this particular moment, where in a lot of ways, we have lost and seated so much ground, but we still have our voice and the ability to message, at least in this right moment, before that's taken away as well. And so how do we optimize Sarah Kate in this moment, knowing all of the things that you have said,

what is our pivot now? Where is the opportunity for us to learn quickly and make this transition? So I think there's a few things to that. And I'll say one is we need to raise and elevate and participate in the voices such as this, right, such as your podcast and the other podcasts. And we need to share them and continue to build audiences. There are specific places that we've identified podcasts for one of them. Video games are another one.

Sports is huge. And sports also got the memo that they can't grow without our. communities. So how do we leverage that in this moment right now? And that's what we're working on at cloud. So I think one is identifying the platforms and the places where we can build and mobilize. Number two is never underestimate organizing, grassroots, grass tops organizing, and we're doing that right now because there are so many people who want to participate. And we had a group called Parents for progress, which is a glad group of parents of LGBTQ people or who are LGBTQ themselves, who want to organize, who want to participate and can tell their personal stories. And they're in the boardrooms

and they're in the PTA meetings and they have the opportunity to bring people along. Because Americans are with LGBTQ people. This barrage of lies has gifted people for sure. and made them think something is happening that's not. And so we have to meet that moment of all the lies that have been told and unravel that. And then I think it's also in our messaging, right? Yes, it's about storytelling and sharing. It's also about, I think, we're a little precious about our messaging. We test it.

We have think tanks about it. They're out there. It's got to be authentic. It's got to be real and it's got to be relatable. So if you think about surrogates, I always call them surrogates for us in the way that we navigate the media ecosystem. Like a Taylor Swift is a great one. I mean, I think she has like a half a billion followers. She can't move the needle on these issues because she's not seen as authentic and real.

She doesn't worry about the cost of eggs. But Joe Rogan does. And he's seen as authentic and real. So it's really thinking about the relationships we're creating and how do we create authentic and relatable relationships with people. We were being put into this like Taylor Swift. And I love Taylor Swift. This is, please, no shade to Taylor. I think she's wonderful.

Amazing. I'm using her as an example of sort of that celebrity that breathes rare air and doesn't feel relatable to everyday people and has been separated up. from them, if that makes sense. Yeah, understand. Well, Sarah Kate, we will have to leave it here today, but I just want to say I commend the work that you have done with Glad for well over a decade and the work and the fight ahead that you will no doubt be on the front lines of and continue to be on the front lines of. And we really appreciate you in the work that you're doing, particularly in this moment and for taking the time out to chat with us here at the new abnormal. Well, thank you for the work that you're doing because you're on the front lines of it too

and covering these stories and sharing them and building an audience is key to getting us to a better place. And I am very, very hopeful. I think it is dark. It is very hard. And I don't want to diminish that at all. And I am a crazy optimist. And I think this is happening. I also believe that this is happening because we've been so successful. And we need to own that. We've been really good at introducing the world to LGBT people. Even trans people. We've had trans people on the cover of Time magazine.

We've had trans people leading regular TV series. And that has created this backlash. And so it shows the work we have to do. But we have had enormous success. And we now need to protect that. and continue to advance it. Amazing. Thank you.

Thank you. Danielle Moody. Andy. Levy. End this. Yes. Just end this. Fabulous.

Yes. Just end this. You're right. Just end this. Who's your fuck that guy for today? Let me tell you something. We have said so many times on this show that the threat. that the thread that runs through Donald Trump's advisors, appointees,

is something that is so vile. They all share some type of accusation or conviction of sexual violence, abuse, harassment, assault, you name it. You can literally run down the checklist. And then they all go ahead and they cloak themselves in some form, of religiosity in order to denounce everyone around them. And you know, we say this often, all of it is fucking projection for their disgusting and despicable behavior towards women, towards the LGBTQ community, so on and so forth. But this one, and I won't even say,

I'll say it, for this week takes the cake because I'm sure somebody will top it next week. But Robert Morris, who is a former Texas megachurch pastor, and this is coming from the Texas Tribune, he is also, folks, a Trump advisor, has been indicted. And what is he indicted for? Hmm. Sexual crimes against a child. So let's unpack it. Robert Morris, according to the Texas Tribune, resigned from his.

mega church last year amid sexual abuse allegations. He has been now indicted in Oklahoma for child sex crimes that date back to the 1980s. This man has been Donald Trump's, one of Donald Trump's, quote unquote, spiritual advisors. In 2020, Trump held a quote, roundtable on transition to greatness. What a title. He, he said, Morris was in attendance at that roundtable discussion. He now faces five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child, the Oklahoma Attorney General's office said in their press release. The indictment comes a year after he has resigned from Gateway Church in South Lake after an adult woman, Cindy Clemenshire, said Morris repeatedly sexually assaulted her while she was a child in Oklahoma in the 1980s.

And guess what he's been doing since he resigned from his church. He's been working as a traveling preacher, which I guess makes sense because it'd be so hard to pin him down, moving from place to place to place. The thing is, what folks are saying is that this woman who came forward said, quote, after almost 43 years, the law has finally caught up with Robert Morris for the horrific crimes he committed against me as a child. Now it is time for the legal system to hold him accountable. These are the people that Donald Trump is surrounded by. These are the people, whether it be Epstein, whether it be Morris, whether it be Andrew Tate and his brother, whether it be Kavanaugh,

who he appointed to the bench, Hegset, who has a police report. Like, the list goes on and on and on. This is disgusting. It is vile. But unfortunately, it is the norm in Donald Trump's world. And the women, I got to say, the women inside of the Republican Party,

inside of this regime that sit there with their plastic fucking faces and smiles at these men are just as fucking disgusting. because they know what they are doing. They know what these men are capable of. But they just love the proximity to power. Every single one of these people should be brought down. And instead, they're appointed to higher and higher positions.

Because at the end of the day, we actually don't really give a fuck about sexual crimes against children or against women. If the perpetrators are rich, white, and powerful. Fuck this guy. Yeah, and great reporting by Robert Downen at the Texas Tribune on this. And one of the things he points out in his piece is that this comes as the Dallas religious community is still reeling from a bunch of sex abuse scandals where at least a dozen Dallas area churches or pastors have been accused of committing or concealing sexual misconduct. So, yeah, this is an epidemic is what it is. And it should be treated as such.

And I want to also point out something that Downen notes in his piece, in 2017, Morris was selected by Texas governor Greg Abbott to help support his quote unquote bathroom bill that would ban transgender people from using their preferred bathroom, which of course they always say is to protect women and children from sexual assault. So you've got a sexual. assaulter out there being tapped by the governor of the state to support his bill that is supposedly, but of course is not in reality aimed at keeping children and I guess cis women safe from trans people, which is just not a thing that needs to happen. And it's just the irony is too much sometimes. Fuck that guy. Fuck all those guys. So, Andy. closing out the week with bangers. What's on your top of Fuck That Guy list as we close out this week?

Oh, I'm going to go down to Miami Beach, where it's warm. And where there's a movie theater called O Cinema. It's an art house cinema. It played the documentary No Other Land, which just won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. And it's a documentary made by an Israeli. a Palestinian, and it is basically a movie that wants peace. The mayor of Miami Beach, a guy named Stephen Minor, is very upset that this movie

theater showed this documentary, which is fine. He's allowed as an individual to be upset that a movie theater showed a documentary, although why he should be upset that it showed a documentary that is about Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and is a call for peace. That's another question. But he's not content with just being upset over this movie, which I am 100% sure he hasn't seen, by the way. He is now introducing legislation to terminate the lease that the city has with O Cinema, with the movie theater. This is so far beyond the pal, you can't even see the pale from where this guy is right now, and I don't even know what the pale is.

But this is so disgraceful, and the idea that someone in political power would try to shut down a movie theater because he doesn't like a movie that the theater is showing, we've had a lot of instances in the last couple of months of sort of feeling like, what country is this? Because things like this are not supposed to happen in America. Not saying they don't happen in America, because sometimes they do. they're not supposed to. We're supposed to believe that a movie theater can show a movie and that the government can't then say to that movie theater,

we're shutting you down. You know, that happens in other places. That doesn't happen here in America, except it does. And it's happening right now. And I was having a conversation with someone on Blue Sky the other night and how upsetting and anger making it is that there are Jewish people in this country. who are basically being handmaidens to fascism. Mayor Stephen Minor is one of these people. And look, I don't want to go into it again

because I talked about it at length on our last episode, but the idea that they don't realize, that these Jews don't realize that this always ends badly for the Jews, I don't understand it. But even that aside, this is just the idea, I'm losing the power of speech, which is ironic because that's what these people are trying to do to this movie theater

and to so many other people. But I'm losing the power of speech to say how angry I am at this and at the concept of it and the fact that they're actually doing it. And as my people say, it is Ashonda. And Mayor Stephen Minor, you are Ashonda. And fuck that guy. I know that folks keep saying over and over again, like, is this America, is this America? For a country that had a president that showed, premiered birth of a nation.

at the White House, you would think, birth of a nation, the most, like, the foundation of the KKK and white delusion in this country, you would think that, like, you can showcase anything that you want. If that's what you're offering, we have a country that allows white nationalists as cowards to wrap their faces and walk down Main Streets, because that's their right to assemble. And yet an Oscar winning film done by both a Palestinian and an Israeli directing team that was celebrated at the Oscars, you're going to terminate their lease agreement because you don't like what was shown? Then don't fucking watch it. Like that's your right to be like, I don't like this film. I don't appreciate this film.

Then don't go see it. Yep. But the idea that you now have the power. to take away people's lease agreements, to take away the opportunity of those who want to engage with this film that had a hell of a time getting fucking distribution in the United States because of the content matter and the fact that we actually don't truly, well, we don't now live in a democracy, but we never really did when you can literally just decide not to show, not to pick up a film because, oh, the contents are too much.

instead of giving the public the option to like see for themselves what is happening in this place. I just, you know, fuck that guy. Fuck all of them. Yeah. I just want to point out that no other land still does not have U.S. distribution. Yeah. There are some movie theaters that are showing it, but it does not have a distributor here in the United States. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal.

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