The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump May Tank U.S. Economy Faster Than Any Other President

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

The New Abnormal hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie are not confident about Trump’s economy. Then, ProPublica investigative reporter, Mica Rosenberg, joins us to break down a recent piece, “ICE Enforcement Official Tapped to Lead Unaccompanied Migrant Children Office, Triggering Alarms.” Then journalist and author, Eoin Higgins is here to tell us about his new book, “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.” 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. 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. ProPublica investigative reporter Micah Rosenberg joins us to break down a recent piece, ICE Enforcement Official Tap to Lead Unaccompanied Migrant Children Office, triggering alarms. Then journalist and author Owen Higgins is here to tell us about his new book, Owned, how tech billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the left. But first, let's have some fun. So we're being booed while we're being couped, it feels like here. We've got basically a coup going on in Washington, D.C., which we're going to get to some of that stuff in a bit.

But let's start with the tariffs that were announced over the weekend. And when I say we're being booed, what I mean is that pretty much every sporting event that took place in Canada over the weekend where the American National Anthem was played hockey, basketball. Our national anthem got booed by the Canadians. And I guess it pains me to say this as an American, but I'm with them. Yeah. These tariffs are insane. They have been immediately responded to in kind by Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and by some of the provinces in Canada. And yeah, go ahead, Daniel. Here's what I will say. I very rarely, maybe probably have never said the following statement I'm about to say. I agree with the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote a piece entitled The Dumbest Trade War in History.

Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason. And they go on in the piece to say that basically it sounds as if, quote, it sounds as if the U.S. U.S. shouldn't import anything at all that America can be a perfectly closed economy making everything at home. The U.S. willingness to ignore its treaty obligations, which, by the way, Trump signed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement in his first term, that his willingness to ignore its treaty obligations, even with friends, won't make other countries eager to do deals. And this is coming from the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch of all fucking people, who is saying very clearly as, you know, folks are, you know, we're recording this.

And right now, the stock market not doing well. And there were alerts going out over the weekend saying that, guess what hedge funds are doing right now? They are betting against the U.S. economy. They are betting against Trump's economy. And if that is giving you deja vu to the early 2000s housing crisis and crash when hedge funds were betting, knowing that people were being, that predatory lenders were creating housing mortgages that created the mortgage crisis. But hedge funds were betting that the market was going to implode and they got rich and

people lost their fucking houses, if that is what is providing a deja vu feeling, it should. Because when hedge funds decide that they're going to start betting against the U.S. economy, it's probably because they see in the near future that the U.S. economy is going to fucking tank with the decisions that Donald Trump and this MAGA administration, this MAGA coup regime are making. Yeah, and coming closer to home, let's make no mistake about it. All these tariffs are a sign that you are about to be spending a lot more when you go shopping, whether it's in the supermarket, where you're going to see a lot of prices go up.

According to the Washington Post, we imported $9.9 billion worth of vegetables and more than $11 billion worth of fruit and frozen juices from Mexico last year. So your vegetables and fruit are about to go up. The CEO of Best Buy says, forget about your electronic stuff. the Consumer Technology Association says smartphones might be about to cost $213 more, $213 more for your cell phone because of Donald Trump's idiocy. And I have to think that, you know, on top of this being absolutely horrible for Americans, China has got to be laughing their ass off. They've got to be absolutely laughing our ass off. Like Trump walks around, they all, you know, the maggas walk around talking about the dangers,

of China and they're giving them the keys to the kingdom here. Like they're literally telling them, hey, you know, here's more, here's more money in your pockets from you sending your goods elsewhere and trading with these countries that are no longer going to want to trade with us. So it's just, the whole thing is absolutely insane. It is as many people have been saying since before the election, we are all being taxed now. The 20% tariff is a 20% tax on you. It's a 20% sales tax on you, on me. Even on you, Daniel.

Yes, you, Daniel. You know, what's amazing is that we are entering only week three. Only week three of this regime. Egg prices are at an all-time high because of the bird flu, which we have no new information on because Donald Trump has stopped the CDC from providing America and the world with any information about what is happening with our public health. You're now going to have people going to get, you know, basic things like their fruits, their produce, going to the grocery store for a number of things. And now all of a sudden people are going to realize just how interconnected our world is. And this idea that Donald Trump thinks that he can close off America and that somehow our economy will be self-sufficient when over the last decades it's been Republicans who have sent all of these jobs, factories, and everything overseas, like, is wild to me.

I mean, it is, it's like for the Wall Street Journal to say, this is stupid. And for the rest of the world to recognize in this moment that not only are they. booing the United States, but that they are going to manage to exclude the United States moving forward in any of their trade agreements because guess what? Y'all can't be fucking trusted. And that's what Donald Trump is showing. This motherfucker who wrote the art of the deal is tanking every single deal that we have. And I just, you know, it is extraordinary because I think that he may tank our economy faster than any other Republican president that usually takes their entire first term in order to do that, I think Donald Trump is going to do it within the first 100 days.

Yeah, he's off to a raging start. Just quickly, before we move on, I want to read Doug Ford, who's the Premier of Ontario. He put out a statement saying, starting today and until U.S. tariffs are removed, Ontario is banning American companies from provincial contracts. He went on to say that they spend about $30 billion on procurement, and they have a $200 billion plan to build Ontario, and they are not going to let American companies even bid on those contracts. And he said he's ripping up Ontario's contract with Starlink, the Elon Musk-owned company. He said, Ontario won't do business with people hell-bent on destroying our company. And he closed by saying Canada didn't start this fight with the U.S., but you better believe we're ready to win it.

These are our allies. And I don't say that, taking a shot at them. I'd say that, like, this is how Trump is making our allies sound. So I think you're absolutely right. I mean, our economy, we are in big trouble and Democrats need to get off their ass and start doing something and start fighting. And we've all got to start fighting even more against this stuff. I mean, I think that, you know, what is terror? terrifying is that, again, I just want to go back to the fact that you have hedge funds betting against the U.S. economy. And what do people have in the market? Their 401ks, their pensions, their future is in the market. And Donald Trump recently said, oh, I know that these tariffs are going to hurt the middle class, but like, they'll get over it. Like literally is saying what Elon Musk said on the campaign trail. Yeah, these initial decisions are going to hurt, but like, you know, it'll be short term for long term prosperity. But they didn't give us any fucking timeline on what they're short term versus long term prosperity. And again, the question is prosperity for

whom. So meanwhile, while the booze are coming from Canada, the coup is coming from inside the house, the White House, to be more specific, it is wild to think that January 6th is in the process of succeeding. And there are different tactics being used now, obviously. Unfortunately, so far, they are proving to be more effective tactics. Let's start with the Department of Treasury where a bunch of kids, basically, apologies for being agis, but we're talking about people age like... Their children. Their children. They're 19 to early 20s, meaning some of them can't even have a fucking drink. And believe me, they need them. They have gained access under cover of the completely phony department of government efficiency. I can't say the acronym. They have gotten

access to incredibly sensitive Treasury Department computer systems that deal with U.S. government payments. And we're talking trillions of dollars of payments here. We're talking people's social security numbers. We are talking the systems that pay out social security and Medicare benefits, the systems that pay salaries for federal workers, that pay government contractors, that issue tax refunds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Elon Musk now has access to all of that stuff. And a bunch of people at the Treasury Department were put on leave for refusing to go along with this.

David Labrick, he was the acting Treasury Secretary before Trump's stooge took over. He had refused to give over access. He was placed on administrative leave. leave, and he has since retired. We are in the process of turning over the economic and financial keys to our country, to Elon Musk, who last I checked was not voted into any office whatsoever. Mm-mm-mm. I just, you know, I got to tell you, the alert comes out on the phone about who now has access to our Social Security numbers, benefits, all of these things. And you want to talk about the immigrants that are destroying America.

There's just one. Yeah. And he's from South Africa. Came to this country, not legally. And so let's just be clear about who has the keys to the kingdom. It isn't, you know, he bought this presidency for less than $300 million. That's how much he paid for Donald Trump. That's how much he paid for access to 330 million Americans information.

And now he has it. and the people that have tried to stand up are gone. They're either being put on leave. They've resigned and have been pushed out. This is a full-on purge. And the thing is, is that all you hear about is Democrats, quote, unquote, scrambling. And I'm confused because all of this was said very directly. All of it was actually written down in their 900-page manifesto called Project 2025.

So explain to me how in this day, nine years into Trumpism, Democrats are quote unquote fucking scrambling with a reaction to the fact that Elon Musk can go in and erase anybody's Social Security number right now. Stop anybody from being able to access their benefits. Can just shut down full websites and full agencies. And Democrats are like, oh, maybe we'll send a strongly worded memo? I, you know, I am just, yeah. Look, it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway, this is illegal. We have to say it so people remember. I know.

Because they are acting like it's not illegal and that so far is working for them. Because Democrats, for the most part, are standing around in Washington going, wait a minute, can they do that? Is that okay to do? Hakeem Jeffries' response to this is to write a letter to his Democratic colleagues saying that they're going to introduce a bill restricting access to Treasury's payment system. A, it's a little late. And B, you don't need a bill to do that. What is being done here is flagrantly illegal. And in fact, by introducing such a bill, you're almost giving them cover. You're saying, well, what they did was somehow it was okay with the law. And that's why I needed to introduce this. bill. So I really don't understand what's going on down in DC, but between, you know, Musk's, uh, young turds having control of, of all these files now. And then, you know, Danielle, we can talk about what's going on with U.S. aid. I mean, this is, I think, probably, you know, and I don't even

know how to rate it. I was just going to say probably the most disgusting. But to be honest, I just don't know where to rate these things right now. But essentially, at again, the behest of an unelected billionaire that bought the presidency, Elon Musk, U.S. aid around the globe has shut down. He has shut down not only USAID's Twitter account. He has shut down the website. He has shut down the billions of dollars worth of aid that go around the world. And I'm going to read this piece from inside a New York Times article that says, in famine-stricken Sudan, soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in a war zone have shut down. In Thailand, war refugees with life-threatening diseases have been turned away by hospitals and carted off on makeshift

stretchers. In Ukraine, residents on the front line of the war with Russia may be going without firewood in the middle of winter. Some of the world's most vulnerable populations are already feeling Trump's sudden cutoff of billions of dollars in American aid that helps fend off starvation, treats diseases, and provide shelters for the displaced. Not to mention HIV medication, which is now not being given to anyone, including babies and children around the world at the behest. of Elon Musk. There needs to be another word for evil. There needs to be another word for the white

supremacist fascist coup that is not only taking over the United States right now, but is now wrecking havoc around the world with immediate real life consequences. People are going to die because Elon Musk doesn't want to pay fucking taxes. That's what's happening. I just... Yeah, and again, a couple of things here. USAID was established by Congress as its own agency in 1998. It was originally created, yes, by an executive order by JFK back in 61, I want to say, but Congress established it as its own agency in 1998. So again, Donald Trump unilaterally closing it without congressional approval,

illegal, unconstitutional, et cetera, et cetera. Another thing to look at is it's interesting to note that U.S. aid was probably in terms of American organizations, it was the biggest in helping to overturn apartheid in South Africa. I'm not saying that's why Elon Musk wanted to get rid of it. I'm just throwing it out there as a fact. I'll let y'all make of that what you will. I mean, here's the thing. Donald Trump and this administration has promised their donors billions of dollars. worth of tax breaks, just like he provided them with in his first term, that added $7 trillion to our deficit. He has promised to do that and more. And he is literally, by virtue of the decisions that have being made over the last two weeks,

showing you how he's going to pay for it. He is going to pay for it by denying starving people food, by denying sick people access to medicine so that the richest 1% can continue to hoard their wealth. And people and children will die because of it. And that is not hyperbole. It is a fact. Yeah. It seems like they are actually in a competition to see exactly how many people they can kill. And like, I don't know, you know, what they've set the target number at, but it feels very, very high. And my last thought is, if I'm not going to say you. When we get through this and this is all over, because I do believe that eventually we will,

there are going to have to be so many trials. We are going to need to, I don't know, maybe hold them in a series in one city, and we can name them after that city. I'm just spitballing here, but I think that's what we're going to have to do. You know, I hope we get there. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal, investigative reporter at ProPublica Micah Rosenberg, whose recent piece, with regard to immigration,

an ICE enforcement official tapped to lead unaccompanied migrant children office, triggering alarms. Micah, you have been doing work with regard to reporting on immigration for years. And I just want you to have the opportunity to set up for us what you have seen in terms of this transition of the new Trump regime, second term, in terms of how things have quickly shifted over the last two weeks from your vantage point of how you've been covering immigration. Yeah, thanks so much, Danielle, and thanks for having me.

I think what's really striking since the inauguration on January 20th is how the Trump administration has moved so swiftly to sort of compress, you know, many measures that they tried in the first administration over the course, the first Trump administration over the course of four years and compress a large amount of action just into the first few days. And I think that this shows, you know, maybe even more with other parts of the government how they're, how prepared they are and how they're really coming into this now kind of battle tested from the first administration where a lot of these policies were sort of floated the first time around, maybe hit protests or court challenges that kind of stopped them in their path. And some of them

had mixed success. And I think really they've been able to solidify, you know, some of their arguments and approach and really come out of the gate with a bunch of executive actions that really move things quickly forward. And in some ways, that's kind of left Democrats in Congress, immigration advocates who might want to oppose these things, sort of scrambling to find out what to respond to first. You know, and I have to say, and this is not you, this is my anger and frustration with Democrats at this moment, which is I'm so confused about why you're left scrambling about any goddamn thing. Donald Trump has been talking about his attacks on immigrants and migrants and what his plans were for the past four years. He put together an entire 900-page

manifesto that has laid out in black and white what would be happening with regard to migrants and immigrants in this country. So why is it such a shock to Democrats and why are they left scrambling when this person has told you everything that they were planning to do? And they kind of, they kind of just threw up their hands about it. You know, I think, think part of what is happening is that there really has been, you know, a shift in recent years on public sentiment, public opinion towards immigration, in part because of all of the, you know, attacks that I think Trump and other Republicans went through the campaign, but also just because of Biden's own immigration policies and because of the changing nature of the types and

numbers of people who've been arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border, people coming from new countries that haven't necessarily come in these kinds of numbers before, and, you know, settling in places around the United States that may not have kind of the community, you know, support system infrastructure to, you know, support them and sort of, you know, more local resources may be going to that effect. So I do think that there has, because of all those dynamics, been an important shift in sort of public support, maybe sympathy towards immigrants and especially recently arrived ones. And so I think Democrats may be in some way reacting to, you know, the constituents kind of lack of outrage on the one hand. And I also think, you know, the Biden administration also took many measures to sort of crack down on asylum, you know, put in more. restrictions already, which kind of laid the groundwork in some ways for for these policies and their

reception. Well, when there's only one party that is doing all of the talking and there's only one party that has created and shaped the narrative around building animus and hate targeted at the immigrant and migrant population, like then of course the sentiments are going to change. And that's where, in my opinion, that Democrats have not seemingly, and this has been the case on so many different policy fronts that Republicans have been able to take hold of and create an entire narrative around. And Democrats have not found a way to penetrate that or to shift the conversation. And so people are fed one idea of how things are working as opposed to what immigrants and migrants do and are connected to the fabric of this country and our economic growth,

particularly in places like a Springfield, Ohio, that became the target of the Trump campaign for the Haitian population that was there. And that particular town was on the verge of economic collapse before the migrant Haitian population came in and started working jobs that had long been left. I agree to an extent, but I feel like the scrambling on the side of Democrats is ridiculous to me, given how long we have been living under Trumpism as a country. But I want to focus on what I think last time around when we were talking about in the first Trump administration, children being separated from their families, children in cages, the Trump administration going to court so that they did not have to require hygiene inside of these detention centers that were

housing children, not providing soap or blankets or toothbrushes or any of the like. And now here we have, for the first time, an ICE official, Melissa Harper, that you write about, is now being tapped to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which has never happened before. So can you talk to us about why that should be triggering alarms as your article states and why this is outside of the norm, much in the same way, most of what Donald Trump does is outside of the norm. Yeah, well, when, you know, the Department of Homeland Security was created, you know, almost 20 years ago, there was an explicit effort to separate out sort of the care and placement of unaccompanied migrant children. So these are children who arrive at the border by themselves without a parent or legal guardian.

and to separate that out from sort of the infrastructure of the immigration enforcement agencies and put it under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services. And so under that agency, there's an office for refugee resettlement, which also deals with refugees who are coming from abroad, but they have a special mandate to care for and place these migrant children who arrive by themselves. And I think that came out of kind of a series of laws and legal settlement that was directly speaking to children, sort of having a special and more vulnerable category for maybe other, you know, border crossers. And so that's how it's

been for the past 20 years. In the first Trump administration, there was an effort to sort of break down some of those lines of care and placement for unaccompanied children and immigration enforcement because what the office does currently is children are encountered at the border. They detain them and try to kind of quickly reunite them with sponsors who are living in the United States. Usually our parents, they can be relatives. They are sometimes not relatives. And they try to sort of, you know, vet those people, but they're also trying to release them

quickly, which has created problems in the past, which we can talk about in more detail. But during the first Trump administration, this division, was sort of broken down when they started sharing information about those children and their sponsors with ICE enforcement. And part of that was actually led to, you know, arrests of kids and families and their sponsors for the purpose of deportation because, you know, oftentimes the sponsors themselves are undocumented. And so that sort of created a cascade of problems because, you know, sponsors then became afraid to come forward. Kids ended up staying in custody for longer periods of time, which leads to a whole other host of problems. But even though that information was sharing was happening,

it got shut down relatively quickly because Congress put us off to it and then the Biden administration reversed that practice. But this is the first time where actually a former ICE official, as far as we can tell from our sources, has been named the acting director of, of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. And so it's kind of a more explicit return to that stance of kind of breaking down the line between immigration enforcement and the care of unaccompanied children. And I think that it's important to state too,

which I think that your piece lays out, which is that it is a very different ideology that ICE has, which is largely punitive when going after undocumented people, adults, versus the ideology that is within the office of refugee resettlement. Like there is one that is searching for them, as you would, criminals, putting them in handcuffs, putting them in vans and carting them off. And then there is an agency that is trying to resettle people.

So can you just speak about the distinctions between those two offices? And again, why this is alarming, this kind of mix and crossover that's happening, this appointment? Yeah, I think there is supposed to be sort of a different mission, which is why, you know, it's under two separate agencies and why they didn't necessarily put, you know, the overseeing of unaccompanied minors into the immigration enforcement infrastructure at the outset when they were creating DHS. But, you know, I think partly where this desire to kind of break down those barriers, on the one hand, is coming just from, you know, the pledge of, you know, President Trump, Tom Holm, and his borders are Stephen Miller to kind of ramp up the numbers of

deportations and, you know, have mass deportations. A lot of these people are people who've sort of come forward and, you know, registered maybe their names and addresses with the government. And so it's kind of a, you can see who might be here potentially illegally or illegally. So that's on the one hand. But on the other hand, I think there is, you know, an issue that has emerged with so many and accompanied kids kind of crossing the border and then being quickly released out into the United States, that once they're out of federal custody, there's not really follow-up. The agency has always said, you know, they're not in our custody anymore. And they've tried to do follow-up in various ways. They, you know, do follow-up calls. But a lot of times people don't pick up their

phone or they're afraid to get calls from the federal government. And so that is where this sort of zombie figure of the number of missing children comes from. It's not that they're missing, but, you know, they haven't been able to get in touch with them. And the Office of Refugee Resettlement says, look, they're, you know, they're not in our custody. We would like to do follow up to see if they're okay, but, you know, it's sort of out of our capacity and they need more funding for it. They've tried to ramp it up. So, you know, the, what has come of that is that in some cases, you know, kids have been released into situations where, as, you know, my colleagues and I have reported on end up in situations where they are working underage dangerous jobs. And in factories,

there have been cases. There was a high profile case in 2014 where there was a trafficking scheme where kids were being forced to work on a egg farm in Ohio. So those types of situations over the years have raised legitimate alarms about sort of the post-release situation of these kids. You know, the advocate view is we should provide more support, more help so that, you know, those situations don't arise. And, you know, the administration has kind of used, you know, concerns about trial trafficking to talk about the need for having this information, you know, passed to ICE. And here's the thing. Over the last several years, there has been a concerted effort by Red State governors and Republicans were at large to roll back child labor laws.

at a time when there has been an influx of unaccompanied minors coming in crossing our borders. And Democrats, to their credit, have tried to introduce a series of bills that would protect the exploitation of unaccompanied minors coming across the border. And we're seeing it not only on farms, but like you said, in car factories and, you know, in various places operating. machinery at ages of like 11 and 13, where you shouldn't be in positions at all unless you were 18 or older. And so can you just speak to what seems to be a blatant effort by Republicans, and I'm using my words, to exploit this influx of minors and put them to quote unquote work?

We've heard this refrain over the past couple of weeks as it comes to, you know, eliminating free lunches in schools. Oh, these kids should go work. Can you speak to that? Well, I think it speaks a bit to the sort of inherent tension of immigration in our country today. There is, especially after the pandemic, there were severe labor shortages. And when we were reporting with my colleagues when I was formerly at Reuters, we were reporting on children working in car parts, manufacturing plants that were supplying carmakers, Hyundai, and Kia. And, you know, the companies at that point were saying they couldn't find workers and, you know, the labor contractors were, you know, supplying these underage workers. And so I think this is true across many industries, you know, child labor

is one point of it, but there's also the reason why there's a lot of undocumented hiring. And so I think this is sort of the dual tension that, you know, often in Republican-controlled states, just like in other states, in Democrat-controlled states, there's a lot of hiring of immigrants illegally, but a real focus on sort of arresting those who are in the country illegally and deporting them versus a sort of more concerted effort to target the employers who... Right, right. exploiting the children or, you know, hiring workers illegally. You know, this administration has spoken about both, but I think what we've seen in the past

over the history of kind of work site raids that they've talked about, you know, there's a targeting of the immigrant workforce. And, you know, as it filters through in terms of how people are fined or arrested, you know, it's very rare to see a big consequence for the industry or the company's, you know, responsible for this hiring. You know, I will say you are doing extraordinary work and coverage because I feel as if this is going to be an issue that is going to explode very quickly and isn't going to receive the kind of coverage or alarms that it did the first time around. So I just want to thank you for your work. And, you know, folks, the article is up now entitled ICE enforcement officials

tap to lead unaccompanied migrant children office triggering. alarms, it is absolutely worth the read, as is following Micah. Thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal. And I hope that you will come back and talk to us again soon. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. How and why did tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, and David Sacks go about trying to control new media and which journalists have been the willing collaborators? This is the subject tackled by journalist Owen Higgins in his fantastic new book, Owned, How Tech Billionaires on the Right bought the loudest voices on the left. It's out February 4th, and he joins me now to talk about it. Oh, and thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me. So I apologize for starting out with a spoiler, but the two journalists you focus on most in the book are Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi. So let's start there with Greenwald. You say you yourself were inspired by Greenwald, you know, in your journalism career. So how does a guy like that turn into who he is now? As you write, people are behind many of the institutions that were once threatened by Greenwald now fund the companies that pay him. Talk about when he began to change. Was it during the run-up to the 2016 election? Yeah, I think that's when it was noticed. I would say that Glenn has kind of always been a contrarian, and I don't necessarily use that word in the pejorative sense. I think he's always

had an impulse to kind of push against grain to kind of make himself an iconoclastic voice. If that makes sense? I mean, I share this with him. I think the eight years of the Obama administration for people, some people on the left, you know, identify myself in the book as a civil libertarian leftist. I think I'd still put myself in that category. And I think that I would put Glenn, certainly as a civil libertarian, you know, with, I think everyone's politics have some wiggle room there. But I think that broadly you can say that about him as well. And I think that after eight years of the Obama administration, following eight years of the Bush administration, which was very formative for me, and I think probably for Glenn as well. Glenn's, you know, a good

amount older than me. I wouldn't say like a huge amount older than me, but he's a good amount older than me. But I think that for both of us, if I can speak for him, I think that our politics were probably formed in large part like during the Bush administration and the assault on civil liberties, the global war on terror, and just kind of everything that happened around then politically and kind of, you know, the reaction of Democrats. And for me, when I saw Obama come in, in 2008 during that primary campaign and then his administration started in 2009. You know, there was a hope that maybe something would really change and especially as far as surveillance and war went. Things didn't really change that much. And to the extent that

they did change, they kind of became more technocratic, but the goals and the aims didn't really change all that much. And I think that for Glenn, and certainly for me, after eight years of watching this and watching a lot of the, I mean, Glenn basically said this to me, like, during our interview that, you know, at a certain point during the Obama administration, he kind of felt like he was still going in the direction of opposing all of this stuff and people who, I mean, I use Rachel Maddow when we were talking about her in, in the book at this point, but I think that he would probably say this about a lot of liberals is that they kind of start to excuse this stuff and became more like national security liberals because of who was in power.

And I think that that is kind of like the big thing if you wanted to kind of pin his shift to one thing. And I think that kind of moving from there when he saw Sanders and Trump come in. I mean, you can see this in his writing at the time. The social media posts have survived. And I think that if you look at that kind of stuff and the way that he was talking about this, he was really ready for someone to kind of shake things up. So while I don't think that he was a Trump supporter in 2016, I don't think that he would have defined himself as that at all.

And I don't think it's fair to call him that at that time. I do think that he was kind of reflexively defensive of Trump because of the liberal institutions that were opposed to him. Now, what kind of happened after that is that liberal institutions kind of leaned all the way into Russian interference as opposed to kind of taking stock in what had just happened in the election. And I know that for him and for Matt Taibi and for a lot of journalists, myself included, that was quite frustrating to watch. And I think that for Glenn and Matt, especially, I think that that kind of stuff really pushed them in a way toward, if not specifically the right at this point, a more almost like a third position where they weren't affirmatively supporting Trump, but they were certainly opposed to the liberal democratic order that they saw as kind of protecting this mainstream national security liberalism. I think I agree with that. Throughout the book, though, it felt to me like there were, I sort of in my head, at least, counted maybe four rough categories for how and why they changed. And one of those is ideological, simply what you were talking about. And also on other issues besides national security, their ideologies legitimately changed. But then I also, you know, there's definitely financial.

You go into that a lot. There's ego or adulation and fame, as you described it, and also aging. And obviously there's overlap among those four things. But does that sound about right? Yeah, I think that is right. And I think that as, you know, As this evolution kind of continued, I mean, just kind of contextualize what I was saying. Like, I'm just talking about up to like 2016, 2017 there. I'm just trying to like lay the groundwork on that. Right. Of course. But then like after that, you're completely right. They go in this direction where they start to become more, at least I would say, it may be amenable to the arguments of certain social conservatives where Greenwell and Taibi both had been opposed to the religious right during the Bush years. they kind of began to embrace some aspects of those arguments, particularly, you know, I go into especially the anti-trans stuff. But I think that as well, like COVID was a big motivator here,

feeling like the government was lying to them, as well as I think it does really just come down to this idea of I want to be the iconoclass. I want to be the contrarian. If there is a mainstream opinion, I'm the one who's going to oppose it. And I don't think that that's a bad thing for journalists. I don't think that that is a bad impulse for journalists to have. But what I do think is that at a certain point, like, okay, so like to jump to Taibi for a second, he wrote this book called Hate Inc. I think it came out, I want to say like 2018, 2019. I might have, it might have been 2017, but I think it was 2019 actually. And in it, he makes this argument basically that, and I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially he's saying that Rachel Maddow is as bad as Tucker Carlson, right?

And these two kind of being like the leaders of of the cable networks that they were talking for. And while I think you could make an argument that Maddow has as much of an effect on her audience as Carlson has on his, you have to look at who the different audiences are. And I think that there's a bit of flattening here because of the scene, these kind of mainstream media figures and feeling like you had to kind of be opposed to these guys no matter what. And I think that that had a lot to do. I think the contrarianism does. But I think that you're right. The ego and the money as well. You know, just just feeling like the world is kind of getting past you, like things are kind of leaving you behind.

At one point, honestly, in the book, because I'm sure that you read near the end when I was talking to Greenwald about Taibi, he didn't really address Taibi specifically, but he said that in general, like, as you get older, your politics do tend to get more conservative. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting that you're saying, like, when he was saying, I was like, well, this is the whole thing is just going to have to go in as a block quote into the story. Like this is because this is exactly what I'm talking about. And I think that's exactly what he was talking about too and kind of explaining his politics in a way that he may not have meant to. But I thought that it really did kind of explain where people kind of come to as they get older. There's a certain sense of wanting things to be comfortable and stable, especially when you're successful and you have money. And I think that's a lot of what it is for these guys. And all of that is probably like a really good faith interpretation.

There is also like the money. Like as they took these further right wing positions, the money started to. flowing in. That's pretty much like a kind of a one-to-one thing there. You can deny it or dress it up with whatever qualifications you want, but if you just look at the timeline, the timeline is pretty clear. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about the tech guys, because I feel like in many ways the main character of the book is actually Peter Thiel. Am I wrong? I think Peter Thiel is one of the main characters of the book. I think Elon Musk comes in the second half quite a bit. I think that a lot of the reason that Teal and Greenwald are probably so present in this book is because

I find both of them very interesting as characters and as people with political ideologies. And Teal, you know, rather than Musk and I think Andresen and Sax don't really have the same thing that he does where he has a very specific political project that he wants to see happen. And he's willing to spend money and to kind of shape conversations and media and ideology in in ways that will further this political project. And I think we see that in his investments. And we see that in kind of the influence that he wields not only over Musk, which I think he still does wield a lot of influence over Musk, but also like just all of those, all the PayPal

mafia guys, he has this kind of, he kind of looms over them, for lack of a better term, right? He kind of looms over them and he kind of pushes the conversation, you know, subtly and and less subtly, I guess. Yeah, and then eventually he, both he and J.D. Vance, invest heavily in Rumble, which is, you know, a quote, quote, conservative alternative to YouTube where Glenn Greenwald now post videos. And of course, there's also Mark Andreessen, who has a substantial investment in substack where both Greenwald and Taibi moved to in 2020 when they left the intercept and Rolling Stone respectively. So you really do have, as you say, you've got guys who, one, sort of went after the financial industry and the financial giants now being funded by them?

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that even more than that, these are men whose companies have profited off of the surveillance state, which is something that both Greenwald and Taibi have spent most of their careers nominally opposing, certainly. I mean, Greenwald, his whole career is built on this, you know, even before Snowden. I mean, this has been his issue for a long time. Now he is making the majority of, or pretty much all of his money, from a social media, or not a, sorry, a video app, as you say, Rumble that is funded by the guy who founded Palantir, right? This is like one of the big surveillance contractors and Elon Musk, the Twitter files in Matt Taibee.

I mean, Musk's fingers are in every single national security pie you could imagine. SpaceX, Starlink, you know, same with Jeff Bezos. I mean, the Amazon Web Services is a set. not only to the national security and surveillance architecture, but also to the federal government in general. So all of these guys have made billions and billions and billions of dollars from the federal government, and their politics have only gone further to the right while this is happening, this kind of anti-government right, which is kind of amusing in the dark way. But these are the guys who are funding Greenwald and Taibian and other journalists and other people like that.

And even if they're not directly funding them, like they're not bringing the wheelbarrow of cash personally to their front door and dumping it out. Their investments are in these companies. They invest in these companies. These companies invest in these journalists, these pundits. I think it's, I mean, it kind of strains credulity not to think that's what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I do want to talk about Musk because particularly with the Twitter files,

you write that after years of confrontational commentary on the financial industry and questioning the mainstream, Taibi fully dispensed with any pretense of challenging power late in 2022. And he did so to gain access. And that is, of course, about the Twitter files. Can you remind people what went on there? Musk took over Twitter and he, for reasons that I would kind of define as his anger at the way that his takeover was being treated.

I mean, I think with Musk, almost all of his decisions come down to both money and, you know, very petty personal grievances, right? And so he, yeah. So he allowed Taibi. and Barry Weiss and a few other journalists who were less important to this story to access the Twitter files, which were kind of these curated tranches of, you know, either Slack. I think like Weiss had like Slack messages and emails and like they, Taibi was like looking at, I think they were all looking at Slack.

They were looking at different, like the way that Twitter was moderating different conversations, the way the Twitter dealt with the Hunter Biden laptop story, COVID vaccines, as well as, you know, other other moderation tools and moderation decisions that they made. And these were announcing these kind of grandiose, long Twitter threads, first by Taibi. And, you know, then by Michael Schellenberger was one of these journalists and Weiss as well. And, you know, they presented these as like real big bombshell reports. And while I think almost anybody would say that has an interesting stuff would say, hey, this was really interesting to get a sense of like how this stuff works.

Was it, however, a bombshell report that revealed, like, government censorship and this, I can't remember what Matt calls it now, but there's this kind of private sector, public sector, sensorious manipulation of, like, algorithms and truth and stuff. Like, no, it didn't really show that. It showed essentially these companies working to adhere to their own moderation standards and also deal with powerful entities, both in the federal government and elsewhere. And I'm certainly not saying that they made the right decision most of the time ever or or not at all. I'm not, I don't really make a judgment on that. I do think, though, that it didn't really show what they said it would. But that didn't matter because what it did was it fed the way that it was framed and the way that it was reported out, fed into this idea of the way that this stuff worked that was being pushed and promoted by the right wing, which is why you had Taibi and Schellenberger appearing, you know, at congressional hearings and, you know, guests of the Republicans, of course, and kind of like driving a lot of conversation,

both in like more mainstream right-wing media like Fox News as well as just the general, I think more the House GOP than the Senate GOP, but certainly like a lot of the party there. For me, the Twitter files really gets to the way Taibi and Greenwald and people like Barry Weiss and all the other, quote unquote, heterodox thinkers view the world. because like one of the things you pointed out is, you know, Greenwald, Taibi, all these guys want to be contrarian and want to think they're speaking truth to power. And they have adopted this worldview that conservatives are the victims of, you know, they're the victims of the culture with a capital C, whether it's cancel culture or Hollywood or the universities or whatever. And this allows them to pretend that they are sort of on the side of the little guys, even as they take, you. you know, as they use these platforms that are funded by billionaires and even as the Republican Party

controls all of the federal government. Certainly for my entire life, American conservatism has been defined by self-victimization. So it's not surprising that this would be an attractive message for them to send an attractive framing of the culture war. But, I mean, one of the things that I'm really interested in right now, and I have a piece coming out about this, I think, for Rolling Stone in a few weeks, is, is, you know, what are these guys going to do now? So now, like you say, they have the federal government.

They have the social media sites, including Facebook, you know, like TikTok, who knows what's going to happen with that, Twitter, and I mean, X, whatever. So now they control everything or most things. So where do people like Taibi and Greenwald and Weiss, et cetera, kind of go from here? You can't continue to say that you're fighting for the little guy when you're fighting for the ideological movement that controls the entire federal government and a lot of these websites whose influence on speech has been so important for you allegedly for so long, right? So what are you going to do? And I think it is kind of an interesting thing to look at and to

kind of wonder what they will do. As far as what we'll see in kind of the cultural and political zeitgeist, I don't know. It does, it feels like whenever, again, in, in, in, in In my experience, watching this stuff, living through this stuff, it does seem that whenever the right gets all the power, they're like a dog that catches the car. Like they call them reactionaries for a reason, right? If you don't have anything to react to, like, because you control everything, then what are you going to do? Like, eventually it doesn't really work.

So then you start. I think at one point in the book, I talk about how Greenwald and other people like him are like sharks. And they always have to kind of keep on swimming and hunting. And so what you, and this isn't actually, I think this. I think Anna Merlin might have said this phrase to me, but you know, kind of saying that there's sharks and they're always moving and hunting, but if you continually like make the pool a lot smaller, like Twitter basically banning or throttling, you know, a lot of like left-wing accounts and now the right

wing doesn't have the left to fight against anymore. So now they're all in the pool with each other and now they're just going to start to eat each other. And the question is not whether or not that's going to happen because it will, but it's like how long does that going to take and what's that going to look like. Yeah, for sure. I'm out of time, but I just wanted to note that to me, the most damning line in the book, honestly, now I can't remember if it's something you wrote or if you were quoting someone else. You said Greenwald is loyal to those who are useful to him. And that to me is one of the, that's one of the roughest things you can say about somebody. So it really, really stuck with me. Oh, and thanks so much. The book is owned. How Tech Billionaires on the right bought the loudest voices on the

left. It's out February 4th. Highly recommended. Absolutely sailed through this book. It's such a, it's such a great read. Thanks so much for coming on, Owen. Thanks a lot, Andy. Thank you for having me. Andy Levy. Daniel Moody. Andy. That's if we haven't been talking for 30 minutes about all the fuck those guys. Who are you kicking off this week with? I want to kick it off with someone who's probably flying a little under the radar and shouldn't be. His name is Darren Bede. He's not a household name. He was in Donald Trump's first administration as a speechwriter and was let go after it came out that he had spoken at a white nationalist conference. Well, he's back.

He's now the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department. This is considered a top 10 position in the State Department. Now, I want to, again, this guy is going to be in charge of public diplomacy and public affairs. Okay. I want to read a bunch of things that Darren Beatty has said over the years. In speaking of China and its genocide of the Uyghurs, he wrote, The Chinese aren't genocidal. They just object to Uyghur supremacy and Uighorness.

If Uighers simply reject Uyghur supremacy, they'll have no problem functioning in Chinese society. That's sort of the least of these. He said, and this is not a long time ago, people are not digging these up from like 2016. Here's one from October 4th, 2024. So what, four months ago? Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.

Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities and demoralizing competent white men. I'm sorry. Are there any that are in that? Okay, sorry. Let me not go to. No, there aren't. But that's what he saw fit to tweet while there was an active coup going on on January 6th, 2021. He tweeted, Tim Scott needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA.

He tweeted, BLM must take a knee to MAGA. They must learn their place. Ibram Kendi needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA. Learn his proper role in our society. K. Cole James of Heritage Foundation needs to learn her natural place and take a knee to MAGA. I'll give you one guess what those three people in one organization he named have in common. They are people of color. And this is the guy that is now going to be the acting undersecretary, again, for public diplomacy and public affairs for our state department.

This is as bad as it gets. This is a straight up white supremacist, racist, misogynist asshole. And a guy who was forced out during Trump's first term, remember, but is now back and in probably a more powerful position. In case you were wondering how Trump 2.0 was going to differ from Trump. 1.0. So yeah, just fuck that guy. Fuck everyone who said Marco Rubio was going to be fine as Secretary of State because he was normal when it was clearly obvious that as normal as he might have once been, he is now in full thrall into kissing Trump's ass. So so many fuck those guys to go around, but in particular to Darren Beatty, fuck that guy. I mean, I just don't even know where to

begin. When you're talking about the fact that white male competency needs to be at the center of things, name me a white male that is in Donald Trump's administration that is competent. We have the cabinet more like a junk drawer that is filled with reality TV stars and pageant queens. People who did not earn anything but a handout from their daddies in order to formulate their careers. and if had given the opportunity to do it on their own, you would never know who the fuck these people are. And, you know, for the white women handmaids who stand up like the press secretary,

who stands at a podium and talking about how diversity, equity, and inclusion has ruined this country, you wouldn't have a fucking job without it. Reminder. Fuck all these people, honestly. Yeah, and I just because I forgot, I just want to add one last. fuck that guy to the news outlet, a semaphore, who in their story about the announcement of

Darren Beattie or Beatty in this position, in their headline, referred to him as a MAGA intellectual. Is that like jumbo shrimp? I'll let people decide after the various tweets of his that I just read just how fucking intellectual he is. Anyway, all right, Danielle, make it better. Make it better, Daniel. That is not my job. Okay, I don't know if you saw the job description for co-host of this show, but it is, it is not it.

When we brought you on, I thought we specifically said, Danielle, we're bringing you on. We didn't mean, I mean, you did make the show better. So yes, that is what we meant. But we also just meant it in general. It, like, as in the universe. Exactly. Then I am failing. Because my, fuck that, I mean, this is, I don't even know what to say, folks, because we are

entering week three of the Trump regime. And over the last two weeks, we have been bombarded with, I don't think that my phone has buzzed more every moment of every day over the last two weeks with headlines about what executive order Donald Trump is signing, what agency is being shut down, who needs to take a knee, what thing Elon Musk now has control over, that he is an unelected person. And all I could think about is Steve Bannon. And why is that? Because the media still has no ability to keep up with what they are being inundated with. And by virtue, the American people are being inundated with. And it is part of the fucking strategy. So let me remind you of what Steve Bannon said back in 2019.

The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one. And we'll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang.

These guys will never, will never be able to recover. But what we've got to start with muzzle velocity. So it's got to start and it's got a hammer and it's got to go. Donald Trump and this second regime, this coup, is doing exactly what Steve Bannon told them to do in 2019. And the most important thing that I think that people need to recognize with the deluge of information that is coming out is that they are creating this narrative in this story that Donald Trump is the king of America and there is nothing that we can do, that everything that he's doing is legal and can't be stopped in any which way and that we are in fact helpless. And so we find ourselves treading water

barely with our noses above it, drowning in what they are putting out. And the fact is, you know, Ezra Klein wrote this piece in the New York Times over the weekend that said, don't believe him. Because in order for this to work, their coup and the fascist take over to work, we have to believe that he has more power than he does, that they all have more power than they do. Optics is the name of the game here. And we have to be a lot more intentional about our consumption than just following out whatever bouncing ball they send out next. So my fuck that guy is going out to Steve Bannon and Tamaga at large for the strategy that they are implementing and that we need to stop falling for.

Fuck those guys. Yeah, fuck all those guys. And I guess I mostly agree with Ezra Klein here. I get what he means when he says, don't believe. them? The problem is it's easy to say don't believe him, but you have to do something about it. And the you here I'm really talking to is the Democrats, mostly in Washington and also at the states, where the governors are at least so far doing a very good job of not just saying we don't believe you and we are suing you. So that's the only place where I worry about saying don't believe him,

even though I think the way Klein intends it, I 100% agree with. I just worry that it's not enough to say you can't do that. You have to put some force behind that. And, you know, the only people right now in a position to do that are the Democrats who are in elected office. And yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Fuck those guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.

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