The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump: Project 2025 Will Lay ‘Groundwork’ for Second Term

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

Despite saying at the presidential debate that he hasn’t read Project 2025 and doesn’t want to read it, Trump has acknowledged it will provide a plan if he is elected president. Plus! The New York Times’ best-selling author Jason Pargin joins the podcast to talk about his new novel I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. 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 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 Kedden, 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. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin, who is by far one of my favorite TikTokers, but also an incredible author. And he'll join us to tell us about his hilarious new book. I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clips.

Tepid enthusiasm. I've been giving you such good clips. I can't believe this. Mm-hmm. There's a classic rule of politics that there's always a tweet for what Trump says that contradicts it every single time. And there's a lot of things that connect him to Project 2025, but this one is priceless. He gave a keynote speech announcing Project 2025's work and what they were planning to do. And we're going to listen to it.

Our country is going to hell. The critical job of institutions such as heritage is to lay the groundwork. And Heritage does such an incredible job at that. This is a great group. And they're going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do and what your movement will do when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that's coming. That's coming.

This is the thing that he doesn't know. about, right? Same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure this will stop him from claiming that going forward. Here is the foundation that has given us the plans to remake America. He literally says.

And then when asked about Project 2025 that nearly 200 former Trump staff work on, he says, I don't know her. Got it. I'd believe him if he said he didn't read it because he reads nothing. Oh, for sure. But, you know, that's the easy one, but he could never just do the lie right. It's amazing because he's so good at her. Yeah.

No, look, this is a guy who always orders the same thing at McDonald's because he can't read the menu. Andy, I have news for you. Yeah. Yesterday, he switched to crypto burgers at his crypto event. Of course he did. Of course he did. He's not being faithful to McDonald's anymore. Oh, boy.

Speaking of dementia, J. Trump, here he is talking with Fox News's Greg Gutfeld. Well, I'm going to let him show off the confusion. They even said, but all of them, and they didn't correct her once, and they corrected me everything I said practically. I think nine times or 11 times. And the audience was absolutely, they went crazy. And the real, I thought it was, I walked off, I said, that was a great to bed. I loved it.

You know, you got a lot of people watch. I guess we had 75 million people watching, something like that. And you have to do well. You can't do badly. For instance, he just throws numbers around. He's like, who was it on Sesame Street? It was the count. One of the greatest to ever do it.

Right. And he literally just throws numbers or $75 million or $60 million, I think. I don't know. And it's like, yeah, such a good business. Oh, God. Well, the thing is, that's what he cares about. Like, in his mind, if the ratings were huge, then he did a good job. because ratings are what matter.

And so he conflates the two. And it's just wild. And then, of course, I'm sure Greg pushed back very strongly. No, he didn't. That is not what happened. No? Oh, interesting. The other interesting thing he didn't push back on is what he talked about the audience,

you know, that did not exist. Yeah, that was one of those weird things where I'm like, did he mean the people at home? watching? No, because it clearly was the crowd. I know. And then he says they went nuts or they went wild. And it's like, that's not really something you say about the people at home. So I don't know. The poor guy is just, you know, I just don't think he's mentally fit, Jesse, Danielle. I'm waiting for my New York Times op-ed. Yeah. Yeah. Is the audience in the room with us now, Donald? Yeah. Well, girls, I got some tea. Rumors are going around.

that Trump and Laura Lumer are just smitten with each other. And since it's Maga World, I'm going to shock you here, but it seems she confirmed the rumors that she herself is who encouraged him to talk about eating dogs of the debate because of fucking course. Let him play that clip of Donald Trump saying they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people in Springfield, Ohio. You know, the thing that the media is blaming me for, they're saying, well, it's very clear that Laura Lumer is the one who told Donald Trump to say this

during the debate. So what? She just, you asshole. Oh my God. They're so fucking repulsive. I have no words. She is so repulsive. Like people are saying,

blah, blah, blah. And it's true. The people are the ones that are with the facts. And you just admitted it. Just like J.D. Vance admits about creating. Like, they're just, like, they don't even, they don't even care or respect. expect us enough to lie.

It's like, yeah, so what? So what? I did it. So what? What are you going to do? So what? Oh, my God. Yeah.

We should also point out that a bunch of high-ranking Republicans have gone on her little rumble show. So this is not like people want to say, oh, we just need to get her away from Trump. No. She's not some extreme thing that if they could just get rid of her, everything would be okay. She's the Republican Party. She's MAGA. Mm-hmm.

A thing people don't discuss enough is who you surround yourself is a lot of the presidency. To your point, Andy, always about the debates. The decisions you make of who you bring around you is so much of it. I mean, Hillary Clinton lost to Barack Obama, notably from the reporting in the book Game Change, mostly because she trusted Mark Penn an incompetent pollster. And when you pick bad people, bad things happen, like talking about eating dogs and then bad things happen to people in America. Well, we have another testament to his bad choices of character who's also going to tell us more about Laura Lumer.

We have the Insel King again, Groyper leader, anti-Semite, Nick Fuentes, who you may remember from dining with Trump. Well, he's going to tell us what he knows about Laura Lumer. And it's interesting. Finally, someone in the campaign is listening. Someone is heeding my advice. They brought back Corey Lewandowski from 16. Laura Lumer shows up And Laura Lumer supports

white nationalists and white identitarians. She's been a friend of mine for years and she has talked about white genocide consistently. She was at Seaville. She defended me for a long time. And he has turned this whole week wall-to-wall media coverage

about immigration rather than abortion or brat or whatever. It's perfect. Mm-mm-mm-mm. Uh-huh. I really like the short. short hand of Seville,

uh, being Charlottesville to, for those who didn't pick that up, the transcript writes it like it's Seville, like a nice English countryside town, but, but no, he's talking about Charlottesville, that she went there with the white supremacists.

Mm-hmm. Real cool company there. I mean, it's so obscene. Like, first of all, white identitarians. Is this what he called himself? He's got all sorts of fancy words to put a around his racism and anti-Semitism.

White is not an identity. I just like I, you know, I hate to break it to him. Like, he should break open a book. But like, they're just so disgusting. And again, like, I feel like this is the problem. Unless you are saying the N-word or like wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit, like, for some reason, people can't just call people a racist. He's a racist.

Lauren Luma, racist. Donald Trump, racist. Like, that's what you don't need to invent words, right? I am a proud racist. When you're spouting bullshit lies about the white crisis, right? And why the real reason behind their push against bodily autonomy for women is so that they can create and force women to create more white babies. and black women dial? Like, it is just, like, I'm so beyond people part and parceling.

They're bullshit. They're racist. You don't need, it's not racially tinged. It's not a racist highlighter. It's just racism. I was going to say, or you could call yourself, you know, like the media does, you could just call yourself racially charged. Nope.

Nope. Nope. Nope. A woman hires a lift driver to take her and a large black box from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., with the stipulations that he can't ask her what's in the box, he can't bring anything trackable like a phone or computer, he can't tell anyone about it or ask her any questions. For 200 grand, he agrees, and so begins a road trip from hell in Jason Pargin's incisive and hilarious new book. I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom out Tuesday.

Pargeon is the New York Times bestselling author of the John Dies at the end series and the Zoe Ash novels and also a bit of a TikTok star. joins me now. Jason, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. As I said in the intro, the book is flat out hilarious. I couldn't even tell you how many times I laughed out loud. But it also deals with some serious and I would say even heavy themes. The anxiety of living in the era we do, the role that social media and the internet in general play in fueling this anxiety, just to name two. I know asking why an author wrote something or where they come up with the idea that is pretty hacky, but I am curious if there's a story behind the story.

Other than, it just seems like something that I have experienced myself a lot, particularly in the last 10 years, because the next part of the story from the hook you laid out there is that the internet gets wind of this trip, of this mysterious person transporting this mysterious box, and they start to piece together that something terrible is about to happen, that they actually there's a theory that it could be part of a domestic terror plot, something like that. So the book winds up being this ticking clock thriller where the thing you're racing against is the ability for information to travel across social media platforms and actually sift through it and find the truth. So I'm someone who is terminally online. I have been since I first got an AOL connection in 1996,

six, I think, and have had many experiences of refreshing a feed, not of journalists, but of people who are rapidly trying to gather information ahead of the journalists, because the journalists are waiting to actually get sources and confirm things. So I just did this yesterday after there was another assassination attempt on the president. Like, I was refreshing Twitter. And watching the bad information flow in and watching good information get discarded, it's something I've been doing now for more than half my life. So ultimately, it becomes a story about that, about the movement of information through this bizarre system we've built. Yeah. And look, there's a lot of stuff in the book is about the internet and about social media. One of the characters in the book, a former FBI agent named Joan

Key, says that, or is thinking in the book, that TikTok is possibly the most addictive piece of software ever created. You in real life are someone who uses that platform a lot and really well, I should add. Do you share Joan Key's belief in this case? In a book like this, I tried to include characters that kind of represent every view. And I never wanted to seem like one person is voicing like they're there to yell at the reader about, you need to get off your phone because I am a creature of this ecosystem. I would not have a writing career if the internet had not come along. My first novel was originally posted as a blog. It was one of the first big books that back in the era when letting bloggers published books was seen as weird. So I cannot lecture anyone else about being glued

to a screen, but there is no question. The algorithms are not built for truth. They are not built to make you smarter. They are built to keep you doing one thing and one thing only, which is glued to a screen. So automatically from the jump, no matter who is running, it, no matter how honest the company is or how much you like them, their incentive is not in your benefit. Their incentive is to keep you glued to a screen where in a perfect world, if there was a new story and you wanted to find out what had happened, and then you find out what happened, and so you can say, okay, now my curiosity has been satisfied, I have learned what has happened, I'm going to turn it off and go outside and play with my children in the sun. The algorithms fail

if you ever turn it off. So it's more like a casino thing. Obviously, the casino's job is not to help you win money. The casino's job is to get you to stay there glued to a stool, pulling the lever on the slot machine. So the thing we are using to get us information. And with TikTok, Gen Z uses TikTok as their Google. Right. When they want to find out something, they search on TikTok.

Like this is a habit. TikTok is not built for that. TikTok is built to hypnotize you. And I have more than half a million followers on there. I've been on there for two years now and have grown a huge following. And I tell myself that I'm trying to be one of the good ones. Like I'm trying to spread things that are actually true or things that are interesting and not trying to play up on people's fears or anything like that.

But if you try to do what you feel like is good, honest content, you will find yourself swimming against a current. And it's not that TikTok is specifically more evil than any other. company, I don't trust Mark Zuckerberg more than I trust the owners of TikTok. They all have an incentive that runs counter to my interests. Except for Elon Musk, who is the world's greatest altruist, I think. He just wants us to be to be better. That's all. It's his only motivation. Yeah. So in the book, Abbott, who is the lift driver and Ether, the woman who hires him to drive her in the black box, They head out across the country, and because they don't have any cell phones or computers

or anything, they're kind of blissfully unaware that they've become the subject of a ton of online scrutiny. Talk about the role of Reddit, both in the book and in real life. You describe it as where the internet's unfathomable gush of data was gathered, sorted, and shaped into an satisfying narrative. That's, it's so interesting to me because I've been around long enough to see the internet evolved from a series of chat rooms to a series of message boards to a series of blogs. And then finally around 2009, 2010, you started to see the social media era. And then when smartphones came along and started to become pervasive around 2012, everything totally changed. Like everything had to be geared totally around something that could be easily browsed on a tiny

screen. My whole deal is that I have watched the nature of the flow of information change with each of those. For example, where there used to be a whole galaxy of message boards of niche interests, now it's pretty much just Reddit. The internet has one big message board and it's all divided up by the subreddit. It's like if you're a fan of, I don't know, the Philadelphia Eagles, once upon our time, there'd be a bunch of niche fan websites and message boards where you could talk to other fans. Well, now, by far the biggest gathering of Eagles fans is going to be the Eagle subreddit. So he has basically a kind of monopoly on that kind of discussion, which is permanently recorded long-form discussion where it's all threaded out and people can reply to each other.

But because that now dominates, then Reddit culture, which is a very distinct type of culture, where it's heavily male, it's heavily libertarian, it's heavily atheist. That kind of acts as an umbrella over everything in a way that I don't think anybody fully appreciates, especially if they were born after the internet was pervasive. Because the one advantage I feel like I have is that I was in my 20s before the first time I logged on. Right. Because I'm extremely old. I don't think it's hard to understand how platforms kind of shape information and shape misinformation until you've seen the difference between how people used to talk to each other versus how they talk to each other now.

And with Reddit, which plays a role in the story, this is where people, like Reddit wants you to do this. They want you to follow a live thread on any kind of a breaking story. And so, for example, infamously during the Boston Marathon bombings, Reddit sleuths, you know, all got together and immediately found the guy who did it, who it turned out not only didn't do it, but he wasn't even alive at the time. Right. And that's a kind of thing where the rush to be first, where we're not going to wait for a journalist to tell us what happened. We are going to ourselves dig through social media. We're going to put clues together.

We're going to take this still photo from a security camera and decide, hey, I've decided I know exactly who this guy is, that the way like voting on comments works, the way certain things rise to the top, the way it governs what becomes visible and what doesn't, that all winds up kind of pulling the strings on the discussion in a way that is not necessarily visible to you if this is the only way you've, you've ever known it. Yeah, and one of the things that happens in the book is that the first person to post about this road trip on Reddit is a friend of Abbott, a guy named Zeke, who is simply worried about Abbott and wants to make sure he's okay. And then quickly, you show how it spirals out

of control, and his subreddit becomes, people start posting these unbelievable conspiracy theories on there, and then they spin off into their own subredits, and you've got stuff about how Ether is a Russian saboteur who seduced Abbott into collaborating, that the black box in the car contains the corpse of a classmate of Abbots, that the black box contains the body of an extraterrestrial biological entity, and it just spins completely out of control, and that really is what happens in real life. And I think the thing is the people that are in power, know this is how information moves online. Because there's a very minor wording choice that gets made when posting this thing.

Because the guy, first of all, is trying to get eyeballs on it out of concern, but instinctively realizes that, hey, I've got a friend who needs help, doesn't get traction, doesn't get engagement. But, hey, I've got a friend and the cops are looking for him. I think he's got a gun in the car. That is engagement. Because now you have what could be a spectacle. You could have something, you know, there's a sense of scandal or danger.

And so it is not even necessarily out of malice that he winds up, setting the tone of the discussion. It is simply, if I want people to see it, this is what I have to do. And you can see marketing people doing this, publicists, politicians, who instinctively realize these people do not want to have a discussion about, just to pull a random example out of my butt. About the boring bureaucracy of, that is immigration. Right. That our immigration system is thousands of pages long, it has to govern how a hundred different situations are handled. Who has the right to pass through?

What are the caps? And what happens to somebody who comes illegally? What happens to somebody overstays a visa? There's a million situations and a million laws and regulations and thousands of employees and different agencies have to handle it. Nobody wants to talk about that. The fact that what we're trying to do is shape an effective and, you know, efficient bureaucracy. If you can put out there a single extremely entertaining, crazy lie,

then that's what you do. And you can tell yourself as they do tell themselves that, well, but in this information ecosystem, this is the only way to get the word out on this very important issue. If I talk about the details, if I talk about how complicated this all was, nobody's going to care. But if I can just come up with one gut-wrenching crime that I can accuse an immigrant of doing, that is what will get people yelling at each other. That will trend on Twitter. It's an instinct that is correct in the sense that they are right, but also is utter madness to actually do. Like the thing you're doing is crazy. But it's that thing where I have to lie or to shape the story in a certain way for it to have a chance of getting seen. And

even the people at the very, very top have decided, okay, then that's what will do. Well, thankfully, that hasn't reached the stage where a presidential ticket would do something like that. So we've got that going for us, at least. In the book, it turns out, as Abbott has a bit of a past, he posted some misogynistic, in-cell-type videos filled with the standard cultural ideas of that group, that white men are victims, that women, especially attractive women, get away with pretty much anything, et cetera. And there's a line in the book that reads Keyes theory was that all modern hate groups were really just in-cell grievances in disguise. And that made me think a few months ago I interviewed the great journalist Ellie Reeve who wrote a fantastic book called Black Pill. And one of the things she wrote in the book was that every white nationalist she'd spoken to told her that Gamergate changed the white power movement. And this seemed to be exactly the same thing that you're saying in Black Box of Dune. Yeah. And again, this character you're quoting has a very specific, very pessimistic world view. And she has, you know, her view is not said to be the official one or even necessarily that it represents the FBI.

But she is basically has figured out that young men have one big red button you can push, which is sexual insecurity. And that plays out as in all sorts of ways, even implying that a woman has cheated you or that a woman is using sex to get ahead or whatever, all of that pushes that button. And they have figured out that this is the pipeline. I mean, I remember when Gamergate happened, which was now. 10 years ago. Yeah. And not knowing what it was because I was working at Crack at the time. I was the executive editor at Crack.com for a lot of years. And people were hammering us with messages in the general inbox in our comments saying, why aren't you covering this? Why are you hiding this? Like, what are you talking about? They said, well, this woman,

a game developer, she's like had sex with the reviewer. It's like, what? Why would that be a story? What are you talking about? So I remember going to check. that out and went to where that discussion was happening at the time, which was on the politics section of 4chan, which was not a site that I frequented very often. And within five posts found a drawing of the greedy Jew caricature from Nazi Germany with the stereotypical version of rubbing his hands together in the Gamer Gay discussion. And it's like, how are the Nazis involved in this? And then figured out over the years, oh, they've got a specific way of saying, you can't get a date

because of feminism, because if you had lived in the 50s, you would be Don Draper. You would have women all over you and they would just have to do whatever you say because they were subservient. And so they've created this thing. It's like, well, the reason you can't get a date, the reason you can't get a job, the reason you don't have any friends, it's because of feminism. It's because they kept using the phrase cultural Marxism, a term that I had never heard in my life. And all of these Gamergate kids were using it like it was just a household word that everybody uses. and that was the first time I realized, and I think the news media was totally blindsided by it in general, that they had actually been building this pipeline in the background for years,

where he had these unaffected guys who either got college degrees and couldn't get work or whatever, but they had kind of dropped out of society. They were just on the Internet all the time and saying to them, hey, the reason you don't have any of the things that are considered, you know, that you're supposed to have to live a good full life is because, of the left, the feminists, whatever. And that's so attractive because you're instantly telling these guys, hey, it's not your fault. They reject you because you are too good and smart and strong. Your thoughts are too original. And so everything that plays into that, for example,

anytime they would get post deleted or anytime they would invade a message board or a subreddit and get banned en masse, it's like, see, see, the feminist silence men. And it's like, this just proves it. It's they're the ones holding us down. That's the reason, you know, the reason I don't have a date, it's not because I have an off-putting personality and I don't groom myself. No, it is a conspiracy. And who is it? Who is behind it? Well, it's all of these left-wing groups. And they had shaped a perfect and powerful message that, you know, it would be two years later. Suddenly, it's not just that Donald Trump was running for office, but I was watching 19-year-old boys posting Trump memes. It's like, that was not a thing in my lifetime where

are like young men in high school are rooting for a Republican in his 70s. There was not some big teenage punk boys for Bob Dole back in 1986. That was not a thing that happened. And so when I saw that and how there was, you know, there's a Donald Trump subreddit that was hitting the front page every single day, it's like, this is something new. And it is something that we were not on top of. This happened under our noses. So this may seem odd to listeners.

after all the stuff we've been talking about. But I felt like the book was ultimately optimistic. Am I wrong? In the sense that at the end of the day, all of the players in this situation and in all situations are just people and the most dysfunctional people, they usually just have needs that are not being met. And I don't think that's like a progressive hippie outlook on the world.

I think most people, even if you're talking about the corrupt bill, You can watch how Elon Musk behaves on Twitter. It's like, this guy needs to get married or something. There's no reason this billionaire should be refreshing Twitter for 20 hours out of his day. Like, that's not something a happy and fulfilled person does. So the idea here in any story I write, and I think all good stories are like this, in that it's not a polemic telling you how to vote or telling you what changes to make in your life. It's just portraying these are people trying to exist in this moment of time.

and a lot of the forces that shape their lives are things they have no control over. So this is why one reason I was writing the book, it's a book that heavily involves the internet and social media, but I was trying very hard to write it in a way that would still make sense 50 years from now. Right. Because it's trying to capture a moment. And if you're trying to capture this moment, I do not believe it is as simple as the things we want to accomplish as a society are pretty clear and straightforward and easy.

And there's just a small group of supervillains who are preventing it. I don't think the world works that way. I think that when you take two completely normal people who actually don't disagree all that much, but you put them in an online environment where the only engagement is from the most extreme conflict, they will start behaving in a way that if they did it in person, you would call it a personality disorder. But online, it's like the algorithms will not give you visibility unless you react to every slight as if it's World War III. So it's optimistic in the sense that I think humans are very adaptive and adaptable and we've had to overcome weird changes in society in the past.

I think at the end of the day, most people do not want to fight. I think at the end of the day, most people are not radicals. They're not violent. And when given a chance to sit down and work things out, most of the time they do. We would not have a society if people were not capable of resolving their differences peacefully because that's just every day. It's optimistic in the sense in that at the end, it does believe in humanity, and it doesn't, my worldview has never been that humans are corrupt or garbage. When you see a bunch of people behaving horribly, usually you can find the origins of it. And usually you can find yourself saying, you know what, if I had been there, if I'd been among them, if I'd grown up hearing the same things they'd heard, I probably would be right there with them.

The book is, I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. I want our listeners to understand that this book is an uproariously funny read, and I plowed right through it. I just couldn't put it down, and I think the closest analogy that I would use, or the closest analog, is probably Douglas Adams' books, the Hitchhiker's Guide and the Dirk Gentley books. It's just an absolutely fantastic book. It is out Tuesday. And Jason, thank you so, so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast The Last Laugh and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

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