The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Reveals the Biggest Threat Facing the U.S.

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

The former president downplayed the threat of climate change, falsely claiming that the seas will rise over the next 400 years by just “one eighth of an inch.” Plus! ! Author Alan Gratz, who wrote the children’s book Ban This Book, talks to Andy Levy about a campaign by Moms for Liberty and Ron DeSantis employees to take that title literally and ban his book. 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 Campbell 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 author Alan Gratz, who wrote the children's book, ban this book. And it'll join us to talk about Moms for Liberty and a DeSantis employee in Florida's recent decision to take that title literally and ban his book. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips?

Clips. Clips. Clips. Danielle, clips. I understand the tepid response this week. It's going to be bad. Oh, my God. It's bad when you say it's not going to be bad.

I can't even imagine what this is going to be like. All right. Well, let's not tip a to Potoa and let's just go head first into the stupid. It's Christ. Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, a man who looks like his shit sticks very bad, yet talks like it doesn't. He has some thoughts on Vice President Kamala Harris' intelligence. He's imprinted on the country permanently that she is a really shallow, uneducated, and uneducatable person.

And that other than her weird laugh, there's no really significant part to know. Is he fucking serious here? Like, who's he talking to? The mirror? Like, who's he talking to? Yes. The person who graduated from Harvard has a law degree and served as the California AG as uneducated. An uneducatable.

That's what I have on me. Yeah. What he has proven is that one can, in fact, have a degree and be fucking dumb as rocks. So, bravo, Newt Gingrich. Bravo. I hate him. I mean, that was basically, that was Strom Thurmond or George Wallace or any of those guys, except that they could say the N-word back then.

I mean, just imagine it being bleeped out in your head. Because that's what he said. That's what he called her. Let's cut to the chase here. I mean, particularly, as you said, the uneducable part. Look, I am not Kamala Harris's biggest fan, but I don't think she's stupid. And everything he said was just wrong.

Yeah, it's just so clear what he was actually saying. And he said it to Sean Hannity, which I suppose is not a surprise. I want to pose a question. Are you educatable when you leave your wife on her deathbed and then learn to do it a second time too? Is that educatable? Hmm. Pattern narcissism. He was, he left her deathbed because he was busy learning. Oh, yes, yes. That's what's happening. Yes. Also, I kind of find her weird laugh very charming. I just as I find when she talks about people falling out of a coconut tree. Those are some of my favorite. I actually, I'm saying this in all earnestness. I actually find it very fun. That's just just. I'm not bothered by her laugh. And like also weird laugh. Can we play DeSantis?

Like, are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I really, when we talk about uneducated, let's think about all the people he stands next to all the time on these two. Okay, well, another all-star speaker of the house man of deep thinking. Mike Johnson has a stark warning for you too, because he's heard you say the Pentagon is overfunded and he wants some words with you. We believe there's probably terrorist cells set up around the United States now, all because Biden opened the border and refuses to close it.

There's no way that anybody could possibly think that Republicans have anything to do with this. We've been working on closing the border since we came into office and began in our House majority in this Congress. We passed HR2, the most aggressive border security measure that's ever been passed by Congress. And you know where it is right now? It's sitting on Chuck Schumer's desk in the Democrat-controlled Senate. We are hamstrung in doing anything until we have a president who cares about a closed border. And that's why we need President Trump back in office. Well, this is very dangerous.

And obviously, we're all wondering what Christopher Ray is alluding to. I mean, we just heard one lawmaker earlier say we're waiting for another 9-11. There are terrorist cells all over this country. Oh, yeah. And they happen to wear red hats. And they happen to storm the Capitol building on January 6th. and they happen to walk down Main Streets with their white supremacist regalia. Yeah, he's absolutely correct.

And, oh, that's right. You mean the immigration bill that they blew up because Donald Trump told them to because he didn't want to give Biden a win? You mean that immigration bill? And they've been working on it since the beginning of time, like he said. So what he's also admitted to is that they're also fucking failures. So bravo. Yeah, I mean, ironic as he's the speaker, because Buddy, the terrorists are coming from inside

the house. Mm-hmm. You know, and it's funny because he talks about them coming over the border, but personally, all those people, Danielle, just referred to, I think Taco Bell's too spicy, so they would not run for the border personally. 100%. I always wonder which side of the eight-sided dice in every election year we're going to give the GOP fear mongering a bunch of bullshit, and I'm like, I guess it landed on this one.

The old 24 TV show won instead of caravans of immigrants rushing the border since those ones didn't work out so well in the last two elections. Oh, that's coming, though. You're right, that we'll probably get all eight sides of the dice this election. Yeah, we get all of the worst timelines. Fun times. Unfortunately, he's not done with his bullshit. Oh, God. And what they're referring to you here is the transcript of Biden's testimony in the documents case. So was the transcript doctored in some way? How significantly was it changed? Well, that's the question, right? Maria, We don't know. You and I, no one else can answer those questions except the Attorney General and a handful of people at DOJ who have the actual audio tapes. They have to turn it over to Congress.

So they're still pretending that the testimony was doctored? That's the pretend, yes. I know it doesn't matter, but he knows he's lying here. Like, he just does. And again, I just, like, I watch these people, and I've said this before, and I'm just going to keep saying it, though. they talk about being such committed Christians, and they literally go around breaking commandment after commandment every day. It's unreal to me.

Their religion is white supremacy. Yeah. What they worship is capitalism and patriarchy. Like, that is how we know that in their minds, they're breaking no commandments. In their minds, they're doing exactly what their imaginative God and Savior does. Apparently, according to Marjorie Taylor Green, he also sleeps with porn stars because she equated Donald Trump to Jesus. So their perversion of religion is what we should talk about on a regular basis because they have none. Well put.

So now we come to the Charisma King himself, one governor, Ron DeSantis, a man who does not have a way with words. And he's going to try to rebrand Florida. Let's watch him succeed. Really, he's going to succeed. And I've always had people come up to me who, who maybe in the past would not have thought Florida for higher education. They say, why go to Columbia and be treated like that when you can go to Florida? We're the Harvard for the unwoke now. The what?

The Harvard for the unwoke? Uh-huh. The Harvard for the undead. Oh, my God. My favorite is he's talking about the Columbia students of the way they were treated. Florida's reaction to protesters is to, like, legalize running them over and things like that. Oh, he's not talking about the protesters. He's still referred to Columbia.

That's the most recent thing. But what he's talking about is, in his mind, the way the protesters treated the other students, i.e. the Jews. Yes, which they would make Kent State look like a carnival if I'd happen there. Mm-mm. Not Kent State a carnival. No. I'm just going to stick with my Harvard for the undead because he really has, he's created a zombie university system. It looks like a real university system and it, you know, it has the trappings of it, but it's completely hollowed out. It has no soul whatsoever.

Yeah. If you want a degree that means nothing. I mean, you could go to Trump University. Oh, right. That was folded. Or you could go to the state of Florida. Same, same, but different. Yeah. I did also notice in other rebranding things, I guess he decided. He didn't go Trump enough with all his policies and he tried to go past Trump and now he's turning red instead of orange and it's really strange looking like the red complexion is something else. He's like Maga hat red in this video. Oh, Jesus. Is he screaming or it's just like his? I think his soul is always screaming at the inside.

It's kind of what his vibe is like. Every time he laughs, I think he's screaming inside. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of pain in there. Okay, we have one horrible last one. Donald Trump, a man who's confused and uneducated on many a thing. But I truly feel when he's talking about climate change, that is really when he just, his brain just goes to another fucking planet.

And let's listen to do that. I really think other than nuclear weapons, which I think are the single biggest threat, not global warming, when they say that the seas will rise over the next 400 years, one-eighth of an inch, you know, which means basically have a little more beachfront property, okay? Think of it. The seas are going to rise.

Who knows? But this is the big threat. I watched Biden the other night. It's the greatest existential. He loves that word because it's a big word and he thinks, you know, he thinks he knows. He doesn't even know what the hell the word means. He goes, it's the greatest existential threat to our country, global warming. In the meantime, you get these maniacs with nuclear weapons that can do damage.

which I won't even talk to you about. It's the greatest. There has never been anything like it, the power of weaponry today. It will be obliteration. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So he lives in Florida, right? Mm-hmm. The place that has massive four and five category-grade hurricanes on a regular basis. More coastline than any of the lower 48, if I'm not mistaken. Mm-hmm. The erosion of the... the beaches because of those types of storms and the fact that no one wants to provide homeowners

insurance in those places because of the threat of climate change, which isn't a threat. It's actually here. And he's talking about a quarter of an inch in 400 years. Who brought that science to him? The same fucking probably went to the same university as the doctors that told us that he was only 200 pounds. I cannot. I cannot.

I won't. By the way, it's 10 to 12 inches in the next 30 years. Oh, what is math, Andy? What is math? I know. Like, as I'm saying it, I'm like, what's the point of me saying that? But that's from the NOAA's website and is, I think, the generally agreed upon figure, not an eighth or a quarter of an inch over 400 years, 10 to 12 inches over the next 30 years, which is truly catastrophic.

So it's just, he, yeah, he's just stupid. This takes me back to when Ben Shapiro proposed a very similar thing saying that people will just sell that beachfront property and the YouTuber H-bomber guy did the proper reply to this, which is he beat down a wall with an axe, put his head through it and said, to who, Ben? Aquaman? Aquafucking man, Ben? Well, it's just, it's such a stupid talking point and they love saying dumb shit like that. You would like to not even have to reply at all to it because on its face, it's just idiotic and it's like something a nine-year-old would say.

But this is like the standard conservative talking point. Yeah, childhood baby haunts about a very serious thing that's happening very fast before our eyes. Fuck those guys. Alan Gratz has written numerous bestselling novels for young readers, including ones that deal with such weighty topics as the Holocaust, World War II, 9-11, and the War on Terror. He is widely acclaimed with his books receiving rave reviews and often making year-end best-of lists. In 2017, he wrote a book called Ban This Book, which tells you. tells the story of a young girl who fights back after her school board removes her favorite book from the school library. The school library journal called it an excellent addition to all middle grade collections and said,

hand this to book lovers, aspiring librarians, or any kid who wants to make a difference. But the Indian River County School Board in Florida had a slightly different take, and they banned ban this book from the three schools it had been in. As the Tallahassee Democrat reports, board members were irked by the fact that the book references other books that had been removed from schools and why that it was guilty of, quote, teaching rebellion of school board authority. Joining me now to talk about this is the author of Ban This Book himself, Alan Gratz. Alan, thank you so much for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. Okay, so before we get to the absurdity of this school board, I want to ask you about the book itself. Tell us fourth grader

Amy Ann's story. Sure. So Banff this book is the story of Amy Ann Ollinger. She, as you said, is a fourth grader. She goes to a school where a parent starts challenging and banning books. So as a protest, Amy Ann and her friends take those books, hide them in her locker, and start checking them out in secret to other kids as a banned book locker library. And they get into a little bit of trouble for that. But the book is about kids responding to and fighting back against book banning in their community. So the Indian River County School Board doesn't like this. Ban this book was challenged by a woman named Jennifer Pippen, who, surprise, surprise, is the head of a local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a great. group listeners of this podcast are all too familiar with. So Pippin, who I'm guessing would be very

upset if she discovered she shares a name with the Tony Award winning musical. She challenges the book's appropriateness. And then in a three-two vote, the board votes to remove it from two elementary schools and one middle school in the district. Were you aware that any of this was going on before the vote actually took place? No, not until afterward. I was emailed by a local group that was fighting for the freedom to read and had been arguing in favor of keeping the book on the shelves and lost their battle. And they wrote a very nice email to me saying, hey, I'm sorry, we fought for this book. We didn't win. But in the course of it, we read the book and we thought it was really delightful. So thanks for that. And it was a nice compliment to get,

but in a bad news sandwich. So this is unfortunately how many authors find out that their books have been challenged is only after they've been banned. These things happen so quickly and often invisibly, because unless members of the community are paying attention, these things just happen in these meetings where, I mean, you've seen school board meetings where unless there's some big issue being discussed, nobody's there. It's an empty room. You know, it's an empty room. You know, local journalism has been gutted. And so there's nobody there covering it. There's no local newspaper to cover it anymore. And so these things are just happening on the down low and we don't know about it until after the fact.

So when banned this book was initially challenged by this woman, Jennifer Pippin, that triggered a process where before it got to the board for a vote, it was looked at by the district's book review committee. And this committee actually said the book should be kept in the schools, but then the board chose to override this, right? Yeah. And this is counties, most school systems have systems like this in place and have for quite some time.

If a book is challenged, then it often goes to a review committee. And that review committee has librarians who, you know, paid to go to school and have degrees in library science and are trained to evaluate books for their appropriateness for a different age groups. And it all these groups also often include members of the community. Parents who have kids in the school. They review the books. They make a recommendation to the school board say, hey, like in the case of ban this book, we don't see anything. We don't see anything objectionable in this book. They said, this is fine for our middle school and elementary shelves.

And then the school board unilaterally, I shouldn't say unilaterally because it was a three to two decision. But the school board still overrode the decision. And why? Because two of the three were Moms for Liberty candidates who'd been elected in these school board elections where like 600 votes will get you onto a school board because nobody cares. And so the groups like Moms for Liberty and other culture wars. have decided this is how they're going to make change. This is how they're going to get their agenda across is get their candidates elected to these small boards and committees. The third person who voted for it, and this is really interesting in this case, the school board had a

three to two majority of people who would have voted for the freedom to read. But one of the members of this school board in Indian County moved, and he thought that his house was now outside of his territory. And so he offered a letter of resignation. She said, I'm sorry, I moved houses, I no longer represent this community. And it was only after one of the freedom to read groups was like, hey, whoa, we did the research and you're not. You're actually still in this community. You don't have to resign. He tried to rescind it, but DeSantis refused his rescind and put one of his people on the board. And so it was an appointed person, not an elected official, who is the third person who voted against Ban this book. And will, I'm sure, continue to vote against

other books until they can be replaced in the next election, if they can be replaced in the next election. Yeah, and that board member, the one who was appointed by DeSantis, his name is Kevin McDonald. I want to read a quote from him. This is from the Tallahassee Democrat had him quoted. He said, the title itself and the theme challenges our authority. And it even goes so far as to not only mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours. It not only mentions them, but it lists them. He found this beyond the pale, and I read this and I'm just sitting there going, I cannot even imagine saying something like that without realizing how small of a person it shows you to be. Yeah. And it really reveals the motivation behind these book bands across the country. It is not about protecting kids. It is about erasing voices.

And the fact that he doesn't even want a book on the shelf that lists the books that you can't get in the library. Right. means that he doesn't want people to know that those books exist. And this is what's behind all of this is we see the books that are being banned and challenged in the United States right now are predominantly from writers of color or writers who identify as LGBTQ plus. A lot of times their books are about race or about the issues surrounding living in America as an LGBTQ plus person. But a lot of times too, they're being banned just because of who the author is. And the book has nothing to do with any of those themes or issues. These folks are being targeted because of who they are and the books that they are writing.

And this guy is just saying the quiet part out loud. We don't want anybody to know that these people and their books exist. Yeah. And it's just like he acts like you wrote the anarchist cookbook or like some bond making recipe book where you're like, you know, oh, he lists the books that have been banned across the country. We can't allow this. This is dangerous. And here's the other thing. This bears discussing. Well, I wrote the book in like 2015. It came out in 2017, but I started working on it a couple of years before that. The book banning landscape was very different in 2017 than it is today. First of all, I had to decide when I was writing the book, am I going to make up titles that are being banned? Or am I going to use the titles of real books that are being banned? And I thought it was more effective to use real books. And I went to the American Library Association and I said, I want lists of all the books that have been banned in the United States. Bander challenged since 1990. I wanted something that felt at least

somewhat modern, not going back to books from the 60s or 70s or something like that. For kids who were reading my books today, the 90s is ancient history. So I wanted to make sure that all the books were books that had actually been challenged or banned in the United States. And so, but back then, the books that were being challenged and banned were very different than the books that are being targeted today. If you go back and look at the ALA's website, they will list the top 10 ban books every year. And yes, every now and then there was a book like My Two Moms that would show up. But the list was dominated by books like Captain Underpants, which was deemed disrespectful to adults. Or you'd get books like the Harry Potter books because they promoted witchcraft.

You know, whoever had some niche nut job thing that they were worried about, they would ban books in their communities and that would spread. Today, though, all of those books have dropped off the top 10 list. Those are not the most banned books. The most banned books, again, are books by people of color by people from the LGBTQ plus community. It has really changed. If I were writing ban this book today, I would have used a very different list of books in there. So to get back to this one commissioner who doesn't like the books that are being listed in my book, the other irony here is that those books nobody cares about anymore. Like those aren't the ones that people are actually coming in and banning anymore. I honestly think what they really didn't like about my book is that it called them out

for their own stupidity. I examine what means to challenge and ban books and the motivations behind that and how books don't hurt kids. Book banners don't want to hear that because that's part of their rhetoric around this is that books can harm kids and that they want parental choice. And that's another Orwellian term because parental choice means taking the book off the shelf so that no parents can choose to let their kids lead it. The strange thing is, yes, the books that I list have been challenged in banned in the United States, but those aren't the ones they're coming after right now. They're coming after a whole different group of books now. At one point in the book, Amy Ann and her friends decide that if one book can be banned,

all books can be banned. They literally go through like every book on the library shelf and they find a reason that it can be banned. And the idea in the book is that this will teach the school board a lesson, which, spoiler alert, in the book it does. But this does kind of feel like what groups like moms for liberty do for real, doesn't it? And they don't care how ridiculous it is. Exactly. And again, if I were writing the book today,

I would have to address that. If you open up book banning so that every single person in the community can choose a book that they find objectionable, you will find that at the end of the day you have no books left on the shelf. Because everybody has something that they don't like. There are people who will say, I don't want the Bible in there. I don't want anybody promoting any religion. And so now you've got Christian fundamentalists who are banning books, and now their book has been banned. So yes, the idea is that in the book, these kids come up with the most ridiculous reasons that they can for banning books. You know, Magic Treehouse is a violation of the building codes because it's not built to code. You know, like they come up with the silliest reasons. But it does feel like silly season with the book challenges and bans that are happening right now because there's one single form you have to fill out and you can put in any silly reason that you want to. And then a lot of these school boards are just rubber stamp committees. They don't really care whether a book is appropriate, like in the case of Indian County and ban this book. They just want to get rid of all the books, period. Yeah.

I'm also guessing they don't actually read the books. I think that's a fair bet. Yeah. In ban this book, the main, I guess, antagonist you would call her is Sarah Spencer. And it turns out that she actually sits on arts board. She helped build a new playground for the school. She's done other good things. And Amy Ann comes to realize that she's not actually a villain, that she's just in the

case of banning Amy Ann's favorite book. She's misguided. I'm curious if you feel that way about Jennifer Pippen or about the three board members who voted to ban your book. Because I'll let you in on a little secret. I do not. I agree with you. And again, I'm much more sympathetic to my villain.

We'll reduce the characters to that. But I'm much more sympathetic to my villain in ban this book than I would be today. No, I have no sympathy for the causes and the motivations of the people who are out to ban books today. I don't think that they are good people. I don't think they are good citizens. I think that they are often racist and I think that they are often close-minded people who feel their own status in society being threatened.

And one of the things that we have struggled with in publishing, I'm going to pivot here, but I'm coming back, this is all connected. One of the things that we've been struggling with in publishing is that it has been a very white dominated profession for a long time. Most editors are white. Most of the authors who get book contracts are white. I am white. So the readers out there don't have to Google me. I'm white. I'm middle class. I'm male. I'm cisgender. I am like the demographic that I think that Pippin and others would probably find the least objectionable. If you're looking at who I am as a person, I am one of those people who has traditionally benefited from the lack of diversity in publishing. And we, as a publishing industry, have really been working hard at this. I work with, we need diverse books, and I try to raise money for them.

And I work as a mentor to diverse authors who are unpublished trying to help them get published because I know the status I have and the privilege that I have. And we've made some gains. We've made small gains. We are not where we need to be. The number of books published by people of color does not reflect the number of people of color in the United States. It's not proportional. It's far fewer people are getting published than we actually have who are people of color in the United States. So we have a long way to go.

But we were making progress. And of course, of course, that small incremental progress is, I think, directly related to why we are seeing challenges like this today. Because as soon as we started to get other voices on the bookshelf, That's when the crazies came out from under the rocks and said, no, no, no, we need to go back to everything being all white all the time. So I think it's directly proportional. You know, it's that same effect, you know, posed to Barack Obama. We finally have a black president and then we have Trump as a result. That's the punishment that we have for trying to make some progress.

I worry that it is going to set us back because publishing is a business. Publishers can say all they want that they are out to publish diverse voices and to get the best stories on the shelves. And the editors themselves may mean that. I mean, they really mean well. I know a lot of them personally. But at the end of the day, this is a business. And these, like, Random House, Penguin is owned by Bertelsman, a big giant German conglomeration.

They have shareholders and a bottom line. And if libraries and schools and the regular customers aren't buying diverse books because they can't get them, because they've been banned or challenged and they don't know that they exist, the publishers will stop publishing those books because they're not selling. What's the reverse of trickle down? There's a ripple effect that will go back up the chain, and those books won't get published anymore. And the minimal advances we've made in getting diverse voices into the marketplace is going to be eroded by this backlash at the local level. And from a few people, you know, we've read the stories about how it's like 11 people across the country who are initiating these book bans.

And I don't know if it's 11 people, but it is a very, very few people. And the squeaky wheel is definitely getting the grease here in the United States right now. We were talking before we went to air, and I mentioned that I bought ban this book yesterday so I could read it before talking to you. And I joked that, you know, well, at least you got one sale out of this. And you were saying that, you know, there is this sort of myth out there that banning a book can increase its sales because it will peak interest in the book. But explain to me why this is a myth. It is a myth that ban books equal sales because for the most part, when a book is true, challenged or banned, it just disappears. In very rare cases, like mine, I may see a bump in sales

because my book is called ban this book and a group banned it. How ironic. It's getting headlines here and in England. And when Mouse was banned, it got a lot of attention. But for the most part, there are tens of thousands of books that are being challenged and banned in this country every year. They are not talking to the new abnormal on a podcast. Their books disappear. And so the reality is, not only are those voices silenced, but those authors don't see any sales, and they have to turn away from writing because it cannot sustain them. They aren't making any money off of their books because no one's reading them. Yeah, man, the whole thing is just so sad and so insane. Alan Gratz, thank you so much for joining us.

The book is ban this book, and I would encourage people to go out and buy this book and to also go to the American Library Association's website and find that list of banned books that Alan was talking about. and buy those books as well. Alan, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure. Thanks a lot, Andy. 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. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast

and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.