The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump’s Recent Rhetoric Is Just as Scary as It Seems

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman stops by the program to talk about Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—and why Congress should consider scrapping it entirely. Deepa Iyer of the Building Movement Project stops by the podcast to share her unique way of visualizing social movements as entire ecosystems—with each person playing a distinct role in various movements and communities. Plus! Guest host Maura Quint who serves as campaign and communications work for Americans For Tax Fairness. 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. What an excellent show we have today.

The nation columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Spencer Ackerman tells us how he really feels about Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its implications. Then we talk to Deepa Ayer, author of We Are Builders, who will explain the ecosystem of roles in building a movement and her work with the Building Movement Project. But first, let's have some fun. Welcome to the new abnormal. This is Andy, as you probably figured out. Danielle is not with us today. She is celebrating an extended birthday weekend, and she has taken the day off. And good for her, I say.

Here to fill in and to get us through and to more importantly get me through this episode is our good friend Mara Quint. She does campaign and comms for Americans for Tax Fairness. She is a very funny comedy writer whose work can be seen at places like McSweeney's and the onion. And I'm told also that she is very important for reasons. It's so good you said that. Yes. I was pretty much told I had to as part of the conditions for you coming on. So welcome, Mara, and thank you for being here. Thank you very much for having me on. Although when you did ask me to come on, I kind of thought I was filling in for you and I was very excited because I was like, oh, I get to do something with Danielle. She's amazing. And then I showed up and now I guess I'll get

through it, you know, created teeth. No, I understand. And I was very careful to not make it clear that you were filling in for Danielle for that very reason. Because I'm not stupid. You do it. I'm not stupid. You do to me. Yeah, I did. And I'm proud of it. It's called being a professional.

Speaking of being professionals, Tim Scott, who by all accounts is a member of Congress from South Carolina. I have heard that said. Rumor has it. Has dropped out of the presidential race for 2024. Please hold your applause. He made this announcement on Fox News Sunday night. and to explain why I said, speaking of being a professional, before I stuck into this,

he apparently didn't inform his staff that he was dropping out, and a bunch of them were in Iowa working away, and they heard the news on their TVs. And not a big fan of that. Mara, when someone drops out of a presidential race, the first thing we usually hear is, well, who's going to get their votes, who are their votes going to, et cetera? Who is going to get his vote? Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know who Tim Scott's mom is going to vote for now. It's going to be really difficult for her. But I think that probably most voters are going to be just fine. However, I do think that his staffers probably have a lawsuit on their hands because that is a cruel and unusual thing to be sent to Iowa and then told like, all right, now it's over. I mean, like, you could be told that when you're home and happy, but now you're stuck in Iowa.

That's very, very unfortunate. Here on the Daily Beast podcast, The New Abnormal, we don't take shots at different states of the Union, all of which are special in all ways. and we believe that all states matter. Iowa, it's first in the nation, Mara. For what exactly? I don't know. Okay. They do have, and I've been to Iowa a couple of times, and everyone in Iowa has told me the same thing, because I'm always like, all right, what should I do? I'm here. And they tell me the same thing, and that is go get breakfast pizza at the gas station. And they're very proud of it. So, and honestly, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I am better than thinking that is actually a fantastic thing to do. Did you get breakfast pizza at a gas station?

I haven't done it. Oh, my God. I didn't have a car to get to the gas station. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. Otherwise, I would have been all over it. But I found out that it was not incredibly easy to get an Uber driver in Iowa when I was there.

Because otherwise, it would have been no problem. I did get once, the one time I did get an Uber driver. It was probably the best Uber ride I've ever had. And it was absolutely in Iowa. And it was like, I think because I don't know, I travel to too many like kind of big cities. and the Uber drivers are all like, they have like Tesla's and stuff where you're just kind of like, I'm uncomfortable. I don't know how this door handle works. Right.

Something about it feels like wrong. But like in Iowa, it was like, this dude bought this car in 1981 and he'd never ever vacuumed it a day. Like, you know, it was preserved with all of the relics of 1981. And that made me feel very at home. And he was in no way acting like, I'm your driver and I'm taking you somewhere. He was acting like, I'm your cousin's friend. He told me to come get you. Like, I don't know why he had a New York accent, but nonetheless, like, it was just a very, like, the idea that I was paying him for this was ridiculous.

But it was perfect because I was asking him to drive me to the liquor store, which was fully where I probably the only route he knew, actually. So it was, it was great. I love Iowa, is the point. I think what we're trying to say is you can tell that it's sort of obvious why Tim Scott dropped out because we started talking about him and we're now talking about within like 90 seconds. We're pivoting to Uber drivers taking us to liquor stores. So I think we're actually proving a point here. Before we move on from Tim Scott, I do want to point to one thing, because this annoyed me. The New York Times headline for him dropping out included the phrase, his sunny message failed to resonate. I was trying to figure out, is this the sunny message of bombing Mexico or the sunny message of bombing Iran?

Or what was the sunny message that I missed? I think it's the sunny message of Christophascism, which is a delight if we all would just pray to Jesus together. And that was his overarching message in every single one, especially of the debates, was that he really, really wanted to bring us back to the Christian values that America was founded on. And he even said in the last debate something along the lines of the, this is what the founders intended were to be a Christian nation. And I was like, oh, boy, man, I don't know which one of us learned a different element. school idea of why America was founded, but one of us is really wrong here. Yeah. So basically, he wants to go back to the sunny message of the Puritans. Even pre-Puritin, it feels like, the Puritans, at least, were kind of like, oh, we've got to get away from, you know, religious oppression. He's just

like, I've heard a lot about religious oppression, and it sounds awesome. All right, I guess we should move on from Tim and Scott. Now, I do want to point out, though, that if you, when you make jokes about his girlfriend, his girlfriend won't see them, but real people will. So please keep that in mind. Let's pivot to something slightly more serious, and that is, of course, Donald Trump, the former and hopefully not to be again president of America. That was incredible grammar, Andy. Really hope my English teacher mom did not hear that. Here's what Trump had to say in a Veterans Day speech in New Hampshire.

He said, quote, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They'll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream. This was, of course, immediately and correctly compared by historians to the rhetoric of noted freedom lovers like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. And yeah, pretty much anyone with a functional brain stem, I think, can easily make that comparison. Mara, did you make that comparison? No, I just thought he was accurately depicting my struggle from his point of view. I don't.

I don't see why anyone would consider that. Uh-huh. Yeah. No, I'm actually just surprised he knew the word vermin, honestly. Like, that seems kind of big. He definitely seems more like a rat kind of guy, you know? Like, let's step up. Yeah.

I mean, look, let's be honest. Someone wrote that for him. True. He also said in this speech, the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Nobody likes to make jokes about Donald Trump more than I do,

but we're so past. even like looking at shit like this. And I assume there are people who will still excuse this kind of talk or will, if not excuse it, they'll just sort of like, you know, we get this, the whole shrugging thing and like, oh, that's just trumping. Trump. He just says things. I don't think we can do that.

Can we? I don't think we should have ever been doing that. And that's just it. We hit this moment over and over and over again. And it is just an incredible frustration. And I don't, I mean, like, probably the only true thing that this man has ever said was he could shoot someone in Fifth Avenue. Like, I don't think there's anything he could do or say that would rock any support from him, which is frightening as hell. And I think he could give, I mean, you could argue that this is just an Adolf Hitler speech, but I think he could just give full transcript, full, like, stand there.

He could do the Heil Hitler. He could do the whole thing. And I don't know who would be like, oh, too far. I don't think there's a too far for his supporters. I think it's fair to say that his rhetoric has gotten worse as time has gone on. Like the stuff he said then was bad enough. And we didn't need a worse version of that. But we've got that now.

Like the stuff he says now is not the same stuff that he was saying in the 2016 election. Even, I don't even know if it was the same stuff he was saying in the 2020 election. I think most of this seems to have started after he lost, whether he's in. embraced QAnon more, or maybe he's just come to the realization that, like you said, like there's no line for his supporters. I'm not here to stand for Joe Biden. And if you don't like Joe Biden, that's a perfectly reasonable position to have. The people who can't see the difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I'm a little worried about them and their life. But the hope is that rhetoric like this, and my guess is that by March, this rhetoric will seem tame. Maybe this kind of

stuff does make the squishy people kind of see that, oh, maybe I shouldn't vote for this guy? I mean, I think so much of it is where people are getting their information from. And that is so intensely splintered at this point. And I also do not think that there is a too far for the right media infrastructure that is propping him up and supports him. Rama McDaniel, who said that it wouldn't matter if he was convicted of a crime. If he was the nominee, they would still support him. And so in general, like, I think the whole right-wing infrastructure is just ready to push out whatever he says and to back it up. And so if that's how you're taking in your media, you're just hearing like, okay, yeah, no, I mean, you know, that's true. There are a lot of terrible people and they're doing awful things.

I saw it like a week ago, whatever the last election was a week or two, I don't even know. I'm lost in time. I live in Pennsylvania and I was volunteering at the polls, which I always do. And like the things that people were coming up and saying were so detached from any sort of reality. We had a school board race. And they were literally, there was someone who asked about the litter boxes in our schools. Oh, boy. Right.

Like, this is nothing to do with our schools whatsoever. They're not getting that from any sort of local information. That's not even been like a thing that's gone around this area. They're getting that from these, you know, extremist right wing places. Then they're willing to hear it all as truth and fact. And that's terrifying. Yeah, no, it's scary as hell. I mean, the litter box thing won't die. It has been, I even hesitate to use the word debunk. Like at a certain point, we are elevating these things by saying, no, that's been disproven and that's

been debunked instead of just saying, now, somebody fucking made that up. Yeah, and you're a fucking idiot. Yeah. Exactly. But look, the litter box thing has been, like, people, serious people looked into it and we're like, no, this never happened. Like, there's not been to school that this happened in anywhere, let alone in, like you said, in Pennsylvania, you know, where you are. But you're right. We live in this, I don't even know if bifurcated is the right word at this point, but so many people only get their news from the conservative media sphere, whether it's Fox News or Newsmax or whatever online sources, the Daily Wire or wherever they're going. The amount of things they know that just aren't true is astounding. Absolutely. And so like when I think about, you know, who is squishy, I mean, I don't really

know too many people who exist in that like imagined squishy sphere. I know people who believe strongly in sort of very specific policies that they're going to support no matter what. And if that's on the right, they do not give a shit about anything else. And if they do, they become the best you can hope for is a non-voter. Like that's the best you can hope for is they just decide, now fuck it. I don't want to deal. But I don't see many people going, gosh, I don't know. I mean, He makes some good points, but also he's a Nazi. Or it's a toughie. I'm going to have to think on it.

I feel like there are people like that. Maybe not. I don't know. But I feel like there are people who are like, well, you know, yeah, I don't like a lot of the things he says. But, you know, oh, he's just talking. And the actual policies, I really like. No, I do think there are a lot of people exactly like you just described. I think there are lots of people say, oh, I wish he'd just shut up.

But, yeah, I mean, I like what he wants to do. I wish you'd shut up because he says stupid shit. But that's like a wave. They don't even, it doesn't, they don't care. Right. Because fundamentally they support the like, the ultimate goal, which is terrible, terrible things. Yeah, I do want to talk about this for a second. Stephen Chung, who's a Trump campaign spokesman, he told the Washington Post, I guess the Washington Post brought up the notion that this kind of speech might be a little fascist and that there were people that historians, et cetera, that were pointing out the way it matched the.

rhetoric of your Mussolini's and your Hitler's. And Stephen Chung told the post, quote, those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump derangement syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House. Now, this to me, because I saw this all over Twitter and blue sky and whatever, with people making the point that, well, what he's saying is as fascist as what Trump said. And I thought, yeah, he's trolling. To me, this is obvious trolling. And I'm not excusing it by saying that because I don't think we need a spokesperson for a presidential campaign to be an edge lord. I sort of was happier when, you know, those people were not

edge lords. Am I wrong here? It's way too on the nose for this to be anything but trolling. I guess the question is like, what is trolling anymore, right? Like, what does trolling mean? It means not fully believing what you're saying, but saying it to get a rise out of someone? Because that's all they do all the time. Like you could, you could argue the entire Republican establishment is trolling, right? Like, none of them fucking believe any of this shit. They're just trying to piss people off and, you know, then control who they're pissing off and in what way the pissed off people use that rage. So sure, in that way, yeah, he's trolling. They're all fucking trolling. Okay. I also want to point out that in this quote, he said that their entire existence will be crushed. The Washington

Post reports that Chung later clarified that he meant to say, their sad, miserable existence, not their entire existence. So again, this is just like, I'm not excusing it. And I'm not, I'm just saying like, yes, this guy clearly is saying something that he knows is fascistic in response to accusations of being fascistic. There's no way he's not aware of that. I think that's my point. But I think like if we want to loop back around, yes, he's saying something knowingly fascistic to the accusation of being fascistic because he's fascistic. Because he's fascistic. Fundamentally, that is absolutely what they really do believe, but they're going to pretend they don't and they're going to pretend they don't by being over the top of it.

It's like this ridiculous snake-eating its tail situation. I completely agree with you. I guess my only point is like I don't think you need to point out to Stephen Chung that what he said was fascistic because he did it on purpose. That's what I guess what I mean by trolling here. Yeah, he did it on purpose. And he also is getting, you know, a. ton of backslaps for doing it. It's very much like, oh, look at you. Like, that's right. They're

going to be real pissed about this. And you won because you pissed them off in some way and they're upset. Yeah. So yeah. And he's, he gets to walk away being like, that's right. I'm a tough guy or whatever the hell they think they are in their little scared world. Oh yeah. He full on owned the libs. Yeah, exactly. And speaking of owning the libs, Trump's allies have, according to a new report in Axios, they've got a new plan for what's going to happen if he gets a second term. The report from Axios, which came out on Monday was headlined, Trump allies pre-screened loyalists for unprecedented power grab. I'll read you the opening graph of the Axios piece, and here's what it says. Former President Trump's allies are pre-screening the ideologies of thousands of potential

foot soldiers as part of an unprecedented operation to centralize and expand his power at every level of the U.S. government if he wins in 2024. Axio says this is according to officials involved in the effort. So what does this mean? This is all part of Project 2025, which we've talked about a lot on this show. That's the Heritage Foundation program that's been signed on to by over 80 right-wing groups like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty and basically seeks to remake the federal government in Trump's image.

In this particular case, Trumpists are using an AI program developed by Orrub, I guess the fact that Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, dumped $20 million into Tim Scott's campaign wasn't enough money spent on stupid things. So they're using an AI program that Oracle has developed to weed out those people deemed insufficiently loyal to our version of North Korea's dear leader. And Axio says hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to ensure that if there's a second Trump inauguration, they'll be ready to install a pre-vetted pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists. This is not good news, Maura, in my humble opinion. Sounds a little bit terrifying, just a tiny bit. I love the added touch of using AI.

I know. It's as, you know, as though we weren't already enough into the future that they warned us of, right? But now it's just like, no, no, no. Let's make sure that the technology, the robot power, can come together to decide who should live or die. That seems like maybe it's not a good idea. This is absolutely terrifying. And it's one of those things where it's like, like, I want to make jokes because that's how I cope, right? But then like, there's a little part of me that's just like, oh, they're just going to play that audio when you're in the camps. And you're like, that's how it feels. It's just like, okay, yeah, I don't know what to do to stop this.

But it is absolutely horrific. And it definitely goes like, okay, I liked reading like World War II books as a kid, you know? Like, I liked reading things that were historical fiction set in that time. And now I feel like, oh, okay, I get it. This is more real now. I understand this. They didn't get all the details right. Yeah.

This is how it goes. Yeah, no, I agree. The fact that they're using AI, it's like, really, you're going to go full dystopia? Yeah, exactly. God. It's definitely another one of these, like, moments where, I mean, we're all doing it, right? We're all noting these moments of just like, oh, my God, who knew there was like another step that we could go? But here it is. Mark it down. So we're making it very easy for like, like, if humanity survives, you know, a hundred years from it'll be able to be like, oh, no, no, they mapped it all out for us. This is what happened. Or the, you know, robot overlord that's the designated earth will be able to at least have that sort of historical knowledge. But like, it's very, very hard. to watch and feel as powerless as I think a lot of this is making so many of us feel.

Yeah. And there were two points in the Axios piece that really, I don't want to say they're the points that stood out because the whole thing is, as you said, dystopian and terrifying. But one of the things they said was that the purpose of installing this pre-vetted army of Trump loyalists is to, quote, rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents. And all I kept thinking was, I know what they're saying, and it's not untrue, but all I kept thinking was, yeah, this country has a real history of very restrained presidents. I mean, like, basically everything that you ever learned in any sort of civics class of like, here's how the government works and here's why it should work that way.

If you ever heard about checks and balances or any of those types of things that were supposed to make you go, we live in a democracy and this is a good system of governance. It's like they heard it and went, well, okay, cool. All right. This is the list of things I want to destroy, and I'm going to go about it and absolutely just take them, dismantle every single one. They were looking at it like, all right, check, check, check, check, check. Yeah.

Yeah, they were looking at it in a totally different way. It was like opposition research for them. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And then the scariest part of this piece, which I should point out is written by, I guess, Jim Van der Heye and Mike Allen, they point out that all of this, this project 2025, this plant, pre-screen loyalists. None of this is being done by people like Rudy Giuliani. It's being done by people whose brains haven't been eaten away by bad hair die. It's being done by

people at heritage and places like that, people who are not stupid. That is terrifying because I think one of the few things that that legitimately saved us from a second Trump term was the the sheer sort of incompetence and in many cases raw stupidity of so many of the people around Trump. That is absolutely true. The only, I mean, like, and this is the only saving grace of a sort, smart people exist. They do, but there are fewer of them, I think, than we think exist in the world. Like, I do think that we've all kind of had this notion of this sort of intellectual group of people who have the ability to really do amazing things and wreak plans, whether they be good or bad. But my experience, as an adult, working with all sorts of institutions and individuals, is that the amount of people who are, who are actually capable of executing anything? Very slight. So, I mean, like, I don't know, even if it's going to the supposedly smart people. I mean, it's not a lot to be able to be like, well, maybe they'll also be dumb.

But, like, huh. I hope so. I'm clinging to it at this point. I do feel, though, that if nothing else, these do seem like the kind of people that maybe learn from mistakes and, like, adjust plans accordingly. Whereas I don't think someone like Rudy Giuliani and a lot of the people that Trump had around him, the Jenna Ellis is and people like that, I don't think they were capable of that. And so you saw the same mistakes sort of playing out over and over again. And these people, yeah, I'm not, you know, they may not have 180 IQ or whatever.

But I do think that at least some of them are smart enough to say, okay, we can actually look at stuff that was tried that didn't work and we can plan accordingly. And that just terrifies me. Yeah. No, it is very frightening. I mean, I have already fully believed that if Trump were 20 years younger and, and looked like a Kennedy or something, we would already be in camps. I just, I feel like it's so very thin what is holding any of this together. And so, yeah, just a slight increase in intelligence in one person could tip the whole thing into absolutely a disturbing future, which we are hurtling towards.

This is such a happy podcast. I'm so happy to be here. You know what? We are here, Mara, as I like to say, because this is the new abnormal. It is. It is. I feel like that's the title. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was established in 2008, and the government calls it a crucial tool in collecting intelligence from hostile foreign adversaries.

But folks like Senator Ron Wyden, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and many others have been strong opponents of its existence in use, saying that among other things, it gives way too much warrantless collection power to the government, a power that is often abused and used to go after Americans for doing things like protesting. Section 702 expires at the end of the year unless Congress renews it, and now some of its staunchest opponents have decided that they would rather reform it than let it die. Here to tell us why he thinks this is ultimately a bad idea is columnist for the nation, writer of the Great Forever Wars newsletter on Ghost, and at least in my mind, friend of the pod, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Spencer Ackerman. Spencer, thanks for being here. We're friends, Andy. Okay, I just, you know, I don't like to assume.

I appreciate that. Before we get to what's going on now, explain why folks like you, the ACE, ACLU, the EFF, Senator Wyden, et cetera, think 702 is so bad. Are you saying that this isn't only used to look at communications from swarthy foreign terrorists who want to destroy America? It is used to look at your communications, Andy, provided that you are making some form of international digital communication happen. What 702 is is a reference not to the powers of 702, but to the legal justification regime

around it. So you'll recall that among the things that Edward Snowden disclosed in 2013 was that the government had, through the NSA, a program that had piggybacked in some way upon the servers of the major internet communications platforms, including social media platforms like Facebook, but also Google, Apple, the major tech giants. That was called Prism. And what Prism enabled the government to do was collect international communications, including some that it would later concede, were purely domestic communication. As they sat on the servers of the companies that hosted them, there is also a separate effort within 702, known as upstream, by which the NSA collects that data as it transits the internet, and even performs what might be considered men in the middle

attacks on the servers of those companies in order to extract the information that it's seeking. This is done wholesale. It is not done tied to specific targets. It is not done accordingly through a warrant process. The procedures by which these operations occur are approved twice yearly by a secret panel of federal judges known as the FISA Court for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and certified by the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney. general. One thing that we have learned consistent over the 15 years that 702 has been in existence is that those procedures by which this collection occurs are not forthrightly and truthfully representative of the way this collection operates. We have seen that through numerous

foreign intelligence surveillance court declassifications over the years. And what in fact happens is over collection and particularly what we are very concerned about as over analysis. In other words, the FBI does not need a warrant to go, or the NSA for that matter, but the FBI in its law enforcement function capability does not need any kind of warrant to search through that database for information concerning Americans. Social security numbers have been searched for. We've learned in recent years that members of Congress, Congress have been warrantly surveilled using 702, as well as we learned earlier this year,

in 2002 communications of Black Lives Matter protesters were spied upon using this power. This is supposed to be, as was described in 2008, a counterterrorism authority. It has since, because of its immense value to the U.S. security apparatus, morphed into a general catch-all enterprise that whatever the justification is, senior intelligence officials describe as one of the most important tools that they have. It was described as a crucial tool against Russia, a crucial tool against China, a crucial tool for cybersecurity. But in fact, over the past 15 years, what we've in fact learned is that 702, by design, operates as a carve-out for the rules that are known as FISA, in effect, since 1978, to protect Americans' communications from being

warrantlessly intercepted by U.S. intelligence without suspicion of being connected to an agent of a foreign power, which is to say espionage. That's 702 distilled really simply. Okay. Explain where we are now. 702, which you, in a piece of the nation earlier this year, you described it as among the enduring abuses of the war on terror. It's set to expire at the end of this year, unless it's renewed by Congress, which it has been twice. We've been down this path two times before. Senator Wyden, who voted against 702 originally, against its renewal both times, now thinks it would be better not to just let it expire, but to reform it. Why? Wyden and others who have been part of the coalition resisting U.S. surveillance abuses generally and Section 702 specifically believe that

the political climate around Section 702, particularly in a kind of post-Trump, enduring congressional MAGA era, is so hostile and the likelihood of its straight up and down renewal sufficiently remote that the coalition can extract almost every surveillance reform priority that it's had over the last several years through allowing 702 to persist, transform, and be leveraged. In your Forever Wars piece about this, you say that the reforms that are being proposed by Wyden, and as you say, backed by a pretty broad coalition of these privacy-minded groups, such as the ACLU and many others, that these reforms are excellent. Walk us through how they want to reform 702. It's very easy for this discussion to bog down in specifics for surveillance nerds like myself. So let me kind of answer that question by speaking to the sort of general principle. that these groups are trying to reapply. Fundamentally, the problem with surveillance law is that it's always going to lag behind surveillance innovations, the pace of technology as it develops

as it becomes increasingly symbionic with 21st century capitalism, which is to say, as all of us through typical economic activity generate a tremendous amount of digital signals that can then be intercepted, collected, sifted, and used against you, particularly when those occur internationally. What Wyden and the coalition are proposing is something that will cut off those outpacings of surveillance law at a pass. They talk about how tools, including emerging AI clients and digital assistance, you know, think Siri, think Alexa, think the things that are increasingly part of,

of your kitchen appliances and your bathroom appliances that are increasingly like built it. All of those emerging technologies would be put under this broad surveillance restriction framework, which is to say you increasingly need individual suspicion to sift through the collected data, to use that data and disclose the use of that data in a court of law should it come to it, especially to ensure that once that over-collected data, which is to say data that has nothing to do with people for whom the government possesses reasonable, articulable suspicion of being, you know, agents of a foreign power, conducting espionage and so forth, are purged within a reasonable amount of time before they are used against American citizens.

There are also, for emergency cases, carve-outs of a particular period of time. time. But in general, it gets surveillance law off a back foot of racing to keep up with technological developments and puts those technological developments under this broader architecture of when to collect, what to protect around analysis and removal of data within a reasonable time once it is found to be not applicable under those principles. Okay. So given that these reforms, which again, you yourself say are, excellent. I have three questions. One, what's your beef? Two, what's your problem, man? And three, what is the very Star Wars sounding executive order, one, two, three, three, three. Yeah. So my

extreme hesitation about all of this does not come from any question that widen and the people pushing these reforms are doing anything but really far-sighted, long-view, surveillance reform that I would normally welcome without hesitation. They've thought this through. They've talked about ways in which they have structured this bill in order to make sure that their reforms survived contact with the intelligence community. I applaud them for all of this. My problem is kind of twofold. First, this is a unique opportunity to finally wet 702 die and to save it from the jaws of death. I worry is going to come at the expense of all of the great reforms that the Civil Liberties Coalition is trying to put upon it. Why do I say that? I say that because from the declassification

record that we have over the lifespan of 702, we have a very clear story. That's, and I should say not just 702, but throughout the entire war on terror. We have a very clear story being told of efforts to place surveillance restrictions upon the surveillance apparatus getting rapidly lawyered away by the legal cadre inside U.S. intelligence that reinterprets both existing laws and emerging laws in order to say that actually what Congress really meant was that in a war like this one, we get to operate with minimal restraint. Don't worry, we're going to protect your civil liberties the whole time. fundamentally, those reforms, whether they come rarely through Congress, more often through

the edict of a judge on this secret court known as the FISA court, they get whittled away. They get rendered toothless. They get ultimately into a position where they don't work as either intended or desired. That's my concern here. And to be clear, that is a fundamental problem with the way U.S. intelligence has become accustomed since 9-11 to operating, which is to say with impunity, with minimal oversight, and with a distinct lack of consequence for both, you know, institutional abuses and specific abuses.

So that's something that goes deeper than this bill, that this bill is also trying to redress and I hail its good faith efforts. Then the second problem kicks in. We are living through a renewed political climate of, of collective suspicion and hostility against Palestinians, Arabs generally, Muslims broadly, and their allies here in the United States. 702 is the mechanism because it concerns international collection and analysis of communications records, that all of these voices, both on the right and, frankly, emerging from the White House as well,

as they cast these same collective suspicions on Palestinians as being, you know, no more than mouthpieces for Hamas, by which collection on Americans here is going to occur for the purpose of seeking material support of terrorism charges. We have seen these calls go out since October 7th that against student activists, against financial infrastructure here in the United States, legal infrastructure to support Palestinians, their allies, and general dissenters from Israel's U.S. supported war on Gaza. 702 is going to be what they use to make those cases. This makes it an incredibly parlourous moment for the renewal, even with these restrictions

intended to being placed on it, of Section 702. This is really something that I think it's fair to say the history over 15 years being so consistent and this political environment now being so overwhelmingly reminiscent of the one right after 9-11 that I feel like we have to factor into the continuation of Section 702, the foreseeable abridgment of people's civil rights using this specific mechanism for this purpose. So earlier you mentioned that 702 was used to spy on Black Lives Matter. And what you're basically saying is that, A, you have no doubt that it is now being used in a similar way against, say, Palestinian students, and that you believe that even with these reforms, it would be

continued to be used in ways such as this. Now, the backers of the bill are people who have been deep in the trenches, both from an activist sense and also from a legislative sense, of crafting a bill that deals with the whittling away of the restrictions that I describe. I am confident that if there is any group that can craft legislation based around this particular surveillance concern, it's them. I cannot help from looking at this history worry that an aggressive cadre within the various legal portfolios inside the NSA, the director of national intelligence, the FBI, the Justice Department, will find creative loopholes here. We'll find ways of making language commodious enough to permit this sort of continued over-collection and

over-analysis. I think to some degree, we have to face facts that this history demonstrates that this is part of a culture of lawlessness within U.S. intelligence, specifically within U.S. surveillance, that passes itself off as compliance. That is no fault of this bill. That is the reality of the circumstance that I think 15 years of history requires us to recognize. Basically what you're saying is no matter how well or even perfectly crafted these reforms are, there are forces that will find ways around them. And we'll have opportunities to, even if they're not able to come up, you know, with sufficient creativity, those within 702 because they have another option.

So in 1981, Ronald Reagan put out an executive order known as 12-3-3-3-3-triple-3 has an extensive surveillance component that we still know very little about, but we know it involves mass surveillance, including on Americans. What the people in the surveillance reform community say, when I come to them with my concerns about this bill, is that if we let 702 die, they'll just put all of this stuff into 12 triple three, which has no congressional oversight over it and no FISA court oversight over it. I don't have a good answer to that. I would also say that if these reforms pass and the legal communities inside U.S. intelligence can't find good enough language around them, they also have the option of routing those powers into 12 triple three for those same reasons. So we are looking at a wicked problem of reforming the surveillance apparatus that involves something, A, much more large scale than just 702, and B, 702, you're just never going to have, because you don't know what conditions will apply in six years if the thing is renewed again.

A better option likely to finally make 702 go poof in a puff of legal smoke. Right. Last question. What does the Biden administration want? Do they want just a, you said earlier that the chances for a straight up and down renewal of 702 are remote. Is that what the Biden administration wants though? Did they just want a straight up renewal? Sure is. That's exactly what they want. They want no restrictions on this thing at all. They are backing U.S. intelligence to the hilt on this. The FBI is already using the scary prospect of Hamas

supporters possibly planning something violent in the United States as an excuse for renewing 702. It came out the day after my piece ran that that's the play that they're going to try in the Senate to attach 702 renewal to some bill that's, you know, a must pass before the expiration happens in December. I don't know if the House is going to pass that. So it may ultimately be that the White House, and this is certainly what the Civil Liberties Coalition wants, will have, you know, not really a viable option except to go through the bill of wide and his comrades. Well, so there's no daylight between a Democratic administration and a Republican administration

as far as how they stand on 702, which is just more of it for as long as America exists, basically. I have to say that, you know, one of the reasons that a straight, you know, renewal is imperiled is because of MAGA Republicans who have told themselves this story whereby, you know, Trump in January Sixers are persecuted by Section 702, but not the people who are actually. persecuted by Section 702. And that's created a political dynamic where they are more in line with surveillance reform than a Democratic White House is. What a world we live in. Spencer, thank you so much for being here and explaining all of this. It's fascinating as always. And everyone go read Forever

Wars on the ghost platform. It's just an indispensable tool for understanding the world around us. Spencer, thanks again. Thank you, Andy. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal for the very first time and hopefully not the last time. Her title on social media says Weaver and Storyteller. Deepa Ayer is at the Building Movement Project, is the author of the book We Are Builders, is the author of another book Social Change Now. And how Deepa caught my eye was via Instagram where I saw the book, this entire map ecosystem of what our roles are in building movements, in building community, when so many of us at this time are feeling helpless and in a lot of ways hopeless.

And Deepa, when I saw the map, I said, who did this? I said, who did this and where is this? because I had a series of accounts that I follow friends that I have that were all posting it. And that is how I was led back down the follow wormhole to your page. I want you to be able to give folks a 50,000 foot view into the building movement project and your work. Yes, Daniel, thank you so much for having me. It's really wonderful to be in conversation with you. I work at a national nonprofit organization that supports movements and nonprofits do social change work

more effectively and sustainably. And one of the resources that I created is this social change ecosystem framework, which, as you say, is a map, a visual map. But what it does is it invites us to think about what our values are and what roles we can play, both in moments of crisis and beyond, in order to be of service to our ecosystems, to our movements, to our neighborhoods, our campuses, our communities. And so that's what this framework is. And I think, as you say, it often resonates when there is a crisis because people are feeling overwhelmed. They're unsure about how to act. They don't know what to say. They don't know where to start. And so this framework is often a point of entry for both individuals and organizations. So let's talk about the different

roles. I don't know if you call them roles, if you call them titles, but I would really like for us to be able to kind of walk through them because I feel like for me, as somebody who has worked in different movements, the LGBTQ movement, social justice movements, racial justice movements, in all different formats. I think of the role that I have now in terms of storyteller, communicator, narrator in a way of the moment that we're living in. So can you just name out the different roles and just give us a quick like synopsis of what each of those are and then we can dig in more? Yeah, sure. So there are, as I mentioned, 10 roles. So I'll just maybe go through a few of them and then we can dig into them. The role of the visionary is really the person or organization that sees a North Star.

This is where we're going. They inspire us to get there. They can see the world as it should be. And visionaries are really important in this moment. I think they're the ones that are helping us to get out of the binaries and reductive thinking that often lead us to a standstill. And they do their work best when they're connected to another role, which is the role of the builder. And the builders are those who create the scaffolding between our reality and that North Star. So these are the folks who are putting together the programs, the events, the campaigns. They're organizing others to get involved in the like. Two other roles I'll mention are. disruptors and frontline responders that are connected because both of those rules are responding

oftentimes to some form of crisis in their community. So frontline responders are the ones who are making sure that when there's an emergency, they're on the ground responding, right? So that could mean they're organizing donations. We saw this in the pandemic. So many frontline responders getting groceries. And then disruptors are the ones who are getting into good trouble, like Representative John Lewis asked us to do, they oftentimes are the ones who are on the streets leading a protest, or they're somehow intervening and interrupting conversations, even between family members and friends to say, you know, there's another way to think about this. And then healers and caregivers are two other roles in the ecosystem. They both are really focused on creating communities of joy and care and support. So caregivers often, often are rendered invisible many times, but they're so important in our ecosystem. They could be the ones who are making sure that the frontline responders have food and water and nourishment as they go out on the streets. Or the healers are the ones who are thinking about how do we actually

process trauma in our communities? What are ways of restorative justice or healing circles that we need to put into place? So I'll pause there. But that's how these roles act in service to shared values, but also how they actually complement each other as well. I'm curious as to how that kind of ecosystem and this layered approach that is centered around, like you said, shared values, shared goals came about. Because I feel that in a lot of ways, we've seen this and maybe not named in the same way, but we understood what people were doing, let's say during the civil rights era, that you did have these spokespeople, you did have the people that were, you know,

that were church leaders. You did have the people that were on the ground that were putting literally their bodies in between themselves and police. The young people, the students sitting at lunch counters, like everyone had a role in that way. And then we kind of fast forward. There are so many movements and so many things that have happened in between those 60 years and now. But you fast forward into, let's say, a Black Lives Matter, which has more so had been formed in a more decentralized, more online, and then activated in a physical space. So can you talk about the creation of these layered roles, the shared values, and what you might have learned from past and then present movements? I really appreciate that question. You're absolutely right.

Movements have always existed in solidarity with one another, in connection with one another, because otherwise they can't really succeed or build power. I think that oftentimes, though, many of the roles were not named. They were not articulated. They were not expressed or seen. And so it somehow makes us feel like folks are working in silos, disconnected from each other. Right. And so I think thinking about it as an ecosystem tells a different story, the reality of the story, really, that folks were all working together in concert at times, but they were taking on different roles in order to serve the same purpose, but just finding different rules. And when they work together, when they were not in silos, when they connected with each other,

they advanced their goals a lot faster, a lot more effectively, and they could actually see some structural change. Because that's really what this framework is for. It's not just like, oh, I'm a weaver. It's about, well, how are you weaving in order to create structural change or to bring about justice or to bring about an equitable situation in your school or in your community? And I've used this framework actually with my son, you know, who's like 13 years old, but I use this for him to even learn about the civil rights movement. And so he would map out like the different figures we would read about so that he could see that this was a large ecosystem.

And included the student disruptors at the sit-ins in Jackson, Mississippi, right? It included visionaries like Martin Luther King Jr. It included even healers that we may not even know about or caregivers. It helps us understand that in every movement, that people and organizations do play valuable roles in order to advance the larger goals of that ecosystem. And I think that what is important, and you know, we say this in so many different ways, in the naming of the thing, in whether you are naming the obstacle that you were trying to move past or you are naming your role and your work in trying to move past that obstacle, the naming of the thing is really important. because I think that it does center us in a way that then moves us out of a siloed way of thinking. I feel right now, Deepa, in the place that we find ourselves in the United States, and I'm just going to focus on the U.S. right now, the place that we find ourselves in the United States

over the past, close to a decade now, eight years we're getting ready to turn into 2024, has been a place of deep friction, strife, tribalism, misinformation, which is so much, what I think is the most dangerous thing, which is hopelessness and helplessness. And I want you to speak on the people that you come across, movement leaders get burned out. People that are in nonprofits that are working on, whether it is abortion or LGBTQ rights or trans rights or, you know, health care or climate change, they are working on an issue normally that is also personally affecting them. So there's no arm's length between the work that they're doing

and the life that they're living. And then for those people that are even outside of that, that are trying to figure out, well, what do I do? Everything just feels so bad. Everything is just awful. What do you offer to both those people, the ones that are in it and can get burnt out because this is what their actual labor is day and day out?

and then those that are on the outside, but feel like they are so helpless, which cedes the ground for hopelessness, which cedes the ground for non-action, because I'm just one person. So for the first group of folks that you talked about, and this is so real, we see nonprofit and movement leaders not just burning out, but having disastrous health consequences, moving through so many personal issues because this work is hard and it's not resourced well. and it is almost always in a cycle of crisis. And so it often feels like you're on this really hot stove in a pressure cooker. And I've certainly felt that way.

Most of my work was actually born out of the 9-11 attacks and the backlash that occurred afterwards. And for years, I was a frontline responder. But one of the ways this framework, I think, can help us is to actually ask the question of sustainability. And the questions that I often ask movement leaders when they're using this framework is to say, if you have been playing one role for, say, 10, 15 years and you are exhausted, then how about thinking of playing another role in this particular context? You don't have to leave

the movement. You don't have to leave the issues that you love and care about. And as you say, your labor and your work and yourself are intertwined, right? So oftentimes when we feel exhausted, we feel like we just have to quit and move on. But this framework offers us an opportunity to do a reset. So even for myself, I've tried really hard to move out of the frontline responder role and instead, say, be a guide where I support other frontline responders or to be a storyteller. To say this is what happened in the first 15 years after 9-11 and the war on terror. And how is that different or the same today, right, in this moment? So those are ways in which we still stay in the ecosystem, but we have a little bit more strength and vitality and energy because we're playing a different role. And then for those folks who are overwhelmed, who are on the seesaw of like numbness and outrage, don't know how to step in, I think this framework also allows them a point of entry to think about, you know, what are my lived experiences, what are my skill sets and how can I use them in order to advance the wider goals of an ecosystem? And that does get to this piece, as you say, on hopelessness. That's real. But I've seen, say, you know, young people actually use this framework to say, I have these skills. I can make things, right? I can create films. I can create graphics. And so in that way, I'm going to be a builder to support a campus organization. Or I've seen folks who are able to do the weaving, which means connecting the through lines between different issues. So they are ready to facilitate conversation. rather than be on the front lines or disrupt.

So there are lots of ways that folks can plug in, but I think the important thing is a level of self-awareness and also to understand and be connected to a broader ecosystem. And that could be an organization, a volunteer group, a nonprofit, it could be your mutual aid association, right? It could be your professional association, some sort of ecosystem where you have some alignment with, and then ask the bigger question,

When I come in with my skillsets and with my perspectives, how can I actually advance some change through this ecosystem? So those are ways in which folks can use the framework on both those counts. And what I love, too, about this, I mean, there are just so many things that I love and that I'm drawn to. But it's also this idea where people who listen to my shows, they believe that they need to marinate in misery by watching cable news 24. hours a day, seven days a week, that they need to know every single statistic, every single bad thing

that's happening because that's how they show their care. And what I say to folks on this show and on others is that that is the quickest way to lose your mind. Like that's the quickest way to tap out. I continue to say that by being able to, yes, dip your toe in, be aware, you know, access different entry points of news and understanding of what is happening. Don't just go to one outlet, go to several, don't just, you know, listen to what is being said by U.S. corporate media. Go to global media outlets so that you have a kind of 360 view. That being said, your role could be about putting more art, more light, more joy, and more beauty into a world that is feeling really dark. Absolutely. And I think that those are some of the ways we just get so mired and then we end up

getting paralyzed and don't know where to turn. And I think even in this moment, right, when we're looking at what is happening in Gaza, there are ways that people are stepping up and showing up. They're doing that by really getting clear on their values. You know, when we talk about peace or empathy, there's no bounds to that, right? We can hold space for all suffering. And then we can also recognize that what is happening in Gaza right now that many scholars have said is a genocide. And so how do we actually get engaged to stop that? That can feel super overwhelming if you're one person. But if you're connected to an organization or a network, then you can start to say, okay, maybe what I can do is actually provide care as a caregiver to my friends who are

Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim, checking in on them, or even to care for the mosque or synagogue that's in my neighborhood to make sure that they're doing okay right now, right? Or I could be a disruptor and actually join a march like the National March on Washington that's coming up over the weekend in November or other marchers all around the country to say how I feel and to join a larger movement. Or I could actually be a weaver and make these connections about how war and militarism in all parts of the world ends up actually creating displaced peoples and harming people. And I could write about that or learn about that and talk about.

that. So there are lots of ways that folks are plugging in right now, especially in right relationship with values of peace and empathy and justice and understanding they're part of this broader network, because if we watch the news, like you say, or if we're doom scrolling on X, it really does feel like it's too big. But I think that even a small step in right relationship with roles and values can move us forward and make us feel hopeful. I just want to say again, Deepa, that I'm so grateful that I discovered that I was like the explorer that discovered your page and your work because it has really helped shift how I am speaking about this moment, how I am offering to audience members like where they can tap in and where they

are also free to tap out. And so I just deeply appreciate what it is that you are doing, that you are working on, that the organization is working on. And again, I want to say to folks, the books are, we are the builders as well as social change now. And Deepa, tell people where they can find you and learn more about the organization and how to connect. Yeah. So building movement project at building movement.org. And you can find more information about the map and the framework at social change map.com. And hopefully you can follow. me on Instagram and X off of Danielle's pages. Amazing. Dipa, thank you so much for the work that you're doing. Thank you so much for making

the time for the new abnormal. And I hope that you'll join us again soon. It was my pleasure. Thank you for all that you're doing, Danielle. Andy Levy? Maraquint. Who is your fuck-that-guy of today? Well, thank you so much for asking. My fuck-that-guy for today is a guy named Jacob Chansley. You may know him better as the Qanonan Shaman, which doesn't quite rhyme, but looks like it does, so it's a visual rhyme. Obviously, one of the guys involved in the little hostile takeover of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, he enjoyed his time in the Capitol so much that apparently he wants to go back there and he is considering running for Congress from Arizona on the libertarian ticket. So you would think that my

fuck, that guy would be him, which, and you would be mostly right. But I also want to point out that the chair of the Libertarian National Committee, Angela McArdle, here's what she had to say upon hearing the very exciting to her news that the QAnon Shaman wants to run as a libertarian. She said, quote, it should be no surprise that the infamous QAnon Shaman is looking to run for Congress as a libertarian instead of Republican. The GOP has clearly abandoned the people who rallied for Trump and Bolivia. the consequences. The Libertarian Party is a home for any and all who have experienced aggression and injustice at the whim of the state, which is every living American. I read that and I thought, I get to say this as a former libertarian, these people are

fucking nuts. And they always were. And even when I was a libertarian, I kind of knew that. And most people, like most libertarians had nothing to do with the Libertarian Party because it was more of a philosophy and the party was always sort of goofy and whatever. But they're not, they're not even goofy anymore. Like, I really would love for them to go back to goofy. Because all they are now is sort of, you know, it's maga on creatine or something. And the idea that this guy who led a, I don't, call it a riot, call it an interruption, I don't even care what you call it, that this guy has experienced aggression and

injustice at the whim of the state. The guy fucking broke the law on video. There was nothing at the whim of it. the state about this. And also seems to me he was kind of the one, yes, he experienced aggression as the aggressor. Sure. But I don't think that's what she means. So I'm adding her to my list here. And I'm making Jacob Chansley, who belongs obviously nowhere in Congress and her, Angela McArdle, I am making them co-fuck-that guys for today, Marr. That's wonderful. They both deserve it very much. And I think the second edition was very, very important and clean.

Look, I hope they'll be very happy together. They should be in Arizona, which is another place that makes sense. So Mara, close us out. Who's your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is Mike Johnson. Have you heard of him? It sounds familiar. It's a very common name, though.

It is. Isn't that interesting? It's a common name. You don't necessarily remember it. He is, apparently, I've heard the speaker of the house. But I mean, we don't know who this guy. Like, nobody knows. Like, oh, yes, Mike Johnson.

He came from this district. He represented these people. Like, he's a ghost. He doesn't really exist. They picked the most nondescript person with the most nondescript name ever. And they made him speaker of the house. And I find that kind of terrifying. He's pushing right now his proposal to avoid the shutdown.

But it is a laddered proposal, which means that, like, there's funding that runs out at different times. A clean proposal, it would just be like, we are going to fund everything until this date. This one's like, oh, okay, some of it to hear and some of it will do a little bit longer. And the reason, generally speaking, that you get these laddered proposals is because you don't have a strong body of support behind you. So if you have to like scramble and be like, will you support me if I say this part, though, then you end up with these like laddered things. So even his caucus is like, they don't even really like him. which normally when you're a new speaker, you should like, you get this like grace period where they all go like, ah, you know, like, okay, we've bought you. We'll use you. Like, it's like gym membership, right? Like, oh, okay. Like I signed up. I'll use it for a month or so before I start going. You get a free training session. Exactly. And you're like, okay, sure. I'm behind it. They're not even like given that. It's like they like begrudgingly signed up. And then when I'm not, I'm not going though. It is raining outside and no. Like, that's how little support he has. And at the same time, the one thing he did pass was this

funding aid, the aid package to Israel. He passed that through his caucus. And he passed it because what he did was attach pay for, the supposed pay for to it, where he cuts IRS funding. The IRS funding that was solely designated to going to recoup the taxes that rich tax dodgers have been avoiding. So it doesn't actually raise any money to recoup that. It's, costs us money to take back that IRS funding. But that's what he attached to it. That was the thing that his party really, really liked. And that's what they were able to pass. So he very like this nondescript, unliked person, the only thing he's been able to do is protect rich people. That's it. That's absolutely it. And I know that they are going to use him as this like ghost vessel to just

continue to like absolutely make the wealthy as wealthy as possible by trying to pass through additional tax cuts, additional, you know, recouping of funds that the rest of us need, and trying specifically just to help major corporations. And they're going to play off the fact that no one knows who this guy is. No one can even picture him. His name is out of your head the moment you've heard it. And for that reason, I want us to remember that Mike Johnson sucks. He's awful.

Oh, fuck that guy. Okay, but who is your fuck that guy? I'm going to come up with one, okay? Just give me a little more time. Okay. I need a name, though. Did you ever mention his name? I don't think so.

Did I? You know, you know the one, the guy that they just, they, the, oh, it's, my brain is getting clouded. Matt, it's Mark something, I think. That, Mick, maybe, I don't know. Mark Jacobs? No, that's the fashion guy. He seems bad, too. We can move to that, I'm sure.

I fucked that guy, too. Yeah. 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 thedailybeast.com slash podcasts.

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