The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump’s Troubles With Women Are Just Beginning

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

Melania Trump’s recent revelation that she supports abortion rights—in clear opposition to her husband’s own positions on the issue—may have shocked some, but The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moodie wasn’t surprised or moved by the admission. Then, senior political reporter at Rolling Stone—and former Daily Beast reporter—Asawin Suebsaeng joins the program to discuss his most recent piece, “‘American Death Squads’: Inside Trump’s Push to Make Police More Violent.” Plus! A conversation with Katya Schwenk, a reporter at The Lever, about her recent story, “The Toxic Loophole Behind a Chemical Plant Disaster.” 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. Rolling Stone's senior politics reporter Aswin Tsumasag stops by to talk his recent piece co-authored by Tim Dickinson, American Death Squads, inside Trump's push to make police more violent. Then Katia Schwake, who's a journalist for The Lever, joins us to tell us all about her recent piece, the toxic loophole behind a chemical plant disaster, which is a deep dive on how the recent bio lab chemical fire was a long time coming thanks to chemical industry lobbyists. But first, let's have some fun.

Danielle, before we start, just a quick shout out to the people in the path of Hurricane Milton, mostly down in Florida and Mexico, and just hope everyone stays as safe as possible and as dry as possible. It looks like another huge, nasty one, not even a week after Helene. I mean, it's just absolutely nuts and just hope everyone is safe down there. So we occasionally, Danielle, you may know this. We sometimes talk about Donald Trump on this podcast. Yes, against my desires, but sure.

And usually it's about something he's, you know, said or done. And, you know, we don't want to break the streak. The nine-year streak. Yeah. Yes, yes. Yes. So Donald Trump is a big believer in genes. I don't mean Levi's.

I mean, talking about good genes and bad genes, he's done this a lot. Steve Benin over at MSNBC.com has a pretty good compilation of it. You know, in 2020, he told a Minnesotan crowd, you have good genes, you know that, right? A lot of it is about the genes. Isn't it? Don't you believe? The racehorse theory. I think it's safe to say that that crowd was mostly white and of European slash Nordic descent.

And the resource theory, of course, is the idea that. that much like with racehorses, some human beings are just born with genetic superiority to others. And there's a ton of other examples of this. Up to and including this past weekend, when Trump went on the Hugh Hewitt show, Hugh Hewitt for people who don't know, used to be a at least moderately respected conservative radio host. He has since gone full MAGA and is one of the biggest hacks in the business. So unsurprisingly, Donald Trump went on his radio show.

And one of the things that Trump said is that you can tell whether migrants are predisposed to committing murder by their genes. And he said, quote, we've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. Just for the record, this is Nazi shit. I was telling, Danielle, before we started recording, I now have a browser tab in Chrome that is labeled Nazi shit that is just filled with, you know, links to stories about things that Donald Trump and other MAGA people are saying. and I really don't like that I have a tab labeled Nazi shit, but here we are. So anyway, Danielle, isn't it interesting that he tells a white crowd of Nordic descent that they have good genes and then talks about migrants coming from our geographic South, talks about them as having bad genes?

I mean, it's wild to me that anyone that had anything to do with birthing Eric and Donald Trump Jr. would talk anything about genes and how good they are, when in fact, I think a case should be. opened to see the stupidity gene. Nonetheless, Donald Trump is a racist. And like, I, I don't know how many times that we have to say that, I don't know how many times that things can be racially tinged before they're fully died. But the reality is, is that this isn't just Nazi speak. Donald Trump, I'm just going to go out on a limb and say is a full-blown white supremacist. He doesn't just hang out with them and dine with them and, like, invite them to his rallies. And he's just at 70-something years old.

just influenced by the wrong white supremacist crowd, like these are his fucking people. So for him to say these things out loud and continue to say these things and continue to poll at the numbers that he does just make me feel a lot of despair and grief about the state of America, where 40% of the population is cheering Donald Trump on,

hopes that he wins, so that he can begin what will only be some type of, full-blown genocide that will happen in the United States. I don't know what else we want to say about it. When you were talking in such disgraceful, disgusting terms about immigrants, whether they are legal or not, because this is the new thing, is that before, it was all about illegal immigration. And now, when you're fact-checked, as J.D. Vance was on the debate stage, when you're told that the immigrants of Haitian descent that are in Springfield, Ohio are here legally, then you start saying, well, I'm just getting rid of everybody. And who are the quote unquote everybody that they want to get rid of? Everyone that is black and brown

and is not of that stock of gene that has blue eyes and blonde fucking hair. My feeling is that Donald Trump continues to go on these tirades and continues to echo these sentiments to rousing applause and gets treated with front page coverage of his plans and treated like a normal candidate. And he continues because he can. Because it's only a handful of folks that are actually calling this shit out and saying what the truth is. But the likes of New York Times, Washington Post, and others continue to treat Donald Trump as if he is not aspiring to be the 21st century's Hitler and giving him fanfare and

fluff coverage. I don't know what else to say. And I feel like everything just falls at this point on non-listening ears because it's been a decade of this kind of bullshit. Yeah, I mean, two things. One, Danielle, the rules were that you weren't going to fact check. Right. I'm sorry, yeah, apologies. So please. And the second one is, no, I know what you're saying about people not listening and not hearing. I just do want to make it clear that you are, of course, not talking about our listeners. No, of course not. As we've said, studies have shown, are some of the smartest, the most attractive people on planet Earth. It's so hard to know even, like, where to start, because what he's proposing or what he's philosophizing about is eugenics, which has been as widely

debunked and disgraced as possible. And yet somehow these absolute losers on the right, And as you say, they're mostly white supremacists. Want very desperately to believe that because of the color of their skin or their ancestry that they are somehow superior. It's bad enough when it's some total loser on Reddit or whatever, Twitter. But this is the guy who may well be president again in a month. This whole thing of race science is just, it couldn't be more disgusting. So meanwhile, this didn't quite make it into my Nazi shit tab, Daniel. But it's still pretty bad.

J.D. Vance has come out and said over the weekend that if elected Trump would seek to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. I suppose this is not much of a surprise, but I don't know if Trump has actually come out and said that lately. Vance used the disinformational rhetoric that the right loves to do on abortion. He said, we don't think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions, as if that's what Planned Parenthood does. Mm-hmm.

They appear to be trying, on the one hand, so hard to resonate with women voters because of any demographic group in the country, they do by far the worst with women, particularly women of color. But even for white people, the split between men supporting Trump and women supporting Trump is pretty big. And yet they can't help but shoot themselves in the foot constantly when they talk about in particular abortion or reproductive health in general. And I guess the only thing I can say is here we're go again. The reality is that there is nothing that they're going to be able to do that is going to quote unquote soften their stance on abortion. You have a chosen, a vice president who has called for a national abortion ban on a number of occasions. You have a former president of the United States that appointed three conservative mogified judges so that you could overturn Roe v. Wade. You have been on video, audio, any type of recording where you said, that women should be punished and criminalized for having abortions. You at one time love the idea of a abortion of a pregnancy registry.

And then when you find out that that's wildly unpopular, you pivot on that too. Their stance with women with people with uteruses sucks because nothing that they are offering shows that they trust women, care about women, or want to do a damn thing for women, other than bring them back to the 19th century and force them into a place where you have no choice but to, I guess, drop out of the workplace because now you're pregnant and you have no recourse. And so you're stuck into like hell, essentially, hell. That's what they want for women. And, you know, just to add on to that, they also don't want you to be able to get a divorce.

If you're in a bad, unhealthy marriage, J.D. Vance has said that on a number of occasions. you shouldn't be able to change your spouses like you do your socks. He says that as he literally stands next to a man that was married three different fucking times with five kids by three different women. So I'm so disgusted that anyone with a working brain in their head would fall for any of the lies and two steps that they're trying to do right now with regard to women and reproductive health care. because the fact is this isn't just about abortion.

It is about economic freedom and the ability to create a path for yourself. And that begins with the very fundamentals of being able to control your fucking body. So the idea that we even have these conversations and we just talk about it separate from economic freedom and power is crazy to me. But like, I don't know who they are fooling, you know, except for the white women like, Lauren, Lumer, who are happy being the Republicans handmaidens. But putting out Melania, for instance, last week to tell people that like she believes in abortion, let me say this in unequivocal terms, I don't give a fuck about what Melania thinks.

I don't care. Because guess what? If her husband gave a damn about what she thought, then he wouldn't have moved to overturn abortion. So what she showed the rest of the world is that she has no power and no sense. So bravo, Melania. I hope that those that are buying your books and I'm certain that it's your husband that will buy them to show how amazing it is that people give a damn about what's inside that little head of yours. I don't care.

And I would like Melania's jacket, you know, so that I can wear it as a billboard so people can understand that when it comes to her, her thoughts or their two-step on abortion, people know very clearly I don't care. I want to draw people's attention to something that the Republicans have been doing now for a little while. They're trying to be cutesy with language and claiming that, as Trump has said recently, that he would not support a federal abortion ban. The way they're being cutesy about this is they are in favor of, at least some of them are, what they're calling national minimum standards. Let me explain what that means. National minimum standards might mean no abortions after six weeks, or it might mean no abortions after 15 weeks. And then they can say, see, we're not for a ban. And no, you are for a ban. You're just for a ban at a certain point. Six weeks, to pick the most ridiculous example, is a time frame at which a woman might even not know she's pregnant or have just discovered, like, literally that week that she's pregnant. So it's a de facto. band and even 15 weeks. All of these are bands, and they're trying to be really, really cutesy about this. I want to be clear, I'm not the first to point this out. Adam Serwer is written about it.

Jessica Valenti's written about it. But it's something that I think is, even though others have written and talked about it, it's a little bit under the radar. And it's something to look out for. And it's also interesting to note that they're not calling for a minimum standard that would say, say that there are exceptions for rape or incest or for the life of the woman. You really do get a sense of what they exactly want from a quote unquote minimum standard, and that is to take away the rights of women. So I just think that's important to note in all of this discussion about abortion and reproductive freedom. They have no desire for women to have any type of power in this country. They don't want black people and people of color to have any type of

of power. They don't want queer people to have any type of power. They want white supremacist Christian nationalism and a theocracy to be what governs people in this country. And if you fall out of line, then you will be punished. That is the kind of country that these people want. And in many ways, in many states, they're up and running. I continue to say that you do not have to wait until 2025 for Project 2025 to be operationalized. Just go to Florida, just go to Alabama, just go to Texas. And you can see how it is playing out right now, right? With like dumpsters filled with books in Florida that they have banned and gotten rid of. You look at this and I don't know what else people need to see, but I guess they need to see their own rights and

their own lives turned upside down to a point where there is absolutely no recourse. Because that is exactly what will happen if Donald Trump becomes president again. There will be no recourse. There will be no other election. There will be no, oh, let us go out into the streets and protests and then will change their minds. No, it won't. It will be done. Half of this country are people with uteruses. And yet you have women that are being interviewed that say, I don't care if I lose my right to vote. I believe in Donald Trump and what he says and stands for. So like there's no convincing those people that they are literally giving over their bodies, their power, their like right to freedom to white supremac and think that like they're going to be the ones

that are okay. Good luck. Yeah. Meanwhile, in an amazing example of Donald Trump keeping it classy, the British newspaper The Guardian got hold of some tape from a dinner where Trump spoke back in August in Aspen, Colorado. It was a fundraiser. And he talked a lot about his favorite topic, immigrants and how awful they are. Except for the ones he marries. Right, exactly. well, except for the white ones. He told his usual lies and talked about 22 murderers coming here from the Congo because the Congo sent them here, which is just completely not true. But in addition to all of that, he also told a story about the widow of the man who was killed at the rally where the dude attended to assassinate Trump. And this was a firefighter named Corey Comparatore. Trump told a story at this dinner. about how members of Mar-Lago asked to make a contribution to Comparatore's family,

and they gave him a check for a million dollars. He decided to say that when he gave the check to Helen Comptoratori, she said, quote, this is so nice and I appreciate it, but I'd much rather have my husband. And he followed that up by saying, now I know some of the women in this room wouldn't say the same. Oh, my God. Which, I mean, look,

if you're a comedian on stage at the comedy seller, okay, make that joke. You know, it's in bad taste, but comedians are allowed to be in bad taste. Again, this is the Republican nominee for president. And he is sitting there, and he followed, he said, I know at least four couples. There are four couples. Governor Abbott that I know, and you're not one of them. At least four couples here would have been thrilled, actually. Apparently the line killed, because on the tape, there's a lot of laughter when he says it.

The woman's husband is dead. Yeah. I mean, these people are so depraved. I need a bigger thesaurus. I don't know what else you call that. That is not a joke that anyone should make. Her husband is dead. Yeah.

Oh, my God. Okay. Last week on The New Abnormal, we talked about Donald Trump saying he wanted one real rough, nasty, and violent day during which law enforcement would be able to do pretty much whatever it wanted. In a piece called American Death Squads, Inside a... Trump's push to make police more violent. Rolling Stone senior politics writers Aswin Soop sang and Tim Dickinson go into more depth about just what this would mean. Sadly, we were unable to get Tim. So joining me now is our consolation prize. Swin, thanks for being here. Always happy to be your

consolation prize, man. It's my bread and butter. I know, I know. Okay, so Swin, police in America already have this thing called qualified immunity, which basically protects them from lawsuits or any personal consequences related to their job unless they violate quote unquote clearly established law. It sure sounds like Trump doesn't think that's enough and wants to increase this qualified immunity to total impunity. And this isn't the first time he's talked like this, is it? Oh, no, absolutely not. He's been running on a campaign of pro-policeality since at least 2015 and 2016. It sounds a little bit hysterical, maybe to the layman when you put it in those terms, but if you analyze what he's been saying publicly since at least 2015 and what he did and

tried to do during his first administration, there's no way you can come to the reasonable objective conclusion that what he is for isn't a pro-police brutality platform. You were bringing up earlier very recently. He was campaigning for the presidency again by telling a large rally audience that he wants there to be a day in America that resembles the horror sci-fi franchise, the purge, except only for cop, so they can send a message to retail fees. He was talking specifically about retail theft. He wasn't even talking about let's try to have the cops do the purge so they can end murders in America.

No, he was talking about like stealing from stores, which is not great, but that's where his mind is at, even for these lower levels of crimes. Nobody dies, perhaps. So that sounds cartoonishly dark and weirdly violent, I think, to a lot of normal people, even people who don't like crime in their communities and think that maybe that wouldn't make things better. But the important thing about these moments, it's not just Trump riffing in public. It's not just him saying these things, which would be bad enough that he's been saying these things publicly as the leader of the Republican Party for almost a decade. Because when you say these things, it has real world effects. He's one of the most powerful people in the

world. It's not happening in a vacuum. But the point we want to get across with our reporting at Rolling Stone is that he's backing up this really dangerous, dark, ennicing rhetoric with actual federal policies. Like I said here, he tried to do a lot of this and did some of it when he was present the first time. His conversations with people who are in or almost certainly in his government in waiting if he is reelected, He's had these conversations about federal policy to try to give the police even more carte blanche to act as savagely and as violently as a guy like Donald Trump would want them to act. Yeah, I want to run through there because there's some examples of this that you have, that you and Tim have in the piece.

And I want to start with this one. You say that, or you're right with that when he was president, several ideas that Trump repeatedly bellowed about in the Oval Office included conducting mass executions and having U.S. police units kill scores of suspected drug dealers and criminals in urban areas in gunfights, with the cops then piling those corpses up on the street to send a grim message to gangs. It sounds like it's out of a movie, doesn't it? Yeah, it's unreal. Right. And it's not just his violent fantasies, which, yes, are fueled by a lot of errously violent elements of American pop culture.

These are things where it is basically explicitly influenced by his admiration for the drug war policies, of strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or Chinese terians in the way that they've handled street criminals or their drug problems. These are things where he will say both privately and publicly that the way he, if he were emperor of the United States, would want to conduct the American drug war on American streets if he could get away with it. And again, I want to emphasize again how much that is influenced by his admiration for fucking Rodrigo Duterte, which is something that even

some of the heaviest hitters in his own Republican Party have at least pretended to condemn over the years as like a blatant violation of the most basic human rights that we know about. Yeah, another thing you wrote was that Trump's vision for a far more savage standard of American policing is fundamental to understanding his deeply authoritarian policy proposals that have been throttling the U.S. political landscape in society for nearly a decade now. You know, I read that and I thought, well, that was spot on was my first thought. My second thought was Tim must have written that part, but that's not important right now. But in all seriousness, I think y'all are dead on there.

Like, this really is the essence of authoritarianism. And it's the heart of his authoritarianist Ben, isn't it? Yeah. And it's treated, I think, by a lot of the public, the media, and the political landscape as kind of something, I don't know if to shrug off is the right word, but it's definitely not emphasized or front load as a lot of the other stuff because I think there has been a bit of a permission structure with those sorts of things because unlike other things in federal policy, Trump isn't overseeing every single police department or the NYPD or LAPD American Society.

So there's kind of this idea that, oh, he's just mouthing off. He saw something in a dirty, hairy movie. So this is like lower on the pecking order to worry about. Well, there are several substantive things that we get at the piece, including how Trump's Department of Justice function the first time around and how he wants it to function the second time, around. Well, I think that's a little bit of a flawed premise, even though he's not a literal police chief in an urban area or a small town. But in terms of why I think it's a mistake to shrug it off is because his desire for the American police forces to be as militarized as possible

and to crack as many skulls of his real and perceived enemies, including anti-Trump protesters as possible, is absolutely core to understanding the brist, and rampant authoritarianism of the modern day Trumpified and Mogified Republican Party. You have no better example, in my opinion, even when you're counting all the immigration horror show stuff, all the weaponizing the Department of Justice against your enemy stuff, to me personally, in understanding the DNA of where we all are right now, in this breaking of the American systems, in this like coming to a head's moment that we have with the 2024 presidential election, there is no better decoderate than examining how not just Trump, but the rest of the

mainstream of the national and states Republican parties, view what American policing should be. There's just nothing more fundamental, nothing more instructed to me than that. One thing that I want to be clear in our reporting, and we've done basically a series of these articles recently, and this was just the most recent one on this particular issue, is that we documented scenes of Trump in the Oval Office, getting reddening the face, banging his fists on the resolute desk in the Oval Office, demanding that the United States should have these things that his own administration officials would later privately refer to in their conversations with themselves and to us as quote unquote Trump's American Death Squad's idea.

So, I mean, that in itself is remarkable, in my opinion, it's bad that a former and potentially feature leader of the free world is thinking in that way. A lot of bad policy, whether directly related to American policing or not, can flow forth from that mentality. But the point we want to get across in this reporting is, okay, do we think the odds are constitutionally high that he gets the entire pie of that, that he gets to fool deterte? And that's only tens of thousands of corpses of suspected or confirmed American criminals are being piled up in the streets. And Donald Trump gets to grin about it all the way from the executive branch looking down on this new landscape of coinage that he's unleashed on America. Okay, no, I'm not sure I would put the chances of that

happening at 100%. And it's a little bit discomforting to me that I'm not giving you a flat-out answer of no, but that's where we are right now. But the point is he wants to get as close to that, as the courts, as the constitution that he wants to shred, and as Republican Party that basically lets him get away with everything, we'll let him get away. So we won't get as close to that as possible. And during the first semester, whatever you can say about Team Trump during the first four years, or maybe hopefully the only four years of a Donald Trump presidency, there were occasionally people here and there who would hear him bellow about these things and demand these big, brash, grotesque apologies changes, and kind of look at each other and be like,

eh, we don't really want to go to prison. Yeah, that sounds kind of illegal. Maybe we should just have a temper tantrum, and we can all move on from it. The entire design of crafting a second Trump administration from the top to the bottom has been explicitly to make sure that those people are not in significant places of influence to try to veer Donald Trump off those paths. He's going to be and said have all of those slots replaced with people who are going to enthusiastic and bloodlessly say to themselves, okay, we might not be able to get all the there, but how can we satisfy enough to get at least some of the way there? And that is the

problem. The authoritarian mission creep of a potential Donald Trump's second term, whether it has to do with American policing or anything else, is where the danger lies. It's not like America is going to become the fourth or fifth Reich overnight if Donald Trump gets reelected president. It's the slide towards magified authoritarianism that will feel, if it does happen, resoundingly normal to the vast majority of Americans. One of the things you wrote about in the piece was that a source with direct knowledge of the matter told you guys that since Trump accepted the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police last month, he's floated the idea of getting rid of internal affairs units in local police departments. And along the lines of what you were saying, my first thought was, well, he can't do that. And then my second thought was, first of all, it's bad enough that he even wants to do it. And second of all, sure, he probably can't do it across the country. But floating ideas like that sends a message to cops, saying you want one crazy, violent day with complete impunity for cops, sends a message to cops.

And there are a lot of states where the mayor and the police chief, et cetera, all down the line are MAGA Republicans. And they will jump at the chance to try to do these things, I would think. Absolutely. Like we were talking about earlier, these words, especially when they're coming from someone who could be president of the United States against someone who is currently the leader of the Republican Party. and a massive political movement, these things matter.

He is, he as that incredibly powerful person, is not just saying a thing or spouting off at a rally, giving you, in his view, and maybe even millions of other people's view, the permission to act as brutally as you would want to in your darkest heart of hearts. Exactly. And not only that, he and his team are backing it up with actual policy prescriptions.

We reported in the piece that one of the things that he and some of his closest ideological allies and advisors want to do if he gets back in there for a second term is to get serious with and solidify a policy that they toyed with in 2020, but did not actually get to fully execute, which was if your jurisdiction or this major city or place or whatever isn't being pro-cop enough for Donald Trump's desires or is being too politically correct in their policing or whatever dumb term they were used there, they are going to be. to withhold or stop flowing to your state big blocks of federal funding. Like that that is something that they toyed with and didn't fully consummate in 2020,

that they would like to start floating into place at the start of a second term. Any hint of accountability or DOJ investigations that you have of local police departments that are allegedly rampant or rife with racial bias or discrimination or police brutality or corruption, you can all those probes and then some to go away. Trump has already talked to some of the people close to them, that list of people he thinks deserve parties if they were police officers who were federally investigated or charged and convicted with some of these crimes or offenses. So when it comes to his rhetoric, there's the things I've just discussed with you and the other

bits of reporting we have in the piece, which goes to show that he and his people and so much of the Republican Party want to put the full weight of the federal government and executive branch and Department of Justice behind this cinematically dark, cartoonishly violent vision of what American policing should be both at the local and federal level. Yeah. And again, if you're a cop and Donald Trump is elected president again, and you are thinking to yourself for the, you know, next four years or whatever, whatever I do, the president's got my back. And again, And like you said, you can forget about any investigations that are going on now by the Justice Department are going to go away.

We also know there won't be when a cop does something. Under a second Trump term, there won't be any investigation. And if there are federal charges somehow and the person is found guilty, Trump will probably pardon them. And again, all this does is send messages to an officer out on the street that whatever I do, the president's got my back and I'm doing this and he supports me. and he wants me to be doing this. And I just, I really not sure I can think of anything more dangerous for this country.

It's why we're reporting on it as core to understanding where his head and the Republicans party's head is currently at when it's talking about how do we as in as ostentatiously and bloodthirsty away as possible punish our enemies and exculpate the offenders who just so happen to be our friends, whether it's a corrupt politician or a corrupt cop. And one other thing I want to leave your listeners with is one of the thing we got into in the reporting of the piece that we've been talking about is that in terms of going farther than he did during his first four years in office, there was this moment during the mid-2020 math protests against police brutality and racial injustice that obviously saw quite a good deal of riding

across the country, including in Washington, D.C., where the Trump White House reached out to the D.C. government to say that we're considering commandeering control of the D.C. police force, which is something that due to a quirk in laws is something that the president of the United States is actually allowed to do if he or she declares certain emergency situations, there are scenarios in which that a sitting president of the United States is allowed to turn the D.C. police into his or her own personal police force, basically. In conversations that he's had with close advisors, Trump has made clear to them that if he gets back in the White House and if there is a reason where he thinks that that needs to be done, whether it's more protesting or rioting or

a certain level of crime that he doesn't like in Washington, D.C., that he is willing to seize control or at least make a serious play for in a way that he did not in mid-2020 to make the D.C. police force basically Donald Trump's own personal plaything. So when I was saying earlier about how, like, these things really, really do matter, but it's not like he controls the LAPD directly or the NYPD directly. This is an example where he could have one day, an actual police force has his own personal goon squad or at least try to turn it into that. So that's something your listeners can feel comfortable about that if he gets reelected. Yeah. Swin, thanks as always for providing comfort to our listeners and to me personally. It pains me to say this, but it's always a pleasure

to have you on and good luck with the allergies, man. Thank you so much. It's nothing, if not mentally healthy. Every time I get to come on and talk to you about the dark and disturbing ways that this country might further degenerate. Convierre, your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has you heard of the best. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilitates the companies on your site web, in the networks, and in whatever,

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Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal. Katia Schwank, who is a reporter at The Lever, which has a really, just, I don't even know what to say about this story that you wrote.

I'm like gobsmacked. I'm out done. Folks, the title of the story is the toxic loophole behind a chemical plant disaster. So, Katia, let's start from the beginning. About what is it now, probably over a week ago, two weeks ago. In Atlanta, there is a fire that catches at a biolab facility in Conyers, Georgia. This happens on September 9th. And what I recall is seeing what looked like almost an atomic cloud over this facility that had now endangered and triggered an evacuation for 17,000 residents, but then warnings for 90,000 residents to shelter in place.

The cloud, like I say, is huge. It was like just this huge plume that according to the EPA was filled with chlorine. And what you're writing about is the fact that biolab, which has been working in this area since the 1970s, has had facilities in this area since the 1970s, has been able to maneuver around these huge loopholes that allow them to go unregulated. pick it up for me there. How is this plant allowed to operate in a residential area for that many decades and be unregulated by the EPA and by OSHA? How does that happen? Yeah, it's pretty shocking stuff once you start digging into it.

And what I'll say first is that, you know, this chemical fire, chemical accident that we saw last Sunday was not the first time that this has happened. you can look as far back as 2004, and you will see similar images of another cloud of chlorine gas that was sent into the air as the result of a chemical disaster at the same plant in Georgia. So this is a company and a facility that has a history of chemical disasters that have caused residents to evacuate. And yet despite that, as you said, for 20 years, for decades, as long as it's operated, this facility has not been subject to federal regulation. overseen by the EPA that are supposed to prevent chemical disasters, a law that was written to prevent chemical accidents, and this plant is not subject to those rules. And the reason why, as we learned,

is that there have been loopholes carved out of this law by the chemical industry, so that certain classes of chemicals, including what they're called reactive hazardous substances, that react with other substances, or in this case, reacted with water, to cause, you know, major chemical catastrophes are excluded from this law. And so when we, you know, when we saw this chemical accident last week, we began looking into it and found that, you know,

not only has this plant not been subject to these regulations that require them to create risk management plans and require them to report on what they're doing, but regulators, a watchdog agency has been warning about the same company, warning the EPA, warning the government that it is not subject to these rules. And again, the reason why has been a very powerful chemistry lobby that has been trying to exclude as many substances as possible from being covered by these regulations. Now, what is extraordinary about this? And one of the folks that you write about in here is a local resident. And her name is Christina Brown.

And you write about the fact that initially her and her husband and their two dogs, left their homes to go stay with family. But then Christina's husband needed to return to work. Now, the shelter in place notification was still in operation, but it didn't matter. He had to go to work. And what she's experiencing are headaches, irritated eyes, and body aches. And what has been said is that long-term,

chlorine exposure can be absolutely detrimental to your long-term health. So I guess one of the questions that I have is that if they are able biolabs to utilize loopholes not to be regulated, are the people, the residents that are then exposed to these chemicals that may develop long-term illness, do they have any recourse in terms of legal accountability against biolaps? Yeah, it's a good question. So what we saw back in 2004 after a very strikingly similar incident, as I mentioned at the Biolap facility in Georgia, residents, you know, experienced similar symptoms to what Christina and other people in Conyers have been, have told me and others about. And what happened in that case was that many residents in that town filed a class action lawsuit against Biolab and ultimately won a $7 million settlement, though it was after, I will say, after like six or seven years, fighting in court, fighting against the company, which did not want to give them a cent.

And there have been whispers that there's a class action, you know, a similar lawsuit going that might take shape after this latest disaster. even though there is that avenue for accountability, in a sense, it's hard to feel gratified by that, I think, for some residents who are still going to be suffering, you know, these consequences, which we don't even know what they could be yet, but are certainly experiencing acute symptoms right now. Whatever the path for accountability looks like, whether it's in court or whether it's, you know, changing the laws and regulations, it seems like it is going to be a long battle. I don't think that suing after the fact after you have already fallen ill is the kind of recourse that is needed and that we're looking for. Obviously, we're looking for regulations to be put in place so that the risk that residents have are mitigated.

But when you have an, I mean, you laid this out so well in your piece, these lobbying efforts by bio labs ran into the $15 million range. that's how much money they have spent to not be regulated. And, you know, what happens and what you detailed is that with each administration that comes through, that is a Democratic administration following a Republican administration, Republicans go in, they weaken, if not try and utterly gut the EPA, which is what the Trump administration tried to do. The Biden administration comes in, tries to strengthen the EPA, then you have the Supreme Court that works to gut the EPA again because of all of the MAGA judges that are sitting up at the Supreme Court. And who ends up losing in this political back and forth are the actual people that are harmed. And I would argue

that what you laid out in your piece and talk to me about this is that since the 1980s, when there were huge chemical disasters, spills and what have you, that were part of the form of for the EPA, there has been a steady weakening of the EPA over the last three to four decades. Yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean, conservatives and, you know, people with austerity politics, they, they have tried to gut the EPA at every turn. And so, yeah, you see this with this regulation, this law about chemical disasters and with like any other, you see this like really frustrating sort of back and forth, as you were saying, where, you know, the EPA, under a Democrat, under Obama, like proposed regulating some of these chemicals. And then they get this flood of industry backlash.

And before they can, you know, even try to come up with some kind of final law or rule, the Trump administration comes into office, totally guts the EPA. And at the same time that they are seeing court decisions from the Supreme Court that are, you know, completely changing what is defined as protected, you know, waters of the United States,

deregulating, fighting back against. the EPA's efforts to regulate, you know, methane emissions. So, I mean, it's just, I can't imagine what it is like for environmentalists in this fight. I mean, it really is, you know, one step forward, two steps back at every turn, it seems like. I think that what is most shocking, Katia, is that this has not received a lot of coverage. I understand that we live inside of a 24-hour news cycle where most stories are not covered for more than a day. It's just continually like chasing ambulance, then the next story breaks, and the next story breaks, and the next story breaks. But I find that there is a significant amount of harm that is done when we are not talking

about the ways that deregulation causes real life harm. We get caught up in the politics of the thing and got caught up, you know, with the Supreme Court, with the Trump administration, with the Biden administration trying to fight back. But then you have 90,000 people who are going to be subject to long-term health effects and potential defects that come down the road that are going to be left unexplained. No, we don't know how this happened. And I just wonder why you think that in this day and age, stories like this don't receive the type of treatment that they deserve. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is. It is so striking, right? Like you can have this literal giant, black cloud of toxic gas, send tens of thousands sheltering, spread all the way to the city of

Atlanta, the big city. And it's like a single day, you know, a single brief mention in the Washington Post and, you know, other sort of legacy news outlets. It's pretty crazy. But I think we've just gotten to this point where these kinds of disasters are happening with such frequency. It's just stunning. And that's something I learned as I was reporting the story is like how often these kinds of chemical disasters, you know, maybe not always at this scale. But, you know, there is a chemical accident at facilities that are unregulated by this EPA rule almost every other day, like more than 100 a year last year. So it's just, I think there's just this deluge of accidents. And I also think we have perhaps normalized this too much in that, you know, people just are not shocked by this. more and that's really a scary thing.

I think that that is what is really terrifying is just that this has just become so matter of fact, right? Like, oh, these things happen. Like, oh, you know, of course people have to shelter in place because of chemicals that are in the air that we don't actually know anything about. I mean, I go back to a couple of summers ago. I live in New York where we were told to stay indoors or wear masks outside. and this is when the sky turned yellow because of the down draft of the wildfires that were happening

in Canada that were hanging now over New York City. You have no idea. We say, oh, it's just, you know, it's a wildfire, it's trees, it's blah, blah, blah. No, it's not. Like, it was a whole bunch of shit that was being burnt, you know, and all of those toxic fumes are going into the air and you have no idea what the long-term ramifications are to be breathing that type of stuff in. What were some of the things that stood out to you as you were covering this that you hope people take away? Yeah. I think what you were saying earlier was really a big takeaway that like we talk a lot about the Supreme court. We talk a lot about deregulation. You know, we talk about right-wing interests coming into power. And yet sometimes there is just a lack of close attention to the actual practical

tangible impacts of this, like this chemical fire, which I think to me is like such a clear consequence of long, you know, long-term deregulation, erosion of environmental protections, lobbying by industry. And I think that's something we really need to be paying more attention and thinking about it and looking at how it's impacting communities. And you know, the other thing I'll say that I think is important with this story that I've had many people emphasize to me is that These kinds of chemical disasters, they are often occurring in, you know, black communities, Latino communities that are historically disinvested. And this is the case certainly here in Georgia.

You know, this is a majority black suburb of Atlanta. And so I think that we really need to keep that in mind that we are forgetting about these people and allowing this to happen to them. And I think that's another reason why we're not seeing the kind of coverage that I think this incident deserved. Many, many, many years ago, I worked in environmental justice, in the environmental justice space. And the things that I learned about the areas that were more likely to have high rates of asthma, more likely to have high rates of lead poisoning, more likely to have a lot of super fun zones and all of these things. And it was always, always black communities and communities of color that then would in turn have the,

long-term health issues like cancer that develop over time. It's really wild. It's incredibly disheartening. And I just appreciate you reporting on it in such a thorough way because otherwise, you know, if we're looking out to these legacy outlets to cover what is inequitable treatment, inequitable, like, we won't see it. We won't see it. And it's just like this is something that happened on September 29th, it is October 7th. And are these people out of the shelter in place warning? Is that still taking place right now? Yeah.

So the county has ended its shelter in place warning. That was sort of the most recent development, although they say they're still sort of monitoring air levels. But I mean, I think residents are still very concerned. The last time I spoke with Christina, a day or two ago, she said she was still trying to stay inside as much as possible. She was still experiencing symptoms, even when she did leave the house. I think now is a critical moment, right?

It would be easy to move on quickly from the story. And once we do, the people in Conyers are not going to be moving on. They're still going to be dealing the impacts of this. So, yeah, I mean, it will definitely be something we're going to be continuing to follow. And I'm glad to talk to you about it. Really appreciate you. Again, folks, the piece is up now at the lever. it is entitled The Toxic Loophol behind a Chemical Plant Disaster.

In the years before the catastrophic biolab chemical fire this week, chemical industry lobbyists fought to ensure disaster prevention rules didn't cover such facilities. Kachia, thank you so much for your work on this and for making time to join us on The New Abnormal. Really appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me, Danielle Moody. Andy Levy.

Danielle, it's another week. It's another week closer to the election. Go ahead and drop your fuck that guy. So here's the thing. You know, last week, Marjorie Taylor Green tweets something absolutely ridiculous where she alludes to the fact that they control the weather

and that to think anything otherwise would be, quote, ridiculous. Now, we know that Marjorie Taylor Green is a lunatic. and has said some of the most anti-Semitic things, some of the most racist things, and just plain, just stupid. But what is wild right now is that the Republican Party

is running with this idea that somehow, some way, the hurricane is manmade. And somehow, some way are filling the internet with deep fakes of, children on rafts holding pets and talking about how the Biden administration rescued Haitian migrants, but not American citizens and this, that, and the other thing. And it's getting to the point where so many Republican governors and mayors have come out to dispute these claims because guess what? Their actual constituents are hurting right now. Millions of people without power, without

water. And like we said at the top, there is yet another hurricane category five right now that is going to hit the Gulf and Tampa straight on. The idea that you would be flooding the internet with fakes and lies at a time of like deep tragedy and devastation just shows you that there will never be a bottom. Republicans just keep going to hell. And what I think, it's not even like they post these pictures and videos and they believe them. It's just to sow division and distrust in everything that you see. Because if you can't trust your own eyes, if you can't trust your own ears, then you begin to trust nothing and no one, which makes way for authoritarianism and dictatorships.

So that because you can't trust the institutions, you've eroded all. faith in them. So you put all of your faith in one grifting ass, lying ass individual. It's so sick. And I know that we laugh about the things that Marjorie Taylor Green thinks. But the fact is, is that when she told us several years ago that she was no longer the fringe, but the mainstream of the Republican Party, that is when every fucking siren should have gone off in all of our heads, in all of media everywhere and been like, wait, what? Because here we are. now and it's not a joke and these lies are going to cost people their lives and already have threatened so many people's lives as we've seen in Springfield Ohio so for that reason like this whole

distortion misinformation deep fakes and all of this bullshit that is happening around these hurricanes to all of the Republicans that are doing this just fuck those guys like people stop voting for these fucking people that don't give a damn about you. Yeah. I mean, this is so beyond disgusting. It's hard to know even where to start. And the thing is, as always, there are some of them, and by them, I mean, like Republicans in some position of power or authority, who tweet out this picture or retweet it, who

honestly believe it's real. And it's very clearly not real. If you look at it for more than half a second, there are like 8 million red flags that would tell you it's not real. but they can't be bothered. And then, of course, there are the ones who know it's not real and simply don't care. And Amy Kramer, who is with the Republican National Committee, she was one of the first to tweet it out. And then it got labeled as an AI picture.

And she followed up by saying, y'all, I don't know where this photo came from. And honestly, it doesn't matter. I'm leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now. No, it's making a mockery of the trauma and pain that. people are living through right now because it's fake and the people who are living through it right now are real. It's absolutely disgusting and then you see reply after reply saying, I don't care if it's AI, it's still accurate. It's like, no, it's the opposite of accurate. It's just this is the mindset of such a large amount of people in this country right now that

it's truly frightening. That as long as something helps with their political priors, they don't care if it's real or not. They literally don't care. You can tell them it's not real. You can show them. You can prove it's not real. And the response will be, I don't care. It's still accurate. All of this is being handed down by the top, by people like Stephen Miller, by people like Marjorie Taylor Green, by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance making up the claims about the eating of the pets. And even when they know it's not true, they simply don't care. Fuck all these people so much. So, Andy, how are you starting out the week with your fuck that guy? I'm going to go down to the state of Oklahoma and talk about a guy named Ryan Walters,

who is the state superintendent of public instruction, which in other states would be called the Department of Education. There's two parts of this story. The first is this guy is a nightmare. He is a total MAGA nut job. as an example, he appointed Chaya Ritchik, who is, aka. Lips of TikTok, to the State Library Advisory Committee. She lives in Los Angeles and doesn't have kids. But, you know, whatever. He has decided that we need Bible education in public schools.

And if you're thinking that he means the Bible should be taught as literature or as philosophy, first of all, no, you're not thinking that. And you are correct in not thinking that. He wants it taught in a religious manner. And he has said that, quote, every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom. Okay, so that's part one. Already, he cares not at all about pesky things like the Constitution or keeping his damn religion out of people's faces. He wants $3 million more, which will add to $3 million that's already been allocated.

So he wants $6 million in total to purchase King James Bibles for the state. So again, he wants taxpayer money, $6 million of it to purchase Bibles to be used in classrooms in the state. Again, Constitution doesn't care. Interestingly, this is what he specified the Bibles must be. It must only the King James version. Okay, there's tons of versions of the King James Bible. But then he goes on to say, it must include copies of the United States Pledge of Allegiance,

U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the U.S. Bill of Rights, things that are famously generally not in Bibles. And these Bibles must be bound in leather or leather-like material. Well, it turns out, Danielle, there's only one Bible that meets all of these ridiculous specifications. Let me guess. Do you want to guess? Mm-hmm. Does it rhyme with pump? It does rhyme with pump. It also rhymes with chump. Mm-hmm. It is the Trump endorsed God bless the USA Bible that he is selling for, I don't even know, 90 bucks or something like that. I guess there's also a second Bible called the We the People Bible that meets these specifications.

That one is endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. So what he's trying to do here is take $6 million of Oklahomans taxpayer money and give it to Donald Trump. Let me tell you how outrageous this is. Two dozen Oklahoma House Republicans have now signed a letter calling for Walters to be investigated. Now, imagine what you have to do as a MAGA conservative to get two dozen Oklahoma House Republicans to call for your investigation. That may be the most amazing part of this story, that he's gone even too far for a whole bunch of Oklahoma Republicans. So just to sum up, Ryan Walters is a grifter and a phony person of religion, and fuck that guy. I wonder what the kickback is for, that will end up in his account for the

purchasing of those Trump Bibles. Follow the money. Fuck those guys. I assume it's a cabinet position would be my guess. Welcome. 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.

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