The Daily Beast Podcast - Tucker Carlson Is Obsessed with Smearing Trans People

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

Writer and trans activist Parker Molloy joins host Andy Levy on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal pod to talk about Tucker Carlson’s awful obsession with making trans people look absolutely batshit—and the serious implications of that which are already happening around us. Plus! Molloy and Andy discuss the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to anti-trans legislation, why the right’s outrage with pronouns is “fake,” and the latest in the Elon Musk Twitter saga. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. And I'm producer Jesse Kennett, 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 great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal,

and we thank you so much for being here. Joining us now is Parker Malloy. She's a writer who has a great newsletter called The Present Age, which I highly recommend you subscribe to, and I want to note that I am a paid subscriber to this, so this is not an ad in any way, shape, or form. Parker, thanks for joining us. Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Now I'll send you over the money. No. This is not an ad. Suddenly you hear the cash out. app like register. Exactly, yeah. Oh, my Venmo's blowing up. Yeah. So I can't believe how much I could talk to you about, but let's start with sort of the midweek news that Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter is potentially back on. He's having maybe some issues with his finances, but it looks like it might be back on. Now, if I've read your tweets correctly, and maybe I haven't, so please tell me if I haven't,

you are not a fan of his or of this. No, not, not particularly. Not a fan of Elon Musk, not a fan of really any billionaire owning a giant communications platform like Twitter. That seems to be a recipe for disaster, especially when it's someone who might feel compelled to put his thumb on the scale a bit. Right. Like I've seen a bunch of people, you know, now saying, oh, well, Musk buying Twitter is good, actually. And I am absolutely positive that it's coincidental that most of them seem to be straight white cis men. Yeah, yeah. They're like, no, this will be great for, this will be great for Democrats in the midterms. And in 2024, I mean, it's cute that they think that that's the measure of whether something is good or bad is how the Democratic Party like performs. I mean, as if there's nothing more to the world than that. But I don't know. It's just those text messages that came out of him and his buddies, clearly having no clue how anything works, but just thrown ideas at the wall to see. that sticks, that's one of those things that's going to kind of stick with me for a bit. Like there was the person who was suggesting that a Blake Masters type be put in charge of

like enforcement of policies, which, you know, that's a little worrisome. Yeah, more than a little, maybe. Let's talk about Musk specifically and why, even if you were to concede that maybe there's a billionaire who it might be okay, you know, if they ran this platform. But Musk ain't that guy. So why? From the first mentions of Musk buying Twitter, there was a lot of this, you know, him saying, oh, I'm for free speech, which sounds great. Everyone loves free speech. You're not going to find someone who is anti-free speech. No one openly identifies themselves that way. Yeah, I just, I just hate conversation. But his description of what he's meant by that has

changed so much to where it's clear that it's not that he's necessarily pro free speech. He just, he'll say what kind of pops into his head. And he tweeted back in April. He said, by free speech, I simply mean that which matches the law. And that's one thing in the U.S. That which matches the law is a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that people probably do not want to see on their Twitter feed. Just generally. It's not a matter of you know, censoring, dissenting political viewpoints or anything like that. It's questioning whether you want to turn Twitter into 4chan, which I don't think most people want that. That's not what comes to their mind when they're thinking like free speech. They're more like, I should be able to

insult trans people. You know, like that's, that's kind of like what pops into people's heads, but not so much like, hey, I should be able to post like weird nude photos of people's bodies. being, you know, like, attacked and stuff, like, all of the stuff that happens on 4chan, which I used to have to read. I feel like anyone who has ever spent any time on any of the chance to, like, keep track of anything happening in the world, knows that this would be a terrible idea, because it gets bad. And if you have someone who's sympathetic to that sort of idea, that mindset, which he seems to,

He seems to kind of be in that, you know, that tech bro, libertarian kind of group. I posted something to my newsletter back in April about this where I went on 4chan that day. And I'm like, I'm just going to screenshot like four or five of the first posts that come up. And there was one that was just like someone wrote tap tap, ahem, excuse me. And then just wrote, I hate N words, like over and over and over. for like, you know, like two paragraphs. And I was thinking like, yeah, like I don't think, I don't think people want that on Twitter, but I guess we'll see. And then he was saying he wants to address the bot issue where he's saying, yeah, well, we should get rid of accounts that are,

that are bots. But I mean, bots are free speech too. People create bots for all sorts of fun, non-nefarious reasons. There are some great Twitter bots out there. Yeah, also, he's the kind of guy that anytime anyone says something negative about him, he just says, oh, the bots are out again. Yeah. His personal history of targeting people that he doesn't agree with, that in itself should be maybe a little worrisome. I mean, remember when the... The submarine? Yeah, that's a submarine. And the whole thing went on and on and he insisted that he had evidence that this guy was a pedophile. It seems unwise for him to be in charge of anything. this. But I think that one thing that's concerning, just overall, I mean, Twitter being a public company, a publicly traded company, is that there's more transparency. When you take Twitter private, there's much, much less transparency because they don't have to account to anyone other than

the few individuals who own it. So that is one thing that I think that people should just generally be a little concerned about, because it's not as though Twitter was ever especially forthcoming with data or explanations about anything or how it works. Yeah. And also, I mean, like, if we're being totally honest here, when you see someone who buys, like, a newspaper or becomes a big shareholder in a media company, you know, like John Malone over at CNN and Discovery and all that stuff, like he donated a bunch to Trump, people will go, well, well, why do you think that they would, they would ever try to try to, try to,

tilt that in their favor or to their advantage. And my thought is why wouldn't they? Of course. You know, I mean, if I'm someone who every year I'm a billionaire and I'm out cutting checks to politicians all over the place, why wouldn't I use what I own to try to achieve the same goal? I mean, that's just, it just makes sense and to pretend that people act otherwise generally is, seems naive. Yeah, and it feels to me like even if, you know, even if they start out with sort of a noble intention and they say, no, I'm buying this. I'm going to leave it just as it is. You know, I'm not going to put my finger on the scale or anything like that. It does feel like after a while, they sort of slide into the mindset of, wait a minute,

I own this. Why am I letting this stuff happen on there that I don't like? Yeah. And it happens on big and small levels here. I mean, you have Bezos in the Washington Post. You have, you know, Musk possibly with Twitter. At a local level, I'm in Chicago, and I can't remember the guy's name because he was one of the co-owners of the Chicago Reader, which is our like Alt Weekly here. And in like 2020, he had them publish an op-ed by him that was just straight up anti-vax stuff. And the people who worked at the reader were kind of frustrated by this because they didn't have a choice to push back on it. it became a whole ordeal, and he eventually sold his portion of it, and that was that. But at the same time, that sort of stuff is not, I don't think it's as uncommon as people want to

believe. Absolutely. And it's not necessarily that they'll go in there and they'll be that brazen, like that guy, where he's like run this op ed by me. But I think that when you start looking at who gets hired for certain positions to sort of carry out the vision for whatever these platforms or outlets end up being, they're going to move things in that direction, whether quickly or whether slowly. It's just something that will happen. If I was put in charge of hiring everyone at Twitter and I hired just a bunch of people who think exactly

like me and believe the same things as I do, then two years from now, I couldn't be shocked and surprised if Twitter ended up just looking like a place that's exactly like I would have made it because I put those people in charge. So yeah. All right. So let's move on to a larger topic. It feels very much like attacks on LGBTQ people are on the rise. And certainly it's out of control on places like Twitter, but also, as the kids say, IRL in real life. And there's not much doubt that the GOP has decided to basically embrace a rerun of the the gay panic of the 80s that some of us are unfortunately old enough to remember, and that all they've done is take the same playbook and keep it with gay people and then expand

it to trans people. That's certainly something that is absolutely going on right now. The recent inclusion of going back to kind of attacking gay people as well has to do with the fact that for the past few years, Republicans have been attacking trans people and trans rights kind of quietly in the background. And there wasn't a ton of pushback. There were some, but there wasn't a ton and they were getting away with it because you'd have Democrats who were like, oh, we want to fight this. But at the same time, we don't want to lose the diner vote or whatever. And they would do things like protest votes by just not showing up or something like that,

which I think that's how Democrats in North Carolina handled it in 2016. when they were passing that bill. And so a lot of this stuff would just be quietly implemented. And if it didn't get the big national backlash like North Carolina did, then you would have situations where they would go, cool, mission accomplished, now what? And in Florida, I think you're kind of seeing what the now what ends up being. It's the bill to really micromanage what kids can learn in school, what books can be allowed in school, and stuff along those lines that goes beyond.

just their previous sort of attacks on, you know, trans kids and trans rights generally, which, you know, I mean, it was in 2021 that Ron DeSantis signed a bill that made it illegal for trans students to use or to participate in school sports and then implemented something else that made it harder for them to access medical care and all of these other things that were kind of just happening below the radar. So of course, he kind of ups it with the so-called don't say gay bill, which just makes it really difficult for LGBTQ people to exist in public as teachers or as parents of students or as the students themselves. Sometimes there are some trans people who people don't know that they're trans when they see them.

and that's fine, but there are trans people who, for whatever reason, people are always going to see them and go, yeah, I can tell that that's a trans person. And both sorts of people should be allowed to exist and thrive in society. Otherwise, it's just a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for discrimination and it's going to hurt a lot of people. So that's something that I'm really worried about, especially as it concerns these attacks on what, people can learn in school because it kind of echoes the, I think it was the 2013 law that Russia implemented, the gay propaganda law that they put over there. And the whole idea of that was that it became illegal to put things out in public that exposed children to basically being gay or being trans and promoting it in any sense. And when you use language like promote, It's so vague that it's hard to tell what people are talking about. And so that was a horrible thing. And we've seen how that has affected them over there.

There have been all these reports that have come out about discrimination on the rise after that law passed. And it's similar to in the UK, you had Section 28, which was back in the 80s and up until, I think, 2000, where it was the same idea, where it was you cannot promote the. these lifestyles or you cannot promote being gay or trans, you know, as though you need to sell it to people. But those sorts of laws, they sound harmless enough. You know, it sounds harmless enough to be like, yeah, teachers shouldn't be teaching kids to be gay or be trans, which is how they're always framing these things, as though you can just like, I don't know, debate someone into being gay, which people will talk to me and try to make arguments about, you know,

why they don't think trans people are legitimate. And it's like, I'm trans. And I keep thinking to myself when these things happen. It's like, what do they expect me to do? Like, you win, good sir. I guess I am a man. Like, that's not going to happen. Oh, my God, you're right. Yeah. Oh, God. All this time. If only someone on the internet had yelled at me sooner. You know, like so these things worry me because they come with, I mean, they come with, I mean, they come with a body count. They come with some horrible, horrible things. And back in 2013, there was, there was this woman in the UK, her name was Lucy Meadows. She was a teacher. And after, you know, in Christmas 2012, she said, she told the school that she worked at.

She's like, hey, here's the thing. I realize that I'm trans. I'm going to transition. I hope that that's okay with you. You know, we can, if you want, we can move me to a different class or we can do, you know, whatever. And the school was like, no, we get you and we support you. And we're going to you know, we'll have your back. And so she comes out as trans and the school was like, I guess we should send students a note, which that seems like maybe the first mistake. So they sent a note to students to be like, B.T. Dubbs, your teacher is a woman now. And eventually that made it into the British press, which kind of freaked out about it. And then they started hounding this random, like, trans woman,

Right. Arguing that, oh, she shouldn't be a teacher. You shouldn't be around kids with this. And it's just, it's a way of existing, a way of being. And they hounded her and they kept going on and on and running stories about some random woman. And then in March 2013, she killed herself. So it's not good. And I wish that that would have been the moment where people would have gone, oh, wow, maybe we shouldn't

act like this. But that hasn't happened. And it seems to have only actually gotten worse. So now, you know, people will find weird and ridiculous examples they can use to try to make trans people look bad. Like Tucker Carlson was covering some story of a Canadian teacher a couple weeks ago who apparently came out as trans and wears like these big, goofy prosthetic breasts. Yeah, I saw that. Totally inappropriate way to dress for school or anything else. And obviously there is a way to argue that that shouldn't be, you know, allowed at the school based on, you know, dress codes or general sense of, you know, what should be, what should be appropriate in a school. And instead it was used to be like, look, these are what these trans weirdos are like and you shouldn't, they shouldn't have non-discrimination protections and, you know, stuff like that. That is just, it's so frustrating to watch because that is the only perspective that a lot of people are going to get.

The only trans person they're going to hear from is, well, they're not even going to hear from that trans person. They're going to hear from Tucker Carlson screaming about how this is leading to the end of society. Yeah, I'm of two minds here, and I guess we're getting close on time. But so I want to throw this out there and get your take on it. So when I say I'm up two minds here, part of me is like, I look at this stuff going on and it's depressing and it's terrifying. And I say that as a, you know, as a straight white cis guy who is not personally affected by this. And it's terrifying to me. So I can't even begin to imagine what it's like for someone who's, you know, not me.

But I've come to this conclusion that the reason this is terrifying is to me it does feel like this is the closest thing with all the horrible things going on on the right right now. this is the closest comparison to me to actual like nazism where it's just establishing a class of people and scapegoating them for all these ills or supposed ills in society and just and just completely you know basically doing everything but making them wear a gold star you shouldn't have to be trans and you shouldn't have to be gay to look at this and go this is fucking terrifying like this is not what this country is supposed to be. It scares the shit out of me. So funny, you should, you should kind of mention that because there was a story back in 2016

where a trans student is going to school in Wisconsin. And at the school told this, it was a transgender boy, told him, hey, you're not allowed to use the boy's restroom. You can use this separate one that is not the girl's restroom, which is like, it's one of things where it's just like it's certainly not an ideal accommodation, but it's better than forcing him to use the girls' restroom. What they did was they told him that he had to wear a bright green wristband so that the school could more easily monitor the restroom usage. And that was one of those things that after people saw that, the school was like, yeah, I guess maybe making the trans students

identify themselves with clothing is maybe not an ideal way to do this. But it kind of speaks to just how It's the mindset. Yeah. It's very dehumanizing. People will talk about, they're like, but what if someone isn't trans and they transition? It's like, well, then they can detransition. And obviously that's not ideal.

You don't want people just messing around with like their hormone levels willy-nilly. Like you don't. Of course. That's obviously not ideal for anyone of any age. Right. But at the same time, there is never any concern that people have for, okay, but what about what about the kids? who actually are trans?

Or what about the adults who are trans? Because they use discussion of kids as kind of a way into the conversation. Of course. They always have. Yeah. It's not as though they're like, hey, we just have a problem with like, you know, a few months ago, it was their big focus where they all pretended that they were just very, very interested in the integrity of women's sports.

They're like, no, no, no, no. We have nothing against trans people. We just want to make sure that the winner of the women's NCAA, whatever, is not trans. It's like, okay. But they're not proposing legislation that would codify, like, legal protections for trans people and employment and housing and public accommodations. No, like, they're not like, yeah, we will totally come and protect your rights for adults. We just have concerned about kids.

No, they're like, no, we're concerned about kids. Okay, can we pass this other bill that would help adults? Well, no. Right, of course. Yeah. So that is one aspect that worries me because trans people, we are a really small portion of the population. You know, I have no, it's hard to even say how small, but they're still, there's, there's

probably, every estimate I see is more than a million. And for a while, I was like, well, that's a lot of people. You know, if you demonize a million people and wipe them out, like, that's, that's bad, obviously. And then COVID comes and a million people die and people are like, shut up, open the dairy queen. You know? Right. Oh, no. Yeah.

But I do want to say, because I started that by saying I'm of two minds and that's the part where I'm terrified. And I've mentioned this before on the show. The point that maybe gives me some hope and some long-term optimism is, like I look at, I have two nieces. One is in her early 20s and one is in her late teens. And they are both like so comfortable with saying, you, And they'll just casually say, like, oh, I was out with my friend.

They're non-binary. I was out with my friend. They're genderqueer. And they're comfortable with that stuff in a way that, honestly, I probably never will be just casually because I didn't grow up with it. And I just, I love how casual they are about it and how it's just a big shrug. So that does give me some hope for the future that basically the kids are not going to put up with this. I hope that that's the case. because explaining this to kids is not actually difficult.

It's not. You know, when my wife and I first started dating back in, God, 2014, so when we first started dating, her niece was over at one point. And she saw me and she goes, is Parker a girl or a boy? And Kayla was like, Parker's a girl. And she goes, cool. And I was like, oh, why is she asking me? Why was she asking that?

And she just goes, oh, no, she asks everyone that because, like, she literally everyone she meets because she just doesn't know. And she's just cool with whatever you tell it, whatever answer you give, she's just like, cool, got it, noted, and moves on. Because, like, no one is saying, go up to kids and be like, so here, let me, let me show you a diagram of very intense and graphic, like, transition related surgeries. Like, no, no one's doing that. And, you know, but at the same time, all I think people want is to be able to exist as a member of society. No one says anyone has to like trans people. No one, you know, like if someone wants to hate on me, that's cool, whatever. Nothing has ever stopped them from doing it before.

Right. But at the same time, I think that there is a need for the right to actually, they have to step up and say, we understand these are people. We understand that they have a place in society as well. they have just as much a right to exist as any of us do, and we have to find a way to coexist. That means, hey, maybe stop calling in bomb threats to children's hospitals. Just, you know, maybe dial back the temperature a little bit on that sort of stuff.

But instead, there's a lot of weird defensiveness that comes up when this conversation happens. You know, when anyone says, well, it's actually not a huge deal to just kind of allow trans people to exist around us. well, yeah, what if they sneak under a door in a restroom? It's like, yeah, well, that's bad no matter who does it. I mean, these are not legitimate criticisms. It's just a way to justify existing feelings. And so that's something that I have some hope, as you were kind of saying, I have some hope that things will someday improve when younger generations realize that and, you know, when they're, when they're more influential. But until then, there's going to be a lot of these arguments where it's like, no, we need to hide, because they think if they hide that LGBT people exist, that maybe

the younger generation won't grow up to be that way. And, oh, well, maybe if we hide this from them or maybe if we highlight the weirdest stories that we can find about trans people to try to smear them all or the one that really gets to me is when people are like, there are too many genders. I can't figure it out there. Like 60 or 70 or 1,000. And the only thing they're basing that on is that Facebook like years ago was just like, huh, well, yeah, we want to, you know, here's our big data collection machine. You know, we're going to let people pick whatever they want to put in this little space and kind of go for it. And that was presented as some sort of like weird win for trans people when really it was

just like them finding a new way to collect more data from people. And, you know, everyone goes, I can't keep up with all these extra pronouns. Zer and Zim, it's like, I'm trans. I know a ton of trans people. And I know zero people who go by odd bespoke pronouns. Everyone I know is just he or she or they. and that's kind of it. Maybe I'm just boring,

but the fake concern about like having to learn, you know, a dozen new kinds of pronouns or whatever is obnoxious. Sure. I could talk to you for another hour. Thank you so much for joining us and hopefully we'll have you back again soon. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

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