The Daily Beast Podcast - What if Tucker Carlson Told the World He’d Been Vaccinated? w/ Oliver Darcy

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

Imagine if Fox News host Tucker Carlson went from “just asking questions” about the COVID-19 vaccine in primetime every night to showing a photo of himself taking the shot and telling his viewers to do the same. Would we be “looking at a very different country right now?” co-host Molly Jong-Fast asks on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Next on the show, David Wallace-Wells, a writer at New York magazine and the author of The Uninhabitable, Earth joins Molly to share his insight on the Delta variant and the extreme climate events we’ve been seeing recently. Finally, on the episode, Media Matters’ Angelo Carusone decodes the mystery of conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s “genius” weaponization of Facebook. It all comes down to three things, Carusone says money (Shapiro’s spent an eye-popping $11 MILLION this year so far), content, and some good old-fashioned cheating. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up day down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kennan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

We have a super fun episode today. New York Magazine's David Wallace Wells is going to talk to us about the Delta variant as well as climate change. Then we'll talk to Media Matters, Angelo Corrissone, about the oh, so shocking news that Ben Shapiro's media empire is astroturfed. But first, CNN's senior media reporter Oliver Darcy is going to talk to us about Fox News and the vaccines. Welcome to the new abnormal Oliver Darcy. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. Well, we are excited to have you. Let's talk about the weird Fox News vaccination.

I want to say about face, but it isn't really an about face. Right. It's definitely not an about face. It's like a PR campaign, if anything, I think. It's like a don't you dare say I'm an anti-vaxxer, anti-vaxxer. Yeah, and you know, it's actually, when I say PR campaign too, it's been pretty effective. Biden praised them last night. So, you know, the president is praising them over these, they're doing the bare minimum and earning praise from the White House. So it's working. Can you explain to me what the thinking that got Fox News down this anti-vax rabbit hole was?

I mean, like, how did this start? Because remember, like, if we're going to go back in time just for a second, Rupert Murdoch got vaccinated in December from the national health system. He did not hide I mean, he wasn't like Trump. He did it outright. How did we get from that to Tucker Carlson every night just asking questions? I kind of think that the Tucker Carlson thing is like always going to be the natural end. You know, because he was there, he was questioning masks and having Alex Berenson on. And so to me, like, I just when I saw his first like anti-vax segment, it just felt like the natural end to things. I've been, I guess, a little more surprised at some of Carlson's colleagues who have also adopted that similar rhetoric. And then you've seen that rhetoric bleed into, you know, other parts of Fox, which has been, to me, I guess, somewhat surprising. Maybe it shouldn't have been as surprising.

I guess I always anticipated Carlson to be the anti-vaxxer just because if you pay attention to him, that was just obvious. But the others, like someone like Kilmead or, you know, some of these other folks, I wasn't anticipating them. necessarily trafficking anti-vax rhetoric or at least anti-ante anti-ante anti-vax I think is that is that right anti-anti anti-vax. Exactly. Yeah, it's very clear. It strikes me that Fox News is just continually worried about that what drove them with the January 6th coverage with their, you know, shopping the big lie is the same thing that drives the anti-vax stuff, which is sort of a worry that they are going to get replaced by an OAN or Newsmax. It's tricky to figure out what motivates Fox.

There's no central tenant. Yeah, exactly. It's not like when Roger Ailes ran the place. And there was like a very particular message that was relayed across the network. And now it's like basically the shows operate autonomously. But I guess they all know what the viewers want. And it's been pretty clear, you know, for the past several months that the viewers, or at least a good portion of like the core viewers are skeptical of the vaccines,

and they just don't like Biden and the Biden administration. So I think those things, and you couple them together, kind of create this recipe for the anti-vaccine rhetoric that you hear on the channel. Yeah. I mean, you really study this more than the rest of us. So I'm curious to know if you think this is true or not. I feel like if Tucker Carlson went on TV tonight and was like, I got vaccinated, here's a picture of me getting vaccinated. You need to get vaccinated to go, go, go, that we could be

looking at a very different country right now. Do you think that's true or am I being overly? No, I think that's 100% true. I think if Tucker Carl, I mean, I think there are a few people right now who have the ability to really move the needle in terms of increasing vaccinations. I think that there are so many people who linger on what Tucker Carlson says. And if he were to go on air and say that they're safe, they're effective, they will save your life. It would, it would make a huge, huge, huge difference. And you have to also keep in mind that when Tucker Carlson says something, he kind of creates a market for that story. It's almost like he's like the new drudge in some way. Like when Drudge used to like have a narrative he preferred, there would be like

a market for a story that would fit into that narrative and he would drive the conversation. Tucker Carlson sort of does that on Fox. And so if he were to come out and, and, you know, say he's been vaccinated and all this, I think it would allow. others to jump on that bandwagon maybe and say that they too have been vaccinated, encourage their audiences to get vaccinated. I think that said, you know, that's never going to happen. Right. So we're in this reality where the pandemic in the U.S., you know, we could end it pretty much because we have plenty of vaccine, but there are forces like Carlson who are opposing it. And it's really not only sad, but it's just such a disservice to his

viewers. But it seems like the viewers don't put together that, that they're dying of a preventable virus. Yeah, I mean, I think they are legitimately his viewers. They have all different reasons for not wanting to be vaccinated. But I think a lot of them, you know, if you watch Kirk of Carlson, you think that people are dying after being vaccinated. You probably have, like, significant fear about being vaccinated. And then you go online and you see all these conspiracy theories and other, you know,

right-wing blogs that push this sort of rhetoric. And you can see how people are legitimately afraid. If you live in that ecosystem, you probably would be, you know, pretty afraid of the vaccine. So I think for them, they see COVID as a less of a risk almost than probably they think I might catch COVID or I can certainly get vaccinated and that could also create health risks. So I don't know. Right. It's just sort of amazing to me that we're at this point. It feels to me like that the conservatives' ability to sort of project has worked really well for them.

And what I mean is there's a lot of talk. Tucker Carlson is one of the main people who says stuff like this, but a lot of people like Ben Shapiro and all these people in the right wing ecosystem tend to say things like, you know, the news is biased against Republicans, everything is biased against us, we are the victims here, and then they have a very, you know, a very sort of well-oiled apparatus that is in fact biased against Democrats. Yeah, and it's not, it's not, it's only biased against Democrats. It's like, you know, it's a bias is not strong enough of a word, right? It's, it's a machine that aims to, like, destroy democracy. I mean, I don't know what the right way to say it is, but it's, yeah. It's not like they have, like, some sort of, like, you know, like tiny bias that they, you know, it's like their intention is to destroy the other side. You know, if you look at, like, Andrew Breitbart's old slogan, it was like, hashtag war. Like, for them, this is war and they aim to destroy.

So, yeah, I mean, I guess it's ironic. And nothing, I mean, there are liberal websites or whatever and nothing exists like this on the left. There's no left wing necessarily machine like there is on the right. And it seems like it's only really gotten stronger over the years, too. It's not like it's a weakening machine. It's like it's growing and growing and growing. Well, the thing I'm struck by is that it feels to me, and again, I could be wrong, that the lesson that these Republicans have got from Trumpism is to be just as disgusting as possible. So, like, you have people who would never have done this, U.S. senators, who are now no more than online trolls, right? Like, I mean, Ted Cruz is always sort of a little bit like this. But, I mean, to even be a Republican senator, you have to. like lean into these weird culture war stuff and you know you have endless lindsay graham tweets

about a chick filet i mean it just seems like they are just the lesson they've got from trump is that governing is totally unnecessary and it's much more important to fight with a fast food restaurant i think trump definitely cemented that with the base i think there was definitely some of that before trump like he said like ted cruz is one of those guys who kind of never seemed as in in governing as being popular and conservative media. And there are others like them. But you're right in that, like, it's now mainstream within the Republican Party. Like, it's very difficult to be a senator, a GOP senator, and not be playing ball with someone

like, you know, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or whoever may be. And so I think, I guess I just think that they know that their base is looking at them and watching these shows and listen to these. personalities more than they listen to them and they have to curry favor with them. So, uh, so they do it because, you know, politicians just want to stay in power. Do you think that there's a way in which this ever ends well? I mean, it just seems like it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse, not to be too neurotic here. Yeah, I thought about that. Like how does, I don't know like how does this, like in 20 years like where are we? I don't know.

Like, I'm hopeful that maybe people will be a little bit more news. And, you know, we are only just, what, like seven months out of the last administration. So maybe, you know, in three years, like, things will be a little different. But also, I could see, you know, I could see this going the opposite direction. And like I said, this right-wing media apparatus only appears to get stronger. And now they have no real guard rails on them anymore. Like, there used to be some guardrails on Fox. Right.

There didn't used to be like all this disinformation being poisoning the system the way it is today with the advent of like Facebook allowing for these things to go viral and spread before they can be fact checked. So I wish I could be more optimistic, but it seems like we're going, you know, down this dark tunnel and there's no real light at the end that I can see. Yeah. And it feels like the government is kind of over their skis regulation wise. Like, there isn't a way to regulate this that would solve the problem without messing up. Like, it would punish the wrong people. I don't really think this is a necessarily something that they can solve. But I will say it does feel, and up until, like, this past week, like, the White House, it seems like they don't really understand what they're up against a lot of times.

Misinformation about the vaccine has been going on for a long time. And all of a sudden now the White House is like, expressing concern and pressuring like Fox and or not Fox, or Facebook and I guess to some extent Fox like where have they been? Like it just seems that they don't really understand. They rather just kind of like ignore this and pretend like we're in the old school like age of politics versus figuring out a way to combat or address it. Like I don't know what that solution is,

but I know that doing nothing and pretending it doesn't exist is also not a very good solution. Thank you, Oliver Darcy. Please come back soon. I would love to. Thank you, Molly. Thank you. Hey, folks. If you haven't heard every single week, we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner. And sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening.

in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal.com. That's new abnormal. That's the daily beast.com. David Wallace Wells is a writer at New York Magazine and the author of the uninhabitable earth. Welcome back to New abnormal David Wallace Wells. It's great to be here. Thanks for having We have a lot to talk to you about what we've wanted first to talk to you about the Delta variant. Let's do it, yeah. So how bad could, not to read the title of your article to you, but how bad do you think you could get?

I'm sort of on the optimistic side of the spectrum on this question. You know, where I start is from the fact that 90% of American seniors have been fully vaccinated, according to the White House. And that means, given the age skew of the disease, that the vast majority of the country's overall mortality risk has been eliminated. I would say something north of 90%, maybe 95% of the total mortality risk has been just taken off the table by the vaccines. And so what we're likely to see is what we're seeing in the UK now, a really dramatic decoupling from between case numbers and ultimate deaths, because cases are circulating largely among people who are younger

and more resilient to the disease. And even in parts of the country, you know, we think of as being really vax resistant. I think the state with the lowest senior vaccination rate is Mississippi, which is 76 percent of its seniors have been fully vaccinated. You know, it's not to say that this isn't scary. There will be a lot of cases. People will get sick. People will get very sick. And some people will die. You know, I wish our vaccination rates were 100 percent. And I wish that we didn't have to live with that amount of continued spread and illness. And when you think about where we came from what it was six or nine months ago, just as a baseline, we're just in a much, much less risky place where, functionally speaking, the disease is something like 10% or 5% as

lethal at the national level as it was then. Can you go back to decoupling for a minute? Because that's a word I have read a lot of during this pandemic, and especially right now with the Delta and the vaccination rate. Can you explain what that means? It just means, you know, if we six or nine months ago saw X number of cases, we would know from that that we would, would see two or three weeks later X number of deaths. And now when we see that same number, X number of cases, we're likely to see one 20th of X number of deaths. It won't look the way it did a year ago. The graphs might look the same because the growth rates are similar, but the absolute number of deaths are just going to be a lot smaller. And there have been some great actual, some great

graphics that have been put out about the spread in the UK that show exactly this, which is to say comparing this current delta wave to the last wave that they had and showing that almost, there are still people who are dying. The fraction is just so much smaller. So let's just dig into this for a minute because I've seen anecdotally, what it seems like to me is that we are going to have to adjust to this idea that there will be, we as vaccinated people may get delta, but we will not have the same kind of tragic trajectory that we would have had a year ago without the vaccine? Yeah, you know, there is some debate about exactly how

severe this disease is as opposed to transmissible, this variant is as opposed to transmissible. I think most of the smartest people I've talked to think that it's at least right in the ballpark of the other variants that it's not dramatically more severe. But we're having a slightly misleading impression from the fact that it is transmissible, which means, you know, if it's three times as transmissible, then you're basically speeding up the spread of the disease in the story of the disease by a factor of three, which means that, you know, in a given month, you're likely to see the same number of cases,

hospitalizations, and deaths as you would in three months' time. And that doesn't actually mean that the disease itself is on a sort of per case or per individual basis works for you. It's just that we're sort of seeing a lot of it compressed timeline-wise, which is one reason I think we're seeing a lot of quite alarming and harrowing reporting out of hospitals right now, especially in parts of the country where Delta is raging. But on the individual level, you know, it seems as though, to begin with, none of these vaccines were tested against that transmission, which means we have somewhat limited data about exactly how much they protect you from getting the disease or from spreading it.

They were only tested at large scale before they were rolled out to protect against severe disease. And it seems as though they are all basically as effective against severe disease with the Delta variant as they were against the other cases, which means that if you were vaccinated, you are quite well protected against Delta as you were with all these other things, which is to say it's not impossible that you could get very sick and there have been some small number of deaths in vaccinated people. It's not totally impossible. That's what numbers like 95% mean or 94% mean. But it does mean that it's a remarkably effective vaccine judged by the standards of vaccine history

and will protect you by and large against the scary outcomes. It won't protect you perfectly against getting the disease, but it probably does reduce the amount of symptomatic disease, which means you're likely, if you do get it to not even notice. You could have any symptomatic case, yeah. Even if you get a symptomatic case, it's likely to be much milder than it would have been without the vaccine. Well, there is a higher level of breakthrough infections with the Delta, though. Yes, it's three times more transmissible, which means that you're likely to see more spread than you would with the other variants. That's true, yeah.

I agree. And I mean, I think we're continually adjusting to a new normal when it comes to the virus, talk to. me about the kids, because you wrote a piece, which I think is really important. And as someone who has three teenagers, I've really seen firsthand just how damaging. You know, I hate to say this because it is such a Republican talking point. But the truth is, the school lockdowns have been just unbelievably terrible for kids. I think that that's absolutely true. And we won't really know the full toll of that for years. And it's quite likely that the effects will be felt much more among the poor and disadvantage to sort of, you know, were able to swallow the difficulties

of the last year, much less easily. But, you know, I think it made sense last spring when we were really worrying about the spread of the disease to identify schools as a major transmission point and to think about shutting them down at least temporarily. Right. But it was wrong. Well, the logic then was different than it is now, which is to say that we weren't just worried about the well-being of the children themselves and their vulnerability to COVID. We were also worried because before vaccinations, you have this huge population of incredibly vulnerable people, especially the old, but also to a lesser extent, people with comorbidities. And every time there's a case transmission, it's one link in a chain that could lead

or unlikely will lead eventually to someone who is vulnerable and who may get very, very sick and die. And so we were thinking about cases back then because we knew that cases were going to lead to deaths, even if the first case in this instance, the case in the child, wasn't all that dangerous. because we're now living in a different world where we've essentially protected the most vulnerable population. And age skew is a much, much more dramatic driver of vulnerability than any of the other, you know, factors that we've talked about throughout the pandemic of class and race and even, you know, medical history, comorbidities, age is so much more important. And we've done a really good job nationally of protecting the elderly, which means that like I said earlier, that the lion's share of the country's mortality risk has now been eliminated. And that means that we can think a little more clearly about each individual case as a case of individual risk rather than as a case of social risk. And when you do that, you see really clearly that, you know, COVID is not nothing to kids.

There is some risk of severe disease. And certainly long COVID is a real problem. Is it not a real, but there is some long COVID in kids? Yes. It's, you know, long COVID, I think is a very unsettled scientific question. Right. And we don't really know. I mean, it's certainly real.

Some people certainly have it. But we don't really have a good grasp on the prevalence. Many of the most talked about studies about how common it is are from self-reported surveys. And oftentimes when those ratios get compared to the population at large, you can see that it's like people who haven't gotten COVID are also reporting fatigue and anxiety. And again, I don't want to say that it's not real. It is real. But I suspect that it's right. It's just statistically we don't, we can't really.

graded at this point. Yeah, there's some things that say it's 10%, others that say that it's five or one or even less. And, you know, I would just say it seems to me that the ones that suggest it's 30% or 50% of all cases are dramatically too high, that that would mean that we'd have today maybe 50 million Americans with debilitating chronic COVID. And that just doesn't seem to me to be the case at all. So, but, you know, it is a real thing. And it's a worry in children. There is some encouraging data on that front, which suggests that there is a correlation. It's not a rule, but there's a, there's a, there's a correlation. And these, you know, these, again, are just some studies that I wouldn't say that they're definitive, but they're suggestive, showing a real correlation between the severity of the

acute phase of the disease and the potentiality of long COVID, which means, while it may be possible to have a mild case, you're much likelier to have long COVID coming out of a severe case. And since kids are much less at risk of severe cases, that would suggest that it would be less prevalent in the juvenile population than in the adult population. And when you look at the raw numbers, especially, you know, for the big overall, like, top line mortality risk for kids, it's really, really small. You know, the CDC says officially that the risk to children of severe disease and death is lower than the flu. There are some numbers that actually make that comparison. You can sort of cut the numbers a few different ways, and you can cut them in ways that

make that comparison not exactly true, but it's at least in the ballpark of true. It's a disease of roughly that scale among children, and especially among pre-adolescent children. If your kids are five or seven or 11, chances are you weren't going to be taking them out of school for a year in the face of a devastating flu season. You weren't going to be insisting that they, you know, wear masks on the playground because there's some flu going around. Possibly, that's the sort of, you know, I wouldn't want to tell any parent how to parent their children. I have two young kids of my own. And it's not always easy to think rationally about this stuff. But looking at the numbers, probably that's the sort of protection that we want to be designing at a social level for our

children. Yeah. I mean, I just as someone anecdotally who has three teenagers, I've just seen, and they have been, and they're very lucky and privileged, and they have had a really terrible year. So I do see how hard this is for them. So let's talk about the climate catastrophe, because every day, it seems like there's a new, you've written about this so much, and me and you've been so clear on this, and I think so clear-eyed. It seems like every day there has been a different weather catastrophe, the kind of stuff that was forecasted for 2032, you know, not the kind of stuff. You know, we have Germany, you know, with these massive floods that look like they belong in, you know, a totally different. I mean, it's just so shocking to me. I mean, is it later than we think?

I think many climate scientists are looking at the heat events, the temperature events, the extreme weather events of the last few weeks, seeing them falling entirely outside the range that their models contain and worrying that the work that they've done in the past to predict the near future is inadequate to the changes that we're already seeing today. And that's really alarming. These are models that they're not simple models. They have these huge uncertainty ranges. They've got the fifth percentile outcome all the way to the 95th percentile outcome. They're really designed to include all possible futures, you know, not right at the median projection, but somewhere in that model, it's supposed to account for just about everything that could possibly. happen. And the fact that we're seeing right now in the present tense in 2021, a lot of stuff that doesn't fit in that range really suggests that, you know, we may be looking at a whole new horizon, a whole new landscape of possible futures that include many more harrowing events hitting us much more regularly than we expected, even those of us like me, who spent a lot of the last few years looking at a pretty grim end of the spectrum, it seems as though that, you know, that sort of alarming, alarmist point of view on climate. is much closer to the path we're on than most of us would like to admit. It is shocking to me, like the heat dome. I mean, it just, the fires, the smoke.

I mean, every day there's another climate catastrophe. Are we too late? The last two weeks we did, like, climate people, all climate stuff. And they said, you know, even one degree difference is the world, right? Like, if you can just keep the temperature from rising, you know, like the more you can just keep the temperature down, the more lives you save, the more planet you save. Are you of that school, or do you think that we're just in such a heading towards catastrophe so fast? There's nothing we can do.

Well, we are heading towards catastrophe so fast, but what kind of catastrophe we have is up to us. Yeah, so, I mean, basically I share the view of those previous guests. And just to give a sense of the scale, you know, we're at, depending on what data set you look at 1.2, 1.3 degrees Celsius of 1. Some people say it's 1.4, but in that range. And, you know, that doesn't sound like very much, but it already puts us entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization, which means that everything we've ever known as a species

as a result of those climate conditions we've already left behind. So when you talk about a difference of one degree, that's the scale of difference you're talking about. You're talking about a difference that would remove the species and the planet from everything we have ever known. And so every degree that we go past where we are, now is that same scale of difference. It is the whole scale of human history from here. That's really quite alarming. Now, you know, I've, I think that where we're almost inevitably heading,

which is probably later this century, like two and a half degrees, maybe a little bit less than that. If we got really lucky, we could maybe keep it to two. That's a really, really grim future. But it looks a lot better than the future path that, you know, it looked like we were on temperature-wise, emissions-wise, a few years ago when people thought that something like four or four-and-a-half was a sort of, quote-unquote, business-as-usual trajectory. But what worries me, you know, to return to the first question you asked about these, about that is all those numbers I just mentioned are our median projections. Each of them also have huge uncertainty ranges. And if we are doing quote-unquote well in bending the emissions curve, which I think, you know,

we're probably not yet, but it looks like we're about to enter into a phase in which we we do start to cut emissions so much dramatically. We could still end up at like a at a future point where we've done remarkably well and say landed at an emissions level that we once thought was going to give us two or two and a half degrees of warming. But it turns out that our models were not quite sensitive enough and the climate was more sensitive and that same level of emissions give us four. You know, that's totally possible. Yeah, that looks more likely it feels like. You know, the scientists I've spoken to say that at the moment they're more focused on reconsidering climate modeling of particular events than on the big question of total temperature rise.

So like the Pacific heat dome was like, you know, a crazy off the charts event. But they're not saying that we now need to rethink how we do the whole global model. It's just we need to rethink how we do extreme heat models in particular regions. Right. But that's not ultimately that reassuring. Well, it's a little reassuring. Little reassuring. Yeah.

Question I have for you, because I have all these children and I want them to be able to live, I often wonder about the sort of Hail Marys. Like, I'm in New Mexico, and I was talking to someone who works at the labs, the Las Alamos Labs, and she was saying that there are some, I mean, she was saying we're completely fucked, but she should say there's some kind of interesting Hail Mary climate stuff coming out of Israel. Coming out of Israel, you mean about water? Right, and then also they've solved their water problem. I mean, are you seeing stuff like that?

Well, there's sort of two separate questions in one there. The first is when we talk about all these climate impacts, you know, that really is only half of the story. The human response and how we adapt and how we change is fully half of the story. And when we talk about, you know, these unprecedented droughts we're likely to see crazy wildfires, smoke conditions, which I think are about, you know, sort of more alarming than anything else because of the health impacts that they can have. They're really truly terrifying. But over the course of decades, we will adjust to those. impacts. That's not to say that we will figure out ways to avoid them entirely. I don't think we will. I think the challenges are too big for that. But we also can't imagine a future in which we simply take the world that we have today and impose on it, you know, a climate apocalypse and think that those two things give us the way that we're going to be living 30 or 40 years. Like, we will be changing too. So Israel is a great example about, you know, water. They've solved their water problem, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's some issues with like racial and justice about that. Yeah, no, no, I mean, I am in no way saying that Israel has, but I'm just saying this one issue with the desalinizing the water is working.

Yeah, that's one thing they're doing. They're also really great at cleaning the water, the wastewater that they have so that, you know, in the U.S., I don't remember the exact figures, but it's something like we're capable of, you know, recovering something like 10% of our wastewater and we're using it. And for a long time, American scientists have thought that that was something close to the ceiling of what was possible. And in Israel, it's something like 85%. Like, you know, and I think a lot of that is, you know, especially in wealthy countries will become a way, a part of the way that we live. We're going to, all of us going to be living with more air filters, you know, especially in places like, you know, California and the rest of the American West, which will be kind of choked in smoke for many months of the year, probably going forward. Jesus Christ. And, you know, we're probably going to build a seawall to enclose New York Harbor at some point.

Right. To protect all the real estate. I know that seems inevitable. The seawall seems like. Yeah, totally. And, you know, at a more local level, there will be communities that do what seem like less. intrusive efforts to protect their coasts with, you know, expanding wetlands and marshlands out into the water. There is a lot of things we can do. I do think in general, the climate community,

the climate movement has sort of under-discussed the question of adaptation, which is this whole set of things. It may end up being even a bigger project than the project of decarbonization. That's how large it could be. Well, it's going to have to be because otherwise you give up. Totally. And, you know, some things that we even talk about as really grim climate futures, say human migration are in a sense a form of adaptation too. If we have hundreds of millions of people fleeing South Asia and the Middle East because of extreme heat, for instance, in trout, you know, or at least moving from where they used to live. We have that. We have that to a lesser

degree, yeah. Yeah. You know, and that's tragic in a certain way. It's a lot of people leaving their ancestral homelands. You know, there's a lot of heritage that's being lost. And those people are, especially if they migrate internationally, are going to face a lot of pressure and backlash. On the other hand, from a sort of human mortality perspective, it's a success story if that happens because they will be leaving a place of intense risk to one of much less risk. So that's like on the adaptation side of things. And I think that there is a lot that we're going to do. And a lot of it is already being done. There's also sort of the moonshot technologies for decarbonization.

Yes. Can we talk about that for two seconds? Because that gets me excited. Yeah. There's a lot that could be done. The problem is our timelines are really short, which means when you think about, you know, it takes. took the internet 30 years to penetrate the globe in a really pervasive way. And that is not a technology that requires, you know, the building of huge pipelines and massive solar farms and,

you know, industrial plants to suck carbon out of the sky. It's a much less resource intense rollout. And it still took us like a few decades. Or even to think about like the smartphone, it still hasn't reached global penetration. Right. And we tend to suck at infrastructure as we have seen over the last, you know, a couple years. Like, Americans do not excel at building infrastructure, which is what this is. Americans in particular, yeah. But it's also just, it's hard even in places where they don't have nearly the obstacles that we have here. It's still just hard to build really heavy-duty infrastructure. It's complicated. It, you know, it alienates people close by. And my own perspective is basically like, we need to be running as hard as we can with the technology that we

have today, namely wind and solar, which are not just working. They are. cheaper than dirty energy in order to clean up the parts of the emissions, the carbon emissions pie that we today know how to clean up and which actually represent the majority of emissions, which is to say power and transportation. We also have to make sure that Exxon is held responsible and that people know. I mean, they're one of the main reasons why we're in this situation right now. Well, I mean, I can't argue with you about the villainy of oil companies. And I would say as a soft counterpoint that many of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world are state-owned. They're not private enterprise. And so, you know, you're talking also about a lot of state actors as well,

yeah. Yeah. But, you know, to get back to the moonshot technology stuff, you know, we have machines that suck carbon out of the air. They work. They're expensive. It costs more to take carbon out of the air than it would be to sort of avoid doing it in the first place. But we can do that. It costs about $100 a ton, these, you know, large-scale direct air capture machines. And just to give you a sense of exactly how expensive that is. It's a little bit of a misleading comparison, but the IMF estimates that counting the environmental impacts of carbon emissions, along with direct subsidies, that globally we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business by $5.5 trillion a year, we could run enough direct air capture machines at $100 a ton to suck all of the carbon we're creating today out of the atmosphere,

meaning that we could run that same complete industry that we do today and transport the same way, everything the same way and not add any more emissions to the total for less than $5.5 trillion a year. So we're subsidizing the fossil fuel business more than it would cost to run these machines. Now, it's not nearly as simple as that because in order to run those machines, even at a scale to decarbonize just the hardest to decarbonize sectors, which is to say heavy industry and jet fuel, which is a slice, a tiny slice of the problem, would require something like a third or half of today's global energy production. And it would mean building these plantations of machines all across the world.

And then finding away a place to bury the carbon once we've captured it, you know, all told it's been estimated, even just that not doing this at a scale that would make up for our cars or our factories or our electricity or anything like that. Just the tiniest sliver of hard-to-de-carbonize emissions would require building out a new infrastructure, something like two to four times the size of today's oil and gas business. And, of course, there's no market for captured carbon yet at the moment.

So nobody would be paying for it. David, this was fascinating. No, happy to talk and good to catch up. Hope we talk again soon. Angelo Curasoni is the president of Media Matters. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Angelo. Thanks for having me. We're very excited to have you.

We really wanted to talk to you about everyone's favorite, Mr. Ben Shapiro. Oh, God. So Ben Shapiro is sort of the genius at weaponizing Facebook. And I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah, I absolutely can. Although, I mean, I'll point out one thing at the top, which may or may not make people feel better. But yeah, I think there's a little bit of cleverness and genius and creativity there. The other thing is, and we shouldn't discount this, is money.

Yeah. It really helps. Explain that to us because I didn't know that. One of the things that I find really interesting about Facebook. So obviously, people, it's just for context. I mean, Ben Shapiro really dominates Facebook these days. Yes. He's like eight out of.

every 10. That's right. Yeah. It's crazy. I mean, there's a measurable chunk of all Facebook engagement that is directly or indirectly connected through Ben Shapiro. Like he, he's big enough now that it influences their algorithm just in terms of how much, you know, how much reach and engagement that they get. So that's just the first thing at the top is genuinely how significant of Facebook engagement Ben Shapiro actually is. And so it actually is a threat, right? Because he's a massive misinformer and also extreme. The part that I was saying, saying is not all genius. It's that, you know, the dirty secret is that it's not really all organic. Ben Shapiro spends money as if he's a presidential candidate on Facebook. That's, I mean,

in all seriousness, he really does. Can you explain that to us? Yeah. And I think this part gets a little bit lost because Facebook doesn't have transparency. Yeah. Really? I'm shocked. Yeah. So just to give, uh, so he just, it's crazy. So one of the things that Facebook has is, a political ad tool. So it's like, you know, if you run ads that are marked as political, they show up, you know, you can actually like see the ads. And it shows that Ben Shapiro spent like a million dollars or something on ads. Like, okay, well, he spent like a million dollars so far on ads. That's a good chunk of money. But yeah. But that doesn't actually tell the whole picture because what Facebook defines as political

is actually a very narrow lane. In fact, Ben Shapiro spent over $11 million dollars so far this year. What? 11 million. $11 million. First of all, how is it? is he so rich? And second of all, what? So I have no idea where Ben Shapiro is getting all this money from. $11 million is a lot of money to burn on Facebook ads. And to be clear, it's not like he's selling a product in these ads. You know, if he was selling Ben Shapiro or hats or something, you could assume a certain amount of that money you're going to make back. A lot of these things

are promoting what are, what Facebook defines as culture ideas. And therefore, they don't show up in their political ad tools. So he spent $11 million this year? So far. So far. And here's why that matters. Because the way Facebook's algorithm works when you're distributing information is that, you know, you're only as good as your last piece of content. So if, you make, if you make a Facebook post and it gets really good engagement, the next thing you get will give really, you know, we'll get good engagement to start. You know, Facebook will sort of give it a head start. And then, because they decide how many people to distribute the content to. So if you have 100 followers, for example, on Facebook and you post something, they may show

it to five of those 100. And depending on how that performs is how they decide to distribute it to more. So if you're a creator like Shapiro, your goal is always to keep your engagement really high because that means that you will start at a higher place. And so one of the dirty secrets about Ben Shapiro's Facebook performance is that he's buying it. Most of the ads they buy are actually promoted posts. So there really is a genuine pay-to-play component to this, which is that he is so artificially inflating the engagement on a whole range of his content that Facebook is rewarding that investment by giving everything else that he posts

a head start. Wow. Yep. How does he have so much money? He really shouldn't have that much money. It makes absolutely no sense. I mean, I guess that he, you know, they, I mean, look, right-wing billionaires are obviously fun media publications because they see the investments on and the return on investment. That's always been the case, right? I mean, that started in the 90s and it's continued. They'll run these things at a loss because the goal is the politics. So. Right. Like the Washington Free Beacon. That's right. You know, there's no, there's no shortage of right-wing money that they're willing to incinerate, especially when you're promoting, you know, preventing women from having abortions and being mean to gay people.

Right, right. That's kind of their raison. That's right. Yeah. Ben Shapiro, in all seriousness, for quite some time, I haven't checked this year, so I won't speak to this year. But up until, you know, every year for the past few years, Ben Shapiro has actually been the single most influential voice on reproductive health in the United States of America if you measure it by reaching engagement and influence on conversation. That is the worst thing I've ever heard. I know. I'm sorry. I have wanted. Ben Shapiro has no place in any of our uteruses. Like, let me tell you. Talk about a person you don't want talking about reproductive health. I mean, that is madness.

Yeah. And that's it. But so the short of it is that, and I don't want to reduce it all down to money, but it really makes a big, big difference. Mediocre content that had $11 million of engagement money pumped into it for the first part of this year would be disproportionately out. performing even really good content on Facebook right now. That's the first thing. The second thing is the content itself is high valence. It's highly emotional. Most of what he is promoting is mean things about liberals. That helps because people react harshly to, that people react harshly to it. They like it. They engage with it. It makes them feel good. And so those two things together, both the nature of the content that he posts. And then the ads are the biggest influencers. And then there's one more. So he's paying for it. Then there's the content itself. And this is the third one. And this is the one that I find

the most oddly inexcusable. He cheats. I'm shocked. I am shocked that Ben Shapiro cheats. And here's, here's the cheat. If you're a Facebook creator. I mean, it's hard to say that he's a creator, but yes, continue. Yes. Right. I know. If you have any kind of a platform and you have a Facebook page associated with it, if you're, you know, you make your websites or whatever, what Facebook says is that you can have multiple Facebook pages, sure. But what you're not allowed to do is coordinate the activity in such a way to artificially juice or inflate or interact with the engagement. Right. There's all kinds of rules about how quickly your, if you have, so if you have multiple Facebook pages, there's all kinds of rules as to how quickly you can cross post something or engage with it,

because it effectively is spam. Right. Facebook has been very vigorous about using the anti-span rule against groups that fight for social justice, especially those that are fighting against police brutality in the past. They've enforced a lot of the anti-spam rules against them. Ben Shapiro has a network of Facebook pages that very dutifully break the rules every time they post a bunch of content so that it artificially tricks Facebook's algorithm into thinking it has more initial engagement than it should. And we flag this for Facebook. And we have the receipts. We've demonstrated how they break the rules, we pointed it out repeatedly. They have not enforced the rules, oddly, uh, against them. What? Yeah. Facebook is a bad actor. I know. Like knock me over with the feather.

That's it. That is the Ben Shapiroification of Facebook. It's, it's money and cheating. He cheats any money and cheating. I'm completely shocked that this guy is involved with money and cheating. Let's pull back for a minute as we talk about Facebook because the Biden administration has, I believe, rightfully so. I think they walked it back a little bit, but you saw last week Joe Biden gave a helicopter talk where he said Facebook is killing people. He was met with all sorts of how dare you use that kind of. But there is a real correlation between Facebook and anti-vaxing. Yes. I have read studies which say that when Facebook goes to a place, the anti-vax, you know, there's a drop-off in vaccinations. Can you talk about that? So there's an enormous.

a enormously strong relationship between the anti-vax community and Facebook. In fact, I think a lot of times people think about, they think about it from like a, like, almost too narrow, say, oh, there's one bad piece of anti-vax content. And it's on Facebook. And there's all kinds of fights about free speech and moderation and whatever. But that actually isn't how Facebook influences the conversation. Interesting. The way that Facebook really influences the conversation about vaccines and other things is

actually through their recommendation engine. specifically on joining groups. Yeah. And so one of the things we saw last year is that anti-vax groups on Facebook had the second highest growth rates on the platform, 7 to 11%. Kewa not had the most at 24%. Yes. Oh, good. I'm glad to see that we're... But the reason that you blame Facebook for that is this.

Their own internal studies show that 60 to 70% of all signups to pages and groups come from Facebook recommending it to people. So what matters is if you're on Facebook, that's right. If you're on Facebook and you're somebody that Facebook has identified as being potential mark. Exactly. They will promote those pages to you. And that to me, so what they're actually doing isn't just giving you or allowing one piece of content to be on their platform. It's worse than that.

It's actually that they're organizing. And they're helping connect people to things that they otherwise would not be connected to or would have a much higher barrier to entry in order to find it. And so that is why, to your point, when Facebook comes into places, you see a change in vaccine rates, in part, it's just one of the side effects of Facebook actually helping connect what is otherwise disconnected things that usually are on the fringes. And that is, honestly, their real big threat is that they bring all these things together, which then creates a much bigger mess. Now, obviously, they've had problems with moderation and everything else, and they haven't consistently enforced their rules. but their real biggest threat is actually in helping these people find each other in the first place.

Yeah, I'm shocked. They've also been particularly bad actors with the Republican Party. Yeah, and that's the part that I think helps kind of explain a lot of this, is that the decision maker at Facebook, I was in Zuckerberg, right? He's the CEO, I get that. And that's where a lot of the center of attention should appropriately be because he's the ultimate person accountable and responsible. But the actual person that sets the policy, so what I was just describing before, about the way that Facebook does recommendations, there have been internal discussions about whether or not they should just, you know, turn off their recommendation tool for anti-vaxers.

Like, it doesn't mean you ban them all from the site, but maybe you don't organize them, right? Or you slow it down. They've had these discussions. But the person who makes the decisions at Facebook on all ranges of policy is a guy by the name of Joel Kaplan. who is a former Republican, I guess current Republican operative. He was at the Brooks Brothers riots. And he's coming through it from that lens. And his deputy is another Republican operative, Kevin Martin, who himself was a member of the Brooks Brothers riots, which was that thing in the Florida recount 2000, where they stopped the vote count.

So they are making decisions consistently through a largely partisan political lens. And how that ends up playing out is in day-to-day enforcement. You know, Ben Shapiro has been the beneficiary. of that. When there have been internal flags around rule breaking or attempts to give strikes, the people who have overwritten that have been people like Joel Kaplan. It happened with a daily caller. It happened with Breitbart. They've come in and actually removed enforcement actions against some of these right-wing, you know, sites for breaking the rules. So there really is a conservative bias to Facebook. There is. And I think they think that people claim, or at least

conservatives claim that they have an anti-conservative bias. But actually, there's not been a single day where the left or news has outpaced the right on Facebook, except for one day in the past two years, and that's when Michelle Obama wished Barack Obama, happy birthday. Every other day, the right wing has about 60 percent of the entire share of voice of Facebook's conversation. And then the rest is split between non-ideological, nonpartisan, and news, and then left-leaning sites. And for context, the amount of content that just the news sites themselves produce is like four times, three or four times, what you're getting from the right leaning echo chamber, and yet they usually only get about 10 to 15 percent of the share of voice. It's like the deck is stacked against them. It is.

And look, it helps that they cheat. It helps that they pay like Ben Shapiro. But a big part of it, too, is that, you know, if you went to Google, right, and you started running searches, if your search results were based on, how Facebook prioritizes its content, people would be in the streets not knowing what's going on, right? People would actually be furious because there's an expectation that you're going to get some reliability in your Google search results. Facebook's algorithm is out of whack. They don't wait any of the content appropriately. In fact, they advantage a lot of right-link content. And the right is worked the refs appropriately. I think one of the most insidious things that

the right did in order to gain Facebook was when Facebook said they were going to open the program up to fact checkers a bunch of right-wing publications. Right. Like the caller. That's right. And then they started fact-checking reproductive health content and getting things from abortion providers taken down on fact checks that were coming from right-leaning sources that were debunked. And that was just one example. So they not only get an advantage at the top in terms of the big picture, but then they are able to pretty effectively work the refs. I never saw Facebook push back in the aggressiveness that they did to the Biden

claim over the years against the right. It is incredible to me that we are living in Facebook's dystopia. I'm just glad that Mark Zuckerberg is making enough money to pay for all his sunblock. Thank you, Angelo. Thank you. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz?

The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be willing to the first to listen to Fever Dreams, the new podcast from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts

or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcast. Jesse Cannon. Molly Jong Fast. I hear shit's going down. You know, it's interesting because when we started this segment 10 billion years ago, I wondered if we would ever run out of people who were fucking assholes. And we just have a continual embarrassment of riches. You know, I'm going to be honest with you.

I felt like this would be like going to the Far Beach day. There's going to be a new crop and a new weed to pull. Yeah, I'll fucking say. So my pick for this is the January 6th committee cluster fuckery and all of the reporting about it. So I'm going to give you a quick rundown yesterday. Nancy Pelosi rejected the addition to the January 6th committee of one jacketless Jim Jordan and Representative Banks, Jim Banks. Now, let me just say Representative Jim Banks had just come out with a statement right after he was assigned. to the committee, he said he wanted to force the Democrats and media to answer questions so far ignored,

adding this committee would be studying not only the January 6th riot at the Capitol, but also the hundreds of violent political riots last summer where many more innocent Americans and law enforcement officers were attacked. So basically, Jim Banks was going on that committee to you know, Benghazi it up, right, make it as partisan as possible. And, focus on everything, but what actually happened on January 6th. So, you know, we have Kevin McCarthy putting Jim Banks and Jim Jordan on this committee. And as she was right to do, Nancy Pelosi was like, no fucking way, or we haven't Jacketless Jim on this committee. And she refused to seat them. This was the best thing that could ever happen to Kevin McCarthy. And in fact, we all know

that Kevin McCarthy picked Jacketless Jim because he wanted Nancy Pelosi to say no fucking way. And then this was, you know, this was, we saw how this was going to go down. And then there was just a ton of media coverage yesterday about how, you know, Republicans had won this one. You know, this is our democracy, right? This is not like some kind of infrastructure deal. this is like, do we have a democracy or do we not have a democracy? And so as much as I love to see, you know, partisan, rancourt, that's not what this is. This is democracy. This is like, are we going to say it's okay to try to turn over, an overturn an election and plan a coup or not?

And this should be, Republicans should want the truth because they want democracy. Not Republicans should, you know, win one for the gipper. So for that, I say, fuck you to the mainstream media, which did not do a good job covering this, but really also fuck you to McCarthy, who really did set this up in a way to really try at every point to undermine Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats. So for that, I say, minority leader and jacketless Jim, you are fuck that guy. Oh, man. So my fuck that guy is, you know, we always have to play our, is this person. in bad faith? Are they just dumb as shit? Do they get their news from people who are bad faith,

dumb as shit people? And I'm going with the latter on Representative Madison Cawthorn. I think what's interesting about Madison Cawthorn is that is so handsome and so stupid. Well, that is how it sometimes comes. I mean, not everybody could have the looks of the braids like you and I, Bolly, you know? Known for our great beauty. Yes, yes. So Madison Cawthorans has accused Anthony Fauci of operating as a pawn of the CCP, which is the Chinese Communist Party, folks. Yes, Dr. Anthony Fauci, member of the Chinese Congress Party. Yes. Molly, you know, I think I could see this a little. I mean, spaghetti, you know, it's a Chinese and it's an Italian thing. Fouchi, you know, so, sounds, right. Fouchi, he, Fauci loves baseball. It's definitely a connection.

Get this to the Gateway Pundit at once so we can get this going. Yes. So he has promised to quote unquote prosecute this guy if the GOP wins in 2022. Oh, fucking idiot. It really is unbelievable the lengths that these people will go to try to score points and find these dumb fucking culture wars. And when I say dumb, a lot of these have been dumb. But prosecuting Fauci, a thing you actually cannot do,

Because Madison, Cawthor... What are you going to prosecute him for? He knows nothing. He knows fucking nothing about how these systems work. He was literally voted into office to own the fucking lips. And, well, I think sadly... We're owned. Yeah, I think sadly Madison doesn't realize the game that's being played

because he's not very bright. But also, Madison is a girl's name. This is an interesting one, Molly. So I recorded it. a popular band named Madison at one point. And they were girls. But to me, it's a town name because that's what they were named after. Madison, Wisconsin.

Madison, New Jersey. Hello. I don't even know where that is. But all I can say is that Madison, Carlton, you're welcome on the new abnormal any time. No, you're not. Sorry. Take that back. I'd love to chop it up with the thorn, you know.

Get it spiky. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast,

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