The Daily Beast Podcast - Where Is Merrick Garland Amidst All This Elon Musk Nonsense?

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

As Elon Musk unveils his latest scheme, a proposed plan to give away $1 million each day to registered voters in battleground states, the co-hosts of The New Abnormal have just one question: Where is U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland? Plus! A talk with Brian Merchant, a former technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Merchant, the author of “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech,” breaks down exactly how Musk’s tech projects have become inseparable from his authoritarian aspirations. 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. 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 Cannon, 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.

Los Angeles Times tech columnist Brian Merchant, who's the author of Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, joins us to talk about how Elon Musk's tech projects are now inseparable from his authoritarian ones. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, early voting has started in a bunch of states. and USA Today has a new poll of early voters that shows Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump, 63% to 34%. This is among people who have already voted. So good news, the bad news, is that same poll shows that people who plan to wait for election day are preferring Trump 52% to 35%.

So, look, I'm glad to see Harris leading, and particularly in certain counties in, I believe, North Carolina and Michigan and Pennsylvania. I don't know how much stock I put in this in terms of it being predictive, but I would rather see her up 63 to 34 than down 63 to 34. I mean, I think that it's reassuring, or I guess it provides us with a bit of hopefulness as we are now two weeks away from the final day of voting, which is November 5th. And what makes me hopeful, at least, are the numbers that were coming out of Georgia, that were coming out of North Carolina for their early voting, that we're blowing 2020 numbers out of the water. I think it says a lot. We know that even though Donald Trump votes by mail, a lot of Republican. encourage their people to vote in person on election day. So I think that we can be encouraged by the early voting numbers and still encourage people

to get out and vote. And I mean, I don't know about you, Andy, but I'm still terrified. So, you know, we'll just let that sit there. But, I mean, it just seems so fitting that this entire election apparently has turned into a game show or a lottery show for the likes of a... of Elon Musk and others. But that would make sense when you have a game show host that is a convicted felon who the show creators of The Apprentice came out last week and said, oh, we're so sorry, America.

We made this whole fucking thing up. I don't know why it took them so long to come out and say that, nonetheless. But Elon Musk is now like, you get a million dollars and you get a million dollars and you get a million dollars playing his best Oprah except with our elections. So that feels great. Look, we're so beyond calling out hypocrisy and saying, can you imagine if X did this instead? But seriously, can you imagine if George Soros did this? Like, I cannot even imagine the 24-7 coverage on Fox News and the outrage from people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump

and the entire conservative media ecosystem and all the quote-unquote, heterodox thinkers who are just conservative slash Republicans. And it's just absolutely wild that I don't think a single one of them cares about this except that they might think it's a good thing. Look, I don't know if this is illegal or not. I know Rick Hassan, who knows a hell of a lot more about election law than I do, says it's, I think his quote was, he said it's clearly illegal. I'm not entirely sure I agree with that. I feel like there might be some, I don't know. There might be some gray area there. I don't really, well, I don't want to say I don't care because I would like for it to be illegal. It should be illegal. On the other hand, I don't know that it matters if it's illegal because Danielle, I know you're a huge Merrick Garland fan. Been saying it for four years. Yeah. Cannot say enough about him, about how quickly he moves, about how ready he is to take on big, important cases. But I'm sorry, Danielle. I have to do.

agree with you. I have no confidence that the Justice Department, i.e. Merrick Garland, will do anything about this. I say this a lot, and I'll say it again, I would love to be wrong about this. I would love to come back on this show later in the week or next week and say, hey, look at that. Merrick Garland did something. I just don't see it happening. I feel like it's going to be one of those, well, it's so close to the election. We can't really, you know, we're within a month. It would break protocol or some bullshit reason. So look, whether it's illegal or not, it is certainly, it's at the level where it needs to be investigated. I don't know how anyone could deny that.

I just don't have a ton of faith in our Justice Department to get off its ass and do that. But that is exactly the reason why Elon Musk would pull a stunt like this. Right. Yep. Because that's exactly what it is. It's a stunt. Elon Musk could give a damn about democracy. If you did, then you would encourage people to go and vote and just tell them the issues and why your candidate is better.

But you see every way that the Republican Party knows that their candidate isn't better. So they have to come up with whatever stupid fucking tricks that they have in order to convince people to vote for Donald Trump. And here's the thing about Merrick Garland. This does not smell right. Neither one of us are attorneys,

but it doesn't smell right to say to people, here's a million dollars to sign some pledge or to do X thing. That doesn't seem normal. it doesn't seem right. And it would be great if the Attorney General of the United States said, you know what, this doesn't smell right. And I am going to open up an investigation. And you know what? This action needs to be suspended until we can actually investigate it. But of course, Merrick Garland won't do that. Because I don't, is Merritt Garland still with us? Because I'm,

I'm confused. I haven't heard from him or seen him in a very long time. So I don't know. I think he's still there. I think he clocks in every day. And, you know, I don't know, reads the paper and goes home, maybe. Maybe he's quiet quit. I don't know. Since 2021? Like since then? Yeah.

I think, you know, he quiet took the job and then he quiet quit it. I know Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania governor, says that this should be investigated. The Pennsylvania Attorney General is a Republican. So I don't have a lot of faith that that will happen in the state. if there are state laws being broken, I don't know. It is absolutely wild to me that Elon Musk is out there. I mean, the dude gave his pack has given $75 million to Donald Trump. He's now offering a million dollars a day, which, by the way, I also should say,

I would not count on getting that money from Elon Musk if I were a Pennsylvania voter. Are you sure? Because he presented somebody with a big cardboard check. Look, yes, I think you'll get a prop check from Elon Musk, whether you'll get a an actual real one, I would say is highly debatable based on his predilection for lying and for claiming things and saying he's going to do things that never end up happening. So there's that. The other thing is, and I know people have checked this out, the website where you can go to sign this petition, is apparently very easily gamed. Did he do it himself? Because we know that

Elon Musk doesn't do very well with tech shit. So. Well, that's true. No, I'm saying that people, listeners of this podcast, if they so choose, could probably go to that website and enter a bunch of fake information and completely gum up the works. I'm not saying they should do that, but I am saying that from the accounts I've seen, it actually would be fairly easy to do. So, you know, just something to think about. You know, people are always looking for ways to take action. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of good, funny, fake names out there is all I'm saying. Oh, God. I just, yeah, you know, Merrick Garland. I wonder how he'll go down in history. Maybe we won't have books, though, so then he'll get off Scott Free. Yeah. He might go down as the last Attorney General of the United States. No, no, Trump wants one. Come on.

I guess. How else is he going to act revenge? Come on. Yeah. All right, fine. I take it back. That just depressed me. there are real world consequences to the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade that came down from the Supreme Court. And as Donald Trump goes from stump to stump celebrating the fact that he was able to appoint three right wing justices in order to kill Roe v. Wade across the country, we're starting to see reports that are coming out. First, there were reports about the rise in maternity mortality rates for women. We've talked about some of the terrible stories, horrible stories of women losing their lives, bleeding out at home as fear of going to the emergency room or being turned away while they're miscarrying

and dying. And then there are others that are not given the care that they need. They live, but they're no longer able to have children or develop worse. issues. Now, there are new reports that are coming out about the increase of infant deaths in places that have abortion bans, particularly in Texas. I honestly really don't know how you look at these numbers and think to yourself if you're Amy Coney Barrett, if you're Brett Kavanaugh, if you're Neil Gorsuch, if you're these people that made this decision and so happily did so. And you look at the numbers of infants dying of parents having to hear their infants gas for their last breaths because they were

forced to give birth knowing that those children would die hours later in a gruesome, horrible death. It's just so depraved. And these numbers are real. And they're going to get worse. And I just, I know why the numbers are so close in this election, Andy, but I just, when I see stories like this and I see these numbers and I see the names of the women that have died and like, and this number just continues to grow, I kind of lose hope in humanity because I'm just like, why would a quote unquote industrialized nation like the United States be operating in terms of reproductive care, health care, as if we're in a developing nation without access to science, technology and things of that nature that would advance.

us. I don't understand the pure desire to work backwards. I want to say that I'm being 100% serious when I say this. I don't think that the people you named, I don't think they see this as a bad thing. I think they see this as a good thing. And here's why. Because when a baby is born, it can be baptized. And if the baby is baptized, then the baby's soul goes to heaven. I'm not saying this in any way other than I honestly think that's what they believe. And maybe I'm out over my skis here. I don't think I am. I really don't think I am. I don't think it's an accident that the justices who voted to overturn Dobbs are very conservative religious Christians. As listeners of this show know, I have interviewed a ton of people, whoever

written books and done documentaries about the Christian right, about the Catholic right. And I think that we very much underestimate sometimes how much the religious beliefs of these people influence what they are doing. And I really think in a case like this, they think it is a far better outcome to have a baby born with congenital birth defects that lead to its dying than for it to not have been born at all. And I think that all of that comes down to their religious beliefs. And I certainly don't think they have any compunction whatsoever about forcing their religious beliefs on the entire country. That's what they want to do. So that's my answer to that. And I can't claim that I'm a mind reader. So I could be wrong. But I fully believe that none of this to them is a bad thing.

I really don't think they look at this and go, ah, well, that's an outcome, you know, that's an unfortunate outcome and, you know, side outcome of this rule. I don't even think they think of it as that way. I don't think they think it's unfortunate at all. And that's the problem, I think, too, that we have on the left is that you can't show these people

data points and logic when they're operating in this like, I don't even want to just call it a religious realm. It's a zealot space. In this religious zealot space where, you know, the greatest suffering gets the greatest reward in the afterlife in their religion. But why you should have the ability to impose those beliefs on everyone I don't understand. And I will never understand. But you're right to those people that had the ability on the Supreme Court, on the

jacked up, mogified Supreme Court to make this decision, to give women in certain places a death sentence and to provide infants with the same is wild to me. But there is no way to convince or have conversation or meet halfway with people that just operate in a completely different mode of being around their zealot sensibilities. So it's awful. And what we know is that if Donald Trump gets reelected, this is going to be nationalized, and there will be no safe space. And I wonder, you know, because obviously the next goal is to go after birth control, to go after any mode and ability for women to be able to control their own bodies, because the response to this would be, guess what? Less women having children. Like, less women committing to wanting to be mothers because

even in a pregnancy that they want, they're risking their lives depending on where they live. So why would I do that? You know, like, I think that that is going to be, you know, the whole idea behind this was that the birth rate of white babies was dropping in comparison to infants of color. And the white supremacist belief around the replacement theory is that we need to procreate. So we got to force white women to carry these babies. But if the result is that then they decide not to get pregnant and then you just have more, it's just this cycle that is being created is really, really sick. It's really sick. And I don't see any way that it works out well for anyone. Yeah. And look, let's tie this to what's going on in Missouri. The Attorney General of Missouri,

Andrew Bailey, has filed suit against saying that Mifapristone, which, as we know, is one of the drugs that is dispensed to provide a medicated abortion. One of the arguments he is making in his lawsuit saying Mifapristone should be banned is that, you know, he's dispensed, is that, you know, young women, and this is women, particularly age 15 to 19, are having fewer children, which is bad for the state because it could make them lose seats in Congress. It could make them qualify for less federal funding because the population would be lower. These are the arguments he's making is that this drug is bad because teenage girls are having fewer children because of it. Look, I know the Handmaid's Tale is one of the most overused and overwrought metaphors that we've got.

But come on. Like, they're making it too easy. How much plainer can they make it that they want women, including teenagers, to be baby factories? That is just so repulsive. It's like, oh, my God. I mean, he's saying it's injuring the state because teenage girls are having fewer babies. My mouth is wide open. I thought we wanted to stop teen pregnancy.

I thought that was one of like the goals. I guess only like in blue states? Like, wow. Okay. No, I think it's only as you pointed out before. It's only for people of color. The biggest election of our lifetimes is less than a month away. And the news is only going to get crazier and more important as the countdown continues.

As each day brings new headlines and critical campaign updates The future of the country may be decided by the stories that cut through the noise and capture our attention during the next few weeks. If you want to stay informed through all of the twists and turns, the Daily Beast's new daily newsletter, October Surprise, is the reliable resource you're looking for. It will keep you in the know on everything that's happening as we race toward election day. Sign up now at beast.pub slash October surprise. Beast.pub slash October surprise. My next guest says that Elon Musk's tech projects are inseparable from his authoritarian one. Joining me now to explain what he means by this is former Los Angeles Times tech columnist Brian Merchant,

author of the great history of the Luddites Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, and publisher of a fantastic newsletter at bloodin the machine.com, which is where he wrote about this. Brian, thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Okay, so before we get into your thesis about the inseparability, explain what you mean when you refer to Musk's authoritarian project. Yeah, well, look, we've seen Musk drifting this direction for a while, or at least publicly.

We don't have a full access to his political views or we haven't until he bought Twitter. And now he's sort of bit by bit been sort of onboarding himself more fully onto sort of the mob. I guess what you would call them, the MAGA cause, the modern conservative, or the writer wings of the modern right movement's cause. And that is, especially he's adopting their interest in especially migration. And he tweets all the time now about these floods of illegal, he calls them, that are coming into the country, just, you know, much like Trump would. He's echoing this language. And it has turned into something that's beyond just sort of a fleeting interest that he might, you know, tweet about three years ago. It's becoming a more concerted political program and it has completely vested, I argue, now that he's on the ground, knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, his home base is in Pennsylvania for the time being.

He's paying people to vote. He's bankrolling these super PACs, tens of millions of dollars into Trump and making him one of the first. sort of actual faces of the Trump campaign calling for things that are, for lack of a better word, authoritarian. I thought in this piece a long time about what actually to call this so far, maybe outright fascist, some people would call that, is maybe a bridge too far. Maybe it's not. We could debate that.

But it is this project of concentrating power and being able to wield that power. And he does that, you know, now on his platform Twitter, where he kind of decides what goes and what doesn't, what to amplify and whatnot, and he's putting that in service of these ideas and these politics like mass deportation, or clamping down on human rights and being, you know, anti-trans, he's got this whole campaign against wokeness, and it has, I argue,

it has transitioned from just being sort of his political views to a program that he's now putting into action, and now we have to view Elon Musk and his many projects, his tech company projects and his political ones under the same sort of ages, under the same umbrella. This is all Elon Musk's project now. Okay. So first of all, I would say, yeah, I think authoritarian is probably the gentlest way of putting it at this point. And I'm comfortable with the fascist label. I think they have shown that they are anti-democracy, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't have a problem with you saying authoritarian. I don't mean it that way. I'm just, I am.

comfortable just calling it straight up fascist it there seems to be that right i mean and i'm the point that he's like really sort of echoing in a lot of ways the sort of nakedly and openly and enthusiastically fascist party from a hundred years ago who sort of became the musilini's biggest cheerleaders who said you know we've got a a lot of these things are very much uh rhyming where you just like musk today's you know like oh there's you know we don't want to bother with all the technical details and people's feelings with technological progress is all. We got to get to Mars. We got to do these things that, you know, they also coincide with the glorification of my own ego. We can wipe away the meddling issue of democracy in favor of sort of the shiny rockets blasting us

into the future. And that's pretty much what Musk is doing today too. For a trip, go back and read some of those early futurists. It's a hundred years ago and now. But, you know, with differences in language, they sound a lot like Musk. And, and, and, yeah, I think he's, I don't know that he like is a true, like, programmatic fact. Like, this is what he really wants is he wants to do fascism in the streets. But he certainly has these tendencies and he has had this drive to kind of consolidate power again at his companies where he's always the CEO, where he's always running everything on Twitter, which became X, where he is controlling the flow of information. And now when he's actually out there with Trump running this political program. So yeah, you could make the case,

and I think you'd probably be right. Okay. So let's talk about why this authoritarian slash fascist project shouldn't be thought of as separate from his tech projects, because they're not usually written about this way. And you say this in your piece, you say there's no connective tissue between them in terms of how they're covered. And one of the examples you use, I think it's a great one, is the Wii robot event that Tesla recently held. Remind our listeners what that was. And then Tell us why you think it needs to be covered in tandem with Musk's political activities. Yeah, there's a few reasons. But yeah, quickly, the Wii robot event was Tesla's sort of showcase event,

where every so often, you know, Tesla has to placate its investors and its partners and say, okay, here's what we have coming. We have all of these new vehicles. We have all these new features. We have all these new technologies that are in our pipeline. You should continue to invest in us. You should continue to be confident in us. You should continue to back us.

This is, I should note, especially important for Musk because for a long time now, Musk, the reason that Musk is the richest man in the world is because so many people buy into this vision that he's selling. It's not that he's selling more cars than anybody else, not even close. It's that people think that Tesla has this outsized value, this outsized potential in the future. to become, you know, the most widely productive and widely influential car company in the world. So he's selling this vision of the future. He has to sell it over and over. He sells it and investors get frustrated because he rarely delivers.

He's been promising self-driving cars for so long that it's a running gag now that he still doesn't, he doesn't actually have ones that are fully self-driving. But the important thing for our purposes is to look at this. He holds this event and then people from, you know, the company, media, the automotive media, the tech media, they attend it. And for a long time, of course, they go back and they write their stories about, oh, well, this is the next Tesla model. Or, oh, this is what Elon Musk's vision of the future is.

The problem is, and where this gets thorny now, is that on Friday, you know, Elon Musk's vision of the future, quote unquote, is, you know, selling cars. On Saturday, it's back to saying we need a mass deportation program to extract. migrants who, by the way, I'm all now calling invaders and agreeing with Trump on this principle that they're enemies within, this really nasty political program. So it's almost like whiplash. You can't just sort of slice out and say, okay, well, this is what Musk said on Friday. He's got this car company. It's what has made him so rich, so powerful, and allowed him to sort of broadcast his views directly into the American public and then sort of ignore the ramifications for what he's going to say the next day,

or even sometimes just minutes later, hours later. And it's causing this dissonance, I think, in the American Commentariat, the public, where we, it's hard. Nobody wants to kind of admit that the world's most successful billionaire, the most successful tech tycoon is also engaging in this really often repulsive political program. and doing so nakedly and openly. And it's just, we need to start squaring these images that we have. There's, you know, of Elon Musk like the billionaire on the cover of the biographies. With Elon Musk, the guy who's using all of the wealth and political capital and clout that he's generated from those projects directly

to try to make other people's lives miserable and to gain himself even more power in, you know, a coming Trump administration, if that's what shakes out in November. We really have to sort of reckon with the totality of this political project. And I would argue you can see it in his companies a lot of the time. You know, of course in X, where he has fired content moderators, gotten rid of anybody who doesn't agree with him, and had people boost his own account. And he's interested in tweeting conspiracy theories and rockets.

And that's pretty much it. So you get this gross blend of bad politics and pictures of rockets flying into the sky. And people are emulating him and you have a total breakdown of the utility of this platform. It used to be a pretty decent place to go. You always had its problems, right? But it was a good place to go during a hurricane, during a storm, you know, a major news event. You could get decent information. And now you can't because Musk has elevated his own ego above that.

And he's boosting sort of by virtue of having tinkered with the algorithm to preference him. all of these sort of also similarly authoritarian-minded right-wing political guys. So he's risen his voice to the top there, but then also in Tesla because it really also struck me, like, what are the sort of things that are coming out of this event? And he marches out all of these robot butlers and robot servants

that are going to do this work for you. And it's kind of like, huh, Musk is saying that we need to get rid of illegal immigrants, he calls him. I think that's dehumanizing terminology and I think he does it on purpose. Of course. A lot of people who disproportionately do a lot of the service work, do a lot of these kind of jobs right now. And he's here he's having like kind of one of the marquee moments from his event is all these robots marching out. And then they're doing service work. And he's got this little, you know, infomercial floating around online about how you can have, you know, robots do your

housework and stuff for you. And it just all sort of starts to click. And he's always also talking about how we need more people, you need to increase the birth rate. So, like, why does he want more people coming into this country, which, of a certain kind, right? And who does he want to kick out? He got to start looking at what the vision of all of these different fronts of his project are, you know, again, in this unified way. Because I think he's become a particularly noxious, particularly powerful, and particularly ugly character now on the national stage. To sort of drill down a little further on your point about these role. and how they're portrayed in this muskian future.

When I saw this, I thought to myself, this is almost his very real version of the phony great replacement theory, which is a conspiracy theory that he is very much into, which is, you know, that the Democrats want immigrants coming in here, particularly brown and black immigrants coming in here so that they will vote Democratic and if they will replace white people. And here he is showing these robots who in his mind is like, well, they will replace the immigrants that the Democrats want to bring in. Right. Yeah. And again, this is often a feature of sort of fascistic futures where you long had, if we can control the technological apparatus and have full automation, then all we need is the right people, quote unquote, to be in power,

pulling the lever and then we can have all of these jobs done again without messing with with the small people or the kind of people that we want to sort of stoke hatred of I agree with you to me that was one of the most jarring moments of the whole presentation you know he's got other stuff too he's got like more cyber trucks and all this stuff but it all is increasingly you know I wrote in an earlier piece about how you can look at sort of the style and the design of some of these things and make certain inferences from what's coming. But look at like the cyber truck as well, which is supposed to be this electric truck,

but it's designed almost to make it look like it wouldn't be out of place in some dystopian sci-fi film where, you know, you get to be the one surviving the hellscape on the wheel of the cyber truck that's going to mow people down. And now you can go home to your robot butlers and you can, you know, again, it is all of this sort of like this dystopian future making where a select class of people who can afford this stuff, you know, get to not only survive, but like thrive among the remnants of the mess that they're making.

And that's what's so infuriating about all this to me is that it's only, you know, perpetuating all this stuff. We can see now the direct impact of continuing to elevate Musk, to continue to give him money and power and finances, because we see. what that project is that we've been talking about and the impact that it stands to have, which may not be small on, you know, American democracy. So it seems beyond obvious, as you keep saying, that when a guy who has given Donald Trump $75 million through his PAC is now saying he's going to give away a million bucks a day

to someone in a swing state who has signed that PAC's petition, as long as there are a registered voter, which may well be illegal. But it seems beyond obvious that. all this might be tied into the same guy's technological vision. So I was trying to figure out why it isn't covered this way. And one of the interesting things you write is that Musk, like Trump before him, has both broken the media and his catnip for it. And I think that's a really underrated point. And maybe that's the simple answer to why it isn't covered this way. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple reasons. I do think that that's one of the big ones is that, you know, he is a pretty reliable attention grabber, right? Just like Trump four years ago or eight years ago or whatever,

the media kind of professed to begrudge, you know, all these awful things that he was saying and doing, but he also led to a huge subscription boom in like the Washington Post, right? And New York Times. There was like sort of a pastime of talking about him, of discussing his exploits. He was genuinely novel and people didn't quite know what to do with it. And there were people that were genuinely, you know, afraid and rightfully so and outraged and trying to, you know, focus the lens that way. But, you know, I think Musk is a similar way. And I think he knows this.

He plays with this. He, you know, he might have stuck his foot in his mouth accidentally the first few times on Twitter before he owned it. And before he would say some nasty things that would get him in trouble with the SEC or, you know, or land him in the middle of a lawsuit. If you remember the cave diver episode, what you call the hero cave diver, a petto guy, and that led to a defamation lawsuit and all that. But now, you know, he knows that he can reliably command a lot of attention

just by tweeting or just by doing whatever's on his mind. And, you know, the media needs to contend with that increasingly. Because, yeah, he is a person of interest. It's undeniably true. But I think there's another element to it. And that's that, again, like, Trump, if you're saying that, you know, this guy is wielding his wealth and his power in this way, then you're kind of saying on an innate level that this guy is a bad guy and that our sort of entire

allegedly meritocratic system that has allowed him to accumulate such wealth and power is broken on a fundamental level. This is what we're doing with it. I think that there's some fundamental, especially on your more August publications and, you know, to like really want to sort of peel back the veil. Because one thing I also note in the piece is that when you see the politics coverage, it's just like, oh, Elon Musk is coming to town and he's taking it on like he would any one of his companies. And it's not the idea that he has a deep-seated desire to realize these horrible things like mass deportations,

forcible mass deportations, doesn't really enter the picture. It doesn't occur to them. It's like, oh, he's running his ground game like he would one of his startups. That's the least interesting thing we can say about this. most important thing to say is that Elon Musk seems to be a full-throated convert to authoritarian politics, and he's stopping at nothing, it seems, to realize that vision now, using his personality, his brand, his money, his connections in service of doing these things. So it's quite wanting, even in the political press, for the whole scope of the picture of what's going on now.

In your piece, you say, it's time to get our act together, and the hour here refers to the media that covered Musk. Do you think this will happen? I mean, I think it could. I think there's a genuine sort of repulsion at the extent to which Musk has gone in this direction now, how far he's taken this willingness. Some billionaires will give money to a group or a candidate that they agree with. Musk is actually parachuting in and sort of signing his entire person over to this cause now. He's back. He's backing it. He's supporting this authoritarian project. It is sort of increasingly impossible to sort of deny that this is what he is all about, that this is what he wants to happen.

And so if you cover it in any other way and you say, oh, you know, he made some neat cars over here, it's going to start looking quite blinkered that we're missing this piece of the pie. That said, it's really, you know, there's a lot of incentive to be able to keep covering his companies and his sort of exploits without sort of broadcasting this full portrait. it so it may be hard to get some folks fully on board with telling the whole truth here. But I do think that it will get better. And I do think we'll get a fuller picture as we near Election Day. At least we can hope.

I hope so. Yeah. Brian Merchant, thank you so much. If you haven't read his book, Blood in the Machine, the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech, and if you think the Luddites were the bad guys, you need to read the book and have your eyes open. And also check out Brian's fantastic newsletter, as I said, at Blood in the Machine.com. Just some great writing on tech and culture and politics. Brian,

thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Andy. Cheers. Andy Levy. Danielle Moody. Please tell us how you are kicking off this good, good week in America with your fuck that guy. Oh, man. My fuck that guy is Donald Trump. I'm not even going to hide it or try to make people guess or whatever. It's just, it's straight up Donald Trump. And obviously there were a ton of different reasons that he could be my fuck that guy today and every day. I'm going to go with the McDonald's photo op, press-op bullshit that he pulled. And that was, I'm of course referring to over the weekend. He went into a McDonald's and donned a little apron. It was not a little apron. I'm just going to

get it. Well, fair point. Fair point. Dond a big apron. And stood by the fry station and handed out bags through the drive-through window. And look, your first question might be why. Mm-hmm. The short answer to that is, because he's a buffoon, the longer answer is he is convinced that Kamala Harris has lied about working at McDonald's when she was in, I think it was high school, maybe college, because of things like she didn't put it on her resume. And he wants to draw attention to that by himself, not actually working at a McDonald's. I guess. And this gets me to, like, yes, he's my fuck that guy, but I know we harp on the media a lot here. But can we talk about the coverage that this got? Can we talk about, as Parker Maloy pointed out in her excellent newsletter, USA Today, putting up a social media post saying Donald Trump showed up for a quick shift at McDonald's. No, he didn't.

Jesus Christ. The McDonald's was closed. Let's get that straight right away. He didn't walk into a working McDonald's in the middle of a lunchout. or even like, you know, 4 p.m. or whatever, but a McDonald's that was open and serving real customers. This McDonald's closed. They closed it down for him to do this stunt. C-SPAN tweeted out. Former President Trump works at McDonald's. No, again, he doesn't. It's so fucking easy. Oh, my God. CBS News, he donned an apron and worked the drive-through. Again, he didn't work the drive-thru. Again, we've talked about this before, but we are now, we're pushing 10 years of this guy being front and center. It obviously goes back long before that.

But in terms of the national political media, it's a minimum of we're pushing 10 years. If you want to go back to 2012, I could do that too. But let's just say 10 years. Let's say 2015 is when this shit started. They have not learned a damn thing. And it is absolutely unbelievable and disgraceful. The amount of coverage that this got, along with his 12 minutes, soliloquy on Arnold Palmer's penis. The coverage that these two things got compared to the coverage of, I don't know, him saying he's going to deport 20 million people of saying the list is endless. These things got at least as much, if not more coverage. Remember that $10 million bribe he maybe got from Egypt? Not really, no. I mean, yes, I do, but no. Yeah, but no, because we

haven't heard a word about it. We can get pages of breathless commentary about his Arnold Palmer rant or him working at a McDonald's. There's something very, very broken with our system and with journalism in this country. I'm going to expand my fuck that guy to include the usual suspect around here, which is the media, which look, I'm tired of saying it. I'm sure people are tired of hearing it, but they really do just be clown themselves pretty much every damn day. I'm sick of it. So they get a fuck that guy, but ultimately the fuck that guy goes to Donald Trump for doing a stupid stunt like this less than a month out from the election. The reality here, though, is that of course Donald Trump is going to continue to do these type of fucking circus stunts. Why? Because the media does exactly

what it is that he bets on them doing. So like, why would you stop? If you have a constant win, you know that you can just call up a presser. I have important news, even though we know by now, like you're the 78 year old that continues to cry wolf, like the media comes running with their cameras, you know, waiting with bated breath for him to say whatever bullshit that he's going to say. And so it's like, it's, and I said, you know, interrupted you and said it's so easy. And by that, I mean that it's so easy. What he does is so fucking easy because the media falls for it as if we haven't been doing this for a fucking decade. Like it's not cute. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that's the thing is that they look for these fucking like,

Oh, look at this wholesome, you know, election moment. It's like the guy's a fucking fascist, dude. Like, so he's at a McDonald's. Hitler probably ate fast food too. Like, what the fuck? Oh, God. Anyway, fuck that guy. All right, Danielle, who you got here?

Well, I'm sure it's someone different. It's not, you know? And I just realized we did it last week too. I know, I know. Look, the election's in a couple weeks. It's going to be a lot of Donald Trump as fuck that. guy. Yeah, you're right. I'm just like laughing at the fact that last week we said, oh, it's maybe the first time we've ever done it. And here we are again, folks. This is fuck that guy to Donald Trump,

but also like a really proud of the Central Park Five here. So the exonerated five, which you all remember from, obviously from the DNC, they spoke at the convention about Donald Trump using his platform and his power when they were children and wrongfully convicted of battery and rape in 1989 of a Central Park jogger and later on exonerated but after their lives were largely spent behind a prison wall. They've paid their debt that should never have been paid to society at all and the millions of dollars that they've gotten in return can never bring back the years that they've lost. That being said, Donald Trump, the man who took out a full pay ad in the New York Times, and the New York Times, by the way, allowed Donald Trump to take out a

full page fucking ad to call for the execution of black children will not stop talking about the exonerated five and the fact that he believes that they're guilty, even though it has been proven without a reasonable doubt that they are innocent. So as of this recording, the exonerated five are suing Donald Trump in a civil suit for defamation. over the comments that he made during the debate with Kamala Harris where he got his ass handed to him. And the lawsuit argues this, quote, that the comments that Donald Trump made were extreme and outrageous and intended to cause severe emotional distress. This is a civil suit. So the result of a suit like this will end up with money, you know, if it moves through the courts in the way that we hope so,

as opposed to criminal charges. But I got to tell you, just dating back to what Donald Trump did, the way that he used his power, his privilege, his wealth to try and crucify black children in the media. And then once those black men now exonerated black men in the eyes of the public, in the eyes of New York, all of these things, and he continues to go on these tirades, I hope that this case moves forward. I would love to see Donald Trump have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to these men for the damage that he has caused them. And I hope that we get to see it happen.

So for that reason, Donald Trump, once again, is my fuck that guy. I'm not in a very faith-having mood today, but it would be absolutely amazing to see him have to pay out any amount of money. and the larger, the better, obviously, to those five guys. That would make me so happy, Danielle. I would just be so happy to have him have to do that. I wish I had the faith that it will happen. But look, at the debate with Harris, he, as you pointed out, he again said that they pleaded guilty, which they didn't.

He also said that they killed someone, which the crime itself was not a murder. It was a rape and assault. So he's up there calling these five guys murderers who weren't even charged with that. So look, a civil suit for defamation, fingers crossed. But fuck that guy. And uplift those guys. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday.

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