The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Matt Gaetz Was Left Twisting in the Wind

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, come eye-popping new details in the Matt Gaetz scandal. But perhaps the worst thing of all for the Florida Republican, who is accused of underage sex trafficking, may be that Donald Trump thinks he’s useless. Yes, the congressman spent years sucking up to the former president—and even said he’d give up his job to defend him. But Trump has only managed to offer a tepid 24 words of support since the scandal broke, and George Conway has a theory about why. Joining co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon on the latest episode of The New Abnormal, the lawyer and Washington Post contributing columnist says, “The fact that he doesn't stick up for [Gaetz’] conduct here tells you that he has no use for the guy. And why should he? All Gaetz’ sucking up to Trump, Conway says, is now “in the past. That doesn't get you points with Donald Trump. Now it's what you can do for a malignant narcissist.” It’s pretty clear now that Gaetz is now toast—and of no further use to Trump or the rest of his party, which will spend this weekend at a big RNC meeting in Palm Beach “paying homage to the orange criminal form,” as Conway puts it. The party now faces a conundrum, he says, stuck between trying to rebuild and at the same time glorify Trump. It’s a losing strategy, says Conway, that will peel off yet more centrist voters and bring more of “the kinds of candidates that drive Mitch McConnell crazy, you know, the Todd Akins of the world,” and more like Gaetz. Also on the show, Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which helps Democratic candidates run for office, talks about how the pandemic and the racial justice movement have inspired more people to run than hatred of Trump.  Finally, 8chan founder Frederick Brennan talks to Molly and Jesse about how he knows that Ron and Jim Watkins are behind QAnon today, in an excerpt of an interview that will run in full on the new Daily Beast podcast Fever Dreams. 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 its just Rick & Molly 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 http://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 Jongfast, 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 upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how we get our out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure everything

doesn't go too far off the rails. While we have fun discussions about our world gone mad, and while I take that duty seriously, ourselves not so much. Today we have a great episode with Amanda Littman, who's the co-founder of Run for Something, which helps Democrat candidates run for

office. And then we will have Frederick Brennan, who you may know from the recent hit HBO Max documentary Q into the storm. Who's going to talk to us about why Ron and Jim Watkins need to be arrested and how he knows they are who is behind QAnon in its present form. But first, we have lawyer and contributing columnist to the Washington Post, George Conway, to talk to us about what's been on his mind.

Hello, George Conway. Hello, Molly Jongfast. How are you? Good. Welcome back to the new abnormal. All right. I'm happy to be here. What's this?

My third or fourth time? I don't know. I think it's like your 57th time. No, I don't think that. I don't think quite that many. You're a pretty regular guest. I'm an irregular, regular, which makes sense because it's the new abnormal. Exactly. We love an irregular, regular, regular.

So tell me, what the fuck is going on? I don't know. I'm decompressing from politics, frankly. I don't pay as much attention as I once did because there's something missing, and it's refreshing. I don't know what that something is. So I wrote a piece for The Daily Beast today about one. one Florida congressman with enormous hair. Hmm. Can you guess who I'm talking about?

Well, there are many districts in Florida. I, gosh. I mean, would there be any particular congressman that we would be interested in at this particular time? I got me. I don't know. He's under federal investigation for the thing that Q&ON says Democrats are doing. Huh. That would seem hypocritical.

It would seem... I think it's... the deep state. I mean, so QAnon seems to not be so interested in the Matt Gates scandal, but, you know, it's an interesting thing because this has only been out for less than two weeks. And already, we've just, like, every day the scandal gets worse and worse, right? Like, we had. It's going to be a beauty.

I mean, these two, I mean, if you just read anything about this Joel Greenberg, Seminole County tax collector guy. Who carried a gun. I mean, he's the guy you knew who was smoking weird shit in his room in college, who you knew was going to end up in jail someday. Okay, I mean, that's who he is. And it's like, okay, it's amusing to see him sometimes, but you want to get as far away from him as possible after the sun goes down. And some people are attracted to that because they are like that.

And that could be a certain congressman with big hair from. Florida. So I wrote this piece yesterday that came out today on the Beast site where I talked about all of the people that Donald Trump has defended, okay, like sketchy people, like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong and Roy Moore and, but I had forgotten and I found this online the other day that not only did Donald Trump defend all those people, he also defended. justlan Maxwell Gislane

Gislein? Gislein Gislein I'm not I'm not I'm not an expert But Gisleine Maxwell saying

I wish her well I wish her well And that meant that there was something in it for him I don't know what that is Right I think he probably That tells you

That maybe there was something He felt she could have said About him and so he, you know, he signals to the people he thinks he has exposure from. And that's what he did. That's what he did with the people, you know, the people like Flynn, and he did it particularly with Roger Stone. Stay strong, I think he said.

Yeah. Strong Stone. So I don't know what is that, you know, his issue, you know, what prompted that with Maxwell? I can only guess, and I'm not going to speculate because we really don't know. But, you know, the fact that he doesn't stick up for this Congress... Matt Gates. ...tells you that he has no use for the guy. And why should he?

In my mind, it's a bit odd that here is a guy who said he would give up his job, right? He would give up being a congressman to defend Donald. Trump. Right, but that's in the past. Okay, that doesn't get you points with Donald Trump now. It's what you can do for a malignant narcissist. Oh, God, I said the words. I'm trying not to say those words. The former guy. The thing with the former guy is, what can you do for or against the former guy now? and if there's something you can do for him or if there's some reason he has to fear you at the present time because of something you could do in the future, you know, he will try to work on you by saying, you know, I like you and don't, you know, he'll say something nice or at least not avoid saying something nice. I mean, you know, he always said, one of the things he said about Putin was he says nice things about me, so I'll say nice things about him.

And there was more too than that, I suspect. Really? Yeah. You don't say. And that's how his mind works. It's purely transactional, but it's transactional for what the person he's talking about or thinking about could do for him in the future. Past consideration doesn't necessarily count.

So let me ask you a question, because you are actually a Republican. I changed my voter registration in March of 2018. Oh. Because I felt that the party was becoming some kind of a personality cult for someone whose name I forgot. But a friend of mine who I was talking to on the phone yesterday, who is also a conservative, was saying to me that he was worried he was getting woke. And I said not to worry because this person is such a conservative. But he said, I'm secretly very happy. was what Biden has done.

And he said, and my other conservative friend called me on the phone and said he is also extremely happy with what Biden has done. And he said, that's very interesting to me. What in particular are they focused on? Is it just the style or the policy or the fact that the Biden is not insane? I mean, the big part is big for me. The fact that it's not completely insane is, you know, I mean, the standard for me for what we require a president, I'd like to raise it.

someday, but right now it's pretty low. But he said, which I thought was interesting, was he said, you know, he's doing all the infrastructure that Trump said he was going to do. That's true. And I have libertarian tendencies, but I'm not, you know, chaos, anarchic libertarian by any means, not even close. I do think there's a role for government in things. And I do think that we spend too much at all levels of government. And, you know, for example, there's a lot of transfer payments that go to people who don't need it. For example, so it's a terrible thing to say, you're running. All right. Well, no, no, there is, I promise you there's no one who listens to this podcast who doesn't love Social Security. It's very hard to complain about nuances in Biden's government and his,

and, you know, his policy when you had a guy who was an autocrat. Well, it's hard to complain about a lot of things when you supported a guy who did all the things that the former guy did. Yeah. It's ridiculous to hear these people talk about Andrew Cuomo. Right. And it's absurd. For any Republican to be, who supported Donald Trump would be talking about Andrew Cuomo. That doesn't stop them.

And that goes with a lot of things. Right. It's so interesting. I mean, I feel like we are in this strange time. So there's a big RNC meeting this weekend. I don't know if you know this. I do know. about it. I don't know if you know about this. I know some people who are there. Yeah, you do?

Yes. So, and it's not at Mar-a-Lago. It's at the four seasons. Right. But it is in Palm Beach. Palm Beach, Florida. Yes. And it seems like they're going to go over to Mar-a-Lago to hear Trump speak. Yes, to pay homage to the orange criminal former guy. Right. But the idea here is that they're going to rebuild the party, but they're not going to disavow Trump. Well, that's the problem. This is the big conundrum that they have. Trump doesn't actually want to rebuild a Republican Party to make it stronger and more

effective. He wants to retain control of it to the extent it glorifies him. And those two objects are actually mutually incompatible, as attested to by the fact that the former guy in four short years managed to lose. the popular vote in two presidential elections and to lose the House and to lose the Senate, which is just a remarkable, remarkable achievement. I mean, nobody, I mean, I mean, very, I very strongly must say that no one else could be capable of that. Right.

And he managed to do that. And he's determined to make sure that everyone pays fealty to him, that all candidates pay fealty to him, and they're peeling off centrist voters from the primary. from the next years, from next year's primaries by doing that. And you're going to get, you know, the kinds of candidates that drive Mitch McConnell crazy. You know, the Todd Aiken's of the world. And the, what was the woman from Delaware? I remember her?

You're just getting more and more of those types, you know. Marjorie Taylor Green's. Marjorie Taylor Green type. And you're going to get more hollies. You're going to get more people who, I mean, you get this guy, what's is, how do you pronounce his name, Gritens? back from he was a He was a

He was a Greatened Right the revenge porn guy He's he's back Well because why should revenge porn Be a bridge too far In trouble I mean it doesn't make any sense

Revenge Bourne No he's for revenge porn He voted against it He was against it before he was for it No he was he was supportive of Katie Hill Right He's what Matt Gates's position is that he's against revenge porn when he's the victim, but he reserves the right to show pictures of people to other

people. So it's a one way kind of revenge. It's kind of a narcissistic revenge porn position there. Yeah. Matt Gates is a very conflicted guy. And also he's under investigation for sex trafficking by the FBI, which sort of rhymes a little bit. So do you think, though, when they have the, you know, they're going to reconstruct the Republican Party without disavowing Trumpism? I think, fundamentally the problem with the Republican Party now, and tell me if I'm wrong, because you know a lot more about this than I do, is that they are just sort of weak. Well, I mean, there are a lot of problems with the Republican Party now. One is it doesn't have a positive message for the nation. It doesn't stand for anything. This is the party that in 2020 couldn't get it together enough to put together a party platform. It was too hard. Because all it. Put it on a card. You'd have to actually think. It's just better to just say you're for Donald Trump.

And that's essentially why they, you know, re-adopted the 2016 platform that didn't make any sense in 2020 because, you know, things change. And that's one problem. They have a huge demographic problem on a number of levels. One is the aging of the population. The Republican Party skews old today. The youth turnout in 2020 was through the roof because of,

of how alienating Trump was. And those initial political affiliations that people form in associations that form in their mind when they first become a voting age, those stick for a while. Going to take a while and do that. And those people are now, you know,

a lot of them say, hey, I voted and they're going to do it again. So they have a big demographic problem. They're making up for it a little bit because many Hispanic voters are not different, not that different ideologically, or economically from some of the white voters, the lower propensity white voters that the Republicans

have picked up because of Trump in 2016 and 2020. But I don't think that's an offset, but it's offsetting, again, against the loss of the, you know, what ought to be Republicans in the suburbs of many of our metropolises. So that's the problem. And the problem is fundamentally, everything goes back to, at least for the Republican Party in the last four years, It goes back to the former guy's narcissism. The former guy's rallies were never meant to persuade the people who could be persuaded but weren't. He was meant to terrify everyone.

No, they weren't. They were meant to assuage his own ego. Right. People who are going to believe in him anyway and vote for him anyway instead of reaching out. And the reason why he only did that is he had this narcissistic thirst for praise. and he couldn't accept the risk of being rejected, which is why he would not speak to audiences that might disagree with him. And he would not try to reach out to them to say, hey, listen, look at things from my perspective. And here's something that can help you.

He was only interested in how people could help him and boost his ego. And that doesn't really work when you're trying to, you know, I mean, all politicians are narcissistic to some degree. But you have to persuade them. You have to empathize with them and persuade them that, you know, to see it your way, or at least they persuade them that you see it their way. And that's what, you know, good politicians do. Again, another example, Bill Clinton. There is now a box on the Trump donation site that says, Jesse, will you tell us what the box says? It says that if you don't click it, it will tell Trump that you're a defector since you're no longer donating to him.

And it's a recurring donation box. Well, they've been doing, they do that, use that kind of, I'm going to separate two things here. The kind of language on the right that's used to raise money and this method of checking boxes. The language is something they've been used, they use for a long time. It's extremely cultish that, oh, Donald, you know, Donald Trump, are you with Trump? Are you, you know, I mean, it's really very much a personality called, personality called driven. kind of fundraising. It's like Scientology, but somehow stupider. Right. And then it is incredibly stupid. If you look at this stuff and I get some of it in the mail still, in fact, somebody called me the other day raising my

my house phone in New Jersey. They called me the other day trying to raise money for Devin Nunes. Wow. The Republican fundraise always tends to be lots of scare tactics. and lots of, you know, how much do you hate the other guys? And then now this sort of cultish cultish with Trump. And then this box checking thing is just insane. I don't think it's necessarily automatically just confined to the Republicans. I think other people do it. But the way the Republicans combined the box checking,

where you automatically have pre-checked a box that says you're doubling your donations or making them weekly with this, you know, Are you with Donald Trump? You know, so basically you have like a long paragraph that basically says, are you a traitor or are you supportive of Donald Trump? You know, and it's basically like 100 words. And then you have like five words of this box is checked so that you will give a money to us every week. And it's like a tiny little print not in bold.

I mean, the combination of the two is just insane. I mean, it is just insane. And, you know, the New York Times story had this, they described some poor. A poor woman, I think it was. A woman in hospice. In hospice who basically had her bank account cleaned out because he had checked to give, I don't know, $250 just once. And it started taking $250 out every week to the election. And basically she had no money left.

Well, 3% of all credit card fraud last month was the Trump campaign. Yeah, I just am amazed by it. I mean, if you were selling, I don't know, dog food this way, the FTC would come down on you like a ton of bricks. But politics are, you know, there are exemptions for politics. I don't know why this isn't some form of mail or wire fraud. There are no exemptions for politics there. I mean, you're basically, it is fraudulent. And it is a form of deception.

No people aren't going to read it that carefully. and you're intentionally obscuring the fact that they're giving more money than they believe they're giving. And I don't know why that isn't mail, I mean, mail or wire fraud. I'm sure by five years in jail. But I just want to say one last question, which I think is really interesting. It does seem to me like the Trump kid sort of disappeared. Yeah, but they still have secret service protection. So they're out there.

Oh, wow. Money well spent. Our tax dollars well spent. They really have sort of disappeared. I guess. Shooter's pretty loud. To me, he's kind of disappeared, the former guy. You know, I mean, occasionally when you see these crazy statements that he issues,

I mean, some of them are the Easter weekend crazy. Other than that, happy Easter. I mean, what, that was just great. To the haters and the losers. Haters and the losers. Happy, happy. The haters and the losers. Amanda Littman is the co-founder of Run for Something,

which helps Democrat candidates run for office, and the host of the Run for Something podcast. Welcome to the new abnormal, Amanda. Molly, I am so excited to be talking to you. This is going to be fun. Well, I'm very excited to have you because you are doing God's work. Oh, thank you. I say this as someone who's like an agnostic, so take that as you will, but I do believe it.

Will you explain to our listeners what Run for Something is? Yes. So Run for Something was born of the ashes of the 2016 election. And I worked for Hillary and worked for a bunch of campaigns before that. And shortly after Election Day in 2016, I got a Facebook message from somebody I went to college with. Hey, Amanda, I'm thinking my running for office and a public school teacher here in Chicago. What do I do? If Trump can be president, it seems like anybody can do this, what do I do?

And I didn't have an answer for him because at the time, if you were young, if you were newly excited about politics, someone to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would help you. And that, to me, like, that's a big problem and sort of symptomatic of some really big issues with the Democratic Party. So wrote a plan, built a website, found a co-founder, this incredible operative named Ross Morales for Ketto. And we launched this organization on inauguration day over four years ago thinking it would be really small. We were going to recruit and support young diverse progressives to run for local office. We figured we'd get 100 people in the first year and it would be like a side hustle. We had a thousand people sign up in the first week.

As of today, we're up to more than 75,000 young people all across the country who, who've raised their hands to say, I want to run for office. What's next? So we've built a program that has endorsed more than 1,500 and elected nearly 500 young people, mostly women, mostly people of color in basically every state. And it's been really cool, not a side project anymore. Sure. So tell me one of your success stories. Oh, I could do this for hours. I'll give you two. So in Texas in 2018, we started working with a young woman who was at the time, 27 years old. Family had immigrated from Columbia. She had just moved home back to Houston from who's at Harvard Graduate School. Her name was Lena Hidalgo. And she was saying, I know, Lena Hidalgo. But back in 2018, she was this 27-year-old, ambitious young woman who wanted to run for a county executive, a position called Harris County Judge, because she loved budgeting and she loved

emergency relief. And she thought that Harris County had really screwed up some emergency relief stuff, especially around floods. Nobody thought she could win. She was going up against a Republican who'd been in office for at least a decade. And nobody was like, you can't take him down. He's been there. He's an incumbent. This is a hard position. Lena ended up winning in 2018 and really a come from behind grassroots victory and has changed the game in Texas. She's arguably one of the most powerful women in Texas and possibly in the country. She is in charge in three years. Yeah, she's in charge of the third largest county in America. She manages a billion, multi-billion dollar budget. She's responsible for millions of Texans being able to vote early

for keeping people safe during the pandemic when the Texas lieutenant governor was going on TV saying sacrifice our seniors for the economy. God, I remember that guy. It's incredible. And she's what, now maybe 30 and running for re-election next year and really has shown what is possible when you elect people who give a shit. Well. Second example, I'll give you Molly. I'm obsessed with her as well is down in Virginia in my home state. We helped in 2017. Jennifer Carroll-Foy. Oh, I know her too. Go on.

Sorry, I don't mean to interpret you. No, now you know all our favorites. When we first got started with them, they were... Right, I wouldn't have. Yeah, they were like up-and-coming nobody's. I mean, amazing, but nobody's. Jennifer was running against a guy that the party had sort of handpicked as the candidate. About maybe a month after she announced her campaign, she found out she was pregnant with twins.

She ended up winning her primary by 10 votes, gave birth to these little preemie, who were in the hospital and the NICU all summer, so she would knock doors during the day and visit her little babies at night. She ended up flipping a seat in the Virginia State House red to blue, helping pass Medicaid expansion, leading the fight on ratifying equal rights amendment in Virginia, is now running for governor.

And if she wins, she will be the first black woman governor in America. Wow. That's so cool. No, it's very, what you're doing is very cool. This is the whole idea is that the people we start working with today or four years ago are, are rising stars. I always tell people it's like, we're the hipsters of politics. We know people before they're poor. How do you find these people? So some of it, we find them through

advertising events. We run a big holiday club national run for office day. We do a lot of social media. We work with partner groups. So, you know, we hosted a training or a webinar with United We Dream to talk to dreamers about running for office. Some of it is people find us. They reach out to us or they get recommended by a friend or they listen to our podcast or they read my book and they're like ooh i never really thought about running for office before but you make me think that maybe and then they reach out one of the things that i learned when i would go to these arena summit events was that women need to be told to run for office do you know this statistic seven times right and men will just tell you what they're running for and ask you for money

Molly, how many times when people told you you should run on this podcast? How many more do we have to do before you run? I feel like people don't really want me to run for up. Like, ultimately, it's not really, but. They say it, though. They say it. I think they kind of say it to be polite. I don't think that's true.

But so let's talk about that, though. It's so funny because it's like, I think about this a lot because there's this congressional seat. I live in a district with a congressional seat where people are always running for it. and there's a Democratic incumbent who's very entrenched, and there's this one guy who just always runs for it. And I just am curious, like, how do you sort of combat that? Well, part of it is telling the stories of people who've done it first. It's what makes this a really, like, rewarding work is it builds on itself.

So, you know, Jennifer ran, as I mentioned in 2017, while giving births of twins. In 2018, a young woman in Texas, Aaron's Wiener, saw Jennifer run and was like, if she did it with two babies, I can do it with one and proceeded to like run and give birth and then win and brought her little baby girl into the state capital with her later next year. Similarly, when we worked with Danica Rome, the first openly trans state. Yes. Yeah. We got a bunch of press for it after the 2017 elections. We heard from dozens of trans people afterwards saying, I saw you help Danica.

Can you help me too? One of them was the Colorado State Representative Brianna Titone, who's, you know, work helped inspired. Taylor Small in Vermont and Sarah McBride in Delaware. It really is someone has to go first so that a whole bunch of people can go next. Yeah. Which is cool. I'll say the other thing we have found is that for most people, and especially for women, especially for women of color or queer women or any woman who doesn't meet the sort of

idea of what a politician looks like, knowing that they're not alone and that there will be help for them, there will be support for them, has gone a long way. I think the other thing we try to reinforce for people is that running for office is absolutely really fucking hard. It is miserable. It's not glamorous. You're not going to make a ton of money. You're not going to have as much power as you think. If you win, it often gets worse because then you have to govern and governing as if possible, even harder. And it is one of the most rewarding things you could possibly do. It is one of the most powerful ways to serve your community. Sarah McBride has said this when I talk to her for a show of if you want to fall in love with your community, run for office. If you want to really understand. and see the vulnerability of your neighbors, of your friends, of your enemies, run for office. It is just like a transformative experience, win or lose. But I think especially for folks who don't meet the sort of understanding, knowing that it's supposed to be that way and that it's not because you're a failure, it's not because you're

incompetent. Like it's supposed to transform you and feel impossible and then you do it anyway. Yeah. So like level setting there is really helpful. Amanda, so I know my question here is a little more answer to and you do a lot more of this work. So I want to turn to you to this. But one of the things when I've talked to a lot of smart people who've thought about running that I wish would run is they're like, well, who's going to be on my team? What do you say to those people?

Well, the thing we remind people is that your greatest currency in your campaign is your relationships with others. So you start with your family, your partner, your parents, your kids, you know, your coworkers, make sure they're all on board with you. because if you're your partner or your parents or, you know, someone close to you was like, maybe you shouldn't run, either your campaign will suffer or your relationship with them will suffer or both. So you want to make sure you're aligned in that sense. From there, you know, fundraising will require talking to everyone you can possibly imagine, your, your dentist, your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, strangers on the street, you'll go through your phone and text or call everyone you've ever met. That part sucks, but it's part of the job. You build out your team with people you know,

and trust. And I think it really, the thing we often have to remind people is that a presidential campaign, which is what you most people understand as like a campaign because it's what we see in the news is thousands of people. Most school board and state legislative races are maybe one or two or five paid staff at most. A lot of times it's volunteers. You know, 75% of school board races cost a thousand dollars or less. 85% cost $5,000 or less. A city council race, you know, maybe it's depending on where you are. New York, obviously very different than Boise, Idaho. But it can be anywhere from 15,000 to millions, sure, but most places it's not. Most places it's in the $15,000 to $100,000 range, which is a lot, but it's also not coming from your pocket. It's coming from people you're asking

to invest in your community. So your team is the people you trust. Your team is the people you can count on. And I think I've heard our kids that say many times over is they are always shocked at the people who show up for them and equally shocked as the people who disappoint them, which is why you ask everyone. Amazing. One of the things that I saw that I found really interesting, and I'm curious to know what your take on this is in Arizona, when I was there, when I went to an arena event, arena summit event there in Arizona, that we met all of these young activists who had grown up

under the, you know, sort of terrible legacy of Sheriff Joe Aparo. Just Sheriff Joe Arpaio? He said, I get every name wrong. And they had experienced all of this discrimination and all of these just terrible laws under him. And it had actually really galvanized the community. Have you seen this other places? And do you have thoughts about this? I do.

I think one of the things, especially over the last year, the combination of the pandemic and so the the racial justice uprisings of last summer has really nailed home for people is that local government, these positions that we don't usually talk about, things like sheriff or DA or city council or school board or community college board have a direct and meaningful impact in your life, whether you like it or not. So you really want good people to be in them. One of the things that I am like the most proud of is that January 2021 was run for something's best recruitment month yet. And that so far this year, we have identified more potential candidates in the first four months of the year than we did in all of 2017 or in all of 2018. Wow.

You know, I had thought that maybe this was a fad or like a Trump-inspired thing, but only 3% of the candidates who actually get on the ballot with us ever mentioned Trump in their intake survey or any of their materials. It's really about solving these local problems and about bringing about change in their communities. And I think the like living through the worst of it, seeing how school boards have handled closing and opening and closing and opening again and seeing how city councils or DAs have handled, whether it's prosecuting police violence or navigating police budgets, you really can like understand the power of who gets elected in these positions. And it makes you furious.

Because it's like if these fucking assholes are in office, my life is worse. And I'm going to get to see them at the grocery. grocery store every week or at church or at the PTA meeting. And I have to, like, I know exactly how dumb these people are. I can't believe they're the ones in charge. How Democrats manage to somehow really, like, lose a fair number of Latino voters. So I'm curious to know, in my mind, if Democrats find really great Latino candidates, they can get these voters back. Are you seeing that? And how do you do that? How do you focus on that? Well, we haven't seen direct correlation between like race of the candidate and the impact it has on voter turnout. Right. So there's not really like a one to one

connection there. I will say that we know that candidate, the best, most meaningful way to get someone to show up with the polls is for them to have a personal relationship with a candidate and to meet them, for them for them to have an interaction with them. And I think one of the problems that Democratic Party has faced is that especially for folks outside our base or for folks who are trying to sort of like nudge over the finish line or convinced to join our team is that they need to have that connection. They need to put a face to the name. Otherwise, Democrat is like the boogey man they see on Fox News or their Sinclair broadcast every night. Right. Joe Biden's not knocking every door, especially pandemic, but like, you know, Rock Obama wasn't knocking every door. And most congressional candidates,

most Senate candidates, most gubernatorial candidates, they're too busy either raising money or going to big events and they're not personally talking to every voter. When you have a city council candidate who's from the neighborhood or a school board candidate who you know from school or whatever, you're able to have some kind of personal accountability in a way that is so much more meaningful and much more effective ultimately. On the Run for Something podcast next week, we're talking to Chloe Maxman, who is a young woman in a deeply white, deeply rural, main state legislative district. So not quite Latino, Latina, but comparable in that she is representing a district and in 2018 was the first Democrat to ever ever represent her district. In 2020, when she ran

for the state senate, she took out the Republican leadership in the state senate. And she talks a little bit about like how did she have those conversations with people who fundamentally disagreed with her. And part of it was she turned her campaign into a constituent services program where they called every senior citizen in her district during the pandemic and did wellness checks with all of them. So they made something like 13,000 calls. But two, she would go. to people's homes and they would say you're the first Democrat I've ever met running for office. You are the first Democrat who's ever come to my door. And that is true for so many places in this country, whether it's rural, urban, Latino, black. We're not there and we're not having

these conversations. So more so than any advertising we can do or type of candidate we recruit, it's simply having people on the ground who they can put a face to. They can build a relationship. with. You do see, though, that it does feel like Republicans are winning the messaging war with their right-wing media and the fact that Democrat has become like a scary boogeyman when we have this like very, I mean, not conservative, but we have a president who is extremely popular right now and who largely has spent his time giving people money. Yeah. I mean, it's like we had a president before who was like a crazy racist who was like gassing children at the border. And now we have this president who is like very agreeable and giving people money. And yet we Democrats are still trying to fight

against this like negative perception of the Democratic Party. You know, it's strange. It's really hard. And I think it's like part and parcel of a larger democratic problem. And that 30 or 40 years ago, Democratic donors did not give a shit about long term investments in, you know, the hot word of the weak infrastructure. You know, in the political Since infrastructure is media, infrastructure is local party building, infrastructure is things that will not pay off in two or five or ten years, but will pay off in 30 years. And Republicans did. They did the work. And we are now at the tail end of the Republicans' 40-year plan to build sustainable power. And this is what we get. And Democrats are on year five. And we have a lot of ground to make up really quickly, really, really quickly. Yeah, it's so interesting, but it does sound like what you're saying, this idea that Democrats really need to be on the ground, introducing themselves to people. And we actually had Jamie Harrison on, and he talked about the idea that, like, and we had talked about that, I heard a lot of talk about this in 2016, which was the idea that Democrats didn't even bother running in very red states.

Yeah, and he said that they're going to engage in the 50 state plan now. Right. I hope that's true. I'm really excited to see what they're able to do with it. And I think we, like, run for something just put out some research, maybe a week or two ago about something we call reverse coattails, which is some study that we did that looked at competitive state legislative elections versus uncontested. And in any given cycle, maybe 30 to 40 percent of state legislative races have only one candidate from a major party in them. They go uncontested. And more broadly, anywhere from 70 to 80 percent of the 500,000 elections on any given year, go uncontested. This is a big problem. If you look specifically at state-ledged races, we found that simply fielding a full slate of Democratic candidates in a district, even if you control for partisanship, for money, for everything else you could possibly sort of control for in a study, increase the top-of-ticket performance by anywhere from 0.3 to 1.5%. Oh. Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, though, because, for example, on this podcast, I have

subjected our listeners to my obsession with one Louis Gomes. from Texas's first district. And this has been a Quixotein quest of mine because I think he's like one of the worst members of Congress. And I don't say that lightly because there are a lot of really terrible Republican members of Congress. But he has run almost unopposed in his district, which, and he's, you know, he's brought proud boys.

I mean, he's just done all the like really Trumpy things. And so we did have this candidate. Hank for Texas on twice. And even though Hank for Texas didn't win, and I assume Hank for Texas will run in the next cycle, Hank for Texas, you know, he tried. And I feel like we need to be having people running for Texas's first district. And it does make a difference. And if they do see a normal Democrat, it does help the Democratic brand. It goes such a long way if you think about the impact of a campaign beyond what happens on Election Day. Obviously, only winning is winning. Like we don't get to govern if we don't win.

And we should try to win. And if you think about the victories of 2020, of flipping the Senate, winning in Georgia, winning in Arizona, you know, even Biden winning Wisconsin and Minnesota and Pennsylvania, that doesn't happen without the organizing that happened in 2017, four years ago. You know, John Nossif becoming senator in 2021 does not happen without John Nossif losing a congressional race in 2017. We have to see these things as compounding on each other and understanding that you have to lose a little. over time to eventually win big because you're not going to go from like a 60% Republican district to 51% Democrat in two years. There's not, but you can go from 60 to 58 to 55 to 53 to all of a sudden it's a swing district and all of a sudden it's blue over the course of a decade if you have sustained investment. So the thing that I have like been shouting from the top of my lungs lately is that this

actually isn't an operative or strategy problem. It's a donor problem because Democratic don't who, especially on the major side, you know, grassroots donors certainly have to make separate sort of qualifications about, but on the major donor side, do not like making long-term investments. The number of ones who said to us straight up, ooh, after 2020, I'm done with politics. After 2020, I'm back into tech, I'm going back to nonprofit, I'm going into philanthropic. Boy. It's like, you are why we lose. You are why.

You know what? Even if you don't think what we're doing makes sense. even if you don't buy into the optimism and the hope and the long-term investment, Republicans do. They absolutely do. So why are we unilaterally disarming? I'm really like, I'm hopeful and inspired by a lot of the good numbers they've seen from, you know, the first quarter and the organizing that's been happening and like the DNC and the DLCC and even run for something being in a pretty good financial place. And the number of organizers who are out of work after 2020 is still unbelievable. because these folks don't have budget to pay them.

And we talk a big game, sustained organizing, on the ground work, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we don't have the money. Right. And meanwhile, Republicans have heritage where they can employ everybody who's off the cycle and then keep them ready for 2024. They have an ecosystem that allows them to basically keep people and payroll all year around in different capacities and Americans for Prosperity that's running all year round. I still don't think it got enough attention.

The El Libre, which is like the Koch brothers funded Latino outreach work, which does a lot of just like civic engagement, citizenship, you know, English classes, that kind of thing. You wonder how Republicans are able to win with Latinos. Part of that is because they're there all the time. And the Coke brothers are money. We don't talk about enough. Some of it is messaging, sure, but some of it is they're simply present

and are building a brand with these voters in a way that we're not. Rich people listening to this podcast, listen up. Thank you so much, Amanda. I hope you'll come back before the midterms so we can talk about all your candidates. We definitely have to have you back. You're amazing. Oh, I'm always happy to have you, too. I love talking about one for something.

And Molly and Jesse, I'm always happy to talk to you also. Thank you for joining me. Thrilled to have you. Thank you so much for joining us. 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 Soledadadad 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. Dot the Dailybeast.com. That's new abnormal. at the DailyBeast.com. Frederick Brennan is the founder of H.N., who you may know from the recent HBO Max documentary, Q. Into the Storm. He's going to talk to us about why Ron and Jim Watkins

need to be arrested. And if you enjoy this conversation, it is presented in full on the Daily Beast's newest podcast, Fever Dreams, which you could find on your favorite podcast app. You were sort of a breakout star of this documentary on Q&ON. What do you feel like the filmmaker left out?

I think that, The reason that I'm, as you're saying, the breakout star is just because there are so few good people featured in that documentary that anybody who is even moderately, you know, sane comes out looking like the greatest person. But that would be my answer to that. You know, as far as what he left out, I have to be totally honest. I haven't even watched the last two episodes because, I mean, I experienced all of that. And it was very difficult for me, you know, those days and leaving everything and all of that. So I've still not done so.

I need to, but I haven't. But, you know, yeah, that's all I can say. So, Fred, you've talked a lot about it. It's in your Twitter bio that you think Ron and Jim Watkins should be arrested. What should they be arrested for? And can you make that case? Sure. That's pretty easy.

Essentially, what QAnon was, what the Q poster was doing, was impersonating a federal agent that is at its simplest what Q is. The only reason anybody ever believed in any of the Q drops is because they believe that they were coming from a source inside the Trump White House. In particular, they believe that they were coming from a military intelligence source. And that is textbook impersonation. And the Watkins has received material gain for that in terms of their site getting bigger than being featured in mass media. He had a super PAC. I believe he still has it called Disarm the Deep State that received donations. He received ads that he would not have received otherwise. People knew

that they had to come to this source to see them. So he received ad revenue that he would have not got in otherwise all sorts of ways that he profited personally from the fact that people believed that there was, you know, impersonation of a federal agent going on there. And Ron Watkins himself, in the documentary, admitted that he at least posted his cue at least once. That's how I read it. You know, he didn't start it necessarily, but he was the only one that could say who had written a cue post because he was the admin of H.N. And in the same way that Jack Dorsey could take over somebody's Twitter account and start posting his them, he can do the exact same thing. And he admitted that, you know, right at the end of the documentary, I did see that clip.

And this impersonation, whether the charge would be, you know, conspiracy to impersonate or impersonation itself, you know, for Ron and Jim, I think a very strong case can be made. And the only reason that, let's say, you know, the federal government has chosen not to is because for some reason we have this idea that the Department of Justice is only supposed to charge cases that are, you know, guaranteed wins, like 99% conviction rate or whatever. but I think that this case is too important and that the courts should be left to decide whether or not what they did was impersonation of a federal agent, even if there is this new medium of the internet and there is all of this new stuff because the internet is the world and it affects the world. And we can't keep looking at the internet and being like, oh, well, it happened online. So this needs a lot less resources and a lot less attention. We should actually be looking at it in the opposite way that crimes that occur online should receive at least as much attention if not more. Fred, so, you know, obviously, so for those who haven't seen the documentary, you were working for Jim after selling A. Chan to him. When did you first begin to suspect that Jim and Ron might be in control of Q?

So, just a little bit of my backstory. I made Ait Chan in 2013 October. And when it got popular, which was around August of 2014, I could no longer, you know, afford to continue doing it. And I didn't necessarily want to continue doing it on my own. So I essentially just, you know, gave it over to them. And I believed that their ownership of two channel, which is a Japanese website that's similar, would make them, you know, qualified and prepared to do that. And I wasn't aware of the shady means that they managed to get control of that site.

In any case, I had no ownership over it by January of 2015. And by April of 2016, I'd already resigned and I was working on other projects for them. So, you know, I, even though that's the case, I was still kind of working with the same people and talking to them on a daily basis, even if it's only about, you know, two channel. Obviously, as it seen in the documentary, Jim Watkins is saying stuff like, oh, I'll hope you'll come back. And, you know, they would always try to give me news about what's going on on H.N. To try to get me to come back as it's admin again. So when Q originally came to H.C.N., which was in 2017, or, you know, like right at the end, right at the end of 2017. like December and then 2018 January, right that era.

Ron Watkins was very excited about this because he had all of these new users on 8chan. And I believe that that's kind of when he started thinking to himself, how is he going to keep control of this new community? Because, you know, in the same way that they left 4chan and came to 8chan, you know, they could leave 8chan and go somewhere else. So he came up with that, you know, so-called secure trip code system to keep Q essentially locked into the walled garden of 8chan, where it could no longer. or leave. And then once Q wrote the post that, you know, there will be no outside communication

that sealed the deal. Nothing outside of this platform. Essentially, Q would only post out of A-Chann according to Q. So I became convinced for sure that they had taken over the Q account after the shootings that occurred. There were multiple. There was the Chrysert shooting. And then the manifesto got uploaded to A-Cham. There was the Poet-Shutting. Same thing. There was the El Paso shooting. Same thing happened again. And after those three shootings, 8-chan became very unstable because I came out against it and I was able to keep it offline for months at the end of 2019 until they finally were able to move over to a Russian hosting provider that I was not able to influence. But in the period between, Q did not post at all.

Q was not able to reach their followers at all. And when H.N. came back online, it was extremely unstable. And I was trying to post on it to see if it worked. And it was not working at all for me, but somehow Q was posting. And that was kind of the moment for me that seemed. the deal that they decided during this hiatus at least if they had not already been controlling it before. They were controlling it now. And Q somehow had administrator credentials because I know how the site work. That posts that are made through the admin functions are prioritized. There's a high

load. So I knew, you know, at that moment that they had taken it over. So what was the moment that you knew that the Wackens were Q? Like I said, when 8chan had been down for three months because of me, And then it came back and Q had no way of knowing if he was a third party that this was going to be a stable solution. Because 8chan had been up and down, you know, first as 8chan and then as 8chan and then is 8Kun. And then I had been able to manage to pull it back down again. Like this was like their fourth attempt to get back online. First they did it through the Chinese host. Then they hit it through a few American hosts.

And then I believe a British one was in there somewhere of auxility. And every time it would get taken down. And if Q were a third party, he'd have no way of knowing that this was going to be. the time that it's going to work. And he would want to safeguard his ability to reach his followers by writing something like, hey, in case 8chan doesn't last, you can find me at Gab or yeah. And he didn't do that. And not only did he not do that, he continued in this only eight Chan, only ever 8chan stance. And like I said, I was trying to post on 8chan and I'm its admin. So I, you know, I was its admin from here. I wrote all of its software. My name is still on the bottom because of the open source licensing

requirement. You know, they have to attribute the author of the code. That's one of the only things they have to do because it's free software so they can use it and I have no legal right to stop them. But they have to attribute me. And so I'm sitting there as somebody who wrote the software. If anybody should be able to post, it should be me. And I'm not able to. Other technically inclined people that were trying at the time, we're not able to. And somehow Q can. And that day in November 2019 when 8-10 came back online and Q was able to post when the site was barely working at all, It was kind of only up over tour. And even then, it was only read only.

You could not write. And somehow Q can write when nobody else can't. So, yeah, that's when I knew. Do you think definitively, are you sure at them? Yes, for sure. I'm sure that they took it over. I have no way of knowing who started it. I have no way of knowing, like, who they weren't in contact with,

who could have helped them write drop? That's not something I can know. You know, were they in contact with other people such as Bannon, such as General Flynn, Stone? Those are not things that I'm capable of knowing. But I know that at the end of the day, it was Ron and Jim were holding the keys to the server. And it's them who decides what gets written as Q and who is going to, you know, have the so-called honor of having the trip code and the verification through A-Champ. And so, yes, I'm sure it's them.

I, you know, it would be very interesting if anybody else was helping them. So far, there's no proof of that. But, yeah, I could not be more convinced. When did you know that this all had to be stopped? Like, when did you realize that 8chan had to go? Well, it was after the Christchurch shooting for me. So it was all the way back in March of, no, that would be May of 2019. So quite a while ago now.

And everything that has developed since then, you know, the Chrysler shooting, Poet-Alpaso, the Hollis shooting in Germany, the person who did that was an 8-Chan user but just wasn't able to post it on 8-Chm because 8-chan was down, but he made references to 8-chan and employees of 8-chan. And even he made references to Mark in it. So we know that he's an agent user. And all of those shootings were what sealed the deal for me. But to see how they were able to not only survive after all of those shootings,

but to, as they put it, embrace infamy, thrive and continue this Q&N movement into something during the pandemic that became so explosive that it led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol and the kind of intrusion of the Confederate flag farther than it had ever been since the Civil War. I mean, you know, it should be pretty obvious to every. everybody by now that H.N. is a site that continuously breeds domestic terror because its owners like it that way. They like the embrace infamy. They like everything that's going on. And they enjoy immensely the attention that they get and the power that they will. And, you know, if they aren't put a stop to now, I don't even know what they could do next. But they have all the skills. They still have all these radicalized users. And the thing about conspiracy theories and grifts like this is that, you know, the people never learn their less. They just keep looking for another conspiracy.

theory. And it's only a matter of time before there's another one that radicalizes them again. And we have the same kind of sequence of events. So, you know, I definitely think that they should be held to account for impersonating a federal agent. I definitely think that they should be, you know, held to account for using Russian hosting because they can't find anyone in the U.S. that will support their toxic views and beliefs. I've even thought that with all of the sanctions they have, Why is it legal for an American host, or I'm sorry, an American website to even use Russian hosting? That doesn't even make sense. Obviously, the only reason you would need to do that is to circumvent, you know, U.S. law, right?

So, but I guess people just don't take it seriously because it's just internet stuff. And that's part of the big problem. I mean, if it were people coming over from Russia and helping them, well, there would be all sorts of legal requirements around that. But having a server in Russia is suddenly, oh, it's all different, you know, because it's It's a server. But the line is still running, you know, straight from Russia into the United States. And that's where all of the traffic goes.

And that's where all of the Q drops were traveled along that line through, you know, the entire storming of the capital end a year before. So to hear the rest of this conversation. Head over to Fever Dreams on your favorite podcast app and subscribe today. Fred talks explicitly in that full interview about Ron and Jim's fascist and racist motivations and much more. 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 one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, the new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Tsubisang 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 podcasts. Okay, so my fuck that guy this week is going to be Jair Bolsonaro. He's killing all his people. He's replacing anyone who disagrees with him. He's, you know, got this variant now.

I mean, so basically what happens is the more the virus is allowed to propagate, the more it is able to just mutate and get worse and worse and worse. So Bolsonaro is like a little reminder of, I don't know that Trump was ever as bad as he is, but there's a little reminder there of what happens when you are an autocrat and you don't care and you don't listen to doctors and you just say, like, we'll just be fine. And we're literally watching like a mass extinction. No, it's crazy. And it's something that I think their deaths down there are up to something like 4,000 a day. Yeah, I mean, it's a much more.

country and they're digging up graves and they're just killing all their people. And they're also putting the rest of South and Central America at risk. If you turn your country into a national petri dish, you basically get more variants, which become harder to, you know, over time, the more mutations that occur, that means that your vaccination programs might not be caught up to. Exactly. And they don't even have a vaccination program. And you have all of these local leaders begging him to take it seriously. So I feel like you really see what can happen if Texas were a country.

And so I say to you, Bolsonaro, fuck you, and stop killing your people because it's just, I mean, it's just unconscionable to me. I also think that with this southern border issue, you really do see that what happens in all of those South and Central American countries, we are all one planet and we have to take care of our you know the whole continent or else we're going to be in a lot of trouble so that is my fuck that guy okay i know this is too simple and easy but i'll go with matt gates

no please it's just pretty obvious i he's going to get what he deserves clearly it's only a matter of time it does seem as if everybody knows this guy's in a lot of trouble yeah no and no Nobody, he's got nobody defending him. They all, I think they all kind of knew that he was just a ticking time ball. And nobody wants to come within three feet of him, like 10 feet of him. Yeah, it's a triumph of the fail sun. 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. will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

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