The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Michelle Malkin Is Den Mother of the Alt-Right Dipsh*ts

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

On the latest episode of THE NEW ABNORMAL, Rick Wilson explains why he’s avoiding sushi, tea, helicopters, and, perhaps, knives. Molly Jong-Fast wonders what is going on in Michelle Malkin’s mind, and unexpectedly wins an alt-right prize. And our dynamic duo talk to Daily Beast reporter Olivia Messer about her new story involving Ashton Kutcher, Joe Exotic, and some rather suspect coronavirus tests. Plus! Molly and Rick debut two new features: Breaking Dumb, and Trump Those Fuckbros (or is it the other way around?). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, this is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly John Fass, novelist, an editor at large at The Daily Beast, and the person who tells Rick not to tweet the things he wants to tweet. I'm an editor at Large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, bestselling author, and full-time troublemaker. The new abnormal is about one nation under a pandemic and how it's changing all of us. We'll talk about what's happening in the country and the culture and look at good and bad people, leadership, and ideas. Molly and I come from very different political worlds. But what brings us together is that we both love America. And we realize that putting our country over party and ideas over ideology might be the only thing that gets us through this.

We'll be joined by smart guests from media, politics, culture, medicine, and science. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sands from invading our respective bunkers. All right. So we have a slightly different format for today because we have so many complaints. Do you have a number of complaints? Because I have a number of complaints. I have a number of complaints. My complaints are boundless in number.

This is in honor of Jerry Stiller, right? The Festimus. RIP. The airing of grievances will now begin here on the new abnormal. That's right. Our Festivus episode. So I guess the last time we talked was on Friday right after the episode came out. And then how could we have known that this weekend would be Fire Festival of Presidential Leadership with the Rage Tweeting Weekend 2020?

It's amazing. He just plums the depth. You know, you'd think going to Camp David to reflect and strategize would have left him without the time to tweet like a hundred fucking times over the weekend. There's always time for Twitter. If you and I can attest to anything, there's always time to Twitter. It's always time for Twitter. That's right. So he spent the weekend trying to rev up the Obamagate story.

And retweeting a lot of really Nick Fuentes. Actually, he didn't retweet Nick. He retweeted Michelle Malkin, who has been a bitweeted a lot of really, Nick. Malkin, who has become like the den mother of the alt-right dipsets. Right. She's technically worse than Nick Fuentes. Oh, yeah. She's become so much of an alt-right.

She calls herself the mother of groopers. And for our audience, who's not up on the alt-right lingo, the groopers are whatever goddamn symbol with the frog and the anti-Semitism and the yada, yada, yeah, there's my Jerry Stiller thing right there. But this entire idea that Trump was going to have learned something from Charlottesville and wasn't going to play footsie with the alt-right. anymore. Well, that's shit's right out the fucking window, isn't it? And the fact of the matter is

Michelle Malkin is the tip of the iceberg. All right iceberg, yeah. And these people are like political herpes. They're always going to reappear. They're always going to try to come back. They're always going to try to slither back in through some vector or another. And so Trump this weekend, retweeting

her and thus Fuentes, led to a fap fest on Gab. And these people just lost their damn minds. I have to say, I heard her once speak at one. one of my CPACs, and she said, I'm not white, but I am right. And I was like, I don't know what the hell I'm looking at, but this is bizarre. So the weekend of rage tweeting goes on, and it's all about trying to rev up this thing with Obamagate, and all about trying to get the Q&ON people to get completely hyped up.

And so this weekend, the Trump right was vomiting out memes by the bucket full. A lot of them were things like Obama in shackles or Obama in a prison cell, and a lot of Punisher memes, that's Punisher Skull meme with the usual Q&on phrases, pain is coming, panic in D.C. So they walked into this morning, they woke up with an unaccustomed political erection thinking that Obamagate was going to be the big story of the day. Yeah, they were excited for the presser. They really were. They were thinking, Bill Barr is coming out today and he's going to announce that the mass arrest have begun at last. And they were disappointed. So while the presser was ostensibly about the Saudi

Arabian student who was tied to al-Qaeda and shot up the Naval Air Training Center over in Pensacola. Another Florida issue. But yes, continue. You've heard Florida is the Florida of America, right? Florida is the Florida of the world. Australia thought they were the Florida of the world. They're not even close.

That's right. Certainly true. A lot of these people went into this, watching this press conference thinking, you know, Bill Barr is going to, he's going to lay it down. He's going to follow Trump's lead. And he gets asked the question, and he says, well, no. I don't see a scenario where we prosecute Barack Obama or Joe Biden. And there were three groups of people who at that moment, they'd had a lump of coal in their ass,

a diamond would have popped out. They were squeezing so hard in anticipation. So gross. I got that from my grandma, by the way. She was a handful. But they were so ready. In Trump world, they've become accustomed to Bill Barr being their soldier. They think of Bill Barr now as a weapon.

And so with Donald Trump pushing everybody under the sun this weekend and every Fox producer all weekend, writing copy about the war on Obama and the Obamagate, get him in the dock and make him testify. Even Fox News, quote unquote, the supposedly less foxy side of Fox went all in on Obama Gate this weekend. Oh yeah, they were over the moon on this. So they hear Barr say this and their reaction was clearly not happy. The second group of people who are all the Trump fluffer media types. I mean, the federalists, they must have been weeping and tearing their hair out, rending their garments when they heard this because they've been framing this all at. as it's obvious that it comes from the very top.

It was Obama's plan to spy on Trump, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, when you've got the attorney general who is not known for his unwillingness to do anything that helps Trump, shoot that down, there's a moment of despair. We're going to see that playing out the next couple of days. And finally, all the conspiracy nuts and the QAnon people and the Trump crazies on Facebook, but I repeat myself. Facebook, they do seem to have really lowered the bar of discourse, like between Planned DEMIC.

If I lower the bar, you mean they dug somewhere down around the Earth's core? Yes. Those people, I mean, they are convinced, absolutely convinced in their hearts that there will be mass arrest. There are thousands and thousands of secret indictments that we're going to get Mo and that the entire corrupt adrenochrome harvesting, child killing, blah, blah, pizza gate, yada, yada, yada. It's my second yada, yada, yada, yada of the show. I will now cease.

Pizza gate conspiracy world is just seconds away from Donald Trump and King. Q and on JFK Jr. rolling up this massive injustice. Those people heard that, and I guarantee you, for about 30 seconds, they had like, is this cognitive dissonance? Is this what I'm feeling? But no, it's not because they're too indoctrinated. And they immediately jumped to this idea of this is 97-dimensional quantum hyper-chess. None of you can understand how Trump is.

The plan. Trust the plan. And I think the Biden campaign had to just be staring and shaking their heads today because I don't think they really had a good grip on how to respond to some of the things that were happening this weekend. Somalia, you know what triggered a lot of this crazy Trump tweeting over the weekend. It's not just the sense of trying to make Obama get a thing, but Obama being a thing. Right. He gave a very good, very, very good address, graduation address, which a lot of people really liked and was also covered on the Fox News channel, which Fox News is not allowed to do that.

Somebody is getting a firm spanking over that one. One of the things I think that emerged from that is Donald Trump has this self-image of being a masterful communicator. And I can tell you, as a Republican, when we used to try to build out ads about Obama and try to punch back against that very calm, technocratic affect of his, voters never bought into the whole, he's a crazy socialist. He's a Kenyan Muslim sleeper agent. They never bought into it because he just sort of delivers a message really well. I think he was trolling Donald Trump this weekend in a way that Trump could not resist. And that's why we had Tweed a Palooza all weekend. So, Molly, on the other side of amazing graduation speeches this weekend, did you catch the one by Ben Sass?

It's funny. Someone sent it to me a few days ago. And I thought, oh, Ben Sass, who has the energy. And I always feel with Ben Sass, like, I feel bad for him because clearly the guy is, he's not a trumpist. He's just we, right? So I just waited. But when I finally saw it, it was so depressing. This was sort of the best of the Republican Party, and he's just such a disaster.

Yeah, there were a lot of people who watched that and thought, tell me this is some kind of, like, interesting performance art prank. I don't think he has performance art pranks in him. You know, there's a great difference between being funny and knowing how to write comedy, and it was neither. Well, it was interesting because you could tell that people have told him he's funny. And so he was, he clearly believes that he can be funny. And whoever told him that must really hate him.

The comedy stylings have been sass this week on Netflix. That's right. It was just disturbing on every level. I noticed that you were a Russian meme this weekend. I apparently was a Russian meme this weekend. Julia Davis, the great Russia student and who writes for the Beast. And who watches Russian television all day long. So we don't have to.

The other night I was referred to on Russian television as a dissident. So I'm thinking that at long last, the Trump people have mentioned them to their masters back home at the home office in Moscow. So I'm going to avoid sushi, T, polonium windows and helicopter rides for the foreseeable future. And perhaps knives. Perhaps knives. We don't want you stabbing yourself in the back before you fall out of window. Well, I've got the flu.

Would you like to run down our special news segment? Normally, of course, folks, we do a fuck-the-sky segment. But today we're doing a segment we call Trump Those Fuck Bros. Trump Those Fuck Bros. Sorry. Fuck those Trump Bros. Sorry. Fuck those Trump Bros. Try saying that three times fast. It was an impressive weekend of the Trump kids, just each one stupidering the other, right? So we started the weekend with Junior who shared Junior's Instagram page is like the worst of the worst. It's sort of like a cesspool of the worst of 4chan. And in one of Junior's Instagram memes was a alligator calling Joe Biden a pedophile.

This caused the New York Times to write an article about the fact that in the fancy Washington, the classy Nixon world of Washington, you would not have the president's adult son accusing the his father's challenger of being a pedophile. Right. Look, that meme he posted, I don't know where he got it from. I'm not saying that Donald Trump Jr. is an aficionado of reptile porn. I'm not saying that.

But obviously, he knows somewhere to find reptile porn because he posted reptile porn. I mean, is Don Trump Jr. A reptile porn aficionado? A fan? I don't know. Does Donald Trump Jr. Spank Bank feature a folder called Komodo Dragons? I don't know.

I'm just asking questions. Yes, you're just asking questions. You're changing the narrative, right? I mean, who among us does not want to question the narrative? But what I'm always impressed with with Jr., is that he is always so aggrieved. Right. I'm so sorry for Junior's upbringing. All right. Well, and there we have it. Certainly. Rick Wilson is not trying to get to Don Jr. in any way, clearly.

But anyway, so we had Friday was a day filled with Don Jr. rage tweeting and the New York Times being horrified. And then as if clockwork, Eric peered on Judge Box of Wine. Do you mean the Judge Janine Franzy hour? She gets very drunk and yells at the television. among us, but not those of us with TV. Right, exactly. And she had Eric on, and Eric had somehow, because he, as a vampire, had an entire background, which was candles.

And it looked like he was in a sort of cave. I don't know if that's the decor of his apartment or, you know, at the private club he's living at or in Transylvania, where he goes. But it had candles and crazy sort of gothic stuff behind him. And then he got up there and talked about how unfair it was. and how actually Democrats had created coronavirus to make his dad look bad. That it will magically go away? Yes.

I'm Eric Trump and welcome to the Twilight Fanfic readalong hour. There are days when I almost feel like a scintilla of pity for Eric, but it passes kind of swiftly. But that idea that Eric Trump goes out and says, this is a made up disease, it'll disappear once the election's over. And you just have to slap yourself occasionally and remember that in any other time, in any other White House, in any other administration, in any other timeline, the president's large adult son saying that, the major media would not be treating it as a cause for coverage. They'd be wondering why the president hasn't had the kid committed. Why he's not hooked up with an adequate mental health counselor and sufficient medication.

But I think it's also very telling that what the Trump children are saying is always closer to where Donald Trump is than any political advisor. It's always closer to what Trump is really thinking and saying private. than anything Kelly Ann whispers to a reporter or anything Mark Meadows says to a reporter or anything, anybody in the campaign size tries to contextualize and spin and Mercedes Schlapp or Match Slap will come out and say, oh, no, this is really very normal and this is about this and that strategic. No, bullshit. These guys are saying what daddy thinks.

Right. And I think the most telling of those is our special friend from this weekend, Ivanka. Well, she was sort of trying to outdo everyone else. If you're trying to outdo the large adult sons, the failed sons really set the bar this weekend. But when Ivanka came out and retweeted Elon Musk, when he said he'd taken the red pill and she retweets it and comments on it, this was a very, very clear signal. Because remember, I said that if you thought they were done with the alt-right, you're out of your mind. The alt-right has a specific meaning on the red pill. Of course, it's derived from the movie The Matrix, where the red pill supposedly leads you to truth and understanding that the world is a construct.

Well, in the alt-right, taking the red pill, and there are variations on this theme, so I'm not going to be too doctrinaire about what the alt-right means. With the alt-right, taking the red pill often means the realization that the world is controlled by, can you guess, Molly? Can you guess? Women? Oh, no, no, even better. Minorities? Try again. The favorite alt-right minorities.

Yes! Ding-ding-ding! You win the prize! Wait, I'm Jewish, so that means that I went, right? Yeah, well, obviously, you control the global banking system, duh. That's right. enslaved them for years and caused them to have to live in mom's basement. She saluted Elon Musk for, quote, taking the red pill and the alt-right lost its damn mind. It was a moment of pure joy for them

because they feel like once again, just like when Donald Trump in 2016 was retweeting accounts like, white genocide TM, and instead as a following the Trump political rule that we have no enemies to our right. This whole thing this weekend, all this signaling from this weekend, was very clear to me that they were trying to re-establishment. some of that relationship and to reboot some of that love of the Green Frog Army. The thing with Ivanka is for so long that Vanka has claimed, I mean, this is like a passion of mine as someone who grew up as a feminist and has this real aversion to people using feminism as a fake way to sell their brand. The Red Pillar has a really misogynistic

trope. Sure. So to have Ivanka kind of endorsing it is really the end of her pretend feminism in my mind. I would think the end of her pretend feminism was the fact that her dad said you could grab them by the pussy and she didn't walk out and say, I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm done. True, true. So I feel like we just had to do a weekend recap because there was just so much, like I said, I had many complaints about this weekend. That's right. Many, many complaints. Of complaints about you people.

You people. Hey, in case you missed it, the Daily Beast recently launched a crossword puzzle. It's made to let news junkies like us flex our mental muscles with clues, on what's happening in politics and pop culture. Head on over to the Daily Beast.com slash crossword dash puzzles to play now. It's a great way to pass the time during the coronavirus, and it's free.

Folks today, Molly and I are delighted to welcome one of the Daily Beast star reporters, Olivia Messer. Olivia hails from Texas and has become one of the leading folks at the Daily Beast covering the COVID crisis and how we're responding to it. And we are delighted to have you here with us today, Olivia. Thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. So you had a piece the other day about whether or not we're doomed for another lockdown. And what do you think the consequences are going to be in some of these places, you know, outside of the spin machine of the White House every day? Sure. So it's been really interesting to watch the difference and even the public health opinion from when I first started reporting on the coronavirus in January to now, even in January,

even among the public health officials in the U.S., there was a feeling that might not get that bad here. And we might not have to do lockdowns or some of the people. the other more draconian measures that other countries were doing. One, for our legal reasons and the difference in the amount that freedom and self-determination are big factors in our culture here, but two, just because there really was this feeling among a lot of people that it might not be that much worse than the flu. Looking back on that, now it's wild, that that was even coming from public health expert, but I don't think we could have possibly known everything that was going to happen in regards to our own response, the testing rollout missteps in the U.S. will have changed

everything about the way that we responded to the crisis. The fact that we still don't have enough tests now, even in many places, to test not just everyone with symptoms, but everyone who's been in contact with everyone who's had symptoms. And for most places that are reopening, no, we don't have any of those things. Even in places where there's no current outbreak, there's no guarantee that that won't continue to happen. It hasn't spread everywhere in every community and every city. You know, at least in New York, one of the really interesting things, I think, in the next few weeks, is we started this new antibody test initiative a week or two ago with plans to test 140,000 people. And even though that's not enough tests to make individual level decisions or know about immunity,

it might be enough to tell us how widely it's spread in New York. And that might be able to tell us something about who can open and when and what communities have been more affected. I've read that it's about, they're expecting it's about 30%. The issue there is really a matter of who gets tested and who doesn't. Rather than just sampling a random population of people, the way that New York is doing it is requiring you to sign up. And for the most part, people who are signing up are people who think they had it. So at 30%, that's pretty high.

So the way that you go about, that sort of survey, has a big impact on the percentage result. you get, which is, I think, part of what's difficult, even I wrote a story about Nebraska, about how these different sites were having different positive test results. And it's very difficult from the outside to know how much that's about the different tests they're using and their accuracy versus sample bias or lab conditions. And all of this is being learned at the same time in all of these different places. I've read the accuracy on some of these tests is very varied. Yes, so there's two different metrics and then there's different metrics within those metrics. It gets very complicated. But there's sensitivity and specificity. You want to test that knows that when it's detecting something, it's detecting COVID-19, not just coronavirus. And you want to test that is going to respond not just when someone has like a tiny amount of the virus, but enough. But if you need too much of the virus to detect a positive result, then you might get false negatives. There's a lock that goes into those tests.

and all of them are still at the emergency youth authorization level for the FDA. It seems like there are a lot of varying flavors of the testing going on around the country. You wrote a story about this crazy story about the testing out in Nebraska. Can you tell us a little bit about that with Ashton Coocher and what you call the Fire Festival of Corona Testing? To be specific, that was a quote from a state senator. I did not tell it that. I just would like the Daily Beast attorneys to be aware that I, like, That's just a really interesting story.

So there's Test Iowa, Test Utah, and Test Nebraska. And they're all being done. They're the same group of software engineer and health companies. Most of them are software companies based in Utah. One of them is close friends with Ashton Coucher. And I guess Ashton Coucher got wind of how successful the Test Utah project was going and had a meeting with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds where he said, hey, you might want to check this out. And, you know, look, I can't speak to the amount of betting she did after that, but she chose it. And she also told Governor Ricketts of Nebraska that he should do it as well. And so these three multi-million dollar contract were created based on that. And then there's been some bumpy rollouts in all three states. And it turned out some really wonderful local reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune found that Test Utah's results were very different than the same results at local and

public labs in the state. And so the local paper in Nebraska, the Omaha World Herald, did a similar search and found basically that if you were getting tested at the test Nebraska site, they were coming up with 3% positive result versus 18% positive result at state hospitals and local hospitals. And so that brought up these concerns of false negatives. Now, as I said before, there's all sorts of factors that could go into that. It could be the test or it could be sample bias because people are only getting tested through public health labs at doctor's orders and people getting tested through Nebraska might be self-assessing. But the bumpy rollout had some really interesting, I mean, just some of the documents that we received when they first started, the governor's office didn't

prep apparently a lot of other offices. And so there were emails going out from the social media marketing for this campaign where a congressional aide emailed the governor's office and was like, is this coming from you guys or is this like a Joe Exotic Fund? Like, what is this? Rick and I like any Joe Exotic jokes. Absolutely. Right. Yes, of course. Remember when Joe Exotic was a thing like 10 years ago?

And I've grown a COVID mullet. Oh, stop. No, you haven't. Pretty sure I follow you on Instagram and we do not have a mullet. Never had, never will. Olivia, what you're describing about the way the tests have rolled out in this crazy patchwork, in the dawn of time when I was a very young man in the first Bush administration, I was a young junior deputy appointee nothing burger at the Pentagon.

This guy who was this expert on defense procurement one time said to me, he goes, well, this is a cliche, but everything here, you can have it fast, cheap, or it'll work. Pick two. And it seems like that's sort of the rule with these tests. Even though entrepreneurs and tech bros and everybody else are trying to throw skill at the problem, it still seems like it's a patchwork. The concerning thing for me is that no other country has been having this same testing problem. And I know that there were reasons early on that things were slower, but I still haven't, even as I've been reporting on this, been able to wrap my mind around.

One public health official that I spoke to a few weeks ago was saying that the serology tests, for example, that they've used in Egypt for the last five years. They've been able to test some 65 million people for everything from hepatitis to diabetes, starting at the age of 12. And it's given them this huge insight into their public health issues and how to solve them and all of that. And it was done for 50 cents a person. And serology tests are cheaper to make than diagnostic kits and they are easier to make. That being said, diagnostic kits are available at the White House in 15 minutes and they're still costing Americans. More than that, some cases in Iowa, I believe last week, there was a story about how it took 17 days to get results back. Just remember, everyone who wants a test can have a test.

Yeah, I was told that. What's happening with that? I heard about that. Have you been able to get a test just for free? Anybody here? Put your hands up? I have not. I haven't left my house in like two months.

I don't know what's going on in the world. So, Olivia, have you done any reporting or any or talked to any sources on the difficulty between discovering a viable vaccine and then scaling it up to treat 350 million Americans? I think that's a big jump. People are totally underestimating in this scenario. I think there seems to be a disconnect in wow, we found something that could work, and then the months or even years of clinical trials necessary, and then the matter of how much of it we can produce on top of how expensive it's going to be. It's really lovely to be able to say we have this

therapy that might work, or multiple therapies that might work, or a vaccine that might work, But taking that from idea to actual production, manufacturing, dissemination cost, I think that it just right now we're far enough away from it that it seems like a miracle that we might even find one. But the problem is, I think it's early enough that those kind of concerns could be starting to be addressed now. For example, if in November, December, we had started talking about how to scale up our public health infrastructure, how to hire contact trace. how to produce tests, things might have gone pretty different when we actually got to the point where we need to do those things. You broke the story that Governor Abbott behind closed doors said, yeah, we're going to reopen, but I know it's not the right thing to do, basically. Can you run us down on that story? Because I got to tell you, that Greg Abbott is not a bold guy as a rule,

but that seemed like a fairly truthful statement behind closed doors. I'm curious how you think that played out and how it's playing out. But he said in public up until that point, after he had reopened the state, and not just reopen the state, but put restrictions on what local folks can do. So, for example, he said, these things are open now. No locality can close any of these things more than the order across the state. So even if there's a specific outbreak in a specific city that feels like it requires more shutting down, those folks are not allowed to do that. At the same time, in public, he was saying, we know that reopening could lead to more cases. We know that this might be a result, but in private, he said things like ipso facto. It is a fact that when we open, there will be more infections.

And he didn't say this, but also more deaths. And the difference in tone to my mind was really striking. I went back to make sure that every press conference, everything that he had said publicly, I was hoping maybe there wouldn't be this much discrepancy, but that's really not what I found. It was that we know that this risk exists and not just that it's a risk, but that it's a guarantee and still felt that it was the right thing to do anyways. So, Olivia, do you feel like when you're talking to folks out in the states that they feel like they're on their own or are they happy to be sort of having some autonomy or do they

wish there was a different kind of guidance from the federal side or, you know, do they feel like they're sort of swimming upstream in this whole thing? What's the read? The main underlying thing that I would say has been the case in doctors I've interviewed on the front lines everywhere from California to Florida, Georgia, Ohio, New York is just a fear that the leadership from the White House is having an impact on the CDC regulations in a way that is endangering them. But this concern about, well, if we don't have enough masks, we're going to change the mask guidance to be a little bit more lax. And whether that was a matter of we just don't have enough or this has actually been okay the whole time. Everything from a lack of PPE to a concern about they're not being enough staffers or overtime and burnout. Folks who are afraid, who are deeply afraid for themselves and for their family that I've interviewed have not seemed to have very much faith that those at the top are making decisions for their benefit.

So what was the thing that made you kind of the most optimistic? Leave us on a good note here. I would say that Remdesafir results that were announced a few weeks ago were extremely promising. The folks who were involved in those trials that I talked to seemed really excited about the impact they could have on a large scale. But also, I think at least so far, the loosening of the restrictions, while it could cause a second wave, while surges could still happen, while I still don't know when I'm going to be able to leave my own apartment. It does seem that we've had some impact on the curve in

terms of social distancing. You know, there's been controversies, but there's been this nationwide solidarity on the understanding that this social responsibility could have huge public health consequences and that the personal sacrifices that everyone's making to their own emotional well-being or financial well-being or even their own health if they're still working on the front lines seems to have created the solidarity that I think has been missing in American culture for a few years now. That's really interesting, Olivia. And how has it changed the way you look at your reporting and how has it changed the way

you're looking at the work you do at The Beast? I've gone through some phases in my reporting. I've been almost two years covering almost exclusively sexual assaults. And after Me Too, that was most of what I worked on. And stories like that are tough. I'm a survivor. I've written about that before. I mean, what I mentioned about the solidarity before has been true in my reporting of this

in the sense that everyone I'm speaking to about their personal concerns, maybe I'm not going through the same financial difficulties. Maybe I'm not on the front lines in the same way. But there is this common thread of understanding that we're all in this boat together. And it makes it feel like every story I write matters in terms of the national. conversation in a way that I often felt like local crime stories, I was working to get a reader to emotionally connect with the material or in a big picture politics story. I was working to convince the reader that they should care about this policy because it's going to impact them. That same need,

everyone cares about this. It matters so much to everyone. I care so much about every aspect of it being as diligent and thoughtful and meticulous as I can. But that's a problem. But that's a pressure that even though I was always really careful in my reporting before, I didn't go to sleep at night and think this story is either going to be hurtful or harmful to the national conversation. And that's not because I think that many people are reading my stories. I don't know about that. But I just think that everyone who's reporting on this stuff knows that we're all figuring this out at the same time. We're still learning things about the virus. We're still learning things about policy response to the virus. And it's really possible for everyone reporting on these

aspects of reopenings and closures and how tests are working, that can affect what tests are going to be used in the future and what states are going to reopen next and how everyone is looking at it. I think there's a really interactive facet to the kind of reporting on this because everyone is still learning together that hasn't been present in many of the things I've reported before. We have a new segment we're calling Breaking Dumb. News that happens while we're taping this podcast that is so fucking stupid, we have to tell you about it. President Trump says, every day he takes a pill of hydroxychloroquine and zinc. Here's a quote. I've taken it for about a week and a half and I'm still here, he said. This is going to set off a gigantic, huge wave of online

idiocy, people taking fish tank cleaner and dying. Right. And of course, the noted pharmacology experts like Diamond and Silk and Dan Bingbongo and the rest of these mouth breathers all declaring, see, he was cured. He was protected by the hydrochloroquine. Oh, my lord. And I mean, I don't know that you want the president of the United States experimenting with experimental medication. Well, I mean, it's not experimental for malaria, but last I checked, Donald Trump hasn't been outside in a malarial environment for long, which to my regret, I think he probably should try it in some subtropical climb. But of course he is. And we will see a huge amount of correlation and causation conflation in the coming days.

And we're back to this same. I swear to God, there's somebody making money on the hydrochloroquine connection. There is no Trump action somewhere that doesn't have a grift built in. Well, I wrote about how there was a thought that the miracle pill is very much, this is the Monorough president, right? So a miracle pill would make sense. And the idea that this miracle pill is something that he wants to be right. He has a lot riding on being right on the. Oh, no question, Molly. He wants to be able to say, I cured it. I cured it. It was my special

alchemy that cured it. No, all the rest of you thought you'd have a vaccine, but Dr. Trump has provided you with the cure. That is so desperate for it. Oh, God, the stupidity title wave that's coming off of this particular tweet and decision is going to be epic. Epic. Epic. Well, folks, that's the very first, but certainly not the last of our segment we call Breaking Dumb. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. It will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media.

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