The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Vaccinated People Are Not Taking Delta Seriously Enough w/ Dr. Eric Topol

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

The American public is being misled about the coronavirus vaccines, and it needs to stop now. That’s what Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Institute, tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast on the sobering latest episode of The New Abnormal. Fully vaccinated folks are walking around thinking they’re 95 percent protected from the virus, but with the Delta variant raging across the country, that number is actually more like 50 percent, Topol says.Next on the show, Daily Beast contributing editor Spencer Ackerman joins co-host Jesse Cannon to talk about his amazing new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. All the explanations for Donald Trump becoming president “seem to just sort of gloss over the fact that for the past 20 years, this country has been continuously at war,” Ackerman tells Jesse. That enemy was never precisely defined, though it ultimately was radical Islam or even Islam itself— ”which opened the door for a really broad series of authoritarian possibilities." Finally, Jesse gifts Molly a very special early birthday present—a special message from a certain former mayor and cigar fan. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. You've heard of the best.

The best conversion of the world. The incredible system of the market facilitation the website on your website, in the

social and in in any place. That is music for your ears. No, you'll be more vows.

Your business will your business will a super-exit for one euro at month in Shopify.

coms bar records. Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up to down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it.

And I'm producer Jesse Kennan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We have a really, really interesting show today. Today we're going to talk to Spencer Ackerman, the author of Rain of Terror, about the War on Terror and how it brought us Donald Trump. And then at the end of this episode, there's a fuck that guy that you're really going to want to stick around to the end of because we have some exclusive audio from one of our greatest schools on this show,

and it really is one of the funner things we've done on this show in a while. But first we're going to talk to Dr. Eric Topol, the head of the Scripps Institute, about the breakthrough rates of infection from the Delta variant that's causing the vaccinated to get sick with COVID. I'm so excited to have you back, Dr. Eric Topol. Hey, I'm great to be with you again, Molly. Let's talk about Delta, because I think we got to talk about Delta. What is going on? It's actually a bad scene in many respects. Obviously, everyone is aware of what's going on in Florida and Louisiana and the South Gulf Coast.

but the problem is it's deeper than that. The vaccines are leaking is the percent of people protected infections. You know, it used to be 95 percent protection from the original, basically, you know, alpha and the provisions of the virus, 95 percent. Now it's probably 50 percent. Really? You think it's that loud? Yeah. And now, and it isn't being told to the public. They don't know. They keep thinking that all these vaccines are just going to,

to hold up. And that's the problem. They're not good enough by themselves. We need the mask, the dishing, you know, that Swiss cheese model pulling out all the stops. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need right now. And so the public is misled about the vaccines are not, and we see that. It's very in Israel. Right. Israel, the numbers in Israel were like, what, 60%. Well, they were initially 60%, but over the more extended 539%. You look at it. You look at it. You look at it. UK.K. data in random sampling and they showed that the range was 49 to 60 protection. So this is nothing like 95% anymore. No, it's not. Yeah. No, I mean, that is the thing that I have noticed. It strikes me as it's more like 49% breakthrough rate, but then there's like a high percentage

of people who get breakthrough with asymptomatic. Yeah, I mean, I think we don't know because we test so poorly. You know, we have one-fifth the number of tests of UK or Israel or many countries. And we're not even at one half of where we were in the third monster wave when we still weren't doing enough testing. So, you know, just to be clear, the hospitalization and death protection is quite good. Yeah. It's very high. It's not as high as it was, though. I mean, it was, you know, 96% or something.

Now it's probably closer to 98%. So that's dropped down a little bit too. But the main thing is that this is so darn infectious that the vaccines are not holding up well. I mean, sure, they protect, you know, 50% or higher, but that's nothing like what we had before. What have you seen? I mean, I feel like Israel is the test case because they're small and they're very organized and they're doing and they're able to vaccinate almost their entire country. I mean, obviously, there are larger moral questions about Israel, but just to look at vaccines, they're doing a third shot now.

Right. They have over 600,000 people over age 60 who've already gotten the third shot. And it looks so far, it looks quite good. I mean, it's suppressed infections back to the way, you know, the 95% level. You know, it's basically, it's all about the neutralizing antibodies, right? So if you just get up those neutralizing antibodies, even though this is the original vaccine, not Delta specific, right? Right, right, right. That's enough to, you know, give you protection probably for, you know, at least six or so months. So that's what we have right now. And that looks like where we're headed.

I was very reluctant to be supportive of boosters because I thought it was basically, you know, a good sales job from the Eiser and Moderna because they were the ones, you know, presenting some data and saying, well, we need boosters. Right. That was in May and June. The administration got really pissed at them for saying that they were working on boosters. Yeah. Yeah, but now from real data, real world data, not just the fact that there was a story about neutralizing antibodies dropping substantially. And we thought, as you know, that, oh, well, that's no problem. That happens naturally.

The B cells kick in, the T cells kicking. And, you know, you're good for years. Well, it turns out the B cells and T cells didn't kick in to help prevent infections and spread. They're pretty good. They're kicking in to help us prevent the serious illness. although, again, not quite as well as we'd hope. So the problem we got here now is that we're a neutralizing antibody-dependent situation to protect against spread. And that's going to require right now, you know, the boosters in Israel are for age greater than 60,

but then they're going to move to age greater than 50 and so on. So that's probably where we're headed over time. Right, right, right. And then there's also, I want to get back to the boosters in a minute, But then there's also a, it seems like there's going to be a specific delta booster coming from Pfizer too. Yeah, well, we need that. And that would have been better, in fact, than what we have, which is basically the default because there's this vaccine already out there. But it's going to take a while.

And more importantly, you know, we're not putting enough of resources and priority to the universal pan-sarbricovirus vaccine. We can do that. But we just have to go after it, just like we did with the original vaccines. So we don't have to keep having boosters and deal with the next Greek letter varying. Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. So I think people, vaccinated people even, don't understand why we have to vaccinate the world. And I want you to sort of riff on this. But essentially, unvaccinated people allow the virus to spread and mutate.

So the more the virus keeps going, the more it mutates, the more it gets around the vaccine. Is that correct? Absolutely. The problem we have right now is the dilemma about boosters in this country versus this global inequity of all these countries that have not, don't have any vaccines are so little. But the problem, Molly, is that the U.S. is now the number one driver of infections in the world. Oh, shit. I didn't know that. And so if we don't control it here, you know, that isn't doing a good service for the planet. So, you know, there's people say, well, you got to ship the vaccines out.

Well, you know what? It is out of control right now in the U.S. Now, probably in the weeks ahead, it'll go, it'll be a U-turn like we've seen in other countries. But we don't know, right? Because in the U.K., those numbers went down and then they went back up. Yeah, they're starting to go up, not nearly, you know, like they were. But yeah, it's very unstable because this virus is so efficient, Delta, and finding holes, and it burns through. And then it, you know, basically retreats. But, you know, there's still plenty more people out there that are vulnerable. And that's why, you know, it's not a stable situation.

So there is a global inequity issue. It's big. But we're not doing our job in this country of blocking the fertile grounds for more variants. As we're going to be a little controversial here because we're saying what I think is true and what anyone can see is that the vaccines while they prevent severe illness and death, they're not working as well. And that's why we're having all these breakthrough infections. And that's why we have to get the world vaccinated. But the head of the WHO said that these wealthy countries should not do boosters. That instead they should continue to vaccinate the rest of the world, which is a nice thought and is also a.

a moral imperative to vaccinate the rest of the world. But they're not going to do that. And the WHO has really squandered a lot of goodwill from the early days of COVID. Do you agree with that? Yes. I mean, I think in the ideal world, what Tedros said at WHO would be right. But look, Israel is already moving on this in a big way. And they have been for months.

Right. Many countries in Europe have already sealed up their plans for boosters. So we need to massively rev up the vaccinations, particularly the ones that are good at helping to prevent spread. And we need to control, contain this virus wherever it is hot. And it's really hot in the U.S. right now. Dr. Hottes, who I know you're friends with, has a recumbent protein vaccine that works really well and is really cheap. But the Biden administration is not buying it. Yeah, I don't understand it.

But, you know, I think there has been a general embracement for the MRNA platform. Right. Even though it's hard to ship. It's so potent. I mean, it's our best that and perhaps the protein Novavax. We don't know for sure against Delta. There are no data. But, you know, even though it's leaking, it's the best we've got.

If you start looking at these other vaccines, particularly the Chinese vaccines. Right. You know, the data. And the Russian. And the Sputnik. you know, we don't have anything good against Delta there that we know of. And so we have basically a much more formidable foe right now. And we need, ideally, to go into scale for vaccines that we know really work well.

Now, the vaccine Peter's worked on, you know, we don't have any data for Delta. If it holds up really well, you know, gosh, we should get behind it. But I don't see the efforts, the all-out efforts for getting a much more. more potent vaccine that will hold up for years against all variants, which we can do. The science is there, yeah. Oh, you think there is science to do that. Oh, gosh, yeah, because what's amazing is now that we have isolate the antibodies that some people make, you know, like the less than 1% make these unbelievable, like, treasure

antibodies against like every epitope of this virus. And also through synthetic libraries, you can also go that route. But between these different strategies, we are just about there for having these remarkably potent antibodies to take down all the cervical viruses, which is this family. And that would then lead to reverse engineering of a vaccine, which would give us the best protection, not just against Delta, but, you know, All strains of COVID. Yeah, but you don't hear anything about it. Why not? The only organization that's backing it is CEPI, which is an international organization, largely funded through philanthropy.

But the U.S. isn't going after this. Why? I don't understand it. You know, there's a lot of things, Molly, I don't understand. Like, why don't we have tracking of breakthroughs at least going in the hospital in this country? You know, we don't even know. We have 70,000 plus people in the hospital. Right now? And we don't know what they're infected with, right?

Well, yeah, we don't know if they're vaccinated or not. If they are vaccinated, when did they get their vaccines? How old are they, you know, at which vaccine did they get? I mean, simple stuff that we have. Every one of those patients in the hospital, we have that data, but we don't have it as a country, which is amazing. I feel like one of the fundamental problems that we keep coming up against with this. And if you look at a place like New Zealand, right? New Zealand, they have QR codes. You go places. You register your QR. R code, if there's an outbreak at a place you go, they let you know so you can get tested, right? And so New Zealand, and then they have these very, very severe and serious quarantines. So New Zealand has no COVID. But America won't even, I mean, in Texas, they won't do contact

tracing in schools. Oh, right. Our public health efforts to do that are just pathetic. But one thing that we're really missing to manage this. This is the hardest phase that we've had to confront in, you know, post-vaccination. We aren't using rapid tests like are being used in many countries around the world for navigating, going to school to do anything. You know, the rapid test, it takes, you know, 10 minutes, that you know, a paper test, that anybody read two lines, your infection, one line, you're good to go. They should be in every household. And why are we talking about going back to school without rapid tests. So Denmark, Austria, Germany, I mean, Germany has kept the lid on Delta. They're all Delta there, but you wouldn't know it. If you look at their

data, I mean, they're doing beautifully. Singapore, so many countries have managed this Delta wave, but they do rely on rapid testing to keep people at home. So they don't go out and infect people. I don't get it. Yeah, I don't get it either. It seems completely nutty. Where do you think this goes now. Over the weeks ahead, we will make a U-turn, but, you know, how much more damage is going to be done by Delta between now and then is, you know, every day, Florida gets worse. Today again, it's just, I just can't imagine how we can keep getting worse. And so what about Texas, the next big populous state? It's not looking good right now. So as the wavefront spreads further, the real question is, does it stop or does it start getting into, you know, states that are

are relatively quiescent compared to. So that's an unknown, but, you know, it will eventually make this U-turn probably in September sometime. And then the question is, are we going to end up? Are we going to get tens of millions of more people vaccinated quickly? Are we going to start getting serious about collecting data, navigating, getting better mask out to people and getting people to use masks, getting the rapid test, pulling out all the stops. Are we going to take this seriously? Finally, how much more devastation do we have to put up with

before we get serious here? Yeah, I know I've started masking again when I go into places, you know, and I travel now, but I just, I make sure to mask. I feel actually pretty safe on planes because of the way the air is and also because I'm masked. And then I am just, you know, I'm just careful when I'm around multiple people because I know that even though I'm vaccinated, this vaccine isn't really a magic bullet anymore. Right. Now, what kind of mask do you use? Right. Oh, good question. Well, what kind of mask should I use? Well, I mean, I would say either a K-N-94 or an N-95. You think, yeah. Yeah. And at the least, you know, double-mas, tight fit of the mask on your face. Really? You know, but K-N-94 is a relatively expensive. Those are the ones that could be shipped to the whole country. You know, they could have

something on it like, you know, USA and where we're all united to take on this virus. But, you know, we've asked for this. I've been pleading for the mass and the rapid tests for well over a year now. And now is when we needed them weeks ago before Delta, you know, infiltrated here. But no, I think I think you're fine to travel, Molly, and fine to do all that you're doing. But people, I think, should take the mask story seriously. Plus, another thing. You're hearing, it's fine if you're vaccinated to have gatherings. Vaccinated people. Right.

Wrong. It isn't. Because vaccinated people can still spread. That's right. And they could be, you know, the next day is when they start getting symptoms. Or, you know, just today there was a Vietnam study, 62 healthcare workers where they studied all breakthroughs. And they, you know, several were asymptomatic, but had very high loads.

So you just don't know. You just don't know. So I would not recommend people getting together with other vaccinated people in an indoor setting until we get through this delta way. Right. No, I mean, it strikes me as very, it strikes me as a real problem. And I think the thing that I'm seeing is that people don't want to talk about breakthrough infections because they think that. And I think it's the, and it's the reason why people don't want to talk about boosters is because they worry that it will, it will anti-vaccin. will seize onto it. But the problem is, anti-vaxxers are so insane, they'll seize onto it anyway,

and we need to protect people. That's our job. That's the point. People can handle the truth, at least the people who are not, you know, engrossed in conspiracy theories. And so the issue here is tell the truth. That is, you know what, say the vaccines aren't working as well. Like in San Diego County, right now, the odds are you getting an infection if you're unvaccinated to fully vaccinated is nine to one. It used to be, let's say, 15 to 1. Right, but still pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, it's still provided. In fact, it's actually gotten better in an absolute form during Delta because Delta is like the ultimate acid test for people getting infected. So you don't just give people the data, let them know that you got to be on guard. There's too many people right now that think the pandemic is

over or I'm fully vaccinated, so I'm fine. They don't get it that we have a, we have a, we have a, we have a problem here, and it's called Delta. Yeah, no, I know. It's really scary. When do you think they'll suggest boosters? I mean, it seems like any minute they're going to suggest, because for people who have autoimmune, immune suppressive on chemo, the vet, two shots has never really been enough, right? Right. They need a third shot, and that should have happened. Hawaii's back. We've had the data. I mean, we've had the data for organ transplant people. It's more coming out even on that today. They really need the third shot, and that may still not be enough. Severe immunosuppressed you are, the more you need this help, this neutralizing antibody story.

But no, I think we don't have that kind of deliberate timeliness of getting decisions made that are critical. And we do too much watching, looking at data from around the way where you don't even have our own data, obviously looking at. And we can't because it doesn't exist. But I hope the booster story among elderly people will be coming up quickly to make the call. It strikes me that these mRNA vaccines are safe and that you can really get more than two shots. Can you explain to people why that's safe with the mRNAs? Well, unlike the adenovirus vaccines like AstraZeneca and JNJ, they have a viral vector so that we have an immune response to the vector, where the MRNA is a pure message, which is going into cells to tell it to make antibodies.

So that there's no, that is, it's inert. It doesn't induce an immune response. It's ideally suited for boosters. What would be better, as we've discussed, is, you know, get one that's actually against the virus that is causing all the problem. But it's a perfect platform, just as is the, protein, the Novavax. These are the modern, you know, more ideal platforms for if you need to go after boosters rather than the attenuated dead virus or the viral vectors because they induce immune response. Do you think that the, I just eventually we're going to get MRI vaccines

for everything, right? Yes. Yes. Until something better comes along. That's where we're looking. Right. Yeah. But for cancer. and for, I mean, what I think a lot of people don't understand, and especially because there's so much anti-vax stupidity in this country, is that we have crossed a Rubicon here in

science. I think you're bringing up one of the most important things, and to me, the silver lining of the pandemic is we have a whole new approach to getting, you know, exquisite delivery to cells and the message, the mRNA that we never

had before, you know, now tested at the ultimate scale of the human species. And it will be directed towards things like cancer, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases. It's wide open. We didn't have this before. And this is actually really exciting for a way to combat the diseases that we face. Yeah.

And if we didn't have these MRNAs, we'd have millions and millions of people dying every day from this virus. Well, no, I mean, I think the other vaccines, the more conventional one, like the ironoviral vectors and the other ones, they would do the job. They do pretty. They just don't do as well. For hospitalizations and deaths.

I mean, they hold up, you know, pretty close. You know, 92% said a 96%. That's not that part different. They just fall apart, at least, you know, in Delta. Well, in Delta, but mainly the problem they have is they're not good at preventing spread, whereas MRNA was so great at that until this juncture, when they've come together more. That's why this has been, and

will be, you know, we don't know if there's going to be another version of this virus that's worse than Delta. I sure hope not. I'd say there will be. Yeah, but you know, this is so darn transmissible, so hypercontagious, it's going to be hard for this stinking virus to get

even more, but it's possible. 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 Soladadobrian. 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. the DailyBeast.com. That's New Abnormal.com. Spencer Ackerman is a contributing editor at The Daily Beast and author of the amazing new book, Rain of Terror, as well as the publisher of the substack Forever Wars.

Spencer, you've written this absolutely brilliant book that I listened to you, read into my ears. So a lot of what you detail is people seem to think that a lot of what happened with Donald Trump's cruelty and all of the chaos happened because he had a personality disorder. You make a very good argument that this

was because of a lot of poor decisions we made in our past. Can you explain that to us? Sure. And sorry to Jesse for having to listen to me talk about this yet again after who supported our audiobook. So I, at the time working for the Daily Beast when I came up with this book, reign of terror. And the sort of genesis of it was that there were a lot of explanations put on offer for how it was that Donald Trump became president. And some were more compelling, some were less compelling. But all of them seemed to just sort of gloss over the fact that for the past 20 years, this country has been continuously at war. It's been at war with an enemy. It never precisely defined. That accordingly allowed a definition of the enemy to achieve a kind of escape velocity where it

wasn't a criminal conspiracy amongst a group of violent radicals. It was ultimately radical Islam. or it was Islam itself in some circumstances. And once that decision coalesced, that opened the door for a really broad series of authoritarian possibilities. This starts, you know, really taking shape very soon after 9-11, despite the fact that, as you hear, you know, constantly, that George Bush said that Islam was a religion of peace and that this wasn't a war against Islam. Well, if it wasn't, I don't really know what would have been different. And examining as well all of the ways in which the structure of the United States government changes, not just to launch wars overseas, but to enact systems of surveillance that a generation before were inconceivable, mass surveillance, everyone's communication records, being hoovered up,

and then analyzed on the theory that once all of that data is analyzed, connections between, you know, previously unknown people and terrorists will emerge, as well, the systems that bind presidents and make their decisions lawful, the judicial system in particular, end up acquiescing to the war on terror more than they end up restricting it. Most often judges say that they, don't trust their own authorities to review national security information. And so what the president

ultimately decides not only ought to happen, but how much we ought to know about that, typically pertains. There are some exceptions, but that's generally the rule. And then finally, there isn't really for a very long time in the war on terror, much of a left-wing opposition. it really squeezes out space for left-wingers in this country. But what there is instead is typically liberal acquiescence, not just from the Democratic Party, but from the media organizations that affiliate with it and sort of liberal intellectuals in general.

And all of these things together really over the course of time hollows out America, makes its institutions brittle, makes it inclined to accept a whole lot of paranoid explanations, including outright big lies by CIA, for instance, in the NSA over the scope of their own counterterrorism operations. And all of this is just sort of waiting for a figure like Donald Trump to commandeer it. So basically this is how we got Trump? I don't think it's the only way, the only way we got Trump. it is, however, a vector for all of the others. And like to give one example of that, think about

birtherism and what the birther conspiracy theory was. Most conspicuous in the birther conspiracy theory, the one that held that Barack Obama was not really a citizen, but a Muslim from Kenya. Obviously, anti-black racism is like the real glaring siren of that. But it also mattered that the conspiracy theory held, that he was a Muslim. That wasn't chosen by accident. It showed that the Islamophobia that really takes root after 9-11 throughout the country provides this atmosphere of emergency, that it tells the rest of the country that it ought to live in fear of their Muslim neighbors, not only a conspiracy theory by a number of violent people that claim to act,

in the name of Islam, but people who might just simply worship or come from the same cultural or regional places that the American overclass chooses to understand the 9-11 attackers as coming from. And ultimately, this emergency provides an open door, a reason, like a renewed purpose for all of these nativist currents throughout American history to charge back in. And you see that with the right-wing reaction to Obama, kind of in general, the birther theory, the conspiracy theory, is a banner that those forces hold up to kind of justify through this, you know, persistent state of emergency, why its works are so urgent. And similarly, this also wraps in fear of immigrants, fear of foreigners. That's the kind of Kenyan aspect of it all,

in the kind of three-legged stool of birtherism. All of this together fits really neatly in the political environment that exists after 9-11 and persists ever since until it's just sort of waiting for Donald Trump. So I don't think the war on terror, I'm not arguing the war on terror,

is the sole reason. I'm arguing for what its place within those reasons were. One of the things I found most interesting in the book is you really started with, Matthew McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing. Can you explain that choice? Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that. It's important to me that the book see the war on terror, that it sums up the war on terror by looking at it in its entirety.

That is to say, you know, very often we understand the war on terror through looking at its component parts, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, drone strikes, NSA surveillance, torture, Guantanamo on down the line. I wanted this thing to be the whole war, mostly focusing on what it does to America. And in order to see the whole war on terror, it's necessary to look at what happens when there is a terrorist attack that everyone recognizes is a terrorist attack, but it's not committed by Muslims. It's committed by white people. And once I started to say, started looking at the Oklahoma City attacks in 1995 in kind of contradistinction to what we know happened after the al-Qaeda attacks on 9-11, you really see very vividly all of the ways in which

when terrorism is white, it's exempted from all of this treatment. To give just like one very small example, there is a network of white supremacist violence. at the time of Timothy McVeigh's attack. It exists almost in plain sight. You know, you think of, you know, before Oklahoma City, places like Randy Weaver's Ruby Ridge. There are a number of other places, in addition to this one place that Timothy McVeigh visits

called Elohim City in northeastern Oklahoma. But all of the people involved in those, like, active terror camps. And again, we're talking about white supremacist terror, the oldest, most resilient and bloodiest form of terrorism in American history. Terrorism that can command allegiance from just orders of magnitude more people than supposed radical Islam can inside the United States. And all of that infrastructure is entirely left alone after Oklahoma City. There's a narrow prosecutorial focus on getting McVeigh and his partner, Terry Nichols. There is a big counterterrorism law that gets pushed through Congress after the 1995 Oklahoma City attacks that helps to criminalize association, that makes it easier for people who have nothing to do with terror violence, terrorist violence.

Instead, do things like donate money to causes that either terror groups, uses a front or otherwise affiliated with them, those become more criminal and actions against them more punitive, but generally expanding the aperture of law enforcement and surveillance and prosecution against a broader cohort of people. But that cohort, by the terms of that very law, are all Muslims. And those connections that they're looking at are between Muslim terrorist organizations and Americans. This has nothing to do with Timothy McVeigh. And it's in moments like that where you really see very glaringly that there are, you know, after Oklahoma City, there's kind of a proto-patriot act that gets put in a place.

But that protopatriate act makes sure for a variety of reasons to neglect white supremacist terrorism, which was the very reason for the bill in the first place. So one of the places we're at now is it seems even on the left who are we'd think are very anti-war, is a lot of people are now saying Biden has really fucked up with pulling out of Afghanistan. What is your take here? If you can't quote unquote fix Afghanistan in 20 years, you are not going to fix it in 21 years, you're not going to fix it in 22 years and so on and so forth. And what you probably also ought to consider is that you are among the reasons why Afghanistan

is in this state. the United States has tried for a literal generation to create, you know, this is often talked about, I think, in a kind of fantasy realm that is to say, filtered through American exceptionalism and this idea that America is doing Afghans a giant favor by not just saving them from the Taliban, but, you know, building structures where like women can go to school and so forth. And, you know, obviously I don't want to diminish the nightmare for women that will come under Taliban rule almost certainly. What I mean to say instead is that the United States isn't like in Afghanistan for women's rights. The United States isn't building stuff in Afghanistan for women's rights.

The United States is building stuff in Afghanistan because it wants to have a reliable proxy that will host American military and intelligence power in Afghanistan, a country. that, remember, its western neighbor is Iran and its eastern neighbor is Pakistan, places where the United States wants to play in very different ways and in very different forms. And nevertheless, like a simply present, if not dominant role in that area towards those in other countries. The United States isn't doing Afghans any favors, nor is it seeking to make sure that Afghans have a stable future. It is seeking to make sure that America has a stable. future projecting power in a place like Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is the Taliban won this war and America lost it and there are consequences to that. The consequence in this case is that the

Taliban very likely will take over the country. The question that I have for the Biden administration when you hear people like General Frank McKenzie, the commander at Central Command or Secretary Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, talk about retaining the right in perpetuity to surveil and, if necessary, bomb Afghanistan. What, in fact, is this pullout? Is it just a pull back? And then re-escalation will happen once there is enough elite political freak out over the, you know, straight Taliban victory. That is what, of course, happened with President Obama going back into the Iraq war. after the so-called Islamic State conquered Mosul in 2014. So that is sort of where I think, like, the thinking about Afghanistan has gotten really confused in a way that, you know, left untrammeled favors re-escalating a hopeless and long-lost war.

So I've talked about the first Gulf War, and a lot of what I've heard from them is that actually the sanctions are more destructive than the bombings. Have you found that with your research? And sanctions are sort of the way that both parties think of, like, doing war in a way that is nonviolent. And they seem to be way more destructive than actual violence. You know, way more destructive is a matter of interpretation. Samuel Moyne has an excellent book that's going to come out in September cold humane. You may be very interested in that because it sort of takes a very critical eye at the ways in which American foreign policy tries to present itself as having a humane face when

engaging in acts of domination and barbarism. And sanctions really are just one of these things that are entirely normalized in American foreign policy discourse and treated not on a continuum with bombing and with war, but as an alternative to it. What are sanctions? Sanctions are economic strangulation, either unilaterally carried out by the United States or often unilaterally dictated, but carried out with big multinational coalitions or even multilateral institutions. And the whole purpose of it is to make the economy of an incalcitrant or an adversary nation scream. That's a term that Richard Nixon once used, make the economy scream against the Democratic Socialist President of Chile, Salvador, I ending. The point of that is to make a

is essentially to inflict not discriminant attack like with bombing, you know, implementing violence against what's supposed to be a proportionate target, but causing enormous hardship amongst an entire population. It's a strategy of hurting an entire population, when the point is to change policy amongst government officials. Government officials are really good, like elites everywhere, of insulating themselves from the hardships and the consequences of such tools like sanctions. So all that remains is a population knowing that they are hurting, that they are even starving, that they are being denied medicine, and that's because of the United States.

America. So, Sped, sir, Adam Hussune is one of the main characters in the book. Can you tell us about him? Readers of the Daily Beast may be familiar with Adam Hussune in a way that a lot of the general public isn't. But as I was mostly done with the first draft of my book, I discovered that there was this guy who was locked in an ice prison outside of Buffalo, New York, who had been the first post-9-11 terrorism convict. He was convicted of a terrorism-related offense in the criminal

courts, who served all his time and was released, but then was picked up by ICE and kept, in fact, in this case he was transferred from federal prison to ICE custody, and kept in indefinite detention

ever since. So here is someone who had turned out had spent with, you know, the exception of a few months, starting in June 2002, the entirety of the war on terror locked up. And he was also, like, once I learned about his case, a symbol of the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act is what expands the level of penalty for the things that he was ultimately committed of doing. It criminalized certain behavior, basically. Like, he was ultimately convicted, thanks to, writing checks to banned terrorist-affiliated charities, which were only banned after, with one

exception, he wrote all of those checks in the 1990s. The exception was a check that he wrote like within a few weeks of the Patriot Act passing. And included in the Patriot Act was a power that had given civil libertarians a great deal of fear in 2001, known as Section 412. Section 412 allows for the indefinite detention of non-citizen people who are not deportable to another country. What does that mean in practice? It means stateless people like Palestinians. Well, it so happens that Adam Hessoon is Palestinian, and he grew up in Lebanon during the Civil War before coming to the United States in the 1990s. So that means when he gets out, or rather when he doesn't get out, when he gets finished serving his sentence for not acts of

violence, but things that the United States criminalizes after 9-11, he doesn't get free. He goes to a different cage, an even more wallless one. And there's a big challenge to his detention from the ACLU and from some brave attorneys in Buffalo. and it's ultimately successful, but not before the prison that he's in, the ice prison that he's in, becomes briefly in April 2020 the worst affected ICE prison from the coronavirus. And we can't prove that Adam Hesum got Corona, but he got real sick at the start of the pandemic in a prison where there was rampant coronavirus very early on.

And once I encountered this guy and started doing some reporting on him and reading up on his I just thought like I had to tear up a whole lot of the book because I found a person, a human being who can take us pretty much from 9-11 to COVID-19. And I rewrote a whole lot of the book to be basically like a lot of this story through Adam's eyes. Love it. And it really works well. Spencer, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, Jesse and Molly, thank you so much for inviting me to talk about the book. Thanks, Spencer. 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, new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's fever dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly Jungfest. I hear someone's being fucked up.

Well, here's the thing. As one of the tweets said, Madison Cossorn, quite the case against homeschooling your children. Here's the tweet. He's homeschooled, of course. Here's a tweet, 1984 is a great fiction novel to read. Let's just stop for a second here.

Novels, all novels are fiction. So fiction novel is redundant. A great novel to read. What else are you going to do with a novel besides read it? I know he looks 18, but that's like about the age you're supposed to read that by. No, nobody writes like this. Okay. So it's a great fiction novel to read, right?

as opposed to hitting yourself in the head with it. But it seems like it is becoming the reality we currently live under more and more each day. So clearly, I mean, for any, there are any number of things here. Number one, George Orwell would not have been a Madison Cawthorn Stan. I think we can agree that he would not.

You know, he was an anti-fascist. Number one. Number two, he clearly never read 1984 because he did not. Number three. This guy's just such a fucking idiot. I think the only way he would read 19A4 is if the Gateway Pundit reprinted it. Yeah, I don't think the dumbest man on the internet is going to be reprinting it. But anyway, for that, Madison Cawthorne, go fuck yourself.

Well, Molly, I'm going to abstain from the fuck that guy today. Instead, we're going to celebrate you because you have a birthday coming up. Not until, I think it's not until next week. It's not until next week, but, you know. An early birthday present. You know, you would send. to me, I really just want a cool cameo. And I saw that opportunity just knocked because, you know, the world works in mysterious ways.

So now for our dear listeners, I'm going to play them the cameo I got you for your birthday from one, Rudolph Giuliani. I do want to say for context, too, he followed so little of my directions. It was not supposed to say it was from you, it was from you all the fans. And as you will hear, he did not pay attention. I should very well. I wish we had the video. Oh, if only.

Maybe I can hand it to the Daily Be Social. Amazing. Happy birthday, Molly. I understand your birthday's coming up on August 19. Jesse asked me to call you to wish you a happy birthday because you are a big fan of and dedicated to Make America Great Again. And it's going to need Make America Great Again

again because of the direct. it's going in right now. I understand you have a beautiful voice. Congratulations. That's just a gift from God. And obviously, you've got a John Good Friend in Jesse who asked me to wish you a happy birthday and also to say that all the fans of your podcast

are wishing you a happy birthday. And I wish you'd follow my podcast. It's rudiescomonsense.com. Just hit subscribe. You get it for nothing. It's rudiescomonsense.com. The podcast comes out on Wednesday, Friday, and an alert on Monday, a little talk about what's going on. And what I try to focus on is the information, the news that's not being given to you, that's being censored now in this very unusual time that we're in America. And I'd love to see your podcast.

So if you can get that information to me, I'd be very interested in seeing it and hearing your voice. But again, happy birthday. Enjoy the 19th of August. It's just a few days before my daughter's birthday. And I hope you have a great day. And I hope you keep with that voice and it keeps bringing everyone joy. God bless you. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber.

Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.