The Daily Beast Podcast - Will Kellyanne Conway Have a Come to Jesus Moment?

Episode Date: September 14, 2021

Lee Papa, author of The Rude Pundit, discusses with Molly Jong-Fast the chances of Kellyanne Conway joining George W. Bush as a resistance hero, Washington Post’s national health reporter Dan Diamond sheds light on the big COVID booster debate happening amongst top health leaders, and Mike Duncan, host of The Revolutions podcast, tells us why our current state of U.S. politics looks a lot like Ancient Rome, minus a Newt-icus Gingri-ticus. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Then we'll talk to historian Mike Duncan, host of the Revolutions podcast about the historic parallels of what America is presently going through. But first, we have the author of the rude pundit, Lee Papa. Welcome to the new abnormal Lee Papa. Great to be here. Great to be talking to you, Molly. I'm very excited because you and I have known each other for a long time. And I remember the first time I heard about you, which was when there was this secret blog that no one knew the author of. And it wrote all this very nasty stuff about Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

Yeah, the early days of blogging. Well, I mean, I wasn't in the earliest days. I was sort of in the second wave of bloggers. We were wild and free. It was just new frontiers out there, and we felt like badasses getting to say whatever the fuck we wanted to say. Yeah. And some of it was pretty raunchy.

Almost all of it was pretty raunchy. That was my, that was the angle I was coming from. I decided that, you know what? What had happened was I had read Al Franken's book, Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them. And the reaction of that, like, oh, this is lowering political discourse. Yes. And so my response was, that's not lowering political discourse.

Let me show you what lowering political discourse is, and it involves a lot of sodomy jokes. So, Lee, Papa, nobody knew, but you're actually an academic. Yes. Yes. And that was the big reveal that people were pretty shocked by. The reason why I wanted to have you here besides the fact that we're friends and also that my husband used to teach with you and so we have many commonalities is that I wanted to talk to you about George W. Bush, the weird wild ride of W. Especially this weekend. You saw this four and a half minute speech. Talk to me. I mean, first of all, it was just one paragraph of the speech that everybody's focusing on, you know?

it's that one paragraph where he said, oh, and by the way, there's crazy motherfuckers in the United States, too, that we need to be careful of. They're just like the crazy motherfuckers in other places. Great. Thank you, W. Thank you for that. And, you know, let's just forget that the reason why one of the big reasons that terrorism from the Islamic world is still even a problem is because of you. And let's also just shove aside the idea that during your administration, You did dick about right-wing terrorism in the United States in the post-Okloma city world.

And it was just, and the way that everybody's like, oh, my God, it's so, look at George W. Bush, he's such a statesman now or whatever the fuck they're saying. It's like, oh, my God, this wasn't that long ago. It's so interesting to me because I keep thinking about, like, if Trump had said in 2015, Islamic terrorism is the same as domestic terrorism, we might not even be in this fucking. mass to begin with. I think you're absolutely right. And but again, you know, let's also remember that all along the way, every time that somebody wanted to do something about the right-wing terrorism in the United States, they were smacked down. Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security wanted to do something. I believe there was Janet Napolitano wanted to do something about it. And they put out a short report and Republicans lost their shit. Like, you know, how dare you? You know, that's our base. Yeah. Those are our guys. I mean, that is the thing that is so interesting to me. And now we have a moment in time where I guess Bush feels bad. I don't fucking know.

I mean, seriously, I sit there. You know, I hear people talk about how cute it was that he and Michelle Obama are friends. And, you know, they shared candy. And, you know, like some kind of rehabilitation of him is going on. And it's like, dude, just shut the fuck up and make your stupid fucking. paintings and, you know, just stop. Go away, you know. Or, or you know what, go do Jimmy Carter's shit, you know, you wanted to make yourself, go, go clear brush for the poor or something like that. Right. Here's a question for you. He's a terrible painter. It's more of an observation,

but I would like to discuss. No, please, please. They're like mental patient paintings. Oh, yeah, yeah. They are therapy paintings. I mean, You're sitting there going, oh, yeah. Somebody told them, you know, the way to work through all of this morning that you're going through for how shitty a person you were as president. And in general, you need to paint that out, man. Yeah. I mean, the Putin painting is like, you know, clearly things have gone horribly wrong. Now, the thing that I think is interesting that I, I, and you, I want you to tell me truthfully.

I grew up in a house where Reagan was, like, considered to be the, you know, the devil. And Bush Sr. was, you know, the evil empire. I have always been proudly horrified by W. Who just struck me as just such an idiot. I feel like history has not been kind to W. No. And, you know, in the long term, it's not going to be. I mean, you know, what you just did there was trace the descent of the United States.

Reagan, you know, gutted the social safety net, which they're trying to restore right now. And then he let in all of the crazies in the fundamentalist Christian right, let them have a seat at the table, justified their existence. And then Bush Sr. still pandered to them. And so we're just seeing this constant devolution. I mean, you know, is Ron DeSantis the next step down from Trump? I don't think there's a world in which Trump lets Ron DeSantis. get anything? No. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, if he still has breath in his body, he is going to run again. The craving for attention that he has is so bottomless that if he sees somebody else taking that

mantle of leader of the Republican Party, I mean, he's already losing his mind about it. Well, there's also money to be made in running for president, right? There's the Ron Paul presidential candidate industrial complex. Oh, it's the greatest grift. It's the greatest grift you can think of. I mean, you know, think about what Jill Stein did after the 2016 election and got everybody to contribute money to her calling for recalls. And, you know, and then Dick happened with that. And so she just made off with it. Yeah. I mean, who among us? So I want to know, do you think now we have seen a rehabilitation? What I think is interesting is it does seem like, history is not going to be kind of Bush, but a lot of the Bush people have managed to sort of been rehabilitated into resistance heroes. Do you think this will happen with Trump people, or you think that it's just, they're too toxic? I mean, do you see a Kellyanne come to Jesus moment where

she's on MS. Yeah. I think after turning off all of the American Idol fans, Kelly Ann's kind of coming to the end of her, coming to her expiration date. I recently said that Kelly Ann Conway, been around since the Bush years, or since 9-11, or before even. I said, it looked like she'd been, you know, laundered in a river and balled up and thrown in a corner. You can say it, I can't. That's okay. I said Sean Hannity also looked like they had taken two wax figures of Sean Hannity and matched them together. I think a really interesting thing that I've seen is that Taco Carlson, like, killed Sean Hannity and no one noticed. That could be true, too. And Laura Ingram danced on his corpse, yeah.

Right. But I mean, like, Sean Hannity used to be like the superstar of the lineup. And now he just like, I feel like he barely permeates. Yeah, who knew that losing Alan Combs would do that to him? He killed Alan Combs. I believe it. You will not convince me otherwise. But as far as, you know, any kind of rehab of people from the Trump administration, I mean, we're kind of slowly seeing it.

We're seeing Trump's Surgeon General. is appearing as an authority on COVID on CNN. And you just want to go, no, he was there when everybody was dying. Why would we want to hear this man? So do I think it's possible? I think that some of your higher profile people, you know, are never going to make it past the borders of Fox News or One America or Newsmax. But I think we're going to see some of those, you know, people who got out.

I mean, you know, why should we listen to NAP? Nikki Haley anymore. She jumped into the administration for a while. I mean, let's not just because you decided, oh, shit, this is, this, this ship is sinking and jumped early doesn't mean that you're not responsible for turning it into the iceberg. Yeah. It is interesting to me, Nikki Haley, and also the other one I think of is from South Dakota, Kirstie Nome. The two of those guys, like, they sort of Sarah Palin themselves. Yeah. They still get. all of this attention. I mean, you know, and, you know, Nikki Haley has faded somewhat now. You know, you know, you know, hoping that Trump decides not to run so she can jump into a presidential

race. Christy Noem is just, just one of those fucking, you know, monstrous Republicans that's like, let me see if I can be, you know, the craziest person, the craziest one in the asylum, you know? like, oh, the guy next door is writing a manifesto and shit on the wall. Fucking, you know what? I'm going to eat my own arm. The thing I'm struck by is it is a race to the bottom with these Republicans. Like, you know, you got Ron DeSantis suing cruise ships, right? It's one of his biggest industries in his economy.

He's suing them because he doesn't want them to have vaccine passports because Republicans love capitalism so much. that they don't want to let private businesses do things that would help them, right? You got Texas who's got a bounty system on abortion so you can sue your Uber driver. I mean, does, do you think, like, do these people ever decide, like, we're supposed to be capitalist? Like, maybe we should get involved in me? I mean, like, do you think companies ever hit back on this? I mean, a few weeks ago, McCarthy threatened telecon companies, and they said if you go along with the subpoena, we're going to come after you when we control the house.

I mean, when do Republicans get to be pro-business? I think that they've never been pro-business as much as they've been, you know, pro those who keep donating to them freely. I mean, you could say that about all politicians, but, you know, we know that, you know, as soon as you start giving tax breaks to companies, you've decided that capitalism isn't a system that can work. As soon as you, you know, you're paying people not too far. you've decided that capitalism doesn't actually work.

So the whole thing is a big lie. And so my thing is I love, you know, the we're against regulation. That to me is the hypocrisy. Like, here's what companies want to do, but you know what? We're going to regulate it so they can't do it. And you're like, well, what the fuck is the difference between that and saying, you know what? Don't dump a bunch of shit in the ocean and poison everything. What's wrong with you?

Why is your regulation better than our regulation? Right. No, I mean, and also, like, it seems clear to me that regulating to not destroy the planet makes more sense than regulating because you want people to get COVID. I mean, these two things are not the same. No, but just the concept of regulation, you know, it's like don't, then don't come out and say, you know, we're cutting regulations and that's one of the reasons why you should vote for Republicans. No, we're just judging your regulations against the other regulations. And companies love what Biden did. They love it.

They're like, oh, my God, thank fuck we have cover now. And we're seeing surging vaccination rates in places because, you know what? People don't want to lose their jobs. Don't want to get tested once a week. It's a pain in the ass. Well, that's what Delta is, you know, Delta made a fee for the unvaccinated, and then people got vaccinated. I mean, this is not rocket science.

The thing I keep thinking about is like, and I was thinking about it this weekend because the mansion was on the Sunday shows and he was. saying he thought that the handout, the handout, quote unquote, was too big that it didn't make any sense. He represents the sixth poorest state in the country. Yep. The thing is, is that that $3.5 trillion is not that big. It has spread over 10 years. That means, you know, it's maybe a tiny bit of the federal budget bucket that they're filling with this bill.

And you sit there and go, what the fuck? Why would you do this? Why would you do something that is so specifically going to raise the standard of living for the people in your state with so many programs that are directed at the very people that vote for mansion? I mean, I don't get it unless there's something, you know, obviously, you know, he caters to the fossil fuel industry. and he's, you know, he's always been anti-anything that abrogates climate change. But he's also, you know, I don't know, I didn't know West Virginia was a nice place to have a yacht until Joe Mansion. I don't think he has the yacht in West Virginia.

There are some nice lakes. There are some nice lakes of West Virginia. Wait, are you telling me that Joe Mansion doesn't have his yacht in West Virginia? But here's a question for you about this. Isn't the fact that we're talking so much about Joe Manchin a function of Chuck Schumer not being able to do his job? This is the conundrum. This is the thing that Democrats have to stumble over all the time. It's what could he do?

You know that the threat is always lingering of Manchin saying, yeah, fuck you, I'm going to become Republican now. And, you know, frankly, his state was what? Plus 30, plus 40 for Trump? Right, right. He's just hanging in there. If he even runs again, he's in his 70s. So yeah, we can sit here and say, yeah, Chuck Schumer should be really putting the thumb screws on him, you know. Or even just giving him paid for. I mean, there are earmarks now. Yeah, but he obviously doesn't give a shit about that. Otherwise, that would have been done. What's Lisa Murkowski's price to come on over since they don't want her anymore in the Republican. I mean, you know, Trump doesn't want her in the Republican Party. Why is that not happening?

Like, I mean, I'm not saying Nancy Pelosi is the greatest at all. I'm not like a Yaz Queen type. But I'm just saying we're not, you know, there are a lot of Congress people and we're not talking about, I mean, and I know there's like a little, there's conflict with the moderate. But there are little conflicts in the House, but you don't have somebody, you don't have like AOC on the Sunday shows being like, do this for me or else. Right. Which you do have with Mansion. Well, you do have that, though. You had it for a little while with the so-called moderates in the Democratic caucus in the House that we're trying to say do this or else, but I think they've got sufficiently slapped down or out-maneuvered. But we also know the filibuster hangs over everything and the failure to get rid of the filibuster hangs over. And I know it doesn't on this reconciliation bill. Just that narrow, narrow margin, Mansion has always been like this. Mansion is our Lieberman, right? now, you know? Lieberman was the reason why we ended up with the Affordable Care Act instead of a

public option. It was Lieberman and it was one or two others that Max Baucus, I think, was another one that was against a public option. But it was Lieberman that was leading the charge against it. And so we always seem to have these thorns in our side and on very narrow votes. What the fuck are we going to do? All right. I'm even more stressed out than I was before. Thank you. Sorry, do you want, I don't know, let me think, is there any good news out there? Autumn's coming. That's right.

Things will cool down. It'll be nice to go out to take long walks. Right. And then we'll have another COVID spike. 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 Cory Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soul. a dad O'Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner, and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening

in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal.com. That's new abnormal. at the DailyBeast.com. Dan Diamond is a health reporter at the Washington Post. Welcome back to the new abnormal Dan Diamond. Thanks for having me back on the very abnormal moment that we find ourselves in. Talk to me about the vaccine mandates because I feel like Friday was a big deal.

President Biden's speech was a big deal. There was a lot in there about the COVID response. There were things that health experts had been clamoring for for weeks or months. The vaccine mandate piece, was absolutely big. So some of this was a direct mandate, some was more of the softer mandate, where if you don't get the vaccine, you have to submit for regular testing. But either way, the idea that about 100 million Americans will either have to get a shot if they want to work in the federal government, or they'll have to prove that they aren't testing for COVID if they work for one of

these larger companies, it is the kind of stick where we have evidence that this work, some of the early adopters that put vaccine mandates into place saw compliance of over 90%. But there is a question, Molly. It's very different to do this at, say, a hospital back in May or June versus some random restaurant or small business in October or November. We have to see, I think, how this will play out in the real world. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting. The thing that I keep thinking about is I have all these children. I don't know if you know this. And when they were little, they had vaccine schedules. And it was not presented to me as this was like a choice. And in fact, like, my kids now have these, you know, forms that need to be filled out every year, which include

vaccination schedules. So there is precedent for this. It's such an irony that we have this expectation for kids to go to school to comply with vaccinations. And kids right now are the ones who are getting vaccinated because the vaccines aren't available for them yet. But yes, there is precedent in American society. This wasn't especially controversial a few years ago. President Trump, some Republicans when there were measles outbreaks were saying people had to get vaccinated. So it's only COVID that has made things supercharged politically and in a bad way. The thing I keep thinking about is K.I.V. Okay. We hear her on a tape a couple weeks ago saying like I basically melting down and saying you guys have to get vaccinated. This is ridiculous.

like, I don't know what to do here. This is insanity. Really upset, okay? She's an older woman. She's from Alabama. Like, this is not a person who is, you know, used to sort of displays of whatever. And then we hear her this weekend, like, railing against vaccine mandates. I mean, is it just that Republicans feel they have to do this in order to not get primary challenges?

Well, there are a couple things going on, I think. first when K. Ivey, the Alabama governor a few weeks ago came out and attacked the unvaccinated, not only was that surprising because of her public persona, it was surprising because most people in Alabama were unvaccinated. I mean, talk about bad politics. She's attacking most people. But I think that frustration was something that lots of officials in different ways felt that the vaccines have been available for months, that a lot of Americans aren't getting them. The interesting thing about K. Ivy, a Republican governor, getting mad about it, is Republican governors disproportionately haven't done that much compared to Democrats at getting people to get shots. So now that these vaccine mandates

are being rolled out by President Biden, embraced by Democrats, yes, we are seeing a culture war over this issue, which is dispiriting as a health reporter. There is clear evidence that the vaccines, while not stopping every infection, there are still breakthrough infections, but they inhibit at the worst effects of COVID. And the only way at this point to get some Americans to comply does appear to be creating these mandates. And if you are not willing to get a shot and you want to work at a hospital, for instance, that that would seem to be a real public health problem, Molly. These are places where unvaccinated Americans are going to be. And we know that someone who is unvaccinated can be a real vector of disease. Right.

Well, we saw, I mean, this weekend we saw the teacher, or last week we saw the teacher who got, you know, I don't know what percentage of her class from reading aloud. She gave them all COVID, right, the unvaccinated teacher story. So I do feel like there's more and more information about this. Talk to me about the boosters. So we are in a moment where the booster shots are likely coming. We don't know exactly when they will be coming. And there's considerable debate at the highest levels of the government's health response. over whether the boosters are necessary. We will almost certainly need more shots eventually,

as the immune response wanes, new coronavirus variants emerge. And then there is this debate over what the right number of shots is. Molly, you were mentioning the vaccine schedule for kids. Some people get three doses of the HPV vaccine. There are three doses of the hepatitis B vaccine. The thought that there might need to be three doses of the coronavirus vaccine, that's something that Tony Fauci and senior government officials have openly contemplated. But the question is when, when do we get to a point where we need that third shot? And there's a very interesting journal article that just came out on Monday, co-authored by some of FDA's own officials who said that there's not enough evidence for booster shots yet, particularly given that the vaccines are still

inhibiting the worst outcomes. They're preventing hospitalizations disproportionately, and that there's real need for shots overseas. So we are moving into a moment where CDC officials and advisors, FDA officials will be reviewing this data in the coming days and weeks. The FDA Advisory Committee is scheduled to meet Friday to discuss booster shots, but some of those regulators are worried that we might be moving too quickly on this plan, even though the White House has very much embraced it and wants to be ready to go next week with boosters for all adults, if that's okayed. I want to push back on this, not to you, but sort of in the larger sense.

The reporting today, there's an article in Lancet. It is written by people at the World Health Organization, among others, and it says that in the World Health Organization is really against boosters. This has not been a great pandemic for the World Health Organization. Can we talk about that? Do you think they've squandered their credibility a little bit? I think it hasn't been a great pandemic for. for virtually anyone in public health. I mean, except Nancy Messer, right?

Nancy Messonnier? Right. The CDC person who said, you guys all got to get ready because it's coming. Yeah, the official who spoke out in February 2020 and was promptly shoved to the side by the White House. But what's interesting about Nancy Messonier is she did come back into the response and she made a number of decisions that may not have been great. She was involved in rolling out the vaccines late last year, which was kind of a bumpy rollout. So I think what that speaks to, Molly, is any public health official advisory group has made hundreds of decisions and recommendations over the past year and a half. Some of those decisions are just going to look bad. Even if you have an 85% batting average, those bad decisions are going to overhang. Now, you asked specifically about the World Health Organization. Did the W.HO.HO.HO.

show dropped the ball in the beginning. Could they have done more to move faster, to sound the alarm, to put pressure on China? All of the above, absolutely true. So they're not without blame and scrutiny and some of what President Trump was pushing last year when he took on the World Health Organization. There were plenty of Democrats who were frustrated, too. I think the challenges, the World Health Organization is the global health body that we've got. And even if it's imperfect, it is trying to serve this role of looking out for those more vulnerable countries. And that Lancet paper that you just referenced, that was co-authored by not just World Health Organization folks, the FDA officials who are leading the review of vaccines.

So this is not just a global perspective. This is a U.S. regulatory perspective shared by some of the top regulators. Do you think that they are more concerned? And this is just a question we have to ask. look, I mean, the Biden administration, the one thing the Biden administration has really done, has not done what it's supposed to do is with its work vaccinating the world. The global challenge is real, and that has been a big disappointment. It's like you're looking at my notes of stories I need to write. I have to write this story. I talk a lot to Peter Hottes, and he is working on a recumbent protein vaccine, which he offered them, and they were like, you know, and I know there's it. So I get a lot of the frustration from him and then also. from Dr. Topol, like that they both are sort of, they're pushing this administration.

So funny Peter Hotez aside, he's the famous vaccine doctor in Texas. I am looking, as we're talking, I'm looking at my bookshelf, and I see a book by Lawrence Wright, who wrote this great COVID book, but also wrote a fictional book about a pandemic about a year or two ago, right before COVID. And I'm pretty sure that Peter Hotes was the basis for the hero of Lawrence Wright's fictional book about fighting a pandemic. I mean, he is a guy. Yeah, Peter Hottes is a guy who walks the walk and talks to the talk. The fear about the global response and that we are not doing enough as a wealthy country that has millions of vaccines, some of which are expiring because Americans are refusing to take them, even as people overseas,

health workers are dying for not being vaccinated. Yeah. It is a huge, huge problem. And yes, that is something where the Biden administration has had challenges figuring out who's leading the strategy, how fast to move. And then there's the political fear, Molly, that if the U.S. took tens of millions of vaccines that aren't being used here, shipped them overseas, and then some horrible catastrophe happens where we need those vaccines back, that that would haunt the administration. So they've been very, very cautious about how much they want to engage before getting our own house in order. Yeah, I mean, that strikes me as a real problem. And we see, so the reporting I just read today was that it's about 35 percent that promised never to get the

vaccine. How do we talk to those 35 percent? I've been working on this since early this year. I've been talking to some of those people who have been vaccine holdouts. Not all of them are dug in their ways. I've talked to people who changed their minds because of mandates, hard or soft. There were Yankees fans who wanted to go see a baseball game in New York, and the Yankees said they wanted proof of a vaccine, and that was enough to get them to do it. There are people who just needed time to talk with their doctors, talk with their families, or see their friends get vaccinated. So some are still changing their mind this late in the year. I do think, unfortunately, there are other Americans who are just so dug in. They have different information sources that have raised

specters of fear around the vaccine, and that's where the mandates may end up being important if they want to keep working at a big company, if they want to, say, go visit their family members and need to travel on a plane that requires vaccination proof. So that's that's likely the mode of convincing people at this point, making it less and less of an option and more and more of a requirement. The polling I read showed that people will get vaccinated to fly. Yes, people want to travel. That has been consistent in the polling. I will say that the polling sometimes lies. I had looked at a polling finding that FDA approval was seen to be a big motivator. People were saying, well, we know that the shots only have emergency authorization. We need

full approval. So I went back. As soon as that full approval came down a few weeks ago, I went and found some of the same people who said that to me and asked, okay, now they've been fully approved. These shots, do you want to get one? And every single person but one said, actually, I still have concerns about these shots. It's a moving target. People are looking for reasons not to get vaccinated. So Dan, Dr. Fauci had a interview this week where they said, you're going to mandate vaccines, but what about people who just got COVID? Aren't they less susceptible to getting it than those who are vaccinated right now because they have the antibodies?

And he didn't seem to have the best response to this. Do you have any thoughts on what happened here? I don't know that moment, Jesse, but I will say that there has been debate over do people who have this quote unquote natural immunity if they've been infected. do they need the vaccine? And the overall evidence that I've heard from public health experts is, yes, the best combination is to have the natural immunity and the vaccine immunity, and that seems to be the most enduring response. But some Republicans have argued against the vaccine by saying, look, I already had COVID. Don't I already now have the protection that I

need? And based on what we understand, especially given the possibility of reinfection with another COVID variant, the more you can do to boost your immune response with vaccination, the better. Right. That's the Rand Paul stick of like, I got it once and, you know, so I won't. I swim at the Senate pool while waiting for the results to come back. Just got to get that in there when we talk about Rand Paul. Do you think that the Ivermectin thing is still going?

And can we talk about that a little bit for those of you who have not read about this every day for the last month, but basically, anti-vaxxers are kind of obsessed with this deworming medicine that you can also use for lots of different parasitics, but is largely used in horses. Has this sort of been cured, or you think they're still really into this? The ivermectin craze is sad and striking and reminds me a lot of the hydroxychloroquine. efforts last year, where it works in some capacity to fight parasites. There are some studies, which have generally been debunked, that maybe it can fight COVID. So people latch on to silver bullets in this fight against the pandemic. President Trump was infamous for this, looking for some

quick fix. And I just mentioned, Molly, I went back to some of those folks who said, I'm waiting for FDA approval on the vaccine. Several of them said, well, I might not get vaccinated, but I'm thinking about Ivermectin. And it's just amazing that we have more data on these coronavirus vaccines than virtually anything else. I mean, hundreds of millions of people have gotten these shots around the world, and we know overwhelmingly that they work. And yet, because of the way that Americans get information now and the distrust they might have for government sources, or if a Democrat is pushing an idea, then Republican thinks it's wrong, or sometimes vice versa. It just is really sad how polarized this has become. So I don't think we're through the

ivermectin craze, but I do think it's important that the ivermectin attention may have outstripped the actual number of Americans getting ivermectin. It's a problem, but it's not the dominant problem right now. Let's hope. Where do you think these people are getting their bad information? I do think a lot does come from Facebook. There's evidence that social media has spread some of the most damning bad information. I spoke with researchers at Annenberg School at University of Pennsylvania about this, how Facebook correlated with where people were getting the worst information and the biggest conspiracy theories around COVID versus people who might watch the network news. Not that the network news gets it perfectly right

either, but because it's more robust, it's a mainstream news organization as opposed to whatever meme is being passed around by your uncle. So it is disturbing. And that's something that I feel like as a health reporter I'm competing against, right? Like, I need to write the stories that not only have the best information, but are accessible enough that if that 45-year-old guy who's not vaccinated is thinking about taking Ivermectin, he knows why that's a bad idea and understands why the coronavirus vaccines work so well. Yeah. Thank you so much, Dan Diamond. Please come back. Molly, I'm happy to be back. And thanks to you and your dogs for giving me a few minutes to weigh in on all of us. Oh, God, those dogs.

Mike Duncan is the host of the Revolutions podcast and author of Hero of Two Worlds, the Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution. Welcome to the new abnormal, Mike. Thank you for having me. So, Mike, you have a New York Times bestseller on a guy who was alive in the 17 and 1800s. How on earth did you make this story relevant to us today? So the way that I get this guy onto the bestseller list is, first and foremost, you know, I have been writing and producing the Revolution's podcast for many years. It's been ongoing since 2013. And in making all of these episodes, you know, I'm doing discrete seasons on the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, Spanish, American Independence, et cetera, et cetera. And the Marquis de Lafayette just keeps showing up in this series, like over and over and over again. He was present. for so many different moments during this 50-year period that we, you know, call the age of Democratic Revolution, which I think the thing that makes it relevant to us today, aside from just like a lot of

people listen to the podcast and sort of Lafayette became something of a low-key mascot of the show, because like a stray puppy, he just kept showing up again and showing up again. And I'm like, but just funding revolutions or in other ways, too? I would say that his relevance to us, especially in the United States of America is that our origin story as a people, as a culture, as a country runs through this period. A lot of what we think of as the United States of America is built out of these ideas that come from the mid-18th century enlightenment period. And then through to the late 18th century and the early 19th century, all of these ideas are remain current in terms of like, what are we fighting about when it comes to the Bill of Rights,

what are we fighting about when it comes to the Constitution? all of these things come out of this era, and Lafayette is right in the middle of all of it. He is close personal friends with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and James Madison. He himself is trying to import these ideas. He's trying to import them from Europe to America and then re-import them back from the United States,

what becomes the United States to Europe. So he's a part of the origin story of the United States. I think he's a part of the origin story of really the modern world. And everybody loves a good origin story, you know, If you're going to have a superhero movie, like, it's always going to be an origin story. And so if you tell the origin story of the modern world and the United States of America, Lafayette is right there, playing a very prominent position. That's so interesting. Do you think of, like, now that you've done all this research on revolutions, how worried are you about us right now?

Well, I am very worried about us right now. And I have been for quite some time. And this actually goes back sort of even before my work on revolutions, I did a whole series. series, you know, about the, you know, the rise and sustained golden age and fall of the Roman empire. And my first book, which is called The Storm Before the Storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, was about a period of Roman history sort of when the Roman Republic was still an ongoing concern. And there was something like democracy, however limited it was. There was something like participatory government that then collapses by, you know,

around into Julius Caesar. So the book that I wrote, the first book I wrote, is, about what happened before Julius Caesar comes along in the generation or two before that, that really sets up when the Caesar's come along to crash the system. Because it's not like Julius Caesar inherited a very healthy polity and a very healthy republic and then just kind of pushed it over through sheer force of will. It was already breaking down. So that, I wrote that book five or six years ago, hoping to have a, you know, sort of like, there's a lot of parallels here between like what the United States is going through and what Rome was going through. And then as I'm writing the book, I was finishing it in 2016, sort of as Trump is making his appearance on the stage for the

first time. And there was a running joke like all through 2016 that I was, I'm like I would tweet. Like I'm writing the book as fast as I can. Like I'm trying to get this out there because events are now moving quicker than even I would have thought because I identified, I feel like a lot of what is currently ailing the United States of America back when I was working on the Rome stuff. So what is currently ailing the United States of America? We got to get there right now. Come on. Oh, we can just, we can just, well, I guess.

No pressure. Let's go. The last point that I'll make about it is then when I move into revolutions, all I do in revolutions is set up some polity, some government, some regime that is going to be so broken that it's overthrown. So all I do in life has prepared me to, like, just look out in current events and be like, well, this is a problem and this is a problem. And I think the fundamental things, there's large structural economic inequality in the United States that was sort of if you look through, if you just take something random like the Ginny Index.

Can you explain to our listeners what that is? Oh, it's just a very simple measure where like so one, like a score of one on the Ginny Index is like one person holds all the wealth in society and nobody else has anything. whereas a zero would be everybody holds an equal amount of wealth. And then you can economists and sociologists can go through and they score different countries. And you can see how over the last like 50 years, we got close to something like parity after World War II. And it has been diverging ever since, like especially since the 70s and 80s. It really started diverging. Can you explain why that happened after World War II?

Oh, my Lord. The most simple explanation is that out of World War I and World War II, the industrial capacity of Europe was devastated by the fact that they spent like 30 years blowing each other to hell. And when they did that, the only large industrialized nation that was sort of really left on firm footing was the United States of America. And because of that, so much of the manufacturing and the commerce of the world started running through the United States. and there was broadly shared prosperity as a result of all this. There was heavy unionization. There were good wages for people who were in the quote-unquote lower classes. And this starts to break down.

Once you get into the 1970s, Germany and Japan have now sort of like returned to the world stage. With the help of the United States, I mean, that was the plan to bring them back to life. And then I think ever since then, there has been a dismantling of the social systems, the social safety nets. There has been, you know, you can just track. tax policy over the last 50 years and see how basically every time there's any kind of tax reform, it is going to allow the wealthiest segment of the United States to hold more of their money and to have fewer tax dollars available to sort of be redistributed downwards. So Reagan did this.

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, this is, Reagan is a symbol of it, but it's a grant. There was a grand and still ongoing conservative backlash to sort of the big government liberalism that starts with the New Deal and runs through the great society. This is Thatcher, too. I had sort of the same things were happening in Britain as in the United States. And I think what has happened is that all of those sort of grounded in economics and grounded in sort of the material conditions of the state have also run into an intense polarization at the political level, which is something I think more or less gets unleashed by the Cold War, when the Cold War ends,

excuse me, that during the Cold War, there was something holding the parties together in a way that then completely broke down once the Cold War ends. And you can, you can, you can then track. And for this, we're pointing at people like Newt Gingrich or, you know, Rush Limbaugh in terms of what are the new partisan strategy? How is, how is the Republican Party going to capture power after so many? I mean, they were, the Republicans did not hold the House of Representatives for like 40 years. How are they going to recapture power? And then what are they going to do once they have? it. And you can see the polarization that we're dealing with today. It all traces back to the same period in the 70s and 80s and 90s. So this tracks a bit to like what was going on in the Roman

Republic back in the day. Like 2,000 years ago, many of these same things were going on. Did Rome have its own Newt Gingrich? I think so. I mean, I wouldn't want to say, you know, there's not a one-for-one parallel between like New Gingrich. There is a guy named like Nutecichus. But do you have a wife that would really retouch the selfies? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, let us talk about Newt Gingrich's wife with this serious journalist here. Yes, yes, yes. No, so there is a thing about there's a negative partisanship is, I think, what I'll just call it right for the second,

which is that if somebody in the other political party wants to do something, that would objectively be beneficial for society, broadly beneficial for society. That means that the person who's proposing that reform or that project is going to get a lot of credit, and they're going to be more popular than their political rivals for having done this thing that is very popular. And at the beginning of the Rome book, the beginning of Storm Before the Storm, you know, this comes down to land reform, where there was, there had been for about a century a movement of small-holding farmers, their property to very large landed magnates, right? The land of the landed aristocracy starts gobbling up more and more land,

and this is putting pressure on sort of the middle and lower classes in Rome, and there was persistently projects to reform how land is distributed in Italy, to give sort of these old smallhold farmers their land back, you know, essentially. And we can see in the Roman period the various people who propose these land reforms, who are going to benefit politically from carrying through these land reforms are intransigently opposed by their political opponents, not necessarily because their political opponents are against land reform, but because they're against the idea that their political rival would get credit for that land reform. Yeah, man.

And this, yeah, yeah, does this sound familiar to anybody? Yeah, it does. And so I have personally seen this in my own life. I mean, and we can take this back to Newt Gingrich, because when Bill Clinton is originally, like back in 93, going to propose health care reform, Newt Gingrich's message to everybody in the Republican caucus was it doesn't matter what they come out with. We are going to say no to it.

It is dead on arrival, right? And this has been, I think, the political strategy of the Republican Party for the last 30 years. Is anything Democrats want to do or can do? It doesn't matter if we agree with it. It doesn't matter if Barack Obama is basically floating Mitt Romney's health care plan. It doesn't matter how much Democrats go out of their way to try to bring in Republicans or use Republican

ideas to enact health care reform, which just Democrats happen to think is a good thing to do, the legislators in the Republican caucus are going to fight this tooth and nail and not allow it to be enacted. So this has created gridlock. This has created a system of government that is no longer responsive to the great crises and the great issues that are facing the country at the moment. I have a great deal of fear, as I'm sure we all do, about a system that is this deadlocked being able to respond to something as momentous as a climate catastrophe that is looming above all of our heads. And, you know, this is going to require very swift and vigorous action. And you have a system of government that for the last 20, 30, 40 years has really entrenched itself into something

that is just permanent deadlock. And that's also a thing that crippled the Romans is their, the deadlock that happened inside the Senate started to have very negative effects on. the broader society, which allows somebody like Caesar to come crashing through the gates. Is there a time in history when something like climate change came along? I mean, I guess a pandemic is the closest thing where you had to convince a large group of people who don't believe in science that science is real. I don't know just off the top of my head if there is something, you know, quite like this. As you said, like, there have been several plagues that have swept through. And, you know, maybe there is a sort of a doctor, a Cassandra type figure who's like, if we just do this,

you know, we won't have to, you know, if we drink, if we boil our water, you know, everything will be fine. And people are like, boil our water. And why would we ever do that? That's stupid. And he's like, there's little tiny invisible things that will kill us. I'm sure that those things have gone on in the past. But I do think that we are facing something somewhat unique in that, you know, past societies. And hopefully, now that this book, the Lafayette book, has been a bestseller, I do want to move back to Rome to talk about a period where Roman civilization really started breaking down in the third century, which had a lot to do with a climate shift. We have experienced climate shifts in the past, but never as a result of human activity and never had it within our power to undo it, not undo it, but at least navigate it or know that we were supposed to be navigating it. I mean, when there was a climate shift 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, people just knew, oh, I used to be able to grow wheat here, and now I can't.

Or there used to be a lot of rain, but now there's not that gods must be angry at us. And they don't quite know what to do with that. But these days, we do know all of these things. We have more information available at our disposal than we have ever had at any time in human history. We all carry around supercomputers in our pockets. And it is very troubling and somewhat annoying that with our, all of this vast amount of information at our disposal, we still can't seem to muster the gumption to take decisive action over something that is obviously quite real.

So, Mike, I want to be charitable to your current book after we've discussed so much of the other one. It's all right. Hey, the royalty checks come in either way. So one of the things about Lafayette that I believe you point to is that this was actually a very good person. We don't hear a lot about good people in history. Can you explain to us the role of good here? he did in the world. Yeah, and this was something that I found attractive about him as he started showing up in the podcast over and over again is that in studying all of this Roman history and all

of this revolutionary history, I am often dealing with capital G, capital M, great men doing, you know, big world historical things like Napoleon or like Caesar. And the thing is about these guys is if you're going to be that big and great on the world stage, you are often capable of doing awful things. You are capable of doing terrible things, and most of them have a ruthless ambition that allows them to sort of rise to power by climbing on the bodies of hundreds of thousands of people who are dead as a direct result of the actions that these quote-unquote great men have performed. I mean, Caesar committed genocide in Gaul. The Napoleonic wars are an absolute bloodbath that Napoleon is riding on top of. And so all of these guys that I'm talking

about have this sort of, there's a deep sociopathie and psychopathy to great political leaders, ultimately, and to come across somebody like Lafayette who didn't have that. He didn't have that killer instinct. He didn't have that ruthlessness. And it's why he never, it's why he was never the president of France. There were a couple of times in his life where if he had been a slightly different person, we would be talking about the Marquis de Lafayette as the first president of France. People wanted him to have that job, and he declined it each time. There were other moments where if he had been more ruthless, he could have gathered up the armed forces who were under his direct command and loyal to him almost personally and used them to seize political power, and he never did.

And this makes him not a great man, but it does make him a good man. And so people, like, people ask, like, did you write a great man biography? And it's like, no, I feel like I kind of wrote a good man biography. And he is somebody who, from the time that he was a teenager, all the way through to the end of his life, he dies in his mid-70s. And all through his life, he is somebody who is going to observe the world that he is living in, politically, economically, socially, and ask himself, what are the things that are going on here where some people are suffering or something could be done better? Or there is a, there's a law that is prohibiting something that maybe we should allow it, or maybe there's something that's being allowed that we should prohibit. He's a reformer. He's a social and political reformer at heart who was willing ultimately to push through to a revolutionary event if he felt that his reform projects were being pushed back against too hard. He's willing to go into revolution to support his reform projects, but he's just somebody who's walking through life trying to make the world a better place. And there's also something good about that. I don't think

there's anything objectionable about that as a way to be as a person on this earth. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, I guess there are people like that in America right now, but we just don't read about them. Yeah, sure. I think there's a lot of people who are actually like that. And Lafayette's, you know, if we were to transplant him to sort of the present and figure out like, okay, where does this guy fit into modern politics? He's very clearly like a liberal, coastal elite philanthropist. He's very rich, but he also spends his money on charitable causes. He's not somebody who's just trying to extract wealth from the society that he's living in because he was an aristocrat. You know, like, where's his money coming from? His money is coming from like the rent and produce,

well, the rent and produce of the people who are on his ancestral lands who are working. he inherits all this property, but like, where does that money come from? It comes from the work of the people who are on the land. So he is getting all of this money, but at the same time, he's doing his best to pretty relentlessly spend that money in ways that he thinks are good or would be beneficial for society as a whole. And he, you know, he winds, he starts his life as one of the richest people in France, and he bounces back. But there is a point where he's down to zero. He's, he goes through a period of what is essentially bankruptcy as a result of everything that he tried to do. And then, you know, he runs afoul of many of the French revolutionaries when things get more radicalized,

which also, you know, he's dispossessed of most of his property. I think that's where his position is, both for good and for ill. And the criticisms that you could make of, you know, coastal, liberal elite philanthropists, I think are criticisms that you could level at Lafayette, but also the good things about that are true of Lafayette, that you would rather have somebody who is very rich spending their money on what they think are good causes rather than just hoarding it and dumping it in for us to find in whatever the next iteration of the Panama papers are going to be. Right. Which when we all found out that like half of all global wealth is just sitting, you know, it's just sitting in these bank accounts, which we all suspect. That's the thing. The Panama

paper is just kind of coming and going without maintaining any kind of currency in the political zeitguises, it remains a great source of frustration. for me because we keep talking about how we don't have the wealth or resources or capacity to do all these really big things that we need to do, completely overhaul the infrastructure of the United States, you know, have addressed climate change in a meaningful way. And we're like, oh, we don't have the money for it. It's like, did you read the Panama Papers, man? We got money. There's plenty. That's a great point. Yeah, that is a really good point. Thank you so much for coming on. This was really, really great. I appreciate you having me on here. I hope.

I was able to give a little bit of historical perspective that doesn't fill people with too much dread. Yeah, it was just the right amount of dread. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody should have an appropriate amount of dread. Fear can be a great motivator. 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

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which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Jesse Cannon. Molly Jong Fast. Tell me what's going on. Today we have Fuck that guy. It was a virtual smorgas board of fuckery.

I couldn't decide. We were both just trying to decide our people. I had to go with the Cheeto Jesus because on 9-11, which, you know, I have lived in New York my whole life. I was here on 9-11. I wasn't, you know, in the towers or anything, but I certainly did, you know, absorb some of the collective misery that was 9-11. And, and it's not a great day. I mean, I, you know, it's, it's sort of a sad day. And it's, you know, I mean, it's just not a great day.

And so, you know, Biden went, Biden's very good at doing what you're supposed to do as president. In fact, a lot of people, even fucking Ronald Reagan was good. And W. And all these people that I'm not a big fan of are pretty good at just sort of doing what you're supposed to do, which is go to the fucking thing and sit there and not make it about you. But Mango Mussolini decides, no, I'm not doing that. And he decides that he's going to emce a pay-per-view boxing match. Classy.

Right. This is a classy move. And he's also going to, and now again, we don't know when he recorded this message. But on the day of 9-11, the Moonies, which is a cult, which you may have heard of, run by the Reverend Moon, Moon, who's actually dead. So his sons have gone off and made splinter cults. They worship with AR-15s. One of the sons was at the January 6th riot. They're big Trump supporters. And Trump gave this bat shittery of a speech, which again, it was sort of like a cameo. I don't think it was tape live, but who knows, where he said that he had denuclearized the Korean Peninsula, which

You know, is not true. Let me tell you, as someone with the last name, Zhang, no relation, I am here to tell you that Trump did not denuclearize the fucking Korean peninsula. And God damn it, fuck that motherfucker. Fuck that guy. Jesse, who is your fuck that guy? One Amy Coney Barrett, a Supreme Court Justice who has been voting pretty partisan but says, My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.

But what she's doing here is she's saying that because the news media will print that. But her actions speak a lot different than what she's actually saying. And the fact is, is two of the justices who've been on this court forever, just vote everything. It's so funny when you watch like a... They're like the definition of partisan hacker. When you watch any documentary these days of anything happen in like the 90s even, you see like these votes that are 7 to 1 or, you know, handily decided votes. That doesn't happen now because these partisan hacks in the Supreme Court, like Clarence Thomas, who's asked two questions in like literally 30 years or something, just vote on the side of the conservatives no matter what the evidence is, they find some bullshit to say it. Here's the thing about Amy Coney Barrett's deriding partisanship.

She did it at the McConnell Institute. She was introduced by fucking Mitch McConnell. I stole three Supreme Court seats. I mean, fuck you. So, Amy Coney Barrett, fuck you. Your press release doesn't mean anything your actions do. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to.

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