Hi, I'm Molly Johnfast, 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 and 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 Cannon. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. Well, I know I learned a lot from today's show.
David Drucker, senior political correspondent at Vanity Fair and author of the fourth-wing book, In Trump's Shadow, will talk to us about how the Republican Party is mutating. Then we'll talk to Marcus Flowers, who is actually running against one of the main mutations of the Republican Party, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. And he's going to tell us how he's battling her to win that congressional seat. But first, we have the author of the amazing book, The Cruelty's the Point, and a writer at The Atlantic, Adam Serber.
Welcome to The New Abnormal, Adam. Thank you so much for having me. So we've long been wanting to have you. You wrote a piece, Adam, called The Lie About the Supreme Court Everyone Pretends to Believe, which was about the partisanship in the Supreme Court, which is particularly clear now with our super-conservative 6-3 court.
Justice Alito then talked about this piece in an interview, and you wrote a piece responding to Justice Alito, saying, by attacking me, Justice Alito proves my point. I mean, do you think you're the only journalist to ever have this happen? Probably not the only one. No, I'm sure I'm not.
I mean, these things just usually, they're not really out in the open that way. I think Clance Thomas has a long-term grudge against Nina Totenberg. There's actually some pretty good examples of personal animosity between individual justices and individual reporters who have covered the court for a long time. I think what was weird was that the piece that I wrote, I'm not a regular Supreme Court correspondent anymore.
I used to cover the court for MSNBC and Mother Jones, but I haven't been to the court in years. And so it's a little strange, just in general, that Alito pulled out something that was not written by a regular Supreme Court correspondent. It was clearly an opinion piece, to make his point. I'm not entirely sure why that piece in particular got under his skin.
I would like to think it's because I've accurately described his motives, which is that the conservative majority on the court no longer feel any obligation to even pretend they're not just doing what they want to do. But I think on some level, he must have thought that somehow by citing that, he was making his point that the court is apolitical and it's actually journalists who are mischaracterizing things, which, you know, women in Texas do not need me, do not need the Atlantic to tell them that they don't have a right to an abortion anymore. They don't need me to tell them that. They know that.
And so Alito can sneer and be like, well, technically, but, you know, the reality is that women who can afford it are, like, traveling across state lines to exercise a constitutional right. And that's a situation that the Supreme Court decided to allow in Texas. It's hardly a legal faith to assume that that situation is the way it is, because the majority of the court does not really recognize abortion as a constitutional right. This gets into a question I wanted to ask you, because I do think the Roberts court was able to make it look, you know, they did a lot of very conservative things, but they made it look like they were not as partisan.
This summer, I think we saw a lot of Republican justices bitching, and we should say conservative justices, but we all know what they really are, bitching about journalists considering them to be partisan. But there really is a real difference, like, between this Kavanaugh court, right, because he's now the swing voter, and the Roberts court of the last semester. Do you see that? Yeah, I mean, I think what's different is that Roberts, when Roberts controlled the court, what Roberts liked to do, they used to describe these as time bombs.
He would, like, warn you that he was going to do something a couple years before he did it, in, like, some decisions, like, a couple years before the Shelby County decision. There was a different voting rights case in which he was basically, right, I'm going to strike down a big portion of the Voting Rights Act if you don't do what I want to do. And this is already ridiculous, right? But that looks moderate compared to what the court is doing now, but now that he no longer has control over it because they can afford to lose his vote.
Now they're just like, well, we're just going to do this now. You know, he used to warn you, and so it gave an impression of incrementalism, even though, as in the voting rights case, you know, Roberts is basing it on nothing in the Constitution. It's just his own personal ideological belief that voting rights legislation goes too far and infringes on what he sees as the equal sovereignty of the states, which is a doctrine that simply does not exist in the Constitution and has some, you know, pretty noxious precedents in terms of its use. You know, that looks moderate compared to what the court is doing now, which is like, we're going to do whatever we feel like doing.
And if John Roberts doesn't like it, he can vote with the liberals and we'll still have five votes. Yeah, it's amazing. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the Biden Supreme Court group that has recently put out a decision on whether or not the court needs to be expanded. Now, look, if the purpose of the commission was to get Biden off the hook for expanding the court, then they did his job.
I could probably pick a group of elite lawyers who would recommend court expansion, but I would have to pick them. If you just get a bunch of esteemed legal scholars, the elite legal profession revolves around the prestige of the court. So you're sort of like, it's like getting a bunch of the Board of Amazon to like vote on rules regarding internet commerce. I mean, that's probably a little too strong, but the point is that these people are pretty much all institutionalists.
They want the Supreme Court to be there and to do what it does. They might prefer a different composition of the court, but they're not going to undermine the court as an institution in any way. And this is sort of, this is actually, I mean, the problem with this also is that it changes the dynamic for the justices, because the justices are concerned about how the other political branches might react to them. They might restrain themselves a little bit.
But the justices, particularly the conservative justices, who have been whining about being seen as partisan because they're acting in a partisan way or ideological way, they're going to respond to this with like, well, you know, we don't have anything to worry about. And they really don't, honestly, because it's not like Joe Manchin or Justin Sinema are going to vote for court expansion. They can't even get them to vote for a popular infrastructure bill. But there is basically, the court is getting no pushback from anywhere except for public opinion.
It's certainly not getting any criticism from the Biden administration, which for obvious reasons does not want to piss them off. It's not in their interest to get in a fight with the court right now because the court is holding all the cards. But to the extent that they're lashing out at the press, it's because the only people who are giving them a hard time is in the arena of public opinion. The Democrats are not going to do anything.
The Republicans are ecstatic about the composition of the court. You know, so the only people who can register their displeasure and not face consequences for doing so are basically people in the public realm who never need to go before the court and therefore never need to vote for them. Let's pull back for a minute, because what I think ultimately is the underlying issue with all of this is that democracy continues to be in peril. How worried are you?
I don't know if I'm worried. I'm resigned. I mean, I think you look at what's going on right now is you basically have a race at the bottom that's occurring where Democrats basically, their ability to retain the majority in the House rests on their ability to gerrymander the hell out of the states that they control. And you see Republicans doing something similar where they're trying to gerrymander the states that they control in such a way so it's to make it more likely that they will be able to get the majority in Congress.
And when you do this, what happens is, I mean, it's pretty much what the liberal dissent has said in prior cases on gerrymandering, which is that these politicians are choosing their constituencies. And they choose their constituencies in this way so that they can insulate themselves from backlash against public opinion and they do things that are unpopular. In the case of Republicans, they are trying to insulate themselves from the growing diversity of particular states. Like here in Texas, they are just, you know, despite their gains with Latino voters in the last cycle, they are attempting to diminish the influence of Black and Latino voters with the drawing of districts.
And that's just happening in plain sight. Can that backfire? I mean, I think it can backfire in the sense that you can't prevent people from moving. You can't prevent coalitions from changing.
Whereas you once might have shown that a particular suburban area would have been a Republican district. Maybe now it's more of a Biden district. Gerrymanders aren't effective forever. Right.
Doesn't it make your margin smaller? It really depends on the map. I mean, what they're doing now with gerrymandering is they really have it down to a science where they can very much figure out how to draw a district, broad districts in such a way so it's to completely marginalize the other party. And the problem with this is that the way that democracy works is there's a feedback loop.
Representatives have to hear from the public. And when they act against the public's interest, the public can give them feedback in terms of voting them out. But if you can never vote these people out, then the people in power never have any incentive to care what you think. So you have a situation like Wisconsin where, you know, Democrats would have to win the popular vote by like 10 points or something because of gerrymandering and geographic distribution in order to actually win a majority in the state legislature.
And this is just, you know, it's a real problem. It's a solvable problem. You can do things like multi-member districts that will like diminish the effect of this kind of approach to democracy. But it is a real problem for democracy in the basic sense that people cannot actually, popular vote cannot be expressed because it's been sliced into a million pieces by the politicians who are supposed to be responsive to public feedback.
Let's talk about the January 6th panel because I feel like that committee has, it's a big week for them. They're voting on Tuesday about whether or not they're going to enforce the subpoenas. I always think from what I know that to sort of prevent a slide into autocracy is more narrative. You know, do you have any thoughts on that?
The thing with things like this is when you look at American history, the precedent is that when you do not respond forcefully to violent attempts to change the outcomes of elections, those efforts can be rewarded later on. I mean, a lot of the guys who in the South, a lot of men who led insurrections in the South against the reconstruction of governments return to Congress as congressmen and senators. And so, you know, the risk here, you know, with the Capitol riot is that this is going to become, and you're already seeing it happening, that rather than a shameful event, it's going to become a kind of rallying point where people who participated in it or promoted it or celebrated it are going to be seen as more loyal to the party and therefore more desirable as representatives. And unless there is a sufficient enough, a forceful enough response, there isn't going to be a deterrent from doing something like this again.
That said, I really think that the risk of a violent overthrow of the United States government is actually quite low. I think it's like far more likely when you look at the way democratic backsliding has worked across the world, I think it's much more likely that someone with authoritarian instincts wins an election and quietly erodes the democratic system of checks and balances with a high level of control over his own party, which acts as a kind of buffer between him and the institutions of accountability in that particular government. And so I think it's actually a bigger risk that Donald Trump gets elected again and he is even less restrained than he was last time by either Republicans or by institutions within the government. I think that is a much bigger risk than the Proud Boys, you know, attacking D.C.
and taking over the Capitol again, if that makes any sense. Yeah, it does. I worry more about like a Ron DeSantis playing by Donald Trump's rules. I don't really know because I think it is difficult to distinguish between the qualities that were unique to Trump and the qualities that are institutional within the GOP.
So, for example, the Republican Party did not need Donald Trump to tell him how to racially gerrymander districts. He didn't come up, for example, with the plan to try to use the census to affect a nationwide racial gerrymander that would enhance the influence of white voters. That was done before he even took office by a Republican Thomas Holtfeller who was a longstanding political operative. Yeah, there's another conservative talking point that seems important and I'd love to just get your hot take on it, which is a lot of these people like Marjorie Taylor Greene are talking about this idea of a national divorce.
I'm going to get to that in a second, but first, I want to finish up a prior thought, which was, you know, it's hard to distinguish between the aspects of the GOP which are turning against popular democracy because they want to retain power with a minority coalition using the counter-majoritarian levers of government in undemocratic ways and Donald Trump as a person who was unrestrained in his expression of the ideological principles behind the belief that that minority coalition is more legitimately American than the rival parties coalition. I think, you know, it's both an institutional and an individual problem for dealing in the sense that I'm not sure, you know, maybe Ron DeSantis is as shameless as Donald Trump, maybe he's as selfish, maybe he's as his ability to inspire undying loyalty is the same, but I'm not so sure. You know, but institutionally the larger problem is the ideology of the Republican Party that says our voters are truly American and the other parties aren't, so we are justified in stripping them of their basic rights and, you know, the structure of our system of government which allows them to hold power with a minority of the votes. Those are sort of the real big issues and they fuel each other.
As far as the national divorce thing, look, man, that's a joke. I'm sorry. Like, these guys on social media who want to play neoconfederate every day, it's really stupid. I have little patience for it.
Nobody wants to do that. It's just a bunch of loud voices on social media and the reality is that, you know, because of the urban-rural divide, what that means is that, like, you know, Atlanta and San Antonio and New York have more in common with each other than the rural areas of their own states and vice versa. So, like, upstate New York is probably more politically similar to rural Texas than places that are nearby. It's just a stupid idea.
The sort of, like, insurrectionary fantasy, which I've been saying for years, honestly. I've been saying versions of it for years. They've always been, like, seriously and then, like, go and, like, you know, because we live in a country with very lax gun laws and lots of firearms, can we, like, go and shoot somebody up or shoot a public place up on the basis of some sort of ideological insanity? I mean, obviously, it's dangerous in that sense, but nobody actually wants to break up the United States.
It's a stupid idea. On the other hand, I think that the talk about this, it's really sort of a concession that they do not even want to try and win over a majority of the population and they feel like they should be entitled to run things even without appealing to the majority of the population. They don't want to have to win people over. They want to just have power no matter what.
They want to roll a seven every time. They just do not want to accept the transfer of power as a thing that has to happen in a democracy when you lose. And I think that's dangerous as far as, you know, it is an ideological belief that is perhaps closer in the mainstream of what the Republican Party is right now than I would like. But there's all this stuff about, you know, we're going to have a second civil war.
You know, I think that's mostly fanatizing from guys who, you know, want to act off on the internet. And hopefully I'm right about that, but that's what it looks like to me right now. Yeah, me too. I hope so.
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To become a member, head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com. That's newabnormal.thedailybeast.com. David Drucker is a senior political correspondent at Vanity Fair and author of the book In Trump's Shadow. Welcome to the New Abnormal, David Drucker.
Good to be here, thank you. So let's talk about the book. Your book is about this idea of what the future of the Republican Party is going to look like. Would you say, is that fair?
Yeah, no, that is fair. In Trump's Shadow, the battle for 2024 and the future of the GOP was my attempt to take the Trump years and the Trump era and look into the future and see how the former president, Donald Trump, impacted the Republican Party long term and try and do that through the prism of what the 2024 primary could look like. And my thinking, among all the other things I was thinking that sort of led to the book was that there are so many great books, incisive books, about what happened during the Trump presidency. But what I wanted to try and do was take some of those things and talk about what it meant for the future of the party.
And given we're really a two-party system and a two-party country, what it meant for the future of the country. Yeah, I think we talk about that a lot on this podcast is what the Republican Party is going to look like. And I think you can't, you absolutely, I mean a lot of listeners on this podcast are pretty committed liberals. I think that's fair to say.
You know, I'm often saying to them that they really need to know what the Republican Party is up to. So I'm curious to know your take because you also do write, you write for a bunch of places like Vanity Fair and you're on CNN but you also write for the Washington Examiner. You know, it's funny, the Examiner never tells me what to write or what not to write beyond the usual editor assignments of, hey, I think this campaign would be a good look and do or what about this thing? The thing that's interesting in my mind is that Republicans will talk to you in a way that they probably wouldn't talk to so much.
I think that's a fair point. And I think, look, I think part of it is just that for various reasons, when I became a journalist full time and this became my profession, for various reasons, I started in Southern California. I started cultivating Republicans more than I did Democrats at the time because I felt like there was an open space in the marketplace. And I really just wanted to get ahead.
And I remember thinking at the time, you know, there's a lot of things going on with the Republican Party that not everybody understands. Because they are the minority party in California, they don't get as much ink as the Democrats are getting. And so all that is to say is that I spent 20 years studying the Republican Party, its evolution, talking to Republicans in politics and Republican voters. And so I think some of this is the trust that I've developed with Republican sources.
And some of it is just that I understand the mind of the Republican voter and the minds of the various kinds of Republican voters. And so I think it has helped me sort of understand them and know how to talk to them to try and understand what's going on. So what is going on? Great question.
And within Trump's shadow, I set out to try and explain what is going on. And I think there are a couple of different things happening. As I report in the book, Trump is still as hostile as ever to the party he affiliates with and the party he leads. But in fact, that's why so many Republican voters like him, because he channels and shares their contempt for the party they affiliate with.
At the same time, you have Republican politicians, particularly Republicans who want to run for president, who plan to be around a lot longer than Trump. And I mean that really in a chronological sense. You know, if you were in Trump's shadow, for various reasons, I focused on six particular Republicans. But like if you're a Tom Cotton in your early to mid-40s or a Nikki Haley on the cusp of 50 or even, you know, a Mike Pence in the late 50s, early 60s, your political career, you're hoping is not over.
And if you're Donald Trump, you're 75 years old headed to 76, it's just chronologically so many Republicans are trying to figure out the lay of the land. And what I discovered in Trump's shadow in reporting this is the most important thing to Republican voters probably, at least when you're looking at the Republican base, is attitude. How you channel Trump's attitude as they see it as a fighter and how you do it in a way that's authentic so that base Republicans don't look at you as a pretender. And this is one of the things that preoccupies Republicans that are looking at higher office.
Oh, I'm sure that's true. And so interesting. Now, a lot of people would say that the Republican Party has taken an anti-Democratic tact, right, with all of this. You know, the big lie is now a litmus test for if you are a Trumpy Republican or not.
Do you see that? I mean, it seems clear to me, but I'm not in it the way you're in it. So I think that it's true in some cases and not in others. And I think the best way for me to illustrate that is that, you know, for some Republicans that we see on news programs, even today, yesterday, tomorrow, what have you, if you ask them a direct question, did Donald Trump lose the election?
Was Joe Biden elected in a fair election? Not an election absent any fraud at all whatsoever, but just a fair election where even if you add up all the fraud, it wouldn't change the outcome. And some Republicans, particularly Republican leaders in Congress, don't want to answer that question. Right, because they know there was no fraud.
Correct. Look, as an aside, I don't know anybody in either party that's ever told me there is absolutely zero fraud in an election in a country as big as ours. The question is always, was there enough fraud to change the outcome? No evidence has been presented to prove that.
And I just want to just follow that through for a minute. I mean, the only election fraud that I have seen that was proven was that North Carolina congressional race that Dan McCready and the Republican had all those ballots picked up. So, I mean, besides that, I've never seen a election fraud case that actually went and was prosecuted. But anyway, continue.
Yeah, correct. And look, some Republicans will make the argument that because of the pandemic, some states changed the rules governing how people vote in a way that wasn't consistent with their state's constitution. And people can have that academic argument all the time, but we still have not seen any evidence that people manufactured votes, stole votes, manipulated votes, and the Electoral College results were certified by all of these states. And that's a key metric.
But the larger point, Molly, I was trying to make to answer your question, was that on the one hand, you have Republicans who won't acknowledge that Joe Biden was elected. But on the other hand, as I reported in Trump's shadow, you have somebody like Tom Cotton, who in many ways was a Trumpy Republican, if you will, before there was Trump, if you look at his policy agenda, who made it his business to never get on the opposite side of Donald Trump while Donald Trump was president. But when push came to shove and it was time to either object to the Electoral College results or not, Tom Cotton voted to certify the Electoral College results, would not support objections, and in fact worked very hard with Senate Minority Leader, the then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to stop his fellow Republicans, convince them not to object to the results, because he found that it undermined our constitutional system, and it suggested that the power of the election somehow might lie with the vice president, a single individual within our government, found it completely incompatible with our Constitution. And so he wouldn't go along with it.
And there are other Republicans like him, even though they don't get as much attention, because naturally, especially in our business, the people that are speaking up the loudest tend to get a lot of attention. So you had numerous sources confirm this? Yes, and I feel very confident in my reporting on Tom Cotton in In Trump's Shadow. And I would add that my reporting on how Mike Pence, the vice president, approached this is also consistent with somebody who, though he desperately avoided any separation or suggestion that he was ever on opposite sides with Donald Trump while Donald Trump was president, Vice President Mike Pence completely resisted attempts to have him throw the election.
And in fact, when he set out, when he had his attorney in the vice president's office, Gregory Jacob, research the constitutional implications of this and do a full deep dive into what the vice president was empowered to do or not empowered to do, part of his goal, according to my reporting, and I'm very confident and comfortable with my reporting, is that he didn't want, he wanted to be the last vice president that anybody would ever tempt into throwing an election, because what the former president wanted him to do was reject state certified electors. And keep in mind, I don't want to get too far into the weed, but there were no competing slates of electors from any state or the District of Columbia. Every state submitted one certified slate. That means there was nothing for the vice president to do but ascertain or count.
And the president was telling his vice president, no, no, no, you can just send this back to the states or throw it to the House. And not only was the vice president uncomfortable with that, he wanted to make sure he knew what he was talking about. He also wanted to make sure that no president would ever try and do this again. And so in the Dear Colleague letter that he issued ahead of the vote, ahead of certification, it was intended as a sort of, this is my own analogy, but often in Supreme Court decisions, even the dissenting opinion becomes a sort of roadmap for future lawyers to try and attack something.
He was trying to leave a paper trail that definitively said the vice president doesn't have the power to do this, so that in the future, if a future president pulled this, there would be this paper trail to say, Mike Pence already looked into this when Trump asked him to do it, and we already know we can't do it. And so these are very complicated figures. They abetted Trump. They were supportive of Trump, however you want to look at it.
But the request, the push to subvert the election was a bridge too far, even for some of the most admiring and committed Trump supporters. But here's a question for you. So, yes, it didn't happen this time, but it looks to me like a lot of these Trumpy, I mean, if the litmus test for these people who are running for governor in Arizona and governor in different swing states or red states is that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, how do we have a free and fair election of those people? Well, I think this is a fair and unknown question, and it's a question that I've been asking Republicans that I talk to.
And, for instance, I recently interviewed former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who, we'll tell you, is one of Donald Trump's close friends and we know is his close advisor and close ally throughout his presidency. He's now become very critical of how he handled the post-election period. But what I asked Chris Christie for the Texas Tribune Festival in my interview was, how confident are you that if a Democrat wins the presidential election in 2024 and the House is controlled by the Republican Party, that the House will not object and overturn or attempt to do so the will of the voters? What Governor Christie told me was that he believes that House Republicans, a majority of them, were willing to vote to overturn the 2020 election because it was a free vote.
They knew they didn't have the votes to do it. They knew it wasn't going to happen. And so even if every single one of them did so, they were outnumbered. That vested with the responsibility of actually certifying the election, it's not something they would do.
That's his opinion, but I know that a lot of people are concerned about this. I mean, it's terrifying. So you really believe that Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton would have not let Pence do it if he had? Well, there are the mechanics of the issue.
You know, Mitch McConnell and Tom Cotton and any other member of Congress were not in a position to control what Mike Pence did on the dais. But I think that had the former vice president gone along with Mr. Trump, we would have seen political chaos in the moment. And I think that the entire, I think the joint session was shut down as all this sorted out.
We know that Democrats wouldn't stood for this. We know that there are many Republicans who wouldn't stood for this. But exactly how this would have played out, it would have been unprecedented. What I feel confident in my reporting in the book is that their very intent, Mitch McConnell, Tom Cottons, and other Republicans, particularly in the Senate, but not only in the Senate, was that Biden won the election, that none of the challenges in court had been fruitful, and that there was only one option, and the option was to certify an election and move ahead.
Do you think that the Republican Party, like there are so many candidates who I think of as, you know, not someone I necessarily align with politically, but who I used to think of as sort of reasonable, but none of those people will ever speak against Trump. I mean, the closest we got were the people who voted that it wasn't okay to lead a violent insurrection. I mean, what are they scared of? I think there are two different ways to look at this, right?
So there are some Republicans, not many, who are willing to speak against the former president. The ones that are vocally opposed to him, and I think of Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who I write about in Trump's shadow. So I think about Representative Liz Cheney, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. These are Republicans that may be able to have a local power base, but are going to have trouble running for president, and this will explain why so many Republicans that have issues with Trump don't want to be as vocal as the Republicans I mentioned, and it's because for a large, for a significant, and I think the way to refer to it as a significant percentage of the Republican base, reveres Donald Trump.
And then you have another percentage of the Republican base that doesn't necessarily revere Donald Trump, but believes that he did, aside from all of the bluster and the post-election period, did some very consequential positive things, and they're not interested in the party going backward, and they're also not interested in a party at war with itself. And so for all sorts of reasons, if you're a Republican aspiring to the White House, you don't want to alienate voters. And so what I would say is they're not really scared of Trump. They're scared of the base.
They're scared of voters, and Donald Trump still has a very good relationship with the base, and not always, but in many instances, can energize the base and weaponize the base against a particular Republican that he doesn't like. This was really helpful and very interesting, and I hope you will come back. I'd love to come back, Molly. Thanks so much for having me.
Thanks, David. Marcus Bowers is running for Georgia's 14th congressional seat against Marjorie Taylor Greene. Welcome to the new abnormal, Marcus. Thank you for having me, Molly.
I appreciate it. So tell us a little bit about your race. My race against Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, we're doing pretty well. We've raised about $3.5 million so far from probably about 130,000 individual contributors.
And last quarter, we raised about $1.3 million, and now we're up to about $1 million cashed on hand. We're going to need all of that money to make an unprecedented investment in this district, one that's never been made before. We're going to be the first Democrat campaign in Georgia's 14th congressional district to be able to go up on the Atlanta television market, the Chattanooga television market. We're going to have a field of organizers.
We're going to knock 100,000 doors. We're going to sit and talk to the people of Georgia's 14th who are kind, generous, and caring people. I know people don't believe that because look who we sent to Marjorie Taylor Greene. There's actually a story there.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene is not actually from your district, right? She's not actually from the district. Well, she lives in Milton, Georgia. That's in Lucy McBath's district.
Right. She moved in there because she knew she could win, right? So, you know, I don't even think she would have won the primary against Handel, but, you know, she swooped into our district when Tom Graves decided to retire. She came in, self-funded to the tune of about a million and a half against the Republican primary challengers there, and they'd really raised a lot of money.
I think maybe Calvin had raised $100,000. I don't know. She swooped in commercials and, you know, gets her name out there and just basically bought the primary for being honest about it. And, you know, the people really didn't know who she was.
Right. They got a bad bill of goods there. That's basically how that happened. In general, the Democrat dropped out of the race.
Yes, because he was getting a lot of death threats, too, right? I spoke with Kevin a little bit before he dropped out of the race. And, you know, at the time I was a government official, so I was bound by hatchbacks. I couldn't be too outwardly political and do too much.
I couldn't do anything I could, you know, do some phone banking, go out and put out signs, whatever he needed. And I understand why he dropped out. The Secretary of State would not allow the Democrats to field with another candidate at the time. So we ended up with Congresswoman Green.
Yeah. And it's not such a red district, right? It is, but it's changing. You know, we're waiting to see in November what the lines are going to look like.
But I can tell you this right now. There's about 30 to 40 percent of the GOP who are absolutely in Congresswoman Margaret Taylor Green. You know, I tell people all the time, I'm not talking to people here in this district because I'm running. I'm running because I've been talking to people in the district, but I know how they feel about Congresswoman Green.
To be fair, there's probably about a third of the district who's going to be with her because she's a Republican. But not all of them are with her. And I guarantee you that the Democrats here is. And depending on what it looks like in redistricting, because this district can't get any better, it can only move into the Atlanta suburbs, towards the Atlanta suburbs, and it'll become bluer.
So I think that's a result of the trying to hurt Lucy McBath. Right. So that could actually hurt Lucy McBath, but it'll help you. That's kind of what the lines actually end up being.
So we'll know more after the special session in November. Tell me a little bit about your backstory. So a little bit about me. I was born in Troy, Alabama, birthplace of John Lewis, absolute icon of the civil rights movement.
One of the many men from the civil rights movement that I absolutely looked up to and watched the story my entire life. At 11 years old, I moved into a children's home in Talladega, Alabama, which is right next door to the district. So I have a long history with this district as my father. And I sent another oath to be here for many, many years.
And at 18, I joined the Army. I swore that oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And that's what I've been doing ever since for the last 27 years as a soldier, defense contractor for state and Department of Defense and a government official for Department of Defense. And I spent about a decade in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing all kinds of missions there.
My background is in logistics and compliance. I sit on governance contracts. I've trained Afghan Iraqi soldiers and police officers. So that's a little bit about me.
You come from the district. I'm from Alabama, but I've lived in this district for many years. Yeah, it is certainly something to have someone who actually lives in the district you're running for Congress, which I think is, yeah. It is.
And like I said, my family's lived here for decades, so this is home. You know, well, it's been about 20 years overseas, and I came back to the States and decided to come back home. So you're in a tough district, but you are running against a real MAGA lunatic. That's what I put.
Right, but I feel like you could sort of create the playbook for how to run against people like that, right? Because you're not running against a normal Republican. You're not running against an Adam Kinzinger, or, you know, you're really running against someone who she has, in fact, been kicked off all of her committees. So I'm wondering how you'll, if you have sort of special ideas on how to do that.
You know, for me, it's simple, Molly. It's about meeting people where they are. It's about going out and talking to people. And I think a lot of what we're seeing in this district and many other districts around the country feel like they've been left out.
And, you know, for me, most of my life, I consider myself apolitical or nonpartisan. And here's the thing. Our district's facing multiple challenges, and that's what I'm running for Congress. Solve those challenges, whether it be jobs and the economy or infrastructure, health care, education for our kids.
I mean, rural broadband is something that, you know, we really need here. Let me tell you what got me into this race. It was watching Marjorie Taylor Greene and the social reckoning that was happening all last summer. Then on January 6th, I was working as a government official, I was working from home, watching what was going on at the Capitol, watching Trump's rally, watching people go from that rally to the Capitol and break in.
And then the point for me, the breaking point for me was seeing police officers being beaten with an American flag. Meanwhile, you have a Confederate battle flag being braided through the Capitol, Rotunda. That's when it became mission critical for me. The very next day, I call my supervisor, and I resign my post as government official.
So this weekend, I saw Ms. Greene having a national divorce. It seems like it's pretty easy to really appeal to people. Do you really want to be represented by the person who's representing that in our country right now?
Do you have thoughts on how you appeal to people and try to get them on the side of a Democrat that a lot of people don't trust around Georgia now? You know, unfortunately, you know, this is nothing new. This whole national divorce thing she's talking about. She was talking about receiving from the union earlier this year.
And it's just, you know, we've seen these antics time and time again from her. But I tell you, the people here, they're tired of it. They want effective and efficient governance. And it's not so much about red or blue.
It's definitely not about that. For me, it's about effective and efficient governance. It's about serving the needs of the people. I've been a public servant my entire adult life.
So I've done nothing but serve the country. But quite simply, America's been my life. I've got to bring authority. I've got to bring authority.
I think people see that. We've got a huge veteran community here. And they know it's all about the country. For me, it's not about your party politics or your political leanings.
It's about getting things done for the people of the district. It's about exigual services. Something Marjorie Till Green knows nothing about. Something she hasn't done.
So she's been in Congress. I'll sit down and I'll work with local leaders, with, you know, business leaders in the districts to get things done. The message to the people of the district. It's about working together and getting things done.
Effective and efficient governance. Not politic grievance. Not antics. Not talking about succession.
It's ridiculous what she's doing right now. People are seeing right there. And they're tired of it. They want to see a government that works for them.
And that's what I intend to bring to the seat. Still, isn't it worse to have an empty, I mean, isn't it worse to have her in Congress than to not? No, it's not good to have her sitting in Congress doing nothing for the people of George's 14th. It'd be much better to have someone there who can work across the aisle.
But, you know, I tell people I'm optimistic and naive. I've been up to Capitol Hill. I've talked to lawmakers on both sides. There is goodwill there in the center.
Yeah. On both sides. This is a Republican. If she's a true believer, you need to approach her as such.
Uh-huh. I feel so sorry you're going to have to disgust this person so much for the next year of your life. Are you scared about, like, QAnon death threats and stuff like that? Because that was what, in the end, took her other opponent out.
Are you scared about that or no? I take things as they come. I take threats seriously. I spend a decade in war zones.
You know, I told you this is an important mission. It's one that I just couldn't walk away from. It's about bringing sanity and decency back to the seat. So, you know, the QAnon guys, I've already had those threats and things like that.
We've faced several of them. But what they're going to learn about Marcus Flowers is that it wasn't built for backing down. Not when the mission is important. And it is.
Democracy itself is at stake. And that's not a purpose. It truly is at stake. Thank you so much, Marcus Flowers.
I hope you'll come back later on. Anytime. I appreciate you having me on. Justin, it's a great talk with you guys.
Thank you. What's crazier than QAnon? More outlandish than Pizzagate? 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 podcast from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange aquelites, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday, hosts Swin Subisang and Will Sommer, checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to thedailybeast.com slash podcast, 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 John Fast. What's going on?
Lots of people being assholes. That's a fuckery. Today was the day that 84-year-old Colin Powell died. He was, in a previous incarnation, a Republican, but since the Republican Party has no place for people who are at all normal, he voted for Obama, he voted for Biden, he's not really Republican anymore, but he is being used by the Republican Party to make a case against vaccines.
And the Fox straight anchor, and by straight anger I mean straight news anchor, though really he's not, John Roberts tweeted out, gotta make you think about breakthrough, it's something to the effect of, he actually deleted the tweet, but the tweet says something to the effect of breakthrough infections, I wonder how many breakthrough infections there are. This inspired some of the worst bad actors to go forth and speculate about breakthrough infections, but here is the truth, and Dr. Peter Hotess just said this on CNN, which is multiple myeloma is a cancer that works on your immune system, so it makes you quite impaired. Immunosuppressed people don't do as well with the vaccines, which is why there has been this recommendation that if you have an immunosuppressed condition, you get a third shot.
And this is not, you know, an 84-year-old with multiple myeloma dying of COVID is not the same as a healthy person dying of COVID who's younger. And we know this from reading numerous pieces about the virus, is that really your age is a determinative factor, even if you're vaccinated, that the age makes you more likely to die. And then this person has the immunosuppressive cancer. So even more clearly, this was not about rates of infections, but was really about how dangerous this virus is for people with immunosuppressed conditions.
And so Republicans are off to the races using this as proof that vaccines don't work. And for that, I say, oh, come on, you haven't killed enough people. I mean, when do they get done with this? When do they decide that they've killed enough of their supporters?
And so for that, I say, fuck you guys. Jesse, who is your fuck that guy? Mine is one Kendall, I'm sorry, Don Trump Jr. Jesus Christ, especially coming back really hits you hard.
Yeah, really? So good old dumb of the Dumb and Dumber brothers. He is now yet again appealing to the QAnon portion of the Republican base. And he Instagrammed a message that said they should start reporting the number of kids that go missing every day the way they report COVID numbers.
Who wants to tell them? If we don't report missing children, we just don't do it. Because why would we? It's not like they're children and people miss them.
But, you know, this is like the funniest thing, because, like, QAnon and the loony right find every way they can to find the dumbest things to latch onto, because we have to remember the statistics about kids going missing, that fewer than 300 kids under the age of 21 were abducted by strangers between 2010 and 2017. And it's a non-existent problem. Nearly every abduction is someone in the family taking a child from another member of a family. This is a non-existent problem.
So maybe we should report this every day to show how dumb you are, junior, and QAnon is. Yeah, I mean, I think that we know that this is some way of trying to get these QAnon people to believe that Trump is solving, you know, a non-existent problem. But Trump is very good at solving non-existent problems. Some might say that's the only thing he's good at.
And these people all love to virtue signal a non-existent problem and try to pretend they're virtuous by saying, oh, I'm protecting children. It's like, mm-hmm, now you argue against masks and vaccines all day and get people killed. You're not virtuous. Yes, a good fuck that guy, I think.
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, show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again in the next episode. Want more great listens?
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