Hi, I'm Molly John Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundit and a writer at the Atlantic Envault. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objective. And I've produced a Jessica and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.
We're here to have fun, smart conversations with the wisest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What an interesting show we have today. Margaret Sullivan, who's a media columnist at the Washington Post and author of Ghost News, is going to talk to us about what's going on in media today with her coverage.
Then we're going to talk to Adam Gentelson, who's of course the author of Till Switch, a former Harry Reid staffer and executive director of Battleboard. And he's going to talk to us about what's going on in Congress presently. But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy.
Molly John Fast. Another weekend of Donald Trump confessing. Donald Trump confessing crimes. It's every weekend now.
Donald Trump gets up there at a rally and confesses to a crime. It's like TNT, the network shows the Star Wars movies like almost every weekend. And this is like the same thing. It's like, you know, every weekend you can be sure you could probably watch The Force Awakens or a new hope on TNT.
And Trump is giving a speech where he's trying to subvert democracy. It's a great country. Yeah. Every time I watch one, I think, and you know, I'm not saying I watch the speeches because I don't get right side broadcasting.
But I do, I don't even know where that exists. I guess it exists online. But I do. It's not cable.
Now I want to move to another country. But every time he'll say something like this, I think, well, this now they'll get him this time. I've been thinking this for, you know, what, six plus years, five and a half years? Yeah.
No, I stopped thinking that a long time ago. And this way I'll be pleasantly surprised if they ever do get him. One of the phrases we use now is they're saying the quiet part out loud. The thing with Trump is there are no quiet parts.
And that's actually a good thing because as you said, he gets up there and says exactly what he was trying to do. In this case, he's talking about how Pence should have overturned the election and given it to him. It's obviously scary that a guy who was president and maybe president again is saying shit like this, but also good. Say it.
No dog whistles. Just say it so we know. And then we can go from there. It's sort of preferable to the other Republicans who try to couch it in careful language and lawyer speak.
And then it's always funny because they always get stabbed in the back of Trump who just says, no, I was trying to overturn the election. One of my favorite Republican defenses is when they say attempted crimes aren't really crimes. Like they'll say, well, Trump attempted an office insurrection, but they didn't actually do it. It's like, you know, there's jails filled with people who attempted murder.
Right. I mean, like, it's a phrase we hear every day. I mean, but they don't. They absolutely don't.
It's like for Trump, there's like different rules. Yeah, absolutely. And really, there's a decent chance that we were saved as a country by how dumb a lot of these people are that I don't mean that as a joke like that. I mean, it's for real.
If a handful of these people were smarter, who the hell knows what this country would look like right now? We've been saved by the fact that Trump and his acolytes are fucking morons. The problem is ultimately Republicans seem to and the non Trumpy Republicans continue to hold themselves hostage and are handcuffed to Trump. One of the great examples of someone holding themselves hostage and being handcuffed to Trump is Senator dismayed Susan Collins.
Perhaps you've heard of her from the great state of Maine. I have heard of her. She famously has concerns. She has concerns.
And yet on the Sunday shows, she can't say whether she won't support Trump in 2024, despite the fact that she voted for him to be impeached and convicted. Like didn't she? Yeah, yes, yes, both. Yeah, you sort of have to marvel at how a brain can work that way.
I mean, real profiles encourage there. Absolutely, she's a coward. That's clear. But to vote to impeach a guy and then say, well, I can't say that I won't support him if he runs again, the contortions you have to go, like you should be in a circus or a carnival.
Yeah. And she just got reelected. Well, sometimes they'll say, well, you know, that it is afraid of a primary challenger or right like with Texas, Governor Abbott is worried that he's going to be replaced by someone even Trumpier. I mean, again, disgusting, but you can understand the motivation in this.
There's just no motivation. Right. It's just who she is. She can't bring herself to come out and say it.
And again, you just you sort of have to marvel at it, like not in a good way, but like you're literally watching a free show. You're watching the modern Republican party say that even though they know everything that Trump does is wrong and everything he stands for is wrong. And even though they know that the party is starting to turn on Trump, even though they know all these things, they still are addicted to him and can't quit him. To take it somewhere else with what they can't quit with, there's just new reporting from the Daily Beast, us one, Super Sang, who I know Andy, you have a really tight relationship.
But he's reporting that Trump has now invested in the midterms because he sees as an opportunity to show that really the deep state was who was responsible for January 6th. What are you guys seeing there? He's basically going around saying that FBI agents supposedly caused all the stuff on January 6th. Ray Epps.
Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly.
As usual, this is not a Trump theory. This theory has been, you know, percolating on the right for a while now. It's sort of side by side with the people who did this were patriots, but at the same time, no, they didn't really do it. It was the FBI.
Like, again, do after marvel at how these brains work. The brains using the term loosely, yes, continue. Yeah. Now, Trump is saying he wants an investigation into how the FBI managed to do this.
Yeah. And again, he is also going around at the same time saying that these people were heroes. Right. It's amazing that you can say they were heroes, but also they didn't do it.
And it was an FBI plot because those two things are the opposite of you. They were heroes, but also agents of the deep state somehow. And he's going to part of them. And he's going to part of them.
Right. So just you have to throw logic out the window when you analyze this stuff, which makes it very difficult for those of us who, and you know, I don't mean this, I'm not like bragging or anything, but I just I like to use logic and reason. I like to activate those parts of my brain when I read something. But I think most people do, but then there's these people and you can't, but you just read this and you're like, huh?
I don't know. Like, I can't read Urdu, but I feel like if I, you gave me a page written in Urdu, I would understand it better than I would the stuff that comes out of the mouths of a lot of Republicans these days. Well, I also think ultimately the goal is just to try to distract people. And remember, and I think this is an important thought, which is like really kind of even scarier, which is the media complex is so siloed that people on the right can have a lie.
They can tell it enough so that there are people believe it. I mean, a great example was remember the visual of the helicopter dangling the person from it and Don Jr. and his group of far right people got very excited and said like the Taliban is now torturing people with the helicopters we left for them. Now it turns out right that this was later fact checked and the guy was hanging a sign.
Okay. I mean, not the best way to hang a sign, but it was not torture by the Taliban. And look, I'm sure the Taliban has done a lot of that shit. Nobody here is taking the side of the Taliban, but that one image was not what it was represented to be, but it doesn't matter.
Don Jr. still has it as his header. You know, you'll ask people in the street at a Trump rally and you say like, did the Taliban hang people from a helicopter and they'll say, yes, there's no debunking it. Exactly.
Because as you said, they don't read the debunkings and you know, and we say, look, I'm Molly, I'm sure you see it probably more than I do, but I see it on Twitter all the time. I'll tweet something and I'll get replies from people and I read the replies and I'm like, how can you believe that? And then I'll remember that. Oh, yeah, this is something that Tucker Carlson or Gateway pundit or someone like that put forth like months ago and within five minutes was shot down.
It's like, no, that's not true, but they don't see that part to your point. All they see is the original, you know, what was said or the post that they read and that's what's permanently in their brain. And Facebook does a really bad job of continuing that on. No, absolutely.
Absolutely. You know, I think it's interesting. I just want to get this in here for one second. Facebook had these Facebook leaks.
We saw that they were not doing anything to temper the algorithm that was in fact radicalizing people and then they pivoted to meta and we never heard about it again. Right. Because everyone's so excited about living in a cartoon world. Yes.
Steve Ioki is launching his own metaverse. So we got to ignore the fact that teenagers are killing themselves and that our democracy is going to help. And more importantly, that people are being introduced to QAnon. They like a post about architecture in the South and they get introduced to QAnon.
As one does. I will say, the one good thing about the metaverse is, you know, at least Tucker Carlson can go in there and he can probably find an M&M. He still wants to fuck. I guess he looked like there's technically no real laws of the metaverse yet.
You know, he could sit there, put off the ever-dabored victor or a bottle at once and not, if you'll repercussions have a nice little threesome. Jesus Christ. Things really took a turn there. I'm sorry.
He rated it. Let me take us a turn to another hellish tech giant as somebody who's covered spotify since before they launched America. I've noticed this pattern that would spotify is of all the tech giants. the kings of gaslighting and they're added again by trying to say that they're going to put content warnings on Joe Rogan's podcast.
What do you guys see there? They lost like four billion in market value last week. So that's pretty much what I'm seeing there. But the thing is they're making this big deal that they posted their content guidelines, but those content guidelines have supposedly been around for a long time.
They just haven't been applying them to Rogan. So it's not like they suddenly said, oh, well, we're coming up with new content. I like, no, you've had those guidelines since before, I believe, since before they signed Rogan and they just decided not to apply them ever. So it's a little rich for them to now say, oh, we're going to put content warnings on them.
Also, I don't know what content warnings to me are just dumb. They work so well on Facebook though. But I mean, the thing that I think is worth noting is that Rogan is clearly worried. You know, he sort of apologizes much as those right when guys can.
And you did say, like, I understand and we need to put on other perspectives. Look, I mean, you did not see the barstool sports guy being like, I'm sorry, right? Like he understood that like millions and millions of dollars are at state care for him and that he needs to not. But I think it's important if we're going to talk about him to talk about how this is about spreading health disinformation during a pandemic.
This is not about he can't say whatever he wants to say. This is not censorship, which is actually happening in this country. This is a real concerted effort to get people to not die of a very preventable virus. Oh, 100% agree with you.
The thing I will say about Rogan is, and I think this separates him from like Dave Portnoy, the barstool guy that you brought up. I think Rogan is an honest guy. I don't think he's playing a role. I think the stuff he says he truly believes while 100% agree that he is spreading health disinformation and that that's a serious problem to his credit.
I will say that I don't think like Rogan is not a grifter. So many of these guys are grifters and Rogan, I think, is not what you get on his show is sort of him sort of unvarnished and unfiltered, for better or worse. And the problem is that a lot of times it's for worse. And that's where you run into problems, particularly, as you said, with something like, you know, being in a pandemic and spreading health misinformation and stuff that is just, it's outright lies.
Where the Rogan is lying when he says it or not, the stuff he's spreading are untruths. That's a serious, serious issue. Right. And I mean, he is a wrestler and he was on television telling people to eat bugs.
I mean, the man is not an expert on science. I think you're right. Like, he thinks people are taking him with the wind salt. We clearly see that millions and millions of people listen to him so they are not.
And that it's important that this, you know, and I think this is an opportunity for him to have Peter Hotez on and to have a lot of these really smart doctors who are very good. And talking to people on the right. I agree with both of you largely on that. But I think that there's like one thing which is you're right that he acts in his own good faith.
But the biggest problem with him is that he's not large enough minded to take on all the stuff. Like he thinks balance is having Jimmy Doryon who calls himself a leftist. He has an anti-vaxxer. Right.
He like, he thinks he's being balanced when he has like the cooks of like all these sides on. And the other thing I think that a lot of people miss is that like, when you watch the way everyone's uniting around him, is they're all saying that the mainstream media was so bad because they got the Iraq war wrong, which, yes, a lot of the media failed on. But the thing is, is Joe Rogan and his ilk put a worship of a lack of fact checking in. And even though we in the media do a ton of that and try to be as rigorous as possible oftentimes, they're sitting there and they're demeaning it and think it's absolutely ridiculous that they should be held to any of the editorial oversights that we are.
Yeah, they're lazy and they also have to produce nine hours of content a week and he's not a journalist. Well, he did say he does no preparation for that. So I don't write too much respect for that. He's also not a journalist.
The expectation here that he would have journalistic standards. I don't know where they would come from. I think it's more of a question of like these doctors were very brave to write this letter. These people like Rogan have huge, very passionate followings of people who are more than happy to send you whatever horribleness.
And so good for them for standing up for public health. But a question is why did it fall to the doctors? That's absolutely true. It's funny, just so you brought up the fact that he says he does no preparation for his shows.
And the thing is that's become like, and I'm not saying he meant it in this way, but that's sort of a plus in so many people's minds these days. Should he be doing prep for his shows? You would think so. Like, I can't imagine sitting there and doing a show and not having done any prep.
Like I just would, that would make me extremely uncomfortable. These days it's like, what's he going to do to prep? What's he going to read the so-called experts? Yeah, yeah.
By not prepping, he sort of becomes a man of the people. He's a voice for us because we don't do any prep either. And so we like hearing this. And that's a much larger problem than Rogan.
But Rogan has this incredibly large and incredibly powerful platform. And it sort of boggles my mind that he doesn't look around and say, you know what? I have millions of people that listen to me. Maybe I should do some prep work before I talk to a guest.
I think a funny thing that illustrates this to us, like, so he has this illusion of a fact checker that looks up, info or says, and says, yeah, OK, we got an article. One article says this clearly must be true. But the funny thing is, is that you see, like, you had Jordan Peterson on last week. And like teenagers on TikTok do more thorough fact checking what Jordan Peterson says after these shows air.
And it's like unbelievable. But watching a kid with braces on that, like, it still be more research than him. It's just a pathetic place that we're at. Joe Rogan should be embarrassed by that.
It boggles my mind that he's not embarrassed by that. But I don't know. Maybe that statement from him was sort of an acknowledgment that he now realizes that he maybe can't operate this way, that there are repercussions and downsides to operating this way. And maybe he'll change.
I don't see him pouring through packets of information before each show. Right. You could have a co-host on that show. You could add someone who knows about science or who could tell him he was full of shit.
I mean, the issue isn't. Right. That's why you brought me on. Right, exactly.
That's why you brought you on. Spotify has created this monster. I mean, they took him when he had huge listeners, but they've corporatized him. And now they have to figure out if they're going to be a corporation, they can't have people like Alex Jones.
That's why Alex Jones is an on Fox News, right? So the question is, the corporations have responsibility. I wish that our government were a little better at this, but they're not. So we have a situation where corporations have to take care of this.
So let's see what happens. What I think is really interesting is that actually, I don't think it's interesting. It's depressing as hell. Ohio is having is in the middle of a pretty disgusting GOP Senate primary contest.
And it's become kind of a race to the bottom. It's sort of a microcosm of the fuckery that is happening in the mainstream GOP. We have JD Vance, Josh Mandel, and there are other people in it. Trump is actually not endorsed either of them.
He's endorsed a third candidate, but JD Vance and Josh Mandel in a race to the bottom. Josh Mandel is in Orthodox Jew, but has recently criticized the government for the separation of church and state. He's very mad about that. JD Vance recently got the coveted Jewish space laser endorsement.
Andy Levy discussed. Well, I mean, it's got to be a little painful for Josh Mandel, who, as you pointed out, is actually Jewish. Yes. And then so the guy who is like, you know, part of the space laser agency is not getting the endorsement of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And that seems a little unfair for getting that there are other candidates in this race. If you just look at it and it's JD Vance and Josh Mandel, it is absolutely impossible to figure out which of these guys is worse. It's true. It's impossible.
They're both just, it's hard to tell who's worse. Yeah. I think both of them are full of shit. I don't think either one of them even like really believes the stuff they're saying.
Mandel is maybe closer to believing the stuff that Vance is, in my mind, anyway. But I don't think either one of them is even the real deal who, honestly, like Marjorie Taylor Greene is the real deal. She believes that she says. Yes, she's completely crazy.
Yeah. I mean, it's this idea is performative moronics versus actual moronics. Exactly. And it's, you know, it's always hard to tell which is worse.
But JD Vance is just, he's sort of bad at it. Like he'll put out these statements and it's like, you can sort of see that underneath it. It's like, yeah, you don't believe this. You don't believe this at all.
It's harder to tell with Mandel, I think. Yeah. Well, Mandel has a crazy, crazy look in his eyes. Like he's run for this seat a million times.
He's going to run again. And if he has to say really crazy shit to get there, he'll do it. Whereas I feel like JD Vance is still like he wrote this fancy book. He went to Ivy League colleges.
He's being completely funded by VCs. So I do think his, his moronics is largely performative. Yeah. I can remember watching him debate.
Shurad Brown, the last time he ran against him. And this is like a guy who like could not get the Excel spreadsheets out of his brain long enough to say a talking point. Like this was not a person engaging in culture wars then in any substantial way. But now he's seeing that this is the only way they are.
Even with all that, he might just do it in a more authentic way than Vance does. Yes, yes. Solid point. How do you go from like you said, this is an Ivy League dude who had a big budget movie made of his best-selling book.
And now he's walking around, you know, with Marjorie Taylor Greene. And it's like, how do you map out a life like that? It's just so bizarre. So yeah, I just, I can't like, okay, Molly, if you had, like, if someone said you have to pick one of these guys to be in the Senate, which one would be?
Oh, I don't know. It's hard. Like it's impossible. It's impossible, isn't it?
And imagine a world where you're bragging about a Marjorie Taylor Greene endorsement. Like that has to be the bottom. I mean, that's like Laura Lomer territory. That's like chaining yourself to the door of the Facebook headquarters.
You know, I mean, I don't know. Andy, I'm psyched that you figured out the opposite of a Sophie's choice, though, for this. You know, it's true. Like, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like the old thing, if you only have one bullet and but the question is answers, you kill yourself.
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That's new abnormal. Daily Beast.com. Margaret Sullivan is the Washington Post media columnist and author of Go Sting the News. Welcome back to the new abnormal Margaret Sullivan.
Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to be with you. You know, since you are my one friend. It also is nice to have you.
Just chat. Exactly. We can just subject our listeners to chatting. But actually, I think that my one friendship has has enabled me to strong on you into coming onto the pot, which I appreciate.
Again, it's totally my pleasure. I'm happy and I'm like knowing that Jesse's there in the background. So, you know, it's all good. You've written a bunch of really interesting pieces.
Your beat is media and you were the public editor for the New York Times. So you have a really good sense of when media is doing its job and when it's not. And what's happened now with these lawsuits is it's even more sort of complicated and interesting. Can you give our listeners just a little bit of a sort of broad overview of what's happening?
Sure. You know, what I wrote about in my column for the Washington Post, you know, in the past couple days was three defamation lawsuits that have been filed against media companies, two of them actually against the New York Times and one of them against Fox News. So they're very, as you might imagine, very, very different. But the, you know, probably so that the two that are sort of in a way, polar opposites, both very interesting, are the lawsuits by two voting technology companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, against Fox News, saying in essence that Fox gave a big megaphone to people who were amplifying Trump's lies about how these voting companies rigged the 2020 election, which they didn't.
So the voting companies are like, you heard our reputation, we're filing a defamation suit. And in fact, they're filing suits also against Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and some of the other companies, I think, either OAN or Newsmax, like I can't quite remember which. But anyway, and it's, you know, it's $4 billion worth of defamation lawsuits saying that you can't do that. We actually have heard our company.
That's one. And then another one is Sarah Palin's case against the New York Times, in which she says that the Times defamed her in a, or libled her in a 2017 editorial that did contain, and I'm saying this, it did contain an error at first, and then the Times corrected it. And what happened? Well, the error was that it made a false connection between Sarah Palin's political rhetoric and the shooting that happened in 2011, in which Congress woman, then Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was injured and six other people were killed.
It basically said that this was an incitement of violence and the editorial, which was written in 2017, came on the heels, quickly on the heels of the mass shooting in Virginia that involved Steve Scalise and badly injured Steve Scalise. So it sort of tied that back. But it made this connection. It said basically that Sarah Palin's campaign rhetoric or political rhetoric had incited this violence in 2011, which really there was no basis for that.
And so as soon as that editorial went online, people, particularly people on the right, started to get very worked up and say that this was slanderous. Yes, it was an editorial. And what the process was that James Bennett, who was then the editorial page editor, took an editorial that he felt was a little too soft and tried to make it more interesting. And in making it more interesting on Deadline, he inserted this error into it.
And now Sarah Palin is saying, you've libled it and defamed me. So, you know, those are the broad outlines. There's also a case by, by Project Veritas against the New York Times, also for defamation. So, and they're all interesting in their own ways.
But the thing that I wrote about that I thought was interesting was that sort of the public's tenor has changed on press rights issues and that there are no longer, in many cases, in this involves judges too, sometimes, that people are no longer sort of thinking like, well, we need to leave the press alone. We need a robust free press. That is not their point of view to a large extent anymore. That doesn't sound good.
Yeah. No, it's not good. I mean, it's not good. I mean, it means that people, yeah, you know, and I'm sure you know this, just from walking around and telling people you're a journalist that doesn't, unless you're in the bluest of the blue parts of the country, it doesn't tend to be received very well.
I mean, I remember, you know, I spend my summers sometimes in a part of New York State. It's the reddest congressional district in New York State. It happens to be where former congressman Chris Collins had his district before he went to prison for insider trading. And I would tell people, you know, sometimes I would do some interviewing of regular people there.
And I would say, you know, I'm a journalist, I work for the Washington Post and people would literally look you in the eye and say, and sometimes they think they thought this was funny, but they would say, oh, so you're the fake news, right? And they kind of meant it. So, I mean, when you get a jury, you may have many people on the jury who are so down on the press that any case that comes before them, that seems like it might, you know, discipline the press in some way, they may be more sympathetic to that than they would have been years ago or decades ago. The Dominion lawsuit, there's a desire for some of us and by some of us, I mean, me to root for Dominion, but because, you know, they really were a slandered.
I mean, now there's a whole group of people who believe that Dominion is involved in kind of terrible stuff. But ultimately, the case is a little more complicated, right? It is. I mean, you know, the way that we have strong press freedom laws and if a public figure or, you know, a public entity that's well known is involved, what has to be proven is not just, oh, they said something false, but they said something false, knowing it was false.
And that is called actual malice. And did Fox News know that what they were publicizing and giving people a chance to giving their platform to was false? Probably. I think they knew it was false.
Did James Bennett know, you know, when he was on deadline and making these changes to this editorial that he was inserting a mistake? I don't think so. I don't think so. So I think they're very different.
But I understand what you're saying about wanting Fox News to be held to account because they do a lot of damage and they do spread a lot of misinformation. And it does seem like it would be a positive thing to have them at the very least wondering whether it's a good idea to do that all the time, because someone might sue them for billions of dollars and it might give them pause. And I think giving Fox News pause would be a very good thing. It would be a good thing for everyone.
And it might cut down on the disinformation. But I just want to circle back again to the question. I mean, I do think what happens with a lot of times with the right wing media is they equate a mistake with malice. Yes.
You mean, a mistake on the part of the New York Times or something? Right. A mistake and an editorial or a mistake. And you know, there'll be something where, you know, Fox News will say, I mean, a great example of Seth Wretch, right?
Yes. Seth Wretch was murdered. Seth Wretch was this. Seth Wretch was obviously Seth Wretch was not any of these things, right?
Well, he was murdered, but he wasn't murdered by Hillary Clinton. Exactly. Right. And the family of Seth Wretch begged Fox to stop.
And eventually they did to them. And but that's like, you know, there's clearly a malicious attempt there, but making a mistake is not the same thing. That's right. And I mean, you know, as human being, you know, as journalists are human beings and therefore they will always make mistakes.
I mean, it's it just goes with the business. You know, you're on deadline, you're you're trying to get it right, but you don't always get it right. And that's really why we have these strong protections for the press because it sort of understands that there will be errors and that if those errors are sort of in good faith, then they should not be harshly punished. But if they're in bad faith, if you say, Nope, we're going to go ahead and say this, even though we know it's wrong and we don't care, then that's not only known as actual malice, it's known as reckless disregard for the truth.
And those are things that can get you in big trouble, even if the person is a public figure like Donald Trump or Rudy Giuliani or whoever it may be. Or super spreader Sarah Palin. Yes, Sarah, Sarah Palin has not been well behaved in New York City since she tested positive for COVID, you know, a few days ago or last week, whenever it was, she tested positive, turned out that she wasn't vaccinated, of course, because she said she would be vaccinated over her dead body as she put it over my dead body as she put it. And then was in a restaurant on the Upper East Side and just kind of went didn't show her vaccine card because she didn't have it.
And then unbelievably, after she got the positive test, she went back to the same restaurant apparently to apologize, but anyway, ended up having to eat there, but they said they seated her outside, which I'm not sure that that that really helps matters all that much. But no, I don't think that she has been taking the her shedding the virus at all seriously. And it's actually very irresponsible. It does seem like the years of being targeted by Trump have really for certainly for certain groups have really eroded press trust.
Is there anything you think, and I know you've written a book about this, you know, and you're writing another one, but just for our listeners, like, what do you think journalists can do to restore a little bit of that? I think among people who are open, if they haven't been completely turned off by rhetoric, like Trump's that the journalists are the enemy of the people or something, I think that, you know, we need to do some things like be more transparent in how we gather the news, correct our mistakes quickly, do good work, try to represent pro-democracy issues in a very clear way, tell our story a little bit better about what we're about. And also, you know, in news stories, try to keep the bias out of it and try to present things in a straightforward way, which is what people will say over and over and over again that they actually want. And sometimes I think you say that, but you don't really want that.
But that is actually what people, I think, do want. But you have a really good point and then I'm going to let you go. That mainstream reporters should still have a pro-democracy bias. Can you just explain for two seconds what that is?
And then I promise I'll let you go. In most ways, the tendency is to say, well, reporters should not be involved in, you know, they shouldn't be in a march. They shouldn't be carrying a picket sign around. But I think one thing where we can take a stand and can really be clear about what we believe is what we're here for.
You know, we're here to tell the truth. We're here to represent democratic issues, for example, the right to vote without being hassled and without having people with guns come to the voting place and intimidating people. Those are not stances that have anything to do with party politics. And so I think when we represent that and keep that really high on our agendas, then I think we're doing our job.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Margaret, thank you so much for coming on and I promise only to bully you into this sometimes. You are welcome. No problem.
I was happy to do it. Adam Chantlson is the Executive Director of Battleborn, a former Harry Reid staffer and the author of Kill Switch. Welcome back to the new webnormal, Adam. Thanks, Molly.
It's great to be here. I feel like so much has happened since the last time we had you on. The worst of which was at Harry Reid, your mentor and former boss did die. And I'm so sorry.
Thank you. Let's talk about, can Congress do this many things at once? Well, theoretically, yes, we practice almost certainly no. I mean, especially the gridlocked Congress that we have today, this is definitely some overload that we're looking at here.
So there's going to be triage big time. And, you know, hopefully we get what we need, even though we may not be able to get what we want out of this year. So let's start by talking about the Supreme Court, because that is really pretty interesting. Did you think Breyer was going to retire?
And I mean, were you on the Breyer's going to retire? Or were you on the Breyer's going to stay in until the last minute? I, you know, it's funny. I had held out hope that he was going to retire.
And then just a few days before he made his announcement, I had a conversation with someone in the Senate that made me think that I was wrong, that he was not going to retire and that it was all hopeless. And so I was actually in a state of despair on that front when the news of his announcement broke. So I was pleasantly surprised. You know, it really seemed like he wanted to spend last year preening and, you know, doing his thing.
But the logic behind not retiring just seemed so flawed to end by half, you know, with it with it. Half a brain. And I think especially after seeing what happened with Ginsburg and being replaced by Bearer, I feel like he was hard to imagine. He didn't come to that conclusion.
I spent a few days really mired in the upset that he was not going to, but then I was happy to see that I was wrong. So there's so much stuff happening. The thing that I wanted to know is is BBB. I think BBB as no, it's, I think, you know, this is how we think we think in tweets.
Oh, I mean, honestly, I think that's what it is. I think that unfortunately, I think as BBB as we know it is is DOA in the sense that there will not be some massive package that includes a wide range of priorities that Democrats have dreamed about for a long time. But I would file this under, you know, can you get what you need? Even if you can't get what you want, I think, you know, breaking it up into smaller pieces and passing some of the essential elements of it, such as climate change that the mansion still seems open to and some of the other pieces that still seems possible, you know.
And so is Biden going to have an FDR size first two years that that seems highly unlikely, but is he going to have a very successful first two years that that still seems very much in the offing? They did. I mean, they passed a lot of legislation. It's just that nobody knows because they didn't do a sort of victory tour.
That's right. And some of that is forced on them by circumstance because in a gridlock Congress with the filibuster still in place, you know, you either have to get 60 votes for things, which is very, very difficult to do. I found McConnell's decision to give them 60 on infrastructure was pretty brilliant because it sort of rehabilitated him and Senate Republicans. What is basically low hanging fruit when it comes to policy, not to downplay the importance of it, but I mean, right?
No, no. I mean, who doesn't want to fix the crisis? Yeah, exactly. You know, but that allowed them to have some credibility to then deny by partisanship on other topics.
And so the reason you can't do sort of individual bills with a lot of hoopla and publicity around them is that, you know, you then have to sort of shoehorn everything into reconciliation packages because you only get so many bites at that apple. So you're talking about basically two legislative vehicles that can move through the reconciliation process and thereby go around the filibuster. So you kind of have to put everything into these buckets and switch them all together. Why?
The reconciliation process was not designed to be used this way. So we're using it. And, you know, what it was designed for was for an annual budgetary process. And so the thinking was that and their rules put on it to make sure that people didn't try to use it for other means.
And so, you know, you only need to do a budget once a year. So, you know, the rules that sort of surrounded say you can do it once what they're essentially doing now is splitting that one vehicle into separate pieces and moving them separately. But that's why they're only sort of two legislative vehicles available for this calendar year that will be able to bypass the filibuster. So, you know, you kind of got to throw everything into those buckets and pass whatever you can.
And that takes away from your ability to do very focused messaging on, you know, bills on specific topics. And it's unfortunate, but, you know, hopefully it doesn't able to actually get things passed because you can get around the filibuster in this way. Do you think that Democrats aren't as like, if you think of Harry Reid, Harry Reid was a little bit like a Democratic Mitch McConnell? Yes.
I mean, in no way other than effective. Yes. Why don't we have that? Well, Senator Reid, I wrote a little bit about this in the piece I did remembering him when he passed.
And, you know, his political superpower was his ability to not care what anybody thought about him, in particular, not caring what the sort of, you know, chattering class and punditariat thought about him. And he woke up every single day, completely undistracted by what was going on in the news media, was completely uninterested in his own clips. I mean, most politicians want to read everything that was written about them in the last 24 hours first thing when they wake up. He did not care.
You know, he would just think every day about how he could gain an inch of ground, a few inches of ground, a mile of ground and work every lever at his disposal to gain whatever he could in that in that day. And, you know, slowly that builds up over time. And he was deeply competitive and he wasn't afraid to take punches if he thought that at the end of the day he could land more punches on the other guy. You know, as a former boxer, he had this intuitive knowledge that both sides would get blooded up.
The only question was who would land the punches harder and who would win in the end. So I think that that immunity to sort of what conventional wisdom thought of him freed him up to pursue a range of options, this is something that he was criticized for too. That other people might have considered too difficult, but also to think creatively about what levers are available. And I do think that is something that we will all miss about him.
Theoretically, you could have a Democratic Mitch McConnell. Yes. What would Schumer need to do in order to be able to play in this sort of same sandbox? Well, I want to be very fair to Schumer here.
And I think it's fair also to point out that, you know, Senator Reid, you learn on the job. You know, it's his first few years he had his own ups and downs. He helped to be back which is pushed to private social security, but he also took a lot of criticism for not opposing the Iraq war, more strongly or not being hard on the border. And so I think that it's really about knowing how to play hardball when that's necessary, even if it means you're going to come in for some criticism.
I mean, I think we're seeing that now with a lot of moderates placing anonymous quotes criticizing Schumer for his leadership when, in fact, moderates are getting everything they want in terms of the agenda that is pursued. So I think it's tough to learn to have that tough skin, that thick skin, but I think that is part of the job. We hear a lot of criticism of progressives and that the progressive agenda could somehow endanger Democrats' success. But then we don't hear a lot of criticism about progressives who are, you know, like in the Republican party, they'll do anything to keep their base happy, right?
And in the Democratic party, there are all these Democrats who are, you know, desperate for some kind of student loan relief. And that's like not even on the agenda anymore. I'm just curious, how do you think that fallacy got going and why do you think it's kept going? There is a reflex, the punch left, anytime something goes wrong with Democrats.
And it's been that way for 40 years really since, you know, since the party sort of began to splinter a little bit in the post-civil rights era, which we're seeing now is sort of how evidence-free that assertion can be, you know, in order to get absorbed. There's very little evidence that the progressives are the cause of Biden's decline in the polls. And in fact, there's a lot of evidence that it's from many other factors, including the fact that I think the Democratic base feels a little disappointed right now. I mean, Pew was out with the poll recently that showed that most of Biden's decline is coming from among Democrats, and in particular from among young people, as you say, on student debt and people of color.
So, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think that perhaps that is due to the failure to deliver on things like student loan debt cancellation or voting rights. And so I think that, you know, moderates have gotten their way. And if you look at what has been passed in the agenda Biden has pursued, it has been, you know, the American Rescue Plan in March of last year, and then the bipartisan infrastructure deal were the two big ticket items. And that is, you know, if moderates have scripted the year to go a certain way, that is what they wanted, and that is what they got.
So if Biden's numbers are declining and we've pursued a moderate agenda, I think the logical conclusion is that perhaps that hasn't been the right way to go. But there is this deeply ingrained reflex to blame on progressives that I think is just going to take time and experience to overcome. It is amazing to me that we're still doing that. And if the shoe were on the other foot, imagine a Republican Party, I mean, their base doesn't even want popular things.
Their base wants crazy, crazy stuff that doesn't even make any sense that is, you know, morally, you know, they want a wall with Mexico. I mean, they want stuff that's not even real stuff, and the Republicans are desperate to pay under them. I mean, don't you think it's a little bit ironic? It is.
I mean, you know, look, Democrats are big tent coalition, you know, Republicans, they're coalitions made up of lots of different kinds of white people, but at the end of the day, it is, it is almost an entirely white party. And so I think that that is a fundamental strategic difference between the two parties. And Democrats just have a more diverse coalition, and that has always been a source of tension within the party. And it goes back to the 1980s in the rise of the Democratic leadership council, when, you know, their whole path to power and what they urged candidates to do was explicitly to punch back at civil rights groups and at the time unions in particular.
So, you know, this tension between sort of predominantly white moderates and then the other parts of the Democratic coalition is something that has been longstanding, is always a challenge to figure out. So, you know, this isn't this isn't not a problem. It is a legitimate challenge for the party. But I think that punching left and blaming activists is just a very unsophisticated and ultimately ineffective approach to it.
Whereas Republicans, they can just they can rile up their base and establishment goes along with it. And, you know, that's works out reasonably well for them. Like, really, if you were a president Biden right now and you wanted to deliver for your base, what would you do? What would what would be like a few things you would do to deliver for your base?
I would cancel student loan debt. I think that that that's that is something you can do. I think that it would pay off big, electorally, and I think it would would help you to find Democrats. I would look for every opportunity available to bring the party back together.
I think the Supreme Court nomination fight presents a great opportunity to do that. All of the candidates I've seen floated on the shortlist seem to be candidates who would help to bring the party together. And then I would frankly look for opportunities to highlight Republican obstructionism. You know, back in 2011, after the midterm, the very bad 2010 midterms, one of the ways that President Obama sort of got back on his feet was just by highlighting Republican obstruction.
He released this thing called the American Jobs Act. We brought it up in the Senate. It didn't pass, but just by virtue of Republicans obstructing it and the White House working in close coordination with congressional Democrats to highlight that Republican obstruction. You know, we sort of got our mojo back and it got us in a good place heading into 2012, which obviously was a successful year for Democrats.
So, you know, there are things you can do to bring the party together, which is both delivering on the results you can do, even if you only Congress, and then looking for ways to direct attention and Republicans obstructionism their extremism to remind us all who the big, I mean, the challenges is here moving forward. I was watching reliable sources yesterday and they were talking about how Biden has not gone on left or leaning podcast venues and neither have people from the White House and how his fight with Steve Ducey actually gets him in front of a media ecosystem that he would otherwise not be in front of. What do you think about that assessment? I think that's absolutely right.
I think I, well, on both fronts, I think that is why Steve Ducey did not seem scripted or planned at all. It seemed completely other cuff, but I thought it was brilliant. It's very human too. And I also agree that making a more conscious effort to work through progressive media is very important.
This is the era we live in. People get their news from a lot of different sources, you know, finding scoops to hand out to people and to bring them into round tables and discussions like that. It's something we had to lie with Senator Reid's office actually was a conscious effort. You have to have the right people in the room who know who have those relationships and who can help you shape a smart strategy around it.
But it's very, there's no cost to it at all. And it really does help bring people into feeling like they're part of the team. I mean, this is a big 10 coalition and you have to make a conscious effort to bring everybody in, especially in the midterm, where traditionally our coalition doesn't turn out in his strong numbers. So that would be a very wide strategy for them to start pursuing even now, better late than never.
Thank you so much, Adam. I hope you'll come back. Absolutely, Molly, anytime. What's crazier than QAnon?
We're 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, the new podcasts from the Daily Beast tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swinsuba Sang and Will Summer, checking it on the movement of the radical right into the Daily Beast dot com slash podcasts for 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. Andy Levy, Molly John Fast, who has raised your ire today? So many people, Molly, but my fuck that guy for today is a guy a lot of our listeners probably haven't heard of, which is not a knock on him. But he's got named Josh Hammer.
He's the, I believe he's the opinion editor of Newsweek magazine. And he tweeted out on Sunday night, or Sunday afternoon, he tweeted something that said, American culture is rotting from within, right liberal pleas for competition and marketplace of ideas now invariably fall on deaf ears. What is needed is firm, unapologetic state action to vanquish wokeness in the name of the common good, period. I love a vanquish.
You got a good vanquish. If you had a guess what he was all in a tizzy about, you know, you'd probably think it was a Supreme Court nomination or something like that. But no, the story that he was talking about here was a story about the fact that we're about to get a bunch of new emoji as we do, you know, a couple times a year. And that among these emoji are a pregnant man.
It was a little, you know, a little cartoon picture of a man with a, with a belly is what in Josh's mind means we need a state action to vanquish this. And I just like, I'm looking at this. I'm like, you know, these are the same people that if you say something like, well, you know, Joe Rogan is spreading dangerous information, they'll say, oh, you don't like Joe Rogan, don't listen to him. Right.
And then they'll turn around and like, you know, there's a little, there's a little, you know, we all know what emoji on there, little cartoon, just a little cartoon man with a belly, you know, holding his pregnant belly. And now suddenly we need full on state action to vanquish this. So Josh Hammer, and you know, whatever the current incarnation of Newsweek is with its creepy cult leader, founder or owner, whatever, that's why fuck that guy for this day. We're getting very creative here.
I'm impressed. My fuck that guy is the right wing media. And I'm going to put an example here of a phenomenon that they are enabling. And actually, they really have created it.
So we had a state trooper. His name was Robert Lamay, Washington state trooper, 22 years he had been on the force, Jay Inslee, Inslee, the governor there, who is a pretty serious guy, was one of the first to an act of vaccine mandate. He got furious. He went viral.
When he signed off in his cruiser, he told the Democratic governor to quote, kiss my ass. That was in October, of course, I think you will be completely unsurprised to find out October 19th, Laura Ingram is thrilled to highlight him as a in his civil disobedience. He died on Friday night of COVID. He was 51 years old.
He had four children. If you're 51 years old and you've had three shots, the chances of you die and go down by an enormous number, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 times less likely to die of COVID. If you've been vaccinated, the right wing media made him a celebrity for his choice not to get vaccinated. And now we're not going to see Laura Ingram with it.
I mean, imagine a world where Laura Ingram goes, you know, we did this. And now he's dead. No, the people watch Fox News will never know that he died. And he could have probably lived and his four kids could have had a dad and he could have continued on.
And it's just the way that the right wing media is painting this is just absolutely deplorable. And for that, Laura Ingram and all of you Fox opinion hosts who know better and have a 90% facts rate, you know, the business and vaccine passports and testing and tracing. And you guys, you know what you're doing, you know better on your hands. Yeah, absolutely.
It's remarkable that they just don't care. It's terrible. I mean, it really is terrible. Like you said, this guy, 51 year old guy did not have to die.
His kids did not have to grow up without a dad. It's really sad. I'm not no will wrap this episode of the new abnormal from the Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.
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