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Check it out at plored.ai. That's PLUD.AI. Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and welcome to the Daily Beast, the new abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at the Daily Beast.
We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kennan, I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.
Today we have some amazing conversations. First, we have Ann Nelson, the author of Shadow Network, Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. He's going to talk to us about the network of Shadowy Right Wing groups offering legislation in our country. Then we'll have Chef Andrew Zimmernong, who's the host of Bizarre Foods as well as MSNBC's What's Seating America.
And he's going to talk to us about the state of food politics. First, we have Returning Fave, the Nation Magazine's Justice Correspondent, Ellie Masal. Hi Ellie, welcome back, back, back to the new abnormal. Hi Molly, thanks for having me.
I'm just here luxuriating in my decision to be a last Catholic that feels like really wise forces foresight on my part. I know this will be a big surprise to a lot of our listeners, but I'm actually not a Christian. And so it all seems the same to me. Someone wants to try to explain to me the difference between Catholicism.
I mean, I know, you know, the general differences, but... Catholic is big. Right. It seems to me that American religion and even religion around the world is not having a very good time of it.
And then perhaps they shouldn't be alienating the one person who's at all interested in that. The thing that gets me about this dust up, right, is that the Vatican, and when you talk about the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, like the Vatican kind of comes into play. Yeah, exactly. And so the Vatican is telling American Catholic bitches, bishops, y'all, slow your role.
This is not what we do. And the American Catholic's are like, oh, that's girl, we hate that fucking guy. We have the first Catholic president in 50 years. We hate him though, we hate him.
Well, it's interesting because it is, you know, the Pope and Biden are more aligned than the American Catholics. Again, you're supposed to listen to the Pope with your Catholic. That's like literally... Right, he's the big boss, right?
He's the big boss at the end of the game. Just for your listeners to be clear. Like Joe Biden has not had an abortion. Of that, I am very confident.
Yeah. I'm also like, I have a high level of confidence that Joe Biden has never paid for an abortion. Yeah, I have a high level of confidence about that too. Or performed an abortion himself.
Now, that should be enough to be a good Catholic, right? Like that is you living your faith in a way that makes sense to you. All Joe Biden is saying that he is not going to impose his religious beliefs upon other people that's the whole thing. Why would you deny a sacrament to a person who is living their life as you want them to, but simply not willing to go out and force others to do that?
Like what's the upside of that? That's why I say to me it comes down to some kind of rift because there's no theological reason for them to be doing this. Right. Well, it definitely is.
And I think that the idea here is that he's not allowed to be a Catholic. I mean, it's so preposterous. But then I'm curious to know, like, if you look at the Supreme Court, the really religious people on the Supreme Court are Catholic. Oh, yeah.
The Supreme Court's a low key Catholicocracy. When you look at it, right? Or two. There's only one Protestant on the court.
I believe, of course, that he was raised Catholic if I have his religion, right? But yeah, most of the conservatives are Catholic and kind of very hardcore versions of that. And there is a thought in my head that I wonder if the bishops are doing this to also pressure the Catholic justices ahead of next year where, you know, spoiler alert, they're going to take away abortion in some form next year. Oh, yeah, that's coming, man.
In October. That is just what's going to happen. I'm going to talk to you about this time next year. When you're having on this time next year, we will be talking about which way the Supreme Court chose to functionally end abortion rights in which states.
Like that's going to be the conversation a year from now. So that's coming. And I do wonder if the Catholic bishops are, organization are kind of seeing that play out and just wanting to put as much pressure on the Catholic justices as possible on this issue. That actually makes sense because this letter really came, Apropos of nothing.
And I'm always a little suspicious of things that come, Apropos of nothing. Do you think, I'm curious to know, since you really know a lot about the Supreme Court, a lot of people think they're going to make it a state by state. Like, red states can take away abortion, you know, choice. Do you think that's how it's going to go?
Or do you think they'll like really overturn Roe and be like, because they can do whatever they want? Making it a state by state calculation is overturning Roe. Like, I don't think that they will take the political heat of writing down. And thus, we overturn Roe v.
Wade. That's not how it's going to legally play out. And I think that unfortunately, a lot of them Instagram media will miss the headline because they won't overturn Roe by saying we are overturning Roe. But they will fundamentally do is overturn the logic of Roe.
The logic of Roe, and this is, I feel like people, even people who are pro-choice, I've kind of missed the boat here, the logic of Roe is that the state has a legitimate interest in the health and safety and whatever of an unborn child after that child is violent. After that unborn, theta, collection of cells, baby, whatever you want to call it, after that thing can exist outside the mother's body. So the mother doesn't have to pay for it in blood and nutrients. Whatever that thing can exist outside of the mother's body, the state then has a legitimate interest in making sure that thing is healthy, happy, and of course it doesn't ever put money behind that interest.
That's a different point. The key distinction in Roe is viability. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which is our more updated abortion law, that says that prior to viability, the state can restrict abortion rights and access as long as it's not placing an undue burden on the potential mother to have access to her constitutional rights.
Now what undue burden means is kind of different. Everybody, Republicans think almost any burden is not undue, Democrats think most burdens are undue, fight, fight, fight, fight. The way they're going to overturn Roe is by obliterating that fetal viability stamp. They're going to say that states can place a burden on abortion rights whenever they want.
One week, two week, three weeks, whatever they want, they can place a burden on abortion rights before fetal viability. Then they'll say whatever restrictions they can think of are not in fact undue. They won't directly overturn Planned Parenthood. They'll say we still have to have undue burdens and they won't directly overturn Roe.
They'll say that people have a right to abortion. It's just that the state can place an undue burden on that right before fetal viability if they want. Right. They'll open the door to whatever the conservatives want, which will then completely screw women as always.
I just want to go back for a minute and talk to you about this weekend because it does seem to me that Republicans are having a hard time landing a punch on Joe Biden and are so because he's so white and old and Catholic that they're trying to get sneaky about the ways they do it. Do you see that at all? I don't know. When you say landing a punch, the problem with that frame is that it assumes that we're both watching the same boxing match.
Right. And we both understand reality as it is. That's just not true. Republicans are talking in an ecosystem that bears a little resemblance to my world or what I believe the world actually looks like.
They're having a conversation that exists for an hour a night on Tucker Carlson's show. Right? And so it's really hard to assess whether any of these blows or landing or punches are like because they're not trolling in reality with the rest of us. Right?
Right now the most powerful person in the Republican party is Tucker Carlson. Yes. Like he's the one that sets their agenda. If Tucker complains about something, the next day Republican senators are complaining about that same thing.
Not because their constituents said it because Tucker said it and they assume that if Tucker says it, eventually their constituents will care. So let's get ahead of that train. Right. He sets their agenda.
What lands and what doesn't land. It's hard to understand when the agenda is being set by a TV show host. An opinion TV show host who has once argued, who had lawyers argue that no one takes his opinion seriously and so he shouldn't be liable for things that happen. I mean, can you imagine if like the Democrats were like, oh, what does Pat Sage act say tonight?
But see what we got to do. That's where we are. Yeah. I mean, we're basically there.
But so Ben Smith, the media, one of the media columnist at the New York Times had a piece this on Sunday. I'm sure you read it where he said basically Tucker Carlson's secret weapon is that he has this very chummy relationship with a lot of elite journalists who use him for sources. Yep. I saw that.
Yeah. So basically democracy dies in DMS. I don't know when we're going to learn our lesson about access journalism. I would have thought we should learn less than him.
But like I learned the lesson that access journalism was going to lead us to ruination after the second Gulf War, right? That was a war started by access to. Wait back it up a little bit for my dad who might not know what you're talking about. Right.
There was never there were never weapons of abstraction. Never. Never. That was made up.
That was made up. That was the same time. Stronolist who kept feeding information to the New York Times, which kept reprinting that information uncritically like they were the press office for the Pentagon. That's that's how that word got started folks.
If you've miller didn't tell us the lesson that this is how we start wars because the same thought process that went through that went behind the lead up to the Gulf War is the thought process that went behind the election of Donald Trump. It was the same thought process. And once again, journalists reprinting press releases uncritically, journalists doing the carrying the water, abnormalizing and legitimizing badly crazy stuff is how we got to Donald Trump. So we didn't learn after that.
We didn't learn after that. And it looks like we're not going to learn it again. And the type in the Ben Smith piece about Tucker is just another kind of data point in the fear immense of how broken mainstream media is when it comes to access journalists. You know, what strikes me about that piece is that there is a problem when we consider ourselves, you know, you and I happen to be on the opinion side, but we're still as legitimate as anyone else.
But what I see with a lot of journalists is that there's this phenomenon of being too cool to care. And when you're too cool to care, then you are just, you know, sort of an isles the way Tucker Carlson is and you don't care ultimately. But Molly, why don't you say that that is a particular problem of white male heterosexuals. Yes.
Yes. Yes. Because being too cool to care is legitimate if you can't be hurt. Right.
No, I'm just right. Like they act like they had nothing to lose because they don't because there's no version of America that takes from them, right? There's no version of America that limits their rights and free. There's a reason why, I don't want to name names, but there's a reason why Substack is calling unto itself a host of white male straight journalists, right?
Because the thing that they're most afraid of is this thought that one day they might not be able to say everything they want to say while still getting an endorsement from Nike, right? Like that like cancel culture is their biggest fear because that's actually taking something from them. They're right to piss people off of no consequences, right? That's what they're worried about.
The rest of us are worried about our basic rights, whether we can go to the grocery store without being shot, whether we can start a family, whether we can adopt into starting a family, which is something Supreme Court ruled against last week. The real concerns that the rest of us have that these white male straight journalists just don't don't have. And so they don't report, they don't report about it. They don't talk about it.
They're not concerned. I think it's this nihilistic obsession with the takes for the takes sake that is really like ultimately the biggest thing heard in journalism today. But I want to talk to you about this decision. So it's a decision that basically Catholic charities don't have to allow gay couples to adopt children.
Yeah. So this is Fulton County versus city bill delving. The issue was that a Catholic charity was one of the screeners for the city for potential foster couples, right? And the Catholic charities, Catholic social services said that it would no longer screen the same sex couples.
Because there are so many foster parents want want want. They want to take children who are troubled. The city of the Laplacia said, well, that's discriminatory. So you can't be one of our screeners.
Yeah. And the Catholics charity said, no, no, no, you have to let us. You have to let us be part of the state run operation because if you don't, that's impinging on our free exercise of religion, which is a bad crazy argument. That's not a great argument.
But this is the argument that conservatives are now using to take away gay rights. The fundamental thing people need to understand is that the new attacks on gay rights, it's not 20 years ago. They're not conservatives are not attacking gay rights frontally in terms of like gay people shouldn't have rights. They've lost that.
So the next battle, the next front for them is to not say that gay people shouldn't have rights. It's to say that religious people shouldn't have to respect those rights at all. If their God tells them that bigotry is demanded, right? So that's their new tactic.
And that is the tactic that unanimously was upheld again. It's not the first time it's been upheld. But it's the first time it's been upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court in this case, Fulton County, Fulton versus city of the wealthy. Now, when I say unanimous, I'm doing a slight disservice because while technically yes, the decision was 9-0.
That was not it. There was not 9. There are not 9 people on the Supreme Court who agree about this issue at all. If anything, that decision was 1-2-3-3 in terms of the ideological split in the case.
It's kind of complicated. I wrote about this in the nation about why the liberals kind of went with the conservatives on this issue. But the fundamental point is that there was a way to make the Catholic Charities win that kind of only made the Catholic Charities win in this case. And then there was a way to make the Catholic Charities win that would have made kind of all religious objectors win all the time when it comes to discriminating against gay people.
And the liberals chose the safer option of just giving the baby its bottle in this one case while preventing the more extremist conservatives from changing the law going forward in a much more deep and irrevocable way. That's why they did it. It was a little bit of strategic voting, a little bit of forced trading went along. So it's not like, suddenly things that gay people can't be foster parents.
That's not what happened. But it does show that there's a, the conservatives are kind of talking amongst themselves and the liberals are just kind of being drug along for the ride trying to pick the least bad out of terrible options. Right. It's like we're in the bad place.
We are totally in the bad place. When it comes to religious attacks on LGBTQ rights, this is going to be the next 20 years. Right. This is how they're going to be doing it.
And we've already seen it. Right. We saw this in Mass Repeat Skate Shop where the fundamental argument was that the baker had a religious right to deny public accommodation to people because he objected to their sexuality. We're going to see this in trans cases up and down our system.
This is their way. They've weaponized the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Think about it. What Free Exercise is supposed to mean is that I can do what I need to do without the government bothering me.
Right. That's the most civil form of it. And really America was kind of unique in the 1800s as for being a country that had such a free exercise clause. Right.
But Free Exercise was never meant to trump otherwise neutral secular laws. Right. You can't say my free exercise of religion means that I get to shoot people. That's not right.
No, you can't shoot people. I don't care what your God says. You can't, you can't stone people to death. That's not what we do.
What the conservatives have done, again, with respect to the rights is to try to warp the Free Exercise Clause into a defense of bigotry. And that's a battle that we're going to have to fight for the rest of my life. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that.
That seems great. So this really quickly, we're waiting on one more big case this term. Because, you know, Supreme Court upheld Obamacare for like a third time, right? Supreme Court did this horrible thing against gay rights, but we're still waiting to see how it weighs in on voting rights.
In Arizona, there's a case in front of the court that they expect to be decided this week about whether Arizona's voter restrictions, not the crazy stupid 15th recount they're doing right now. And they're going to have a lot of restrictions they had in place before the last election, whether some of those restrictions are going to be allowed to stand. Now, I think it's, again, with this Supreme Court, I think Arizona's going to win. The question is how much they win by.
And so this is just like the gay rights case. This could be another situation where kind of Roberts and Tony Barrett and alleged attempted rapist, but Kavanaugh will have some kind of moderate conservative position, whereas Alito and Thomas will have some kind of extreme conservative position. And the liberals will have to choose whether or not they sign on to a bad voting rights decision or let Alito make it a terrible voting rights decision. But that's what we're still waiting for this week.
Yeah. We're definitely in the bad place. I mean, that's thank you for making me feel slightly worse. We should expand the court.
I know we should. Well, they want from me. I know. I mean, six conservatives there like that's that the ball game.
I can't. It's just so horrific. Anyway, thank you so much for joining us. This was great.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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That's newabnormal.dailebeast.com. And Nelson is the author of Shadow Network, Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Welcome. And the newabnormal.
Thank you. Good to be here. Why don't you start by explaining to us basically it's like it feels like something out of the point of Inci Code. There are a network of conservative radio stations and then conservative donors and then conservative policy shops that are all connected.
Can you sort of explain this to us? Yes, absolutely. The way I unfolded in Shadow Network is that while a lot of Democrats were living in cities and in coastal areas, in the meantime, in the middle of the country, there were these entities that were pushing back against the reforms of the 1960s, civil rights, women's rights, you name it. One, they decided to exploit Reagan's victory and come together and found something called the Council for Natural Policy, which would advance their policies and their interests.
Basically, the policies were anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, pretty much anti-civil rights and integration, based in fundamentalist Christianity of the South and the Midwest. And they joined forces with oil interests from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana. And that's the Koch brothers, right? Well, the Koch brothers have played very nicely with them.
They've crossed funded each other's organizations, et cetera. But there are various oil interests that have been deeply involved, as well as the DeVos family of Michigan, the Amway Britain. And they networked in a way that the Democrats have never replicated. So the messengers craft the messaging, the radio stations, and now the digital platforms broadcast it.
And they use this to take power in states that basically the national news media hasn't been looking at. Yeah, so why don't you give us an example of a state where the legislature has picked up a bill that comes from this consortium? Well, okay. So the bills are often crafted by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is run by a member of the Council for National Policy.
And for example, you have this replication of what's called the heartbeat bill across many states right now, which imposes such severe restrictions on abortion that it basically eliminates women's right to choose. Right. And this comes from this heartbeat bill came, was originally originated in Ohio. And what they do is they craft a bill where they think it's going to be a sympathetic state environment in the legislature in the courts and the state house, and then they leverage across state borders.
Another example comes from my home state of Oklahoma, which decided that they would pass a bill that's been signed into law that says that if you run over a protester for a Black Lives Matter protest, for example, it's not a crime. Right. And that is also an ALEC bill. So there are different kinds of bills that we've seen pop up in all of these state houses, like the running over protesters' bills, the heartbeat bills, what these fetuses that don't have hearts yet.
There is the anti-trans bills. I mean, there are a couple of different sort of, you know, that a couple of different culture war issues that these guys have picked up. But I'm curious, like, I want to walk it back a minute because this is all very complicated, or at least it is to me, this national council, you actually know a bunch of the people who are on here because even though the membership is super secret, you have been able to find it. Well, what happened was that the Southern Poverty Law Center had access and published their 2014 directory.
And I worked from that writing my book. And oh, it had some great names. It had Steve Bannon. It had Kellyanne Conway and all of these people leading into the Trump campaign.
And Charlie Kirk. And Charlie Kirk appears in 2020. So what happened between then and now is that a couple of ACE researchers, one of them named Brent Alpress, found a way into their online systems, a legal entry point, and downloaded their more recent membership list. And they've been published by two investigative centers, the Center for Media and Democracy, and documented.
So they also published their meeting agendas and videos where they lay out their plans for stealing the election in 2020 and beyond. So explain that to us. So this is an organization that, as I said, has very closely related moving parts. The strategy, the media, the ground game with their organizations that go to order to canvassing all run by members of the Council for National Policy.
So National Rifle Association, Susan B. Anthony List, which is anti-abortion, and they coordinate. And in their meetings, starting in 2019, they said, oh, Trump may not win the popular vote. So therefore, he has to win the Electoral College, and we are going to try the following measures to win the Electoral College.
A few months later, their meetings show that they're saying, oh, he might lose the Electoral College. So we need to pressure the state legislatures. Right. That's pretty crazy right there.
Yeah. Like that moment where they're like, he might lose the Electoral College. So let's just override democracy altogether. Absolutely.
And one of their leading members, the lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, was on the call with Trump where he's pressuring Brad Raffensberger from Georgia to quote unquote, find 11,000 votes. Right. Right. I remember that.
So and Cleta Mitchell is quite nutty. I mean, from what I saw, you know, on television and read about her. And she is like a very high up member in this group. Oh, yeah.
She's a very long-term member. And I would say that we underestimate these people at our peril. Because what they do have is access to state level pressure. So they are able to say to their membership of over 400 strong.
And we're talking about a lot of big money people who donate big money to local campaigns. Like who? Well, the DeVos family to start with. The DeVos family has bought several campaigns in Michigan, including the one that crippled Michigan's labor unions with the right to work law.
They were all over that. Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, who has been a conduit for coke money, did the same thing in Wisconsin, crippling the political activities of Wisconsin labor union. We saw what the effect of that was. And then you've got various oil interests that come into it.
So there are these donor consortia. Some of them are fundamentalists, like the National Christian Foundation. Some of them are through coke brothers, coke empire, donors trust. So a lot of it's dark money and a lot of the donors work through these conduits.
So when they want to pressure state legislators, well, in some of these swing states, there's not a lot of other money flowing around. So they got undue pressure. And they also have a majority of Republican state houses to work with. Right.
You're an academic. So how did you get involved in this? Well, I was in Oklahoma and I came east to college, but I go back to see family at least once or twice a year. I was driving to Walmart because that's what you do in Oklahoma and turn on the radio and found this fundamentalist radio station that was overtly political.
And I knew something about nonprofits and how you're not supposed to be campaigning for it against a candidate if you're a tax exam. So I started following that and I thought it was just basically this local radio preacher. And then I found out, no, this was part of hundreds of radio stations across the Midwest and the South. And the message that was coming out was extraordinary because this preacher, it was calling, he was saying, if John Kerry wins the presidency, he will make heterosexual marriage unsanctified.
I'm like, what? What is this? You're like, I would even do that. Well, you know, but you're talking about people who are not reading the New York Times.
They believe that they hear on the radio. And this woman was like, I've been married to my husband for 40 years. You mean, we won't be legally married. And it's like, no, man, you've got to go out and vote.
You know, I thought, okay, wait a minute. I got to look into this. So and that's how you got involved in this story to begin with. You know, as a journalist, you see a thread and you pull it and then more or something come out.
And you know, when Trump won the election, I was like a lot of other people watching the returns expecting Clinton to win the way the New York Times had told me she would. And then I was like, all right, I got to dive into this. Do you think that Democrats have anything like this? No, I know they don't.
There are several reasons. One is that the Koch brothers developed a state-of-the-art data platform or political data that integrates consumer data. And then they networked it across the country to their chosen candidates who can use it with their door to a canvassing. So they've had this competitive advantage where if you knock on a door, you know, the guy is a member of the NRA and he's afraid of Democrats taking the guns, the next door is a Catholic housewife.
So you talk to her about abortion, right? So you have these two messages and you leverage that to tailored social media messaging, right? The Democrats have not networked their data across the country. They have not subsidized it the way the folks have.
They have not networked it into grassroots canvassing. So even though they have a majority of public opinion for their policies, they've been at a deficit in terms of their campaign tools. Right. Makes a lot of sense.
It strikes me with all of these local state issues. What I see in the Republican Party that seems so seamless and what you've written about in your book and what I think is so incredibly important for listeners to understand is that you'll have something like an anti-trans bill and then you'll see messaging. I want you to tell our listeners what you told me the other night about how exactly this information and these news stories get dispersed because you had very specific platforms and where they go from one to the next. Can you explain that?
Absolutely. I mean, it functions like a corporation doing advertising, right? So you've got the marketing people focusing on a message and finding buzzwords that are usually not true. Let's say the term partial birth abortion was invented by their groups, focus group tested, and it is not a medical term.
It does not exist, but it is such a visceral image that they found that it evoked emotion. So then what they do is take this idea and take their surrogates, whether it's Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council or they have a whole stable of spokespeople that appear on their media as well as on Fox and Sinclair News and others. And they repeat these terms and it's another form of the big lie because if you repeat this often enough, people absorb it. And then what you get in these states are people who are voting against their own self-interest.
They're voting against public schools for the kids. They're voting against clean air and water because they feel that the only issue on the table is to stop partial birth abortion, which doesn't mean it. Right, right, right, which isn't even really a thing. I mean, we spend an entire two-week news cycle on critical race theory, right?
Which is not, you know, and that's the biggest danger on facing American children. Critical race theory. None of these people could tell you what the fuck it is. Oh, it's it would be funny if it weren't so serious.
So you asked about the media platforms. One of the media platforms that was founded and is run by a Council for National Policy member is the Daily Caller. So who runs that? So I see a member named Neil Patel co-founded it.
And he's with Tucker Carlson. With Tucker Carlson, yeah. And Tucker Carlson, I believe, sold out his interest, but Patel remains. And Jenny Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, right?
And it's a so-called correspondent where she profiles other members of the CNP, such as Charlie Kirk of TPU, turning point USA. What's amazing, it's so funny with Jenny Thomas and Queen of Mitchell. These are two of the absolutely craziest women I've ever seen in mainstream, you know, profiled in, you know, in mainstream media in any possible way. So it's fascinating.
Continue to start interrupt you. Well, and I think Queen of Mitchell is very sharp and obviously very strategic because they accomplished a lot in terms of voter suppression. And they've done it very quietly. Jenny Thomas and Charlie Kirk, who work in hand in hand quite a lot, both posted social media in support of January 6.
And I should add that when pressuring the state legislators and pressuring local election officials like Brad Rapensberger didn't pan out, they moved from plan A to plan B to plan C, plan D, and plan F was January 6 and the March on the Capitol. But I should also add that right now they've moved on and they are positioning themselves for the midterms in 2022 to change the election laws in enough states that they can take over Congress and cripple the Biden administration regardless of the outcome of the actual public opinion and the actual intended vote. Right. With the caller.
So you'll see something in the caller, which doesn't have a huge circulation, but the caller feeds other right wing media networks. So can you explain that? Yes, there's an incredibly extensive ecosystem. And you've got, well, for example, Charlie Kirk has his YouTube channel.
And the regular media is run by two very prominent members of the Council for National Policy. They distribute content to over 3000 radio stations in the United States. And then they've got their own network of digital platforms, which include red state and PJ media, et cetera. Then they've got Facebook distribution channels, right?
And beyond that, we're seeing evidence that there's some interrelationship with QAnon. There's an interrelationship with QAnon, but even besides that, they are feeding the Fox news opinion shows every night. Yeah, Fox is a pretty faithful chronicler of their platforms. But I should add another really important component for decades.
They've been building relationships with fundamentalist churches. So Family Research Council, which is a core organization in the CNP, has this organization called Watchmen on the walls. And they claim to have tens of thousands of member pastors. And if you look at their website, they give you materials that you're supposed to download and then they put them in their church bulletins in the sanctuary, which include voting gun, right?
They tell people in their churches how to vote. They give them sermons to deliver from the pulpit. They give them videos to project in the sanctuary. The thing about this is that they also, in terms of the data, download church directories and direct social media at the members of the congregation they feel will vote Republican.
And other messaging will go to suppress Democratic votes. So the key here, and I've taught classes at Columbia on digital media, and a lot of times the Democrats go with kind of a social media slactivism approach, which is how it likes to do that. The secret sauce in this is to get people in their real life organizations and communities to exert peer pressure. So it's one thing if somebody in your Facebook group likes or not likes it.
If somebody in your church looks you in the eye and says you've got to vote against partial birth abortion, it's incredibly effective. Well, also if your pastor is saying like, you know, trans people are going to take over the world if you don't take away the rights. I mean, that is very powerful. And it is a really, there is no Democratic equivalent.
No, I think the Democrats have believed that if they came up with enlightened policies, the public would notice and vote for them. I wish the world worked like that. Me too. All right, this was amazing.
Thank you so much. I hope you'll come back soon. I'd love to. Thanks so much.
Thank you. What's crazier than QAnon? Morale Landish 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 podcast from the Daily Beast tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday, host Swinsuba Sang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement of the radical right head to thedillybeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's fever dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Chef Andrew Zimmern is the host of Bizarre Foods and MSNBC's What's Eating America.
Welcome to the new web normal, Andrew Zimmern. Hello. We're so excited to have you. I think of you as someone who is like in that spot between politics in a way and food.
I like to describe it that way. I usually call it civics because then I avoid political arguments with people I don't want to have political arguments with, but that's sort of a fib. I use civics as a bit of a cover because I think that policy is the love language of our time. And if we don't actually make things policy and turn things into laws, we're not going to fix the problems that are out there.
I think my personal journey is really what cast the dye and certainly making the MSNBC series, What's Eating America solidified it a bunch of us about 10 years ago. And I'm talking about people who are at the big kids table in the food world. Tell us, tell us. Tom Calicchio, Jose Andres, a bunch of others.
We were all standing around a party at South Beach Wine and Food Festival. This is eight, nine years ago. And maybe 10 years ago. And we had all, we all had the same experience, which was we were doing dinners.
We were cooking at Galas. We were speaking at events and they were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they were pouring those hundred thousands of dollars into buckets that had million dollar holes in the bottom. And it really wasn't changing anything.
And it reminded me of Michael Moore in his first movie where he's shouting, I think, at the GM or Ford building, he's standing outside screaming at it. And it felt like we were tilting at windmills. And everybody decided in their own way that we were going to try to, you know, that it really was policy need to be changed in America. You know, the farm bill needs to be really able to food bill.
We needed to address hunger and waste with the power of law behind them. We needed to increase snap with the power of law behind it. We needed to increase access to healthy food with the power of law behind it. And so everyone went on their own way.
Now, Jose, probably most famously, certainly most famously, not probably started World Central Kitchen, you know, was nominated for Nobel Prize last year. So he's not bad. He's done very well with that. Check.
Tom started a pack and got really involved on Capitol Hill and is one of the most cogent and informed voices on policy that we have in the food world. He can talk about, you know, state legislation in Arkansas, as well as he can talk about hunger issues in Long Island, New York. And he has done a ton of work in that arena with several different groups that he has founded. And Tom and I are both co-founders of the Independent Restaurant Coalition that started 456 days ago.
Yesterday we learned we were 45 days old. Our goal there was to literally singleness of purpose was to actually get money from the federal government to all the independent restaurants in the United States. And so we, when PPP came out, we helped fix that. We sent representatives to meet with then-President Trump, you know, along with Earl Blumenauer and a whole bunch of others across the aisle, Senator Wicker of Mississippi, Senator Cinema, Dean Phillips of Minnesota, a bunch of others created what was the Restaurants Act that ended up becoming the Restaurant Revitalization Fund.
We needed $120 billion, we got $39 billion, and now we must get the federal government to refill that coffers with those horrific lawsuits that have come from three different groups, all insisting that people of color and women and small business owners should not be prioritized against the big restaurants. And it's something that we really insisted on. But answering your first question, I am a storyteller. So I decided that I was going to start doing a different kind of food show.
So I actually changed Bazaar Foods a little bit against the rules. You know, the last couple of years of Bazaar Foods were stories about the Underground Railroad and the insurrections of the 1850s during the border wars between Kansas and Missouri and how they apply to today's, you know, racist environment that we live in. And I really tilted everything I did towards civics and politics and then wound up doing that big award-winning series on MSNBC. And so now that really informs everything that I do because I believe we are at a crisis, an existential crisis point in global history, whether it's with climate, our private sector, personal health, hunger, anywhere you look at it, things are not good in need fixing.
And I'm not sure we have people in the right seats to do the fixing. So to your question about the money for restaurants, the biggest business in America is the US government. Within that, I think it's the Defense Department is number one, both in bodies and people. The number two business silo in America are restaurants.
We represent 5% of GDP. We are, we represent a trillion and a half dollar industry. When we lose, you know, I think it was a Q4 2020, we lost $200 billion in revenue. Right.
You know, obviously that's in winter time, you know, the spring and summer and when it's warmer in different parts of the country, people were able to eat out and restaurants did some business. But the fact is that opening the doors on all of them now doesn't make up for the year plus of lost revenue. The incredible debt restaurants took on. So even though your neighborhood restaurant may look crowded tonight when you walk by it, everyone is desperate for dollars.
So we created along with some incredible politicians from both sides of the aisle. This restaurant revitalization fund, Senator Schumer, helped push it across the line with the Biden administration. It got put into the CARES Act at the last moment and it set aside. We asked for $120 billion.
We got $29. So we knew we had to get it refilled. The SBA administered and the SBA has been fantastic to work with. The Small Business Administration, that's actually who you submit your forms to and they dole out this $29 billion.
They got $65 billion worth of applications within, I think, the first 10 days. One of the small little pieces of this wonderful legislation was that the people who had been hurt the hardest disproportionately were going to get first bite at the money. In other words, rich white guys with restaurants get out of the way. People of color, the physically disabled women owned businesses, all were going to have first bite at the apple prioritized.
And of course, I think one of those suits is out of Texas. Oh, and so they sued you for discrimination? Well, no, they're suing the government. Staying you are discriminating, the money should be applied for freely.
So the independent restaurant coalition, as I said, which I'm a very active founding member, we have no horse in that fight legally. Our singleness of purpose, the only thing we care about is refilling the coffers because there's $65 billion in applications. If the US government throws another $35 billion into the coffers, everyone who applied can get their money. And then we'll deal with the next wave of people who need money, but at least we'll get that taken care of.
If we don't, we are facing a real serious economic problem because there's a false kind of bubble with everything opening where this little mini boom lit economy where people are feeling good is actually not working for everyone. And I believe there's another 10, 50% of restaurants that will close because they're not getting this money. We've already closed, I think, 20% of restaurants we've lost. And it's the number two employer in the United States.
And it's the only employer that, well, it's the number one employer of single moms, first time job seekers, last time job seekers, depending on who's dating, you look at the number one or two for new arrivals in this country of returning citizens, people coming out of jails and institutions, these people are not going to get a job at the investment bank tomorrow. We need restaurants and they're the lifeblood of our communities. Look at the supply chain going in, wine, vegetables, trucking, napkins, whatever it is. And they pump 92% out the back door.
They're like banks. We just take the money for a while and put it back out there. It's a magical, magical piece of business in so many ways. And if we don't take care of them, we are really, really, really in trouble.
It's interesting because I live in Manhattan close to where you live and many of our restaurants are gone. Yeah. And there will be people who step in who have money, who are going to seek opportunity. What I worry about most is not restaurants from the Upper East Side of New York or Shaker Heights in Cleveland or Beverly Hills in LA.
Those rest of those spaces, people will come in and they will raise, that will get taken care of. What scares the crap out of me are all the little restaurants that do, you know, $700,000 a year where dad is cooking and mom is running the register and the kids are waiting tables and I'm kind of exaggerating to make a point. It's the restaurant version of the roadside fruit stand with the freckle-faced kid that looks like Hawk Finn and his overalls. How do you get money to those restaurants?
The RRF did that because we were prioritizing the people who needed it the most, right? Small restaurants, restaurants run by people of color, women owned businesses, etc. There was a long list, you know, veteran owned restaurants, you pull all those out and what's left behind are restaurants run by people who can wait in line a little easier. And so these lawsuits have been an absolute disaster and I hope that these are taken up quickly by a higher court and dismissed and more importantly, we want the Biden administration to throw $35 more billion into the fund, essentially rendering the lawsuits neutering them because we're just going to give the money to everyone who's applied.
We don't have to prioritize anyone. Talk to me about food waste because that's another thing you're working on and I'm curious about that. Yeah, you know, food waste is a big issue. Frequently people, some might one figure.
They say, oh, we waste 40% of America, but 25% of Americans are hungry. So if we just waste less, we can feed everybody. It's much more complex than that. The vast majority of food waste occurs pre-consumer contact.
In other words, with the whole, between the growers in case of vegetables and fruits and the wholesaler. So we have to do a better job of supply line distribution so that a lettuce field in Salinas Valley doesn't get plowed under because there's no boxes or people to harvest it. So what does that mean? That means we got to fix our immigration problem because everybody who's, you know, 60% of fruits and vegetables are grown in one place in Central California and everyone there is an immigrant and half of them are illegal.
So we have to fix our immigration problem in order to start addressing this wholesale loss. We have to protect the supply chain and take better care of our goods. We have to have supermarkets that aren't throwing away perfectly good food just because it's blemished and they think it doesn't look good sitting out there. We have to teach people that ugly food is good food.
We have to have people in America. I gave some tips the other day on one of my presentations for a supermarket chain that if everyone in America just took out one shelf and one bin in their refrigerator, they would shrink their space in their fridge by about 20 to 25%. That would decrease their waste almost automatically. America has been sold super-sized refrigerators.
No other country in the world has big refrigerators like ours. So people like to load up for the week and that means they waste a lot of food and the manufacturers of the fridges love it, the supermarkets love it, the food companies love it because we throw away food and buy more. We have to have realistic labeling and freshness dating yogurt lasts way longer than the dates that are on the label. My father-in-law believed that that took inspiration.
I believe so too and I can actually point to the day and time that it happened but that's perhaps for another episode. You can keep a pad over the garbage can and just write down every piece of food that you throw away. At least you'll know are you throwing out all leftovers from dinners? Maybe you need to eat more of them.
Are you throwing out fruits and vegetables? Well maybe you need to buy less or cook more of them. Educating yourself, those are the two big tips for people in the home. But food waste is a massive, massive issue that has so many tendrils going into it and if we wasted less food then we would be able to target more of what we're able to keep to those that are in need.
But the hunger issue, the number one thing we should do for hunger is simply in large snap. You know, for every dollar that goes out it brings $1.87 I think into the community. It is of benefit. Can you explain that a little bit?
So the government gives somebody a food stamp is what we used to call it. It is food stamps. I just hate that word. Yeah.
But what's it stand for? Supplemental nutritional assistance program. You get a shit, you go, you get a pound of lettuce, right? Right.
But that pound of lettuce, the money that goes to the supermarket and to the farmer actually multiplies. It's sort of an econ 102 issue. So most people don't understand that when that money goes to pay the bills, the people who take it in are it's a profit center for them. That head of lettuce represents profit.
So they're able to put their, the right amount of money back into their system. The other factor that contributes to this plus up benefit is when you have people who are using food stamps for food, then they're able to spend their cash on other things when they have it, right? And also they don't starve. Well, most importantly, most importantly, I mean, look, the bottom line of all of this, and I know that I'm not just preaching to the converted, I'm preaching to someone who has helped convince me of this in other areas outside of my areas of expertise, you know, the late Senator Paul Wellstone, my mentor here in Minnesota, always said, we all win when we all win.
That's not socialism. That's called humanism, right? In American 2021, it's criminal. It's almost genocidal when you look at the fact that there are so many different groups of Americans who are disproportionately affected by this.
I mean, just look at what's going on in the indigenous American communities. It's the same thing that's happening with the vote. You know, look, it's not voter suppression. It's voter exclusion.
It's not food insecurity. It's hunger. We have to start using the right words for these things that we have to get change. Political will has to be there.
We have the skill to solve all these problems in America. We just don't have the political will. And I think it's vital. You know, I'll give the plug one more time, vital for our representatives on Capitol Hill and DC to refill the coffers of the restaurant revitalization fund.
And anyone who wants to learn more about this, please go to independentrestorons.com where you'll read all about what the IRC organization, our nonprofit is up to. Hi, Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly John fast. So so it's an interesting, you know, it's been an interesting weekend.
I always look to members, former members of the Trump ecosystem to really be assholes, but this really takes the cake. And now you'll remember Dr. Ronnie Jackson. He was Trump's physician.
He was the one who said that Trump is a cognitive test and he's very sharp and very intact. That was Ronnie Jackson. So now Ronnie Jackson, he then he took that, you know, he was a sort of Trump propaganda. He was able to parlay this into getting a very bright red Texas GOP seat as we are not surprised.
Now he has basically the same job as the dumbest member of Congress, one Louis Gomert. That's the French. So Jackson now that he's lied for Trump and also now serves in Congress, he has decided that he's going to call. And remember, there were also allegations.
The reason why he didn't end up overseeing the Department of Veterans Affairs was because there were allegations of misconduct and bullying, intimidating staff and making inappropriate sexual remarks. Though, of course, in the Trump administration, inappropriate sexual remarks is called like hello, you know, they're very it's called a Tuesday. That's right. They're big into inappropriate sexual remarks.
So Jackson, of course, denied it. And so it was a political hit job. Sure. Whatever.
You know, yeah, right. So anyway, he decided that now he's decided he's going to target Biden with the same things that were, you know, the same allegations that were targeted Trump. But you know, the irony here is these allegations towards Trump were largely because Trump would do things that were crazy, you know, man, woman, TV, dog, cat, right? So Ronnie Jackson has now decided that he's going to come at Biden with what Democrats came at Trump and what Trump has said about Biden all along, which has made Biden actually just appear, I think, much more eloquent because, you know, the buildup was so negative.
So anyway, he has written a letter. He wants Joe Biden. He's concerned. He's convinced that he doesn't have the mental capacity, the cognitive ability to serve as our commander in chief.
That's what Jackson said. And Jackson got some of the really the dumbest members of Congress to sign off to run this. He's also targeted Dr. Anthony Fauci.
And so for all of this, I say, Ronnie Jackson, fuck you. And also, are you a worse congressman than Louis Gomer? I mean, is it possible that there's a new worst member of Congress? I don't know.
Wow. This is this is a real big turret in the chapters of this podcast that you're considering this? Well, I mean, I think Louis Gomer can be the stupidest and then we can make, you know, and Ronnie Jackson can be the most evil, but there's still time. We'll see how this plays out.
Jesse Cannon, who is your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is somebody who the national stage may not be familiar with. But unfortunately, I've had to get to know even more well throughout this New York primary for the mayor that thankfully ends tomorrow. Thank God.
But it is one Eric Adams, who is one of the frontrunners of the race who is now saying because Andrew Yang and Catherine Garcia, both former guests of this podcast, have formed an alliance that this is voters suppressation and disenfranchisement. And Jim Crow. Jim Crow, of course. I find this really, really bad because in a time where Republicans are basically trying to cast aspersions on every future election, the fact that just because two people have decided to out maneuver him, he's going to now sow doubts in the system is what Republicans are doing and it's what is going to make this democracy die if people don't have faith in our elections.
And when you just do this because your personal brand is being damaged, it's disgusting Craven and it also shows me that my thoughts have been right all along. Eric Adams, you should have been running in the Republican primary the whole time and not in the Democrat one because that's what you talk like on that debate stage every time. So for that, I say fuck that guy. Hey, he's also the front runner.
He's also very likely come Wednesday going to be our mayor. Hey, man, I just want to say Eric, that was Jesse's pick and mine and please don't come after me with the terrifying rat traps. But they drown the rats and alcohol. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from the Daily Beast.
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