The Daily Beast Podcast

Feds raided Rudy Giuliani’s New York City apartment on Wednesday in regards to his dealings in Ukraine, but the question many folks have, including The New Abnormal listeners, is whether he will actually be held accountable for his alleged criminal activity? In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal LIVE, Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon spoke with Daily Beast White House reporter Scott Bixby and Daily Beast politics editor, Matt Fuller, about the former Trump crony, the chances of Ron DeSantis or Trump running for president in 2024 and why liberals are drinking the John Boehner Kool-Aid. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fast-falling apps, valued at billions of dollars. Governments printing up untold trillions in debt, just so they can buy it up themselves. Bitcoin knock-offs, soaring. Literal shell companies, all the rage. Has Wall Street (and the whole damn financial sector) lost its collective marbles? If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Republican Party has suffered a total moral collapse and is now held together by a bunch of “nutcases” happy to endorse autocracy and neo-fascism—or so says Howard Dean, former presidential candidate and ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The Democratic Party grandee tells Molly Jong-Fast he won’t run for office again so he is no longer treading on eggshells. That’s bad news for the likes of Sen. Josh Hawley and Mike Pompeo, who are on the receiving end as the former governor lets loose on the “crazies,” the “whack jobs,” and the “conspiracy theorists,” in a fiery edition of The New Abnormal podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s been a weird year--some might even say an abnormal year--but we’ve had a consistent bright spot: the loyal listeners of The New Abnormal podcast. Thanks to you, we’re celebrating our one-year anniversary with a major milestone: twenty million listens. Producer and host duo Jesse and Molly sat down for a speed-round of twenty questions to celebrate in style. Check out Molly’s hilarious and insightful responses in an exclusive mini-episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andrew Yang will do whatever it takes to get the New York City economy going again if he’s elected mayor. And by anything, we mean he will shit-talk Florida to get as many rich New Yorkers as he can to come home from the Sunshine State, he tells Molly Jong-Fast in this episode of The New Abnormal. Plus, Toure, host of the podcasts Democracy-ish and Toure Show, tells Molly why the current police system is more about making money than it is about protecting the people. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mika Brzezinski’s firing from CBS in 2006 was a total surprise. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, she tells host Molly Jong-Fast about how it all went down, why there should be a '70 Over 70' list for women, and her biggest regret from her first “Morning Joe” contract with MSNBC—especially after finding out what Joe Scarborough did with his. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mika Brzezinski’s firing from CBS in 2006 was a total surprise. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, she tells host Molly Jong-Fast about how it all went down, why there should be a '70 Over 70' list for women, and her biggest regret from her first “Morning Joe” contract with MSNBC—especially after finding out what Joe Scarborough did with his. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On a special edition of our hit podcast The New Abnormal, the president’s son opens up to Molly Jong-Fast about … well, about a lot. Why the Trumps continue to go after him so hard. Why his wife won’t let him have a laptop. How easy it is to cook crack cocaine. How hard it is to live in fear of a relapse. But Hunter Biden also gave some hard-to-swallow answers about the emails he traded with the bigwigs at energy companies in China and Ukraine—answers that could come back to haunt him. It’s all part of an absolutely gripping episode that you absolutely have to hear. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trump’s tweet about Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift” originated from a conversation between her and the former first couple in their bedroom. Really. In this episode of The New Abnormal, the Morning Joe co-host gives her hilarious retelling of the events that led up to this infamous tweet, and exactly how she responded when she found out about it: “I'm talking to Melania about it, woman to woman, then Donald came up and said, you know, Melania has had no work done. She's perfect. I'm like, ‘that's great.’” Then! The National’s Elie Mystal breaks down the Derek Chauvin trial and why it’s unlike any other cop murder trial he’s ever seen. Plus! Why are Matt Gaetz’s Republican enablers just as skeezy? If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY)’s tearful rebuke against Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) during a House hearing on violence and discrimination against Asian Americans was semi-unplanned. She had a speech ready to go, but when Roy went on an anti-China and lynchings rant instead, she just lost it. “I had to cut out excerpts of my prepared speech, which I'm sure my staff got upset about, but I just had to say it. I had to respond to what he was saying and the disturbing way in which he said it,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast in this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal. “I was just so sick of the Republican party from the very top levels of leadership constantly using these [racist] terms, which literally helped embolden people to commit acts of hatred against the community.” Molly can’t help but wonder, out loud, how Rep. Meng can work with these people day in and day out. To that, she lets Molly in on a not-so-secret-secret: “The things that they say on social media is sometimes different from what they're doing,” she says, referencing the GOP members who didn’t vote for the American Rescue Plan Act, but tried to take credit for it among their constituents. There were even 164 Republicans who didn’t even vote for an anti-hate bill that just said they stand against Asian racism. But Meng isn’t surprised by that, especially after Jan. 6. “You had these members who literally talk about law and order on their conservative outlets. And then were literally blowing past, yelling at and shoving Capitol police officers because they didn't want to go through the metal detectors. It’s just a complete lack of respect for the very institution that they brag about respecting.” Molly compared it to the Trump era. “The whole Trump administration, it went from the Muslim ban to the wall with Mexico, and now they were like, you know what? This virus is from Asia. And it's like, they only have one speed. And it's racism.” Plus! Congresswoman Meng convinces producer Jesse Cannon that 16-year-olds should get the right to vote and addresses one of Molly’s favorite questions: How can Dems get better at messaging? If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY)’s tearful rebuke against Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) during a House hearing on violence and discrimination against Asian Americans was semi-unplanned. She had a speech ready to go, but when Roy went on an anti-China and lynchings rant instead, she just lost it. “I had to cut out excerpts of my prepared speech, which I'm sure my staff got upset about, but I just had to say it. I had to respond to what he was saying and the disturbing way in which he said it,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast in this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal. “I was just so sick of the Republican party from the very top levels of leadership constantly using these [racist] terms, which literally helped embolden people to commit acts of hatred against the community.” Molly can’t help but wonder, out loud, how Rep. Meng can work with these people day in and day out. To that, she lets Molly in on a not-so-secret-secret: “The things that they say on social media is sometimes different from what they're doing,” she says, referencing the GOP members who didn’t vote for the American Rescue Plan Act, but tried to take credit for it among their constituents. There were even 164 Republicans who didn’t even vote for an anti-hate bill that just said they stand against Asian racism. But Meng isn’t surprised by that, especially after Jan. 6. “You had these members who literally talk about law and order on their conservative outlets. And then were literally blowing past, yelling at and shoving Capitol police officers because they didn't want to go through the metal detectors. It’s just a complete lack of respect for the very institution that they brag about respecting.” Molly compared it to the Trump era. “The whole Trump administration, it went from the Muslim ban to the wall with Mexico, and now they were like, you know what? This virus is from Asia. And it's like, they only have one speed. And it's racism.” Plus! Congresswoman Meng convinces producer Jesse Cannon that 16-year-olds should get the right to vote and addresses one of Molly’s favorite questions: How can Dems get better at messaging? If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, come eye-popping new details in the Matt Gaetz scandal. But perhaps the worst thing of all for the Florida Republican, who is accused of underage sex trafficking, may be that Donald Trump thinks he’s useless. Yes, the congressman spent years sucking up to the former president—and even said he’d give up his job to defend him. But Trump has only managed to offer a tepid 24 words of support since the scandal broke, and George Conway has a theory about why. Joining co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon on the latest episode of The New Abnormal, the lawyer and Washington Post contributing columnist says, “The fact that he doesn't stick up for [Gaetz’] conduct here tells you that he has no use for the guy. And why should he? All Gaetz’ sucking up to Trump, Conway says, is now “in the past. That doesn't get you points with Donald Trump. Now it's what you can do for a malignant narcissist.” It’s pretty clear now that Gaetz is now toast—and of no further use to Trump or the rest of his party, which will spend this weekend at a big RNC meeting in Palm Beach “paying homage to the orange criminal form,” as Conway puts it. The party now faces a conundrum, he says, stuck between trying to rebuild and at the same time glorify Trump. It’s a losing strategy, says Conway, that will peel off yet more centrist voters and bring more of “the kinds of candidates that drive Mitch McConnell crazy, you know, the Todd Akins of the world,” and more like Gaetz. Also on the show, Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which helps Democratic candidates run for office, talks about how the pandemic and the racial justice movement have inspired more people to run than hatred of Trump. Finally, 8chan founder Frederick Brennan talks to Molly and Jesse about how he knows that Ron and Jim Watkins are behind QAnon today, in an excerpt of an interview that will run in full on the new Daily Beast podcast Fever Dreams. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to http://newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That new documentary on QAnon ended with something of a bang, with one likely suspect seeming to half-confess that he was ‘Q,’ the oracle of the violent conspiracy movement. But there may not be even a single ‘Q,’ explains Will Sommer, one of the people featured throughout the documentary and the co-host of The Daily Beast’s new hit podcast, FEVER DREAMS. “There was kind of like this group surrounding the original Q,” Sommer, who’s writing a book on QAnon, tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “There's not even one solid Q in the beginning. I mean, Q does not use the name. All these posts that are attributed initially to Q do not use the Q name. So you get into this fight over the canon, of who is Q who's not Q.” Speaking of delusional movements, the Republican party is at a bit of a loss these days. They can’t seem to figure out how to get in the way of Joe Biden’s agenda—or even to throw an effective counterpunch against the guy. “The Republicans don't how to push back. The most effective pushback of Biden's whole infrastructure relief plan has been from [Obama’s former national economic council chief] Larry Summers,” James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, tells Jong-Fast. “Intellectually, they just they've lost their footing.” Carville adds, “I think the most significant 24 hours in American politics was from 8:00 PM eastern on the 5th of January to 8:00 PM eastern on the sixth. And that time you had the two Georgia wins and you had the insurrection and those events taken in tandem have been very, very underappreciated by contemporary commentators. They were just a different party on the night of January the 6th. Everything changed in a 24-hour period. And, you know, they’re still off balance.” “And while they are balancing, I think the Biden people have just stayed focused and running as much through as they possibly can. But [the Republicans] don't have a coherent pushback. It's all CBS: cancel culture, the border, and senility. That's all they do,” Carville adds. “They just completely reinvented a coalition and their messaging overnight has gone from an Episcopalian, Presbyterian, white party [to] rural and non-college... They don't want to talk about free trade or anything like that,” he continues. “And Biden is not just a polarizing figure. I mean, you can't gin it up. I mean, Obama, for obvious reasons he could get them all ginned up. They try to get a charge out of Biden, but it just doesn't work that well… They'll get it back. But right now they're having a hard time.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Democrats are in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time in a decade. But to the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, it’s clear that the party’s brand is broken in a large swath of America. “I think what we have to do as a party is battle the damage to the Democratic brand,” Harrison, the former senate candidate, tells Molly Jong-Fast in the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “I experienced it on my own race, Lindsey [Graham] and his crew of dark money effectively labeled me as somebody who believed in defunding the police. My grandfather on my stepfather's side was in the Detroit police department for 40 years. So I don't believe in that. But they were able to do it because the Democratic brand had been so tarnished in South Carolina that people would believe anything. If they said, ‘Jamie kicked a puppy the other day,’ they would have believed it.” “It's not even just with Republicans, the Democrat brand with some of the folks who are core at the base of our party is not the greatest,” Harrison continues. “And so I want to spend a lot of time, energy, and effort understanding why the brand is where it is, what it is and how, and what we can do in order to improve it.” Especially in rural and red-state America, Harrison says: “We have to take credit and claim the things that we will have gotten done over the course of this next two years. We're going to do a lot for rural America. The American Rescue Plan has so much in there for rural communities across this country. And it will have a huge benefit, this infrastructure plan, when we get this done. The broadband component in it alone, will totally transform rural America.” “Those communities are also just as diverse as urban communities. We also need to make sure that we're listening to them,” he adds. “And then, in the end, we’ve got to deliver and I believe we can do those things. Not only will we grow our base, but I think we also persuade a few other folks to take a look at us.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The New Abnormal’s least favorite Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz, is in hot water over mounting allegations that he’s been involved with underage women and taking them across state lines. To discuss the burgeoning scandal, co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon brought on The Nation’s national affairs correspondent, Jeet Heer, who says he isn’t the least bit surprised. “It’s the ones you always suspect the most,” he says. Noting Gaetz’s strange appearance on the Tucker Carlson show, where he tried to get Carlson hitched to his sinking ship, Heer says he sees a connection with what other people in the alt-right swamp engage in. “Occasionally you see racists try to implicate the person they’re talking with, like, ‘You think this as well. You also don’t like those people right?’... To normalize this behavior. That’s basically what he’s doing: ‘Oh yeah, you remember the dinner that we were at with your wife? And wasn’t there some sort of really sleazy scandal involving you?” To Heer, Gaetz describing his dinner with a young date along with Tucker Carlson and his wife is reminiscent of the Woody Allen movie Manhattan. “In the movie, Woody is dating a 17-year-old [Mariel Hemingway]... and they go out to these dinners with their adult friends who are middle-aged.” The imagery is hard to unsee. For more strange twists in the Matt Gaetz story, Molly and Jesse brought on Daily Beast senior politics editor Matt Fuller, who says he’s been hearing rumors of Gaetz’s bad behavior for over three years. “Let’s just say he has a proclivity for younger women. He certainly has been open to dating college-aged women, congressional staffers, maybe some interns from Turning Point USA. He’s a man about town,” Fuller says. The crew agrees that you’re not in a good place when reporters are having to pin you down on the language you’re using around accused pedophilia. “It’s been very odd to hear exactly how he phrases these answers on a lot of this, because he always says, ‘I haven't had any inappropriate relationships with underage women.’ And it’s been unclear if he’s saying underage women, like, with an age of consent, or…? We don’t know what he’s talking about.” Also on the show, Molly sits down with one of the foremost warriors in the fight against the “anti-science movement,” vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez, who talks soberly about what we have ahead of us in the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus, getting so high you end up flying from Kentucky to Kenya, how you troll Joseph Goebbels, and podcasting with the Original Gangster Villain—that’s all on the latest The New Abnormal. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that everyone’s favorite Suez-Canal-blocking ship is now the subject of a QAnon conspiracy? The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer lay out why the adrenochrome set is convinced that the stuck ship’s cargo is full of trafficked children on the latest episode of our Fever Dreams podcast (Hint: it has to do with Hillary Clinton’s secret service code name—you guessed it, EVERGREEN.) Speaking of Hillary conspiracies, Suebsaeng and Sommer discuss why the right just can’t seem to come up with a good Joe Biden conspiracy to smear the new president; Trump’s base seems more interested in reverting to their old hatreds of Clinton and Barack Obama. (As Suebsaeng points out, Biden quite simply is not Black or a woman, and so doesn’t inspire the same level of vitriol from the hardcore racist, misogynistic Trumpites.) Meanwhile, there’s a tug-of-war going on between those in the Trump administration who want the former president to receive “credit” for the COVID vaccine drive and the rightwing anti-government, anti-vaxx diehards who refuse to believe that their Emperor God actually wants them to get the shot. The tussle is crystallized in Trump’s former HHS staffer Michael Caputo, a “really brash, incredibly Trumpy longtime Republican operative” who has taken it upon himself to prosthelytize about the vaccine in biker bars among the “MAGA Sons of Anarchy”—and who’s running into a lot of resistance. Keep an eye out for the interview with The Daily Beast’s own Kelly Weill, who walks our hosts through the crazy cast of lawyers and faux-lawyers who have sprung up to defend the Capitol Rioters and anti-masker businesses—one of them quotes from Lord of the Rings, another has never actually passed the bar because he thinks it’s a British conspiracy. And most importantly, we learn about Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’ supervillain origin story, how Texas National Guard troops faced a hostage situation with Pizzagate overtones, and how Will Sommer is singlehandedly responsible for bringing the phrase “soy boy” out of the Internet swamp into the national spotlight. Listen to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Goldie Taylor has been working in and around Georgia politics for decades. So she knows first-hand the kind of stunt Republicans are trying to pull with this new voter-suppression law. “What [Gov.] Brian Kemp will tell you, what other state GOP office holders will tell you, is that they've done this to restore confidence in the ballot. Poppycock. They have done it to keep people who don't look like them, church like them, live like them, away from the voting booth,” Taylor tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. Taylor knows a lot of her out-of-state friends are outraged, too. But their calls to boycott Georgia over this law? They’re just wrong, she says. “Sometimes being an ally means shutting up,” Taylor continues. “As soon as this began to happen, we heard people, especially people in Hollywood say, ‘Oh, we're going to boycott Georgia until they stop this.’ Right. And both me and Dr. Bernice King stood up and immediately said, ‘No, you want to put the very people that you aim to help out of work in the middle of a pandemic. You're going to make it so that they can't recover in an effort to pay back a governor who won't feel it.’” “Sometimes you have to take on a whole state or a whole county or a whole country. I do believe in that,” she added. “In this case, that's not what the leverage lies. In this case, the leverage lies in the direct contributions, the financial pipeline that greases the pockets of state house Republicans. Dry it up. “How do you dry it up? You target their donors, big corporations: Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot, AT&T—all these companies who have huge footprints here in Georgia, who are pouring money into our state house. You put pressure on them specifically. But what you don't do is tell Major League baseball to take a game out of the city, because who gets hurt? The people who are selling the popcorn, who parked the cars. People who scan your tickets. The people who can least likely afford it.” Then! Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman discusses why even people on the left need to take Jim Jordan seriously. And Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall talks about why “Washington is a town that is really wired for Republican governance.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Take one self-proclaimed satanism expert. Add in a pinch of dumpster-diving. Throw in a chicken-coop fire, and (of course) pillow magnate and Donald Trump pal Mike Lindell. And you’ve got the recipe that Trump 2020 deadenders are currently leading in the great state of Arizona to try to, somehow, overturn the election there. “It could be like a Coen brothers movie. It has that atmosphere,” Daily Beast political reporter Will Sommer tells his colleague and co-host Asawin Suebsaeng on the premiere episode of Fever Dreams, The Beast’s new podcast. “You have these kind of vigilante groups of people who connect on Facebook and say, well, let's go to the board of elections—and then they dive into the dumpster and see what they can find…Or there was a fire at a chicken farm owned by or connected to this guy who's opposed to the recount, and they said, well, he probably put the ballots in there and set the fire! And then they go out to the farm and they smell the air and they say: This smells like burnt ballot to me!” Fever Dreams takes you inside the right’s push to retake power, from the conspiracy-slingers to the MAGA acolytes to the straight-up grifters. Thought the Trump era was crazy? Wait ’til you hear what comes next. To start, there’s the slew of Republican efforts to not only to keep challenging the 2020 presidential contest, but to also execute further election and voter crackdowns across the country. “What’s going on is that Republicans need some shred of voter-fraud evidence that they can then use to impose more voting restrictions,” Will adds. “But what they’re doing here in Arizona…[the recount effort involves] this satanism guy, who maybe does not have the most credibility, or they were looking to hire this very pro-Trump outfit that’s been laughed out of other state recounts. To help further unpack how the Trump era was just one long, aggravating, and monumentally blood-drenched Coen brothers movie that we were all forced to live through, Swin and Will welcomed Ike Barinholtz, the comedian and star of such films as Blockers and the Neighbors franchise, as well as in TV series Bless the Harts, Eastbound and Down, and The Mindy Project. The whole Trump presidency “really was Burn After Reading,” Ike contends. But “if you want to learn how the insides of the [Trump] White House work, you have to watch Step Brothers. It will all make sense.” Ike also opens up about what it was like to co-star in the 2020 satire The Hunt, just as then-President Trump was busy issuing, in Swin’s words, a “cultural fatwa”—via tweet—on the movie. “No one loves ‘cancel culture’ more than the Republicans. It’s their favorite thing, they love it, they thrive on it,” he says. “The worst possible thing is for Donald Trump to tweet about you. Just, it changes your life in a terrible, terrible way…I was super nervous that he was going to tweet about it. And then he tweeted about it!” As a result, he and others working on the movie were, naturally, inundated with threats of retribution and violence... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GOP Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn led a tour for themselves and others in their party at the border on Friday, but according to Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who took over Beto O’Rourke’s former 16th district in Texas, it’s all “political theater.” They want to “use the border as a prop, do a whole lot of complaining and finger pointing. But these are the same people who've been in the Senate for a number of years when their party had control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, [and] they did not solve this problem,” she tells The New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast and producer Jesse Cannon. That’s not to say that Biden has all the answers, he doesn’t. But she does feel like it’s finally time we get to the root of the immgration debate in our country. “[Constituents] don't want us to be the problem,” she adds. “They want us to solve problems.” But how? It’s two fold, she explains. First, we need to have real sit-down conversations and policies in place in regards to the countries in the Southern Hemisphere to hold them accountable (“These countries are turning a blind eye in many respects to the awful human trafficking, criminal organizations and networks that have existed for a long time.”) And, it’s going to take Americans getting real with themselves. We’ love the ideal of the immigrant more than the actual immigrants themselves. “Why are Americans so afraid of immigrants?” Escobar asks. “We need to instill some compassion into the hearts of Americans.” Plus! She and Molly discuss why Latino voters, in Texas specifically, can be pro-Republican and pro-ICE. It seems irrational but there’s a reason. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What’s our wildly divisive political climate doing to today’s 20-year-olds, who will be our political leaders of the future? That’s what Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) asks co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. In the past, Kinzinger says, Americans could look to Ronald Reagan and Democratic leader Tip O’Neill having a beer together, despite their differences. Today, Kinzinger says, we’re not seeing similar examples: “All we do is go on Twitter and TV and call the other side douchebags.” It doesn’t bode well for us getting back to normal politics, he warns. Still, says Kinzinger—the first sitting GOP congressman to accept an invitation to come on The New Abnormal—former President Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party does seem to be waning. Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, which Kinzinger fully supports, is a big part of that, he says. “He can put out crazy press releases calling Rove a RINO like he’s doing, but… it’s taken a lot of his influence away.” “I think we’re going to survive this,” the Illinois lawmaker says of the future of the party. “But it’s certainly going to be an epic battle. It’s probably gonna be an epic battle that needs to happen.” Kinzinger also explains why he thinks the Democrats’ For the People Act is a bad bill, why Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene needs to be called out for dehumanizing transgender people, and why he thinks Trump is the real RINO. Also on the show, MSNBC host Ali Velshi talks to Molly and Jesse about criss-crossing the country this year and somehow managing not to get COVID, and whether the media can get back to normal now that Trump is out of office and not sucking up all the oxygen. Finally, author and editor Ronald Brownstein talks about his new book, Rock Me on the Water, and what the cultural and political atmosphere of the early 1970s have in common with the present moment. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When we think of presidential pets, we think of their cute moments and endless photo-ops on the White House lawn—but the reality is you sometimes need to acquire a pet to distract from a scandal. So it was in the 1990s, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Mo Rocca explains on the latest episode of The New Abnormal, when the Clintons adopted Buddy the dog. “The Clintons had Socks,” Rocca tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast. “And then in the depths of the Lewinsky affair, when Clinton was in real turmoil, Dick Morris advised him to get a dog. This is totally true. And because dogs were more popular, they got a chocolate lab, Buddy. Labrador retrievers were at that point the No. 1 breed in America for 17 years running. And so the cat was given, I believe, to [Clinton personal secretary] Betty Currie. I mean the cat, it was like, ‘Exit, stage right.’” Rocca also explains why he enjoys writing his popular podcast Mobituaries: “In general, I deal with dead people because they don’t have publicists, so they’re a lot easier to deal with.” Molly and co-host Jesse Cannon are then joined by civil rights activist and host of Pod Save the People DeRay Mckesson, who tells them that police violence is actually getting worse, not better, despite increased public scrutiny. “Police actually killed more people in suburban communities in almost all our communities combined,” Mckesson says, adding that the public perception of what is happening in legislative changes to policing is not reflected in the actual practices of policing. “New York City has never banned strangleholds. So when [Eric] Garner gets killed, the police immediately say, ‘We didn’t choke him.’ They’re like, ‘We strangled him.’ But that’s essentially their argument right there: ‘We did not use the “banned” technique.’” The conversation then turns to school reopenings amid the pandemic, with Molly and Jesse joined by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who is none too happy about New York City mayoral frontrunner Andrew Yang leading educational policy. “I think that people are very, very intrigued by the universal basic income proposal that he’s made,” Weingarten says. “...And what Yang is raising by basically undermining the public schools at the same time as he has lifted up privatization charters and yeshivas is actually walking away from the common good and the public good of what a city needs to run.” And then for the people’s favorite New Abnormal segment, “Fuck That Guy,” Molly aims her ire at New York Times best-selling author turned aspiring Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, who is trying to up his chances of getting that seat by firing off tweets flirting with white nationalist tropes. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since the spread of COVID-19 launched a global pandemic in 2020, over half a million Americans have been killed by the virus. And experts agree that the death and infection rates have been much worse in the West—mainly the United States and Europe—than many other places in the East. In other words, while other countries like China, Cambodia and New Zealand were able to tempur the spread, the U.S. had its ass handed back to it. There are a lot of reasons for this, says David Wallace-Wells, New York magazine writer and author of How the West Lost COVID. Factors like population age and geographic location played a role in these places’ ability to control the virus, but ultimately, one of the most “catastrophic” factors that played into the death roll, is something we very much had control over. And that is how our leaders responded and our collective culture, on both a federal and local level. “I think the toll of the disease really throughout all of Europe and all of the Americas shows you just how devastating cultural and political inaction is,” he said. “South Korea looked at what was happening in January. And they said, ‘Holy, this is really bad. Like if China is locking down an entire city of 10 or 11 million people for a period of months, like this must be really scary and we should get our act together in response.’ And in the West, we just didn't.” Host Molly Jong-Fast is adamant that having a person who wasn’t inept in office, aka someone other than Trump, would have made a huge difference in saving lives. Wallace-Wells agrees. He also thinks even the Democratic leaders and bipartisan health officials dropped the ball, too, though, at least in the beginning. “Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and even Anthony Fauci, all of them were sort of saying to some degree the same thing, which was, ‘we don't want to disrupt things too dramatically unless we need to,” and that cost lives. “Our wealth, our medical capacity, our cultural capacity was gonna prevent us from being vulnerable in the way that these other countries elsewhere in the world were vulnerable,” he added. It’s also a scary indicator of Americans’ lack of ability to take immediate action if it’s uncomfortable for future crises, like climate change Molly points out. But there is some good news: “I think the cultural lesson of this pandemic is [that] we under reacted and it's likely that we're going to be much more aggressive in the future.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Since the spread of COVID-19 launched a global pandemic in 2020, over half a million Americans have been killed by the virus. And experts agree that the death and infection rates have been much worse in the West—mainly the United States and Europe—than many other places in the East. In other words, while other countries like China, Cambodia and New Zealand were able to temper the spread, the U.S. had its ass handed back to it. There are a lot of reasons for this, says David Wallace-Wells, New York magazine writer and author of How the West Lost COVID. Factors like population age and geographic location played a role in these places’ ability to control the virus, but ultimately, one of the most “catastrophic” factors that played into the death roll, is something we very much had control over. And that is how our leaders responded and our collective culture, on both a federal and local level. “I think the toll of the disease really throughout all of Europe and all of the Americas shows you just how devastating cultural and political inaction is,” he said. “South Korea looked at what was happening in January. And they said, ‘Holy, this is really bad. Like if China is locking down an entire city of 10 or 11 million people for a period of months, like this must be really scary and we should get our act together in response.’ And in the West, we just didn't.” Host Molly Jong-Fast is adamant that having a person who wasn’t inept in office, aka someone other than Trump, would have made a huge difference in saving lives. Wallace-Wells agrees. He also thinks even the Democratic leaders and bipartisan health officials dropped the ball, too, though, at least in the beginning. “Gavin Newsome, Andrew Cuomo, and even Anthony Fauci, all of them were sort of saying to some degree the same thing, which was, ‘we don't want to disrupt things too dramatically unless we need to,” and that cost lives. “Our wealth, our medical capacity, our cultural capacity was gonna prevent us from being vulnerable in the way that these other countries elsewhere in the world were vulnerable,” he added. It’s also a scary indicator of Americans’ lack of ability to take immediate action if it’s uncomfortable for future crises, like climate change Molly points out. But there is some good news: “I think the cultural lesson of this pandemic is [that] we under reacted and it's likely that we're going to be much more aggressive in the future.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It didn’t have to be this way. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t have to become politicized—or racialized. But last March, President Donald Trump “decided to call coronavirus, which has no ethnicity or zip code or nationality, the China virus,” says Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali on the 100th episode of The New Abnormal. “There was no reason to make coronavirus a racist thing,” co-host Molly Jong-Fast adds. Now, not only are people of Chinese descent coming under attack across the U.S., but other Asians—because “bigots aren’t nuanced,” adds Ali, who wrote about the wave of anti-Asian hate for the Beast before the Atlanta massage parlor murders. “As a Muslim, as a son of Pakistani immigrants, we’ve been through this for the past 20 years,” he tells Jong-Fast. “And I realized that that story in America is the original story that gets a remake, and sometimes the villain just gets changed, right? So right now it’s Chinese or the Chinese, whoever looks Chinese. It’s been Muslims. It’s always African-Americans, it’s Latinos. We’re all the invaders.” “It’s a society-wide problem,” he says, “that requires a society-wide solution.” After Ali tells Jong-Fast why we’ve got to nuke the filibuster, she welcomes freshman Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) on the podcast to talk about the pandemic and how the vaccine campaign is going. “The United States is probably in the best position, except maybe for Israel, throughout the world, in terms of vaccinating its population,” Auchincloss says. Still, he cautions: “Not to be a Debbie Downer, but this problem of cold storage is very much still with us. If you look at countries near the Equator, we are nowhere near herd immunity. And indeed we’re looking at late 2022, early 2023 to hit that tipping point. And there the cold storage supply chain is very much an issue.” The U.S. needs to develop a Marshall Plan for vaccines, he says, because “we’re in a race right now between vaccinations and variants, and it doesn’t help the United States if we win it domestically and lose it internationally.” Lastly, Jong-Fast brings on Evan McMullin, former 2016 presidential candidate and former CIA officer, to talk about how the GOP is changing. The last five years, he says, were not an “anomaly” for the party. “We were headed towards that for decades,” he says. “And I don’t see us getting past the last five years immediately either. I think there is that opportunity, but you know, it, it will take time.” McMullin says he’s still a registered Republican but is not sure how long he’ll stay that way, given the “current direction” of the party. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s bad enough Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat, turned down the minimum wage hike with that oh-so-cute thumbs down. Now she’s threatening to derail the whole Democratic agenda, insisting on archaic Senate rules that give Mitch McConnell and the Republicans outsized power. “I think is a lot of people feel that this groovy, bisexual Senator should be voting in a groovy way and not like a terrifying conservative,” Molly Jong-Fast says on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Do you see a world in which Democrats can get her on board for filibuster reform?” she asks Senate veteran Adam Jentleson. “I definitely think that,” Jentleson answers. “I think she's miscalculated a little bit. I don't think she can afford to be out as far to the right as she is right now. Even [centrist West Virginia Sen. Joe] Manchin has started to shift a little bit. And so she's kind of out on a limb.” “Joe Manchin can say, I am the only Democrat who can hold this sea, it's me or a Republican… and that's valid,” Jentleson adds. “He's generally a pretty reliable vote for most of the things we want to pass. He can be very frustrating, but it's literally him or a Republican… Sinema cannot say that she's the only Democrat who can hold that seat. There are other credible Democrats who could run in a primary and win the general election.” Sinema’s fellow Democrat, Sen. Mark Kelly, is up for reelection in just two years. “For him to win, he needs to accomplish a lot of things. He needs to be able to go to voters and say, here's what we did,” Jentleson adds. “And so I don't think that Sinema can, can tell Mark Kelly to go jump off a bridge... It's just untenable to say, ‘I'm going to stand in the way of all the things that Democrats want to do because of my love for the filibuster’ in a purple state. I don't think this is a long-term sustainable position.” Then, former Stockton, California mayor Michael Tubbs talks about his push for universal basic income. And The Daily Beast’s Diana Falzone takes us inside Fox News, as staffers there lose their minds in the face of a challenge from an even crazier conservative network. “They’ve dug in their heels. And now they're going to give the viewers what they want, which is this red meat of cancel culture of Dr. Seuss of Mr. Potato Head,” she tells Jong-Fast. “Things will get even more, as the staffers say at Fox news, ‘Foxifized,’ which is the war on Christmas, the war on men. There’s always a war going on.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not hard to see that the Republican party was the Party of Trump during the four years he was president. But what kind of party are they now? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. “When you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one,” says New Yorker writer and professor Jelani Cobb. There is one thing about today’s GOP, however, that is very clear: “They've doubled and tripled down on a type of politics that is very appealing to disgruntled white people or white identity politics.” If history repeats itself, as it often does, this tactic will bite them in their behinds. In this episode of The New Abnormal, Jelani chats with Molly Jong-Fast about the major similarities he sees between the current state of the GOP and parties of the past that no longer exist. Oof. “The Republican party [are] the modern version of the Whigs,” he explains. “They broke apart over debates about the expansion of slavery, and they could not figure out where they stood on these fundamental questions. They were incoherent internally. And so what was notable to me was the extent to which all those dynamics are present within the current Republican party.” And capitalizing on “white desperation,” is one of the ways it’s trying to remain in power, he adds. This explains the Jan. 6 riots and there’s some bad news: “It might be reasonable to look at January 6th as the onset of a particular kind of political violence rather than the culmination of something that's already concluded,” he says. Then! Molly asks Jelani about the Voting Rights Act and its fate, and he shares a history nugget that many people might not know about (Abraham Lincoln basically gave Black people the right to vote to offset white supremacists in the South, which he saw as a “direct threat to American democracy.”) History strikes again. “A lot more is at stake than we generally acknowledge,” says Jelani. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s not hard to see that the Republican party was the Party of Trump during the four years he was president. But what kind of party are they now? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. “When you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one,” says New Yorker writer and professor Jelani Cobb. There is one thing about today’s GOP, however, that is very clear: “They've doubled and tripled down on a type of politics that is very appealing to disgruntled white people or white identity politics.” If history repeats itself, as it often does, this tactic will bite them in their behinds. In this episode of The New Abnormal, Jelani chats with Molly Jong-Fast about the major similarities he sees between the current state of the GOP and parties of the past that no longer exist. Oof. “The Republican party [are] the modern version of the Whigs,” he explains. “They broke apart over debates about the expansion of slavery, and they could not figure out where they stood on these fundamental questions. They were incoherent internally. And so what was notable to me was the extent to which all those dynamics are present within the current Republican party.” And capitalizing on “white desperation,” is one of the ways it’s trying to remain in power, he adds. This explains the Jan. 6 riots and there’s some bad news: “It might be reasonable to look at January 6th as the onset of a particular kind of political violence rather than the culmination of something that's already concluded,” he says. Then! Molly asks Jelani about the Voting Rights Act and its fate, and he shares a history nugget that many people might not know about (Abraham Lincoln basically gave Black people the right to vote to offset white supremacists in the South, which he saw as a “direct threat to American democracy.”) History strikes again. “A lot more is at stake than we generally acknowledge,” says Jelani. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Republicans are terrified—with good reason. Utah Sen. Mike Lee went viral this week when he sputtered earlier that one of the new voting rights bills making its way through the House was “written in hell by the devil himself.” And Lee’s GOP colleagues didn’t exactly knock the notion down. “They should be scared of it,” Rep. Eric Swawell, the California Democrat, tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “What we saw this past election in Georgia and Arizona —states that have historically made it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote—was that when you expand access to the polls, Democrats can win. And so I'm sure it was not comfortable for Georgians and Arizona leaders to certify the results for Joe Biden and [Sens.] Mark Kelly, [Raphael] Warnock and [Jon] Ossoff.” “But instead of doing the right thing and standing on the integrity [of the election], they're learning the wrong lesson,” Swalwell adds. “What they're doing now is they're going back and saying, ‘Well, we don't ever want to do that again. We don't ever want to certify a Democratic victory. So let's just change the rules... Let's get rid of early voting. Let's get rid of Sunday voting, which benefits the faith-based communities of Georgia. Let's make it a misdemeanor if you pass out food or water to a long line.... And that way we can protect ourselves from another Democratic victory.’” “If we do not pass HR1 and HR4—the two voting rights bills—you will see this institutionalized across the country, and the results will be devastating,” he continues. “HR1 gets rid of the dirty maps of redistricting, gerrymandering, and the dirty money. It strips down to the studs as much as you can legislatively the Citizens United ruling. HR4, The John Lewis Civil Rights act really puts back in place what's called pre-clearance—requiring approval from the courts before you can move polling places or purge voter rolls. And so if there was ever a reason to break the filibuster, which was put in place to block voting rights, it would be to advance both voting rights. It's almost a perfect completion of the circle.” Then, Justice Democrats spokesperson Walid Shahid talks about how President Biden can avoid the traps that snagged Obama. And Carl Zimmer—a top science reporter for the New York Times and author of Life’s Edge: the Search for What It Means To Be Alive—joins Jong-Fast to discuss the pandemic, and the botched response that we are only now beginning to counteract. “People knew this was coming for 20, 30 years, and yet we didn't prepare well enough,” he says. “If you look at countries like Nigeria or Senegal, and look at their case rate, their death rate, and all the rest, they have done incredibly well. And, and I was recently listening to a Nigerian disease specialist, talk about why this is. And one reason is that they'd been through Ebola and been through other outbreaks. They know what a virus can do when it goes berserk. And so they coordinated very early lockdowns and everyone was on board and they had good, consistent public health messaging. They didn't have a lot of money, they didn't have a lot of resources, but they were coordinated and effective. And I think we could learn a lot from them. And we should also look to ourselves and say, ‘well, why did we in the United States that makes such a spectacular mess of it.’” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis may have been the runner-up to former President Donald Trump in the recent CPAC straw poll, his chances of ever becoming president himself are not good, according to Florida’s top Democrat. “You know, he went MIA for three weeks in November claiming that he was working on some statewide plan. My take is that he probably had COVID and didn’t want to tell people when the vaccines first came to our state,” Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Fried also spills the tea on DeSantis’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his real boss—Trump. “A lot of it was, he [DeSantis] was getting his nod from President Trump and wasn’t able to do anything without President Trump’s approval, and the same thing is happening here, because now President Trump is a resident. So I’m sure that [DeSantis] is consistently calling the president and I’m sure the president’s wealthy friends in the state of Florida are asking for the vaccines, and so they’re getting it delivered to them.“ But Fried isn’t done truth-telling about DeSantis and how his vaccine rollout will burn down his presidential aspirations, after he allowed non-residents to claim coveted doses for themselves while Floridians went without. “He allowed for out-of-state people to come into the state. So we heard, you know, big donors and people on the boards of hospitals and nursing homes were flying into our state,” she tells Molly. Also in the episode, Peter Segal of NPR’s beloved quiz show Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! joins Molly to talk about the emotional life of politics and everything that isn’t on Twitter. Sagal feels passionately that when the aliens come down to Earth, they are going to not see much of a difference between left and right wing cable television rhetoric. “Differences that are obvious to us would not be to a Martian,” he says. “Looking at a camera and explaining to us very seriously and very sincerely why another group of people are terrible... They’re trying to get the audience to feel the same way about the opposite group of people, to feel indignant, to feel angry, to feel righteously upset about how awful these people are to feed that fuel. And what that says to me is that we’re more alike than we thought.” And then the crew brings on David Shor, who says his job is to “get Democrats elected” but his formal title is head of data science at Open Labs. Shor tells us how Democrats can win elections and the big problem with the 2020 election. “One of the big stories of this election is that those non-white conservatives started to vote more like white conservatives, that we started to see this ideological polarization that’s happened over the last four years,” he says. “This has been a long-term trend, 2018 was worse than 2016. I think it’s something that a lot of people ignored, that there were a lot of races where Democrats did substantially worse than [Hillary] Clinton among non-white voters, and it was impactful. The reason we lost the Florida Senate race, or the Georgia gubernatorial race, if we had done as well among non-white voters as Clinton did, we wouldn’t have lost those races. And in the same way, going to 2020, I think, you know, 2020 was worse than 2018. And if you look at some survey data, you get some hints as to why. We ended up asking after the election, we did a large post-election survey of Latinos and asked a battery of issue questions just to try to get at what was motivating some of these voters who switched over. I think the single largest predictor was attitudes toward crime, attitudes toward public safety, attitudes toward policing.” All of that plus Kyrsten Sinema’s Marie Antoinette imitation and the secret to getting that sought-after “NPR voice” on the latest The New Abnormal. If you... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s safe to say that the people of New York City are ready for a new mayor, and certainly one who isn’t Bill deBlasio. Sure, he gave the city universal pre-K but had some faux paus over the years, most recently in 2020, when he was accused of antisemitism for a tweet addressed to the Hasidic Jewish community over social distancing rules during COVID and also (this one was big) for not standing up to the NYPD for harassing citizens during the George Floyd riots this summer. One of the many candidates stepping up to take his place is Maya Wiley, an activist, professor and veteran of City Hall, who says she will handle things much differently if she becomes the next mayor of New York City. To start, she doesn’t think there should have ever been a curfew during the protests, she tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, producer Jesse Cannon and Beast editor Harry Siegel in this members-only episode of the New Abnormal. (“You can not have a control and containment model of policing that sees who are, who are expressing first amendment rights as the enemy.”) She also made it clear that she won’t bow down to bullying from police unions like many believe deBlasio did. “[The NYPD] works for us. You're public servants,” she says. “We're going to put the public back in public safety. And what I mean by that is civilian oversight are the rules of the road. Of the priorities of policing, we are going to right-size it, because it does not make any sense to have police doing functions that other experts should be doing like mental health crisis response.” When it comes to the city’s economy, she plans to take a Depression-era approach: investing in “communities that have been hard hit by COVID.” Plus! Molly asks her about Cuomo’s allegations (“There has never been any change worth fighting for where you didn't have someone who was difficult to work with.) If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It’s safe to say that the people of New York City are ready for a new mayor, and certainly one who isn’t Bill deBlasio. Sure, he gave the city universal pre-K but had some faux paus over the years, most recently in 2020, when he was accused of antisemitism for a tweet addressed to the Hasidic Jewish community over social distancing rules during COVID and also (this one was big) for not standing up to the NYPD for harassing citizens during the George Floyd riots this summer. One of the many candidates stepping up to take his place is Maya Wiley, an activist, professor and veteran of City Hall, who says she will handle things much differently if she becomes the next mayor of New York City. To start, she doesn’t think there should have ever been a curfew during the protests, she tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast, producer Jesse Cannon and Beast editor Harry Siegel in this members-only episode of the New Abnormal. (“You can not have a control and containment model of policing that sees who are, who are expressing first amendment rights as the enemy.”) She also made it clear that she won’t bow down to bullying from police unions like many believe deBlasio did. “[The NYPD] works for us. You're public servants,” she says. “We're going to put the public back in public safety. And what I mean by that is civilian oversight are the rules of the road. Of the priorities of policing, we are going to right-size it, because it does not make any sense to have police doing functions that other experts should be doing like mental health crisis response.” When it comes to the city’s economy, she plans to take a Depression-era approach: investing in “communities that have been hard hit by COVID.” Plus! Molly asks her about Cuomo’s allegations (“There has never been any change worth fighting for where you didn't have someone who was difficult to work with.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is just how dire things got for the Biden campaign in early 2020. Plus, just how much damage Trump did by hiding his COVID vaccine, and Colorado’s voting model. How did Joe Biden manage to eke out a presidential win after washing up in fourth place in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire? Co-host Molly Jong-Fast still wants to know. “I’ve spent much of the week talking about being wrong about Cuomo, but I would like to take a minute to talk about being wrong about Biden,” she tells NBC News’ Jonathan Allen, co-author of the new book Lucky: How Biden Barely Won the Presidency, on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. While Jong-Fast and others were writing Biden’s political obituary in February 2020, his staffers were suggesting the former vice president refinance his house to put money into his dying campaign, Allen says. “It's not the most unheard of thing for a candidate to do it,” he says, but “a presidential candidate doesn't do that. And the subtext of going to him to tell him that is that it might be time to just wrap up the campaign. To Joe Biden's everlasting credit, he believed in himself.” Allen talks about how Biden’s key endorsement from South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn came about—and another key to his win, the coronavirus pandemic. “COVID hits and Biden is taken off the trail and he is able to be scripted know for his entire career, been disciplined and reporters love him because they'll talk, but he's on disciplined. And now his campaign has the ability to control his message and choose when he talks and how he talks to who he talks to. Um, and he's able to make those discretionary decisions along with his advisors. And meanwhile, Trump is on the stage at the white house, telling people to inject disinfectant, to combat COVID.” Allen also talks about whether Biden will be able to unify the country and get any Republican votes to get legislation passed. “I think that there are things on which a Biden will be able to get votes from model Republicans. Um, it sort of independent thinking Republicans, you know, the converse is some of these bills are going to be incredibly difficult for them to vote against. I mean, think about voting against the COVID relief bill that's already made, you know, an entire campaign's worth of ads for an opponent. Marco Rubio is going to vote against this COVID relief bill, and he's going to have a democratic opponent next time. There's several that are thinking about getting in, including Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy from Florida.” Also in the episode, Jong-Fast is joined by Eric Topol, cardiologist scientist and author and the founder and director of the Scripps research transitional Institute, who talks about how the vaccinations are going and how hard the U.K. variant will hit. The U.K. variant, he says, will hit hard in Florida, California, and Texas, but he’s not so worried about the South African and Brazilian variants, which “ don't seem to be nearly as infectious.” How are vaccines going? The U.K., he says “can go much faster since they're not giving the second doses right now. We've actually been pushing for that in the US to get ready for this variant that we're going to be hit with there that you gave variant, but there isn't receptivity at the white house, uh, yet, or we're Tony Fauci. We think that just for a month to go with the one dose, uh, you know, and then get these, all these people get their second dose a little bit delayed would be really advantageous, but we haven't had success in pushing for that.” HE also says it’s a travesty Trump's decision to cover up the fact that he was vaccinated. “We have politicization of the vaccine of vaccines. We have a remarkable global gap... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, a central goal of the conservative movement was to install right-wing judges. A Republican president delivered, big time. And these Trumpists are still pissed. Which tells you one thing. For the authoritarian wing of the Republican party, this was never about interpreting the American legal code. It was always about raw political power. “It's not about the rule of law. It's not about getting good qualified judges. It's about results- oriented litigation,” former U.S. Attorney for Alabama Joyce Vance tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “They want judges who will vote to save the election for a president who has clearly lost it. And that's just out of bounds. It doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican. The notion that the courts could be used to steal an election is really the epitome of being anti-democratic. It's ludicrous. It's ridiculous. It just shows you that these folks are off the rails. They might as well have stood on a stage at CPAC and torn up the Constitution.” Vance adds, “We should immediately begin to identify what's being done here as anti-democratic. I don't believe that that's where my Republican friends in Alabama are. Many of them are good people who have different principled views than I have on policy issues. They believe in the Constitution and the rule of law. And they're horrified by what they're seeing.” Because the Trumpists aren’t just looking for judges that overturn elections they don’t like. They don’t want anyone outside of their crowd to be able to vote, period. “These efforts to suppress the vote previously have been relegated to dark corners of political operatives. It's now actually the platform of the Republican party to make it hard for people to vote, because they're afraid that they might not vote Republican. They should be expending half the energy they're expending on voter suppression on trying to win voters over, on creating policies that are appealing to the population,” Vance says. “This is a sickness in the American political dialogue.” Vance also looks at the mushrooming scandals around Andrew Cuomo, and the mounting legal cases for Trump. Then, Olivia Troye, who worked for Trump and Mike Pence during the early days of the pandemic, talks about their botched response to COVID. “It turns out nobody in the White House cared about spreading the virus,” she says. And the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, fresh from CPAC, talks about how even straight-laced Republicans are now espousing the Big Lie. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The theme this year, stupidly enough, is ‘America Uncanceled.’ But the only real way to get any kinda cred at the 2021 Conversative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, to make a stink about how you’ve totally been canceled. One easy way? Refuse to wear a mask, even though the host city and the hotel both require it. “We’ve seen these conservative influencers who, it seems, are deliberately getting kicked out of CPAC by not wearing a mask,” The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Because for them, CPAC is sort of just the place to see and be seen. They don't really care if they get kicked out. I mean, they don't want to hurt their brand by wearing a mask. And so we've seen a lot of these guys [showcase] the video of the ceremonial ouster from CPAC.” “They're really against being canceled, but it actually seems like the culture of conservatives now—the merit badge is, you got canceled. Like, Marjorie Taylor Greeene is a celebrity now, because she got canceled,” adds producer Jesse Cannon. But there’s a reason the CPAC posse is coalescing around cancelation. It’s because they can’t agree on much else. “The thing that I was really struck by, Jong-Fast says, “was that they're so light on policy… There's no nuts and bolts stuff.” “The only policy discussion you hear at CPAC is when some lobbyist is clearly trying to plant something,” Sommer replies. “Theoretically, CPAC is supposed to be a bring[ing] together of the factions of the conservative movement. But this year I think everyone is so shell-shocked from 2020, they can't acknowledge that they lost. Because that would mean acknowledging that Trump lost. And everyone's just so terrified of Trump.” The only thing left to fill the space is the performative resistance. “So, apparently, to get this hotel, [the CPAC organizers] had to promise that people would wear masks,” Sommer says. “But at the same time you're inviting the people who are least willing to wear masks, to celebrate often how much they hate masks. So you have speakers like Ted Cruz saying how dumb it is to wear masks.” Sommer adds, “So then occasionally in CPAC you have to have the organizers stand up and say, ‘we all love property rights, right?’ ‘Yeah!’ And they're like, ‘well, what about the right to have people a mask on your property?’ And everyone goes, ‘boooooo!!!’” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The theme this year, stupidly enough, is ‘America Uncanceled.’ But the only real way to get any kinda cred at the 2021 Conversative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, to make a stink about how you’ve totally been canceled. One easy way? Refuse to wear a mask, even though the host city and the hotel both require it. “We’ve seen these conservative influencers who, it seems, are deliberately getting kicked out of CPAC by not wearing a mask,” The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Because for them, CPAC is sort of just the place to see and be seen. They don't really care if they get kicked out. I mean, they don't want to hurt their brand by wearing a mask. And so we've seen a lot of these guys [showcase] the video of the ceremonial ouster from CPAC.” “They're really against being canceled, but it actually seems like the culture of conservatives now—the merit badge is, you got canceled. Like, Marjorie Taylor Greeene is a celebrity now, because she got canceled,” adds producer Jesse Cannon. But there’s a reason the CPAC posse is coalescing around cancelation. It’s because they can’t agree on much else. “The thing that I was really struck by, Jong-Fast says, “was that they're so light on policy… There's no nuts and bolts stuff.” “The only policy discussion you hear at CPAC is when some lobbyist is clearly trying to plant something,” Sommer replies. “Theoretically, CPAC is supposed to be a bring[ing] together of the factions of the conservative movement. But this year I think everyone is so shell-shocked from 2020, they can't acknowledge that they lost. Because that would mean acknowledging that Trump lost. And everyone's just so terrified of Trump.” The only thing left to fill the space is the performative resistance. “So, apparently, to get this hotel, [the CPAC organizers] had to promise that people would wear masks,” Sommer says. “But at the same time you're inviting the people who are least willing to wear masks, to celebrate often how much they hate masks. So you have speakers like Ted Cruz saying how dumb it is to wear masks.” Sommer adds, “So then occasionally in CPAC you have to have the organizers stand up and say, ‘we all love property rights, right?’ ‘Yeah!’ And they're like, ‘well, what about the right to have people a mask on your property?’ And everyone goes, ‘boooooo!!!’” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office finally got its hands on Donald Trump’s taxes and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes clear why he spent so much time trying to keep them hidden away. In this episode of The New Abnormal, Mary Trump joins as Molly Jong-Fast’s co-host to talk about the development, a topic that she knows a lot about. (Quick recap: She helped with the New York TImes’ investigation into Trump taxes.) But these taxes are different than the taxes Mary had been involved with, she says. “The taxes I gave them are old and from my grandfather's company. So I think [the new taxes] will be really helpful in establishing patterns where such patterns actually exist,” she explains. But there’s one problem. She doesn’t think Trump is really sweating it down in Mar-a-Lago, mainly because he’s gotten away with so much shit for so long. What makes this time any different? “If he goes down because of his taxes, Al Capone style, I'm all for it,” she says. “And if it's bad enough, which it's going to be, I think his ability to stay out of jail decreases significantly.” It’s not impossible, and there is one thing she says we can keep doing to make it happen. Then! there’s still the Republicans’ MAGA Problem. “It's almost like they have Stockholm syndrome [from Trump] that they gave to themselves,” Molly says, and Mary piles on: “They are an anti-democratic party and they will do anything, including embracing counter-majoritarian tactics, to maintain their power, no matter how illegitimately.” Even if it goes against their voters’ own interest, or well-being. (“Self-interest in the name of being superior,” says Mary.) Then! Rep. Sylvia Rodriguez (D-TX) joins Molly, producer Jesse Cannon and Daily Beast congressional reporter Sam Brodey to share what the situation currently looks like in Texas, how AOC spent a few days visiting her and helping out and why running off to Cancun was never even a thought in her mind—but recruiting Sen. Ted Cruz to volunteer at the food bank with her is. (“His neighborhood is slightly different than mine, and they have a lot of access to resources and it would be helpful.”) Plus, Rep. Val Dennings (D-FL) shares what being in the Capitol during the riots was like from a former law enforcement officer perspective and faces Molly’s very blunt question. Is she going to run for Senate? If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just us discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Atlanta-based comedian Blaire Erskine has blown up on Twitter over the past year with videos that not only roast Trump-loving conservatives but have also managed to fool a large number of prominent liberals. With characters like Tiffany Trump’s best friend, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s daughter and Ted Cruz’s spokesperson, Blaire rides a fine line between parody and reality and nails it every time. In this episode, we talk about how she honed this new craft during the pandemic, why 90% of the hate she gets comes from the left and a lot more. Twitter: @blaireerskine and @mattwilstein | Instagram: @blaire.erskine and @lastlaughpod Subscribe to The Last Laugh here:https://link.chtbl.com/thelastlaugh Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, he’s gotten away with it. He lied. He cheated. He treated the government like a get-rich-quick-scheme and his most ardent followers like marks. But now, Donald Trump could be facing serious criminal charges. The kind of charges that might lead to the former president going to jail. The Supreme Court turned down Trump’s final appeal, and that means his accounting firm has to turn over his tax records and business documents to Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance ASAP. “Trump's lawyers will always come up with something, but there should be no reason why the grand jury won't get these financial records tomorrow,” Daily Beast legal analyst Jay Michaelson tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “Basically, what we all know happened was: Trump inflated the value of his business when it suited him, which is in order to get on the Forbes list [of richest people] and also to get loans from Deutsche Bank. And then he deflated his worth in order to save on taxes. So that's illegal... Not only is that insurance fraud and bank fraud, but that could affect those loans,” Michaelson adds. “Will he go to jail for, like, the rest of his life? Probably no. Is it possible that this would lead to criminal charges that would carry jail time? I would say that's pretty likely, and we could have a grand jury indictment fairly soon,” Michaelson continues. “A lot of these kinds of white collar crimes are settled, and they're settled out for large financial settlements. In this case, I'm not sure that Cy Vance is interested in settling with Donald Trump—even if Donald Trump could afford the fines that he would have to pay, which I don't think he can.” To which Jong-Fast asks, “Can he borrow it from Jared?” “Unfortunately, he's not the financial wizard that he makes himself out to be.” “Wait. But Jared made $200 trillion.” “Don't fall for it. I mean, he's cute, but he's not really that smart.” Also on a packed episode of The New Abnormal: Tommy ‘Quentin Quarantino’ Marcus talks about all the cash he raised for Planned Parenthood—in Rush Limbaugh’s name. ‘How to Be a Liberal’ author Ian Dunt tells us how post-Trump Americans should see still-Boris Brits like him: “So what you should do is look at us like we were like someone you used to date that is still taking heroin. ‘I'm so glad I left that behind,’ because that's where we are.” Finally, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner about how the fight against the far-right needs to be taken international. “We're going to do a deep dive on this anti-government extremism—and particularly some of these groups, their ties to right-wing groups in Europe, oftentimes amplified by Russia,” he says. “I know the threat is real. I know it's not just in this country.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We know how the story went: Trump was impeached for a second time. There is a trial. He is found not guilty because there not enough votes needed to make it happen, despite the majority of the Senate voting against the former president. Lots of people have questions in regards to this process. Namely, what the hell? But also, why didn’t the Democrats forgo their right to call witnesses? Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CA) told co-host Molly Jong-Fast his perspective on things in this member-only bonus episode of The New Abnormal. “Whether it's five witnesses or 5,000 witnesses, it would not have changed the ultimate outcome,” he says, echoing Rep. Jamie Raskin has said on the issue. They did consider witnesses nonetheless, says Neguse, but to him, it came down to timing. “It was clear that other witnesses whom had been speculated about in the media in terms of potential witnesses that we could have heard from were unlikely to voluntarily comply and voluntarily appear, which meant we would have to issue subpoenas. And they could very well contest those subpoenas in court,” he says. Ultimately, he feels the point was made, and everyone knows Trump was responsible: “That is something that obviously was crystal clear by virtue of the evidence that we showed during the course of the trial, which of course the American public had a chance to see as well.” He shares his own experience during the Capitol insurrection, including the moment he realized things had gotten bad. “I texted my wife and told her that, uh, I loved her and our daughter,” he says. Plus! He and Molly discuss what plans the House has to make sure this doesn’t happen again and that people in power are held responsible. And is Medicare for All and federal legalization of marijuana on the horizon? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We know how the story went: Trump was impeached for a second time. There is a trial. He is found not guilty because there not enough votes needed to make it happen, despite the majority of the Senate voting against the former president. Lots of people have questions in regards to this process. Namely, what the hell? But also, why didn’t the Democrats forgo their right to call witnesses? Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CA) told co-host Molly Jong-Fast his perspective on things in this member-only bonus episode of The New Abnormal. “Whether it's five witnesses or 5,000 witnesses, it would not have changed the ultimate outcome,” he says, echoing Rep. Jamie Raskin has said on the issue. They did consider witnesses nonetheless, says Neguse, but to him, it came down to timing. “It was clear that other witnesses whom had been speculated about in the media in terms of potential witnesses that we could have heard from were unlikely to voluntarily comply and voluntarily appear, which meant we would have to issue subpoenas. And they could very well contest those subpoenas in court,” he says. Ultimately, he feels the point was made, and everyone knows Trump was responsible: “That is something that obviously was crystal clear by virtue of the evidence that we showed during the course of the trial, which of course the American public had a chance to see as well.” He shares his own experience during the Capitol insurrection, including the moment he realized things had gotten bad. “I texted my wife and told her that, uh, I loved her and our daughter,” he says. Plus! He and Molly discuss what plans the House has to make sure this doesn’t happen again and that people in power are held responsible. And is Medicare for All and federal legalization of marijuana on the horizon? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Andy Slavitt was shocked when he joined the Biden administration. “I was under the impression coming in—as many, many Americans were—that there were big stockpiles of vaccines waiting to go out the door that were produced over the course of the last year. It's been much, much less the case than I think we'd been led to believe,” the White House senior adviser for COVID response tells Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. It was one of a host of shortcomings the Biden team found, Slavitt says: “Not enough vaccines, not enough vaccinators, not enough places for people to get vaccines.” “So when we got here January 20th, one of the things we learned as an only 46% of the vaccines delivered to states had actually made its way into people's arms. Now you'd never expect that to be 100%. But 46%? It was low,” Slavitt adds. There’s now a plan in place to purchase as many as 600 million doses, hopefully enough for every American. States are now using 75% of their doses, a big step up from a few weeks ago. And there may be another vaccine around the corner, from Johnson and Johnson. “I would love to tell you, we weren't going to be starting with a huge stockpile of Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The truth is we're starting with a small number and we've got to build it as quickly as possible.” Meanwhile, the virus is evolving. More contagious, deadlier variants are spreading, fast. But even here, Slavitt sees some signs for hope. “All of the vaccines work very well against the English B117 variant. So that's good. The South African variant—and there's another one that looks like the South African, that's the Brazilian variant—that one it's interesting. There is a degradation of performance of the vaccines against the South African variant. However, that degradation is thankfully still above the scientific threshold for effectiveness,” Slavitt says. “It still generates antibodies. It doesn't generate as many. But it’s good.” The vaccines may even be a bit better than advertised, Slavitt says. “You know, we may have done a little bit of a disservice to ourselves when with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, we talked about the end point as including [serve] and mild [COVID-19 cases], because we really don't care as much about the mild. And so we get very fixated on the fact that they're 95% percent effective against both, right. And we probably should have stepped back and said, ‘you know what, let’s just measure it against more severe symptoms.’ In which case, the Johnson and Johnson does very close to comparable.” And all of the vaccines seem to stop severe cases—from all the variants. There are even some indications that “viral load”—the amount of virus a person carries—“is decreased for people who are vaccinated,” indicating “that these vaccines not only reduce disease and save lives, but these vaccines also will reduce the ability of people to affect one another, which if it holds up, will be terrific news.” But only if the vaccine gets into the arms of the people who need it the most, Slavitt cautions. “It's not just how many vaccines are being administered, but also how equitable equitably they're being distributed. Because look, we all know there are half the population or more would crawl over broken glass to get the vaccine, right. But the problem is they’re crawling over other people,” he adds. “You know, they're getting online and going into communities, maybe neighborhoods they've never visited or visited in a long time, but [where] we put vaccines that are really hard hit by the virus. People are coming in, refreshing their browser, and going in and getting these appointments. It's really important that we not just focus on how many people we vaccinated, but that we do it as equitably as possible. And that's a big, big push for us.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

That impeachment vote in the Senate was tough to swallow, with 43 Republicans voting to acquit Trump for the insurrection done in his name, by people waving his flag. Even more gag-worthy was Sen. Mitch McConnell’s speech afterwards—blaming Trump for the wannabe coup minutes after voting to let him off. “The most galling statements for me were the ones from the Mitch McConnells and the Rob Portmans and the Marco Rubios after they voted to acquit Donald Trump, basically saying, ‘Well, you know, the whole coup thing was kind of bad and I wish you wouldn't have tried to do it. And I wish a cop wouldn't have died. And you know, he made some bad choices. But you know, I had no choice,’” Bulwark writer-at-large Tim Miller tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. But of course, McConnell and his crew did have a choice. The House impeached Trump on January 13. The Senate decided to take a vacation, rather than take up the case right away. And once the vacations were over and Biden was sworn in, they decided against all reason and precedent that an ex-official like Trump somehow couldn’t be convicted. “For Mitch McConnell to be like, ‘I really wanted to do it, but…’ Bullshit. The only reason that you didn't do it was because of you. It is galling. Give me a hundred [militia-friendly Rep.] Lauren Boberts—who are too stupid to know that it was bad, or Ted Cruzes—who are sociopaths—over Mitch McConnell, trying to try to tell me that he has some feelings about this. Give me a break,” Tim says. Also on the show: Rep. Andy Kim tells Molly what it’s like to be the rare Democrat representing a Trumpy district. Molly gives an update on the Lincoln Project situation. And Tim keeps going in on McConnell. “I know that many listeners will think that Mitch McConnell doesn't have a soul at all, and that's understandable. But he actually does have a flicker of one. He does love the Senate, you know,” Tim adds. “And he wanted to be able to emote about that in his weird Mitch McConnell way. And that's what actually makes it worse… Don't try to memorialize to me. You had an opportunity to do something you didn't. You made the craven move. You sided with the insurrectionists.” Miller says, “Basically what we saw on Saturday was a Republican party that had an opportunity—after five years of being craven cowards that rolled over for Donald Trump at every chance—finally was able to put the stake in his heart and say, ‘We don't need you anymore. We don't tolerate this. And we want to move forward, even it takes a little pain.’ And 43 of them said... ‘nah.’” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert weren’t elected to their positions in the House of Representatives by accident. They ran campaigns like everyone else, and won. Given Greene’s “nutty” aka QAnon-supporting and anti-mask-censorship antics in particular since she arrived in Washington, it may be hard for lots of people to understand why. In this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal, co-host Molly Jong-Fast sat down with Doctor John Cowan, the Republican surgeon who lost to Greene in her district despite both candidates supporting Donald Trump, to get an idea for what people may have had in mind when casting their ballots for her. “I think this is why she got elected is because people really felt like these guys are absolutely crazy in Washington DC,” he explains. “And they are, many of them are, trying to actively destroy the country through their policies and rhetoric and whatnot. And [voters] looked at someone like Marjorie and said, ‘we've got the answer to that. You know, she's a fighter she'll say or do anything.’” Essentially, says Molly, she won for the same reasons Trump did. Cowan agrees: “I think they just thought, well, we've got somebody who's literally going to kick it to the government and maybe he can crack that or drain the swamp as he was off to say.” Then, Molly talks to Gregg Smith, a former Marine and ex-colleague of Erik Prince, who is running against the GOP’s Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado. He feels that he can and will defeat her. Donald Trump had support out there because “people out here will generally vote against the mainstream,” but that support has dwindled, and Boebert’s response to the insurrection is being questioned, he says. But Democrats aren’t going to win the area by pushing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders-level ideologies too hard. “You've got to address the issues that are important out here.” That’s basically what both Cower and Smith have in common with one another: hope in the voters. “I do think people eventually will wake up and see that there's a lot of darkness there,” says Cowan. Plus, Smith shares the moment he knew Erik Prince couldn’t be trusted: “I never want to see him again.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert weren’t elected to their positions in the House of Representatives by accident. They ran campaigns like everyone else, and won. Given Greene’s “nutty” aka QAnon-supporting and anti-mask-censorship antics in particular since she arrived in Washington, it may be hard for lots of people to understand why. In this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal, co-host Molly Jong-Fast sat down with Doctor John Cowan, the Republican surgeon who lost to Greene in her district despite both candidates supporting Donald Trump, to get an idea for what people may have had in mind when casting their ballots for her. “I think this is why she got elected is because people really felt like these guys are absolutely crazy in Washington DC,” he explains. “And they are, many of them are, trying to actively destroy the country through their policies and rhetoric and whatnot. And [voters] looked at someone like Marjorie and said, ‘we've got the answer to that. You know, she's a fighter she'll say or do anything.’” Essentially, says Molly, she won for the same reasons Trump did. Cowan agrees: “I think they just thought, well, we've got somebody who's literally going to kick it to the government and maybe he can crack that or drain the swamp as he was off to say.” Then, Molly talks to Gregg Smith, a former Marine and ex-colleague of Erik Prince, who is running against the GOP’s Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado. He feels that he can and will defeat her. Donald Trump had support out there because “people out here will generally vote against the mainstream,” but that support has dwindled, and Boebert’s response to the insurrection is being questioned, he says. But Democrats aren’t going to win the area by pushing Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders-level ideologies too hard. “You've got to address the issues that are important out here.” That’s basically what both Cowan and Smith have in common with one another: hope in the voters. “I do think people eventually will wake up and see that there's a lot of darkness there,” says Cowan. Plus, Smith shares the moment he knew Erik Prince couldn’t be trusted: “I never want to see him again.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amidst hundreds of thousands of Americans dying from COVID-19, countless pleas from health officials and the CDC to wear maks and social distance, and a recent report from Lancet that put the cherry on top of the “this was basically Trump’s fault” sundae, Fox News has decided to do what Fox News does: Go against all of that. This time, their “poison pill” of choice, as Media Matters’ President and CEO Angelo Cursone calls it in this episode of The New Abnormal, is vaccine skepticism. “What Fox is doing with the vaccines right now is similar to the role that they played at every step of public health measures,” Cursone tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast. “They dismissed social distancing early on. They were sort of skeptical about the masks and Jeanine Pirro was warning her audience. That the only reason people wear masks is to do bad things.” Now, they’re telling their viewers they’re not sure about taking the “George Soros Kool-Aid.” (Rick Wilson is already seeing this play out with “MAGA moms” on Facebook). But Fox has a reason for this, adds Cursone, who shares his theory. It has to do with your cable bill—and it’s also the very way the network could be destroyed. The more outrage they get, the more viewers, the more negotiating power they have against cable companies to get them to charge cable watchers more for their channel. “Fox News, now, for every person that has cable news pays Fox news between $2 and $2 and 50 cents a month, whether or not you ever watched the channel and what they're trying to do, because they've lost so much, advertising [wants to] get that number up from about $2, a person to $3 to $3 and 50 cents over the next year,” and if there’s a way to hit them where it hurts, explains Cursone, it’s here. Of course, it’s not a New Abnormal episode if there isn’t talk of impeachment, especially the hearings going on right now involving the Capitol insurrection. Rick is particularly furious at Rick Scott and Marco Rubio: “They're basically just saying, ah, yeah, our little plot failed. Our little coup failed. So we're just going to hang out here and be the dick kids in the back of the room, throwing at the teacher.” Speaking of dicks, Molly tells the fun little tale of Marjorie Taylor Green and the Tantric Sex Guru and Daily Beast congressional reporter Sam Brodey talks about his experience witnessing the trial in person. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For years, Facebook has been a cesspool of conspiracy theorists, political ragemonsters, and quacks pushing cures for decaying Boomers. But as dangerous as these creeps were, they were mostly contained to the social network. Until the pandemic hit. Now, all of us are locked down. And Facebook’s worst actors and brainwormiest thinking is bursting out into the real world—and threatening to take it over. “I see it a lot actually in local community pages,” The Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill explains on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “To give an example, I was looking at a page, a local news site, about my 5,000-population hometown. The main restaurant, they closed down for a COVID exposure or something. And people were saying, ‘Ah! This is tyranny. We don't have to do this.’ Someone was posting an image macro in the comments with the ‘where we go one, we go all’ Qanon thing. And I'm like, ‘Oh my God, like, this is about the salad bar.’” “You really see the conspiracy theories and the atomization, the disconnection from real people and how you would hopefully behave in a real life setting. That just vanishes on Facebook. And I think with so many people using that now as their main means of communicating, it's spreading,” Weill tells Molly Jong-Fast. Take the icky phenomenon of online multi-level marketing. Those “are those parasitic posts that you see all over your Facebook. It's your friend from home saying, ‘Hey, I just got a great deal on vitamin supplements. And, uh, if you, you know, give me $50, I'll send them to you. Or you can go into business with me and become my associate,’” Weill says. “It's something that you're not legally allowed to call a financial cult, but golly, does it sound like one.” One local politician in Kansas was in so deep, he had “someone come and make a sales pitch for during a political meeting on preventing COVID,” Weill continues. “During a council meeting on COVID, he brought in someone from an essential oil company to make the pitch about how these products can help you and your family and empower you to live the healthy lifestyle.” “I don't think there are official rules against doing that. We've just been, uh, coasting on people not doing that. That's been kind of the unspoken expectation,” Weill says. Speaking of expectations, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stops by the show to talk about what he wants to see from Trump’s upcoming second impeachment. And Rick Wilson has a message for the Republican senators who want to let the ex-president off the hook: “This is one of those votes, like the Iraq war or Obamacare, that you never escape. You never escape it. And if you think the tide isn't turning, you're not paying attention. Trumpism is still a threat and will be for a long time, so I know that's why those guys are afraid. But the rest of the country is done with this bullshit.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic shook things up, a lot. It exposed the country’s deepest inequalities, and arguably, made them worse. Now, all eyes are on President Biden to see how he’ll fix it, and Republicans are responding exactly as expected: by crying about the debt. Here’s the thing, though, says Paul Krugman, an American economist and op-ed columnist at The New York Times, there’s really no reason to. It’s a tale as old as time. Both parties spend, but when it’s time for Dems to make the economic plans, and Biden took office, Republicans “suddenly rediscovered that they were worried about debt” he tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. But it actually doesn’t matter, he claims. “The important thing to realize is that governments are not like you and me, governments don't have to pay back their debt,” he explains. “All they have to do is make sure that their obligations don't grow beyond any reasonable estimate of what they can us over time. That means they never actually have to pay off debt. It's a threat that exists only in the imagination of people who want to have some reason to squeeze government spending.” Instead, says Krugman, lawmakers should prioritize giving money to poor families with children, which is cheap and will get them out of poverty. “You can do an enormous amount for children, fairly affordably,” he says, but for the love of Pete, stop calling it tax breaks. “It's actually just giving people money,” he says, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Will the Trump voters go for this? It’s unclear, but Krugman says Biden’s policies actually help them the most. (“There's basically no place in America that is more dependent upon federal aid. That is more lifted out of absolute misery by massive support from the taxpayers than Eastern Kentucky. And it's very, very hard to find someone who didn't vote for Trump and those in those counties.”) Plus! The past alignments of the Democratic and Republican parties are completely changed, he says. (“People used to describe [the GOP] as being a center, right party, but it's not, it's now an extreme authoritarian, anti-liberal, anti-science, anti-almost-everything party that more or less [resembles] fascist parties of Europe.”) And! A prediction of what economic recovery look like post-pandemic. It’s good news for the working class. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The pandemic shook things up, a lot. It exposed the country’s deepest inequalities, and arguably, made them worse. Now, all eyes are on President Biden to see how he’ll fix it, and Republicans are responding exactly as expected: by crying about the debt. Here’s the thing, though, says Paul Krugman, an American economist and op-ed columnist at The New York Times, there’s really no reason to. It’s a tale as old as time. Both parties spend, but when it’s time for Dems to make the economic plans, and Biden took office, Republicans “suddenly rediscovered that they were worried about debt” he tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. But it actually doesn’t matter, he claims. “The important thing to realize is that governments are not like you and me, governments don't have to pay back their debt,” he explains. “All they have to do is make sure that their obligations don't grow beyond any reasonable estimate of what they can us over time. That means they never actually have to pay off debt. It's a threat that exists only in the imagination of people who want to have some reason to squeeze government spending.” Instead, says Krugman, lawmakers should prioritize giving money to poor families with children, which is cheap and will get them out of poverty. “You can do an enormous amount for children, fairly affordably,” he says, but for the love of Pete, stop calling it tax breaks. “It's actually just giving people money,” he says, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Will the Trump voters go for this? It’s unclear, but Krugman says Biden’s policies actually help them the most. (“There's basically no place in America that is more dependent upon federal aid. That is more lifted out of absolute misery by massive support from the taxpayers than Eastern Kentucky. And it's very, very hard to find someone who didn't vote for Trump and those in those counties.”) Plus! The past alignments of the Democratic and Republican parties are completely changed, he says. (“People used to describe [the GOP] as being a center, right party, but it's not, it's now an extreme authoritarian, anti-liberal, anti-science, anti-almost-everything party that more or less [resembles] fascist parties of Europe.”) And! A prediction of what economic recovery look like post-pandemic. It’s good news for the working class. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So how are House Republicans dealing with the fallout from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s freshly resurfaced 9/11 trutherism, school shooting denialism, and threats on fellow lawmakers’ lives? They’re giving her a standing ovation. “Marjorie Taylor Greene is House minority leader,” co-host Rick Wilson says on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “She runs the House.” The newly elected Georgia Republican, Rick says, is the GOP’s equivalent of the “crazy uncle.” “You know, we know he’s drunk. We know he’s crazy. We know he comes to Thanksgiving dinner every year lit to shit. And we’ll just pretend it’s not happening. And even though Greene was booted from her committees Thursday night in a largely partisan vote, Rick predicts she “will raise a ton of money because they will all say, ‘Oh, we have to teach the lying libtard cucks a lesson. And Marjorie Taylor Greene is a hero and Trump loves her, and therefore we love her’... I guarantee there will be a cottage industry that emerges and says, ‘Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene is rough around the edges. She says some crazy things sometimes. And you know, we don’t believe in those crazy things she says, but, but, but a little echo the distance but she’s just asking questions. She owns the libs. Don’t you want to own the libs?” Later in the episode, co-host Molly Jong-Fast asks Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) whether Republicans will return to the normal world now that former President Donald Trump has been defeated. “Some of the early signals are not good,” the senator says. “Look at Kevin McCarthy yesterday, there were basically no consequences for one of the members who’s just spinning these conspiracy theories. And based on what I heard, there’s a real question about when the dust settles here in the next couple of days, whether she’s going to have more power than she did before.” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) tells Molly that while he has always “tried to form coalitions where I can, when you have someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s not just refusing to certify the election results but was actually threatening assassination against Secretary Clinton and President Obama and harassing members of Congress, you have to draw the line.” “Kevin McCarthy last night displayed the greatest moment of weakness in a party leader I have seen since Newt Gingrich tried to resist the all you can eat pizza bar at Sbarro,” Rick concludes of the House GOP’s closed-door vote Wednesday night. “This idea of giving Marjorie Taylor Greene a free pass by rapping her lightly on the wrist and having her say, ‘I no longer believe wink, wink, wink that QAnon wink, wink, wink is a real thing, wink, wink, Hillary Clinton wink Adrenochrome wink the Jews wink.’ By letting her pass through there and letting his people give her a standing ovation with no punishment, no sanction, nothing, he showed his weakness and he showed how weak he was to the country, to Pelosi, and to the rest of his party.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In recent days, top members of the Biden administration have a startling admission: That millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were lost somewhere in the system. So now, the race is on to track down all of the vials. “This is the number one priority within the Biden administration right now is finding doses and making sure they don't go to waste before they start to ramp up supply through other means,” Erin Banco, The Daily Beast’s lead reporter on the COVID beat, tells Molly Jong-Fast on The New Abnormal. “Their rhetoric right now has been, ‘we have only been here for X amount of days, please give us time. This is not easy.’ I think they're only going to be able to use that excuse for so long. Like, look, you're in government. This is your job. Yeah, these things take time—especially coordinating them across all the States and territories when everyone has a different distribution plan. It’s a slog. But from what I hear, the CDC should have a better idea of where things stand this week,” Banco adds. And while the scramble to find the doses continues, the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection still lingers—especially for those who were there in the Capitol as the MAGA mob raged. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI) tells Molly about her harrowing experience. “There's pounding at the doors. Officers are yelling at people and saying ‘make sure those doors are secured,’” Dingell recounts. “My colleagues were taking benches and chairs and helping secure the doors. And we were told to sit in our chairs, pull out our escape hoods, which are the gas masks. And that if we were told to kneel, we needed to do so right away, because there could be some shooting. It still seems surreal.” Finally, Rick Wilson addresses the revelation that John Weaver, one of his fellow co-founders of the Lincoln Project, sent unwanted, sexually explicit messages to people as young as 14. “If we had been aware of this, if I had been aware of this, I would not for a second have hesitated to report John Weaver to law enforcement. I would have done it in a hot minute,” Wilson says. “I am sickened at his behavior and I'm sickened that we fell for a deception of this scope and scale. And I'm sickened by the fact that a predatory person tried to use our organization and our mission to exploit it for personal reasons,” Wilson adds. “It's a group that shares, we share a very firm belief in accountability, Okay. And I think John should be held accountable.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices