“The problem is there are so many mass shootings that they are now pushing other mass shootings out of the news” and Republicans just want to change the subject each time, co-host Molly Jong-Fast says to kick off the latest episode of The New Abnormal. But the cold comfort is that “there are so many shootings that we're going to be talking about it, even though Republicans want to run out the clock, they're never gonna be able to run out.”
But, co-host Andy Levy warns, while “I would be incredibly happy to be wrong,” it’s still not clear that Democrats have the votes to accomplish much of anything. “A lot of the country doesn't think that there's anything wrong with an 18-year-old buying an AR-15 or an AR-15-style weapon or a semiautomatic rifle, period.“
But it may well be now or never, says Molly, and “I would encourage everyone here to push Democrats, and Democrats need to push themselves. They have an opportunity here and we don't know when this will ever be back.”
Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast.
Molly and Andy agree that the coming Supreme Court decisions on abortion and guns should be a prime opportunity for Democrats but, says Andy, the party’s consultants and many of its leaders are still stuck in the 1990s while “the world is different now. They have not changed. They have not adapted to the world and the Democratic Party needs to stop listening to them and needs to realize what the Republicans have realized, and to a large extent caused this problem: It’s not the center that drives things and it’s not this triangulation strategy.
“The Republicans do not give a shit about triangulation. They do not care about anyone outside of their base. But what they do is they turn out a large percentage of their base to vote. They motivate their base and they play to their base, and it’s working,” says Andy. “And it’s unfortunately probably going to work in November—big. The Democrats need to realize that they have got to adopt a similar strategy. This does not mean find the left-wing version of QAnon and play to it. Thankfully, the Democratic left-wing base is not insane QAnon people. It’s people that are to the left of Joe Biden on a lot of things but they're not crazy in the way that the right wing is crazy. So just listen to them.”
Plus, We’re Not Broken author and MSNBC columnist Eric Garcia joins the pod to tell Molly about his reporting on autism in America while having autism, and Strict Scrutiny co-host and ABC Supreme Court contributor Katie Shaw explains how politicians hide behind the Supreme Court’s 2008 gun decision to pretend they’re powerless now, and about what’s looming when the Court issues its first big gun decision since then any day now:
“We’ve had two subway shootings since the oral argument in this case. And if all of a sudden there's, you know, an enormous increase in the number of guns on the subway—I live in New York city and we all ride the subway all the time and that's a terrifying future to contemplate” if the court follows up on finding an individual right to have weapons in the home by finding that there’s also a right to bear arms on the street.
“And even if the court says something like, ‘Well, you can ban guns in the subway.’ I'm not sure how you enforce a ban like that.”
Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.