Don’t Feel Bad for Kevin McCarthy—He Dug His Own Grave

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It’s hard to imagine a person facing a tougher work environment than House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) over the past week—with criticism raining down on all sides and an insurgent campaign to oust him from his long-sought role.

But there’s no reason to feel bad for him, according to The New Abnormal co-host Andy Levy on this week’s episode.

“He is sort of stuck in this place now, but it’s a place largely, or at least in part, of his own making,” Levy said. “I always think about Nancy Pelosi, who for better or for worse had an incredible grip on the Democratic House members when she was speaker. She did keep things running… and McCarthy has none of that.”

It’s a point that co-host Danielle Moodie agreed with, adding that there’s no way for him to “satiate the MAGA monster that [McCarthy] has been feeding for close to eight years now.”

“They’re never going to be content unless you present Hunter Biden’s head on top of Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden in shackles,” Moodie said. “And even then, they’d say, ‘This isn’t harsh enough.”

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Then, WIRED staff writer Druv Mehrota joins the program to discuss Shotspotter’s recent purchase of a dystopian predictive policing company called Geolitica, which created a product called PredPol. The deal has civil liberties and privacy advocates up in arms—they say that the proliferation of this technology has the potential to exacerbate already existing biases in American policing.

“Cops are more likely to make arrests in Black and minority areas, and then the PredPol algorithm predicts more crime in those areas, which leads to more patrols in those areas, which leads to more arrests, et cetera, ad infinitum, I suppose,” Levy said of the situation.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.