Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast and welcome to the Daily Beast, the new abnormal.

I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at the Daily Beast.

We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science

that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer.

Our world has been turned up to a down.

On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it.

And I'm producer Jesse Kennan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

Today we have a super interesting episode.

We'll talk to historian and host of the podcast now and then, Heather Cox Richardson, about how a history is linking up with our present.

Then we'll talk to political investigations reporter at the Daily Beast Jose Pallieri, about some very interesting legal jeopardy for both Donald J. Trump and Matt Kates.

But first, we have Bloomberg opinion columnist Robert A. George.

We're so excited to have you. I think of you as like a grown up, even though I don't know that you're that much,

if you might be a tiny bit older than I am, but I think of you as someone who has been doing this for a while.

I have been doing this for a while. Even when I don't share my age, people can sort of figure it out.

I work for New Gengrich back in the 90s.

Yes.

Whether I'm a grown up, it depends on who you want to talk to, but I have been around for a while.

Yes. Let's talk about CPAC.

I mean, there's some rewriting of history here with CPAC, and I want to just for you to weigh in on this,

since you have this history of being in the GOP, people are saying, well, CPAC has always been where the conservative movement is,

but it actually has always been kind of a fringe lunatic group.

I wouldn't quite go that far. If you want to call it fringe, if you want to call it the right of the right, I think that's fair.

...