Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Emily Jane Fox sits down with the First Son to talk about his addiction, his dad, what makes a Biden love story, and why he thinks the GOP, and Don Jr. in particular, are obsessed with him.

Hive correspondents unpack Jared Kushner’s romantic and financial spin in his upcoming memoir and try making sense of Donald Trump burying his ex-wife, Ivanka’s mother, on a New Jersey golf course.

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham joins Inside the Hive to talk about what she witnessed on January 6th, Melania’s “lazy” run as First Lady, and what people should know ahead of 2024.

This week, Inside the Hive cohost Joe Hagan talks to Lis Smith, Democratic campaign veteran and author of the new memoir Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story, which details her journey, the public one and the private one, through Democratic campaigns over the past 17 years, for candidates as varied as Jon Corzine, Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and, most infamously, former governor Andrew Cuomo, whose lurid political demise she details down to the last moments of his time in office. A savvy political operator, Smith trains her sights on stubborn problems like Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and what to do about President Joe Biden, who, despite his abysmal poll numbers, she says is preparing to come out swinging in advance of the midterms.    “If the [midterms] are a referendum on Democrats, we will be screwed in November,” says Smith, but if Biden and his surrogates can effectively target Trump-tainted election deniers and antiabortion Republicans, “that’s a terrain we can win on. And that’s a switch that we need to flip—we need to flip that switch pretty soon. And we have the opportunity to now.”   Smith, who helped take Buttigieg’s star to the national level, is now working with Michigan state senator Mallory McMorrow, who went viral with a searing counterattack on anti-LGBTQ+ Republicans. Smith puts McMorrow on a short list of candidates, along with Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas, to form the future of the party. Listen to Joe's record: "Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980."

This week’s episode of Inside the Hive first dives into the latest revelations from the January 6th committee, and explores what could happen next as the panel draws to a close Then Chrysta Bilton, along with her husband Nick Bilton, join Emily Jane Fox to discuss “Normal Family,” Chrysta’s memoir that recounts her discovery of more than 35 biological siblings from the same sperm donor. She describes her colorful upbringing, the shock of a lifetime in finding out that she was perhaps unknowingly dating her half brother, and how this experience shaped her views on nature versus nurture

This week, Vanity Fair contributing editor Jeff Sharlet joins Inside the Hive to talk about his journey into the far-right world of Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Qanon-ers and Trump cultists — who they are, what they’re saying, what they believe, and what their still-growing movement might portend (including the specter of civil war in America).  Also: Willem Marx, a London-based contributor to Vanity Fair, discusses the fall of British PM Boris Johnson as well as his latest report on the undue influence of Putin-connected Russian oligarchs in the British establishment - including, allegedly, Johnson himself.

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, the former head of Planned Parenthood joins Emily Jane Fox to discuss abortion rights, contraception, and advocacy in the wake of Roe “I thought that at some point, there would be some group within the Republican party that would go, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa. This is too far,” she said.

This week Inside the Hive features two guests focused on the Jan. 6 hearings. First, Daniel Goldman, former federal prosecutor and newly-announced candidate for New York's 10th congressional district, analyzes the findings of the Select Committee investigating the insurrection from the point of view of a lead lawyer in the first Trump impeachment. “If [Merrick Garland] doesn't charge him because Trump is a former president, then that is political,” Goldman says. “And so if you want to de-politicize the Department of Justice, you can't not charge him.” Second, Inside the Hive talks to Alex Holder, the British filmmaker whose exclusive access to Donald Trump and his family before, during and after Jan. 6 has turned his forthcoming documentary, Unprecedented, into explosive new evidence for the Committee and the filmmaker himself into a possible witness. After witnessing Trump’s “tone of belligerence," says Holder, “I predicted that [the Jan. 6 insurrection] was going to happen the night before.”

This week, Inside the Hive co-host Joe Hagan talks to Jason Selvig and Davram Steifler, the comedy duo known as The Good Liars, about their viral prank on the National Rifle Association in late May. Selvig, posing as an NRA ally, stood before Wayne LaPierre and thanked him for his continual “thoughts and prayers” for mass shootings, presenting a brutally exhaustive list. The duo has attended 15 Trump rallies, poking at the QAnon insanity inside, and were eyewitnesses to the insurrection on Jan. 6th—which they also managed to turn into pointed comedy. “You couldn't help but feel like they were getting ready for a battle reenactment or something,” says Steifler. "Everyone we stopped was like, ‘This is 1776.’”

Author Dave Cullen, who has been covering mass shootings in America for two decades, joins Emily Jane Fox for this week’s episode of Inside The Hive, to talk about the slow progress he has witnessed in how new groups are taking on the NRA for the first time, and what he is hearing from survivors of mass shootings about how they are dealing with the repeated trauma.

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a key member of the Jan. 6 Committee investigating the Capitol attack, gives Inside the Hive an exclusive preview of next week’s primetime hearings.  After nearly a year of investigating the insurrection, Raskin says the most surprising discovery has been "the role that money played, and the role of a financial motive behind all these events, to keep the money pouring in.” The committee, he promises, will also draw direct and indirect lines between “the top of the Republican hierarchy” and the "violent hooligans and street fascists” who overran the Capitol.  But will Donald J. Trump himself be implicated? Raskin has said the former president will get his “comeuppance" but whether he’ll face direct criminal justice for his “premeditated” role in an attempted coup remains an open question. Tantalizingly, Raskin deflects on the question of whether former VP Mike Pence has spoken to the committee or might testify against Trump. "I can't get into it,” he says.  Plus: Raskin offers a powerful message and emotional plea to Democrats demoralized by the political landscape facing the party going into the midterms. 

The only public figure with the guts to confront cynical Republicans over gun laws and the Texas massacre was a defiant Democrat who the media class long ago dismissed: gubernatorial nominee Beto O’Rourke. Inside the Hive cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan grapple with the horrors of this week's events in Uvalde and what they say about our broken politics and national backslide. When rare instances of idealism and courage are framed by political elites as mere opportunism, is there any hope left? Where do we go from here?

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running to be the state's next governor, joins Emily Jane Fox fresh on the heels of Tuesday's primary elections. In November, Shapiro, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, will face Republican Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed far-right candidate who wanted to overturn the 2020 election results, whom Shaprio called "extremely dangerous. Fox and Shapiro dive into his opponent's role in the January 6th insurrection and how to message to voters who believe in The Big Lie. Plus, Shapiro speaks to what he learned from Democrats' campaigning mistakes in 2016, why he believes freedom is on the ballot, and his thoughts on how to win in a swing state.

On this week's episode of Inside the Hive, co-hosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan are joined by Hive political reporter Abigail Tracy to talk about the plight of the Democratic Party leading into this year’s midterms. With the right savaging Democrats on the economy and culture-war issues, and a total loss of congressional power to the Trumpist right looming, what is the Democrats' message to voters and why isn't Joe Biden delivering it?

Rebecca Traister, feminist, author and New York Magazine contributor, talks to co-host Joe Hagan about the shocking Supreme Court leak that all but confirms the impending death of Roe v. Wade. Democratic leadership from President Joe Biden to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi have failed, Traister says, to formulate a "robust and morally persuasive message” to counteract the decades-long march of anti-choice Republicans who are set on reengineering society to the past. With consequential elections on the horizon, the fall of Roe could very well mean the toppling of other progressive rulings, from the right to contraception to marriage equality and even interracial unions. Traister finds slivers of hope in a new generation of progressive female voices who are forcefully connecting abortion rights to economics, class, and race as they face "an era that none of us can imagine.”