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Boebert Apologizes For Anti-Muslim Remarks About Omar; Rep. Greene: McCarthy Doesn't Have The Support To Be Speaker; Researchers Link Social Media To Girls' Depressive Episodes; Whistleblower Testifies On Facebook's "Toxic" Effect On Girls; NASA Launches Spacecraft To Smash Into Asteroid. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired November 26, 2021 - 15:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[15:30:00]

MARGARET TALEV, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: And we heard Marjorie Taylor Greene say on the Matt Gaetz podcast in recent days that McCarthy doesn't have the votes that he needs to lock down the speakership, if Republicans take over. So, there's going to be a tremendous amount of pressure on him from this small but growing flank of the party.

And at the same time, if he doesn't act, if the House Republican Caucus doesn't kind of rein in these members, the Democrats who still control the majority have made clear that they're going to start having these censure votes. And so I think that's the kind of political struggle that we're seeing going on right now.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: I mean, Dean, since you think that one apologetic tweet does not erase the hate that this inspires, what do you think should happen next?

DEAN OBEIDALLAH, CNN.COM OPINION CONTRIBUTOR: I think that you should be censured to say, look, put Republicans on the line. Let them say, are they OK with anti-Muslim bigotry, and let's be blunt. As a party, they had been for years. Anti-Muslim bigotry became a staple of the GOP because I wrote about it since 2012 campaign with then Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.

Donald Trump took it to levels we have never seen before with calling for a ban on all Muslims and Islam hates us. We saw more hate crimes in the 2016 campaign against Muslims than we did against Muslims after 9/11. And that was the words of Donald Trump.

So look, this anti-Muslim bigotry is part and parcel of the GOP. I don't know what caused her to apologize. She might flip flop on the apology. We'll see how it works out. Because this -- she has a incendiary track record. She wants press, doesn't care about policy. She wants to get attention. That's all she's about.

CAMEROTA: I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene also wants attention and that's all she's about based upon her policy background, which is undetectable. So I'm reluctant always to play these things. But Margaret, because you brought it up, I feel we should play it because it does affect Kevin McCarthy's future. So, I mean, listen to the thanks he gets for trying to protect her or not punishing her. So listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-GA): We know that Kevin McCarthy has a problem in our conference, he doesn't have the full support to be speaker. He doesn't have the votes that are there. Because there's many of us that are very unhappy about the failure to hold Republicans accountable, while conservatives like me, Paul Gosar, and many others just constantly take the abuse by the Democrats.

I've demanded it. I want Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney kicked out of the GOP conference.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you respect the Republican leadership right now?

GREENE: No. No. I don't respect them at all. I can't respect leadership that doesn't hold people accountable.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Margaret, obviously, Congressman Kinzinger, Adam Kinzinger, is not part of that little tribe. And so what he tweeted was, "I hate to LOL this, but I must. GOP leader," meaning Kevin McCarthy, "is a living example of what happens when you try to hug a skunk." Basically saying he's created these Frankenstein monsters.

TALEV: I don't know if he's created them. He has enabled them because they are crucial to him staying in the position of power. And that's the political dynamic that we're going to see play out over the next several months. And like let it be said -- and Kinzinger can't run for re-election. So, you know, there is a dynamic in the GOP right now that is -- and this is a cycle that feeds on itself that is driving some of these issues.

When it comes to Muslim rhetoric, you know, we've seen Americans in general, including inside the Republican Party, develop more positive views about Muslim Americans in recent years. Having said that, the overwhelming majority of Muslim American voters in this country are either Democrats or independents, a very small share, or registered Republicans the polling tells us. And there is embedded inside the Republican voter dynamic in the United States, a concern that Islam -- I'm not talking about the people, but the religion that Islam is antithetical to American goals or standards or national security.

And so, particularly when it comes to these kind of attacks, you know, there -- when you're -- there is a reality inside kind of the dynamics of the party right now that's also challenged. So McCarthy has to decide like are some of these issues, red lines for him, that he's willing to push back against publicly even if it means undercutting his own leadership, weakening -- making his own future leadership more vulnerable. At this point, he has chose to kind of give this part of the caucus, at least publicly, a lot of slack.

But I think as long as Democrats keep pushing for centers and keep, you know, in the current dynamic say they're going to move forward with punishments and centers, then he's going to get that pressure from both sides. And as he tries to become speaker next year if Republicans win, it's going to be very, very difficult for him to manage market.

[15:35:04]

CAMEROTA: Margaret Talev, thank you. And Dean, people can hear you talk about this as well as a host of other fascinating topics on your radio show, "The Dean Obeidallah" show SiriusXM. Thanks so much, guys.

OBEIDALLAH: Thanks.

CAMEROTA: A new study shows female athletes, by far, took most of the online abuse directed at Olympians in Tokyo. We'll have more on the struggles women and girls face online ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Female athletes received 87 percent of all of the online attacks at this year's Tokyo Olympics. This is according to a study by World Athletics.

[15:40:00]

It looked at the deluge of disturbing abuse on Twitter as female athletes were subjected to sexist, racist, transphobic and homophobic remarks, plus, unfounded doping accusations. Many of these posts warranted intervention from social media platforms.

And the online abuse of female Olympians is just one reason many have been criticizing social media platforms. A Facebook whistleblower, you all remember, is asking Congress to step in and do something. And then just last week, a bipartisan group of at least 10 state attorneys general launched an investigation into Instagram's effect on teenagers.

So let's bring in New York University Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been collecting research on the relationship between the mental health of teenage girls and social media. He's the co- author of the coddling of the American mind. And his latest piece for The Atlantic is titled, "The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls, The Preponderance of the Evidence Suggests That Social Media Is Causing Real Damage to Adolescents."

Jonathan, great to see you. You're any of us who are parents of teenage girls, as I I'm, innately know that there is a direct link between their mental health and what they see on social media. But you have the research. So tell us of the direct line between these two?

JONATHAN HAIDT, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST, AUTHOR: Yes, that's right. So there's a lot of published academic research on this topic. And a lot of it says, well, there's a correlation, but the correlation is tiny. It's, you know, it's no more harmful than eating potatoes and some studies. And what I found in digging into this research along with Jean Twenge, the author of "Biogen" is that when you zoom in, not on screen time, because a lot of these studies are about screen time, if you zoom in, not screen time, but social media. And if you don't look at the boys, just look at the girls, some of the correlations are much, much bigger. And so the academic evidence is actually there. And it's not just correlational studies, it's also experiments.

When you assign people to randomly either reduce their use of social media or not, you find that actually people get happier if they're off for a week or more. So the academic evidence has been there for a long time. And I'm saying we need to take -- we need to really see this and start acting.

CAMEROTA: I mean, we're talking about suicidal thoughts, we're talking about a spike in emergency room visits by teenage girls, this isn't just, oh, they'll be, you know, a little bit happier if they get off social media. This is --

HAIDT: Right.

CAMEROTA: -- dangerous stuff.

HAIDT: That's right. And it's not, you know, a spike makes it seem like it goes up and then maybe down. No, there's a very sudden jump up in rates of depression, anxiety, and as you said, hospital admissions for self-harm. And even suicide for younger teen girls, there's a kind of a -- it was fairly level until 2012. And then suddenly, in 2013, it goes way up, and it stayed up and it's continued to rise for all of these variables. So we have an enormous mental health crisis, and people aren't doing anything about it.

Another thing that I was struck by in your research is this isn't just vulnerable teenage girls or teenage girls who already had some sort of mental health issues. This is -- we're talking millions of people, your research suggests.

HAIDT: That's right. Now, there are surely individual differences. And it probably is the case that girls who are more prone to anxiety to begin with suffer more. And some confident extroverted girls might -- they might benefit from it socially. But the cost is not to just a few percent. We're talking about a doubling, more than a doubling of rates of depression, self-harm, anxiety. So it's affecting an enormous number of girls.

And if you just think about -- look, my daughter is 12. If someone came to me and said, we have this thing, it's going to take about 20 hours a week from your daughter's life, and it'll probably be bad for her, what do you say? Can we sign up when she's 11? I'd say hell no. Are you kidding me? But yet 11-year-old girls can just lie and get on Instagram, and most of them do.

CAMEROTA: As you said, people aren't doing enough about it. You know that there was this Facebook whistleblower Francis Haugen who is trying -- here's what she said to Congress on October 6th.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRANCES HAUGEN, FACEBOOK WHISTLEBLOWER: It's just like cigarettes. Teenagers don't have good self-regulation. They say explicitly, I feel bad when I use Instagram, and yet I can't stop.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: I mean, they're addicted, basically. They can't stop it. It makes them feel worse, yet they can't stop because it lights up whatever that scent, you know, addiction center is in their brain. So what needs to happen next?

HAIDT: Yes. So first, people have to understand, this is more than an addiction. Addiction is between you and the substance. This is not just addiction. This is a social trap. When my kids entered sixth grade, they both said to me, Dad, everyone's on Instagram and I have an account. And I said no. And that was very hard for my son who really felt isolated because of it.

So, the companies have put us parents and our kids, they put us in this trap. It's not just that the kids are addicted like to tobacco. It's they've set up a social game in which it's bad for everybody. But you know what, if one kid gets off, it's even worse for that kid.

So we're all stuck doing this something that we don't want to do and we'd all be better off if we could just delay (ph).

[15:45:03]

My big thing is, can't we just let girls go through puberty without having to perform on Instagram? Can't we just delay until high school? Can we all just agree nobody should get an account until high school? And at that point, I think it's still damaging, but it's hardest on the girls going through puberty.

CAMEROTA: And so what are you calling on Congress to do?

HAIDT: Well, in the -- in this article I have in the Atlantic on the experiment that's going on in teen girls, two very simple things that are bipartisan, not controversial. One is passed the bill that forces Facebook to share the data. This, to me, is unbelievable. That the only good data that can really show what's happening and what's causing problems is held in secret by Facebook, they won't share it. So we got to force them to share the data.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

HAIDT: And the second thing is, is COPPA, the Childhood Privacy Protection Act. They set at the age of internet adulthood to 13. It was supposed to be 16, but the platform's lobby to down to 13 back in 1998. We've got to put it up to 16 and then actually enforce it. 13 is too low --

CAMEROTA: OK.

HAIDT: -- and it's not enforced. CAMEROTA: Really good information. Jonathan Haidt, thank you very much for sharing the research.

HAIDT: My pleasure, Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, now to this, it sounds like the plot of a movie, NASA just launched a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid. A test run, in case of big rock, heads our way one day. I'll speak to the scientist leading the mission next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:50:20]

CAMEROTA: NASA is trying to manipulate asteroids away from Earth. They plan to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if it can change the rocks course. The spacecraft for this mission took off Tuesday, but the collision will not happen until late September or early October of next year.

Andy Rivkin is the mission leader, he helped build the spacecraft that you just saw take off. He's also a planetary astronomer at Johns Hopkins. Andy, thanks for being here. This is mind blowing on so many levels, the logistics of how you figure this out and can make this happen. I mean, I have a hard time with planning the logistics of picking my kids up from their sporting events tomorrow. How can you plan the logistics of hitting a moving target with a spacecraft 10 months from now?

ANDY RIVKIN, INVESTIGATION LEAD, NASA "DART" MISSION: That's a great question. The orbits of objects in the solar system, of course, have been studied for thousands of years. You know, the ancients literally knew where the sun and the moon and planets were going to be at any time.

For asteroids, we have data that shows very precisely where they will be. So for the Dynamo system, and for its moon amorphous, we have a good sense of where it's going to be. And we're going to send DART to intercept that. But then within the last hour or so, we also have some onboard computing, that's going to be able to find the target and actually steer us in.

CAMEROTA: OK.

RIVKIN: And that's SmartNet -- I'm sorry, that's SmartNet technology is one of the technologies that we're validating on a mission.

CAMEROTA: So in other words, even if the asteroid speeds up, or slows down over the next 10 months, or changes trajectory a little bit, you still think that you will hit it?

RIVKIN: Absolutely. The, you know, the ways that objects move around the sun in their orbits is a very well-known science. And so, we think we've got that part down. And it'll just be a little tweak at the end that will need SmartNet for. CAMEROTA: One of the things that I like that you have talked about is that there are lots of natural disasters for which we feel as though we're just sitting ducks. But this one -- and I mean, up until now, we thought that we were sitting ducks for an asteroid hurtling towards the Earth. But you say that we don't have to be sitting ducks anymore for asteroids.

RIVKIN: That's right. There's basically an entire national and international strategy for taking asteroid impacts off the board, or at least knowing when they might happen decades ahead of time. So DART is a validation of the technique of what we might do if we found something. And then meanwhile, there are telescopes around the world that NASA is funding, for instance, to do the job of looking to see if there's anything specific we need to worry about, and to give us as much warning time as we can.

So it's all part of one big strategy. DART is one piece, the telescopes are another.

CAMEROTA: And is there anything hurtling towards Earth that we need to worry about right now?

RIVKIN: No, there is not. We are-- as far as we know, we're clear for the next 100 years or so. There are objects, the size of Dimorphos. So, 160 meters in size or so, about the size of one of the great pyramids. We only know where about half of those are, so we need to find the others. But at least as far as we know, we are in the clear.

CAMEROTA: I'm so glad I can cross this off my worriless for the next 100 years. It's rare that I can cross something off. That is very good news. My producers also want me to ask you, did you get the idea for this from the movie "Armageddon?"

RIVKIN: No. And so, you know, full credit. My colleague at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Andy Chang is the one who realized that we could do a test like this in a binary system that the D.A., Double Asteroid of DART and make the measurements much more easily than we would with a single object going around the sun. But people have talked about asteroid deflection techniques for a while since actually a little bit before "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" occurred.

And of course, in "Armageddon," they want to take a nuclear device and use that to blow the thing up and we are just using a, you know, a -- our spacecraft or RAM and we want to keep it intact. We just want to give it a little tap so that we can show that we can do that.

CAMEROTA: That sounds like an improvement over "Armageddon". My producers also wanted me to ask, did you cry at the end of "Armageddon?"

RIVKIN: You know, I don't know if I should admit this. I've never seen "Armageddon."

CAMEROTA: OK.

RIVKIN: I saw "Deep Impact" and of course, I know the -- I cry when I hear the Aerosmith song if I'm in the right mood. How about that?

CAMEROTA: That's awesome. Andy Rivkin, thank you very much for letting me ask you all these silly questions.

RIVKIN: Thanks for having me.

CAMEROTA: OK, meanwhile, President Biden restricts travel from South Africa and seven other countries. This will start this Monday. This is because of this new coronavirus variant called Omicron. We have much more our breaking news ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[15:58:52]

CAMEROTA: The top 10 CNN Heroes of 2021 have been announced and one will be the CNN Hero of the Year. Heroes like Michele Neff Hernandez. She created a community of widows who heal together.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I would tell the nurse, tell him I love him, put the phone by him because they would not let me in. Sometimes I just go sit in the parking lot just to be close to him. You know, April 13th they told me he was gone. I needed someone to understand what it was like to be widowed.

MICHELLE NEFF HERNANDEZ, FOUNDED SOARING SPIRITS TO HELP WIDOWERS OVERCOME THEIR GRIEF: you imagine that when someone dies, the worst day is the day they die. And the truth is that living without them is the hard part. But you have to make your way through.

Thank you for being here and showing up for each other.

We help people live and live through something that many times they did not think that they would survive.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: And you can go to CNN Heroes.com right now to vote for your CNN Hero of the Year.

Thanks so much for joining me today and have a wonderful weekend everybody. "THE LEAD" with Jake Tapper starts right now.