Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well,
Speaker 1: we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's
Speaker 1: best minds.
Speaker 2: And Congressman Mike Collins is trying to blame the assassination
Speaker 2: attempt on Donald Trump on President Biden with no evidence
Speaker 2: at all. We have such a great show for you today,
Speaker 2: Slate Stalia Lithmics stops by to talk to us about
Speaker 2: the further implications of the Supreme Court's recent rulings. De
Speaker 2: will talk to author Dave Agers, director Arthur Bradford, and
Speaker 2: public school teacher Jill Westbrook about their new documentary To
Speaker 2: Be Destroyed, which covers the book banning in Rapid City,
Speaker 2: South Dakota. But first we're going to actually hear a
Speaker 2: word from Mollie since we felt our previously taped discussion
Speaker 2: was not appropriate for today's show.
Speaker 3: Hi, this is Molly John Fast.
Speaker 1: This is a special kind of introduction today just because
Speaker 1: I want to talk about a couple of things. This
Speaker 1: weekend was you know, there was an incredibly tragic incident
Speaker 1: of political violence. Donald Trump was shot. He's okay, hey,
Speaker 1: thank god, but it is really scary and we all
Speaker 1: have to remember just how we're so lucky to live
Speaker 1: now in twenty twenty four, and if you look back
Speaker 1: in the sixties, there was a ton of this kind
Speaker 1: of political violence, and I hope, I think that if
Speaker 1: we're all really if we all really focus on it,
Speaker 1: that we can take the temperature down. And that really
Speaker 1: should be our goal no matter what, because violence is
Speaker 1: never okay, and you know, we don't want anyone to
Speaker 1: get hurt here. We all have strong feelings about how
Speaker 1: we want America to look like, but the guiding principle
Speaker 1: has to be to be kind to each other and
Speaker 1: not hurt anyone. The other thing I wanted to mention
Speaker 1: because this is such a hot time and a lot
Speaker 1: of people have come over to me and felt really despairing,
Speaker 1: and they felt like, now, you know, this has been
Speaker 1: a really bad news cycle for Democrats. There's no sugarcoating that.
Speaker 1: But I just want to point out a few things.
Speaker 1: First of all, we're still four months away from the election,
Speaker 1: so that's a one hundred and fourteen days, so that's
Speaker 1: a long time, and as we've seen from the last
Speaker 1: three weeks, a lot can happen in one hundred and
Speaker 1: fourteen days. I also think that as much as we
Speaker 1: feel for what happened to Donald Trump, and it is
Speaker 1: absolutely awful, does not necessarily mean that he will then
Speaker 1: win the election. Remember, we are in a super polarized
Speaker 1: moment in American life. What he is selling is not
Speaker 1: the kind of America that a lot of us want
Speaker 1: to live in. And I also want to add that,
Speaker 1: in fact, there's historical precedent for this. So Teddy Roosevelt lost,
Speaker 1: there was an attempt on his life. Ronald Reagans on
Speaker 1: eight point boost in popularity that was entirely gone in
Speaker 1: three months, and that was in a much less polarized time.
Speaker 1: So again, and I think this is a really important point,
Speaker 1: and we've talked about it before. We were talking about
Speaker 1: whether or not Joe Biden should drop out and who
Speaker 1: was the Democrat's best chance at being Donald Trump. Because
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, even though we feel for him and we
Speaker 1: want him to be safe and we understand that political
Speaker 1: violence is not okay, we also can say at the
Speaker 1: same time that he continues to be an existential threat
Speaker 1: to democracy, and that the only way that it's important
Speaker 1: that he loses fairly at the ballot box and no
Speaker 1: other way, But he continues to be an existential threat
Speaker 1: to democracy. But the point of what I'm saying is
Speaker 1: that all of the people who are telling you that
Speaker 1: this we know how this thing that happens in July
Speaker 1: is going to play in November are wrong. No one knows.
Speaker 1: We can see polls, but they are merely trend lines.
Speaker 1: We do not know. So when people tell you that
Speaker 1: they're sure you should run, screaming in the other direction.
Speaker 1: None of us know what November is going to look like.
Speaker 1: All we know is that if you're worried about democracy,
Speaker 1: there are solid things you can do. You can write postcards,
Speaker 1: You can support your local everyone from the dog catcher
Speaker 1: to the school board. There are local elections that you
Speaker 1: can support. You can be a poll worker and make
Speaker 1: sure that are counted fairlight. There are so many opportunities
Speaker 1: for you to protect democracy, and so no one should despair.
Speaker 1: There are many months left and no one really knows
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. Spring is here, and I bet
Speaker 1: you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick
Speaker 1: up some fashionable, all new fast politics merchandise. We just
Speaker 1: opened a news store with all new designs just for you.
Speaker 1: Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top bags to grab
Speaker 1: some head to Fastpolitics dot com.
Speaker 2: Dalia Withwick is a senior editor at Slate and author
Speaker 2: of Lady Justice, Women, The Law, and the Battle to
Speaker 2: Save America.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to I want you to explain Chevron because
Speaker 1: it's enormous and it seems like it hasn't made a blip.
Speaker 4: First of all, Hi, Molly, it's really good to see
Speaker 4: your face. I think two things, and then we can
Speaker 4: talk about the nuts and bolts.
Speaker 3: So Chevron.
Speaker 4: One is that I'm starting to realize that when the
Speaker 4: court like drops the ten or fifteen biggest cases not
Speaker 4: just of the term, but like of our lifetimes, in
Speaker 4: the last ten days of the term, that's a really
Speaker 4: deliberate act of obfuscation, right, Like that is a very
Speaker 4: purposeful way of saying, there is no possibility you can
Speaker 4: keep up with this.
Speaker 3: So Chevron's going to get a day. And that happened.
Speaker 4: And speaking of Canada, I just happened to interview from
Speaker 4: my podcast former justice from the Supreme Court of Canada,
Speaker 4: and I was like, do you all like drop all
Speaker 4: the biggest cases of the term, like in the last
Speaker 4: five days, like with no warning of what's coming. And
Speaker 4: she's like, no, no, that would be insane, so like
Speaker 4: no other court does this, but it does have the
Speaker 4: effect of making it impossible to fully parse what happened.
Speaker 4: And I think Loper Bray and Relentless, which are the
Speaker 4: two Chevron cases, might be the most important cases that
Speaker 4: nobody understands. And I think they got obscured by the
Speaker 4: abortion case. I think they got obscured by Fisher, the
Speaker 4: January sixth cases and then the immunity case. But this
Speaker 4: like fundamentally reorders how government happens. I guess the very
Speaker 4: shortest version I can give you is like, since FDR,
Speaker 4: government happens by way of agencies. It's not like the
Speaker 4: president single handedly setting out environmental policy or drug regulations.
Speaker 4: You have agencies, all those ABC agencies, you know, the
Speaker 4: EPA and the FDA and the SEC. Hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 4: of very smart people at the heads of agencies, and
Speaker 4: like millions of lawyers and scientists who decide things, and
Speaker 4: Congress if it's doing its job, rights regulations and those
Speaker 4: agencies apply them. And this is not a controversial proposition
Speaker 4: until it is. But the basic idea is, if you
Speaker 4: write a statute and it's trying really hard to be clear,
Speaker 4: but it cannot possibly be specific enough to anticipate every
Speaker 4: single percentage point of particulate matter that you are trying
Speaker 4: to regulate, like with the Clean Air Act since nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty four. In the Chevron case, the rule was, if
Speaker 4: there's an agency regulation that is ambiguous, the courts defer
Speaker 4: to the agency's own interpretation of that regulation. So it's
Speaker 4: the tie goes to the runner who knows what he's
Speaker 4: freaking talking about.
Speaker 3: That's Chevron. This is really the death of expertise, right.
Speaker 4: It's the death of expertise, it's the death of science,
Speaker 4: it's the death of in a deep way, and I
Speaker 4: mean this is a structural point, but it's important, the
Speaker 4: death of conferring decision making power on elected branches, right,
Speaker 4: because not only does this kick out the legs from
Speaker 4: agencies to do their own regulating, it kicks the legs
Speaker 4: out from Congress.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: So this is if you don't like what the EPA
Speaker 4: is doing, you can vote and in a couple of
Speaker 4: years you get a new head of the EPA. If
Speaker 4: you don't like how a judge regulates the environment, when
Speaker 4: a judge does what Neil Gorsitch did in the Big
Speaker 4: EPA case this year, where he under the guise of
Speaker 4: like scuppering the good neighbor rule. First of all, confused
Speaker 4: nitrogen oxide the pollutant with nitrous oxide, laughing gas, Like
Speaker 4: my favorite part, it's the best part, but it's also
Speaker 4: goes to you know what, lifetime appointed judges and justices
Speaker 4: are not experts on climate, they're not experts on CDC
Speaker 4: health legs, they're not experts as Matthew Kesmerick taught us.
Speaker 3: On a mifipristone.
Speaker 4: And yet when they give themselves the power to do that,
Speaker 4: there's no way to remove that judge. So this is
Speaker 4: an actual threat to democracy.
Speaker 3: It is a.
Speaker 1: Power grab because of right has more judges than electeds
Speaker 1: right now, they know what they want to do is
Speaker 1: not what the majority wants, right right.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is part of those conversations you and
Speaker 4: I've been having, like for a couple of years, about
Speaker 4: how do you impose minority rule.
Speaker 3: And you can either do it.
Speaker 4: By way of having popular ideas that people vote for,
Speaker 4: like we would like to have gun regulations, right, and
Speaker 4: then when you can't win because the vast majorities of
Speaker 4: Americans want saying gun regulations, they want clean air. The
Speaker 4: vast majority of Americans actually think people should vote. The
Speaker 4: vast majority of Americans want abortion care. When you can't win, what.
Speaker 3: You do is you go through the courts.
Speaker 4: And what we have learned from the Heritage Foundation and
Speaker 4: Leonard Leo and the conservative legal movement is it's really
Speaker 4: not that hard. It's pretty expensive, but you know it's
Speaker 4: it's sofa cushion change for the Cookes and for Harlan
Speaker 4: Crowe to buy courts, and so they have purchased courts,
Speaker 4: and as you said, every piece of this is part
Speaker 4: of a structural effort to say we are going to
Speaker 4: have minority rule. And not only are we going to
Speaker 4: have minority rule, but it almost doesn't matter Molly, if
Speaker 4: Biden wins or Trump wins, because if all of the
Speaker 4: agencies can be controlled by not just Trump judges, but
Speaker 4: now they're in, they are at the mercy of the
Speaker 4: people who hate regulations.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: I mean, the way Loper Bright and the end of
Speaker 4: Chevron plays out is that the polluters and the people
Speaker 4: who want to get rid of regulations, they're going to
Speaker 4: win because their lawyers are going to effectively be writing
Speaker 4: the regulations. Now that's what's scary about this.
Speaker 1: Can you give us a little backstory on the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court EPA decision is one of the that sets the
Speaker 1: groundwork for this new powerless federal government is really an
Speaker 1: arm of whatever the president wants.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it's one of a huge chunk
Speaker 4: of cases that all slid under the radar Molly. So
Speaker 4: this specifically is a case about something called the good
Speaker 4: neighbor rule that basically has to do with regulating air
Speaker 4: pollution that comes like from you know, downwind states and
Speaker 4: the states bocking at that and on the merits like
Speaker 4: you can have a conversation.
Speaker 3: About that rule.
Speaker 4: But what Justice Gorsich does is he not only says
Speaker 4: like I'm going to tell the EPA how to regulate climate,
Speaker 4: but then he goes on to sort of like give
Speaker 4: himself the authority to explain how we do air pollution.
Speaker 4: And I want to just link it up to because
Speaker 4: we had right there was a bump stock case where
Speaker 4: Trump's own ATF, right after the mass shooting in Las Vegas,
Speaker 4: his own ATF takes the position, we're going to regulate bumpstocks,
Speaker 4: which convert guns into machine guns. We're going to regulate
Speaker 4: them like their machine guns. Clarence Thomas comes along same
Speaker 4: move right, I am an expert on how machine guns work.
Speaker 4: I'm fixing some photographs.
Speaker 3: To my opinion.
Speaker 4: I'll tell you that these are not in fact machine guns,
Speaker 4: because the gun industry has sent me these like slides.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: And we have the SEC case where the court decides
Speaker 4: that the way the SEC does adjudication procedures, every SEC
Speaker 4: adjudication needs to go to a jury. So this is
Speaker 4: a whole and this is Methipristo like really, at bottom,
Speaker 4: this is Judge Cosmerick saying I don't care what the
Speaker 4: FDA thinks about how we regulate drugs.
Speaker 3: I know better.
Speaker 4: And so it's almost I would say, like, this whole
Speaker 4: bunch of cases that seem so obscure are in fact
Speaker 4: the materialization of what Chevron does, which is take regulations
Speaker 4: out of the hands of regulators, as you said, scientists,
Speaker 4: experts the ability to which is why we want federal
Speaker 4: agencies move nimbly and quickly and not wait for Congress
Speaker 4: to you know.
Speaker 3: Pass a specific law.
Speaker 4: All that is gone, and it's at the mercy of
Speaker 4: federal judges who are like, I know better than you
Speaker 4: how clean water works.
Speaker 3: I'm sam Alito.
Speaker 4: And by the way, I confuse laughing gas with nitrogen
Speaker 4: oxide because I'm Neil Gorsich, like this is really dangerous,
Speaker 4: and I guess the last thing I want to say
Speaker 4: about it is, not only is it going to be
Speaker 4: impossible for agencies to work, like agency can't function if
Speaker 4: they don't know what the parameters because everything has to
Speaker 4: go to a judge. But this really makes us all
Speaker 4: at the mercy of the one most Bonker's judge who
Speaker 4: wants to wigh in, and that really is Matthew Kesmerick
Speaker 4: and people in Texas who are just like, I'm just
Speaker 4: going to like start to do nationwide injunctions on every
Speaker 4: agency that I don't like how they run things. It
Speaker 4: so dismantles the way government works, and it preys on
Speaker 4: public suspicion of like nameless faceless bureaucrats that are regulating everything.
Speaker 4: Those nameless faceless bureaucrats are often like lawyers and doctors
Speaker 4: and scientists who are really trying to make sure that
Speaker 4: the food we eat is not going to make us dead.
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of the regulations we have are
Speaker 1: actually not that severe, and in fact, probably should be
Speaker 1: more severe. And a good example of that is Boeing
Speaker 1: or that train disaster in Ohio or the lead in
Speaker 1: the baby food. We actually don't do a great job
Speaker 1: of regulating things, but this will mean even less.
Speaker 3: Right, That's exactly right.
Speaker 4: And I think again, this is one of those sort
Speaker 4: of follow the money issues where it's like who has
Speaker 4: an interest in making sure that planes aren't safe, that
Speaker 4: water isn't clean, that drugs get rushed onto the market
Speaker 4: without being tested, Like whose interest is that in? And like, surprise, surprise,
Speaker 4: it's some of the same people that have like secret
Speaker 4: meetings in California at all men's clubs where they bring
Speaker 4: Clarence Thomas out and let the high donors like pay
Speaker 4: to spend time with Clarence Thomas.
Speaker 3: Like this is not a.
Speaker 4: Mystery, right if this was like Harriet the Spy, like
Speaker 4: you kind of know who benefits from being able to,
Speaker 4: you know, dump pollutants into the air in the water.
Speaker 4: And this has been a decades long plan and it's funny,
Speaker 4: you know. The one other thing I would just say
Speaker 4: about Chevron, and I think this is important. The big
Speaker 4: fans of Chevron in the nineteen eighties were like antonin
Speaker 4: Scalia and believe it or not, Clarence Thomas because what
Speaker 4: they wanted was to constrain judges from like jumping in
Speaker 4: and telling regulatory entities how to do their job, because
Speaker 4: it was like Reagan era regulations, right, Like these were
Speaker 4: people who were trying to deregulate. Now it's flipped on
Speaker 4: its head. Clarence Thomas famously says, like, I'm not evolving.
Speaker 4: There's no issue on which I've changed my position. This
Speaker 4: happens to be a thing he's changed his view on.
Speaker 4: He was for Chevron deference until he was against it.
Speaker 4: But this is so clearly was an effort in the
Speaker 4: nineteen eighties by the conservative legal movement to constrain what
Speaker 4: they thought was like free willing judges like making up policy.
Speaker 4: And now they're like, free willing judges should totally make
Speaker 4: up policy because they're us. And that's the kind of
Speaker 4: totality of where this story begins and ends.
Speaker 1: Can you speak to what this means for Project twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, because it feels like it's setting the stage
Speaker 1: for Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: One of the reasons I love you this is like
Speaker 4: not me blowing smoke is that, like almost everybody has
Speaker 4: failed to connect this to Project twenty twenty five, And
Speaker 4: it's so obvious to me that so much of what
Speaker 4: the Court did this term that was shocking to us
Speaker 4: is being like put into pay you know, on paper,
Speaker 4: and codified in twenty twenty five. Like this is the
Speaker 4: plan and we are seeing it. I mean, it's nine
Speaker 4: hundred pages. There's a lot to chew over, but huge
Speaker 4: parts of it are already being previewed and kind of
Speaker 4: built into law even before twenty twenty five is put
Speaker 4: into action. And so one huge part of it, you're
Speaker 4: exactly right, Molly, is the sort of dismantling the regulatory state. Right,
Speaker 4: whatever was it Grover Norquist who is like, we're going
Speaker 4: to shrink government down to the size that we can
Speaker 4: you know, drown it in a bathtub. And this was
Speaker 4: the Steve Bannon wish list, right, this was the dream
Speaker 4: that we're going to end the administrative state as we
Speaker 4: know it. And that is all absolutely in the pages
Speaker 4: of Project twenty twenty five and the other stuff that's
Speaker 4: in the pages of Project twenty twenty five. The Court
Speaker 4: has absolutely hand delivered. Whether it's you know, making it
Speaker 4: harder to vote, whether it's cracking down on immigrants, I mean,
Speaker 4: the Court is embodying an enthusiasm for Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 4: That really belies the idea that we're kind of having
Speaker 4: in the conversation now of like, is next year going
Speaker 4: to be Project twenty twenty five or not. It's already happening.
Speaker 4: It's just happening in the judiciary.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Protect twenty twenty five wants
Speaker 1: to do is to dismantle a bunch of government agencies,
Speaker 1: including the Department of Education. You can't do these things
Speaker 1: unless you empower the judiciary to stamp them, right, right, I.
Speaker 4: Mean Project twenty twenty five. A lot of it can
Speaker 4: exist without the judiciary, right. A lot of it is
Speaker 4: going to be you know, sees Biden regulatory attempts to
Speaker 4: make abortion accessible and flip it on its head and
Speaker 4: use it to make abortion inaccessible.
Speaker 3: Right, So a lot of it is going to flip.
Speaker 4: What agencies do you know, We're going to do away
Speaker 4: with food stamps, and we're going to do away with
Speaker 4: you know, all sorts of ways of ameliorating poverty and stuff.
Speaker 4: So part of it is going to happen by Fiat
Speaker 4: by way of agencies. But you're exactly right that once
Speaker 4: you have conferred on the judicial branch, the power to
Speaker 4: decide whether or not that is lawful. Then you're exactly right.
Speaker 4: The judicial branch becomes the rubber stamp. One of the
Speaker 4: most interesting cases this year that I think got kind
Speaker 4: of a lot of headlines but people didn't deep dive
Speaker 4: on it was the case that was like the most
Speaker 4: heartless case at the end of the term, which was
Speaker 4: the one about you know, criminalizing sleeping in parks. The
Speaker 4: thing that was I thought most fascinating. I mean, there's
Speaker 4: a lot that was fascinating about that. The Court's just like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: homelessness is a problem. What are you going to do
Speaker 4: if you know they want to put them and put
Speaker 4: them in jail, so be it. I thought that Justice
Speaker 4: Soto mayors dissent in that case is really worth a
Speaker 4: read because she connects it as you just did, what
Speaker 4: the judicial branch is doing to what government can do.
Speaker 3: And so she starts with this sort of like really deep.
Speaker 4: Dive on what has given us a homelessness problem, and
Speaker 4: she's like climate change bing epa right housing policy bing, Like,
Speaker 4: she goes through all of the ways in which government
Speaker 4: agencies can either ameliorate social problems or they can exacerbate them.
Speaker 3: And I I think it was like a very.
Speaker 4: Sly way of making exactly this point that homelessness didn't
Speaker 4: just happen. Homelessness happens because government either has skin in
Speaker 4: the game of fixing it or not. And I thought
Speaker 4: it was just a very very subtle way of saying,
Speaker 4: none of these agencies that you are hobbling in all
Speaker 4: those other cases this year, they can't do their job
Speaker 4: to curb homelessness. So please don't like sanctimoniously say, oh, homelessness,
Speaker 4: where does it come from? Like it comes from what
Speaker 4: you do, and if you don't care about climate change,
Speaker 4: there's going to be.
Speaker 3: More of it. I thought that was a really smart,
Speaker 3: subtle point.
Speaker 1: How does the immunity decision factor into Project twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five because I think of it as it empowers the
Speaker 1: executive in ways we have never seen before.
Speaker 4: Correct, And you're one hundred percent right that, I think again,
Speaker 4: we failed to connect it to Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 4: when we came down right, we were all like doing
Speaker 4: this super lower early thing of like, well, there's official
Speaker 4: acts and unofficial acts, and you know, maybe it's the
Speaker 4: outer perimeter, and maybe it's a core executive function, and
Speaker 4: like trying to lawyer, this decision is kind of pointless,
Speaker 4: you know, because maybe Jack Smith can like recraft the
Speaker 4: Trump indictment and go back to Judge Chuckkins courtroom and
Speaker 4: you know, follow the path. But like maybe the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court will just be like, oh no, what we meant
Speaker 4: was those are all also official acts. So I don't
Speaker 4: know that lawyering these decisions, which is like the very
Speaker 4: reflexive impulse is the answer. I think your impulse is
Speaker 4: the correct one, which is what.
Speaker 3: Does this seek to do? What this seeks to do
Speaker 3: is exactly what is.
Speaker 4: In the pages of Project twenty twenty five, which is
Speaker 4: create a bulletproof executive branch, which is to sort of
Speaker 4: breathe life into this very frightening notion called the unitary executive.
Speaker 4: People may remember the words unitary executive because when they
Speaker 4: were torturing people right at Guantanamo, when they were torturing
Speaker 4: people at Abu grab the defense was us something called
Speaker 4: the unitary executive, which is a version of when the
Speaker 4: president does it, it is in illegal right that there
Speaker 4: is such a capacious power around the presidency and what
Speaker 4: he orders people to do that it can't be checked.
Speaker 4: And that is the immunity decision, like that is the
Speaker 4: beating heart of the immunity decision. And I think you're right, Mollie,
Speaker 4: we kind of missed that. That is one of the
Speaker 4: sort of like wishless like checkboxes in Project twenty twenty
Speaker 4: five that the Court just conferred in like open daylight
Speaker 4: in the Biden administration. This theory that there is almost
Speaker 4: boundless executive control. This was like the bush Cheney wet
Speaker 4: dream that has now been written into constitutional law. You're
Speaker 4: absolutely right, and shame on us that we missed it.
Speaker 3: John, you wrote that decision.
Speaker 4: I mean, he wrote the Office of Legal Council memo
Speaker 4: famously that said, right, unless there's organ damage, it's not torture.
Speaker 4: But yes, it was rooted in this theory of presidential power, which,
Speaker 4: by the way, just like sidebar when people are surprised
Speaker 4: that John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh signed off on this
Speaker 4: immunity decision, this theory of expansive, almost boundless executive power,
Speaker 4: this was their dream, right, This is not a surprise.
Speaker 4: This is how John Roberts has thought about the executive
Speaker 4: branch for a really long time. And so while the
Speaker 4: opinion is sort of shocking on its face for reasons
Speaker 4: that you know, we can talk about or not. The
Speaker 4: fact that Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts signed up for
Speaker 4: this project should not surprise people. This has been things
Speaker 4: something that they have been working on in their capacity
Speaker 4: before they came to the court for a long time.
Speaker 3: This made so much sense.
Speaker 1: I appreciate you so much. We needed this little caveat
Speaker 1: to close the loop on Project twenty twenty five. I
Speaker 1: love you, I appreciate you. Continue to be my north star.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you, back at you.
Speaker 2: Dave Aggers is the author of The Circle, Joe Westbrook
Speaker 2: is a public schools teacher, and Arthur Bradford is the
Speaker 2: director of the documentary To Be Destroyed.
Speaker 1: Welcome to fast Politics. Everyone's going to have to say hi,
Speaker 1: so we can identify people.
Speaker 3: Who've got Arthur. Hi, I'm Arthur. Arthur's the director of
Speaker 3: this movie. And then we have.
Speaker 1: Dave, who is the author and the subject of this documentary.
Speaker 5: Hi. This is Dave.
Speaker 6: Although I would say I am just a participant in
Speaker 6: that documentary. The subject is Rapid City and what they
Speaker 6: did to fight back when their school board went rogue.
Speaker 3: Tell us sort of how this movie came into being.
Speaker 6: Right a couple of years ago, Amanda Ewley, who is
Speaker 6: the publisher of McSweeney's, that we work on a lot
Speaker 6: of projects together. She called one day and said, you
Speaker 6: hear your book was banned in Rapid City in South Dakota.
Speaker 6: And I had never been banned before, and I couldn't
Speaker 6: even think of what book it would be.
Speaker 5: She told me it was The Circle, which really.
Speaker 6: Didn't make any sense because I couldn't think of anything
Speaker 6: highly objectionable in that book unless it was banned by
Speaker 6: Silicon Valley Company or something. So it didn't make any
Speaker 6: sense that it was being banned in South Dakota. But
Speaker 6: we got to the bottom of it and figured out
Speaker 6: that there were maybe three or four pages that were
Speaker 6: vaguely sexual in nature. There's some very very awkward sex
Speaker 6: scenes in the book that are kind of meant to
Speaker 6: be very awkward, and sort of the hech company that
Speaker 6: the center of the book is pre you. It's such
Speaker 6: an atmosphere that everybody's awkward all the time. And so
Speaker 6: it turns out that the book had been assigned as
Speaker 6: not a sign but made available as an option for
Speaker 6: seniors in advanced literature classes in Rapid City. A new
Speaker 6: school board came in a more conservative than the one
Speaker 6: before it, and four new members were elected.
Speaker 1: I just want to pause for a second here and
Speaker 1: just mentioned that this school board was part of this
Speaker 1: Mom's for Liberty carsh to replace members of the school
Speaker 1: board who were less ideological with people who were ideologically
Speaker 1: aligned with Moms for Liberty, And also that some of
Speaker 1: the members of the school board, these three new members,
Speaker 1: or maybe all of them, didn't have children at the school.
Speaker 6: Right right, It wasn't Moms for Liberty directly participating. There
Speaker 6: were two groups called one called Family Heritage Alliance and
Speaker 6: the other one called the Free Republic Pack. But they're
Speaker 6: doing the same thing that Moms for Liberty do. They
Speaker 6: work from the same playbook. They have the same list
Speaker 6: of books that they tried to take out of school
Speaker 6: libraries and off school reading lists. And yet the incoming
Speaker 6: president of the school board, Kate Thomas, had seven kids,
Speaker 6: none of them were in the school district, all of
Speaker 6: whom were homeschooled. So had a new group of school
Speaker 6: board members, none of whom had kids in the district.
Speaker 6: But what was really interesting was that the school board
Speaker 6: itself did not overtly ban these books. It was a
Speaker 6: group of principles from the high school that when this
Speaker 6: new school board was swept in, they pre banned the books.
Speaker 6: They series of emails went around these three principles saying,
Speaker 6: now that we have a new school board, you should
Speaker 6: be very careful. We should eliminate any risks. We better
Speaker 6: be more conservative than before. And so they started looking
Speaker 6: through the school reading lists and libraries to see which
Speaker 6: books school board might object to, and they pulled them
Speaker 6: even before there was any sort of formal activity.
Speaker 5: Did that make sense?
Speaker 1: So, Jill, explain to me how you got involved in
Speaker 1: this pushback against book banning.
Speaker 7: Well, I'm an English teacher in the Rapid city school
Speaker 7: districts and our first indication that there was anything wrong
Speaker 7: with the books that had been chosen for these senior
Speaker 7: English classes was an email over the summer, the summer
Speaker 7: of twenty twenty one, and it was from our administrator,
Speaker 7: our principal at our school, and had an excerpt from
Speaker 7: one of the books that were in question that had
Speaker 7: a little sexual activity in that particular section of the book,
Speaker 7: and an email that told us to remove those from
Speaker 7: our classrooms when we came back to school a month later.
Speaker 7: And then it sort of snowballed.
Speaker 3: We got another email about a.
Speaker 7: Different book, and then a third, and then we just
Speaker 7: started asking questions and trying to figure out where this
Speaker 7: was coming from and were all of our books in
Speaker 7: jeopardy that we taught and where it originated from.
Speaker 1: Can you sort of explain to us what South Dakota
Speaker 1: kind of what it's like there, and like, had anything
Speaker 1: like this.
Speaker 7: Ever happened for not in the education community, as far
Speaker 7: as we were all aware of the larger conversation of
Speaker 7: books that are appropriate for certain levels of classrooms to teach.
Speaker 7: And we're professionals, so we take it very seriously when
Speaker 7: we choose literature to teach to our classes. But this
Speaker 7: was brand new as far as polling books that had
Speaker 7: been approved and ordered and were on the curriculum. It
Speaker 7: took us by surprise. Maybe it shouldn't have, but it did,
Speaker 7: and we started to investigate and it made everybody really nervous.
Speaker 7: As far as the five books that were pulled have
Speaker 7: content in them that is not that different from the
Speaker 7: classics that we teach and other modern literature that's been
Speaker 7: in the classrooms for decades.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm curious about, Like, were you just shocked
Speaker 1: or because you had seen stuff about this on the news,
Speaker 1: did you sort of think it might eventually come to you.
Speaker 7: I think as far as were we shocked, yes, that
Speaker 7: it was immediate pull the books, get them out of
Speaker 7: the classrooms, and then it sort of kind of heightened
Speaker 7: into a frenzy at some point where there were people
Speaker 7: running around making sure that we didn't have specific books
Speaker 7: on our shelves, whether they were in a class set
Speaker 7: or teachers' personal copies of books that we loaned out
Speaker 7: to students.
Speaker 3: It did.
Speaker 7: It took us by surprise, and no one had questioned
Speaker 7: book orders in the past or books that we had chosen.
Speaker 7: They just let us be professional and know that we
Speaker 7: know our students and we know our curriculum.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I think you guys did
Speaker 1: which was amazing, and I don't know if you can
Speaker 1: speak to this because it was more of on the
Speaker 1: administration side, but there were small things that were enacted
Speaker 1: to change the way because these people who joined who
Speaker 1: were involved, right, the superintendent and the people on the
Speaker 1: school board, none of them had kids at the school, right,
Speaker 1: So it was a way to sort of just change
Speaker 1: the rules to make sure that if you are on
Speaker 1: the school board making decisions for the students. You need
Speaker 1: to have kids who go to the school, and that
Speaker 1: prevented a lot of those right.
Speaker 7: Well, it would have, yes, And while that's not a
Speaker 7: direct change in any policy, it has become such a
Speaker 7: conversation that the newest members who've been elected either have
Speaker 7: students who went through our school system, have students who
Speaker 7: are currently in our school system, and we have at
Speaker 7: least one member who doesn't have children but is a
Speaker 7: former teacher at the school where this was happening. So
Speaker 7: people who were invested in the local school district more
Speaker 7: than as an oversight or pushing policy, and were interested
Speaker 7: in actually the education of the children in the community.
Speaker 3: Yes, Arthur, explain to us how you got involved in this.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Dave and I have been friends for a long time,
Speaker 8: and I'm a documentary film maker. So I had reached
Speaker 8: out to Dave years earlier, or maybe a year earlier,
Speaker 8: just to ask him if he was doing anything interesting
Speaker 8: that he might allow us to film. There's always some
Speaker 8: project that he's doing that is interesting in some way.
Speaker 8: So we had gone over a bunch of different ideas,
Speaker 8: but this one wasn't something we had discussed. It kind
Speaker 8: of just came up. He mentioned that he was going
Speaker 8: to Rapid City. Kind of it was almost like last minute,
Speaker 8: and we just asked if we could please come along
Speaker 8: and film and see what had happened.
Speaker 5: It seemed like it could be interesting. I first went
Speaker 5: as a journalist.
Speaker 6: I wrote about the book band for the Washington Post
Speaker 6: because I'd been reading about the band, you know, elsewhere
Speaker 6: in the country for years. You know, we have an
Speaker 6: epidemic right now at over four thousand books ban just
Speaker 6: in the first half of twenty twenty four. So I
Speaker 6: just wanted to see how it was done, the actual
Speaker 6: mechanics of it. And they're really interesting in that it
Speaker 6: happened a lot of different ways. But one thing that
Speaker 6: it never really happens is that these bands are never
Speaker 6: or very rarely authentic from the grassroots parents actually objecting
Speaker 6: that sort of thing. Those things very rarely happen. It's
Speaker 6: always sort of engineered by an outside group. And the
Speaker 6: number of complaints from actual parents that have kids in
Speaker 6: the district that don't want their kids reading a certain
Speaker 6: book are just incredibly rare. Those things almost never happen.
Speaker 6: It's almost always one person, usually an agitator affiliated with
Speaker 6: Moms for Liberty that makes all of the complaints, and
Speaker 6: some districts you have six hundred books that are challenged
Speaker 6: and they're all challenged by one person. So this is
Speaker 6: not an organic movement.
Speaker 1: Arthur, when you got there, I've never been to South Dakota.
Speaker 1: I don't think there's a direct flight from Manhattan. I'm
Speaker 1: just curious if you could talk to us a little
Speaker 1: bit about what sort of life in South Dakota is
Speaker 1: like or how you found it.
Speaker 8: Well, it's a small American city. Yeah, so yeah, it's true.
Speaker 8: You have you fly through Denver. I live in Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 8: so it wasn't a totally foreign place. But in some ways,
Speaker 8: I think living on the coast, I was expecting it
Speaker 8: to be almost more conservative than I think it really is.
Speaker 8: And maybe this is what was a function of that.
Speaker 8: We were meeting a lot of the teachers and people
Speaker 8: like Jill, who will be talking to soon.
Speaker 5: I guess.
Speaker 8: You know, it's a very flat landscape, although there's the
Speaker 8: Black Hills are nearby, and I found that it's not
Speaker 8: that different than your typical American places. But there was
Speaker 8: a sense of you know, the pandemic was just kind
Speaker 8: of easing up as we were starting to film. So
Speaker 8: there was a sense, like all over America, that things
Speaker 8: had changed, things had shifted, and that people were maybe
Speaker 8: a little bit wary of outsiders there.
Speaker 5: I think Rapid City, it's a great town.
Speaker 6: We ended up spending well, I've spent a lot of
Speaker 6: time there at this point. I spent a lot of
Speaker 6: time in Idaho. I didn't find a very different that,
Speaker 6: but you know, it's a pretty sophisticated small city. We
Speaker 6: had a rally, sort of sort of information speaking night
Speaker 6: where people could, you know, town hall kind of thing
Speaker 6: that's in the documentary, and we did expect maybe that
Speaker 6: there would be people standing up saying let's ban some books.
Speaker 5: We don't want these books in our libraries. Whatever. There
Speaker 5: was nobody.
Speaker 6: You could not find anybody, And I think that so
Speaker 6: many the people there are so embarrassed by having this
Speaker 6: take place in their town because I don't think it
Speaker 6: has any popular support. So whether South Dakota as a
Speaker 6: whole is red state, I guess it votes that way.
Speaker 6: But in this town, and in almost any town in
Speaker 6: the US, you're going to find piny, little pockets of
Speaker 6: support for book bands and overwhelming sentiment against them, and
Speaker 6: I have sort of incident faiths and people to do
Speaker 6: the right thing when they have the right information and
Speaker 6: if they know that something so Unamerican and embarrassing like
Speaker 6: a book ban is happening in their town, they will
Speaker 6: act to restore the right to read freely. I would
Speaker 6: encourage anybody to go Rapid City. It's a and the
Speaker 6: surrounding area. You know, Mount rushports about half an hour away,
Speaker 6: and the Black Hills are there. It's a gorgeous area actually,
Speaker 6: And the people restored our faith in sort of just
Speaker 6: any community anywhere doing the right thing.
Speaker 8: I think that is probably the impression a lot of
Speaker 8: like people would have never been there. It's a really
Speaker 8: cool place. The downtown is very interesting. One thing that
Speaker 8: we notice and you'll see in the film is like
Speaker 8: on every corner downtown is a statue of a different
Speaker 8: US president in the Rapid City, which is it's very striking.
Speaker 8: It's just all these You've got Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, fdr.
Speaker 6: All that most of them are surprisingly short. It's really interesting.
Speaker 6: There's some very short presidents, like in the five two,
Speaker 6: five three. It's either that or they can drunk. All
Speaker 6: of these statues just a little bit and make pastors
Speaker 6: by feel better about themselves. It was really weird, but
Speaker 6: I will say, like everybody that we called really early on,
Speaker 6: you know, the first thing that we did when we
Speaker 6: heard the Circle was banned and four other books, is
Speaker 6: that we called Mitzi's with local independent bookstore, and we said, hey,
Speaker 6: if the seniors in high school that had been offered
Speaker 6: these books but now they can't access them, what if
Speaker 6: we allowed any of these seniors to come into your
Speaker 6: store and get all five banned books for free, We'll
Speaker 6: pay for it.
Speaker 5: And Mitzies immediately said.
Speaker 6: Yes, like they didn't have to think about it, and
Speaker 6: we got started with that the next day.
Speaker 5: Basically, so any seniors could just.
Speaker 6: Walk in and say give me those five banned books
Speaker 6: and they'd walk away with five books for free. And
Speaker 6: then there's a t shirt maker across the street that
Speaker 6: we said, hey, can we make shirts here it's say
Speaker 6: let readers read and let teachers teach, And they said shirt.
Speaker 6: They put them in the front window and people could
Speaker 6: also go in and get those shirts for free. So
Speaker 6: it was just sort of like it kind of has
Speaker 6: the feel of a college town even though there are
Speaker 6: a few small schools there, but I think everybody there
Speaker 6: was completely aboard with the idea of fighting this rogue
Speaker 6: schoolboard that didn't represent their value.
Speaker 1: One of the things I wanted to ask you, guys,
Speaker 1: which is part of this idea, is that I wonder
Speaker 1: because when I saw the movie, this is what I
Speaker 1: was thinking about, was just how much of this is organic?
Speaker 3: These book bands?
Speaker 1: And you've talked about this already with the one person
Speaker 1: reporting the books again and again, and how much of
Speaker 1: this is actually AstroTurf? So can you talk about the
Speaker 1: ways in which these book bands are actually you know,
Speaker 1: there's sort of a template for doing it.
Speaker 6: You know, there's Moms for Liberty, which is the sort
Speaker 6: of the leader in this. They're pretty well funded, pretty
Speaker 6: well organized. They have a playbook that they can sort
Speaker 6: of map onto any town, especially a smaller town or
Speaker 6: a more valuable district. And then there's a website called
Speaker 6: booklooks dot org. What they've analyzed like hundreds and maybe
Speaker 6: thousands by now of books and they pull out all
Speaker 6: of the objectionable parts to each book so that anybody
Speaker 6: that wants to and any books can just go there
Speaker 6: and just get immediately to the page and passage from
Speaker 6: each book, from It's twenty two to Beloved to Mouse
Speaker 6: to the Diary of Anne Frank. If you can believe it,
Speaker 6: that is also a book that's being hanned a lot
Speaker 6: right now because of some references to her body changing
Speaker 6: and being attracted to another girl. If anybody wants to
Speaker 6: do that, they can just sort of go to the
Speaker 6: mom's for a liberty playbook, go to booklooks org and
Speaker 6: then at first blush. Some of these books can look like,
Speaker 6: oh wow, yeah, that shouldn't be taught to my third
Speaker 6: grader or whatever. But what you don't find in almost
Speaker 6: any community, you do not find actual parents going on
Speaker 6: the recue saying I don't want my kid reading this.
Speaker 6: And one of the reasons I have teenagers myself. One
Speaker 6: of the reasons that, first of all, I don't think
Speaker 6: people in general believe in banning books. I think that
Speaker 6: overwhelmingly bipartisan issues that the overwhelming majority of Americans say,
Speaker 6: this is just not our way of life.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: The other thing I thought about being around teenagers too
Speaker 6: much is that no teenagers want to be that family
Speaker 6: that is banning books. You know, they don't want their
Speaker 6: parents embarrassing them by being out front in the newspaper
Speaker 6: saying that, you know, my son or daughters shouldn't have
Speaker 6: access to these books because it's so mortified for them.
Speaker 6: And so I think that for those two reasons. One
Speaker 6: it's an American and unenlightened. Second, it's embarrassing for the family.
Speaker 6: And third, the craziest thing of all, And it comes up,
Speaker 6: you know, in our town hall with teenagers, is that
Speaker 6: again and again when they came up to speak at
Speaker 6: the microphone at the town all the teenagers would pull
Speaker 6: out their phones and say, I have everything I could
Speaker 6: ever want and more on this phone. So why are
Speaker 6: we banning a book when I can get infinitely more
Speaker 6: lewd information on this phone at any time. So it's
Speaker 6: a very strange thing. It's coming from a very strange place.
Speaker 6: It's say, we're not going to ban phones, we're not
Speaker 6: even commenting on that issue. But these books from how
Speaker 6: to symbolize values or symbolized ways of life or kid's
Speaker 6: information that we don't want them getting. And then you
Speaker 6: get into how many of the books have LGBTQ themes
Speaker 6: and many of the books sort of present non white narratives,
Speaker 6: narratives go against sort of the farthest right version of
Speaker 6: the history of the US. And then then you get
Speaker 6: to sort of the essence of moms or moms for liberty,
Speaker 6: and that is that they don't want these narratives and
Speaker 6: these stories being taught in schools and then thus being
Speaker 6: endorsed by teachers who have a position of trust and
Speaker 6: power in their children's lives. And so that's where a
Speaker 6: lot of this is coming from. You know, the vast
Speaker 6: majority of the books that are these banned lists are
Speaker 6: presenting these kinds of themes and these stories and narratives
Speaker 6: that they don't want their children exposed to. And obviously,
Speaker 6: the tragedy is that so many places, like more remote
Speaker 6: towns where if you're a gay kid that's looking for
Speaker 6: a book like Perks of Being a Wallflower, that might
Speaker 6: present story that reflects your own experience or helps you
Speaker 6: get through adolescents or helps you sort of see yourself
Speaker 6: in a book.
Speaker 5: If those kids are.
Speaker 6: Prevented from seeing these books or being sort of guided
Speaker 6: through these books by trusted teachers, then that's tragic because
Speaker 6: those are the kids that need it most, that are
Speaker 6: sort of in more remote areas where they don't have
Speaker 6: a lot of role models that have lived the same
Speaker 6: that are sort of guide them through their adolescence. And
Speaker 6: so this is obviously that at the core of it,
Speaker 6: because Moms for Liberty again are not saying don't look
Speaker 6: at your phone or information about being a gay kids
Speaker 6: and not saying that. They're saying they don't want teachers
Speaker 6: teaching them and they don't want them to be tactically
Speaker 6: endorsed by being on library so and that I think
Speaker 6: is sort of the our darker truth and the more
Speaker 6: insidious effect of Facebook bands.
Speaker 1: One of the cool things about the movie is that
Speaker 1: you really see what a thriving, fabulous little city you
Speaker 1: guys have. Do you think that the sort of you
Speaker 1: can be a spot of I don't know what the
Speaker 1: voting pattern in the city is, but there certainly is
Speaker 1: a feeling that people are very progressive and open to
Speaker 1: things and intellectual things. And I'm wondering if that's sort
Speaker 1: of a lesson to take from the movie.
Speaker 7: I think it is, and if I could even expand
Speaker 7: on that Furli, I think the lesson here is that
Speaker 7: we as educators, as parents. I have a student at
Speaker 7: the high school.
Speaker 3: We didn't back down.
Speaker 7: We faced the fear of what comes next, if we
Speaker 7: say these things out loud that were feeling, that are reasonable,
Speaker 7: and we send them out loud, and we the community listened.
Speaker 7: And one of the things that I think we learned
Speaker 7: as a community that I think is a broader picture,
Speaker 7: is that the majority of people are reasonable and the
Speaker 7: voices that our loudest are not the reasonable ones. And
Speaker 7: so the louder we got and the more we just
Speaker 7: didn't sit in our fear, we were able to enact change.
Speaker 1: I mean, that is absolutely true. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on and just talking to me about this.
Speaker 1: The movie is amazing and thank you are doing in
Speaker 1: your community is really cool.
Speaker 7: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be the spokesperson
Speaker 7: for our school.
Speaker 3: Thanks you, guys, really appreciate you.
Speaker 5: Oh okay, thank the lot.
Speaker 3: Thank you.