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DAVID:
Hey there, welcome to Lever Time, the show where we try to make the world a little less shitty through the power of podcasting. I'm your host, David Sirota on today's show, we're going to be talking about how police in the United States are actually not legally obligated to protect us in light of that horrific shooting in Texas last week. Also, a historic climate justice lawsuit is making its way through the courts. And we'll look at the people trying to stop it. Spoiler alert, it's the Biden administration. Then later on, I'm going to be joined by the one and only Judd Apatow to talk about the power of comedy canceled culture and his awesome new HBO documentary, George Carlin's American dream. And this week, our paid subscribers will get to hear a bonus segment. It's my exclusive interview with a former gun industry executive who details how that industry specifically changed its marketing to flood the country with the AR 15 rifles that now define so many mass shootings, a reminder for our free listeners to head over to lever news.com To become a supporting subscriber giving you access to our premium podcast feed plus a lot more. Before we get into all of that. And because this is our first episode, I just want to take one quick moment to introduce myself. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a journalist, author, Oscar nominated writer on the movie don't look up. And I was the speechwriter for Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. I've been working in and around politics and political media for several decades. Yes, I'm basically becoming an old man. In 2020, after the Bernie campaign, I started a newsletter with the aim of providing independent Accountability journalism that covers government corruption, and corporate influence in our politics. It's kind of what I've been doing. For a lot of my life. I've written three books, this is the thing that I've been covering, for really 20 plus years. Now, in just two short years of doing this newsletter, it's grown into the lever, which has become a full scale newsroom of reporters, doing real investigative journalism that holds us accountable the people in power. And that's thanks to our subscribers. And now, we have this podcast, lever time. So what is this podcast going to be? Well, it's going to be a mix of things. Sometimes we're going to talk about the stuff in the news. Sometimes we're going to do more in depth coverage of the stories, the levers reporting on, sometimes we'll have guests to interview. But most importantly, we're going to cover serious issues. But we're not always going to take ourselves too seriously. The world is such a depressing fucking place right now. So we're going to try when we can to have a little fun. As we fight against the forces, slowly destroying organized human society and civilization, we're not going to be afraid to expose the people in power who were fucking with you. We're not going to be afraid to explain why they're fucking you. And we're absolutely going to tell you who's paying them to fuck you. Because to be totally honest, we don't have any time to mince words. That's not why we're here. Life is too short. So that's my introductory spiel. I promise I'm not going to do a speech like that at the beginning of every episode. But it was worth saying to start this project. Lastly, I want to introduce the producer of leisure time and my de facto sidekick producer Frank, what's up producer Frank?

FRANK:
David? Hello, it is good to be here on the first episode of lever time. Wow, I can't believe I can't believe we're here today. We were doing it.

DAVID:
I know. We're fine. And for folks who are interested, this has taken a lot of time to get off the ground. It's not just you know, it's not just you flip on the computer and do this. It's it's been a ton of work. Frank and I have been working on this for a while. So I'm thrilled that we're starting now. And I just want to do a shout out. Shout out to everybody who pitched in to help us bring Frank aboard. Shout out to every all of our subscribers who really do make this stuff possible. I mean, seriously, we could not do this without our subscribers.

FRANK:
Absolutely. And I'm super grateful to be here. Thank you, David, for hiring me. Thank you to everyone else for supporting me getting here. And I'm excited to be a part of the show. I'm going to be the one asking the dumb questions I'm going to I'm gonna make sure if there's something that's not clear a little too inside baseball, I'm going to be the dumb one who pipes up and ask someone to

DAVID:
You're gonna be like the Ed McMahon. You gonna be like Ed McMahon on one Johnny Carson.

FRANK:
Absolutely .100%.

DAVID:
Frank made me one promise you made me one promise. Frank made me a promise when he started that we would not make a podcast that was like pod save America. He made me that promise I'm gonna hold him to that promise.

FRANK:
Well, it's just because it's my favorite. And I can't have more than one favorite podcast in my life. That's, that's the real reason.

DAVID:
This will not be pod save America. It is. Honestly, if anybody hears this, this show become pod save America, I want you to email us and tell us to just shut it down quickly. Because Because if we become that, I've just thought that what's the point? What is the point? Okay, it's time to get to our first story. The big story this week was obviously the school shooting in Texas. I think people are feeling not only devastated by the shooting, but also by that horrible feeling that nothing seems to change. Or as Joe Biden put it, nothing will fundamentally change. There's really almost nothing original to say anymore about the gun violence epidemic, because the facts are so obvious and clear. And they've been so obvious and clear for so long. But it's worth setting up this discussion with just a few simple facts just to say them out loud. So that we all know we're not going like totally insane. So I'm just going to recount a couple of facts three facts. Fact one. Guns are now the leading cause of death among American children. Fact to the assault weapons ban, which let's remember was pushed by Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, signed by Bill Clinton. That assault weapons ban coincided with the reduction in mass shootings. When the ban expired in 2004. Mass shootings afterwards tripled. If you need more evidence of that. Take a look at the difference between three states. I found the stat is incredible. 15 years ago, California, Florida and Texas had about the same rate of gun deaths. Since California tightened its gun laws. Its gun death rate declined by 10% to one of the lowest rates in the country. By contrast, Florida, Texas, in the same time period, loosen their gun laws and their gun death rates climbed by 28 and 37%, respectively. So basically, we know the assault weapons bans work, factory, mass shootings have repeatedly resulted in Republicans making the situation worse, and Democrats doing nothing. So I know that sounds like hyperbole, I know it. But here's the conclusion of a recent Harvard UCLA study. This is their words, not mine, quote, the annual number of laws that loosened gun restrictions doubles in the year following a mass shooting in states with Republican controlled legislatures. There is no significant effect of mass shootings on laws enacted when there is a Democratic legislature. So those are the facts you can't get around them. We know how to reduce the leading cause of death among kids gun violence at our country refuses to do it. And it's just worth saying that out loud. To know that we're not all going insane. Now in this Texas massacre, one thing a lot of people I think did not know about is police responsibility. A lot of the last few days of news have been driven by revelations that local police in Texas waited for nearly an hour without intervening to stop the shooter. And at the same time police outside the school were apparently restraining parents from saving their own kids, including tackling pepper spraying and teasing them. I mean, just think about that like being a parent and, and it's like the worst possible thing you can imagine. As a parent, I'm sure every parent who saw this kind of imagined it in their own lives. And all that highlights how in America, the police are not legally required to protect us. It's they're not legally required to protect people. I remember being shocked about that when a few years ago there was this headline in the New York Times The headline was, officers had no duty to protect students in the Parkland massacre. A judge rules this duty to protect this idea of what duty the cops have to protect you or or no duty to protect you is something that I think we need to talk about. So we're going to talk about it right now. With Alec Karakatsanis. He's a civil rights lawyer, public defender and founder of civil rights Corp, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to challenging says stomach injustice in the United States Legal System, he's also a former public defender.

DAVID:
Alec, thanks for being here, I want to get right into this. In light of the shooting last week, we're talking about this idea called the duty to protect, and how it relates to policing in the United States. And I think a lot of people their first time ever hearing this phrase duty to protect. And it all stems from a Supreme Court case, as I understand it, called Castle Rock versus Gonzales. Let's first and foremost, why don't you explain what that case was, and what precedent it established,

ALEC:
So I think it's first just really important to take a step back and understand that there is no duty to protect people from any particular harms. So the Supreme Court has been clear that police have absolutely no obligation to protect any particular person from any particular threat that they face from another private person. And really, Castle Rock is actually just a very ordinary case in which a person was gauging in, you know, numerous attempts to get the police to protect and enforce a restraining order that she had obtained against her ex husband. And what ended up happening was the ex husband, if I recall correctly from the case, it's been a while since I've read it, but the ex husband ended up taking their their children kidnapping them, and then murdering their children. And while he had kidnapped the children, the the wife had repeatedly sought to have local police and enforce this restraining order and find the kids etc. And they didn't act, they didn't do anything, and they didn't prevent the husband from killing the kids and then killed himself. And the case was is actually in the media is, is I think, often given more significance than it actually has. The real issue in the case was simply whether Colorado law had created what we call a property interest in when it sort of granted this restraining order to the wife and to the mother. Whether it had given her an interest that could be enforceable under federal law. So the ultimate question in the case really came down to how the Supreme Court actually interpreted Colorado law. And that's why it's not ultimately as significant as let's say, of the Shamy case, which I know we should probably talk about a little bit later.

DAVID:
Yeah, we can get into that I'm just I'm sort of my mind is reeling from the fact that Colorado seems to be every gun situation, every gun debate in America seems to always trace back to Colorado, where I'm coming to you from I mean, the Castle Rock, Castle Rock is where you go down to get your up there, there. It's a shopping mall with outlets, that's where you go to get this, get, you know, discount clothes, if you if you if you need them, and you can get down there. And of course, another road on the gun debate leads to Colorado in this case. And I think one thing when I started reading about this, I mean, look, I'm old enough to remember the police academy movies, where the the motto in the police academy movies was was to protect and serve like that was the motto of the police department. And and what you're sort of saying is, is that that's actually that may be the motto of the police. But Castle Rock that case. And the dish Shaney case, which I want to talk about, essentially said that's not actually legally what the mission of the police's so what a dish Shany said

ALEC:
Deshaney is a case in which the Supreme Court held that there is no constitutional right to have the government protect you from certain harms from another private person. So for example, in the Shany, there was a small child who was repeatedly being abused by his father. And the abuse was brought time after time after time to social workers, by emergency room doctors and others to the child welfare officials in Wisconsin. And time after time after time, they did nothing and they failed to protect this small child. And then, when he was a toddler, the father beat him so badly that he had permanent brain damage. And so the child's mother brought a lawsuit saying that the authorities had failed in their obligation to protect this child from the known abuse of the Father and the Supreme Court held that you have no constitutional right to be protected by police or other government authorities from another private actor. I think that's a much more foundational case, because that case establishes that that there really is no con Traditional right to, for the government to protect your body from physical harm from other private actors, whereas the Castle Rock case is really an interpretation of whether Colorado had gone further than the US Constitution and established as a matter of state law, certain enforceable property interests in restraining orders.

DAVID:
Okay, so the police essentially now have the protection of Supreme Court precedent to basically not help people. And and obviously, this relates to what happened in Texas in the sense that what we saw in Texas was police not going in to rescue children, in fact, at times using police force to restrain parents from themselves going in to rescue children. I guess the follow up question is, do you presume that if there are lawsuits, in this case in the Texas situation, that these precedents will protect that police department?

ALEC:
I do, partially because the entire point of decades of constitutional law in this area is to shield police from liability for their failure to follow the law. And I think it's very, very important. And maybe the most important thing for your listeners to take away from all of this is actually a higher level point. And that point is that every elite bureaucrat, politician lawmaker, every person who's sort of in charge of institutions of power in our society understand something very important. And that is that although police market themselves as quote unquote, law enforcement, they only ever enforce some laws against some people some of the time. So for example, all over the country, it's illegal to possess certain drugs. But those laws are completely unenforceable on rich college campuses, private boarding schools, Wall Street banks, where cocaine and other drugs are rampant for the last 40 years. They're ruthlessly and violently, brutally enforced in poor communities and communities of color. It's not because the drug laws are only violated by poor people. It's because police make very particular choices about which laws to enforce against which people so for example, police routinely enforce shoplifting laws against very poor people who need food or shelter or diapers or whatever from the grocery store. They almost never enforce wage theft laws, which cost $50 billion a year. The same is true of tax evasion. police and prosecutors and federal officials hardly ever enforce tax evasion laws, even though it costs a trillion dollars a year, which is about 100 times all other property crime combined.

DAVID:
And I go back to the dichotomy when it comes to what police can and cannot be held accountable for. I mean, there was a recent case, correct me if I'm wrong, just a couple months ago back, I think it was in October about so called qualified immunity, where the Supreme Court essentially said that police officers are entitled to special protection from being sued over their use of force against people. So if you take this together, what and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but I take this together, the police essentially cannot be held legally liable for not going in and enforcing the law, for instance, against a mass shooter at a school. And apparently they cannot be effectively held accountable for overzealous use of force against suspects. It seems to me that this is an entire architecture of jurisprudence, designed to protect the police from being a held accountable, really, for anything. And I think my question on that is, do you think it's that deliberate? Right. Do you think the judges the justices, over many years, have thought through it from that ideological perspective? Or are these a bunch of random rulings? Like what do you think is behind all?

ALEC:
I would say that the common thread and the two examples that you gave, so police have no obligation to protect people constitutionally, and they're protected when they do act illegally, and do violate the law and do brutalized people they're also protected. The common thread is that the elite people who construct and enforce our laws understand that the primary function of police is to preserve inequality. Police are never and were never pitched to the public. For most of the history of the United States. They were first pitched as institutions to catch enslaved people who were running away. And then in the Northeast, and many other parts of the country, the rise of the modern police force was actually a sort of an attempt by big business to infiltrate and crush striking laborers. And so police were only started to be marketed as sort of like a public safety and like serve and protect. That's a latter half of the 20th century, particularly as the rise of mass incarceration happened before that they weren't even interested in this sort of propagandistic notion that they're here to serve and protect us. And so it's a relatively recent phenomenon, actually, for most of this country history, people understood very well, that the role of police was to preserve distributions of economic power and wealth. Police are the institution, if you own land and own property, even if you took that property from Native people or, or black people, when land was being routinely confiscated throughout the south from black families. The police are the institution that you call to bring the force and violence of the state if someone tries to trespass on your land, it's the institutionalization of the bureaucracy of state violence. And so people, it's not necessarily that every police officer and every prosecutor and every judge understands the full extent of how throughout US history, police are the violent arm that that elites have used to maintain their wealth and property, I don't think every single person has that kind of like, deliberate mental state. But the fact that police serve that function, animates and determines at every critical turn in the country's history in terms of how the law around police has developed, animates, what kinds of laws are created and what kinds of doctrines are created. Because think about it like this, if, for example, the Supreme Court and machinee had ruled a different way, and said that we all have an enforceable right to require the police to enforce the law, and to be able to sue the government, if the police don't enforce the law. Imagine all the laws that would then have to be enforced, we have a lot of pretty good laws on our books that prevent violence by the government against us, but also that that require certain basic environmental protections and health protections and anti discrimination protections and protections designed to help tenants and, and workers. And many of those laws are completely unenforceable, for example, there are over 100,000 known violations of the Clean Water Act every year, there are millions of violations of, of toxic and illegal dumping laws, almost none of them are enforced. So what elites really appreciate in our society is that if everyone had an obligation to require the government to enforce the law, they also have to start enforcing all the laws that are designed to preserve equality and the environment and anti discrimination. And, and so elites benefit from a world in which police are given the discretion to decide which laws to enforce because then the police on mass can by and large, can choose to enforce only some laws against some people some of the time.

DAVID:
I mean, this is such an important point. And and there's two things that come to mind. One, what I hear you saying is that the statue, for instance, at the Justice Department, whether it's the with the blindfold, where it's supposed to embody the idea that justice is blind that in fact, these rulings, create a deliberately a legal architecture that says, justice doesn't have to be blind, that justice can be selective, that the police can choose to do what they want to do and not do what they don't want to do whenever they want. It also, kind of reminds me that maybe the depiction of the police in The Big Lebowski was exactly right.

MOVIE CLIP:
Lebowski! Deadbeat! Keep your ugly fucking goldbrick and ass out of my beach community.

DAVID:
That clip from The Big Lebowski where the police is basically being used to essentially protect rich people's property, for instance, that essentially is the paradigm. And I think that's become really, really obvious. So I want to go back to this Texas situation. Not only does it seem that the police at least right now, they botched their entire response. But we've also learned that the police lied about how the events unfolded. So So going back to the specific of this mass shooting, how do you interpret this? Does it seem like a good faith mistake? Is there something more nefarious happening here? I mean, I guess, what do you say to those who say listen, this is these are split second decisions? It's a very difficult situation. A lot of times, people just they make the wrong decision. what's your what's your response to that within the context of what happened in Texas,

ALEC:
There was some version of a significant police lie in Virginia. leave every case I handle it as a public defender. I think what most people need to understand is that police lying is utterly institutional and normal. Police themselves call it Test Elian. But it's much more mundane than that. I think it's helpful to start with a couple of examples. Think about the murder of George Floyd. Think about what the press release from the Minneapolis Police said right after the right after George Floyd was murdered. They didn't know that someone from across the street was video recording it. And so the entire incident was portrayed as a man dying in a medical incident and no use of force was used. Think about what the police said after they murdered Eric Garner. And now we have that on video. Think about what the police said when they executed Walter Scott and Laquan McDonald each case, the police report, and media statements afterward were complete fabrications. But that's not unusual. It's not like police only do that when they murder people. Through and Through. Police live virtually all of the time and different types of lies have different reasons. So many times police lie about particular events to cover up their own misconduct. That's probably the police lie that most people are familiar with. But police have to lie at a much deeper level. Keep in mind, for example, that if the purpose and function of police is to preserve the wealth of people who own things and existing distributions of power, they're sort of constantly existentially in this lie that their goal is to serve and protect and promote safety, that leads to all kinds of subsidiary lies. Like for example, they lie about crime data, they lie about rates of crime going up or down. They lie about in many parts of the country that are now we're now seeing, you know, certain types of so called criminal justice reforms. Police are constantly every day being caught lying about the effects of those reforms on suppose Id crime. Um, so they're constantly having to try to trick people into thinking that police are effective at doing what they're doing, and that what they're doing is actually promoting some kind of health, safety and well being. So I think when you look at the massacre in Texas, it's completely consistent with the history of how these institutions operate. to reflexively tell a story that is not true. But that attempts to minimize the extent to which police his incompetence and corruption and mistakes are widely known to the public. They understand very, very well. I think one final example I'll give you is to show how well the police understand this function is. I testified recently at a hearing in the San Francisco government. The San Francisco government uncovered that the police were had a nine person dedicated PR team and unit, the head of the unit was making almost $300,000 a year. This doesn't even count all the police officers who work part time on police PR, it doesn't count the eight person unit at the mayor's office, it also does police PR the goal of all of these people earned millions of dollars in a just one city like San Francisco is to manipulate the news and something that happened. Fascinating that that the government in San Francisco uncovered is that the police have a separate unit, the community engagement unit that is constantly doing focus group and other research to figure out how to frame things for the public. And that same unit has multiple officers whose entire job for that unit is to respond to the scenes of police shooting and police violence and get on top of the media narrative right away spin things start telling a story because the way you spin things right away. This is one of the basics of crisis communications, you can prevent a story from going viral by telling a particular version of it right away.

DAVID:
I mean, it's it's so it's so what you're telling me is I'm both not surprised. And it's so dystopian that there is a unit in a police force. And I'm sure I'm sure San Francisco is not an isolated incident. I want to just ask you the flip side question. I'll play devil's advocate here for a second. A lot of the arguments that you're making about police are echoed in a in a slightly different form by the gun rights movement, which will say that this that people need to be able to arm up in order to protect themselves against state violence against state encroachment against an overbearing government, which includes the long arm of the police. What do you say to that? What's the response to that when you hear the gun rights movement make some of these same arguments to try to justify their position on allowing, for instance, assault weapons to be everywhere and anywhere in the United States?

ALEC:
Before I answer that question, let me just point out a central hypocrisy in the gun rights movements arguments, because these are often the very same people that are the most vociferous in are claims that black people shouldn't own guns. So they apply this self defense argument in vivo, in incredibly aggressive and vigorous ways when this sort of paradigmatic gun owner is is a white Christian, but through a variety of different mechanisms, most prominently through local, state and federal laws that restrict who can own weapons and for example, like if you have a felony conviction, it's actually a federal felony to own a weapon. So if you had a federal drug felony from, you know, 30 years ago, and you live in a so called high crime community that police sort of market as one of the most dangerous communities so you live in the inner city of Chicago, where right wingers and police unions are marketing that is incredibly vital place to live, it's actually a federal felony to carry this, this gun for your protection, even though in other contexts, it's seen as like a like a fundament fundamental foundational constitutional right. And, and so one of the reasons you can you can see that it's not really about self defense and protection, is the conservative courts and, and right wing establishment throughout the country has, over the last several decades, worked to ensure that many of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society can be prosecuted for exercising what in every other context, they call it constitutional. Right. But let me let me answer your your bigger question. And I think there's a much more profound and insidious flaw at the core of a lot of his gun rights arguments, and that is that they are assuming a society that is as unequal and violent as our current society, and then suggesting a policy more and more guns for everyone that almost echoes some kind of like, global arms race. Now, I think that that policy prescription is actually contrary to all of the evidence. So for example, there's overwhelming evidence that putting more guns in people's hands actually leads to more deaths through suicides and accidents. There's overwhelming evidence that putting more guns in schools and more police in schools actually increases fatalities in school shootings and other many other negative effects. But the key point is that it assumes no other interventions to make our society more equal. And so a much better policy response when much more consistent with the scientific evidence would be to address the underlying root causes of harm and violence and alienation and lack of community connection. And I'm talking about things like investment in early childhood education, and mental and medical health care in safe places to live in. theater, music, poetry, arts programs for kids, these are all things that the evidence actually shows leads to less violence of all sorts, including shootings. And so if you if you take as a given and say, We can never fix the level of harm and violence and inequality in our society, then I can see why you might mistakenly be led down the path of saying, Well, everyone needs to just have more guns, because we're in this big, big arm race,

DAVID:
right? problems aren't fixable, just load up, get as many weapons as you can to prevent whatever dystopia you fear, and that you see on your on your television. So very quickly, I just want to ask, and we're running out of time here. But I want to ask very quickly, out of the Texas shooting, if you could wave a wand and something good or positive came out of it. visa vie police reform or gun policy, but let's stick on police because because that's what we've been talking about. What would it be if you could if you were the governor of Texas, if you were the president of the United States, what would the thing to come out of something so awful as the Texas shooting be as it relates to police,

ALEC:
I would just follow the overwhelming scientific evidence. And I would commit massive investments to early childhood education and free preschool. Universal Preschool throughout Texas, I would take all of the money I would remove all of the cops from schools and take all the resources it's being spent on on cops in schools, which were the research shows actually leads to more harm and more violence for kids. And I would invest that in evidence based solutions, like getting kids, more teachers and more attention and more sort of introduction to like educational opportunities at the earliest possible age. That is really the the solution that is most consistent with evidence. And yet it's also the solution that is harnessed to imagine the political class supporting.

DAVID:
Thanks so much for taking the time with us today. Thanks for digging into such a difficult issue. Very quickly. Alec, where can our audience find and support your work?

ALEC:
You can find me on Twitter @equalityalec and you can also check out my book usual cruelty and And you can also support the work of our amazing civil rights organization, which is called civil rights Corp. You can find us at civil rights Corp on Instagram and Twitter. Alec, thanks so much for your time. Absolutely.

DAVID:
Okay, it's time to get to our lever story for today we're gonna be joined by the levers Julia Rock to discuss a piece that she wrote about a landmark climate justice lawsuit in which a group of teenagers are suing the federal government for the right to a livable planet. You heard that right. They are suing they're in court aiming to secure a constitutional right to survive the climate apocalypse

TV CLIP:
I might have gotten away with a tow wasn't blasted kids and their dogs, washed it meddling kids. And it would have been mine if it hadn't been for those meddling kids.

DAVID:
Joining us now is Julia rock. What's up Julia,

JULIA:
surviving the first heatwave in New York City,

DAVID:
ah, perfectly on point to a climate lawsuit trying to secure a right to survive the climate crisis. Okay, so you wrote this piece for the lever about this historic climate lawsuit? It's for those interested, it's called Juliana versus the United States. Let's first and foremost go through the broad strokes of what this case is just the really the top line of what's going on here. Tell us?

JULIA:
Yeah, so as you said, this is really one of the kind lawsuit 21 Young people sued the federal government back in 2015, during the Obama administration, trying to stake a claim to a constitutional right to a livable planet, as you said,

DAVID:
this case is predicated on in part on the idea that the government knew about climate change. I mean, we've heard a lot of these stories and some cases about what it Exxon know, what what did the oil industry at large know, what did the advertising industry know, this pivots around the idea that the government actually knew about climate change a lot longer than it is LED on? Or that lots of people knew about? Why is that so important, legally to this case?

JULIA:
Yeah, that's a good question. So you know, as you pointed out, we've seen all these news stories and investigations about you know, Exxon published this scientific report in the 1970s, about the impacts of climate change. Well, in this case, there's sort of this long brief written by this guy, Gus bet, he worked in the Jimmy Carter administration, and then founded the Natural Resources Defense Council, sort of outlining what what the federal government has known since the 1970s. About not just climate change, but about how you know, the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, and the fossil energy system is contributing to climate change. And the reason that matters legally, is, you know, it's one thing for the government to do something that is actively harming people, it's another thing for the government to do something that is actively harming people that it knows it's doing to actively harm people. So you know, the lawyers will often bring up an analogy in this case, which is, you know, there's a difference between the government sending a kid to a foster home, that is going to be, you know, where the where the kid might face harm that might be dangerous, you know, as opposed to a parent, causing harm to their kid, because in one case, sort of the government is the actual perpetrator of the harm, whereas in another case, it sort of has has a passive role.

DAVID:
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back in a moment. And when we get back in a moment, we're going to talk about what the Biden administration is doing in this case, which side is it on? See if you can guess?

DAVID:
Welcome back, we're here with The Lever’s Julia Rock discussing her recent big story on that landmark climate justice lawsuit called Juliana versus the United States. All right, I want to get into what the Biden administration is doing in this case, because of course, the kids are suing the US government, which is now represented by the Biden administration. This case has been going on before that it's been going on since I think it was the Obama administration to 2015. So when you tell us what the Biden administration is doing, tell us also give us some context on on how the Obama and Trump administration's dealt with this case as well.

JULIA:
Yeah. So when the case was first filed, in 2015, against the Obama administration for you know, massively expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, despite knowing about the harms of of climate change, the Obama administration immediately moved to dismiss the lawsuit. You know, they didn't they didn't want this this case to go to court. Trump took office soon after that and took an even more aggressive approach to keeping the lawsuit out of the courtroom and actually, you know, moved up through the federal district courts to the circuit courts and the Trump administration, I think on six different occasions, made emergency pleas to the Supreme Court shadow docket in order to prevent the case from ever seeing seemed like hold on,

DAVID:
Hold on, hold on. What's the shadow docket?

JULIA:
Yeah, so the shadow docket is sort of a way that the Supreme Court handles emergency cases or emergency please, at least, what they would like to designate as emergency cases without really any public scrutiny. So there aren't any hearings on these cases, most of the times when an opinion comes down, there's no written opinion, you don't know what the vote was. It's this very shady way the Supreme Court can make really consequential decisions without anybody knowing, you know, what the reasoning was? And who voted which way?

DAVID:
I mean, this is like sci fi movie shit, right? Like, this is like this secret, backroom smoky room where nine people come together and just decide giant precedents and laws and interpretations that affect millions of people for the rest of our lives all in secret. I know that that that sounds conspiratorial, but that's basically what we're talking about here.

JULIA:
Right? Yeah. And the the court's use of the shadow docket has really exploded in the past, like 10 years. You know, as the as the court has, has turned to the right.

DAVID:
But I thought I thought the the American right was all about transparency. And and, you know, everyone showing what's going on inside of government? I guess not, huh?

JULIA:
It probably shouldn't come as any surprise that that the shadow docket has been used in really consequential environmental cases, not just the Giuliana lawsuit, although no case has been on the shadow docket as many times as the Giuliana case has.

DAVID:
Okay, so Joe Biden comes in the office. He's portraying himself as Mr. Climate. Where's he come down? Where does His justice department come down?

JULIA:
Yeah, well, so last fall, the the plaintiff sort of had settlement talks with the Biden administration. And what they were hoping to come to was a deal with the administration to reduce carbon emissions through a process that would be overseen by the courts. And I think they sort of thought like, this is something Biden could do without Congress come to a deal, and have sort of this court mandated order to to reduce carbon emissions. And instead, what the plaintiff said, as you know, the administration didn't really come to the table in good faith, they didn't really have any interest in coming to an agreement on this. So now, the case is awaiting a decision from a judge that would allow it to go to trial. And the plaintiffs expect that to be a favorable decision.

FRANK:
Guys, I've got I've got kind of a dumb question here. Other than like, being in bed with the fossil fuel industries, like what What other reason do like Democratic administrations, like the Obama administration and the Biden issue? What What other reasons? Do they have to be fighting this lawsuit?

JULIA:
I think that's that's sort of the big caveat, other than being in bed with the fossil fuel industry, because I think that is the main story, you know, of us climate politics over the past 40 or 50 years, when, you know, the government has known about climate change, and not really done anything about it. So I think that's a huge element. I think also, something we've seen in other parts of our reporting is that, you know, the Justice Department hasn't really changed its stances on cases since the Trump years, there's there's sort of a lot of inertia there. Merrick Garland is in charge, there's not really an interest, it seems to use, you know, the Justice Department as as maybe a force for social progress.

DAVID:
I want to ask the question about if they get a favorable ruling, if they get a favorable ruling, what do these what are the plaintiffs? What are the kids, the lawyers for the kids think the Biden administration will do then?

JULIA:
So So what the plaintiff's lawyers have said is that, you know, in their talks with Justice Department, lawyers, Justice Department lawyers have said, Yeah, we don't think this case should go to trial, we're going to do everything in our power to stop it, including appealing the case to to, for an emergency order on the shadow docket to block it from going to trial. They do not want a big public trial on this case, they have made that very clear to the plaintiff's lawyers,

DAVID:
I guess I want to get into what the upshot of a case like this, what the folks the Biden administration, folks, what the government is so afraid of, like, if this case is successful if they actually established a constitutional right for future generations to survive the climate crisis. What does that mean in practice? Because I think knowing that will tell us what the government is so afraid of?

JULIA:
Yeah. Well, what they're so afraid of is, you know, every federal government regulation, every law, every policy, being subjected to a test of is this going to threaten the future of a livable planet, so any law could be challenged on the premise that it's going to increase carbon emissions and continue to heat up the planet And, you know, what they're saying is like, we can't do that. That's too much for us to do

DAVID:
that. It's like, it's like if somebody made a movie about an asteroid headed towards Earth, and then the Congress and lawmakers had to consider that legislatively. What do we do about this? It's like a court case saying we don't actually, government's position is we don't want to actually have to even consider the comment. It's like, straight out of our goddamn movie wanting to get a tablet.

JULIA:
Because back in, I think it was the spring of 2020. A judge actually used that analogy. Like, it's like, there's a comment out of here, or it's, yes, yes, it comes up in a brief

DAVID:
life imitating art imitating life it's, well, you've made me feel like the metaphor for the movie was was spot on. I know, there were folks who were saying, Oh, it's not a perfect climate metaphor, but but there you go. Now look, you actually spoke to one of the youth plaintiffs Nathan Berry, about how being a part of this lawsuit has influenced his whole worldview. And I want to take a listen to what he told you.

JULIA:
It's definitely like, it's, it helps me grow up really quickly, especially in realizing that there isn't a partisan issue. And I mean, I don't mean that in like a sing song. Like everyone's supporting it. I literally mean, the exact opposite, right? That, that from the get go this like Climate Champion president, who's often put on a pedestal. And I, you know, there are many things to like about Obama, but like, you know, it was pretty quick that the powers that be are going to be fighting alongside tide them. And you know, of course, when Trump came into office, the fossil fuel industry pulled itself out voluntarily, because they just assumed they wouldn't need to pay all those all that money anymore. Like no, like, just because a Democrat isn't in an office doesn't mean that suddenly we need to stop fighting.

DAVID:
Did you get a sense from Nathan, about whether the plaintiffs the kids in this case, are feeling discouraged at this point? Are they are they do you think they're feeling hopeful about it? I mean, where do you think their heads are at?

JULIA:
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think, as Nathan said, you know, a lot of these kids were in, you know, middle school during the Obama years when this lawsuit was filed. And immediately Obama tried to miss the dismiss the case. So as he points out, they haven't really had any, you know, belief that the Democrats were going to solve the climate crisis without putting up a huge fight. So I think with him, it's like less a question of being hopeful or discouraged and more realizing, like, I'm going to be fighting for this until the day I die.

DAVID:
So I mean, I guess this is another example of hope and change becoming more of the same. And frankly, I'm actually I'm sort of happy to hear that, that clip from Nathan, kind of a revelation that the powers that be are not here to save us that it's going to take a case, or cases like this, that the the notion of the great president coming here to save us is just it's encouraging, in a sense to hear young people have that realization, because that is the realization. And I want to ask a question related to that, which is, has there been any kind of institutional support for this case? Or is it kind of like the adults are sort of, and the environment major environmental groups and the kind of big time think tanks in DC and the like? Are they all just kind of eye rolling this?

JULIA:
No, that's a great question. I think a lot of observers have been surprised by just how much institutional support the case has gotten. There was a group of I think, six democratic attorney generals that wrote an amicus brief in favor of the plaintiffs, there were maybe 50 Congress, people who urged the Biden administration to come to the table on this case. And there actually have been a lot of law professors, you know, who are almost surprised by how quickly judges thinking on climate is changing. And that that has been, I think, a point of optimism for them, you know, in one of the during the first year or two, that this case is being litigated, a federal judge said, like, I had no doubt that there's a constitutional right to a livable planet. And, you know, we probably can't expect this Supreme Court to make the same claim. But that is really a profound shift in legal thinking on the climate crisis.

DAVID:
Now I can hear some of our listeners eye rolling. I know it's hard to hear the idea here. I rolling up mix my metaphors, but I can I can kind of hear the sighing I can hear the eyes and the sockets rolling from this vantage point. Oh, well, the idea that we're going to solve the climate crisis by relying on the Supreme Court is ridiculous because ultimately this case could get to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court or it's basically a panel of assholes who don't seem to have any regard for The future of the country for for really anything I mean, they are truly the these are nihilists. So I guess what's your response? What's the plaintiff's response to this idea that ultimately, this entire strategy is predicated on relying on six assholes on the Supreme Court to suddenly be good people?

JULIA:
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I would say, say about this that sort of surprised me over the course of reporting this story is, even though the plaintiffs have not gotten like a favorable ruling, you know, okay, this case can go to trial, or yes, there is, you know, this constitutional right, that you're claiming exists. They have gotten judges, you know, federal judges to say, or write down really consequential things about the climate crisis, there was an example. You know, I think it was the Federal District, Federal Circuit Court dismissed the case, because they said the plaintiffs didn't have standing in a particular way. But they also said that, you know, humans burning fossil fuels is heating up the planet. And I saw like, on the websites of different corporate law firms saying, Well, this is a really concerning precedent for them to, you know, draw the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change.

DAVID:
It's really, really concerning concerning science of what's going on.

JULIA:
A judge said in some hearing on the case, like, how can I possibly exercise any other right, if I cannot breathe the air outside? So I think even though there hasn't been an opinion, you know, entrenching this constitutional right, it is forcing the courts to acknowledge these things that for so long, they haven't been forced to acknowledge. And I think the plaintiffs would say that's, you know, that's been that's been very worthwhile. The other thing that the plaintiff's lawyers say is, well, we're actually making a very conservative legal argument there. It's based on this legal principle called the public trust doctrine, which which goes back to Roman law. It's, it's sort of a common law issue. And they're sort of saying we're making a conservative appeal to a conservative bench. And I'm not sure anybody on the Supreme Court is actually an idealogue. I think maybe, you know, the right wing judges are just always going to be in favor of business, and honestly, some of the Democratic judges as well. But it is sort of a compelling argument.

DAVID:
I mean, it does. I'm not a constitutional lawyer. But it does stand to reason that if there's a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that you cannot have life, liberty, or happiness on a planet where that doesn't support human life, right. I mean, there's sort of a fundamental point here. So I guess the final thing I would ask you is very quickly is what's the status of this case? Now, what happens next? And if folks listening to this are interested in getting involved, is there anything they can do to support the plaintiffs?

JULIA:
Yeah, so it seems like what's going to happen next is the original federal court with a lawsuit was filed is going to rule that it can proceed to a trial, and then the Biden administration is going to do whatever it can to block that from happening. So probably the best way to support the plaintiffs is to pressure the Biden administration. You know, however you can to let this let this lawsuit see the light of day,

DAVID:
Julia, great reporting. Thanks so much for joining us.

JULIA:
Thanks.

DAVID:
Next up, we're going to the place where politics and comedy mix we're going to talk with comedian and filmmaker Judd Apatow, about his new HBO documentary, George Carlin's American dream, just a heads up, you're also going to hear the voice of Joe Warner, who's the levers Managing Editor, and he's a total comedy aficionado, who wrote a whole book about humor. Joel joined us for this interview. You so much for doing this. We really appreciate it. And thanks for doing the documentary on George Carlin. I actually saw George Carlin towards the relatively towards the end of his life. When he was touring, he came to Helena, Montana. And we were surprised we were living in Helena, Montana. And we were surprised that he, somebody of his fame and caliber would come all the way out to Helena, Montana. I guess my first question for you on this as the HBO special is called George Carlin's American dream. What do you mean to transmit in that title? Like what is his dream? What's the meaning of the title?

JUDD:
Well, the American dream was a, a piece that he did, where he basically said that nothing is working. And it's all rigged. It's all going down the drain. And, you know, they call it the American dream, because you have to be asleep, to believe it, that we're all being scammed. So, the title of the documentary is really where he landed with his comedy and his philosophy, you know, near the end of his life.

DAVID:
Do you think him if he was alive today, I mean, What would I mean when we're talking to you right now in the middle of what feels like a completely out of control moment in our history? What I guess what do you what do you think his take would be on what's going on? Like what his take be? You know, everything I've been saying is has come true. Where do you think he'd come? He'd come down?

JUDD:
I think that he was someone who thought that a lot of these things were very simple, right? Just that we're not paying attention to the obvious what is the obvious, other countries don't have these laws related to guns, and they don't have this problem. So we can say old all day long. Oh, it should be this, it should be that we have to give all the teachers guns. But the truth is, our our laws don't work at all. And it's all a smokescreen, right, it's a smokescreen. So the NRA can exist. So certain people get rich off the NRA. So certain money can be given to politicians, so they can retain power through the NRA. It's all a scam for gun manufacturers to make money. And the main thing he would always say is they don't care about you. They don't care about you. And it's like someone was talking to me about, about Putin. And they were saying, we, we debate this issue and that issue and Russia and the history of Russia and territories, and they said, is a thief, it's all a smokescreen because he stole a billion dollars or a trillion dollars, and everything else is nonsense. He doesn't care about any of it. It's just people trying not to get caught. And they have to play that game till they're in the grave. And and I think that George Carlin would say, of course, this is happening, why wouldn't this happen right now based on how our laws work, and how the government works and how dark money works.

JOEL:
So one thing I want to ask about was at the beginning of the documentary, you offered these social media posts kind of noting just how, how relevant what Carlin says, still is today. So one thing I want to ask you, though, is that why for you? Do you decide it was time to put out this documentary? What Why export George Carlin right now?

JUDD:
Well, on one level, he's the person that made me want to be a comedian. He's who we all listened to, when we were 10 years old, and first heard comedians cursing, first learned about critical thinking and challenging authority. You know, he's, he's the reason why a lot of people want it to be funny, and thought that would be cool. And, and he gave us a way of looking at the world. But also, as someone who's exhausted from what's happened in the Trump years, and everything that we've witnessed, it certainly felt like a moment to have someone who spoke out a lot of these issues, to give them a forum, even post their their passing, to have people debate his ideas and his interpretation of how our country is working at or you know, how our country is really not working at all.

DAVID:
I want to ask about the scope of his career. Because my, my view of George Carlin or my understanding of George Carlin was, he was always super famous, this name you always heard but he never was. I never He was never seemed. And I say this, lovingly. He wasn't seen as mainstream. Right? He was this person who was so well known. And his name was so well known, but he he wasn't like a necessarily like, like a movie star. And so one thing I am curious about his, his, how do you think he became so well known, while also being almost at arm's length from the very top of pop culture?

JUDD:
Well, truth is that most people are not at the top of pop culture, the type of pop culture is usually pretty good, I'd say it's nicely. The very top of it doesn't challenge you that much. He's really challenging people's core beliefs, their core fates. A lot of his act was about how he didn't believe in God. And he, you know, he had that bit where he said, You know, God, you know, God has these 1010 rules, and if you don't follow them, you will burn in hell for all eternity. But he loves you. And he needs money. He's all powerful, but very bad with money. And those are not mainstream ideas to most people. And he went really hard for things that many Americans To like, such as their guns and their military, and capitalism, so he definitely wasn't the person whose stuff goes down easily. But most comedians are not at the top of the world and, and pop culture. I mean, comedians usually take strong stance occasionally someone's gigantic, but he's someone who was around since 1960. And was always there always an interesting work, and in a lot of ways more like Bob Dylan. How many people go to Bob Dylan concerts? Yeah, he's on the road all the time. He's not selling Beyonce level numbers of records. But every once in a while he puts out another masterwork and we appreciate that we check in with him. From time to time.

DAVID:
I want to ask you to just for folks who don't know about those stages, just briefly to go through them. And I also want to, when you go through them, I I want to know your feelings on whether he struggled with the idea that the more provocative he was, the more difficult he could make. His his path, the more difficult the more resistance he would face.

JUDD:
Well, he started out in a in a comedy team with Jack Burns, who was later in a very famous team called burns and Schreiber. He's an early second city person, and then he went solo and he was a little bit political, but it got softened because of the needs of television. So if you went on the Merv Griffin Show a lot, or the talk shows, you really couldn't challenge things that deeply so he would do the hippy dippy, weatherman and conceptual one, man sketches, things like that. And then he decided that he wanted to be who he really was, he got fired in Las Vegas for cursing. And he got fired in Wisconsin at the Playboy Club for the speaking out against Vietnam and his act. And he decided to grow his hair and grow his beard and become a rebel comedian around 1970. And that's when he had his first gigantic fame, probably his biggest fame. And then late 70s, he kind of ran out of gas in the early 80s. He had a heart attack and heart problems. And I think he tried to calm his thing down and it became a little more like a place for my stuff and examining words and language, and it was a softer act. And then he saw Sam Kinison, and thought, I don't want to spend the rest of my life breathing this guy's dust. And he said, I got to become a better writer and I, I need to be bolder. And in a lot of ways, the last run of his career was about out canvassing Sam Kinison. And he was inspired by the competition, he was one of those people who always thought, I'm not gonna get older and suddenly just be corny and bad, I'm gonna, I'm gonna evolve, I'm gonna keep challenging the audience and I'm gonna keep digging. And then he became more of a writer. And in the last phase, he had a comedic stance, which was, it's over, humanity is over, we're all going to die. We're, the planet is going to shake us off like fleas. And I'm going to laugh and watch the show. And it was really dark. And back then a lot of people thought it was too dark. But now you look at what's happening. And you realize it was someone being so dark and trying to, I think, push you into the light. Like, I'm old. I'm giving up as I get unsolved while I'm alive. But I think the underlying message was, I'm gonna go dark for comedy, but maybe you should get involved and try to fix it.

DAVID:
You know, that's, that's when I saw him in Helena, Montana. That's where he that's, that's the stage he was in. It was, I think it was 2007, maybe late 2006. And I, I remember walking out of that, and, and I mean, it was hilarious. It was great. But it was dark. And I, I was, I guess, what, 15 years ago now. So I was younger and more idealistic. And I remember thinking, both what he said was true, and tapped into core truths, but that is there a risk of so that it helps demoralize people? And so I wonder when when you hear George Carlin even today, the clips that keep being recycled rightly so. Whether there's a concern that it's not self fulfilling prophecy, but that it can demoralize people because the truths are so true.

JUDD:
I think that that's the challenge to the country. is are we going to run out of gas I mean, what is don't look up but uh, George Carlin routine, you know, when I think about it, I think what what did you guys do? It's really, you said I need to kick you goal in the fucking balls, like Wake the fuck up, I'm gonna melt Leonardo DiCaprio. So you understand the stakes here. Right? And that is what George Carlin was doing. He was just saying, this is this is all falling apart, you know that, you know, the table is tilted, you know that this is what the American Dream bit was about. And so in a moment, like right now, do you go march? Do you donate money to, you know, a charity, to fight for a woman's right to choose or gun control or for a politician? Or do you just go it's just too much, I'm just gonna watch 90 Day fiance and go to sleep. And I think a big thing George Carlin said was, you know, we are an uneducated, uninvolved electorate, and we get the politicians who are uneducated and don't serve our interests. And it's basically our fault. He used to say, garbage in garbage out. And when you see that women are very close to losing their right to choose. And there's a lot of rights that disappear right after that if Roe vs. Wade goes down, wouldn't you think that every woman in this country would vote to get rid of all the people that just took away all their power over their own medical choices and their bodies? And they'll either do it or they won't? Right? And if you're a young kid, and you're 18 to 25, wouldn't you try to vote out all the people who are against gun control? And we'll see if kids voted 50% Like they usually do nothing changes if they suddenly voted 85% Maybe everything could change.

DAVID:
I mean, it is like a frustration baked in there a frustration with how docile the population is like, I sense that from George Carlin's work, a kind of underlying frustration with how much the population, how much bullshit the population is willing to tolerate? I mean, is that is that a fair characterization, but that's underneath a lot of what he was talking about.

JUDD:
He said, We gave up everything for gizmos, we gave everything up for a phone that makes pancakes and rubs your balls. That's the line that he said, but he you know, the idea of like numbing the masses with technology and toys and shopping. He really felt like the powers that be want us all fighting and distracted and uneducated, so they could steal the money. And they want us obsessed with no street crime, but not white collar collar crime. And that's what we see right now is, you know, we see Elon Musk, basically abandon all rights for everybody. So he can make sure his tax rate is what he wants it to be. So in this moment, when we're dealing with all of these things, and we need people to be progressive, he's like, I don't care about LGBTQ rights. I don't care about a woman's right to choose. I don't care about saying gun laws. I don't care about getting rid of dark money in politics. All I care about is my tax rate. And that's what George Carlin was saying that most of those people were about, they weren't looking out for you they were looking out so that their 200 million God forbid, doesn't turn into 100 million.

DAVID:
What Why do you think there hasn't been or maybe you do think there has been? But I presume you think that that that there hasn't been another George Carlin? And if you do think that why do you think that is? Is it harder to be a George Carlin now than it was? Or is it just people are cowards? Like why not?

JUDD:
I think that probably the truth is that we're drowning and George Carlin's isn't that we don't have George Carlin, if you took the best comedy, but Samantha B or amber Ruffin or CO bear, John Oliver, and you put it together, it's probably historically brilliant. But the culture is about the fact that we have way too much stuff. So nothing has the impact it should have because it's in a sea of other stuff. There weren't as many specials when George Carlin was putting out specials. It wasn't a world of social media in 2008. But it is interesting that when we start talking about abortion, everyone passes around the George Carlin routine, and they're not passing around anyone else's routine. That's the thing I find interesting. It's not even like they're saying, Oh, here's the great Bill Hicks bit about it or, or whoever. No one else's routine is going around. And I think that's because he was a he was thinking big picture. He wasn't a person who was talking about what happened today with Clarence Thomas. He was talking about the larger philosophical things, the larger systematic problems, and that's why he stuff doesn't age because it is It's very little of it is calling out a specific event.

FRANK:
Judd on that same note, like, why why do you think we're seeing a large swath of comedians these days, kind of like fall into the reactionary right camp where, you know, they're railing against canceled culture and all of the things they can't say. And, you know, and are often at times punching down on two groups, like, you know, like trans people who are any other marginalized groups rather than, you know, punching up. Like, it always blows my mind that like, there are literal fascists in this country, and no one's making fun of them. But some comedians are choosing to take times out of their day to make fun of trans people like why why do you think that shift is happening?

JUDD:
You know, I think that the concern with political correctness and canceled culture is real for comedians, because, as a comedian explained to me the other day, what happens is a pre censorship. So the world is basically saying, you might get in trouble for something that you said. And if you think about, all the comedians are getting in trouble, it's very few. And they're all still in the business. And even the ones who got in trouble, most of them are making a ton of money and selling a lot of tickets, right. But this friend of mine was saying, everyone has watered down their act. And that's really the danger that everyone is afraid. And I think you hear about that on college campuses. And people just feel like they can have a robust debate and conversation about all these things because it is fraught with peril. So I'm of two minds about it. Because I do think a lot of our edgiest comedians are finding a way to make it work and they have big audiences and they seem to be doing doing well. But that is a danger. That's something that George Carlin talked about, which was he felt like less speech was more dangerous than more speech, but he didn't live through algorithms. He didn't live through things being jammed down your throat and conspiracy theories and, and the cruelty of this electronic media system where if you say the wrong thing, you might get 20,000 people tweeting at you. The violence, the most dangerous thing. So I, I kind of drift back and forth on my positions on it because it is still evolving. For me personally, I'm trying to lift people up. That's it. I want to lift people up. I want people to be nicer to each other. I don't want to do stuff that hurts people. There's a lot to discuss, we should be able to discuss everything. I don't think we all need to be so sensitive. And we all have our personal line and I just try to be thoughtful about what my line is.

DAVID:
Okay, we have two last questions for you. And we're here. Here's here they are. They're one. Do you have a favorite George Carlin bit? And if we had to update Carlin's seven dirty words that you can't say on TV in 2022, which would you include?

JUDD:
That's a very good question. I mean, my favorite bit, it's, it's hard to say, I mean, I do love the seven words you can't say on television, because as a kid, you just, you just felt like the whole world opened up to you with it. Because when your little everyone's telling you, you can't handle this, you can't handle that you can say this word. And he was just saying it's all bullshit. And words only have the meaning that you give them and it's all based on your intentions. And he I think he looked as a kid, he felt like he wasn't talking down to me. And so when he was examining language and what you could say on TV, he just felt so stupid. You know, like when you go to England and they can say anything on TV and you're like, they're fine. How can we we can't sit here.

DAVID:
Unfortunately, I'm I'm I'm, I'm younger than you, I think a little younger than you. And I feel like the person who broke some of that cone of silence was Andrew Dice Clay when I was going to camp the person you know the the rhymes with all the all the words. I feel like we Maybe I was too young but like it was less the message it was more just hearing a guy say all that stuff was like wow, I never heard somebody even say stuff like that. A bit bit Carlin's better because Carlin actually had a there was a political message behind.

JUDD:
Yes. I mean, he certainly wanted us to examine it. And he thought, of course, we should examine it and we should say it and you know, what's the big deal? It's a distraction from the real problems to think you can't say certain words. I'm not a good I'm not good at it. I don't have any words that I think should be on on the list. I feel like that covers it, but I think at some point he listed like a few 100 or that that was that was another phase of his career where he's like, he would less like 100 in a row. You know, you'd have to have this incredible memory to do these word runs. But that's one of the ones that he did. And also, you know, we never talked about it that much. But he, he loves being silly and pure aisle and, and a lot of his material was just dumb, and goofy and gross. And that was also a big part of, of George Carlin.

DAVID:
Judd Apatow, thank you so much. First of all, thank you so much for being you. Thanks for so much for being a pal. And also, I mean, this sincerely. Thank you for using your platform to make movies and make documentaries like this, because I really think this is not everybody does what you do in the sense of making documentaries about serious issues, while also doing not that your stuff is unserious, but doing regular comedy, and I think it's really important that people like you actually take the time and effort to do it. So thank you for doing that. Well,

JUDD:
Thank you very much, and thank you for having me.

DAVID:
Okay, now our bonus segment just for our paid subscribers. It's an interview I did with Brian Busey, a former gun industry executive and the author of the new book gunfight in my battle against the industry that radicalized America. Thanks again, so much for being a supporting subscriber and funding the work that we do here at the lemon. I'm now joined by author and former gun industry executive Ryan Busey. Ryan, thanks for being here.

RYAN:
Now. Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to be here today. Thanks.

DAVID:
So you're coming to, we're talking to you, you're in Kalispell, Montana. And I worked on some political campaigns in Montana. And when I did I lived up in Whitefish was down to Kalispell a bunch. And this is relevant to what we're going to talk about. Because when I worked in Montana politics, I worked for a candidate, a guy named Brian Schweitzer, who did, who did an ad, for instance, of him with a gun. And gun politics was a big thing in Montana, obviously remains a big thing in Montana politics. And this is now I think, at this point, God, 20 years ago now. It was a way for him to signal as a Democrat, that he had a kind of cultural connection with the culture of Montana. And I and I, I think now, the idea of a Democrat airing an ad like that, because of what's happened to gun politics in America, which is what you document in your book. I think now, it has a very different message than perhaps it did back then. But I want to kick this conversation off by by just asking you to describe because I think a lot of people don't really appreciate it. What gun culture had been in a place like Montana, up until the more the last 10 or 15 years when gun culture became something I would argue and you would argue came became something much different. What is it? What is it like?

RYAN:
Yeah, so I think your opening story, David is very appropriate, because right there even 20 years ago, when Governor Schweitzer was running, and I remember what was his swatches famous quote, gun control means me using both hands or something like that he liked us.

DAVID:
Or someone like you control your gun, I control mine.

RYAN:
Yeah, something something like that. Right. But, but the point was that even 20 years ago, Schweitzer, who I think we would all agree, has a very good political gut. He knows how to read the room. He knew that guns were this large, overarching kind of cultural virtue signaling thing to that kind of superseded all of these other cultural issues. And that's and that is the the argument, my book is that our national division or national politics was cooked up, seated, whatever you want to say, in the firearms industry, and then handed off to the political right, Schweitzer before it was handed off the political right, knew how to tap into that. And that and the reason he tapped into it, then to the point of your question, is that for most people growing up, like me, I grew up on a ranch and many people in Montana grew up on a ranch. Guns were a very integral part of our lives. In fact, they were very healthy part of our lives. My family, and I worked very, very hard. We didn't have a lot of time to play or have fun. When we did it often involve guns hunting, shooting with my brother, with my dad. And so guns came to represent our culture. And this time we had together camaraderie and family and Americana. And they weren't seen as negative think they were they were Serious, they were dangerous. My father impressed upon me the the need to be very, very, very safety conscious and responsible. But they were integral in our lives and so they become intertwined with the culture of America and and the NRA and other nefarious political organizations since that sort of deep cultural connection. And when you have a deep cultural connection with something like that, and you have an entity like the NRA, and they know how to twist stuff, they can get just the right amount of fear and hatred and conspiracy in there. And then people will do really irrational, Passion Driven things, some of them to the some of them to the negative, some of them degrading our society, some of them endangering our democracy. And here we are today.

DAVID:
I mean, I have a picture of myself from when I was living in Montana, and we have it on our it flashes across our computer, every now and again that my kids see where I'm skeet shooting. In Montana, I think it was outside of a friend's house outside of Bozeman was when I was doing these campaigns in Montana. And I kind of realized, like, the pictures may transmit something, just to me, skeet shooting may transmit a message to my kids that has a different message than what the picture kind of embodied 1520 years ago that and that meaning has changed. And your book talks about how that was a deliberate effort to change what the gun represented. And I want to be specific about this represented as a symbol beyond what the gun does as a as just a, an instrument in the world. Talk to us a little bit about what you saw working in the gun industry. In terms of how that marketing changed, what specifically changed in the marketing of guns to change the message, for instance, have a picture that my kids see of me shooting skeet outside of Bozeman, Montana.

RYAN:
Yeah, so Well, it's a complex story. And there's 352 pages of it, but we'll try to we'll try to cook it down here to a few paragraphs. I think that you're right to hit on this idea that the firearm specifically in large part, the AR 15, now in modern day society, but firearms in general, have been modified into in into a political symbol, oftentimes a political symbol for the right. And the AR 15, I argue has become what is the equivalent of like, a very, very powerful Magga hat, right. It's a symbol of intimidation. It wasn't always that way. And it took a very expensive, purposeful, strategic marketing effort by the NRA and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is the industry trade group, to do those things, and I think to understand it really fully got a backup just one more step about after, after 1999 in Columbine, April of 1999. Columbine, not far from you and Colorado there. The NRA had meetings soon after the shooting. And they decided right then and there, whether they were going to be a part of the solution, which they debated in now uncovered tapes and transcripts. Or if they were going to just essentially become a culture war organization. They chose the latter, they chose to become a cultural organization, a culture war organization needs symbols, and it needs money, so that that decision was made, but it didn't really take off. And it started to take off 2004 Bush decides not to renew the assault weapons ban, okay, there's a stigma that is removed. Then a bit later, Bush just 11 months later, Bush signed a law called plakat protection Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that gave broad liability shields to the firearms industry. So they are now they're free to make AR fifteens of all sorts, which they didn't used to make and didn't display in any trade shows. And now they're free to market them in just about any way they want. So this is all of a sudden, this is like becoming like a frat party, like somebody just dumped a bunch of beer and drugs and then they're like, Okay, you know, have at it, you know, you guys be responsible. So this starts to happen, and it does ramp up. Same time NRA is figuring out fear, hatred, conspiracy, racism that drives their political outcome. All of a sudden, that needs a symbol it needs ar 15. That's a symbol of intimidation. America's first black president starts to lead in the polls. 2007 Barack Obama, it gets really put on steroids, you start to hear things that conspiracy theories start to involve guns. The NRA says Barack Obama is going to rewrite the Constitution. Barack Obama is going to outlaw all handguns like in order. In other words, the early musings of Q anon started to involve guns. And so you went from a culture like mine, like you remember skeet shooting like Brian Schweitzer was a part of and through this evolution and partnership with NRA and need for political symbols on the right. It's turned into what we have today, which is You know, again, I argue it's a big political middle finger for the right.

DAVID:
Your company, Kimber, the one that you worked for, decided not to go into manufacturing and selling AR fifteens. I want to know, not only why they ultimately decided they made that decision, but give us a sense of was there an internal debate in the company? Was there was there like a one side saying we have to and other sides saying no, like, what? What was that? What was that like?

RYAN:
Well, everywhere in the industry, there was a lot of pressure to get into the AR 15 business, like every company had these pressures in, in the early 90s. There was one or two companies making them and they were relegated to the corners of the industry. Nobody really talked about them. You didn't market them. By about mid 2000s. There's about 500 companies making them and that's basically all the same gun. Yes, I write about it in our book in my book that yes, I got pressured. Yes, we talked about it every every company talked about it, because just about every company ended up making them. Yes, there were debates, and I was always on the hell no side of the debate. And I believed it for cultural reasons that were something I already sensed, starting in the early 2000s, that this gun, and the movement behind it was something more than a gun, it was something more than an item. It was this political symbol. It was this. It was it was a sort of this threat of radicalization, it was a way to overturn civil society. That's why we now see so many, you know, open carry people who are armed, intimidating, what are they carrying? They're carrying AR fifteens. Right, nothing intimidates better than that. So I always wanted nothing to do with it. There was also the business reason not to have anything to do with it, which I would deploy if I had to, because I did again, cultural, I didn't want anything to do with it. But again, there's 500 companies making these like they're basically all the same gun. How are you going to set yourself apart when there's 500 companies making them? Well, I can tell you what you're going to do, you're going to deploy incendiary marketing, you're going to try, you're going to try to break norms to create market share, because you're all making the same thing, you know, so I sent that to and I want to just zero to do with that.

DAVID:
Let's talk about that for a second to you, you make reference in your book, to this phrase, the tactical lifestyle. And I think you've totally nailed it. But I want to hear you explain what you mean by the marketing of the tactical lifestyle.

RYAN:
So I'm going to fast forward a few years from where we've been talking to just a couple years ago and and listeners may be aware of this company called Black rifle coffee. They went public a few months ago, and they're putting stores they're kind of the they view themselves as the Maga answer the right wing answer to Starbucks. Owning that company are a couple of veterans. One of them, is a swaggering ex Special Forces guy named Matt best. And in a 2019, Washington Post interview article with Matt, he was asked like, Who are their customers? Who are these tactical people? Who what's the tactical called who's going to drink black rifle coffee? And Matt's answer to the Washington Post reporter at the time, and I've said it enough times, I think I'll get it pretty close here. But he said, quote, there are people who couldn't serve for whatever reason, but they still want to grab their AR 15 and run down the range and do a fucking transition drill, you know, a little taste of the drug. And in that couple sentences, you kind of have encapsulated what the tactical culture is. It's, I want to be a special forces guy, I want to own the room, I want to have power over people. I want this ar 15 Is my way to up in. You know, it's my way to partially play a first person shooter game in real life, and partially intimidate people because they know I'm powerful. And that's that's what's evolved. Now.

DAVID:
I want to ask about the politics of guns. And something I think we don't talk enough about, which is, I feel and you could tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like there's an implied threat of violence in any discourse about this. by that. I mean, it seems that one side is arguing for sensible gun laws, like for instance, just a reinstatement of the assault weapons ban that Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and pushed and Bill Clinton signed, and then the other side is periodically threatening it whether sort of implicitly or sometimes explicitly threatening to exercise its so called Second Amendment rights, if it doesn't get its way. I mean, there was a Florida legislator recently who had tweeted out this is one of many examples. He said I have news for the embarrassment that claims to be our president tried to take our guns And you'll learn why the Second Amendment was written in the first place. My question for you is your you now work with, for instance, the Giffords group that's that's trying to put in place some of these sensible gun laws. Do you feel that that implicit threat, I mean, like, I don't want to sound like a wimp here and the word you know, we're all looking for thing, boogeyman and things to be afraid of. But if one side is saying, we need sensible gun laws, the other side's wielding an AR 15. That seems like an asymmetric debate with an implied threat that we're not actually talking about. But it's right there Is that Is that a fair way to put it.

RYAN:
So if you're at dinner, with nine of your friends, and you're waiting on a tent, and the nine of you have spirited debate, you drink a bunch of wine, you talk politics, you maybe talk policy, whatever, it stays civil, right, those are your rules. And then the 10th person shows up in that 10th person has a loaded ar 15 strapped to their chest, they sit down at the table, fingers near the trigger. What has happened, only their opinion matters, right. And so the old days of Brian Schweitzer trying to send the message of, hey, I'm one of you. And I like to go skeet shooting, and I love my gun has been replaced with this political intimidation that you are describing. And if you walk in the room, or you flashed around your AR 15, or you talk about the fact that you own a bunch of AR fifteens, or you're a Florida politician that tweets about how you're a badass that you own air fifteens that is about up ending our civil democracy or threatening to do it plain and simple. And we should stop normalizing it like this, like, oh, well look away, he didn't really mean it bullshit, like, it is about intimidation. You're exactly right. It's, it's a way to usurp you. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to be a good communicator. You don't have to build coalitions, all of this stuff that really that politics that good politics depends on right? You don't have to do any of that. You show up and let people know you're heavily armed, bam, over, like, and that's what this is all about.

DAVID:
I want to ask you about the personal journey. This, this must have been for you to be working in the gun industry and then essentially, first try to work to change the industry from the inside and then publish this book. What was it like? I mean, how difficult has it been for you as if you've lost friends? Have you? You know, I mean, what, just because I think people lose sight of the fact that being effectively a whistleblower. It's just not an easy journey. I've just want to hear from you about what that that journey at a personal level was like, Did you did you lose friends? Was your family pissed off at you? Like, what was that about?

RYAN:
Yeah. Well, I had hundreds of friends in the industry. I have been to weddings and funerals and you know, everything. I don't, I can maybe think of one or two that will enter my name or, you know, dial my cell phone number. They're all gone. I have quite a few family members who, you know, no longer talk to me and my wife and my kids. When we when we When news of the book launched. We were very worried about physical safety of my boys. I mean, David, you like Kalispell is not the most liberal city in the world. And we were worried about their physical safety at school. We're worried about our physical safety. I was worried about digital safety being trolled our social media accounts, my kids are a junior in high school and an eighth grader. So the answer to your question is, you know, it's been pretty damn hard.

DAVID:
And you're understating the situation about Kalispell, I mean, Kalispell is one of those places that I think has is one of those hotspots where they say there's a lot of militia organizing. There's white nationalism ahead

RYAN:
The head of the oathkeepers lives here, right? I mean, Stuart Rhodes has his head, his office here, right? The guy who helped organize the January 6 insurrection, which by the way, was populated with AR 15. Flags, not Nike shoe flags, not, you know, not too shabby truck flags, ar 15 flags at the very center of our national division.

DAVID:
Now, here's something interesting, of course, that you also Kalispell Montana, as in general is near the Canadian border. And I feel like, at least when I was, again, 20 years ago, maybe things have changed. But I feel like Canadian politics, in some ways is not scary to people who live in Montana because of the close proximity. It's sort of demystified. I mean, you hear your politicians in America, oh, we're gonna get Canadian health care and the Canadians are socialist, but I feel like there's a lot of places up in Montana versus like Canada, Canada's just like right over there. And here's what happened in Canada. In the last 24 hours, the government announced that most owners of military style assault weapons would be required to turn over their firearms to a government buyback program. And this this comment from the Canadian Prime Minister kind of, it's really powerful. He said, quote, as a government as a, as a society, we have a responsibility to act to prevent more tragedies, we need only look south of the border to know that if we do not take action firmly and rapidly, it gets worse and worse and more difficult to counter. I guess my question on that is like, in a place like Montana, that sentiment, like, can that sentiment be uttered? What would happen in a place like Montana, if some if someone said that.

RYAN:
There would literally be armed civil war in five minutes if that was uttered? I mean, I, I am not that's not hyperbolic, I think we're that to be proposed in any serious way, there would be armed Civil War.

DAVID:
So then the question is, if you were all powerful, and you could change whatever you want, what do you think can be changed must be changed is possible to change to change that dynamic? I mean, granted, we can discuss, you know, do we need to? Do we need to do what Canada is doing? Or do we need to have a limited assault weapons now, but what needs to change to counter this baked in culture that you write about in your book?

RYAN:
Well, so first, I'll say, since we live in this complex democracy, nothing is ever going to be air quote here fixed, right? We're not going to fix it. We're never going to get rid. I don't, you know, I don't. I'm a gun owner. I want you with my boys. I want to be able to own guns. I just want the balance between freedom and responsibility restored. And it's really badly out of whack right now. We seem to have maximum freedom all the time. And nobody gives a damn about responsibility. And you see what the repercussions are. It's, it's disastrous, we have to figure out a way to marginally make things better, instead of continually marginally making things worse, and ending up where we are. A couple examples I use first, driving we we love. Everybody loves to drive across town. I do. But I don't love it so much that I drive 90 miles an hour through a school zone. Why? Because I value live kids a lot more than I value dead kids. And is that infringement on my liberty and my freedom? Yeah, I mean, takes me another 30 seconds to get across town. But it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. In other words, my freedom to transport myself or Congress or whatever constitutional thing you want to apply to it is not absolute. And nothing is absolute here. The other example I'll use is cigarettes and tobacco. 20 years ago, we started working on this plan to MIT to limit to try to reduce the incidence of lung cancer, and emphysema and marketing to kids and everything else. And did we stamp it out? No, we still have all those things. People still smoke cigarettes? Did we make them marginally better with all the changes we put in place 1518 years ago? Yes, we did. That's what we have to do on guns start making things better. Instead of making them worse, I'm not pollyannish, we're not just going to wave our hands and fix it. But we can make it better instead of making it worse.

DAVID:
I mean, you cut to something that's so it really something that I obsess about all the time, which is that we not to be cheesy about it. But there was the old idea, the famous quote, asked not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, there's something baked into that, which is that we are living in a society as George Costanza put it in Seinfeld, and that now it feels like there's this sort of me first screw everybody else. Narcissistic hostility to sacrificing anything even even mild, right. I mean, sacrificing, for instance, not driving 90 miles an hour across town through through a school zone, this is considered some sort of huge imposition or not having a military style assault weapon is some sort of unbelievably huge imposition. And I think that's what makes this so difficult, I think to quote unquote, solve is that it's, it's actually representational of a bigger attitude, a bigger culture. So my final question to you is, as somebody who's worked in the gun industry does something like the Texas shooting, which, for various reasons, seems to have at least grabbed the national attention in a way that even past mass shootings happened. And maybe that's fleeting, but does something like that? Raise the prospects of of some kind of change, whether probably not from the industry itself, but politically, the the culture of the industry is created. Does it create the prospect for actually doing some of these changes? Or are you somebody who still looks out and I wouldn't blame you, if you are, who looks out and says you know, I don't think anything's gonna change.

RYAN:
So I think it does create the possibility You have changed it. I will tell you though, I felt this way after Sandy Hook and I write about that in my book every believed everybody believed I mean come on. We had 21 Dead little kids after Sandy Hook Good God, how can it get any worse than that? And we and it didn't happen in fact in our a very purposely decided not to even make the most tiny infantry decimal little change, extending background checks, right. They decided to further they again they doubled down on the culture war. might that happen again? Yes, it might do I think this time might be different. I hope so. I have to hope so. I can't like at some point. This the country has to realize we have jumped the goddamn shark on this. It has gone too far. We'll 19 Beautiful dead little kids in Uvalde. Texas. Be the impetus. Gosh, I hope so. I have hoped for that. It feels like there's something afoot. It feels we like we might like Gosh, barely bother ourselves to impose some background checks on the last few percentage of gun sales. I mean, my the burden that will place on us. But maybe that will happen. That again, this is so hard to fix. People ask me this all the time. Why is this gun thing so hard to fix? And I tell him because you're not tackling the gun thing. You're tackling our national politics, national gun, the gun thing created our national politics NRA ism is Trumpism is the so when you go to tackle little policy things that look easy. Oh, 80% of the people believe in that expanded background checks. I only hear that like 400 times a day. Yes, but you're tackling something much bigger. It's the it's the whole political system that is wrapped up in this all or nothing ism that the NRA laid on us. And so we have had all or nothing. And by tackling the gun thing, you're tackling the center of the core of our issue, but man, it's hard, you know.

DAVID:
You're you're challenging. I mean, you're you're you're ultimately channel I would say it's even deeper. It's not just the political system, you're you're challenging people's self identity, a self identity created by the way, the tactical lifestyle, as you put it has been marketed that guns are not just a are no longer just a thing you used to go shoot skeet, it's it's it's become a way that people identify themselves see themselves. And I think that that's what makes this it takes a policy debate and makes it so emotional. And trying to lower the temperature on that. I mean, that's, that's why this is such a vexing issue. I completely agree. And I just want to you know, I really want to thank you for, for speaking out. I'm sure it was difficult. The book is called gunfight. My battle against the industry that radicalized America and Ryan Busey, I, I encourage you to continue speaking out. Thank you for speaking out, because I will just add, I think you speaking out from the experience that you've had actually makes you a uniquely powerful voice on these issues. So thank you. Thank you so much for that. Yeah.

RYAN:
Thanks for having me. Appreciate the thoughtful questions and desire to want to make the world a better place. So thank you.

DAVID:
Thank you. That's it for today's show. Thanks again for being a paid subscriber to lever. We truly couldn't do this work without you. If you particularly liked this episode, click the link to the tip jar in this episode's description, or head on over to lever news.com to throw in a tip there. Everything you pitch in helps us do all of this journalism. Oh, one more thing. Be sure to like subscribe and write a review of labour time on your favorite podcast app and tell your friends to subscribe to until next time, I'm David Sirota rocked the boat.