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