Hi, I'm Mollie John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and.
Senator Bob Menendez has been charged with acting as a foreign agent. We have such an interesting show today. First we'll talk to Ruth ben Yacht about how all the criminals the republic Party play right into the authoritarian handbook. Then we'll talk to lawyer Josh Cosco who is suing gun companies in order to enact justice for shooting survivors. But first we have the host of the time of Monsters, the Nation's Jeat here.
Welcome to Fast Politics, frequent flyer, my close personal friend Jeet here.
Good to be here in every sense of the word.
Well, we're so happy to have you. Un fucking believable. What is happening right now? I'm going to read you a tweet Dave Wasserman, you may know him as mister I've seen enough.
He is a pollster.
This is his tweet which if I were a Republican donor or member of Congress, this would.
Make my blood run cold.
The reality may be that no r can get to two seventeen.
That's quite a tweet, which I think. I think mathematically he's exactly right. In the sense of the candidates running for the position. There is enough like sort of never Scaliese people and enough never Jordan people that yeah, you don't get to the two seventeen that you need, So mathematically there can be no speaker. They cannot be a.
SAP's right, well, there can be McHenry forever. So the story here is the Republicans in the House kicked out Kevin McCarthy under the arm of.
My man, and he is neither mine nor man. Matt Gates.
He opened the gates of hell, he got rid of Kevin McCarthy, and he left his caucus in nowhere land.
Yeah, no, that is exactly what happened. I mean, I think it's worth thinking about structurally, like why they can't get to seventeen. I always emphasizes, like Nancy Pelosi had
a smaller majority than they have now. Not only was she able to like get elected Speaker and hold on to her position and not get kicked out, she was actually able to like legislate in a very fractured caucus with like you know, real political disagreements always like find the point of agreement that everyone could come around to and do the very essential skill which my girls are in grade three and learn I have been learning for
the last few years. Counting. Addition, just be able to like like figure out like do I ask you have the votes for this? Or do I not have the votes for this, which is a much rarer skill than one would think. One can govern as long as you don't have like a caucus full of like really crazy people. I think the core problem, the further problem I think structurally, which I don't think we're talking about, is fundraising. One reason why Nancy Pelosi could hold things together was she's
just she's just a monster. She still is, you know, she still has monster of fundraising and very useful for members of Congress. Well, it's happening about the Democratic on the Republican side, but you know, you get people who are like very good at working outside that as a stem and you know, fundraising through social media appeal and getting small donors. But on the Democratic side that people are really good at that, AOC being a primary example.
They're pretty responsible. Like there's still party people and still understanding you have to work with in the party. On the Republican side, you have people who can fundraise and not be dependent on the speaker. And you get more fundraising if you stand up for the speaker because a problgram base is trained with this narrative that the establishment is bad. You know, whoever the speaker is, they want to like corral people for corrupt purposes. And here's that
heroic Matt Gates. There are some pictures of him with the young women, but.
The FBI had an investigation into him.
They decline to press charges, which I guess in this Republican party is as good as having never had an FBI investigation into you, Bob.
Now, you know, like because he is the the underdog, the maverick, the guy who's standing up to the established friend. He's getting like a ton of money, right, He's doing like fundraising all through this and becomes the big hero
of the base by doing stuff that is destructive. So basically you have a fundraising model and a political model that is just works against governance the like leave idels aside, just works against the basic function of turning on the lights, you know, opening the door, turning on the lights, like getting the day started. They cannot sees all of that as a deep state plot. You know, like it's a deep state plot to have government.
Yes, to have a government at all.
Yeah, that is a very bad situation. And to have like, you know, one of the two major parties and the party that happens the whole by a slim majority of the House literally structurally incapable of governing at a time which you know, like I know we're not gonna talk about this, but which like very serious stuff is happening in the world right, like, like very serious life and death issues are happening at places like Ukraine and and in Gaza. You know, like it's actually good to have government.
This is my bottom line. I actually believe it is good to have government. I am not an anarchist. I have friends that are anarchists, but certainly I think my anarchist friends don't want whatever the hell it is about pizza stag. It's bad that you have one party that cannot govern. And the other point I would make is I kind of wish Democrats would make that point a bit more.
Oh man, me too.
So right now we are in this republican Fuckeray. You got Steve Scullies, who the strike against him is that he compared himself to David Duke without the baggage and spoke at a white nationalist convention and is very much not on the right side of history when it comes to not being an enormous white supremacist.
And you have him, so that's one side.
But he is actually like a Republican sort of more despite his white nationalist forays, He's actually more of a traditional Republican than the guy he's running again. So I would like to take a moment to think about that for a second. And you know, we had a guest on here, really smart guy, Dana Milbank, who was saying that actually what you see with this Republican leadership contest is the party's move to the right. So you know, Scalice would have been just an inconceivable Speaker of the
House ten years ago. Like that, every decade the party gets further and further to the right. But then Jordan, who has thought of as the insurgent, who has worked very hard to try not to get the twenty twenty election certified, big.
Election liar, that guy, he can't get the votes.
And there's a lot of really bad behavior on both sides. And there are looking at a list here from Hallie Talbot from CNN who has listed the undecided big mads in the caucus, which includes some of the people you would think including Andy Biggs, a person who has also had four ways into why nationalism, and Ken Buck, who was actually a little bit more principled than a lot of those guys. So they are big mad.
Yeah. No, I mean the party has definitely moved to the right, but it's been happening, as you unicated, for a long time, and I think there's you know, like some very good discussions about the sort of roots of all this. That a Scotch Ball who's like, you know, terrific political sociologist at Harvard did an interview with Political which she was pointing towards the Tea Party is a
big inflection point. But I think actually, like, you know, my disagreement with that is I actually think Nuke Gingridge was the you know, like an equally important inflection point, right.
No, No, I agree, Nu, ging Gridge was the moment.
I think if you look at what happened to Gingridge, and I think it's worth recalling because a lot of what we're seeing now was innovated then, including the use of the government shutdown as a tactic when Republicans control the House and Democrats have the presidency. Ging Ridge, he wrote to Power, wrote to becoming the speaker through like riling up the most right wing members of his caucus
against the so called corrupt establishment. Who are people who were like willing to make deals with Dilkminten or even willing to make deals with George W. Bush and side things like the Americans with Disability Act. And so there's a real faction in the nineteen nineties who are basically
like loveries of militia. I don't know if you remember these these characters, but you know they were the ones who saw Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas as that, yeah, as heroic Americans, you know, like standing up to the evils of the federal government. Ging Ridge deliberately riled those people up and you know, use the power of agitating the base to like scare this existing Republican establishment, gemonize them,
get them out, and then he became speaker. But then what he ended up with was, you know, like a caucas he couldn't control because it included like, you know, these riled up French characters who could use all the anger that they had that Gingridge had harnessed and use it against him, and then he, like you know, repeatedly had problems of like serve governance. So so the structure has been in place and built since the nineteen nineties,
and we see it replicated time and again. You know, I think the only way to kind of break this structure is it becomes a political issue and it becomes not just treated as it is in the mainstream media like oh, look at those clowns in Congress, they're clouding again, and actually becomes what it is, which is that you have one party that is functionally unable to govern and it is very much in contrast to the other party.
And again, I would want to have a democratic leadership that really makes this the issue that really like you know, says it's not the maga Republicans or the extreme Republicans. The Republican Party itself is functionally unable to govern, and you know, like, we'll give you a party that can govern and it be as ideologically diverse and will find
this sort of median points. So if if you're more moderate voter and you want a party that can negotiate but also work with different factions, well there's only one party that does that.
Yeah, exactly, and it's not even close.
Yeah, it's a very stark difference. I think domestically it's a bad enough. I think the chances of another government shutdown are like huge, right, oh, no question. And then there's also you know, like stuff that's happening in the world. And again, you know, I mean, one can have disagreements with Biden about Ukraine, about handling Israel Palestine, but on some level you have to believe that the United States needs a government, so it actually needs like.
I keep saying this, but I want to say it because I'm not laughing because it's funny.
I'm laughing because it's horrific.
Is it. Yeah? Yeah, So so you actually need ambassadors to these countries, right, right, And.
That's a real fucking problem that we're having now, which is there's no ambassador to Kutar, there's no ambassador to Israel. All of these military posts are empty. You can't run a country this way, which is part of the point, right.
You need that, you know, like a military where the officer class knows that there's a regular accepted pathway of like going up the ranks, and that you know, as people who get old and retire or move on. If you follow all the rules, you will arise and not have.
Senator from Alabama who lives in Florida keep you from getting your job.
Right.
These are all like important things, and like, I think the people who follow this program understand this, and you know, like you know, you and I understand it. But like to the degree that this is like being a message that's getting out there, I'm not sure about that. I know what you think.
I think this is absolutely a democratic messaging problem. The truth is one party is normal and the other party is completely batchet and they want to destroy the federal government. And I mean I interviewed Randy Wineingarden yesterday. Andy Winegarden one of my favorite people. She's the head of the Teachers' union. And I don't know if she's the head of the idea for the UTA or she's stopped, you know, and she's taking a break. But the point is she has
been demonized and Mike Pompeo made threats against her. And you know what she said, which is so true, is that these people want to end public schools because they don't like the idea of the government doing for people.
Yeah, I know, I mean that's exactly right. In some ways what has to understand for them to somebody be this is paid off. We kind of look at this freak show. But you know, if your goal is actually the fake, like every red the stunts at all, to destroy Steve Benda likes to say, the administrative state, then actually, you know, they're kind of winning. They're getting what they want.
And you know, like I think if it were put to the American public that this is actually what they want, It's not like lower taxes, you know, like a more streamlined government or things that you know, like a white spot of the population right agree with, is actually like government dysfunction and no government that would clarify a lot of things for voters.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Democrats have real trouble when they get this opportunity to message being able to do it.
And I think part of.
It is this fundamental belief that because Democrats are the good guys, they don't have to sell what they're doing the way Republicans do. And I think that's ultimately really wrong.
I think that's part of it. I mean, I think the other part of it is that Biden has decided to go along with a kind of mixed message of like saying, you know some mega Republicans that are bad, but you know, like I'm a guy who's worked with Republicans before, I work with Starthurman to appeal to those voters that are still nostalgic that it is a sort of like restorationist vision, like you know, we can turn back the clock and like, you know, go back to
like I don't know what, like nineteen eighty two or whatever, or like nineteen seventy eight pip Onneil would go have a beer with Ronald Reagan and things were good, and then we were all little children and happy. Like I don't think that I don't think it was that good to be good with, and I really don't think that we're ever going to go back. It's unwillingness to give up that illusion that that the older type of politics have we returned to. You have to have people that
like see things. Clearly, there's a generational divide. I mean, one sees that in the way that people like Gretia Whitmer is governing, that the hardened Democrats who have been in the sort of trenches of these like purple states and have seen you know how extreme. The Republicans can be like they don't want to go back to that. They think, like we get a narrow majority, we govern and we give our people what they want.
Like in Minnesota.
One of the things I want to ask you, though, I'm going to push back for a minute.
So I have this theory about Biden.
One of the reasons why Biden has continually overperformed at all his elections is because the voters are older than we think they are, and they vote in a sort of older way than we think they do. So, for example, I think that these Republicans need to lose until they understand that they're anti democratic ideas are a shanda, as we say in Judaism. There's no place for anti democracy
in the United States of America. But there are older people who have a sort of like fantasy of harmony and that playing on that is actually good for good electoral politics. Yes, no discuss you have twenty seconds.
Yeah, I think there are some truth to that, But I think it's the situations in flux. And you know, I think those older voters are getting older here and I think there's a generational divide, and I think going to the next election Biden's real weaknesses among young voters. They want more fight, Yes, they.
Want more fight.
Jeet here, thank you always great.
Ruth Bengiatt is the author of Strongman Us Leading the President and the publisher of the Substack Lucid.
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Ruth, thank you glad to be here.
I want to talk to you about what you see going on right now. The fundamental thing that I think is so interesting, which you write about and talk about, is this idea that there is a real that we really have one party that no longer believes in the fundamental tenets of democracy.
Can you talk about that.
It's very shocking and it's a process, and it's been going on since. I mean, some people say Trump was able to kind of capture the party because it was ready to be captured by an authoritarian. It was already moving toward a kind of a liberal political culture, and
the Tea Party was a big symptom. But Trump really accelerated that by being the charismatic demagogue and you know, shifting the political culture of the GOP to authoritarian methods and philosophy and the leader party relationship that he imposed, where loyalty was what mattered. Not expertise and no internal dissent, you know, follow him or else. Intimidation that kind of accelerated it and prepared it to participate in his attempt
to overthrow the government and the election. So it's been a long process, but now we are in a stage where the GOP is an autocratic party quite openly, and its allies are other autocratic parties and governments around the world.
It's quite open about that too. And it's the people who are finding favor the people who are rising to the top, as we saw in the GOP debates and the selection of the House Speaker, they are people who are believing in violence, who are identifying themselves as extremists, who don't believe in transparency, accountability, or any other democratic principles.
I think that's a really interesting and important point there, because this is sort of Trumpism continues, right, Yes, I mean, I guess it started before Trump, it sounds like from what you're saying, and that makes the most sense. But this kind of continuation of it is really this obsession with the kind of violence.
Talk to me about that.
Really what's happened is the GOP has kind of internalized the principles of the coup. What is a coup. It's a violent strike at a government. It says that we don't believe anymore in democratic methods of transitions of power. And Matt Gates said this at the Iowa State ferries. It only forces will bring change to Washington. And so violence becomes a kind of dogma. And that's also why you see number two contender Ron DeSantis, who really the guy is obsessed with violence. I mean, he loses no
opportunity to talk about violence. And it's not just that, you know, he says, we're going to be slitting throats on day one. This is you know, gangster talk. This is how do Terte talks or terrorists talk. But you know, he just like it's the little things that show you that he feels he can only get ahead by his spousing violence. When Trump was being arraigned and the reporter asked, DeSantis, you know, what were you doing?
Did you see it?
Did you watch it? And he said he Now, he's a governor of a really large state. He has lots to do. What does he say? He said, I was overseeing an execution.
So it's just this.
Constant recall to violence, and like they're drunk on the power of being able to have the authority to order violence or encourage violence. So that's what I'm most worried about as a constitutive party of the j.
OP and a scholar. Will you back up to tell the story of sort of.
How you realized that this thing you studied was about to sort of become the central tenant of one of our political parties.
Yeah, so, you know, I was a garden variety academic. Let's say, I was already writing per CNN on like historical things. So I had started to do like, you know, opinion pieces. But I was a scholar of fascism and propaganda. And then Trump came on the scene and it all seemed so familiar from my studies of Mussolini. And again I wrote a book on film propaganda, so the visual was important. So I saw him doing the loyalty oath.
And then the big red flag was his speech in January twenty sixteen that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and he wouldn't lose any followers. This is fascism because he was saying he was identifying himself with violence, saying he approved of violence. He was personally capable of violence, but he would also be.
Loved if he committed violence.
Yes, that led me to change my professional life. I had a book I was working on that was an academic book, and I put it aside and I started to I wanted to warn the American public of what was going on and that it could happen anywhere. And that was the genesis of deciding to write Strong Men, which goes over one hundred years of authoritarian history but has Trump in it, so Americans could see that this has a history and has a context.
Such a good point.
So talk to me about when we talk about this idea that criminals are needed in government if the goal is an authoritarian rule, what does that mean exactly.
It's so strange because the concepts come from the corruption chapter of Strong Men, and it's like it's like the GOP is just bringing it to life. Incredible. So, if you are a party that's becoming autocratic and you are depending on corruption, which means both like defrauding people like George Santos is the embodiment of part of the GOP. It also means lying to the public institutionalized lying, where you have lying as dogma. That's the big lie and
all the other things. If that's how you're going to operate and you're going to depend on that, then you need special kind of people with criminal skills as you're elite. So there's a kind of renewal of elites that goes on. And again this is not just us. Like in Modi's India in twenty nineteen, over a dozen legislators, like sitting parliamentarians had open like criminal charges against them, including murder. So and there are many other examples that give in
my book. So I've been watching this with the GOP and who is you know? So there were people, for example, people who participate in January sixth were encouraged to run for office by Trump, or people who Another form of corruption is when you obstruct justice, and that's like Jim Jordan. He didn't want any investigation of molesters, that kind of thing.
So the GOP now rewards people who are lawless or encourage lawlessness, and that's been like a renewal of elites, and it's terrible because the qualities that they want in a politician. That's also why the GOP candidates pose with assault rifles. You either have to be violent or corrupt or both.
It's so amazing.
And one of the things I'm struck by is just how good these people are at winning the information wars. I mean, talk to me about that. Some of the stuff is so simple, but it works so well for them.
It does.
They are very skilled, and it's not just the Fox media machine. It's the individual politicians who kind of do this naturally. And in a sense, if if you have decided to just institutionalize lawing in the party, then you have to become information warriors. Of course we can poke fun at Mardrie, Taylor Green and others, but she's a
very skilled information warrior. She knows what to say and how to say it, and she uses the classic techniques of smearing, innuendo, conspiracy theories and Jim Jordan's surprisingly people don't think highlie of him for many good reasons, but he's surprisingly skilled at defending Trump, which is also a sign of this. You must defend the leader. There are
rules for these things. It's like they're innately good, but that's at it because they are invested now in lying as a party method of getting to power.
I know we've talked about this before, but now I'm so stressed out.
Will we talk about this?
I get very stressed at I mean, how do we stop America from being the Philippines. It strikes me that one of the ways we would be so much safer is if we had a coalition government, which we don't.
That's a huge problem that we've just got these two giant parties and so the people, the Republicans, who they don't identify anymore, they don't really have a place to go. And but the other part the reason they feel they don't have any place to go is the effectiveness of right wing media saying that Biden is a leftist, that we're all leftists, like I'm on you know, I'm on professor watch list. That thing of turning what is that?
The Charlie Kirk one.
Yes ibe was put on there and it says, not only for all of us on there, you're not only a radical leftist, you're also trying to like indoctrinate students into your like freedom. That's the polarization stuff. So in fact, there are lots of like moderates, and yet the people who don't identify anymore with Republicans are influenced so that they said, I'll never vote for Democrats and then they don't vote at all, perhaps and that helps the Republicans too.
So that's one big problem.
I think now is the time to everybody needs to reach out to people they know, including vets or people who care about national security, people who don't vote but should vote, and really use outcome arguments I call them, like, political violence is not good for business if you know business people. Political violence is not good for national security if you know you know those people in those sectors.
We have to all reach out to those we know and do bridge building when there's lots of bridge building organizations in America. But we can do this too. That's one thing that we can do in our lives.
And you know, it's funny because it's like Nan Yahoo and the far right Republicans which is basically all of them, but Tommy Tuberbil in this case both it's very critical of the military, feeling the military is too woke and not you know, racist, sexist, discriminatory enough, even though the military has through combat seen how important it is to have leaders that look like the people on the ground. You know, they've actually really like lived the importance of diversity.
But Republicans have been very involved in criticizing the military, and Tommy Tuberville has stopped all military appointments because of choice talk to us about that.
I think that's partially bs his excuse. I have a tweet that when viral it's still going on, that this is an attempt at sabotage and it has to be seen in a broader optic together with Rand Paul, who's very pro putent, his blockage of diplomatic appointments, so that the US remains singularly unprepared militarily, national security, diplomatically, and
its influence is curbed in the world. So when we talk about corruption, there are some people commit corruption by doing you know, illegal things, and other people out obstruct processes from happening. And that's what those two are doing. So holding up so many military appointments, he knows what the outcome is and all, and that Millie has talked about it. It's very obvious. But the goal is to help America's adversaries who are autocratic by blunting the force
of America in the world. And it's like it's a decapitation, Like we don't have ambassadors in a lot of very essential places, including many places in the Middle East right now, and we don't have heads of important military positions. This is sabotage and this is why I some people think this exaggerated, but they are saboteurs, and the goal is to take down American democracy, not only internally but as
a force in the world. And it's exactly what the Chinese and Russians wanted in their joint statements in the fall of twenty twenty one when they didn't opid together the ambassadors and then Putin and Chi and they said we've got to take down essentially said we've got to take down American influence and that's their quote multipolarity, and Tubberville and Paul are contributing to this. That's really how I see it.
Jesus, with this Israel conflict, how does this autocratic Republican party figure in, Well, maybe it doesn't.
What we can see. And I just published this morning a substack, my substack Lucid, an essay on Nitaya, who's kind of what's his destiny going to be and how his autocratic overreach trying to have the that's called the judicial coup, contributed to an atmosphere that led Hamas feel it was propitious to attack, which is not to not blame Hamas for the atrocities, but to show that it's
a lesson that Americans should take heed of. And what happens when you have somebody who only cares about staying out of jail, which is the whole reason for N'taya, who's actions for a year almost and is something he has in common with Trump.
Can you say more?
Nitagnanfum thought he had won the autocrats lottery because he was re elected as Prime Minister in December twenty two. Me too, with an ongoing corruption trial and multiple charges of fraud, bribery and more. This this is like again it since strong man. It's so crazy and the first thing you need to do, so you've got to get back into office if you have indictments, and then you need to fix the judiciary so you can't have to
go to jail so nothing happens to you. So that was the reason he did the judicial reform, and it caused massive protests, including participation of military and security elites. And what we know from studies of how autocrats can fail is when military and security elites start to turn against you, that's really a problem for the autocrat and that was happening to Nitanyahu, So it left Israel much
more divided and weaker. And yet he wouldn't give up an he allied with these right wing fanatics like Ben Vere who fanned the flames.
So that's the lesson.
So so my piece today that published just what could his death destiny b And he's not really the right person to solve the problem, the structural problems that Israel has because he's a strong man and he's only interested in himself.
Really exactly, it's such an interesting I mean, it's such a I don't want to say interesting because it's horrendous. But we are in such a perilous time in American life, and I feel like the international conflicts actually somehow make domestic life more perilous.
Yeah, it's all destabilizing because there are links with all these things. And that's why I'm always trying to stress that the GOP. You know, when Trump came in the first time, he had two goals. One was torect democracy at home, but the other was to detach America from what's called democratic international order right and put it in And that's why, Oh, I love I love North Korean
leader love letters. You know, Putin is the greatest she and he's been trying through all his pronouncements about how great were to autocrats are to change the perception and get Americans to see Strongman as positive and that will benefit him and the GOP, even though so Trump's gone now, but the GOP is continuing this action. So it's all linked. It's what's happening here is very, very linked to developments and ontoprasies abroad.
I wish this wasn't going to be our problem forever, and everybod I assume it will be.
I see, I says, learning a lot from what is going on, and there's a lot of good things happening in America as a result of reaction to repression.
From your mouth to God's ear. Thank you so much anytime.
Josh coskop Is, a lawyer, was suing the gun company Rubbington.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Josh.
Thank you. Mollie.
I wanted to get you on the podcast because this is what happens. Everybody follows the New York Times. Of course we do our own stuff here, but also follow.
The New York Times.
And one of the reasons why I did why this story has been so interesting to me is because you know, we have a lot of senators on this podcast, a lot of congress people, and I had Chris Murphy on a couple times.
And I always ask him about.
The guns, and he had this hopefulness about it, and I was so shocked by that. You know, he had a certain sort of hope about changing things. And so when I read this story in the New York Times, the lawyer trying to hold gun makers responsible for mass shootings, I knew that I had to get you on this podcast. So explain to our listeners how you got here, and just a little bit about your story.
Sure, well, I started from a place of total ignorance about not just anything about guns or the gun industry, but about the law special protections that the gun industry has from our government from lawsuits. And I'm a lawyer but didn't know anything about it. So I was effectively a clean slate and less than zero. And of course initially thought of that as a handicap, but there may have been a silver lining in that. To your point about Chris Murphy, it probably made me more optimistic than
I had any right to be. But I sort of stumbled on the case because being in Connecticut, of course, I wanted to do anything I could to help the families, and then happened to be getting a ride from somebody to an airport who knew one.
Of the families. That's how I got the case in the first place.
We're talking about the families of tell our listeners.
So our farm represented nine families of the shooting. These are families who lost either children or adult loved ones and educators. And the nine families that brought the suit that we represented, this was the only lawsuit filed, so the balance of the families didn't participate in the lawsuit. The case that I was involved with was the case following in the Sandy Hook School shooting.
And those of you were in Connecticut.
And elsewhere, of course everywhere across the country probably knew where they were when they first heard of the shooting. And in that case, in that shooting, of course, there were twenty six people killed, twenty children and six adults.
And in the aftermath of that shooting, as a Connecticut lawyer, I was consulted on by some of the families sort of by happenstance, and then to start developing ideas about how we could go about bringing them some measure of accountability and closure, if you will, although that's an elusive thing when you're talking about a mass shooting.
I want you just to talk a little bit more about Sandy Hook because it is it was one of the sort of bleakest I mean, it's hard to pick the bleakest, but one of the bleakest mass shootings. But it also happened in a state where you had opportunities because of being in Connecticut that you might not have in a state like Texas.
Well.
I think one of the sad truths is that there was also the apparent opportunity for essentially a child, although adult by legal definition, a child by evolution, to acquire an AR fifteen.
But you had legal opportunities that you would not have had in a red state.
In Connecticut, we had some advantage that other states might not have. So this big or some less disadvantage, I should say, because the federal immunity law, so the law that we were really confronted with in this case, applies
to all states. So you've got to get through that regardless of what type of state you're in to bring a lawsuit in a case of a mass shooting, and Connecticut has some laws that you can work with, and the accomplishment I guess in our case was that we were able to use one of those laws to get us through this federal protection.
So explain that a little more sure.
All states have consumer protection laws that basically apply to businesses doing commerce in their state. It's a way for consumers to take on big corporate interests who are engaged in wrongdoing in your state. And typically or oftentimes, these consumer protection statutes are afforded and can be used by
people who are in a business relation. So, for example, if somebody bought a gun in a state and there was unethical marketing and it caused somebody to buy a gun and the gun malfunctioned or the gun went off or whatever, but the purchaser of the weapon was injured in some way, the purchaser might be able to bring a direct cause against the gun company because they were in a relationship. A business relationship would also apply to
competing gun companies. The question in our case was does it apply to third parties who were aggrieved in the way that these family members were aggrieved in the shooting, you know that were killed in the shooting, and in our state, there is no requirement that the law be limited to those who are in a direct business relationship,
and that's what the Supreme Court Ofkinnecticut held. Now, other states written into these laws, these consumer protection laws, other states actually say in the law effectively that you need to be in a business relationship with the defendant. So that wouldn't work our theory arguably wouldn't want in those states.
So what happens now, I mean, what are the larger implications of what you've done in this Sandy Hurt situation.
Well, I'm a lawyer who represents people whose livesmen turned up to side down, and I'm not a politician, and I'm not in any kind of an advocacy or.
Public interest type group.
The hope of the tort system in general, in this case, specifically this case more than any other, is that as a result of having to be held accountable for the harm that was caused, that not only brings a measure of justice and accountability of the families, but it also has a substantial ripple effects within the gun industry in this case, or industries that serve as underwriters of the gun industry.
You know, if you take a drug of medicine and it makes you sick, then you can often sue the company that made you sick. But if you are shot in a mass shooting, there isn't the same kind of consumer protection.
For lack of a better word, I mean, be pretty much nailed at. I mean, that's the concept is that victims of mass shootings and other shootings for that matter, are not only aggrieved in the most horrific ways typically, but also are treated as second class citizens under the law because of the unique protections given to the gun industry.
And as a corollary to that, the gun industry is treated with kid gloves, given special treatment and protections by government, which when I learned about this, I thought was super ironic. I mean, here's an industry that rails against the federal government, right you know, and they get a yet yet their biggest big buddy is the federal government.
But that's the reality.
We have this very insane Supreme Court. Doesn't it seem like something that they are going to get involved in?
Does that worry you?
Well, I've heard people say that, and I think that with respect to that sort of thought, I think that just speaks to the ability of the public in general to distinguish between something political in terms of guns, and something commercial. One of the things that I was acutely aware of, because I've done it myself, is that once a year guns we're just programmed to go right to Second Amendment.
You know, good guy with guns.
Supreme Court, we've been so programmed, and it does have a political component.
I was aware of that.
But you know, there's also this separate thing, which is the obligation of corporate America to behave like adults and to show some concern and act responsibly with respect to the way they conduct business, and especially when it comes to matters that pose a grave risk to the public
and public safety. And yes, it's true that guns may have enjoy this sort of what many of us feels a distortion of constitutional law and protection, but that doesn't alleviate the obligation of those that profit from guns to behave like responsible corporate citizens.
If that makes any sense.
Yeah, no, it does.
And in fact, it's funny because it's like we are in this period of a Supreme Court that is their whole idea of this sort of originalism is that if the founding fathers wrote the Constitution. If they didn't have gotten control in there, then it doesn't exist.
And you know, you should be able to beat your wife.
Yeah, I know it's crazy, but it is.
This idea of consistency in legislation and consumer protection is like one of the sort of things. I mean, American life is built on being able to sue people when they do something.
You don't like to state.
The obvious one that the common law upon which we inherited predated our constitution and was endorsed by our constitution. So there are lots of things in play here, and there's lots of you could spend I'm sure hours taking apart the reasoning of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Brewin, but you know, among many other things, I mean, the types of weapons that they're dealing with in cases today didn't even exist in those times, so that ought to right there invalidate any comparison my view.
Yeah, but I think it is a really good point.
The thing I'm struck by, why not when we cover things like this is and again it's not political, but it is.
But everything is political.
There are so many people on the conservative side who have been working on legislation via the Supreme Court, for example, I think of three h three creative right.
You know she never made the websites. She probably never will. I mean, do you worry about that?
And also are there reverberations from what you do that could be used in that way to shift legislation.
If I put on my parent hat, I worry about it, and my love of America hat, I worry about it for all of us and especially you know, people I love and for my country. In terms of my lawyer, Laine Hat here, even for this Supreme Court, it would be it would be an extreme overreach to try to reach into litigation like that which we have in Sandy Hook and claim it as somehow impairing some constitutional right
that they've made up to be fair. I think that the Supreme Court recognized that when they looked at the application to have this case heard by them and denied it. If I were you, I'd be asking me the same questions. But I think this discussion just is more evidence of how everything about guns ends up in the same place in these camps. You know, there's the pro gun, pro Second Amendment folks, and then there's the quote unquote common
sense gun reform folks. Or as the other side says, the gun grabbers, or as the common sense side says, you know, the gun crazies or gun nuts. I mean, so it just it gets there and we all end
up at the doorstep of the Supreme Court anyway. But if you think about it, well, in our case, basically we were saying, look, it's just wrong for any company, especially a company that sells AR fifteen's, to try to brand themselves with children and teenagers and work around the parents and get to their kids and establish a relationship that is built on solving their problems with violence and loan gunman assaults. That's wrong whether you're a Democrat or
a Republican, or gun person or not. So you know, that should have nothing to do with the political questions that seemed to put us in this permanent state of really inability to move forward in any direction politically.
So in these lawsuits you find a lot of times things in discovery. Talk to us about the discovery process.
The big I guess achievement of the case was when the Supreme Court at Connecticut said yes, you can go forward with this case. Up until that and a lot of people who had looked at the case from the outside thought that the chances were virtually nil. They didn't see what we saw, but in any event, that was a prevailing view, and that was a prevailing view of the gun industry. So they've never really had to get to that next step. And I think your listeners may
not be familiar with the sequence of things. It's complicated, you know. The first thing is you have to do is you have to gather information yourself what's publicly available, and you put together a story I always think of as a complaint, like the story of the case, and you'd find the law that fits with that story and the facts that you know them, and you file that lawsuit. And most lawsuits then go forward into what's called discovery, where you get the documents or information that you need
from the person you're bringing lawsuit against. When it comes to guns ensuing the gun industry, they have this special protection, and this is the protection that was given by Congress in two thousand and five. And under the special protection, the gun industry is allowed to try to dismiss the case and shut it down right from the start.
So right after you.
File that complaint and tell your story based on what you understand the facts, to be, the gun industry then moves to shut it down and dismiss the case, and they were very, very successful at that up until the Sandy Hook lawsuit. The importance of that is if you shut down the case before you get to this second part where you get to find out and get information from the other side, it means you get to keep your secrets of how you do business hidden because this
process gets shut down before you get there. So in our case, after the Supreme Court of Connecticut greenlit part of the case, and after the Supreme Court denied reviewing, after the United States Supreme Court denied reviewing the Connecticut short decision, we were then allowed to get into that second part of the process, which was discovery, which literally means discovering things from the other side. So in this case, what I knew, Molly, I didn't know what we were
going to find. To be honest, all I knew is that we were headed into what I've described as like a dark, underground cave that nobody had ever been to before, and the only people who'd been there are people in
the gun industry. What I knew we needed to do was to make sure that we drove a truck through that opening and try to find as much our way through that cave in as much detail as possible, and more to be less allegorical about it, like I just wanted to get all the stuff we could, right could because the family's case and to a person to a family,
you know, amazing in the mass shooting. We tend to lump victims of mass shootings into one block like they're all that means they're all for gun reform or all for these was and that they're poltically different like the people they were before. But the one thing the families, the nine families shared was the goal of trying to learn as much as they could about this industry and shed light on it in order to hopefully prevent the next Sandy Hook. And so this was a critical part
of the whole endeavor. And so you know, even if we had proceeded with the case and it didn't go anywhere after we were able to get through into this dungeon or this cave, it would have been a victory to get this information and to be able to share it with the public.
So what was it?
We now know?
What?
When I'm behind closed doors of what had become the world's biggest gun conglomerate for a period of time. You know the decisions that were made in the boardrooms in terms of how to market, how to expand the market, what techniques and schemes to use to bring in a younger and younger demographic. When they were facing increasing competition. We know that they pivoted towards AR fifteens because of
the high margin and profit that they provided. We know that a private equity firm called Cerberus was heavily involved in the transformation of the American gun industry.
We know that. I mean, you might have asked yourself, as I.
Have as a parent, how come I never heard of an AR fifteen when I was growing up, right, But every twelve year old now knows what one is. It's not accidental, but that comes as a result of what was a very clever, very concerted, and very greedy effort to sell as many AR fifteens to as many people as they could.
Jesus when you saw this where you just.
Chalked, I mean I was, and I wasn't because frankly, I didn't expect much out of the gun industry after way, I mean, I didn't really know much about the gun industry again, because I didn't really know wasn't an area
of focus in mind. But I learned that the gun industry in many ways was no different than any other industry that was profit driven, but in some way, in some critical ways, it was whereas if you got behind the doors of it, you went into a boardroom of a car manufacturer, car company like Ford, you know there's gonna be a safety division. There's going to be somebody in that in each meeting that's going to say, hey, can we do this? Is it really safe? What are the implications to public safety?
Right? Cars can be pretty.
Dangerous, you know, should we really be marketing them to children? To run over people? And you're going to get a more you're going to get a more diversity, and you'll have a ethical and moral governor on all kind of in the boardrooms that's utterly lacking in the gun industry. There's no pushback to anything. There's it's a no holds
barred industry. That's what I learned. I guess because we could all see the finished product, like you probably saw the man card advertising that promoted masculinity and owning an AR fifteen. You know that doesn't happen by accident, So I didn't expect much, but I think that the extent I was shocked, it was the cognitive dissonance between what they were doing and the effects we're seeing in our communities.
Number one and number two is just the utter lack of anybody or any even structural thing in place that looked at public safety or any implications of their scheme to make money. And the other thing is that, you know, whereas I think of greed and as a bad thing, this particular gun conglomerate, which was the brainchild of this private equity firm, existed for one reason and one reason only, and that was to try to build a billion dollar revenue company that they could then go public with a
gun company. So that was their first, second, and third goal was to make money and buy their own testimony and admission. And do you know, bad things happen when people lose their way in an effort simply to accumulate wealth at the cost of everything else. And really bad things happen when those people sell ar fifteen's and other types of fire arms to children or try to brand
themselves to children. But just it speaks to the desperation and the lengths of which people go to so I wouldn't point to one individual as being a bad person or their fathers and families. Everybody in the gun industry mostly has family members that they care about. There's just this cognitive dissonance and refusal to see or even evaluate the implications of what they're doing.
Josh, thank you so much. I hope you'll come back.
I'd love to BALI thank you no moment perfectly.
I it's Molly chm Thost and you're getting the moment of fuckoring on your nun today. I am can you use this moment to talk about the one soldierate Nancy Mays who told Jah temper on Celo that she knew funny As Democrats who trusted Jim Jordan, I promise you there's not a single Democrat who trusts Jim Jordan, and that incredible Nancy may Fly is your moment of suckery.
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