Mary Trump, Will Sommer, Joanna Schwartz

her new book Shielded, How the Police became Untouchable. But first we have the author of Too Much and Never Enough, the host of the Mary Trump Show and not my therapist, Mary Trump. Welcome Too Fast Politics, my friend and yours, Mary Trump. Hey, Molly, it's so good to be back with you. I'm so happy to have you. I'm sorry. We were just talking about our parents getting older and you said we're long lived, Fawn. I was thinking to myself, I actually read an article about how all of these

Republicans were hoping that Donald Trump. I'm sure you saw that article in the Atlantic by the great great McKay coppins about how all these Republicans were hoping that at seventy six, with all the fast food, the party could outrun Donald Trump. Yeah. I haven't read it yet, but I will. I'm sorry to rain on everybody's grade, but well, it's true. My grandfather lived to be ninety three and he was a reason like, he didn't exercise, but he was a very strongly built man with no bad habits. Right.

My grandmother's oldest sister lived to be ninety eight, chain smoking and drinking. Yeah, so I haven't feeling like I'm gonna end up in my dad's cap and the rest of them will kill me young, younger, whatever, but I know it's a terrible bet to place. One of my theories is that meanness is a preservative. Yeah, oh, no question. So let's talk about the twenty twenty four meaning we have spent almost a decade talking about Donald J. Trump shit show that we are facing. You know, Donald Trump

very well, unfortunately for you. I think the question on every Republican and Democrats' mind is would Donald Trump accept if he is not the nominee? And I just want to add a bit of a caveat because you know, people will point out that when it said I know Donald Trump even though I literally haven't spent any kind of quality time, not that there's such a thing as great. I was going to see a significant amount of time

with him since like the late nineties. The reason I know him so well is because, and this is a red flag, the man hasn't changed since he was a teenager. Right, So he's constitutionally and psychologically the same person. Trapped at amber, he won't accept anything, and I think his voices then become running as a third party candidate or just fighting the It was rigged, it's a hoax, it was stolen from a card. Right. Either way, Republicans won't be able

to get his voters. No, that is the thing that's so fascinating to me, that's absent from all of their calculations. It doesn't matter if somebody else is close in the polls, or even maybe leading in the polls. There is at least thirty percent of the Republican Party voters that will not vote for anybody else. What do you do when

you're starting at that kind of death visit. The thing I find so fascinating about this whole scenario is Donald Trump is back to the Republican Party into a corner They kept thinking that he would at some point go quietly, right, like, if he just lost enough races, he would say like, oh, this is enough. I mean that never happens, right, never. And which works though, is that they've never said this is enough. They could have gotten themselves out of this

problem many, many times, starting in twenty fifteen. Right, all they had to say was, if you want to run the Republican Party, you have to release your tax returns or something like that. Right, all right, I think you're right. They kept thinking, as Republicans often do, that they can control the monster they created, and then, of course the monster ends up taking over the whole party, and that's

what they're stuck with. So so we can engage in a little bit of schadenfreude about this, right, but at one we still have to deal with fucking Donald all the time too. And I set this back in twenty sixteen, the fact that he had a point zero zero zero one percent chance of winning in November was terrified, and now the percentage is much higher. Right, the Republican Party has worked really hard to try to keep from having to off against Trump. They've worked really hard to avoid conflict.

I mean, I'm thinking of Nicky Haley who just jumped in the race. Nicky Haley was a member of Trump's administration. She was a good little girl. She had been normal. She had sort of tried to play along the way a normal politician would, but she tried to avoid confrontation. And the problem is, I don't think you can do that with Donald Trump. Well, you can't afford confrontation on the one hand, and you can't be more him than he is, right right, That's I think Josh Marshall said

this recently. It's like, if this is a contest about who is the best Donald Trump, which it will be, who can beat the guy who actually is Donald? Right? Well, that's Ron Sands. It's biggest problem is that you can't be the rich man's Donald Trump. No you can't. Haley reminds me of Pence and that each of them did the right thing once, right it January sixth with Haley was taking the Confederate flagtown and that's the thing that

is going to doom their candidacy. It's so pathetic. I mean, it's like we're laughing, but it's tragic, Like this is tragic, This is tragic, This is terrible for American democracy. This is terrible for everyone except perhaps hopefully the Democratic Party. Hopefully. It's a high stake scambal that I personally, as someone who doesn't like high skate stake scambals, would rather not like I'd rather can't you know that Biden runs against

a normal candidate. But I don't see a world where this Republican Party produces that there aren't deady anymore, even if by some bizarre like if an asteroid hits the planet and every other Republican is disabled and Haley's the only person left standing. She's also not a normal candidate anymore, like none of them, even Sinunu in New Hampshire, who pretends to be. He recently said that if Donald gets a nomination, he's voting for Donald. So what good is that? Right?

So right, right, they all have made this bet, and yeah, it's like they're gambling with the rest of our sanity because it's unsustainable. Every freaking election can't be about whether or not democracy is going to survive, and yet here we are again. I mean, the only thing I would say is that eventually, as long as Democrats win, and again that's a big caveat because we don't know how

this goes. And if any you know, if twenty sixteen has been any proof, it's that, you know, you can think all you want and still but as long as democracy survives, I actually think that Republicans will eventually get stick of losing. I think so. But it also depends upon democrats willingness. Obviously that they're complicating factors there, but the Democrats willingness when they are in power to marginal continue to marginalize this Republican party into non existence. Yeah.

I read this piece about some new New today in the Times, and there certainly is a sense, like, you know, there is a message. It has not necessarily permeated the base yet, but there certainly is a message that, you know, Republicans cannot win anything other than bright red America with Donald Trump or trumpy candidates. And we saw that, really, really in stark relief during the midterms. Oh we did.

And hence the geomadering and hence their problem with primaries and the need to lie, to eat and steal in every election. But as long as they're in a position to continue rigging the system, or I should say, taking advantage of the system that's pre rigged, in their favor. You know, thanks Founders, We're always going to be in this very tense standoff, like how much can we accomplish

like Democrats. I think that the idea that Democrats would ever have a supermajority in the Senate is like vanishing Leasball, right right, right, yes, no question. So we'll have to do what we can do within the reality of having two sort of non Democrats in the Democratic majority. Just do our best to get enough people in there to get rid of the Filbusler. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think I wouldn't underestimate that eventually Republicans

will get sick of losing. But I don't know when that happened. I mean, we're seeing right now McCarthy is in the House trying to he's elevated this Freedom Caucus. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of Trumpism in the means of like unforced errors happening in the Republican Party, which is pretty interesting if

nothing else. Yeah, And what's sort of interesting, unexpected and a little bit upsetting, is that it's it's their incompetence that seems to be breaking through to people it's not the racism, it's not there. It's not the stuff that discuss us. Yeah, yeah, it's it's that they're holding hearings on these absolutely bullshit things that that are irrelevant to everybody's day to day lives and they're wasting money doing it.

So I guess that's good. But again it's against the backdrop of they're having such an electoral advantage and knowing that in order to win, all they really need to do is focus on three states, right. I mean, it is interesting to me, though, I will say, like Benghazi worked in twenty fifteen, like it worked, it worked well, it worked for Republicans. They ruined Hillary like they did it. McCarthy was psyched, he said, he announced it on TV.

He was delighted. So I don't think that what we're seeing now is a kind of like I do think voters are getting a little more savvy. Yeah, that is absolutely true, and that is something that should make us give us a little boost of, if not hopelessly positivity, because it's so egregious and it's so constant, like there are no breaks here. Right when you saw the polling on this Weaponization Committee, which was the brainchild of one

Tucker Carlson. You know, Tucker Carlson told McCarthy in early January that if he wanted to be the speaker, he needed to start a church committee, then Tucker might bestow the speakership on him. By the way, that's not how it's supposed to work. In case you're wondering, he did it, and the polling showed that the America people knew right away what it was, so that I think is actually a pretty hopeful sign. It is. The question, though, is

how much davage can be done in the meantime. You know, we just found out that Kevin McCarthy gave said Tucker Fish the Carlson access to all of the video from January sixth, Right, it makes you wonder what that's all about. You know, what are they planning? And we just continue to be in this extraordinary period of norm breaking to the point that norms don't matter anymore except for norms of course, right exactly. But I mean that's a good point.

I mean, think about a news hoost is getting these videos. He's right now being sued. His network is being sued by the voting machine company from the twenty twenty election because it is clear, and there is text message evidence that Tucker and Laura Ingram and John Hannity didn't believe anything they were shopping for the last two years. So we're way past norm breaking. What do we need a word for norm breaking? When you are really like post

post post norm breaking. I'll work on it. Yeah, we need to work shop a word for you know you norms. Those those were waved us bye bye a long time ago. Yes, it did. It shows you that the ease with which it happened leads us, I should say, to having discovered also how vulnerable our institutions are and how willing so many people are to kind of put pressure at their weakest joints. Yeah, we've got a lot of rebuilding to do, but I think we also have a lot of reconceptualizing

to do. Yeah, I'll say, I mean, for example, there's a special counsel right now called Jack Smith. I guess he still exists allegedly. What right do we have to know? We're all the American people again, like all these people who you know, these rioters, A lot of them went to jail, but you know who didn't go to jail? Any one above that? Yeah, that's the danger point, we cannot consider any justice to have been done. If that

remains the case, I mean, it is entirely untenable. And with the same will, we can say the same thing, at least hypothetically in Georgia. If charges are brought against everybody except like Mark Meadows and Donald Trump, how is that justice? I mean, that's the big question. And again

it's too soon to know. Before people start yelling at me, it's certainly possible that tomorrow, as soon as this podcast publishes, Jack Smith puts out a ton of indictments, and we are all eating our shoes, by the way, I just want to say, and look, I would be delighted to eat my shoe. I do think Donald Trump, for you know, will run on these indictments. And I mean, don't you think, oh he'll run on them. He'll fundraise off of them.

One thing Donald likes he likes having a lot of people against them, like he wants the Republican feel to be as big as it was in twenty sixteen. That just works in his favor. He likes having multiple fronts to fight on because thinks that demoralize us, like cheating, lying and stealing and name calling and ad homam him attacks kind of make him happy and bright, delight him, build stronger. Yeah, yeah, he'll use that and he'll he's already called the sentis a pedophile for God's sex, or

replied that he was one. So it's going to be completely nasty. And there are enough people. Again, We've got at least least thirty percent of the Republican electorate that will finance this stuff because it's the only thing in their lives that make them feel better than or make them feel empowered. Yeah. Mary Trump, I am delighted to have you. I look forward to having you back. We will survive the next two plus years. We will, indeed,

and we will we will thrive well. Sohmer is a reporter at The Daily Beast, an author of Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy then Unhinged, Amrapath, Welcome, q ask Politics, Will Somar Molly, thanks for having me Trust the Plan, but we really shouldn't trust the Plan. Huh No. Yeah, so the book is called Trust the Plan. I'm using sort of a QAnon slogan there that they encourage their believers to just sort of lay back and let q and Donald Trump take care of these satanic

pedophiles who run the world. But of course things, you know, when you do trust the plan, I think things tend to go a little awry. And the books about that and how both were QAnon believers and the rest of us, how bad things we've gotten. Can you just explain to us what is happening right now with QAnon? Yeah, I mean they're still cooking. I mean so so q told a few years ago said to the believers, said stop

identifying yourselves as QAnon, stop talking publicly about it. And so as a result, I think we see it a lot less visibly now, but they're still at it. You know, q pops in every couple months to post, and I think, you know, we see a lot of evidence that I think we're gonna have a resurgence of QAnon as not just sort of broader as sort of conspiratorial thinking or talk about groomers and cabals and this kind of stuff.

But I think Qan on itself we'll have a resurgence in twenty twenty four and as we move into that. But I think really the biggest thing with them is how Donald Trump has moved to outright and endorsed them and you know, he posts all day on truth social you know, memes of him wearing q buttons and all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, that does seem like a really important sea change, Like we had Trump sort of flirted with them, but he kind of knew

it was naughty. And then now since he you know, in his desperate quest to hold on to power, all of a sudden, he was like, oh, yeah, this will work for May for so long. It's sort of the arc of Trump and QAnon. As these guys they wanted, they believed in Trump so bad he was like their messianic figure, and all they wanted as they endured all this, you know, mockery from people who knew them, all they wanted was for Trump to say Quanon was real. And

so you know, they would go to these rallies. They talked about trying to break into the White House to ask him this kind of stuff. And then you know, actually, you know, if the Trump campaign kind of put them to the side and said, well, why don't tell you're okay, you can come in, but don't wear your shirts and

maybe don't stand in front of the TV cameras. Maybe don't freak people out and then in twenty Trump starts saying, well, you know, maybe these people are onto something, and then now more explicitly, he's he's he's embracing them a lot more. It seems to me, like with the anti vaxers and like people like the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi, it does seem to me like there's a kind of liberal sect of QAnon. I hate even saying that because it doesn't sound like English. Yeah, this is sort of a

fascinating aspect of it. This stuff really took off during the pandemic. There's various terms for them. They're called pastel QAnon. In some ways. It sort of spreads along online yoga and wellness communities on Instagram. There's also this aspect called Save the Children, which is sort of a QAnon front group where people would say, aren't you concerned that six hundred thousand children go missing a year? Which is which is not true, But people say, yeah, right, I was

gonna say, it seems like a lot of kids. I mean, that would be about a third of the kids born every year. Yeah, and so yeah, it doesn't make any sense, but I wouldn't be very concerned about that. Yeah, And that's sort of the funnel is that then you know people well, meeting people who wouldn't consider themselves Trump supporters, they sort of travel down this rabbit hole and say, well, why are these kids going missing? And someone says, well, let me tell you about a lady named Hillary Clinton.

And that's how you get a lot of these kind of liberal QAnon believers. Yeah, and did these people eventually vote for Trump? I think that's how it works out is often these when I talk to people about like why did you get into QAnon when it is a more liberal person, You know, they get into it because of maybe they're already in kind of like alternative wellness spaces or selling essential oils and an mlm oh yeah,

don't tera exactly exactly. A lot of the appeal of QAnon that I think often gets undercovered, but we talked about in the book is there's a very personal aspect of it, and there's this promise of you know, if you have debts, it will be abolished, or if you wrench your house, suddenly you'll come to own this house. So been people in kind of desperate circumstances they get into it and then then they okay, well, who's the

guy who's going to make all this happen. Well, his name is Donald Trump, right right, right, So let me ask you. I want to ask you about this Epstein list.

They all think there's some Epstein list coming out right right right, that there's this you know, this Epstein client list that the deep State won't release, but it's coming any day, right exactly exactly, And they right, and so you know, or you know, even sometimes they'll circulate sort of photoshopped aspects of it where it'll say, oh, John Roberts, was you know, on the Epstein list or whatever? Is there a list coming out? No, No, there's no list, Molly.

I mean, as far as I know, I mean, there's the government has never said we're going to put out a list. Oh so this is completely made up? Yeah, exactly, it's made up. Oh wow, that's really freaky. I have been really surprised, and again I'm not saying that I am going to join this insane cult, but I have been very surprised at how little of the Epstein stuff has been released. I think often, you know, I certainly don't mean to to brush this, you know, Epstein stuff

under the rug. I mean I think often qNaN is is most effective when there there really are like very weird, disturbing things happening in the news, you know, whether it was the pandemic or um or or the Epstein stuff, which is really weird. And then he supposedly died in jail. You know, there's a lot of shady stuff around it, and usually that that can make a great recruiting tool to then say, well, you know what else is weird and then you know, sort of lead someone down the path, right, No,

I mean just crazy. First, I want to ask you, is there any sense that this is getting better or are we really all going to die? Well? I think certainly, you know, I occasionally talk to people who leave Qunan, and but I honestly think that this, this kind of conspiratorial thinking and this kind of the Quanan movement is something that's going to be with us for a while.

I think, you know, there are like a lot of a lot of legitimate problems in American society, and I think people are often driven in, you know, they get in these kind of dire straits, often like dead or you know, medical issues, stuff like this, and they see these conspiracy theories as an escape and kind of a fun fantasy world that they can live in, and then you know, sometimes it unfortunately ends up in being January sixth, or you know, these other kind of QAnon violent moments.

How much of the geopy base is really QAnon? Very conservatively, I would say ten percent, but I think it's probably higher than that. I mean, we see poles that say, you know, when you ask someone do you believe in QAnon, perhaps you get as high as fifteen percent, Whereas if you say, more broadly, do you believe that there is a Satanic cult that abuses children and drinks their blood, et cetera, it's actually much higher than that, Like it's

in the thirty percents. Yeah, yeah, Jesus. And so at that point, you know, and people can say, like, you know, look at that, Oh well it's not a majority. Well that's great. You know, we're still we're talking about tens of millions of people. Yeah, there's are a lot of people. So then this leads to my next question, which is this group is not transferable, right, like Ron de Santis can't harness the power of QAnon, right, I don't think

so at this moment. You know, I think if you know, someday, Donald Trump will leave and someday we'll get a new iteration of this conspiracy theory. But but until then, I mean, they really, you know, he is the he's the god figure. They call him the god Emperor, you know, I mean, this is the god Emperor. Wait? Really yeah? Yeah? Wait? They called Donald John Trump the god Emperor. Yes, yes, and looks it's a little tongue in cheek, Malli, but they do call it, you know, they call him geodas right,

the God Emperor of the United States. Jesus fucking Christ. They know, the same guy we're talking about, right, Yeah, it's it's the Donald Trump, right, I mean, and that is you know, I think we're starting to see but speaking of the Santas, we're starting to see Trump kind of waghe into weaponizing these pedophile allegations against him, right because he you know, he posted this picture and he said, oh,

Rod parting with high schoolers? Is this true. The thing that I don't understand about this is like these people, when these things are debunked, they don't ever like have a moment where they're like, oh, we weren't right about this, so maybe we're not right about everything. And I mean that is the sort of the cognitive dissonance that's so fascinating about it, where when one of these moments doesn't happen, then you know you have to kind of jigger it

around in your head and so suddenly, you know. I talked to Q and On people when Biden was inaugurated, which was of course a huge moment let down for them, and this woman said, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna throw up. But then they kind of go back and they say, well, I guess the deep State was a little tougher than we thought, and we'll just have to redouble our efforts. I imagine if they spend all that time working on stuff that was actually real. Let's talk

about what is happening at Project Fairitas. What is happening at Project Veritas? Oh my gosh, Molly, where do I start? So give us a little for my dad, who is hopefully listening to this, because if you've lost your dad, you're really in deep shit. Please explain what Project Fairtas is. Sure, so, Project Veritas is a nonprofit. I want to underline that

because that comes up later. Yes, Insane is a political group run by James O'Keefe, who's kind of the this right wing figure who pioneered these hidden camera stings, and so most famously he dressed up as a pimp and went into the liberal group Acorn and said, you know, I'm a pimp, and how can I traffic underage girls? Essentially, And a lot of these videos were accused of being

misleadingly edited. But he's been very effective at embarrassing and in some cases taking down liberal groups with these stings. And he also went after Times Reporter and went after I mean, he's done a bunch of these kind of things and they're very sketchy, and the idea is to prove that the media is somehow trying to get conservatives exactly.

They do a lot of honey pots, for example, where you know, a lovely young lady from Project Veritas, or as James O'Keefe refers to them as pretty young things. Jesus you know he internally. Yeah, So that's the kind of environment they're working with, feminist icon and so you know they'll try to for example, when when Trump was an office, they would try to catch FBI agents saying, oh, we can't wait to get this Trump guy. Or they go after journalists and so that's kind of their bread

and butter. How bad must it have been for them to have fired him because he's the boss, right, And so there's all this kind of crazy stuff going on a project Veritas. So they were there under FBI investigation over the theft of Ashley Biden's diary, right, which may or may not be her diary, right exactly. There are these lawsuits from employees who suggest this very sexist culture of James O'Keeffe. Shocked who could have seen that, I mean realize James O'Keeffe like pulling up porn on his

computer at work, allegedly really hard partying. They claimed someone pooped on the floor at a party, another guy had a drug overdose. So then this all comes to a head over James O'Keefe spending the kind of the Marquee expense here, and we're talking one hundreds of thousands of dollars. Is James O'Keefe is a big musical theater fan going back to high school. And they have admitted this is that he started a production of Oklahoma I think in

twenty twenty one. This is true, And so they paid twenty thousand dollars to basically relocate Project Veritas staffers so that he could work with them and I think Virginia while he was doing this Oklahoma production, and then they had to admit to the irs like, okay, yeah, I guess this was not within our purview as a nonprofit. So this spending has been out of control. According to the board. It seems as though he fired some people who were looking into it, and then they stepped back

in and reinstated them. And then now this kind of comes to a head on Monday where James O'Keefe marches into the office and records this nearly hour long video where he's kind of ranting here, Oh, I would hope, I mean, because you know, he's a recording guy, so you know, I'm interested to see because you know, his staff says he alleges that he's been very abusive a lot of the staffers, and so that I'm curious all these people with hidden cameras and all this expertise whether

there's a video or audio of him that's going to emerge. But he basically had this kind of bizarre video where he ranted against the board and he's just he's crying and stuff like this, and then he announces, you know, I'm quitting Project Veritas and I'm going to create my own rival, new Project Veritas. So now there's this this chance that there's there are going to be these two rival organizations at each other's throats. Oh Jesus, I mean I did see Don Junior. A lot of these guys

are team James O'Keefe. They certainly are. You know, It's interesting to me because the board here, you know, people like Don Junior are painting this board as you know, a bunch of liberals. But I mean these are James O'Keefe loyalists who stepped in here, and so it makes me think that, you know, essentially, there's what the board is arguing is that it got to the point where they they were at risk of breaking the law themselves

if they didn't rein him in. But you have people like Don Junior who are arguing that this nonprofit should be run as the James O'Keefe piggy bank for musical productions. Well, why should it be any different than his dad's pack. Honestly, I do think Donald Trump's charity is the model here.

I mean this idea that they say, well, James raised all this money, but he didn't raise it for you know, one of the allegations is that he spent nearly twenty thousand dollars taking a private jet to go meet one of his boat repair men. I mean, this is not supposed to be for right technically now, but it's kind of incredible. I am without speech honestly, I mean I just am without speech with this. So you think that James O'Keefe now goes off and starts his own Project

Veritas Part two, Yeah, I think that's the plan. And really, I mean Project Veritas, I think you could easily replicate it. It's it's pretty much James O'Keeffe and sort of some some wayward youths who are willing to to do honey pots. And you know, I'm sure he can buy some more hidden cameras, so I think he will do that. And I think the board here I don't think there are under any illusions that it's going to continue without him. It speaks to how concerned they were about his spending that.

You know, it seems like they let up get away with a lot and then they said, hey, James, you know, maybe we skip this musical and then you know, it all blew up. But you do also see how unhinged a lot of these people are, right, I mean, like obviously James o'keith had a pretty good gig. He just couldn't keep himself from blowing it off exactly. And you know, often what I run into covering covering the right is how many personality issues come up. And probably Veritas had

a great thing going. It sort of seems as though O'Keefe's personality, you know, according to the board and his spending, and you know, also I really don't underline. I mean, his underlings allege just haine his treatment. They said he would just go after people and what they call public crucifixions at work. It seems like a very rough place.

But it's hard for me to imagine. And this is the thing with these MAGA workplace disputes, Like the whole thing of MAGA is mistreating people, right, So like what are you going to be like? This is not a healthy workplace, Like you're working for a guy who said all Mexicans were rapists? Like how do you what? There's no decorum here? I mean, I don't know how you have a leg to stand on. Well, you know, it

is funny. I mean this idea, these same people who are saying, oh, you know these let's explode, expose these liberal snowflakes. And then, you know, especially, I mean big Project Veritas target has been labor unions, and then suddenly these workers are like, all right, we gotta organize, we gotta go to the Yeah. Right, this is kind of amazing. I mean it's like, you know, it is like they're rediscovering all of these liberal values again and again. You know,

maybe unions have a good point here. Thank you so much, will I hope you'll come back. Thanks for having me. I know you, our dear listeners are very busy and you don't have time to sort through the hundreds of pieces of punditentry each week. This is why every week I put together a newsletter of my five favorite articles on politics. If you enjoy the podcast, you will love having this in your inbox every Friday. So sign up at Fast Politics pod dot com and click the tab

to join our mailing list. That's Fast politics pod dot com. Professor Joanna Schwartz is the author of Shielded, How the Police Became Untouchable. Welcome to Fast Politics. Professor Joanna Schwartz thank you. Thanks for having me. Very excited to have you. So I feel like the book. I think we have to say the title of the book because it is exactly what we're going to be talking about right now.

It is called Shielded, How the Police Became Untouchable. I'm sure you wrote this during the middle of police you know, there have been so many of these police misconduct incidents. So tell me. I want to first ask you, how

did you when did you decide to write this? Yeah. So, I was a civil rights litigator in New York City in the early two thousands, and when I was bringing these cases with a small civil rights firm in the city, I started thinking about how civil rights cases actually work on the ground and all of the challenges that there

are to relief in these cases. And then when I became a law professor about fifteen years ago, I started focusing my research on civil rights litigation and many of the questions that I first was asking as a young lawyer bringing these cases about how the rules actually work on the ground. And so I wrote a bunch of law review articles that lawyers and law students and advocates read. Then,

in the wake of George Floyd's murder. I decided to write this book, and I was getting a lot of calls from legislators and from journalists trying to understand how the system worked and why there are so many barriers

to relief in these cases. And so I wanted to write Shielded to describe all of these barriers in ways that people who aren't lawyers and don't tenderly read law review articles could understand, and to explain all of the interlocking ways in which there are challenges to getting justice at each stage of the litigation. That's how I came

to write Shielded. Give us a little taste of what they are sure well, there's been a lot of conversation in the news, particularly after the murder of George Floyd, about a legal protection called qualified immunity, and it's a protection that essentially means that even if an officer has violated the Constitution, they're protected so long as there's not a prior court decision with virtually identical facts in which

that similar conduct was held to be unconstitutional. And as I describe in the book, there is a case coming out of Fresno, California, where a police officer stole a quarter of a million dollars in money and rare points when conducting a search. That officer got qualified immunity because there wasn't a prior court decision where something so outrageous

had been done. And that meant that the person whose home was searched, who lost a quarter of a million dollars, didn't get any relief and the officer didn't suffer any consequences of that extreme misconduct. And that's only one of

the barriers. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution, which protects against unreasonable searches, in seizures, in ways that allow police to arrest, assault, and even kill people who've done nothing wrong, so long as they can say it was objectively reasonable for them to do so at the time because they thought the person had a gun in their hand, for example. And I also talk about how difficult it is to get justice against local governments, even truly dysfunctional ones.

It's very difficult, given the Supreme Court standards, to get relief from them as well. Obviously, you are not the first person to come on this podcast and talk about this wildly conservative Supreme Court, and you know it's certainly something we focus on a lot. But I want to

get back to this idea. Do you think that some of this is founded on the notion which I, as in New York are fined completely bizarre, but is clearly like a big selling point to some people outside of the cities that you can shoot people if they show up at your house. Well, there is a really interesting way in which gun control or lack of gun control,

and police violence intersect. And in fact, one of the stories that I tell in the book is about a person who is playing video games in their home at night, doing nothing wrong. Police pounded on their door at one thirty in the morning because they thought, for no good reason at all, that this person owned a motorcycle that had possibly been involved in a crime earlier that night. And this man, Andrew Scott, had a gun that he lawfully possessed. He brought it to the door down at

his side. But someone is pounding on his door at one thirty in the morning and doesn't say who they are, and when he opens the door, he's shot by a deputy sheriff, and then the deputy sheriff. The claim against him is dismissed because the deputy was reasonable in the court's mind to shoot him because he had a gun. Well, that was a gun. He was lawfully in possession of

the law. The constitution is, you take it by interpreted by the Supreme Court, says you can have a gun anywhere, but if an officer thinks that you're gonna hurt somebody, they can shoot you and they have not violated the constitution. Great, great country we live in. The thing I'm all strapped by is that it just seems like, I mean, I know, there was statistics about at how few crimes police actually do solve, and it does strike me with a lot

of this. Certainly a lot of this. There's racism, I mean a lot right like back to Rodney King the history of much of this, and especially in the LA Police department, but in other police departments. We've had people on here talking about the gangs and the police departments. I mean, there's certainly a lot of racism and a lot of other sort of rot in the institution. But it also does strike me the police or just not

that good at this. I think that we as a society give police a tremendous amount of authority to do things that are difficult to do. I'm not sure, and I think we as a country are starting to think about whether they actually should be given authority to do these things. There are discussions across the country about how to handle people who are having mental health crises and

to not have people with guns responding. Philadelphia recently passed all that would limit police power to stop people for minor traffic violations, right, which is how a number of these shootings happen. Right. Yeah. I mean my book really focuses on what to do once officers have violated the constitution and the law, what is the path toward justice?

But I think a full consideration of all possible reforms also means we need to think about what we allow police to do, what we authorize them to do, and some of it are things that police really are not well suited to accomplish, and we should be thinking about how to run our society differently. I totally agree, and this is like one of the largest problems of our age.

But I just want to mention, like you know, with the Gabby Petito saying, even cases where you know it's a white person and by other white people, they are still just appalling and atrocious. And I mean that's the thing. It's like, I'm just by how bad they are with domestic violent I mean, I just don't understand how this group has so much political capital. If you had a company that was doing this, you would fire the CEOs.

I think that the political capital point is a really powerful one, and part of what I focus on in the book is that that political capital has really been built up based on fear mongering about what society would look like if it was too easy to get justice, if there were more constraints on police and what they could do if there was more transparency, And really, in response to any effort to have more oversight over police, there have been claims that courthouses would be overflowing with

frivolous cases, and officers would be bankrupted for reasonable mistakes made in a split second, and no one would agree to become a police officer, and without a police force,

there would be chaos. And I've really spent my academic career studying these and other justifications for all of the limits on transparency and justice, and those claims are overblown, if not false, but they're scary, and I think that it's hard for politicians to say I'm going to pass these reforms, I'm going to demand this transparency in response to union officials and police officials saying, if you do this, your constituents will be unsafe. I want to talk to

you about qualified immunity because I think a lot about doctors. Right. Doctors have medical malpractice, right, and if you kill a patient, you can be sued. Right. Yeah. Police want qualified immunity because they don't want to be held responsible for things like killing a prisoner. But that would be what that would mean, right, Well, I think that there is. I mean, qualified immunity does create those real protections even when the

constitution has been violated. The constitution itself, though, also creates protections so that prisoners can be killed even if qualified immunity wasn't there. The way in which the courts have understood the constitutional power is so limited, and in fact it's especially limited when you're talking about prisoners, even more so than police. Yeah, I mean I just am struck by you know, yesterday there was a news event of a man who had they had called the police on

him because he had addiction problem. The police had put him in the freezer. He had frozen. To us his temperature, his body temperature was seventy two. I mean, so clearly we are seeing police cruelty as an American epidemic. Yeah, no, absolutely, and we see it again and again in these moments when there is a high profile case like Tyree Nichols and like George Floyd before him. These are moments where the public's attention is captured and there is the sense

that we need to improve things. But every day there are stories if you look, of terrible injustices that have occurred that don't get that kind of public attention. And those are really the stories that I try to tell in this book, because those are the cases where the shields protecting against accountability are. They're most powerful in the cases that have the least political salience. Yeah, I mean that certainly seems like where we are and just how

do we get out of this? Well, I think that there's a lot of barriers to relief, there's a lot of barriers to justice, and the bright side of that is that there's a lot that can be done at every level of government to improve where we are. I think that we should applaud and continue to explore ways to limit the reach of policing, certainly with people who are suffering mental health crises, with people who have done minor traffic violations and don't need to be pulled over.

There are also important things to do with police internal discipline and to undo some of the protections that have been negotiated through union agreements that make it very difficult for police departments to take any action against their officers. But then I also think, and this is really where the focus of shield it is that we need to make the back end systems of accountability work better than they do, which are happening in a variety of different ways.

State governments across the country are trying to create greater restrictions on what police can do and do away with protections like qualified immunity. And there's a lot that can happen at city at the level of city government as well that people can ask their own city officials to

make valuable changes that I outline in the book. I want to ask you about the police union because, as someone who's a granddaughter of communists terry committed to unions, we've had a lot of trouble getting unions to really do for workers. The police union does not have any

trouble with that. Can you explain why, well, I mean, police and corrections unions are really among the most powerful unions that we have in the country, and I do think that that power has been fueled in part by these claims that without the protections that they're given, our country will not be safe, people won't agree to service officers, and that those dangers of increased crime and lack of protection are going to be on the responsibility of legislators,

who then have to answer to their constituents. It's a very powerful message that I think union leaders in corrections and in law enforcement have been using for decades and decades to increase protections, and it's they are powerful in a large part because of that message that I think it's very difficult for legislators to push back against. Yes, agreed, and also OI, it's such a grim, grim reality. We in New York have a mayor who was a policeman, and he is very into a lot of whatever I am.

I'm not a fan, but in a way we're sort of more stock when it comes to reform because of our mayor. Yes, no discuss well. I think that New York is a unique place for a variety of reasons when it comes to policing. The New York City Police department is dramatically larger than any other police department in the country. The next largest, I believe is Chicago, and it's like a third of the size of the MYPD.

And then of course the are just budget. It's a very very powerful part of the New York City ecosystem. You also have very strong advocates for reform, both private citizens and lawyers and folks on the city council. There is a tremendous amount of power that law enforcement has. There is also a tremendous amount of important work that's being done by local city council members and by advocates. In other parts of the country, there aren't lawyers that

do this work. There aren't civil rights organizations that bring these cases and bring attention to them. So you've got challenges, But you also have people who are focused on improving policing in the NYPD. Yeah, so interesting. I hope you will come back anytime. Jesse Cannon, Molly Jong Fast. These conservatives, they just always can find some dumb nitpick thing about where you didn't visit, where you're not at each day, and they're mad. President Biden is doing an unprecedented visit

to the Ukraine, you know, the Ohio trained derailment. On this podcast, we have taken it very very seriously because we do not like environmental catastrophe is unline, you know, unlike the rest of the world, which also doesn't like environmental catastrophes. But you know, especially once that are caused by deregulation. You'll remember deregulation as Donald Trump's favorite thing in the kioworld. You guys, deregulation, that's what happens when

you deregulate industries like trains. And so Donald Trump going to Ohio on his tour to tell the many people of Ohio how bad he feels for them and how deregulation had nothing to do with this enormous environmental catastrophe that could have been prevented by regulation. Very mad at Biden for going to Ukraine during President's Day, one of the very rare times a sitting president had gone into an active war zone. He took an eight to ten hour train ride. Secretly, it was quite a ballsy move.

Republicans are mad that he's not in Ohio because Joe Biden is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to your the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.