The Breakfast Club - INTERVIEW: Elie Mystal Talks 'Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America' Trump, Voter 'Fraud' + More

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

The Breakfast Club Sits Down With Elie Mystal To Discuss 'Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America' Trump, Voter 'Fraud.' Listen For More!YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakfastClubPower1051FMSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Pod of Rebellion, our new Star Wars Rebels rewatch podcast. I'm Vanessa Marshall, voice of Harrison Dula, Spectre 2. I'm Tia Zirkhar, Sabine Ren, Spectre 5. I'm Taylor Gray, Ezra Bridger, Spectre 6. And I'm John Le Brody, the Ghost Crew Stowaway moderator. Each week, we're going to rewatch and discuss an episode from the series and share some fun behind the scenes stories. Sometimes we'll be visited by special guests like Steve Blum,

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Hollywood saved me. On this week's episode of Eating While Broke, a podcast presented by the Black Effect Podcast Network, Nick Cannon joins us to discuss his journey from teenage comedian to entertainment mogul. Now I do the Superdad content with my kids and everything that people go viral for and making millions of dollars on YouTube, I was doing in the 90s. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Eating While Broke and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.

Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Wake that ass up early in the morning.

The Breakfast Club. Morning everybody. It's DJ, Envy, Jelly, Jess Hilarious, Charlamagne, the guy. We are The Breakfast Club. We got a special guest in the building. They call him Big Ellie. The reason I don't want to mess with your last name is my style? It's Miss Doll Rhymes with Kristall.

I made that up myself. Kristall, Ellie, Mistal. All right. My kids used to say Ellie Rhymes with Jelly and I didn't like that at all. So I had to come up with something. But welcome. New book out, Bad Law. Man.

First of all, Ellie, you know, you're one of my favorite people to listen to. I love reading your work in the nation. I started reading a lot more of your stuff a few years ago when I realized the Constitution didn't mean much, okay? Not to us. Anymore, right? So, I'm glad you're here. What got you into studying constitutional law? Well, I went to law school and I hated it. I went to Harvard Law School and, you know, part of the legal training is like they say that they're going to make you think like a lawyer,

right? So what that means is that they take the way you think, which was fine to me, and they break you. And then they try to build you back up in this new, like, legal way of understanding the world. And I just never accepted the training. At every point when you're telling me that like, oh, well, this is how it's always been done. I'm always like, by the slavers. And I should care about that. Why? And just so was a constant while I was in law school, like back and forth in terms of my professors trying to kind of push me in a certain box and me resisting that box and not, you know, not all of my professors.

I, one of my professors was current Supreme court justice, Elena Kagan. She was great. Right. But I would go to her office hours and be like, why is this like this? And she would say, Thurgood Marshall once said, it's like, I don't give a damn what Thurgood said. He was talking for a different time. What about our time? And so these were the conversations I had all the time.

And that led to my first book and certainly my career in general. And that's why you feel like all laws before 1965 should be deemed unconstitutional? I said presumptively unconstitutional, which is a legal dodge. I'm trying to lawyer my way around that. But my fundamental premise is that before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which I think is the most important piece of legislation ever passed in American history, this was functionally apartheid country. Not everybody who lived here could vote here. Not everybody who lived here could participate in the government here.

The majority of people who lived here, if you think about not just black people, but also Latinos and also women, couldn't actually participate in the government. What do you call that? We have a word for that. That word is apartheid. And so if you're now going to say that we passed some law before everybody had a say, before everybody had a vote, and that law it should still be controlling today, I say hell no. It's like Roy Breaker from Lockstock, right? If the milk's sour, I ain't the type of pussy to drink it. Right? So if you're

gonna go all the way back before everybody had a vote, I'm saying that presumptively speaking, that law should mean nothing. I'm not saying that you get rid of every single law passed before 1965, some of them I quite like, like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that was a good law. I also like the Sherman Antitrust Act. I like a lot of laws that were passed before 1965, but my argument is that if we like the law,

we could pass it again. We could pass it again this time asking everybody and for that example I didn't make that up myself right the example that I'm using here is what they did in South Africa Right when South Africa got over apartheid did they just go back to their Afrikaner Racist constitution be like oh, we just need a couple of amendments We just need a couple of changes here to make a work. No, they threw the whole thing out and started again, this time asking everybody.

This time having a completely new delegation of all of the people of South Africa, not just the white folks, but not no white folks. And they came up with a new constitution. It's one of the reasons why the South African constitution is generally thought of as one of the best constitutions in the world, and ours continues to be a piece of crap. So what laws would you kick out immediately?

What laws are you saying needs to get the fuck out of you? Yeah, so the first one I have in my book is that I want to eliminate every single voter registration law. All of them. All of them in every state are bad, right? That's different from voter eligibility, right? We, I think, can all agree that there should be eligibility requirements like an age requirement, right?

You have to be 18 to vote. I might say 16. But I'm not gonna say eight, right? I got an eight-year-old. We don't want... No, they're not ready for that, right? That's a voter eligibility requirement. But once we... once you're eligible, there's no reason for you to have to pre-register

in order to execute your franchise. If you're eligible to vote, you should just be able to rock up to the polls and vote. Again, I didn't make that up. That's what they do in nearly every other democracy. In nearly every other democracy, either has mandatory registration, automatic registration, or same day registration.

What we do with this bull crap of having to show up 10 days before, a month before in some places in order to pre-register before you're, we're alone basically in the modern world in terms of people who do that. So we could just get rid of all of them. We could just get rid of all of them. And the people will say like, oh, well, we can't do that

because of voter fraud. Right. Well, first of all, and I know this is going to be hard for some listeners who spend a lot of time listening to Republican lies, but voter fraud does not exist. I loved how you broke that down in the book, expound, please. Voter fraud just doesn't exist. It's not a real thing. We shouldn't make laws based on protecting us from things that don't exist.

An analogy I've made is like, if let's say I want to go fishing, I want to go fishing that lake. The government says, no, you can't fish there. And I say, why? They say, because the Loch Ness Monster might get you. Get out of my face with that. Shut up. That's stupid. We're not going to restrict my right to fish because of a thing that doesn't exist. So that's number one. But number two, Republicans keep saying we need voter ID. The voter ID is the thing that secures our election, that protects us from voter fraud. And I call their bluff. I'm like, all right, you want voter ID? Fine. Let's make a deal. Remember how this country used to actually make deals in order to move forward? Let's make a deal. I'll give you your voter ID. It's gotta be national, it's gotta be free,

because if it's not free, it violates the 24th Amendment's prohibition on poll taxes. But you give me a free national, I'll give you a free national voter ID, and you give me automatic registration of every eligible voter that is also portable between either in the states or between the states portable means,

if I move, I don't have to re-register, my registration follows me, I don't have to follow my registration. You give me that deal, I will give you your ID card. Who says no? And I promise you the people who say no are the Republicans, are the ones who claim that voter ID is necessary to secure our election

because their goal is not to secure elections because again, voter fraud doesn't exist. Their goal is to restrict people from voting. So if I say, hey, we're gonna fix your fake fraud problem, but we're gonna let a lot more people have a lot easier access to voting, Republicans are the ones that are like, oh no, that's not, yes, but not like that. Right? So again, if they were serious about voter ID, there is a deal

on the table that we could make and they are the ones who don't want to make it. And that goes through, as I'm sure you guys know, through so many issues in this country where Republicans claim that there's a problem and Democrats, and I got a lot of smoke in the book for Democrats, but generally Democrats are like, okay, let's make a deal. And Republicans like, we don't want the deal. We want the issue. We don't want to fix it. We want people to be pissed that it isn't fixed.

And that's what Republicans keep doing as opposed to actually making a deal with Democrats who are always willing to fold and trade and whatever. And so we don't fix any things, we just keep being pissed about things that aren't fixed. Well question, do you feel like all elections have been free and fair? Because people will say, Democrats will say the 2016 election was stolen.

And then some will say, they feel like this one was stolen. Big picture, we haven't had a single free, fair election in this country, ever. Ever. Because we've never had an election in this country, this, ever. Ever. Because we've never had an election in this country. This goes back to my point. We've never had an election in this country where everybody who was eligible to vote or should be eligible to vote could easily go and vote.

So I would say it's never actually been free and fair in terms of the particulars in the current what was rigged, what wasn't rigged, whatever. Look, Trump lost in 2020 and he won in 2024. I don't like that he won in 2024, but he both got the most popular votes, 90 million people stayed home, but he got the most popular votes of the people who bothered to show up,

and I believe the election happened as fairly as we do in this country. What do you think about his executive orders on elections that he just recently signed? Oh, this is all his national ID crap. And if you look at his version of national ID, think about the things that he won't do that I just said that we could do for national ID. He won't make it free. He literally is talking about IDs that people have to pay for. And while that might not be a lot of money to people like you and me That's a lot of money to somebody and it's a regressive tax That means like it's a heart. It's a larger percentage of your funds the lower the less money you have, right?

So first of all, he's not making it free. Second of all, he's not making it national So he's putting in a system where like Alabama or Mississippi can have one kind of ID requirement, but Wisconsin and New York can have another kind of ID requirement. And we can imagine just how worse it'll be, how much harder it will be for certain kinds of people to get IDs in Alabama or Mississippi versus New York or California, right? So he's not making a national fix to the problem. And he's trying to give the specter that this is somehow tied to making sure that people are citizens. Citizens already, non-citizens already can't vote. And there has again, not been any evidence produced by any of these people that we have a significant or even a minor portion

of non-citizens actually trying to vote. Again, it just doesn't happen. And certainly doesn't happen in the numbers that would be necessary to like flip an election, right? But he's not, again, he's not interested in fixing the problem. He's interested in keeping people angry and pissed off about the problem. We're talking to to Ellie Mustow, a new book out now, Bad Law,

10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. And you talk about chapter three. Who gave away the skies to the airlines? Now, I just want you to know, Jess and myself are reading some of your chapter titles. We love them, we got to go through a lot of them. There's a couple that, me and her, we're talking and we were like, these would be good if we were on Ediblesibles but go. Do y'all like flying? Yes. You love flying? I do. You like flying? I hate flying. It is like the worst it is always the worst day of my life. Why? Well I'm fat so I gotta squeeze myself into a small ass seat that ain't built for me. I got somebody's seat back right into my lap.

I can't eat nothing. The seatbelt extender? The most embarrassing moment of my life every time I have to do it. Ma'am, can I have a seatbelt expender? I'm a fatty, please. And then I have to pay. And then I cry on the inside.

The food's expensive, the liquor sucks, the service sucks. I'm always delayed, my bags get lost, it is miserable. Why don't you fly a cargo? I fly Asgard. No! Whenever I can, I drive. Whenever I can, I drive.

I know that's bad for the environment, but if I'm doing East Coast, that's why my agent's like, if you want LA kind of east of the Hudson, it's like one price. And if you want me to get on the plane, it's a whole different price. Palsling. Right. Yesterday's price is not today's price if I got across, if I got to get on a plane. But anyway, it didn't always used to be this way. Flying used to be awesome, spacious seats, good service, kind people, and they weren't nickel-and-diming you at every point. And the reason why it used to be great and now it's not is this

thing called deregulation. The airline industry used to be one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country. That makes a lot of sense because we're putting metal in the sky and hoping it comes down at a survivable rate. That's crazy. So it used to be one of the most heavily regulated industries in the country with literal price fixing. Literally, they could the government set the maximum price that you could charge for certain routes. And I know conservatives, Republicans, even a lot of Democrats like price fixing. That's terrible. That

stops innovation. No, it doesn't. It makes flying a public service and it makes it easy for people to get around the country. FDR thought it was a war plan, that it was part of our mobilization plan for war to have reliable, cheap and accessible commercial air flight. Right. Democrats and Republicans gave the skies away literally to corporate raiders in the 1970s. Now, when I started researching this book, I actually assumed that this was a Ronald Reagan program, because most, you know,

I don't know about your process. My process is usually like if I see something bad, show me the Republicans, right? Show me what Reagan did, because I'm sure it's his fault. And there's always a mustache twirling Republican, you know, behind every curtain. But for this particular issue, this Republican plan to deregulate the airlines

and let corporate, let the market decide how we fly as opposed to the government, that was spearheaded by the Democrats. And as I did the research, Democrats that we all know kept coming up, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, huge in this deregulation. Stephen Breyer, one of the Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court for a long time.

There were all of these Democrats that like, Ralph Nader, right, got sucked into the gospel of deregulation. And once they did it, once the Republicans, I would say, snow-job the Democrats into this thing, the first thing that happened when they gave away the airlines is the thing that has killed the Democratic Party

for my entire lifetime. The Airline Deregulation Act came out in 1978. I was born in 1978 for my entire lifeline. Labor got gutted airline jobs used to be good jobs baggage handlers and flight attendants and pilots pilots used to be one of the best jobs you could get and With market forces with deregulation those good jobs got slashed Right, and then you go into the Reagan era where Reagan's like social safety net

And then you go into the Reagan era where Reagan's like, social safety net, here's a big old hole I'm cutting in your social safety net. And people fell from good middle class jobs straight through down to the bottom. And they've never forgiven the Democrats for it. See, that's the thing that I think the Democratic Party didn't kind of realize. When you cut labor, labor used to vote for Democrats consistently, right? Not just black labor, white labor, this white working class laborers used to vote for Democrats. But once the market controlled everything, Democrats weren't helping them. And that's how they became, I believe it's part of the reason why they became obsessed

with their cultural issues, as opposed to their economic issues, because they felt like they weren't going to get ahead economically anyway. Right. And if you tell people like you're not going to get ahead economically, you're going to be poor, you're going to be struggling, but you're going to be better off than that black person over there. They're going to be like, okay, sign me up, Trump. Like that's, that's how it happens. You get, you tell white folks that they're going to have nothing, but they're going gonna have a little bit more than black folks, and white folks will sign up for it.

Yeah, the rich white man has convinced the poor white man that the liberal white man has taken all this shit and given it to niggas. And it's not true. It's just straight up not true. But this act, this particular law that I write about, is one of the first times where the Democrats, where the Democratic Party play ball with the Republicans. And I say that it's one of the biggest mistakes of the Democrats

for the past 50 years and if you understand how they made that mistake you can understand how they've made pretty much every mistake they've made sense, right? Because the same problem, it's the same giving to the market what should be a government service. I understand that people don't like the government, I understand that people think the government is inefficient, I don't like the government, I don't like interacting with government forces. But as opposed to the market, see, people say you can vote with your wallet. Nah, the person with the biggest wallet can vote the most when you're in the market. If you're in the

government, then my vote technically counts just as much as yours. Right. And that's the huge difference. So when you give away government services to the market, what you are doing, Democrats, is giving away my power to affect change in my own life. Right. And that's, that's the problem. It's like the difference between going, sending your kids to a school and sending your, your kids to a factory. Right. If you send them to a school, I have a vote, I have a say in how that school's run and what my kids should be taught and how they should be treated. If I send my kids to the factory,

all I gotta say is in their paycheck. And I'm using child labor because Trump wants to do that. Now you got a question, right, Jase? Chapter nine? No, it's 10. No, okay. Chapter nine. Well, actually, why can't we say gay? What are we supposed to say?

You know, as I'm sure most of your listeners are aware of, I could have written the whole book just bad law in Florida. Like you can just go through the Florida client. This is terrible. This is just racist. This is stupid. Right? I focused on the Florida don't say gay law because it is so particularly oppressive and stupid. The law says that you cannot teach about gender difference, sexuality differences, transgender issues. You can't say any of those words to school children. Transgender issues can't say any of those words to school children Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley season one I just knew him as a kid long silent voices from his past

Came forward and he was just staring at me and they had secrets of their own to share Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. I was no longer just telling the story. I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.

I never expected to find myself in this place. Now I need to tell you how I got here. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley Season 2. Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad free with exclusive content starting April 9th,

subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Right. And if you talk to certain kinds of conservatives, they're like, well, that's fine. on Apple podcasts. They're not in a kind of lascivious sexual way, but they're interested in who and how these things work. They see it everywhere. I wonder though, would they be if they weren't taught about it in school or shown it on television? Yeah, because they just see it in their daily lives, right?

And so I use the example, if I'm a school teacher and I've got my wife and I have a picture of me and my wife on my desk at school, the kids see that it's me and my wife, that it's a man and a woman, right? If I'm a gay school teacher and I have a picture of me and my husband on the desk, they see that that's different. They see that it's a man and a man and they might have a question about that. And in Florida, I'm not allowed to say. Why? And so you act like it, people act like it's neutral, but it's not, it is what the scholars call heteronormative.

It's pushing the man and the woman, that's the normal way of doing it, and the man and the man or the woman and woman, that's just crazy and weird when you could just say like, oh, that's my husband, anyway, back to math. So what do you think about, you know, Trump's transgender bill where it's just two genders, just any of them? What is your thoughts on that?

It's it's again, biologically, it's not true. There are people who are different. That's just a biological fact we can pretend people people think that is it biological or neurological? Man, I don't know. biological or neurological? Man, I don't know. I'm not a scientist. I said neurological because you can think you're in the wrong body, but that's not

biologically. The fact. Biologically, it's men and women. No, I don't think that's right. I think that there are, again. Is there something other than men and women? You have aliens. See, now you're pushing me into don't say gay. You're getting me away from the law, but I'm just asking as I

Understand it. There are people who are born with female hormones in male bodies Right or vice versa and they want to express how they feel inside as opposed to how they look on the outside. But I think the larger point is not just that I don't know, the larger point is I don't care. There you go. There you go.

It's not me, I'm the way that I am, right? I don't care how it doesn't affect me. Just somebody else being trans doesn't make me think, oh man, maybe I should be trans. I always wanted to wear nice hats. Like that's not, like that's not how my, whatever. I tell a story in the book about, in my kid's class, one of the kids in my younger kid's class came out as a boy after being a girl. At what age um I want to say eight okay? And you know the parents were just like How does one really how is that the kids were just like yeah, whatever?

It's Ramsey's now it used to be Cleopatra. It's Ramsey's now, but it's cool, and then if I'm your mom I'm like no I named you fucking Cory. How are you just gonna come up and be Shakira today? I named you fucking Cory. How are you just gonna come up and be Shakira today? But that's between that's between Ramses and and his mom and the mom that's not between me and that's not that's not between The school and the kid I don't have a say But it kind of does. What is the school set call them or her? You know me cuz if your mama named you Cory and now you you're saying I don't want to be called Cory I want to be called Shemeika. So now at the school supposed to call you should Man I go to my kids go to a progressive school

We're like if my kid came in and said I want to be called ketchup today They would call him ketchup for like they would just they would call him what the kid wants to be called And I think that's just the natural thing to do if somebody comes and tells you their name you say their name Right, you don't say actually your cash is clay. No, you say their name, right? You don't say, actually, you're Cassius Clay. No, you say you want to be Muhammad Ali today, guess what? You get to be Muhammad Ali. So that kid goes to school and say I'm Batman, they're going to call you kid Batman? They're going to call my kid Batman. But see, I think that's a little different. We're talking about his name.

Is it? Yeah, because if I say, yes, this is my name, you call me my name. But if I say, I am Ketchup, and I just stand still, and when hot dogs come around, I'm Ketchup coming out my head. That's just a little different. I don't, I see, I disagree. I don't think Ramsey's does anything different in school now that he's Ramsey than he did when he was Cleopatra. I don't think that there's any,

doesn't learn differently, doesn't go to, doesn't eat lunch in a different- You might start going to different bathrooms. Might start going to different- Which make women uncomfortable. It probably keeps them uncomfortable. Yeah, the other eight year old women uncomfortable the kids are comfortable yeah the other eight-year-old girls all right they're only eight do you do you know how uncomfortable kids are in bathrooms as they hit puberty generally so now you sent a little boy yeah but now is a

private stall I walked past the sinks and other dudes into a you get to the private stall and it's like what you doing here Shemeek? You know you have daughters or sons sons alright So yes sons will not get naked in front of your wife and other women But he will do in front of you correct if you have to change or this something like that She's a girl going to a boys bath from where you're in. Oh, he's gonna feel Uncomfortable it's gonna make him feel awkward don't you think think? And even more uncomfortable than he would, than, you know. So we were at Citi Field, and my boy,

going on the urinal, and my boy just drops Trow. Doesn't use the fly, doesn't like, just drops Trow to his ankles and just takes a pee. Now, I was uncomfortable, I was like, that's, how was you raised? Oh wait, that was me. Like, how did that happen? Right? And I was like maybe you should pull, you know,

when you do, he's like, oh why? It's my butt, why? I was peeing and I was like, all right son. He definitely sounds like your son. All right son. That's a fair point, right? Like people will get over it, people will learn. And again, we're talking about this from

the perspective of making things more comfortable for the heteronormative kids in the school. We also should be talking about this in terms of making things more comfortable for the trans kids in the school. Because as much as we might say it might be uncomfortable for the trans girl in the girls' bathroom for the other girls, imagine how uncomfortable it is for the trans girl in the boys bathroom as they hit puberty. And we know, and again, this is not me making it up. We know statistically speaking that trans women

are the most likely people to be brutalized, to be murdered, to be beaten up, to be victims of domestic violence in this country. So if you're telling me that we can potentially save some trans kids from that fate, and the cost is that some girls have to be a little bit uncomfortable in a bathroom at a high school, that is a trade that I'm willing to make,

and that is a trade that I think society should be willing to make. I respect everybody's right to live, but I don't wanna have this conversation no more. Like you said earlier, it's true. I don't care. This is how y'all lost the last election. Not just one of your favorite people.

You like to listen to them. I do. I just don't like this part of them. So yeah, you listen. Take them on all counts. This is what we like to do. Can I just get back to the law just really quickly? Just very closely on the law of this, the idea that we can discriminate against trans

people but nobody else doesn't make sense legally, right? If we're gonna have a law that treats everybody equal under the law Then we have to treat trans people with the same kind of respect and decency that we treat everybody else And once you start trying to poke holes in that you see they're not stopping at trans. They're going right to gay They're going to write to all these other things right the chapter it says the chapter They gave us art now. We can't say train now. We can't say trans now. We can't say say all these other things, right? The chapter, it says, the chapter- We can't say gay, now we can't say trans. Now we can't say trans, now we can't say all these other things, right?

So again, from a legal standpoint, a quality- You wanna drop your trousers? You can go back to the other- No, no, no, no, you're not gonna just pee right here. Just whip your shit out and just pee right here. We're not uncomfortable at all. That's, we got to, we're evolved, right? Yeah. So yeah, so just legally speaking

The easiest thing in the law is just to treat everybody. I gotcha. Why are people so nonchalantly? Nonchalantly discussing Trump getting a third term Hmm. Well, here's the thing He can't constitutionally But what he can't do and what he can do are two very different things. That's right. If you understand that we live in a fascist dictatorship, and we do, this is what it feels like. I know that the New York Times hasn't said, today fascism started, but like it started. Right? This is, we are now living in a fascist dictatorship. And so when you tell the fascist dictator, hey, you can't do this legally, I might be right, but he might not care. So if you're asking me about the law, no, there is at the 22nd Amendment is ironclad on this issue. There is no wiggle room, you cannot serve, you cannot be elected president more than twice. Doesn't matter if your terms were consecutive or nonconsecutive, they were very clear at what they wanted to do when they wrote that amendment. It's one of the

most clear amendments in the entire constitution. That said, Trump is a fascist dictator. And if he, look, bro, my man lost the 2020 election and attacked the Capitol and came this close to overturning that election, right? So who's to say that he can't do it again? Who's to say that he can't be successful in doing it the next time, right? So we can't blithely say that he can't do something just because he's legally prevented from doing something. He's already shown isn't actually give a damn about what he's legally prevented from doing.

So can I make a case for how he'll do it? Sure, I can make... I like to say one of the things that makes me a little bit of a different legal commentator than a lot of others is that I understand what white people are capable of. I've never forgotten what white people are capable of in this country. And if you want to tell me that Trump is going to run for a third term and has a way to win it I can tell you how he does it he gets himself because remember we don't have one federal election system in this country We have 50 so all he has to do is get himself on the ballot in red states that are already

capitulating to him enough red states to get to 270 votes the ballot process is Controlled by the states not by the federal government you can say well like he shouldn't be kicked off the ballot process is controlled by the states, not by the federal government. You can say, well, like he shouldn't be kicked off the ballot, but he should have been kicked off the ballot last time because he was in violation of the 14th Amendment. What does the Supreme Court do? Oh, no, we shouldn't decide such things. It should be up to the 14th Amendment. He should have been kicked off last time, but the Supreme Court didn't step in.

Will they step in next time? I don't know. So what Al Sharpton and everybody's saying is BS that that can't happen, that's untrue. It can. No, it's not BS. It can't happen legally. Got you.

But let's not fool ourselves to think that Trump is not willing to act illegally. Right, he can illegally get himself on the ballot. He can illegally get himself to some version of 270 votes and he can illegally declare that he is illegally get himself to some version of 270 votes and he can illegally declare that he is still the president and who's gonna check him, boo? Like who's gonna actually stop him from doing that?

It won't be the Supreme Court. I love the article you wrote for the Nation card. It's impossible to overstate the damage done by the Supreme Court. Do you think the Supreme Court would back him in something like that? I don't know. Wow.

Not only do I not know that they would back him, if they don't, I don't know that he would follow their order. There's been no evidence that Trump is gonna follow a Supreme Court order that he doesn't like, and more to the point, there's been absolutely no evidence that he's going to enforce a Supreme Court order on the co-president, Elon Musk, that he doesn't like. So even if the Supreme Court stands up to him,

and I'm putting that in air quotes, there's no evidence that he'll actually listen to them. Because he controls, anything that he controls the physical power of, and I think people really have to understand this in a kind of chest thumping way. Like if he physically controls it, because he physically controls the army, he physically controls the paramilitary, he physically controls the secret police, if he physically controls the army. He physically controls the paramilitary.

He physically controls the secret police. If he physically can control something, he doesn't have to listen to nobody. Legal, illegal doesn't actually matter to him if he has physical control. Now, if he only has control because he's got to get other people to do his bidding in the states, in the localities, that's a place where the Supreme Court can kind of step in and maybe show some spine, right? So if you think about these lawsuits that he has in New York against, like, Kathy Hochul, if it's a situation where, like, he has to force Kathy Hochul to do something and Kathy

Hochul says no, and the Supreme Court says no, well, then I don't think Trump can't force her to do it unless he's literally willing to put, you know, boots on the GW, which he might. But, you know, then we'd have some real traffic problems in Fort Lee. But if it's something that he has complete physical control over, I see no evidence of him actually following the Supreme Court order. What do you say to people who say, is it really a fascist dictatorship if this is what people voted for?

That the people will say this was that was democracy working. People voted for Hitler. Yeah, people voted for working. People voted for Hitler. People voted for Franco. People voted for Pinochet. Fascist dictators are always popular. That's how they get to be fascist, right? And it never has to happen to a lot of people. That's not how they stay in power. It just has to happen to enough people to make everybody else fear it could happen to them. everybody else fear it could happen to them. That's how fascism has always worked. It's never been I read a book Adam Surrer from the Atlantic made me read a book recently called They Thought They Were Free and it's about it's like written about Germans in the 1950s and it kind of goes back to how all the free Germans who we call Nazis now didn't think they were part of a Nazi fascist

regime. They thought they were just normal citizens in their country. They didn't think they were part of a Nazi fascist regime. They thought they were just normal citizens in their country. They didn't know they were under a dictatorship in real time because for most people, their lives don't have to change. Yeah. Most people can keep doing whatever they were. Most people, whatever they were doing on November 4th, they could still do on November 6th. The election didn't change their lives because it never changes most people's

lives because then they would get pissed off It only has to happen to a few people it only happens to have happens to a smaller sect especially a sect that this country that people think are Deserving of cruelty and shame and a lack of dignity, you know, whether it's trans people or new immigrants or whatever people who think deserve black people deserve to get the boot up the ass That's who it happens to I'm a good person doesn't have to happen to me. That's how fascism always work look guys

We live in a country where you can get snatched up off the street for writing an article in the newspaper and As a person who writes articles in newspapers, this is something that has really worried me and really changed and affected how I think about my job and my life. And we can say, well, what happened to green card holders? Now, so far, how long before it happens to me? I'm American, I was born in Queens, right? But how long?

What part of Queens? Flushing, I was close enough to Shay that you could hear the stadium. What high school you going, I'm an American, I was born in Queens, right? But how long? What part of Queens? Flushing, I was close enough to Shay that you could hear the stadium. What high school are you going, I'm just curious. Well then I moved to Long Island and I went to Friends Academy, which is like a private Quaker school in Glen Cove. Kind of as my parents made more money,

we moved further and further. That's how it worked, in Queens. Out on the island. Right, so as I think about my career, when I'm doing book events now, I have security. Yeah. Which is not something I did for my first book. When I write, I think about how,

when I write about Musk, especially because he's the one with so much power, I write very truthfully about him, but carefully, I use all of my legal skills when I'm writing about Musk to be very careful about what I'm saying because I know that he will Sue people and he will go after people is anything that you feel like this Presidency has done good at all was everything bad If we need carefully now, you know, I'm trying to think carefully how to say it without cursing I'm trying to think carefully how to say it without cursing. Um, better fly.

Feel free to cry. Yes. It's okay. Sure? Yeah. Not one fucking thing. Because there is not one fucking thing that fascism does well. And if I give them that credit, I legitimize all of it.

It's one of the reasons why I was so angry at Schumer's capitulation on the budget deal. If you say that you can work with these people here, there and whatever, what you're fundamentally saying is that you just have a little bit of a disagreement on this, that and the other thing. You're not actually fighting fascism, you're just playing normal bullshit partisan politics. From my perspective, Trump is a fascist threat to the country, nothing he do can be okay.

And I wanted to say that about other Republicans. I wanted to say that about Mitt Romney or John McCain or even W, Dick Cheney, different, but even W, right? You could find some things that you could work together with those people on because they were fundamentally democratic presidents. I mean, democratic with a small D, right? Presidents who believed in democracy.

Don't get gay. Oh, we can't say gay. Oh, we're in New York, we're in New York. Don't get gay, because you say can't say gay. Oh, we're in New York. We're in New York. Don't get gay. Because you said small D and they were just thinking of small penises. No, you weren't. Yes, y'all were.

What's wrong with you, Jess? I've got a couple more questions. I said small D and I said Bush, like in the same sentence. Oh, okay, okay. Just to be candid, but you know. What was the significance of Cory Booker's filibuster? One of the things that Democrats can do since they have no political power is start building narratives, start building movements

and start building momentum towards change. One of the reasons why I wrote my book is that I, look, I wrote this before the election, before Joe Biden's first debate. I knew we were in trouble by the time, while I was writing it. I was under no illusions. But I kept writing it and I kept thinking that

this would be a good time to release it because from my perspective, if we lost, this book then becomes my first attempt to write Project 2029. Ooh, I love that. These people are out here writing Project 2025. When did they start writing that? In 2021, when they had no power.

When they had no political power whatsoever, that's when they started their plans for this current maggot revolution. So from my perspective, this is the time when we have no power, that we need to actually start thinking bigger and start thinking more actively, right? When Republicans come into office,

they come in with a sledgehammer and they smash things, smash things that I hold dear Smash things that I care about right when Democrats come into office We come in with like super glue and tape and we're gonna like put the base back together to make We got to smash some things My book is about what we can smash what Corey was doing is that same kind of idea of building? momentum to something bigger. And that is the best use of democratic power at this point, because it's the only it's the only power that they have.

You can't actually stand up to them legally because you have no authority. You can't send them to Congress because you have no authority. You know, I think they should be doing more than placards at the State of the Union. That was pathetic. Doing what Cory Booker did, breaking racist Strom Thurman's record on the Senate floor, like these are the narratives and stories that we can be building now so that by the time we get to 2026,

I'm not even talking about 2028, tell me get to 2026, primary season, that's the fight. But is it too late if we're already in a fascist dictatorship? Fascist dictatorships don't historically last very long. Okay. Because they overplay their hands. They very long. Because they overplay their hands. They're terrible. And they overplay their hands, and while that small group

of people, they want to hurt at the outset, that everybody's like, yeah, let's hurt them. That always expands. It always expands. That's the nature of fascism. The in group gets smaller, and the out group gets bigger. And there's a tipping point. the out-group is so big, they can overthrow the in-group.

That's how every fascist dictatorship has ended, except for Rome, where you needed actual barbarians. Has there ever been, and you would notice, I don't, has there ever been a time in history when fascism has been voted out though, is what the question I'm asking. Yeah, yeah, Franco was voted out. Okay.

Right, we didn't have to bomb his country, right? the question I'm asking. Yeah, yeah, Franco was voted out. Okay. Right, we didn't have to bomb his country, right? You can vote these people out. Again, I'm not sure that we're gonna have a free and fair election anytime soon. That's the point. But yeah, you can vote these people out. And if you, my wife's from Zimbabwe,

if you look at the African continent, happens all the time. You get like a terrible warlord and they do terrible things and usually they have to die. But, you know, when they die of like natural causes, you have a new election. And sometimes you get much better leaders the second time around. I would hope that we're not in the situation where we're in this until this man chokes on a Big Mac.

Like I would hope that we could be a little bit more proactive than that. But no, I don't. We're in a fascist period. Whether it lasts two years or five years or 10 years or 25 years is entirely up to us. Ellie Mostel's new book, Bad Law, 10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. I learned a lot from you, Ellie.

I like reading your stuff, man. You are very good at what you do. Thank you so much. I tried to make it accessible. I learned a lot in this interview. So I appreciate you thank you. Thank you so much. All righty ladies and gentlemen pick up the new book bad law it's the Breakfast Club good morning. Wake that ass up in the morning. The Breakfast Club. Welcome to Pod of Rebellion our new new Star Wars Rebels Rewatch Podcast. I'm Vanessa Marshall, voice of Harrison Dula Spectre II.

I'm Tia Zirkhar, Sabine Ren, Spectre V. I'm Taylor Gray, Ezra Bridger, Spectre VI. And I'm John LeBrony, the Ghost Crew Stowaway moderator. Each week we're going to rewatch and discuss an episode from the series and share some fun behind the scenes stories. Sometimes we'll be visited by special guests like Steve Bloom voices Zabarelio Spectre 4 or Dante Bosco voice of Jaiquel and many others. So hang on because it's going to be a fun ride. Cue the music.

Listen to Potter Rebellion on the iHeart radioio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I was always around it. Hollywood saved me. On this week's episode of Eating While Broke, a podcast presented by the Black Effect Podcast Network, Nick Cannon joins us to discuss his journey from teenage comedian to entertainment mogul. Now I do the Super Dad content with my kids and everything that people go viral for and

making millions of dollars on YouTube, I was doing in the 90s. Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect podcast network on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow Eating While Broke and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.

I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley season two, starting April 9th on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.