Mike Papantonio joins radio host Pete Dominick to lay out some of the parallels in his new legal thriller, Law and Disorder, with today’s corrupt politics.
Transcription of the above video:
Dominick:
You have written a novel in the genre of maybe like a John Grisham who I love. By the way, I met John Grisham and how annoying is this for you, Mike, when people meet you and tell you something that they like about you and then they just leave it at that. I meet John Grisham and I’m just standing there next to him. I go, “I loved A Time to Kill.” He goes, “Thank you.” He just looks at me being polite and I go, “Yeah. I also loved The Client,” and he’s like, “Thank you. Please get this guy away from me.” I didn’t know what else.
Papantonio:
He’s a brilliant writer.
Dominick:
You’re taking from your life as a lawyer and putting it in this novel. Explain the parallels to real life including the two rich oil brothers.
Papantonio:
The Swanson brothers of course are kind of a take off on the Koch brothers but they’re really a composite. Every character in there is a composite. Nicholas [inaudible 00:00:51], the lead lawyer there is a composite of many lawyers that I’ve known in 35 years. All of the characters really are. The Swanson brothers are really, I guess if you look at them, they’re an entity that works in the shadows all the time. They’re the ones that are fixing elections that we don’t even know about, fixing races that we don’t know about. They’re the ones that are pumping money that looks so innocent into a school board race because they want to completely change, if you can imagine, local races as much as they want to change national races. They’re the people that Hillary Clinton attacked years ago and said there is a right wing conspiracy in this country and everybody laughed at her and said, “You’re crazy. There’s no such thing.”
They’re exhibit A of that right wing conspiracy when you start figuring out what they do, how much money they have to spread around, and how successful they really are. It’s gotten to the point where the Swanson type brothers, the Koch brothers are buying universities right now, Pete. They bought Florida State for God’s sake. They bought the business department at Florida State.
Dominick:
You’re referring to organizations like ALEC, I think. There’s a lot more that’s being done at the state and local level that I think Americans don’t understand. We’re so focused on national elections probably because of national media and probably because of the consolidation of local media that we have a reporter at the state house anymore. We used to have that so we’re not getting accurate journalism about local issues and certain organizations on the right and left probably take advantage of that but certainly an organization like ALEC which is the American Legislative something group.
Papantonio:
They write legislation. They actually go to-
Dominick:
Explain that, Mike, at the state level how much impact that has.
Papantonio:
In Florida, and it wasn’t just Florida, it was several states, but we found that our legislators were actually taking word for word the bill that ALEC would write whether it’s about education, whether it’s about abortion, whether it’s about climate, whatever it is. They would take that bill and they wouldn’t change a word. They would simply sign off on it. The reason we saw that happening is ALEC, it’s a very sophisticated, it’s a very elegant system that they use to capture these politicians. They wine and dine them. They send them to these exotic and unusual seminars in exotic places like the islands or California, wherever it may be, really nice settings, and they have an entire week to indoctrinate those people. When it comes down to the legislative process, they write the bill, the hand it to the legislator and this legislator simply goes and passes the bill word for word and that’s from the top to bottom. I’m talking about races.
ALEC is involved in races all the way down to school boards, all the way down to county commissions. For example, we have the Koch brothers involved in county commission races because they want fracking and so they feel like if they can take care of the county commissioners, they can take care of the local politicians, then they can frack in the backyard. We think if we win the White House or if we win the Senate in the house that all things are well. It’s not. Howard Dean told us years ago. He said unless you capture control of the 50 state’s local politics, you’re going to lose. You’re going to be gerrymandered out of existence and sure enough, that’s what happened to us.
Dominick:
That’s exactly what happened. Don’t you think that that is why we should always push back on these articles and these ideas of people saying, “Oh. The death knell of the Republican party.” It’s going to be very hard for a Republican to win the White House based on voting demographics and the way the electoral college works but at the state level, they have a whole bunch of state houses. They have a whole bunch of governors and the Republican party’s alive and well in many states and will remain so. Is that fair to say, Mike? Do we agree on that?
Papantonio:
Exactly. I totally agree because politics is local. All they have to do is win locally and the culmination of all that, when it’s this giant leap, when they can win 40 out of 50 states, they make a giant leap with their ideology. Whether or not that ideology is reflected in the White House, whether or not it’s reflected in the Senate, it doesn’t make any difference. You could take a politician that could say the most outrageous things and back where he’s elected, they really don’t care because he’s a reflection of that guy who lives down the road so politics locally is what we have to overcome. Howard Dean was right about that. We ignored it. It was an arrogance that both liberals and progressives said, “Gee whiz. We don’t have to worry about that small stuff,” and that small stuff has us in exactly the situation we’re in right now.
Dominick:
Let me ask you. We’re talking to Mike Papantonio. His new novel Law and Disorder. I’ve been reading it. It’s a legal thriller. It’s really well written. It’s great. Mike is great. I’ve been a long time fan of yours. Mike, give us one more parallel from your new novel Law and Disorder that deals with the real life issues that we have to deal with every day in the United States of America.
Papantonio:
Here it is, Pete. Thank goodness that you’re out there. Thank goodness social media is out there because stories would never be told. This book focuses on the death of corporate media. Thank goodness for The Young Turks and Ring of Fire and what you do, Sam Seder, and all these people out there working so hard to get the message out. Thank goodness for you because the good news is there’s a trend taking place. As you know, 18 to 35 year olds don’t watch the nightly news but they do listen to Pete Dominick.
Dominick:
I think it’s really interesting. We’re corporate media but we’re subscriber based and I just say as far as we’re concerned, we don’t have editorial interference from above. We have arguments but we have a great amount of freedom here but I want to ask you, do you think in the future media will be decentralized and it will be more of a democracy, more of a meritocracy where there’s no Sirius XM, there’s no HBO or NBC. It’s just the Pete Dominick Show the Mike Papantonio Show or whatever and you aggregate a following. There’s no necessarily centralized media. It’s much easier to do.
Papantonio:
It used to be like that. In 1985, there were 57 independent media organizations. Now there are what, five? The chances of it moving away from that are slim unless there is a cultural movement and that cultural movement is away from corporate media to social media and we see it happening. If you talk to people that have been doing this as long as I have, I’m seeing it day to day. I’m seeing corporate media struggling to try to keep up with what’s happening with social media so what you do every day, Pete, absolutely matters. It’s so critical. I know every time Sam Seder and Bobby Kennedy and I go on the air, what we’re saying is going to be bounced all over the media. If it’s a podcast, if it’s a video like we’re doing here in our office as we talk, it’s going to be bounced all over the country and there will be change related to that.
Dominick:
You’re videotaping your side of our interview?
Papantonio:
Yes.
Dominick:
I should have videotaped mine. We could have put them together, Mike.
Papantonio:
You’ll see that cut up. That’s how social media works. Pete, the secret to your success is you believe in what you do, you’re on the right side of things, and everybody’s not going to agree with you as we’ve seen just in this interview. There’s things that you and I disagree with but they’re small. The big picture is we know what has to happen on important issues like how we treat people, on issues like climate change, very important issues that are game changers for this entire world.
Dominick:
It’s the most important issue to me and it’s the one I’m the most active on as an advocate, as an educator of climate change, conservation, keeping kids connected to nature, and let’s wrap on that because obviously your partner RFK Jr. is a huge activist on it. Not one question in four debates including the Vice Presidential debate about climate change. How much of this is about corporate media and ratings and that issue maybe not getting them as many eyeballs or people not understanding that issue and obviously the denialists wear that.
Papantonio:
It’s not just media. A lot of it is media but since we’ve talked about human nature a little bit let’s talk about it just very quickly and that is that there is something about human nature that is they’re terrified. We’re terrified. Americans are terrified. We’re terrified of everything, my God. That’s why we carry guns and that we’re fearful people. Because of that fear, what we do is we put together as you pointed out a protective mechanism and that is to say, “Gee, this isn’t going to affect me.” We don’t even have the decency to ask ourselves, “Well, if it doesn’t affect you, how’s it going to affect your children and your grandchildren,” because we are so fearful and that fear is very difficult to overcome.
Dominick:
Great, great pleasure getting you on the show finally, Mike. Like I said, I’ve been a fan for a long time and never talked to you. I hope you’ll come on again and I hope folks will go buy his new novel, Law and Disorder. Listen to Mike on the radio. Really appreciate it, Mike.
Papantonio:
Thank you, Pete.
