Hi, I'm Connor Fowler, and I'm Matt Smith, you're now listening to Apocalypse Duds. We are in the Bible bunker with Barry. Our next guest is perhaps one of our most accomplished, or we have tricked yet another person into appearing on our program. Rather than just an attorney, a man of God, a movie obsessive, he led lobbying organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Barry has been on Fox News and other major networks. He just released his brilliantly titled memoir, Paid to Piss People Off, Peace, Porn and Prayer. He's also a stand-up comic. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome the Reverend Barry Linton. It is very nice to be with both of you. Hell yeah. When Connor told me, "You were going to come on," it was a very exciting thing. Are you living an exciting enough life, if you think of it? Look, this is the high point of your week, that's okay. If it's a high point of your year, admittedly, I probably do not lead a very exciting life. Oh, yeah, outside of playing music, I take it pretty chill. Good. We just argue about the most idiotic stuff. Yes. Yes. Connor and I, for how close we are as friends, we love to fucking argue with each other. Yeah. We've been talking about the saddle shoes recently. Saddle shoes. So I'm interested in a particular type of saddle shoe. It's a brown leather with a brown suede panel on the top, right? They're really ugly, maybe with a red clay sole. Yeah. Matt does not think this is a good idea. No. No. Actually, I pulled a few other people, and they all said it was a bad idea, so I know I'm doing it. You know what's the worst idea about footwear? When I grew up, I lived in this two bedroom house across from an exit ramp on a super highway. It wasn't a very nice place, but I think we didn't have a lot of money, and I used to buy shoes from the back of magazines for $19. I ruined my feet with those shoes, but the idea of spending like $25 on a pair of shoes I'm not even going to ask you about the saddle shoes, how much they cost. I was looking at a pair of, well, there's a pair of polo saddle shoes that you pay for $70. $70. I mean, well, and the problem is they're made in China. They're not even American made, you know, they're not even like they're probably made by a child. And we try to not do that on this show. Try not to do that. Nope. It's a good thing to it. It is a good thing to avoid indeed. Absolutely. So here in Pennsylvania, is that Bethlehem? Bethlehem of Pennsylvania, not is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. So you're hanging out. You are buying shoes out of a magazine. What magazine is it? I think it was a parade magazine, which was included in your Sunday newspaper kind of add on, and it was on the back cover, like every other week. Were they like dress shoes, were they like they were like they were dress shoes. But they were plastic. They weren't leather. They were just but they came in weird colors. And I remember getting a green a green felt shoe after my own heart, really. I taught school at the Cardinal Clichen Central High School for girls, which was the only integrated school in the city of Boston in the early 70s, before. Oh, wow. It's really. And the archdiocese of Boston to its credit decided it was going to keep two schools open and encourage non-Catholic teachers and students to attend and give scholarships to Hispanic and African-American students to integrate it. And it was a marvelous experience. And in fact, curiously, about a week from now, they've invited me to come to their 50th high school reunion. Oh, that's awesome. Wow. So you think you're going to see your students? I'm going to see my students and, you know, I'll tell you one other story about the school. I taught a class about called the darker side, which is about this kind of phenomenon that was of great interest at that time in the early 70s and has exorcisms. The exorcist movie had just come out. And I said to the students, look, this thing is rated R, but if I get a permission slip from your parents, I'll be your guardian. And so I did, and you know, it's amazing how many people's parents had exactly the same handwriting. Exactly. But big day comes and it snows and the schools are closed, but I felt an obligation, a kind of moral obligation to show up in case some of the students decided to come also. Hundreds students showed up with their boyfriends. That's amazing. They screamed from the moment the credits stopped and the movie began until the very end. It took me years before they re-released it. And I was able to kind of hear it because it was, it's just, but I had the opportunity to meet this woman who was the stunt double for Linda Blair in that movie because there were some things that were just too nasty and they wouldn't let, I think Linda was 15 at the time. Linda would do the masturbation with a crucifix scene, but Eileen Whites, she's a wonderful person. She wrote a book. As far as I know, this is the biggest thing she ever did in her actress and career, but it was a, it was fun to meet her. And I told her the story and she thought it was funny. That's fucking hilarious. So let's see, we've mentioned Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Boston, and now you're in Baltimore? I'm in Hanover, Massachusetts. Hanover. Okay. Hanover. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Now no relationship to Hanover, New Hampshire, which is where the cards have been. Yeah. Well, I don't know much about, but I live. That's where the presses are. It is. Well, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Because in Hanover, New Hampshire, I mean, with all due respect to any of your listeners that may live there, but this was like the most unpleasant year and a half I ever spent anywhere. Wow. I mean, here, here's a college and everybody, I'm sure a lot of nice people went there, but Denise DeSussa went there, great guy, great guy. I think he dated Laura Ingraham. Yeah. That's a power couple indeed. I think they've broken up, but yeah, Laura, I was on her show quite a bit. Because you have relationships with these people who are like, they're like villains. Yes, they are. Denise DeSussa is not a villain, Denise DeSussa wishes he was a villain. I know. Right. Well, who you have gone toe to toe with. Oh, they are, and I mean, now I have to say, there are a couple people that I used to debate all the time, one of whom I want to mention, his name is Rob Schenk, Rob Schenk, probably the most effective anti-choice activist in the country. Wow. And I used to, you know, I've been on TV with him a lot. We had debates at colleges. And he's now changed his mind completely. And on another podcast, I had him on, and he said that he thought so many times during the 20 or 25 years that we would have these arguments that maybe I was right. And he said on the show, he said, I realized I was mainly wrong and you were mainly right. And he's now a opponent of Christian nationalism. He's the guy that used to hook up Republican major donors with Supreme Court justices. And he's completely repudiated all of that. And he's even testified just before the Democrats lost the House, before the Judiciary Committee about what he had done and how long it was. That's amazing. That's like, sorry, go on, man. No, I was just going to say that's like the one out of I don't even know, like, you know, maybe there's more success stories with something, but like that's maybe the only one I've heard of. That's what we're one of the driving questions of this is like, what do we do? What do we do with these people? They are not going anywhere. We are not going anywhere. How do we coexist, right, without like shooting each other? Yes, exactly. But one of the things, and we can talk about this in more detail, but I find that if you spend a lot of time with conservatives, that you do find certain things that they agree with. I'll give you a couple of examples. Sure. About a year and a half, I was on every afternoon for three hours with Pat Buchanan. And then, and Pat's is pretty much a conservative as you can get, but he hated these free trade agree, so-called free trade agree, and so he and I would agree. And then we'd bring Ralph Nader into the studio. He went against them too. So it was Larry Lynn, Ralph Nader, and Pat Buchanan all saying, stop NAFTA. And we thought maybe it was going to be stopped. And then there was this abominable debate between Al Gore and the third party candidate at the time and Ross Farrow, and yeah, I was having trouble remembering his name, but- Well, I think many people will forget Ross Farrow. Yeah. So Buchanan walks in to the studio and looks and many goes, we lost everything because Ross Farrow did a miserable job in that debate on Larry King. And I think that was the end of the opposition to NAFTA, which has turned out to be pretty much as bad as its critics thought. Yeah. Oh. If not even worse. I mean, not to be that person, but like it's hard to even say like in one sentence precisely how bad it is for all of the people involved. So like, this is an anecdotal story, but I once worked for a store that worked with an American and a Canadian suiting factory, which the American one was eventually bought by the Canadian, or the people that owned the Canadian one. Okay. That's the stage. We could order a cashmere jacket from the Canadian company for literally half the cost of the American company, because of like, however the fuck, and I'm not a, not a super smart person, but like whatever NAFTA regulation allowed Canada to import cashmere charge no duty whatsoever. Yep. And then the American company had to pay up a fucking ass to get this fabric. And it was just, you know, I was just like, like, I just, how did no one think this was like a bad, or no one being in our fucking government? Well, no. This was about it. Right. It's like the people in power want it to happen. They make it happen. And it doesn't matter what anyone thinks shopping off your nerves despite your face. Right. And it's just like, I'm a normal ass person working a normal ass job. And I can understand this, but these mother fuckers can't or it's meant to be frustratingly above your head. Right. Right. Yeah. And it's gotten worse. I want to tell you, I spent so much time, I roamed the holes of Congress, not only for Americans United, but for the ACLU for many years and working on amnesty for war resistors before that. So cool, man. So cool. I mean, it was great stuff, and the, but the important thing about it is you could actually form alliances, even if temporary ones with the worst people who happen to agree with one thing. Like, for example, I did radio every Friday for years with Oliver North. And you'd think, well, what in the world would he have in common with me? And it turned out to be the death penalty. No. The death penalty. I mean, I absolutely hate it. And I was, I was once asked to moderate a panel at the big anti death penalty convention, which was in Chicago that year. And I, the woman that runs it said, would you, you know, would you kind of em see this panel? And I said, what's the topic? And she said, the topic is conservatives against the death penalty. I said, well, why would you possibly want me to do that? And she said, but you play well with conservatives. And the next day, speaking of people that you kind of move every once in a while. Our sister-in-garms, Eva Qul, founded her brand, Epilate, in 2008 and has remained dedicated to making quality garments in the USA at a fair price ever since. Known for her discerning taste and fabric, she searches endlessly to offer things not seen anywhere else, culminating in a fantastic assortment from casual to formal. Eva sources some of the most amazing fabrics available and offers them in an inclusive size range from 34 to 48. You can message her for personal help in finding your size too. If you're looking for a go-to clothing resource, visit epilatebrand.com and enter the code "Dudcast 10" for 10% off your order. Jay Sekulow was not only the top lawyer for Pat Robertson for a long time, but he even defended Donald Trump during his first impeachment. Oh, yeah. That's why I think why that name rings a bell because he didn't see the news. I mean, unless it on 500 debates with Jay, and so after I got invited to this death penalty thing, I called him up. I said, "You know, Jay, I've never talked to you about this. I know we disagree about it. What do you think about the death penalty?" He said, "I'm against it under all circumstances." And he said, "It's not just from some legal technicality. It's immoral to give the government the right to kill you." I said, "Would you give me a quote that I can use?" And he said, "I'll do it better. I'm going to borrow Pat Robertson's recording equipment tomorrow. We'll set up a time. You ask me questions. I'll give you answers and you can run the tape at the conference." That's awesome. "Woo everybody away." And then the very last debate I had with Jay was at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In the middle of this discussion, he says, "You know, I don't see why anybody's against Medicare for all." And it blew people. I couldn't believe he had said that. And he said, "It just makes good sense. Why wouldn't you be in favor of it?" Right. I mean, because I'm on Medicare, but I'm not against it, but I think it could certainly be better at most people of my age, 75, most people. They want glasses. They want hearing aids. Yeah. You can't get any of those with Medicare. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Dental care. Yeah. You can't get it. Yeah. I feel like anything that is supposed to elongate and support your help should be fucking included with any type of health care. Absolutely. Like, there's no fucking reason why, like, independent insurance in our current system is absolute garbage, for sure. But anything, like Medicare, any type of health care should have dental vision because you need these things to live. Absolutely. This is not just, this is not a minor matter, and, you know, as the title of the book, I mean, I was kind of blessed by actually having jobs where it could do good stuff, and I paid for it. Yeah. Oh, we're going to get into people. Yeah. I mean, we're going to get into that work for free, basically. Right. Yeah. Well, I had a little question, which I hope is like a thread through this. All right. We could go, I guess, for the first attempt at the answer of this question. Like, how do you, we have a question written that calls it an olive branch, right? Like, how do you extend an olive branch to those Christians out there to say like, we're not going to take away your stuff. Like, you're going to be okay. We really are on the same team here. Yep. Like you're talking about with all these nice men. Yeah. There are a couple of religious right women, too, and they're truly deranged. No, but, but they, there's some extremely effective people. There's a woman, I don't, I've lost track of her, I'm not sure, but she was a superstar of Christian radio named Janet partial, and you could have conversations with her, and she was remarkably effective and vastly more knowledgeable and articulate than so many of the men that were used all the time and the right. She was not that popular. She was, she was not never Ann Coulter. Of course. Well, why would we want to be Ann Coulter? Who could be Ann Coulter? I will never want to be a, you know, I heard Ann Coulter give many, many speeches and we were on occasionally on things, but when she'd go to a new city, she'd say the same things to start the speech that she said in the last city, when I would go and I traveled all over the country and I would watch the local news before I'd show up at the dinner or whatever I supposed to do and find something to connect me with that local community so I could tell a story or make a joke about that particular city. That's, I considered that possibly the most important thing I did to get ready for anything, but you know, most people think they're going to read the same speech they wrote a year and a half ago, but make a reference to where they're speaking at that moment, and that's terrible. It's sloppy. Yeah. Another little aside here, how did you feel when you saw the Pat Robertson died this past weekend? Well, I mean, you know, Pat was, yeah, I'm not happy when anybody dies, really. I mean, I'm sure they think they're going to be at the right hand of God. I don't know where they are or even particularly care, but I mean, it's, one of the things you have to get over when you do the kind of stuff I spend my life doing is you have to get over hating people because if you, if you look to just hate people, you're going to find loads of opportunity for that, but it's never a good way to start. You can hate everything they stand for, which in the case of, you know, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Fulwell, I hated virtually everything. I can't even think of a single thing where Jerry Fulwell and I agreed, nothing. Well, it would be pretty hard. It would be pretty hard. You know, what bothers me more than anything about Fulwell, he didn't, he didn't work at learning anything. Robertson, to his credit, did actually try to keep up. I was on Fox News many, many times with Jerry Fulwell and one day he was, he was in Washington and we were in the green room at Fox and green rooms where he was supposed to sit down with the other guests and, and not kill each other. Well, so what's the green like, green, like, is there water there or their chairs? Oh, there's, there's water there. If, if it's a green room in the morning, there's a whole breakfast there. Yeah. There's locks and bagels there. Wow. Juice is there, is there enough, is there enough liquor to make you lose your mind? Because I don't think there is liquor, but I'm kind of a G-totler. I mean, I really gave up drinking about, I mean, I think 50 years ago. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I would have to be the most drunk I've ever been to be on Fox News. So yeah, I, I, I commend you on that, sir. Well, I dreamt about being on Glenn Beck's program many times. I think that that would be, that would be an amazing match. We would smash each other's heads into each other's heads. I do that. Yeah. Glenn Beck, you know, he's the only right wing person of my generation that I was never on his show. I was supposed to be on it. I was on it, but, um, somebody was filling in for him, but just, just for comic relief, I subscribe to the non-paid version of the Blaze. I used to write for the Blaze. I'm not even joking. I used to write for the Blaze. I used to write for the Blaze. I worked for this, uh, financial copywriting organization in Baltimore and I wrote for the Blaze one of their most successful leads ever, which I think still leads. Where will you be when the dollar dies? Where will you be where the dollar dies? Right. My genius, my genius, like, they had all kinds of anti-Obama stuff. They had all kinds of like, really water filtration systems like, you know, by gold. But you know who else has gone, Glenn Beck was always on the wrong side. Oh, yeah. But Russell Brand. Do you know who Russell Brand did? Yeah. Yeah. Great comedian. And he was kind enough to, um, when was that Americans United for Separation of Church and State? It was, whole year, two years actually called Voices United for Separation of Church and State. And there were comedians, there were singers, there were bands, all of which were in favor of Separation of Church and State. And Russell Brand and Sarah Silverman did this benefit for us in California. And I always would call in to the box office if it was a big venue and go, "How the tickets go on?" And when I called about the Russell Brand appearance, they said, "We have $1,000 meet-and-greats available." I said, "You have $1,000 meet-and-greats." I said, "It's a little pricey for me." But I figured if that's all they have left, everybody will be there, the plays will be sold out. So we get there an hour before we go to the box office, they say, "How the tickets going?" She said, "Oh, we got hundreds of tickets." I said, "Really?" So then I called a couple of my friends in Los Angeles, because this was in L.A. And I said, "Are you coming tonight? Is it going to be a great show?" I said, "Oh, no. We can't afford $1,000." And Sarah Silverman, if you asked her to this day, she would say somebody sabotaged that event and lied about the ticket sales because they didn't want anybody to come. What the fuck? Wow. Well, I'm not a ticket master fan, and neither does the government anymore, because they've just filed any trust suit. Right. Finally. Which they've been talking about since the early '90s. Of course. Yeah. Of course. I mean, they've seen their ridiculous, their availability is ridiculous. But my daughter's a lawyer, and she writes about antitrust, and she just sent me an article she did about this antitrust lawsuit. Hell yeah. I don't know anything about antitrust, but it's good to know that those for whom you have been a parent have gone on to other things, announced know enough to write about antitrust. Right. Yeah. No, that's like, I don't know the technical sort of machinations of that, like how they're going to do this to a ticket master, but we support it. Of course. Yeah. Of course. So Barry, what's kind of the timeline that led you into the work that you've been doing? Yeah, I never, never expected to do any of this. I expected that I would go to seminary, I would be in some kind of a moderate size city like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and I'd have a church there, and I'd just be a traditional pastor. But the life, as they say, had had other plans. And I, when I was in college, had one spring break, I said to one of my roommates, I said, how are you going to spend the break? And he said, I'm going to London. I said, well, that must be fun. Right. And he said, no, it's no, because my girlfriend's pregnant. And we have to go there to get an abortion. And I said, wow. I said, don't you live in like Massachusetts that they have liberal laws there? He said, no, we have to do that. So I hooked them up with a group out of the Jensen Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. And they routinely help people go to other countries to obtain abortions. But that's the thing that got me. I said, for a church to have that much power, I mean, they can do anything they want. They can say anything. But once you try to turn the laws of the country into what you think are your theological beliefs, you have crossed a line. That's the first time I really started to think seriously about what separation of church and state meant, and that just propelled me into thinking, and something's got to give. And when I had an opportunity, I had worked with Americans United for a long time and been on panels and spoke at their conventions. But when I found out there was an opening to run the organization as its executive director, I was just incredibly fascinated. Plus I was living in Hanover, New Hampshire. Remember that? The dream. That asshole place. And so we were living there and my wife was having a reasonable time. And I was supposed to teach doctors how to communicate after I realized they don't want to learn how to communicate. They don't want to talk to the rest of us. They just want to publish papers and go to these conferences and present those papers and never speak to a human being. Years and years after I left, a woman from the New York Times who covered medical stuff wrote a whole book about why healthcare professionals need to talk to real people. And she was appalled. And people that she would attempt to interview for the book would say, "Well, how long is this going to take?" And she'd say, "Well, it's not going to take more than a half an hour." And the person would say, "Well, a half hour talking to you means a half hour. I'm not working in my lab." Right. That's true. What? That's true. But when I interviewed her, I used to do radio a lot, including hosting radio. And I said, "But what do they think?" And she said, "It's because they think it's a waste of time because it's not going to get them anywhere." And that's when a lot of them think. And I worked for a doctor up there, and he used to send me to places about his project, which was creating interactive video discs. You remember, but perhaps you're not aged enough to remember video discs, these giant things that were as big as an LP record. Yeah. Laser discs, right? Yeah. Laser discs. And they had invented this way that you would sit down with a nurse, and they would... If you had a BPH in large prostate, that was the first one they did. And they'd have people, and you'd watch somebody talk. And then the person would say, "Well, what do you think is... Where would you like to go with this?" And then they'd have a series of questions, and you'd touch the screen and hit a question. "Does this mean I might get prostate cancer?" And then there would be somebody there talking about what the answer is to that question, which is cancer is kind of no. But I thought these are so heavy and big, and they're going to be displaced. I said to this doctor, I said, "You know, they're going to come up with really smaller ones." Or maybe you want to talk about doing more health conditions, or non-healthy conditions, and put them on a VHS tape, a video set. You wouldn't have any of that. So he invents the thing. He sells it to Sony. He's on good morning America, then he kind of gets bored with the whole thing. So he used to be invited to go to medical conventions, and I was living in Hanover, remember, Hanover. And wife and kids were still in Washington for about a year. And so I'd go home every other weekend. There was an event in Baltimore, speaking of Baltimore, and I love Baltimore. We tell you about that a little bit. But so he'd say, "Well, you go and explain what we're doing." I said, "I'm not a doctor. Why do I want to go to a doctor's convention?" "No, no, but you know how to explain this." I said, "Yes, I do know how to explain it." So I'd go to these conventions, and I literally couldn't believe it, because nobody ever did what I always do, which is start out with some anecdote, something that's, if not related directly to the city, something to make it clear that we're going to have a somewhat lighthearted conversation about a very serious subject. They didn't like that. They didn't understand that. Nobody ever did that. But I can't believe people can give a presentation that might last an hour and not say something humorous or make an effort. Right. Right. How can you do that? And the answer is, you can, if you're in that medical world because they don't expect you to do anything but read your... How about PowerPoint? Yeah. I hate PowerPoint. It's bad all the time. But it's worse when all you see on the PowerPoint, exactly the words that are being spoken by the speaker. They love that. They love that. They love that. I know that. So I'm at a conference of physical anthropologists. I didn't even know. Sorry. What is that? What does that mean? They look at the development of species and they're big on evolution. They actually... What's the evidence that you will have, right? So they had this panel. It had 12 people on it. And everybody except me had a PowerPoint. I stood up. I said, "Look, I don't have a PowerPoint." And the reason I don't have a PowerPoint is I used one once and I caught the flu afterwards. And I said, "I'm never going to use it again." But I said, "I do have something to show you." And I pulled out of a paper bag, a monkey puppet. And I said, "He is my science advisor and you better take a good listen to anything he says." At the halfway point, when everybody was waiting for the next six people, they said, "You know, Barry, no one's going to remember anything that was ever said, but everyone will remember the day the monkey came out of the paper bag." Well, I think that's probably the title. Yeah. Yeah. The monkey out of the paper bag. Just curious. I grew up Southern Baptist, I'm staunchly an atheist at this point, had a lot of friends over the years that went to seminary, and/or Liberty University or whatever. And I've heard anecdotally that a lot of people that enter seminary come out basically disbelieving all of the shit that led them to going to seminary. Do you have any kind of like struggle with that? No, I mean, I don't want to get too deeply in the weeds here, but I'm very impressed with something called process theology. And the idea of process theology boils down to this. Everything changes. Evolution is real. Why don't we think of God as being an evolving person? And I was on an atheist podcast a couple of weeks ago, and somebody said, "Well, what do you mean by that?" And I said, I told a story about a guy who had written a book, a very prominent attorney, trying to figure out if God exists, his conclusion was he wasn't sure. But I said, when you look at those attributes often attributed to God, like all being all knowing, the very first book of the Bible, Genesis, here is God. He creates the Garden of Eden, and one of the first things that happens, he loses Adam and Eve. He doesn't know where they are. The idea that God's all knowing, but he lost his two creative, two created humans in a matter of minutes. There's something wrong with that. Yeah. I'm not an atheist that wants every, is adamant and combative about whatever people believe. I don't give shit. Matt is probably the least annoying atheist I've ever met. Maybe. Yeah. It's partly because I have learned things. You did it. Right? Yeah. You had a very religious upbringing. Oh, super. But I love my parents to death. They are, in my opinion, what a Christian is supposed to be. I know that this exists for any religion, just because I don't believe in it. It doesn't mean that I can't appreciate it in enriching someone else's life as long as my golden rule is don't be an asshole. And so, as long as people aren't an asshole and not shoving shit, tell people's throats, then I don't care. Exactly. Yeah. It's an interesting phenomenon, because I also have friends of many different religions and I would say astrology and things are a sort of belief system in certain ways. Right. All that stuff. Yeah, just because I don't believe in whatever doesn't mean that I am superior to anybody else. No, exactly. But you're right. So many of them do. Yeah. And if you can hook them on something, the other thing is they're not nearly as Bible-littered as they think. Oh, yeah. And I'll give a very specific example. For a long time, I mean, I'm now on the board of the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum. No way. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're very elite. You're very elite. Before we move on, are you friends with Louis Black because he is a very good friend with Louis Black? Oh, very good friend with Louis. Follow a question. Can you possibly help us get him on this program? I can't put him on a spot like that. Sorry. I doubt that he's doing many of these, you know, he's on the slide tour right now. I have a picture of me with him when he came to UMBC, and everyone in the Student Events Board was like, "This guy, Connor, is like you, Louis Black, and so we pose for a picture like this." So me, he is in my top five comedians of all time. Like him, Carmen Hicks, they're like my profits in a lot of ways. The whole trinity. The whole trinity. The whole trinity. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I forget where I was going. Oh, no. I know where I was going. Anyways, they had me do the fundraiser for the library last November. How did you get him? I'm sorry. How did you get involved with the Vonnegut Library? Through Louis, frankly. That's awesome. He said, Barry Lin is a kind of funny guy, and he's smart. Did you guys like go to school together? No, no, no. We didn't. We, I met him because I got this big award called the Puffin Foundation Award. It's a large amount of money, and it's done in conjunction with the Nation magazine also. And they gave me this award, and I had me come to New York, and he turned out to be the MC. So, and I, so, you know, I said a low tune before I didn't really know. I'd never met the guy. I'd seen him many times. So I stood up when they gave me the award, and I said, I want to thank you for the award, and I really want to thank you for having Louis Black be the MC because it's the first time I've been able to see him without paying $125. And he, and I, you know, not knowing him, I thought, well, maybe he's funny, but maybe maybe he's going to be offended by this, but that funny, right? He was, he was, but so we actually were back in Washington. I, we had a conversation at a fundraiser down there a few weeks ago. But one of the things I said at the, when I did the keynote address for the library, I talked about the many things that people want to censor. And of course everybody, not everybody, but lots of people I want to censor pornography, their ads for products they don't approve of. And they also don't like a lot of children's books. And one of the ones that, you know, my wife and I read to our grandkids up here is Charlotte's web about friendship between a pig and a spider. Right. But the Christian right doesn't like that book. Why? It has talking animals and there are no talking animals in the Bible. Now think about this. That is not true. There are talking, the talking animal in the first book. It's talking. It's a snake. A snake. So that snake screwed up, but it gets worse, I said. The last time I was invited on Fox News, which I didn't do, I was supposed to have a debate on a Saturday morning at 6 30 in the morning on Fox and Friends. This was the Fox and Oak, please. They better have lots of locks, locks, and lots of coffee and they better send a car, which they generally did. I said, who's going to be down the other side? What is this about? And they said, well, we have the creator of veggie tails, is talking vegetables, talking about Bible stories. I must have skipped the seminary class where they explained that talking vegetables are great. Fucking animals, satanic. Hey, do you like clothing that's well made? If you can listen to us, we assume you do. Our long-time comrade, Ava Kuehl, is the founder and created behind a gnarly brand called Evelyn. She offers thoughtfully designed and graphic garments made right here in the USA at a non-busy price. Evelyn let's say falls like the Doyle work jacket, the more directional Kanagata and the infamous Rivecino have been captivating her clientele for more than a decade. The commitment to offering unique, interesting fabrics and staunchly consistent fit is unrivaled from casual outerwear to made to order RTC, tailored clothing. Evelyn that offers garment for any occasion. Visit epilnetforan.com and enter the code dudcast10 or 10% off your first order. It's so bizarre. My aunt is like rabid atheist, she is like PhD chemical engineering, you know? So she raised her kids with nothing, with no religion at all, so they were confused when people were talking about Easter, but she allowed them to watch veggie tales because it was so well done and fun. So it works even for a doctor of chemical engineering, right? Absolutely, but it was just censorship. I hate it. I've hated it since high school. In the same way I've hated conscription since high school, I hate the draft. I don't ever want it to come back when people go, well we're going to make it, it's going to be fairer this time. Listen, as soon as you allow a single exemption, you have just made it unfair because you are always going to find the Donald Trump's of the world that are going to go to a doctor and they go like extreme, heel pain, so you're out or they, there were proposals to bring draft registration back, and I was, of course, against that, and they brought it back, Jimmy Carter was against it, then he was for it, and it eventually got started. So I looked at the data, there's a guy that I know lives in San Francisco, who's obsessive about this. He was one of the few people actually prosecuted for failing to register. He wrote a note to the Justice Department and said, here's where I am, I'm not going to sign up, so if you want to come get me, come get me, and they did. Do you know how many people were ever prosecuted since we've come back with draft registration 18, 17 of them, 16 of them, wrote a similar note saying come and get me, and one guy was a Laotian refugee who probably didn't even know he was supposed to register, but if you have 18 people, literally millions of people have violated the draft laws since that went in effect in the early days of the Reagan administration, we're talking about selective service, right? Yeah, selective service, and you're still supposed to sign up if you go to a post office there, most of them still have forms, right? They try to be with all kinds of stuff. If you're applying for food stamps, if you're applying for absolutely their craft thing, like if they find out that you ducked it, they're going to kill you, like, yeah, but they, you know, the idea was if you don't tell them that you've moved, if you don't tell them your change of address, that's the same penalty, 5 years, $10,000, 5 years in prison, 18 people, and they do rely on these secondary issues, it won't give you food stamps, it won't give you a driver's license in some states, if you can't prove that you've registered for the draft, but even if you have registered, you probably haven't changed your address, and as a consequence, as a contest, I saw something pop up, it said we've been just connected. Yeah, I saw it, it said, just connected. Now it's reconnected. Oh, yeah. This is the miracle of technology. You're the miracle of technology, anyway, it's like obscenity law, you know, it's like most people who don't like porn, not saying everybody, but most people who really hate it, really hate the underlying conduct. They don't like porn because they don't like the people who are gay, for example, are having fun. Right. Right. I mean, yeah, when I, I spent an entire 18 months destroying something called the Ed Meece Commission on Pornography set up, set up during their Reagan years, and I was at the ACLU at the time, and I knew this was coming, and I, so I went to the, you know, my boss into the boss in New York, I said, I really want to fight these people. I just hate what they're going to do. And I said, I also know not being a woman, you know, maybe you should have a woman do this. And then I thought, no, that's just stupid. And I was, I knew that the women's rights project of the ACLU was going to be very helpful. And I knew this was the piece of the ACLU that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was ahead of for a while. Sure. But I said, I'm going to do this, I'm going to go to every one of their meetings, I'm going to give them as much trouble as humanly possible. When they announced who was on the commission, everybody called me and asked, what do you think of this? And I said, I think a train marked censorship has just left the station. Oh, and that was a quote of the day in the New York Times. And I thought, man, that's good, I'm glad I can do that. But then everybody said, this guy can give good quotes, we should go to him all the time. And I did and I, you know, my favorite episode of this, all of these are chronicled in great detail and paid to piss people off, this case, volume two, where they decided to go to Houston, Texas, and I own a field trip to three adult bookstores. And I mean, these, these are like the scuzziest bookstores. You can imagine, like water running down over the floor. So the third one, first, the worst. And I'm sure you don't know what buddy booths are, but I can guess, well, why don't you tell us what buddy booths are, buddy, buddy, you could go into these booths and put a little token in or a quarter in. And then you could watch like three minutes of a porn loop. And then you could put another token in. I'm in this buddy booth with Henry Hudson, who now sadly is a federal judge in Virginia. But when you do that, they got to give you something. So they gave, and Ellen Levine, who was a remarkably progressive woman, who was then the editor of Woman's Day magazine. And so Henry, we're watching two gay men wearing green rubber monster masks having sex. And Henry says to me, "Mary, when you testified, which I had done months earlier, when you testified, you said all of these films have, they have ideas. What's the idea of this?" And I said, "Well, Henry, how about try it, you might like it." And Ellen was already souring on it eventually. She basically said that the conclusions, which are all, you know, let's find new ways to censor stuff, had no credibility. So she was quite a vocal opponent of their conclusions. But I could tell she was just trying to, try and let the laugh, right, right, right. I knew her heart was in the right place, but there's another thing. There hasn't been a successful obscenity of leave child pornography aside. I couldn't care less if he stopped that. But when you've got consenting adults involved in sexual activity, whether you choose to engage in that activity or not, people have a right to do that. There hasn't been a successful obscenity prosecution for probably the last eight years. And why is that? And part of the reason is, juries don't like to convict people. Because let's say they're prosecuting Debbie Dozdallis. Of course, Debbie Dozdallis, episode 16. I don't know if there were that many, but you watched it at home on a DVD the weekend before. Why would you send somebody to jail for five years or find them millions of dollars? Because they were watching something you just watched in your own family two weeks before. Yeah, it's just it's absolutely insane. And that's why prosecutors, although they claimed after the Mise pornography commission left, there would be thousands. I remember one guy in Utah said, there'll be thousands of prosecutions based on this conclusion. Yes. Yes. They weren't like in a modern day context, it's kind of like the, you know, right or on drag shows in drag queens and shit. And it's like, yeah, how many, like, give me 10 examples, fuck, give me five examples. One example of a trans or drag person that is convicted for some fucked up shit. Well, like, like, ass shooting, murder, I'm not even talking about that. I'm like, give, give me our example of one of these people being a predator of children, being a sexual abuser, et cetera, et cetera, like we see priests and cops and boy scout leaders and whatever the fuck all the time. Yep. Well, it's, that's a good question for which there is no good answer, but, but they find these things and they convince people, you know, up here in Hanover, Massachusetts, not could be confused with Hanover, New Hampshire. And you may have heard is a place, but, you know, you, we, there was a school board race up here. And I said, we didn't know, we just moved up here and we, we did, you know, register to vote up here. And so we were going to vote. And I heard that there was one person on the school board who was a right wing nut. And I didn't know, but there were a lot of people around running for office. So I talked to them. And finally, I talked to a woman who just gave off the kind of a, is she really a sane person vibe? And I said, what, what, what's the biggest thing that you'd hope to do if you get on the school board? She's like, cut the budget. I said, cut the budget. The schools are really hurting for money. This place and everywhere else. Why would you want to do that? She said, because they're teaching critical race theory. Oh, it's. He said. We got a 54 minutes without announcing that, this is a big topic. Absolutely. I said, yeah, I thought that was something they occasionally teach in law school. It's here. And she said, Oh, yeah, it's here. And it gets worse. And it gets worse. She said, I said, what's worse? And she said, the Jews have brought in some people from one of those Jewish organizations that teach about anti-Semitism in our high school. I said, Jews did that. And I thought, the nerve, yeah, wrote good people. But needless luckily, as she lost a lot, you think there's always a boogeyman? I mean, do you think that there's always that like, so it was the specter of communism, which of course, is Mark's own words, right? Right. But then we had all kinds of stuff. We had the Nazis. We had the Axis. We had communism again. We've got now. What is it even? It's so hard to say. Yeah. Well, I mean, drag queens. Right. Yeah. Public enemy number one, talking animals, you know, they still are going after that. They need to bring back veggie tales so that someone has like, incisive criticisms and critiques of religion in modern America. Yeah, that's, they're probably not going to do that. No, they're veggie tales people. They're still back. And one of them has, to his credit, the only two guys that created it, has kind of moderated his beliefs on race. But not always nice stuff, that's very, very, that's so frightening. Yeah. So, but if it wasn't that, it would be something else. One of the things about censorship, which you think so, yeah, I mean, I think that would simply find something else. One of the things because, you know, porn really does divides people and there are plenty of, there are plenty of feminists on both sides of that question. Right. But when somebody, when somebody says, why don't we just specify the kind of porn you can't make? No gay porn. No gay porn. We hate gay porn. We hate gay. Yeah, no, one of the guys, it's, it's, it's, it's redundant. It's a redundant phrase, even gay porn. It's just porn. Also, it's porn. It's porn. It's porn is porn. There. So we had a, I spent like six months after the porn commission abandoned its, its duty and issued its final report. Ironically, Henry Hudson, the aforementioned now federal judge handed the huge two volume bound set of the porn commission to Ed Mies, the attorney general during the Reagan years, under the statue of the goddess of justice, they really just have no soul. But they, they didn't know the goddess of justice had a bare breast. And by this time, I mean, I had ticked them off so they couldn't stop me from coming. They said, we're not letting you into the main room. You have to watch this. And so I was watching from another room in the justice department. And every once in a while, somebody would, they would kind of screw in a microphone and look up and laugh and laughing at me and I thought, oh my God, it's, it's the bare breasted goddess of justice. And just to confirm how silly all of this was, they actually had a debate during the course of the commission meetings over whether Michelangelo's famous statue of David, where you can see a winky, a winky, yeah, yeah, whether that was pornographic. And two people kind of said it was one was James Dobson, the head of course, yeah, yeah. And the other was Father Bruce Ritter, Father Bruce Ritter allegedly set up this place for homeless children in New York. Yeah, well, it got worse because during the course of the porn commission, a couple of journalists found something interesting. He was hiring young men to stay in his room at the expense of the taxpayers of America during these mission meetings. And he was not prosecuted for anything. And these were not children or teenagers, but they were not, they were minors. And so he, he was moved from the archdiocese of New York to India to spend, oh, right, where there's no over, there's nothing except cows, right. And yeah, they didn't prosecute him for anything but the New York City Attorney General. You know, who we love lately, I mean, I love the Attorney General in New York City, you know, and the last... They've been doing some decent work. Yeah, he's been doing some great work. But anyways, he set him away and, but he, you can't, if you said, I know I was going somewhere with it, or there were debates about porn, I mean, the porn commission. And I talked to a lot of groups and I spoke to a group somewhere in the Eastern Shore. And it was, there was a very popular professor, Midwest professor of, you know, technically what he was, English literature or something, but he, but he was very much against censorship. And he was my partner and the other side they had, among other things, a guy who, outside of Devadakan, may have the largest porn collection in the world, and he was, wow, and he really did say the best for last. Yeah. And what he did, my partner, I love the guy, but he thought we were going to be talking about Lady Chatterley's lover. I said, you know, I think we're going to be subjected to something a little more graphic than that. And so this character, who's a psychiatrist, showed nothing but, this is a subset of porn. And it's a little mutilation, oh, yeah, dude, that's a BME pain Olympics, you got kind of a torture. And there's a, that's all he showed. And so my pal, my colleague is kind of at a loss because he thought we were really having an argument about, you know, kind of classic English literature and whether that was obscene. And he was not prepared, I think, for he was not prepared, but anyway, it was, Park Deets was the name of the guy. Park Deets later became, well, I don't know what he's doing now, but, you know, the other people in that commission, they were so strange, they had a constitutional law professor. He was at the University of Michigan Law School at the time, when I asked what he thought about porn, he said pornography is not entitled to any First Amendment protection. It's more akin to a visit to a prostitute or the units of the dildo. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Right. But he was your expert. They would turn to him. What do you think professor? He later moved to the University of Virginia, where he apparently was a professor of my own daughter, when she went to law school there, because I saw him at graduate grade, and he was there, and we commiserated, but you can't, you know, if you, it's a little bit like abortion, this is going to have enormous blowback in the upcoming election. There's just no question about it. And the more states that have initiative campaigns to do something like guarantee the right, at least the right as far as Roe versus Wade took it, the right to make a choice about terminating a pregnancy, the more of those that are on the ballot, the more the chances are that terrible people will not be reelected in their states. If you find those things and you do it, the one thing, I go back to this, you can't hate people. You cannot hate the people on the other side, but you can sure use the rules that do exist to try to stop them. You can hate everything they stand for, and you can argue with them accordingly. That's what I've been doing ever since this young guy came to a party of ours and said he wanted to do what I did when he got out of school. And I said, well, what do you think I do? And he said, I think you get paid to piss people and day, and today that man is not only a fashionista, but a well-crafted podcaster. Wow, Barry, you are a gentleman and a scholar as bright as that is, but at the very least very entertaining. You've been stealing your advanced age. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been fucking great. And we didn't really talk close once, but I'm also... Even though you wore the Ed Hardy. Yeah, you did wear it. Ed Hardy got this at Las Vegas. I used to speak in Las Vegas. You know who I like to talk to in Las Vegas? Librarians. They're my favorite audience. They're all against censorship. I talked to them there. And of course, there was a close with this. Sure. There was an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show I was on with a guy from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is where, among other people, the current speaker of the house, Mike Johnson. Sweet. Sweet. What a wonderful dude. He's a great guy. I'm not a great guy. If I had a nickel for every plea I got from Hakeem Jeffries about, I want to be speaker of the house. He had a chance to be speaker of the house. He should have bitten his tongue, let Marjorie Taylor Greene oust Mike Johnson by having all the Democrats because Mike Johnson is a Christian nationalist. He says he is, you don't have to wonder if he is. He said after his election, he was on Hannity, Hannity asks, "Well, where do people, where would they find you get your values?" And he said, "Go to your bookshelf. Pick up a Bible and open it, that's what values come from." So he's a dangerous person. But Marjorie Taylor Greene is my rep and I hate her. Is that true? Yeah. Not like you're lying, but like, holy shit. He ate her with a fire of a thousand fucking sons. And small side note, if you don't know about the last person that ran against her whenever the fuck she got elected, what was that, 2018, it is one of the saddest stories I have ever read in my entire life. Like this dude was just a normal ass person and had to flee the state because her father, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's on like every major mainstream news, maybe not Fox, but everything else. So go lift that up, she is the dumbest spawn of Satan I've ever, I've ever win this in my entire life. Sorry. So I think, so you won't be voting for her. I think I was in the middle of a story of forgotten. Where was I even going? I'm Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Healthy Japanese. Nationalists. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, please just, you know, most, a lot of good progressive people don't agree with me. But I just think they should have gotten rid of him. He is not, he is not just a conservative. He is a Christian nationalist conservative. He is third in line for the presidency. He believes the Bible gives answers for everything, not just gay rights and abortion, which by the way, no, abortion isn't even criticized in the Bible. Yeah. Yeah. But nevertheless, yeah, then maybe he could do something now. I know there's a thought that, well, maybe he'll, he'll allow the Democrats to, you know, pass another funding bill in the late fall and it doesn't mean it's kind of like expanding the Supreme Court. Of course, it's corrupted. It's not just corrupted because of the gifts that have been given to people like Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, but it is absolutely cripple. It's crippling every understanding, but reasonable people have about what the Constitution means. And the late Phyllis Schlafly and I agreed about only one thing. And that was that we shouldn't have a constitutional convention. She was afraid too many progresses would show up and put all kinds of stuff into the Constitution that she didn't like. And I had the same fear. But unfortunately, I thought, yeah, if the conservatives come and the liberals come, the liberals aren't going to, they're not going to stay long enough to make a difference. Yeah. I learned out that liberals tend to, uh, they tend to go home early. Yeah. That was great for the whole thing. Yeah. I make a big reference to the, uh, great Kenticov incident of 2020, um, from the liberals. And it just like y'all grow some fucking balls, like not to gender like, yeah, I mean, we're like, you read a book, you know, don't do that. That's obviously offensive. Exactly. Yeah. If you know, if you can't, if you're offended, everybody is offended by everything. I taught before I was even on the board of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum, I, uh, I taught webinars there in the summers about free speech. And one of them was called everyone hates something. Let's just ban everything. And it was very well received. I think it may even be up on my website, which is berrywlin.com. Yes. Everyone go visit Barry's website. Yeah. Barry's got an Instagram. Barry's got a right Instagram. There's a Facebook. There's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Legendary poster. Barry posts, like at least once every day and it's funny. So I would give him a follow for sure. Terrific. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Well, we chatted about the things you wanted to chat about and it's been a God damn joy. It really has been awesome. Yeah. It's like a whole time. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. We appreciate you coming on Barry. Thank you so much. Happy to do it. Happy to do it. If you would like to send us questions, comments, concerns or just a fucking meme in their email, it's a pop-up studs, we're at pop-up studs on Instagram. I am Matt Smith at Rubble's Rokes and I'm Connor Fowler at Connor Flower. Connor. Flower. Wow. I changed it. Ah, okay. Yeah. Connor. What? What does that mean? Well, it's my name with the letters jumbled. Oh, man. I support it. Yeah. You are throwing a wrench into the system, motherfucker. I truly do. And one day the wrench will hit the right part of the system and we will all be living in a communist paradise. All right. Y'all say we bid you a do. Thank you. We bid you a do. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. Thank you both.
