James Lasdun's road trip to America's courts

You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones and today I'm joined by the novelist and poet James Lasdon to talk about a recent road trip that he took through the United States last October. From one courthouse and one trial or hearing to another, from Chicago to Deadwood to El Paso to New Orleans, a trip that he wrote up in a recent issue of the lrb. James Laddison's new book, the Family man, about the Murdoch murders in South Carolina is about to be published and we talked about it a bit the last time he was on this podcast in November 2025. I can highly recommend that discussion. Hello, James, and thank you so much for joining me again.

0:16

Hello. Thanks so much for having me.

0:54

So I tried to plot your route more or less on Google Maps just now, and Google seems to think it's an 80 hour, 5300 mile round trip. Is that more or less what it was? How long were you on the road for?

0:56

I was on the road for a month and I actually clocked up 10,000 miles on the odometer. But, you know, there was a lot of coming and going and a lot of sort of, yeah, some crisscrossing. I went west through Chicago and I went all the way into Wyoming, but that's as far west as I went. I didn't, I didn't get to California and I dropped down through Colorado and New Mexico into Texas and then headed east across Texas and to New Orleans and then kind of made my way back up north to New York. I began in New York, by the way, with one final stop in the, in North Carolina and was leaving out

1:12

California and the west coast and the East Coast. I know you began and ended in New York because that's where you live, but the trip was sort of through the heartlands, through the Midwest, through the South. Was it a question of time that meant you couldn't get further west? Or were you deliberately avoiding the elite, so called coasts? I mean, was there an idea that you were going into middle America?

1:54

Partly. I mean, I would have liked to have gone further west. I really wanted to get into Montana and I would have liked to get up to, you know, Washington and Oregon. I was a little less interested in California and the east coast just because I know them a bit better and most of the rest of the country is quite, I haven't traveled very extensively. I've done odd kind of hops here and there, but I've never done a big road trip. So, you know, it was partly, it was about seeing bits of the country that I had not seen. And then, you know, there were constraints of time. What could just be managed in the time that I had. And I was hard pressed to do even what I did, what I did. I was on, on the move pretty much all the time.

2:15

Well, I mean, yeah, within a long way to travel in a. In a month. I mean, you say at the beginning of the piece that the idea, this idea of a road trip organized around trials and hearings across the US you say it had been in your head for years. So what was it that appealed to you about this idea? I mean, why had you, why had it been in your head for years? What was it about traveling from one courthouse to another that appealed?

2:59

I don't have a simple answer. I mean, I do like going into courthouses. I had discovered that I like sort of sitting in on, on hearings and trials. I'd already started doing that a little bit in England before I left. In London, there are places where you don't have to do anything. You can be completely passive. And meanwhile, people in very sort of extreme situations reveal themselves in intimate detail. And the stories that you sort of see unfolding are always fascinating. And the communities that form around every case, that include the lawyers, the witnesses, the accused people, are also sort of interesting, I find, especially if you go to a kind of drawn out trial and you get to know them a little bit and you begin to see that that's actually an interesting way of finding out about a place because you're getting a group of people who are sort of yield some quite sort of intimate truth about the world that they inhabit. It inevitably picks up some of the sort of local color of each world, the local character of each world. And so I began to think of it as a way of doing a trip of seeing a country, of getting to know a country that would be more interesting than just driving around or seeing kind of cultural monuments or natural monuments or whatever. And I'm not very good at striking up conversation with people in bars and things like that. In fact, I'm terrible at it. So again, you don't have to be any good at that. You just go and you sit in a courtroom and these stories unfold.

3:24

When you say that you did have some misgivings, mostly to do with the voyeuristic element, as you put. But there's also the question of your own role, your own position in the courthouse. Cause as you say that in a courtroom, there's the familiar cast, there's a judge, then you may have A jury defendant, you may have a plaintiff, the lawyers, the witnesses and so on, but your role, your position was not immediately visible or transparent to the other people in the courthouse. And did people wonder who you were? They did.

5:00

They. Nobody ever seemed to mind, but they were always curious. I mean, I think judges are always curious because very few people do attend trials, do attend. They're open to the public. So you can go. You have the right to go, but they sort of want to know who you are. And quite often, clerk of the court will come over and say. And sort of introduce themselves and say, well, you know, are you a. Are you from the press or are you connected to the trial in some way? And I sort of. One of them asked me. Well, one judge, I think, said to me, oh, so you're an observer? When I had said I wasn't any of those other things, and I said, yes, I'm an observer. And that seemed like a good formula to kind of use when I was asked the question. And it seemed to satisfy people, and they seemed, on the whole, very happy to have somebody attending, somebody sort of watching. The question in my mind was, am I affecting the proceedings in any way? I mean, I hadn't given it very much thought, but one of the very first hearings I went to was an immigration hearing in Chicago. And I went into this tiny room, and there were a dozen Hispanic people. I came in, and I obviously do not look Hispanic. And it was immediately clear to me that they all thought that I was an ICE agent, because they looked absolutely horrified. And I realized, okay, I have to. I mean, I have to assume that you don't go in and not be noticed. You're not an anonymous, invisible nobody. And then I wondered, in some instances, I wondered if the judges were affected or the lawyers were affected, because sometimes the lawyers would want to talk. And lawyers are very kind of exhibitionists. They love performing. They love the idea that someone might be writing an article. And you wonder, yeah, you wonder, would this have gone differently if there had not been an observer present?

5:30

I mean, some of the cases that you describe, and we'll get onto the specifics of some of them in a moment, but some of them, you're occasionally surprised that the judge is sort of. He or she has been incredibly reasonable and possibly quite lenient. I mean, is there some sense, do you think, that maybe if you hadn't been there, they might have been a bit shorter with the defendants, that somehow that your presence as the observer, and maybe you can write about them and they'd kind of think, well, you know, I'd better not have my best behavior, as it were, but maybe should be, rather than just going, oh, I don't know, you know, send you to jail for 10 years, fuck it. They were sort of a bit more careful about it because you were there.

7:21

It crossed my mind. And I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case. I mean, in, you know, one or two instances, I thought in New Orleans, I went to a sentencing hearing for a guy who'd been found guilty of carjacking, armed carjacking. I'm quite a series of fans. But it was very clear that the guy hadn't meant to harm anybody. He was delusional. He thought he had been shot in the head. And he was asking that he had carjacked a public bus, in fact, and he was demanding to be taken to the hospital. So, in fact, even though it was a serious crime, on the face of it, there were a lot of very sort of mitigating circumstances. And he was facing up to 15 years. The judge gave him 13. I got the feeling this judge was a pretty strict judge, not given to leniency. I wondered if maybe he'd shaved a year off because he knew that he had sent his clerk over to talk to me. And, I mean, who knows? Maybe he increased. Maybe he'd been planning to give the guy less. I don't know. But once you've been noticed, you can't help feeling that you've been sort of taken account of, too, in the way they go about their business.

7:55

I mean, one of the things that you talk about. I mean, you adapt a phrase of Saul Bellows, this idea of a kind of character as a reality instructor. And you suggest that reality instruction is perhaps something that you got out of this, these trips to courthouses. And you began in Saul Bellows, Chicago. And one of the things you talk about is that you also tried to go to different kinds of criminal and civil hearing, that there are many different kinds of court. And the first one was an immigration court, as you said. And that was the one where you were worried that you were mistaken for an ICE agent. I mean, did that experience make you change your mind about some of the places you were going to go to? Did you think, having had, that maybe you should not go to, you know, immigration courts where these sorts of hearings were going on, which should be ones that you should avoid?

9:10

No. And I went to another immigration court. In fact, I tried to get into a couple of other ones, but I went to the one in El Paso. No, it Just made me aware of what, what people might be thinking and there wasn't much I could do about it, but I wanted to see whatever I could see. And yes, I went to criminal, I went to civil, I went to federal, county, state courts, all different kinds, different kinds of hearings, even traffic court. And I found them all to be absolutely riveting. Even, you know, traffic court, which I thought I just would be spending half an hour in. And probably because it happened to be happening on the, on the day I was in that town and I could easily happily have spent the whole day there. I don't know if happily is the word, but it was just very, very interesting. You know, it was all. It was sort of focused one's mind on the centrality of the car to people's lives, which we know about. But it's the vulnerability that, that brings to these people who are dependent on their cars in rural places for their jobs or whatever, who get caught at a drunk driving checkpoint or whatever and face losing not just, you know, with their license, if they lose that, they can't drive, they can't work, they can't. I mean, it's absolutely catastrophic. And so watching how quite a sensitive judge who was also, of course a stickler for the law, managed that and dealt out these very sort of carefully calibrated penalties to people and the way they kind of pleaded for themselves, the way they talked about themselves, I think that's what I mean by reality instruction is, you really see it's partly because. Because in this country people are very candid, very frank, I find. And so they'll talk about themselves and their conflicts and their self reproach and also their feelings of injustice or whatever are all very there on the surface. And you really get to see what is going on in the minds of people in these communities again in a way that I don't think I'd find out for myself in a bar in a million years.

9:57

Yeah, I mean, that amazing story, really, that one about the traffic stops. There was a woman who had been stopped for drunk driving, but she needed her car for work. So this, right. So the judge said, okay, you can't drive except for work. So she had a special dispensation to allow her to drive for work and she didn't have children, which meant she wasn't allowed to use her car to go and get groceries. But presumably if she had had children, she would have been so this very careful, you know. And it's sort of, I mean, my first job in journalism a very long time ago was working at the Reading Chronicle, and I spent some time at the magistrates. And even there you see some of these sort of stories, and often with magistrates and judges being more reasonable than Les Miserables, for example, would lead you to think, there's this guy that he'd repeatedly failed to turn up to court because he'd missed his bus and he didn't have a car and it was a long way to get in. He tried hitchhiking and he'd left home at five in the morning. But then after a couple of hours not getting a lift, he'd given up feeling downhearted. And he'd been accused of stealing a chicken from a supermarket. And he said that he had stolen the chicken, but, you know, he couldn't afford to buy the chicken. And eventually, you know, they heard all this and they said at the end, well, okay, you've got to pay for the chicken. That's no fines, but you've got to pay for the chicken. How much can you afford? And he said, well, I really, you know, almost nothing. They said, well, how about five pence a week? Can you pay for the chicken at the rate of five pence a week? He said, I think I can manage that. And it just seemed. I mean, it was utterly heartbreaking story on one hand, but on the other hand, the reasonableness of the enforcement of the law was oddly heartening. And, you know, some of the stories that you tell here really sort of reminded me of that in some ways. Sometimes justice does. Does work in a way that follows the law and is also as fair as it can be to the people who are breaking the law through desperation or whatever else.

12:00

I think that. I mean, that was mostly what I saw was that kind of attitude of reasonableness and a very serious sort of regard for the law itself and giving due process. But I've seen some pretty nasty judges, too, and been quite shocked by the sentences that they've given. Not on this trip, but elsewhere, but again, not judges who are being corrupt or kind of disregarding the law, just being unnecessarily strict, I felt, because of whatever prejudices they had. And you get to see what prejudices they do have quite often. I mean, they're remarkably unshy about revealing them.

13:51

Is that prejudices about race and about gender and about class?

14:35

Not so much that, because you would get into a lot of trouble for that if that came up, but more about values. This was a trial I covered before any of these. Our family dentist was accused of murder and was on. It was a big trial and he was accused of various other things too, including sort of forgery and fraud. And he was acquitted on the murder charge, but he was found guilty on the forge. And the forge. Forgery charges were ridiculous. The jury just gave that verdict to sort of as a sop to the prosecution, to the police. And the judge used the guilty verdict on this very minor forgery charge as a way of giving a pretty stiff sentence to the dentist he would not have got under any other circumstances. And he revealed while he was giving this sentence, he revealed that his reason for doing it was that this dentist had been involved in a very salacious sort of menage artois, which has ended with one of them being killed, which was why he was accused of murder. And the judge was clearly had this very sort of old fashioned Victorian values about adultery and things like that. And that came through. I mean, he wasn't shy about admitting that. The complication in the story is that at the time of the trial, even though the dentist. Well, the dentist was acquitted, and I fully supported that. I thought he couldn't possibly be guilty. I'm less sure of that now. So that's another thing that happens to you in these courtrooms is because they're places where judgment is going on all the time. You find yourself in a very judging frame of mind. You're constantly thinking, well, is this person guilty? Did this person really do that? Could they have done that? And you form a judgment and it's often, you know, not really very solidly founded. And it changes. And it often changes after the trial.

14:40

That's really interesting. And it changes in the course of the trial as well, doesn't it? Because you talk about these swerving tales, which is a brilliant phrase. The way that you hear one witness is telling their part of the story and you think one thing and then the next witness tells their part. And there's this rapid reframing of events, as you put it. And there was one. Maybe you could just talk us through one of them. The trial that you sat in on in Mitchell, South Dakota.

16:30

And that was when there was a guy there that had one of these tales. He was pulled over for speeding and then failed a. Well, he was given a sobriety test and he was a bit unruly and he got into a lot of trouble. He was sort of locked into a police car anyway, you know, he was facing losing his license. And it turned out as the story evolved, you learned that almost every piece of it that had been presented was in fact either not quite true or that there were Circumstances underneath it that gave it a completely different meaning. So for instance, he was unruly in the police car where he'd been sort of locked in, which he tried to get out of for one simple reason, which was that he had been with his young son when he was pulled over. He was separated from him, put in the police car, and he saw social services coming to take away his young son. So he tried to get out. Earlier that day, it turned out he had found out that his father, the boy's grandfather, had taken the boy to a casino against the father's express wishes. And the father had burst into the casino and grabbed his son and driven off with him in a state of fury. And it was in that state of he wasn't in. In fact drunk as a plea bargain. He had pleaded that he. That he was pleaded guilty to it. And it was in that state of sort of frenetic agitation that he was picked up by the police. And that was the only reason he was sort of difficult in the. In the cop car was that he saw his son being taken away from him. So there were all these very kind of strongly mitigating circumstances that arose. But the first thing you saw was this guy going up and being, you know, his story coming out. And he didn't look like a particularly sort of docile guy. He looked tough. And you could believe all these things that were said of him. But then as the story evolved, he begins to look different. He begins to look very sympathetic and very gentle and very decent, very nice. And that's one of the strange things about these stories that evolve in courtrooms is how they affect your own perception, which they do very strongly.

16:57

And in the end he got. So he kept his license but spent the weekend in jail.

19:02

Yeah. The judge felt that he had to give him something, so he put him in jail for the weekend. Yeah.

19:07

In terms of those prejudices, you also get them from witnesses, right. That there's one, there's an accused who you call. You call him Fletcher. So presumably not his real name. And the way that the witness talked about him and didn't want to get too close. Cause he thought he might have a disease. And you know, Fletcher is a black man. And the witness, the racism clearly informed the witnesses response to him.

19:13

Yeah. Although he didn't seem to be aware of it, but it was. So it was such a sort of, to me, such a sort of obvious case of. Of racism. I mean, this was in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a very small case, but it was very. It was. It was Rather sort of pitiful. I mean, this. The accused guy that was basically living on the streets. I think he'd kind of. And he. He was drunk. I mean, they. Body cam footage from the. From the police, when the police arrived on the scene. I mean, he was drunk, but he wasn't a threat to anybody. But he had gone into a restaurant that was being renovated by the. By the witness. He was accused of having set off the. The alarm and the extinguisher system and creating a big mess inside the restroom. And he was acting pro se, as they say, for himself. He had. He didn't have a lawyer, but he. He really wasn't up to it. But he acquired a lot of sort of legalese, legal phrases that he just began spinning out at random. You know, sort of, I rest my case or let me rephrase. But none of it really made sense. And it just got sadder and sadder. And meanwhile, the main witness against him, who. I don't think. I mean, he was describing what he had seen, which was this guy going in. But it was when he was describing his own reactions, his own unwillingness to go in and find out what was going on or engage with the guy in any way, that's when the racism came out. I say it was unconscious because I think it couldn't have been that conscious because both the judge and the prosecutor were black in that case. So I don't think the guy knew that all these sort of. This fear of catching a disease from the guy were sort of tropes of racism. But he was sort of blithely coming out with them one after another, but nobody said anything.

19:38

And in that case, he was found guilty.

21:30

He was found guilty. It was a bench trial. And it wasn't a jury that found him guilty, it was the judge. And you know, the evidence was pretty strong that he had gone in and set off this extinguisher system. So I don't know if it affected the outcome. Yeah.

21:32

And I suppose. But also, I mean, as with many of those cases that he's. He'd been in jail cause he couldn't afford his $200 bond and he'd been having trouble in jail.

21:50

I don't know.

21:58

I mean, it's one of these stories that it seems that there's no. There's no good ending to this. I mean, there's no happy way for this to go.

21:59

Right. And a lot of the stories were like that in the sense that they weren't about kind of fiends or sort of hardened criminals. Or anything like that. They were mostly about people who'd sort of lost their way or got in a scrape or, you know, had problems with drink or drugs, some suffering from mental illnesses of one kind or another. I think the guy in Omaha was. Or a combination often of those things. And they just, you know, life for them was. Was fairly chaotic. In a lot of cases you saw that and, you know, getting in trouble with the law was just part of that chaos. And you go into these courtrooms where the system is set up to try to make sense of something that has happened. And it has these very interesting procedures for doing that. And I admire them quite a bit. The way the protocols by which it is sort of conducted, I think are good at getting to the truth, but they never quite get to the heart of the real chaos that seems to be operating in the lives of these people. It's not set up to do that. It's set up to get a verdict. Fair enough. That's what it's about. So you always leave kind of half admiring and half feeling something's been missed.

22:05

And there was this one jury trial that you went to and it was sort of. Well, it was. It was a fixed point in the journey that you knew before you set out that in Deadwood, South Dakota, there was going to be a jury trial with a fixed date. So you. That was a fixed point on the journey. And what was that trial about?

23:16

Well, I didn't know in advance what it was going to be about. All I knew was that the clerk of the court, I called around before I left to see if I could sort of find out what was going on. It's quite hard because courthouses don't publish much of a docket usually, and if they do, they don't stick to it. And even if they've got a trial listed on the docket, it usually doesn't happen because they're mostly plea bargained out before they. Before they go forward. The clerk of the court told me that she was almost certain that this trial was gonna go ahead. And she gave me the date. She didn't tell me what it was about. So that was. Yeah, that was a fixed point. And so I arrived in Deadwood, South Dakota and I went there for the first day and there was a long sort of jury selection process which was fascinating in itself because it took the form of a kind of colloquium on the American justice system with the judge and two. And the two lawyers holding forth to the jury and questioning them en masse. It wasn't the usual kind of one on one questioning. They were questioning them and they were discussing things like what it means to be guilty beyond reasonable doubt, what these criteria mean and what the jury felt about the justice system. So that was an eye opener. And that all came before I found out what was going on, which was that the accused guy, it was a pretty simple, basic thing that would normally have been played out. He was accused of impersonation. He'd been stopped for some kind of traffic offense, found to have fentanyl in the car, and then he impersonated. He gave a false name. He basically gave his brother's name and brother's date of birth. Normally that would be pled out. He hadn't played that out because he was a sovereign citizen. This was told to me by the judge. It didn't actually arise explicitly during the trial, but the judge himself was very, very forthcoming. We had a kind of stroll together and later he invited me into his chambers while we were waiting for the verdict. And that was in a way the most interesting thing about that case was the fact that this guy was a sovereign citizen. This is a movement that has arisen in recent decades. I think it began on the sort of far right as an offshoot of patriot movements and white supremacy movements. It's no longer exclusively a far right thing. It's a sort of more libertarian thing. There are people who profess not to recognize the U.S. constitution, not to be bound by it. It's a lot more complicated than just that. So they don't really recognize the legal system. And for that reason, among others, they're constantly getting into trouble. They'll drive without license plates and things like that. So they're forever getting pulled over. They don't believe that they are obliged to recognize the laws of the land. And they constantly tell the cops who pull them over that they have various formulas they come out with like, I'm not driving, I'm traveling. Which they seem to think is going to somehow work in their favor. They always end up getting arrested. There's a whole. You can, you can see a lot of these videos of this body cam videos on, on YouTube. They're quite interesting and rather sad. They're slippery customers that there are hundreds and thousands of them. They're becoming the bane of the, of the judicial system in the US I found out as I traveled they actually go, some of them go into courthouses looking for trouble. They'll put a lien on a judge's house. They'll approach bailiffs and demand to know Their names and thrust cameras in their faces and things like that. They're a funny mixture of wanting to be sort of not seen by the authorities and very much wanting to get in the faces of the authorities. So anyway, he was a sovereign citizen. He made some of the moves that sovereign citizens do, like weird things that don't really make any sense, like putting. Getting liens read into the process of the trial and.

23:34

Yeah, and a lien, as far as I understand, it's sort of. It's claiming that you have a right to someone else's property because they have a debt or something. Or is it this?

27:25

It's something like that, yes. Yes, that's right. When you put a lien on a person's house. Yes.

27:35

And so it's a kind of legal instrument, I guess. But how did the sovereign citizens try to use liens to help their cases?

27:41

I mean, I asked an attorney in the Deadwood courthouse about that and she just said it. Basically, it doesn't make any sense at all. And so I think what you're left with is that a certain amount of pure drivel has, or rather a large amount of pure drivel has now become something that these courthouses have to sort of somehow accommodate. And I think these liens, these supposed liens that these, these sovereign citizens use or threaten to use probably fall mostly into the category of drivel. But there's vast quantities of material that they download from. From the NAT that supplies them with what they believe are kind of watertight, foolproof ways of handling these legal situations that they get themselves into. They don't. They don't do anything at all, but they. But they can be very time consuming because courts sort of have to pay attention to them if. If they present a hundred thousand word document that they've downloaded that explains why, you know, judges are not recognized, although sheriffs, oddly enough are, and all the rest of it and all the other. All the sort of multitude of reasons why they cannot be put on trial. The courts have some obligation to engage with this. And what the judge told me was that sometimes DAs will just get so sort of fed up with all this that they'll say, forget it, just put it as down as a. You know, they'll charge it down to a misdemeanor or something and get it thrown out. So it's just not to have to deal with it. And I think that's part of the strategy too, is that you can kind of use it to just to wear people down.

27:50

You have them in England as well, but they Call themselves free men on the land, and they like to cite Magna Carta. And so, you know, if you're stopped, if a freeman on the land is stopped by the police and they say that you, you know, Magna Carta means that I don't recognize your. Your authority and so on.

29:35

Yeah, I guess that is the same thing. Yeah. Yeah.

29:52

In one courthouse, someone did ask you if you were yourself a sovereign citizen, didn't they?

29:54

Yes, a bailiff asked me. I was. I was in a trial about. It was a competency hearing to find out if a guy who had an IQ of 74 or something was competent to stand trial. And during a recess, I asked a bailiff what the guy had been accused of, and she wouldn't tell me. And we got into a conversation and then she suddenly looked at me very suspiciously and she said, are you a sovereign citizen? And I said, no, I'm not. But it turned out that they were menace at her courthouse as well. They'd had to ban them from coming in with cameras and filming.

30:00

I mean, I suppose the only thing to say in defense of them is that as, I mean, I don't suppose it is many of them are responding to Trump, but in a sense, if you see that the government is so flagrantly failing to govern or misusing the government or subverting the Constitution, it's one. And I know many of them became sovereign citizens before Trump, but it's an insane response to an insane world, perhaps.

30:35

Yeah, well, you could definitely argue that. I think most of them have been sovereign citizens before that. But. But they are there. They're definitely an indicator of how much tension there is and how society, this society is held together with kind of paperclips. I mean, it's really just pulling apart in so many directions, and you really feel it when you're up against people like that, that really there's. There's very little common ground between so many sort of different blocks that are pulling in very, very different directions.

30:54

Go back to the question of the jury selection just for a moment. I mean, it's. I mean, one of the things that's very interesting with you writing about that is you say that it wasn't lost on you. That is the significant gap between the good faith exchanges here at the Lawrence County Courthouse and the brazenly bad faith goings on at the Justice Department itself. I mean, and this disconnect between sort of the legal system, the justice system working, it's going by. I was going to say going through the motions, but it's More than going through the motions, clearly, that it's sort of working pretty much as it should be at the level you were observing it compared to what was happening at the highest level with Trump's Justice Department. I mean, was that often in your mind as you sat in on these trials?

31:25

It was constantly in my mind. I mean, it was very much. I mean, it still is in the news, although it's been somewhat eclipsed by other things. But this was when the Justice Department was just. Had become by then, completely open that they were just a personal instrument for Trump's sort of retribution agenda. And they were going after James Comey. They were going after the Attorney General of New York State, Letitia James. They were trying to prosecute these people. They were. They. They were investigating them on criminal charges. They'd failed in both cases. But this was what the Justice Department was turning into, having. You know, it's had controversies and things in the. In the past, there have been things that have happened that, you know, have. Have raised flags, but there's always a big scandal when that happens. And. And there just was so much of this that people had just begun to sort of realize, well, we have a corrupt Justice Department, there's nothing we can do about it except hope that the, you know, the other levels, the judges will resist. And they have resisted so far, mostly on those big things, but it comes at an enormous cost. And, yes, so I was very conscious of that and wondering, well, how deep does it go? And, yeah, I mean, at the county level, you don't. I asked this judge in Deadwood whether he had ever felt any pressure from the Justice Department or anything like that, and he said, no, you don't feel that at his level. But he'd heard of federal judges who were beginning to feel it. We didn't get into what particular cases they would. They would be filling it in. But, yeah, there's been a. You know, that's what the Trump administration is doing is a wholesale attempt to subvert the Justice Department, and they appear to have succeeded.

32:06

And that, as you've said, you covered 10,000 miles between courthouses, and there was, as you say, a geographical as well as a legal side of the project. So, I mean, as you drove through the land and you described the landscape or other landscapes, the many different landscapes that you drove through on this journey, I mean, did you begin to see that some kind of connection between the kind of landscape that you would drive through and then arrive at a courthouse and the kinds of cases that were taking place there? I mean, clearly There was one where it was ranchers against miners, which could be almost a situation out of a western, which is clearly deeply tied to the land. But was. Was there a more general sense that somehow the land played a part?

33:52

Yes, I mean, yes and no, but very often, yes. I mean, yes, that was in Wyoming. That was. That was a very sort of. That's a case that wouldn't have happened except in a part of the country where you had ranching and mining going on. Crossing the desert in Texas, crossing the Permian Basin, where all the drilling is going on. I sort of observed part of this very strange case that could only have happened because there was a huge amount of money being raised from oil revenue in what is the least populated county in the U.S. loving county in Texas, which has 64 people, but it has a revenue, a tax revenue of something like 60 million, which made it a very plump target for anyone who could figure out a way of going in and taking over the town. And this character called Malcolm Tanner had decided to do that. And he was moving his followers down there so that they could get on the voter roll and vote.

34:36

His social media media followers.

35:35

His social media followers, which he has hundreds of thousands, and he bought some land and he was offering them housing in the desert if they would come down and vote for him. And he. He'd already got 30 people down there, which. Which was beginning to be enough of a threat to the, you know, to the community in terms of the likelihood of his being able to take it over, that the Attorney General of Texas had got involved. Ken Paxton, who's himself has been accused of fraud and got in all kinds of trouble for corruption of his own. But the basis of all of this was oil and gas and the money that came from that. And again, so that was geographically connected directly. I mean, many of the things I saw could have happened anywhere, but there was always something that gives it a sort of local flavor of some kind. I felt, just by virtue of sort of driving five hours through a landscape and arriving at a courthouse, and you feel it's somehow saturated in the place. And as I said, I mean, there are these communities around each case and, you know, they speak in a certain way. There's a certain set of language, a certain set of sort of idioms and terms that are used in different places, different procedures. But I don't want to overstress that. It's a feature of it, but it's not the be all and end all.

35:37

And you've mentioned El Paso already. And again, I mean, clearly that geographically significant because it's on the border with Mexico. And as you say, you'd expect you'd pictured it as a bustling border town,

36:58

but it was more of a ghost town, eerily empty. There was almost nobody on the streets. It was incredibly hard in downtown El Paso to find an open cafe or restaurant. And the area, there's a district that sort of goes to the. It leads to the bridge that crosses into Juarez, Ciudad Juarez, which is on the other side of the river in Mexico. There's an area that leads in the US Side up to the bridge crossing that's full of inexpensive stores which are usually apparently. I mean, I haven't been there before, but they usually. And they clearly must have been bustling because there are so many of them. There's hardly anyone in them at all. And that was because ice, I mean, ICE are just sort of picking people up. So people don't want to come in from Mexico to shop, and the people who are undocumented or even documented on the US Side don't want to be on the streets because ISIS had been very, very active there. And Texas spearheaded the techniques and the behaviors that ICE have been now using across the country. They'd been doing it for several years, these sort of courthouse raids where they would kind of wait for people in the courthouse to have their cases dismissed by judges and then pick them up and take them to these terrible places.

37:10

And that. I mean, that emptiness that the courthouse. For that same reason, as you said, the courthouse, even in El Paso was empty. And what you've just described, that the U.S. attorney now tells ICE before the case even happens, that they're going to close it. So somehow there's a short circuit, and you don't even have to have the hearing now, and the ICE will just pick people up and take them away.

38:29

It's complicated. Yes. I mean, well, they. What they had been doing is they would tell. They would tell ICE when they were about to close a case, and ICE would be ready to pounce and take the person away. Now, what they've just. What they started doing around about the time that I was on the road and actually a little before was a very cynical thing. They would basically get the immigration courts to drop the cases altogether, because once they drop the case, the plaintiff, the accused person, is no longer under the protection of the courts. In other words, if they're still running the case, they'll often be telling the person who's seeking documentation, okay, you've got a hearing in six months. Make sure you're there. And that functions as a kind of protection. They can't just technically be scooped up and taken away or sent away. Whereas if they drop the case, if they drop the case altogether, which is what they were being increasingly pressured to do, then these people are no longer under the protection of the courts. And ICE can then do with them what they want. I don't think it has a legal basis or it's being legally challenged. I know that. But that's what was going on a lot.

38:50

And you were at one point, very briefly stopped by a border patrol.

40:06

I mean, I went through a checkpoint. That's all. I can. Nothing more than that, but that it's very strange in a country that prides itself on being the freest country on the planet to get to a. To a checkpoint with flashing lights. And it's to do with your identity. I mean, it's. It's. I knew that these things existed. I knew they were in Texas, and I was driving through Texas. It didn't totally surprise me to come to one, but it's very. It's a very unnerving experience. Nothing unnerving happened to me. I didn't. I mean, the guy barely looked at me. He just said, US Citizen. And I, I said, yes, and. Because I have, you know, I have dual citizenship. But he didn't want to see my passport even, or anything like that. You know, I'm just a white guy in his 60s driving a Prius. I didn't interest him. But it's, you know, you can imagine what it would be like if you had anything at all that might interest these people. I mean, these people, of course, armed to the teeth, and it's terrifying. And they've got cars waiting to chase you if you decide to. If you decide to turn around.

40:11

And that question of your U.S. citizenship because you're born a British citizen and you describe becoming a US Citizen as well, just as the drumbeats for war in Iraq were reaching a pitch. And you also write earlier in the piece that you've sort of. I guess one of the reasons for taking this trip is that you more recently begun to wonder what it is that keeps you in the United States. And did taking this trip help you answer that question?

41:15

I mean, it was very much on my mind, that question, and in many ways, it sort of. Even though this. This idea had been. I'd had this idea for years, I. I never really done very much about it, but this partly precipitated it. This, you know, this sense that I'm here voluntarily. I Mean, I could be elsewhere, unlike most people here. I could. I could, you know, go back to the uk and my wife, who's a US citizen, would. Would love to leave. And my, you know, my kids are grown up, so I don't have. I mean, my life is here, but I could get out. So staying voluntarily makes you feel implicated? Weirdly, much more than I think I would feel if I was simply a US citizen, because I wouldn't have any option. It's not a simple one, but I do know a lot of expats who've left, not necessarily specifically because of that, but it's often, in a few cases, sped up something they'd been thinking about anyway. It's not pleasant to live in this country at the moment, if you have any sort of political awareness at all, and very few people don't at this point. So you wonder all the time, well, what can I do about it? What can people do about it? I mean, we've got a democratically elected guy who's behind all this. So it's not like you can say, well, it's an illegal regime, but at the same time you feel obliged to get involved or do something or, or speak or. I really didn't know what I can do other than observe and write. And I did feel the need to observe more because I don't know the country very well, because I haven't traveled much outside New York and California, and it seemed like the first thing I needed to do was to get to know the place a bit better. And did that help me to make a decision about whether to stay or leave. Now I feel in the same state of sort of resigned inertia, that question

41:40

of what you can do. I mean, there was. You were in New Mexico on the weekend of the no Kings protests.

43:40

Yeah, I mean, it was very touching. It was tiny. I mean, but I was in Taos, which is a completely sort of anti Trump town anyway. You know, it was. It wasn't much of a protest. I'd been in the New York one last year that was much, much bigger and it was kind of impressive. But I feel, you know, I think everybody at this point realizes, yeah, it's great denoking things, but they're not really doing very much and it's not changing things. They're good for forming sort of solidarity and community, but. And there was an old guy I was standing next to who was ranting on about how in the old days everyone would have been turning cop cars over and nobody wants to put their ass on the line anymore. And, you know, I couldn't help agreeing with it, but he and I were just standing there, not turning over cop cars. So I don't really know, you know, what one can say.

43:46

And there's also. And Thomas is. Or near there is where the one court that you were asked to leave.

44:37

Yeah, well, I wanted to go to a Pueblo court because, you know, this is a. The Pueblo Indians are a sovereign nation. And I thought it would be interesting to see some sort of court hearings in some way that wasn't the U.S. or it wasn't quite the U.S. and I called ahead in that to ask permission because I thought that would be a, you know, a good thing to do. And they said, yeah, that's fine. And I showed up at the. Not at the courthouse. I. I showed up at the administrative buildings and told the person there that I, you know, I had called ahead and I. I was. I was going to a court hearing. And she was very, very perturbed. And she said, well, I'm not sure about that. She got her boss to come and talk to me, and her boss came and talked to me and was, you know, very pleasant and polite, but, you know, wasn't particularly impressed with my proposition that I go and listen to a court hearing because it would help my article. And in the end, they basically told me I couldn't go. I couldn't do it. So I didn't even get to the courthouse. It wasn't that I was turned away from the courthouse. I wasn't even. I didn't even make it that far. The whole experience was very polite and pleasant. You know, they did warn me at one point that one of the women I spoke to said, you know, we are a sovereign nation. Be careful. I don't know exactly what she was warning me of, but I certainly wasn't gonna start insisting on going to a hearing or anything like that. So I just. I left.

44:44

At one point, you mentioned the walking guides that you've. You've written with your wife, I guess, many years ago. You wrote these books now. And the one that I have has an excellent section with advice on what to do if you get lost. One of the things that you advise readers to encounter the situation with a spirit of adventure. And so in your 10,000 miles, did you lost at all driving through the American heartland? And if so, did you encounter it with a spirit of adventure?

46:13

It's hard to get lost with the phone as long as your phone is working. But I was much more worried about breaking down because I was driving this 2008 car, it wasn't very in the greatest shape. And even though the GPS seems to work everywhere, the phone does not. So you'd go for miles and miles without any kind of signal on your phone at all in some parts of the country and no other traffic on the road. I mean, you could go without seeing a car for hours. And sometimes in very extreme weather, like it's either extremely hot or. I was heading up to Yellowstone park, it was getting extremely cold and snowy. The government was shut down. Also. This was during one of the government. That month was the month of the government shut down. I mean, so some of the kind of emergency services, if you were near one of the national parks, would not have been very well staffed. So I did wonder what I would do and I asked a few people, what would you do? And nobody had a very good answer. They just said, well, you just sort of wait and hope. And I guess I would have tried to cultivate some spirit of adventure too, but it would have been scary, to be honest, in some of those places.

46:37

And I guess wait and hope. I mean, that's kind of the advice of what to do about the political situation in some ways as well, isn't it?

47:48

I guess that's right. Yeah. What else can we do?

47:55

Yeah. Wait and hope. Yeah. James Lazdon, thank you very much.

47:58

Thank you.

48:02

You can read James's piece in the 23 April issue of the LLP. A new issue is out today with William Davis on Hyper Politics, Lale Khalili on the struggle for power in a melting Arctic, and TJ Clark on Willem de Kooning in Cuba. The lrby podcast is produced by Anthony Wilkes. This episode's producer was Ben Walker. The music is by Kieran Brunt. I'm Thomas Jones. Thank you for listening.

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