How We Can Combat State Violence | Punching Up with Maya May & Paul Farahvar

When the courts become the last lever of democracy, comedy becomes the sharpest tool left. Punching Up takes on a question that feels less rhetorical by the day: Who can we actually sue? With lawyer-turned-comedian Paul Farahvar joining Maya May, the conversation turns practical, even tactical — tracing how the right to film, document, and challenge state violence might be the only rights still holding. Every case becomes a lesson, every laugh a release valve for a system cracking under its own impunity.

Paul lays out the bureaucratic maze designed to protect power from consequence, showing how federal immunity and qualified immunity have turned accountability into an obstacle course. What used to be simple questions — who’s harmed, who’s liable — now reveal a structure built to shield the enforcers, not the enforced. Behind the legal detail sits a quieter truth: Ordinary citizens are left to master the law just to survive it.

In Los Angeles, Catie Laffoon’s viral confrontation with the City Council turns that imbalance into something visible. She describes officials staring at their phones while residents plead for protection, a police department breaking laws faster than courts can process them, and taxpayers footing the bill for their own suppression. It’s a frustration we all feel. Her outrage captures a larger exhaustion — the sense that authority has grown deaf to the people it claims to serve.

Somewhere between protest and parody, Punching Up lands on the heart of it: The fight for justice now depends on those willing to use humor as both shield and scalpel. When institutions fail to check abuse, resistance becomes procedural, creative, and loud. What once looked like satire now feels like civic instruction — teaching people how to survive a government that treats dissent as disorder. The absurdity isn’t a punchline; it’s the evidence. Tune in for a reminder that laughter, litigation, and persistence remain the only laws still working.

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