Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to tack it Up and hear a podcast about things
Speaker 3: falling apart and putting them back together again. I'm your host, Bio.
Speaker 3: Long so long ago, in a galaxy far far away,
Speaker 3: we talked about the collapse of the US Postal Service
Speaker 3: and the absolute horror show that's been inflicted on postal workers.
Speaker 3: When we last left our intrepid heroes, things were not great.
Speaker 3: They have continued to be not great. And with us
Speaker 3: to talk about this entire shit show is bad Mouth.
Speaker 3: He's a letter carrier and for it Worth and Tommy Espinoza,
Speaker 3: who is a former letter carrier and former union steward
Speaker 3: for the Post Office Union. That one. Yeah, look, it's
Speaker 3: like I got up at seven am this morning. It's
Speaker 3: up and that locus. I got up and get it.
Speaker 3: You're getting tired, Via, But both of you two, welcome
Speaker 3: to the show, and I'm excited to talk to you both.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great to be back.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So all right, let's start in a place where
Speaker 3: many things start, which is to say, the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 3: the full crow upon which history pivoted. So one of
Speaker 3: the things that we talked about the listeners sort of
Speaker 3: the last episode is that post office workers are not
Speaker 3: legally allowed to go on strike. This is sort of nonsense,
Speaker 3: but it also doesn't mean that it's never happened. Oh,
Speaker 3: by the way, is this we're abut to talk about
Speaker 3: wildcat strike disclaimers? No one here represents a union there
Speaker 3: speaking of their individual capacity, et cetera, et cetera. None
Speaker 3: of this is legal advice. I do I do I
Speaker 3: have any more caveats that we usually say for these things.
Speaker 3: That's roughly all of them. Yeah, but did you want
Speaker 3: to talk about sort of the last time that things
Speaker 3: kind of looked like this and what happens.
Speaker 4: Yeah, tell me you want to take that one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, going back to the nineteen seventies, the working
Speaker 5: conditions for letter carriers were so bad that most of
Speaker 5: them couldn't afford the cost of living. They found themselves
Speaker 5: in a position where they are working for a quasi
Speaker 5: federal position and are finding themselves on welfare, struggling just
Speaker 5: to find the means to get to work, oftentimes having
Speaker 5: to work a second job, if they even have time
Speaker 5: for a second job. Because the Post Office has and
Speaker 5: still is very good at skipping around a lot of
Speaker 5: labor laws. I think nowadays people probably work around sixty
Speaker 5: hour weeks. I think probably at a minimal around fifty
Speaker 5: hour weeks, especially around the holidays. And it's not just
Speaker 5: letter carriers, this is people inside of the distribution centers,
Speaker 5: inside of the warehouses. Things were not good. And on
Speaker 5: top of the actual working conditions themselves, the environment was
Speaker 5: incredibly toxic.
Speaker 1: There was a long history of abuse.
Speaker 5: You're dangling people's livelihood over their head, care like holding
Speaker 5: a carrot over them, you know, and it really pushed
Speaker 5: people to an edge. You saw a lot of violence
Speaker 5: on the workroom floor, not only from supervisors but from
Speaker 5: carriers that just snapped.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a time of great disparity.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the thing with the Post Office is Tom was
Speaker 6: mentioned and they dangled a carrot, but there's never any
Speaker 6: goddamn carrot. It's all stick. It's supposed to be a
Speaker 6: carrot and stick, it's all stick. There's no carrot there.
Speaker 6: Management in the post office is just trying to get
Speaker 6: you to move as fast as possible and cut corners, and
Speaker 6: that erodes safety, it erodes service, and it just a toxic, horrible,
Speaker 6: horrible and vironment. And so back in the seventies, before
Speaker 6: the wildcat strike, it was illegal then, just like it's
Speaker 6: illegal now. The NELC National Association of Letter Carriers Congress
Speaker 6: called all the shots like we had some collective bargaining rights,
Speaker 6: but not full collective bargaining rights. But like back then,
Speaker 6: adjusted for inflation, starting wage was fifty thousand a year roundabout,
Speaker 6: and it topped out at about sixty eight thousand dollars
Speaker 6: adjusted for inflation, and that took twenty one years to
Speaker 6: get to that point. Yeah, so it's pretty wild and
Speaker 6: like very similar to today. Now starting wage adjusted for
Speaker 6: inflation is just over forty thousand dollars before taxes. So
Speaker 6: we're making even less money now than we were before
Speaker 6: that wildcat strike, right, And a couple other real familiar
Speaker 6: things like you know on popular wars, rampant inflation, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 6: every time you turn on the radio or TV, there's
Speaker 6: some lunatic politician that you can't stand hearing about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, time is a flat circle.
Speaker 6: But Vince Sobrado, who was an organizer out of New
Speaker 6: York City, the ANOC didn't strike all over the country.
Speaker 4: It was New York and Chicago and San Francisco.
Speaker 6: It was some major hubs, right, and Vince Sobrado came
Speaker 6: out of that and we won in that strike one
Speaker 6: collective bargaining rights. Now, the thing we gave up, and
Speaker 6: it was a trade off, so we have a no
Speaker 6: layoff clause, so they can't lay us off.
Speaker 4: But we gave up the right to strike.
Speaker 6: Making sure that there wouldn't be another wildcat strike.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: So that's kind of why our hands are tied in
Speaker 6: that sense. Now, if we have an impasse our with
Speaker 6: our negotiation, and like we get a tentative agreement and
Speaker 6: we during the ratification process vote that down, now we
Speaker 6: can either try and go back to the bargaining table
Speaker 6: or it gets brought in front of an arbiter basically
Speaker 6: an impartial judge, and they'll have a panel. The post
Speaker 6: Office will pick two, and they then ELC will pick two,
Speaker 6: and then I think there's one impartial that's supposed to
Speaker 6: be impartial between that. I believe that's how the arbitration
Speaker 6: process works. We got to prove our case in front
Speaker 6: of impartial arbiters instead of going on strike.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so, as we sort of mentioned before, one
Speaker 3: of the things about the post office, it's it's similar
Speaker 3: if people remember the rail like the rail strike that
Speaker 3: didn't happen, where there's all of these hoops you have
Speaker 3: to jump, you'd be able to go on strike. And
Speaker 3: that's because again, like rail workers, postal workers don't operate
Speaker 3: under the normal sort of National Labor Relations Board like framework.
Speaker 3: Right now, admittedly there was a very good chance that
Speaker 3: it like in like seven months, we don't even have that.
Speaker 3: No one has that anymore. But you know, things are
Speaker 3: as we are right now. Yeah, it's it's I think
Speaker 3: things are going good, but the as things are going
Speaker 3: right now, let's get into the current tentative agreement, and
Speaker 3: I guess we should actually we should roll this back
Speaker 3: a little tiny bit. People who haven't listened to these
Speaker 3: episodes before, can you explain what a tentative agreement is right.
Speaker 5: So a tentative agreement is effectively the first draft. When
Speaker 5: you are going through and negotiating, you will reach a
Speaker 5: contract where management and the union kind of agree and
Speaker 5: they put it before their union members. And the idea
Speaker 5: is that your union members are able to vote whether
Speaker 5: or not this tentative agreement passes. And again, like that
Speaker 5: nof was saying, if it gets rejected or if it
Speaker 5: gets turned down, then it goes back to the drawing board,
Speaker 5: or we get an arbitrator, and it goes through a
Speaker 5: lengthy process. Our specific contract has been under negotiation since
Speaker 5: before I.
Speaker 1: Was in the Post Office.
Speaker 5: The amount of back pay that they're going to have
Speaker 5: to pay on some of these races is kind of insane,
Speaker 5: and I imagine that a lot of people won't see
Speaker 5: it for a long time.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's what a tentative agreement is.
Speaker 5: A lot of people think that it's a bad thing
Speaker 5: to go back to the drawing board, or a bad
Speaker 5: thing to be negotiate or be put before an arbitrator.
Speaker 5: I largely think that is a myth. If you think
Speaker 5: about any sort of negotiation, the first the first offer
Speaker 5: is never the best one. I think a lot of
Speaker 5: people are just afraid that somehow you would end up
Speaker 5: giving more than you're getting. And I think that's just
Speaker 5: the way that the rhetoric has gone for unions lately,
Speaker 5: and I guess I need to adjust that a little bit,
Speaker 5: because the Teamsters, even like the Service Workers' Union, they're
Speaker 5: all really doing well. The Communications Union, we're in a
Speaker 5: little bit of a different age, but a lot of
Speaker 5: the Post Office is old heads, military veterans, that kind
Speaker 5: of sort who will just come from a little bit
Speaker 5: of an earlier time when the labor movement was really
Speaker 5: starting to plant their feet on the ground.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of them are still dealing with I
Speaker 6: like most of us are the hangover from the Reagan years. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: so they're all terrified of union stuff. Even though they
Speaker 6: love the union and they're in the union, they're very
Speaker 6: distrustful of it. And they don't think that we can
Speaker 6: ask for what we deserve. They think we need to
Speaker 6: ask for what they think we can get based on
Speaker 6: the ship that management is saying, because they're again still
Speaker 6: shell shocked from the Reagan years and all the anti
Speaker 6: labor stuff.
Speaker 3: And that's that's how a profound impact on most of
Speaker 3: the unions that survived that period and a lot of
Speaker 3: them didn't, right, which is which is you know, part
Speaker 3: of why you get people who behave like this. But
Speaker 3: on the downside is it means that you get handed
Speaker 3: a lot of deals that absolutely suck. But do you
Speaker 3: know what else absolutely sucks? It's the products and services
Speaker 3: that's for this podcast, the probably don't I don't know.
Speaker 3: We are back, so let's talk about what the tentative
Speaker 3: agreements that y'all are being asked to sign is right now?
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, so it's been I think we're coming up
Speaker 6: on six hundred days since our last contract expired.
Speaker 4: Jeez. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's people that just want their back pay. So
Speaker 6: even if the back pay is dog shit, they're desperate
Speaker 6: because inflation is eight percent across the country in some places, right,
Speaker 6: and like people are just desperate for that chunk of money.
Speaker 6: That delaying process feels very very intentional.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the tenetive agreement comes out around five hundred days
Speaker 6: after negotiations we're supposed to have started, and there's all
Speaker 6: sorts of nonsense going on during then, but we're getting
Speaker 6: promises like it's going to be a historic agreement, We're
Speaker 6: going to get significant raises. We're going to go to
Speaker 6: an all career workforce, which, by the way, we don't
Speaker 6: have right now.
Speaker 3: Hey, can you saw what that is with the way? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Uh okay.
Speaker 6: So in every other trade you have an apprenticeship program, right,
Speaker 6: so when you get on the job, you wet behind
Speaker 6: the ears, you're brand new. You are automatically career, you
Speaker 6: are automatically paying into your retirement. You're automatically getting the
Speaker 6: regular benefits everyone else is. In most trades, you're paying
Speaker 6: half the dues that the journeymen are paying, and you
Speaker 6: are considered a full employee.
Speaker 4: You're the new jack.
Speaker 6: You're getting all the shit jobs, but you are a
Speaker 6: full employee. The Post Office has a position called the
Speaker 6: City Carrier Assistant, which, on paper and how they'll tell
Speaker 6: you sounds like an apprenticeship program, but it's really more
Speaker 6: like they took an apprenticeship program and an unpaid internship
Speaker 6: and jammed them together. Because these kids are coming in
Speaker 6: and I'm not even kids. I'm forty years old. I
Speaker 6: started as a CCIA of forty years old. They're coming
Speaker 6: in making less than twenty dollars an hour. They're not
Speaker 6: considered a career, so they're not paying into their retirement.
Speaker 6: You have got all the same union protections, Your benefits
Speaker 6: are super low, you get five days of annually the
Speaker 6: year and no sick time. Like it's it's yeah, it's
Speaker 6: a meat it's a meat grinder.
Speaker 4: So that was a big thing.
Speaker 6: And it creates a whole third tier because we already
Speaker 6: have two different, two different tiered wage system which sucks enough,
Speaker 6: and anyone that pays attention to labor that drives a
Speaker 6: huge wedge between workers and it crushes solidarity at kneecaps
Speaker 6: a union, and now with the CCA position in this
Speaker 6: non career workforce, it's created a whole third tier.
Speaker 3: This is one of the things that the UAW is
Speaker 3: fighting for. It's like, is eliminating teering systems all together,
Speaker 3: because if you're actually trying to get a functional union
Speaker 3: and make people's jobs better, that's the thing that you do.
Speaker 3: And having a having a third tier yeah not good,
Speaker 3: extremely bad.
Speaker 6: Yeah exactly, And it's it's it's because they've adopted sort
Speaker 6: of this Amazon model of doing things where they just
Speaker 6: have this burning churn situation where like Amazon Bezos said
Speaker 6: that he doesn't want anyone working for Amazon for more
Speaker 6: than like.
Speaker 4: Two years, Yeah, if they have these.
Speaker 6: People constantly and they're constantly burning through them, and they
Speaker 6: never have to pay full benefits, they never have to
Speaker 6: pay into their retirement, they never have to pay them
Speaker 6: more than twenty dollars an hour, and they can just
Speaker 6: get you to work your ass off and burn out
Speaker 6: and quit within two years.
Speaker 4: As people retire, their labor costs go down. It's evil.
Speaker 4: It's absolutely it's some Jack Welch hateful bullshit.
Speaker 5: So touching on that, if people are really quitting before
Speaker 5: they reach a point in their career where they're educated
Speaker 5: and can stand up for themselves or stand up for
Speaker 5: each other on the workroom floor, that's one of the
Speaker 5: major reasons that our union is failing. And like you said,
Speaker 5: you use the exact example that I would have. The
Speaker 5: Amazon model is working really well. If you can just
Speaker 5: make it so that people are so miserable they quit
Speaker 5: their job before they understand what their rights are, how
Speaker 5: they can protect each other, what even the contract says
Speaker 5: on the basics of when can you call out, when
Speaker 5: are you required to come in? Can they send you
Speaker 5: home early without your pay? That's massive. And while we
Speaker 5: were talking about the conditions of the nineteen seventies and
Speaker 5: how long it takes you to get to the top
Speaker 5: of the pay scale. This third tier actually increases that
Speaker 5: time by sometimes three or four years. I've known people
Speaker 5: who have been ccas for three or four years. I
Speaker 5: don't think I've seen beyond that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Speaker 5: What this does is it means that before you go career,
Speaker 5: you're spending all this time. You're effectively a fully trained,
Speaker 5: full employee, completely capable of doing everything that's required of you.
Speaker 5: You're just not getting any of the career benefits making
Speaker 5: a minimum wage. And on top of that, the way
Speaker 5: our benefits work is it does come out of your
Speaker 5: pay chash Sheet's not like other jobs where it might
Speaker 5: be a separate package or already calculated. In for instance,
Speaker 5: a lot of the trades, they'll say, hey, you get
Speaker 5: twenty three an hour, but the reality is you're making
Speaker 5: around twenty nine or thirty because you're not paying into
Speaker 5: your health.
Speaker 1: Insurance or your retirement or.
Speaker 5: Anything, that you're effectively making less than the minimum wage.
Speaker 5: You're almost paying to go to work as a CCA.
Speaker 5: Then just to be Yoda and told that you're not
Speaker 5: going fast enough, even though there's no street standard. But
Speaker 5: that's that's getting into a little bit of nipicky key
Speaker 5: contract and stuff that language.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so yeah, that's one thing that they're promising was
Speaker 6: to get rid of that non career workforce. So this
Speaker 6: ta comes out and after hearing that we're getting rid
Speaker 6: of the non career significant raises, it's going to be
Speaker 6: historic for us. What they offered us was one point
Speaker 6: three percent Jesus Christy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and this is something for if you
Speaker 3: were in a union and you hear your leadership say
Speaker 3: the words historic contract, you are screwed. That agreement is
Speaker 3: going to suck. I remember on this show, literally live
Speaker 3: and recording right before they're supposed to be the Teamster's
Speaker 3: ups strike, right Like, I'm literally on the episode with
Speaker 3: two of the union people and we get the text
Speaker 3: of the contract in the middle of recording, and we
Speaker 3: get the thing with it is this historic contract, and
Speaker 3: we're like reading it in the middle the episode was like, wait,
Speaker 3: this fucking sucks. Shit. It's like, that's that's how you
Speaker 3: know you are duped when you get the historic When
Speaker 3: they start pulling out the historic contract thing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you'd think if you're making six figures a year,
Speaker 6: you could understand how to buy a used car and
Speaker 6: know that you promise low and deliver high. Like I
Speaker 6: don't understand how making six figures a year. They haven't
Speaker 6: figured that out. But yeah, so in this contract, one
Speaker 6: point three percent, and that's enough to piss anyone off
Speaker 6: because that drops about the same time that we all
Speaker 6: see the longshoremen getting going back to the table because
Speaker 6: they didn't get sixty percent, you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I'm surprised more people just didn't call in sick because
Speaker 6: we all got this news on the worker and floor
Speaker 6: and I was like, did you see this shit? I
Speaker 6: know people that quit that day, you know what I mean, Like, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's wild. So one point three percent. They're keeping
Speaker 6: the city carrier assistance to nin career workforce. They're removing
Speaker 6: some of our union protections right like it used to be.
Speaker 4: You have twelve six the hour rule.
Speaker 6: You don't have to work more than twelve hours in
Speaker 6: a day or sixty hours in a week. You can
Speaker 6: say I can't do this, I'm going home, and the
Speaker 6: union could protect you. Now if you are a CCA,
Speaker 6: or if you have signed up to do overtime and
Speaker 6: they tell you to stay sixteen hours you have you
Speaker 6: have no choice.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ. So so so you you gave up things
Speaker 3: for a one point that's that's a one point three
Speaker 3: percent raise. Is like like that that's the kind of
Speaker 3: thing that you get if like I don't know, say,
Speaker 3: like you got like some unbelievable concession package somewhere else,
Speaker 3: maybe conceivably you would take that, or maybe maybe it's
Speaker 3: a thing where like you're you're you're like a nurse
Speaker 3: and your problem isn't pay. Your problem is you're working
Speaker 3: like two million hours a week. But like that's that's
Speaker 3: a that's a you got concession somewhere else, the kind
Speaker 3: of thing, not a we gave up stuff for like
Speaker 3: the worst rays you've ever seen.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it makes it makes you think about,
Speaker 6: like what was there?
Speaker 4: What was their first offer?
Speaker 6: Like it's been over five hundred days of negotiations, what
Speaker 6: was the first offer? We got to put the fuel
Speaker 6: in the mail trucks ourselves?
Speaker 4: Like you know what I mean, Tom.
Speaker 6: Do you want do you want to talk about what
Speaker 6: the tenet of agreement doesn't address?
Speaker 5: So the tenetive Agreement, we spoke about the Post Office's
Speaker 5: strategy for dealing with our grievances or how to combat
Speaker 5: the union last episode, and so for the people that
Speaker 5: didn't listen to it or just need a refresher, the
Speaker 5: Post Office has found this extremely effective strategy that if
Speaker 5: they just don't agree at any point in our in
Speaker 5: our grievance procedure, which is if they violate the contract
Speaker 5: and we want to be made whole, whatever that may
Speaker 5: look like, they can just keep on saying no and
Speaker 5: push it up to arbitration because there is a grievance
Speaker 5: procedure that ends up with a third party intervening as well,
Speaker 5: and if they push enough of those grievances up, we
Speaker 5: have a major backlaw on this process because our final
Speaker 5: resort is now just the standard of operation. And what
Speaker 5: that means is that there's nothing to force the Post
Speaker 5: Office to comply with the contract. If someone wasn't paid
Speaker 5: correctly or was missing a whole day of pay, got
Speaker 5: sent home, or was put on emergency placement, which is
Speaker 5: a process where they say you did something dangerous and
Speaker 5: so they can take you off the clock. It could
Speaker 5: be months or even a year before your case is
Speaker 5: even looked at. They do have a process, of course,
Speaker 5: where they try and prioritize it, but it's obviously not working.
Speaker 1: The other thing that the contract doesn't really touch on is.
Speaker 5: Our uniform situation, where the companies that make and manufacture
Speaker 5: the uniforms for our letter carriers and actually for all
Speaker 5: the positions in the post office are effectively trying to
Speaker 5: sell you a shirt for like eighty dollars, or the
Speaker 5: most egregious one is like your win your Parka is
Speaker 5: close to four hundred dollars and your balance that you're
Speaker 5: you're giving is I think three eighty FM.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's been one.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's up to four ninety nine.
Speaker 6: But the rain trench coat, just the raincoat is four
Speaker 6: hundred and sixty five dollars and you have to get
Speaker 6: it through a vendor, so you can't even pay them
Speaker 6: money to do that. Like a pair of polyester pants
Speaker 6: that's going to fall apart in two months, ninety five dollars.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, it's it's wild. It's wild price gouging.
Speaker 6: And they they were going to address that, and what
Speaker 6: they did was they increased are they increased our uniform
Speaker 6: allowance by thirty five dollars, which is like three pairs
Speaker 6: of socks from those magazines.
Speaker 3: Great incredible stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's it's wild.
Speaker 3: Someone should dig into who's running that company and like
Speaker 3: who they're working with to get those contracts, because probably
Speaker 3: a fun story there.
Speaker 5: I think it's like four out of five of the
Speaker 5: approved manufacturers or the distributed are owned by the same people.
Speaker 3: So oh great, okay, Yeah, I'm bequeathing this as a
Speaker 3: gift to it. I know there's a bunch of journalists.
Speaker 3: You listen to this, go go do that story. I
Speaker 3: guarantee you'll find some unbelievably unhinged stuff.
Speaker 5: And a quick shout out to any letter carriers that
Speaker 5: are listening to this. If you don't use your entire allowance,
Speaker 5: look out for the ccas, look out for the PTFs,
Speaker 5: the non career and the fresh faces on there. If
Speaker 5: you don't use the entirety of your uniform allowance, to
Speaker 5: the way that they view it is that they can
Speaker 5: give us less money, So use all of it. Don't
Speaker 5: protest by not spending that money. It's not even yours,
Speaker 5: so spend it. Give it to someone, do something, you.
Speaker 6: Know, Yeah, get the new jack in your office a
Speaker 6: fucking raincoat, because like I tried, to do the math
Speaker 6: on it. For winter gear for a place like Minnesota,
Speaker 6: to get all the winter gear and your summer gear,
Speaker 6: it's going to take you four years of uniform allowances
Speaker 6: to get.
Speaker 4: All that gear. Jesus right, it's ridiculous. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And like it's Minnesota, right, Like I'm from Chicago, so
Speaker 3: like it is, it is slightly warmer in Chicago and
Speaker 3: you get wincheles in negative forty here, Yeah, and like
Speaker 3: Minnesota is much worse. So like that is that that
Speaker 3: is not like optional stuff. That is the difference between
Speaker 3: you having hypothermia and you not.
Speaker 4: Have Yeah, no, exactly.
Speaker 6: And and god forbid you want to buy a pair
Speaker 6: of shorts as well, because Minnesota, Minnesota summers get over
Speaker 6: one hundred index.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, speaking speaking of ways to not die in
Speaker 3: Minnesota summers, here are some product and services that will
Speaker 3: probably not help you with that, but maybe they will.
Speaker 3: And we are back.
Speaker 6: One of the other things that Tom touched on that
Speaker 6: this agreement doesn't address is he talked about the non
Speaker 6: compliance and the grievance backlog, but also just the toxic
Speaker 6: work environment, which we've talked about.
Speaker 4: And it's so bad.
Speaker 6: The whole reason we have The trope of someone going
Speaker 6: postal is usually because someone's bullied to a point where
Speaker 6: violence occurs. They either take it out on management or
Speaker 6: my own manager in my first year got in a
Speaker 6: fistfight with one of the clerks.
Speaker 3: Jesus correct.
Speaker 6: The post office has lost grievances because management was threatening
Speaker 6: to shoot an employee. Any letter carrier would have been
Speaker 6: fired for that immediately that manager got a letter of warning.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we have a joint statement on violence in the workplace,
Speaker 5: which I think you were about to get into the leg. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they're just not complying. It's a very one sided thing. Effectively,
Speaker 5: management has qualified immunity.
Speaker 3: Great, great, your managers are also cops. It could attack you. Incredible,
Speaker 3: incredible stuff from the post office.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and then there's a bunch of wage theft too.
Speaker 6: I mean personally, I caught my own manager putting in
Speaker 6: all the ccas for two hour lunches because the ccas
Speaker 6: are new and don't know what they're doing and they
Speaker 6: don't know check their time all the time, putting us
Speaker 6: all in for two hour lunches and then told me,
Speaker 6: tried to pretend to me, oh, that was just an
Speaker 6: automatic computer error. Whereas if we take a thirty one
Speaker 6: minute lunch. I have my phone blowing up being asked
Speaker 6: why I'm not moving and delivering the mail. But you
Speaker 6: guys manage to accidentally miss a two hour left.
Speaker 3: Come on, don't lie.
Speaker 4: You don't gotta lie.
Speaker 6: You don't gotta lie to be my friend, Like, come on,
Speaker 6: and then and then there's other places around the country
Speaker 6: where we the NLCS one grievances where management was making
Speaker 6: CCA's work in the dark, delivering mail till like seven
Speaker 6: thirty pm and clocking them out at four o'clock in
Speaker 6: the after business. All right, so they got people out
Speaker 6: there working for free. It's it's and we have to
Speaker 6: catch we have to catch them doing that. Yeah, they're
Speaker 6: never going to own up to it that they all
Speaker 6: watch their payroll. The management structure at the post office,
Speaker 6: it's like the TMU version of Game of Thrones. They're
Speaker 6: all nasty, they're all backstabbing each other, and like, the
Speaker 6: nastier you are and the more willing you are to
Speaker 6: screw people, the higher up you go in management at
Speaker 6: the post office, Like it's disgusting.
Speaker 5: So there's even more convoluted ways that the management finds
Speaker 5: to effectively steal from the employees, and one of them
Speaker 5: huge problem is changing the metrics on what a route
Speaker 5: looks like. And so they can alter the times of hey,
Speaker 5: how long you were in the office packing your truck
Speaker 5: when you got back to the office and started unloading
Speaker 5: and cleaning, And so what they do is they make
Speaker 5: it look like the street time took you, let's call
Speaker 5: it five hours, and you were in the office for
Speaker 5: four hours. That way, they can make a route look
Speaker 5: smaller than it actually is and have an excuse not
Speaker 5: to hire another person, which makes it so that this
Speaker 5: poor carrier who was assigned to this route now has
Speaker 5: a ten hour day, eleven hour day just by default
Speaker 5: on a light day, on a regular day.
Speaker 1: This is a really big problem for the rural carriers.
Speaker 1: Their contract is a little bit different.
Speaker 5: Effectively, they get paid by the job, not necessarily hourly,
Speaker 5: or that's the case for a lot of them, and
Speaker 5: so if you're adjusting their times, they're going to be
Speaker 5: paid out for an eight hour day. But you know,
Speaker 5: the route has just been stretched out through this method
Speaker 5: of just dishonest scanning and disalamant entries, and they get
Speaker 5: free labor. And I'm not even well versed on the
Speaker 5: RCA contract that's a whole other You know, there's only
Speaker 5: nine unions that go into the post office, which means
Speaker 5: there's probably nine different contracts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in every single one of these contracts, they're
Speaker 3: inventing new, different and unique ways to do wage theft
Speaker 3: just steal people's money, which, and it's worth noting again,
Speaker 3: like if a post carrier like broke into an office
Speaker 3: and stole the amount of money that is being stolen
Speaker 3: from them, they would go to prison forever. Right, But
Speaker 3: because it's your boss doing this, Like, the worst thing
Speaker 3: that happens to them is they have to go through
Speaker 3: a grievance procedure even though they are just literally robbing you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, and yeah, you do not fuck with the
Speaker 6: mail cops. But the mail cops the postal inspectors work
Speaker 6: for management. So yeah, and management does nothing but sit
Speaker 6: in their chair all day, sniffing their own farts, watching tiktoks,
Speaker 6: and trying to figure out how to screw people through
Speaker 6: the virtue of spreadsheets while we are all out working
Speaker 6: our asses off. It's a very demoralizing and abusive, abusive situation.
Speaker 6: So we were hoping that shit would get addressed in
Speaker 6: the tenetive agreement and none of it was. So there's
Speaker 6: all sorts of problems with that. I'm with building a
Speaker 6: fighting an elc and we are basically a bottom up
Speaker 6: more of a radical reform caucus.
Speaker 4: I am out of Fort Worth, but like it's started.
Speaker 6: In Minneapolis, and you've got people in Chicago and New
Speaker 6: York and Naples, Florida, and San Antonio, Hawaii, all over
Speaker 6: the country who are basically, we are tired of we
Speaker 6: are tired of our leadership being in bed with management
Speaker 6: or at least doing things where they look like they're
Speaker 6: in bed with management. We've been putting on vote no
Speaker 6: rallies all over the country. You've probably seen some on
Speaker 6: the news.
Speaker 3: And this this is vote no for the tight devisse. Yes,
Speaker 3: this is this is this is a vote to send
Speaker 3: your bargaining reps back to the table with the demand
Speaker 3: that we can't take a deal that sucks this much.
Speaker 3: That's what a vote no thing is. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So yeah, we've been trying to get letter carriers to
Speaker 6: vote no on it. That's so we've been doing the
Speaker 6: vote no campaigns so we can vote this shit down
Speaker 6: and get it in front of a judge. Because once
Speaker 6: it goes into arbitration, there's a lot of fear mongering things,
Speaker 6: Oh we could lose this, Oh we could lose that.
Speaker 6: Oh we could lose this. But like Mia, you you
Speaker 6: said it yourself. These are all concessions. We're not getting
Speaker 6: anything for giving up all these things. One point three
Speaker 6: percent is what we're getting.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, like one point three percent is the kind
Speaker 3: of raise that like in a normal functioning union is
Speaker 3: like that. That's like a company's opening agreements that both
Speaker 3: you and the company knows you're not going to take. Yeah,
Speaker 3: like it's a joke.
Speaker 6: Like that in and of itself would be a major
Speaker 6: concession to get something else.
Speaker 4: But we're doing all these concessions to get that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the win quote unquote.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the thing is the Postal Reform Act says that
Speaker 6: we are supposed to get paid comparatively to a comparable
Speaker 6: company in the private sector. So an arbiter is going
Speaker 6: to look at that and try and look at ups
Speaker 6: UPS or Amazon, and the post Office is really trying
Speaker 6: to push it towards Amazon, which is why I try
Speaker 6: to talk to every letter carrier i know to support
Speaker 6: and get some crosscraft solidarity with Amazon, because without going
Speaker 6: on too much of a rabbit trail the whole you know,
Speaker 6: a rising tide lifts all ships, and one union in
Speaker 6: another industry helps everyone in every other industry. And trying
Speaker 6: to get people to understand that. But like you compare
Speaker 6: our contract to UPS and UPS they top out with
Speaker 6: I think their benefits package tops out one hundred and
Speaker 6: twenty four thousand a year and it's about, you know, five.
Speaker 4: Or eight years to reach top scale. Ours tops out.
Speaker 6: With this tentative agreement at ninety three thousand a year,
Speaker 6: and it still takes us thirteen years to get to
Speaker 6: top steps. Christ, that's not comparable, right, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 6: not at all. So I'm not afraid of arbitration. I'm
Speaker 6: hoping we get this in front of an arbiter, because
Speaker 6: unless that arbiter is completely crooked, I can't see him saying, well,
Speaker 6: you guys deserve one point three percent.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So when I first saw badmouth talking and what his
Speaker 5: posts were on Reddit and stuff like that, I got
Speaker 5: really excited because I remember when I was speaking to
Speaker 5: my local president and talking to the stewards in my
Speaker 5: area across like a couple of different stations, the kind
Speaker 5: of big question was what do you do when the
Speaker 5: union breaks your heart? And I guess the answer is
Speaker 5: everything that badmouth has just talked about. You build a
Speaker 5: better one. You remind people that there is an alternative.
Speaker 5: Everything started somewhere. And if you go to his first
Speaker 5: episode on the From Aid to Arbitration podcast, he has
Speaker 5: something called the CCA Corner where he's educating the newcomers,
Speaker 5: the fresh faces. He's just talking about horizontal power. And
Speaker 5: I was listening to that episode before we had spoken.
Speaker 5: I got so excited just to hear what this this
Speaker 5: person was up to.
Speaker 6: You know, I try to sneak in as many anarchist
Speaker 6: shit without saying I'm an anarchist. I try and sneak
Speaker 6: as much of that shit in as I can. I
Speaker 6: get old heads who have a Trump hat on talking
Speaker 6: about anarchist talking points.
Speaker 4: It's it's funny as fuck to me.
Speaker 1: You know who won't break your heart?
Speaker 3: Frogs support this podcast if you don't fight them with
Speaker 3: therefore canoffee. Is there anything else you want to talk
Speaker 3: about with arbitration or should we move on to the
Speaker 3: impending doom of the postal Service? Yeah?
Speaker 6: I think I think the arbitration there's a whole lot
Speaker 6: of fear mongoring and shit. I think anyone paying attention
Speaker 6: to things we can't get a worse deal is the
Speaker 6: main point there, and that's that's the whole point of
Speaker 6: the vote no campaign is to just tell people, hey, dude,
Speaker 6: we might as well go down swinging, like we're not
Speaker 6: going to get a worse deal than this.
Speaker 4: But that's that's pretty much it for arbitration.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's let let's let's move on to the
Speaker 3: future of the post office, which I want to take
Speaker 3: a second to mention that, like, Okay, look like I
Speaker 3: am not someone who has any respect for the people
Speaker 3: who built the US government. However, if you want the
Speaker 3: US government to like exist, right, the postal service is
Speaker 3: something that was deemed so important that it is like
Speaker 3: establishing the postal service is in the main body of
Speaker 3: the constitution. Now, freedom of speech right, and like the
Speaker 3: right to free association, that's not in the main body
Speaker 3: of the constitution. That is a fucking amendment. Right. The
Speaker 3: people who built the American system thought that the postal
Speaker 3: service was a more important thing to make sure to
Speaker 3: have in the main body of the constitution that set
Speaker 3: up the modern version of the government.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: They thought that shit was more important than like you're
Speaker 3: right to have freedom of assembly, like you're right to
Speaker 3: not literally be grabbed off the street and tortured, which
Speaker 3: is like the Fourth Amendment right. So like, you know,
Speaker 3: in the scale of priorities of like how important is
Speaker 3: the postal service, Like that's how important people who set
Speaker 3: it up thought it was. And those people were not
Speaker 3: very smart and like a bunch of racist slave voters.
Speaker 3: So I would argue it's actually more important than they
Speaker 3: thought it was because they're you know, I mean, like
Speaker 3: obviously their priorities are completely out of whack.
Speaker 6: But like I am not a founding father, stand but
Speaker 6: the post office was actually invented by Benjamin Franklin, who
Speaker 6: I don't believe owned any slaves, and.
Speaker 3: Yeah he was really racist, but yeah, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean like I know, I know that, I know that part.
Speaker 6: I'm I just I don't think he actually owned anybody,
Speaker 6: but like that's it's a yeah yeah, and it was
Speaker 6: started I think fifteen years before the Constitution was even written.
Speaker 3: Oh no, he did, he he he he did own
Speaker 3: a slave as a young man, and I think freed him.
Speaker 6: You know, I was trying to get the racist bastard
Speaker 6: a little bit of a win.
Speaker 3: But like we're finding this out live on this So yeah,
Speaker 3: he did for his early life and then became an
Speaker 3: abolitionist later, which is still bad.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's uh. You know, I'm glad you came
Speaker 4: around eventually, I guess.
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Look, we're finding this out live on the show. Oh
Speaker 3: my god, that was a lot of time of him
Speaker 3: owning slaves. That absolutely I.
Speaker 4: Take that was why I take back my critical support.
Speaker 3: Critical uncritical opposition.
Speaker 6: To hell with Brent frank in school, the hell with
Speaker 6: b Franklin too. But yeah, we're coming in a Trump
Speaker 6: administration and stuff. And let me tell you that the
Speaker 6: situation wasn't really great under Biden either, because we have
Speaker 6: a postmaster, Lewis.
Speaker 4: Dickhead to Joy.
Speaker 6: He was put into place by Donald Trump, and you've
Speaker 6: seen they wanted to slow walk the post office into
Speaker 6: privatization since the Reagan years, right, and they're just slowly
Speaker 6: chipping away at service and quality. D Joy was connected
Speaker 6: to XPO, the giant logistics company. He had stock and
Speaker 6: I can't remember what position he held. He apparently detangled
Speaker 6: himself from that when he became postmaster. But you know,
Speaker 6: they all say that I don't know for sure. I
Speaker 6: am not an accountant, so I can't do that well.
Speaker 3: And like like, also I want to point out the
Speaker 3: president of the United States is issuing a cryptocurrency like
Speaker 3: that shit that sit is that shit is so fake now,
Speaker 3: like oh god yeah.
Speaker 6: So like Joy's also got a reputations of just being
Speaker 6: a massive job killer besides looking like a low rent
Speaker 6: spider man villain. So under his tenure, we've seen service
Speaker 6: take quality take a nosedive. And I want to talk
Speaker 6: about this stuff, and this might get my ass in trouble,
Speaker 6: but I am tired as a letter carrier who loves
Speaker 6: my job, loves saying hi to people in the neighborhood,
Speaker 6: loves walking three yards and knowing the names of all
Speaker 6: the dogs on my route, and being the face of
Speaker 6: the post office. It is so frustrating to have people
Speaker 6: blame the mail man and the letter carrier for the
Speaker 6: decline in service, because we are out there being brutalized
Speaker 6: by the Post Office, doing our best and fighting against
Speaker 6: the degradation of service. That is a top down problem
Speaker 6: with leadership in the Post Office. I wanted to outline
Speaker 6: some of the stuff that I have evidence of and
Speaker 6: have seen firsthand of management undercutting the service of the
Speaker 6: post office. They willfully delay the mail all the time.
Speaker 6: There's pictures of racks and racks of DPS. It's assorted
Speaker 6: letters and they come in trays just sitting in a
Speaker 6: warehouse somewhere, and management they will order you on a
Speaker 6: regular basis to prioritize delivering packages over the mail. If
Speaker 6: it's a big heavy day and they're looking at labor hours,
Speaker 6: they will sometimes tell you to not deliver the mail
Speaker 6: and just deliver.
Speaker 4: The packages because the packages.
Speaker 6: Have a tracking number and their boss can get in
Speaker 6: They can get in trouble for that, but they can
Speaker 6: lie and hide the mail for another day.
Speaker 4: Like that shit happens all the time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's like can just be like they can
Speaker 3: just be like hiding like your bills yep, or life
Speaker 3: social Security check yeah yeah, also your junk mail.
Speaker 6: Have you ever have you ever ordered something and it
Speaker 6: says it was delivered but you didn't get it, and
Speaker 6: then it shows up the next day, or it says that,
Speaker 6: oh there's a vacation hold, I didn't put this on hold,
Speaker 6: and then it shows up the next day, or you
Speaker 6: got to go down to the post office.
Speaker 1: To get it, or recently severe weather delay.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I mean the severe the severe weather delay
Speaker 6: can happen, but I'm talking. What I'm talking about is
Speaker 6: ones where the package didn't make it to the letter
Speaker 6: carrier who's out there delivering. Because this has happened to
Speaker 6: me multiple times, and it didn't make it to me
Speaker 6: before I left the station. But because they want to
Speaker 6: make their numbers look good for their boss, they will
Speaker 6: scan it at the station as if it was delivered
Speaker 6: or as if it's a Jesus.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So because they want.
Speaker 6: Their numbers to look good, because their entire job is
Speaker 6: life on a spreadsheet. And so then I have to
Speaker 6: I have to talk to my customers the following day.
Speaker 6: But like it said, it is delivered.
Speaker 4: I didn't. I saw you, and you didn't drop it off.
Speaker 4: I was worried someone stole it. What happened. I was like,
Speaker 4: I know exactly what happened. I know what their name is.
Speaker 6: That's some of the service degradation. We've had people in
Speaker 6: other areas catch management.
Speaker 3: Throwing away mail Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 6: Management reprimanding carriers who follow the manual and provide good
Speaker 6: customer service, like I've been on the phone where I've
Speaker 6: had my manager call me because I was standing in
Speaker 6: one place for five minutes. And it's because I was
Speaker 6: helping an elderly woman move her garbage cans and helped
Speaker 6: her get some groceries out of her car to bring in.
Speaker 6: You know, all the stuff that you see the good
Speaker 6: mail man, the reason why people love the post office.
Speaker 4: Shit like that. I got told no, you're not doing that.
Speaker 6: And I had another customer come up to say hi
Speaker 6: to me while I was on the phone, and I
Speaker 6: just stopped to just say hi as I'm walking by,
Speaker 6: and my manager chewed me out for even talking to
Speaker 6: the person. They don't care about us, and they throw
Speaker 6: us under the bus all the time. Because if I
Speaker 6: don't deliver a package because they never made it to
Speaker 6: me and it says delivered, the customer will come and
Speaker 6: complain at the post office. Management will tell them, oh,
Speaker 6: I'll talk to the carrier. That carrier made a mistake,
Speaker 6: and it's no, carriers do make mistakes, but like this
Speaker 6: intentional degradation of service to make the numbers, that blame
Speaker 6: always goes on the letter carrier, and it is we
Speaker 6: love our job. We love our jobs we love our communities.
Speaker 6: I got like I might start crying if I talk
Speaker 6: about this too much, Like I love bringing treats to dogs,
Speaker 6: like I get Christmas cards from old folk on my route,
Speaker 6: Like I know, like I know when some people's birthdays are.
Speaker 6: And I had an old time around on my route,
Speaker 6: sat outside to say I to be every day. Suddenly
Speaker 6: he wasn't and his wife was out in the garden,
Speaker 6: and I said, where is he. Oh, he passed last night,
Speaker 6: and she starts crying. I start crying, and like I
Speaker 6: get in trouble for taking five minutes to give her
Speaker 6: a hug and talk things through for a second, like it's.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sorry.
Speaker 3: This is one of these areas where like delivering the
Speaker 3: mail is a social thing, but the thing is like
Speaker 3: sociality is the enemy of capital, and that's that's the
Speaker 3: people who are running the post office that they don't
Speaker 3: give a shit about, you know, like the actual social
Speaker 3: bonds and ties that you know that that are the
Speaker 3: thing that society is supposed to be composed of. Like
Speaker 3: they care about their metrics and them being able to
Speaker 3: make more money in them, you know, being able to
Speaker 3: advance higher in their career ladder. Yes, it reminds me
Speaker 3: a lot of the campaign against the school system, where
Speaker 3: you deliberately underfund things and then you blame the teachers
Speaker 3: for why the service is bad, and it's like, well,
Speaker 3: it is not a teacher's fault that there's like forty
Speaker 3: eight kids in a classroom, right, Like, yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: And there's also a very very similar preparatization campaign run
Speaker 3: by a bunch of Australia powerful forces. Let's go back
Speaker 3: and talk a bit about like who the people are
Speaker 3: who are doing this and what their sort of plans are.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you have to joy he's doing that, and
Speaker 6: we have all of these they're starting to some of
Speaker 6: the stuff they're building these I think they're called sdnc's.
Speaker 6: It's basically they take a bunch of post offices from
Speaker 6: a metro area and then they make one big distribution
Speaker 6: hub like Amazon. Well that is adding an hour commute
Speaker 6: onto some of these letter carriers. They come in, they
Speaker 6: get to their mail truck and then they have to
Speaker 6: drive their mail truck for an hour to even start delivering. Right.
Speaker 6: It's a huge message, it's a huge fiasco, and it
Speaker 6: feels very intentional because what's going to happen when they
Speaker 6: close those facilities built by the government down and it
Speaker 6: starts to privatize. Well, what do you know, Amazon just
Speaker 6: got a new hub or whoever ends up trying to
Speaker 6: step in. That's a little conspiracy brained, but like certain
Speaker 6: fiasco's done by de Joy's delivering for America plan seem
Speaker 6: Taylor made to fail for the Post Office but work
Speaker 6: for someone else. And then also you have Brian Renfrow,
Speaker 6: who is the current president of the NLC, the one
Speaker 6: who was telling us that our tentative agreement was going
Speaker 6: to be historic, when all it does is help management.
Speaker 6: He has gone on speaking tours lying about this tentative
Speaker 6: agreement and everything he says sounds like management gave him
Speaker 6: a script. And there's a whole lot of theories on
Speaker 6: that and how when he know when he loses his position.
Speaker 6: People have running bets on what position he's going to
Speaker 6: take in the Post Office the second he's voted out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: He's the one who's negotiated this whole contract.
Speaker 6: He used his position as president, He iced out everyone
Speaker 6: from the union. He's the only one who talked to
Speaker 6: the Post Office. So this this tenet of agreement is
Speaker 6: his Babe, Wait, what yep, the executive council. What yeah,
Speaker 6: he didn't tell the executive council.
Speaker 3: Wait, you didn't even have like a bargaining team.
Speaker 4: No, he had a.
Speaker 6: Bargaining team that were all outside contractors. He had no
Speaker 6: one from the union with him. What yeah, because he wanted.
Speaker 4: It to be his baby.
Speaker 3: That's so unhidea. That's like, I need to stop here
Speaker 3: for a second, because that's like, if your union is
Speaker 3: doing that to you, you need to understand, Like, dear listener,
Speaker 3: that is not how any of this shit is supposed
Speaker 3: to work. Yep. Like, even even a normal corrupt union
Speaker 3: will have a bargaining team that is composed of like
Speaker 3: it will have a bargaining team that isn't outside contractors,
Speaker 3: so there'll be people from inside the union who are
Speaker 3: like the stooges of like whatever sort of management click
Speaker 3: is in power. Like having them all be outside contractors
Speaker 3: is one of the most ludicrous things I've ever heard.
Speaker 4: You need to.
Speaker 3: Cutting out. That's so wild, Oh my god.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah No.
Speaker 6: And the thing is we're coming up on six hundred
Speaker 6: days without an without a ratified contract, like he has
Speaker 6: been the only one doing it this whole time, and
Speaker 6: there's a bunch of shady shit. Okay, so he's struggled
Speaker 6: with alcoholism. I have dealt with addiction. I have lost
Speaker 6: friends to addiction. I have family members to struggle with addiction.
Speaker 6: I respect anybody who is going to take care themselves.
Speaker 6: But he disappeared for something like fifty days or something,
Speaker 6: didn't tell anybody. He ghosted everybody. He ghosted everybody, and
Speaker 6: this is the early days of negotiation. People stepped in
Speaker 6: to start negotiating without him. It turns out he had
Speaker 6: gone and checked himself into rehab. But the thing is,
Speaker 6: the NLC has two fucking vice presidents. I have all
Speaker 6: the respect in the world for someone to take care
Speaker 6: of themselves. But when you got two hundred and seventy
Speaker 6: seven thousand employees livelihood, yeah, you're responsible for and you
Speaker 6: got I don't care if you got cancer, if you
Speaker 6: got an addiction problem, or I don't care what it is.
Speaker 6: If you got to step away to take care of yourself,
Speaker 6: please do that. But puts your vice, one of your
Speaker 6: two fucking vice presidents in charge. So what happens is
Speaker 6: someone steps in while he's gone, he comes back, gets
Speaker 6: mad that at them, strips them of their responsibilities. Blackballs
Speaker 6: them from the union and goes back into negotiations all
Speaker 6: by himself, which is why getting to the next point
Speaker 6: on this. At the most generous, he is in ept
Speaker 6: as hell. He is inept as hell and just the
Speaker 6: worst sort of person to be in there. At the worst,
Speaker 6: he has corrupt as hell and just DeJoy's stooge. And
Speaker 6: the thing is, we work for the federal government. Whether
Speaker 6: it's malice or incompetence with the federal government, it's usually both.
Speaker 4: And it doesn't matter.
Speaker 6: Which one it is to me, whether he's corrupt or
Speaker 6: just an idiot, it's all the same to me because
Speaker 6: I can't make my fucking rent. So expect de Joy
Speaker 6: and the Post Office to do us dirty. That's their
Speaker 6: job as management. But to have the president of our
Speaker 6: own union doing this to us is unacceptable, and like
Speaker 6: it's yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: So on that note, that's one of the big pushes
Speaker 5: for the union recently has been to reach open bargaining
Speaker 5: where the membership is actually a part of it. And
Speaker 5: that's what to my knowledge, it is one of the
Speaker 5: major issues that the building and fighting and IOC or
Speaker 5: the building better union talks are going towards.
Speaker 3: Yeah, can you can you talk about what open bargaining is.
Speaker 3: It's a thing that should be the standards for all unions.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean open bargaining is effectively the bottom
Speaker 5: up structure of having your members were even the representatives
Speaker 5: put forward motions that are open to the public and
Speaker 5: open to the membership so that you can effect tofllly
Speaker 5: ask for more or get a different variety of opinions
Speaker 5: and strategies, you know, the duality of power kind of structure.
Speaker 5: But what the post office currently has it's not open bargaining,
Speaker 5: or what postal union has, it's not open bargaining. They
Speaker 5: have their own team that they send in. They don't
Speaker 5: talk to the membership. You kind of just elect your
Speaker 5: officials and then they come back with whatever they ended
Speaker 5: up with, and they don't consult with any of their
Speaker 5: bottom line, which is problematic for obvious reasons, including this
Speaker 5: one where someone can go missing for fifty days and
Speaker 5: most of the membership has no idea. I've even talked
Speaker 5: to people. I think it was like two or three
Speaker 5: weeks ago. I went to a bar and I ran
Speaker 5: into a letter carrier from the next city over as
Speaker 5: a go did you vote?
Speaker 9: Know?
Speaker 1: And it's like, what are you talking about? He doesn't
Speaker 1: know that there's a vote going on.
Speaker 3: Is out there?
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, but yeah, yeah, I guess. I mean, like
Speaker 4: the main objective we want to do, I'm sure we're
Speaker 4: running at a time.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, sorry.
Speaker 4: I could talk about this shit for days.
Speaker 3: I mean I do.
Speaker 4: That's pretty much all I do anymore. Like Tom was saying,
Speaker 4: the building of fighting ALC and pushing for the vote,
Speaker 4: no thing.
Speaker 6: The main thing that we're wanting is coming onto shows
Speaker 6: like this and getting the public perception of what the
Speaker 6: letter carrier deals.
Speaker 4: With what's going on.
Speaker 6: Because this Trump's coming in, they're going to be trying
Speaker 6: to privatize it like they always do.
Speaker 4: That's already been in the works.
Speaker 6: It's important that the public knows this degradation of service
Speaker 6: is the point of it, and how how can the
Speaker 6: public sort of support our fight so we can keep
Speaker 6: the post office.
Speaker 4: So I wanted to just share a couple of links.
Speaker 6: If you're a letter carrier and you want to get
Speaker 6: involved with reforming things from an electoral end, there's the
Speaker 6: Concern Letter Carriers and you can go to Concern Lettercarriers
Speaker 6: dot com. They're going to be running in twenty twenty
Speaker 6: six to get rid of Renfro. If you are impatient
Speaker 6: like me and you can't fucking wait that long, and
Speaker 6: if even if you're not a letter carrier, you can
Speaker 6: see how we're fighting with the building of Fighting NLC,
Speaker 6: which is more of a radical, bottom up reform caucus.
Speaker 6: If you want to get involved in that, or you
Speaker 6: just want to kind of get updates from people who
Speaker 6: aren't going to bullshit you, you can go to Fighting
Speaker 6: NLC dot com to check that out. Oh, Tom, did
Speaker 6: you want to talk about the ANLC Legislative Action Center.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we touched briefly on last episode. The NLC
Speaker 5: actually can't really use a lot of the money and
Speaker 5: funds from the union itself to lobby or to push
Speaker 5: Congress or anything like that, so there are separate organizations.
Speaker 5: There are facets of our organization that do that. You
Speaker 5: can find that at NLC dot org. Specifically, they do
Speaker 5: have a link where you put in new zip code
Speaker 5: and it gives you the appropriate Congress member to write
Speaker 5: a letter to and really push them on what to do.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 5: You can also donate to their fund if you see
Speaker 5: so fit and are able to do so.
Speaker 6: Yeah, at that legislative action thing is actually pretty cool
Speaker 6: because you don't even have to call. They'll have pre
Speaker 6: filled out things that you can just click, enter your
Speaker 6: email and it'll do it for you.
Speaker 4: So it's a real quick snap.
Speaker 6: It's the easiest way to harass or your congress person,
Speaker 6: aside from drunk dialing Ted Cruz, which is my favorite.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll have links to all that. We'll have links
Speaker 3: to all that in the Discover.
Speaker 6: There's one more plug I wanted to make because all
Speaker 6: the fires out in LA right now, because you have
Speaker 6: letter carriers where the post office burned down and so
Speaker 6: did their house, and now they're reporting to duty at
Speaker 6: another post office twenty minutes away to go and deliver
Speaker 6: deliver mail to a devastated neighborhood.
Speaker 4: Because the thing is, when shit happens.
Speaker 6: Whether it's a hurricane or a fire or you know,
Speaker 6: the first people who show up are your neighbors or
Speaker 6: the punks or the punks and mutual aid in your
Speaker 6: neighbors show up. The first person you see from the government,
Speaker 6: we're federal employees, were not federally is. But the first
Speaker 6: hint of normalcy that a lot of people get is
Speaker 6: trying to just hide out and be safe and then
Speaker 6: they see their mail man walking through their fucking lawn
Speaker 6: trying to deliver it to their shit, you know what
Speaker 6: I mean. Like that's important, and we all love what
Speaker 6: we do. We love being a part of the community,
Speaker 6: and we love helping. And sorry, I knew I was
Speaker 6: gonna cry at some fucking point.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 6: So the NLCS an NLC Disaster Relief Fund.
Speaker 4: The public can donate to it. It's usually letter carriers.
Speaker 4: We all donate to it.
Speaker 6: And what happens is if your house burns down like
Speaker 6: in La right now, or if like you were devastating
Speaker 6: the fires in in in Hawaii or whatever. When that happens,
Speaker 6: a letter carrier can apply and as soon as they're approved,
Speaker 6: which can happen within a day or two, they automatically
Speaker 6: get sent like a thousand dollars from the fund to
Speaker 6: just pay for their pay for their hotel or pay
Speaker 6: for their rent a car. And then they get approved.
Speaker 6: It's not a fix all, but they'll get like they'll
Speaker 6: get another check after a little bit to help with
Speaker 6: some of their damages after they make their claim. That's
Speaker 6: something that normally it's just letter carriers giving to letter carriers.
Speaker 6: So we can all take care of each other, but
Speaker 6: like the public is allowed to donate to that too.
Speaker 6: I know there's a lot of you guys have already
Speaker 6: been talking about a lot of mutual aid stuff at
Speaker 6: the beginning of your episodes lately. I just want to
Speaker 6: plug that one as a mailman specific one. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 6: sorry for crying.
Speaker 3: No, no, Yeah, I mean it's emotional, it's yeah.
Speaker 4: That shit sucks, bro, Yeah, it really does.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Is is there anything else that you want to
Speaker 3: make sure people know before we head off?
Speaker 5: If I have one thing, it's just help your co workers.
Speaker 5: You don't have to be a steward. You don't have
Speaker 5: to be anything. Just find somebody who don't think deserves it.
Speaker 1: Help them too. I guarantee you that they do.
Speaker 10: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a book
Speaker 10: about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co
Speaker 10: author of an upcoming book about the eugenics move in
Speaker 10: Texas called The Purifying Knife.
Speaker 11: And I'm Stephen Monchelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in
Speaker 11: Texas who covers political extremism and beyond.
Speaker 10: Since the late nineteen nineties, Alex Jones built an extensive
Speaker 10: media empire, spreading out landish conspiracy theories from his home
Speaker 10: base in Austin, Texas. A native of the Dallas suburb
Speaker 10: of Rockwall, over the years, Jones has claimed that the
Speaker 10: Apollo eleven moon landing was fake, so too, he said
Speaker 10: was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, he claimed
Speaker 10: was stage to justify new gun control laws. According to Jones,
Speaker 10: the US government can control the weather has intentionally caused
Speaker 10: floods and other weather disasters to punish Texas and other
Speaker 10: conservative states. He has insisted that chemicals intentionally placed in
Speaker 10: American drinking water are turning frogs gay, part of an
Speaker 10: experiment by the American government seeking a way to undermine
Speaker 10: the nuclear family while peddling dubious supplements with unproven health benefits.
Speaker 10: Jones began his broadcasting career with a call in public
Speaker 10: access cable TV show, before moving on to radio and
Speaker 10: then online. In spite of his outlandish claims, in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 10: Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas
Speaker 10: that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott.
Speaker 12: Now to a Texas sized conspiracy theory, sparking headlines across
Speaker 12: the country, including this week in the New York Times
Speaker 12: the theory that an upcoming Pentagon training exercise is actually
Speaker 12: part of a plan to impose martial law.
Speaker 3: To many, it's far fetched, but not.
Speaker 12: To some of the top politicians in the Lone Star State.
Speaker 11: The conspiracy theory Jones described on his Info War show
Speaker 11: spun in even wilder directions. The Army troops participating in
Speaker 11: the jade Helm military exercise, panicked right wingers said, would
Speaker 11: turn on the local population. Guns would be seized from
Speaker 11: private citizens, and local walmarts would be converted into vast
Speaker 11: holding cells where those opposing Obama's plan to seize dictatorial
Speaker 11: power would be imprisoned. According to these sorts of theories,
Speaker 11: these accusations went viral, and a military spokesman got waylaid
Speaker 11: by angry questions At a Bastrop County Commissioner's Court meeting
Speaker 11: held near the Central Texas staging area for jade Helm.
Speaker 11: Armed men in trucks patrolled in Bastrup County and surrounding communities,
Speaker 11: and a private group called Counter jade Helm spied on
Speaker 11: the movement of troops and military vehicles while they quizzed
Speaker 11: residents for any intelligence they may have gathered on the
Speaker 11: impending alleged coup d'eta.
Speaker 10: The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far
Speaker 10: right political leaders were willing to pander to Jones and
Speaker 10: his elk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National
Speaker 10: Guard to monitor US Army troops near Austin.
Speaker 7: We're playing a pivotal role of government, and that is
Speaker 7: to provide information until people have questions.
Speaker 10: Texas Senator Ted Cruz pledged that he would demand answers
Speaker 10: from the Pentagon about the military's intentions, and said he
Speaker 10: completely understood the widespread paranoia.
Speaker 3: You know, I understand the.
Speaker 13: Concern that's been raised by a lot of citizens about
Speaker 13: Jade Hell.
Speaker 3: We have seen for six.
Speaker 14: Years a federal government disrespecting the liberty of the citizens,
Speaker 14: and that produces fever.
Speaker 10: Suffice it to say, the Obama administration did not overthrow
Speaker 10: the state government. The intense outrage and fear generated over
Speaker 10: army combat preparations might have seen perplexing to those outside
Speaker 10: of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic
Speaker 10: and pro military. However, seething distrust of liberal elites is
Speaker 10: a lucrative business in Texas. Alex Jones built a fortune
Speaker 10: of two hundred and seventy million with his Internet show
Speaker 10: and sales of dubious health and survivalist products advertised on
Speaker 10: those broadcasts. This is nothing new south of the Red River.
Speaker 10: From the beginning of its history, the state has been
Speaker 10: an incubator for outlandish and occasionally not completely unreasonable conspiracy theories.
Speaker 11: After Texas violently separated from Mexico in eighteen thirty six,
Speaker 11: white Texans spent the next decade fearing their southern neighbor,
Speaker 11: a nation that saw the Texas Revolution as illegitimate and
Speaker 11: wanted to regain control of the breakaway province. Meanwhile, those
Speaker 11: same white Texans viewed the African Americans they enslaved with
Speaker 11: suspicion bordering on dread, knowing that their black captives desperately
Speaker 11: wanted freedom and might use violence to liberate themselves. This
Speaker 11: created an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that fed conspiracy
Speaker 11: theories of all sorts. After their rebellion against Mexico, Texans
Speaker 11: won to become part of the United States, but they
Speaker 11: were forced to spend almost a full decade as an
Speaker 11: independent republic because of well founded suspicions held by American
Speaker 11: abolitionists that the Texas Revolution was a part of a
Speaker 11: plot to add a slave state to the Union.
Speaker 10: A decade later, the tide shifted and Texas was hurriedly
Speaker 10: annexed in eighteen forty five after widespread rumors gripped Washington
Speaker 10: d c of a British plot to an next Texas
Speaker 10: and converted to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery.
Speaker 10: In the eighteen fifties, even prominent Texans like Sam Houston
Speaker 10: flocked to the American Party, also known as the know Nothings,
Speaker 10: that claimed the Pope had ordered Catholics from Ireland Germany
Speaker 10: to immigrate to the United States in order to take
Speaker 10: the country over and hand power over to the Vatican Panics.
Speaker 10: O were suspected rebellions by the enslaved, gripped Anglo Texans
Speaker 10: in eighteen thirty five, eighteen thirty eight, eighteen forty one,
Speaker 10: and in eighteen fifty six went perhaps as many as
Speaker 10: four hundred African Americans held in Bondage and Colorado County
Speaker 10: in south central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against
Speaker 10: their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom. In Mexico,
Speaker 10: where slavery had been abolished.
Speaker 11: Eighteen sixty, construction workers carelessly tossed matches into a pile
Speaker 11: of wood in Dallas during a hot, drought ridden summer.
Speaker 11: The blaze that resulted destroyed much of what was then
Speaker 11: only a village. Immediately, suspecting that enslaved arsonists had set
Speaker 11: the fire as part of a planned revolution, whites in
Speaker 11: Dallas tortured and whipped almost every enslaved person in the
Speaker 11: county in search of scapegoats. Eventually, they hanged three African
Speaker 11: Americans and set off what would become known as the
Speaker 11: Texas Troubles. Fires broke out across the state, and each
Speaker 11: got blamed on black suspects and their supposed white abolitionists.
Speaker 11: Instigators often men from northern states. As one historian put it,
Speaker 11: white Texan enslavers decided it was better to quote hang
Speaker 11: ninety nine innocent men than to let one guilty pass.
Speaker 11: Acting on little evidence, mobs lynched as many as eighty
Speaker 11: enslaved African American men and thirty seven accused white abolitionists.
Speaker 11: By the time the panic burned out in September.
Speaker 10: A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad
Speaker 10: Strike of eighteen eighty six and the rise of the
Speaker 10: Populace movement, which called for the government seizure railroads and
Speaker 10: telegraph lines, in addition to a global panic amongst the
Speaker 10: well to do about anarchism. After a series of bombings
Speaker 10: in Europe and even the United States from the eighteen
Speaker 10: eighties to just after World War One convinced economic elites
Speaker 10: in Texas that revolution was in the air. The ku
Speaker 10: Klux Klan, which in its original incarnation during reconstruction served
Speaker 10: as a goon squad to keep newly freed African American
Speaker 10: labor under tight control, came to dominate cities like Dallas
Speaker 10: in the nineteen twenties, where one and every three eligible
Speaker 10: men were members.
Speaker 3: Of the KKK.
Speaker 10: At its peak, the KKK charged that both Jews and
Speaker 10: Catholics were conspired hiring to control the world. Texas politicians
Speaker 10: like Representative John Box of Texas, in a column in
Speaker 10: Henry Ford's anti Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent, charged that
Speaker 10: Jews had manipulated the Congress. They add loopholes to American
Speaker 10: immigration laws passed in nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty four
Speaker 10: in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire
Speaker 10: into the United States as part of a scheme to
Speaker 10: undermine American society.
Speaker 11: As oil millionaires and billionaires built their wealth over the
Speaker 11: twentieth century, they became a force in conspiratorial faw right
Speaker 11: politics in Texas. Starting in the nineteen thirties, they mobilized
Speaker 11: against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which they insisted was a
Speaker 11: part of an international communist plan to overthrow capitalism around
Speaker 11: the planet. Anti communism, anti Semitism, and hostility to the
Speaker 11: post World War II African American civil rights movement blended
Speaker 11: seamlessly in the conspiratorial imaginations of the fall right, in
Speaker 11: the lone Star State, ideas that reached a national audience
Speaker 11: in large part because of oil money.
Speaker 10: John Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English Department's
Speaker 10: Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in nineteen fifty one, authored
Speaker 10: one of the first and perhaps the best selling of
Speaker 10: all time, book promoting Holocaust denial Iron Curtain over America.
Speaker 10: Beatty claimed that the Jews of today were not the
Speaker 10: Hebrew heroes of what Christians called the Old Testament. Instead,
Speaker 10: they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the
Speaker 10: Kazars that converted his Judaism around the year eight hundred,
Speaker 10: too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Baty wrote Kazar's
Speaker 10: undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the Communist
Speaker 10: Revolution in Russian nineteen eighteen. After immigrating to the United
Speaker 10: States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party,
Speaker 10: Batty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty
Speaker 10: also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed
Speaker 10: it into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty discribed in
Speaker 10: his book as quote the historic bulwark of Christian Europe,
Speaker 10: a mere six years after Soviet and American troops that
Speaker 10: liberated Nazi concentration camps. Betty claimed that most of the
Speaker 10: victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a
Speaker 10: fraud used after nineteen forty eight to blackmail the West
Speaker 10: into political and financial support of Israel. The SMU professor
Speaker 10: urged the United States to expel Jews from the United States.
Speaker 11: Rather than earning him scorn. Bed's virulently hateful anti Jewish
Speaker 11: rants won him a large following his book, Iron Curtain
Speaker 11: Over America went through nine printings. By nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 11: the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women's organization, adopted a
Speaker 11: unanimous resolution backing BAT and requesting that SMU investigate alleged
Speaker 11: communist influence on the university's faculty politics and values. Bed
Speaker 11: taught at SMU until his retirement in nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 11: two years after a panic over allegedly read art during
Speaker 11: which the conservative Dallas Patriotic Council accused the Dallas Museum
Speaker 11: of Art of intentionally promoting quote subversive artists who were
Speaker 11: ostensibly part of communist front groups connected to the Soviet
Speaker 11: Union after.
Speaker 10: World War Two in the establishment of communist regimes in
Speaker 10: Eastern Europe and in China. The uber wealthy giants of
Speaker 10: the Texas oil industry, to a large degree, funded what
Speaker 10: came to be known as McCarthyism. Clinton murchison, whose son
Speaker 10: in nineteen sixty became owner of the Dallas Cowboys National
Speaker 10: Football League team, became one of the largest financial contributors
Speaker 10: to red baiting Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. In Houston,
Speaker 10: hard right organizations like the Minute Women Fought Against School
Speaker 10: Integration took over the school board firing the assistant superintendent,
Speaker 10: George eBay because he previously lived in California and Oregon,
Speaker 10: where he had nice things to say about Roosevelt's new
Speaker 10: deal in the African American freedom struggle. A math instructor
Speaker 10: got fired after he carelessly common in a teacher's lounge.
Speaker 10: They supported Adleae's Stevenson, the Liberal Democratic Party nominee for president.
Speaker 10: In nineteen fifty two and nineteen fifty six, Theston School
Speaker 10: Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things
Speaker 10: about the United Nations, while right wingers in Dallas force
Speaker 10: the City Library and the Museum of Fine Arts the
Speaker 10: demand artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of
Speaker 10: their supposed communist sympathies.
Speaker 3: But before we get into that quick ad break.
Speaker 11: One Dallas oil magnate who built a mansion intentionally designed
Speaker 11: to be a bigger duplicate of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate.
Speaker 11: He used his wealth to broadcast extremist fever dreams in
Speaker 11: the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. His name was hl Hunt,
Speaker 11: and he was profiled by the BBC in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 8: But as well as being perhaps the most approval. The
Speaker 8: most stingy plutocrat of Texas, HL Hunt is probably the
Speaker 8: most controversial, for he is a fervent advocate of right
Speaker 8: wing some would say reactionary causes. He is against the UN,
Speaker 8: against the War on Party, against Medicare, against central government
Speaker 8: aid of any sort. He would rather Washington didn't rule
Speaker 8: the United States at all, and in his ideal land,
Speaker 8: votes would be distributed according to the amount of taxes
Speaker 8: who paid more than most Texans. Even he is inclined
Speaker 8: to see communists under every couch and behind every curtain.
Speaker 8: To Hunt, mankind is divided into communists and constructives. His
Speaker 8: private word for anti communists, you are either for him morroganim.
Speaker 15: He brooks no halfway position.
Speaker 11: A health baddist who avoided whitebread and sugar, Hunt believed
Speaker 11: his diet of largely raw vegetables might actually allow him
Speaker 11: to achieve immortality. He also thought he had psychic abilities,
Speaker 11: lived as a secret bigamist, and published pamphlets such as
Speaker 11: Hitler was a Liberal, an early prototype of Rupert Murdoch
Speaker 11: and Elon Musk. Hunt tried to create an alternative right
Speaker 11: wing media infrastructure, funding a nationwide radio program and pamphlet
Speaker 11: subscription called Lifeline that promoted conspiracy theories from coast to coast.
Speaker 15: Didn't time for last time.
Speaker 3: Let the tective class is around the world.
Speaker 16: Every leftist praise and cliche of the past half cent
Speaker 16: three now has the hollow ring of mythology.
Speaker 7: This is freedom Talk number fifty three Brendy.
Speaker 16: Cup is all available at the rate of three for
Speaker 16: twenty five cents from Lifeline, Dallas, Texas seven five two
Speaker 16: o six.
Speaker 7: I'll be back after this message.
Speaker 4: From our sponsor.
Speaker 10: The Lifeline show was hosted by a former FBI agent
Speaker 10: named Dan Smoot and broadcasts on more than eighty television
Speaker 10: one hundred and fifty radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy
Speaker 10: was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from
Speaker 10: billionaires such mself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless.
Speaker 10: Hunt once rage at Smoot when the Lifeline hosts claimed
Speaker 10: on air that democracy was political outgrowth of the teachings
Speaker 10: of Jesus Christ, Hunt corrected Smooth, condemning democracy is the
Speaker 10: handwork of the devil in a phony liberal form of
Speaker 10: watered down communism. Hunt innovated in number of ways to
Speaker 10: alarm audiences about far left plots during.
Speaker 8: The last two years, hl Hunt has added another emotive
Speaker 8: missile to his armory, his league of so called youth
Speaker 8: freedom speakers, engaging young teenagers drilled to deliver three minute
Speaker 8: bursts of his propaganda to rotary clubs and Bible classes.
Speaker 9: Many people in the United States really don't believe that
Speaker 9: communism is a serious threat. Well, these people are in
Speaker 9: for a big shock because the communists have every intention
Speaker 9: of doing exactly what they've said they'll do, and they
Speaker 9: do not hesitate to use force and violence anytime they
Speaker 9: think that it.
Speaker 17: Will further their cause. Now, I don't pretend to know
Speaker 17: all the answers, but I do know that it is
Speaker 17: our duty to get out and warn others of the
Speaker 17: serious threat that we are facing. We have got to
Speaker 17: get out and tell others of the subversive movements that
Speaker 17: are going on right here under our very own noses.
Speaker 18: It's time to do away with this attitude. Oh, it
Speaker 18: can't happen here. Will communists bury us? Will we face
Speaker 18: fine squad as in Cuba? And will our little bitty
Speaker 18: children become slaves? Ladies and gentlemen. The answer rests in
Speaker 18: the hands of you and others like you.
Speaker 15: Thank you.
Speaker 11: For much of the twentieth century, Dallas had built up
Speaker 11: a reputation as a clean, dull, modern, and efficiently run city.
Speaker 11: By the nineteen fifties, however, it had also acquired a
Speaker 11: reputation as the capital of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, a
Speaker 11: development that historian Edward H. Miller would describe in his
Speaker 11: book Not to Country. In nineteen fifty four, Dallas elected
Speaker 11: a far right House representative, Republican Bruce Alger. Less than
Speaker 11: a week prior to the nineteen sixty presidential election between
Speaker 11: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, a pro Alger mob assaulted
Speaker 11: in spat on the Democratic vice presidential nominee and then
Speaker 11: Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Ladybird, as they
Speaker 11: left the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. Alger joined the protesters,
Speaker 11: who held signs with slogans that said LBJ sold out
Speaker 11: to Yankee socialists. Soon thereafter, Major General Edwin Walker, who
Speaker 11: inspired the deranged fictional character General Jack d Ripper, the
Speaker 11: person responsible for global nuclear holocaust in the nineteen sixty
Speaker 11: four film at Doctor Strangelove, called Dallas Home.
Speaker 14: I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration,
Speaker 14: Communist in doctor nation, communist subversion, and the International Commune
Speaker 14: conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Speaker 11: Before filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned Walker into an unforgettable caricature,
Speaker 11: the real life Walker achieved infamy commanding an infantry division
Speaker 11: in what was then Western Germany. President Kennedy pressured Walker
Speaker 11: to resign because he repeatedly lectured soldiers under his command
Speaker 11: to vote for far right wing political candidates. He also
Speaker 11: distributed among the troops literature from the conspiracy theory promoting
Speaker 11: far right John Birch Society, and he encouraged them to join.
Speaker 11: The John Birch Society, formed in nineteen fifty eight, opposed
Speaker 11: American membership in the United Nations, which it claimed was
Speaker 11: part of a global communist conspiracy to enslave free peoples
Speaker 11: around the world. The fringe organization, established by former candy
Speaker 11: manufacturer Robert Welsh, accused all American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt
Speaker 11: to Kennedy of being secret communists under the command of
Speaker 11: the Soviet government.
Speaker 10: The John Birch Society also saw the African American Civil
Speaker 10: rights movement as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to divide
Speaker 10: the country, and argued that efforts of towns and cities
Speaker 10: after World War II to add fluoride to public water
Speaker 10: supplies was part of a sinister scheme to weaken men
Speaker 10: physically and make them less able to resist the radical
Speaker 10: takeover the United States. That particular Bircher conspiracy theory made
Speaker 10: a long lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across
Speaker 10: the United States banned fluoridated water today. That John Birch
Speaker 10: Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial
Speaker 10: candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti floridation
Speaker 10: essays on The Dallas Express, a right wing website that
Speaker 10: repurposed the name of historic black newspaper that went defunct
Speaker 10: in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 11: Edwin Walker's devotion to the John Birch movement cost him
Speaker 11: his military career. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert mcmara,
Speaker 11: Walker retired and moved to Dallas, where he found a
Speaker 11: friendly political environment. The national far right saw him as
Speaker 11: a martyr to Kennedy's supposedly out of control leftism, and
Speaker 11: he received financial support from fellow devotee of the John
Speaker 11: Birch Society hl Hunt. In nineteen sixty one, Walker made
Speaker 11: the cover of Newsweek as a leader of the New Right,
Speaker 11: and in nineteen sixty two he entered the race for
Speaker 11: Texas governor.
Speaker 7: To all victims of communist tyranny throughout the world, I
Speaker 7: send this word the hour of your deliverance is approaching.
Speaker 7: To patriots in every land Korea, China, the Ukraine, the
Speaker 7: Baltic Nations, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, the Congo, Cuba, and
Speaker 7: every other land strickened by the monster of communism. I say,
Speaker 7: for the time, lie low, preparing your hearts for liberation.
Speaker 7: Do not expose yourselves to the brutal requital of a hunster.
Speaker 10: Temporarily in power, Walker was a painfully dull public speaker.
Speaker 10: In the end, he couldn't bring his version of deliverance
Speaker 10: to his own state, finishing a distant sixth in the
Speaker 10: nineteen sixty two coubinatorial race. That would not prevent him
Speaker 10: and his allies from creating mayhem over the following months.
Speaker 10: He got arrested and was ordered to be psychiatrically evaluated
Speaker 10: by Attorney General Robert Kennedy after he incited racial violence
Speaker 10: during the integration of the University of Mississippi. In September
Speaker 10: nineteen sixty two, Adelaide Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador of the
Speaker 10: United Nations, would confront Walker and a model of his
Speaker 10: followers when the diplomat visited Big d on October twenty sixth,
Speaker 10: nineteen sixty three. Stevenson was shoutowed down as he attempted
Speaker 10: to deliver a un day's speech to Dallas Council on
Speaker 10: World Affairs.
Speaker 15: Shall we get on with the business of the meeting?
Speaker 19: Surely, surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come
Speaker 19: here from Illinois to teach Texas.
Speaker 7: Mantors, do I.
Speaker 11: Outside Memorial Auditorium theater, where Stevenson delivered his speech, Walker
Speaker 11: had gathered a furious gang of middle and upper class
Speaker 11: men and women who rocked his limousine back and forth
Speaker 11: while it waited to whisk him away to safety, and
Speaker 11: surrounded the ambassador when he stepped outside. When he finally
Speaker 11: returned to Washington, d C, Stevenson warned the administration about
Speaker 11: the intense and extremist atmosphere in Dallas, where President Kennedy
Speaker 11: was planning a visit meant to heal a rift between
Speaker 11: the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party in Texas.
Speaker 10: On the morning in November twenty second, nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 10: Kennedy and his entourage felt foreboding as they prepared for
Speaker 10: a short airplane draft from Fort Worth to Dallas. The
Speaker 10: president just examined a full page ad in the far
Speaker 10: right Dallas Morning News that featured a bold face headline
Speaker 10: welcome mister Kennedy to Dallas. The advertisement, paid for in
Speaker 10: part by H. L. Hunt's son Nelson bunker Hunt and
Speaker 10: the future owner of the Dallas Cowboys. HR bum Bright,
Speaker 10: featured accusations that Kennedy was soft on communism around the
Speaker 10: world and radicals at home, while persecuting conservatives who criticized him.
Speaker 10: The same morning, a group distributed leaflets designed like a
Speaker 10: wanted poster, with front and side photos of the President
Speaker 10: with the caption wanted for treason. How can people say
Speaker 10: such things? The President said to first Lady Jackie Kennedy,
Speaker 10: We're heading into nut country.
Speaker 4: Soon.
Speaker 10: The Kennedys would make their faithful flight to Dallas, and
Speaker 10: the President would die from an assassin's bullet shortly after noon.
Speaker 11: The President's murder spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 11: Some said the president had been murdered by the mafia,
Speaker 11: angered because they had been investigated by the president's brother,
Speaker 11: Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Others blamed Teamster's president Jimmy Hoffa,
Speaker 11: who also had been the subject of criminal probes by
Speaker 11: the Justice Department. Others suspected assassination plotters included Cuban leader
Speaker 11: Fidel Castro, who had himself been targeted for assassination attempts
Speaker 11: by the Kennedy administration, exiled Cubans in Florida, angered because
Speaker 11: the president had not fully supported the attempted overthrow of
Speaker 11: Castro during the nineteen sixty one Bay of Pigs invasion,
Speaker 11: and even the Soviets. One of the more elaborate theories
Speaker 11: involved an alleged plot hatched by American military leaders and
Speaker 11: CIA agents, angered that Kennedy supposedly wanted to end American
Speaker 11: involvement in Vietnam. Finally, others said Lyndon Johnson order to
Speaker 11: hit on the Chief executive because he wanted to grab
Speaker 11: or maybe others said Kennedy died because of combination of
Speaker 11: some or all of the above, having made enemies with
Speaker 11: the intelligence agencies under his command, who he had said
Speaker 11: he would dash to the wins if they continued to
Speaker 11: do things that were against what he saws in the
Speaker 11: best interests of the United States. Quote President shot one
Speaker 11: hundred twenty nine times from forty three different angles. A
Speaker 11: satirical headline from The Onion later.
Speaker 10: Asserted sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences.
Speaker 3: William L.
Speaker 10: Pierre spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas.
Speaker 10: As a city student, anti communist dread and any Semitic hatred.
Speaker 10: As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society,
Speaker 10: but grew frustrated because there wasn't racist enough. He became
Speaker 10: a leading figure in the American Nazi Party at the
Speaker 10: age of forty one, formed the Neo Nazi National Alliance.
Speaker 10: Beginning in nineteen seventy five, he published in serial form
Speaker 10: us influential examples of white supremacist literature, The Turner Diaries,
Speaker 10: a novel which told the story of white nationalist revolution
Speaker 10: in the United States in the near future. This revolt
Speaker 10: is sparked by a Jewish authored law outlying private ownership
Speaker 10: of guns. The hero Earl Turner, joins an underground terrorist
Speaker 10: army the organization, which battles a Jewish plot to destroy
Speaker 10: America not just through gun control, but also through uncontrolled
Speaker 10: non white immigration and by using rock music and drugs
Speaker 10: to encourage interracial sects. At one point, to save the
Speaker 10: white race, Turner blows up the FBI National headquarters in Washington,
Speaker 10: d C. With a truck bomb.
Speaker 11: In the novel, racist revolutionaries then take over Vandenberg Air
Speaker 11: Force Base in southern California and sees its nuclear missiles,
Speaker 11: which they later use on cities across the nation while
Speaker 11: ethnically cleansing California of non whites. They hang sixty thousand
Speaker 11: so called race traders during the day of the Rope,
Speaker 11: a phrase you may find familiar if you've ever looked
Speaker 11: at white supremacist posts online. In the end, the book's hero,
Speaker 11: Earl Turner, finally defeats the system by flying a crop
Speaker 11: duster armed with a small nuclear weapon into the pedagon.
Speaker 10: White nationalists have since seen the Turner Diaries as both
Speaker 10: an accurate description of the modern world and as a
Speaker 10: manual on how to win a race war. From nineteen
Speaker 10: eighty three to nineteen eighty four, The Order a white
Speaker 10: supremacist terrorist group that took its name from the Secret Circle.
Speaker 10: The fictional Earl Turner joins robbed a pornography shop, banks,
Speaker 10: and armored cars, hoisting more than eight million dollars. They
Speaker 10: later distributed to several white supremacist groups with the intent
Speaker 10: of funding a white revolution. Along the way, they assassinated
Speaker 10: Jewish radio talk show hosts Alan Berg. The Turner Diary
Speaker 10: became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled
Speaker 10: veteran in the nineteen ninety one Gulf War who saw
Speaker 10: the deadly confrontation between in the FBI and the Bureau
Speaker 10: of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and the gun toting branch Davidian
Speaker 10: religious sect in Waco, Texas on April nineteenth, nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 10: as a major step and a government plan to seize
Speaker 10: firearms from law abiding Americans.
Speaker 11: McVay had spent years selling copies of The Turner Diaries
Speaker 11: at gun shows. He retaliated against what he saw as
Speaker 11: his government oppressors by blowing up the Alfred Murrah Federal
Speaker 11: Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the
Speaker 11: Waco configuration. He used a truck bomb facing his attack
Speaker 11: in part on the fictitious bombings of the FBI headquarters.
Speaker 11: In William Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries also depicted a
Speaker 11: deadly attack on the US Capitol. Some of the pro
Speaker 11: Trump riots who assaulted the Capitol on January sixth erected
Speaker 11: gallows and livestreamed their crimes as they joked about hanging politicians,
Speaker 11: comparing it to the day of rope, Pierce described in
Speaker 11: his pro Nazi work of fiction, Stay with Us through
Speaker 11: this adbreak to learn more.
Speaker 10: Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of
Speaker 10: an aggressive military intervention to stop Communist expansion abroad, and
Speaker 10: with varying degrees, a commitment economic and civil rights reforms
Speaker 10: at home. But because of his assassination by the twenty
Speaker 10: first century, many on the far right saw as a
Speaker 10: martyr to the liberal deep state. Beginning in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 10: a very online far right conspiracy theory arose that centered
Speaker 10: on cryptic messages first posted on the four chan message
Speaker 10: board and then on eight chan by an anonymous person
Speaker 10: who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was a reference
Speaker 10: to the Q Clearance, which gives government officials access to
Speaker 10: high level security secrets. Kennedy would be central in the
Speaker 10: imagination of what came to be known as the QAnon movement.
Speaker 11: Q or QAnon developed a huge following that interpreted these
Speaker 11: confusing and often contradictory posts as actually revealing a secret
Speaker 11: global capal that included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and
Speaker 11: liberal celebrities like Tom Hanks. These people were all accused
Speaker 11: of being a part of a child sex trafficking ring
Speaker 11: in which the young victims were molested and tortured, and,
Speaker 11: in some interpretations of the theories, had their precious bodily
Speaker 11: fluids harvested to manufacture a drug known as adrenochrome, a
Speaker 11: drug that produces hallucinations and supposedly grants eternal youth. These
Speaker 11: stories resembled anti Semitic legends about Jews kidnapping Christian children
Speaker 11: before passover in order to use their blood in Manza bread,
Speaker 11: a trope or canard really that has become known as
Speaker 11: blood libel in the QAnon mythology. Donald Trump plans to
Speaker 11: conduct mass arrests and executions of these Satanic child molestors
Speaker 11: in an event called the Storm. Trump has winked and
Speaker 11: nodded to the q and On movement, encouraged believers and
Speaker 11: even incorporated some of its key slogans in imagery in
Speaker 11: speeches and posts online, such as where we go On,
Speaker 11: we go All, and as I've reported for Rolling Stone,
Speaker 11: a cult like spinoff group of Q and On believers
Speaker 11: have repeatedly gathered at Daley Plaza, the site of JFK's murder,
Speaker 11: to wait for the prophesied return of JFK and his son,
Speaker 11: JFK Junior, who both are dead, but these believers think
Speaker 11: were either miraculously resurrected or never actually died, and have
Speaker 11: been secretly working with Trump to take down the aforementioned
Speaker 11: global satanic pedophile cabal. Some believe that when JFK and
Speaker 11: JFK Junior finally reveal themselves, a sort of kingdom of
Speaker 11: righteousness will reign and good will ultimately prevail over evil.
Speaker 10: Q and On believers were a heavy presence during the
Speaker 10: Capital Insurrection in January sixth and q Andon banners competed
Speaker 10: with Trump and Confederate battleflags for attention, and November that
Speaker 10: first year we saw the first of the series rallies
Speaker 10: that Steve just referred to. They went to Deey Plaza,
Speaker 10: where President Kennedy had been murdered fifty eight years earlier.
Speaker 10: Over the course of many months, q Andon disciples kept
Speaker 10: returning to the site of JFK's death, some staying at
Speaker 10: a local hotel so they could be nearby when the
Speaker 10: Kennedy return happened. This was covered by Dallas ABC affiliate
Speaker 10: WFAA in November twenty twenty one. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed
Speaker 10: some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site.
Speaker 20: Word on the street is that Junior JFK Junior will
Speaker 20: show up and introduce his parents.
Speaker 21: You're expecting JFK Junior absolutely, Okay, how is that going
Speaker 21: to happen and never die?
Speaker 3: Are we going to see him today? JFKG. Yeah, that's whatever.
Speaker 3: We're helping. We're hoping to hope and pray, and then
Speaker 3: after that he'll probably be the vice president with Trump.
Speaker 10: Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs
Speaker 10: that marginalize them from family, friends, and mainstream society.
Speaker 3: There was one real truth several of these people agreed
Speaker 3: to talk about. But you got to understand that most
Speaker 3: of the world is going to think that's just crazy.
Speaker 20: That's why half my family won't talk to me. Anymore,
Speaker 20: then will my girlfriend thinks I've.
Speaker 3: Lost my mind.
Speaker 10: With the return of Donald Trump to the White House
Speaker 10: on January twentieth, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe
Speaker 10: to the seat of power. JFK Junior won't emerge and
Speaker 10: grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will. Bobby Kennedy Junior.
Speaker 10: Bobby Kennedy Junior has insisted that Wi fi causes cancer
Speaker 10: and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV vaccines.
Speaker 10: He claims against overwhelming evidence cause autism, anti depressed since
Speaker 10: caused school shootings, and chemicals and water lead to gender dysphoria.
Speaker 10: One of these chemicals, RFK Junior insist might be an
Speaker 10: old obsession of the conspiratorial right.
Speaker 7: I think fluoride is a poison becauses loss IQ in
Speaker 7: our developmental injuries, and think florid is on the way up.
Speaker 11: RFK Junior mind You is the nominee for the head
Speaker 11: of the Department of Health and Human Services, and in
Speaker 11: a recent interview claimed that he was aided in his
Speaker 11: schoolwork through the recreational self medication of heroin. Trump has
Speaker 11: himself obsessively promoted his own sinister tales of the deep
Speaker 11: state that supposedly stole the twenty twenty election from him, and,
Speaker 11: as we have said, has co opted some of the
Speaker 11: slogans of the q Andon movement. None of this, obviously,
Speaker 11: was disqualifying to a plurality of voters this past November.
Speaker 11: So why are people drawn to conspiracy theories? First off,
Speaker 11: they provide convenient explanations that can be broken down into
Speaker 11: sort of simple logics for people who may not have
Speaker 11: frameworks for understanding a complex world. And they also provide
Speaker 11: believers sort of new family and friends as they become
Speaker 11: increasingly alienated from their original family and friends. Regardless of
Speaker 11: whatever plots they believe they have revealed. It's clear that
Speaker 11: conspiracy theorists of this sort they don't believe that history
Speaker 11: is a product of class conflict, or imperialism or the
Speaker 11: global scramble for natural resources, not ahing like that. It's
Speaker 11: not shaped by political and economic alliances between elites, or
Speaker 11: irreversible transformations and technology that render old job skills irrelevant.
Speaker 11: There's no material analysis. All of this loss, all this fear,
Speaker 11: all this terrifying disruption of what is comfortably routine they
Speaker 11: view stems from a sinister plot, a plan that is
Speaker 11: hidden tightly by a small circle of elites, sort of
Speaker 11: cartoon villains with near superpowers that control the world. And
Speaker 11: if only the right people, the sort of heroes of
Speaker 11: the story of the movie that they think that they're watching,
Speaker 11: if only those people would step forward and pull off
Speaker 11: the mask of the villains, then everything would be set right.
Speaker 10: These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings in
Speaker 10: sight unseen, manipulate every aspect of the world's politics, culture
Speaker 10: and finance, manipulate elections, engineer depressions, urban riots, and even hurricanes.
Speaker 10: Yet for all their cleverness, they leave just enough clues
Speaker 10: so that amateur sleuths, if they are just smart enough,
Speaker 10: can crack the code. Conspiracy theories make history and understandable
Speaker 10: contests between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes, who then
Speaker 10: feel superior because they've unveiled the mass their plan. As
Speaker 10: they discover kindred spirits, they find community otherwise lacking in
Speaker 10: their lives. Perhaps, if just enough people know about the conspiracy,
Speaker 10: they hope the bad guys will fall and the millennium
Speaker 10: will follow. That fantasy offers a simpler, more emotionally satisfying
Speaker 10: vision of the future than planning on how to dismantle
Speaker 10: capitalism or figuring out how to persuade white people, for instance,
Speaker 10: surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories
Speaker 10: are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often from
Speaker 10: Oklahoma City to the US capital, a call for deadly action.
Speaker 11: And while figures like hl hunt and their operations like
Speaker 11: Lifeline maybe in the past, we have our own contemporary
Speaker 11: versions of this with roots in Texas. We now have
Speaker 11: Elon Musk who controls x formerly known as Twitter, in
Speaker 11: which he has used his platform with millions of followers
Speaker 11: to promote dangerous conspiracy theory like the Great Replacement theory,
Speaker 11: which we recorded a previous episode of this podcast about. Ultimately,
Speaker 11: we are living in a culture that swims with conspiracy theories,
Speaker 11: and for us to make our way out of the
Speaker 11: rabbit hole, we're going to need some sort of framework
Speaker 11: for understanding the world, something that can help us better
Speaker 11: understand how we got here and where we're going. And
Speaker 11: no matter what that is, it certainly won't be something
Speaker 11: as simple as believing that we just have to pull
Speaker 11: off the mask of some villain and then everything will
Speaker 11: be set straight from there.
Speaker 10: This is Michael Phillips and this is Stephen Monticelli.
Speaker 22: Thanks for listening, Hello, and welcome to It could happen
Speaker 22: here a podcast about things falling apart and how to
Speaker 22: put them back together. I'm your guest host, Margaret Kiljoy,
Speaker 22: and this is an episode about both of those things.
Speaker 22: Not Margaret and Killjoy, but about things falling apart and
Speaker 22: putting them back together. If you live in the US,
Speaker 22: you might have noticed the things are falling apart. In
Speaker 22: the onslaught of new federal changes over the past few weeks.
Speaker 22: There is one that is both astoundingly important and also
Speaker 22: likely to disappear below people's radars because it affects prisoners,
Speaker 22: trans prisoners. Prison is the place that society puts people
Speaker 22: to forget that they exist. We shouldn't be that way,
Speaker 22: while prisons ought not to be how we solve problems
Speaker 22: as a society at all, but it is the way
Speaker 22: that things currently are. Things that affect prisoners are routinely ignored,
Speaker 22: even though we live in a society built on the
Speaker 22: idea of incarceration. It's been in the news that US
Speaker 22: trans people somehow just sort of don't exist anymore, that
Speaker 22: everyone is either male or female, dictated at birth and immutable. Obviously,
Speaker 22: this flies in the face of biological and social reality,
Speaker 22: and it's going to impact us trans people quite a bit.
Speaker 22: One group of people that it's going to impact very immediately,
Speaker 22: very dramatically, and very dangerously is trans prisoners. According to
Speaker 22: Bureau of Prison Statistics, there are currently one thousand, five
Speaker 22: hundred and twenty nine trans women and seven hundred and
Speaker 22: forty four trans men held in federal prisons, and not
Speaker 22: all of them are being held in gender appropriate prisons already.
Speaker 22: As we're going to talk about with our guests in
Speaker 22: a bit, prisoners have to go through an incredible amount
Speaker 22: of dehumanization in order to have a chance of being
Speaker 22: placed in the right facility. But now that isn't an option,
Speaker 22: and women are being moved into men's prisons. Does the
Speaker 22: idea of being a woman in a men's prison scare you?
Speaker 3: It should.
Speaker 22: It's terrifying. It's worse than what you might imagine. One
Speaker 22: trans woman prisoner who's using a pseudonym for her lawsuit
Speaker 22: going by Maria Moe, has already filed a lawsuit in
Speaker 22: federal court to stop this new regulation. She is challenging
Speaker 22: it on both procedural and constitutional grounds. The government didn't
Speaker 22: go about this in the legal manner, and to house
Speaker 22: trans women with men goes against the Eighth Amendment, which
Speaker 22: prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the Fifth
Speaker 22: Amendments do process clause. I simply can't imagine putting a
Speaker 22: woman into men's prison as anything other than cruel and
Speaker 22: unusual punishment. The state can pretend that trans women aren't women,
Speaker 22: but the men in prison will not treat her like
Speaker 22: how they treat assists men. On January twenty first, the
Speaker 22: woman suing the prisons was told that she was going
Speaker 22: to be moved to men's prison after all of her
Speaker 22: records were suddenly changed to mark her male. Federal data
Speaker 22: says that trans prisoners are sexually assaulted at ten times
Speaker 22: the rate of other prisoners, and that's the state's own reporting.
Speaker 15: On the issue.
Speaker 22: But you know who doesn't know how to effortlessly transition
Speaker 22: to ads after saying something as serious as that, it's me,
Speaker 22: I don't know how to effortlessly transitions ads after giving
Speaker 22: you a statistic like that. When we come back, we're
Speaker 22: going to talk about how serious the situation is, but
Speaker 22: also provide just an absolute, incredible number of things that
Speaker 22: you can do at various levels of risk to support
Speaker 22: the people whose lives are about to be ruined by
Speaker 22: this policy change. Okay, and we're back. So to talk
Speaker 22: about how trans people fare in prison, I have brought
Speaker 22: on my friend with the most experienced in prison, the
Speaker 22: former political prisoner Eric King. Eric served just shy of
Speaker 22: ten years in prison for throwing a molotov into an
Speaker 22: empty federal building one night in response to the Ferguson
Speaker 22: uprising of twenty fourteen. Those were a protests that were
Speaker 22: anti police protests that started in the wake of the
Speaker 22: police killing of eighteen year old black man Michael Brown.
Speaker 22: Eric is also the co editor of a book called
Speaker 22: Rattling the Cages, Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners,
Speaker 22: which has a forward by none other than Angela Davis
Speaker 22: and is worth checking out. Eric was released from the
Speaker 22: eighty X Supermax in December twenty twenty three. He walked
Speaker 22: out of prison wearing a support trans kid shirt and
Speaker 22: has been vocal about his support for us as soon
Speaker 22: as he walked out the door. So Eric, thanks for
Speaker 22: coming on. It could happen here.
Speaker 3: How are you.
Speaker 22: I'm doing really well, glad to be back, Thank you
Speaker 22: so much. Yeah, so you reached out to me about
Speaker 22: this what would you call it, like a policy change?
Speaker 22: Yeahcus to order, I guess, yeah, you know, And basically
Speaker 22: we talked about like how do we try and make
Speaker 22: sure that people know about what's happening. And I wanted
Speaker 22: to ask you, So, you're a sis man and you
Speaker 22: didn't have an easy time in prison, right as far
Speaker 22: as I as far as I understand now, I think
Speaker 22: no one gets to have an easy time in prison
Speaker 22: is one of the things, especially in a supermax, So.
Speaker 3: Not that easier than others.
Speaker 22: I guess, yeah, you were not among the people who
Speaker 22: had it easier. And as I would follow your journey
Speaker 22: through the federal prison system, it seems like you had
Speaker 22: to defend yourself against both other prisoners and also prison staff.
Speaker 3: Is that a fair way to put it mildly? Yeah, yes,
Speaker 3: that was what was going on. Can you tell me a.
Speaker 22: Bit about the experience of trans people in prison, because
Speaker 22: when you look at this executive order, it sort of
Speaker 22: implies like all trans women are in women's prison and
Speaker 22: all trans men. Actually, I literally have no idea where
Speaker 22: transmit are held. I would rather if I was a
Speaker 22: transmit I'd probably rather be in women's prison. I just
Speaker 22: I don't know what was the situation like before this
Speaker 22: executive order.
Speaker 19: So I want to start with saying, like, the reason
Speaker 19: I hit you up is because there's so much like
Speaker 19: horror happening this first week of like Trump's new presidency,
Speaker 19: and I didn't want this issue to get swept under
Speaker 19: the rug. A lot of times, the bigger, more mainstream
Speaker 19: issues will get the most attention. And I still remember
Speaker 19: our trans family inside, and so that's what scared me
Speaker 19: enough to be like, dude, I need.
Speaker 3: To talk to you about this.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 19: So when I was inside, there was not very many
Speaker 19: trans people, and they're like, correct prison, Like a trans
Speaker 19: woman should be in a women's prison, yea, a trans
Speaker 19: man should be in a man's prison.
Speaker 3: And that wasn't happening on the level that it should have.
Speaker 19: And there was a rare case like Marius Mason who
Speaker 19: had enough support, enough publicity where they were able to
Speaker 19: but most people we were stuck at their gender at birth.
Speaker 19: And so over the last couple of years, people started
Speaker 19: getting a lot more access to safe prisons. That's why
Speaker 19: I'll call them my prisons where they feel safest. Okay,
Speaker 19: so I trans women were starting to go to women's prisons,
Speaker 19: and it wasn't very many. It's not like there's tens
Speaker 19: of thousands, but handfuls. Because it is it's very hard
Speaker 19: in the federal system. To get recognized as a transgender person.
Speaker 19: You have to go through years of degrading and humiliating
Speaker 19: therapy with a prison psychologist. You have to get just
Speaker 19: horribly treated by doctors who ignore you, gaslight you, diminish,
Speaker 19: you try to push Christianity on you, and then if
Speaker 19: you make it through their brutality, then you were one
Speaker 19: of the lucky ones.
Speaker 3: You got to say, like, I am this person, this
Speaker 3: is who I am.
Speaker 19: And if you're even more lucky, you got to be
Speaker 19: transferred to a prison that would make you feel the
Speaker 19: safest and the most whole is a human And that's
Speaker 19: the goal, Like, that's the safety goal. Basically, that's where
Speaker 19: we wanted things to be pushed. That people would be
Speaker 19: recognized for who they are, they would get treated for
Speaker 19: who they were, and they would be sent to a
Speaker 19: prison that was congruent with who they were.
Speaker 3: And that's what's all being taken away.
Speaker 22: Yeah, and when you talk about the safety, I don't
Speaker 22: want to like necessarily go on at great length about
Speaker 22: how trans women suffer invents prisons, but it's probably worth
Speaker 22: talking about, like because you've described it as there's like
Speaker 22: literal sexual slavery happening in the prisons.
Speaker 3: Is that a fair way to put it?
Speaker 19: Yeah, one hundred and ten percent yes, yes, And I
Speaker 19: only speak for federal prisons. I know in some states
Speaker 19: it's different. Like in some states people are able to
Speaker 19: use like their femininity as like a power play, as
Speaker 19: a tool to keep themselves safe. And so if that,
Speaker 19: if that's an option, then great, But what I witnessed
Speaker 19: in the federal prison was the exactly opposite of that.
Speaker 19: People are getting destroyed. And if you go into a
Speaker 19: men's prison presenting as female in any way or soft anywhere,
Speaker 19: or as any type of one or any type of
Speaker 19: nonsense straight mail, you are an automatic target. And it's
Speaker 19: not like hyperbole to say that if you walked onto
Speaker 19: a penitentiary yard and you had makeup, if you had
Speaker 19: your hair long, if you had breast, if you had
Speaker 19: anything presenting as female, you will get butchered.
Speaker 3: Within an hour.
Speaker 21: You won't survive that, or you'll get by some group
Speaker 21: and you will be a site like you will be
Speaker 21: property and at the lower custody levels, it's a lot safer.
Speaker 3: If you're at a low security like FCI.
Speaker 19: Englewood, you're not in danger, though you're a danger of
Speaker 19: humiliation and being degraded by staff, but you're not going
Speaker 19: to get stabbed there.
Speaker 3: But God forbid you go to Victorville.
Speaker 19: Medium, Florence Medium, or any penitentiary, Like that's a death
Speaker 19: sentence for real.
Speaker 22: Yeah, do you want to talk about the worst things
Speaker 22: that ever happened to you? Do you want to talk
Speaker 22: about you? And I We did another episode on my
Speaker 22: other podcast Live like the World is Dying and talking
Speaker 22: about how to survive prison, and in it, you talked
Speaker 22: a little bit about what was necessary to kind of
Speaker 22: stand up for trans prisoners. Do you want to talk
Speaker 22: about that a little bit?
Speaker 19: Yeah, So, like everyone needs to have like consequence awareness
Speaker 19: and they need to work on the lines that make
Speaker 19: them feel most comfortable, of course, but for me, I
Speaker 19: was not comfortable at all watching trans or gay prisoners
Speaker 19: get brutalized. And so there were times where we'd have
Speaker 19: to raise money to buy a prisoner out of sex slavery. Yeah,
Speaker 19: we just have to buy them and then basically free
Speaker 19: them or pay off whatever debt they owed so that
Speaker 19: they no longer have to be in that situation.
Speaker 3: And there was other times that you you have to
Speaker 3: knife up or you have to show up physically.
Speaker 19: And I'm not a big I of course, like I
Speaker 19: don't tolerate like anti trams bullshit in my life anywhere,
Speaker 19: and that includes in prison, and so like there are
Speaker 19: times you have to step to people and say like
Speaker 19: I am not gonna let this person have this happen
Speaker 19: to them. And if you want to continue doing this,
Speaker 19: then like we're going to take it to the next level.
Speaker 19: And I wish to god there was more prison allies
Speaker 19: that would be willing to do that inside, because once
Speaker 19: someone is shown to have like support, it makes them
Speaker 19: less easy to be a victim. If people see that
Speaker 19: like this person's trams or like other people are riding
Speaker 19: with them, they're less likely to go after them because
Speaker 19: they'll be consequences. But if they're all alone, then they're
Speaker 19: just a sitting duck. And so like we need that,
Speaker 19: we need CIS men to show up and be like this.
Speaker 3: Is not happening.
Speaker 19: I don't care what race you are, I don't care
Speaker 19: what gang you in you're in, You're not going to
Speaker 19: hurt this person, And that's stuff that we had to do.
Speaker 19: Sometimes it's scary as shit because you don't know what's
Speaker 19: going to happen.
Speaker 3: But you have to, like you have to live your ethics.
Speaker 22: One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to
Speaker 22: you about it and have you on this show is because, unfortunately,
Speaker 22: I mean, prison is kind of a concentration of the
Speaker 22: worst parts of society. I do not want to say
Speaker 22: the worst people in society. I believe it has much
Speaker 22: more to do with the incarceration and the way that
Speaker 22: people are forced to be right when they're incarcerated. There's
Speaker 22: a tangent. But have you heard the whole thing where
Speaker 22: there's no such thing as an alpha male.
Speaker 3: Wolf in the wild. I've only heard from you, and
Speaker 3: I loved it.
Speaker 22: Okay, I probably said this exact same thing last time
Speaker 22: we time think activity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so it's like it obviously is going to
Speaker 3: bring out the worst in people.
Speaker 22: That one of the reasons I want to have you
Speaker 22: want to talk about this is because I think that
Speaker 22: the experiences that you're talking about, they're much more real
Speaker 22: and intense than most people on the outside are like
Speaker 22: really thinking. You know, they're like, oh, that sounds bad,
Speaker 22: but then their brain kind of turns off and they
Speaker 22: stop imagining what bad looks like. And I think that
Speaker 22: this idea that we're going to have to stand up
Speaker 22: for our ethics regardless of the risk and cost to
Speaker 22: ourselves sometimes is what it takes to create a society
Speaker 22: that is resistant to fascism. I think it's the same
Speaker 22: energy that people are going to have to do with,
Speaker 22: like no, you can't take my neighbors right in the
Speaker 22: era of ice.
Speaker 3: I think that's really well said too.
Speaker 19: I think the way, like I used to wear inside
Speaker 19: is like we can't take steps backwards. We can't relinquish
Speaker 19: any progress we've made, not a single pinch of it.
Speaker 3: Like everything has to move forward.
Speaker 19: And whatever you're capable of doing, Like not everyone's capable
Speaker 19: of like physically stepping to someone and saying like no, right,
Speaker 19: But everyone's capable of something, whether that's doing calling campaigns,
Speaker 19: organizing protests outside of prison, whether it's contacting region, contacting
Speaker 19: this person, raising money, doing whatever it takes. Everyone can
Speaker 19: do something to keep people safe. And it's the same
Speaker 19: in the free world, Like it's not different. Everyone has
Speaker 19: something to offer. But it can't be apathy. It can't
Speaker 19: be this nihilism that like what does it matter, Like
Speaker 19: they're going to do it anyway. If we do that,
Speaker 19: like we're just forfeiting the future and we're letting our
Speaker 19: our family get but butchered.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 22: I really like that way of phrasing it. Yeah, we
Speaker 22: can't forfeit the future. How can people support transprisoners with
Speaker 22: what's going on right now? I don't know how in
Speaker 22: touch you are with people on the inside and things
Speaker 22: like that. How are people feeling, like what's the vibe?
Speaker 3: What can be done?
Speaker 19: So I assume, like when you're asking what can people
Speaker 19: do to support transprisoners? I assume you're asking what can
Speaker 19: free world people do to support those inside?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 22: I mean you actually kind of have said what people
Speaker 22: on the inside can do, all right, which is necessary
Speaker 22: and important.
Speaker 3: But people on the outside, what can people do?
Speaker 19: Visibility is safety, Like I saw that in my bid,
Speaker 19: and I've seen that in other people's bids. And if
Speaker 19: you look at someone like Marius Mason, if you look
Speaker 19: at people like Jennifer Rose, keeping people visible and letting
Speaker 19: the prison know that, like we're not turning a blind
Speaker 19: eye to this person, like you're not going to get
Speaker 19: a free one on them that cups people alive, Okay.
Speaker 3: And so the more the staff knows.
Speaker 19: And the administration knows that like this per is looked after,
Speaker 19: the more they are likely to look after them because
Speaker 19: they don't want to be held accountable. Okay, So things
Speaker 19: like getting books into people, things like getting pin pals
Speaker 19: of people, raising money so that they don't have to
Speaker 19: go into debt, Like that's real, Like this debt stuff
Speaker 19: is serious. So making sure they have money on their books,
Speaker 19: Like I don't care what they spend it on. I
Speaker 19: don't care if they spend on drugs. I don't care
Speaker 19: if they spend it on twenty bags of coff. You're
Speaker 19: gambling as long as it keeps them out of slavery
Speaker 19: or out of that knife, like that's what matters. And
Speaker 19: then Patsy names around like it's almost as if we
Speaker 19: concentrate like all of our prisons supporting like five or
Speaker 19: six people, and then we forget that there's like fifteen
Speaker 19: thousand trans people in prison. Yeah, and so organizations like
Speaker 19: Black and Pink do a really amazing job, but like
Speaker 19: there's there's not enough, Like we need visibility like, we
Speaker 19: need to keep people present in our lives that we
Speaker 19: don't know and we might not like their charges, they
Speaker 19: might not be nice people like, they might not be cool,
Speaker 19: but we need to.
Speaker 3: Keep them alive. Like that's what abolition is. So visibility.
Speaker 22: Yeah, that makes sense. I sort of know the answer
Speaker 22: to this, but I'm gonna pretend like I don't know
Speaker 22: it at all. What's Black and Pink. Black and Pink
Speaker 22: is an organization. I know it used to be an
Speaker 22: anarchist organization.
Speaker 19: It might be something else now, but it's an organization
Speaker 19: that's focused strictly on supporting trans and queer prisoners. That's
Speaker 19: all they do, social prisoners, political prisoners, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 19: We're gonna find you a pinpal and we're gonna get
Speaker 19: people to write you and they do a really amazing job.
Speaker 19: Like I honor them for putting in that work because
Speaker 19: it's hard.
Speaker 22: And so someone who's listening, who's never considered being pen
Speaker 22: pals of the prisoner could get in touch with Black
Speaker 22: and Pink and be hooked up with someone to write to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you like.
Speaker 19: Even just like right now, someone googled black and Pink
Speaker 19: pin palm, black and Pink prison Pinpal, like it'll pop
Speaker 19: up the website. You just click on flying a pin
Speaker 19: Pal and you can find someone in your city, find
Speaker 19: someone in your state, find someone back to relate to,
Speaker 19: like to have a little biography, and you can find
Speaker 19: someone like to connect with and potentially save their life
Speaker 19: or save your life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it can make you better too.
Speaker 22: Yeah, okay, so writing helps when you talk about putting
Speaker 22: money on people's books, like who does that? Is that
Speaker 22: something you also could go through black and pink? Should
Speaker 22: people be doing their own fundraisers? And then like working
Speaker 22: with prisoners that they've already made connections with, like how
Speaker 22: should people either plug in or start things?
Speaker 19: So each prison is different, like state and federal, But
Speaker 19: to put money on someone's books, you can do that yourself.
Speaker 19: You go you find out wherever prison that person's at,
Speaker 19: and you can just go to the BOP website or
Speaker 19: that prison's website. BOP is Bureau Prisons. It's for federal people,
Speaker 19: and it will just walk you through how to do it,
Speaker 19: how to send the money ground from Walmart or how
Speaker 19: to do the JPay and put it on through your
Speaker 19: credit card, and you can do it like if there's
Speaker 19: an ABC in Erica's Black Cross community near you, you
Speaker 19: can fundraise with them. If there's any like books through
Speaker 19: bars or abolitionist groups near you, like you can and
Speaker 19: should fundraise with them to raise awareness. But you don't
Speaker 19: have to, Like everyone can do this on your own,
Speaker 19: Like this is a single person job. Yeah, but it's
Speaker 19: better if we do it as a community.
Speaker 22: Well, the way that I fund raised is that I
Speaker 22: have advertisers that interrupt me talking about anti capitalist things.
Speaker 3: And here's one of those interruptions.
Speaker 22: And I'm gonna go ahead and donate my pay for
Speaker 22: this episode to exactly what we're talking about. And here's
Speaker 22: ads they are not donating. You can think of whatever
Speaker 22: you want about these ads, and we're back okay with
Speaker 22: this new executive order, Like how are people feeling either
Speaker 22: inside or people who are doing prison abolition work, or
Speaker 22: like how crisis does this feel?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: What's going on? I can't like speak for ever. It
Speaker 3: should quel like a ten out of ten.
Speaker 19: Yeah, like this is a carceral genocidee real, this isn't
Speaker 19: a rasure of an entire people. So like, if you're
Speaker 19: not at a ten for this, like you either do
Speaker 19: not care or you're not understanding how serious the prison
Speaker 19: system is.
Speaker 3: I've talked to a couple homies inside.
Speaker 19: I have to be really delicate because I'm still on probation,
Speaker 19: but those people understand that, like the mood is turning dark. Okay,
Speaker 19: they see inside that like when fascists come into power,
Speaker 19: it empowers everyone else below them to be brutal because
Speaker 19: they can get away with it now. And so these
Speaker 19: people that were already monsters under the most liberal of
Speaker 19: prison director are now getting told by the president that
Speaker 19: they do not have to respect this person's entire life.
Speaker 19: And so it's a very serious situation. We've got a
Speaker 19: non binary person about to go and name Casey Goonan,
Speaker 19: and they got sentenced for allegedly fire bombing some cop
Speaker 19: cars and support with Palestine, and I talk with them
Speaker 19: on a weekly basis, just trying to prepare them because
Speaker 19: like right now, where they're at is a jail and
Speaker 19: they haven't really experienced the prison yet, and so it's
Speaker 19: all about like getting them ready for like here are potentials,
Speaker 19: like here's what they could do. But it's dark in there,
Speaker 19: like the Nazis are celebrating, and that includes the ones
Speaker 19: with badges especially.
Speaker 22: Yeah, that makes sense. What kind of support felt the
Speaker 22: most useful to you in other prisoners. He talked about
Speaker 22: this a little bit, but I'm I'm like curious about
Speaker 22: like you talked about, like visibility, are protests outside of jails?
Speaker 22: Do they do they make people feel like good and
Speaker 22: welcome or does it make the guards cracked down on everyone?
Speaker 22: Like I know that there's this you know, habit of
Speaker 22: noise demonstrations every New Year's and what kind of stuff
Speaker 22: felt good, and what kind of stuff felt good but scary,
Speaker 22: and what kind of stuff was just annoying? Like I
Speaker 22: don't know, I'm just trying to find more stuff that
Speaker 22: people can do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the noise demos are cool, but they're performative.
Speaker 4: M M.
Speaker 19: It's more for the people that are doing them than
Speaker 19: the people inside.
Speaker 4: M hm.
Speaker 19: But like, let's say you're a trans person out of
Speaker 19: jail and there's thirty five people outside waving your banner.
Speaker 19: That will get you respect inside, get people to say, oh,
Speaker 19: what the hell.
Speaker 3: Is going on with them? Okay?
Speaker 19: Yeah, like that is that's serious to where you can
Speaker 19: build up a rep if someone's already in prison, that's
Speaker 19: you'll probably get them fucked up and put in the shoe.
Speaker 3: That's what happened to me.
Speaker 22: If there's a noise demonstration with your name, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 22: be delicate how you do it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, because that's what put me in ad X. Oh shit,
Speaker 3: so that's a real that's a real double edged sword, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 19: They use that as the as the thing saying I
Speaker 19: was the leader of Antifa because I got people to
Speaker 19: come out and protest for me.
Speaker 3: So I got pulleyt. Bel Chapo.
Speaker 22: We shouldn't tell everyone that you're we have to keep
Speaker 22: it on the DL that you're the leader of Antifa.
Speaker 3: For real. We dropped the ball. I know. Wait, I've
Speaker 3: been told I'm the leader of Antifa. You're my leader?
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, I'm more reagional leader.
Speaker 19: The things that help the most, like in a real
Speaker 19: life situation, are the things that provide mental safety and
Speaker 19: something to do. Okay, so books, magazines that gives you
Speaker 19: something to do, like empower yourself and pass the time
Speaker 19: and stay out of the way. Money helps because then
Speaker 19: you can do crafts, you can paint, you can do art,
Speaker 19: you can sell things, you can do crochet. That stuff helps,
Speaker 19: and then letters obviously like that gives you someone to
Speaker 19: talk to. It people are actually putting thought into the letters,
Speaker 19: and I always encourage and I always will for as
Speaker 19: many people as possible to on a daily or weekly basis,
Speaker 19: call that prison, call the prison, no matter what prison, state, federal, county,
Speaker 19: and demand to speak with the warden, the captain, the warden, secretary,
Speaker 19: the lieutenant, the head of psychology, and demand to know
Speaker 19: how is this person doing? What are you doing to
Speaker 19: keep them safe? We're hearing this in this what is
Speaker 19: going to happen to our family? That makes a difference. Okay,
Speaker 19: if you know a lawyer, pay the one hundred and
Speaker 19: twenty dollars an hour to have them do.
Speaker 3: A legal call.
Speaker 19: That way, the prison sees this person has a lawyer
Speaker 19: protecting them. They don't need to know that. It's just
Speaker 19: a one time call. Yeah, but that legal call, just
Speaker 19: the wellness check is what they call it. Let's that
Speaker 19: person get word out about what dangerous stuff is happening.
Speaker 19: But it also forces the prison to recognize that they
Speaker 19: might be protected by legal system.
Speaker 3: Okay, so these things help.
Speaker 22: Yeah, what's the master plan here for how we're going
Speaker 22: to respond to this executive order? Because obviously we're not
Speaker 22: necessarily in a position to immediately reverse this order and
Speaker 22: get women put into women's prison, which is a crazy
Speaker 22: thing to have to say, we're not going to be
Speaker 22: able to get women put into women's prisons, but is
Speaker 22: organizing with a local group. You create a group and
Speaker 22: you basically like figure out who the local trans prisoners
Speaker 22: are in your area and make sure that you're communicating
Speaker 22: with them and that they're getting wellness calls from lawyers
Speaker 22: and basically like just making sure that the prison knows
Speaker 22: that people are paying attention to the fact that there's
Speaker 22: now women in the men's prison.
Speaker 19: Is that that's a soft version of what we should do, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Fair enough.
Speaker 19: There's other versions that are yeah, okay, there's the other
Speaker 19: version that like I wish people would do. Yeah, there's
Speaker 19: a version where we do BDS but for every single
Speaker 19: company that's benefiting from prison labor, yeah, and say, as
Speaker 19: long as you let this transgender hate go on, we're
Speaker 19: not going to support your business. There's boycotting, there's putting
Speaker 19: people on the road so that the cops can't show
Speaker 19: up to their jobs.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 19: There's protesting outside warden's houses, there's protesting outside governor's houses.
Speaker 19: If it's for state prison there is tangibly putting your
Speaker 19: body on the line. There is sabotaging cop cars that
Speaker 19: go into the prison, there is barricading the entrances. There's
Speaker 19: a thousand things we can do to say, if you
Speaker 19: heard our people were hurting you, yea, whether it's in
Speaker 19: your pocket, whether it's in your car, whether it's in
Speaker 19: your daily life, whether it's annoying you. We can find
Speaker 19: things to do if we care enough. And we saw
Speaker 19: people do it for Palestine. And I don't think transgender
Speaker 19: lives are less important than Palestinian lives. Yeah, it has
Speaker 19: to be an equal thing in my mind. Yeah, but
Speaker 19: the subu sid's really great too. That's like that's daily stuff.
Speaker 22: No, No, but you're right, and it's like it's funny
Speaker 22: because it's like, in my mind, it's so hard to
Speaker 22: ring the alarm bells when all of the alarm bells
Speaker 22: are ringing, and everyone's kind of ignoring alarm bells right now.
Speaker 22: I mean, I guess the answer is that we talk
Speaker 22: about it like this, but like, how do we make
Speaker 22: sure that people actually listen to the alarm bells that
Speaker 22: are happening right now? And I think part of it
Speaker 22: is being really unfortunately brutally honest about what it's like
Speaker 22: to be a woman in men's prison.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't think people understand it all.
Speaker 19: And yeah, there's all this misinformation too, Like you'll hear
Speaker 19: these like fascist talking points coming out of liberals' mouths
Speaker 19: to where like well, I don't want my tax dollars
Speaker 19: going to like pay for their surgery, or I don't
Speaker 19: want some man just sneaking into a woman's prison saying
Speaker 19: these transgenders we can rape everyone. And these are like
Speaker 19: the same scare tactics and like misinformation that's used for
Speaker 19: every single, like every single repression you've ever seen. And
Speaker 19: it's our job to confront those head on and call
Speaker 19: them out. His lives, show show the real information, and
Speaker 19: it's our job to continue to just force people to
Speaker 19: recognize that this is a dangerous and real situation.
Speaker 3: We can't let this entire group.
Speaker 19: Of people be destroyed, because like, if you're going to
Speaker 19: turn your blind eye to transgender people, you're going to
Speaker 19: do it to gay people, You're going to do it
Speaker 19: to women, You're going to do it to black people,
Speaker 19: and then it's just you, and then no one's going
Speaker 19: to protect your stupid ass. We have to as or
Speaker 19: as I have to as assist man. We have to
Speaker 19: keep bringing this bell. We have to make people listen.
Speaker 22: I mean as a as a not currently in prison
Speaker 22: and trans women. Like one of the reasons I think
Speaker 22: this almost happens. I mean it happens because the cruelty
Speaker 22: is the point, but like it's terrifying. You've actually experienced
Speaker 22: the thing that's terrifying. It is terrifying the idea of
Speaker 22: going into prison in the United States, especially maximum security prison,
Speaker 22: potentially especially men's prison, both as a man or a
Speaker 22: trans woman. I wouldn't want to be in men's prison,
Speaker 22: and I don't.
Speaker 19: Even want to compare it, by the way, Okay, it's
Speaker 19: not comparable. Okay, Like if I didn't have antique attachment
Speaker 19: on my face, I could walk into any prison in
Speaker 19: the country and be like, Oh, there's just a white guy.
Speaker 19: There's just a white roll. Yeah, have no problems. Yeah,
Speaker 19: a transgender person. There's a single place except for a
Speaker 19: protective custody yard, where they can walk in and immediately
Speaker 19: feel safe. Yeah, it's the exact opposite. Everywhere they go
Speaker 19: is fight or flight. The scariest moment you've ever had
Speaker 19: your entire life. Point four to seven, all day.
Speaker 4: Every day.
Speaker 19: Yeah, picture someone breaking into your home in the middle
Speaker 19: of the night, in that terror you get. They have
Speaker 19: to walk into a new prison every single time and
Speaker 19: face that terror every single day. Yeah, it's not comparable
Speaker 19: at all. It's scary as shit.
Speaker 3: No, that's fair.
Speaker 22: Like to be honest, like I think about and this
Speaker 22: is like maybe more honest than I'm usually am on
Speaker 22: this podcast. Like, you know, I don't do as much
Speaker 22: frontline activism as I did. And part of that's like, oh,
Speaker 22: I'm like aging and I have other work that I do,
Speaker 22: And part of it is like I came out as trans,
Speaker 22: you know, part of it is like I never liked
Speaker 22: the idea of like because I always was trans and
Speaker 22: the idea of like being surrounded by only men was
Speaker 22: just viscerally terrifying. But now in particular, like it's just
Speaker 22: such a it's a mind fuck. It's terrifying, and you know,
Speaker 22: I feel like one of my main roles is to
Speaker 22: try and help people be like, look, we're in this
Speaker 22: together enough that you should be scared, but you should
Speaker 22: get through the fear. But it's like the fear of
Speaker 22: prison is like such a I mean, it's part of
Speaker 22: the reason that people say, like, no one is free
Speaker 22: is till everyone is free, as long as there is
Speaker 22: a single person in prison, you were not free because
Speaker 22: your freedom can be taken away from you at any point,
Speaker 22: and that fear of prison it's funny. Okay, I'm almost
Speaker 22: done with this rant. You know, people have kind of
Speaker 22: like figured out at this point that certain branches of
Speaker 22: Christianity will use the fear of hell to force people
Speaker 22: to be good by their definition of good right. And
Speaker 22: it's a scare tactic. It's terrorism. It is like a
Speaker 22: you know, you better behave or infinite suffering awaits you.
Speaker 22: But then even the people who are critical of that
Speaker 22: haven't necessarily wrapped their head around that. The existence of prisons,
Speaker 22: especially the existence of punitive prisons, like the sort of
Speaker 22: theoretical perfect model of the Norwegian prison or whatever, where
Speaker 22: you're just sort of separated from society, which I suspect
Speaker 22: is not actually I suspect Norwegian prison actually kind of sucks.
Speaker 22: But the American prison system is a prison system that
Speaker 22: exists to make you on the outside not feel free,
Speaker 22: like because it can be taken away from you and
Speaker 22: you can be thrown in prison.
Speaker 19: That's my rant, Yeah, well, I mean, you're absolutely right,
Speaker 19: like that is the entire goal is to make sure
Speaker 19: that the community walks the government line, because if you don't,
Speaker 19: this is what will happen to you. And when people
Speaker 19: pull like the nonsense of like well, if you're not
Speaker 19: committing crimes, you shouldn't worry about it, Like they are
Speaker 19: not looking at how like arbitrary crimes are. Yeah, they're
Speaker 19: not looking at how quickly something can become a crime,
Speaker 19: or how quickly something that wasn't a crime can be
Speaker 19: portrayed as one. And the trans struggle, like trans people
Speaker 19: should not have to be on the front line. Again,
Speaker 19: no point should you or any of our trans family
Speaker 19: ever have to like put their freedom on the line,
Speaker 19: Like that is that's a privilege role, Like that's our role,
Speaker 19: my role, and my boss shouldn't have to get arrested
Speaker 19: for transliberation. Like they should be safe, like they should
Speaker 19: be able to feel comfort and warmth. You should be
Speaker 19: able to feel that safe and warmth and love, Like
Speaker 19: black people shouldn't be flighting the black liberation pipe. That's
Speaker 19: that's white people's flight. Trans people should not have to
Speaker 19: put their vulnerable lives on the line for this struggle
Speaker 19: if we really believe in in the liberation struggle.
Speaker 22: Yeah, and it's hard because you also want to like
Speaker 22: while also not wanting to like lead that struggle. Right, Like,
Speaker 22: I think that like white people putting themselves on the
Speaker 22: line for black liberation is like super important.
Speaker 3: But then obviously you can get into there's the hero
Speaker 3: shit and trying to take a leadership.
Speaker 19: Yeah, do the David Gilbert role, be a soldier how
Speaker 19: they need you, and help and fight how people actually.
Speaker 3: Need you, not how you think it should be done. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 22: Well, any last words for our audience around this particular issue.
Speaker 19: Yeah, Here in Denver, Brenn Rose's Legal Center, that's who
Speaker 19: I work for. It's a transgender ran civil rights law firm.
Speaker 19: We're about to put forward the trans Bill rights here
Speaker 19: in Colorado to guarantee safety. And I bring that up
Speaker 19: to say that not only is there direct action and
Speaker 19: protest we can do, we can also try to weasel
Speaker 19: into the legal system.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 19: There's a thousand ways we can fight these motherfuckers, and
Speaker 19: we've got to use every single one of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 19: And I have nothing but love and solidarity for every
Speaker 19: transgender person alive anywhere and I'm with you, and we're
Speaker 19: going to get through this.
Speaker 22: I hope we are going to get through it, because
Speaker 22: even as individuals we might not, right, But that's as
Speaker 22: it's true about being alive, right, Literally, none of us
Speaker 22: are going to get through being alive alive right. At
Speaker 22: some point that's going to stop working for us, and
Speaker 22: they can't get rid of us. We have always been here,
Speaker 22: we will always be here as long as there are
Speaker 22: humans that are going to be trans people, they're going
Speaker 22: to be queer people, they're going to be All of
Speaker 22: the identities that they're trying to destroy cannot be destroyed,
Speaker 22: even if us as individuals might But again, we weren't.
Speaker 3: Going to get out of life alive anyway. That's what
Speaker 3: I hold on to.
Speaker 22: I don't know about everyone who's listening, but the thing
Speaker 22: that I hold onto is that just literally I was like, well,
Speaker 22: I wasn't.
Speaker 3: I'm not immortal. You know, it's got a time limit.
Speaker 22: Yeah, And all we can do is to say, go
Speaker 22: back to one of the first things that you said,
Speaker 22: we just kind of can't compromise our ethics, you know,
Speaker 22: like there's like balancing acts right where you have to think, like, well,
Speaker 22: I probably shouldn't do something where I like while out
Speaker 22: and get myself killed and accomplish nothing. Fight to win, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 22: and some of fighting to win is knowing when not
Speaker 22: to fight and things like that. Right, but but not
Speaker 22: and secretly you're just actually doing it at a cowardice way.
Speaker 22: You actually have to be strategically being like where and
Speaker 22: when should I engage in what ways? And there are
Speaker 22: so many different ways that people can engage. Yeah, thanks
Speaker 22: for coming on, And do you want to talk about
Speaker 22: your book?
Speaker 3: So rather than the cages out right now?
Speaker 19: It's with ak Press and it is a oral history
Speaker 19: of the political prisoner movement hold from the mouths of
Speaker 19: those prisoners. It covers like fifty or so prisoners from
Speaker 19: every movement, Black trans Our Elders are more recent anti fascists.
Speaker 19: And it was a beautiful way not just to hear
Speaker 19: about like oh I fought for this, but what was
Speaker 19: my life like inside?
Speaker 3: What did I experience?
Speaker 19: What gave me joy? What gave me hope, what gave
Speaker 19: me sadness? And it's a way to see the vulnerability
Speaker 19: and humanity of those inside. And I think that's really
Speaker 19: valuable right now and here soon my ADX book is
Speaker 19: coming out on them press. Oh cool, so I'll be
Speaker 19: I'll be hounding you for that here soon, for that coverage.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, Wait, well what's that book callor about.
Speaker 19: It's gonna be called a clean hell, and it's gonna
Speaker 19: be about how I want it trial, because no one
Speaker 19: does that in the Feds. Zero point zero eight percent
Speaker 19: of people win in federal trial. And then how I
Speaker 19: got sent to the federal supermax and there's no books
Speaker 19: out about the supermax, there's none. Well, and so one
Speaker 19: of your homies has the inside scoop.
Speaker 22: Yeah I got Yeah, you were just an undercover journalist,
Speaker 22: just a real undercover solitary confinement.
Speaker 3: So had Josh Davidson is helping me edit it.
Speaker 19: Josh Davidson from rather than the Cages, who did also
Speaker 19: certain days.
Speaker 3: So it's seemed been a really great project, Carlso awesome.
Speaker 22: All right, Well, people should check out both of those
Speaker 22: things and take care of people inside. And I hope
Speaker 22: that we'll have you one again soon.
Speaker 3: Yay, thank you so much.
Speaker 13: It could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and yeah, it's happening.
Speaker 13: The past few years I've been writing about how the
Speaker 13: religious right has been trying to roll back trans rights,
Speaker 13: take away gender affirming health care, and essentially remove trans
Speaker 13: people from public life. And the day that I'm writing this,
Speaker 13: President Trump just issued an executive order aiming to ban
Speaker 13: gender affirming health care for everyone below the age of
Speaker 13: nineteen in the United States, with promises to weaponize the
Speaker 13: Justice Department and alter the national Health guidelines for gender
Speaker 13: affirming care. And unfortunately this is just the start. But
Speaker 13: this won't be a wallowing in the doom and gloom episode,
Speaker 13: nor will I be laying out the fool proof solution
Speaker 13: to get us out of this predicament. Instead, we'll be
Speaker 13: hearing from two people who are trying to do something
Speaker 13: to affect change in the physical world. Last month, Mia
Speaker 13: and I talked with Neha and Cassie, who are organizers
Speaker 13: and baristas with Starbucks workers Unite It, and they also
Speaker 13: co facilitate that union's trans Rights action committee called Track.
Speaker 3: And specifically, the topic of this episode is how.
Speaker 13: To use union organizing as a way to fight for
Speaker 13: trans rights and secure access to gender affirming healthcare, which
Speaker 13: is unfortunately an increasingly critical issue. We've already had conservative
Speaker 13: states like Tennessee pressuring private insurance companies to drop covering
Speaker 13: gender affirming care by blocking insurers from contracting with the
Speaker 13: state's medicaid program, basically holding it hostage. And now with
Speaker 13: the federal government threatening gender affirming care and seemingly more
Speaker 13: and more restrictions kind of on the horizon, working outside
Speaker 13: the state and not relying on government programs like Medicare
Speaker 13: and Medicaid will only become more and union organizing is
Speaker 13: one way to do that. A union contract, union infrastructure,
Speaker 13: and the collective resources of you and your fellow union
Speaker 13: workers can help protect trans people in the workplace and
Speaker 13: get us the things we need. If you already have
Speaker 13: a union at your workplace, you can get more involved
Speaker 13: and fight to prioritize trans rights. And if you don't
Speaker 13: have a union, you can work to secure access to
Speaker 13: gender affirm and care through unionizing your workplace and having
Speaker 13: healthcare protections as a core part of your contract. For
Speaker 13: more on that topic, I'm going to play the conversation
Speaker 13: between my fellow union member Mia and Neha and Cassie
Speaker 13: from Starbucks Workers United, and I'll occasionally pop back in
Speaker 13: to provide some context. Here's Cassie.
Speaker 23: When you fight for a collective bargaining agreement, a contract
Speaker 23: between union workers and their employer. You can fight for
Speaker 23: gender affirming care to be included in the healthcare that's provided,
Speaker 23: and make sure that that healthcare is afforded and actually
Speaker 23: usable by the people working there, and that their wages
Speaker 23: are adequate to cover out of pocket expenses, including travel
Speaker 23: expenses if you live in a state that's coming under threat.
Speaker 13: But it is not just healthcare that is under threat
Speaker 13: right now. Just days into office, Trump already started to
Speaker 13: roll back Biden era federal discrimination protections. Last Monday, the
Speaker 13: Trump Badman sent a memo ordering a freeze to all
Speaker 13: federal grants, loans, and aid, requiring a sort of audit
Speaker 13: to ensure the recipients of those funds use the money
Speaker 13: in a way that quote conforms to the administration priorities unquote,
Speaker 13: and not to promote quote dei and woke gender ideology unquote.
Speaker 13: On Tuesday, a judge temporarily halted the order, and on
Speaker 13: Wednesday the White House provoked the directive. But this clearly
Speaker 13: demonstrates what the new priorities are for the Conservative government,
Speaker 13: and they we'll most certainly try this again, probably in
Speaker 13: a more targeted, discriminatory fashion, to limit the general backlash.
Speaker 13: But even as the government starts openly allowing discrimination or
Speaker 13: even encouraging it, discrimination protections is still something that unions
Speaker 13: can write into their contract.
Speaker 23: Having non discrimination language in a contract that covers gender
Speaker 23: identity is a really critical way to improve not just
Speaker 23: for yourself, but then also we talk about these things
Speaker 23: like hiring discrimination. If you get that kind of language
Speaker 23: in a contract at a union job, that's going to
Speaker 23: help everyone who comes after you. Because additionally, as a
Speaker 23: union you have the mechanism of enforcement of a grievance
Speaker 23: and an arbitration procedure. Right, that's sort of, you know,
Speaker 23: the critical in addition to obviously all the kind of
Speaker 23: actions you can perform. And you know, we can talk
Speaker 23: about what things might look like without the NLRA, but
Speaker 23: for now, we have grievance and arbitration procedures still. And
Speaker 23: in states where there are legal protections against employment discrimination
Speaker 23: for trans people, like here in California, the bar to
Speaker 23: defending yourself legally is obviously a lot higher, including financially,
Speaker 23: than defending yourself through a grievance procedure at a union job.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 23: A grievance procedure at a union job is way more
Speaker 23: accessible to the average working person than hiring a lawyer
Speaker 23: and going through a legal system that is totally stacked
Speaker 23: against you and in favor of the wealthy. Having a
Speaker 23: union to defend you, you know, with the collective resources
Speaker 23: of your union that you're part of, and having your
Speaker 23: shop steward or you be a shop steward and filing
Speaker 23: those grievances yourself. It's so much more accessible for regular
Speaker 23: workers to get enforcement when they are discriminated against. And
Speaker 23: that's obviously not only relevant for trans people, but it
Speaker 23: is certainly relevant for trans people.
Speaker 13: Now, if you don't have union organizing experience, this could
Speaker 13: all seem a little intimidating, even if you already have
Speaker 13: a pre existing union at your workplace. MIA has done
Speaker 13: a whole bunch of episodes on unions and labor organizing
Speaker 13: on this podcast you could certainly look to for more
Speaker 13: information and a bit of encouragement. In twenty twenty three,
Speaker 13: Neha co founded TRACK, the Trans Rights Action Committee, which
Speaker 13: is a subcommittee of the Starbucks union that was started
Speaker 13: to help advocate for trans rights within the union and
Speaker 13: share information about the challenges trans workers were experiencing. We
Speaker 13: asked Neha about the process of getting this focus on
Speaker 13: securing trans healthcare through your union to be something that
Speaker 13: the union collectively fights for the way that our union.
Speaker 15: Started focusing on trans healthcare as one of the core
Speaker 15: issues isite we weren't organizing around. And all started with
Speaker 15: a conversation with like a regional staffer here in Oklahoma.
Speaker 15: I have like a regular check and call with my staffer,
Speaker 15: and this was like two two and a half years ago,
Speaker 15: and he was just like asking, you know, what's going on?
Speaker 15: What are you concerned about? And I was like, well,
Speaker 15: I'm having some issues with like accessing health care, and
Speaker 15: he not heard like how difficult it was for like
Speaker 15: trans people to access healthcare and Starbucks. He wasn't aware
Speaker 15: of like how expensive it could be. And as I
Speaker 15: started talking to him, he was like, hold on, let
Speaker 15: me like set up a meeting with some other people.
Speaker 15: I think they need to hear this too. So then
Speaker 15: we have like a follow up meeting with more like
Speaker 15: staff and other organizers. I talked about these issues again,
Speaker 15: and one thing led to another thing, and they ended
Speaker 15: up encouraging me to form a subcommittee with their union
Speaker 15: for trans workers to kind of like build community for
Speaker 15: us and connect us, but also hear more stories from
Speaker 15: trans workers about the struggles that they were facing, specifically
Speaker 15: in accessing healthcare. And so that's kind of how TRACK started.
Speaker 15: And it's been really moving to see how over the
Speaker 15: past like two three years, this went from like an
Speaker 15: issue that was affecting like a minority of a minority
Speaker 15: of workers, right, Like, it's not like every single work
Speaker 15: at Starbucks is trying to like have facial combinization surgery
Speaker 15: or anything like that. Right This issue that was affecting
Speaker 15: like a small step set of us ended up becoming
Speaker 15: like one of the biggest issues we were organizing around.
Speaker 15: It makes me really emotional when I think about like
Speaker 15: how much my union coworkers and like my comrades like
Speaker 15: actually like fucking care about trans people. Right of kind
Speaker 15: of like how TRACKS started and how we started to
Speaker 15: organize around trans healthcare specifically.
Speaker 23: It's been a focus for us for a long time.
Speaker 23: Also in part because the initial you know, our public
Speaker 23: bargaining proposals that were released early on when we first
Speaker 23: formulated our demands in included improvements to gender affirming care
Speaker 23: at Starbucks.
Speaker 3: And part of that's because there.
Speaker 23: Were trans people involved in writing those initial demands right,
Speaker 23: and you know, Neihaw was involved nationally in the campaign
Speaker 23: and had the opportunity and the encouragement to start track.
Speaker 3: You know, we have to be part of it.
Speaker 23: I think is on some level, you know, the most
Speaker 23: basic prerequisite for everything that came after is because trans
Speaker 23: people have been involved with this campaign from the beginning.
Speaker 23: We do have so much support and solidarity from our
Speaker 23: coworkers and from our fellow union comrades, regardless of whether
Speaker 23: they're SIS or trans, and I think part of that
Speaker 23: is because we've really showed up and done the work.
Speaker 23: This again goes to that kind of like false narrative
Speaker 23: of there's like some kind of contention between workers' rights
Speaker 23: and trans rights. It's like trans people have been super
Speaker 23: motivated to get involved in this camp pain and fight
Speaker 23: for the rights and benefits for every worker at Starbucks.
Speaker 23: Other workers have seen that, seen the way we've been
Speaker 23: involved and dedicated, and that's given them the sympathy and
Speaker 23: solidarity to stand by us for an issue that affects
Speaker 23: us very you know, directly and somewhat narrowly compared to
Speaker 23: a lot of the other things we're fighting for. So yeah,
Speaker 23: on some level, I think it comes down to unions
Speaker 23: are a place where trans people can get involved in
Speaker 23: political life in a way that's hard to do in
Speaker 23: other parts of American political life. And you get to
Speaker 23: build that solidarity, and if you're there at the table,
Speaker 23: you have a chance to highlight the issues that are
Speaker 23: important to us. And if you're fighting for everyone else,
Speaker 23: they're going to want to fight for you too.
Speaker 13: Track's logo says trans rights are labor rights, a phrase
Speaker 13: one of Nahe's co workers came up with to express
Speaker 13: the idea that even if your state becomes an unsafe
Speaker 13: place for queer and trans people, trans people will still
Speaker 13: fight to ensure that their workplace, their store, is a
Speaker 13: safe place for any trans person who works there. As
Speaker 13: the functioning of the state and the federal government becomes
Speaker 13: more and more alienated and distant, or in many cases,
Speaker 13: increasingly hostile to the likes of you and me, one
Speaker 13: of the few ways we can still exert power over
Speaker 13: our lives is through unions, regardless of whether you live
Speaker 13: in Portland, Oregon, or Oklahoma City, and specifically, as access
Speaker 13: to trans healthcare becomes more and more of a growing issue,
Speaker 13: this is becoming more of a core issue itself. That
Speaker 13: you can organize around and can actually build a union around.
Speaker 23: Lots of different struggles have been highlighted in our campaign.
Speaker 23: You know, we have really made racial justice a major
Speaker 23: priority as well. I mean, obviously economic justice is at
Speaker 23: the core of any union struggle, but you know, we're
Speaker 23: really invested in making sure all workers are included in
Speaker 23: this movement and their specific concerns are represented as well
Speaker 23: as our general shared concerns. And as more and more
Speaker 23: things get taken away at the level of federal politics
Speaker 23: and state politics in many places, people will be looking
Speaker 23: for recourse. It's like, how do I get back the stability,
Speaker 23: the protections, the dignity, the power that I've lost, particularly
Speaker 23: if you know some of these folks are not super
Speaker 23: democratically accountable. People will be looking for how they can
Speaker 23: build power and how they can find security when the
Speaker 23: state is not providing it and when the state's actively
Speaker 23: undermining it. Actually, and unions are one of the truly critical,
Speaker 23: irreplaceable answers for protecting yourself, for protecting the people you
Speaker 23: work with, for protecting your community, and for taking back
Speaker 23: some of the things that they're trying to take away
Speaker 23: from you, whether that's on the job protections, whether that'sanomic equality,
Speaker 23: whether that is your access to trans healthcare, whether that's
Speaker 23: protections from racism or misogynistic discrimination in your job and harassment,
Speaker 23: all of these things. If the state steps away, people
Speaker 23: should and will look to labor organizing as the answer instead.
Speaker 15: Our ability to build power in this way is a
Speaker 15: way that we maintain hope so that we can keep
Speaker 15: organizing for a better future. I think one of the
Speaker 15: best tools like these fucking fascist freaks have is making
Speaker 15: us feel like there's no hope. It's beating us down,
Speaker 15: it's making us feel like we have no power, it's
Speaker 15: making us feel completely disconnected from the government, our workplace,
Speaker 15: all of these different things that like exert power over us.
Speaker 15: And I think labor is such a direct way to
Speaker 15: give people that power back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Morales a terran a struggle, and this is a
Speaker 3: way that you can fight there that does other things
Speaker 3: too at the same time, critically important and.
Speaker 13: Do you know what else is important? Being subservient to
Speaker 13: the capitalist impulse of pivoting to ads.
Speaker 3: Okay, we are back.
Speaker 13: Here is more of our interview with Starbucks workers.
Speaker 11: You needed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because things have
Speaker 3: been very bad. And one of the specific ways that
Speaker 3: they've been very bad is that there's become this framing
Speaker 3: and this has been around for a while, but it's
Speaker 3: getting sort of increasingly adopted in mainstream circles that trans
Speaker 3: rights are opposed to workers' rights, and that's just nonsense.
Speaker 3: So I wanted to sort of start there with a
Speaker 3: bit of a discussion about, well, the ways in which
Speaker 3: the trans struggle is a worker struggle.
Speaker 15: The trans community is like disproportionately like impoverished, like a
Speaker 15: lot of us are struggling to just pay for rent,
Speaker 15: are basic like needs, right, Yeah, I think that's firmly
Speaker 15: assumes that like all trans people are like, I don't know, rich, working,
Speaker 15: attack or some shit like that, which just is not true.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The actual stats, by the way, these are running
Speaker 3: from the US Trans Survey, which is the largest survey
Speaker 3: of trans people in the US. Thirty four percent poverty
Speaker 3: rate than the national number for assist people is eleven percent.
Speaker 3: The unemployment rate is eighteen percent. The US uneployment rate
Speaker 3: assists people is four percent, eighteen percent is nineteen thirty
Speaker 3: six great depression levels of unemployment. Thirty percent of trans
Speaker 3: people have experienced homelessness in their lives. The national rate
Speaker 3: is about seven percent, and those numbers are actually very
Speaker 3: misleading because it's actually much worse than that, because these
Speaker 3: demographics skew young significantly because of both the shortness of
Speaker 3: our life expectancy and how often we get killed. And
Speaker 3: also there's more people who are realizing that they're trans
Speaker 3: now than there ever has before, So those homelessness numbers
Speaker 3: are we are racking up a rate of homelessness that
Speaker 3: is four times higher than the regular rate, and we're
Speaker 3: doing it in significantly less years than it takes the
Speaker 3: CIS population to rack up these levels of homelessness. So
Speaker 3: things are extremely bad for trans people. Transfems make like
Speaker 3: sixty cents on the dollar of like the average American worker.
Speaker 23: Yeah, and I think you see that in our union.
Speaker 23: We have a lot of worker leaders who are trans.
Speaker 23: It's a noticeable obvious fact about our unions that trans
Speaker 23: people have really been deeply involved since day one at
Speaker 23: all levels of this union. And I think part of
Speaker 23: that is because Starbucks has been associated as a place
Speaker 23: of economic stability and opportunity for trans healthcare for a
Speaker 23: community that has relatively few opportunities. I mean, if you're
Speaker 23: talking about eighteen percent unemployment. Then you're talking about people
Speaker 23: who certainly are going to have difficulty getting employer provided healthcare,
Speaker 23: let alone employer provided healthcare that's going to include gender
Speaker 23: affirming care, right, And so Starbucks has been held up
Speaker 23: as an opportunity for that for a lot of people.
Speaker 23: It's obviously drawn a lot of us to the company.
Speaker 23: Many of us started working there for that exact reason,
Speaker 23: and then, you know, have discovered in many cases that
Speaker 23: it's actually not so accessible. You know, I can say
Speaker 23: in my case, it's definitely one reason I started working
Speaker 23: at Starbucks because I heard like, hey, if you want
Speaker 23: facial feminization surgery, go work at Starbucks.
Speaker 3: That was a community tip.
Speaker 23: And then it turned out that I made so little
Speaker 23: money that I qualified for Medicaid, And in California, where
Speaker 23: I'm lucky enough to live for now, Medicaid covers those
Speaker 23: things and is more affordable and accessible than the Starbucks
Speaker 23: healthcare actually was, So I ended up relying on Medicaid instead.
Speaker 23: And I think a lot of us have felt and
Speaker 23: seen that dissonance between coming to this company looking for opportunity,
Speaker 23: looking for a place that is inclusive and will hire
Speaker 23: trans workers, it says, and ostensibly offers trans healthcare, but
Speaker 23: then finding out where those gaps are and realizing like,
Speaker 23: actually it's better for me to stay on Medicaid, which
Speaker 23: is easy to do because I make so little money
Speaker 23: at this job. It takes that shine off. And I think,
Speaker 23: you know, our economic vulnerability as a group is precisely
Speaker 23: what drove a lot of us to seek improvements here.
Speaker 23: It's related to our transness, sure, but it's also like
Speaker 23: just fundamental working class issues. We need better wages, we
Speaker 23: need better healthcare. You know, that's something everyone benefits from
Speaker 23: and everyone can relate to.
Speaker 15: And I mean, I can also attest to the fact
Speaker 15: that I started at Starbucks five years ago because I
Speaker 15: needed to have access and gender firming care. I was
Speaker 15: coming from a situation where I came out as a teenager.
Speaker 15: I was disowned and kicked out by my family. I
Speaker 15: didn't have access to college. I was like basically on
Speaker 15: my own right, and I had no idea how I'm
Speaker 15: going to matter transision, and like older trans women in
Speaker 15: my life told me to apply to Starbucks. And it
Speaker 15: was also like one of those things where like, again,
Speaker 15: I live in Oklahoma, It's not like there's a ton
Speaker 15: of employers who are like super excited to hire trans women. Right.
Speaker 3: That's something I also want to highlight because I don't
Speaker 3: think people understand this at all. If there's cysts is
Speaker 3: that the level of employment discrimination is staggering. It is, however,
Speaker 3: hard if you are a sis person you think it
Speaker 3: is to find a job, it is like thirty times
Speaker 3: harder if you are trans. It's unbelievably difficult. And the
Speaker 3: promise of just like any job that will hire a
Speaker 3: trans person is a huge deal because you know otherwise
Speaker 3: odds are you walk in the door and they take
Speaker 3: one look at you and like, you know, you're fucked.
Speaker 15: Right, And I think that's how Starbucks kind of like
Speaker 15: advertises itself too queer and trans workers, right. And I
Speaker 15: think this is reflected in the demographic of my store.
Speaker 15: Ninety nine percent of my coworkers are clear a lot
Speaker 15: of us or trans. There's like a lot of trans
Speaker 15: women who work at my store. I actually don't even
Speaker 15: know if we have a single straight coworker. Actually, we
Speaker 15: have liked one token like diversity higher, but he literally
Speaker 15: just transfers. I think it's all gay people, but no,
Speaker 15: like all of us applied to Starbucks because like, what
Speaker 15: other options do we have? Right, And again, in my case,
Speaker 15: I applied to Starbucks because I needed access to gender
Speaker 15: froming care. And over like the five years that I've
Speaker 15: worked here, I've realized that while that benefit might look
Speaker 15: good on paper, in practice, it's hard to actually qualify
Speaker 15: for that healthcare. It can be completely unaffordable for a
Speaker 15: lot of us. Right Like, last year, I made sixteen
Speaker 15: thousand dollars in total from Starbucks, and like a disproportionate
Speaker 15: amount of that income was just going towards healthcare, which
Speaker 15: doesn't even take into account like rent or bill or
Speaker 15: anything else. Like we're struggling to just fucking get by.
Speaker 13: Something that Mia pointed out is that one of the
Speaker 13: few places trans people are actually overrepresented is in union organizing.
Speaker 13: Because trans people don't really have a safety net. Fewer
Speaker 13: of us can turn to or rely on family support.
Speaker 13: So union organizing is one of the ways we can
Speaker 13: directly fight for a better life.
Speaker 15: But the current political climate as it is, it's even scarier.
Speaker 15: I mean, Cassie was talking about not being able to
Speaker 15: actually access the Starbucks healthcare and having defined other ways
Speaker 15: to pay for gender firm and care. But I mean,
Speaker 15: we're looking at like a Trump administration that could possibly
Speaker 15: be trying to make it impossible for anyone to use
Speaker 15: Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender firming care. We're looking
Speaker 15: at state by state like healthcare vans, right. I think
Speaker 15: it's more important than ever to organize and focus on
Speaker 15: transwrites and our access to healthcare, our wages, our safety
Speaker 15: at the workplace. Where else are we gonna protect ourselves
Speaker 15: like that?
Speaker 13: The Starbucks union is also fighting for guaranteed scheduling and
Speaker 13: better staffing in stores, and this relates directly to a
Speaker 13: worker's ability to access health care and gender affirming healthcare.
Speaker 13: Part of Starbucks healthcare being somewhat inaccessible is that employees
Speaker 13: have to work a certain threshold of hours to qualify
Speaker 13: for benefits, including healthcare. Failure to get enough hours of
Speaker 13: work scheduled means losing access to your own health care,
Speaker 13: and this kind of reflects a more subtle form of
Speaker 13: employment discrimination.
Speaker 15: I can speak to this. I've heard this from many
Speaker 15: other workers. It is such a struggle just to get
Speaker 15: the minimum amount of hours to keep your benefits. I
Speaker 15: was talking to another worker who was telling me about
Speaker 15: how she had to like literally cry and beg her
Speaker 15: manager to schedule her enough so she didn't lose access
Speaker 15: to gender firm and care. And of course this manager
Speaker 15: was scheduling enough hours for other workers who weren't trans women, right,
Speaker 15: And so I've been having like protections in a contract
Speaker 15: that guarantee a certain number of hours that are scheduling.
Speaker 15: That kind of thing also makes it easier for us
Speaker 15: to maintain and keep the benefits that we need.
Speaker 13: And obviously this benefits all workers because everyone benefits from
Speaker 13: having enough hours to actually get the money you need
Speaker 13: to live. The Starbucks union started the official bargaining process
Speaker 13: with the company last April, and they were supposed to
Speaker 13: have their final bargaining session last December, based on a
Speaker 13: shared expectation that the contract would be closed and ratified
Speaker 13: by the end of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 15: So after nine months of bargaining, it's December or expecting
Speaker 15: to finish up contract bargaining. And after like a few
Speaker 15: months of like delaying and not really giving us a
Speaker 15: counter on wages or benefits, Starbucks like finally gave us
Speaker 15: a counter proposal, I mean like counter proposal.
Speaker 3: It was literally like a page.
Speaker 15: And their counter proposal was basically no changes to benefits whatsoever,
Speaker 15: and a one point five percent raise if non union
Speaker 15: stores received a raise that was less than that, And
Speaker 15: for context, one point five percent for most of us
Speaker 15: is thirty cents. So yeah, after nine months, that was
Speaker 15: the best they could do. So it wasn't really a
Speaker 15: serious like counter proposal. I mean, frankly, it was a
Speaker 15: fucking insult.
Speaker 13: So with less than a week's notice, they organized the
Speaker 13: biggest ULP strike in the union's history, resulting in five
Speaker 13: thousand baristas at over three hundred stores across the country
Speaker 13: going on strike on Christmas Eve. Now, this is not
Speaker 13: the kind of open ended, ongoing strike that you're probably
Speaker 13: more familiar with. A ULP strike refers to a short
Speaker 13: term strike action directly tied to an unfair labor practice,
Speaker 13: which is any act by an employer that violates a
Speaker 13: worker's legal rights, and unlike ongoing strikes, ULP strikes can
Speaker 13: happen anytime, not just during contract bargaining. In fact, the
Speaker 13: Starbucks union has utilized ULP strikes the past few years
Speaker 13: to address unfair labor practices. Part of the shared agreement
Speaker 13: to finish the contract before the year's end was to
Speaker 13: also resolve outstanding unfair labor practices by the end of
Speaker 13: twenty twenty four, which did not happen and thus the strikes.
Speaker 13: And this was a super tight turnaround to organize strikes
Speaker 13: of this scale. By having a representative or delegate from
Speaker 13: each store in the union present at bargaining, which is
Speaker 13: hundreds of workers, that provides a direct link to every
Speaker 13: store in the campaign. This was how the union was
Speaker 13: able to pull off a mass mobilization on an extremely
Speaker 13: tight turnaround. So when it's time to vote to go
Speaker 13: on strike, there's already workers across hundreds of stores around
Speaker 13: the country ready to organize their co workers and get
Speaker 13: the word out. Contacts with union advocacy groups and a
Speaker 13: network of allies ranging from campus activists to LGBTQ organizations
Speaker 13: can also help spread the word about these strikes, raise awareness,
Speaker 13: and pull more numbers onto the picket line. On more
Speaker 13: of a big picture note, once you get these sorts
Speaker 13: of structures and networks from union organizing, you also gain
Speaker 13: the actual capacity to deploy them quickly in a way
Speaker 13: that actually lets you do rapid responses to changing situations.
Speaker 13: And that capacity is something that transadvocacy just hasn't really
Speaker 13: had in a long time.
Speaker 15: These sites are directly connected to the broader political situation
Speaker 15: in America right. I think that a big issue that
Speaker 15: trans organizing has right now is that there's not a
Speaker 15: lot of on the ground reaching out, connecting to mobilizing
Speaker 15: people who are impacted by these policies that are like
Speaker 15: negatively impacting trans people. And so I think the kind
Speaker 15: of organizing that unions are doing right, that we've been
Speaker 15: doing this entire time right where we're speaking to people directly,
Speaker 15: where we're getting them organized, getting them involved, is really
Speaker 15: a helpful starting point for like turning discontent and turning
Speaker 15: anxiety and fear around issues into like actual action. I
Speaker 15: think it's like super essential that we have this contract.
Speaker 15: Now we're heading into twenty twenty five, we're heading into
Speaker 15: a frankly pretty fucking scary time for trans people. We
Speaker 15: need a contract that protects trans healthcare. We need a
Speaker 15: contract that guarantees better wages. We need a contract of
Speaker 15: only for the protections that it guarantees workers in terms
Speaker 15: of like safety at work and type of terms of
Speaker 15: making sure that they're not being taking advantage of at work.
Speaker 15: Right well, Starbucks offered us again was an insult. It
Speaker 15: wasn't a real counter proposal. We're more ready than ever
Speaker 15: to like finish his contract and to have something, but like,
Speaker 15: we need movement from Starbucks. We need a serious counter proposal.
Speaker 15: Thirty cents and no changes to benefits isn't going to
Speaker 15: fucking do it.
Speaker 13: We're going to go on another ad break and return
Speaker 13: to finish up our interview with Starbucks Workers United. Okay,
Speaker 13: we're back. I'm now gonna throw to MIA or a
Speaker 13: discussion on how union organizing can help strengthen trends. Advocacy
Speaker 13: in general.
Speaker 3: We're in this kind of crisis period of I don't
Speaker 3: know what you call the national trans movements, just the
Speaker 3: extent that it exists, where the advocacy orgs and the
Speaker 3: legal strategies they've been pursuing are not working. We're losing
Speaker 3: in the courts all the time. Their electoral strategy of
Speaker 3: kind of bearrying themselves to the Biden administration has failed,
Speaker 3: and I think this is a moment where we need
Speaker 3: a new plan. And this is as good of a
Speaker 3: plan as I've ever seen. And I think one of
Speaker 3: the things that we're going to see, we're going to
Speaker 3: need to see and we're literally just going to have
Speaker 3: to do over the next few years. I mean ideally
Speaker 3: over the next couple of months, because we don't have
Speaker 3: we don't have much time until these people take power.
Speaker 3: Is more sort of you know, not just intra union
Speaker 3: coordination of organizing a transworkers, but is organizing trans workers
Speaker 3: across different unions and trying to figure out how we
Speaker 3: leverage our power, like more broadly to you know, protect
Speaker 3: ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to
Speaker 3: be free. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 23: That's something we're still building our capacity for that in
Speaker 23: this union, but we definitely do have relationships with other
Speaker 23: trans union activists and organizers. We're affiliated to Workers United,
Speaker 23: which is affiliated to SCIU, So obviously that's kind of
Speaker 23: the most direct and easiest way for us to get
Speaker 23: in touch with other trans folks that are in the
Speaker 23: labor movement, get support, get feedback, get ideas, and share
Speaker 23: in turn what's been working for us. But it is
Speaker 23: a capacity we want to build out even further because
Speaker 23: we are going to need that solidarity between and among
Speaker 23: labor unions in order to form a coherent response. I mean,
Speaker 23: as you're saying, the response hasn't been working. The kind
Speaker 23: of problem solving we're seeing from a lot of politicians
Speaker 23: basically amounts to sidestepping the issue, pretending it doesn't exist.
Speaker 23: You know, maybe not throwing trans people under the bus
Speaker 23: explicitly by actively supporting our elimination from public life, but
Speaker 23: certainly not standing up and defending us. And unions are
Speaker 23: one of the only ways that working people can come
Speaker 23: together in large groups and pool resources for political activity.
Speaker 23: And we know there are a lot of problems with
Speaker 23: how many unions currently do that. But for those of
Speaker 23: us who are you know, very committed to struggle for equality,
Speaker 23: that's not going to compromise and throw some group under
Speaker 23: the bus. We understand that we have to get involved
Speaker 23: and be part of labor in order to improve how
Speaker 23: labor does politics in this country. If we want people
Speaker 23: to stand up and defend trans rights and defend trans healthcare,
Speaker 23: and defend our ability to exist in public life.
Speaker 3: Then we have to, like we have to be the
Speaker 3: ones to do it. We just we have to do it.
Speaker 23: And getting involved in your union is one of the
Speaker 23: only accessible ways that trans people are going to be
Speaker 23: able to build that kind of political capacity and find allies.
Speaker 23: We have an opportunity here because you know, to do
Speaker 23: a version of Jijik's mistranslation of Antonio Gramsci is like,
Speaker 23: you know, the old trans movement is dying in the
Speaker 23: New World's like struggles to be born. Now is a
Speaker 23: time of monsters. But I think this means that, you know, you, like, literally,
Speaker 23: the people listening to this show, the people on this now,
Speaker 23: we are going to be the people who define what
Speaker 23: the trans movement is going to be going forward, right,
Speaker 23: and we have to because we have no other choice.
Speaker 23: But this also means that, yeah, we are going to
Speaker 23: be the ones who get to set the tone of
Speaker 23: what we're doing, get to like strategically decide on how
Speaker 23: we're going to do this. And I think we have
Speaker 23: advantages too in the sense that there are ways in
Speaker 23: which our economic marginalization is sort of helpful in that,
Speaker 23: you know, if you look at the sort of independent
Speaker 23: unions that have been forming recently, right, even more so
Speaker 23: than in conventional unions, unbelievable numbers of those people are trans,
Speaker 23: right because you know, Okay, you're dealing with the population
Speaker 23: where it's very easy to get salts, easy to send
Speaker 23: people into unionized stores because no one has jobs anyways,
Speaker 23: and so the you know the risk of you losing
Speaker 23: it is like lower because you're already taking a low
Speaker 23: wage job, et cetera, et cetera. And I think I
Speaker 23: think there's there's things about these movements and the way
Speaker 23: that we're embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements,
Speaker 23: Like the start unionization thing is not that old, right.
Speaker 23: I think we're well positioned on the sort of front
Speaker 23: of a bunch of different changes that are happening in
Speaker 23: both union organizing and in how the American working class
Speaker 23: works to build something together that can actually go back
Speaker 23: on the offensive for the first time in like a decade.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 15: And I think we're at a moment where we actually
Speaker 15: have to like fight for ourselves, right. Yeah, Again, we're
Speaker 15: at a point where no one else is going to
Speaker 15: fight for us. We have to be willing to take
Speaker 15: that step and fight for ourselves advocate for ourselves. At
Speaker 15: this moment, it's up to trans people to get involved
Speaker 15: acially with the labor movement, and there's so much opportunity
Speaker 15: to advocate for trans rights, to like build up the
Speaker 15: transliberation movement in a way that hasn't been done before.
Speaker 15: I think it's so essential for us to not feel
Speaker 15: hopeless and see the potential here and get involved. I'm
Speaker 15: not necessarily telling people that, like you should go apply
Speaker 15: to a Starbucks and like convince them to unionize, but
Speaker 15: also like I'm.
Speaker 23: Not not saying that, you know, trans people are getting
Speaker 23: that opportunity to actually drive our own liberation, and there's
Speaker 23: just so few places in society where we get that.
Speaker 23: That's been one of the most exciting things about being
Speaker 23: part of this union for me.
Speaker 3: And yes, you should.
Speaker 23: Consider going to work at Starbucks and unionizing it. And certainly,
Speaker 23: you know, to directly plug a little bit. If there
Speaker 23: are Buristas in your audience, they absolutely should go to
Speaker 23: our website. I think there will be a link like
Speaker 23: in the description of the episode or something. Go visit
Speaker 23: our union's website, get in touch with an organizer, and
Speaker 23: start organizing. I know it can like sound daunting in theory,
Speaker 23: like what does it mean to start organizing my workplace?
Speaker 23: But there is a template, there's a plan.
Speaker 3: You know. We've done this a bunch.
Speaker 23: We've done it at over five hundred stores, at least
Speaker 23: five hundred and twelve at this point nationwide, which is
Speaker 23: pretty incredible, especially to have done all that without yet
Speaker 23: having even secured our contract. So we have a good
Speaker 23: template for how to win, and if you just get
Speaker 23: in touch, then people will reach out to help you.
Speaker 23: And that does include professional staff, but it also includes
Speaker 23: people like us who are workers that will be peer
Speaker 23: to peer, worker to worker organizers, because that's what this
Speaker 23: campaign has been built on from the beginning, is workers
Speaker 23: organizing each other. So yeah, I mean, there's really truly
Speaker 23: never been a time that's better than now and also
Speaker 23: never been more essential.
Speaker 3: It's never been more needed than now. So this is
Speaker 3: the time.
Speaker 23: And if you're not a barista, or you can't become
Speaker 23: a barista, then we still really need people to sign
Speaker 23: a solidarity pledge with our union and get involved that
Speaker 23: way as allies, as supporters. You know, community support is
Speaker 23: always critical to union struggles. We are bargaining our contract
Speaker 23: with Starbucks right now, and community support is a huge
Speaker 23: part of what's going to get us, you know, the
Speaker 23: contract that does deliver the kind of protections and benefits
Speaker 23: we're looking for, that does set a precedent for what
Speaker 23: trans inclusive union organizing and union bargaining can look like
Speaker 23: in this country. It's kind of a terrifying responsibility sometimes.
Speaker 23: But the thing about this union is because it is
Speaker 23: one of the exciting bright spots in American labor right now.
Speaker 23: I do think a lot of people are looking to
Speaker 23: us to figure out, well, what are they doing, what's working,
Speaker 23: what's going well? And I certainly think, you know, the
Speaker 23: results we get for trans workers in our union have
Speaker 23: some precedent setting importance. So it is really critical, even
Speaker 23: if you're not in this union, even if you don't
Speaker 23: work at Starbucks, to support this struggle because it will
Speaker 23: have ripple effects. There will be ramifications for American labor
Speaker 23: and for the struggle for transliberation as a consequence of
Speaker 23: how things turn out with us.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we could really use your support.
Speaker 13: Earlier this episode, we talked about hope, and as important
Speaker 13: and as useful as that can be, it is also
Speaker 13: super crucial that people know how they're actually able to
Speaker 13: organize and actually try to get things done. After this
Speaker 13: last election, I'm sure many of you, like myself, were
Speaker 13: flooded with posts and performative calls to action. Now is
Speaker 13: the time to organize your community, but never with any
Speaker 13: real information on what that actually means or how to
Speaker 13: go about it. But something like the Starbucks union is
Speaker 13: actually a very direct way to do that, especially if
Speaker 13: you're a barista.
Speaker 15: I think I have to emphasize how achievable that is,
Speaker 15: Like it is possible five hundred plus stores across the
Speaker 15: nation have done it in this political environment. Right, I'm
Speaker 15: going to shout out one of my coworkers. She transferred
Speaker 15: to another store in Oklahoma, and I was chokingly telling her.
Speaker 15: I was like, well, you're allowed to transfer as long as,
Speaker 15: like you, you unionize your store immediately, and she was
Speaker 15: like okay, And she did it, like within like a
Speaker 15: week of being there. She'd like talked one on one
Speaker 15: with everyone at that store, people who were all already
Speaker 15: wanting better wages, better healthcare, better staffing, And through these conversations,
Speaker 15: she organized that store. And that is so fucking amazing
Speaker 15: to me, and it makes me feel so I don't know,
Speaker 15: I don't want to sound like patronizing or whatever, but
Speaker 15: it makes me so proud to see that, right, to
Speaker 15: see that she's been able to see how our store
Speaker 15: has organized, how we've spoken to people, how we've reached
Speaker 15: out to like her co workers, and she's been able
Speaker 15: to take that and replicate that so easily, get so quickly,
Speaker 15: Like when I say, with them, like a week or
Speaker 15: two of transferring to the store. I am not exaggerating.
Speaker 15: She was fucking on top of it. If we can
Speaker 15: do this in fucking goddamn Oklahoma, we can do this anywhere. Right,
Speaker 15: It is possible. You can do it if you can
Speaker 15: have a conversation with your coworker, if you can have
Speaker 15: a conversation with multiple co workers, if you can develop
Speaker 15: relationships with them friendships, if you can establish that you
Speaker 15: have like a common issue, right, if you can make
Speaker 15: it clear that like the struggles we're facing at our
Speaker 15: workplaces have a solution. You can do this. All you
Speaker 15: have to do is actually fucking take that step to
Speaker 15: make it happen.
Speaker 3: Every single union that has ever been formed was maybe
Speaker 3: by people exactly like you. You the listener listening to
Speaker 3: this right now, Right, you are exactly the person who
Speaker 3: has organized every union that anyone has ever done. Right,
Speaker 3: It's it's not something that's like the domain of pure
Speaker 3: professional organizers. You can do this too, Yeah, you really can.
Speaker 23: And I mean, you know, at my store, I was
Speaker 23: the only transperson at my store, and despite being a
Speaker 23: transsexual communist, I was able to organize a successful election
Speaker 23: at a store that includes you know, half of people
Speaker 23: being Trump voters like the idea that you have to
Speaker 23: hide or diminish yourself, or that because you know your
Speaker 23: trans or otherwise marginalized, that it's impossible for you to
Speaker 23: build that solidarity with your coworkers and come together for
Speaker 23: your common issues.
Speaker 3: It's just not true.
Speaker 23: People understand their own economic liberation, even if they don't
Speaker 23: fully just yet. There's always an intuitive level you understand
Speaker 23: you're getting screwed over. You can tell that the system
Speaker 23: is not set up fairly and it's not set up
Speaker 23: for you to succeed as a working person. And with
Speaker 23: the right conversations, with the right information, with the right
Speaker 23: relationships and solidarity that you build with someone else, people
Speaker 23: can be brought to understand what the solution is and
Speaker 23: that the situation you currently live under with shareholders and
Speaker 23: capitalists stealing all of this value from you is unacceptable,
Speaker 23: and that there is a way to fight to get
Speaker 23: back what you've earned with your labor. So for those
Speaker 23: of you who are listening, you don't have to hide
Speaker 23: who you are politically or personally to do that work
Speaker 23: to bring people along. And in fact, if we do
Speaker 23: hide who we are, then we're not really going to
Speaker 23: be getting people all the way to where they need
Speaker 23: to go. You know, we're not going to build a
Speaker 23: movement of people committed to liberation by side stepping issues
Speaker 23: and hiding pieces of who we are and saying that, oh, well,
Speaker 23: you know, transliberation is not really important. That's not how
Speaker 23: we're going to build like a durable coalition. I think
Speaker 23: this is a problem that politicians in our country keep making.
Speaker 23: It's a mistake they keep making of thinking they can
Speaker 23: ignore or downplay certain issues tensions within their coalitions to
Speaker 23: keep those coalitions together. But when you ignore it, you
Speaker 23: don't address it, it just blows up later in the end. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 23: get involved that you really have nothing to lose and
Speaker 23: nothing you know, accept your change not to be I
Speaker 23: mean I just realized halfway through. I was like, well,
Speaker 23: I might as well finish the quote.
Speaker 15: So, Okay, we're like such a scary point for trans people,
Speaker 15: and I know that that's terrifying that that's also an
Speaker 15: opportunity to pivot and to like actually make meaningful change.
Speaker 15: Right again, I cannot emphasize enough we create our own
Speaker 15: hope for a better future. It has to be on us, right,
Speaker 15: We can't just I don't know, depend on other people
Speaker 15: to do this work for us. We have to show
Speaker 15: up and do this work. And I don't know. Personally speaking,
Speaker 15: I am fucking tired of liberals who want to just
Speaker 15: ignore trans people and pretend we don't exist. As like,
Speaker 15: I don't know, our TVs are flooded with anti trans ads.
Speaker 15: I'm tired of depending on people who aren't advocating for
Speaker 15: me right. I'd rather fight for myself through my union.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and I think that's a good place to
Speaker 3: close on. Is in some sense a cold world that
Speaker 3: has left us with no one to fight for ourselves
Speaker 3: but ourselves. But if we fucking do it, we can win,
Speaker 3: and we can drag everyone else along with us.
Speaker 13: On that note, I'm going to close out the show
Speaker 13: here with a few plugs for Starbucks Workers United. You
Speaker 13: can find their website at Sbworkersunited dot org and SB
Speaker 13: Workers United on social media. I'll have a link to
Speaker 13: their website and their solidarity pledge in the description below.
Speaker 13: See you on the other side.
Speaker 24: Welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 25: We decided every week you were going to do in
Speaker 25: episode called Executive Disorders, White House Weekly, where we report
Speaker 25: the news, and today we are going to start that episode.
Speaker 25: We have the entire full time team here. We have
Speaker 25: Mio Wong, Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, James Stout, and I
Speaker 25: am the voice in your ear Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you should know we'll be making a number
Speaker 2: of references to a show you haven't watched, called The
Speaker 2: news Rooms. So many we didn't just pretend we didn't.
Speaker 25: Yeah, anyways, let's do the episode now go.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So this episode is also going to be a little
Speaker 13: bit different because the idea is to cover each week
Speaker 13: of stuff that's happening visa via the White House. And
Speaker 13: it's been two weeks since since Inauguration Day, and we
Speaker 13: are recording usually on Wednesdays, so there'll be, you know,
Speaker 13: a day or two there that we will record the
Speaker 13: week after. But we have a whole bunch of stuff
Speaker 13: today because we are covering essentially two weeks. I'll start
Speaker 13: with some of the transgender executive orders that happened last week.
Speaker 13: There was an order defining two sexes assigned at conception,
Speaker 13: which made plenty of biologists scratch their heads. A lot
Speaker 13: of this is just going to impact the ability to
Speaker 13: change your gender marker on federal documents for the next
Speaker 13: four years, you know, passports, also removing the the ex
Speaker 13: gender marker from federal documents. There's also a new directive
Speaker 13: that Pride flags are not to be flown on federal buildings.
Speaker 13: Also a separate one. I don't think we have included
Speaker 13: here in the research doc but how brutalist and modernist
Speaker 13: architecture is now not allowed to be used on new
Speaker 13: federal buildings. You have to use Greek or Roman inspired
Speaker 13: architecture because they project power. So all of those like
Speaker 13: Greek avatar statue Twitter accounts have a complete cultural victory.
Speaker 2: Now, uh great, I am going to agitate to replace
Speaker 2: the Oregon State capital with just a statue of a
Speaker 2: Roman orgy. You know, we don't even need place for
Speaker 2: the legislators. Just look at the statue and you'll know
Speaker 2: what to do.
Speaker 13: This actually is like bad, you know, very very nineteen thirties,
Speaker 13: you know.
Speaker 26: Yeah, yeah, famously no other regimes have hawken back to
Speaker 26: Claus Caalle era.
Speaker 13: Well, and specifically is like calling like you know, modern architecture,
Speaker 13: brutalist architecture, as you know, is like weak or bad
Speaker 13: or things that get restricted.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 13: On a more somber note, part of this two sex
Speaker 13: that conception thing also means that a whole bunch of
Speaker 13: trans women are now being sent to men's prisons. And
Speaker 13: like a lot of this stuff is stuff that we
Speaker 13: knew was going to happen, and it did happen quite immediately.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is this is just the start.
Speaker 13: I guess we'll throw over to MIA for some more
Speaker 13: executive action done on the wellcual gender ideology angle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there
Speaker 3: might be another anti trans executive order. We'll get to
Speaker 3: that end. But the big ones for right now is
Speaker 3: that Trump is trying to do a and this is
Speaker 3: not something we talked about in our in our last
Speaker 3: episode about what's gonna look like with trans people, but
Speaker 3: a federal funding ban for trans healthcare, which means for
Speaker 3: for youth trans healthcare, which means any provider that like
Speaker 3: gets federal funding. And this is and this includes things
Speaker 3: like taking Medicare and Medicaid right those like hospitals can't
Speaker 3: do any kind of gender for a main care for youth.
Speaker 3: Part of what's sort of terrifying. I mean, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've they've defined
Speaker 3: are as age nineteen.
Speaker 13: Or under the age of nineteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, under the age of nineteen. Yeah.
Speaker 13: Obviously, like that gives you know, worries for stuff that
Speaker 13: we've been talking about for years for how they might
Speaker 13: try to start bumping up the age for these for
Speaker 13: these HRT bands.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 13: This also could be them not really realizing what they're
Speaker 13: doing to some extent, because this could also just be
Speaker 13: copying I believe in Alabama or an Arkansas ban and
Speaker 13: that was like the highest age used in any of
Speaker 13: these like state healthcare bands. They could just be copying
Speaker 13: that over because it is the highest one. And like,
Speaker 13: I'm not sure how much they've thought about, you know,
Speaker 13: their capacity to start, like, you know, arbitrarily raising that number.
Speaker 2: I mean, part of what I think is happening. And
Speaker 2: I think this because this was definitely at play in
Speaker 2: the Alabama ban is this is, in addition to being
Speaker 2: an attack on trans people, part of a broader set
Speaker 2: of messaging towards the Parents' Rants movement, which very much
Speaker 2: does not consider eighteen year olds to be adults.
Speaker 13: Totally, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And on that note, one of the things they're
Speaker 3: trying to do is target states that have like trans
Speaker 3: sanctuary laws by trying to like get parents who take
Speaker 3: their kids to save states, like charged on kidnapping charges
Speaker 3: and so forth, noting supposedly later today there's going to
Speaker 3: be one about using the Attorney General's office to work
Speaker 3: with attorney generals in states who prosecute teachers to use
Speaker 3: gender firming pronouns as like sexual abusers. And I want
Speaker 3: to point out like these executive orders specifically, like the
Speaker 3: second raft of them that I've been talking about, Like
Speaker 3: these are all unbelievably legal, right, yeah, Like these are
Speaker 3: probably not going to get implemented immediately because there's immediately
Speaker 3: going to go to the courts, Like the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: will probably give them some of it. But like you
Speaker 3: can't just like declare something a crime and have the
Speaker 3: Attorney general prosecute people for it. Like that specific thing
Speaker 3: is genuinely so ridiculous that it might not survive the
Speaker 3: Supreme Court. It's nonsense, but things that aren't nonsense, And
Speaker 3: this is something you genuinely can do that's very dangerous.
Speaker 3: Is he's trying to get And this is from per
Speaker 3: Aaron Reid, He's a trans journalist, does pretty good work
Speaker 3: on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to
Speaker 3: not follow w PATH guidelines or WPATH is this sort
Speaker 3: of organization that sets the guidelines for like Trend's healthcare
Speaker 3: and this we don't know what this is going to do.
Speaker 3: There is a chance that this could endanger private like
Speaker 3: healthcare covering it because they follow the government using WPATH.
Speaker 3: So that's extremely extremely bad. But again, and this is
Speaker 3: going to be a running theme in the next section
Speaker 3: of this. A lot of this is stuff that he
Speaker 3: should need Congress for and he's just trying to do
Speaker 3: it because he thinks that he can and he doesn't
Speaker 3: give a shit.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's just signaling to the base even if
Speaker 2: it gets stopped, like he's I think, I don't think
Speaker 2: he cares if decent chunks of it gets stopped.
Speaker 3: He tried to do the thing. Yeah, I agree with Robert.
Speaker 3: He can now shift the blame to someone else.
Speaker 2: Look, man, I did the executive order, which honestly is
Speaker 2: what Biden should have done on some stuff. Right, fuck it,
Speaker 2: make the statement, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So speaking of fuck it, let's get into this
Speaker 3: whole this whole freezing the entire federal government thing. We're
Speaker 3: we're gonna do a more detailed episode about this next week.
Speaker 3: But maybe the most unhanged thing that he's sound so
Speaker 3: far than the birthright stuff. He did an executive order
Speaker 3: that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Early this week,
Speaker 3: the US Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo
Speaker 3: to everyone telling them that, like all grant programs are
Speaker 3: frozen until they submit, like they submitted a description of
Speaker 3: like what the grant program is and why it's not
Speaker 3: DEI and so like think things that were like fucked
Speaker 3: by this, right I have a few of these programs
Speaker 3: and they were the grants they were shutting down. Here,
Speaker 3: the Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial carbon Monoxide Poisoning Program WOA,
Speaker 3: the National School Lunch Program, Special Milk Program for children,
Speaker 3: the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, infants, and children, the
Speaker 3: do d's Basic and Applied Scientific Research Grants DEI D.
Speaker 3: It's even got a D right in there, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Like one of these and this is a very serious
Speaker 3: one least for these people holding onto power was the
Speaker 3: National Guard's Military Operation and Maintenance samously low, which like
Speaker 3: it's like it's like eight billion dollars of money to
Speaker 3: the National Guard.
Speaker 2: Hey, critical support. He got one thing, right, The.
Speaker 3: Way that you can tell that none of these people,
Speaker 3: and the thing is a sign of is that none
Speaker 3: of these people have any idea what's going on inside
Speaker 3: of the state. They don't understand what it is, they
Speaker 3: don't understand what it does. And I can prove this
Speaker 3: for a fact because one of the programs that they
Speaker 3: froze was a program that gives money to police to
Speaker 3: do patrols outside of a nuclear weapons assembly plan.
Speaker 2: Joey, they defunded the nuke police, like check the Segmal
Speaker 2: loop gang. I think I got a plan based on
Speaker 2: that we're gonna become the first nuclear armed podcasting network.
Speaker 3: So like, I think I think people have this conception that, like,
Speaker 3: you know, they're operating according to a plan. These are
Speaker 3: all sort of strategic like strokes and masters strokes, and
Speaker 3: like no, they're just they're just lashing out right. They're
Speaker 3: driven by peer anger, and they're trying to do this
Speaker 3: purge of the government if anything woke or whatever, like
Speaker 3: anything that's like vaguely involves non white people or just
Speaker 3: like anyone who's not assists white dude, they're trying to
Speaker 3: get rid of. Yeah, and this memo was immediately challenged
Speaker 3: in court because it's also this is also hideously illegal.
Speaker 3: The president doesn't control the purse strings. That's like, you know,
Speaker 3: in the Constitution, it says that Congress controls this. So
Speaker 3: where we're at now is that the memo has been withdrawn,
Speaker 3: but there's there's a bunch of really conflicting information where
Speaker 3: like Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to
Speaker 3: go through with the executive orders.
Speaker 13: They're probably going to try to rewrite it. They might
Speaker 13: make it more targeted against you know, woke whatever that means. Yeah,
Speaker 13: it may not be as like broad as this as
Speaker 13: this official memo, but they're certainly going to try again.
Speaker 3: But the problem that they have is that there's there
Speaker 3: are literally so many of these grants and the read
Speaker 3: the reason they did it this way in the first
Speaker 3: place was because they just they just they found a
Speaker 3: list of grants. I copied all of them and they
Speaker 3: were like, Okay, departments, you have to go figure this out,
Speaker 3: and we're freezing your stuff until you do that. Even
Speaker 3: Medicaid was frozen for a few hours yesterday. Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: Like the effectively nuked most of the capacity of the
Speaker 3: federal government. And it's gonna take a lot of effort
Speaker 3: for them to sort through which of these things they
Speaker 3: could afford to turn off so that they don't end
Speaker 3: up like turning off the new police.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 13: Yeah, critical support to abolishing the nuclear security.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they did what Biden couldn't do.
Speaker 13: Yeah, let's go on a quick ad break, and then
Speaker 13: we will return to report more of the news.
Speaker 3: All right, we are back.
Speaker 13: I guess I will turn over to our Immigration and
Speaker 13: Border correspondent, James Stout.
Speaker 3: That's me, Yes, please report the news.
Speaker 26: I'm ready to report the news. I have never been
Speaker 26: more ready. Okay, this is gonna be a long run
Speaker 26: because that was a raw of executive orders about the
Speaker 26: border in the flurry flurry Yeah, a sounder the word
Speaker 26: we're allowed to use. Okay, a flurry Okay, A murder
Speaker 26: like crows, you know, the collective nown for crows.
Speaker 13: I mean this is going to result in a murder.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 26: Well, so let's start with a couple of the big ones, right.
Speaker 26: The first one was essentially revoking the right to asylum
Speaker 26: to anyone quote engaged in the invasion across the southern
Speaker 26: border end quote. I want to highlight this invasion language
Speaker 26: because obviously like I adventure to say, I've spent more
Speaker 26: time at the southern border of the United States sent
Speaker 26: anyone in the executive branch, and most people reporting on
Speaker 26: it too. The idea of an invasion is laughable. I've
Speaker 26: been at the border twice since Trump was inaugurated. It's
Speaker 26: extremely quiet. I've never seen things more quiet. The remarkable
Speaker 26: thing I saw was a pig of Vietnamese pop Belied Big,
Speaker 26: which some people have released, which now lives there. I
Speaker 26: think it's being rehomed because of some other stuff that
Speaker 26: we will talk about later. But this invasion language is
Speaker 26: important because it's used as a justification for some of
Speaker 26: the things that the executive branch is doing which would
Speaker 26: otherwise seem to be outside of its authority. It's getting
Speaker 26: the national security encounter terrorism treatment, and anyone who's followed
Speaker 26: US politics for the last twenty years will understand that
Speaker 26: that means an effective waiver for all of your constitutional rights.
Speaker 26: And migrants have always been people who don't have rights,
Speaker 26: and this is just something that we're now seeing like
Speaker 26: further pushed. So let's go through some of these orders.
Speaker 26: Aside from the effective asylum ban, he directed the United
Speaker 26: States Northern Command to quote unquote seal the border. This
Speaker 26: has resulted in a deployment of about sixteen hundred United
Speaker 26: States troops. Most of them are military, police or engineers.
Speaker 26: We've got marines, and we've got army, and in San
Speaker 26: Diego Sectory its first marines out of Pendleton. They're the
Speaker 26: ones that I've seen locally. He has directed various government
Speaker 26: departments and the Attorney General to begin quote identifying countries
Speaker 26: throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is
Speaker 26: so deficient as to warrant a partial full suspension on
Speaker 26: the omission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively
Speaker 26: the travel ban that we saw in the first Trap administration,
Speaker 26: or a version of that. Right, it's a visa revocation
Speaker 26: or a travel ban for people from certain countries. And
Speaker 26: we can guess what those countries will be. At last time,
Speaker 26: they were for the most part, majority Muslim countries, right,
Speaker 26: and we.
Speaker 3: Might well see that again.
Speaker 26: They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of
Speaker 26: undocumented families.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 26: This is one if people go back to our like
Speaker 26: what can Trump do for mass deportations podcasts that Robert
Speaker 26: Sophie and I did sometime in November. I think you'll
Speaker 26: get more information there on like what is and what
Speaker 26: is not possible than we have time to go into today.
Speaker 26: But you're seeing a lot of the things that we
Speaker 26: talked about there coming into reality now. I guess specifically,
Speaker 26: the attempt to rescind birthright citizenship relies on the idea
Speaker 26: that they are not quote unquote under the jurisdiction thereof
Speaker 26: of the United States, which is how.
Speaker 3: The fourteenth Amendment is phrased.
Speaker 26: Generally, it is understood that people who are not considered
Speaker 26: to be under the jurisdiction of the United States and
Speaker 26: therefore don't get citizenship when they're born here are the
Speaker 26: children of diplomats, because they have some diplomatic community right,
Speaker 26: so they're not necessarily governed by United States laws in
Speaker 26: all areas, and that is why children of diplomats don't
Speaker 26: get citizenship people when they're born here. The Trump administration
Speaker 26: is arguing that applies to children of undocumented people as well.
Speaker 26: There are five court cases challenging that already, so they've
Speaker 26: got an upp battle in the courts there. He has
Speaker 26: attempted to restart the Migrant Protection Protocol MPP, better known
Speaker 26: as REMAIN in Mexico. Right, the Migrant Protection Protocol requires
Speaker 26: migrants to wait in Mexico whether immigration cases are processed.
Speaker 26: In practice, it puts them in a lot of danger. Right,
Speaker 26: Some of them are fleeing Mexico. Others are fleeing groups
Speaker 26: or states that can reach them in Mexico, so it
Speaker 26: leaves them in an unsafe place. The other thing he
Speaker 26: did while Trump was still in the inaugural ceremonies, like
Speaker 26: literally minutes after taking office, was canceling CBP one CBP one.
Speaker 3: There is a lot of misinformation about what CBP one is.
Speaker 26: CBP one is an application that allowed migrants to make
Speaker 26: an appointment and they had to be either in southern
Speaker 26: border states of Mexico or north of Mexico City. They
Speaker 26: could then make an appointment to approach a United States
Speaker 26: port of entry, those that are places where you can
Speaker 26: enter across the land border and make their case for
Speaker 26: their asylum right, do their first asylum interview.
Speaker 13: Like this is like following the law, Like this is
Speaker 13: like the process.
Speaker 26: Yeah, making a CBP one appointment is quote unquote the
Speaker 26: right way exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 26: You have a legal right to enter between ports of
Speaker 26: entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what
Speaker 26: we saw in their outdoor attention situation, right. But doing
Speaker 26: it via CBP one is like the belt embraces correct
Speaker 26: way to do it. People who had appointments at noon
Speaker 26: Pacific on the day Trump was inaugurated saw those appointments canceled.
Speaker 26: They can't make appointments anymore. CBP one is gone. Those
Speaker 26: people who have waited an average of nine months in
Speaker 26: dangerous places have wasted their time. They now don't have
Speaker 26: a pathway to asylum in this country. If you go
Speaker 26: back to my episodes on the Daddian Gap, you will
Speaker 26: hear some of those people.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 26: Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any
Speaker 26: legal means.
Speaker 3: To enter the United States and claim asylum.
Speaker 26: Trumps directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about
Speaker 26: this in our previous podcast. Don't the amount of detention
Speaker 26: beds they would need to hit the thirteen million deportations
Speaker 26: they talked about it is immense. But one of the
Speaker 26: things they are doing is starting to house it's people
Speaker 26: whose countries won't accept them for deportation, right, which is
Speaker 26: a thing that has happened. The United States has begun
Speaker 26: using military aircraft for deportations in the last two weeks.
Speaker 26: I want to stress that this isn't a capacity issue.
Speaker 26: Biden deported eight thousand people in a month in the
Speaker 26: September to October of twenty twenty one. Trump is aiming
Speaker 26: to hit five thousand. Biden did it all with contractor flights.
Speaker 26: Trump is doing a lower number and using air force flights.
Speaker 26: This is not because he can't get the contractors. It's
Speaker 26: purely an esthetic choice, and it's an esthetic choice which
Speaker 26: has roffled enough feathers in South and Central America that
Speaker 26: you have Honduras saying that they're going to revote the
Speaker 26: US mission to have a military base in Honduras is
Speaker 26: a mistreat migrants. We had Columbia briefly refusing US military
Speaker 26: flights with deportees. Mexico doing the same.
Speaker 13: Briefly entering a trade war with Columbia. Yeah, Yes, which
Speaker 13: lasted about two hours.
Speaker 2: The one hour trade war about the same length as
Speaker 2: the Civil war in Western Yugoslavia.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 26: The trade war with Columbia was averted when Columbia sent
Speaker 26: its own military plane to get these deportees.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Columbia caved immediately.
Speaker 26: Yeah, then they will continue to accept US deportees as
Speaker 26: they have done for a long time. Right again, if
Speaker 26: you listen to my Darien series, you'll hear of some
Speaker 26: Colombian people being deported. We're now getting into things that
Speaker 26: are like more. These are orders that we haven't seen
Speaker 26: realized yet. One of them is he is He has
Speaker 26: talked about having the Attorney General remove as far as
Speaker 26: possible federal funding from so called sanctuary jurisdictions. Right these
Speaker 26: are normally places where local law enforcement will cooperate with
Speaker 26: federal immigration enforcement. ICE makes a majority of its detentions
Speaker 26: from people who are already detained, people who are like
Speaker 26: arrested by police, yes exactly, for whatever. Then those police
Speaker 26: notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a
Speaker 26: lot more of door to door ICE rates in the
Speaker 26: last two weeks, and they've been ramping up even really
Speaker 26: really this week. But ever since Trump was inaugurated, we've
Speaker 26: seen ICE attempting to enter people's homes. Often they just
Speaker 26: have a warrant issued by themselves rather than they judicial warrant,
Speaker 26: so we've seen people refusing to let them into their homes.
Speaker 26: We've also seen the removal of the quote unquote sensitive
Speaker 26: places doctrine. Yeah, sensitive places had previously been understood to
Speaker 26: be schools, churches, and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote
Speaker 26: unquote enforcement operations.
Speaker 3: In those places.
Speaker 26: Those are actually places that, like the Sensitive Places doctrine,
Speaker 26: have been in place for a long time. This wasn't
Speaker 26: like a Biden thing that this was. This had been
Speaker 26: a long term thing. So ICE is now and we've
Speaker 26: seen immigration actions conducted at like a church in Atlanta,
Speaker 26: for instance. We've seen I think they were actually Secret
Speaker 26: Service agents who identified themselves as an ICE agent, sort
Speaker 26: of school in Chicago because a child had posted an
Speaker 26: anti Trump video.
Speaker 3: And then I guess the.
Speaker 26: Last thing that we are seeing is this designation of
Speaker 26: organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. This is an
Speaker 26: interesting one. We haven't really seen any action on this yet,
Speaker 26: but it's one of his executive orders. In day one
Speaker 26: in his first administration, he designated irand Kuld Force as
Speaker 26: a foreign terrorist organization and then needed to kill their leader. Right,
Speaker 26: So this FDO designation opens up the possibility of a
Speaker 26: lot of like covert activity I'm talking like the CIA
Speaker 26: and like Tier one special forces units. It also allows
Speaker 26: him to bring about economic sanctions on anyone materially supporting
Speaker 26: these organized crime organizations. In practice, that would encompass huge
Speaker 26: swaths of the Mexican economy, right, because there are people
Speaker 26: in agriculture, people in business who are paying protection or
Speaker 26: they're being extorted to pay money, right, And so in theory,
Speaker 26: those people are now materially delefating a tent terrorist organization
Speaker 26: and they could be sanctioned as well. We will have
Speaker 26: to see how this plays out, I guess, and they're
Speaker 26: still the directive was to look into and then name
Speaker 26: these groups.
Speaker 13: Well, and it's something that heg Seth has previously been
Speaker 13: in favor of and he has now been confirmed.
Speaker 26: Yes, yeah, Hegseth has talked to about using special forces
Speaker 26: in Mexico.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, and this this was a Gender forty seven stuff.
Speaker 2: They've been talking about this for a while.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 26: Yeah, it's also in our Agenda forty seven episodes if
Speaker 26: people want to go back there a direct action rate
Speaker 26: in Mexico, drone warfare in Mexico. Obviously, doing this without
Speaker 26: the permission of the Mexican government would be an act
Speaker 26: of war, right, like killing foreign nationals without the permission
Speaker 26: of their government, conducting direct action raids bombing another country
Speaker 26: like that, That is an act of war. The US
Speaker 26: has had an fid FED Foreign Internal Defense Mission right
Speaker 26: where it trains advisors and assists Mexican law enforcement and
Speaker 26: military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chappa,
Speaker 26: for instance, were trained I think by mass Sock. But
Speaker 26: this has been happening for a long time. But to
Speaker 26: go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge,
Speaker 26: a huge step up. The only really analogous, directly analogous
Speaker 26: thing I can think of is Clinton with a plan
Speaker 26: Columbia designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. But that
Speaker 26: was very much with the cooperation and support of the
Speaker 26: co being government, and we're seeing a much more adversarial
Speaker 26: relationship between the United States and Mexico right now. The
Speaker 26: last thing I want to mention is that this deployment,
Speaker 26: I've spoken about it, but they're about sixteen hundred troops
Speaker 26: deployed right now. Biden deployed fifteen hundred troops in the
Speaker 26: summer of twenty twenty three. This is not a vastly
Speaker 26: different number, but they are doing different things. They seem
Speaker 26: to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall
Speaker 26: and being photographed at their two major jobs at the moment.
Speaker 3: We will see how that plays out.
Speaker 26: Also with reference to a military Trump immediately canceled the
Speaker 26: refugee resettlement program. With this left people all over the
Speaker 26: world stranded, including Afghanist many of whom worked for the
Speaker 26: United States or family members of US service people. Their
Speaker 26: refugee resettlement program, people don't come to the southern border.
Speaker 26: They go do all their background things and then fly
Speaker 26: into the United States. It's a different status to entering
Speaker 26: and claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights,
Speaker 26: found their flights were canceled.
Speaker 3: They're now stranded.
Speaker 26: Lots of them were stranded in Pakistan and facing immigration
Speaker 26: enforcement there in the case of the Afghans. So yeah,
Speaker 26: that is a speed run of all the terrible Trump
Speaker 26: immigration executive orders. We'll be reporting on this pretty extensively,
Speaker 26: so you can keep coming back for more. But another
Speaker 26: thing that we have more of right now is advertisements.
Speaker 13: Okay, we are back. I have a few other notes
Speaker 13: I want to add for the woke front that I'm
Speaker 13: reporting on right now. I think it's been a lot
Speaker 13: of conflation between you know, like DEI and like what
Speaker 13: we would consider like affirmative action DEI refers to like
Speaker 13: these specific like corporate training policies and diversity initiatives, which is,
Speaker 13: you know, separate from long standing affirmative action policies, which
Speaker 13: has been used both in the corporate world and in
Speaker 13: like the government for like decades at this point. And
Speaker 13: what a whole bunch of this DEI rollback type stuff
Speaker 13: is essentially doing is just openly discriminating against the people
Speaker 13: who are not like straight white men. It's like, if
Speaker 13: you are a straight white man, we cannot hire you
Speaker 13: because that would mean we are doing DEI. And like,
Speaker 13: this is what a lot of the stuff that we're
Speaker 13: seeing kind of looks like. There was a mass email
Speaker 13: to federal agencies about DEI and calls to report DEI
Speaker 13: policies in their department if they're going by like other names, right,
Speaker 13: So that would be stuff like affirmative action.
Speaker 15: Right.
Speaker 13: If there's anything that is about you know, trying to
Speaker 13: trying to increase the diversity in your workforce or any
Speaker 13: quote unquote woke topics including you know, gender ideology, anything
Speaker 13: anything that seems vaguely woke, you're supposed to now report
Speaker 13: to make sure that gets removed because that's not part
Speaker 13: of the new federal government. I believe someone from the
Speaker 13: NSA did leave a tip on that email line reporting
Speaker 13: DEI masquerading as as another name. Similar to this, there
Speaker 13: was a memo or an email that was leaked to
Speaker 13: Ken Klippenstein from the Defense Intelligence Agency which basically said
Speaker 13: that they're not going to be observing any any woke
Speaker 13: call holidays, including Martin Luther King Junior's Birthday, Black History Month,
Speaker 13: Women's History Months, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, Asian American Pacific
Speaker 13: Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth, Women's Equality Day, National
Speaker 13: Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National
Speaker 13: American Indian Heritage Month, with a small asterisk saying that
Speaker 13: the pause on observing these will not affect the federal holidays,
Speaker 13: which would be MLK and June teenth, although who knows,
Speaker 13: they might try to even remove some of those as
Speaker 13: being federal holidays.
Speaker 26: I did wonder that, like, at some point, you're gonna,
Speaker 26: like you're gonna lose people when you take away their
Speaker 26: days off work.
Speaker 13: I get like that, right, right, So like I think
Speaker 13: they might leave those like actual federal holidays in but
Speaker 13: you're not allowed to observe any of these any of
Speaker 13: these other awareness months or or you know, Pride Month,
Speaker 13: Black History months, like you're not allowed to acknowledge that
Speaker 13: at all in these federal agencies now, at least for
Speaker 13: the Defense Intelligence Agency, support for most of Trump's executive
Speaker 13: orders does fluctuate. According to a poll from Reuters, the
Speaker 13: support for closing all DEI offices is actually pretty split.
Speaker 13: Fifty one percent oppose the closing of these offices, according
Speaker 13: to their poll, Forty four percent are in favor, and
Speaker 13: it's very segmented. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be
Speaker 13: the Gulf of America pretty disliked, with seventy percent being
Speaker 13: in opposition.
Speaker 2: Look, the one thing people hate most is changing names.
Speaker 13: Having the names been Lang.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody likes that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he did Denali as well, Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that was changed more recently. But the
Speaker 2: Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for
Speaker 2: longer than its America has existed as a country, the
Speaker 2: United States, right.
Speaker 26: I mean, Denali has been Denali for longer than America
Speaker 26: has existed. It's just right, right, right, But there was
Speaker 26: a period where we called it McKinley. No one's ever
Speaker 26: called it the Gulf of America. Yeah, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 26: saying the Denali thing's right, I'm just saying like that's
Speaker 26: a much harder.
Speaker 3: So yes, yeah, yeah, you're not going to get much
Speaker 3: buying on that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Pardening J six protesters, new tariffs or taxes on Canadian goods,
Speaker 13: and ending birthright citizenship are all around sixty to thirty
Speaker 13: sixty oppose thirty percent in favor. Trump during his first
Speaker 13: week did see a record high approval rating that has slowly,
Speaker 13: I think gone down, but I don't know. It's hard
Speaker 13: to gauge the level of like general enthusiasm for his
Speaker 13: actions right now. And there's I think part of like
Speaker 13: the general strategy that we're seeing is there's just so
Speaker 13: much happening every single day that you can't even keep
Speaker 13: track of it all, let alone like internalize it. Like
Speaker 13: he's he is trying to sign as many of these
Speaker 13: orders every day so that both the courts, all of
Speaker 13: these like NGOs, advocacy groups are always working and we're
Speaker 13: never sure what is real, right, We're never sure what's
Speaker 13: going to stick around all of these memos about funding
Speaker 13: and grants. It's just so exhausting. And that's like part
Speaker 13: of the design is that this just feels like a
Speaker 13: constant stream of nonsense that we maybe have to deal with,
Speaker 13: maybe we won't. One of the more odd things is
Speaker 13: Trump openly embracing manifest destiny language, which I guess isn't
Speaker 13: actually odd, that's actually makes sense. It's just one of
Speaker 13: those things that it feels very rubicon esque. But he
Speaker 13: does have this new distinct focus on territorial expansion. During
Speaker 13: his inaugural address, he praised quote unquote to our American
Speaker 13: ancestors for having quote won the wild West. Now, apparently
Speaker 13: the call about Greenland to Denmark did not go very well.
Speaker 13: Denmark did not realize how serious Trump was, and it
Speaker 13: was apparently quite angry during that phone call, and you know,
Speaker 13: seemingly upset that Denmark is not going to easily hand
Speaker 13: over Greenland. He seems to be pivoting more towards retaking Panama. Yeah,
Speaker 13: which is which is something that he also mentioned in
Speaker 13: his inaugural address.
Speaker 26: Let me tell you, Panamanians not stoked. I've been receiving
Speaker 26: communications from Panama where it was his step down, but
Speaker 26: they are burning American flags.
Speaker 13: The quote from the inaugural address is quote the United
Speaker 13: States will once again consider itself a growing nation. When
Speaker 13: that increases our wealth and carries our flag into new
Speaker 13: beautiful horizons, and we will pursue our manifest destiny into
Speaker 13: the stars.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I don't know, what do you have to do?
Speaker 3: That's not a good thing. I think that's bad.
Speaker 13: Like obviously, that's you know, not great, not ideal. You know,
Speaker 13: invading Panama not ideal. Going to war with Greenland slightly
Speaker 13: more funny because it's cold. I think specifically is focused on,
Speaker 13: like why that he believes the US has a vested
Speaker 13: interest in Greenland, isn't just picking out a spot on
Speaker 13: the map. I think this also could be like related
Speaker 13: to trying to prepare for climate change. Having territory in
Speaker 13: the Arctic is going to become an increasingly valuable commodity
Speaker 13: to have. And and I think there is a part
Speaker 13: of this that could be legitimately on that side, because
Speaker 13: I mean, I don't know, Maybe Trump should just get
Speaker 13: really into Alaska.
Speaker 26: Well, he did deregulate drilling in Alaska, Drill baby drill.
Speaker 26: I will be up there later this year talking to
Speaker 26: people in Alaska about drill baby drill.
Speaker 13: Very excited for that, But I don't know I think
Speaker 13: it's also generally not super useful to make huge generalizing
Speaker 13: statements about what this type of stuff Trump is doing
Speaker 13: right now and how it will reflect on his entire presidency.
Speaker 13: People have been been doing this kind of about Trump's
Speaker 13: flip flopping opinions on TikTok, you know, being very into like,
Speaker 13: you know, saving TikTok and then then calling it worthless,
Speaker 13: but then going back to actually making sure that Microsoft
Speaker 13: buys it or something. And you know, people are very
Speaker 13: easy or quick to like jump onto these sorts of things.
Speaker 13: Trump's flip flopping tendencies maybe not sinking every single easy
Speaker 13: bucket and acting like these would be emblematic of his
Speaker 13: entire presidency, and like that's not the case. That that
Speaker 13: does not actually mean that Trump just says things even
Speaker 13: though he's gonna call TikTok worthless, does not mean that
Speaker 13: he's going to not do that easy lay up. We're
Speaker 13: all aware of how much he just says what is
Speaker 13: on his mind.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 13: And I think these sorts of things do not necessarily
Speaker 13: mean that he's going to like plummet to being the
Speaker 13: most unpopular president ever because he refuses to use the
Speaker 13: right messaging around TikTok or something. The other economic situations
Speaker 13: he might walk us into would be you know, much
Speaker 13: much more affecting to his general popularity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's he is doing again. I talk about
Speaker 2: this a lot. Why fascists succeed is that they try,
Speaker 2: like they're constantly reaching for stuff, and oftentimes like they overreach,
Speaker 2: but nobody pushes back so they get the thing. Right,
Speaker 2: That's what he's doing here. Do I think that he's
Speaker 2: willing at this point to commit to a full scale
Speaker 2: military invasion and armed occupation of Panama, a thing that
Speaker 2: could be a real problem for his presidency? Right, like
Speaker 2: US troops dying in meaningful numbers in attacks in a
Speaker 2: country that we had no fucking beef with before. That
Speaker 2: could be a real fucking problem for a guy who
Speaker 2: ran on the things that he ran on. But maybe
Speaker 2: he gets a bunch of sessions for nothing. It's the
Speaker 2: same thing with Greenland. You make the push, you try
Speaker 2: to scare Denmark, you try to scare Greenland, and you
Speaker 2: see if they'll accept something, and then you you walk away,
Speaker 2: maybe with a coup, and you do it fucking widely enough,
Speaker 2: you might get something right like That's that's it.
Speaker 13: He's always testing his limits.
Speaker 3: Because that's what they do.
Speaker 26: Yeah, I mean, look at Columbia, right, he immediately went
Speaker 26: to like eleven on the retaliation scale and effectively receive concessions.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So, I think, you know, similar to how you know
Speaker 13: it was annoying in the first like resistlib era to
Speaker 13: take every single crazy statement Trump says seriously, or like
Speaker 13: you know, do this performative outrage over every single thing
Speaker 13: he does. I think it's also useless to do fast
Speaker 13: mimetic reactions that form generalizing statements about you know, how
Speaker 13: something that Trump is doing is emblematic for the rest
Speaker 13: of his term and now he's like doomed to failure.
Speaker 13: I think those statements are actually pretty useless and at
Speaker 13: the very least are not helpful. Right now, let's close
Speaker 13: by talking about Guantanamo. I guess Robert and James I'll have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Trump has signed an executive order saying that
Speaker 2: they're going to create a facility capable of storing thirty
Speaker 2: thousand migrants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. First, we should probably
Speaker 2: just talk about how realistic this is. If you ever
Speaker 2: looked at a topographical map of Guantanamo Bay, it's quite
Speaker 2: a large like the US concession in Cuba is a
Speaker 2: sizable degree of land. But it's not easy land to
Speaker 2: build things on, right, Like it is that it's rugged terrain,
Speaker 2: you would say, So making a camp like this is
Speaker 2: almost certainly going to be extremely expensive, and at least
Speaker 2: under kind of the way things currently work, it will
Speaker 2: probably take a good amount of time to get set
Speaker 2: up like. This is not a quick thing. This is
Speaker 2: not an overnight thing. And one thing I want to
Speaker 2: remind people of is that they have already have expanded
Speaker 2: a number of camps and facility in the US to
Speaker 2: deal with all the migrants they are taking in.
Speaker 3: So this is not the start.
Speaker 2: If you want to call this, and I think it's
Speaker 2: fair to call this a plan to start a concentration
Speaker 2: camp system. That system began early, and in fact it
Speaker 2: started before Trump took office. A decent chunk of it
Speaker 2: was anticipating him coming into office.
Speaker 3: But this is not the first camp, right, Yeah.
Speaker 26: And like Biden did significant legwork for tension that is
Speaker 26: cool and unusual. Yes, with his legal defense and his
Speaker 26: establishment of outdoor attention for migrants since the end of
Speaker 26: Title forty two in May of twenty three, And I
Speaker 26: think like we have to acknowledge that, I know people
Speaker 26: are very much into that, Like, don't criticize the Dems
Speaker 26: right now, Like if they don't change, if taking a
Speaker 26: fat l in what should have been one of the
Speaker 26: easiest elections of the century doesn't change them, then nothing will.
Speaker 26: And like we have to acknowledge that we are going
Speaker 26: to concentration camps quicker, I mean I will far and out.
Speaker 3: Let's cool the.
Speaker 26: Outdoor detention sites in Hakumba concentration camps right, because they
Speaker 26: sure as hell look like one and they are.
Speaker 2: This is a big personal frustration to me. I'm seeing
Speaker 2: a ton of people going online and comparing this to
Speaker 2: the Nazi concentration camp here after referred to as the
Speaker 2: KZ system.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 2: There's one post I came across on Twitter where a
Speaker 2: person who'm I'm not going to name just to not
Speaker 2: cause a bunch of bullshit for them. Time from taking
Speaker 2: office to opening a mass attention camp Mussolini eight years,
Speaker 2: ll Gala and others, Libya Hitler fifty one days, Docau
Speaker 2: Germany Trump nine days. That's fucking horseshit. Yes, Docou took
Speaker 2: longer to establish. Docou was not the first concentration camp.
Speaker 2: The concentration camp system in Germany under the Nazis started
Speaker 2: as soon as the Nazis took power with a series
Speaker 2: of what we're called wild concentration camps, and this was
Speaker 2: involved a huge number of people, largely political enemies of
Speaker 2: the regime, members of the opposition party, being taken into custody, beaten, tortured,
Speaker 2: and stored in a series of airsats facilities. Two hundred
Speaker 2: thousand people were taken into custody under the wild concentration
Speaker 2: camp system in nineteen thirty three, the first year that
Speaker 2: Germans were in power. These are not comparable systems. That
Speaker 2: does not mean that I don't believe what Trump is
Speaker 2: doing is a concentration camp. It is a concentration camp
Speaker 2: made in the model of the American system. This is
Speaker 2: part of the American history of concentration camps, which goes
Speaker 2: back something like two hundred years right to the I mean,
Speaker 2: we were one of the first countries to employ concentration camps.
Speaker 2: The concentration camp as a concept began with what we're
Speaker 2: called reconcentrados in Cuba, at the behest of a Spanish
Speaker 2: general fighting an insurgency. There were US officers embedded there,
Speaker 2: they came back and those tactics were adapted for our
Speaker 2: wars with Native American tribes on the frontiers and the planes.
Speaker 2: General Sherman was one of the very first Americans to
Speaker 2: care out concentration camps. And what we are seeing here
Speaker 2: is part of America's tradition with concentration camps. It is
Speaker 2: not part of the German tradition with concentration camps. And
Speaker 2: you're going to be mistaken about like how this is
Speaker 2: going to proceed and what the dangers are, because I
Speaker 2: do not think the dangers at this point are that
Speaker 2: we build a death factory capable of incinerating a million
Speaker 2: people in less than a year. That's not the threat.
Speaker 2: The threat is huge numbers of people are taken into
Speaker 2: custody and stored in places that are not safe, that
Speaker 2: do not have good hygiene, that do not have good
Speaker 2: food standards, and a significant number of those people will
Speaker 2: die or suffer permanent physical injury. But it won't look
Speaker 2: like Auschwitz, and if that's what people are expecting, they'll
Speaker 2: be like, well, maybe this isn't that band, Maybe this
Speaker 2: isn't a concentration camp after all. So it's important to
Speaker 2: get things right, both for that reason and because it's
Speaker 2: also disrespectful to the people who died during the fucking
Speaker 2: Holocaust to be like, yeah, Trump's a lot worse than
Speaker 2: Hitler right now, like no, no, stack, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we have it.
Speaker 26: You can trace online from like Bosquier Rodondo right where
Speaker 26: they sent the Navajo people.
Speaker 3: Right bass Rodando is a great thing to bring.
Speaker 26: Yeah, yes, And you can trace a direct line from
Speaker 26: that to the outdoor detention camps we saw in twenty
Speaker 26: twenty three where people were forced to remain in one
Speaker 26: place without food, water, or shelter, and people died as
Speaker 26: a result of that last year two years ago, and
Speaker 26: like that, from there to Guantanamo Bay, it is not
Speaker 26: a massive leap. And yeah, just being like we don't
Speaker 26: have Auschwitz, it's just asinine. Like if you if you
Speaker 26: can't acknowledge that America has a long history of doing this,
Speaker 26: and you know, really you need to examine your own
Speaker 26: preconceptions before like speaking for others.
Speaker 13: Yep, all right, is that this episode for this week?
Speaker 4: Everyone?
Speaker 3: I think that's the episode. I think we're done.
Speaker 24: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Yes, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week.
Speaker 2: From now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 25: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone
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