War in Iran and Alabama Redistricting

This is an IiHart podcast Guaranteed human. My husband is at a spa resort with his mistress right now and I'm calling the hotel to confront them both. Wait a minute, Dakota, She's calling the hotel while they're checked in together. Yeah, that's right, Sophia. And it gets worse. It's vacate the Vacation week on the OK Story Time podcast, where she caught him buying gifts on Amazon and then taped the ten page letter inside his luggage before he flew out. So she planted evidence before he even took off? And spoiler Sophia, two years later, Karma hits so hard he's calling his ex wife in tears saying about his mistress. What a mistake that was o F out what happened, listen to the OK Story Time podcast on the IiHart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast American soccer is exploding. The knockout rounds are here. The US won their group and now every match is winner goo homeome. I'm Tab Ramos. And I'm Tom Boger. On our podcast Inside American Soccer, we'll talk about the real storylines. Discuss the tactics that actually decide matches and give you the truth about the US National team from inside the program. Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup, We've got you covered Listen to Inside American soccer with Tom Boger and Tabramos on the IiHart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast I'm Jake Brennan, and on the Disgrac Land podcast, I explore the wild lives of rock stars and unbelievable true crime stories from music history. These are the stories you haven't heard, the kind you'll end up telling someone else Like the time Paul McCartney spent in a notorious prison or the bizarre crime Lady Gaga is accused of, or that time blondie's Debbie Harry escaped Ted Bunny. Listen to Disgrace Land, on the IHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts Joy is essential and it's also elillusive, but now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy one hundred one. It's a new podcast hosted by me, How to Copy. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on air chats Open your free iHart radio app search, Joy one hundred one and listen now Joy one hundred and one with Hodak Koti is presented by CBS Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilition episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. but You can make your own decisions Hello and welcome to It It Happ here My name is Dna Lkird I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. I'm recording this on may nineteenth, twenty twenty six And this past weekend, may fifteenth was Nakbad day Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe. And Nakba Day commemorates when close to a million Palestinians were expelled in nineteen forty eight with the founding of the Israeli state. So the Palestinian catastrophe Hundreds of villages and towns were destroyed And many Palestinians were made refugees in camps around the new state, in Gaza West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and farurther afield. Within Israel, Palestinians who somehow managed to remain or put under military rule As the past few years have demonstrated, and as many Palestinians will tell you This neck burn never ended. Usually I use this podcast to discuss current events or to interview someone who is an expert on a dynamic I'm interested in and I think is useful for people to hear Today I'm going to be doing something a little different. and outside my comfort zone. I'm going to share my personal family history and our Nakuba story. I'm a Palestinian from Jerusale On both sides, my mom and my dad are from Jerusalem And I was born there Usually when people ask me where I'm from and I say that, they just assume East Jerusalem because That's where Palestinians have been sequestered today They were driven out of West Jerusalem in nineteen forty eight. But actually some of my family were from the western side of the city My paternal grandmother and her family lost their home in West Jerusalem in nineteen forty eight. My grandmother ended up spending three years in an Akaljed refugee camp outside of Jericho. becausecause my great grandfather had been wounded trying to defend the city and they were waiting to see if they could return My grandmother has told me details about this time. She talked about the makeshift school in the camp that only went up to the eighth grade So my grandmother repeated the year a couple of times and then eventually dropped out of school because she couldn't continue past the eighth grade Now the rest of her siblings, especially upon their return to Jerusalem, We're all fully educated. as adults, many of them held advanced degrees. My grandmother was the only one as the eldest who had paid the price of displacement in this way She was trained as a seamstress later on, but always lamented that she had to leave school early She also told me about her house in Ba, which is in West Jusale, a neighborhood inest Jerusalem before it was taken during the Nkba This was a newer neighborhood with nice views of the city where middle class Palestinian families were expanding their homes as their families expanded My grandmother's family had only moved into this house two months prior to the Ncka And she used to tell me how the house had been newly painted and it was made of beautiful stones Before she passed away, she would often cry over this house, as if it had just been taken That house, by the way, still stands in West Jerusalem. The last time I visited Palestine, my grandmother's younger siblings showed me pictures of themselves posing in front of their house Now occupied by Israelis My grandmother's story is very typical. but also very lucky Because her and her family, they did become refugees, yes, but they found their way back to the city. Most Palestinians were never able to return back to their hometowns They were in that sense that They had property and family in other parts of the city on the easastern side and they were able to continue. We were able to continue That's how I was born in Jerusalem myself because of that look Now on my maternal side, I don't know as much about them and their neca story I left Palestine when I was a child. I don't have a close relationship with my mother's side of the family And they harbor a lot of secrets. I never knew much about their histories and their dramas. My maternal grandmother is divorced and the family had fractured in particular ways. so there was a lot of touchiness. Many parts of the family were estranged from each other. One thing I did eventually find out when I was a teenager was that my mother's grandmother, so my great grandmother was actually Israeli This was my mother's paternal grandmother, her dad that she no longer had a relationship with because of her parents's divorce And I didn't have much information beyond that. I knew Her name, Rachel But nobody really wanted to talk about this Israel great grandmother It was also an uncomfortable finding for me at the time because I'm a Palestinian from Jerusalem. The only Israelis I had ever engaged with at that point were soldiers. So I didn't press the subject. It was just another Fily secret We didn't talk about When I got older, I got more curious about this and I asked for more information And I asked my dad to confirm whether this was true that my mother did in fact had an Israeli grandmother. likeike this wasn't a rumor and he said he had met her himself. In fact, he had met her while I was a toddler, apparently, and I had met her. Though of course, I had no recollection My dad says that during her visit to my mother's family, so this would be Rachel's grandchildren and then her daughter in law There had been some argument and they had haranged her over the actions of her state and her state's military And according to my dad, she replied that it had nothing to do with her Because she came during the British mandate era, she was classified as a Palestinian Jew And he told me as much of the story as he had been told. Rachel was a Polish Jewish woman. She came to Palestine. She married my great grandfather who by my father's description, was kind of a wealthy Palestinian playboy type They had two children and in nineteen forty eight when Israel was founded and Palestinians were ethnically cleansed My great grandmother and great grandfather split up What my dad understood to have happened was Rachel left her children joined her new countrymen That was that So as I said, Jerusalem was split up. The western side was cleared of its Palestinians There was an armistice line where actually the newfound Israeli state housed recent Arab Jewish migrants, sort of as cannon fodder One of those neighborhoods where Arab Jews wereplaced later birthed the Israeli Black Panthers And then the western side was under Israeli rule and Palestinians on the eastern side of the city fell under Jordanian rule So the story goes that my great grandmother left and my great grandfather put his children in an orphanage My dad says he heard they were often mistreated possibly because their mother was Israeli And later, when Israel occupied the rest of Jerusalem and the city was unified My great grandmother did go looking for her children, but my grandfather didnn't connect with her to her son and moved to Jordan Now from my mother, I also pressed for more information. She had never told me any of the story But this year, literally a few weeks ago, she finally gave me Rachel's last name. I dug around to see what I could find out about her. I asked online. I got the help of people who had expertise in Jewish genealogy And what I found was a much more complicated picture First, I found an academic article about a quote nonpartisan Zionist youth group in Belgium in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties I don't speak Hebrew, so I'm going to mispronounce this. I think it's called Zeir Ham getting their members ready to make the journey to Palestine. That's what this article was about They were non partisan in the sense that they included a lot of different strains of Zionism. So right wing Zionism, left wing Zionism among the members The Zionism itself, of course, was taken as a given Now, the article included quotes from former members of this group and kind of grainy black and white photos O which the name Rachel appeared in the captions with her last name. And when I first saw the woman identified as Rachel in this group photo I knew instinctively that I had found her because she looked like a blonde version of my mother My intuition was very quickly confirmed because Rachel was identified by her married Palestinian name in the footnotes where she was quoted. I found her, here she was I wanted to know more about what had happened to her after these pictures in Belgium were taken The article states that she immigrated to Palastine in the early nineteen thirties at the encouragement of her quot Zionist mother What had led her between nineteen thirty three and nineteen forty eight T Marry and then leave a Palestinian And then why was she visiting her grandchildren and apparently me? in the nineteen nineties The second big piece of information I got was because of A bllueky account, PY MUND genealogy This is a person who works on Jewish genealogy, has an interest in it. and he helped find an article that had been written about my great grandmother in the Israeli magazine Maharev. So shout out to this guy Now this article was dated june twelfth, nineteen eighty seven It's a three page spread And in this interview that Rachel gives, she talks about her childhood in Antwerp. her immigration to Palestanine as a young woman and her marriage So apparently after her civil ceremony with my great grandfather in nineteen thirty five They had traveled across Europe for a whole year even meeting the extended family in Poland where Rachel's family was originally from Her new husband was honored by her uncle who was an important rabbi Now for reasons she does not outline, Rachel discusses leaving her husband, maybe assuming The separation would be temporary in nineteen forty eight Unlike the story that my father had heard and I had been told, she had not left her children And in fact, there had been four of them She left two of them with her father and took the eldest and the baby that she was pregnant with to West Jerusale She kept her married name and she never officially divorced. I can only assume that she didn't guess the city would be divided or maybe didn't understand for how long Now when Israel took the rest of the city in nineteen sixty seven, she not only reconnected, with her I guess Palestinian children But it seems from this article had warm relationships with them until the end. Rachel had assisted my grandfather, her son. in marrying my grandmother, comppiling the dry The children who had been raised Israeli had reconnected with their family to varying degrees Some of the Palestinian children visited the Israeli children in Tel Aviv, according to this interview Rachel even reconnected with Her husband, my great grandfather, lived with him until he passed in nineteen eighty three Rachel had also maintained a relationship with her daughter in law, my maternal grandmother even after her son's divorce In this article I recognize the descriptions of my mother and my aunts Rachel had kept visiting them until she died in the mid nineteen nineties That explains the visit that my father had witnessed quickly realized that Of course, it had been easier for many members of my family to pretend this had never happened try to keep the truth of these relationships from their children I suppose they preferred a neer story of clean breaks and solid national divisions It's also not lost on me that Much of this obfuscation relies on the common misogynistic trope of the negligent mother, which was Apparently easy for everyone to believe Now, I won't say that Israeli Palestinian marriages are common or that intimate relationships between the two groups are easy to find They aren't unheard of. Israeli political parties are certainly scared enough of this prospect. They often voice condemnations of interethnic relationships of this kind So this phenomenon must exist at some level And I guess I shouldn't be surprised either because Palestine's most well known poet, Mahammed Dar Rish was famous for his poetry, among many of them, a poem he wrote to his Jewish girlfriend titled Rita This was the same man that joined the PLO, lived through the Israeli siege of Beirut and wrote the Palestinian Delar of Independence. Now Racial story really bggled my mind in its contradictions because She had been part of a Zionist youth group. She had actively joined an effort to facilitate the migration of Europe's Jewish population to Palestine. eventually leading to the displacement of Palestinians She had married a Palestinian. And in the interview for Marv, she describes running to the eastern part of the city when Israel occupied it in nineteen sixty seven to see, quote, her friends She says she would marry my great grandfather all over again if she could You see, dear, it was a great love, she told her interviewer Ironically, my parents and my maternal grandparents, all of which share national and religious identities Both ended up divorced Rachel and her Palestinian Muslim husband somehow stayed together At the same time, Rachel turned a blind eye to many things And she herself hid many things For example, she doesn't reveal the details of her children raised as Israeli The interviewer in the Marv magazine interview emphasizes that they wouldn't want their information known especially about their lineage It seems that neither ever reconnected with their Palestinian father And most tellingly for me in that interview when my maternal grandmother Rachel's daughter in la complains of the Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood that she lived in. The interviewer reports that Rachel feigns deafness and returns the conversation to a discussion of the children Now racial isn't abnormal Israeli society has turned a blind eye to many things Many Israelis pretend that the Palestinians as a national group do not exist. They prefer to think of them to think of us as the reincarnation of Nazis or the modern day manifestation of anti Semitism Or at best, Palestinians are merely generic Arabs with easily severed ties to this particular land The Israeli state even grows pine trees over emptied and demolished Palestinian villages to ensure return is impossible and to hide the extent of what happened. In the latest war on Gaza, images and videos from Gaza are dismissed as AI fabrications They call it Hollywood It's just an effort by Palestinians to put Israel in a bad light governments, the world over seem to have taken this position, of turning a blind eye to the oppression Palestinians have faced and assuming Palestinians would live and die never having exercised their basic rights All I can say is I'm living proof that these silences For long the inevitable But the truth eventually comes out and the return. is inevitable. The longer we wait to acknowledge the reality of the situation, the more people will suffer And the more this kind of intergenerational trauma will continue. I recently finished Molly Crab Apple's book Here Where We Live As Our Country onn the Jewish Bnd She quotes Jewish Bundhist Lvk Hodes saying that Qote, belief in mankind is not popular today In these last years, we have all seen it become deeply debased, despoiled, and spat on But if man is at heart a beast, no amount of running away will help This really resonated with me. I firmly believe that we can't rely on silence to disappear our problems. We can't run from each other. Let my family history be a testament to that When we understand that, then the truth And the resolution and the return is only a matter of time And maybe then The neckba will end Thank you for listening and Hope you all stay safe Hey, I'm Hoda Cotby, host of the podcast, Joy one hundred one with Hoda Cotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're gonna have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating likeike when actress Olivia Mun shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Seaan Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy one hundred one with Hodak Cotby on the IHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Jake Bernie. and on my podcast Disgraceelland I tell the stories behind music's biggest names, the moments that shape them. them and changed music history forever. Like how the story of the Foo Fighters and Dave Grohll isn't just about music Imagine that. You're in the biggest band on the planet, as Dave Groll was in nineteen ninety four in Nirvana. and the phone rings, and you learn that your singer, your friend The reluctant voice of a generation, Kurt Cobain is dead This is a story of fame, pressure, friendship, and the weight of fulfilling your destiny. Learn more about the moment everything changed. Disgrracand is part of the exactly right network. Listen to new episodes every Tuesday, bonus episodes Thursday, and rewinds on Sunday on the IHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts ir My first guest is Paris Hopen, Shakira, Luke and Iarin. Samira Gacy. I'm so excited on a bouncy bed. You have surprises? Many surprises. Welcome to Site three hundred five where the good chat comes to life. What Yeah no Carary As the to my se Mious is seven Set me aante. Oh You're the only person I know that loves the yellow Starburst. This is Sweet three hundreder five. Listen to Sweet three hundreder five with Lter Pons as part of my Gulura podcast network on the IiHart Radio apppp, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. American soccer is exploded. The knockout rounds are here. The US won their group and now every match is winner go home. I'm Tab Ramos. and I'm Tom Boger. On our podcast Inside American Soccer, we'll talk about the real storylines. I'm not worried about Balisic, I'm not worried about Balligan. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back. And give you the truth about the US National team from inside the program It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarter finals or potentially a great run into the semifinals. Whether you're a lifelong fan or this is your first World Cup, we've got to come Listen, insside American soccer with Tom Boger and Tab Ramos in the iHart, radio app, Apple podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Iidapp and H a podcast about going on strike and hopefully winning. I am your host Mia Wong. There's a concept in E organizing called a hot shop, which is a shop where everything is moving really, really quickly And people are organizing really quickly and bad stuff is happening really quickly and people are reacting really quickly. And today we are going to talk to maybe the hottest shff I have ever encountered So And to discuss this shop I am talking to Jackie Maay and Dejia Iigo who are members and organizers of Real U Electrolysis Worers United. Both of you two, welcome to the show I thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us on such shhort notice. you said hot shop and yeah, it's been a week Very heartwek indeed I had heard this was going on And it was there's an attempt to go public The next thing I heard was like the next day and there was a strike. and I was like, oh my God, this is wild. So yeah, not even a week ago Yeah, it will be I think by the time you're listening to this, it will be one week. Yeah. ye. Okay, that's fair Yeah, I want to mention this is being recorded on Monday and may twenty fifth. this situation is moving very quickly. There is a chance that things have changed by then. We will try to Get an update in if something really major has happens P'us roll this back to the beginning. and I think the place I want to start is So you aret It's real you electrolysis workers united. So you are electrolysis workers I know this audience specifically of it could happen here. has a significantly higher chance of the general population to know what electrolysis is. But can you explain for people who don't know or only kind of familiar what electrolysis is Of course Trolysis is the only FDA recognized method of permanent hair removal is a technique that dates back a surprisingly long time where We insert a filament about the size of a hair into individual hair follicles And with the use of electricity to generate either heat or lie We basically kill each hair follicle at its root and that hair, if all goes according to plan, will not come back. It is commonly used in gender affirming care, and that is one of the, if not the specialty of real electrolysis. Yeah, can you talk a bit about this in a gender affirm and care context? Of course you know, if you are a transgender person and you are undergoing medical transition There is a variety of reasons you might want to have hair permanently removed, either in preparation for surgery bothoth in terms of a transfeminine or transmasculine surgical context, you will need hair permanently removed from some parts of your body that will be involved in that you also may want to have facial hair or body hair permanently removed. Again, this applies to both trans feminine, transmasculine and peopleeople anywhere else on the transgender spectrum Because, you know, not everybody to have body hair. Yeah or facial hair Yeah, and this is something that I mean, I can personally say, you can get a lot of dysphoria from body hair. It can be real bad. Oh yeah, I cant and not Having it is such a huge difference? Yes. And I guess A thing that I should say, so my understanding of electrolysis, I have not done electrolysis. I have a lot of friends who have. But the thing about electrolysis versus like, you know, shaving or something is that once you hit a hair follicle, it's gone And theoretically after you're done with, you know, like a bunch of the sessions, you just don't have hair growing their ra Yes, correct And also I should note that it is also covered by most health insurance that does coverage g under affirming care. I know we all have kind of mixed feelings about the WPath standards, but it is considered the standard of care for hair removal under the WPath. You know, a significant proportion of the patients at the Reo electrolysis Clinic are using insurance to pay for their care. Ms Yeah, which is really cool Not all Tre healthcare is that expensive, but Theillic Tsis is not the most cheap thing if you are paying out of pocket and andering on. Yeah, it's usually out of pocket is somewhere between one hundred and twenty to two hundred and forty dollars an hour depending on your provider Yeah. And these are weekly sessions, usually at least an hour. sometometimes they can be less for those who have difficulty tolerating it Some people go for even more, like some patients may elect to get like six hours of it done, but again, this is a lot of out of pocket costs, especially when it generally takes anywhere from a year and a half to three years to fully clear an area. So this is why It's so important to have this covered by insurance because really adds up quickly Yeah, and I think this is also gets into what's important about The shop, which is that This is one of the few Lrlesest places I've ever encountered where Huge portions of the staff are trans. Yes. And yeah, can you talk a bit about what what that's been like doing you know, like doing this kind of genderffirming care. on other trans people who Normally Lets say this is the medical setting, I can count on one finger the number of trans healthcare providers. I mean, I guess If you count pharmacists, I can add like a second finger like my entire life and I'm extremely lucky that I've even gotten one transop care provider who was trans. Well It's an honor and a privilege to be able to work with other trans people for gender affirming care for our community Yeah. because we don't just serve the Vancouver area, we also serve the PDX area. And further, we have patients that commute from hours and hours away That is true Yeah. For people who don't know A little bit of geography stuff that will become important later. So this is Vancouver, Washington, which is just like right across a river from Portland. This amazingly, the fact that technically speaking, this river is like the state border will become important in a little bit Yes. Yeah,. Yes it will. Oh boy Yeah. So all right, I'm going I'm going to ask all of you to put a little pin in City that is technically across a state border from another city, but is like you just drive over a bridge and you're there. Let's go talk about some strike shit Mmhm Okay, so I guess to start, can we talk about how organizing kind of first started at at Re electrosis. Yes It first started because they hired M Mia Oh with me Ever since I was a little girl, I have been enchanted with the idea of a workers' union and people working together to make their conditions better. It is something that I have had to learn and practice on my own. because I didn't know about the IWW. Yeah. It's a thing that I was trying to do before I moved out here And then this opportunity just rorops into my lab and it's And on queer people, I've got host probles. It's not becauseuse I'm cold And and how could I in good conscious just like Let that opportunity go. Yeah Yeah, Jackie May is very much the motive force behind us getting our shit together and unionizing I remember from the time that I started im Me was talking about Having a goal to unionize the shop we weren't expecting it to be on such a fine, but I was really excited to have somebody else who is into doing this because I've always been a hardcore leftist and an extreme socialist unist, I don't know, whatever label you want to put on me, Wers rights. like we should own the means of production and we should be the ones receiving all of the benefits from it. Yeah, but Jackie May has just been like ready to go. We can also talk about like the actual start to like okay, what did we actually start doing things to this direction, rightight? You want to take that Jackie May? Yeah. so lightight talks have been going on since I got there in actually June of last year It's always just been real light, real surface level is in, hey, do you support a union wouldould you like to consider being in one one day? and then I go about my day. con like that's as far as the conversation goes because that's all the information I need at that point. Yeah So I knew who in the building was yes And last month One of our members, someone who was already in talks with us was fired and the circumstances around that person being fired The vibes were off, right? Like prerevious week, there was Dirty. Cart that just happened to here in her room that would be worth the write up to get her fired That cart couldn't have been hers because before she started school, she moved that cart to another to her substitute cllinici's room Like could could not be management said it was. So it looks like something that was fabricated. To clarify, this this union member, this coworer was going on a leave of absence to attend a certification training program So that is why she had a substitute clinician. taking over her equipment I should also add that this was the first time they have ever done room inspections on site.. In fact the only they've only done room inspections twice and both times resulted in a termination. Well, that's not suspicious at all. H. Anyway, sorry Jackie Mate, please continue. No worries. it's okay We're listen, we're allowed to rabbit trail we come back to So Our friend was fired, right? It's super duper suspicious. Yeah. And I saw an opportunity and I That opportunity talk to people about it and For like a few days after this had happened, nobody knew where she was at. Nobody knew what happened. Yeah. So the narrative was entirely up to me and just going This is what they did. And and we all know this we all know this person. We've worked alongside this person. We all recognize her skill and how intelligent she is She's going to go on to teach this stuff. It It's true. And it made all of us scared One of our best just be rememoved like that Yeah Th go This is my understanding, this is a pretty small shop, right? L everyone knows everyone else. Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah. like maybe maybe fifteen or sixteen practicing clinicians at a given time. Yeah. Yeah, I guess makes it more scary when it's someomeone you know and you're close to just is just suddenly fired And I should note that most of us to have worked there are also patients there. So like a lot of these you know a lot of our coworkers are not just coworkers, they're also practitioners that provide gender affirming care to us So we don't just have like a superficial sense of the clinical skill of these people. We have direct experience Yeah And that makes it just that much more devastating when it somebody you know is extremely good at their job is just suddenly gone under very suspicious circumstances. Yeah, I think Dvastating So this gets into one of the truly wildest and most distressing parts of this entire story which is Can you talk about But I guess I would just call it The most neutral thing I can call it is the loone. Yes, absolutely. So remember when we kind of put a pin in the fact that Vancouver, Washington is right across the river from Portland, Oregon So there is a big difference between how the state of Washington and how the state of Oregon regulates the practice of electrolysis In the state of Oregon, you cannot practice electrolysis without first going through a certification program and passing a certification exam to become certified in the state of Washington, as long as you are practicing under the authority of somebody who has been certified in another state, You can practice electrolysis without certification. In fact, the state of Washington does not currently have their own certification framework for electrolysis So Those of us who work at Re U Electrolysis were all hired without prior certification. I think there may be one or two exceptions over the years, but by and large, The overwhelming majority are People who have no prior experience performing electrolysis. So ReLU, electrolysis does have certified electrologists on staff who are responsible for the training of new hires. One of the conditions of employment at Real U Electrolysis is to agree to sign a promissory note wherein real electrolysis will basasically Provide a stipend and pay for all expenses related to receiving a certification from a certification program. in exchange for fourour years of work Really electrosis. Those who sign this note are not required to directly pay back any money unless they either fail to complete their schooling fail to pass their certification resign their position within four years or are terminated. And at that point, they are immediately liable to repay the full amount of the promissory note. So essentially As soon as you enter schooling, And again, this is a condition of employment. Every single person who has been hired by real electrolysis could not start working without signing a contract agreeing to sign this promissory note when it comes time to be sent to school Yeah, and can you talk about like how much money is it that you have to pay back if you either get fired or leave At least twenty one thousand dollars in this case. Jesus. ris L Oh my God Al It's cartoonishly evil Yeah I should clarify as well that most of us who are hired are not coming into this job from a place of financial privilege. Most of us had some manner of skepticism over this contract, but because the opportunity just seemed so great and because we had not heard any history of you know, any sort of bad faith actions from management. we all just kind of decided, well, I get to work with a bunch of cool trans people on a bunch of cool trans people for decent pay and benefits. probably won't just fire me once I signed this loan. like that wouldn't be cool And so Where this really comes into play is that the union member, the coworker who was fired, as I mentioned before, was on a leave of absence to be in school And basically She was fired and immediately they demanded repayment in full of this loan So not only did she lose her job over extremely spurious circumstances She now was on the hook for twenty one thousand dollars like immediately Like I think the deadline they gave her is in like two days So I want to add something to all of that S hadad her sign that loan knowning that she had two write upps on the books and that her next write up within those four years would lead to termination They knew that. they have that on file. They admitted that to our faces We had a group of witnesses who can attest to this because we did all confront them That's jumping a little bit further ahead in the story Yeah, I just I want to stay here for a second to just sort of just walk through how unbelievably unhinged this is Which is that yeah, so the condition of working here is that you have to sign like what is effectively an adventured servitude contract Like it's like, okay, you you have to work here for L four years And if we ever decide to fire you, you can't leave And if you ever decide to fire you, you just owe twenty one thousand dollars. On the face of it is such an an unbelievably exploitative situation because yeah, this is a bunch of queer and trans people. No no fucking trans person has twenty one thousand dollars. Like that's just not a thing Like, yeah, we should certainlyay out a one thousand dollars. Like what are we doing here? Like taking advantage of the trans community Yeah and then You have the justice as the baseline condition of Everyone has just the doom of Damocles hanging over their head And then also, you know, like what you were describing were, okay, you get someone to sign the contract knowing that you can get rid of them after one war infraction, That's such an incredible incentive to mistreat and fire people because If you fire someone, you can just Collect try to collect like twenty one thousand dollars from them. Financially ruin somebody. financially destroy somebody. render them homeless. Yeah St. Yeah It's what we call a perverse incentive. Yeah. You can just reduce someone effectively into a debt beyond. Usually that kind of threat is abstract This is how we're incentivized to work and to stay in line. If you lose your job, then you're going to like drown in all of the things you need to do to survive No, here it's just Yeah, you're now twenty one thousand dollars in debt to this company that just fired you Y And again, that is due and payable immediately.. The way the contract is worded does not stipulate any sort of repayment period. We have attestations from previous employees who have been fired under this contract and been released from it So we do know that The owners of ReU Electrolysis will selectively choose to release terminated employees from their contract. However, they have elected not to do that. in the case of this union member, this coworker, who was fired last month Yeah, so that also just that also looks like retaliation, your words. like sort of deliberately Your words Yeah, you know, it doesn't it doesn't look good. There aren't Good answers as to why you would do that in this situation and not in others The story gets more fun too. Oh yeah. Yeah, we're just getting started. Before all of this gets even more unhinged, we need to go to I don't know, maybe a source of hingedness and security. I mean, if that's true, I hope better things happen in your lives. But we're throwing to the products and services that support this podcast We are contin you with this story here and get to I guess the next set of fire rings This just keeps escalating So before we actually get to the next set of firings, we would have Oour First And Daysjia, correct me if I'm wrong, our second meeting? You are correct. Yeah, we would have our first and second meeting before the next firing may second and may fourteenth Yes So that next firing would take place on Monday mayay eighteenth That was Monday may eighteenth. Yeah. So like one week ago from when this is getting recorded, which bear that in mind as the rest of the story plays out because the timeline here is so condensed that like it's like all of the shit that happens with like a bad union bosting campaign condensed to the span of like three days. Yes. we are we are speed running bad boss versus union workers story. like this is like one of the fastest escalations I've ever seen Before we get to this Monday, let's talk about what happened at those two meetings because this is genuinely such an impressive pace L like how fast all of this got organized Yeah, so the first meeting may second, we basically gathered every clinician who we believed we could trust, who was not either a manager in training, or did not have direct ties to management and also who was on site because there were some people that we would have loved to have talked to who were off site attending a certification program at another location So we gathered up everyone we could that started with about eight of us and grew to ten as the night wore on We talked about the circumstances around the firing of that coworker who was in school We all talked about our options for how do we proceed We voted unanimously to form a union and to do so under the auspices of the industrial workers of the world Thanks in part to Jackie May having contact with them and having gotten a bit of a lowdown on like what our options looked like. Yeah. So that was The TLDR of the first meeting. ten people that's like two thirds of the shop Like of the total people Yeah you see Yes of the people who were active practicing clinicians there, I think they were only missing a couple impressive. I wish we could have got them Yeah, we we definitely wish we could have gotten to everybody or had been clearer on who was actually not management. Yeah, that's also a thing that like management play a lot of games with who is and isn't union eligible I just want to like stop for a second and be like getting like two thirds or more of a shop to show up to the first meeting and vote to form a union is like be the fastest I've ever seen this happen. It's like, but you do this in one meeting? L it's like, yeah, speed ran the entire organizing process. Like one meeting Un unbelievable. Can we put this on Gamestone quick too? Yeah, like I maybe I don't know we could submit it for a world record a new world record category. Any percent unanimous. As they say Nobody organizes quite as well as a bad boss. That's true. It's it's you you have yeah, you have you have the double benefit of bad boss firing people and also like It's a bunch of queer and trans people, which is like yes. ideal conditions for organize it Yes, So that meeting that was may second, The next meeting took place on may fourteenth Now, Jackie made Do you want to talk a little bit before we talk about this meeting about some of the things that happened in between the two meetings like certain actions by management and people who are manager adjacent All right Right. Yeah. so hour Tools in laundry, sterilization. Maybe specialist. I'm not quite sure on the word for it. Salem. is married to our director of Operations, Zerk Lee. That's's that's o boy. Wait, there's more Oh no Salem actually approached at least one of our one of our union members to ask directly if we were forming a union Yeah, which by the way, you're not allowed to do you're not supposed to do that You know, right? That's Yeah, great, incredible stuff. It's a lovely gray area because Eum isn't management, but technically isn't management is simply married Married to management Bess technically. Technically illegal, but like management's really really not supposed to be doing that. Yeah. I think it also bears clarifying at this point that Zich Lee, Director of operations and effectively the HR Department of Re Electrolysis abbsolutely heard Jackie May express positive union sentiment forgot about that This goes back to summer of twenty twenty five. Like there have been multiple instances where people in management have directly heard Jackie May talking about being pro union. Granted, Jackie May has always been properly elliptical about it in the presence of management. God it's hard, but ye. but the suspicion was clearly established long ago. Yeah That is true, that is true. This will be important Oh boy. Foreshadowing is a literary technique No. So to continue, during these two weeks in between meetings, thereabouts, yes, we did have Salem, spouse of the Director of operations, poking around, asking questions. Oh boy Yeah, and I will say this is also a very common management tactic, of course. And it's part of why when you're organizing, you need to do the basic power mapping of figuring out Who is close to the bosses and who is close to management and what ties they have because that dramatically affects. Yeahah, You two absolutely both know this, but for the listeners, yeah, it is very important to figure out who the person who's married to management and will report to them is Yes. So I treat it as game theory. I have treated all of this like it has been game. Yeah because that's how I process it That's that's That's all I needed to say about that. Go ahead, Djia Yeah. so to the credit of every union member, not a single person violated opseC on this. Nobody confessed to any union organizing activity. Yeah That doesn't chang that they continued to be suspicious. In any case, we had our second meeting on may fourteenth. At that meeting present were representatives from the IWW as well as a representative from ILWU loocal five, because at that point we had not been formally endorsed by a union and we wanted to get some perspectives from whoever was available to speak to us. and those were the two shops that were available to come talk to us t that meeting, we againgain voted unanimously to continue with organizing, unionizing. We were initially going to do it under the auspices of ILWU local five. however Their onboarding protocols are a little bit more time consuming and involved than the IWWs and the following Monday, which Jackie May will be talking about in just a second, there were some circumstances that sort of forced us to go with the Union who could get us on board Lickety' split Yeah. so that Monday, I want to it was like midday. I had just finished with like my I want to say my first two people and was I was on my way to the break room to grab a drink and on my way out, I see my coworer, fellow union member and even my housemate come out of her Office flanked Bye Re U electrolysis management. and The last time I saw her that day was She had tears streaming down her face and she just goes, Jackie Mevee fired me and I responded immmediately. Yeah, I got I want to say five For six of us to gather outside of Director of Operations Zeric Lee's office and we voiced our displeasure We voiced that our coworkers should have their jobs back We voice that none of us feel safe because of the working conditions, None of us feel safe because of the way management goes about handing out disciplinary actions, the inconsistency with the different things that they will or will not punish I just see his eyes peeking up over his monitor And he's like, well, I can't I can't discuss what's in somebody's you know personnel file and also I can't hire them back. My hands are tied. You dont you don't know all of the documentation on our side. So I go, okay, who else do we gott to talk to? And Zk Lee points us to president of Re U electrolysis. on a lantry and we go down to her office And we say the same things and she says, I'm not What is I'm paraphrasing? I cannot make unilateral decisions. Yes. And I asked who else we would have to talk to about this And she said that would be C presresident Leia La Favor and Director of Operations, Zrk Lee I turned around and right across the hallway from Ona's office is Leah in reception. So We give them the exact same spiel of we're not happy with this This needs to be corrected. None of us feel safe about this And this was not simply Jackie May speaking either Yeah those of us present All voice concerns myself included you know, it was it was very clearly not the actions of a single individual but of inssert a group They may trust me to speak for them, but I also know when to be quiet so that they can voice their opinions Pos Asia had finished with all of their appointments and said, Hey, I'm done for the day. I'm going home. This isn't me giving you an official resignation, I need to go home and consider my options And I followed suit with, I'm not giving you a resignation You have essentially created a family emergency for me. and now I have to go see to that family emergency That is important. We will come back to that interaction. Oh boy Later Yes. I will say being one of the two presidents of the company and someone goes, donon't fire our coworkers and you go sorry, that's not like I can't make unilateral decisions is the most absolutely chicken shit response I've ever seen in my entire life. Like it's like it's like fucking it's fucking like Verner von Braon like when the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department. It's like you are the president of the company Like what are we doing here? Like you like I can't make unilateral decisions. like you are the president. Like there's like ear Nal management. what are we doing here I mean I guess like I mean, the thing you're doing here is everyone in secession is trying to be like, o actually can't do anything. It's like yes, you can, you do run The business, but I would also like to note that this conversation held between group of us with Oalante and Leil a favor Very early on in that conversation, Oelantry said this conversation is over and walked away. However, Leah ye, they did did continue to have a conversation with us and was the person that we informed that we are not resigning. Anybody who leaves today is doing so because their schedule is clear or they are having a family emergency. Both of these things are acceptable reasons for leeaving your shift and that has been established through ample precedent. Yeah. Yeah So that was Monday. That was Monday, may eighteenth. Jesus Christ That's not even all of Monday, right? I want to point out or includlude that to rate Fom a job site, I went home I grabbed my other roommate who is att the time wasn't a part of the union because wasn't an employee of Real U Electrolysis, but is on the Re U Electrolysis hiring list. so's like a contractor situation? Not quiet they will work with us in the future. Oh It just like hasn't been fully hired. Yeah. That's kind of the way they do things. like they hire people well in advance of having them actually start work. Like most of us were hired like months and months and months before we started actually Takeaking chefs So Monday I go home pick up my housemate who is incredible and has a special interest in documentation and bureaucracy She and Dejia are my two doocumentscers and shout out, shout out to Vay because we wouldn't have been able to get here without you And we went to the IWW over in Portland And we had a meeting with them and We just walked in there with the intention of asking for help from like their solidarity network of like, hey We have just been put into like a hardship status at this point because of what has happened. Can you help us like with rent? And I want to say that meeting was like two or three hours long. We talked about a lot of plans moving forward And instead of just having support with rent, we came away with a plan of what we would be doing next Yeah And Tuesday came We had All eleven people of this union meet in the parking lot. and sign our petition together We got it photocopied. We made digital copies We made sure it was all safe. Our person got that stuff filed away for us got us some very nice red folders to be able to keep all of these documentation in. And ye we were given, I was given a red folder labeled management And we planned to deliver this on Wednesday Tuesday was Why? Tuesday was like Quiet before the storm, quuiet? Yeah. We were all braced that I was going to be fired Yeah because while I wasn't swearing or rude to management, I wasn't as even toned or level headed as I am right now I was also bracing to be fired because I did also do a lot of that speaking and I was extremely emotional at the time as well. Absolutely. I do think there is one little tidbit that is important to mention about the employee who was fired on Monday. is not only was this person union member and one of the organizers This person also had a fully like workplace sanctioned and endorsed romantic relationship with the first person who was fired.. And like again, this is not like they were illicitly dating. It's like management had a protocol, had forms and all that for when coworkers are dating. It's in the employee handbook that they're okay with that Yes And so it looks so they're like moving through the Yeah that' that's that's interesting. I that's o boy. I. Yes. there's a thing this an FAA guy said about There there's a story of that guy who was like flying around in a lawn chair with like balloons attached to it. Oh my Godd, I know that story. Yeah. and the thing about the news calls the FAA guy and the FAA guy goes we don't know what section of the Federal Aviation code is violated, but when we figure it out're prosecuted with it, and like to be some kind of violation of like specifically targeting people in a relationship. Like theres there's gotta be something there But I don't know. And I mean, admittedly American workplace law is a complete nightmare, but that is Extremely sketchy and sh chitty And yes, we're going to get it sorted out. Yeah. Oh yes. Yeah. I was, o boy, Jesus Christ, that feels not good and good Lord Okay, so Jackie May, please continue I slept real good Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Let me just say that. I slept real good Wednesday morning, we coordinated and we went we went a little early admittedly. I got a little There was a little bit of adrenaline and I kind of jumped the gun just a hair. We were supposed to wait until eleven fifty five to deliver our signed petition. It's okay Yeah, we all had noon appointments and We are all so committed. to h patients that None of this process interrupted patients in treatment. All of this had been coordinated around our schedules so that people got to continue getting treatment.. That is correct There' never been a point where a patient's treatment session has been interrupted or a patient has been abandoned. I'm saying this because there are some accusations from management to that effect, and I would like it on public record that that is absolutely false and that we can all attest to this. oreshadowing. Yeah. moreore foreshadowing. Yeah boy. Sorry. Oh boy So Wednesday morning I have the privilege I have the backing of the crew to go serve this paperwork We had somebody from the Union kind of send out, send out a feeler text to find out when The president and co president would be in the building. It wouldn't be until after twelve thirty We serve that paperwork to Director of Operations Zrk Lee He took that at eleven forty eight He doesn't really give us a response besides there's a lot here I'm going to have to read it all thoroughly and give back to you We go about our days I have to leave site. after two of my appointments ' I my phone at a gas station, so I had to leave and come back. It's okay. we got it. it's all good Yay two fifty one. I'm back on site. I am in my own office I have C president, Leila Favor and one other member of management present and they are firing me. They are handing me three right up Jesus Christ. Now the earliest of those write upps, or I should say, I guess the oldest of those write upps are from may fourth twenty twenty six and it essentially is a write up that says Jackie You were rude to management Now let's talk about why. Let's talk about why That write up happened You see By that point in time, we were on the third pay period where we were all being given paper checks after years. Yeah, years of direct deposit. like long history of direct deposit only. switched to paper checks We were given paper checks Those checks had been bouncing. Paychecks are bouncing? Yes Yeah, Yes. Yeah. Not just Jackie Mace either Yeah Jesus Christ. That is true Like Im what I will say is on average per pay period, like a handful of us had their checks bounced. That will come into play later. That's foreshadowing. Oh boy Yeah. so My check bounced once My bank account went, okay, that's kind of suss My check bounced a second time. I currently don't have access to a bank account because my bank has labeled what has happened fraudulent activity and my bank is investigating me because they've now figured out that it's not me that's doing it. I can prove the checks are bouncing A Jesus Christ, but yeah, but they still locked your bank account. Yeah because because the other people's checks spout Jesus Christ. Yeah So we should note here that we all were aware that Jackie May was locked out of fair bank account and experiencing financial hardship to the point where we actually did have someome of our union members, like donating food To Jackie May. Solidarity network came through for me because that kept us fed, that kept us like we we were able to have gas for that for the next like to get us to the next payday. esssentially this This whole thing would set me back like a full pay period. likeike I wouldn't get the last check cashed until we got to the next pay period on Friday because we get paid every two weeks And this is we've talked about on this show a lot is that like You know, And I mean I think most people listening to this show understand this on an intuitive level, but it's like If your paycheck fucking bounces That's really fucking bad. Like yeah, holy shit. And it's like, yeah, like obviously that's going to cause like unbelievable financial distress and it fucking sucks and I'm really sorry you've been having a deal with that. On top of fucking everything else because That's just yeah, that that's something that can just like completely fuck your entire life. That's Through no fault of your own. Yeah. It's literally your boss is fucking up Okay? God. I want to note that still to this day, I do not have access to my bank account as far as I know Jesus Christ, the last week has been real crazy and like I haven't been able to get out to like or anything to get something new set up So that's just the in the background like you're not even getting paid because the checks are boundnced. Yes. And Jackie May was understandably distressed over this and expressed that frustration and that was the cause of a rightite up that was used To justify termination, rightight? Is that do I have that right, Jackie May? That is correct. That is the first Christ. That write up is from M fourth That write up is may fourth. I have heard of a lot of bullshit write up in my time doing this job. Wite up for being rude to management because you were talking to them about the fact that your paycheck bounced. That is the worst write up I have ever heard. That is like I mean like even even including ones where like because obviously like St just like make up shit to do a write up for. But like That's like a special level of like, o no, this did kind of happen, but it's because They fucked up and boued your paycheck Jesus Christ. So Jackie, I believe you were recounting the write ups that Leil a favor present it to you about that. I' just I'm just losing my mind. That's so awful So the second one is because they did a room inspection. It's really weird. They like doing room inspections when they want to remove somebody. Yeah. So there was a room inspection and they were like, your room's not clean enough Okay That's your statement The third write up. Do you remember when I had a family emergency that they caused and I left site because they caused a family emergency. Yeah. My third and final write up was because I left early And they tried to say, well, Jackie, you didn't ask for our permission, excuse me, Jackie May, you didn't ask for our permission to leave for the day. you just told me it was happening. M And that was my fold rightite up I would like to add to this that I myself have multiple documented instances of having to leave work because of a health or mental health Emergent situation. And there has never been a situation where I said May I leave has always been I need to leave and I have noted and observed this with O Employees as well, none of these incidences ever culminated in any write up or any sort of disciplinary action. So this is clearly inconsistent with ample precedent for the application of disciplinary standards. Yeah.re they're just trying to find reasons free write ups, which is also like justust a sign of How Well y'all are like doing your jobs that like 'causeuse like normally employers have like random code infractions that are always just sort of laying around they can pick up and be like, hey, but it's like they couldn't even like find anything. They had to just like Basically fabricate complete just like absolute nonsense Yes. Jesus Christ Am I recalling correctly, Jackie May that these are the first instances of any documented disciplinary action against you in your tenure at Reolect Trosis? Yeah, I'm a good girl. I follow the rules. And I do so very, very well. so And then suddenly it's like, oh, here's here's three write upps Like again, like the the post facto write up. For the high I am upset that my paycheck bounce. convers Jesus. Yeah. And so I will note that even that very first write upp did take place after we were engaged in organizing activity after management had demonstrated suspicion. Yeah. And all of these write upps were delivered within a few hours of the delivery of our petition for voluntary recognition Uh huh which I I will say looks not even just suspiciously like it looks like they have just like a giant polar bear sitting there and the polar bear is union retaliation and they've like painted a little clown face on it and gone, this is a clown not retaliation from forming a union. And like no, that is on polar bear. what are we doing here Oh God So what happened next, Jackie May Oh gosh, what happened next Well, you know, I had to clean out my office. so I grabbed the stuff that was important to me. I took my time. I wasn't angry. I didn't I really didn't speak throughout much of it because at that point the best thing I could do is just Take my recording, not say anything And as soon as I was out of the office I Sent a message to the union members that said, hey I was just fired, they walked me out of the building If we're going to do something about this, we need to do something about this now And that was at two fifty one by four o one TM Wednesday afternoon We had the rest of the Union organize a organize and stage a walkout in solidarity. Really quick I'm gonna let Desjia take over 'causeuse I was outside. Yeahah So point that We found out Jackie May had been terminated We called an emergency vote in our secure messaging platform that we use to coordinate things. And we voted in favor of doing a walkout once we had each finished with our obligations to patients In fact, I actually had an appointment scheduled from three hundred fifteen to three hundred and forty five that at that point I elected to continue that appointment and I did so and I provided Treatment as usual, cleanup as usual, chart noting as usual Not a single person who engaged in this walkout did so without completing their scheduled treatment in that time slot. Yeah Once that appointment was finished and everything was in good compliance within my room and the rooms of those who were not. appointments because we did have a couple of union members who were in longer appointments. who were not able to join the walkout immediately Those of us who are free did walk out And when we did this, We spoke directly to Leia L Favver, who was sitting at the reception desk and said that we are staging a formal walkout in protest of the wrongful termination Jackie May. And this is not a resignation. this is a legally protected action under the National Labor Relations Act. Leah then Anyone who walked out that door must immediately surrender their keys and was no longer welcome on the premises Jesus Christ, sorry I was just in terms of like open retaliation for union activity. like Oh boy. Yeah. we were o honestly Mia, we were so gobsmacked at the just absurdity that She would take such a blatant action of retaliation that our response was, are you sure you want to do that And the answer was yes So Initially we did not return our keys because we wanted to confer with somebody from the IWW. So we spoke with an IWW representative who advised us that their demand for the return of the keys was a lawful demand for the return of company property and that we should comply with that. So we did We gathered up our keys, We sent a representative back in to return them And at that point we were officially on strike We've reunited with Jackie May in the parking lot We started strategizing about how we were going to do this. IWW sent some folks our way to like provide support. I took off to pick up some art supplies so that we could make signs and just general like things like water and snacks. are other union members who are currently Inside, treating patients finish their appointments as scheduled and emerged when they were no longer responsible for any patient care. also turned in their keys point we did have an IWW representative on scene who accompanied those employees back inside to return the keys and to Confirm to Leia a favor directly that this is not a resignation. It cannot be construed as a resignation, that this is a protected organizing action. All we were doing was complying with a lawful demand for the return of company property We have plenty of witnesses to this regardless of any statement that they may choose to make To the contrary Which also I just want to know, this is the first time I've ever gotten timestamps. I like w. this is the best documented one of these I've ever seen L yall are veryer organized. Oh yeah. Oh my Godd. No, no, we're not we're not playing around Yeah. So at that point, Jackie May, I think you can take it from here Yeah, so real quick, I got to go back. We got I forgot a very important detail about Monday after after my corker union member and housemate was fired In talking to Zerakli, I I looked him in the eyes and I told him don't do this. I said, please don't do this, please don't call my bluff on this Please don't make me do this And we're here now I jumping back to Wednesday, I had to go off site. I was meeting with some IWW members who were We were mainly discussing what we were going to do next in or what options we had. in response to a mass firing. Yeah We spent a couple hours at that. I came away understanding a whole bunch more as to what we're doing. I return to the shop and I think I don't remember it very well because I was all emotion and adrenaline at that point in time. Yeah. What I will say is that when Anaantry and Leil La Favor were getting in their cars to leave site I made sure that they heard me block hard me that a good chunk of downtown Washington could hear could hear my anger and my passion. If I don't know if you can tell in my voice right now, but I kind of went a little too hard on it and it's why I sound like I do now. little little bit scratchy. It happens, I'm honestly surprised I can speak as well because there hass been lots of chanting and singing and yelling and because we have been on the picket line pretty much since then every single day that the business is open. That is correct Yeah, which I want to roll back for a second and just point out that like Going from yeah, we all signed our union petitions. And then We delivered it the next day and then that same day everyone is on strike is Astonishing The te of it is absolutely incredible and then also just It says a lot about the solidarity that you all have and all of your like Yool's character that Hey, yeah, there's just everyone does a walkout and goes on strike and then B also, I think it speaks to who you're fighting for here, both each other and also the fact that All of you were so careful today Make sure that your patients got their care is Yeah, it's something that I think speaks It says a lot about the kind of people all of you are and it says a lot about the kind of people that management is. This is what they're doing to people who who both fight for each other and also care deeply patience people that they're taking care of You know I really do I know Jackie May and I are the ones who are kind of operating as the mouthpiece, but absolutely need to express the deepest most sincere appreciation for all of the other union members because you know, not everybody involved in this has been as just like ung ho angry like out let's do this. Like this has been really difficult and nerve tracking for a lot of them, but you know what? they have followed through and persevered and not a single person who started this with us has switched sides or dropped out Everybody has been so brave and so committed and showing up so fiercely And and yeah, we are also patience are still the most important thing. Yes, we've been picketing, but we have not been turning anybody away from crossing the picket line. We Every patient that shows up to be treated by one of the very few people who is still on site providing care at Re electrolysis crosses the line with our complete blessing And we are absolutely vocal and unequivocal about that that we are not trying to deny anybody care and in fact We are Reaching out to other electrology providers out there to try to offer some options to our patients who have chosen to forego their care out of solidarity You know, we really We want to get back to work and go back to giving care to our people But management has made that impossible. You know I think one of the things that comes we really clearly here is like Yeah, how willing management is to hurt people and how dedicated all of you are to making sure that people you're caring for get their care and also The just astonishing amount of bravery that it takes to not only Go on strike and continue to be on strike Also to do that in a situation where getting fired potentially means that you have to fight off. Paying the company that was employing you that you're striking against twenty one thousand dollars That is some of the worst conditions imaginable And all of you did it anyways, and it's one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Thank you. Yeah It's almost Pride. It's twenty twenty six We're making history here. This union is For trans people, by trans people, to provide care, to by and large other trans and queer people and Weirdly, I have to say thank you to our two bosses because if they hadn't have made the decisions that they made, things could have been so different. It didn't have to be this way Yeah is what I have to say. It didn't have to be this way, but they chose this. They chose this and we have chosen at every time, every every opportunity to choose each other and to choose our community and go, no, you're not gonna bully one of us. We're not allowing this anymore We are sticking together Yeah, and it's been really incredible seeing the way that all of you have taken this opportunity and taken all of these risks to fight for each other There's a quote that I heard about you from management about why they hired a bunch of trans people that I was wondering if you could tell the audience what that quote is because Jesus Christ It's a super majority of trans people, whichich is super rare Almost almost the entire workforce Yes So This quote comes from President on a Lantry from the Fourth of July Company barbecue held at their house in twenty twenty five Oh no with this Shit eat and grin. She says, yeah. if you Pay a trans woman thirty dollars an hour And you give her health insurance. and a little bit of respect She will march through a brick wall for you Jeez Christ, like There's two immediate obvious angles. One it's like, oh, so you like knew what you like you knew what you were doing here, right? You were deliberately hiring, you were deliberately hiring trans people because you thought because you thought they were they would be easier to exploit And that's Hideous. Those are your words. Yeah, like that that's yeah, this is my this is my analysis of this is like that's Jesus Christ B also this is this is really some like your chickens are coming home to roost. L you have sown the wind and you are now reaping the whirlwind because it is true that trans people get treated like absolute shit and it's very nice to get a job where you're not being treated like shit It's also true that if you decide to fuck over a bunch of trans women We will fight for each other. L trans people and qu people will fight for each other. And I think that's One of the sort of beautiful things about As much as all of this absolutely fucking sucks Like the fact that you were able to pull this many people off the line immediately and get a strike going, you know, that has like almost all of the clinicians are on strike It's this real refutation of what management believed Trans people whichich is like, no, actually, you can't just fucking sit there and exploit us because we will organize and fight. Yeah, we'll fight for each other. We will And I do want to stress too like the diversity of our workforce. L we are not all trans women. We come from like a variety of backgrounds, a variety of ages You know, like I don't know how old the oldest among us is, but I know I'm forty three and we have somebody as young as eighteen on the workforce And they're all in the picket line together. it' it's beautiful It's incredible What what is the state of things sort of rightight now and what are you fighting for in this strike? And I guess how can people help Big questions Well, we are officially endorsed by the IWW. We are now IWW Industrial Union six hundred ten The picket is ongoing. O Fellllow union members are on the picket line right now as we are recording this.. At this point, management has elected not to bargain with us. They have sent a copy and paste letter to all of us who were present for the walkout on may twentieth. basically requesting a response and making some demonstrably materially false allegations about the nature of the walkout and the conversations that were' had with management. So we have a letter from the union that we are going to send from the union email address and will be endorsed by all the individual members. But other than that, that's the only contact we've had with management. so they do not seem interested in bargaining or in resolving the strike. They have not asked for demands Our demands are fairly simple M management go no contact due to strike is not normal. Like completely literally no contactscept for one email. That's like weird by management due to strike standards Usually they're at least communicating L like sometimes they do this, but like that's pl management standards. So I can explain why that is. Yeah. Do you remember earlier when Deaysjia said that O aantery had declared that this conversation was over? It' still over It's Still over. Oh my go The conversation is still over Because that's what she tells herself when she needs to feel in control So we would assume So I would assume is that is true. I've been treating lists like game theory and that opinion is purely speculative What's not speculative is our demands Reinstatement of employment of all union members, including those terminated prior to may twentieth, twenty twenty six the expungement of all disciplinary records for all reinstated employees. backpay for all reinstated employees. The immediate cessation to any and all collections activities related to the outstanding debts owed to real U Electrolyses by any and all union members Voluntary recognition of Real U electrolysis Workers United IWW IU six hundred ten. and the immediate commencement of bargaining for a new labor contract wherein our right to strike shall not be curtailed This is like one of the things that I think about a lot in terms of just how unbelievably unreasonable management is being, which is that those are such unbelievably reasonable and moderate demands. like I don't know, like when you reach the point where like paychecks are bouncing because your bosses are fucking you, like Just just the amount of reasonableness and maturity that all of you are showing and the just Mix of staggering incompetence and evil. that management is showing is it's it's really staggering and Yeah, and I guess that leads me to The other part of that, which is, yeah, how can people support y'all Yeah, that's sort of like an ongoing thing we're working on putting together. We don't really have like a web presence at time of this recording We do have An email address for the union that we've been directing people towards and that is All lower case, all one word, real union electrolysis. at gmail. com and that's electrolysis is E L E C T R O. L Y S I S Yeah, we'll put the email in the description and fantastic. When media stuff and like Social media stuff gets online. we'll put that in the description too. Right now that is the best way to reach us. Bve you could also reach out to the IWW in Portland since So we're working with, they do coordinate things like strike funds and financial assistance and all that. And so We do have their resources available to us and that might be the most expedient way. But yeah, we are working as fast as we can to get other things going, like an internet presence This has all happened so quickly. Astonishing Umso, do you want people to show up to your pickets? And if so, where is that? Oh, please. We would love that. The address for that is nine hundred seven Harney Street in Vancouver, Washington Downtown Vancouver, Washington I'll say that again, it's nine hundred seven Harney Street. Awesome. Come out, show your support Thank you. Yeah. and the picket does take place like at the mouth of the parking lot. I know there has been some confusion from some folks who wanted to come out as to where they meet us. You know, it's on on Harney Street, like just listen for the music and the cheers and you'll find us Yeah, and I've been out to visit the picket line and it's a really sweet time. Everyone there is great And as always we're bringing picket lines, like phys just just being on a picket line In support is like an incredible experience And also like if you can like bring food and water and stuff, it's always something that helps a lot Oh yeah. Yeah Thank you, by the way. would like to also add As far as support is it's not just us who need support, it's also our patients. Yeah. So anybody who is practicing electrolysis in the like greater Portland Vancouver area who is willing to provide care to our displaced patients, please reach out to that email address as well so that we can direct them to you Awesome. Aasia, Jackie Made Thank you so much for coming on the show and Yeah, I hope I hope we can talk to you fairly soon after you win Thank you Thank you for having us. Thank you for letting us tell our story. Yeah, of course. This is incredible. This is such a big help and you also are such an inspiration and such a treasure to this community. Like I've been doing so good at not thankering over being on your show, but like I am a longtime listener and so this is just like Oh my God, oh my Godd. I talking to me all right now. Well, I think You know A, I want to say I think what you're doing is significantly more inspiring than me going on and doing a podcast like the fact that you've you running this strike is just fucking incredible And the fact that you're fighting for your people and fighting for Patience is ad just Unbelievable to all of you as people and to You know, like just like two two trans people in general, You are a credit to us all Thank you. Thank you Also, I want to say and this is' more evident than something I've been saying on this show for a long time, but like the people who form unions It's not some kind of just like special class of people.s it's just literally It's ordinary everyday people like you listener who are the people who join these things and build these movements and fight for them. You know, like you too can be the person who builds, builds a union, your workplace, and fights for it and wins Mm And When we work together, when we organize together, when we fight and fucking w am Yeah. If we're done, I get to get out to the front lines so I can get back to holler at these people ' they need hollered at. Yeah, I'm all fired up now, so. Hi, and welcome to Outlaw, a podcast about how the law is used to crush dissent in the US I'm your host, Olive. On the previous episode of Outlaw on It Could Haen Here, we zoomed in on the legal repression of rapid responders in Iice occupied Minneapolis. On this episode, I'm joined by Bina, Joey and Moe, movement attorneys based in New York, Illinois, and California In this conversation, we zoom out to talk about the larger trends in repression of resistance to ice activity across the country and how to prepare for the long road ahead. Welcome to Outlaw to St start. C you all introduce yourselves, the work you do and how it connects to the repression of anti Iice protest activity? Okay, I guess we're gonna start with the oldest here. My name's Joey Mogul I am based in Chicago I am the director of movevement partartnerships at Movement Law Lab, which is a national organization That is very much in the anti authoritarian fight in the nation Prior to joining Movement Law Lab, I was at the People's Law Oice for over twenty six years where I did mostly civil rights litigation against law enforcement officials and criminal defense of police violence survivors as well as protesters and organizers and at different points have been proud to represent several organizers and many movements seeking justice and liberation I am also part of Chicago Trture Justice Memorials and a board member of the Chicago Trture Justice Center and very much involved in the movement for Justice, Rdress and particularly reparations for Chicago police torture survivors During the surge here in Chicago, I was proud to work with a group known as the Black Community Care Collective serving as a coordinator of their legal committee And that was a group that was very much involved in the resistance and care work that was happening during Operation Midwightlitz Joey, I don't know if you're the oldest person here, but I was referred to today as a GX loser, if that makes you feel any better My name is Maura Meltter Cowen. Ebody calls me Mo I am an attorney in private practice. in New York and I work in particular to defend people against the politically motivated abuse of the legal system. I also teach Federal Indian law, professional responsibility and lawyering at CUNy School of Law to the world's best and most brilliant law students Hi everybody, Bina Aith, she her pronouns. I also had been referred to as an elder and I don't know when that happened, but here we are I am currently an associate at a law firm in L.A called Hatsel Stormer Ranig and Die, where I practiced civil rights, s impact litigation, and also where we are external generenal counsel for several movement groups, including Muslims for Just Futures and Jewish Voice for Peace. Be going to Hadl Stormbin switching to civil rights, I was a state and federal public defender for nearly a decade, a state defender in New York and a federal defender here in L.A prior to that, I practice international law and animal rights law And a lot of my motivation as well has been to support movements and organizers fighting back against the state repression And that's been a big part of my work, giving your rights trainings, advising people and organizers and organizations on their rights and they know what the law says you can and can't do from a radical lens Well, thank you all for being here. Over the past few years, from the movement for Palestinian Lberation to the many ways people are organizing against IIS and authoritarianism today I'm curious to start by just hearing a little bit about broad shifts you're tracking right now in the state's playbook for crushing Dscent Well, I mean, I think that we've seen and you're talking to people who've represented organizers and activists who have been prosecuted by state actors for decades I think that what we're seeing, particularly with this administration is the weaponization of federal charges And we're seeing the weaponization of federal charges en masse And I think this is by design. We are seeing that with the National Security presidential Memorandum number seven issued by President Trump and his administration where they are wanting to enlist the use of joint terrorism task force to go after people they deem to be quote domestic terrorists, unquote And that means they are going after individuals who they claim have extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, anti American sentiment I don't believe we agree with these determinations. and in fact, we absolutely oppose and object to these determinations. But these are individuals who do not agree with this administration's views or takes on immigration, on gender, on anti black violence and the rest And we see, though, that this administration is actually working hand in glove with one another. So after the issuance of the National Security presidential memorandum number seven, we now have Pambiani and the US atttorney's office issuing this memorandum december fourth, twenty five, where they are basically calling on the joint terrorism task force. They're calling on federal agents And they're calling on the Department of Justice to go after organizers and activists throughout the nation They list twenty seven enumerated crimes in those memos, things like rioting, looting, so called docing, swatting, conspiracies to impede or assault law enforcement officers, destruction of property and the rest as well as trying to enlist the use of the IRS and other tax crimes to go after organizers and organizations in several ways. Essentially, anyone who opposes this administration is somehone in the target sites. Can you tell me more about what these federal charges are and what is new about what we're seeing right now And so now what we've seen since the onset of this administration, so for over a year now, we have seen the exponential rise in federal charges being lodged against organizers. I think that is very much a different landscape than we have seen in decades. And I don't want to say there hasn't been the use by the Department of Justice to bring federal charges in the past but not in this massive scale that we are currently seeing it right now. And so what we are seeing is I would say In particular, we're seeing these like assault, impeding harassing officer charges, which is eighteen USC section one and eleven being brought in scores across the nation. That is not something we typically have seen before. We are also seeing charges of conspiracy to impede officers, eighteen USC section two hundred forty one. Again, that's not something we generally have seen before Generally, I can say, for example, as someone who was in Chicago, who was part of representing protestters who were protesting the Democratic National Convention, generally, the federal government and federal agencies don't get involved in protest related activity, but for arson cases prior to the Trump administration, that playbook is out and this new playbook is in. So we are absolutely seeing the federal government stepping in and engaging in this policing and persecution of protesterors and organizers in a way that we have not seen before That said, there's a silver lining here is The federal government is overreaching in so many of these cases and many of these charges are being dismissed Many of these charges are being declined by U. S. attorneys And there have been several not guilty verdicts in LA as well as in Chicago as well as Miami And further, what I think is striking, and I think that this is really unheard of for criminal defense attorneys in particular, is we're actually seeing grand juries refusing to indict in these cases. And given how biased grand jury investigations go, how one sided they are, to have the grand juries come back and not return an indictment really is showing that people are resisting and they are not buying the government's slogan and lines and playbook on this. And they are saying no, we're not going to put up with this So while on the one hand, it's a whole new landscape We're also seeing the counterpart of people resisting and that includes in the federal courts If the term grand jury is new to you, it's basically a special jury in federal criminal cases. that is appointed to decide if there's enough evidence to bring the official criminal charge, the indictment against a defendant But they're super rigged against the defendant. Basically they always indict and Often the grand jury process is just an information gathering to for the government, especially in movement cases, people get subpoenaed to testify before grand juries in a way that often seems just like a fishing expedition because whatever they say can be used against them, and only the prosecution gets to present evidence to the grand jury. There's a lot more to say there, but check out the show notes and I'll link some really important conversations and resources about grand juries. I think that's all exactly right, Joey But it isn't a hundred percent new, right What the Trump administration is doing is that they are able to police First Amendment protected identities, beliefs, and associations by trying to define those beliefs, identities, and associations as terrorism And so there's a whole apparatus for fighting terrorism They then can poull in, draw upon resources they can use and legal authorities that they can exercise as long as the thing that they're Policing. is something that can be called terrorism Well by defining all of these things as terrorism, that lets them sort of trigger all of these resources and authorities Those resources and authorities were not put in place by this administration They were put in place Post nine eleven They were put in place by Barack Obama They were put in place by Joe Biden R? And so this is not a problem with the Trump administration. This is a problem with the surveillance state. This is a problem with consolidating federal police authority. and making it easier and easier for the federal law enforcement apparatus assert jurisdiction over what we would normally understand to be state level matters such as garden variety protest. And so the shift is not uh, one of beind as much as it is a shift in scope where we're seeing the federal government treating, as I said, garden variety protest conduct as though it is militant revolutionary action No, I totally agree with that. And to underscore your point, notot a single law has needed to be passed. There's been no legislation that's needed to be changed in order to effectuate these prosecutions whatsoever, let alone this immigration enforcement. This all prereexisted the Trump administration his administration hasn't passed a single law. So I absolutely agree with you. I'm just saying you're right, the garden variety level of prosecutions we haven't seen, and it's the scale of this. But again, we absolutely know, for example, the Biden administration pursued the Face Act against individuals in Florida regarding, you know one of these false clinics. And you know, it's not that these tools weren't used before, I just think the scope and scale is not what we've seen. Yeah. And I totally agree. And I think it's important to note that the fact that the law hasn't changed is important notot simply because the laws already existed to bring these prosecutions because the law actually hasn't changed, which means the First Amendment remains in effect whichich means that a lot of these prosecutions, as you pointed out, Joey, are going nowhere because they actually can't really be sustained under the current regime the scale and the aggressiveness and the scope, I think, is something we haven't really dealt with before You know, in terms of it being not new. I mean, we know the founding of this country and it's not a just system. And I think if we just also start from that, that is's a system that protects property and white nationalism and violence, and power and capitalism, then I think we can sort of like see where these powers originated from and where the structure originated from And we've also seen that used against radical black activists, against the American Indian movement. So like a lot of these things that we're seeing now were tested on communities of color. prior to seeing, o what works, what doesn't work and then bringing this surge, I think, to our communities know I think in addition to, I think Mjoroy was saying about the FAace Act, that is something we haven't really seen prosecutions under the Face Act before, right? Because the Face Act is actually technically to protect access to abortion clinics And I think that one thing that this administration is doing is finding creative different ways to manipulate the laws that are already terrible to go after folks in a way that we haven't seen before. Like Mo was saying, like so much of the work that we've done defending protesters and movements, a lot of it is state. Of course know some has always been federal, but a lot is usually state And so then see these federal not only prosecutions for the Face A or I know we'll get into either material support prosecutions But also like civil litigation, which I think is something we've never, not never, but really were not prepared for or dealt with as a movement before. These massive civil pieces of litigation that, while on the one hand are brought mostly by private actors like Zionist actors, we know that they're really coordinated by and with the administration because then the administration has mimicked bringing these same lawsuits against these very same activists for the same causes When we know that they're in coordination. And so I think that's also really important to know is that the civil component, you know the movement, of course, like criminals is where we've always been the most concerned. someone's liberty is on the line, someone's life is on the line. But civil is also like this slow death, right of like time and money and just draining organizations that I think is something that we've now had to really grasp ask you a follow up question, Bak, can you break down for people who are listening and really not in the legal world Why a civil case impacts someone's life? Why civil cases against activists are really disruptive to movements? Sure There are many ways So when a civil case lands, I mean first you don't have the right to free counsel like you do with a criminal case It's not guaranteed in the Constitution. You're not facing prison time and incarceration. So you're not guaranteed that. So one, you have to find either free counsel or you can pay for someone to defend you And when the lawsuit lands, there's so many things that happen, there's an affirmative obligation for you as the one who's being sued to preserve any evidence that could be relevant to the case. That is completely antithetical to what a lot of movements do. We don't like save documents and then turn them over to the other side We're going to keep our work internal and our organizing and who we work with. And civil lawsuits really make that really difficult because you have to turn over discovery if it gets that far in the case. And you can't delete things and you can't let things get deleted like on signal. And know you can be sanctioned and there's all these things that could happen if they find out that that happened And then you're subject to other things like being deposed, being questioned by the other side about things you don't want to talk about and that are really antithetical to what we do. And these cases can go on for years and years. And even if you win, there can be appeals, you know there's just so much that doesn't feel like it ever ends with civil litigation. And so much where people you even just have moved on in their lives, like I've moved to a different city, have a different job now, but you're still always tied back to this civil case. And there's no sort of like right to a speedy trial in a civil case, right? That's for a criminal case. So all of this stuff, and I'm sure there's many other things I'm not mentioning that you have to go through that impact of life once you're being civilly suothed But a lot of that, you know it's not, again, like things that we have really dealt with as a movement before. And know really importantly, people don't have the money to pay for lawyers for years and years and years. And it's really expensive to do civil litigation and civil defense. It goes on forever. You have to do so many different pieces of discovery and you know emotions and like all of that is so much more involved And it really, I think part of the tactic is to bankrupt organizations. That's a big part of why these actors are bringing these civil suits I just want to intervene strategically at this moment to say that Everything that Joey and Bina are talking about is true and critical and important And we need to be so alert to the way that these Federal apparatuses are being deployed against our communities also want to say that one of the things we have seen over the last couple of years that I think is so important and we have to hang on to for dear life is that when we fight, we win And so What we're starting to see now You know, we just saw some of my impmressive and beloved colleagues at CUy School of Law are litigating a case right now in the federal courts about Columbia University's repression of student activists And what we're seeing is the court coming back with these rulings that say anti Zionism is not hate speech Columbia University acting at the behest of the executive makes them subject to the constraints of the First Amendment It's potentially violative of the First Amendment to discipline students for engaging in speech. right? We're seeing people fight these federal cases, both criminal and civil and winning. as Joey mentioned, we're seeing grand juries declining to issue indictments or to authorize prosecutors to issue indictments. So I do want to say You know, we really do see the power of communities taking on that legal battle, fighting with you know, our community movement, legal people and meeting that challenge head on and I think as devastating and exhausting as it is and as terrible as the consequences and the risks really are I do want to say We do see people having a lot of courage, marshalling a lot of resources and energy and winning releliably. Thank you. And I know Joey, you started talking a little bit about what we've been seeing broadly across the country and how the state has been repressing specifically anti ice activity. I know you've been based in Chicago and particularly Tune into what's happening there and it's been similar in Minneapolis where it's been a lot of eighteen USC one hundred and eleven cases, federal charges and part of What is coming up is just unpreparedness for movements to meet and defend against these kinds of charges. and also similar vein to the question I just asked Why it matters for people's lives and for movements that it's federal charges coming down instead of state charges Dina When I transitioned from state to federal defense, my reaction was like state it's always horrible. just being in the criminal system and fighting, it's very like David and Goliath, but I felt like I had more of a fighting chance in state court. When I got to federal, it was shocking how much worse it felt for my clients. how restricted you are. In a state, it really feels like when you're doing a trial, you have the power to kind of run the show, right? Of course, a judge can like shoot down many motions for experts for like for doing certain defenses But federal is so much more constrained in my experience, where federal judges went up so much more power. And I think I wasn't also just didn't appreciate how much more power federal judges had and how much more they were willing to wield it. But also I think in terms of the charges are heavier, plea bargaining and sentencing is so much harder and heavier. You're very restricted Even though the sentencing guidelines, for instance, are no longer mandatory, that's what everyone, judges and prosecutors still mostly go by There's so many more mandatory minimums It's so easy to catch a federal charge too, know things like even just gun possession, right? Because a gun might have been manufactured in Texas and then bought in California, which most people wouldn't think is a federal offense. But it can be charged federally. Just all of those factors, I think just I realize how much harder it was in federal court for my clients to have a fighting chance. But you know that being said, I don't mean to make stateates sound like it's this like sort of gold like, oh, Gray, we going to do whatever we want state Not at all. but I felt like I could fight more. I had more leeway to fight in state. You know, federal, I think is a whole is a whole other animal. That was a great answer. and if either of you don't have anything more pressing to add, I would turnurn us back to just the question of if there's anything else we wanted to talk about trends in charging across the country of anti Iice protest. Well, I I just I think I want to echo something that Mo has talked about and I'm not trying to leave it out, but I do think the resistance is so amazing. And I think that know essentially people are being arrested for first Amendment activity, whether it's video recording, IC and CVP agents actions whether it's following officers, whether it's announcing their presence with whistles We've seen people arrested, we've seen people detained, we've seen people interrogated. sometometimes they're charged, sometimes they're not. But I think what's striking is we've seen so many of these cases fall apart. And To be honest, but for prairieand, Texas, which is a devastating loss The federal government has lost in many of these cases They've been able to charge or the cases have been dismissed, but even the ones that have gone to trial, they have lost And that is not something that I think we're used to seeing in federal criminal cases Genally, when someone's charged in federal criminal courourt as Bina was explaining, you know, so few of the cases go to trial because so many people need to take a plea bargain. and the idea that you're going to get to go to trial and win seems very slim That landscape seems to be changing as well. And so I think what we are seeing in this moment is the people are resisting, they are continuing to do this important First Amendment work And they are not being intimidated. They are not being deterred. And I think, you know, all of you and your neighbors and your friends and folks in Minnesota have proven that to us And so I think we're going to continue to see this type of work go on. I'm not seeing this level of surgees at this point ongoing post Minnesota I don't know if we're going to see a return to this prior to the election I don't know if we're gonna to see this if the inssurrection Act is invoked But right now, I don't see this ongoing surge activity in terms of immigration enforcement It's an interesting point. The thing you hear about federal criminal cases is like the federal government can be investigating somebody for years. So by the time that they bring the charges, they have such a strong case against them it makes it impossible to win versus what at least we've seen in Minnesota where it felt like some of these cases were being brought like pretty quickly and kind of slopily, which is just a little bit of a different maybe a little bit more hopeful for people in movements, even though They're still are federal judges and procedural limitations and that make federal cases scarier and worse to go through oftentimes Now for a depressing thing that is happening, let's talk about Prairieand, the recent trial and guilty verdict that recently came down. I'd love to hear how you all are thinking about this case and what it means for movements going forward I think right now the defense just filed post trial briefing I've looked at some of it, and I think there are a lot of really strong arguments you know, for setting aside the verdict And you know, whether or not the judge agrees with me is of course, not a foregone conclusion by There are a lot of really strong legal arguments And this really isn't over There's so much post trial and post conviction relief so many appeals that remain to be done and so much support that can be offered and so much solidarity that can be offered. I think that this case was unusual It was a departure. from what we would typically see in that So many people Guy pulled into this prosecution under sort of a conspiracy theory, right? a theory that all of the people at what was a really quotidian sort of noise demo in front of a iced detention facility somehow spontaneously became a conspiracy to do serious violence I think This is a little bit like the federal government trying to take a second bite at the apple that they took a run at after Trump's first inauguration when they tried to prosecute like almost three hundred people for conspiracy on the basis that they were all dressed in black block And in this environment politically and in that jurisdiction in Texas, it seems like that theory had legs in a way that it didn't in DC So One of the things that happened in the J twenty case was that The prosecution withheld a bunch of exculpatory evidence And based on some FOIA disclosures that a journalist obtained, it looks like actually a very similar thing may have happened here with Prairieand, where the prosecution may have withheld evidence that would be favorable to the defense. and That's called Brady material based on a Supreme Court case about having to turn over information and evidence that would tend to undermine the prosecution or that would be favorable to someone facing criminal charges All of that kind of information, if it's in the custody or control of law enforcement, has to be disclosed to the defendants and to defense counsel. And it appears that there is some material that would fit that bill that was not turned over to the prairie land defendants or their attorneys And so you know that as well is an extremely important argument against letting this conviction stand. And the trial itself, there were just a lot of irregularities. Not only was this an unusual prosecution, but it was characterized by irregularities. Very early on, the judge declared a mistrial on the basis of a t shirt that one of the defense attorneys was wearing Right? There seem to be a lot of conflict. among the jurors There were all kinds of inconsistent statements among the witnesses for the prosecution, right? So there's all kinds of things that happen during this trial that do give me a certain amount of hope. Prair land. is the exception and not the rule You know, I think the government is boundary testing, but I'm not convinced that they're going to find that this is an effective approach to prosecuting protest. Although of course, I want to be very clear, it's been devastating for this community I hear that there's some uncertainty about the long term impacts of this and With that in mind, is there anything any of you just want to add What you think movements should be paying attention to here going forward Also its connection to the expansion of the fundamentally racist war on terror legal regime And it's turn towards activist communities in new ways I can jump in and start I'm really glad you brought up the war on terror as part of the history of this. know I think I mentioned previously, a lot of these tactics that we see, like we've all said, are not new, and much of it has been tested on communities of color. the way that war weapons are tested on the battlefield and brought to our domestic police forces here. Same thing with tactics, right? And so the war on terror like primarily against the Muslim community and the Muslim world, a lot of non Arab countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. , of course is a racist endeavor, but it does sort of like give us a picture of the larger sort of like colonial project of what what we're facing But I think there's also just a lot than that we can takeake from history and take to our movements and leararn from. I think while it's devastating And I agree with Mo. I think the prairie line conviction, there's a lot of bases for appeal, including being prohibited from putting on a self defense argument or defense of others argument, I think we can learn a lot from the way that our movements were targeted in this way, right? a lot of it was from text messages and signal. And I think's just like it's also a really important thing to note while Sal is a very important app to communicate, it's not bulletproof, right? And it's only as secure as you make it. and it is still something that's in writing And so I think I always try to remind folks like if you can open your phone right now and you can see your signal messages, someone else can too Right? So I think a lot of people are under the impression that it's completely bulletproof And I think its also calls the question of like how we organize and also like does everything we do need to go in text or writing? know Is there more value to actually talking with people? Because a lot of things that were said casually, I think in writing look much worse and much more serious than if you would just have a conversation talking ideas through, which again, as an elder, I did in the nineties when we didn't have cell phones I want to kind of piggyback on something you started to say, which is You said These tactics, these strategies have been tested on communities of color And I think the significance of that statement We can't overestimate how important it is to understand that And you know, you can watch it happening in real time. I mean, obviously, we've seen this kind of state repression right since the days of like abolitionists, right But we saw it really becoming very salient during the Nixon administration and thereafter. And you know, the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army were subjected to this. Black communities were then subjected to this and Puerto Rican independence communities were subjected to this And you can see it all the way through the eighties, even with like the so called gang legislation, right? targeting of quote gang activity When you say these communities have been subjected to this, what do you mean? What's the this? Sorry, have been subjected to have been targeted and surveilled and criminalized by the state for what we would understand to be first Amendment protected identities belieelfs associations and activities Right. And so people have been targeted for surveillance and criminalization on the basis of their political beliefs on the basis of their associations and activities in a way that we now see being recuperated against more explicitly political. Protest movements And we saw this During the no Dapple movement at Standing Rock, we saw the revival of a federal charge called civil disorder. I think the last time it had been used had been during The standoff at wounded knee in nineteen seventy four, right? It was like a a federal charge that seems like it was only used against People struggling for indigenous sovereignty And then we saw it being used again during the Floyd uprisings in twenty twenty. And that was the first time we saw it really being used against people who were not explicitly involved in struggles for indigenous sovereignty To give like an example, you know, in terms of like what strategies are tested on the Muslim community or communities of color The case that a lot of us within the movement, at least, are still haunted by is against the Holyand Foundation and the Holyand Five, right? And it's shocking now to realize how many people outside of our circles don't actually really know about that case or even like what material support is. I think only when it became now much bigger and being weaponized in more creative ways Are people sort of realizing, but you know, back for back in the day, when the Holy Land Foundation and Congress were targeted and then convicted and their convictions were upheld for just raising money for families in Gaza was so devastating and crushing to communities into organizing, but it really didn't get the, I think the broad attention that it should have, right? O this other targeting of like using informants in the Muslim community, just going back through history. And I think we can learn from them now. But I think if we had had more attention on those cases than what communities of color were going through, I think there's a lot we can learn from or could have organized, stronger against having now seen, you know, what is doing to communities of color I think if there's a lesson for us to learn from this is that post nine eleven, there was this massive persecution of Muslim communities. And we really saw this apparatus of the material support for terrorism being used against individuals. And as you say, being often in isolation without support. And part of that's because when you get charged with material support terrorism, you know, not only are you facing massive criminal like sentencing, But you know, your organization is being taken down. You're getting debanked you cannot be able to hold financial funds. And what happens is people don't want to get ensnared in that criminal prosecution that often people don't come out and make those solidarity statements. You become essentially radioactive And I think You know, what I'm hopeful is that we can find new ways to resist this material support for terrorism apparatus, which is being wielded in ways that I think are unjust and unfair and illegal and wrong. And I hope there's ways that we can think about how we're going to counter that whether it's in the Prairieland Texas case or in other cases as well, I think we need to get back to the roots of that law. and we need to think about really who's it serving, who' it protecting, and who is it destroying so that we can really rectify the harms that have come from it Material support for terrorism charges are not the only uncommon charges we're seeing being brought against anti Iice protesters Here in Minneapolis, we've also seen the use of the Face act and federal threat and cyber stocking charges Just to note, the use of the Face A is specifically against Black Lives Matter protesters here who staged a protest in a church and I don't think expected to have this random act that nobody knew existed come out and now they're facing super serious charges. I'd love just for Listeners to understand a little bit what these charges are. If there's other unusual charges you've seen around the country, what do people actually need to understand about them? peopleeople who are going out to protest? how much Is it important to know about these different things that can pop up So the Face Act is a piece of legislation that initially was being pushed for by reproductive justice groups. And it was supposed to criminalize people interfering with folks who are attempting to access reproductive health carere. because at the time that It was being lobbied for. there was a pretty active pro life, you know, anti choice movement that was physically making it difficult for people who are seeking reproductive health carere to gain access to clinics. And att the time people who work in criminal defense and who work with criminalized populations, were like, hey, this legislation is going to be mobilized against other kinds of protesterors and it's probably going to be primarily dangerous to people who are perceived as antagonistic to state interests And what do you know that is what has happened because one of the things, one of the concessions that was made in order to get that piece of legislation passed was that in addition to criminalizing obstructing access to reproductive health clinics, it also criminalized obstructing access to so called places of worship for specifically people who are attempting to access those places in order to engage in F Amendment protected religious expxression So Now one of the things we're seeing is people using their churches or their synagogues to do things like have political meetings that are not particularly religious meetings or to do things like sell real estate in Palestine to which they do not have title and cannot lawfully sell And then when people show up to protest those activities the federal government tries to charge them with violations of the Face Act. in like the simplest way What do people need to know? Like there's one outcome here that everyone's like, oh my God, I didn't know that protesting in a church could get me federal charges for like handing out some flyers and using a megaphone. What else don't I know about other risks and random acts that can come up How do you talk to people about that who are thinking about taking action Yeah, I think that that's again, the changing landscape here in seeing the exponential rise of federal charges. I think that when organizers are thinking about the actions they're pursuing, I think they need to talk to attorneys and legal workers and others who have both an understanding of what their local laws and state laws are, but what the federal laws are as well And again, I think that's just a different changing of the landscape I do want to say there's a lot of important organizing that has happened in churches and synagogues and temples. And I don't want to discount that. but I do also want to say I think again, we're seeing a misuse of this law, particularly the Face Act, and it's very, very scary. But you know, I think that there are some really incredible lawyers and organizers in Minnesota who I think are fierce and who are going to fight this to the end And I have hoped that they will come out unscathed Yeah. And I do want to clarify it isn't just protesting at a church. They have to be able to allege that people were by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injuring, intimidating, and are fear with people who are trying to get health carere or people who are trying to worship. So it isn't simply having a protest at a place of worship that remains First Amendment protected behavior I think in addition with the Face A, it has a civil component. So again, like material support, it also has a civil component and many people are getting civilly sued And so a lot of these Zionist groups have also brought suits based on the Face Act for people protesting the illegal sale of Palestinian land inside of Snagogue. And that's a breach of international law and so many other crimes. And just also to think of It's just the disgusting use of this law. you think of sort of the historical targeting of black churches. And like still to this day, like it it's just such a Slap in the face regardless But I think also I'llive to your question about Yeah, like a lot of this can catch people off guard that, I didn't what you know, I didn't know. And even you know, even if they know they really can't prove that you blocked know access, they might still try to either sue you or prosecute you. I think the thing is like none of us are ever going to know all the laws that are on the books and the way that they might creatively try to use them So you know, I don't want people to get paralyzed into not doing anything because it's it is, you know, scary. There's just like you don't know, you know, what what laws are out there that can be used, you know, in some way now, you know, no way against you But I think what Joey and Mo both have said is right about connecting to lawyers and legal workers, just being tight on our organizing, knowing what our rights are and knowing what to do when you encounter law enforcement, which is nothing and say nothing You know, all of that, I think is like hopefully like universally at least like minimizes the harm that can happen to you. It's not bulletproof, right? As we know, it's not meant to be. But I think like, you know, I don't want folks to be like, right now I don't know X. L this other random thing, you could be brought against me And that may happen and continue to happen, but that's what we all do, right? Like sort of like with this message of hope iss what we do is we fight. And like we have fought like state repression, like our answers just have fought state repression. we're not going to stop. They're going to keep adapting and so are we This resistance is not going to stop, E if we have to figure out a new way to resist based on what comes next too ask you all as a final question with your repression forecasting on Anything you want to add about how movements can prepare to meet this repression that is already happening and that which is to come. I can't see the future As I tell my clients every day. I can't see the future I am, but a lawyer, not a wizard. What I can tell you is we know a lot about the state has done in the past And we have a lot of good models to look to We have a rich ancestry of resistance and of movement lawyering and of movement lawyers who know how to work in community with people who are doing the heavy lifting We have made it this far. As Bina said, we're just going to continue to fight and I do hold out a lot of hope not because I have any faith in the law itself or believe that justice is on the table in our courts U but because we are actually really good at solidarity And because we have O a century of evidence that solidarity is not just good for our communities. It's legally effective That's it. Don't talk to cops I might go with the cheesy answer route that I think what communities and movements can do to prepare is a lot of this, right is like coming together and strategizing, especially amongst the lawyers. So uplifting what Moe said is like showing solidarity with communities and lawyers showing up. But I think also, and like Joey and Moe really model this for me as well as lawyers showing up with each other and like working together because it is a lonely fight a lot of times. Be a lawyer when you're not in a circle of solidarity or folks of radical politics or who like also believe in including each other in fighting, you know and doing this work And that is always going to be a losing fight, right? If you're doing it by yourself, you're not doing it with each other and with the communities and with other radical lawyers That's not what we do, right? That's also like not the point of this work. It's for like one sooule lawyer to fight it and win. It's about like us doing it collectively. and that's the way that we win. And you know, just uplifting like you three, like just even having this conversation and Joe and Moe for all the work that you do and the work that you do inclusively, you know, that like gives me hope because I know I've had like many every day, like I just sit and I feel like, alone' like, my Like I have to first end with the message of hope. I have to find some way to keep going. It's really hard. And sometimes I'm just like, I don't know. And then and then we have these conversations. and like, all right, yeah. like we have those moments we get, you know, like we feel defeated But like We have each other, you know, And like our movements didn't come this far, you know, our ancestors didn't come this far for us to give up now. Yeah, I think I would just echo what both Bina and Mo have said. I mean, obviously black, indigenous and other communities of color have faced fascism and authoritarianism before and have resisted and survived This is not the first time in this country we've seen this and it's likely not going to be the last But I think again, I, you know, I would say that you know, as Maram Kama says, you know, hope is a discipline And we have to keep pouring into hope and we't have to keep resisting So I do have a lot of hope and and I and I feel like Again, like, I want to look at what the organizers have done and how far we've come even in terms of this latest administration You know, I would say last year after the onson of this administration, I don't think we were seeing a lot of resistance, not a lot of public resistance And instead, we were seeing law firms cave and deciding to create agreements with the administration. We were seeing educational institutions come cave and come up with a lot of agreements. But what we did see is we saw the people resisting And that happened in LA, and that happened in Chicago, and that certainly happened in Minneapolis and Staint Paul and Minnesota So I take heart. and I think what we need to continue to think about doing is how people are going to do the mutual aid work and the care work. I think we need to continue to do the know Y rights and know Y risks work. That's essential I think a big thing we need to continue to think about is the Insurrection Act and getting information out about the Insurrection Act, which may be invoked prior to this election know, I think that the ongoing work that people have been doing, again, it's about the people and the power of the people that have gotten us this far But even if we look at what happened, this past weeke in eight million people coming out to protest and resist Those numbers didn't exist over a year ago. And so I feel like the resistance is happening. People are coming together And despite institutional Failures I think the movement has grown significantly. And I think we have to even look at the last year and a half to see how far we've come And so I've hoped that we'll go even further And I hope that we're not returning to the status quo And in fact, we are actually dreaming the world we want to live in and that we are going to fight for the world we want to live in and that this is an opportunity for us to let things go and for us to create a new Thank you all for those. Hopeful Hopeful forecasting advice answers You don't always get that twist, which is really lovely. and I feel like it's been something that's on my mind. A lot Here in Minnesota that's sometimes Things are the worst And you're of the closest to violence and terror It's also when you see how powerful people are and how powerful resistance can be I mean, these are long fights and these are long hauls. Yeah I think that's kind of the lesson is you know, not to get all Pure K a vote, but You are not obligated to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. Like these are long Fightes Yeah. They are fights that we don't win alone. It's not possible or desirable to win these fights alone. Right? They're generational I mean, they last multiple generations. So you know, this's like the ever receding horizon of real democracy, right There's no u forecast that could even be adequate because it's going go on for so long But I think the advice is always the same, right? Don't t to cats what she said is generallyill and you're not free to just abandon the work mode is like I don't like write that on a wall somewhere because I think things people jump in, right? It's like, okay, this is how let's do it But it's like once it's not a hot new thing, you know, people kind of move out of the next day. It's like no, that's when we need folks to stick in it and you can't. And I think that's just a really important lesson. Send me your mailing address. I'm send I'm gonna to send you a poster Or can you crochet it? I know you can crochet. You can do together with flowers and everything. Yeah Thank you all so much. You guys are awesome. We love you guys. It's been so great. I feel like at a therapy session I'm like, Ohh,' so much better off but like what we're doing and like where we are and like I have hope take this one of you found Thank you for listening to Outlaw on It Could Haen Here. If you lik the episode, check out the show Outlaw wherever you get your podcasts, and rate, review and follow Outlaw pod on Instagram and Blue Sky for anti repression, updates, news and stories that you might want to know This is It Could Happ Here Executive Disorder, ourur weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis and I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Robert Evans This episode recovering the week of may twentieth to may twenty seventh Jameses some smallm whittittle ity bitty news items to start? Yeah about the little things then we talk about some things in more detail The Trump administration has lifted a cap on refugee admissions by ten thousand This sounds like good news until you realize it is to allow more white South Africans to seek refuge in the United States of America reat stuff. Heate this country. I found the federal register, I think. it's still the document stilled up there, but I will link to the place where the document will probably be The Dutch will never be forgiven H The United States has also continued its campaign of strikes in the Pacific. The most recent one left two survivors, along with one man who was killed. So this Guardian published a piece a while ago about what happened to some survivors who were taken by a US military boat, the U.S military boarded their vessel, stole their food and beer and then transported them to El Salvador where they were Q questioned and then released to immigration authorities and eventually sent home basically I guess effectively deported for illegally entering El Salvador. after they were brought there by the US byy the United States Yeah after the U.S. bomb theble. Yeah So we don't know what happened to these two people, I guess Coast Guard activated took to rescue after the strike. so hopefully they found them. It's better than them drowning out there The Department of Homeland Security is auto extending the temporary protected status for Lebanon. Not because they affirmatively chose to do so, but because they failed to renew or terminate it in time so it ought to extended Mark Wayne Mullin, the DHS secretary, has claimed that the Department of Homeland and Security is drawing up plans to process incoming international flights in sanctuary cities Yeah. This is ahead of the World Cup, right? Yes. So let let's play a little clip We are currently, which we're not initiate yet, but we're currently drawing up plans to say, listen in these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren't allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn't be processing international flights their into their cities either because they don't want us enforce immigration. But they want us to process immigration at their facilities. Nothing about that makes sense to me The line he's drawing, I guess what I want to guess at is that he's claiming that in places where police won't support see it. Iice by removing protess from the streets outside ice facilities The United States It's not going to allow international travelers to enter ports in those cities There's a lot to break down there. I'm not really going to because it suffice it to say that this would cause absolute chaos. That's not gonna to happen because that's going be heavily disrupt capital. that's just not half. Yeah, it's not really possible for this to work. it's not that they can divert to non woke airports, right? That's not how air travel works. is this silly? But it's interesting. likeike like Mullin It's been a bit less kind of crazy in his like posting his policy. Yeah, but maybe he was just getting warmed up. I mean, he's yeah, he obviously does not understand who his true master is. if he actually thinks this is something that can happen. Yeah, he I don't know if he does or he just talking to Fox News and yeah said what he thought Fox News wanted to hear Mullin was talking about this in response to a largely growing protest at Delaney Hall, which is a private detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where Three hundred detainees have been on hunger strikke since last Friday. Mallin has viously claimed that they chose to do this on Memorial Day, Friday, of course, not Memorial Day, and that they want their ethnic food peopleople in detention are entitled to religiously appropriate food, but that's not what's happening here, right? Pe are on hunger strike because of the conditions in the facility. New Jersey Senator Andy Kim Who's been there for a while with protesters, he got pepper balalled And Tagghast He entered the facility to inspect it and he made a thread onX. com the Everything website where he detailed horrible abuse inside including a woman who had been denied OBGYN care and a pregnant woman who had miscarried inside the facility DHS has claimed in response that, quote, in fact, IC has higher detention standards than most U.S prisons that hold actual US citizens. That's an incredible thing to say. when someone has just detailed the fact that people are having unaccompanied miscarriages in your facility and being like, Well, we do worse things to Americans here. There are really a lot of layers there On Monday, one of the leaders of the hunger strike was transferred out of the facility in Newark to another facility, right It's not uncommon for people to be moved around in immigration detention for various reasons to include in this case, they're organizing fininally, the OPCW has published documents detailing a large hall of undeclared chemical weapons that it found in Syria What is the OCPW for those who may not acronym aware It the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Why this is interesting, firstly, There has been open source porting detailing the use by Assad of chemical weapons against his own population for years and this confirms that Secondly, there is a particularly disgusting faction of the left in the United States and elsewhere which has Yes denying that this is the case. spent years effectively running cover for Assad murdering little children with chemical weapons We had very good evidence that this was happening before. We now have incontrovertible proof that Assad had the ability to do this and did do this. we already know that he did it. But it should really make you question the legitimacy of any media source that continues or ever has denied that Assad used chemical weapons or indeed any itician or political actor There's no instance in which it's okay to use chemical weapons against civilians, period. And anyone apologizing for that, in my opinion, is pretty despicable In other news, about two weeks ago, ABC News nuked the five hundred thirty eight archive, scrubbing all the articles with links now redirecting to the ABC politics homepage As annoying as some of the five thirty eight type people can be. this this is a bad removal of like documented informations going all the way back to two thousand eight It is unfortunate that ABC has done this. There still is third party archives of these articles that you can find will make actually referencing information held were previously held on five hundred and thirty eight, much more difficult going forward Yeah, and I'd also just want to say this is a continuous problem with storing information on the internet, which is that Yeah, information on the internet is incredibly ephemeral. It is very easy for entntire people's lives work to simply be deleted because a parent company decided to make a move and Yeah, there's a bunch of people who do good work on digital preservation, but All of the work that we produce online is significantly more ephemeral than we tend to think about Yeah Yeah, as Jamie Loft just said in her last regular podcast that she did for us, this is a future piece of lost media, right? whichich is true of almost everything anyone puts up on the internet There are groups of people who have worked over the years to try and mitigate that, including the Internet archive and the wayayback machine. and they are currently under attack as is from within the Wikipedia Foundation as we'll talk about later. but like yeah, it's the only the only way to make this stuff not be ephemeral and to actually like perman archive of culture is to support the people doing that and the people doing that are never going to be entirely cool with for example, the people who make movies. the people who put out newspapers. And there's an extent to which they just need the backing of us and of our government to say you can't stop them from doing that because it's in the best needs of the human race. And that's not going to happen right now Anyway Last weekend, Fox News reported that Socialist live streamer Hassan Piker and the leader of the activist organization Code Pink. had been subpoenaed by the federal government as a part of an investigation into a humanitarian aid trip to Cuba with a bunch of left wing activists and influencers last March Fox claimed this investigation is part of a quote, broader dragnet involving as many as forty American citizens who joined the Marxist convoy to Havana, unquote After returning from Cuba two months ago, twenty U.S. citizens were briefly detained and interrogated at the border and eighteen of them had their phones and other devices seized by CBP agents at the Miami International Airport Fox reported that these new subpoenas show that Piker is now caught in a quote federal inquiry into whether activists who traveled to Cuba in March violated US sanctions laws through financing, coordination or delivery of goods to Cuba, including potential contacts with Cuban government personnel or entities on the island, unquote also claiming that this investigation is part of a quote broader effort by officials at Treasury, state and justice departments to curb malign foreign influence operations inside the United States, unquote Hassan Pier has said that he learned about the subpoena through Fox's media reporting And he has not yet been contacted by the government Fox referred to these subpoenas as quote unquote administrative subpoenas. And it turns out, neither Hassan Piker nor Code Pink have actually been subpoenaed by the government. They They've not actually been served by the federal government. Oh boy, great On Tuesday, the leader of CodePank told Ryan Grimm that she received an email from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asets contontrol requesting information about the trip to Cuba suggesting that there is some probe here, but it's not technically a subpoena And there's still no indication if Hassan Piker has received a similar request for information. And' like this is bad. It's not Unusual if you go to a place like Cuba that American citizens are certainly not supposed to tra transit to directly to be stopped questionions on the way into the country and it's now not unusual for devices to be taken None of this is good. L the fact that they could just take your shit at the border remains bad. But yeah, as Garrison has said right now This is not what a lot of initial reporting made it look like quite. No, if anything, it seems Fox is trying to encourage this this broader dragnet and manufacture consent for There're being subpoenas for people on this humanitarian aid and influencer trip Yeah James speaking of Cuba. Yeah. so u Let's talk a little bit about people seeking to become permanent residents of the United States. we'll get to the Cuba tie in a minute here. So They USCIS policy memorandum has advised USCIS officors that Most non US citizens seeking to adjust their status will now have to leave the USA to do so What is adjusting? Adjusting is generally when somebody who is here on a non immigrant visa or here on another immigration status adjusts to become a permanent resident, right? And previously they could do that inside the United States or they could go to a consulate and they could apply for a green card or a consulate outside the United States Now they're saying that Aside from cases of what they are calling extraordinary discretion They're going to make people leave and apply from outside the United States Thataddy's bad What is worse is the way that this overlaps with their existing policies, right People already applying are facing huge delays. I've reported on that before. and now new applicants and possibly people who are halfway through their process will have to leave. That will often mean spouses leaving their spous and their citizen children if they have them for an unknown amount of time, right? This could take you It' very realistic to expect this to take years tales with existing These are bans on seventy five countries. What that means is that peopleeople from many of these countries cannot obtain any immigrant visas. There are some very small exceptions to these visa bans. In the case of the twenty countries which want a complete ban, there are exceptions for athletes attending the World Cup or the Olympics, for example, right? So like Iran is one of those countries The Iranian team can attend the World Cup. They're actually staying in Tijuana but crossing the border to come and that matches For everyone else though, if you leave And then you have to come back to collect a green card. You re enter on an immigrant visa, then you get your green card, right If you are prohibited from having an immigrant visa because you are a citizen of these countries, then you cannot re enter And thus you cannot get your green card and thus this is de facto bar people from those travel banned countries getting a green card in the United States now which is very bad. I also noticed that there is not an exemption that I can see for the Cuban Adjustment Act here. The Cuban Adjustment Act is a special exppledited pathway for Cubans that allows them to adjust to legal permanent resident status. It used to be two years now it's a year This is particularly interesting given the USA is talking so much about how terrible things are in Cuba, but also saying if you've made it here and you're safe and you feel safer here, you want to stay You can't, you have to go back to Cuba and apply I guess to adjust It seems very hypocritical, but there's nothing new So I spoke to a couple of folks who would have expertise in this and I don't have their permission to sign the name so won't There isn't a consular option for Cuban seeking to adjust They can't do it outside the country under the Cuba adjustment Act. They have to do inside the country. so they think that this would entirely not include them. But like everything else. It's a little bit unclear and we will find out, I guess Last month, USCIS also removed categorical deferred action for SIJS individuals. SIJS is special immmigrant juvenile status. It's granted to people in the US who are inside the United States without status, who have been subject to abuse, abandonment or neglect as found by a court The Trump administration has already deported many of these young people. This policy memo formally removed categorical deferred enforcement, which the Biden admin began doing in twenty twenty two Essentially some people would be told on receiving SIJS that they would be safe from deportation and they could receive a work permit. Deferred enforcement is the same thing that people under DACA have, right commonly referred to as dreamers that has now been removed. The people with SOJS can adjust to being the SOJS offers a pathway to permanent residency But now these people will evidently have to live in fear right up until they are able to become citizens if they're able to become citizens G these are some of the most unfortunate people on the planet. L like people who get SIJS use of it has increased for like unaccompanied miners, right? or I should say, people have come across in the last maybe since twenty eighteen ish, but still's It's people who have often gone through really terrible things The justification cited, and I'm quoting from the memo here is that quote, the criminality gangs and program integrity concerns in spepecialally immigrant juvenile petitions Ct reviewed over three hundred thousand aliens SOJA petitions filed from the beginning of fiscal year twenty thirteen through february twenty twenty five. Key findings included eight hundred and fifty three known or suspected gang members who filed SIJA petitions, with most receiving approval. Over six hundred MS thirteen gang members filed SIJ petitions and more than five hundred were approved. Among them at least seventy had been charged with gang related federal racketeering conspiracy offenses and many others charged with violent crimes in the United States including murder or sex offensences. Additional SOJ position approvals included more than one hundred known or suspected members of the eighteenthh gang, at least three Trenderragua gang members and dozens of Sorenos Nortenos gang members If you go back and look at those numbers three hundred thousand petitions I see seventy charges. Yeah, that's absurd. That it's a fraction of a single percent. Yeah If they reviewed three hundred thousand. Even if this like eight hundred and fifty number is correct. is completely correct. whichich is not. That's like less than one third of a percent. Yeah, exactly. It is a miniscule fraction if every single person who they suspect. and given what we've seen about suspicion, that could be as much as having a tattoo, right? Yeah It's ludicrous to join one up with the other and say therefore all of these young people, many of whom have gone through horrific things, now will have to live in fear again. That policy memo came in April. I found it when I was looking through the policy memos on the USCIS website. and I haven't seen any other reporting on it. Maybe I've just missed it, but it's certainly something people should be aware of I want to do a scripted series on SIJS people for understandable reasons. notot all of them want to in the media right now In terms of all the like immigration changes that have happened, this collection of stuff is like some of the worst that I've heard you talk about. Yeah. It's really bad. Like they started deporting SIJS people and even even immigration lawyers who have been like that this second Trump administration is going to be really bad. The second Trump administration is really bad. People did not expect them to begin going after these people and they did when they were detaining Another thing they've claimed is that like some of them are over twenty over eighteen because they can still apply up to twenty one in certain jurisdictions, again That doesn't mean that they haven't been through terrible things. many, many twenty one year olds in America rely on their parents for things. Yeah. These people often don't have their parents or have in some cases been abused by or abandoned by their parents. And then sending them back to a place where They may be in danger where they may not be safe, right? There is no moral ethical justification for this really It's really bad. It's really horri Yeah It's pure undiluted violence. Yeah And likewise, like we can very clearly see if we look at the lter travel bg countries going to be a bar on people from a large number of countries where a majority of the population is not white getting citizenship and legal permanent residident status in the United States, right something that has very clearly been a motivating factor of policy for a long time more shit news from me about immigration. Sking of shit news, we have to pivot to advertisements. We. And we're back Ohh, boy. Well, that's all been very depressing. You know what's not depressing? Cathism Oh and that too. T great tastes. great together. Two things that make us all happy Oh, man This week, the same week that we're recording this, Pope Leo XXte issued an encyclical magnifica humumanitas that warned against equating machine intelligence with human intelligence. He declared, We must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence This has been seen, I think by most critics of artificial intelligence as a pretty good encyclical. It is very long. It's well over one hundred pages. So this is not like a quick read. You should think about this as like going in and reading a book It's a really interesting document among other things. The Pope quotes Jer or Tolkien at one point. Yeah, which is a nice little bit He also makes a lot of references to mathematics and specifically like kind of comparing the way Catholicism thinks about divinity and the Holy Spirit and all that to certain kind of like geometric shapes because apparently he was a math major. I did not know this, but it comes through the writing of this. I would say by overall Imression is like, oh, the Pope has a lot more understanding of like technical stuff than I thought he was gonna have. Like this this is not like a bad thing from like a basic understanding of how the technology works standpoint. Obviously, a lot of this is based around the pope's beliefs about like what humanity is and the divinity within humanity which is not something that everybody believes I also have found an awful lot of atheists and just kind of like non religious people who have been sharing this because while they don't agree that like, you know, human beings are sacred because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ necessarily or whatever, or that we were made by God, they agree with the fact that there's something special about humanity that is not being recreated by these LLOs And so I've seen a lot of like praise as a result of that However, I've also seen what I thought were pretty salient critiques. and the number one critique here is that This encyclical was released at an event that was kind of co launched with people from Anthropic. and the Vatican worked with Anthropic for this release and are in general kind of partnering maybe the wrong term, but working alongside them. to try and have a dialogue about the future of AI and what it should and shouldn't do. And specifically, one thing that Pope Leo talked a lot about was the need to demilitarize or disarm artificial intelligence as in remove it from use in like defense industries and certainly make sure that it's not making the call to actually kill people And that's something that Anthropic has also took us stand on so much as that Now the U.S. government is trying to remove any partnership it has with Anthropic. Yes, yes. they at least were openly against that. Now that doesn't mean Anthropic iss a company I like or company that everybody should like, they still plagiarize huge millions of people. Basically anyone who's ever written a book. There's a lot of illegal things, objectively illegal things. Anthropic did. and that's why there are numerous lawsuits against them now. And I think it is in fact a problem that one of Anthropic's co founders, Chris Ola, was invited to speak at this event in the Vatican Because one of the first things he did after, you know thanking the Vatican and the Catholic Church and the Pope for having him there is kind of disagree with what the Pope had said that these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. becausecause Ola said that these systems, I'm going to quote from an article in the regisry here by Thomas Claverurn, quote, AI systems, he said, are not the cold calculating robots we were promised. They are made from us from our words. And as the Holy Father observes, they remain in important ways mysterious to those of us who trained them This is what I have an issue with. Yeah No they' They're mysterious me in the same sense that like if you make a car that had always just been a simple ice engine, if you make that a hybrid and you throw like a computer screen and a bunch of shit in it, you're gonna have a bunch of problems with your car as like a manufacturer that you didn't expect to have because you've added complexity. R. We can't predict every single outcome of machine learning, Right? Yeah But but the way that but the way this anthropic guy is using, you know, basic basic facts about like machine learning and neural networks, but framing them in a way. These are mysterious, likeike the human brain is mysterious. And no yes Yeah, but it's also like of course you can't predict what the output is. your entire process is you multiplying matrices against each other over and over again and then checking to see if the output of the random matrice multiplication you've done is what you want. Yanoo shit Dumb person comparison might be. If I were to buy an empty house and I were to fill that house with random shit for thirty years, for so long that I've forgotten what I've put in the house. And then I sent you into the house to grab something at random from it I mightd be totally surprised by what you bring out. That doesn't mean anything mysterious or sacred has occurred. It just means ye I'd forgotten all the shit I put that out you know. Yeah Yeah. Or it's like it's like if you make a machine that just Bs a random output, yes, you don't know what it's going to be. Like yes, this is what you have done. Exactly. I ranom out but when it was been trained on the corpus of like human knowledge, right? Yeah. And one of the things that I find very frustrating is that Ola made the statement that AI systems are made from us and from our words Right? And he says that in a way as to like, and that's good. It means that like we all are a part of this and it's a part of us. And so there's humanity in it. No, no, no. AI isn't like made from our words. They stole our words without our consent in order to monetize them for themselves That's different That's real different. Yeah in the same way that back in the day, when I began teaching, people would plagiarize by copying and pasting things from books. Yeah. those are also made by people's words. It doesn't make them sacred. Yeah, makes them stolen Oola lists in here three questions for discernment. And he phrases this as like, and I hope the Catholic Church can like help us figure out how we should move forward with these things. These are the big questions behind AI. I want to quote again from that piece in the register because the author of that Cappord has a funny bit here Oa how can we ensure the gains of AI are shared globally? We do not have a mechanism for this. We have many. O is called taxes. anotherother is litigation already ongoing. We also have the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, among others, as well sharing models when nothing else works. It good piece. I recommend reading. That's good. Yeahah, that's good. That's what I've got to say on this. I mean yeah, obviously, the anthropic guy is going to frame certain things As marketing for the company, right? That's going to determine the way that he uses certain words and the way that he discusses machine learning and neural networks, right? When he's saying that this is like based on the human brain roughly, it's because, yeah, it's because its because it's a machine learning, neural network. Yeah. So's that's going to frame the way that he's doing it. I think it makes sense for the Catholic Church to try to enter into dialogue with a company like Anthropic Sure, especially if they can, you know, unite against TL's efforts and even maybe some of some of the efforts of of open AI. But obviously Anthropic has their own motivations for doing this, which is to enrich themselves Yes, yes. but it I don't think it's surprising. that the Catholic Church will also try to enter into dialogue to influence the outcome of these things. I think in general, the Pope' statement is fine I think the Pope statement is fine. I do think this might be a data point in terms of in the future church me to recognize that you can't actually work with these guys Perhaps that will be the outcome. We'll see Well, but I mean, I think I think that's part of what's happening here though, right? is the reason the church is taking anti AI positions while working with them is that they're like they they're trying to have it both ways in terms of co opting both like the anti AI movement and also work like work with these companies to sort of like build their influence space. I don't see it fully that. I think for the popees because he's been very consistent about being horrified by the growth of the arms industry and the idea of AI weapons in war. I kind of suspect from the Vatican standpoint, when that all erupted with anthropic pulling out and saying they weren't willing to with the Department of Defense on the things that Dity wanted them to do, that that's probably when the Vatican made the call, but I don't actually know. You know, I'm not going I'm not going to say that the more sinister outcome is definitely not what's occurring. But I think there's a number of ways to kind of look at what the decision that was made and why it was made I mean, the Catholic Church is one of the most globally influential bodies On the planet They do have like their theological reasons for opposing AI as well as sort of ethical reasons that it's illuminated by the Pope in terms of like worker protections, in terms of the anti war stuff And I do believe he has like actual, you know, legitimate spiritual beliefs about like what humanity is And it was something I appreciate is that he doesn't just take this like AI skeptic point of view And just to deny that like AI will, you know, significantly transform our world, right? Be I think AI is transforming production and in some pretty significant ways. The Pope is not just hoping that I will go away He's affirming that we actually need to do something about this to protect our own humanity evenven though AI is not human, humans do determine how it will be developed Therefore we should act and I think that makes sense for his position Yeah, I don't, I'm not surprised as to the fact that he's doing it I guess my long term doubt is I don't think any of these companies have the ability On their own. to make responsible choices. No, certainly not the future of these of these. And I don't think they have the ability to contribute to responsible decisions. Sure. I think they need to be manhandled. Yeah, totally by armed agents of the state. Owise armed us are going to have to do it, you? That's the reality. No one hundred percent. And that's the reality not just with AI. That's the reality with every mega corporation, right If the government does not stop them from destroying life for large numbers of people, then large numbers of people are going to do crazy things to them, you know? And if you want crazy things to stop happening to, for example, the CEO of Open AI, maybe he should stop saying his technology might kill everyone On a related note Wired has recently obtained thousands of documents from the DHS, FBI, and state level info sharing anti terrorism They're called fusion centers where information is shared between the Feds, the state and local, local law enforcement.. And a report from the New York Intelligence and Counter terrorism Bureau warned of widespread upheaval in response to the adoption of AI and has coined a new term vote annti tech violent extremism, unquote This is this is a this is a quote from this report. quote The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AA technology in the next five years may fuel large scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti tech violent extremist activity Eespecially in lar urban areas such as New York City, on quote this is interesting. Also according to Wired The intntelligence Bureau report referenced the Zyians and warned that quote, paranoid views regarding AI may proliferate in the aftermath of the Z's trial, thanks to their quote attempt to reason the belief that a godlike incarnation of AI is imminent and belief that Humans must best use their time in the present to devote themselves to ensuring its compliance with human morality or face existential consequences for failing to do so. Unquote. This is really interestic This stuff that Robert's been talking about for quite a while Yeah. I'd like I think this report was actually written before Sam Altman Molov Ccktail attack, or at least was written around the same time But I think probably a little bit before. But considering the Molotov cocktail attack on Sim Altman's property and the gunshots fired into the home of a pro data center city council person It makes sense that law enforcement is considering anti AI violence as an emerging threat vector But it also makes sense to be concerned that nonviolent opposition may get caught in a federal or state level dragnet. Yeah. And that's what fusion centers do, right? they dragnet a whole bunch of shit. And that's exactly what fusion centers do. And most of this wired report is talking about documents from fusion centers as we have already seen Law enforcement' surveillance capacity and scope has been empowered and extended by the National Security Presidential Memorandum number seven. And public organizers and protesters are much easier to target than the small minjority of people that actually end up committing violent crimes Wired reported that federal, state and local agencies are gathering and circulating intelligence about alleged threats to data centers. the intelligence documents that wired quotes from outline a variety of threat actors and models, not simply data center protests. addversarial actors, including state sponsored entities, criminal groups and extremists, such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists may target U. S. data centers These actors could also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the U.S. economy using them for activities like cryptocurrency mining or leveraging third party entities such as front companies to gain access to U. S. data and infrastucture, unquote. So that outlines not just like environmental or like The general anti data center beliefs held by the American public, Like this shows like actual, you know, like threats to national security by hostile state actors or criminal groups as well as people with their own environmental or ethical reasons for opposing AI domestically Though Wiard also reported that a fusion center in Northern Virginia created a report on Tesla takedown protests and in person assemblies like demonstrations at an Arlington County budget meeting and a Fairfax County schoolchool booard meeting where people voiced opposition to AI Yeah, and This is again, also like historically what these fusion centers have been used for, as James was talking about, I mean, like all the way back to like God, I mean, like, I probably should have worked out in what order I wanted to talk about these but like, yeah, future centers have been used to target everything from like anti Iraq war protest stuff in like the mid two thousands through like yeah, like ion centers are like one of the big coordingations for like all of the repression in twenty twenty. They've been used in like anti Palestine. protests and like we forge and the campus occupations. so like Yeah, like these sort of like intelligence reports are talking about like different threat factors, but going after protesters is like what these fion centers in a lot of cases are designed to do. So yeah yeah, it's definitely a thing to be concerned about given what these things are and what they do Speaking of cryptocurrency mining U Oh boy So yeah, yeah, spepeaking of using large entities for crypto bullshit Last week, we talked a bit about Kevin Warsh, the new Federal Reserve Board chairman like ties to the tech, right, right? ties to Field, ties to Andresen, ties to This whole sort of world of like tech venture capital money Today I want to talk about There's an executive order from may nineteenth from the Trump administration. orders the Federal Reserve to consider allowing crypto companies and other non FDIC insured entities to use Fedwire Okay, so what is Fedwire On a backacer level, Fedwire is the reason the entire American economy functions It is the payment service that Banks in the U.S used to both send money to each other and to the Fed If you wanted to do an analogy, right? You could say that Fedwire is payPal for banks, but like the reality is not that PayPal is like Fedwire for people Right, Fedwire is Maybe the single most important infrastructure piece of the entire American economy. I was going to talk about this a bit later, but The surface on an average The Fed estimates that it moves one point one quadrillion dollars per year.. Where does a quadrillion fit in the number big scale? That's a million million dollars. A lot per year Right? Like the entire American financial system moves moves through this service And you can also like move money to the government through this. so can you can do exchanges with the Federal Reserve itself or the different Federal Reserve banks. Now, in order to get access to Feduire, you have to be an actual bank Right? You have to be like an FDIC Insured bank. And crypto has not had access to this system. like crypto, I really don't want to call them crypto banks because they're not banks. and that's why they haven't had access to the system because They're not banks Crypto is not money. And it's not none of this stuff is subject I mean, it's subject, I guess to a little bit of like securities regulation, but it's not subject to actual like FDIC regulation or importantly deposit insurance. because again, these are not banks Now, crypto has been trying to get access to the Fed wire system for years because in order for to sort of like interface with the rest the banking system. They have to basically like get a bank to act as a partner for them instead of being able to like directly move the stuff around because they can't access the system And so Trump has At least give an executive order for the Fed to consider doing this Now cannot actually force directly. like you can't just sign an executive order that says you have to let crypto do this because of fed independence But the Fed had already sort of like opened a period of public comment on this. And this is something that I think Warsh this this is a way is why it's important that this is happening after like the appointment of like Kein Wars or like after he'd been Technically speaking, before he'd been confirmed, but like after or like like before he'd been sworn in, but after like, they knew he was going he's going to get through because he is extremely friendly to these groups This is also thing that's sort of important for the crypto industry because one of the issues that crypto has is that Actually trying to like move cryptocurrency around is just a nightmare This's like one of the reasons why no one actually like uses it to purchase things because it's such a disaster and getting access to the Feder's payment system It suddenly kind of it gives you a sort of like you can use the Fed's Payment platform, which actually works unlike theirs, which do not The other reason I'm bringing this up. So it's worth mentioning that even if the Fed were to allow them to create accounts with the Federal Reserve They wouldn't for now have access to a lot of the services the Federal Reserve provides, like they wouldn't be able to do like they take advantage of like repo injections and like stuff like that. likeike a lot of the stuff that the Fed uses to stabilize the economy through injecting money into the banking system and injecting bonds and stuff like that into the system, they wouldn't have access to It's pretty clear that these crypto groups want that eventually because that gives them access to the actual sort of banking capacity of the federal government, which allows them access to things like very low interest short term loans and liquidity, etera etcet, etcer What I want to close on is that this is what Worsh is thing is, right? He want he wants there to be more integration between This sort of like I call like thin tech, right? like the financial tech things, but you know, between these very fascist right wing tech companies They want them to be more and more directly integrated into the payment services and into the banking capacity of the U.S. government I mentioned earlier that Fedwire moves, again, one point one carrillion dollars a year Now This is also what's very dangerous about Trump's people being in control of the Federal Reserve because There is so much infrastructure inside of the Federal Reserve that if it breaks even a little bit, things that we don't think of at all. L no one like literally no one thinks about like even even even if you do banking stuff, you tend not to think about Fedwire because it just works. This This is less of a risk now that like doge gpperers aren't running around, but One of the dangers of Trump attempting to control the Federal Reserve is that if people will break something like this while doing something like attempting to integrate cryptoc companies into it And so that's just going to be a continuing risk that we all sort of have to deal with because ch companies and the Trump administration and now the president of the Federal Reserve wants to fuck with these systems on which Ething all of our lives depends on in ways that we never see All right Speaking of the things that all of our lives depend on Here are the products and services that support this podcast. Products and services, and that's right. Lovely. Yeah And we're back I have to unfortunately talk about Wikipedia or at least the Wikipedia Foundation. Obviously, I think everyone here is pretty big fans of Wikipedia, which is At this point has gone from the thing my teachers used to tell me I couldn't use in projects to like By any objective measure, one of the most significant projects in the history of human knowledge and like storage of things that human beings know and have learned. It's one of the last like gasps of the promise of the old internet and it's also the thing that underpins all of the AI chatbots alongside Reddit one way or another and the answers that they give people, like Wikipediaas incredibly important for AI, which is why the Wikipedia Foundation has made deals like with the AI industry in order to get money for letting them scrape like Wikipedia Which is kind of part of why the Wikipedia Foundation is currently doing really fucking well monetarily. They've got a little under three hundred million dollars in reserves, which is about a year and a half worth of money for them. So first up, wait, so you're saying those little banners that fill hal to the screen every time I use Wikipedia are lying. I don't wantna Actually right now I do want to discourage people from donating to Wikipedia. Historically, I have not. But yes, you should first off know, if you've been feeling bad about not donating, they don't currently need it. They're okay right now, and they shouldn't get more of your money until they stop doing the shit that I'm about to tell you about because over the course of ten days in May, the Wikipedia Foundation has engaged in what you could call major unions firing employees who are trying to organize their fellows and trying to like represent those values within the Wikipamedia Foundation. And my source for main source for this is a pretty good article that Jake Orlowitz put out on medium recently, Big teech's anti labor playbook has come before Wikipedia And it starts with the firing in Mid May of Brook Viber She was the very first full time employee of the Wikipedia Foundation and its first CTO, the chief technical officer. And for more than twenty years, she's like one of the main engineers that has made Wikipedia work, right? And she's also a union organizer. So she's a very important person She's the lead developer for Media Wiki, which is the platform that runs Wikipedia. It had been in since two thousand three. and it's just a very big person both in terms of how Wikipedia works and in terms of like the way in which like their unionizing efforts have gone She was laid off without any real c gi. And then a week later, on may twenty first, the foundation disbanded the community tech team, which consisted of five engineers and a manager. The community tech team had the job of listening to Wikipedia editors, which are number one, the reason Wikipedia has content and number two volunteers, right? So these are regular employees whose job has been to hear what Wikipedia editors want and then help make sure that the salary employees on the team fulfill those desires in as much as that as possible, right? And so when you fire these people, you are saying, we don't really give a shit about the volunteer community. And it's also noted in this in Jake's article that most of those engineers were union organizers. Now there is currently a solidarity petition for Wikipedia editors. So if you are an editor of Wikipedia I think it would be great if you signed that solidarity petition This is the first time that editors have had to do an organized solidarity action with paid foundoundation staff. And yeah, it's a whole thing. The salaried staff there are not on one side about this. This is extremely controversial It has a lot to do with the fact that a number of the old guard, including, you know the folks who are like a number of like some of the oldest people at Wikipedia, have a kind of libertarian bit to them, you might say. And in january twentieth of, twenty twenty six, Bernadette Van was recruited as CEO of The Foundation and her prior career included work at JP. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, as well as a spokesperson role for the NSC, the National Security Council. She was on the Obama Foundation. She was the U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Oh great. This is someone who comes from a background in which fucking with union attempts are very like normal and accepted. The union's demands are not extreme. They would not have any meaningful impact whatsoever on the pile of cash that Wikipedia has. There's no excuse for the Wikipedia Foundation doing this. You should be pissed at them and not give them more money until they make things right. Anyway, that's my opinion I've done Nice So we need to update once again the situation with the United States war in Iran The USA this week again bombed Iran in violation of ceasefire, calling it a self defense strike I mean's still a violation of the ceasefire The negotiations are ongoing Both sides remain long way apart There have been various like leaks and reports of where negotiations were at The O suggested that Iran would exchange freeing up its assets and sanctions relief for rememoving highly enriched uranium Iranian state TV leaked details of a supposed memorandum of undernderstanding, which would be like The memorandum that they would sign in order to say, like, hey, let's get back at the table until then these are our rules kind of. this is the rules we're operating under while we negotiate The MOU has said the blockade would end in the strait would be reopened. the USA has denied that MOU I don't want to go into the blow by blow of like leaked and denied things because it's just a waste of time. None that's real. It's all stock market manipulation. Like it's all justs sorry. That's literally my next sentence. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't stop people killing. it doesn't stop people dying. It does change the oil price and it does change the stock market. and I think If we report on this too credibly, We miss the fact that that is the real impact. That is how we should frame this in our reporting, not do the baroque reveed thing of rushing upate bullet points of something that someone told you would never consider why. Well, James, you will never have a career to acc us with that attitude. Yes,. I think that bridge has been burned, Garrison, but my path in life has been lit by the bridges I burned One thing I do want to note is that Trump has attempted to He appears to want to tie a peace deal to having other countries in the region sign the Abraham Accords Abrahamcord is you not familiar twenty agreement in which the UAE, Bahrain, Later Sudan and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. Interesting. that is unlikely to happen U you killed me Ay toolan now you think they're going to sign the Abrahammerct like what are we doing here? Yeah. I mean, he's just going through a wish list of of shit I guess that he or people close to him want. Yeah. Meanwhile, Iran is continuing to attack southern Kurdistan, right? And I think this offers a very clear vision of Kurdish groups could expect if they decide to ally with the US and serve as a ground force. And of course, there are very many reasonable reasons that they would want to do that, right? too include liberating themselves from an oppressive regime The United States, as it has done every other time, would probably abandon them and they would be subject to this They are already subject to this just because of rumors that they were they were associating with the United States This week, one strike injured nine PAK Peshmga, several of them very critically injured Talking of strikes, let's pivot to Nigeria, where Afrkom is claiming its strikes have killed one hundred and seventy five or more ISIS members. I know that I am like the lonely voice on this. The second I and the second S in ISIS stand for Iraq and al Sham or Iraq and Syria. Yep Yeah, Yes, yes, yes. It's constantly frustrating. ISIS Khoruscan province, that's not what it means. ISIS West Africa. notot what it means So it's the Islamic state of Iraq and Al Sham in Africa. but doing again Yeah, incredible. It's now made into it would be like if there was like a Christian fundamentalist, like the Georgia Baptist schoolchool of life. Y Yeah first les like the United States of America ye the United Statesates of America, Japan Yeah, like come on not what the word means Yeah. I mean, yeah, in the new counterterrorism Doc, I think they almost exclusively refer to it as ISS K Yeah, so that's Khorasan province, which again, not in Iraq or Alsham in what we would call Afghanistan today It's f It's fine. Yeah, this is where we're at with The fucking acronym is not an acronym, it's just a word, I guess no I remain angry. Meanwhile, fighting between Boko Haram and Iswap is what I'm going to be using. Elect Chad continues to threaten even worse famine in the region And Hexeth is claiming that these strikes were part of a campaign to defend Christians. Then I just want to know one more thing to give you a sense of how committed this president is Maybe a year ago He heard the call of Nigerian Christians who are being targeted and killed by ISIS in Nigeria. and he said I want the War Department to focus on ensuring that we do everything we can to protect those Christians Partnerships like that can take time behind the scenes, but he never wared on it. And we got the assets there. and over the last month and there hasn't been much coverage of this, we killed ISIS number two in Nigeria who's most responsible for killing Christians and trying to target the US homeland, and have since, because of the intel we gathered, killed hundreds of ISIS members who were targeting and killing Christians in Nigeria, creating a whole new opportunity there. So there's a lot of things we do that the media pays attention to And a lot of things that the presresident empowers the deepartment to do on behalf of the American people, that he deserves great credit for So here we are paying attention asP asked You will notice that the Africom claim of one hundred and seventy five is not hundreds However, Hexeth in that statement claimed hundreds. maybe we are missing something. Or maybe he's referring to the december twenty twenty five strikes and including all of those and rolling them up together. It's of course worth pointing out that Nigerian government has pushed back on this narrative that these strikes are to defend Christians. There are Christian Bishops in Nigeria who have pushed back on this narrative Because as with many Islamist terror groups, the majority of people these people have killed are not Christians, right? Many of them are Muslims, manyany of them are people of various other faiths L Bkle Haram, right? The name roughly translates to like Western style education is forbidden. it's Haram. Right? Like Like they're going after people who are in that community who have sought out Western education, like There were Many, many, many instances I could cite of these people killing Muslim people Hexus wants to make this a crusade and that's just not how things are on the crown. It's a very simplistic understanding of a much more complicated reality ye that is what I have on Nigeria this week, he is right that the US media covers Africa less much less than it should. trying to do our best here We have one more story. Big story before we close But first, we should mention the Republican primary in Texas on Tuesday. After gaining Trump's endorsement last week, Texas attttorney Geral Ken Paxton won the runoff election in the Republican Senate primary race Paxson won by almost four hundred thousand votes beating the fourth term incumbent Republican settlor John Cornet at sixty four percent to thirty six percent of the vote This is the second week in a row where Trump has successfully intervened to steer congressional primary win. away from incumbents and toward staunch mega looyalists Pxton will now go up against Tel Rico in the general election this November. Should we mention Paxton calling Puert Rico transgender? Yeah. ye. I mean, it's not just Paxton. it's Miller Millerill. Yeah. Yeah ye. Yeah. there seems to be a whole GOP move to bnd him as trans potentially Yeah as part of their, which I kind of see is someome degree of desperation, although I can't really imagine Hxted losing this election. So maybe it's just that they're completely out of other ideas Paxton does seem to have more liabilities than Cornan was. sureure, But's he's Paxton and this is Texas You haveike they're not gonna to take. This guy has been charged with crimes and the GOP tried to get rid of him. Texas refuses. Yeah. Like Texas is like absolutely not. I mean, I never am putting my faith in Texas as as we all know Yeah if I were to set up a pairing Calerico V packxtedon pairing. is the one I would pick as opposed to Talerico V the Cornin or, you know, Crocket V V Paxton Sure. I'm not going to say there's no way that Talerica would It would be an astonishing all I like it would be really Yeah. but I'll come on here and admit I was wrong and I'll be thrilled Yeah. I just spent too long living in Texas. I'm only say this is like the person who's been the most consistent like Asuming there's an election that even sort of functions normally. this is going to be like a two thousand eight style wave. They're not like they're not going to win Texas and until I'm've been wrong. I've been saying this the entire time I've been doing this show and I've been right every single time So like Prove me wrong, Texas ye You know, when I see a flip for Texas coming, I'll call it out But I don't right now. Nope Yeah, ye I'm not saying it'll never happen because demographically probably will at some point.. L unless they they really succeed at their genocide dreams But that ain't happen to now. So this cycle And finally, let's talk about another one of these redistricting cases And one related to the Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act Tuesday A federal court blocked an Alabama Congressional House map drawn by Republicans in twenty twenty three A three judge panel found that the drawn map was intentionally discriminatory based on race Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court cleared the way for this same map to be used in the twenty twenty six midterm elections Alabama Republicans have since labeled the district court panel activist judges. It's worth taking a look at who these judges are, I think The eleventh circuit judge was first appointed to a district court by one Ronald Reagan for The other two district judges were appointed by Trump And this exact same three judge panel had already found this exact same map to be intentionally racially discriminatory years ago This new district court order also rejects the state's claims that the twenty twenty three map was just drawn with partisan, not racial intent writing quotes The purpose of the twenty twenty three plan was to distribute black voters across districts to dilute their votes, at least in part because they are black, unquote This latest ruling is part of a specific redistricting battle that has stretched on for five years with Republican maps being repeatedly struck down, appealed, redrawn and struck down again I've seen some confusion on the exact series of events here. like what the Supreme Court has ruled on, which maps are being used So I want to just briefly go over the sequence of events as I understand it In twenty twenty one, a district court ruled that a new map drawn after the twenty twenty census likely violated seection two of the Voting Rights Act The Supreme Court upheld this decision in twenty twenty three barring the use of this twenty twenty one map After the Supreme Ct decis The Alabama legislature adopted a new map in twenty twenty three But a federal court again found that this newer twenty twenty three map alsoso likely violated section two And the Supreme Court let a ban on the use of this map go through by declining to block the order But they did not rule on the map itself. So the court appointed a special master to draw a new Alabama house map to use going forward In twenty twenty five, following a trial, the district court officially ruled that Alabama's twenty twenty three congressional map did in fact violate Sction two of the Voting Rights Act Finding the map was, quote, an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabama's voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way. unquote Importantly, the Supreme Court had yet to rule on the actual twenty twenty three map itself. after the district court's ruling in twenty twenty five Alabama did appeal to the Supreme Court. But they delayed consideration until after the Louisiana case As we know, that ruling effectively nullified much of section two of the Voting Rights Act establishing that intent of racial discrimination must be shown, not just discrimination as an effect in the drawing of voting districts. But after that ruling, Alabama asks the Supreme Court again for a quick appeals decision before the state's scheduled primary and to put the lower court's order barring the use of the twenty twenty three map on hold considering their recent ruling in the Louisiana case. And on may eleventh The Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency shhadow Docket appeal vacated the order, blocking the use of the twenty twenty three district map and sent the case back to the lower court for further review in light of the Louisiana ruling. So That's a lot b Remember that the district court already ruled that the twenty twenty three map intentionally discriminated based on race, the very requirement set by the Supreme Court's Louisiana ruling So when the district court reconsidered the case this past week They found that the Louisiana decision only strengthened their original ruling. that the Alabama GOP map was intentionally discriminatory and dilluded black voters This is pretty much what Sortimer wrote in her dissent. when she argued that there was ote unquote no reason to send the case back to the district court because that court had already concluded that Alabama quote, violated the fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of black voters in Alabama constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of and unaffected by any of the legal issues discussed in the Louisiana case, unquote. So that's essentially what happened. That's essentially what the district court found The three judge panel also rebuffed opposition to the court ordered map in Alabama on the basis that it bears a similarity to the map at the center of the Louisiana case