It Could Happen Here Weekly 167

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.

00:00:03
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation 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.

00:00:27
Speaker 3: Welcome to tack it Up and hear a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. I'm your host, Bio. Long so long ago, in a galaxy far far away, we talked about the collapse of the US Postal Service and the absolute horror show that's been inflicted on postal workers. When we last left our intrepid heroes, things were not great. They have continued to be not great. And with us to talk about this entire shit show is bad Mouth. He's a letter carrier and for it Worth and Tommy Espinoza, who is a former letter carrier and former union steward for the Post Office Union. That one. Yeah, look, it's like I got up at seven am this morning. It's up and that locus. I got up and get it. You're getting tired, Via, But both of you two, welcome to the show, and I'm excited to talk to you both.

00:01:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great to be back.

00:01:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for having us.

00:01:21
Speaker 3: Yeah. So all right, let's start in a place where many things start, which is to say, the nineteen seventies, the full crow upon which history pivoted. So one of the things that we talked about the listeners sort of the last episode is that post office workers are not legally allowed to go on strike. This is sort of nonsense, but it also doesn't mean that it's never happened. Oh, by the way, is this we're abut to talk about wildcat strike disclaimers? No one here represents a union there speaking of their individual capacity, et cetera, et cetera. None of this is legal advice. I do I do I have any more caveats that we usually say for these things. That's roughly all of them. Yeah, but did you want to talk about sort of the last time that things kind of looked like this and what happens.

00:02:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, tell me you want to take that one.

00:02:10
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, going back to the nineteen seventies, the working conditions for letter carriers were so bad that most of them couldn't afford the cost of living. They found themselves in a position where they are working for a quasi federal position and are finding themselves on welfare, struggling just to find the means to get to work, oftentimes having to work a second job, if they even have time for a second job. Because the Post Office has and still is very good at skipping around a lot of labor laws. I think nowadays people probably work around sixty hour weeks. I think probably at a minimal around fifty hour weeks, especially around the holidays. And it's not just letter carriers, this is people inside of the distribution centers, inside of the warehouses. Things were not good. And on top of the actual working conditions themselves, the environment was incredibly toxic.

00:03:13
Speaker 1: There was a long history of abuse.

00:03:15
Speaker 5: You're dangling people's livelihood over their head, care like holding a carrot over them, you know, and it really pushed people to an edge. You saw a lot of violence on the workroom floor, not only from supervisors but from carriers that just snapped.

00:03:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a time of great disparity.

00:03:37
Speaker 6: Yeah, the thing with the Post Office is Tom was mentioned and they dangled a carrot, but there's never any goddamn carrot. It's all stick. It's supposed to be a carrot and stick, it's all stick. There's no carrot there. Management in the post office is just trying to get you to move as fast as possible and cut corners, and that erodes safety, it erodes service, and it just a toxic, horrible, horrible and vironment. And so back in the seventies, before the wildcat strike, it was illegal then, just like it's illegal now. The NELC National Association of Letter Carriers Congress called all the shots like we had some collective bargaining rights, but not full collective bargaining rights. But like back then, adjusted for inflation, starting wage was fifty thousand a year roundabout, and it topped out at about sixty eight thousand dollars adjusted for inflation, and that took twenty one years to get to that point. Yeah, so it's pretty wild and like very similar to today. Now starting wage adjusted for inflation is just over forty thousand dollars before taxes. So we're making even less money now than we were before that wildcat strike, right, And a couple other real familiar things like you know on popular wars, rampant inflation, you know, Yeah, every time you turn on the radio or TV, there's some lunatic politician that you can't stand hearing about.

00:05:03
Speaker 4: Yeah, time is a flat circle.

00:05:06
Speaker 6: But Vince Sobrado, who was an organizer out of New York City, the ANOC didn't strike all over the country.

00:05:13
Speaker 4: It was New York and Chicago and San Francisco.

00:05:15
Speaker 6: It was some major hubs, right, and Vince Sobrado came out of that and we won in that strike one collective bargaining rights. Now, the thing we gave up, and it was a trade off, so we have a no layoff clause, so they can't lay us off.

00:05:31
Speaker 4: But we gave up the right to strike.

00:05:33
Speaker 6: Making sure that there wouldn't be another wildcat strike.

00:05:37
Speaker 4: Right.

00:05:37
Speaker 6: So that's kind of why our hands are tied in that sense. Now, if we have an impasse our with our negotiation, and like we get a tentative agreement and we during the ratification process vote that down, now we can either try and go back to the bargaining table or it gets brought in front of an arbiter basically an impartial judge, and they'll have a panel. The post Office will pick two, and they then ELC will pick two, and then I think there's one impartial that's supposed to be impartial between that. I believe that's how the arbitration process works. We got to prove our case in front of impartial arbiters instead of going on strike.

00:06:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so, as we sort of mentioned before, one of the things about the post office, it's it's similar if people remember the rail like the rail strike that didn't happen, where there's all of these hoops you have to jump, you'd be able to go on strike. And that's because again, like rail workers, postal workers don't operate under the normal sort of National Labor Relations Board like framework. Right now, admittedly there was a very good chance that it like in like seven months, we don't even have that. No one has that anymore. But you know, things are as we are right now. Yeah, it's it's I think things are going good, but the as things are going right now, let's get into the current tentative agreement, and I guess we should actually we should roll this back a little tiny bit. People who haven't listened to these episodes before, can you explain what a tentative agreement is right.

00:07:00
Speaker 5: So a tentative agreement is effectively the first draft. When you are going through and negotiating, you will reach a contract where management and the union kind of agree and they put it before their union members. And the idea is that your union members are able to vote whether or not this tentative agreement passes. And again, like that nof was saying, if it gets rejected or if it gets turned down, then it goes back to the drawing board, or we get an arbitrator, and it goes through a lengthy process. Our specific contract has been under negotiation since before I.

00:07:41
Speaker 1: Was in the Post Office.

00:07:45
Speaker 5: The amount of back pay that they're going to have to pay on some of these races is kind of insane, and I imagine that a lot of people won't see it for a long time.

00:07:55
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's what a tentative agreement is.

00:07:57
Speaker 5: A lot of people think that it's a bad thing to go back to the drawing board, or a bad thing to be negotiate or be put before an arbitrator. I largely think that is a myth. If you think about any sort of negotiation, the first the first offer is never the best one. I think a lot of people are just afraid that somehow you would end up giving more than you're getting. And I think that's just the way that the rhetoric has gone for unions lately, and I guess I need to adjust that a little bit, because the Teamsters, even like the Service Workers' Union, they're all really doing well. The Communications Union, we're in a little bit of a different age, but a lot of the Post Office is old heads, military veterans, that kind of sort who will just come from a little bit of an earlier time when the labor movement was really starting to plant their feet on the ground.

00:08:54
Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of them are still dealing with I like most of us are the hangover from the Reagan years. Yeah, right, so they're all terrified of union stuff. Even though they love the union and they're in the union, they're very distrustful of it. And they don't think that we can ask for what we deserve. They think we need to ask for what they think we can get based on the ship that management is saying, because they're again still shell shocked from the Reagan years and all the anti labor stuff.

00:09:23
Speaker 3: And that's that's how a profound impact on most of the unions that survived that period and a lot of them didn't, right, which is which is you know, part of why you get people who behave like this. But on the downside is it means that you get handed a lot of deals that absolutely suck. But do you know what else absolutely sucks? It's the products and services that's for this podcast, the probably don't I don't know. We are back, so let's talk about what the tentative agreements that y'all are being asked to sign is right now?

00:10:12
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, so it's been I think we're coming up on six hundred days since our last contract expired.

00:10:19
Speaker 4: Jeez. Yeah.

00:10:19
Speaker 6: Yeah, there's people that just want their back pay. So even if the back pay is dog shit, they're desperate because inflation is eight percent across the country in some places, right, and like people are just desperate for that chunk of money. That delaying process feels very very intentional.

00:10:37
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:10:38
Speaker 6: So the tenetive agreement comes out around five hundred days after negotiations we're supposed to have started, and there's all sorts of nonsense going on during then, but we're getting promises like it's going to be a historic agreement, We're going to get significant raises. We're going to go to an all career workforce, which, by the way, we don't have right now.

00:10:56
Speaker 3: Hey, can you saw what that is with the way? Yeah?

00:10:58
Speaker 4: Uh okay.

00:10:59
Speaker 6: So in every other trade you have an apprenticeship program, right, so when you get on the job, you wet behind the ears, you're brand new. You are automatically career, you are automatically paying into your retirement. You're automatically getting the regular benefits everyone else is. In most trades, you're paying half the dues that the journeymen are paying, and you are considered a full employee.

00:11:21
Speaker 4: You're the new jack.

00:11:22
Speaker 6: You're getting all the shit jobs, but you are a full employee. The Post Office has a position called the City Carrier Assistant, which, on paper and how they'll tell you sounds like an apprenticeship program, but it's really more like they took an apprenticeship program and an unpaid internship and jammed them together. Because these kids are coming in and I'm not even kids. I'm forty years old. I started as a CCIA of forty years old. They're coming in making less than twenty dollars an hour. They're not considered a career, so they're not paying into their retirement. You have got all the same union protections, Your benefits are super low, you get five days of annually the year and no sick time. Like it's it's yeah, it's a meat it's a meat grinder.

00:12:05
Speaker 4: So that was a big thing.

00:12:06
Speaker 6: And it creates a whole third tier because we already have two different, two different tiered wage system which sucks enough, and anyone that pays attention to labor that drives a huge wedge between workers and it crushes solidarity at kneecaps a union, and now with the CCA position in this non career workforce, it's created a whole third tier.

00:12:25
Speaker 3: This is one of the things that the UAW is fighting for. It's like, is eliminating teering systems all together, because if you're actually trying to get a functional union and make people's jobs better, that's the thing that you do. And having a having a third tier yeah not good, extremely bad.

00:12:42
Speaker 6: Yeah exactly, And it's it's it's because they've adopted sort of this Amazon model of doing things where they just have this burning churn situation where like Amazon Bezos said that he doesn't want anyone working for Amazon for more than like.

00:12:53
Speaker 4: Two years, Yeah, if they have these.

00:12:55
Speaker 6: People constantly and they're constantly burning through them, and they never have to pay full benefits, they never have to pay into their retirement, they never have to pay them more than twenty dollars an hour, and they can just get you to work your ass off and burn out and quit within two years.

00:13:09
Speaker 4: As people retire, their labor costs go down. It's evil. It's absolutely it's some Jack Welch hateful bullshit.

00:13:18
Speaker 5: So touching on that, if people are really quitting before they reach a point in their career where they're educated and can stand up for themselves or stand up for each other on the workroom floor, that's one of the major reasons that our union is failing. And like you said, you use the exact example that I would have. The Amazon model is working really well. If you can just make it so that people are so miserable they quit their job before they understand what their rights are, how they can protect each other, what even the contract says on the basics of when can you call out, when are you required to come in? Can they send you home early without your pay? That's massive. And while we were talking about the conditions of the nineteen seventies and how long it takes you to get to the top of the pay scale. This third tier actually increases that time by sometimes three or four years. I've known people who have been ccas for three or four years. I don't think I've seen beyond that, but it wouldn't surprise me. What this does is it means that before you go career, you're spending all this time. You're effectively a fully trained, full employee, completely capable of doing everything that's required of you. You're just not getting any of the career benefits making a minimum wage. And on top of that, the way our benefits work is it does come out of your pay chash Sheet's not like other jobs where it might be a separate package or already calculated. In for instance, a lot of the trades, they'll say, hey, you get twenty three an hour, but the reality is you're making around twenty nine or thirty because you're not paying into your health.

00:14:57
Speaker 1: Insurance or your retirement or.

00:14:59
Speaker 5: Anything, that you're effectively making less than the minimum wage. You're almost paying to go to work as a CCA. Then just to be Yoda and told that you're not going fast enough, even though there's no street standard. But that's that's getting into a little bit of nipicky key contract and stuff that language.

00:15:19
Speaker 6: Yeah, so yeah, that's one thing that they're promising was to get rid of that non career workforce. So this ta comes out and after hearing that we're getting rid of the non career significant raises, it's going to be historic for us. What they offered us was one point three percent Jesus Christy.

00:15:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and this is something for if you were in a union and you hear your leadership say the words historic contract, you are screwed. That agreement is going to suck. I remember on this show, literally live and recording right before they're supposed to be the Teamster's ups strike, right Like, I'm literally on the episode with two of the union people and we get the text of the contract in the middle of recording, and we get the thing with it is this historic contract, and we're like reading it in the middle the episode was like, wait, this fucking sucks. Shit. It's like, that's that's how you know you are duped when you get the historic When they start pulling out the historic contract thing.

00:16:12
Speaker 6: Yeah, you'd think if you're making six figures a year, you could understand how to buy a used car and know that you promise low and deliver high. Like I don't understand how making six figures a year. They haven't figured that out. But yeah, so in this contract, one point three percent, and that's enough to piss anyone off because that drops about the same time that we all see the longshoremen getting going back to the table because they didn't get sixty percent, you know what I mean. Yeah, I'm surprised more people just didn't call in sick because we all got this news on the worker and floor and I was like, did you see this shit? I know people that quit that day, you know what I mean, Like, yeah, it's it's wild. So one point three percent. They're keeping the city carrier assistance to nin career workforce. They're removing some of our union protections right like it used to be.

00:16:59
Speaker 4: You have twelve six the hour rule.

00:17:01
Speaker 6: You don't have to work more than twelve hours in a day or sixty hours in a week. You can say I can't do this, I'm going home, and the union could protect you. Now if you are a CCA, or if you have signed up to do overtime and they tell you to stay sixteen hours you have you have no choice.

00:17:18
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ. So so so you you gave up things for a one point that's that's a one point three percent raise. Is like like that that's the kind of thing that you get if like I don't know, say, like you got like some unbelievable concession package somewhere else, maybe conceivably you would take that, or maybe maybe it's a thing where like you're you're you're like a nurse and your problem isn't pay. Your problem is you're working like two million hours a week. But like that's that's a that's a you got concession somewhere else, the kind of thing, not a we gave up stuff for like the worst rays you've ever seen.

00:17:55
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it makes it makes you think about, like what was there?

00:17:58
Speaker 4: What was their first offer?

00:17:59
Speaker 6: Like it's been over five hundred days of negotiations, what was the first offer? We got to put the fuel in the mail trucks ourselves?

00:18:07
Speaker 4: Like you know what I mean, Tom.

00:18:11
Speaker 6: Do you want do you want to talk about what the tenet of agreement doesn't address?

00:18:14
Speaker 5: So the tenetive Agreement, we spoke about the Post Office's strategy for dealing with our grievances or how to combat the union last episode, and so for the people that didn't listen to it or just need a refresher, the Post Office has found this extremely effective strategy that if they just don't agree at any point in our in our grievance procedure, which is if they violate the contract and we want to be made whole, whatever that may look like, they can just keep on saying no and push it up to arbitration because there is a grievance procedure that ends up with a third party intervening as well, and if they push enough of those grievances up, we have a major backlaw on this process because our final resort is now just the standard of operation. And what that means is that there's nothing to force the Post Office to comply with the contract. If someone wasn't paid correctly or was missing a whole day of pay, got sent home, or was put on emergency placement, which is a process where they say you did something dangerous and so they can take you off the clock. It could be months or even a year before your case is even looked at. They do have a process, of course, where they try and prioritize it, but it's obviously not working.

00:19:38
Speaker 1: The other thing that the contract doesn't really touch on is.

00:19:41
Speaker 5: Our uniform situation, where the companies that make and manufacture the uniforms for our letter carriers and actually for all the positions in the post office are effectively trying to sell you a shirt for like eighty dollars, or the most egregious one is like your win your Parka is close to four hundred dollars and your balance that you're you're giving is I think three eighty FM.

00:20:08
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's been one.

00:20:09
Speaker 4: Oh, it's up to four ninety nine.

00:20:11
Speaker 6: But the rain trench coat, just the raincoat is four hundred and sixty five dollars and you have to get it through a vendor, so you can't even pay them money to do that. Like a pair of polyester pants that's going to fall apart in two months, ninety five dollars.

00:20:28
Speaker 3: Oh my god.

00:20:29
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, it's it's wild. It's wild price gouging.

00:20:31
Speaker 6: And they they were going to address that, and what they did was they increased are they increased our uniform allowance by thirty five dollars, which is like three pairs of socks from those magazines.

00:20:42
Speaker 3: Great incredible stuff.

00:20:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's it's wild.

00:20:46
Speaker 3: Someone should dig into who's running that company and like who they're working with to get those contracts, because probably a fun story there.

00:20:55
Speaker 5: I think it's like four out of five of the approved manufacturers or the distributed are owned by the same people.

00:21:02
Speaker 3: So oh great, okay, Yeah, I'm bequeathing this as a gift to it. I know there's a bunch of journalists. You listen to this, go go do that story. I guarantee you'll find some unbelievably unhinged stuff.

00:21:14
Speaker 5: And a quick shout out to any letter carriers that are listening to this. If you don't use your entire allowance, look out for the ccas, look out for the PTFs, the non career and the fresh faces on there. If you don't use the entirety of your uniform allowance, to the way that they view it is that they can give us less money, So use all of it. Don't protest by not spending that money. It's not even yours, so spend it. Give it to someone, do something, you.

00:21:41
Speaker 6: Know, Yeah, get the new jack in your office a fucking raincoat, because like I tried, to do the math on it. For winter gear for a place like Minnesota, to get all the winter gear and your summer gear, it's going to take you four years of uniform allowances to get.

00:21:55
Speaker 4: All that gear. Jesus right, it's ridiculous. Yeah.

00:21:58
Speaker 3: And like it's Minnesota, right, Like I'm from Chicago, so like it is, it is slightly warmer in Chicago and you get wincheles in negative forty here, Yeah, and like Minnesota is much worse. So like that is that that is not like optional stuff. That is the difference between you having hypothermia and you not.

00:22:17
Speaker 4: Have Yeah, no, exactly.

00:22:20
Speaker 6: And and god forbid you want to buy a pair of shorts as well, because Minnesota, Minnesota summers get over one hundred index.

00:22:28
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, speaking speaking of ways to not die in Minnesota summers, here are some product and services that will probably not help you with that, but maybe they will. And we are back.

00:22:50
Speaker 6: One of the other things that Tom touched on that this agreement doesn't address is he talked about the non compliance and the grievance backlog, but also just the toxic work environment, which we've talked about.

00:23:02
Speaker 4: And it's so bad.

00:23:04
Speaker 6: The whole reason we have The trope of someone going postal is usually because someone's bullied to a point where violence occurs. They either take it out on management or my own manager in my first year got in a fistfight with one of the clerks.

00:23:18
Speaker 3: Jesus correct.

00:23:18
Speaker 6: The post office has lost grievances because management was threatening to shoot an employee. Any letter carrier would have been fired for that immediately that manager got a letter of warning.

00:23:28
Speaker 5: Yeah, we have a joint statement on violence in the workplace, which I think you were about to get into the leg. Yeah, they're just not complying. It's a very one sided thing. Effectively, management has qualified immunity.

00:23:41
Speaker 3: Great, great, your managers are also cops. It could attack you. Incredible, incredible stuff from the post office.

00:23:49
Speaker 6: Yeah, and then there's a bunch of wage theft too. I mean personally, I caught my own manager putting in all the ccas for two hour lunches because the ccas are new and don't know what they're doing and they don't know check their time all the time, putting us all in for two hour lunches and then told me, tried to pretend to me, oh, that was just an automatic computer error. Whereas if we take a thirty one minute lunch. I have my phone blowing up being asked why I'm not moving and delivering the mail. But you guys manage to accidentally miss a two hour left.

00:24:19
Speaker 3: Come on, don't lie.

00:24:20
Speaker 4: You don't gotta lie.

00:24:21
Speaker 6: You don't gotta lie to be my friend, Like, come on, and then and then there's other places around the country where we the NLCS one grievances where management was making CCA's work in the dark, delivering mail till like seven thirty pm and clocking them out at four o'clock in the after business. All right, so they got people out there working for free. It's it's and we have to catch we have to catch them doing that. Yeah, they're never going to own up to it that they all watch their payroll. The management structure at the post office, it's like the TMU version of Game of Thrones. They're all nasty, they're all backstabbing each other, and like, the nastier you are and the more willing you are to screw people, the higher up you go in management at the post office, Like it's disgusting.

00:25:06
Speaker 5: So there's even more convoluted ways that the management finds to effectively steal from the employees, and one of them huge problem is changing the metrics on what a route looks like. And so they can alter the times of hey, how long you were in the office packing your truck when you got back to the office and started unloading and cleaning, And so what they do is they make it look like the street time took you, let's call it five hours, and you were in the office for four hours. That way, they can make a route look smaller than it actually is and have an excuse not to hire another person, which makes it so that this poor carrier who was assigned to this route now has a ten hour day, eleven hour day just by default on a light day, on a regular day.

00:25:58
Speaker 1: This is a really big problem for the rural carriers. Their contract is a little bit different.

00:26:03
Speaker 5: Effectively, they get paid by the job, not necessarily hourly, or that's the case for a lot of them, and so if you're adjusting their times, they're going to be paid out for an eight hour day. But you know, the route has just been stretched out through this method of just dishonest scanning and disalamant entries, and they get free labor. And I'm not even well versed on the RCA contract that's a whole other You know, there's only nine unions that go into the post office, which means there's probably nine different contracts.

00:26:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in every single one of these contracts, they're inventing new, different and unique ways to do wage theft just steal people's money, which, and it's worth noting again, like if a post carrier like broke into an office and stole the amount of money that is being stolen from them, they would go to prison forever. Right, But because it's your boss doing this, Like, the worst thing that happens to them is they have to go through a grievance procedure even though they are just literally robbing you.

00:27:02
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, and yeah, you do not fuck with the mail cops. But the mail cops the postal inspectors work for management. So yeah, and management does nothing but sit in their chair all day, sniffing their own farts, watching tiktoks, and trying to figure out how to screw people through the virtue of spreadsheets while we are all out working our asses off. It's a very demoralizing and abusive, abusive situation. So we were hoping that shit would get addressed in the tenetive agreement and none of it was. So there's all sorts of problems with that. I'm with building a fighting an elc and we are basically a bottom up more of a radical reform caucus.

00:27:46
Speaker 4: I am out of Fort Worth, but like it's started.

00:27:49
Speaker 6: In Minneapolis, and you've got people in Chicago and New York and Naples, Florida, and San Antonio, Hawaii, all over the country who are basically, we are tired of we are tired of our leadership being in bed with management or at least doing things where they look like they're in bed with management. We've been putting on vote no rallies all over the country. You've probably seen some on the news.

00:28:11
Speaker 3: And this this is vote no for the tight devisse. Yes, this is this is this is a vote to send your bargaining reps back to the table with the demand that we can't take a deal that sucks this much. That's what a vote no thing is. Yeah.

00:28:22
Speaker 6: So yeah, we've been trying to get letter carriers to vote no on it. That's so we've been doing the vote no campaigns so we can vote this shit down and get it in front of a judge. Because once it goes into arbitration, there's a lot of fear mongering things, Oh we could lose this, Oh we could lose that. Oh we could lose this. But like Mia, you you said it yourself. These are all concessions. We're not getting anything for giving up all these things. One point three percent is what we're getting.

00:28:43
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, like one point three percent is the kind of raise that like in a normal functioning union is like that. That's like a company's opening agreements that both you and the company knows you're not going to take. Yeah, like it's a joke.

00:29:00
Speaker 6: Like that in and of itself would be a major concession to get something else.

00:29:04
Speaker 4: But we're doing all these concessions to get that.

00:29:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the win quote unquote.

00:29:10
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:29:10
Speaker 6: So the thing is the Postal Reform Act says that we are supposed to get paid comparatively to a comparable company in the private sector. So an arbiter is going to look at that and try and look at ups UPS or Amazon, and the post Office is really trying to push it towards Amazon, which is why I try to talk to every letter carrier i know to support and get some crosscraft solidarity with Amazon, because without going on too much of a rabbit trail the whole you know, a rising tide lifts all ships, and one union in another industry helps everyone in every other industry. And trying to get people to understand that. But like you compare our contract to UPS and UPS they top out with I think their benefits package tops out one hundred and twenty four thousand a year and it's about, you know, five.

00:30:00
Speaker 4: Or eight years to reach top scale. Ours tops out.

00:30:04
Speaker 6: With this tentative agreement at ninety three thousand a year, and it still takes us thirteen years to get to top steps. Christ, that's not comparable, right, yeah, yeah, no, not at all. So I'm not afraid of arbitration. I'm hoping we get this in front of an arbiter, because unless that arbiter is completely crooked, I can't see him saying, well, you guys deserve one point three percent.

00:30:25
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:30:26
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:30:26
Speaker 5: So when I first saw badmouth talking and what his posts were on Reddit and stuff like that, I got really excited because I remember when I was speaking to my local president and talking to the stewards in my area across like a couple of different stations, the kind of big question was what do you do when the union breaks your heart? And I guess the answer is everything that badmouth has just talked about. You build a better one. You remind people that there is an alternative. Everything started somewhere. And if you go to his first episode on the From Aid to Arbitration podcast, he has something called the CCA Corner where he's educating the newcomers, the fresh faces. He's just talking about horizontal power. And I was listening to that episode before we had spoken. I got so excited just to hear what this this person was up to.

00:31:20
Speaker 6: You know, I try to sneak in as many anarchist shit without saying I'm an anarchist. I try and sneak as much of that shit in as I can. I get old heads who have a Trump hat on talking about anarchist talking points.

00:31:33
Speaker 4: It's it's funny as fuck to me.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: You know who won't break your heart?

00:31:38
Speaker 3: Frogs support this podcast if you don't fight them with therefore canoffee. Is there anything else you want to talk about with arbitration or should we move on to the impending doom of the postal Service? Yeah?

00:32:04
Speaker 6: I think I think the arbitration there's a whole lot of fear mongoring and shit. I think anyone paying attention to things we can't get a worse deal is the main point there, and that's that's the whole point of the vote no campaign is to just tell people, hey, dude, we might as well go down swinging, like we're not going to get a worse deal than this.

00:32:21
Speaker 4: But that's that's pretty much it for arbitration.

00:32:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, so let's let let's let's move on to the future of the post office, which I want to take a second to mention that, like, Okay, look like I am not someone who has any respect for the people who built the US government. However, if you want the US government to like exist, right, the postal service is something that was deemed so important that it is like establishing the postal service is in the main body of the constitution. Now, freedom of speech right, and like the right to free association, that's not in the main body of the constitution. That is a fucking amendment. Right. The people who built the American system thought that the postal service was a more important thing to make sure to have in the main body of the constitution that set up the modern version of the government.

00:33:08
Speaker 7: Right.

00:33:08
Speaker 3: They thought that shit was more important than like you're right to have freedom of assembly, like you're right to not literally be grabbed off the street and tortured, which is like the Fourth Amendment right. So like, you know, in the scale of priorities of like how important is the postal service, Like that's how important people who set it up thought it was. And those people were not very smart and like a bunch of racist slave voters. So I would argue it's actually more important than they thought it was because they're you know, I mean, like obviously their priorities are completely out of whack.

00:33:40
Speaker 6: But like I am not a founding father, stand but the post office was actually invented by Benjamin Franklin, who I don't believe owned any slaves, and.

00:33:49
Speaker 3: Yeah he was really racist, but yeah, oh yeah, I mean like I know, I know that, I know that part.

00:33:55
Speaker 6: I'm I just I don't think he actually owned anybody, but like that's it's a yeah yeah, and it was started I think fifteen years before the Constitution was even written.

00:34:07
Speaker 3: Oh no, he did, he he he he did own a slave as a young man, and I think freed him.

00:34:15
Speaker 6: You know, I was trying to get the racist bastard a little bit of a win.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: But like we're finding this out live on this So yeah, he did for his early life and then became an abolitionist later, which is still bad.

00:34:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's uh. You know, I'm glad you came around eventually, I guess.

00:34:37
Speaker 8: I don't know.

00:34:39
Speaker 3: Look, we're finding this out live on the show. Oh my god, that was a lot of time of him owning slaves. That absolutely I.

00:34:47
Speaker 4: Take that was why I take back my critical support.

00:34:50
Speaker 3: Critical uncritical opposition.

00:34:56
Speaker 6: To hell with Brent frank in school, the hell with b Franklin too. But yeah, we're coming in a Trump administration and stuff. And let me tell you that the situation wasn't really great under Biden either, because we have a postmaster, Lewis.

00:35:12
Speaker 4: Dickhead to Joy.

00:35:14
Speaker 6: He was put into place by Donald Trump, and you've seen they wanted to slow walk the post office into privatization since the Reagan years, right, and they're just slowly chipping away at service and quality. D Joy was connected to XPO, the giant logistics company. He had stock and I can't remember what position he held. He apparently detangled himself from that when he became postmaster. But you know, they all say that I don't know for sure. I am not an accountant, so I can't do that well.

00:35:44
Speaker 3: And like like, also I want to point out the president of the United States is issuing a cryptocurrency like that shit that sit is that shit is so fake now, like oh god yeah.

00:35:55
Speaker 6: So like Joy's also got a reputations of just being a massive job killer besides looking like a low rent spider man villain. So under his tenure, we've seen service take quality take a nosedive. And I want to talk about this stuff, and this might get my ass in trouble, but I am tired as a letter carrier who loves my job, loves saying hi to people in the neighborhood, loves walking three yards and knowing the names of all the dogs on my route, and being the face of the post office. It is so frustrating to have people blame the mail man and the letter carrier for the decline in service, because we are out there being brutalized by the Post Office, doing our best and fighting against the degradation of service. That is a top down problem with leadership in the Post Office. I wanted to outline some of the stuff that I have evidence of and have seen firsthand of management undercutting the service of the post office. They willfully delay the mail all the time. There's pictures of racks and racks of DPS. It's assorted letters and they come in trays just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and management they will order you on a regular basis to prioritize delivering packages over the mail. If it's a big heavy day and they're looking at labor hours, they will sometimes tell you to not deliver the mail and just deliver.

00:37:23
Speaker 4: The packages because the packages.

00:37:24
Speaker 6: Have a tracking number and their boss can get in They can get in trouble for that, but they can lie and hide the mail for another day.

00:37:32
Speaker 4: Like that shit happens all the time.

00:37:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it's like can just be like they can just be like hiding like your bills yep, or life social Security check yeah yeah, also your junk mail.

00:37:42
Speaker 6: Have you ever have you ever ordered something and it says it was delivered but you didn't get it, and then it shows up the next day, or it says that, oh there's a vacation hold, I didn't put this on hold, and then it shows up the next day, or you got to go down to the post office.

00:37:56
Speaker 1: To get it, or recently severe weather delay.

00:38:00
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I mean the severe the severe weather delay can happen, but I'm talking. What I'm talking about is ones where the package didn't make it to the letter carrier who's out there delivering. Because this has happened to me multiple times, and it didn't make it to me before I left the station. But because they want to make their numbers look good for their boss, they will scan it at the station as if it was delivered or as if it's a Jesus.

00:38:23
Speaker 7: Yeah.

00:38:23
Speaker 4: So because they want.

00:38:24
Speaker 6: Their numbers to look good, because their entire job is life on a spreadsheet. And so then I have to I have to talk to my customers the following day. But like it said, it is delivered.

00:38:34
Speaker 4: I didn't. I saw you, and you didn't drop it off. I was worried someone stole it. What happened. I was like, I know exactly what happened. I know what their name is.

00:38:41
Speaker 6: That's some of the service degradation. We've had people in other areas catch management.

00:38:46
Speaker 3: Throwing away mail Jesus Christ.

00:38:48
Speaker 4: Yeah, oh yeah.

00:38:49
Speaker 6: Management reprimanding carriers who follow the manual and provide good customer service, like I've been on the phone where I've had my manager call me because I was standing in one place for five minutes. And it's because I was helping an elderly woman move her garbage cans and helped her get some groceries out of her car to bring in. You know, all the stuff that you see the good mail man, the reason why people love the post office.

00:39:13
Speaker 4: Shit like that. I got told no, you're not doing that.

00:39:16
Speaker 6: And I had another customer come up to say hi to me while I was on the phone, and I just stopped to just say hi as I'm walking by, and my manager chewed me out for even talking to the person. They don't care about us, and they throw us under the bus all the time. Because if I don't deliver a package because they never made it to me and it says delivered, the customer will come and complain at the post office. Management will tell them, oh, I'll talk to the carrier. That carrier made a mistake, and it's no, carriers do make mistakes, but like this intentional degradation of service to make the numbers, that blame always goes on the letter carrier, and it is we love our job. We love our jobs we love our communities. I got like I might start crying if I talk about this too much, Like I love bringing treats to dogs, like I get Christmas cards from old folk on my route, Like I know, like I know when some people's birthdays are. And I had an old time around on my route, sat outside to say I to be every day. Suddenly he wasn't and his wife was out in the garden, and I said, where is he. Oh, he passed last night, and she starts crying. I start crying, and like I get in trouble for taking five minutes to give her a hug and talk things through for a second, like it's.

00:40:33
Speaker 4: Yeah, sorry.

00:40:34
Speaker 3: This is one of these areas where like delivering the mail is a social thing, but the thing is like sociality is the enemy of capital, and that's that's the people who are running the post office that they don't give a shit about, you know, like the actual social bonds and ties that you know that that are the thing that society is supposed to be composed of. Like they care about their metrics and them being able to make more money in them, you know, being able to advance higher in their career ladder. Yes, it reminds me a lot of the campaign against the school system, where you deliberately underfund things and then you blame the teachers for why the service is bad, and it's like, well, it is not a teacher's fault that there's like forty eight kids in a classroom, right, Like, yeah, you know. And there's also a very very similar preparatization campaign run by a bunch of Australia powerful forces. Let's go back and talk a bit about like who the people are who are doing this and what their sort of plans are.

00:41:29
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you have to joy he's doing that, and we have all of these they're starting to some of the stuff they're building these I think they're called sdnc's. It's basically they take a bunch of post offices from a metro area and then they make one big distribution hub like Amazon. Well that is adding an hour commute onto some of these letter carriers. They come in, they get to their mail truck and then they have to drive their mail truck for an hour to even start delivering. Right. It's a huge message, it's a huge fiasco, and it feels very intentional because what's going to happen when they close those facilities built by the government down and it starts to privatize. Well, what do you know, Amazon just got a new hub or whoever ends up trying to step in. That's a little conspiracy brained, but like certain fiasco's done by de Joy's delivering for America plan seem Taylor made to fail for the Post Office but work for someone else. And then also you have Brian Renfrow, who is the current president of the NLC, the one who was telling us that our tentative agreement was going to be historic, when all it does is help management. He has gone on speaking tours lying about this tentative agreement and everything he says sounds like management gave him a script. And there's a whole lot of theories on that and how when he know when he loses his position. People have running bets on what position he's going to take in the Post Office the second he's voted out.

00:43:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:43:01
Speaker 4: He's the one who's negotiated this whole contract.

00:43:03
Speaker 6: He used his position as president, He iced out everyone from the union. He's the only one who talked to the Post Office. So this this tenet of agreement is his Babe, Wait, what yep, the executive council. What yeah, he didn't tell the executive council.

00:43:18
Speaker 3: Wait, you didn't even have like a bargaining team.

00:43:20
Speaker 4: No, he had a.

00:43:20
Speaker 6: Bargaining team that were all outside contractors. He had no one from the union with him. What yeah, because he wanted.

00:43:26
Speaker 4: It to be his baby.

00:43:28
Speaker 3: That's so unhidea. That's like, I need to stop here for a second, because that's like, if your union is doing that to you, you need to understand, Like, dear listener, that is not how any of this shit is supposed to work. Yep. Like, even even a normal corrupt union will have a bargaining team that is composed of like it will have a bargaining team that isn't outside contractors, so there'll be people from inside the union who are like the stooges of like whatever sort of management click is in power. Like having them all be outside contractors is one of the most ludicrous things I've ever heard.

00:43:59
Speaker 4: You need to.

00:44:01
Speaker 3: Cutting out. That's so wild, Oh my god.

00:44:04
Speaker 4: Oh yeah No.

00:44:04
Speaker 6: And the thing is we're coming up on six hundred days without an without a ratified contract, like he has been the only one doing it this whole time, and there's a bunch of shady shit. Okay, so he's struggled with alcoholism. I have dealt with addiction. I have lost friends to addiction. I have family members to struggle with addiction. I respect anybody who is going to take care themselves. But he disappeared for something like fifty days or something, didn't tell anybody. He ghosted everybody. He ghosted everybody, and this is the early days of negotiation. People stepped in to start negotiating without him. It turns out he had gone and checked himself into rehab. But the thing is, the NLC has two fucking vice presidents. I have all the respect in the world for someone to take care of themselves. But when you got two hundred and seventy seven thousand employees livelihood, yeah, you're responsible for and you got I don't care if you got cancer, if you got an addiction problem, or I don't care what it is. If you got to step away to take care of yourself, please do that. But puts your vice, one of your two fucking vice presidents in charge. So what happens is someone steps in while he's gone, he comes back, gets mad that at them, strips them of their responsibilities. Blackballs them from the union and goes back into negotiations all by himself, which is why getting to the next point on this. At the most generous, he is in ept as hell. He is inept as hell and just the worst sort of person to be in there. At the worst, he has corrupt as hell and just DeJoy's stooge. And the thing is, we work for the federal government. Whether it's malice or incompetence with the federal government, it's usually both.

00:45:49
Speaker 4: And it doesn't matter.

00:45:52
Speaker 6: Which one it is to me, whether he's corrupt or just an idiot, it's all the same to me because I can't make my fucking rent. So expect de Joy and the Post Office to do us dirty. That's their job as management. But to have the president of our own union doing this to us is unacceptable, and like it's yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:46:15
Speaker 5: So on that note, that's one of the big pushes for the union recently has been to reach open bargaining where the membership is actually a part of it. And that's what to my knowledge, it is one of the major issues that the building and fighting and IOC or the building better union talks are going towards.

00:46:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, can you can you talk about what open bargaining is. It's a thing that should be the standards for all unions.

00:46:42
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean open bargaining is effectively the bottom up structure of having your members were even the representatives put forward motions that are open to the public and open to the membership so that you can effect tofllly ask for more or get a different variety of opinions and strategies, you know, the duality of power kind of structure. But what the post office currently has it's not open bargaining, or what postal union has, it's not open bargaining. They have their own team that they send in. They don't talk to the membership. You kind of just elect your officials and then they come back with whatever they ended up with, and they don't consult with any of their bottom line, which is problematic for obvious reasons, including this one where someone can go missing for fifty days and most of the membership has no idea. I've even talked to people. I think it was like two or three weeks ago. I went to a bar and I ran into a letter carrier from the next city over as a go did you vote?

00:47:47
Speaker 9: Know?

00:47:47
Speaker 1: And it's like, what are you talking about? He doesn't know that there's a vote going on.

00:47:53
Speaker 3: Is out there?

00:47:54
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, but yeah, yeah, I guess. I mean, like the main objective we want to do, I'm sure we're running at a time.

00:48:02
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, sorry.

00:48:03
Speaker 4: I could talk about this shit for days.

00:48:06
Speaker 3: I mean I do.

00:48:06
Speaker 4: That's pretty much all I do anymore. Like Tom was saying, the building of fighting ALC and pushing for the vote, no thing.

00:48:14
Speaker 6: The main thing that we're wanting is coming onto shows like this and getting the public perception of what the letter carrier deals.

00:48:20
Speaker 4: With what's going on.

00:48:21
Speaker 6: Because this Trump's coming in, they're going to be trying to privatize it like they always do.

00:48:25
Speaker 4: That's already been in the works.

00:48:27
Speaker 6: It's important that the public knows this degradation of service is the point of it, and how how can the public sort of support our fight so we can keep the post office.

00:48:38
Speaker 4: So I wanted to just share a couple of links.

00:48:40
Speaker 6: If you're a letter carrier and you want to get involved with reforming things from an electoral end, there's the Concern Letter Carriers and you can go to Concern Lettercarriers dot com. They're going to be running in twenty twenty six to get rid of Renfro. If you are impatient like me and you can't fucking wait that long, and if even if you're not a letter carrier, you can see how we're fighting with the building of Fighting NLC, which is more of a radical, bottom up reform caucus. If you want to get involved in that, or you just want to kind of get updates from people who aren't going to bullshit you, you can go to Fighting NLC dot com to check that out. Oh, Tom, did you want to talk about the ANLC Legislative Action Center.

00:49:23
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we touched briefly on last episode. The NLC actually can't really use a lot of the money and funds from the union itself to lobby or to push Congress or anything like that, so there are separate organizations. There are facets of our organization that do that. You can find that at NLC dot org. Specifically, they do have a link where you put in new zip code and it gives you the appropriate Congress member to write a letter to and really push them on what to do.

00:49:52
Speaker 4: There.

00:49:53
Speaker 5: You can also donate to their fund if you see so fit and are able to do so.

00:49:59
Speaker 6: Yeah, at that legislative action thing is actually pretty cool because you don't even have to call. They'll have pre filled out things that you can just click, enter your email and it'll do it for you.

00:50:09
Speaker 4: So it's a real quick snap.

00:50:11
Speaker 6: It's the easiest way to harass or your congress person, aside from drunk dialing Ted Cruz, which is my favorite.

00:50:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll have links to all that. We'll have links to all that in the Discover.

00:50:23
Speaker 6: There's one more plug I wanted to make because all the fires out in LA right now, because you have letter carriers where the post office burned down and so did their house, and now they're reporting to duty at another post office twenty minutes away to go and deliver deliver mail to a devastated neighborhood.

00:50:40
Speaker 4: Because the thing is, when shit happens.

00:50:43
Speaker 6: Whether it's a hurricane or a fire or you know, the first people who show up are your neighbors or the punks or the punks and mutual aid in your neighbors show up. The first person you see from the government, we're federal employees, were not federally is. But the first hint of normalcy that a lot of people get is trying to just hide out and be safe and then they see their mail man walking through their fucking lawn trying to deliver it to their shit, you know what I mean. Like that's important, and we all love what we do. We love being a part of the community, and we love helping. And sorry, I knew I was gonna cry at some fucking point.

00:51:23
Speaker 4: Okay.

00:51:23
Speaker 6: So the NLCS an NLC Disaster Relief Fund.

00:51:26
Speaker 4: The public can donate to it. It's usually letter carriers. We all donate to it.

00:51:31
Speaker 6: And what happens is if your house burns down like in La right now, or if like you were devastating the fires in in in Hawaii or whatever. When that happens, a letter carrier can apply and as soon as they're approved, which can happen within a day or two, they automatically get sent like a thousand dollars from the fund to just pay for their pay for their hotel or pay for their rent a car. And then they get approved. It's not a fix all, but they'll get like they'll get another check after a little bit to help with some of their damages after they make their claim. That's something that normally it's just letter carriers giving to letter carriers. So we can all take care of each other, but like the public is allowed to donate to that too. I know there's a lot of you guys have already been talking about a lot of mutual aid stuff at the beginning of your episodes lately. I just want to plug that one as a mailman specific one. Yeah, I'm sorry for crying.

00:52:22
Speaker 3: No, no, Yeah, I mean it's emotional, it's yeah.

00:52:26
Speaker 4: That shit sucks, bro, Yeah, it really does.

00:52:31
Speaker 3: Yeah. Is is there anything else that you want to make sure people know before we head off?

00:52:35
Speaker 5: If I have one thing, it's just help your co workers. You don't have to be a steward. You don't have to be anything. Just find somebody who don't think deserves it.

00:52:43
Speaker 1: Help them too. I guarantee you that they do.

00:53:07
Speaker 10: I'm Michael Phillips, an historian, the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co author of an upcoming book about the eugenics move in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

00:53:19
Speaker 11: And I'm Stephen Monchelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers political extremism and beyond.

00:53:26
Speaker 10: Since the late nineteen nineties, Alex Jones built an extensive media empire, spreading out landish conspiracy theories from his home base in Austin, Texas. A native of the Dallas suburb of Rockwall, over the years, Jones has claimed that the Apollo eleven moon landing was fake, so too, he said was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, he claimed was stage to justify new gun control laws. According to Jones, the US government can control the weather has intentionally caused floods and other weather disasters to punish Texas and other conservative states. He has insisted that chemicals intentionally placed in American drinking water are turning frogs gay, part of an experiment by the American government seeking a way to undermine the nuclear family while peddling dubious supplements with unproven health benefits. Jones began his broadcasting career with a call in public access cable TV show, before moving on to radio and then online. In spite of his outlandish claims, in twenty fifteen, Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott.

00:54:37
Speaker 12: Now to a Texas sized conspiracy theory, sparking headlines across the country, including this week in the New York Times the theory that an upcoming Pentagon training exercise is actually part of a plan to impose martial law.

00:54:54
Speaker 3: To many, it's far fetched, but not.

00:54:56
Speaker 12: To some of the top politicians in the Lone Star State.

00:55:00
Speaker 11: The conspiracy theory Jones described on his Info War show spun in even wilder directions. The Army troops participating in the jade Helm military exercise, panicked right wingers said, would turn on the local population. Guns would be seized from private citizens, and local walmarts would be converted into vast holding cells where those opposing Obama's plan to seize dictatorial power would be imprisoned. According to these sorts of theories, these accusations went viral, and a military spokesman got waylaid by angry questions At a Bastrop County Commissioner's Court meeting held near the Central Texas staging area for jade Helm. Armed men in trucks patrolled in Bastrup County and surrounding communities, and a private group called Counter jade Helm spied on the movement of troops and military vehicles while they quizzed residents for any intelligence they may have gathered on the impending alleged coup d'eta.

00:55:54
Speaker 10: The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far right political leaders were willing to pander to Jones and his elk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor US Army troops near Austin.

00:56:09
Speaker 7: We're playing a pivotal role of government, and that is to provide information until people have questions.

00:56:17
Speaker 10: Texas Senator Ted Cruz pledged that he would demand answers from the Pentagon about the military's intentions, and said he completely understood the widespread paranoia.

00:56:27
Speaker 3: You know, I understand the.

00:56:28
Speaker 13: Concern that's been raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Hell.

00:56:32
Speaker 3: We have seen for six.

00:56:33
Speaker 14: Years a federal government disrespecting the liberty of the citizens, and that produces fever.

00:56:40
Speaker 10: Suffice it to say, the Obama administration did not overthrow the state government. The intense outrage and fear generated over army combat preparations might have seen perplexing to those outside of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic and pro military. However, seething distrust of liberal elites is a lucrative business in Texas. Alex Jones built a fortune of two hundred and seventy million with his Internet show and sales of dubious health and survivalist products advertised on those broadcasts. This is nothing new south of the Red River. From the beginning of its history, the state has been an incubator for outlandish and occasionally not completely unreasonable conspiracy theories.

00:57:24
Speaker 11: After Texas violently separated from Mexico in eighteen thirty six, white Texans spent the next decade fearing their southern neighbor, a nation that saw the Texas Revolution as illegitimate and wanted to regain control of the breakaway province. Meanwhile, those same white Texans viewed the African Americans they enslaved with suspicion bordering on dread, knowing that their black captives desperately wanted freedom and might use violence to liberate themselves. This created an atmosphere of uncertainty and distrust that fed conspiracy theories of all sorts. After their rebellion against Mexico, Texans won to become part of the United States, but they were forced to spend almost a full decade as an independent republic because of well founded suspicions held by American abolitionists that the Texas Revolution was a part of a plot to add a slave state to the Union.

00:58:15
Speaker 10: A decade later, the tide shifted and Texas was hurriedly annexed in eighteen forty five after widespread rumors gripped Washington d c of a British plot to an next Texas and converted to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery. In the eighteen fifties, even prominent Texans like Sam Houston flocked to the American Party, also known as the know Nothings, that claimed the Pope had ordered Catholics from Ireland Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to take the country over and hand power over to the Vatican Panics. O were suspected rebellions by the enslaved, gripped Anglo Texans in eighteen thirty five, eighteen thirty eight, eighteen forty one, and in eighteen fifty six went perhaps as many as four hundred African Americans held in Bondage and Colorado County in south central Texas apparently plotted to rise up against their white oppressors and battle their way to freedom. In Mexico, where slavery had been abolished.

00:59:13
Speaker 11: Eighteen sixty, construction workers carelessly tossed matches into a pile of wood in Dallas during a hot, drought ridden summer. The blaze that resulted destroyed much of what was then only a village. Immediately, suspecting that enslaved arsonists had set the fire as part of a planned revolution, whites in Dallas tortured and whipped almost every enslaved person in the county in search of scapegoats. Eventually, they hanged three African Americans and set off what would become known as the Texas Troubles. Fires broke out across the state, and each got blamed on black suspects and their supposed white abolitionists. Instigators often men from northern states. As one historian put it, white Texan enslavers decided it was better to quote hang ninety nine innocent men than to let one guilty pass. Acting on little evidence, mobs lynched as many as eighty enslaved African American men and thirty seven accused white abolitionists. By the time the panic burned out in September.

01:00:11
Speaker 10: A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of eighteen eighty six and the rise of the Populace movement, which called for the government seizure railroads and telegraph lines, in addition to a global panic amongst the well to do about anarchism. After a series of bombings in Europe and even the United States from the eighteen eighties to just after World War One convinced economic elites in Texas that revolution was in the air. The ku Klux Klan, which in its original incarnation during reconstruction served as a goon squad to keep newly freed African American labor under tight control, came to dominate cities like Dallas in the nineteen twenties, where one and every three eligible men were members.

01:00:54
Speaker 3: Of the KKK.

01:00:55
Speaker 10: At its peak, the KKK charged that both Jews and Catholics were conspired hiring to control the world. Texas politicians like Representative John Box of Texas, in a column in Henry Ford's anti Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent, charged that Jews had manipulated the Congress. They add loopholes to American immigration laws passed in nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty four in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire into the United States as part of a scheme to undermine American society.

01:01:26
Speaker 11: As oil millionaires and billionaires built their wealth over the twentieth century, they became a force in conspiratorial faw right politics in Texas. Starting in the nineteen thirties, they mobilized against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which they insisted was a part of an international communist plan to overthrow capitalism around the planet. Anti communism, anti Semitism, and hostility to the post World War II African American civil rights movement blended seamlessly in the conspiratorial imaginations of the fall right, in the lone Star State, ideas that reached a national audience in large part because of oil money.

01:02:01
Speaker 10: John Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English Department's Southern Methodist University in Dallas, in nineteen fifty one, authored one of the first and perhaps the best selling of all time, book promoting Holocaust denial Iron Curtain over America. Beatty claimed that the Jews of today were not the Hebrew heroes of what Christians called the Old Testament. Instead, they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the Kazars that converted his Judaism around the year eight hundred, too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Baty wrote Kazar's undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the Communist Revolution in Russian nineteen eighteen. After immigrating to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party, Batty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed it into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty discribed in his book as quote the historic bulwark of Christian Europe, a mere six years after Soviet and American troops that liberated Nazi concentration camps. Betty claimed that most of the victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a fraud used after nineteen forty eight to blackmail the West into political and financial support of Israel. The SMU professor urged the United States to expel Jews from the United States.

01:03:25
Speaker 11: Rather than earning him scorn. Bed's virulently hateful anti Jewish rants won him a large following his book, Iron Curtain Over America went through nine printings. By nineteen fifty three, the Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women's organization, adopted a unanimous resolution backing BAT and requesting that SMU investigate alleged communist influence on the university's faculty politics and values. Bed taught at SMU until his retirement in nineteen fifty seven, two years after a panic over allegedly read art during which the conservative Dallas Patriotic Council accused the Dallas Museum of Art of intentionally promoting quote subversive artists who were ostensibly part of communist front groups connected to the Soviet Union after.

01:04:11
Speaker 10: World War Two in the establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in China. The uber wealthy giants of the Texas oil industry, to a large degree, funded what came to be known as McCarthyism. Clinton murchison, whose son in nineteen sixty became owner of the Dallas Cowboys National Football League team, became one of the largest financial contributors to red baiting Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. In Houston, hard right organizations like the Minute Women Fought Against School Integration took over the school board firing the assistant superintendent, George eBay because he previously lived in California and Oregon, where he had nice things to say about Roosevelt's new deal in the African American freedom struggle. A math instructor got fired after he carelessly common in a teacher's lounge. They supported Adleae's Stevenson, the Liberal Democratic Party nominee for president. In nineteen fifty two and nineteen fifty six, Theston School Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things about the United Nations, while right wingers in Dallas force the City Library and the Museum of Fine Arts the demand artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of their supposed communist sympathies.

01:05:23
Speaker 3: But before we get into that quick ad break.

01:05:36
Speaker 11: One Dallas oil magnate who built a mansion intentionally designed to be a bigger duplicate of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. He used his wealth to broadcast extremist fever dreams in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. His name was hl Hunt, and he was profiled by the BBC in the nineteen sixties.

01:05:55
Speaker 8: But as well as being perhaps the most approval. The most stingy plutocrat of Texas, HL Hunt is probably the most controversial, for he is a fervent advocate of right wing some would say reactionary causes. He is against the UN, against the War on Party, against Medicare, against central government aid of any sort. He would rather Washington didn't rule the United States at all, and in his ideal land, votes would be distributed according to the amount of taxes who paid more than most Texans. Even he is inclined to see communists under every couch and behind every curtain. To Hunt, mankind is divided into communists and constructives. His private word for anti communists, you are either for him morroganim.

01:06:35
Speaker 15: He brooks no halfway position.

01:06:37
Speaker 11: A health baddist who avoided whitebread and sugar, Hunt believed his diet of largely raw vegetables might actually allow him to achieve immortality. He also thought he had psychic abilities, lived as a secret bigamist, and published pamphlets such as Hitler was a Liberal, an early prototype of Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk. Hunt tried to create an alternative right wing media infrastructure, funding a nationwide radio program and pamphlet subscription called Lifeline that promoted conspiracy theories from coast to coast.

01:07:10
Speaker 15: Didn't time for last time.

01:07:12
Speaker 3: Let the tective class is around the world.

01:07:16
Speaker 16: Every leftist praise and cliche of the past half cent three now has the hollow ring of mythology.

01:07:23
Speaker 7: This is freedom Talk number fifty three Brendy.

01:07:25
Speaker 16: Cup is all available at the rate of three for twenty five cents from Lifeline, Dallas, Texas seven five two o six.

01:07:33
Speaker 7: I'll be back after this message.

01:07:34
Speaker 4: From our sponsor.

01:07:36
Speaker 10: The Lifeline show was hosted by a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot and broadcasts on more than eighty television one hundred and fifty radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from billionaires such mself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless. Hunt once rage at Smoot when the Lifeline hosts claimed on air that democracy was political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ, Hunt corrected Smooth, condemning democracy is the handwork of the devil in a phony liberal form of watered down communism. Hunt innovated in number of ways to alarm audiences about far left plots during.

01:08:17
Speaker 8: The last two years, hl Hunt has added another emotive missile to his armory, his league of so called youth freedom speakers, engaging young teenagers drilled to deliver three minute bursts of his propaganda to rotary clubs and Bible classes.

01:08:32
Speaker 9: Many people in the United States really don't believe that communism is a serious threat. Well, these people are in for a big shock because the communists have every intention of doing exactly what they've said they'll do, and they do not hesitate to use force and violence anytime they think that it.

01:08:52
Speaker 17: Will further their cause. Now, I don't pretend to know all the answers, but I do know that it is our duty to get out and warn others of the serious threat that we are facing. We have got to get out and tell others of the subversive movements that are going on right here under our very own noses.

01:09:14
Speaker 18: It's time to do away with this attitude. Oh, it can't happen here. Will communists bury us? Will we face fine squad as in Cuba? And will our little bitty children become slaves? Ladies and gentlemen. The answer rests in the hands of you and others like you.

01:09:37
Speaker 15: Thank you.

01:09:41
Speaker 11: For much of the twentieth century, Dallas had built up a reputation as a clean, dull, modern, and efficiently run city. By the nineteen fifties, however, it had also acquired a reputation as the capital of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, a development that historian Edward H. Miller would describe in his book Not to Country. In nineteen fifty four, Dallas elected a far right House representative, Republican Bruce Alger. Less than a week prior to the nineteen sixty presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, a pro Alger mob assaulted in spat on the Democratic vice presidential nominee and then Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Ladybird, as they left the Adolphus Hotel in downtown Dallas. Alger joined the protesters, who held signs with slogans that said LBJ sold out to Yankee socialists. Soon thereafter, Major General Edwin Walker, who inspired the deranged fictional character General Jack d Ripper, the person responsible for global nuclear holocaust in the nineteen sixty four film at Doctor Strangelove, called Dallas Home.

01:10:46
Speaker 14: I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist in doctor nation, communist subversion, and the International Commune conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

01:11:08
Speaker 11: Before filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned Walker into an unforgettable caricature, the real life Walker achieved infamy commanding an infantry division in what was then Western Germany. President Kennedy pressured Walker to resign because he repeatedly lectured soldiers under his command to vote for far right wing political candidates. He also distributed among the troops literature from the conspiracy theory promoting far right John Birch Society, and he encouraged them to join. The John Birch Society, formed in nineteen fifty eight, opposed American membership in the United Nations, which it claimed was part of a global communist conspiracy to enslave free peoples around the world. The fringe organization, established by former candy manufacturer Robert Welsh, accused all American presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Kennedy of being secret communists under the command of the Soviet government.

01:12:02
Speaker 10: The John Birch Society also saw the African American Civil rights movement as part of a Bolshevik conspiracy to divide the country, and argued that efforts of towns and cities after World War II to add fluoride to public water supplies was part of a sinister scheme to weaken men physically and make them less able to resist the radical takeover the United States. That particular Bircher conspiracy theory made a long lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across the United States banned fluoridated water today. That John Birch Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti floridation essays on The Dallas Express, a right wing website that repurposed the name of historic black newspaper that went defunct in the nineteen seventies.

01:12:51
Speaker 11: Edwin Walker's devotion to the John Birch movement cost him his military career. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert mcmara, Walker retired and moved to Dallas, where he found a friendly political environment. The national far right saw him as a martyr to Kennedy's supposedly out of control leftism, and he received financial support from fellow devotee of the John Birch Society hl Hunt. In nineteen sixty one, Walker made the cover of Newsweek as a leader of the New Right, and in nineteen sixty two he entered the race for Texas governor.

01:13:26
Speaker 7: To all victims of communist tyranny throughout the world, I send this word the hour of your deliverance is approaching. To patriots in every land Korea, China, the Ukraine, the Baltic Nations, Poland, Hungary, East Germany, the Congo, Cuba, and every other land strickened by the monster of communism. I say, for the time, lie low, preparing your hearts for liberation. Do not expose yourselves to the brutal requital of a hunster.

01:14:00
Speaker 10: Temporarily in power, Walker was a painfully dull public speaker. In the end, he couldn't bring his version of deliverance to his own state, finishing a distant sixth in the nineteen sixty two coubinatorial race. That would not prevent him and his allies from creating mayhem over the following months. He got arrested and was ordered to be psychiatrically evaluated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy after he incited racial violence during the integration of the University of Mississippi. In September nineteen sixty two, Adelaide Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador of the United Nations, would confront Walker and a model of his followers when the diplomat visited Big d on October twenty sixth, nineteen sixty three. Stevenson was shoutowed down as he attempted to deliver a un day's speech to Dallas Council on World Affairs.

01:15:03
Speaker 15: Shall we get on with the business of the meeting?

01:15:13
Speaker 19: Surely, surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas.

01:15:21
Speaker 7: Mantors, do I.

01:15:24
Speaker 11: Outside Memorial Auditorium theater, where Stevenson delivered his speech, Walker had gathered a furious gang of middle and upper class men and women who rocked his limousine back and forth while it waited to whisk him away to safety, and surrounded the ambassador when he stepped outside. When he finally returned to Washington, d C, Stevenson warned the administration about the intense and extremist atmosphere in Dallas, where President Kennedy was planning a visit meant to heal a rift between the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party in Texas.

01:15:56
Speaker 10: On the morning in November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, Kennedy and his entourage felt foreboding as they prepared for a short airplane draft from Fort Worth to Dallas. The president just examined a full page ad in the far right Dallas Morning News that featured a bold face headline welcome mister Kennedy to Dallas. The advertisement, paid for in part by H. L. Hunt's son Nelson bunker Hunt and the future owner of the Dallas Cowboys. HR bum Bright, featured accusations that Kennedy was soft on communism around the world and radicals at home, while persecuting conservatives who criticized him. The same morning, a group distributed leaflets designed like a wanted poster, with front and side photos of the President with the caption wanted for treason. How can people say such things? The President said to first Lady Jackie Kennedy, We're heading into nut country.

01:16:52
Speaker 4: Soon.

01:16:53
Speaker 10: The Kennedys would make their faithful flight to Dallas, and the President would die from an assassin's bullet shortly after noon.

01:17:00
Speaker 11: The President's murder spawned a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists. Some said the president had been murdered by the mafia, angered because they had been investigated by the president's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Others blamed Teamster's president Jimmy Hoffa, who also had been the subject of criminal probes by the Justice Department. Others suspected assassination plotters included Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had himself been targeted for assassination attempts by the Kennedy administration, exiled Cubans in Florida, angered because the president had not fully supported the attempted overthrow of Castro during the nineteen sixty one Bay of Pigs invasion, and even the Soviets. One of the more elaborate theories involved an alleged plot hatched by American military leaders and CIA agents, angered that Kennedy supposedly wanted to end American involvement in Vietnam. Finally, others said Lyndon Johnson order to hit on the Chief executive because he wanted to grab or maybe others said Kennedy died because of combination of some or all of the above, having made enemies with the intelligence agencies under his command, who he had said he would dash to the wins if they continued to do things that were against what he saws in the best interests of the United States. Quote President shot one hundred twenty nine times from forty three different angles. A satirical headline from The Onion later.

01:18:27
Speaker 10: Asserted sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences.

01:18:32
Speaker 3: William L.

01:18:33
Speaker 10: Pierre spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas. As a city student, anti communist dread and any Semitic hatred. As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society, but grew frustrated because there wasn't racist enough. He became a leading figure in the American Nazi Party at the age of forty one, formed the Neo Nazi National Alliance. Beginning in nineteen seventy five, he published in serial form us influential examples of white supremacist literature, The Turner Diaries, a novel which told the story of white nationalist revolution in the United States in the near future. This revolt is sparked by a Jewish authored law outlying private ownership of guns. The hero Earl Turner, joins an underground terrorist army the organization, which battles a Jewish plot to destroy America not just through gun control, but also through uncontrolled non white immigration and by using rock music and drugs to encourage interracial sects. At one point, to save the white race, Turner blows up the FBI National headquarters in Washington, d C. With a truck bomb.

01:19:41
Speaker 11: In the novel, racist revolutionaries then take over Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California and sees its nuclear missiles, which they later use on cities across the nation while ethnically cleansing California of non whites. They hang sixty thousand so called race traders during the day of the Rope, a phrase you may find familiar if you've ever looked at white supremacist posts online. In the end, the book's hero, Earl Turner, finally defeats the system by flying a crop duster armed with a small nuclear weapon into the pedagon.

01:20:15
Speaker 10: White nationalists have since seen the Turner Diaries as both an accurate description of the modern world and as a manual on how to win a race war. From nineteen eighty three to nineteen eighty four, The Order a white supremacist terrorist group that took its name from the Secret Circle. The fictional Earl Turner joins robbed a pornography shop, banks, and armored cars, hoisting more than eight million dollars. They later distributed to several white supremacist groups with the intent of funding a white revolution. Along the way, they assassinated Jewish radio talk show hosts Alan Berg. The Turner Diary became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled veteran in the nineteen ninety one Gulf War who saw the deadly confrontation between in the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and the gun toting branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas on April nineteenth, nineteen ninety three, as a major step and a government plan to seize firearms from law abiding Americans.

01:21:15
Speaker 11: McVay had spent years selling copies of The Turner Diaries at gun shows. He retaliated against what he saw as his government oppressors by blowing up the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Waco configuration. He used a truck bomb facing his attack in part on the fictitious bombings of the FBI headquarters. In William Pierce's novel The Turner Diaries also depicted a deadly attack on the US Capitol. Some of the pro Trump riots who assaulted the Capitol on January sixth erected gallows and livestreamed their crimes as they joked about hanging politicians, comparing it to the day of rope, Pierce described in his pro Nazi work of fiction, Stay with Us through this adbreak to learn more.

01:22:09
Speaker 10: Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of an aggressive military intervention to stop Communist expansion abroad, and with varying degrees, a commitment economic and civil rights reforms at home. But because of his assassination by the twenty first century, many on the far right saw as a martyr to the liberal deep state. Beginning in twenty seventeen, a very online far right conspiracy theory arose that centered on cryptic messages first posted on the four chan message board and then on eight chan by an anonymous person who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was a reference to the Q Clearance, which gives government officials access to high level security secrets. Kennedy would be central in the imagination of what came to be known as the QAnon movement.

01:22:59
Speaker 11: Q or QAnon developed a huge following that interpreted these confusing and often contradictory posts as actually revealing a secret global capal that included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and liberal celebrities like Tom Hanks. These people were all accused of being a part of a child sex trafficking ring in which the young victims were molested and tortured, and, in some interpretations of the theories, had their precious bodily fluids harvested to manufacture a drug known as adrenochrome, a drug that produces hallucinations and supposedly grants eternal youth. These stories resembled anti Semitic legends about Jews kidnapping Christian children before passover in order to use their blood in Manza bread, a trope or canard really that has become known as blood libel in the QAnon mythology. Donald Trump plans to conduct mass arrests and executions of these Satanic child molestors in an event called the Storm. Trump has winked and nodded to the q and On movement, encouraged believers and even incorporated some of its key slogans in imagery in speeches and posts online, such as where we go On, we go All, and as I've reported for Rolling Stone, a cult like spinoff group of Q and On believers have repeatedly gathered at Daley Plaza, the site of JFK's murder, to wait for the prophesied return of JFK and his son, JFK Junior, who both are dead, but these believers think were either miraculously resurrected or never actually died, and have been secretly working with Trump to take down the aforementioned global satanic pedophile cabal. Some believe that when JFK and JFK Junior finally reveal themselves, a sort of kingdom of righteousness will reign and good will ultimately prevail over evil.

01:24:55
Speaker 10: Q and On believers were a heavy presence during the Capital Insurrection in January sixth and q Andon banners competed with Trump and Confederate battleflags for attention, and November that first year we saw the first of the series rallies that Steve just referred to. They went to Deey Plaza, where President Kennedy had been murdered fifty eight years earlier. Over the course of many months, q Andon disciples kept returning to the site of JFK's death, some staying at a local hotel so they could be nearby when the Kennedy return happened. This was covered by Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA in November twenty twenty one. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site.

01:25:42
Speaker 20: Word on the street is that Junior JFK Junior will show up and introduce his parents.

01:25:50
Speaker 21: You're expecting JFK Junior absolutely, Okay, how is that going to happen and never die?

01:25:57
Speaker 3: Are we going to see him today? JFKG. Yeah, that's whatever. We're helping. We're hoping to hope and pray, and then after that he'll probably be the vice president with Trump.

01:26:07
Speaker 10: Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs that marginalize them from family, friends, and mainstream society.

01:26:17
Speaker 3: There was one real truth several of these people agreed to talk about. But you got to understand that most of the world is going to think that's just crazy.

01:26:25
Speaker 20: That's why half my family won't talk to me. Anymore, then will my girlfriend thinks I've.

01:26:30
Speaker 3: Lost my mind.

01:26:32
Speaker 10: With the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January twentieth, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe to the seat of power. JFK Junior won't emerge and grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will. Bobby Kennedy Junior. Bobby Kennedy Junior has insisted that Wi fi causes cancer and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV vaccines. He claims against overwhelming evidence cause autism, anti depressed since caused school shootings, and chemicals and water lead to gender dysphoria. One of these chemicals, RFK Junior insist might be an old obsession of the conspiratorial right.

01:27:12
Speaker 7: I think fluoride is a poison becauses loss IQ in our developmental injuries, and think florid is on the way up.

01:27:22
Speaker 11: RFK Junior mind You is the nominee for the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, and in a recent interview claimed that he was aided in his schoolwork through the recreational self medication of heroin. Trump has himself obsessively promoted his own sinister tales of the deep state that supposedly stole the twenty twenty election from him, and, as we have said, has co opted some of the slogans of the q Andon movement. None of this, obviously, was disqualifying to a plurality of voters this past November. So why are people drawn to conspiracy theories? First off, they provide convenient explanations that can be broken down into sort of simple logics for people who may not have frameworks for understanding a complex world. And they also provide believers sort of new family and friends as they become increasingly alienated from their original family and friends. Regardless of whatever plots they believe they have revealed. It's clear that conspiracy theorists of this sort they don't believe that history is a product of class conflict, or imperialism or the global scramble for natural resources, not ahing like that. It's not shaped by political and economic alliances between elites, or irreversible transformations and technology that render old job skills irrelevant. There's no material analysis. All of this loss, all this fear, all this terrifying disruption of what is comfortably routine they view stems from a sinister plot, a plan that is hidden tightly by a small circle of elites, sort of cartoon villains with near superpowers that control the world. And if only the right people, the sort of heroes of the story of the movie that they think that they're watching, if only those people would step forward and pull off the mask of the villains, then everything would be set right.

01:29:26
Speaker 10: These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings in sight unseen, manipulate every aspect of the world's politics, culture and finance, manipulate elections, engineer depressions, urban riots, and even hurricanes. Yet for all their cleverness, they leave just enough clues so that amateur sleuths, if they are just smart enough, can crack the code. Conspiracy theories make history and understandable contests between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes, who then feel superior because they've unveiled the mass their plan. As they discover kindred spirits, they find community otherwise lacking in their lives. Perhaps, if just enough people know about the conspiracy, they hope the bad guys will fall and the millennium will follow. That fantasy offers a simpler, more emotionally satisfying vision of the future than planning on how to dismantle capitalism or figuring out how to persuade white people, for instance, surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often from Oklahoma City to the US capital, a call for deadly action.

01:30:38
Speaker 11: And while figures like hl hunt and their operations like Lifeline maybe in the past, we have our own contemporary versions of this with roots in Texas. We now have Elon Musk who controls x formerly known as Twitter, in which he has used his platform with millions of followers to promote dangerous conspiracy theory like the Great Replacement theory, which we recorded a previous episode of this podcast about. Ultimately, we are living in a culture that swims with conspiracy theories, and for us to make our way out of the rabbit hole, we're going to need some sort of framework for understanding the world, something that can help us better understand how we got here and where we're going. And no matter what that is, it certainly won't be something as simple as believing that we just have to pull off the mask of some villain and then everything will be set straight from there.

01:31:35
Speaker 10: This is Michael Phillips and this is Stephen Monticelli.

01:31:39
Speaker 22: Thanks for listening, Hello, and welcome to It could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together. I'm your guest host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is an episode about both of those things. Not Margaret and Killjoy, but about things falling apart and putting them back together. If you live in the US, you might have noticed the things are falling apart. In the onslaught of new federal changes over the past few weeks. There is one that is both astoundingly important and also likely to disappear below people's radars because it affects prisoners, trans prisoners. Prison is the place that society puts people to forget that they exist. We shouldn't be that way, while prisons ought not to be how we solve problems as a society at all, but it is the way that things currently are. Things that affect prisoners are routinely ignored, even though we live in a society built on the idea of incarceration. It's been in the news that US trans people somehow just sort of don't exist anymore, that everyone is either male or female, dictated at birth and immutable. Obviously, this flies in the face of biological and social reality, and it's going to impact us trans people quite a bit. One group of people that it's going to impact very immediately, very dramatically, and very dangerously is trans prisoners. According to Bureau of Prison Statistics, there are currently one thousand, five hundred and twenty nine trans women and seven hundred and forty four trans men held in federal prisons, and not all of them are being held in gender appropriate prisons already. As we're going to talk about with our guests in a bit, prisoners have to go through an incredible amount of dehumanization in order to have a chance of being placed in the right facility. But now that isn't an option, and women are being moved into men's prisons. Does the idea of being a woman in a men's prison scare you?

01:34:07
Speaker 3: It should.

01:34:08
Speaker 22: It's terrifying. It's worse than what you might imagine. One trans woman prisoner who's using a pseudonym for her lawsuit going by Maria Moe, has already filed a lawsuit in federal court to stop this new regulation. She is challenging it on both procedural and constitutional grounds. The government didn't go about this in the legal manner, and to house trans women with men goes against the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, as well as the Fifth Amendments do process clause. I simply can't imagine putting a woman into men's prison as anything other than cruel and unusual punishment. The state can pretend that trans women aren't women, but the men in prison will not treat her like how they treat assists men. On January twenty first, the woman suing the prisons was told that she was going to be moved to men's prison after all of her records were suddenly changed to mark her male. Federal data says that trans prisoners are sexually assaulted at ten times the rate of other prisoners, and that's the state's own reporting.

01:35:15
Speaker 15: On the issue.

01:35:17
Speaker 22: But you know who doesn't know how to effortlessly transition to ads after saying something as serious as that, it's me, I don't know how to effortlessly transitions ads after giving you a statistic like that. When we come back, we're going to talk about how serious the situation is, but also provide just an absolute, incredible number of things that you can do at various levels of risk to support the people whose lives are about to be ruined by this policy change. Okay, and we're back. So to talk about how trans people fare in prison, I have brought on my friend with the most experienced in prison, the former political prisoner Eric King. Eric served just shy of ten years in prison for throwing a molotov into an empty federal building one night in response to the Ferguson uprising of twenty fourteen. Those were a protests that were anti police protests that started in the wake of the police killing of eighteen year old black man Michael Brown. Eric is also the co editor of a book called Rattling the Cages, Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, which has a forward by none other than Angela Davis and is worth checking out. Eric was released from the eighty X Supermax in December twenty twenty three. He walked out of prison wearing a support trans kid shirt and has been vocal about his support for us as soon as he walked out the door. So Eric, thanks for coming on. It could happen here.

01:36:48
Speaker 3: How are you.

01:36:49
Speaker 22: I'm doing really well, glad to be back, Thank you so much. Yeah, so you reached out to me about this what would you call it, like a policy change? Yeahcus to order, I guess, yeah, you know, And basically we talked about like how do we try and make sure that people know about what's happening. And I wanted to ask you, So, you're a sis man and you didn't have an easy time in prison, right as far as I as far as I understand now, I think no one gets to have an easy time in prison is one of the things, especially in a supermax, So.

01:37:23
Speaker 3: Not that easier than others.

01:37:24
Speaker 22: I guess, yeah, you were not among the people who had it easier. And as I would follow your journey through the federal prison system, it seems like you had to defend yourself against both other prisoners and also prison staff.

01:37:37
Speaker 3: Is that a fair way to put it mildly? Yeah, yes, that was what was going on. Can you tell me a.

01:37:44
Speaker 22: Bit about the experience of trans people in prison, because when you look at this executive order, it sort of implies like all trans women are in women's prison and all trans men. Actually, I literally have no idea where transmit are held. I would rather if I was a transmit I'd probably rather be in women's prison. I just I don't know what was the situation like before this executive order.

01:38:05
Speaker 19: So I want to start with saying, like, the reason I hit you up is because there's so much like horror happening this first week of like Trump's new presidency, and I didn't want this issue to get swept under the rug. A lot of times, the bigger, more mainstream issues will get the most attention. And I still remember our trans family inside, and so that's what scared me enough to be like, dude, I need.

01:38:31
Speaker 3: To talk to you about this.

01:38:32
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:38:33
Speaker 19: So when I was inside, there was not very many trans people, and they're like, correct prison, Like a trans woman should be in a women's prison, yea, a trans man should be in a man's prison.

01:38:46
Speaker 3: And that wasn't happening on the level that it should have.

01:38:50
Speaker 19: And there was a rare case like Marius Mason who had enough support, enough publicity where they were able to but most people we were stuck at their gender at birth. And so over the last couple of years, people started getting a lot more access to safe prisons. That's why I'll call them my prisons where they feel safest. Okay, so I trans women were starting to go to women's prisons, and it wasn't very many. It's not like there's tens of thousands, but handfuls. Because it is it's very hard in the federal system. To get recognized as a transgender person. You have to go through years of degrading and humiliating therapy with a prison psychologist. You have to get just horribly treated by doctors who ignore you, gaslight you, diminish, you try to push Christianity on you, and then if you make it through their brutality, then you were one of the lucky ones.

01:39:48
Speaker 3: You got to say, like, I am this person, this is who I am.

01:39:51
Speaker 19: And if you're even more lucky, you got to be transferred to a prison that would make you feel the safest and the most whole is a human And that's the goal, Like, that's the safety goal. Basically, that's where we wanted things to be pushed. That people would be recognized for who they are, they would get treated for who they were, and they would be sent to a prison that was congruent with who they were.

01:40:17
Speaker 3: And that's what's all being taken away.

01:40:19
Speaker 22: Yeah, and when you talk about the safety, I don't want to like necessarily go on at great length about how trans women suffer invents prisons, but it's probably worth talking about, like because you've described it as there's like literal sexual slavery happening in the prisons.

01:40:37
Speaker 3: Is that a fair way to put it?

01:40:38
Speaker 19: Yeah, one hundred and ten percent yes, yes, And I only speak for federal prisons. I know in some states it's different. Like in some states people are able to use like their femininity as like a power play, as a tool to keep themselves safe. And so if that, if that's an option, then great, But what I witnessed in the federal prison was the exactly opposite of that. People are getting destroyed. And if you go into a men's prison presenting as female in any way or soft anywhere, or as any type of one or any type of nonsense straight mail, you are an automatic target. And it's not like hyperbole to say that if you walked onto a penitentiary yard and you had makeup, if you had your hair long, if you had breast, if you had anything presenting as female, you will get butchered.

01:41:30
Speaker 3: Within an hour.

01:41:32
Speaker 21: You won't survive that, or you'll get by some group and you will be a site like you will be property and at the lower custody levels, it's a lot safer.

01:41:42
Speaker 3: If you're at a low security like FCI.

01:41:44
Speaker 19: Englewood, you're not in danger, though you're a danger of humiliation and being degraded by staff, but you're not going to get stabbed there.

01:41:52
Speaker 3: But God forbid you go to Victorville.

01:41:54
Speaker 19: Medium, Florence Medium, or any penitentiary, Like that's a death sentence for real.

01:42:00
Speaker 22: Yeah, do you want to talk about the worst things that ever happened to you? Do you want to talk about you? And I We did another episode on my other podcast Live like the World is Dying and talking about how to survive prison, and in it, you talked a little bit about what was necessary to kind of stand up for trans prisoners. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

01:42:24
Speaker 19: Yeah, So, like everyone needs to have like consequence awareness and they need to work on the lines that make them feel most comfortable, of course, but for me, I was not comfortable at all watching trans or gay prisoners get brutalized. And so there were times where we'd have to raise money to buy a prisoner out of sex slavery. Yeah, we just have to buy them and then basically free them or pay off whatever debt they owed so that they no longer have to be in that situation.

01:42:54
Speaker 3: And there was other times that you you have to knife up or you have to show up physically.

01:42:59
Speaker 19: And I'm not a big I of course, like I don't tolerate like anti trams bullshit in my life anywhere, and that includes in prison, and so like there are times you have to step to people and say like I am not gonna let this person have this happen to them. And if you want to continue doing this, then like we're going to take it to the next level. And I wish to god there was more prison allies that would be willing to do that inside, because once someone is shown to have like support, it makes them less easy to be a victim. If people see that like this person's trams or like other people are riding with them, they're less likely to go after them because they'll be consequences. But if they're all alone, then they're just a sitting duck. And so like we need that, we need CIS men to show up and be like this.

01:43:47
Speaker 3: Is not happening.

01:43:48
Speaker 19: I don't care what race you are, I don't care what gang you in you're in, You're not going to hurt this person, And that's stuff that we had to do. Sometimes it's scary as shit because you don't know what's going to happen.

01:43:57
Speaker 3: But you have to, like you have to live your ethics.

01:44:00
Speaker 22: One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you about it and have you on this show is because, unfortunately, I mean, prison is kind of a concentration of the worst parts of society. I do not want to say the worst people in society. I believe it has much more to do with the incarceration and the way that people are forced to be right when they're incarcerated. There's a tangent. But have you heard the whole thing where there's no such thing as an alpha male.

01:44:22
Speaker 3: Wolf in the wild. I've only heard from you, and I loved it.

01:44:25
Speaker 22: Okay, I probably said this exact same thing last time we time think activity.

01:44:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so it's like it obviously is going to bring out the worst in people.

01:44:32
Speaker 22: That one of the reasons I want to have you want to talk about this is because I think that the experiences that you're talking about, they're much more real and intense than most people on the outside are like really thinking. You know, they're like, oh, that sounds bad, but then their brain kind of turns off and they stop imagining what bad looks like. And I think that this idea that we're going to have to stand up for our ethics regardless of the risk and cost to ourselves sometimes is what it takes to create a society that is resistant to fascism. I think it's the same energy that people are going to have to do with, like no, you can't take my neighbors right in the era of ice.

01:45:13
Speaker 3: I think that's really well said too.

01:45:15
Speaker 19: I think the way, like I used to wear inside is like we can't take steps backwards. We can't relinquish any progress we've made, not a single pinch of it.

01:45:23
Speaker 3: Like everything has to move forward.

01:45:25
Speaker 19: And whatever you're capable of doing, Like not everyone's capable of like physically stepping to someone and saying like no, right, But everyone's capable of something, whether that's doing calling campaigns, organizing protests outside of prison, whether it's contacting region, contacting this person, raising money, doing whatever it takes. Everyone can do something to keep people safe. And it's the same in the free world, Like it's not different. Everyone has something to offer. But it can't be apathy. It can't be this nihilism that like what does it matter, Like they're going to do it anyway. If we do that, like we're just forfeiting the future and we're letting our our family get but butchered.

01:46:01
Speaker 14: Yeah.

01:46:01
Speaker 22: I really like that way of phrasing it. Yeah, we can't forfeit the future. How can people support transprisoners with what's going on right now? I don't know how in touch you are with people on the inside and things like that. How are people feeling, like what's the vibe?

01:46:19
Speaker 3: What can be done?

01:46:21
Speaker 19: So I assume, like when you're asking what can people do to support transprisoners? I assume you're asking what can free world people do to support those inside?

01:46:28
Speaker 4: Yeah?

01:46:28
Speaker 22: I mean you actually kind of have said what people on the inside can do, all right, which is necessary and important.

01:46:34
Speaker 3: But people on the outside, what can people do?

01:46:36
Speaker 19: Visibility is safety, Like I saw that in my bid, and I've seen that in other people's bids. And if you look at someone like Marius Mason, if you look at people like Jennifer Rose, keeping people visible and letting the prison know that, like we're not turning a blind eye to this person, like you're not going to get a free one on them that cups people alive, Okay.

01:46:55
Speaker 3: And so the more the staff knows.

01:46:57
Speaker 19: And the administration knows that like this per is looked after, the more they are likely to look after them because they don't want to be held accountable. Okay, So things like getting books into people, things like getting pin pals of people, raising money so that they don't have to go into debt, Like that's real, Like this debt stuff is serious. So making sure they have money on their books, Like I don't care what they spend it on. I don't care if they spend on drugs. I don't care if they spend it on twenty bags of coff. You're gambling as long as it keeps them out of slavery or out of that knife, like that's what matters. And then Patsy names around like it's almost as if we concentrate like all of our prisons supporting like five or six people, and then we forget that there's like fifteen thousand trans people in prison. Yeah, and so organizations like Black and Pink do a really amazing job, but like there's there's not enough, Like we need visibility like, we need to keep people present in our lives that we don't know and we might not like their charges, they might not be nice people like, they might not be cool, but we need to.

01:47:56
Speaker 3: Keep them alive. Like that's what abolition is. So visibility.

01:48:00
Speaker 22: Yeah, that makes sense. I sort of know the answer to this, but I'm gonna pretend like I don't know it at all. What's Black and Pink. Black and Pink is an organization. I know it used to be an anarchist organization.

01:48:11
Speaker 19: It might be something else now, but it's an organization that's focused strictly on supporting trans and queer prisoners. That's all they do, social prisoners, political prisoners, it doesn't matter. We're gonna find you a pinpal and we're gonna get people to write you and they do a really amazing job. Like I honor them for putting in that work because it's hard.

01:48:30
Speaker 22: And so someone who's listening, who's never considered being pen pals of the prisoner could get in touch with Black and Pink and be hooked up with someone to write to.

01:48:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you like.

01:48:39
Speaker 19: Even just like right now, someone googled black and Pink pin palm, black and Pink prison Pinpal, like it'll pop up the website. You just click on flying a pin Pal and you can find someone in your city, find someone in your state, find someone back to relate to, like to have a little biography, and you can find someone like to connect with and potentially save their life or save your life.

01:48:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, it can make you better too.

01:48:59
Speaker 22: Yeah, okay, so writing helps when you talk about putting money on people's books, like who does that? Is that something you also could go through black and pink? Should people be doing their own fundraisers? And then like working with prisoners that they've already made connections with, like how should people either plug in or start things?

01:49:16
Speaker 19: So each prison is different, like state and federal, But to put money on someone's books, you can do that yourself. You go you find out wherever prison that person's at, and you can just go to the BOP website or that prison's website. BOP is Bureau Prisons. It's for federal people, and it will just walk you through how to do it, how to send the money ground from Walmart or how to do the JPay and put it on through your credit card, and you can do it like if there's an ABC in Erica's Black Cross community near you, you can fundraise with them. If there's any like books through bars or abolitionist groups near you, like you can and should fundraise with them to raise awareness. But you don't have to, Like everyone can do this on your own, Like this is a single person job. Yeah, but it's better if we do it as a community.

01:50:01
Speaker 22: Well, the way that I fund raised is that I have advertisers that interrupt me talking about anti capitalist things.

01:50:09
Speaker 3: And here's one of those interruptions.

01:50:11
Speaker 22: And I'm gonna go ahead and donate my pay for this episode to exactly what we're talking about. And here's ads they are not donating. You can think of whatever you want about these ads, and we're back okay with this new executive order, Like how are people feeling either inside or people who are doing prison abolition work, or like how crisis does this feel?

01:50:42
Speaker 4: Like?

01:50:42
Speaker 3: What's going on? I can't like speak for ever. It should quel like a ten out of ten.

01:50:46
Speaker 19: Yeah, like this is a carceral genocidee real, this isn't a rasure of an entire people. So like, if you're not at a ten for this, like you either do not care or you're not understanding how serious the prison system is.

01:50:58
Speaker 3: I've talked to a couple homies inside.

01:51:00
Speaker 19: I have to be really delicate because I'm still on probation, but those people understand that, like the mood is turning dark. Okay, they see inside that like when fascists come into power, it empowers everyone else below them to be brutal because they can get away with it now. And so these people that were already monsters under the most liberal of prison director are now getting told by the president that they do not have to respect this person's entire life. And so it's a very serious situation. We've got a non binary person about to go and name Casey Goonan, and they got sentenced for allegedly fire bombing some cop cars and support with Palestine, and I talk with them on a weekly basis, just trying to prepare them because like right now, where they're at is a jail and they haven't really experienced the prison yet, and so it's all about like getting them ready for like here are potentials, like here's what they could do. But it's dark in there, like the Nazis are celebrating, and that includes the ones with badges especially.

01:52:00
Speaker 22: Yeah, that makes sense. What kind of support felt the most useful to you in other prisoners. He talked about this a little bit, but I'm I'm like curious about like you talked about, like visibility, are protests outside of jails? Do they do they make people feel like good and welcome or does it make the guards cracked down on everyone? Like I know that there's this you know, habit of noise demonstrations every New Year's and what kind of stuff felt good, and what kind of stuff felt good but scary, and what kind of stuff was just annoying? Like I don't know, I'm just trying to find more stuff that people can do.

01:52:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, the noise demos are cool, but they're performative.

01:52:34
Speaker 4: M M.

01:52:35
Speaker 19: It's more for the people that are doing them than the people inside.

01:52:38
Speaker 4: M hm.

01:52:38
Speaker 19: But like, let's say you're a trans person out of jail and there's thirty five people outside waving your banner. That will get you respect inside, get people to say, oh, what the hell.

01:52:47
Speaker 3: Is going on with them? Okay?

01:52:49
Speaker 19: Yeah, like that is that's serious to where you can build up a rep if someone's already in prison, that's you'll probably get them fucked up and put in the shoe.

01:52:57
Speaker 3: That's what happened to me.

01:52:57
Speaker 22: If there's a noise demonstration with your name, yeah, yeah, be delicate how you do it?

01:53:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, because that's what put me in ad X. Oh shit, so that's a real that's a real double edged sword, right.

01:53:07
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:53:08
Speaker 19: They use that as the as the thing saying I was the leader of Antifa because I got people to come out and protest for me.

01:53:14
Speaker 3: So I got pulleyt. Bel Chapo.

01:53:15
Speaker 22: We shouldn't tell everyone that you're we have to keep it on the DL that you're the leader of Antifa.

01:53:22
Speaker 3: For real. We dropped the ball. I know. Wait, I've been told I'm the leader of Antifa. You're my leader? Oh okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, I'm more reagional leader.

01:53:33
Speaker 19: The things that help the most, like in a real life situation, are the things that provide mental safety and something to do. Okay, so books, magazines that gives you something to do, like empower yourself and pass the time and stay out of the way. Money helps because then you can do crafts, you can paint, you can do art, you can sell things, you can do crochet. That stuff helps, and then letters obviously like that gives you someone to talk to. It people are actually putting thought into the letters, and I always encourage and I always will for as many people as possible to on a daily or weekly basis, call that prison, call the prison, no matter what prison, state, federal, county, and demand to speak with the warden, the captain, the warden, secretary, the lieutenant, the head of psychology, and demand to know how is this person doing? What are you doing to keep them safe? We're hearing this in this what is going to happen to our family? That makes a difference. Okay, if you know a lawyer, pay the one hundred and twenty dollars an hour to have them do.

01:54:33
Speaker 3: A legal call.

01:54:35
Speaker 19: That way, the prison sees this person has a lawyer protecting them. They don't need to know that. It's just a one time call. Yeah, but that legal call, just the wellness check is what they call it. Let's that person get word out about what dangerous stuff is happening. But it also forces the prison to recognize that they might be protected by legal system.

01:54:52
Speaker 3: Okay, so these things help.

01:54:54
Speaker 22: Yeah, what's the master plan here for how we're going to respond to this executive order? Because obviously we're not necessarily in a position to immediately reverse this order and get women put into women's prison, which is a crazy thing to have to say, we're not going to be able to get women put into women's prisons, but is organizing with a local group. You create a group and you basically like figure out who the local trans prisoners are in your area and make sure that you're communicating with them and that they're getting wellness calls from lawyers and basically like just making sure that the prison knows that people are paying attention to the fact that there's now women in the men's prison.

01:55:33
Speaker 19: Is that that's a soft version of what we should do, Yeah.

01:55:36
Speaker 3: Fair enough.

01:55:37
Speaker 19: There's other versions that are yeah, okay, there's the other version that like I wish people would do. Yeah, there's a version where we do BDS but for every single company that's benefiting from prison labor, yeah, and say, as long as you let this transgender hate go on, we're not going to support your business. There's boycotting, there's putting people on the road so that the cops can't show up to their jobs.

01:55:55
Speaker 4: Uh huh.

01:55:55
Speaker 19: There's protesting outside warden's houses, there's protesting outside governor's houses. If it's for state prison there is tangibly putting your body on the line. There is sabotaging cop cars that go into the prison, there is barricading the entrances. There's a thousand things we can do to say, if you heard our people were hurting you, yea, whether it's in your pocket, whether it's in your car, whether it's in your daily life, whether it's annoying you. We can find things to do if we care enough. And we saw people do it for Palestine. And I don't think transgender lives are less important than Palestinian lives. Yeah, it has to be an equal thing in my mind. Yeah, but the subu sid's really great too. That's like that's daily stuff.

01:56:31
Speaker 22: No, No, but you're right, and it's like it's funny because it's like, in my mind, it's so hard to ring the alarm bells when all of the alarm bells are ringing, and everyone's kind of ignoring alarm bells right now. I mean, I guess the answer is that we talk about it like this, but like, how do we make sure that people actually listen to the alarm bells that are happening right now? And I think part of it is being really unfortunately brutally honest about what it's like to be a woman in men's prison.

01:56:56
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't think people understand it all.

01:56:58
Speaker 19: And yeah, there's all this misinformation too, Like you'll hear these like fascist talking points coming out of liberals' mouths to where like well, I don't want my tax dollars going to like pay for their surgery, or I don't want some man just sneaking into a woman's prison saying these transgenders we can rape everyone. And these are like the same scare tactics and like misinformation that's used for every single, like every single repression you've ever seen. And it's our job to confront those head on and call them out. His lives, show show the real information, and it's our job to continue to just force people to recognize that this is a dangerous and real situation.

01:57:36
Speaker 3: We can't let this entire group.

01:57:38
Speaker 19: Of people be destroyed, because like, if you're going to turn your blind eye to transgender people, you're going to do it to gay people, You're going to do it to women, You're going to do it to black people, and then it's just you, and then no one's going to protect your stupid ass. We have to as or as I have to as assist man. We have to keep bringing this bell. We have to make people listen.

01:57:57
Speaker 22: I mean as a as a not currently in prison and trans women. Like one of the reasons I think this almost happens. I mean it happens because the cruelty is the point, but like it's terrifying. You've actually experienced the thing that's terrifying. It is terrifying the idea of going into prison in the United States, especially maximum security prison, potentially especially men's prison, both as a man or a trans woman. I wouldn't want to be in men's prison, and I don't.

01:58:23
Speaker 19: Even want to compare it, by the way, Okay, it's not comparable. Okay, Like if I didn't have antique attachment on my face, I could walk into any prison in the country and be like, Oh, there's just a white guy. There's just a white roll. Yeah, have no problems. Yeah, a transgender person. There's a single place except for a protective custody yard, where they can walk in and immediately feel safe. Yeah, it's the exact opposite. Everywhere they go is fight or flight. The scariest moment you've ever had your entire life. Point four to seven, all day.

01:58:49
Speaker 4: Every day.

01:58:49
Speaker 19: Yeah, picture someone breaking into your home in the middle of the night, in that terror you get. They have to walk into a new prison every single time and face that terror every single day. Yeah, it's not comparable at all. It's scary as shit.

01:59:01
Speaker 3: No, that's fair.

01:59:02
Speaker 22: Like to be honest, like I think about and this is like maybe more honest than I'm usually am on this podcast. Like, you know, I don't do as much frontline activism as I did. And part of that's like, oh, I'm like aging and I have other work that I do, And part of it is like I came out as trans, you know, part of it is like I never liked the idea of like because I always was trans and the idea of like being surrounded by only men was just viscerally terrifying. But now in particular, like it's just such a it's a mind fuck. It's terrifying, and you know, I feel like one of my main roles is to try and help people be like, look, we're in this together enough that you should be scared, but you should get through the fear. But it's like the fear of prison is like such a I mean, it's part of the reason that people say, like, no one is free is till everyone is free, as long as there is a single person in prison, you were not free because your freedom can be taken away from you at any point, and that fear of prison it's funny. Okay, I'm almost done with this rant. You know, people have kind of like figured out at this point that certain branches of Christianity will use the fear of hell to force people to be good by their definition of good right. And it's a scare tactic. It's terrorism. It is like a you know, you better behave or infinite suffering awaits you. But then even the people who are critical of that haven't necessarily wrapped their head around that. The existence of prisons, especially the existence of punitive prisons, like the sort of theoretical perfect model of the Norwegian prison or whatever, where you're just sort of separated from society, which I suspect is not actually I suspect Norwegian prison actually kind of sucks. But the American prison system is a prison system that exists to make you on the outside not feel free, like because it can be taken away from you and you can be thrown in prison.

02:00:46
Speaker 19: That's my rant, Yeah, well, I mean, you're absolutely right, like that is the entire goal is to make sure that the community walks the government line, because if you don't, this is what will happen to you. And when people pull like the nonsense of like well, if you're not committing crimes, you shouldn't worry about it, Like they are not looking at how like arbitrary crimes are. Yeah, they're not looking at how quickly something can become a crime, or how quickly something that wasn't a crime can be portrayed as one. And the trans struggle, like trans people should not have to be on the front line. Again, no point should you or any of our trans family ever have to like put their freedom on the line, Like that is that's a privilege role, Like that's our role, my role, and my boss shouldn't have to get arrested for transliberation. Like they should be safe, like they should be able to feel comfort and warmth. You should be able to feel that safe and warmth and love, Like black people shouldn't be flighting the black liberation pipe. That's that's white people's flight. Trans people should not have to put their vulnerable lives on the line for this struggle if we really believe in in the liberation struggle.

02:01:50
Speaker 22: Yeah, and it's hard because you also want to like while also not wanting to like lead that struggle. Right, Like, I think that like white people putting themselves on the line for black liberation is like super important.

02:02:00
Speaker 3: But then obviously you can get into there's the hero shit and trying to take a leadership.

02:02:03
Speaker 19: Yeah, do the David Gilbert role, be a soldier how they need you, and help and fight how people actually.

02:02:11
Speaker 3: Need you, not how you think it should be done. Yeah, totally.

02:02:14
Speaker 22: Well, any last words for our audience around this particular issue.

02:02:20
Speaker 19: Yeah, Here in Denver, Brenn Rose's Legal Center, that's who I work for. It's a transgender ran civil rights law firm. We're about to put forward the trans Bill rights here in Colorado to guarantee safety. And I bring that up to say that not only is there direct action and protest we can do, we can also try to weasel into the legal system.

02:02:40
Speaker 4: Yeah.

02:02:41
Speaker 19: There's a thousand ways we can fight these motherfuckers, and we've got to use every single one of them.

02:02:44
Speaker 4: Yeah.

02:02:45
Speaker 19: And I have nothing but love and solidarity for every transgender person alive anywhere and I'm with you, and we're going to get through this.

02:02:53
Speaker 22: I hope we are going to get through it, because even as individuals we might not, right, But that's as it's true about being alive, right, Literally, none of us are going to get through being alive alive right. At some point that's going to stop working for us, and they can't get rid of us. We have always been here, we will always be here as long as there are humans that are going to be trans people, they're going to be queer people, they're going to be All of the identities that they're trying to destroy cannot be destroyed, even if us as individuals might But again, we weren't.

02:03:26
Speaker 3: Going to get out of life alive anyway. That's what I hold on to.

02:03:29
Speaker 22: I don't know about everyone who's listening, but the thing that I hold onto is that just literally I was like, well, I wasn't.

02:03:33
Speaker 3: I'm not immortal. You know, it's got a time limit.

02:03:37
Speaker 22: Yeah, And all we can do is to say, go back to one of the first things that you said, we just kind of can't compromise our ethics, you know, like there's like balancing acts right where you have to think, like, well, I probably shouldn't do something where I like while out and get myself killed and accomplish nothing. Fight to win, yeah, exactly, and some of fighting to win is knowing when not to fight and things like that. Right, but but not and secretly you're just actually doing it at a cowardice way. You actually have to be strategically being like where and when should I engage in what ways? And there are so many different ways that people can engage. Yeah, thanks for coming on, And do you want to talk about your book?

02:04:14
Speaker 3: So rather than the cages out right now?

02:04:16
Speaker 19: It's with ak Press and it is a oral history of the political prisoner movement hold from the mouths of those prisoners. It covers like fifty or so prisoners from every movement, Black trans Our Elders are more recent anti fascists. And it was a beautiful way not just to hear about like oh I fought for this, but what was my life like inside?

02:04:39
Speaker 3: What did I experience?

02:04:40
Speaker 19: What gave me joy? What gave me hope, what gave me sadness? And it's a way to see the vulnerability and humanity of those inside. And I think that's really valuable right now and here soon my ADX book is coming out on them press. Oh cool, so I'll be I'll be hounding you for that here soon, for that coverage.

02:04:56
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, Wait, well what's that book callor about.

02:05:00
Speaker 19: It's gonna be called a clean hell, and it's gonna be about how I want it trial, because no one does that in the Feds. Zero point zero eight percent of people win in federal trial. And then how I got sent to the federal supermax and there's no books out about the supermax, there's none. Well, and so one of your homies has the inside scoop.

02:05:18
Speaker 22: Yeah I got Yeah, you were just an undercover journalist, just a real undercover solitary confinement.

02:05:27
Speaker 3: So had Josh Davidson is helping me edit it.

02:05:29
Speaker 19: Josh Davidson from rather than the Cages, who did also certain days.

02:05:34
Speaker 3: So it's seemed been a really great project, Carlso awesome.

02:05:37
Speaker 22: All right, Well, people should check out both of those things and take care of people inside. And I hope that we'll have you one again soon.

02:05:44
Speaker 3: Yay, thank you so much.

02:06:06
Speaker 13: It could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis, and yeah, it's happening. The past few years I've been writing about how the religious right has been trying to roll back trans rights, take away gender affirming health care, and essentially remove trans people from public life. And the day that I'm writing this, President Trump just issued an executive order aiming to ban gender affirming health care for everyone below the age of nineteen in the United States, with promises to weaponize the Justice Department and alter the national Health guidelines for gender affirming care. And unfortunately this is just the start. But this won't be a wallowing in the doom and gloom episode, nor will I be laying out the fool proof solution to get us out of this predicament. Instead, we'll be hearing from two people who are trying to do something to affect change in the physical world. Last month, Mia and I talked with Neha and Cassie, who are organizers and baristas with Starbucks workers Unite It, and they also co facilitate that union's trans Rights action committee called Track.

02:07:17
Speaker 3: And specifically, the topic of this episode is how.

02:07:20
Speaker 13: To use union organizing as a way to fight for trans rights and secure access to gender affirming healthcare, which is unfortunately an increasingly critical issue. We've already had conservative states like Tennessee pressuring private insurance companies to drop covering gender affirming care by blocking insurers from contracting with the state's medicaid program, basically holding it hostage. And now with the federal government threatening gender affirming care and seemingly more and more restrictions kind of on the horizon, working outside the state and not relying on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid will only become more and union organizing is one way to do that. A union contract, union infrastructure, and the collective resources of you and your fellow union workers can help protect trans people in the workplace and get us the things we need. If you already have a union at your workplace, you can get more involved and fight to prioritize trans rights. And if you don't have a union, you can work to secure access to gender affirm and care through unionizing your workplace and having healthcare protections as a core part of your contract. For more on that topic, I'm going to play the conversation between my fellow union member Mia and Neha and Cassie from Starbucks Workers United, and I'll occasionally pop back in to provide some context. Here's Cassie.

02:08:46
Speaker 23: When you fight for a collective bargaining agreement, a contract between union workers and their employer. You can fight for gender affirming care to be included in the healthcare that's provided, and make sure that that healthcare is afforded and actually usable by the people working there, and that their wages are adequate to cover out of pocket expenses, including travel expenses if you live in a state that's coming under threat.

02:09:11
Speaker 13: But it is not just healthcare that is under threat right now. Just days into office, Trump already started to roll back Biden era federal discrimination protections. Last Monday, the Trump Badman sent a memo ordering a freeze to all federal grants, loans, and aid, requiring a sort of audit to ensure the recipients of those funds use the money in a way that quote conforms to the administration priorities unquote, and not to promote quote dei and woke gender ideology unquote. On Tuesday, a judge temporarily halted the order, and on Wednesday the White House provoked the directive. But this clearly demonstrates what the new priorities are for the Conservative government, and they we'll most certainly try this again, probably in a more targeted, discriminatory fashion, to limit the general backlash. But even as the government starts openly allowing discrimination or even encouraging it, discrimination protections is still something that unions can write into their contract.

02:10:19
Speaker 23: Having non discrimination language in a contract that covers gender identity is a really critical way to improve not just for yourself, but then also we talk about these things like hiring discrimination. If you get that kind of language in a contract at a union job, that's going to help everyone who comes after you. Because additionally, as a union you have the mechanism of enforcement of a grievance and an arbitration procedure. Right, that's sort of, you know, the critical in addition to obviously all the kind of actions you can perform. And you know, we can talk about what things might look like without the NLRA, but for now, we have grievance and arbitration procedures still. And in states where there are legal protections against employment discrimination for trans people, like here in California, the bar to defending yourself legally is obviously a lot higher, including financially, than defending yourself through a grievance procedure at a union job.

02:11:17
Speaker 14: Right.

02:11:18
Speaker 23: A grievance procedure at a union job is way more accessible to the average working person than hiring a lawyer and going through a legal system that is totally stacked against you and in favor of the wealthy. Having a union to defend you, you know, with the collective resources of your union that you're part of, and having your shop steward or you be a shop steward and filing those grievances yourself. It's so much more accessible for regular workers to get enforcement when they are discriminated against. And that's obviously not only relevant for trans people, but it is certainly relevant for trans people.

02:11:53
Speaker 13: Now, if you don't have union organizing experience, this could all seem a little intimidating, even if you already have a pre existing union at your workplace. MIA has done a whole bunch of episodes on unions and labor organizing on this podcast you could certainly look to for more information and a bit of encouragement. In twenty twenty three, Neha co founded TRACK, the Trans Rights Action Committee, which is a subcommittee of the Starbucks union that was started to help advocate for trans rights within the union and share information about the challenges trans workers were experiencing. We asked Neha about the process of getting this focus on securing trans healthcare through your union to be something that the union collectively fights for the way that our union.

02:12:41
Speaker 15: Started focusing on trans healthcare as one of the core issues isite we weren't organizing around. And all started with a conversation with like a regional staffer here in Oklahoma. I have like a regular check and call with my staffer, and this was like two two and a half years ago, and he was just like asking, you know, what's going on? What are you concerned about? And I was like, well, I'm having some issues with like accessing health care, and he not heard like how difficult it was for like trans people to access healthcare and Starbucks. He wasn't aware of like how expensive it could be. And as I started talking to him, he was like, hold on, let me like set up a meeting with some other people. I think they need to hear this too. So then we have like a follow up meeting with more like staff and other organizers. I talked about these issues again, and one thing led to another thing, and they ended up encouraging me to form a subcommittee with their union for trans workers to kind of like build community for us and connect us, but also hear more stories from trans workers about the struggles that they were facing, specifically in accessing healthcare. And so that's kind of how TRACK started. And it's been really moving to see how over the past like two three years, this went from like an issue that was affecting like a minority of a minority of workers, right, Like, it's not like every single work at Starbucks is trying to like have facial combinization surgery or anything like that. Right This issue that was affecting like a small step set of us ended up becoming like one of the biggest issues we were organizing around. It makes me really emotional when I think about like how much my union coworkers and like my comrades like actually like fucking care about trans people. Right of kind of like how TRACKS started and how we started to organize around trans healthcare specifically.

02:14:47
Speaker 23: It's been a focus for us for a long time. Also in part because the initial you know, our public bargaining proposals that were released early on when we first formulated our demands in included improvements to gender affirming care at Starbucks.

02:15:04
Speaker 3: And part of that's because there.

02:15:05
Speaker 23: Were trans people involved in writing those initial demands right, and you know, Neihaw was involved nationally in the campaign and had the opportunity and the encouragement to start track.

02:15:22
Speaker 3: You know, we have to be part of it.

02:15:23
Speaker 23: I think is on some level, you know, the most basic prerequisite for everything that came after is because trans people have been involved with this campaign from the beginning. We do have so much support and solidarity from our coworkers and from our fellow union comrades, regardless of whether they're SIS or trans, and I think part of that is because we've really showed up and done the work. This again goes to that kind of like false narrative of there's like some kind of contention between workers' rights and trans rights. It's like trans people have been super motivated to get involved in this camp pain and fight for the rights and benefits for every worker at Starbucks. Other workers have seen that, seen the way we've been involved and dedicated, and that's given them the sympathy and solidarity to stand by us for an issue that affects us very you know, directly and somewhat narrowly compared to a lot of the other things we're fighting for. So yeah, on some level, I think it comes down to unions are a place where trans people can get involved in political life in a way that's hard to do in other parts of American political life. And you get to build that solidarity, and if you're there at the table, you have a chance to highlight the issues that are important to us. And if you're fighting for everyone else, they're going to want to fight for you too.

02:16:45
Speaker 13: Track's logo says trans rights are labor rights, a phrase one of Nahe's co workers came up with to express the idea that even if your state becomes an unsafe place for queer and trans people, trans people will still fight to ensure that their workplace, their store, is a safe place for any trans person who works there. As the functioning of the state and the federal government becomes more and more alienated and distant, or in many cases, increasingly hostile to the likes of you and me, one of the few ways we can still exert power over our lives is through unions, regardless of whether you live in Portland, Oregon, or Oklahoma City, and specifically, as access to trans healthcare becomes more and more of a growing issue, this is becoming more of a core issue itself. That you can organize around and can actually build a union around.

02:17:40
Speaker 23: Lots of different struggles have been highlighted in our campaign. You know, we have really made racial justice a major priority as well. I mean, obviously economic justice is at the core of any union struggle, but you know, we're really invested in making sure all workers are included in this movement and their specific concerns are represented as well as our general shared concerns. And as more and more things get taken away at the level of federal politics and state politics in many places, people will be looking for recourse. It's like, how do I get back the stability, the protections, the dignity, the power that I've lost, particularly if you know some of these folks are not super democratically accountable. People will be looking for how they can build power and how they can find security when the state is not providing it and when the state's actively undermining it. Actually, and unions are one of the truly critical, irreplaceable answers for protecting yourself, for protecting the people you work with, for protecting your community, and for taking back some of the things that they're trying to take away from you, whether that's on the job protections, whether that'sanomic equality, whether that is your access to trans healthcare, whether that's protections from racism or misogynistic discrimination in your job and harassment, all of these things. If the state steps away, people should and will look to labor organizing as the answer instead.

02:19:20
Speaker 15: Our ability to build power in this way is a way that we maintain hope so that we can keep organizing for a better future. I think one of the best tools like these fucking fascist freaks have is making us feel like there's no hope. It's beating us down, it's making us feel like we have no power, it's making us feel completely disconnected from the government, our workplace, all of these different things that like exert power over us. And I think labor is such a direct way to give people that power back.

02:19:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, Morales a terran a struggle, and this is a way that you can fight there that does other things too at the same time, critically important and.

02:20:02
Speaker 13: Do you know what else is important? Being subservient to the capitalist impulse of pivoting to ads.

02:20:17
Speaker 3: Okay, we are back.

02:20:19
Speaker 13: Here is more of our interview with Starbucks workers.

02:20:21
Speaker 11: You needed.

02:20:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because things have been very bad. And one of the specific ways that they've been very bad is that there's become this framing and this has been around for a while, but it's getting sort of increasingly adopted in mainstream circles that trans rights are opposed to workers' rights, and that's just nonsense. So I wanted to sort of start there with a bit of a discussion about, well, the ways in which the trans struggle is a worker struggle.

02:20:51
Speaker 15: The trans community is like disproportionately like impoverished, like a lot of us are struggling to just pay for rent, are basic like needs, right, Yeah, I think that's firmly assumes that like all trans people are like, I don't know, rich, working, attack or some shit like that, which just is not true.

02:21:12
Speaker 3: Yeah. The actual stats, by the way, these are running from the US Trans Survey, which is the largest survey of trans people in the US. Thirty four percent poverty rate than the national number for assist people is eleven percent. The unemployment rate is eighteen percent. The US uneployment rate assists people is four percent, eighteen percent is nineteen thirty six great depression levels of unemployment. Thirty percent of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lives. The national rate is about seven percent, and those numbers are actually very misleading because it's actually much worse than that, because these demographics skew young significantly because of both the shortness of our life expectancy and how often we get killed. And also there's more people who are realizing that they're trans now than there ever has before, So those homelessness numbers are we are racking up a rate of homelessness that is four times higher than the regular rate, and we're doing it in significantly less years than it takes the CIS population to rack up these levels of homelessness. So things are extremely bad for trans people. Transfems make like sixty cents on the dollar of like the average American worker.

02:22:14
Speaker 23: Yeah, and I think you see that in our union. We have a lot of worker leaders who are trans. It's a noticeable obvious fact about our unions that trans people have really been deeply involved since day one at all levels of this union. And I think part of that is because Starbucks has been associated as a place of economic stability and opportunity for trans healthcare for a community that has relatively few opportunities. I mean, if you're talking about eighteen percent unemployment. Then you're talking about people who certainly are going to have difficulty getting employer provided healthcare, let alone employer provided healthcare that's going to include gender affirming care, right, And so Starbucks has been held up as an opportunity for that for a lot of people. It's obviously drawn a lot of us to the company. Many of us started working there for that exact reason, and then, you know, have discovered in many cases that it's actually not so accessible. You know, I can say in my case, it's definitely one reason I started working at Starbucks because I heard like, hey, if you want facial feminization surgery, go work at Starbucks.

02:23:27
Speaker 3: That was a community tip.

02:23:29
Speaker 23: And then it turned out that I made so little money that I qualified for Medicaid, And in California, where I'm lucky enough to live for now, Medicaid covers those things and is more affordable and accessible than the Starbucks healthcare actually was, So I ended up relying on Medicaid instead. And I think a lot of us have felt and seen that dissonance between coming to this company looking for opportunity, looking for a place that is inclusive and will hire trans workers, it says, and ostensibly offers trans healthcare, but then finding out where those gaps are and realizing like, actually it's better for me to stay on Medicaid, which is easy to do because I make so little money at this job. It takes that shine off. And I think, you know, our economic vulnerability as a group is precisely what drove a lot of us to seek improvements here. It's related to our transness, sure, but it's also like just fundamental working class issues. We need better wages, we need better healthcare. You know, that's something everyone benefits from and everyone can relate to.

02:24:34
Speaker 15: And I mean, I can also attest to the fact that I started at Starbucks five years ago because I needed to have access and gender firming care. I was coming from a situation where I came out as a teenager. I was disowned and kicked out by my family. I didn't have access to college. I was like basically on my own right, and I had no idea how I'm going to matter transision, and like older trans women in my life told me to apply to Starbucks. And it was also like one of those things where like, again, I live in Oklahoma, It's not like there's a ton of employers who are like super excited to hire trans women. Right.

02:25:17
Speaker 3: That's something I also want to highlight because I don't think people understand this at all. If there's cysts is that the level of employment discrimination is staggering. It is, however, hard if you are a sis person you think it is to find a job, it is like thirty times harder if you are trans. It's unbelievably difficult. And the promise of just like any job that will hire a trans person is a huge deal because you know otherwise odds are you walk in the door and they take one look at you and like, you know, you're fucked.

02:25:46
Speaker 15: Right, And I think that's how Starbucks kind of like advertises itself too queer and trans workers, right. And I think this is reflected in the demographic of my store. Ninety nine percent of my coworkers are clear a lot of us or trans. There's like a lot of trans women who work at my store. I actually don't even know if we have a single straight coworker. Actually, we have liked one token like diversity higher, but he literally just transfers. I think it's all gay people, but no, like all of us applied to Starbucks because like, what other options do we have? Right, And again, in my case, I applied to Starbucks because I needed access to gender froming care. And over like the five years that I've worked here, I've realized that while that benefit might look good on paper, in practice, it's hard to actually qualify for that healthcare. It can be completely unaffordable for a lot of us. Right Like, last year, I made sixteen thousand dollars in total from Starbucks, and like a disproportionate amount of that income was just going towards healthcare, which doesn't even take into account like rent or bill or anything else. Like we're struggling to just fucking get by.

02:27:05
Speaker 13: Something that Mia pointed out is that one of the few places trans people are actually overrepresented is in union organizing. Because trans people don't really have a safety net. Fewer of us can turn to or rely on family support. So union organizing is one of the ways we can directly fight for a better life.

02:27:26
Speaker 15: But the current political climate as it is, it's even scarier. I mean, Cassie was talking about not being able to actually access the Starbucks healthcare and having defined other ways to pay for gender firm and care. But I mean, we're looking at like a Trump administration that could possibly be trying to make it impossible for anyone to use Medicare and Medicaid to cover gender firming care. We're looking at state by state like healthcare vans, right. I think it's more important than ever to organize and focus on transwrites and our access to healthcare, our wages, our safety at the workplace. Where else are we gonna protect ourselves like that?

02:28:10
Speaker 13: The Starbucks union is also fighting for guaranteed scheduling and better staffing in stores, and this relates directly to a worker's ability to access health care and gender affirming healthcare. Part of Starbucks healthcare being somewhat inaccessible is that employees have to work a certain threshold of hours to qualify for benefits, including healthcare. Failure to get enough hours of work scheduled means losing access to your own health care, and this kind of reflects a more subtle form of employment discrimination.

02:28:41
Speaker 15: I can speak to this. I've heard this from many other workers. It is such a struggle just to get the minimum amount of hours to keep your benefits. I was talking to another worker who was telling me about how she had to like literally cry and beg her manager to schedule her enough so she didn't lose access to gender firm and care. And of course this manager was scheduling enough hours for other workers who weren't trans women, right, And so I've been having like protections in a contract that guarantee a certain number of hours that are scheduling. That kind of thing also makes it easier for us to maintain and keep the benefits that we need.

02:29:25
Speaker 13: And obviously this benefits all workers because everyone benefits from having enough hours to actually get the money you need to live. The Starbucks union started the official bargaining process with the company last April, and they were supposed to have their final bargaining session last December, based on a shared expectation that the contract would be closed and ratified by the end of twenty twenty four.

02:29:49
Speaker 15: So after nine months of bargaining, it's December or expecting to finish up contract bargaining. And after like a few months of like delaying and not really giving us a counter on wages or benefits, Starbucks like finally gave us a counter proposal, I mean like counter proposal.

02:30:09
Speaker 3: It was literally like a page.

02:30:13
Speaker 15: And their counter proposal was basically no changes to benefits whatsoever, and a one point five percent raise if non union stores received a raise that was less than that, And for context, one point five percent for most of us is thirty cents. So yeah, after nine months, that was the best they could do. So it wasn't really a serious like counter proposal. I mean, frankly, it was a fucking insult.

02:30:45
Speaker 13: So with less than a week's notice, they organized the biggest ULP strike in the union's history, resulting in five thousand baristas at over three hundred stores across the country going on strike on Christmas Eve. Now, this is not the kind of open ended, ongoing strike that you're probably more familiar with. A ULP strike refers to a short term strike action directly tied to an unfair labor practice, which is any act by an employer that violates a worker's legal rights, and unlike ongoing strikes, ULP strikes can happen anytime, not just during contract bargaining. In fact, the Starbucks union has utilized ULP strikes the past few years to address unfair labor practices. Part of the shared agreement to finish the contract before the year's end was to also resolve outstanding unfair labor practices by the end of twenty twenty four, which did not happen and thus the strikes. And this was a super tight turnaround to organize strikes of this scale. By having a representative or delegate from each store in the union present at bargaining, which is hundreds of workers, that provides a direct link to every store in the campaign. This was how the union was able to pull off a mass mobilization on an extremely tight turnaround. So when it's time to vote to go on strike, there's already workers across hundreds of stores around the country ready to organize their co workers and get the word out. Contacts with union advocacy groups and a network of allies ranging from campus activists to LGBTQ organizations can also help spread the word about these strikes, raise awareness, and pull more numbers onto the picket line. On more of a big picture note, once you get these sorts of structures and networks from union organizing, you also gain the actual capacity to deploy them quickly in a way that actually lets you do rapid responses to changing situations. And that capacity is something that transadvocacy just hasn't really had in a long time.

02:32:50
Speaker 15: These sites are directly connected to the broader political situation in America right. I think that a big issue that trans organizing has right now is that there's not a lot of on the ground reaching out, connecting to mobilizing people who are impacted by these policies that are like negatively impacting trans people. And so I think the kind of organizing that unions are doing right, that we've been doing this entire time right where we're speaking to people directly, where we're getting them organized, getting them involved, is really a helpful starting point for like turning discontent and turning anxiety and fear around issues into like actual action. I think it's like super essential that we have this contract. Now we're heading into twenty twenty five, we're heading into a frankly pretty fucking scary time for trans people. We need a contract that protects trans healthcare. We need a contract that guarantees better wages. We need a contract of only for the protections that it guarantees workers in terms of like safety at work and type of terms of making sure that they're not being taking advantage of at work. Right well, Starbucks offered us again was an insult. It wasn't a real counter proposal. We're more ready than ever to like finish his contract and to have something, but like, we need movement from Starbucks. We need a serious counter proposal. Thirty cents and no changes to benefits isn't going to fucking do it.

02:34:32
Speaker 13: We're going to go on another ad break and return to finish up our interview with Starbucks Workers United. Okay, we're back. I'm now gonna throw to MIA or a discussion on how union organizing can help strengthen trends. Advocacy in general.

02:34:58
Speaker 3: We're in this kind of crisis period of I don't know what you call the national trans movements, just the extent that it exists, where the advocacy orgs and the legal strategies they've been pursuing are not working. We're losing in the courts all the time. Their electoral strategy of kind of bearrying themselves to the Biden administration has failed, and I think this is a moment where we need a new plan. And this is as good of a plan as I've ever seen. And I think one of the things that we're going to see, we're going to need to see and we're literally just going to have to do over the next few years. I mean ideally over the next couple of months, because we don't have we don't have much time until these people take power. Is more sort of you know, not just intra union coordination of organizing a transworkers, but is organizing trans workers across different unions and trying to figure out how we leverage our power, like more broadly to you know, protect ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to be free. Yeah.

02:35:59
Speaker 2: I think.

02:36:01
Speaker 23: That's something we're still building our capacity for that in this union, but we definitely do have relationships with other trans union activists and organizers. We're affiliated to Workers United, which is affiliated to SCIU, So obviously that's kind of the most direct and easiest way for us to get in touch with other trans folks that are in the labor movement, get support, get feedback, get ideas, and share in turn what's been working for us. But it is a capacity we want to build out even further because we are going to need that solidarity between and among labor unions in order to form a coherent response. I mean, as you're saying, the response hasn't been working. The kind of problem solving we're seeing from a lot of politicians basically amounts to sidestepping the issue, pretending it doesn't exist. You know, maybe not throwing trans people under the bus explicitly by actively supporting our elimination from public life, but certainly not standing up and defending us. And unions are one of the only ways that working people can come together in large groups and pool resources for political activity. And we know there are a lot of problems with how many unions currently do that. But for those of us who are you know, very committed to struggle for equality, that's not going to compromise and throw some group under the bus. We understand that we have to get involved and be part of labor in order to improve how labor does politics in this country. If we want people to stand up and defend trans rights and defend trans healthcare, and defend our ability to exist in public life.

02:37:46
Speaker 3: Then we have to, like we have to be the ones to do it. We just we have to do it.

02:37:51
Speaker 23: And getting involved in your union is one of the only accessible ways that trans people are going to be able to build that kind of political capacity and find allies. We have an opportunity here because you know, to do a version of Jijik's mistranslation of Antonio Gramsci is like, you know, the old trans movement is dying in the New World's like struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters. But I think this means that, you know, you, like, literally, the people listening to this show, the people on this now, we are going to be the people who define what the trans movement is going to be going forward, right, and we have to because we have no other choice. But this also means that, yeah, we are going to be the ones who get to set the tone of what we're doing, get to like strategically decide on how we're going to do this. And I think we have advantages too in the sense that there are ways in which our economic marginalization is sort of helpful in that, you know, if you look at the sort of independent unions that have been forming recently, right, even more so than in conventional unions, unbelievable numbers of those people are trans, right because you know, Okay, you're dealing with the population where it's very easy to get salts, easy to send people into unionized stores because no one has jobs anyways, and so the you know the risk of you losing it is like lower because you're already taking a low wage job, et cetera, et cetera. And I think I think there's there's things about these movements and the way that we're embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements, Like the start unionization thing is not that old, right. I think we're well positioned on the sort of front of a bunch of different changes that are happening in both union organizing and in how the American working class works to build something together that can actually go back on the offensive for the first time in like a decade.

02:39:41
Speaker 6: Right.

02:39:41
Speaker 15: And I think we're at a moment where we actually have to like fight for ourselves, right. Yeah, Again, we're at a point where no one else is going to fight for us. We have to be willing to take that step and fight for ourselves advocate for ourselves. At this moment, it's up to trans people to get involved acially with the labor movement, and there's so much opportunity to advocate for trans rights, to like build up the transliberation movement in a way that hasn't been done before. I think it's so essential for us to not feel hopeless and see the potential here and get involved. I'm not necessarily telling people that, like you should go apply to a Starbucks and like convince them to unionize, but also like I'm.

02:40:27
Speaker 23: Not not saying that, you know, trans people are getting that opportunity to actually drive our own liberation, and there's just so few places in society where we get that. That's been one of the most exciting things about being part of this union for me.

02:40:47
Speaker 3: And yes, you should.

02:40:48
Speaker 23: Consider going to work at Starbucks and unionizing it. And certainly, you know, to directly plug a little bit. If there are Buristas in your audience, they absolutely should go to our website. I think there will be a link like in the description of the episode or something. Go visit our union's website, get in touch with an organizer, and start organizing. I know it can like sound daunting in theory, like what does it mean to start organizing my workplace? But there is a template, there's a plan.

02:41:17
Speaker 3: You know. We've done this a bunch.

02:41:18
Speaker 23: We've done it at over five hundred stores, at least five hundred and twelve at this point nationwide, which is pretty incredible, especially to have done all that without yet having even secured our contract. So we have a good template for how to win, and if you just get in touch, then people will reach out to help you. And that does include professional staff, but it also includes people like us who are workers that will be peer to peer, worker to worker organizers, because that's what this campaign has been built on from the beginning, is workers organizing each other. So yeah, I mean, there's really truly never been a time that's better than now and also never been more essential.

02:42:00
Speaker 3: It's never been more needed than now. So this is the time.

02:42:04
Speaker 23: And if you're not a barista, or you can't become a barista, then we still really need people to sign a solidarity pledge with our union and get involved that way as allies, as supporters. You know, community support is always critical to union struggles. We are bargaining our contract with Starbucks right now, and community support is a huge part of what's going to get us, you know, the contract that does deliver the kind of protections and benefits we're looking for, that does set a precedent for what trans inclusive union organizing and union bargaining can look like in this country. It's kind of a terrifying responsibility sometimes. But the thing about this union is because it is one of the exciting bright spots in American labor right now. I do think a lot of people are looking to us to figure out, well, what are they doing, what's working, what's going well? And I certainly think, you know, the results we get for trans workers in our union have some precedent setting importance. So it is really critical, even if you're not in this union, even if you don't work at Starbucks, to support this struggle because it will have ripple effects. There will be ramifications for American labor and for the struggle for transliberation as a consequence of how things turn out with us.

02:43:27
Speaker 3: So yeah, we could really use your support.

02:43:30
Speaker 13: Earlier this episode, we talked about hope, and as important and as useful as that can be, it is also super crucial that people know how they're actually able to organize and actually try to get things done. After this last election, I'm sure many of you, like myself, were flooded with posts and performative calls to action. Now is the time to organize your community, but never with any real information on what that actually means or how to go about it. But something like the Starbucks union is actually a very direct way to do that, especially if you're a barista.

02:44:07
Speaker 15: I think I have to emphasize how achievable that is, Like it is possible five hundred plus stores across the nation have done it in this political environment. Right, I'm going to shout out one of my coworkers. She transferred to another store in Oklahoma, and I was chokingly telling her. I was like, well, you're allowed to transfer as long as, like you, you unionize your store immediately, and she was like okay, And she did it, like within like a week of being there. She'd like talked one on one with everyone at that store, people who were all already wanting better wages, better healthcare, better staffing, And through these conversations, she organized that store. And that is so fucking amazing to me, and it makes me feel so I don't know, I don't want to sound like patronizing or whatever, but it makes me so proud to see that, right, to see that she's been able to see how our store has organized, how we've spoken to people, how we've reached out to like her co workers, and she's been able to take that and replicate that so easily, get so quickly, Like when I say, with them, like a week or two of transferring to the store. I am not exaggerating. She was fucking on top of it. If we can do this in fucking goddamn Oklahoma, we can do this anywhere. Right, It is possible. You can do it if you can have a conversation with your coworker, if you can have a conversation with multiple co workers, if you can develop relationships with them friendships, if you can establish that you have like a common issue, right, if you can make it clear that like the struggles we're facing at our workplaces have a solution. You can do this. All you have to do is actually fucking take that step to make it happen.

02:46:01
Speaker 3: Every single union that has ever been formed was maybe by people exactly like you. You the listener listening to this right now, Right, you are exactly the person who has organized every union that anyone has ever done. Right, It's it's not something that's like the domain of pure professional organizers. You can do this too, Yeah, you really can.

02:46:21
Speaker 23: And I mean, you know, at my store, I was the only transperson at my store, and despite being a transsexual communist, I was able to organize a successful election at a store that includes you know, half of people being Trump voters like the idea that you have to hide or diminish yourself, or that because you know your trans or otherwise marginalized, that it's impossible for you to build that solidarity with your coworkers and come together for your common issues.

02:46:53
Speaker 3: It's just not true.

02:46:54
Speaker 23: People understand their own economic liberation, even if they don't fully just yet. There's always an intuitive level you understand you're getting screwed over. You can tell that the system is not set up fairly and it's not set up for you to succeed as a working person. And with the right conversations, with the right information, with the right relationships and solidarity that you build with someone else, people can be brought to understand what the solution is and that the situation you currently live under with shareholders and capitalists stealing all of this value from you is unacceptable, and that there is a way to fight to get back what you've earned with your labor. So for those of you who are listening, you don't have to hide who you are politically or personally to do that work to bring people along. And in fact, if we do hide who we are, then we're not really going to be getting people all the way to where they need to go. You know, we're not going to build a movement of people committed to liberation by side stepping issues and hiding pieces of who we are and saying that, oh, well, you know, transliberation is not really important. That's not how we're going to build like a durable coalition. I think this is a problem that politicians in our country keep making. It's a mistake they keep making of thinking they can ignore or downplay certain issues tensions within their coalitions to keep those coalitions together. But when you ignore it, you don't address it, it just blows up later in the end. Anyway, Yeah, get involved that you really have nothing to lose and nothing you know, accept your change not to be I mean I just realized halfway through. I was like, well, I might as well finish the quote.

02:48:41
Speaker 15: So, Okay, we're like such a scary point for trans people, and I know that that's terrifying that that's also an opportunity to pivot and to like actually make meaningful change. Right again, I cannot emphasize enough we create our own hope for a better future. It has to be on us, right, We can't just I don't know, depend on other people to do this work for us. We have to show up and do this work. And I don't know. Personally speaking, I am fucking tired of liberals who want to just ignore trans people and pretend we don't exist. As like, I don't know, our TVs are flooded with anti trans ads. I'm tired of depending on people who aren't advocating for me right. I'd rather fight for myself through my union.

02:49:36
Speaker 3: So yeah, and I think that's a good place to close on. Is in some sense a cold world that has left us with no one to fight for ourselves but ourselves. But if we fucking do it, we can win, and we can drag everyone else along with us.

02:49:49
Speaker 13: On that note, I'm going to close out the show here with a few plugs for Starbucks Workers United. You can find their website at Sbworkersunited dot org and SB Workers United on social media. I'll have a link to their website and their solidarity pledge in the description below. See you on the other side.

02:50:30
Speaker 24: Welcome to it could happen here.

02:50:32
Speaker 25: We decided every week you were going to do in episode called Executive Disorders, White House Weekly, where we report the news, and today we are going to start that episode. We have the entire full time team here. We have Mio Wong, Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, James Stout, and I am the voice in your ear Sophie Lichterman.

02:50:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you should know we'll be making a number of references to a show you haven't watched, called The news Rooms. So many we didn't just pretend we didn't.

02:51:04
Speaker 25: Yeah, anyways, let's do the episode now go.

02:51:09
Speaker 12: Yeah.

02:51:09
Speaker 13: So this episode is also going to be a little bit different because the idea is to cover each week of stuff that's happening visa via the White House. And it's been two weeks since since Inauguration Day, and we are recording usually on Wednesdays, so there'll be, you know, a day or two there that we will record the week after. But we have a whole bunch of stuff today because we are covering essentially two weeks. I'll start with some of the transgender executive orders that happened last week. There was an order defining two sexes assigned at conception, which made plenty of biologists scratch their heads. A lot of this is just going to impact the ability to change your gender marker on federal documents for the next four years, you know, passports, also removing the the ex gender marker from federal documents. There's also a new directive that Pride flags are not to be flown on federal buildings. Also a separate one. I don't think we have included here in the research doc but how brutalist and modernist architecture is now not allowed to be used on new federal buildings. You have to use Greek or Roman inspired architecture because they project power. So all of those like Greek avatar statue Twitter accounts have a complete cultural victory.

02:52:26
Speaker 2: Now, uh great, I am going to agitate to replace the Oregon State capital with just a statue of a Roman orgy. You know, we don't even need place for the legislators. Just look at the statue and you'll know what to do.

02:52:40
Speaker 13: This actually is like bad, you know, very very nineteen thirties, you know.

02:52:44
Speaker 26: Yeah, yeah, famously no other regimes have hawken back to Claus Caalle era.

02:52:48
Speaker 13: Well, and specifically is like calling like you know, modern architecture, brutalist architecture, as you know, is like weak or bad or things that get restricted.

02:52:56
Speaker 4: Yeah.

02:52:57
Speaker 13: On a more somber note, part of this two sex that conception thing also means that a whole bunch of trans women are now being sent to men's prisons. And like a lot of this stuff is stuff that we knew was going to happen, and it did happen quite immediately.

02:53:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is this is just the start.

02:53:14
Speaker 13: I guess we'll throw over to MIA for some more executive action done on the wellcual gender ideology angle.

02:53:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there might be another anti trans executive order. We'll get to that end. But the big ones for right now is that Trump is trying to do a and this is not something we talked about in our in our last episode about what's gonna look like with trans people, but a federal funding ban for trans healthcare, which means for for youth trans healthcare, which means any provider that like gets federal funding. And this is and this includes things like taking Medicare and Medicaid right those like hospitals can't do any kind of gender for a main care for youth. Part of what's sort of terrifying. I mean, there's a lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've they've defined are as age nineteen.

02:54:01
Speaker 13: Or under the age of nineteen.

02:54:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, under the age of nineteen. Yeah.

02:54:05
Speaker 13: Obviously, like that gives you know, worries for stuff that we've been talking about for years for how they might try to start bumping up the age for these for these HRT bands.

02:54:14
Speaker 4: Yep.

02:54:14
Speaker 13: This also could be them not really realizing what they're doing to some extent, because this could also just be copying I believe in Alabama or an Arkansas ban and that was like the highest age used in any of these like state healthcare bands. They could just be copying that over because it is the highest one. And like, I'm not sure how much they've thought about, you know, their capacity to start, like, you know, arbitrarily raising that number.

02:54:38
Speaker 2: I mean, part of what I think is happening. And I think this because this was definitely at play in the Alabama ban is this is, in addition to being an attack on trans people, part of a broader set of messaging towards the Parents' Rants movement, which very much does not consider eighteen year olds to be adults.

02:54:54
Speaker 13: Totally, totally.

02:54:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, And on that note, one of the things they're trying to do is target states that have like trans sanctuary laws by trying to like get parents who take their kids to save states, like charged on kidnapping charges and so forth, noting supposedly later today there's going to be one about using the Attorney General's office to work with attorney generals in states who prosecute teachers to use gender firming pronouns as like sexual abusers. And I want to point out like these executive orders specifically, like the second raft of them that I've been talking about, Like these are all unbelievably legal, right, yeah, Like these are probably not going to get implemented immediately because there's immediately going to go to the courts, Like the Supreme Court will probably give them some of it. But like you can't just like declare something a crime and have the Attorney general prosecute people for it. Like that specific thing is genuinely so ridiculous that it might not survive the Supreme Court. It's nonsense, but things that aren't nonsense, And this is something you genuinely can do that's very dangerous. Is he's trying to get And this is from per Aaron Reid, He's a trans journalist, does pretty good work on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to not follow w PATH guidelines or WPATH is this sort of organization that sets the guidelines for like Trend's healthcare and this we don't know what this is going to do. There is a chance that this could endanger private like healthcare covering it because they follow the government using WPATH. So that's extremely extremely bad. But again, and this is going to be a running theme in the next section of this. A lot of this is stuff that he should need Congress for and he's just trying to do it because he thinks that he can and he doesn't give a shit.

02:56:31
Speaker 2: Well, and it's just signaling to the base even if it gets stopped, like he's I think, I don't think he cares if decent chunks of it gets stopped.

02:56:39
Speaker 3: He tried to do the thing. Yeah, I agree with Robert. He can now shift the blame to someone else.

02:56:44
Speaker 2: Look, man, I did the executive order, which honestly is what Biden should have done on some stuff. Right, fuck it, make the statement, you know.

02:56:52
Speaker 4: Yeah?

02:56:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, So speaking of fuck it, let's get into this whole this whole freezing the entire federal government thing. We're we're gonna do a more detailed episode about this next week. But maybe the most unhanged thing that he's sound so far than the birthright stuff. He did an executive order that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Early this week, the US Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo to everyone telling them that, like all grant programs are frozen until they submit, like they submitted a description of like what the grant program is and why it's not DEI and so like think things that were like fucked by this, right I have a few of these programs and they were the grants they were shutting down. Here, the Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial carbon Monoxide Poisoning Program WOA, the National School Lunch Program, Special Milk Program for children, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, infants, and children, the do d's Basic and Applied Scientific Research Grants DEI D. It's even got a D right in there, that's right. Yeah, Like one of these and this is a very serious one least for these people holding onto power was the National Guard's Military Operation and Maintenance samously low, which like it's like it's like eight billion dollars of money to the National Guard.

02:58:09
Speaker 2: Hey, critical support. He got one thing, right, The.

02:58:14
Speaker 3: Way that you can tell that none of these people, and the thing is a sign of is that none of these people have any idea what's going on inside of the state. They don't understand what it is, they don't understand what it does. And I can prove this for a fact because one of the programs that they froze was a program that gives money to police to do patrols outside of a nuclear weapons assembly plan.

02:58:34
Speaker 2: Joey, they defunded the nuke police, like check the Segmal loop gang. I think I got a plan based on that we're gonna become the first nuclear armed podcasting network.

02:58:47
Speaker 3: So like, I think I think people have this conception that, like, you know, they're operating according to a plan. These are all sort of strategic like strokes and masters strokes, and like no, they're just they're just lashing out right. They're driven by peer anger, and they're trying to do this purge of the government if anything woke or whatever, like anything that's like vaguely involves non white people or just like anyone who's not assists white dude, they're trying to get rid of. Yeah, and this memo was immediately challenged in court because it's also this is also hideously illegal. The president doesn't control the purse strings. That's like, you know, in the Constitution, it says that Congress controls this. So where we're at now is that the memo has been withdrawn, but there's there's a bunch of really conflicting information where like Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to go through with the executive orders.

02:59:40
Speaker 13: They're probably going to try to rewrite it. They might make it more targeted against you know, woke whatever that means. Yeah, it may not be as like broad as this as this official memo, but they're certainly going to try again.

02:59:51
Speaker 3: But the problem that they have is that there's there are literally so many of these grants and the read the reason they did it this way in the first place was because they just they just they found a list of grants. I copied all of them and they were like, Okay, departments, you have to go figure this out, and we're freezing your stuff until you do that. Even Medicaid was frozen for a few hours yesterday. Yeah, right, Like the effectively nuked most of the capacity of the federal government. And it's gonna take a lot of effort for them to sort through which of these things they could afford to turn off so that they don't end up like turning off the new police.

03:00:22
Speaker 1: Right.

03:00:22
Speaker 13: Yeah, critical support to abolishing the nuclear security.

03:00:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, they did what Biden couldn't do.

03:00:30
Speaker 13: Yeah, let's go on a quick ad break, and then we will return to report more of the news.

03:00:45
Speaker 3: All right, we are back.

03:00:47
Speaker 13: I guess I will turn over to our Immigration and Border correspondent, James Stout.

03:00:51
Speaker 3: That's me, Yes, please report the news.

03:00:53
Speaker 26: I'm ready to report the news. I have never been more ready. Okay, this is gonna be a long run because that was a raw of executive orders about the border in the flurry flurry Yeah, a sounder the word we're allowed to use. Okay, a flurry Okay, A murder like crows, you know, the collective nown for crows.

03:01:12
Speaker 13: I mean this is going to result in a murder.

03:01:14
Speaker 1: Yeah.

03:01:15
Speaker 7: Yeah.

03:01:15
Speaker 26: Well, so let's start with a couple of the big ones, right. The first one was essentially revoking the right to asylum to anyone quote engaged in the invasion across the southern border end quote. I want to highlight this invasion language because obviously like I adventure to say, I've spent more time at the southern border of the United States sent anyone in the executive branch, and most people reporting on it too. The idea of an invasion is laughable. I've been at the border twice since Trump was inaugurated. It's extremely quiet. I've never seen things more quiet. The remarkable thing I saw was a pig of Vietnamese pop Belied Big, which some people have released, which now lives there. I think it's being rehomed because of some other stuff that we will talk about later. But this invasion language is important because it's used as a justification for some of the things that the executive branch is doing which would otherwise seem to be outside of its authority. It's getting the national security encounter terrorism treatment, and anyone who's followed US politics for the last twenty years will understand that that means an effective waiver for all of your constitutional rights. And migrants have always been people who don't have rights, and this is just something that we're now seeing like further pushed. So let's go through some of these orders. Aside from the effective asylum ban, he directed the United States Northern Command to quote unquote seal the border. This has resulted in a deployment of about sixteen hundred United States troops. Most of them are military, police or engineers. We've got marines, and we've got army, and in San Diego Sectory its first marines out of Pendleton. They're the ones that I've seen locally. He has directed various government departments and the Attorney General to begin quote identifying countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial full suspension on the omission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively the travel ban that we saw in the first Trap administration, or a version of that. Right, it's a visa revocation or a travel ban for people from certain countries. And we can guess what those countries will be. At last time, they were for the most part, majority Muslim countries, right, and we.

03:03:25
Speaker 3: Might well see that again.

03:03:27
Speaker 26: They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of undocumented families.

03:03:33
Speaker 4: Right.

03:03:34
Speaker 26: This is one if people go back to our like what can Trump do for mass deportations podcasts that Robert Sophie and I did sometime in November. I think you'll get more information there on like what is and what is not possible than we have time to go into today. But you're seeing a lot of the things that we talked about there coming into reality now. I guess specifically, the attempt to rescind birthright citizenship relies on the idea that they are not quote unquote under the jurisdiction thereof of the United States, which is how.

03:04:04
Speaker 3: The fourteenth Amendment is phrased.

03:04:06
Speaker 26: Generally, it is understood that people who are not considered to be under the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore don't get citizenship when they're born here are the children of diplomats, because they have some diplomatic community right, so they're not necessarily governed by United States laws in all areas, and that is why children of diplomats don't get citizenship people when they're born here. The Trump administration is arguing that applies to children of undocumented people as well. There are five court cases challenging that already, so they've got an upp battle in the courts there. He has attempted to restart the Migrant Protection Protocol MPP, better known as REMAIN in Mexico. Right, the Migrant Protection Protocol requires migrants to wait in Mexico whether immigration cases are processed. In practice, it puts them in a lot of danger. Right, Some of them are fleeing Mexico. Others are fleeing groups or states that can reach them in Mexico, so it leaves them in an unsafe place. The other thing he did while Trump was still in the inaugural ceremonies, like literally minutes after taking office, was canceling CBP one CBP one.

03:05:07
Speaker 3: There is a lot of misinformation about what CBP one is.

03:05:10
Speaker 26: CBP one is an application that allowed migrants to make an appointment and they had to be either in southern border states of Mexico or north of Mexico City. They could then make an appointment to approach a United States port of entry, those that are places where you can enter across the land border and make their case for their asylum right, do their first asylum interview.

03:05:30
Speaker 13: Like this is like following the law, Like this is like the process.

03:05:33
Speaker 26: Yeah, making a CBP one appointment is quote unquote the right way exactly.

03:05:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:05:37
Speaker 26: You have a legal right to enter between ports of entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what we saw in their outdoor attention situation, right. But doing it via CBP one is like the belt embraces correct way to do it. People who had appointments at noon Pacific on the day Trump was inaugurated saw those appointments canceled. They can't make appointments anymore. CBP one is gone. Those people who have waited an average of nine months in dangerous places have wasted their time. They now don't have a pathway to asylum in this country. If you go back to my episodes on the Daddian Gap, you will hear some of those people.

03:06:12
Speaker 4: Right.

03:06:12
Speaker 26: Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any legal means.

03:06:17
Speaker 3: To enter the United States and claim asylum.

03:06:20
Speaker 26: Trumps directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about this in our previous podcast. Don't the amount of detention beds they would need to hit the thirteen million deportations they talked about it is immense. But one of the things they are doing is starting to house it's people whose countries won't accept them for deportation, right, which is a thing that has happened. The United States has begun using military aircraft for deportations in the last two weeks. I want to stress that this isn't a capacity issue. Biden deported eight thousand people in a month in the September to October of twenty twenty one. Trump is aiming to hit five thousand. Biden did it all with contractor flights. Trump is doing a lower number and using air force flights. This is not because he can't get the contractors. It's purely an esthetic choice, and it's an esthetic choice which has roffled enough feathers in South and Central America that you have Honduras saying that they're going to revote the US mission to have a military base in Honduras is a mistreat migrants. We had Columbia briefly refusing US military flights with deportees. Mexico doing the same.

03:07:30
Speaker 13: Briefly entering a trade war with Columbia. Yeah, Yes, which lasted about two hours.

03:07:35
Speaker 2: The one hour trade war about the same length as the Civil war in Western Yugoslavia.

03:07:42
Speaker 3: Yeah.

03:07:42
Speaker 26: The trade war with Columbia was averted when Columbia sent its own military plane to get these deportees.

03:07:48
Speaker 4: Yeah.

03:07:48
Speaker 13: Columbia caved immediately.

03:07:50
Speaker 26: Yeah, then they will continue to accept US deportees as they have done for a long time. Right again, if you listen to my Darien series, you'll hear of some Colombian people being deported. We're now getting into things that are like more. These are orders that we haven't seen realized yet. One of them is he is He has talked about having the Attorney General remove as far as possible federal funding from so called sanctuary jurisdictions. Right these are normally places where local law enforcement will cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. ICE makes a majority of its detentions from people who are already detained, people who are like arrested by police, yes exactly, for whatever. Then those police notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a lot more of door to door ICE rates in the last two weeks, and they've been ramping up even really really this week. But ever since Trump was inaugurated, we've seen ICE attempting to enter people's homes. Often they just have a warrant issued by themselves rather than they judicial warrant, so we've seen people refusing to let them into their homes. We've also seen the removal of the quote unquote sensitive places doctrine. Yeah, sensitive places had previously been understood to be schools, churches, and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote unquote enforcement operations.

03:09:09
Speaker 3: In those places.

03:09:10
Speaker 26: Those are actually places that, like the Sensitive Places doctrine, have been in place for a long time. This wasn't like a Biden thing that this was. This had been a long term thing. So ICE is now and we've seen immigration actions conducted at like a church in Atlanta, for instance. We've seen I think they were actually Secret Service agents who identified themselves as an ICE agent, sort of school in Chicago because a child had posted an anti Trump video.

03:09:37
Speaker 3: And then I guess the.

03:09:39
Speaker 26: Last thing that we are seeing is this designation of organized crime groups as foreign terrorist organizations. This is an interesting one. We haven't really seen any action on this yet, but it's one of his executive orders. In day one in his first administration, he designated irand Kuld Force as a foreign terrorist organization and then needed to kill their leader. Right, So this FDO designation opens up the possibility of a lot of like covert activity I'm talking like the CIA and like Tier one special forces units. It also allows him to bring about economic sanctions on anyone materially supporting these organized crime organizations. In practice, that would encompass huge swaths of the Mexican economy, right, because there are people in agriculture, people in business who are paying protection or they're being extorted to pay money, right, And so in theory, those people are now materially delefating a tent terrorist organization and they could be sanctioned as well. We will have to see how this plays out, I guess, and they're still the directive was to look into and then name these groups.

03:10:52
Speaker 13: Well, and it's something that heg Seth has previously been in favor of and he has now been confirmed.

03:10:58
Speaker 26: Yes, yeah, Hegseth has talked to about using special forces in Mexico.

03:11:02
Speaker 2: Oh yes, and this this was a Gender forty seven stuff. They've been talking about this for a while.

03:11:06
Speaker 9: Yeah.

03:11:07
Speaker 26: Yeah, it's also in our Agenda forty seven episodes if people want to go back there a direct action rate in Mexico, drone warfare in Mexico. Obviously, doing this without the permission of the Mexican government would be an act of war, right, like killing foreign nationals without the permission of their government, conducting direct action raids bombing another country like that, That is an act of war. The US has had an fid FED Foreign Internal Defense Mission right where it trains advisors and assists Mexican law enforcement and military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chappa, for instance, were trained I think by mass Sock. But this has been happening for a long time. But to go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge, a huge step up. The only really analogous, directly analogous thing I can think of is Clinton with a plan Columbia designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. But that was very much with the cooperation and support of the co being government, and we're seeing a much more adversarial relationship between the United States and Mexico right now. The last thing I want to mention is that this deployment, I've spoken about it, but they're about sixteen hundred troops deployed right now. Biden deployed fifteen hundred troops in the summer of twenty twenty three. This is not a vastly different number, but they are doing different things. They seem to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall and being photographed at their two major jobs at the moment.

03:12:27
Speaker 3: We will see how that plays out.

03:12:29
Speaker 26: Also with reference to a military Trump immediately canceled the refugee resettlement program. With this left people all over the world stranded, including Afghanist many of whom worked for the United States or family members of US service people. Their refugee resettlement program, people don't come to the southern border. They go do all their background things and then fly into the United States. It's a different status to entering and claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights, found their flights were canceled.

03:12:55
Speaker 3: They're now stranded.

03:12:57
Speaker 26: Lots of them were stranded in Pakistan and facing immigration enforcement there in the case of the Afghans. So yeah, that is a speed run of all the terrible Trump immigration executive orders. We'll be reporting on this pretty extensively, so you can keep coming back for more. But another thing that we have more of right now is advertisements.

03:13:26
Speaker 13: Okay, we are back. I have a few other notes I want to add for the woke front that I'm reporting on right now. I think it's been a lot of conflation between you know, like DEI and like what we would consider like affirmative action DEI refers to like these specific like corporate training policies and diversity initiatives, which is, you know, separate from long standing affirmative action policies, which has been used both in the corporate world and in like the government for like decades at this point. And what a whole bunch of this DEI rollback type stuff is essentially doing is just openly discriminating against the people who are not like straight white men. It's like, if you are a straight white man, we cannot hire you because that would mean we are doing DEI. And like, this is what a lot of the stuff that we're seeing kind of looks like. There was a mass email to federal agencies about DEI and calls to report DEI policies in their department if they're going by like other names, right, So that would be stuff like affirmative action.

03:14:21
Speaker 15: Right.

03:14:21
Speaker 13: If there's anything that is about you know, trying to trying to increase the diversity in your workforce or any quote unquote woke topics including you know, gender ideology, anything anything that seems vaguely woke, you're supposed to now report to make sure that gets removed because that's not part of the new federal government. I believe someone from the NSA did leave a tip on that email line reporting DEI masquerading as as another name. Similar to this, there was a memo or an email that was leaked to Ken Klippenstein from the Defense Intelligence Agency which basically said that they're not going to be observing any any woke call holidays, including Martin Luther King Junior's Birthday, Black History Month, Women's History Months, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth, Women's Equality Day, National Hispanic Heritage Month, National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and National American Indian Heritage Month, with a small asterisk saying that the pause on observing these will not affect the federal holidays, which would be MLK and June teenth, although who knows, they might try to even remove some of those as being federal holidays.

03:15:30
Speaker 26: I did wonder that, like, at some point, you're gonna, like you're gonna lose people when you take away their days off work.

03:15:36
Speaker 13: I get like that, right, right, So like I think they might leave those like actual federal holidays in but you're not allowed to observe any of these any of these other awareness months or or you know, Pride Month, Black History months, like you're not allowed to acknowledge that at all in these federal agencies now, at least for the Defense Intelligence Agency, support for most of Trump's executive orders does fluctuate. According to a poll from Reuters, the support for closing all DEI offices is actually pretty split. Fifty one percent oppose the closing of these offices, according to their poll, Forty four percent are in favor, and it's very segmented. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America pretty disliked, with seventy percent being in opposition.

03:16:25
Speaker 2: Look, the one thing people hate most is changing names.

03:16:28
Speaker 13: Having the names been Lang.

03:16:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody likes that.

03:16:32
Speaker 6: Yeah.

03:16:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, he did Denali as well, Right.

03:16:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that was changed more recently. But the Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for longer than its America has existed as a country, the United States, right.

03:16:44
Speaker 26: I mean, Denali has been Denali for longer than America has existed. It's just right, right, right, But there was a period where we called it McKinley. No one's ever called it the Gulf of America. Yeah, yeah, I'm not saying the Denali thing's right, I'm just saying like that's a much harder.

03:16:59
Speaker 3: So yes, yeah, yeah, you're not going to get much buying on that.

03:17:02
Speaker 7: Yeah.

03:17:03
Speaker 13: Pardening J six protesters, new tariffs or taxes on Canadian goods, and ending birthright citizenship are all around sixty to thirty sixty oppose thirty percent in favor. Trump during his first week did see a record high approval rating that has slowly, I think gone down, but I don't know. It's hard to gauge the level of like general enthusiasm for his actions right now. And there's I think part of like the general strategy that we're seeing is there's just so much happening every single day that you can't even keep track of it all, let alone like internalize it. Like he's he is trying to sign as many of these orders every day so that both the courts, all of these like NGOs, advocacy groups are always working and we're never sure what is real, right, We're never sure what's going to stick around all of these memos about funding and grants. It's just so exhausting. And that's like part of the design is that this just feels like a constant stream of nonsense that we maybe have to deal with, maybe we won't. One of the more odd things is Trump openly embracing manifest destiny language, which I guess isn't actually odd, that's actually makes sense. It's just one of those things that it feels very rubicon esque. But he does have this new distinct focus on territorial expansion. During his inaugural address, he praised quote unquote to our American ancestors for having quote won the wild West. Now, apparently the call about Greenland to Denmark did not go very well. Denmark did not realize how serious Trump was, and it was apparently quite angry during that phone call, and you know, seemingly upset that Denmark is not going to easily hand over Greenland. He seems to be pivoting more towards retaking Panama. Yeah, which is which is something that he also mentioned in his inaugural address.

03:18:52
Speaker 26: Let me tell you, Panamanians not stoked. I've been receiving communications from Panama where it was his step down, but they are burning American flags.

03:19:00
Speaker 13: The quote from the inaugural address is quote the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation. When that increases our wealth and carries our flag into new beautiful horizons, and we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars.

03:19:13
Speaker 4: Wow.

03:19:14
Speaker 13: Yeah, I don't know, what do you have to do?

03:19:17
Speaker 3: That's not a good thing. I think that's bad.

03:19:23
Speaker 13: Like obviously, that's you know, not great, not ideal. You know, invading Panama not ideal. Going to war with Greenland slightly more funny because it's cold. I think specifically is focused on, like why that he believes the US has a vested interest in Greenland, isn't just picking out a spot on the map. I think this also could be like related to trying to prepare for climate change. Having territory in the Arctic is going to become an increasingly valuable commodity to have. And and I think there is a part of this that could be legitimately on that side, because I mean, I don't know, Maybe Trump should just get really into Alaska.

03:19:57
Speaker 26: Well, he did deregulate drilling in Alaska, Drill baby drill. I will be up there later this year talking to people in Alaska about drill baby drill.

03:20:06
Speaker 13: Very excited for that, But I don't know I think it's also generally not super useful to make huge generalizing statements about what this type of stuff Trump is doing right now and how it will reflect on his entire presidency. People have been been doing this kind of about Trump's flip flopping opinions on TikTok, you know, being very into like, you know, saving TikTok and then then calling it worthless, but then going back to actually making sure that Microsoft buys it or something. And you know, people are very easy or quick to like jump onto these sorts of things. Trump's flip flopping tendencies maybe not sinking every single easy bucket and acting like these would be emblematic of his entire presidency, and like that's not the case. That that does not actually mean that Trump just says things even though he's gonna call TikTok worthless, does not mean that he's going to not do that easy lay up. We're all aware of how much he just says what is on his mind.

03:20:59
Speaker 4: Yep.

03:21:00
Speaker 13: And I think these sorts of things do not necessarily mean that he's going to like plummet to being the most unpopular president ever because he refuses to use the right messaging around TikTok or something. The other economic situations he might walk us into would be you know, much much more affecting to his general popularity.

03:21:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's he is doing again. I talk about this a lot. Why fascists succeed is that they try, like they're constantly reaching for stuff, and oftentimes like they overreach, but nobody pushes back so they get the thing. Right, That's what he's doing here. Do I think that he's willing at this point to commit to a full scale military invasion and armed occupation of Panama, a thing that could be a real problem for his presidency? Right, like US troops dying in meaningful numbers in attacks in a country that we had no fucking beef with before. That could be a real fucking problem for a guy who ran on the things that he ran on. But maybe he gets a bunch of sessions for nothing. It's the same thing with Greenland. You make the push, you try to scare Denmark, you try to scare Greenland, and you see if they'll accept something, and then you you walk away, maybe with a coup, and you do it fucking widely enough, you might get something right like That's that's it.

03:22:15
Speaker 13: He's always testing his limits.

03:22:17
Speaker 3: Because that's what they do.

03:22:18
Speaker 26: Yeah, I mean, look at Columbia, right, he immediately went to like eleven on the retaliation scale and effectively receive concessions.

03:22:27
Speaker 4: Yeah.

03:22:28
Speaker 13: So, I think, you know, similar to how you know it was annoying in the first like resistlib era to take every single crazy statement Trump says seriously, or like you know, do this performative outrage over every single thing he does. I think it's also useless to do fast mimetic reactions that form generalizing statements about you know, how something that Trump is doing is emblematic for the rest of his term and now he's like doomed to failure. I think those statements are actually pretty useless and at the very least are not helpful. Right now, let's close by talking about Guantanamo. I guess Robert and James I'll have.

03:23:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Trump has signed an executive order saying that they're going to create a facility capable of storing thirty thousand migrants in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. First, we should probably just talk about how realistic this is. If you ever looked at a topographical map of Guantanamo Bay, it's quite a large like the US concession in Cuba is a sizable degree of land. But it's not easy land to build things on, right, Like it is that it's rugged terrain, you would say, So making a camp like this is almost certainly going to be extremely expensive, and at least under kind of the way things currently work, it will probably take a good amount of time to get set up like. This is not a quick thing. This is not an overnight thing. And one thing I want to remind people of is that they have already have expanded a number of camps and facility in the US to deal with all the migrants they are taking in.

03:24:03
Speaker 3: So this is not the start.

03:24:05
Speaker 2: If you want to call this, and I think it's fair to call this a plan to start a concentration camp system. That system began early, and in fact it started before Trump took office. A decent chunk of it was anticipating him coming into office.

03:24:20
Speaker 3: But this is not the first camp, right, Yeah.

03:24:24
Speaker 26: And like Biden did significant legwork for tension that is cool and unusual. Yes, with his legal defense and his establishment of outdoor attention for migrants since the end of Title forty two in May of twenty three, And I think like we have to acknowledge that, I know people are very much into that, Like, don't criticize the Dems right now, Like if they don't change, if taking a fat l in what should have been one of the easiest elections of the century doesn't change them, then nothing will. And like we have to acknowledge that we are going to concentration camps quicker, I mean I will far and out.

03:25:00
Speaker 3: Let's cool the.

03:25:01
Speaker 26: Outdoor detention sites in Hakumba concentration camps right, because they sure as hell look like one and they are.

03:25:08
Speaker 2: This is a big personal frustration to me. I'm seeing a ton of people going online and comparing this to the Nazi concentration camp here after referred to as the KZ system.

03:25:19
Speaker 7: Right.

03:25:20
Speaker 2: There's one post I came across on Twitter where a person who'm I'm not going to name just to not cause a bunch of bullshit for them. Time from taking office to opening a mass attention camp Mussolini eight years, ll Gala and others, Libya Hitler fifty one days, Docau Germany Trump nine days. That's fucking horseshit. Yes, Docou took longer to establish. Docou was not the first concentration camp. The concentration camp system in Germany under the Nazis started as soon as the Nazis took power with a series of what we're called wild concentration camps, and this was involved a huge number of people, largely political enemies of the regime, members of the opposition party, being taken into custody, beaten, tortured, and stored in a series of airsats facilities. Two hundred thousand people were taken into custody under the wild concentration camp system in nineteen thirty three, the first year that Germans were in power. These are not comparable systems. That does not mean that I don't believe what Trump is doing is a concentration camp. It is a concentration camp made in the model of the American system. This is part of the American history of concentration camps, which goes back something like two hundred years right to the I mean, we were one of the first countries to employ concentration camps. The concentration camp as a concept began with what we're called reconcentrados in Cuba, at the behest of a Spanish general fighting an insurgency. There were US officers embedded there, they came back and those tactics were adapted for our wars with Native American tribes on the frontiers and the planes. General Sherman was one of the very first Americans to care out concentration camps. And what we are seeing here is part of America's tradition with concentration camps. It is not part of the German tradition with concentration camps. And you're going to be mistaken about like how this is going to proceed and what the dangers are, because I do not think the dangers at this point are that we build a death factory capable of incinerating a million people in less than a year. That's not the threat. The threat is huge numbers of people are taken into custody and stored in places that are not safe, that do not have good hygiene, that do not have good food standards, and a significant number of those people will die or suffer permanent physical injury. But it won't look like Auschwitz, and if that's what people are expecting, they'll be like, well, maybe this isn't that band, Maybe this isn't a concentration camp after all. So it's important to get things right, both for that reason and because it's also disrespectful to the people who died during the fucking Holocaust to be like, yeah, Trump's a lot worse than Hitler right now, like no, no, stack, yeah.

03:28:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, like we have it.

03:28:02
Speaker 26: You can trace online from like Bosquier Rodondo right where they sent the Navajo people.

03:28:06
Speaker 3: Right bass Rodando is a great thing to bring.

03:28:08
Speaker 26: Yeah, yes, And you can trace a direct line from that to the outdoor detention camps we saw in twenty twenty three where people were forced to remain in one place without food, water, or shelter, and people died as a result of that last year two years ago, and like that, from there to Guantanamo Bay, it is not a massive leap. And yeah, just being like we don't have Auschwitz, it's just asinine. Like if you if you can't acknowledge that America has a long history of doing this, and you know, really you need to examine your own preconceptions before like speaking for others.

03:28:40
Speaker 13: Yep, all right, is that this episode for this week?

03:28:44
Speaker 4: Everyone?

03:28:44
Speaker 3: I think that's the episode. I think we're done.

03:28:47
Speaker 24: We reported the news.

03:28:49
Speaker 2: Yes, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week. From now until the heat death of the universe.

03:28:56
Speaker 25: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media from More podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.