All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. The Decline and Fall of the American Post Office Nut Country Revisited feat. Steven Monacelli & Dr. Michael Phillips They're Trying to Put Women Into Men's Prisons How Unions Can Protect Trans Rights Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #1 You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone Sources: The Decline and Fall of the American Post Office https://www.nalc.org https://www.fightingnalc.com https://concernedlettercarriers.com https://www.nalc.org/member-benefits/nalc-disaster-relief-foundation Nut Country Revisited Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America https://www.ucpress.edu/books/a-culture-of-conspiracy/paper Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816654949/conspiracy-theories/ Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo19197692.html How Unions Can Protect Trans Rights Solidarity Pledge: https://crm.broadstripes.com/ctf/SJID0H https://sbworkersunited.org/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-sign-orders-ending-diversity-programs-proclaiming-there-are-only-two-sexes-2025-01-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-end-federal-support-gender-affirming-care-minors-2025-01-28/ https://www.wjhl.com/news/regional/tennessee/bill-would-block-insurance-companies-that-cover-gender-affirming-care-from-contracting-with-tenncare/ https://www.npr.org/2024/12/24/nx-s1-5238169/starbucks-strike-christmas https://www.them.us/story/starbucks-threatens-to-take-away-trans-rights-at-stores-that-unionize See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Join late night legend John Stewart and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews, and more. Now this is a second term we can all get behind.
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Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B, as we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love.
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We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a player boy in my adult. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in.
It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. So, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, we talked about the collapse of the U.S. 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, who's a letter carrier in Fort 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 7 a.m. this morning. It's happened that long since I got up. You're getting tired, Mia.
But both of you two, welcome to the show, and I'm excited to talk to you both.
Yeah, it's great to be back.
Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, so, all right, let's start in a place where many things start, which is to say the 1970s, the fulcrum upon which history pivoted. So one of the things, and we talked about this in our 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, right?
Oh, by the way, I was just about to talk about a wildcat strike. Disclaimers. No one here represents a union. They're speaking in their individual capacity, et cetera, et cetera. None of this is legal advice. 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 happened?
Yeah, Tommy, you want to take that one? Yeah, so just going back to the 1970s, 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 60-hour weeks. I think probably at a minimal around 50-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. There was a long history of abuse. You're dangling people's livelihood over their head, Gary. 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. Yeah, it was a time of great disparity.
Yeah, the thing with the post office is, Tom was mentioning, they dangle the carrot, but there's never any goddamn carrot. It's all stick. It's supposed to be 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's just a toxic, horrible, horrible environment. And so back in the 70s, before the wildcat strike, it was illegal then, just like it's illegal now. The NALC, 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 $50,000 a year, roundabout. And it topped out at about $68,000 adjusted for inflation. And that took 21 years to get to that point. Jesus. Yeah. So it's pretty wild. And like very similar to today, now starting wage adjusted for inflation is just over $40,000 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, unpopular wars, rampant inflation. You know, every time you turn on the radio or TV, there's some lunatic politician that you can't stand hearing about. Time is a flat circle.
But Vince Sobrato, who was an organizer out of New York City, the NLC didn't strike all over the country. It was New York and Chicago and San Francisco. It was some major hubs. Right. And Vince Sobrato came out of that. And we won in that strike one collective bargaining rights. Now, the thing we gave up and it was a tradeoff. So we have a no layoff clause. So they can't lay us off.
But we gave up the right to strike, making sure that there wouldn't be another wildcat strike.
Yeah.
Right. So that's kind of why our hands are tied in that sense. And now if we have an impasse with 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 the NALC 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.
Yeah. And so as we sort of mentioned before, one of the things about the post office, 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 in like seven months we don't even have that. No one has that anymore. But, you know, as we are right now, yeah, things are going good. But 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.
For people who haven't listened to these episodes before, can you explain what a tentative agreement is?
Right. 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 on whether or not this tentative agreement passes.
And again, like Adnav 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 was in the post office. 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. But yeah, that's what a tentative agreement is. A lot of people think that it's a bad thing to go back to the drawing board or a bad thing to renegotiate 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 Servers Workers Union, they're all really doing well. The Communications Union, the...
in a little bit of a different age, but a lot of the post offices, old heads, military veterans, that kind of sort, who just come from a little bit of an earlier time when the labor movement was really starting to plant their feet on the ground.
Yeah, a lot of a lot of them are still dealing with 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 shit that management is saying, because they're, again, still shell shocked from the Reagan years and all the anti-labor stuff.
And that's had a profound impact on most of the unions that survived that period. And a lot of them didn't, right? 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 robotics and services that support this podcast. They 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.
Yeah, yeah. So it's been, I think we're coming up on 600 days since our last contract expired. Jeez. Yeah, 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 8 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.
Yeah. So the tentative agreement comes out around 500 days after negotiations were supposed to have started. And there was 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.
Can you explain what that is, by the way? Yeah. Okay. So in every other trade, you have an apprenticeship program, right? So when you get on the job, you're 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. You're the new Jack, 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 not even kids. I'm 40 years old. I started as a CCA at 40 years old.
They're coming in making less than $20 an hour. They're not considered a career, so they're not paying into their retirement. You don't got all the same union protections. Your benefits are super low. You get five days of annual leave a year and no sick time. Yeah, it's a meat grinder.
So that was a big thing, and it creates a whole third tier because we already have 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. It kneecaps a union. And now with the CCA position in this non-career workforce, it's created a whole third tier.
This is one of the things that the UAW is fighting for, is eliminating tiering systems altogether. 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 third tier is not good. Extremely bad.
Yeah, exactly. And it's because they've adopted sort of this Amazon model of doing things where they just have this burn and churn situation where like Amazon, what is it? Bezos said that he doesn't want anyone working for Amazon for more than like two years.
Yeah.
If they have these 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 $20 an hour. And they can just get you to work your ass off and burn out and quit within two years. As people retire, their labor costs go down. It's evil.
It's absolutely, it's some Jack Welch hateful, hateful bullshit.
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 used 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 1970s 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 person. 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 paycheck.
It's not like other jobs where it might be a separate package or already calculated in, for instance, a lot of the trades, uh, They'll say, hey, you get 23 an hour, but the reality is you're making around 29 or 30 because you're not paying into your health insurance or your retirement or anything like that. You're effectively making less than minimum wage.
You're almost paying to go to work as a CCA. And just to be yelled at and told that you're not going fast enough, even though there's no street standard. But that's getting into a little bit of nitpicky contract stuff about language. But yeah. Yeah.
So, yeah, that's one thing that they were 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 Christ. Yeah, I mean, if you are 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 there's supposed to be the Teamsters 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 And we get the thing with it is this is a historic contract. And we're like reading in the middle of the episode. It's like, wait, this fucking sucks shit. It's like, that's how you know you are doomed.
When you get the historic, when they start pulling out the historic contract thing.
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, 1.3%.
And that's enough to piss anyone off because that drops about the same time that we all see the longshoremen going back to the table because they didn't get 60%. 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 workroom 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 wild. So one point three percent. They're keeping the city carrier assistance, the non-career workforce. They're removing some of our union protections. Right. Like it used to be you have a 12, 60 hour rule. You don't have to work more than 12 hours in a day or 60 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 16 hours, you have no choice.
Jesus Christ. So you gave up things for a 1.3% raise. 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 it's a thing where, like, 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 a you-got-concession-somewhere-else kind of thing, not a we-gave-up stuff for, like, the worst raise you've ever seen.
Yeah, I mean, it makes you think about, like, what was their first offer? Like, mind you, it's been over 500 days of negotiations. What was their first offer? We got to put the fuel in the mail trucks ourselves? Like, you know what I mean? Tom, do you want to talk about what the tentative agreement doesn't address? So...
The tentative 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 agreement,
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 backlog 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 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
The other thing that the contract doesn't really touch on is 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 $80. Oh, Jesus Christ.
The most egregious one is like your winter parka is close to $400, and your allowance that you're given is, I think, $380. I don't know.
It's been, it's up to four 99, but the rain trench coat, just the rain coat is $465 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 is, That's going to fall apart in two months. Ninety five dollars. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. No, it's it's wild. It's wild price gouging. And they were going to address that.
And what they did was they increased our they increased our uniform allowance by thirty five dollars. Right. Which is like three pairs of socks from those magazines.
Great. Incredible stuff. Yeah, it's it's it's wild. 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.
I think it's, like, four out of five of the approved manufacturers or the distributors are owned by the same people. So, yeah.
Oh, great. Okay, yeah. I'm bequeathing this as a gift. I know there's a bunch of journalists who listen to this. Go do that story. I guarantee you'll find some unbelievably unhinged stuff.
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 pts the 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 know
Yeah. Get, get the new Jack in your office, a fucking raincoat. Cause 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 all that gear, right? It's ridiculous.
Yeah. And like it's Minnesota, right? Like I'm from Chicago. So like it is it is slightly warmer in Chicago and you get wind chills and negative 40 here. 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 having hypothermia.
Yeah, no, exactly. And God forbid you want to buy a pair of shorts as well, because Minnesota summers get over 100 heat index.
Yeah, speaking of ways to not die in Minnesota summers, here are some products and services that will probably not help you with that, but maybe they will. We are back.
One of the other things that Tom touched on that this agreement doesn't address is he talked about the noncompliance and the grievance backlog, but also just the toxic work environment, which we've talked about. And it's so bad. 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 fist fight with one of the clerks. Jesus Christ. 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.
Yeah, we have a joint statement on violence in the workplace, which I think you were about to get into of like, Yeah. They're just not complying. It's a very one-sided thing. Effectively, management has qualified immunity.
Great. Great. Your managers are also cops. They can attack you. Incredible. Incredible stuff from the post office.
Yeah, and then there's a bunch of wage theft too. Me 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 to 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 31-minute lunch... I have my phone blowing up being asked why I'm not moving and delivering the mail. But you guys managed to accidentally miss a two-hour line. Come on. Don't lie. You don't got to lie to be my friend. Like, come on. And then there's other places around the country where the NLC has won grievances where management was –
making CCAs work in the dark, delivering mail till like 7 30 PM and clocking them out at four o'clock in the afternoon. All right. So they got people out there working for free. It's it's, and we have to catch it. We have to catch them doing that. Yeah. They're never going to own up to it. They all watch their payroll, the management structure at, at the post office.
It's like the Teemu 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 it's disgusting.
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. What?
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 10-hour day, 11-hour day, just by default on a light day, on a regular day. Jesus Christ.
This is a really big problem for the rural carriers their contract is a little bit different 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 gonna be paid out for an eight hour
our day, but the route has just been stretched out through this method of just dishonest scanning and dishonest entries, and they get free labor. I'm not even well-versed on the RCA contract. That's a whole another... There's only nine unions that go into the post office, which means there's probably nine different contracts. Yeah.
And in every single one of these contracts, they're inventing new, different, and unique ways to do wage theft and 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.
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you do not fuck with the male cops, but the male cops, the postal inspectors work for management. Yeah. So, yeah. And yeah. 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 situation. So we were hoping that shit would get addressed in the tentative agreement, and none of it was. So there was all sorts of problems with that. I'm with Building and Fighting NALC, and we are a basically a bottom up, more of a radical reform caucus.
I am out of Fort Worth, but like it started in Minneapolis and you got people in Chicago and New York and Naples, Florida and San Antonio, Hawaii, all over the country where basically we are tired of. Aha. 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. This is vote no for the tentative.
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, so we've been trying to get letter carriers to vote no on it. So we've been doing the vote no campaign 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 said it yourself. These are all concessions.
We're not getting anything for giving up all these things. 1.3% is what we're getting. Yeah.
Yeah, like, 1.3% is the kind of raise that, like, in a normal functioning union is, like, that's, like, a company's opening agreement that both you and the company knows you're not going to take. Yeah. Like, that's...
It's a joke like that in and of itself would be a major concession to get something else. But we're doing all these concessions to get that.
Yeah, that's the win, quote unquote.
Yeah. 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 cross craft solidarity with Amazon because without going on too much of a rabbit trail, the whole, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships. Yeah.
And 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. Yeah. And UPS, they top out with I think their their benefits package tops out one hundred twenty four thousand a year. And it's about five or eight years to reach top scale.
Ours tops out with this tentative agreement at ninety three thousand a year. And it still takes us 13 years to get to top step. Screw. 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 1.3%.
Yeah. Yeah. So when I first saw bad mouth 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, that everything started somewhere. And if you go to his first episode on the From A 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 person was up to.
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. It's funny as fuck to me.
You know who won't break your heart?
The products and services that support this podcast if you don't buy them and therefore cannot be are broken. 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, I think I think the arbitration, there's a whole lot of fear mongering 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.
But that's that's pretty much it for arbitration.
Yeah, so let's move on to the future of the post office, which I want to take a second to mention that, like, Okay, look, I am not someone who has any respect for the people who built the U.S. government. However, if you want the U.S. government to exist, the Postal Service is something that was deemed so important that establishing the Postal Service is in the main body of the Constitution.
Now, freedom of speech and the right to free association, that is 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. Right.
They thought that shit was more important than like your right to have freedom of assembly, like your 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 owners, 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, but, like...
I am not a founding father, Stan, but the post office was actually invented by Benjamin Franklin, who I don't believe owned any slaves. And yeah, he was really racist. But yeah, I mean, like I know I know that I know that part. 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, 15 years before the Constitution was even written.
Oh, no, he did. He did own a slave as a young man. Damn it. And I think freed him.
You know, I was trying to give the racist bastard a little bit of a win.
We're finding this out live. So, yeah, he did for his early life and then became an abolitionist later. Which is still bad. Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, glad you came around eventually, I guess. I don't know. 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 sucks shit.
I take back my critical support. I take back my critical support. Uncritical opposition to Ben Franklin's slave-owning ass.
To hell with Ben Franklin, too. I wonder why they didn't teach us that in school.
To hell with Ben Franklin, too. But yeah, we're coming in as Trump administration and stuff. And let me tell you that the situation wasn't really great under Biden either, because we have a postmaster, Louis Dickhead DeJoy. 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 slow.
slowly chipping away at service and quality. DeJoy 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, and, like, also, I want to point out, the President of the United States is issuing a cryptocurrency. Like, that shit is so fake now. Like, so fake.
Yeah, so, like, Detroit's also got a reputation as just being a massive job killer, besides looking like a low-rent Spider-Man villain. So, under his tenure, we've seen service quality take a nosedive, and I want to talk about this stuff, and this might get my ass in trouble, but, like,
I am tired as a letter carrier who loves my job, loves saying hi to people in the neighborhood, loves walking through 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 mailman 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. Jesus Christ. There's pictures of racks and racks of DPS.
It's the sorted 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 the packages because the packages have a tracking number.
And their boss can get it. They can get in trouble for that. But they can lie and hide the mail for another day. Like that shit happens all the time.
Yeah. So it's like they can just be like they can just be like hiding like your bills or like Social Security check. Yeah. Yeah.
Also, your junk mail. 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 to get it.
Or recently, a severe weather delay.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the severe weather delay can happen. But 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 Christ. Yeah, because they want their numbers to look good because their entire job is life on a spreadsheet. And so then I have to talk to my customers the following day.
They're like, it says it's delivered. 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. That's some of the service degradation. We've had people in other areas, catch management, throwing away mail. Jesus Christ. Oh, yeah.
Management reprimanded carriers who follow the manual and provide good customer service. I've been on the phone where I've had my manager call me because I was standing in one place for five minutes 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 mailman the reason why people love the post office shit like that yeah i got told no you're not doing that 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 I we love our job. We love our jobs. We love our communities. We 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 when people's birthdays are. And I had an old timer on my route, sat outside to say hi to me 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, and 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...
Yeah, sorry. This is one of these areas where delivering the mail is a social thing, but the thing is, sociality is the enemy of capital, and 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 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 and 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 the teacher's fault that there's like 48 kids in a classroom, right? Like, yeah. And there's also a very, very similar privatization campaign run by a bunch of extremely powerful forces. Let's go back and talk a bit about who the people are who are doing this and what their sort of plans are.
Yeah, so you have DeJoy. He's doing that. And we have all of these. They're starting to – some of the stuff they're building, I think they're called SDNCs. 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 mess and 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 brain, but like certain fiascos done by DeJoy's Delivering for America plan seem tailor made to to fail for the post office, but work for someone else.
And then also you have Brian Renfro, who is the current president of the NALC, 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 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. Yep, yep, yep. He's the one who's negotiated this whole contract. 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 tentative agreement is his baby. Wait, what? Yep. The executive council. What? Yeah, he didn't tell the executive council. Wait, you didn't have like a bargaining team? No, but he had a bargaining team that were all of outside contractors. He had no one from the union with him. What? Yeah, because he wanted it to be his baby.
that's so unhinged 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 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 there'll be people from inside the union who are like the stooges of like whatever sort of management clique is in power like having them all be outside contractors is one of the most ludicrous things i've
ever heard a union negotiation cutting out the entire, that's so wild.
Oh my God. Oh yeah. No. And the thing is we're coming up on 600 days without a con without a ratified contract. Like he has been the only one doing it this whole time. And there was 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 struggle with addiction.
I respect anybody who is going to take care of themselves. but he disappeared for something like 50 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 with, Without him, it turns out he had gone and checked himself into rehab.
But the thing is, the NALC has two fucking vice presidents. I have all the respect in the world for someone to take care of themselves. But when you got 277,000 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 put 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 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 inept as hell.
He is inept as hell and just the worst sort of person to be in there. At the worst, he is 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. And it doesn't matter 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 we expect DeJoy 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.
So on that note, that's, uh, one of the big pushes for the union, uh, recently has been to reach open bargaining where the membership is actually a part of it. And that's what, uh, to my knowledge, it's one of the major issues that the building of fighting NILC or the building better union, uh, talks are going towards, um,
Yeah, can you talk about what open bargaining is?
It's a thing that should be the standard for all unions, but... Yeah, I mean, open bargaining is effectively the bottom-up structure of having your members or even the representatives put forward motions that are open to the public and open to the membership so that you can effectively 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 50 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. I was like, oh, did you vote no? And he's like, what are you talking about? He doesn't know that there's a vote going on. The agreement is out there. Yeah, yeah. But yeah.
Yeah, I guess, I mean, like, the main objective we want to do, I'm sure we're running out of time. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I could talk about this shit for days. I mean, I do. That's pretty much all I do anymore.
But like Tom was saying, the building and fighting ALC and pushing for the vote no thing, the main thing that we're wanting is coming on to shows like this and getting the public perception of what the letter carrier deals with. what's going on. Because as Trump's coming in, they're going to be trying to privatize it like they always do. That's already been in the works.
It's important that the public knows this degradation of service is the point of it. And how can the public sort of support our fight so we can keep the post office? So I wanted to just share a couple of links. If you're a letter carrier and you want to get involved, with reforming things from an electoral end. There's the concerned letter carriers, and you can go to concernedlettercarriers.com.
They're going to be running in 2026 to get rid of Renfro. If you are impatient like me and you can't fucking wait that long, and even if you're not a letter carrier, you can see how we're fighting with the building of fighting NALC, 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 FightingNALC.com to check that out. Oh, Tom, did you want to talk about the NALC Legislative Action Center?
Yeah, so we touched briefly on it last episode. The NALC 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 NALC.org.
Specifically, they do have a link where you put in your zip code and it gives you the appropriate Congress member to write a letter to and really push them on that. what to do there. You can also donate to their fund if you see so fit and are able to do so.
Yeah.
We'll have links to all that in the description.
There's one more plug I wanted to make because all the fire's out in L.A. 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 20 minutes away to go and deliver mail to a devastated neighborhood. Because the thing is, when shit happens, 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 and your neighbors show up. The first person you see from the government, we're federal employees, we're not federales, 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 mailman walking through their fucking lawn trying to deliver 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 going to cry at some fucking point. OK, so the NALC is a NALC disaster relief fund. The public can donate to it.
It's usually letter carriers. We all donate to it. And what happens is if your house burns down like in L.A. right now or if like you were devastated in the fires in Hawaii or whatever, when that happens, a letter carrier can apply to
And as soon as they're approved, which can happen within a day or two, they automatically get sent like $1,000 from the fund to just 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 just 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 is a mailman specific one yeah i'm sorry for crying no no yeah i mean it's it's emotional it's it's yeah this shit sucks bro
Yeah, it really does. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know before we head off?
If I have one thing, it's just help your coworkers. You don't have to be a steward. You don't have to be anything. Just find someone you don't think deserves it. Help them too. I guarantee you that they do.
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And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Steffens.
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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 movement in Texas called The Purifying Knife.
And I'm Stephen Monticelli, an investigative reporter and columnist in Texas who covers political extremism and beyond.
Since the late 1990s, Alex Jones built an extensive media empire, spreading outlandish 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 11 moon landing was fake. So too, he said, was the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting he claimed was staged to justify new gun control laws.
According to Jones, the U.S. government can control the weather and 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 2015, Jones was able to set off a panic in Texas that inspired action from Governor Greg Abbott.
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. To many, it's far-fetched, but not to some of the top politicians in the Lone Star State.
The conspiracy theory Jones described on his InfoWars 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.
or 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 Bastrop 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'etat.
The crazier the conspiracy theory got, the more Texas's far-right political leaders were willing to pander to Jones and his ilk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to monitor U.S. Army troops near Austin.
We're playing a pivotal role of government, and that is to provide information to people who have questions.
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.
You know, I understand the concern that's been raised by a lot of citizens about Jade Hill. We have seen for six years a federal government disrespecting the liberty of the citizens. And that produces fear.
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 seemed perplexing to those outside of Texas, a state that prides itself on being patriotic and pro-military. However, seething distress of liberal elites is a lucrative business in Texas.
Alex Jones built a fortune of $270 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.
After Texas violently separated from Mexico in 1836, 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 wanted 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.
A decade later, the tide shifted, and Texas was hurriedly annexed in 1845 after widespread rumors gripped Washington, D.C., of a British plot to annex Texas and convert it to a haven for African Americans escaping slavery.
In the 1850s, 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 over suspected rebellions by the enslaved gripped Anglo-Texans in 1835, 1838, 1841, and in 1856, when perhaps as many as 400 African-Americans held in bondage in Colorado County and 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.
In 1860, 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 abolitionist instigators, often men from northern states. As one historian put it, white Texan enslavers decided it was better to, quote, hang 99 innocent men than to let one guilty pass.
Acting on little evidence, mobs lynched as many as 80 enslaved African American men and 37 accused white abolitionists by the time the panic burned out in September.
A wave of labor unrest, including the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886 and the rise of the populist movement, which called for the government seizure of 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 1880s to just after World War I, 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 1920s, where one in every three eligible men were members of the KKK at its peak. The KKK charged that both Jews and Catholics were conspiring 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 to add loopholes to American immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924 in order to let Jewish people escaping the Russian Empire into the United States as part of a scheme to undermine American society.
As oil millionaires and billionaires built their wealth over the 20th century, they became a force in conspiratorial far-right politics in Texas. Starting in the 1930s, 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 far right in the Lone Star State, ideas that reached a national audience in large part because of oil money.
John Owen Beatty, the longtime chairman of the English department of Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1951, 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 call the Old Testament.
Instead, they were descended from a sinister Asian trot called the Khazars that converted to Judaism around the year 800. Too arrogant to assimilate with Christian Europe, Beatty wrote, Khazars undermined society under their stolen identities and caused the communist revolution in Russia in 1918.
After immigrating to the United States in large numbers, they took over the Democratic Party, Beatty said, and moved it to the radical left. Beatty also claimed that Jews controlled Franklin Roosevelt's administration and pushed into war against Hitler's Germany, which Beatty described in his book as, quote, the historic bulwark of Christian Europe.
A mere six years after Soviet and American troops had liberated Nazi concentration camps, Beatty claimed that most of the victims there died from disease and the Holocaust was a fraud used after 1948 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.
Rather than earning him scorn, Beatty's virulently hateful anti-Jewish rants won him a large following. His book, Iron Curtain Over America, went through nine printings by 1953. The Public Affairs Luncheon Club, a women's organization, adopted a unanimous resolution backing Beattie in requesting that SMU investigate alleged communist influence on the university's faculty, politics, and values.
Beattie taught at SMU until his retirement in 1957, two years after a panic over allegedly red 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 World War II and 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 1960 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 and 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 and the African-American freedom struggle. A math instructor got fired after he carelessly commented in a teacher's lounge that he supported Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party nominee for president in 1952 and 1956.
The Eastern School Board yanked books from campus libraries that said positive things about the United Nations, while right-wingers in Dallas forced the city library and the Museum of Fine Arts to ban artists like Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso because of their supposed communist sympathies.
But before we get into that, a quick ad break. One Dallas oil magnate who built a mansion intentionally designed to be a bigger duplicate of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate used his wealth to broadcast extremist fever dreams in the 1950s and 1960s. His name was H.L. Hunt, and he was profiled by the BBC in the 1960s.
But as well as being perhaps the most frugal, the most stingy plutocrat of Texas, H.L. 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 poverty, 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 you 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 or against him. He brooks no halfway position.
A health fattest who avoided white bread 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.
It's time for Lifeline.
...around the world. Every leftist phrase and cliche of the past half century now has the hollow ring of mythology. This is Freedom Talk number 53. Printed copies are available at the rate of free for 25 cents from Lifeline, Dallas, Texas, 75206. I'll be back after this message from our sponsors.
The Lifeline show was hosted by a former FBI agent named Dan Smoot and broadcast on more than 80 television and 150 radio stations. Hunt believed that democracy was the instrument through which wealth would be seized from billionaires such as himself and redistributed to the lazy and the worthless.
Hunt once raged at Smoot when the Lifeline host claimed on air that democracy was a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ. Hunt corrected Smoot, condemning democracy as the handwork of the devil and a phony liberal form of watered-down communism. Hunt innovated a number of ways to alarm audiences about far-left plots.
During the last two years, H.L. 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.
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 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. It's time to do away with this attitude. Oh, it can't happen here. Will communists bury us? Will we face firing squads 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. Thank you.
For much of the 20th century, Dallas had built up a reputation as a clean, dull, modern, and efficiently run city. By the 1950s, 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, Nut Country. In 1954, Dallas elected a far-right House representative, Republican Bruce Alger.
Less than a week prior to the 1960 presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, a pro-Alger mob assaulted and spat on the Democratic vice presidential nominee and then-Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, 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 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, called Dallas home.
I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
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 1958, 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.
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 of the United States.
That particular Berkshire conspiracy theory made a long-lasting impact on the American psyche. Cities across the United States banned fluoridated water.
Today, the John Birch Society is still active in North Texas, where recent gubernatorial candidate and car dealer Don Huffines has published anti-fluoridation essays on the Dallas Express, a right-wing website that repurposed the name of a historic black newspaper that went defunct in the 1970s.
Edwin Walker's devotion to the John Birch movement cost him his military career. Under pressure from Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, 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, H.L.
Hunt. In 1961, Walker made the cover of Newsweek as a leader of the new right. And in 1962, he entered the race for Texas governor.
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 stricken 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 monster 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 1962 gubernatorial 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 1962. Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations, would confront Walker and a mob of his followers when the diplomat visited Big D on October 26, 1963.
Stevenson was shouted down as he attempted to deliver a UN Day speech to the Dallas Council on World Affairs. Mr.
Shall we get on with the business of the meeting?
Surely, my dear friend, I don't have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I?
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.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, Kennedy and his entourage felt foreboding as they prepared for a short airplane jaunt from Fort Worth to Dallas. The president just examined a full-page ad in the far-right Dallas Morning News that featured a bold-faced headline, Welcome, Mr. 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, H.R. Bumbright, 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. Soon the Kennedys would make their fateful flight to Dallas, and the president would die from an assassin's bullet shortly after noon.
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 Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, who also had been the subject of criminal probes by the Justice Department.
Other 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 1961 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 ordered a hit on the chief executive because he wanted to grab power.
Or maybe others said Kennedy died because of a 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 winds if they continued to do things that were against what he saw as in the best interests of the United States. Quote,
President shot 129 times from 43 different angles, a satirical headline from The Onion later asserted.
Sometimes conspiracy theories have deadly consequences. William L. Pierce spent his teen years attending a military academy in Dallas as the city stewed in anti-communist dread and anti-Semitic hatred. As a young adult, he had joined the John Birch Society, but grew frustrated because it wasn't racist enough.
He became a leading figure in the American Nazi Party and at the age of 41 formed the Neo-Nazi National Alliance. Beginning in 1975, he published in serial form one of the most influential examples of white supremacist literature, The Turner Diaries, a novel which told the story of a 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 sex.
At one point to save the white race, Turner blows up the FBI national headquarters in Washington, D.C. with a truck bomb.
In the novel, racist revolutionaries then take over Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California and seize its nuclear missiles, which they later use on cities across the nation. While ethnically cleansing California of non-whites, they hang 60,000 so-called race traitors 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 Pentagon.
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 1983 to 1984, 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, heisting more than $8 million 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 host Alan Berg.
The Turner Diary became the favorite novel of Timothy McVeigh, a bitter, disgruntled veteran in the 1991 Gulf War, who saw the deadly confrontation between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the gun-toting Branch Davidian religious sect in Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, as a major step in a government plan to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans.
McVeigh 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 U.S. Capitol. Some of the pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on January 6th 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, A Fiction. Stay with us through this ad break to learn more.
Kennedy was a classic Cold War liberal in support of an aggressive military intervention to stop communist expansion abroad and, with varying degrees of commitment, economic and civil rights reforms at home. But because of his assassination, by the 21st century, many on the far right saw him as a martyr to the liberal deep state.
Beginning in 2017, a very online far-right conspiracy theory arose that centered on cryptic messages first posted on the 4chan message board and then on 8chan by an anonymous person who identified themselves as Q. The pseudonym was for 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.
Q, or QAnon, developed a huge following that interpreted These confusing and often contradictory posts as actually revealing a secret global cabal 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 matzo 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 molesters in an event called The Storm.
Trump has winked and nodded to the QAnon movement, encouraged believers, and even incorporated some of its key slogans and imagery in speeches and posts online, such as Where We Go One, We Go All.
And as I've reported for Rolling Stone, a cult-like spinoff group of QAnon believers have repeatedly gathered at Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK's murder, to wait for the prophesied return of JFK and his son, JFK Jr.,
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 Jr. finally reveal themselves, a sort of kingdom of righteousness will reign and good will ultimately prevail over evil.
QAnon believers were a heavy presence during the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021. And QAnon banners competed with Trump and Confederate battle flags for attention. In November of that first year, we saw the first of a series of rallies that Steve just referred to. They went to Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy had been murdered 58 years earlier.
Over the course of many months, QAnon 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 2021. Reporter Kevin Reese interviewed some of the ones gathered at the Kennedy assassination site.
Word on the street is that...
Jr., JFK Jr., will show up and introduce his parents.
You're expecting JFK Jr.? Absolutely. Okay. How's that going to happen? It never does. Are we going to see him today?
JFK Jr.?
Yeah. That's what everyone's telling me. We're hoping.
We're hoping. To hope and pray.
And then after that? He'll probably be the vice president with Trump.
Conspiracy theorists often pay a high personal price for beliefs that marginalize them from family, friends and mainstream society.
There was one real truth several of these people agreed to talk about. You got to understand that most of the world is going to think that's just crazy. That's why half my family won't talk to me anymore.
They won't. And my girlfriend thinks I've lost my mind.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House on January 20th, conspiracy theories will move from the fringe to the seat of power. JFK Jr. won't emerge and grab the reins, but a different Kennedy will, Bobby Kennedy Jr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. has insisted that Wi-Fi causes cancer and that AIDS might not be caused by HIV. Vaccines, he claims, against overwhelming evidence cause autism.
Antidepressants cause school shootings, and chemicals in water lead to gender dysphoria. One of these chemicals, RFK Jr. insists, might be an old obsession of the conspiratorial right.
I think fluoride is a poison. It causes loss IQ, neurodevelopmental injuries. I think fluoride is on the way out.
RFK Jr., 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 2020 election from him, and as we have said, has co-opted some of the slogans of the QAnon 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. Nothing like that.
It's not shaped by political and economic alliances between elites or irreversible transformations in technology that render old job skills irrelevant. There's no material analysis. All of this...
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 and pull off the mask of the villains, then everything would be set right.
These enemies of freedom somehow pull all the strings, incite 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 an understandable contest between ruthless bad guys and intrepid heroes who then feel superior because they've unveiled the master 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, to surrender their privileges that come with skin color. Conspiracy theories are mostly a distraction, but unfortunately they are often, from Oklahoma City to the U.S. Capitol, a call for deadly action.
And while figures like H.L. Hunt and their operations like Lifeline may be 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 theories 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.
This is Michael Phillips. And this is Steven Monticelli. Thanks for listening.
Catch Jon Stewart back in action on The Daily Show and in your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. From his hilarious satirical takes on today's politics and entertainment to the unique voices of correspondents and contributors, it's your perfect companion to stay on top of what's happening now.
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The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Steffens.
I've never seen so many women protect predatory men.
And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. Problem.
My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing.
She was like, oh, dad, all he was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower.
What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh, my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Mm.
Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts.
Why would you do that to me when I thought we were friends? We are friends.
Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance.
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
Bloom generally targeted people with money.
And I was not alone.
He took over 100 people for over $15 million. One of the victims was his own grandmother.
I was married to David for almost 10 years. It was insane. I was barely functioning, and I just had this realization that he will not stop until he kills me.
Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con, starting February 12th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Kiljoy, but about things falling apart and putting them back together. If you live in the U.S., you might have noticed... that 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. It shouldn't be that way. Well, 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 1,529 trans women and 744 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 guest 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?
It should. 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 Mo, 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 Amendment's Due 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 a cis man. On January 21st, the woman suing the prison system 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 10 times the rate of other prisoners.
And that's the state's own reporting on the issue. 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 transition to 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 experience in prison, the former political prisoner Eric King. Eric served just shy of 10 years in prison for throwing a Molotov into an empty federal building one night in response to the Ferguson uprising of 2014.
Those were protests that were anti-police protests that started in the wake of the police killing of 18-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 foreword by none other than Angela Davis and is worth checking out. Eric was released from the ADX Supermax in December 2023.
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. How are you? I'm doing really well. Glad to be back. Thank you so much. Yeah. So, you reached out to me about this story. what'd you call it? Like a policy change. Yeah. Executive 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, you're a cis man and you didn't have an easy time in prison, right? As far as I, as far as I understand, no, I think no one gets to have an easy time in prison is one of the, things, especially in a supermax.
Some have it easier than others, 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. Is that a fair way to put it?
mildly yeah yes that was what was going on can you tell me a bit about the experience of trans people in prison because when 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 trans men are held i would rather if i was a trans man i'd probably rather be in women's prison i just anyway i don't know what was the situation like before this executive order
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.
Yeah.
A lot of times the bigger, more mainstream issues will get the most attention. And I still remember our trans family inside. And so like, that's what scared me enough to go like, dude, I need to talk to you about this. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was inside, there was not very many trans people in their like correct prison. Like a trans woman should be in a women's prison.
A trans man should be in a man's prison. And that wasn't happening on the level that it should have. And there was a rare case like Marius Mason, who had enough support, enough publicity where they were able to, but most people 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 what I'll call them, prisons where they feel safest. Okay. So 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. Yeah. But handfuls. Because it's very hard in the federal system to get recognized as a transgender person.
Yeah.
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. You got to say like, I am this person. This is who I am.
And if you were even more lucky, you got to be transferred to a prison that would make you feel the safest. Yeah. And the most whole as 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. And that's what's all being taken away.
Yeah.
And when you talk about the safety, I don't want to necessarily go on at great length about how trans women suffer in men's prisons, but it's probably worth talking about. Because you've described it as there's literal sexual slavery happening in the prisons. Is that a fair way to put it? Yeah, 110%, 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's an option, then great. But what I witnessed in the federal prison was the exact opposite of that. People are getting destroyed.
And if you go into a men's prison presenting as female in any way or soft in any way or as any type of woman or any type of non-cis straight male, 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 breasts, if you had anything presenting as female, you will get butchered
Within an hour, you won't survive that. Or you'll get bought by some group and you will be a slave, like you will be property. And at the lower custody levels, it's a lot safer. If you're at a low security, like FCI Inglewood, you're not in danger there. You're a danger of humiliation and being degraded by staff, but you're not going to get stabbed there.
But God forbid you go to Victorville medium, Florence medium, or any penitentiary, like that's a death sentence for real.
yeah do you want to talk about the worst things that ever happened to you do you want to talk about uh you and i we did another episode on my other podcast um live like the world is dying 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
Yeah. So like everyone needs to have like consequence awareness and they need to work on the lines that like 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. And there was other times that you, you have to knife up or you have to show up physically. And I'm not a big guy, of course, but like, I don't tolerate like anti-trans people.
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 going to 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 yeah 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 yeah
If people see that like this person's trans or like other people are riding with them, they're less likely to go after them because there'll be consequences. But if they're all alone, then they're just a sitting duck. Yeah. And so like, we need that. We need cis men to show up and be like, this is not happening. I don't care what race you are. I don't care what gang you're in.
You're not going to hurt this person. And that's stuff that we had to do sometimes. And it's scary as shit.
Yeah.
Because you don't know what's going to happen, but.
You have to. Like, you have to live your ethics. 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 wolf in the wild? I've only heard it from you and I loved it. Okay, I probably said this exact same thing last time we talked. Just in case. Yeah.
And, and so it's like, it obviously is going to bring out the worst in people. The, 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. 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 gonna have to do with like, no, you can't take my neighbors, right?
In the era of ICE.
I think that's really well said too. I think the way like I used to work inside is like, we can't take steps backwards. We can't relinquish any progress we've made, not a single pinch of it. Like everything has to move forward. And whatever you're capable of doing, like not everyone's capable of like physically stepping to someone and saying like, no. 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 family get butchered.
Yeah, I really like that way of phrasing it. Yeah, we can't forfeit the future. How can people support trans prisoners 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? What can be done?
So I assume like when you're asking like, what can people do to support trans prisoners? I assume you're asking like, what can free world people do to support those inside?
Yeah. I mean, you actually kind of have said what people on the inside can do already, which is necessary and important, but people on the outside, what can people do?
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 keeps people alive. Okay.
And so the more the staff knows and the administration knows that like this person 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 pen 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 it on drugs. I don't care if they spend it on 20 bags of coffee or gambling. As long as it keeps them out of slavery or out of that knife, that's what matters. And then passing names around.
It's almost as if we concentrate all of our prison support on five or six people, and then we forget that there's 15,000 trans people in prison. 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 keep them alive. Like that's what abolition is. So visibility.
Yeah. That makes sense. I sort of know the answer to this, but I'm going to 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. 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 going to find you a pen pal and we're going to get people to write you. And they do a really amazing job.
I honor them for putting in that work because it's hard. 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?
Yeah. Even just like right now, someone Googled Black and Pink pen pal. Black and Pink prison pen pal. It'll pop up the website. You just click on find a pen pal. And you can find someone in your city, find someone in your state, find someone that you relate to, like they'll have a little biography and you can find someone like to connect with and potentially save their life or save your life.
Yeah.
Like it can make you better too.
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?
So each prison's different, like state and federal, but to put money on someone's books, you can do that yourself. You go, you find out whatever prison that person's at and you can just go to the BOP website or that prison's website. BOP is Bureau of Prisons. It's for federal people. Mm-hmm.
And it will just walk you through how to do it, how to send the money ground from Walmart or how to do the J-Pay and put it on through your credit card. And you can do it. Like if there's an ABC and Anarchist 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. Everyone can do this on your own. This is a single person job, but it's better if we do it as a community.
Well, the way that I fundraise is that I have advertisers that interrupt me talking about anti-capitalist things. And here's one of those interruptions. And I'm going to 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? Like what's going on?
I can't, like, speak for everybody. It should kill, like, a 10 out of 10. Yeah. Like, this is a carceral genocide. Yeah. For real. This is an erasure of an entire people. So, like, if you're not at a 10 for this, like, you either do not care or you're not understanding how serious the prison system is. I've talked to a couple homies inside.
I have to be really delicate because I'm still on probation. But those people understand, like, the mood is turning dark.
Okay.
Like 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 being 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 in named Casey Goonan. And they got sentenced for allegedly firebombing some cop cars in support of 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.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah, that makes sense. What kind of support felt the most useful to you and other prisoners? I know you talked about this a little bit, but I'm curious about, you talk about visibility. Are protests outside of jails, do they make people feel good and welcome? Or does it make the guards crack down on everyone? I know that there's this habit of noise demonstrations every New Year's.
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.
Yeah. The noise demos are cool, but they're performative. It's more for the people that are doing them than the people inside. Mm-hmm. But like, let's say you're a trans person at a jail and there's 35 people outside waving your banner that will get you respect inside. They'll get people to say like, what the hell is going on with them?
Okay.
Yeah. Like that is, that's serious to where you can build up a rep. Um, if someone's already in prison, that's You'll probably get them fucked up and put in the shoe. That's what happened to me.
If there's a noise demonstration with your name.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Be delicate in how you do it.
Yeah.
Because that's what put me in ADX. Oh, shit. So that's a real, that's a real double-edged sword, right? Yeah. 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. So I got pulled with El Chapo.
Oh, we shouldn't tell everyone that you're the, we have to keep it on the DL that you're the leader of Antifa. Yeah. 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 of a regional leader. 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 to 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 if 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 and this. What is going to happen to our family? That makes a difference.
Okay.
If you know a lawyer, pay the $120 an hour to have them do a legal call. That way the prison sees this person as 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, lets 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 a legal system. Okay. So these things help. 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.
That's the soft version of what we should do.
Yeah, fair enough. There's other versions that are... Yeah, okay.
There's the other version that, like, I wish people would do. Yeah. There's the 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. Uh-huh.
There's protesting outside wardens' houses. There's protesting outside governors' houses if it's for a state prison. Mm-hmm. 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 hurt our people, we're hurting you.
Yeah.
Whether it's in your pocket, whether it's in your car, whether it's in your daily life, whether it's annoying you.
Yeah.
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. The sub you said is really great too. Like that's like, that's daily stuff.
No, no, but you're right. And it's like, it's funny. Cause 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.
I mean, I don't think people understand at all. And 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 he's transgender so he can rape everyone.
And these are like the same scare tactics and like misinformation that's used for every single like every single repression we've ever seen. And it's our job to confront those head on and call them out as lies, 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. We can't let this entire group of people be destroyed
Cause 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.
Yeah.
And then no one's going to protect your stupid ass.
Yeah.
We have to, as, or as I have to, as a cis man, we have to keep ringing this bell.
Yeah.
We have to make people listen.
I mean, as a not-currently-in-prison trans woman, one of the reasons I think this almost happens, I mean, it happens because of cruelty is the point, but 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 even want to compare it by the way.
Okay. It's not comparable. Okay.
Like if I didn't have Antifa attached to my face, I could walk into any prison in the country and be like, Oh, there's just a white guy. It's just a, just a white bro. Yeah.
have no problems yeah a transgender person there's not 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 24 7 all day every day yeah picture someone breaking into your home in the middle of the night and 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.
No, that's fair. Like, to be honest, like, I think about, and this is like, maybe more honest than I 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's 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 viscerally terrifying. But now in particular, like, it's just such a... It's a mindfuck. It's terrifying.
And, you know, I feel like one of my, like, 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 until everyone is free.
As long as there is a single person in prison, you are 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 like, 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
That's my rant.
Yeah. No, 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. Yeah. Or how quickly something that wasn't a crime can be portrayed as one. Yeah. And the trans struggle, like trans people should not have to be on the front line. Yeah. Like at 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.
Yeah.
And my boss shouldn't have to get arrested for trans liberation. 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 fighting the black liberation fight. That's white people's fight.
Trans people should not have to put their vulnerable lives on the line for this struggle if we really believe in the liberation struggle.
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, but then obviously you can get into.
There's the hero shit. Yeah. Trying to take leadership. Yeah. Do the David Gilbert role. Be a soldier how they need you and help and fight how people actually need you. Yeah. Not how you think it should be done.
Yeah, totally. Well, any last words for our audience around this particular issue?
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 of 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.
Yeah.
There's a thousand ways we can fight these motherfuckers and we got to use every single one of them. 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, I hope.
We are going to get through it because even as individuals... We might not, right? But that's just 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, there are going to be trans people.
There are going to be queer people. There are 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 going to get out of life alive anyway. That's what I hold on to. I don't know about everyone who's listening, but the thing that I hold on to is just literally, I was like, well, I wasn't, I'm not immortal.
You know? It's got a time limit. 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 in a secretly, you're just actually doing it at a cowardice way. You actually like 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?
So, Riding in the Cages is out right now. It's with AK Press, and it is an oral history of the political prisoner movement. Hold... from the mouths of those prisoners. It covers like 50 or so prisoners from every movement, black, trans, our elders, our 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?
What did I experience? 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 PM Press. Oh, cool. So I'll be hounding you for that here soon, for that coverage. Yeah, yeah. Wait, what's that book called or about?
It's going to be called a clean hell. And it's going to be about how I won at trial. Cause I, no one does that in the feds. Yeah. 0.08% of people win in federal trial. And then how I got sent to the federal super max and there's no books out about the super max. There's none.
Wow.
And so one of your homies has the inside scoop.
Yeah.
Yeah, you were just an undercover journalist. Just a real deep, undercover, solitary confinement.
So Josh Davidson is helping me edit it. Josh Davidson from Routed in the Cages, who did also Certain Days. So it's been a really great project also.
Awesome. 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 on again soon. Yay. Thank you so much.
Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show, and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into Jon's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors.
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The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast, brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. With guests like Corinne Steffens.
I've never seen so many women protect predatory men. And then me too happened. And then everybody else wanted to get pissed off because the white said it was okay. Problem. Problem.
My oldest daughter, her first day in ninth grade, and I called to ask how I was doing.
She was like, oh, dad, all he was doing was talking about your thing in class. I ruined my baby's first day of high school. And slumflower.
What turns me on is when a man sends me money. Like, I feel the moisture between my legs when a man sends me money. I'm like, oh, my God, it's go time. You actually sent it? Mm.
Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcasts.
Why would you do that to me when I thought we were friends?
We are friends. Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true.
Let's not forget that David Bloom was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance.
But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare.
Bloom generally targeted people with money.
And I was not alone.
He took over 100 people for over $15 million. One of the victims was his own grandmother.
I was married to David for almost 10 years. It was insane. I was barely functioning, and I just had this realization that he will not stop until he kills me.
Getting a con artist to pay for their crimes isn't easy. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con, starting February 12th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is 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 healthcare for everyone below the age of 19 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 foolproof 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 United.
And they also co-facilitate that union's trans rights action committee called TRAC. And specifically, the topic of this episode is how 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 necessary. 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-affirming 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.
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 health care that's provided and make sure that that health care is affordable 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.
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 admin 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 revoked the directive.
But this clearly demonstrates what the new priorities are for the conservative government. And they will 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.
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, right? 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 even 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, right?
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 is
you know, with the collective resources of your union that you're a 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.
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 2023, Neha co-founded TRAC, 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 started focusing on trans healthcare as one of the core issues we were organizing around, it all started with a conversation with a regional staffer here in Oklahoma. I had a regular check-in call with my staffer, and this was two, two and a half years ago. And he was just asking, what's going on? What are you concerned about?
And I was like, well, I'm having some issues with... accessing healthcare and he not heard like how difficult it was for like trans people to access healthcare at 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 and
So then we had 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 are facing, specifically in accessing healthcare. And so that's kind of how TRACS 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 feminization surgery or anything like that, right? This issue that was affecting like a small subset 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 community
union coworkers and like my comrades, like actually like fucking care about trans people. Right. I was kind of like how tracks started and how we started to organize around trans healthcare specifically.
It's been a focus for us for a long time. Also in part because the initial, you know, our public, um, bargaining proposals that were released early on when we first formulated our demands included improvements to gender-affirming care at Starbucks. And part of that's because there were trans people involved in writing those initial demands, right?
And, you know, Neha was involved nationally in the campaign and had the opportunity and the encouragement to start track, you know, we have to be part of it, 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 cis 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 campaign 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 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.
Track's logo says trans rights are labor rights, a phrase one of Neha's coworkers 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 health care 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.
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. 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 do.
take away from you, whether that's on-the-job protections, whether that's economic 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.
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 like 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.
Yeah, morale is a terrain of struggle. And this is a way that you can fight there that does other things too at the same time, which is critically important.
And do you know what else is important? Being subservient to the capitalist impulse of pivoting to ads. Okay, we are back. Here's more of our interview with Starbucks Workers United.
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 the ways in which the trans struggle is a workers' struggle.
The trans community is disproportionately impoverished. A lot of us are struggling to just pay for rent or our basic needs, right?
Yeah.
I think this framing assumes that all trans people are, I don't know, rich, working in tech or some shit like that, which just is not true.
Yeah, the actual stats, by the way, these are running from the U.S. Trans Survey, which is the largest survey of trans people in the U.S. 34% poverty rate. The national number for cis people is 11%. The unemployment rate is 18%. The U.S. unemployment rate for cis people is 4%. 18% is 1936 rate depression levels of unemployment. 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lives.
The national rate is about 7%. 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, 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. Trans femmes make like 60 cents on the dollar of like the average American worker.
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 union is 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 18% unemployment,
then you're talking about people who certainly are going to have difficulty getting employer provided health care, let alone employer provided health care 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 have discovered in many cases that it's actually not so accessible. 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. That was a community tip.
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 health care.
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 health care. You know, that's something everyone benefits from and everyone can relate to.
And I mean, I can also attest to the fact that I started at Starbucks five years ago because I needed to have access to gender affirming 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 was going to medically transition.
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?
That's something I also want to highlight because I don't think people understand this at all if they're cis is that the level of employment discrimination is staggering. It is however hard if you are a cis person you think it is to find a job. It is like 30 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.
Right. And I think that's how Starbucks kind of like advertises itself to queer and trans workers. Right. And I think this is reflected in the demographic of my store. 99% of my coworkers are queer. A lot of us are trans. There's like a lot of trans women who work at my store and, I actually don't even know if we have a single straight coworker, actually.
We have like our one token diversity hire, but he literally just transferred. So I think it's all gay people. But no, like all of us apply 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 affirming 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 $16,000 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 bills or anything else.
Like we're struggling to just fucking get by.
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.
With 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 health care and having to find other ways to pay for gender affirming 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 medicaid to cover gender affirming care we're looking at state by state like health care bans right i think it's more important than ever to organize and focus on trans rights and our access to health care our wages our safety at the workplace where else are we going to protect ourselves like that
The Starbucks union is also fighting for guaranteed scheduling and better staffing at stores. And this relates directly to a worker's ability to access healthcare 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.
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 literally cry and beg her manager to schedule her enough so she didn't lose access to gender-affirming care.
And of course, this manager was scheduling enough hours for other workers who weren't trans women, right? And so I think having protections in a contract that guarantee a certain number of hours, better scheduling, that kind of thing, also makes it easier for us to maintain and keep the benefits that we need.
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 2024.
So after nine months of bargaining, it's December, we're 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. And I mean like counter proposal. It was literally like a page. Yeah.
And their counterproposal was basically no changes to benefits whatsoever and a 1.5% raise if non-union stores received a raise that was less than that. And for context, 1.5% for most of us is 30 cents. So yeah, for nine months, that was the best they could do. Yeah. So it wasn't really a serious like counterproposal. I mean, frankly, it was a fucking insult.
So with less than a week's notice, they organized the biggest ULP strike in the union's history, resulting in 5,000 baristas at over 300 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 2024. 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 trans advocacy just hasn't really had in a long time.
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 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 2025. 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 if only for the protections that it guarantees workers in terms of like
safety at work in terms of making sure that they're not being taken advantage of at work, right? What Starbucks offered us, again, was an insult. It wasn't a real counterproposal. We're more ready than ever to finish this contract and to have something. But we need movement from Starbucks. We need a serious counterproposal. $0.30 and no changes to benefits isn't going to fucking do it.
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 going to throw to Mia for a discussion on how union organizing can help strengthen trans advocacy in general.
We're in this kind of crisis period of, I don't know, what you call the national trans movement to the extent that it exists, where the advocacy orgs and legal strategies they've been pursuing are not working. We're losing in the courts all the time. Their electoral strategy of... kind of burying themselves in 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 much time until these people take power.
is more sort of, you know, not just intra-union coordination of organizing trans workers, but is organizing trans workers across different unions and trying to figure out how we leverage our power more broadly to protect ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to be free.
Yeah, I think... 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. Yeah. We're affiliated to Workers United, which is affiliated to SEIU. 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.
Yeah.
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 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, then we have to be the ones to do it. We have to do it.
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 Zizek's mistranslation of Antonio Gramsci is like, you know, the old trans movement is dying and the new world 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 the show, the people on this now, we are going to be the people who define humanity.
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 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 a population where it's very easy to get salt.
It's very 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 there's things about these movements and the way that we're embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements, like the Starbucks 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.
Right, 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, especially with the labor movement when there's so much opportunity to advocate for trans rights, to build up the trans liberation 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 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. And yes, you should consider going to work at Starbucks and unionizing it.
And certainly, you know, to directly plug a little bit, if there are baristas 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 it. I know it can sound daunting in theory. What does it mean to start organizing my workplace?
But there is a template. There's a plan. We've done this a bunch. We've done it at over 500 stores, at least 512 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.
It's never been more needed than now. So this is the time. 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. 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 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 trans liberation as a consequence of how things turn out with us. So yeah, we could really use your support.
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.
I think I have to emphasize how achievable that is. Like it is possible. 500 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 And I was jokingly telling her, I was like, well, you're allowed to transfer as long as you unionize your store immediately. And she was like, okay.
And she did it. Within a week of being there, she 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 like 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 coworkers. And she's been able to take that and replicate that so easily and so quickly.
Like when I say within 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 coworkers, 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.
Every single union that has ever been formed was made 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 not something that's like the domain of pure professional organizers. You can do this too.
Yeah, you really can. And I mean, you know, at my store... I was the only trans person at my store. And despite being a transsexual communist, I was able to organize a successful election at a store that includes half of people being Trump voters.
The idea that you have to hide or diminish yourself or that because you're trans or otherwise marginalized, that it's impossible for you to build that solidarity is with your coworkers and come together for your common issues, it's just not true. People understand their own economic liberation.
Even if they don't fully just yet, there's always an intuitive level that 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 sidestepping issues and hiding pieces of who we are and saying that, oh, well, you know, trans liberation is not really important. That's not how we're going to build 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. You really have nothing to lose and nothing, you know, except your chains not to be...
I mean, I just realized halfway through, I was like, well, I might as well finish the quote.
Again, we're at such a scary point for trans people. And I know that that's terrifying, but that's also an opportunity to pivot and to actually make meaningful change, right? Again, I can't 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 so yeah i think that's a good place to close on it 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
Thank you.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. We decided every week we were going to do an 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 Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, Robert Evans, James Stout, and I am the voice in your ears, Sophie Lichterman.
Yeah, and you should know we'll be making a number of references to a show you haven't watched called The Newsroom. So many references. Just pretend we didn't. Yeah.
Anyways, let's do the episode now. Go.
Yeah, 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 vis-a-vis the White House. And it's been two weeks 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 and also removing the X 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, about 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 Greek avatar statue Twitter accounts have a complete cultural victory now.
Uh, great. I am going to agitate to replace the Oregon State Capitol 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.
This actually is like bad, you know, very, very 1930s, you know.
Yeah, yeah. Famously, no other regimes have harkened back to the classical era.
Well, and specifically is, like, calling, like, you know, modern architecture, brutalist architecture as, you know, as, like, weak or bad or things that get restricted. Yeah. On a more somber note, part of this two-sex 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. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
And this is just the start. I guess we'll throw over to Mia for some more executive action done on the woke gender ideology angle.
Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there might be another anti-trans executive order. We'll get to that at the end. But the big ones for right now is that Trump is trying to do a... And this is something we talked about in our last episode about what it's going to look like for trans people, but a federal funding...
ban for trans health care which means for for youth trans health care which means any provider that like gets federal funding and this is this includes things like taking medicare and medicaid right those like hospitals can't do any kind of gender affirming care for youth Part of what's sort of terrifying, I mean, there's a lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've defined a kid as age 19.
Or under the age of 19. Yeah, under the age of 19.
Obviously, that gives worries for stuff that we've been talking about for years for how they might try to start bumping up the age for these HRT bans. This also could be them not really realizing what they're doing to some extent, because this could also just be copying, I believe, an Alabama or an Arkansas ban, and that was the highest age used in any of these state healthcare bans.
They could just be copying that over because it is the highest one, and I'm not sure how much they've thought about their capacity to start arbitrarily raising that number.
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' rights movement, which very much does not consider 18-year-olds to be adults.
Totally, totally. Yeah, and on that note, one of the things they're trying to do is target states that have trans-sanctuary laws by trying to get parents who take their kids to safe states charged on kidnapping charges.
And it's worth 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 affirming 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 illegal, 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 he genuinely can do. That's very dangerous is he's trying to get. And this is from Aaron Reed.
He's a trans journalist, does pretty good work on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to not follow WPATH guidelines. So WPATH is this sort of organization that sets the guidelines for like trans health care. And this we don't know what this is going to do.
There is a chance that this could endanger private like health care covering it because they follow the government using WPATH guidelines. 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.
Well, and it's just signaling to the base, even if it gets stopped. I don't think he cares if... decent chunks of it gets stopped. He tried to do the thing. Yeah, I agree with Robin. He can now shift the blame to someone else. 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? Yeah, yeah.
So speaking of fuck it, let's get into this whole, this whole freezing the entire federal government thing. We're going to do a more detailed episode about this next week, but maybe the most unhinged thing that he's done so far is in the birthright stuff. he did an executive order that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Yeah. Early this week, the U.S.
Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo to everyone telling them that, like, all grant programs are frozen until they submit a, like, they submit a description of, like, what the grant program is and why it's not DEI. And so, like, Things that were, like, fucked by this, right? I have a few of these programs that they were, the grants they were shutting down here.
The Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Program. Whoa! The National School Lunch Program, Special Milk Program for Children, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the DOD's Basic and Applied Scientific Research Grants. DEI, DEI. It's even got a D right in there. That's right.
One of these, and this is a very serious one, at least for these people holding on to power, was the National Guard's military operation and maintenance. Famously woke. That's like $8 billion of money to the National Guard. Hey, critical support. He got one thing right.
The 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 plant. They defunded the nuke police.
Like check the signal loop gang. I think I got a plan based on that. We're going to become the first nuclear armed podcasting network.
So, this is the thing. Like, 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 master strokes. And, like, no. They're just lashing out, right? They're driven by pure anger, and they're trying to do this purge of the government of anything woke or whatever.
Like, anything that's, like, vaguely involves non-white people or just, like, anyone who's not a cis white dude, they're trying to get rid of. Yeah. And this memo is... 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 a bunch of really conflicting information where, like, Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to go through with the executive orders.
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 initial memo, but they're certainly going to try again.
But the problem that they have is that there are literally so many of these grants. And the reason they did it this way in the first place was because they found a list of grants, they 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.
They effectively nuked
most of the capacity of the federal government and it's going to 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 nuke police right yeah critical support to abolishing the nuclear security team yeah they did what biden couldn't do abolish the police yeah let's go on a quick ad break and then we will return to report more of the news
All right, we are back. I guess I will turn over to our immigration and border correspondent, James Dow. That's me. Yes, please report the news.
I'm ready to report the news. I have never been more ready. Okay, this is going to be a long run because there was a raft of executive orders about the border in the... A flurry. A flurry, yeah. A sounder.
The only word we're allowed to use is a flurry of executive orders.
We can't use a murder like crows, you know, the collective noun for crows. I mean, this is going to result in a murder. Yeah, 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, I'd venture to say I've spent more time at the southern border of the United States than anyone in the executive branch and most people reporting on it, too. Mm-hmm. 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 only remarkable thing I saw was a pig, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig, which some people have released, which now lives there. But 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 and counterterrorism treatment. And anyone who's followed US politics for the last 20 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 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 1,600 United States troops.
Most of them are military police or engineers. We've got Marines and we've got Army. In the San Diego sector, it's 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 admission of nationals from those countries. This is effectively the travel ban that we saw in the first Trump administration or a version of that, right?
It's a visa revocation or travel ban for people from certain countries. And we can guess what those countries will be. Last time they were, for the most part, majority Muslim countries, right? And we might well see that again. They have attempted to rescind birthright citizenship for children of undocumented families, right?
This is one, if people go back to our, like, what can Trump do for mass deportations podcast that Robert, Sophie and I did sometime in November, I think. You'll get more information there on 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 the 14th Amendment is phrased today.
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 immunity, 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 even when they're born here. The Trump administration is arguing this applies to children of undocumented people as well. There are five court cases challenging that already, so they've got an uphill 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 where their 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, literally minutes after taking office, was canceling CBP-1. CBP-1, there is a lot of misinformation about what CBP-1 is. CBP-1 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 are the places where you can enter across the land border, and make their case for their asylum, right, do their first asylum interview.
Like this is like following the law, like this is like the process.
Yeah, making a CBP-1 appointment is quote-unquote the right way.
Exactly, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you have a legal right to enter between ports of entry and still make an asylum claim, which is what we saw earlier. in the outdoor detention situation, right? But doing it via CBP1 is like the belt and braces 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. CBP1 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 Dalian Gap, you will hear some of those people, right? Those people are now stuck in Mexico without really any legal means to enter the United States and claim asylum.
Trump has directed ICE to increase detention capacity. We spoke about this in our previous podcast. The amount of detention beds they would need to hit the 13 million deportations they talked about is immense. But one of the things they are doing is starting to house people. 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 8,000 people in a month in the September to October of 2021. Trump is aiming to hit 5,000. 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 aesthetic choice. And it's an aesthetic choice which has ruffled enough feathers in South and Central America that you have Honduras saying that they're going to revoke the U.S. mission to have a military base in Honduras as they mistreat migrants. We had Colombia briefly refusing U.S. military flights with deportees. Mexico doing the same. Briefly entering a trade war with Colombia.
Yeah. Which lasted about two hours.
The one hour. Our trade war, about the same length as the civil war in Western Yugoslavia.
Yeah. The trade war with Colombia was averted when Colombia sent its own military plane to get these deportees. Yeah, Colombia caved immediately. Yeah, that they will continue to accept U.S. 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 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. Yeah, for whatever. And then those police notify ICE and ICE come get them. We've seen a lot more of door-to-door ICE raids in the last two weeks, and they've been ramping up even 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 a 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. Sensitive places had previously been understood to be schools, churches, and hospitals. Now ICE is conducting quote-unquote enforcement operations in those places.
Those are actually places, like the sensitive places doctrine had been in place for a long time. This wasn't like a Biden thing. This had been a long-term thing. So ICE is now, and we've seen immigration actions conducted at a church in Atlanta, for instance. We've seen, I think there were actually Secret Service agents who identified themselves as ICE agents at a school in Chicago.
because a child had posted an anti-Trump video. And then I guess the 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 Iran's Quds Force as a foreign terrorist organization and then proceeded to kill their leader, right? So this FTO designation opens up the possibility of... A lot of like covert activity. I'm talking like 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 benefiting a terrorist organization and they could be sanctioned as well. We will have to see how this plays out, I guess. And there's still, the directive was to look into and then name these groups.
Well, and this is something that Hegseth has previously been in favor of and he has now been confirmed. Yes.
Yeah, Hexeth has talked about using special forces in Mexico. Oh, yes.
And this was Agenda 47 stuff. They've been talking about this for a while.
Yeah, it's also in our Agenda 47 episodes if people want to go back there. Direct action raids 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. That is an act of war. The U.S.
has had an FID, Foreign Internal Defense Mission, right, where it trains, advises and assists Mexican law enforcement and military for a long time. The guys who arrested El Chapo, for instance, were trained, I think, by MARSOC. But this has been happening for a long time. But to go from that to unsanctioned direct action would be a huge, huge step up.
The only really analogous, directly analogous thing I can think of is Clinton with the Plan Colombia designating FARC as a foreign terrorist organization. But that was very much with the cooperation and support of the Colombian government. We're seeing a much more adversarial situation. between the United States and Mexico right now. The last thing I want to mention is this deployment.
I'd spoken about it, but there are about 1,600 troops deployed right now. Biden deployed 1,500 troops in the summer of 2023. This is not a vastly different number They are doing different things. They seem to be chucking razor wire on top of the wall and being photographed. They're two major jobs at the moment. We will see how that plays out.
Also, with reference to the military, Trump immediately cancelled the refugee resettlement program. This left people all over the world stranded, including Afghans, many of whom worked for the United States or are family members of US service people. The 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 to different status to entering and claiming asylum. Those people, many of whom had booked flights, found their flights were cancelled. They're now stranded. Lots of them are 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.
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 there's been a lot of conflation between DEI and what we would consider affirmative action. DEI refers to these specific corporate training policies and diversity initiatives, which is separate from DEI.
long-standing affirmative action policies, which has been used both in the corporate world and in the government for decades at this point. And what a whole bunch of this DEI rollback type stuff is essentially doing is just openly discriminating against people who are not 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 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 other names, right? So that would be stuff like affirmative action, right?
If there's anything that is about trying to increase the diversity in your workforce or any quote-unquote woke topics, including 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 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 woke holidays anymore. including Martin Luther King Jr.
's birthday, Black History Month, Women's History Month, 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 Juneteenth.
Although, who knows, they might try to even remove some of those as being federal holidays. I did wonder that. Like, at some point, you're going to lose people when you take away their days off work. 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 other awareness months or, you know, Pride Month, Black History Month. 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. 51% oppose The closing of these offices, according to their poll, 44% are in favor. And it's very segmented, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America. Pretty disliked with 70% being in opposition.
Look, the one thing people hate most is changing names. Having the names be changed. Nobody likes that. Yeah, he did Denali as well, right? Yeah, I guess that was changed more recently. But the Gulf of Mexico has been the Gulf of Mexico for longer than America has existed as a country. The United States, right?
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 is right. I'm just saying, like, that's a much harder sell.
Yes, yeah, yeah. You're not going to get much buy-in on that.
Pardoning J6 protesters, new tariffs or taxes on Canadian goods, and ending birthright citizenship are all around 60-30, 60 opposed, 30% 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 general enthusiasm for his actions right now.
And there's I think part of 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, 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 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 something that he also mentioned in his inaugural address.
Let me tell you, Panamanians, not stoked. I've been receiving communications from Panama where I was in September. They are burning American flags.
The quote from the inaugural address is, quote, the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth and carries our flag into new beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars. Wow. Yeah. I don't know. What do you have to say? That's not a good thing. I think that's bad.
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 he's focused on, like, why he believes the U.S. has a vested interest in Greenland isn't just picking out a spot on the map I think this also could be related to trying to prepare for climate change.
Having territory in the Arctic is going to become an increasingly valuable commodity to have. 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.
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. Very excited for that. Mm-hmm.
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 doing this kind of about Trump's flip-flopping opinions on TikTok. you know, being very into like, you know, saving TikTok and 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 does not actually mean that. Trump just says things.
Even though he's going to call TikTok worthless does not mean that he's going to not do that easy layup. We're all aware of how much he just says what is on his mind. And I think these sorts of things do not necessarily mean that he's going to 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 much more affecting to his general popularity. Yeah.
Yeah, he's doing... Again, I talk about this a lot. Why fascists succeed is that they try. They're constantly reaching for stuff. And oftentimes, 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 U.S. 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 concessions 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 walk away maybe with a coup and you do it fucking widely enough, you might get something, right? Like that's it. He's always testing his limits. Because that's what they do.
I mean, look at Colombia, right? He immediately went to like 11 on the retaliation scale and effectively received concessions.
Yeah. So I think similar to how, you know, it was annoying in the first like resist lib 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 memetic reactions that form generalizing statements about, you know, how 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 you take this.
So Trump has signed an executive order saying that they're going to create a facility capable of storing 30,000 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 U.S.
concession in Cuba is a sizable degree of land, but it's not easy land to build things on, right? Like 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 weight 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 facilities in the US to deal with all the migrants they are taking in. So this is not the start. If you want to call this, I think it's fair to call this a plan to start a concentration camp system. That system began.
And in fact, it started before Trump took office. A decent chunk of it was anticipating him coming into office. But this this is not the first camp.
Right. Yeah. And like Biden did significant legwork for detention that is cruel and unusual. Yes. With his legal defense and his establishment of outdoor detention for migrants since the end of Title 42 in May of 23. Mm hmm. And I think, like, we have to acknowledge that. I know people are very much into the, 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, there were foreign outlets that called the outdoor detention sites in Hakumba concentration camps. Yeah. Right? Because they sure as hell look like one.
And they are. 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, hereafter referred to as the KZ system, right? There's one post I came across on Twitter where a person who I'm not going to name just to not cause a bunch of bullshit for them. Time from taking office to opening a mass detention camp.
Mussolini, eight years. El Algella and others, Libya. Hitler, 51 days. Dachau, Germany. Trump, nine days. That's fucking horseshit. Yes, Dachau took longer to establish. Dachau 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 were called wild concentration camps.
And this 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 200,000 people were taken into custody under the wild concentration camp system in 1933, 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 200 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 were called Reconcentrados in Cuba at the behest of a Spanish general fighting an insurgency. There were U.S. officers embedded there. They came back and those tactics were adapted for our wars with Native American tribes on the frontiers and the plains. General Sherman was one of the very first Americans to carry 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 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 bad. 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 yeah no no stop it yeah like we have you can trace a line from like Bosque Redondo right where they sent the Navajo people right Bosque Redondo is a great thing to bring yeah yes and you can trace a direct line from that to the outdoor detention camps we saw in 2023 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 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 really need to examine your own preconceptions before like speaking for others. Yep. All right.
Is that this episode for this week, everyone? I think that's the episode.
I think we're done.
We reported the news. Yep.
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.
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