It Could Happen Here Weekly 178
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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 that asks the question, what happens when the people who are trying to help put things back together are also being exploited in the process? I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about a union that is attempting to do exactly that. And with me to discuss this are Jess and Jesus, who are mentors for Friends of the Children PDX and members of the Friends PDX Union Network. Yeah, Jess, Jesus, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, I'm really happy to talk to you both because I think this is a very, very unique and interesting union, especially, you know, talk about especially right now. But to get people sort of rolling, can you explain what Friends of the Children is and what it is that you two do?

Yeah. So Friends of the Children is, it's a national organization. It's a nonprofit, but there are individual chapters throughout different cities. We work out of Portland, which is the founding chapter and also the largest one. Some of the language I'll say that is like used from the website and from like the mission statement that really encompasses the

What our role is and also how it is told to like our community partnerships and the families and youth that we work with is that we are committing to youth when they are typically around kindergarten age level and they're being paired with a mentor and they will have a mentor until they graduate the program. So that usually ends up being a total of 12 and a half years.

And that like within that, we were doing a lot of like individualized care and support. We work with them in the schools. We work with them outside the schools. We help them get into extracurriculars. We help them with like social emotional regulation, developing relationships with other youth in the program. And really just like being a consistently reliable human being. And one of the big like pillars of our organization is the commitment to long term.

Which sometimes can be an issue when you are facing a lot of high turnover as an organization. We both have eight kids on our roster, as do most mentors.

And within that, we have youth. I personally have youth that have been assigned to me that have just started in the program, meaning that they were like maybe first grade when I was assigned to them. And then I also have youth that are middle school level that have had several different mentors in the past.

Some that have stayed there for maybe a few years. And sometimes there's ones that have been there for months. Yeah, I can add to that. The kids we work with, they're enrolled into the program because they have some risk factors in their lives that would lead them to needing a little bit of extra support and help. So we work with a lot of kids that...

that come from immigrant families, from families that have single-parent households, foster care families and kids. Kids that, unfortunately, are likely to face some challenges that our society and the way it's built up will deal to them. And our goal is to help them

through those challenges, just be there for them so that they have a chance of, you know, graduating high school or entering adulthood without having, you know, having had kids or facing like the justice system. It's kids that we love dearly that we work with in the similar way as like

you know, a program like Big Brothers Big Sisters. But we are paid mentors, which is the big difference, right? We're not volunteer based. We are employees, basically social workers for all of the families that we work with. It's honestly like it's a great job. And I think right now, especially like super necessary because things are falling apart. And

Yeah, just adding like one that made me think of how within the work, like I think social work is a very apt choice of words because we are paired with the youth and it doesn't like stop there. Like we work with the families. We also work with like the siblings too, because sometimes you'll have a youth that maybe is the only thing

child in that family that for whatever reason got a mentor and then you support also I mean it's a choice but I would say that most mentors definitely opt in to being there for siblings and family members in the household and making sure that they're also showing up for the caregivers to yeah help them create a loving home yeah and I mean you know I think that you can you can look at this and see how it's supposed to work structurally and you know you were talking about like

I mean, this is supposed to be a, like, over a decade-long commitment to these kids, right? That ideally you're working with the same person and, you know, you're forming really deep emotional attachments because you can't not do that if you're doing this kind of work. But then also, you know, in order for that to work, I think this is, you know, you can see this from the outside. It's like, in order for this to work, this has to be a job that you could stably do for a decade, right? Like, I mean, it's...

Yeah. Yeah. Which I will say we do. And I want to do, I want to give so many props to one of our mentors who has stayed for, for 12 years and has graduated their youth. But of all of our, of all of our coworkers, I believe it's only one that has currently been able to do that and has stayed there as long as I have.

Yeah. Yeah. And the truth of the fact, like, yeah, for any job, 12 and a half years is a really long time. Right. I mean, six years is a really long time. And with this job, we're like we're an emotional sponge for a lot of things. Right. So our kids go through.

everything that you could imagine um and and within that like everything good and everything bad that you could imagine um and our job a lot of times is like we can't solve the things that

are affecting these kids, but we can take in some of those negative feelings and that grief, that anger, we can take it in and almost like dissolve it a little bit, right? But within that, like,

it can affect us so so much um and that's where yeah the sustainability part of like 12 and a half years in this job like that is a lot um and and you we need a lot for that to like at all be be possible yeah i mean like there's this way in which you're effectively like what what this job is is like

you're the person who is trying to mitigate the impact of literally all of the structural systems of violence that exist in this entire country and how they're just sort of targeted down on these kids and your job is to try to protect them as much as possible and that's an unbelievable amount of physical and emotional labor. And then also, like...

I don't know. It seems pretty bad that there's only been one co-worker who's been able to graduate their kids. Just to clarify for history, that's been in our time there. I don't know if over the 30 years, I hope that other people have. But yeah, in recent years, it's only been the one. And also, yeah, this is a job where you are...

not necessarily able to, like, undo the systems at play, but trying to support them. And, like, we...

as mentors are inevitably also facing those systems against ourselves. And like one of the reasons that I think people gravitate towards this job is their empathy because they have those shared experiences. One of the things that is kind of heavy in the culture of friends is being asked your why when you start.

Like, why did you choose friends? And for a lot of people, it is because of wanting to be the person that they needed when they were going through those periods of time. So there's bound to be like a lot of like reactivation of feelings inside yourself that I think we all like, I want to say like every mentor I've worked with does an incredible job of like

handling that and like taking good care of themselves um but it is definitely something that like takes a lot um of regulation and i think empathy is one of the greatest skills in this job but it also yeah it also then leads to us needing greater needs of self-care and things like that yeah and like i mean i guess like to put this in perspective for like people listening to this is like

Okay, your job is to be the person, like, in the friend group who, like, manages, like, when someone's, like, having an emotional crisis, like, you have to, like, help them and deal with it. And that is your job for, like, eight kids who are going through, like, the worst shit in the world. Like...

Jesus Christ. Oh, good Lord. It's honestly like hearing this, it's always really helpful to hear someone's outside perspective of our job, right? Because we get so into it, so into the muck of what this job can be. And I think overall, like social work, it's not just our job, but I'm sure other social workers and people in care industries, we have that...

continuous, vicarious trauma that makes us forget how our job is sometimes. And then it's helpful to hear other people mention it because it's like, yeah, wow, our job is kind of crazy. And the work we do is really important and really important for society. And also, yeah, it's hard. It's hard work.

It's hard and it doesn't like really have an end point. Like we have the hours we work with kids and then we have the hours we think about them and the things going on in their lives. And sometimes it's like sweet things. Like a lot of times it's sweet things where I'll see something and be like, oh my gosh, you know who would love that? And like things like that are like, oh, great idea. Or, oh, let's go see this movie. And a lot of times it's like worrying though too. Yeah.

knowing that there is, there is only so many things we can control. Um, and some things we just have to be the person that's there as they have to go through something. Um, which, yeah, it's, it's hard. Cause we also obviously like develop such loving relationships with these kids. It's hard to see like kids that you care about so much. Um,

that sometimes the most you can do is just be there yeah it definitely is a job that like to some degree is sort of always with you yeah we have a joke about this with this job where it's like like if you do what you love and you'll never be free for a single second of your entire life it's like because you're just always on yeah it's so true

Yeah, as you say this, I worked till like 9.30 last night because I was like, you know what? I'm enjoying this so much hanging out with my guys. So I'm just going to keep working. Yeah, yeah. So speaking of keeping working, we need to go to ads and then we will come back and talk about the ways in which this job that requires an incredible amount of structural support to keep people there for like over a decade is failing to do that.

And we are back. So, okay, now that we've sort of talked about what this is, let's talk about the actual union, which is the thing. Yeah. So can you talk about sort of how did organizing for this union start and what were the sort of issues that could have brought everyone to be like, okay, we need to do this? Yeah, for sure. So...

We first brought about our petition to unionize in March of 2023. So that was two years ago, a long time ago, right? But yeah,

The work for unionization, obviously the organizing behind it, had started much before that. When I first joined Friends, it was in September of 22, and I knew that the work had already been happening the summer before. What was the catalyst was post-COVID, A, obviously a lot of people left, given...

what COVID did to a lot of industries and especially care work. But then likewise, a lot of people were fired and were many would say like fired without like a full on like deep process that included a program manager who

who was really listening to friends and advocating for the mentor role. And they were let go, which spurred a lot of people to want to start organizing. Some of the issues that we face, like the pay, obviously, within social work in general and nonprofit work, it's never going to match up and never going to really...

be as good as like the cost of living, especially here in Portland. But the pay compared to like all of the emotional work and all the work that we do was just not there and not sustainable. It's why people were not

like able to stick around because frankly we were looking at the same issues that our families were facing of like you know food insecurity and needing to like get food stamps or uh like needing like rental and like housing assistance because our pay was just not up to par those are a few of the issues Jess I don't know if you have other thoughts

Yeah, I think you touched on a lot of them. I think it's hard to stay in this job if you are looking to have a family. There's been issues, yeah, with pay, with insurance, with other sorts of things that have led to mentors leaving rather than like staying there. Even if they like really wanted to stay there, just wouldn't necessarily allow for them to have maybe like the life they wanted. And also just honoring, I think with like,

bereavement leave and critical issue leave has been areas that haven't really been addressed. We have had very tragic things happen in our working community with the families that have drastically affected, yeah, the well-being of mentors and staff members alike. Yeah. And I mean, you know, this is a job that structurally is designed to be a kind of like

like again, if the goal is to have one person from like kindergarten to until they like, like a graduating high school, right? Like that is something that requires like 1950s, 1960s style Fordism. Like you have one job for decades. And the only way you can do that is if people are incredibly well supported. And it's like,

the fact that it's like, okay, you're trying to do this, but you're not paying people enough money to fucking afford food. Like what the hell? Like Jesus Christ. Yeah. It's just like, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Or even, I mean, it's still something that we're fighting, but like,

Our workplace doesn't provide health insurance for dependents, which I think is really ironic given how much we care for kids. And then some of our mentors and other co-workers that have kids have to spend so much money on health insurance for their own personal kids. Friends of some of the kids, apparently. That's how this works. Yeah.

The kids, they pick. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, like big, big picture thinking, like the reason why we,

started this whole unionizing project was because we care so much about our kids, right? When I first started working at Friends, I think was the first mask mentor to be hired in a fairly long time after a lot of firings of other mask mentors. And two of the youth that

Actually, it's more than two of the youth, but the first two youth that I was matched up with, they hadn't had a mentor for over two years. Jeez. Which is a really long time. When you are five, six years old and you're used to one person consistently picking you up every single week and hanging out with you and spending time with you for several hours, four, six hours.

Or seven years. And then just like.

next day, next week, maybe even that same day you find out like, oh, you no longer have a mentor and you're not going to have a mentor for two more years because people keep leaving. People aren't wanting to apply for this job because the pay isn't high enough, right? That then like creates like a lot of issues with the kids that we're dealing with. It's not like we are these like saviors or like anything like along those lines, right? But when...

Someone has consistent support and then that support is lost for a long time, especially when you're a young kid where it's been the majority of your life you've been having that consistent support. That then creates a lot of trust issues and overall attachment issues that a youth could face. And

For me, that was the main thing. Like, working with these kids and having to, like, regain that trust was something that's, like, still, to this day, is, like, really emotionally, like, daunting. And I, like...

I will keep saying this. I love my kids so much. Like I like can't stop thinking about them. And I want to be with my kids until they graduate, which would mean me staying at this job for another eight years, which it's a long time. Right. But I want to do that. So I want to, you know, get paid.

have time off when one of my, sadly, this is something that did occur where you've passed away that I worked with and like, didn't have time off to like really grieve, uh, um, hard stuff. And I just want to be able to stay there until they're done with the program. Yeah. And it's like, there's just, I mean, just like a litany of horrors where it's like one, it's like,

you know, when there is like, it's not, you know, like turnover in a normal job sucks. But this is like when there's turnover because people can't afford to live their lives. It's like, you're just like ripping a hole in these kids, like the fabric of their social lives. And then also it's like, yeah, one of these kids that is literally your job to care for dies. You just have to fucking go to work the next day. Like it is so hideous. And it's just like, yeah,

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, like, it makes sense that, like, yeah, people are organizing because it's like, you know, this organization is just systemically failing both the people they're trying to help and the people whose job it is to, like, help them. And... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think one of the things that is like hardest to see while like working there is the ways in which this like job that you do like that, like I care so much about and love doing. But like seeing this like institution in a way be like part be part of the problem, because if we aren't like having it so that employees feel safe.

supported in the way that they need to, like life happens. Sometimes people leave and like move and get a different job for various reasons. But a lot of the times it's, it's because it's not sustainable and it's really hard to leave. And like, it's a heartbreaking thing because I like, I want to graduate many of my youth and,

And it is something that I think about of like, how feasible is that? Like I want to do it. And like also, okay, then that means I got to be frugal and all these other ways or et cetera. And yeah. And working with youth that have already kind of experienced loss and wanting to continue to show up for them. The job itself feels so sacred. And like, I feel so lucky to be in these kids' lives. And I think.

just a lot of the turnover has been out of like lack of sustainability for yourself, like for your wellbeing. Yeah. And I mean, the turnover numbers were pretty wild. I think one time we calculated it and mentors were, it was like a 40 something percent like turnover for mentors. Yeah. And a lot of that happened because like,

In this two-year time period where we've been fighting for a contract, they also froze wage increases. So I've had the same wage for the past two years, two and a half years that I've been working here. And in that same time period, inflation has been pretty crazy. And rent for me has gone up three times. And it's about to get worse. It's about to get so much worse. Yeah.

Yeah, which, you know, gladly now we've had this fight and we're at the two year mark and not at the zero year mark and not looking forward to two more years of doing this. But yeah, it's been hard to sustain this when everything is increasing in price and our wages are completely stagnant. Yeah. Yeah. So let's take one more ad break and then we will come back to talk about, yeah, how unionization efforts are going. And yeah.

We are back. Yes, let's talk about how this campaign is going. So you said you've been in bargaining for like two years? So we had our petition for recognition on March 23rd, 2023. So that was over two years ago. And then our employer didn't formally recognize us.

But through the process of like voting, we got over 93%. Wow. That's incredible. It's incredible. It's super great. And it's also like, wow, we all really needed this. Yeah.

And like there were some other barriers, including like not being formally recognized. Like we also had management contest a few positions that I believe most, if not all, we were able to successfully have be part of our unit. And then we didn't have our first bargaining session until September of 2023. So like almost six months, I think if I did the math right after we did

formally presented our letter for recognition. Yeah, yeah. And like throughout that process, so now it has been like, Jesus is quite good at keeping track of it. But I think as of today, we're about at 40%.

580 days of bargaining. God, yeah. Yeah, it's been a long one and it hasn't been, it's been like also a choppy journey where there has been delays in scheduling, delays in just getting different articles back in time. One of the biggest ones obviously was compensation. And I think, I can't quite remember the period of time, but we presented it

Over a year ago, I think, maybe. Oh, my God. I could be wrong. And it took several, several, several months for us to get anything back from management, which, yeah, was...

a big bummer amongst other things. It sucks. It sucks. And obviously that's the one that we have yet to finalize. Like as, as we're talking right now. Yeah. It is insurance and compensation are still our last two articles left. Yeah. And some of the, like the difficult things, I mean, when you are working on a project, you're,

I mean, I wouldn't be surprised given like really when these conversations started, if we're looking at like over 900 or a thousand days of like really talking about this. But then when you're dealing with,

bargaining for 580 days, like it's exhausting. It is so exhausting. We have regular meetings that we attend to that, uh, our bargaining meetings were specifically scheduled outside of work hours so that like the people on our bargaining team and other union members would have to put in that extra time outside of our 40 hour week. Uh,

Yeah. And within that, like the hardest part is when you directly confront, right, your managers and your bosses about like the rights and the things that you need. So much of it like boils down to respect, right? And your respect as like a worker and the value that you have as a worker in your organization. And when there is the pushback on that,

It honestly is like for me at times was debilitating, right? When you're doing this work and your workplace is stretching things out for so long and you're pouring your heart out on your kids, like really trying to do the best that response from our

Our supervisors and managers, it really was hard. It was hard for me. It was hard for other union organizers in our workplace. And it was hard for all of our workers where we started thinking, dang, what is the value that we have in this workplace? What is the value that we intrinsically have in the work that we're doing with our kids?

It's a lot. And it's a lot when you're facing all these systems that our kids are facing and like taking those things in and then are trying to change those systems, finally able to try to change those systems. And we learned that like, oh, wait, like the place that we're working is actually part of these systems too. And it's doing the same things that we're like fighting to have our kids like have better lives. Like we're facing it right now from inside the house. Yeah.

Yeah, I wanted to add in to, yeah, very much realizing that like our management is also in a way operating, you know, maybe like a corporation, which isn't the hope you would have for a nonprofit. And one of the steps we had to take as a union was filing a UOP, so unfair labor practice, right?

which cited, like I had mentioned before, delays in scheduling and also regressive bargaining, which just means that the way in which they were presenting things would have lessened our quality of conditions. So definitely not what you want to be getting.

Not what you want to be handed across from the bargaining table. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Within this process, they were currently hourly workers, but they tried to change us to hourly workers. Oh, my God. Yeah. Which again, like we're always working, you know, we're always working. So unless you want to pay me for 24 hours. Yeah.

You know, you're talking about, like, yeah, that they're behaving like a corporation. It's like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what, like, my employer did to me, which is, like, one of the largest media companies in the world, and they dragged out negotiations for two years. And, like, you know, you're talking about the sort of, like, just, like, oh, they're, like, the feeling of disrespect where they're just not getting stuff back to you. And it's like, I remember, you know, like...

We'd be sitting there for a bargaining meeting and they wouldn't, and they would be an hour late and they'd be an hour late because they hadn't like bothered to beforehand spend time drafting out what their responses were going to be. So they were frantically trying to get it done before we were there. And we're all just sitting there for literally an hour waiting for them to show up. And it's like, okay, there are people in this unit whose job is to stand next to car bombs. Like, and you can't show up on time to your, to this, to this meeting that you have known was going to happen for weeks. Like, it's just,

I say this every single episode. This is an incredibly common YouTube blessing tactic is draw out the first contract because that's the second point where unions fail after you get recognition votes is here. Yeah, for sure. I think to some extent we expect corporations to do this, but it's like, okay, this is an NGO that's the point of which is supposed to be helping underprivileged

underprivileged youth. And then they're like, we're going to turn around and we're going to screw over different underprivileged youth. Like, it sucks. Yeah, and I think that's like, for me, one of the things that just like mess with my mind the most is that like,

we're not selling a product, right? We're not trying to like get revenue or anything along those lines, right? So like our job is a job that we actually like fully love and like want to stick around, like not just for our own like

financial you know peace and and like our own like financial security like we want to stick around this job because we care about the job and you know that's not to like yeah like other you know businesses and other workplaces that unionize a lot of times people want to do that because they want financial security right um and i think for a lot of ngos non-profits and care work like

We unionize because we want to stick around both because of financial security, right? But also because we just like care so much about the work that we're doing and to be faced with actions by our workplace that, you know,

tried to dissuade us from that, tried to like, you know, in a sense, like it felt like stopping us from wanting to stick around like that again, really hard, really hard. And I think like a really like psychologically hard part that comes with,

unionizing in the care work field and the nonprofit space. Yeah, this isn't a job that people are going to take for the money. But we do need to be receiving...

equitable pay and benefits so that we stay at this job like this by all means and like still like it's this is the same way I feel about it to this day I remember like reading the little like job description for this role and was like oh this is dude this is like my dream job this is like a hundred percent what I want to spend my my energy towards um yeah and yeah I think that's a

a huge part of why we were able to get like that 93% and to have also like routine support for different actions and stuff is just because we have people that care so much about wanting to stick around. Yeah. And that's the thing that NGOs, you know, and you see this in abortion work, you see this in like you see this in nursing, you see this in all of these different fields. It's like, that's the thing that,

that these NGOs use to exploit people is the basic human empathy and love and care that we have for the people who we're caring for. And these people are like, aha, look at this. Aha, these people, they care about the thing that they're doing. We could underpay them and overwork them. It's like, why is there such a work like this? It's just...

What a terrible way to design an economic system. Yeah. It's just, good Lord. Let's talk a little bit about what kinds of organizing things you all have been able to do and the kinds of things you've been able to accomplish by working together, even in these really kind of like, I don't know, structurally difficult conditions. Yeah, we've had a multitude of different actions over the past 580 days. I think one of our...

One of our biggest ones by far, which was, I think also was just one of our most beautiful in a way was November of last year, we did an info picket and it was one of those things too, where it,

was very well planned out, but also even with the best of planning midway through it, we had a shift location, um, based off of just changing information we were getting. And we had one of our like little bits is because our union is called fun. A lot of our, um, posters were SpongeBob themed. So instead of imagination, you know, it's compensation. Um, and yeah,

is indicative of like also how much people that work with us are playful and sweet and why we're are good at our jobs of working with kids um yeah and yeah we had very high turnout i think we had 40 something people within our own organization that showed up for that we've done smaller actions too by just asking for community support like we've had um caregivers um

write letters of support to different people in management. We've also done a few pack the rooms for bargaining sessions, like especially when there have been times that have felt like there's been some semblance of stalling. Yeah, those are just some of them. Hey, Suze, chime in with others. Yeah, within that, and I think like an interesting thing about nonprofits, our revenue comes from donors, right? So we have to play this like,

fun game of like, okay, how do we communicate with our donors? Right. So that we make sure that they know that like, you know, this is part of like what they're donating to, but then within that also like, you know, ask for money as well. Right. Because we do want, you know, better pay and better benefits. Right. So we've contacted donors and we'll still, you know,

plan to do that with both that ask of like support the union and support our organization, right? Because the thing that we care about the most is the work that we do with our kids. And for that to happen, we want our organization to like stay afloat truly. Right. Yeah. Some of the wins that we've gotten, I mentioned, you know,

earlier that they were trying to have us be hourly workers. And that was a big campaign that we were fighting back on for a long time. It's also what precipitated the ULP filing. I made too many buttons

You could never have too many buttons.

So we all were wearing these pins regularly. We, you know, we signed a strike pledge where we had like 80 something percent of the unit say that, like, if we came to voting for a strike, people would strike. And the big win was like, OK, great. We get to stay as salaried workers because they walk back on that on that threat. We are time off.

We have a time off contract or agreement now that like some of my coworkers that have been around a long time, once the contract gets ratified, they'll have like two more weeks of time off. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Because they haven't, they've been around for seven years and they're still at the same amount of time off basically that I'm at and that I've been at since the beginning. Yeah. And when it comes to wages, like we're still, we're still,

Figuring that out, but some of the gains that we are potentially looking at is incredible. I looked at the numbers yesterday of what hopefully, given where we're at right now in the agreements, what I would hopefully get. And I straight up...

like teared up looking at the number because it felt like such a big change in my financial status. Right. And yesterday, like, as I said, I worked till 9.30 PM with my kids, probably because I had this like massive, like weight of, you know, this financial doom that I'm looking at

somewhat lifted at the hope of the wins that we might get from this contract. So it's been incredibly hard, incredibly long, way too long. And all of it is so it's going to be so worth it. Right. I hope that's something that the listeners really get that like this is hard work, but in the end, like is, is the change that we were hoping for, you know?

Yeah. And recently, one of the things that we did do just like a run through of just to kind of boost morale since marketing has gone on for so long was compile all the wins that we have so far just through TAs. So still tentative, but yeah, it did map out a lot of huge things. One of the things we do a lot in this job is drive and we don't have many things in policy about

or repairs when something happens in your car with a youth, like say they throw up, it happens with kids. Like that isn't necessarily something that would have been like covered. We would have had to just pay for that cleaning ourselves. And like mileage is a huge thing where one of our potential like big wins is that we'll get like full mileage covered rather than having to like deduct time from like this illusion of having an office where we would have to minus some mileage, you know,

in whatever way made sense with where our buildings were located. Um, despite even if our kids were like totally somewhere else where we were picking them up. Um, it definitely wasn't like the most sensical way for us to be like being fully reimbursed for what we were doing. Yeah. And, um,

Those are all huge wins that we do have. Like obviously compensation and insurance are two of the biggest that we're still working on. I think recently, like almost within this week, we've started to tip in a way that feels like we may be close to having a contract soon, which I do want to say like, you know, as inspiration to everybody out there that works for a nonprofit, like,

unionize and you know what you might yeah it might fare well for you I have hope for everybody um and like right now I think a lot of our

Like a lot of my coworkers are starting to have hope again, because I do think, like you said, it is totally a manipulation tool to have it drawn out so long. And yeah, it is exhausting to be basically stalled in your wage for two and a half years. But we are like gaining some traction again, which I do think is something that we're still being, you know, cautious with just because

Right now, it does feel like management is working with us a little bit more. But I also think that there are reasonings around that. Like we're about to have in a few weeks our biggest event.

fundraiser for our work because like Jesus said we are majority donor based and I do think there's an appeal to management to have a contract by then yeah it adds to the whole we're doing good work and we treat our employees well I hope that that is something then that is fulfilled by them in an honest way not just a superficial way because we are still pushing for a little bit more right now and have bargaining coming up next week and

So yeah, I'm really hoping that what they're showing us isn't just performative, that we really might be able to get to a point where there is something that is truly good for us. Because we're all ready. We're all ready for a contract. Yeah, as someone who got our contract, it doesn't magically solve everything, but my God, it should make your life better. It is absolutely worth it. Yeah.

Okay, so how can people support y'all both sort of locally here and then just like broader because most people are not here?

Honestly, most of our people in management positions, information is public. If you want to email them and support, go for it. Also, just encouraging either your workplace, if you work in a social work setting, or if you know people that are, because this whole field of work takes such a toll on people and it is the most necessary work. And I think it's really easy to...

fall into the mindset of I'm doing this for the greater good, not, you know, not for money, not for these things, but like you also deserve to feel okay and taken care of and like, like have the things you need to be saying. Yeah. Hey, so is there anything else you want to add? Yeah. I mean, I,

I would add that like we have an Instagram, right? That's friends PDX union network. It's a mouthful, but we'll link the inscription. Yeah. Great. And then within that, like if you're in Portland, like make sure to like follow us and like pay attention to what we're posting because we, you know, hopefully we,

we do not have to get to a point in striking especially uh the place that we're at right now with our contract but in truth like we're looking at 580 days and that is quite a long time yeah and then also like if if listeners do have the ability to donate if they could donate some funds for friends of the children portland and somehow in their notes be like i support the union like

I think that could also be a really interesting way to show the support that like our supporters have like for both the work that we're doing on the youth level, but then also like in the union side of things too. There's been a lot of like communication of like, Oh, this is really going to impact like,

the development side of our organization and like all of the things that like our fundraising team is going to have to do to like meet these, which again, I think that would be more true if like our executive director wasn't making like,

what like five times as much money as i am uh jesus christ yeah uh but yeah showing that support like it doesn't have to be a lot but showing our bosses just how much like the populace like is is supporting our unionization efforts like that that would be really dope too and and then also like it impacts our kids like our kids like that's the truth of it all like

I want my kids to have the best life that they could possibly have. And sadly, we live in a world where money really dictates that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So those are, we will, we will, we will have links in the description to all of that. And yeah,

Yeah, thank you two both so much for coming on the show, and I hope you win, and yeah, I hope you get to go back to caring for these kids, and also while not having to worry about being able to live your lives. Thank you, Mia, so much. Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, of course. Honestly, it's been great talking about the work, because it is really important work, and I'm happy we get to do it. Yeah, it's wonderful, and...

Yeah, and so this is, yeah, this is what could happen here. And yeah, also go unionize your workplace. You can do it. I guarantee it.

Thank you.

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Hello and welcome to the show. It's me, James, today and I am joined by Garrison Davis. Hi, Garrison. Hello. Hello. Garrison has just said some words about something that's happening on social media that I don't understand and it's made me feel very old. That's what's happening today in my world. It's very sad. We're gathered here today to talk about the earthquake in Myanmar, right?

I think most of you will probably have been made aware of the earthquake. Like,

It's somewhat odd that corporate media has really not reported on the revolution in any substantial way since 2021. But the earthquake apparently justified a lot of networks sending people to Myanmar for the first time. Very amusingly, people DMing me on Blue Sky and Twitter asking how to get a visa from the Burmese hunter, which is not a thing I have ever done. The last communication I had with them came in the form of a car bomb that they set off near to a place where we were.

But if you're not aware, the earthquake happened on the 28th of March this year, just before one in the afternoon. It was the biggest earthquake in Myanmar since 1912, and it registered 7.7 on the Richter scale, which is huge. Because it's very hard for foreign journalists to get a visa to enter Myanmar. A lot of the initial reporting focused on Bangkok and the damage done in Thailand.

But the epicenter was in Sagaing, which is near Mandalay. Mandalay is the second biggest city in Myanmar. And that was where the worst of the destruction happened. Almost every street in Mandalay has collapsed buildings.

It's a little difficult for us to get a sense of the exact scale of the damage because the hunter refuses to allow some media has been allowed in the BBC. I saw like sneaked somebody in. It's very difficult for, for media to, to move and report freely. And in addition to this, the hunter has continued his practice of

cutting off internet for people in Myanmar, right? Even during like emergency situations? Yes. Especially during emergency. They've cut it off like as a response to this because I guess they perceive it to be something that makes them look weak. This is...

a tendency that the hunter has displayed before. So in 2008, Cyclone Nargis affected Myanmar and killed over 130,000 people. And they blocked international aid. They said that people didn't need the quote, chocolate bars that the US and other countries

were trying to deliver and that they could exist by like hunting frogs in ditches was their suggestion. I don't think people realize like how far down the North Korea scale the Burmese hunter is, but like they're very worried that any interaction with the outside world, specifically with like, I guess, Western neoliberal powers will be

be damaging for their ability to control the population. So for that reason, we don't know how many people have died, right? From what I've heard on the ground, the death toll is substantially higher than the 3,600 number being reported. The US Geological Survey estimated that an earthquake of that magnitude in that region would kill between 10 and 100,000 people. Obviously, that's quite a big kind of delta there. What I can tell you is that I've heard

First hand, that there are some parts of Mandalay and Sagaing where the stench of rotting bodies is so powerful that people have stopped returning to their homes. There have been so many aftershocks that people are still sleeping in the street because they're worried about the damage structures falling down.

The UN has an estimate of 17 million people across 57 townships. Townships are like the administrative districts that are used in Myanmar, have been affected with over 9 million people facing severe hardship. And of course, this is all compounded by the fact that there were already 20 million people in Myanmar who needed humanitarian assistance. And there are about three and a half million internally displaced people as a result of the fighting that's happened after the revolution.

So like it really came at a pretty difficult time in a place where,

The government is not willing. They said after the earthquake they wanted international aid, but as we'll see later in this script, they've only accepted it from certain countries. I spoke to a friend who has family in Mandalay yesterday. He told me that the way they're assessing the damage is using open source intelligence. They're trying to look in the backgrounds of people's videos on Facebook to work out if their childhood homes fell down, right?

They were using satellite imaging software when I spoke to them yesterday to try and ascertain if their families were okay. They told me, Sagaing has very famous pagodas and the pagodas are all on a hill. Apparently a lot of those pagodas have fallen down and even the hill itself is like listing. So there's been massive cultural damage as well.

Another way in which the damage was compounded by Myanmar's politics was the quake struck, like I said, at 1pm on a Friday, which is Friday prayers. This happened during Ramadan, specifically the day before Idul Fitr, which is a very busy day for mosques, if you're not aware. Successive governments of Myanmar since the 1960s have refused to allow even basic maintenance for mosques.

That means that these buildings were in great states of disrepair, right? In Myanmar, there is an ultra-nationalist Buddhist movement, which has been embraced to a great degree by the junta, but also limited even the National League for Democracy, which was a relatively neoliberal-aligned party that had previously been in power in Myanmar, or somewhat in power, I suppose. Ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks like Ashin Wurathu and his 969 movement

have kind of condemned anything that they did as making them pro-Muslim. And they have this, essentially they have a great replacement theory, right? That Muslims are trying to come in through Bangladesh to replace Buddhists in Myanmar. Yeah, lots of people here have this like very Orientalist perspective of like Buddhism, TM, right?

As this like, you know, like, like, like peaceful, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, no, like Buddhism, like every religion has a variety of sex. Yes. And the Buddhist national sex, uh,

can be particularly nasty. Yeah. I mean, as vicious as any other people, I'm sure we'll be familiar with the Rohingya genocide. And like, there are a lot of monks that supported that, including where Rathu is the most notable one, but there, there are plenty more, right. And they're part of the, I mean, he's, he's literally explicitly expressed like how much he looks up to the English defense league. Jesus. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, like these are people who like, they are part of this global nativist movement. People's Orientalism, I think sometimes stops them seeing that or appreciating that this extends outside of like white global North countries. Yeah.

One thing that I did think that really touched me in the days after the earthquake was young Buddhist Bama people of the majority ethnicity reaching out to me and being like, hey man, this happened in Friday prayers during Ramadan and it has devastated Muslim population. Like thousands of people, hundreds of mosques have gone and thousands of people are trapped in a rubble and like no one's talking about it. Why is no one talking about it? This is terrible. And like it would have been inconceivable to,

to hear young Burma Buddhist people so concerned with the wellbeing of like their Muslim countrymen before the coup in 2021. This was a country that had been manufacturing consent for genocide against its Muslim minorities for four or five years by that point, right? Specifically on Facebook, there's a Behind the Bastards episode on this. You can also listen. If you're new to the show, Robert and I have made two scripted series about the revolution in Myanmar, which we'll include in the show notes.

But that change to a real genuine solidarity and care between these two groups was really touching in the moments after the earthquake and the days after the earthquake. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about the revolution and I want to talk about how the revolution has been responding to this and the impact it's had on the revolution. We are back.

And, of course, the revolution hasn't stopped because of the earthquake. The conflict is still ongoing and the PDFs and their allied ethnic resistance organizations are still fighting against the hunter. In fact, within an hour of the earthquake, the hunter began using paramotors to drop bombs on Hangu village in Sagaing.

This has been a thing that they've started to do recently. In a sense, I guess it's a good sign because it shows that maybe their jets and other aircrafts

are in a poor state of repair, or that they're struggling to keep enough of them airborne. Initially, I wondered if they were using the paramotors because their runways had been damaged, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They've been air-striking just as much as they ever did, which is unfortunate. Satellite images, reports from my sources on the ground, suggest that they're able to continue carrying out bombing raids at a pretty similar rate from when they did before.

Despite this, the National Unity Government, which is kind of the shadow government composed mostly of people who were elected and then deposed by the coup in 2021, and the PDF, who in theory are commanded by the National Unity Government, called a two-week ceasefire right after the earthquake to allow for a humanitarian pause.

The Three Brotherhood Alliance, which is an alliance of the three most powerful ethnic resistance organizations in Myanmar, also called what they called a humanitarian pause for a month. In both cases, they said they wouldn't undertake offensive operations, but they would defend themselves, right? Because I think they had a sense that the junta wasn't going to stop attacking them.

The junta did declare its own ceasefire on April 3rd, and the Kachina Dependents Army, which is another ethnic resistance organization, followed shortly thereafter. Notably, that ceasefire from the junta came the day after its troops fired on a Chinese Red Cross convoy, which is not a great look for them. No, never love to see that. Yeah, we don't love to see people firing on the Red Cross. This is especially bad for the junta because China has been growing closer and closer to the junta and supporting it.

China's had this weird back and forth relationship with the revolution. At times it supported the revolution, it seems like, specifically supporting the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, which is a group that broke off the Communist Party of Burma in the 1980s. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. There's also the United Wa State Army, which isn't part of the revolution, which has the strongest relationship with the PRC, and they're just chilling there.

They haven't really entered the conflict. It's called straight chillin', by the way, James. Straight chillin'? Yeah, there you go. That's how they use it.

I've marked myself out yet again. Straight chilling at the United Water State Army. Thank you, Garrison. Actually, I spoke to some cadres from the Burmese Communist Party recently. The Communist Party of Burma re-entered after 2021 and they're not focusing on proselytizing the Maoist gospel to people. They're focusing on fighting the hunter and developing alliances. And

And it's kind of, it's interesting to see where that will go given, yeah, Marxist-Leninist nationalism is definitely not the majority ideology of the revolution. Most people are committed to some form of federal democracy, which when you speak to different fighters varies from like, we want what you guys have in the US to something more akin to the democratic confederalism that people might be familiar with in Rojava. China is competing with Russia in Russia.

So both of them are interested in supporting the junta, right? And obviously both their ideologies are far from liberatory. They're interested in propping up a totalitarian state. So we have seen both Russia and China send support to the junta, send rescue teams after the earthquake. Meanwhile, the US offered $2 million, which...

I was kind of surprised they offered anything. That is low-key surprising, considering Mark Rubio. Right, yeah. Well, I think Rubio is more of a slightly... Rubio's a neocon. Yeah, I guess it makes sense. Mark Rubio, like five years ago, it doesn't make sense post USAID being gutted. They're like, oh, you're still doing that kind of stuff, huh? Yeah, there's a weird mix of things. Because yes, a traditional neocon...

style Rubio this this tracks but all of the movements that the Trump administration's been doing more recently this seems like seems like a some kind of DEI shenanigans if you ask me yeah actually they added another seven million later nine million which is yeah it's not a lot of money compared to what we would normally expect and at the same time they did it

three USAID workers, at least three, I should say, three that I'm aware of, were laid off. Like literally, they received emails telling them that they no longer had a job while they were on the ground assisting earthquake survivors. Department of Government Efficiency. Strikes again. Highly efficient. We'll send you the money and then also pull out our own people who I guess are supervising how the money is spent or would be. Definitely,

It definitely shows a strategic shift in the region. China, Russia... China obviously is interested in Myanmar because of its rare earth metals, because of jade. China has traditionally had a lot of jade trade with Myanmar. And then...

because it controls a large amount of seafront, right? Which China wouldn't want to fall into like what you would see as like someone with adversarial interests. Russia is still interested in just kind of projecting itself as a global power, even as it continues to shrink every day in terms of its global abilities to project power. But there definitely are both Chinese and Russian assistance helping the Myanmar hunter now. Meanwhile, the US doesn't seem to give a shit what happens here now. Like this is kind of

Not that the Biden administration was doing very much either, but at least we had USAID. And USIP was very invested in Myanmar and actually did a really good job of kind of almost like being the foreign affairs, not branch, but they explained the revolution to the world. Like whenever a journalist wanted to understand the revolution in Myanmar, it was USIP they went to. Obviously, all the contacts that have a USIP have now been doged, which is a shame. So...

Despite the ceasefire, right, I said they fired on these Chinese troops, the Hunter has in fact not stopped bombing earthquake-struck areas since the earthquake. Madeleine PDF, who I'm in contact with, they're the revolutionary forces in the area that was most affected by the earthquake, on April 7th told me that they're aware of 10 airstrikes in their area of operations.

Since the earthquake, a three-month-old baby and a 10-year-old child were killed in an air raid on Naikar village in Papun Township. That was in Karen State. On April 10th, they bombed a school, something that the junta likes to do a lot. They dropped two 500-pound bombs on a food court.

They then circled back and dropped another bomb on the people responding to and giving aid to the people they'd initially bombed at the food court. By food court here, just to clarify, I'm not talking about like at the shopping mall. I'm talking about like a market where people can buy like prepared food, right? They've killed, at best, I can collate from various sources, at least 72 people and injured about 100 people in addition to thousands who died after the earthquake.

There are also reports that Hunter quote unquote recruiters here are engaging in forced conscription in the disaster zone. I read of at least one person who was on a search and rescue team, that they were a trained search and rescue volunteer, right? So they were moving rubble to rescue people and they were forcibly conscripted while they were doing that. Obviously that's had a chilling effect on people going out to help others, right?

What the hunter is not doing is rescuing its citizens. The military is...

detested in most of Myanmar, even in the areas that it controls. And its failure to even try and trap people rescued on the rubble won't help this. There was a video that went viral recently of hunter troops, literally a line of soldiers rescuing bricks. They've gone to a collapsed building and they're inspecting the bricks to see if the bricks are whole and then passing them down the lines and stacking them up. Don't worry, the bricks are safe. Yeah, the bricks are safe. The people are not.

which just like it was genuinely like infuriating to see it when i can't imagine for people who have lost family members how it must feel even rescue workers like i said have been forcibly conscripted equality myanmar has noted more than 100 cases of forced conscription since the earthquake

so that's Myanmar has a conscription rule right a law so anyone men and now women between certain ages can be forcibly conscripted into the hunter's army so they're just finding people displaced from the earthquake and forcing them yeah it's people who have been hiding in their homes right who now don't have homes to hide it yeah or people who came out in order to save their neighbors and now now they're forcing them to be to fight for them

Just as the hunter did with Cyclone Nargis, they've also delayed and in cases blocked aid. A team came from France to assist in a search and rescue. They spent 24 hours sitting in an airport waiting for their visa to be approved.

And then they spent one day working in search and rescue efforts before being told that search and rescue efforts had now finished and they were to go home. They traveled around the entire world, didn't save a single life. Abundance. It's great. Presumably because the hunter wanted to placate China, a Taiwanese team was straight up refused entry into Myanmar.

Taiwan had a search and rescue team that they were willing to send who could have saved people's lives and that they weren't allowed to enter. All tourist visas have been suspended, so it's not like the hunter is overwhelmed with visa applications, but they're not allowing search and rescue teams to enter from countries I guess they're not politically aligned with. This kind of horrific indifference to human suffering has characterized Atatmador for decades.

And it's really unlikely to change as it grows even more desperate and it loses even more territory. It's just going to clamp down harder and harder on its people. B1, in the liberated areas, aid is being mobilized using the mutual aid structures which have existed for decades in the absence of the state.

In significant and growing parts of Myanmar, people are relying on each other instead of the government for aid. And that has its benefits, right? Like people have been out rescuing people from the rebel, but they're also desperately short of resources. I spoke to Mandalay PDF rescue team,

the first week of April. And they literally sent me, they have a notebook of a list of like, we've run out of gauze, we've run out of tourniquets, we've run out of adhesive dressings, we've run out of elastic bandages, right? They're like the literal nuts and bolts of saving people's lives. They run out of, we did a fundraising campaign for them through Behind the Bastards. We raised nearly $2,000, which is great. So they're restocking their supplies, which is fantastic. But that's just one township.

All across the country, people are struggling for the basic supplies that they need to save lives. The military has also blocked aid and medicine from entering their areas, right? So the military controls a lot of roadblocks and it uses its control of those roadblocks to

stop aid and medicine. Often it's kind of hoarding it in the capital city, which is Naypyidaw. If people aren't familiar, Naypyidaw is a city that the junta built for itself to govern from. It means seat of kings. Also in Naypyidaw right now is the US aid agency Samaritan's Purse. Are you familiar with Samaritan's Purse, Gareth? No.

I don't think so. It sounds vaguely familiar, but all of these humanitarian organizations all have the same four words that they shuffle around in different ways. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Samaritan's Purse, perhaps most famous for being run by Franklin Graham. Okay, yes, yes. Son of Billy Graham. I do know what this is and who this is, yes. Yeah, having all their volunteers sign a statement of faith and being extremely homophobic.

For some reason, Samaritan's Purse is establishing a field hospital in Naypyidaw right now. Are they going to force people to convert to evangelical Christianity before they give services like they do in some cases? Yes, yeah. Or just leave them like they did in Afghanistan if they're not Christian. I cannot work out for the life of me what the fuck they're doing. Because like,

The Hunter has made a consistent policy of bombing Christians in Myanmar. In Karen and Karen state, there are a lot of Christian people. On Christmas Day, the Hunter bombed people going to services because it knew that Christians would be going to services at churches. The Karen Christians this year I saw celebrated Christmas in caves because they were so afraid of being bombed. I have no idea what logical leap you have to make.

Bizarre. Yeah. And they're not even at the Insugang. The only people, the only international aid I'm aware of that was able to make it to Sugang was a Malaysian team who were able to save some lives. Unfortunately, there were really strong rains this week and that made all the collapse structures even more unstable. And the Malaysian team I saw have now returned home. We're going to take another ad break here. And when we come back, we will talk about what you can do to help.

All right, and we're back. First, I want to, I guess, have some good news. Despite everything, the military has still been taking massive losses. The all-Burma Students' Democratic Front captured remaining junta positions in Indore. The all-Burma Students' Democratic Front are a group that's been around since 1988, right? And they have...

armed up and re-entered the revolution since 2021 one of the things that they captured on monday was a underground japanese field hospital from world war ii which i guess had been like a entrenched position i guess they're not covered technically by the ceasefire but there was a unit under the national unity government's command that operated with them and from what i understand

This began as a defensive action. They'd surrounded the hunter. I think it's called Japan Cave Hill. They'd surrounded them on Japan Cave Hill for a long time and then

The hunter, obviously, seeing the earthquake and everything, thereafter decided that now was the time for them to break out of this encirclement. They did not break out. They took a fat L. And as a result, they've all been captured now. Meanwhile, in Chinland, if people haven't listened to the episode I did a couple of weeks ago with Azad from the Anti-Fascist Internationalist Front, I was just going back and listening to that to understand Chinland. But the AIF and a lot of their allied forces from the Chinland Defence Force and the Chin Brotherhood

had a significant victory in capturing the rest of the junta's positions in Falam last week. And I think it's very much like on the table that we will see the whole of Qinlan liberated in the next few months or by the end of the year, which would be great to see.

So people are wondering what they can do to help, right? And I think it's a very valid question because I saw today that the UN was meeting with the hunter in Naypyidaw. And I just have no faith that any money that goes to the hunter is going to get to people who need it. Yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely not. You cannot. Like, they want them to die. I don't... No, they're, like, evil. Why? Yeah, yeah. They are literally genocidal. They have done a genocide that has been prosecuted in international criminal court. Like...

I have no understanding why people continue to, like international organizations continue to funnel money to them other than because like they have a status quo bias, I guess. So don't be doing that. But there are groups who are making a really big difference. And one of them that I wanted to highlight, and Robert and I were very familiar with their work from the last time that we were over reporting is Community Partners International. CPI are really cool because they're,

They work by empowering members of the local community to be health volunteers, as opposed to like...

dropping in some doctors from America or doctors from the United Kingdom or whatever. And then when those people leave, they take their skills with them. In CPI, the thing is to educate folks within the community so that they can take care of one another. And I saw that CPI has a matching donations thing right now, which is pretty cool. So if you donate, someone else will match your donation and that will double the amount that you receive.

Otherwise, I will provide a list of mutual aid funds that have been shared with me. Most of them are GoFundMes or things like that. I'll put it all in the show description. They've all been vetted. I know people are sometimes reluctant to give to GoFundMes and they'd rather give to a 501c3 or an organization which has a little bit more, I guess, online presence. In this case, you have to understand that a lot...

of orgs just aren't operating in the liberated areas. The two that I'm aware of are CPI and Free Burma Rangers. I spoke to Dave from Free Burma Rangers. They're trying to get to as many people as they can as well. That would be another great place to donate. And I would include a list of vetted GoFundMes if you want to have a look through those and see if any of them kind of speaks to you more. You can do that too. What this will mean for the future of Myanmar,

We don't know yet, right? We have really no sense of how many people have died, of what it's done to the hunter's ability to control those areas. But until...

The revolution has a way to stop planes bombing people. We will continue to see the same dynamic of the junta losing terrain on the ground, pulling back its soldiers, and then bombing civilians in the areas that it's lost. That is its game plan. It's continuing to get more drones from China. It's getting...

munitions and jet fuel from China. And until there is an embargo on jet fuel and munitions to the hunter, then we will see the same pattern continue, right? They lose terrain, they bomb a school, they lose terrain, they bomb a hospital. It's the same stuff that Israel is doing. Um, and they, uh,

of course previously been armed by Israel as well but we don't see as much solidarity for the people of Burma if you want to stay in touch with what's happening on the ground I think the Irawadi I double R A W A D D Y does a really good job of doing daily summaries right now so I would suggest checking out what's happening there and of course we'll keep you updated on developments in the spring revolution as they come

Thank you.

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SunSip has gut-healthy prebiotics, vitamins, and minerals, all with 40 calories or less. Grab these new SunSip flavors only at Whole Foods in the beverage cooler near HealthAid Kombucha. This is It Could Happen Here. I am not going to El Salvador. It's not going to happen. No way. No thank you, Mr. President.

I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout. Hi, Garrison. We're here to talk about possibly the most upsetting thing I've seen in American politics in like the past six months to maybe even... I don't know. Viscerally, it hit me for like the past few years. Like, yeah, what happened on Monday in the Oval Office was... is kind of the most blackmailed I've ever been, which is not a great way to start an episode. Yeah, like...

It made me feel like I found 2023 very hard, like going out and seeing people freezing in the desert and then coming home and seeing Joe Biden eat ice cream on the timeline. But like this was different. This was so like blatant. There's like a level of like intentional depravity that...

you're reminded of more blatantly. Yeah. And like Bukele's trolling of everyone. So we're going to be talking about an Oval Office meeting between President Trump and El Salvador President Bukele. I guess I could learn his first name. Naib Bukele? There you go. You know he's Palestinian-Salvadorean? Are you fucking serious? No, his dad's an imam.

I don't even have time for that. This is just fucking... I'm sorry if anyone's driving and has had an accident upon hearing that. So, as you probably know, recently the United States government has sent upwards of 300 people, immigrants, to the El Salvador Terrorism Confinement Center, this prison black site that people never return from.

I guess I could point to, for a pop culture reference, which feels a little bit in bad taste, but you could point to the prison in the TV show Andor as being a very comparable facility, frankly. Except they turn off the lights in Andor. They do not turn off the lights in Seacott. Lights are on all the time. They put 10 to 20 people per cell. It's pretty bad. Jameson has done episodes on Seacott in the past. We'll probably keep doing more.

The lights thing, by the way, was a specific policy change by Bukele. There was a particularly violent weekend in El Salvador. And as a result, he stopped letting people who were detained for gang crimes go outside and stopped building windows into the prison and just put the lights on.

like as a way of punishing, I guess, the gangs by punishing the people who were detained there. Yeah. They, they, they can't go outside. They stay in their cell for almost 24 hours a day. They might occasionally get 30 minutes outside, but that's not even confirmed because no one's even allowed inside to see what's going on in there. And we've sent 300 upwards of 300 immigrants there. The majority, vast majority of which have no criminal record. Uh,

Even if you do have a criminal record, being renditioned to a foreign prison camp is still bad. But this is something that Trump hopes to expand on greatly. And they are currently defending their ability to do so in the courts. Since it has been learned that a few people sent there may have been partially sent by accident, but the Trump administration is refusing to return these people and is instead saying,

still trying to convince the public that these are dangerous terrorists that deserve to be disappeared. So let's kind of start with that main case. The case that's receiving the most public attention right now is of a Maryland man named Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who's the subject of a district court case that has been sent up to the Supreme Court and then sent back to the district court on whether this man can be returned home to his U.S. citizen wife and child.

And then on Monday, April 14th, in the Oval Office meeting, President Bukele said that he will not return this Maryland immigrant with protected legal status back to the United States, who ICE admits was sent to Seacott based on a quote-unquote administrative error. Bukele said, quote, how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it. The question is preposterous, unquote.

The El Salvador president also balked at the idea of releasing Garcia from SECOT, since he can't have a quote-unquote terrorist free in his country, lying about Garcia being a criminal. I am going to play a few clips in this episode, because I think it is necessary to listen to these people actually say...

the words that they are saying in the tone that they're saying them. And the exact phrasing on these, I think, is actually pretty important right now. So unfortunately, you are going to have to hear the voices of a few people who you might not rather hear from, including the president of El Salvador. So I'll play this first clip.

President Buckele, can President Buckele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return him? Well, I'm supposed to have suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I return him to the United States? If I smuggle him into the United States, of course I'm not going to do it. It's like...

I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States. But you could release him inside of Salamanca. Yeah, but I'm not releasing-- I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. I mean, we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere, and you want us to go back?

into the releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world. That's not going to happen. Well, they'd love to have a criminal release. I mean, there's a fascination. They would love it. Yeah. These are sick people. It's just insane. Like, the whole pretense of any...

like serious engagement with reality there. It's just gone. Yeah. And they're both like miming that neither of them have the ability to make any kind of deal between each other to, to send people back, even though they have the ability to make a deal to send people there. Yeah. As they sit in the same room, the whole time, but Kaylee is talking, Trump has like this, like a growing smirk on his face. Yeah.

As McKaylee is talking about this preposterous notion of smuggling a U.S. immigrant back into the United States, despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of this immigrant back into the country.

The whole smuggling framing is obviously absurd with him saying, like, I don't have the power to return him to the United States. All he needs to do is release him from SECOT and the U.S. can fly him back, right? Just as we flew him to El Salvador. Like, the two heads of state are sitting right next to each other. They could agree to do this at any time.

But now everyone's pretending that suddenly they don't have the power to undo what they seemingly had the power to do in the first place. Like Bukele has ruled, and we're going to do a whole episode on Bukele and like his rise to power and then his use of power. But like,

Like he's ruled under a state of exception for years in El Salvador, which allows them to detain people without warrants, without trials. Right. And like it's that state of exception that is now the norm there. And that's kind of what he seems to be referring to. Right. Like like we just get to lock people up. Why would I not do that?

In effect, they are arguing that every single human being that is sent to Seacott by the United States is unable to ever leave the prison alive. Yeah. That's basically what they're saying. They're saying both parties, both Trump and Bukele, are unable to have someone who's been sent there return. So they're just saying no one's able to do anything. They're just stuck there until they die. Yeah. And this is part of the design of Seacott.

The person who runs the Seacott security has said that they do not intend in any person ever being released from Seacott. You are not designed to get out. You are stuck there forever. No one's ever left there. Yeah.

It's just where you get disappeared. And that's all that it is. And I think part of why they're so unwilling to send Garcia back is because then you have someone, like the first person who's ever gotten out and can talk about what it's actually like in there when you don't have like Christine Ome and propaganda cameras pointed at the prison bars. Yeah. Bukele is very reticent to release anyone for that reason. And like,

There are plenty of allegations, and I think Time magazine has published this, it's not hugely controversial, that he made deals with gangs in the past in El Salvador to get them to reduce the murder rate. And he certainly wouldn't like to hear that testified to, certainly not in the United States court. So he doesn't want people to be released from there either.

Like you say, they don't want anyone to be able to go to any international human rights courts and testify as to what happened to them there. So it's kind of in his interest to never have anyone be released. It's not just also, I guess, like in his interest, he's also being paid, right? $20,000 per detainee per year by the United States right now. So he also has a financial interest in keeping people in there. Even this per year deal makes...

now kind of makes zero sense because both of them are arguing that there's no way to send anyone back. Right. So like, it's not that it's even like, oh, they're only going to be there for one year. It's like,

They're just there. And who knows if they're going to still be alive by the time that some of these people would be able to get out, whether that's through the miraculous Donald Trump impeachment of 2026, which will never happen, or however. These people are just stuck there because he's not going to release them into his country. We are seemingly unable to take anyone back from there.

I mean, unwilling, right? Like the US is theoretically able. It's argued that we're unable as people get into more after this ad break. Yeah.

Okay, we are back. One thing that we've seen across the Trump administration the past 80 days or so, something that we saw very evident in this meeting, is that whenever a single person is asked a question about the outrageous, possibly illegal, possibly not, but just immoral or evil things that are being done,

The first instinct is always to pass the buck onto someone else. We saw this a lot with Signalgate, how it was always someone else's fault. No single person could get hammered down of being like, okay, you are the person that's going to be accountable for this. And throughout this Oval Office meeting, eventually they started taking questions from...

from journalists and reporters and propagandists who were in the room. And you saw this trend of, you know, if someone asks Trump about what's going on, he passes the buck to Stephen Miller, who passes the buck to Bukele, who then passes the buck to Mark Rubio. And it's like this big circle of like...

Everyone's just talking around each other because no one really has the authority to speak on what's going on or how to fix this problem because they don't see it as a problem. So instead, they just talk in a circle. And I think Miller was one of the most effective at this. And unfortunately, we're going to play the longest clip in this episode, just under two minutes, from Stephen Miller, where he lays out the Trump admin's thought process and strategy behind what they are doing. And I apologize for...

this but it is useful to hear from him or two so here here we go with respect to you he's a citizen of El Salvador so it's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point as to immigration courts found that he was a member of ms-13 when President Trump declared ms-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization

That meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I'm sure you know, you're very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States. So we had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that under our law, he's not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation. This issue was then, by a district court judge...

completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here. That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful, and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that neither...

So you don't plan to ask for a new government?

And what was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve? Was it 9 to nothing? Yes, it was a 9-0. In our favor. In our favor against the district court ruling saying that no district court has the power to compel a foreign policy function of the United States. As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador's sole discretion

was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends up with an ever-living here, because he is a citizen of El Salvador. That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about him for the court can only be directed to him.

So there's a lot there. Yeah. I think I'm going to start with, I can promise you if he was your neighbor, you would move right away. And I think that is really the heart of what this Trump administration is doing. Like it's appealing to this most basic like suburban crime, panic, fear, racism of, well, if he was your neighbor, you wouldn't want him living next to you. Yeah, like if there goes a neighborhood kind of.

Well, just completely lying about the context of this case. Yeah. With Miller saying it's arrogant to suggest that we, the most powerful country in the world, or used to be before the tariffs, can tell El Salvador how to handle its citizens. Falsely claiming that immigration courts deemed him a member of MS-13, which just is not true. Yeah.

talking about kidnapping him from Seacott to return him to the United States, as if ICE didn't just kidnap hundreds of people with no criminal records and send them to a foreign gulag.

And then also lied about the Supreme Court ruling, saying they found the district court order to return Garcia unlawful and grossly mischaracterizing the scope of what the Supreme Court ruling was and how it was sent back to the district court to work with the details on what facilitate the return actually means. And again, I think one of the most telling parts is how he ends by saying, quote, no version of this ever ends up with him living here.

And yeah, they're going to look for any way to make this test case work, right? And if they can do this to someone with protected legal status who is not a terrorist, who is not an actual MS-13 gang member, right? This is kind of ideal for them because that means they can paint anybody as a foreign policy threat enough to be sent to a foreign gulag. Then at the very end of the clip, he passes the buck off to Bukele. Yeah.

to have to have him answer this question again perfectly laying out their strategy there's a lot to break down in what military it's also just kind of interesting camiller is like amongst the press he's not one of the people like sat on the couches supposed to be giving the press conference right he just kind of wades in to i guess like like offer this opinion and kind of like uh be the kind of embassy of this of their response i guess in in a sense yeah i think

crucially like abrigo garcia's protection was from being returned to el salvador right because he had been harassed by gang members when leaving el salvador and when living in el salvador he's lived in the states since 2011 and he left el salvador to flee harassment and abuse from from gang members yeah the gangs that he's been accused of being a part of but like it then follows that like it would be

legal for them to deport him to a third country, right? And that is the path that they've followed with all the Venezuelan migrants, right? They've accused him of being members of Trenderagua. I have not seen a compelling case made that any of them are yet.

I'm sure people from Tren de Aragua have come to this country, but they have not provided any evidence that the people they have sent to Segot are those people. No, we've had like 14 people are accused of some kind of violent crime, like murder or rape. And the other 275 do not have a criminal record whatsoever. Yeah, and the bulk of this is reliant on some kind of idea that they have entirely created from fiction, that there are tattooing practices when one enters Tren de Aragua. And for

For them, even if they can't be returned to Venezuela, they feel like they have this end round, which is, okay, we'll send them to El Salvador. But for the Salvadorians, that's a different question. And that is what they're trying to find here. And that is worrying because...

The case here that is getting the most publicity, that seems to be the one that the Supreme Court has taken up, is about the Salvadorian man. And I hope that doesn't mean that the ship has sailed for the Venezuelans, right? That essentially they don't have a case. Because that was the vast bulk of them. I think there was something like 60 Salvadorian citizens and the rest Venezuelans. No, hundreds of people have been forgotten in this. Mm-hmm.

After Miller's rant there, Mark Rubio jumped in to state that, quote, no court in the United States has the right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States, unquote. And Stephen Miller hopped back in to talk about this Supreme Court case that they're falsely saying they won 9-0, which is not how that case went.

And they start talking more broadly about what can be allowed if it has to do with the foreign policy of the United States and how the courts don't have the ability to intervene in that process.

No, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States. It's that simple. End of story. And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way, as a part of the point. The Supreme Court said exactly what Marco said, that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.

Part of what I find so disturbing about this idea of

of no habeas corpus, no due process if you aren't on foreign soil, is that this idea of the courts having no jurisdiction over foreign policy decisions means that as long as you, whether you're a citizen, whether you're a permanent resident, a documented or undocumented immigrant,

As long as you are forcibly removed from the United States soil, your rights and your due process has been forfeit. And the U.S. has neither the obligation nor sometimes the ability to return you to U.S. soil if that is their foreign policy interest. And this is such a troubling, broad concept that the portions of the courts are kind of allowing them to claim right now. And the complete removal of due process is like,

slowly getting encroached upon at first with undocumented immigrants and green card holders. But as we will see in the next section, they are also absolutely going to be targeting U.S. citizens. Yeah, I think we should just point out, obviously, the court is not conducting the foreign policy of the United States. It's ruling on the legality of the action taken by the president, which is exactly what it's supposed to do.

Yeah, and as it relates to your rights for due process, if you are in the United States. Yeah, yeah, like every single U.S. person, right? U.S. person would be anybody who resides in the U.S., be they documented or undocumented migrant citizen, what have you, like has a stake in this. We're going to go on break and then come back to discuss the expansion of the CCOT detention program and the possible targeting of U.S. citizens. Okay, we're back.

So on April 7th, a few weeks ago, while on Air Force One, President Trump told reporters that he would be, quote unquote, honored for the president of El Salvador to take a U.S. citizens, quote unquote, American grown and born criminals and put them in Seacott, the terrorism confinement center prison black site, saying, quote, Why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? Unquote.

A few days later, the White House press secretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is discussing both publicly and privately. And later, during the April 14th Oval Office meeting, Trump said that if Salvador was to build more of these torture mega prisons, the United States would quote unquote, help them out.

if the Trump administration could disappear more American immigrants and US citizens to these prison black sites. - Are you willing to pay for those facilities to be opened if new ones were gonna be built? - I'd do something, we'd help them out, yeah. We'd help them out. They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games.

I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I say I said it to Pam. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws. But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking. That are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country. But you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve. OK. President Trump.

So this is just the start of a long process that is going to be deeply troublesome and worrying. And again, like this is something that they keep talking about. I think they're still looking for some kind of legal justification or they're looking for something that maybe

if not allows for this, explicitly prohibits this in a way that they can't get around. Yeah, did you notice he called out Miller? He said, you'll have to look at the laws on that, Steve. Obviously, Miller is not the Attorney General. He also did mention Attorney General Pambondi. Pambondi, yeah. Who's also looking into this option right now.

Right. But Miller is often credited with being the kind of mastermind behind Title 42, right? Which was an extremely obscure piece of public health law that was then mobilized by the first Trump administration to immediately return migrants to Mexico without giving them their right to an asylum hearing, right? And like...

That's what I'm wondering if they're going for again. Steve Miller has been very good at this, at finding obscure justifications in United States federal law for shit that they want to do. I think this is why they're definitely trying to stretch this foreign policy claim as far as they can. That if it's outside US soil, there's a limited way US courts can actually interfere or undo things that have already been done.

And again, like the idea that we're going to like fund the construction of even more of these El Salvador mega prisons just to house American grown and born criminals as well as immigrants. Like we're just funding like gulag camps on foreign soil to send the undesirables to. And no matter how much Trump talks about how we're only going to send quote unquote like American criminals there, as we've seen with with Seacott so far, like no, like no.

The majority of people they are sending do not have criminal histories. I don't think anyone can trust the Trump administration's definition of what is and isn't criminal to this extent anymore. Later in the same meeting, Trump reiterated the same idea about sending U.S. citizens who his administration deems criminals to this foreign black site. Here's another clip.

The Press: Just a follow-up question on clarification. You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens, brought criminals to El Salvador. Does that include potentially U.S. citizens, fully naturalized in the Caribbean? The President: If they're criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90 years old, and if --

If they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn, yeah, yeah, that includes them. Why do you think there's a special category of person? They're as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones, too. And I'm all for it. We have others that we're negotiating with, too. But, no, if it's a homegrown criminal...

I have no problem. He's really obsessed with this baseball bats thing. I don't quite know what that's about. It seems like a specific case that he's referring to. Maybe it's something he remembers from like 30 years ago that really got stuck in his head. Right. But also later he says that they're negotiating with other countries to send US citizens to, not just El Salvador. Yeah.

I mean, they've sent migrants, third country migrants to Panama before, right? And detained them there. Honduras, I believe, is building like a prison that's not dissimilar to Secot. Like, I'm guessing this will be their sort of way of courting allies in the hemisphere. Like, they'll sort of pay them a relatively large amount in order to attempt to offshore people they don't like. Yeah. And again, like, as we've seen the past few years and increasingly so now, like,

The effort to label activists or people who are vocally opposed to the United States foreign policy, the United States and the state of Israel, deeming them terrorists, and then by extension, if you charge them with a crime, then criminals, the idea that they can be housed in a place like Seacott now, with very limited to no due process. The whole due process question is still very up in the air for how they're going to handle that aspect.

But you can't just take this as like, oh, you know, that's just Trump talking. Like, no, this is something they really want to do.

And it's like one of the freakiest things that I've seen in like domestic U.S. politics in a long time. Earlier, Trump was recorded half whispering to Bukele, telling him that El Salvador needs to build five more Seacott-style torture prisons to house U.S. citizens, as Trump says, homegrown criminals. Bukele replies that they will have enough room. And then the entire Oval Office laughs.

I said, homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You've got to build about five more places. Yeah, that's fair. It's the bleakest clip I've ever seen before. Talking about homegrowns are next, got to build five more places. Oh, we have enough space. Everyone laughs. And then Trump shows off the new gold frames for the portraits in the Oval Office. Yeah, it's like a dinner party joke for them.

It might just be worth noting that every totalitarian regime has housed its dissidents outside of the imperial core. Germany did this in the East. Russia sent people to Siberia for a reason. Russia, Soviet Union. Creating these stateless zones where the regular laws of your fatherland state do not apply. Yeah.

Right. And where the horrors are so far from the populace that the populace can't really grasp them. Yeah. No, this is like elementary school stuff. It says like the first thing you learn about is concentration camps and gulags and how that's like the symbol of evil. And now it's something you laugh about in the Oval Office to send homegrowns to five disappearing torture camps. Yeah. And like...

Just to be even clearer, I guess what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that there is no due process, right? People are sent there because of who they are, not because of what they did. Like if you're a Venezuelan man who may or may not have a tattoo. Yeah, like we are. I don't know what it will take for some people to realize what's happening here.

And like the president of El Salvador is so on board for this. Yeah, I mean, he doesn't hide from that reputation, right? He embraces it. His Twitter for a while had world's coolest dictator in the bio. I don't know if it still does. It's like both him and Trump have openly...

align themselves with quote-unquote nationalism and nationalists. They're openly saying this. Trump said, dictator on day one, that wasn't just a rhetorical device, that was literal. This is what he's doing. The El Salvador president told Trump, you have 350 million people to liberate, but to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. And he followed that up by saying that he is eager to help with that. Yes.

In fact, Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That's the way it works, right? You cannot just free the criminals and think crime is going to go down magically. You have to imprison them so you can liberate 350 million Americans that are asking for the end of crime and the end of terrorism. And it can be done. I mean, you're doing it already.

So I'm really happy to be here, honored and eager to help. This whole like liberation through imprisonment thing is elementary school stuff here. You don't have to have a PhD in the history of the 1930s to have someone tell you that like liberation of the chosen nation by purging of the undesirables is fascist shit. But like, I'm here with one to tell you if that's what you need, you know?

Like, this is textbook stuff, like Garrison's saying. Like, this is not debatable. Like, I know we spent the last four years debating, is Trump a fascist or not? I don't think that matters hugely, right? Like, this is a fascist thing. It's so much more disturbing that now, according to, like, polls, like, half, around half the population, maybe a little bit less, just agree with the current way that deportations are happening and Trump's immigration policy, like, on a completely, like, flat basis and...

If you spend any time on X, the Everything app, watching videos of these press conferences, it's full of people just cheering this on completely blankly. I think that's a very skewed sample of people who paid for Elon Musk's hate app. Of course, of course. But the number of people... Yeah, it's real humans saying it. These are real people who just completely, completely blankly

think this is a net good. Those people are unreachable. You cannot come back from that. There is no coming back from that. If you believe that the way deportations are currently happening is fair, just, and right, I cannot...

understand you as a human anymore that is so like divorced and like alien yeah you've gone past the point of no return right like liberals who like shield who like shield their eyes from like the horrors at the border like i don't agree with that but in some ways i can like understand it the open like cheering on of this right is like a whole it's a whole other level yeah it's not like i can't bear to see i'm gonna ignore it because it'll cause me to confront the no the contradictions it's i'm seeing it i'm watching it and i think it's fucking great

The last thing I'm going to, I'm going to play here. A CNN reporter asked Trump if he would obey a Supreme court order to return someone to the United States. Instead of answering this question, Trump attacked the reporter and complained about how she wasn't praising him for deporting criminals.

Yeah, mad.

Very textbook authoritarian blanket stuff. There's nothing to commentate about that. It just is what it is. I guess we do have some breaking news because we're recording this on Tuesday. James, do you want to, in possibly five minutes or less...

Fill us in about the update from the district court on Garcia's case since it was sent back to the district court from the Supreme Court last week regarding his possible facilitated return to the United States. Right, so much of this has hinged over what facilitate means, right? Like they found a legal concept that they can argue ad nauseum and in this case it's the word facilitate. The DOJ didn't present any new information today but

We see that there's some hopeful things from a district court judge, and then it kind of all goes up in flames. But I think Chinis is how the name is spelled. I believe it's Chinis. I said that every day that he's there is a day of further irreparable harm. And then she talks about the process being at the roots of the Constitution. Right. She's ordered for like two weeks more of discovery.

which is going to mean that both sides have more time to repair their cases, right? She wants people to testify in front of the court. So the administration has argued that facilitating his return would consist of them allowing him to enter the United States if Bukele released him and possibly providing a flight for that to happen, but not, crucially, ensuring his release from Secord, right? And so anything else subsequent to that doesn't matter. Cheney said that, like,

Their interpretation of the word flies in the face of the plain meaning of the word. Quote, when a wrongfully removed individual is, and then I'm adding to the quote here, I guess, or context, she means when a wrongfully removed individual is taken outside the US, it's not so cut and dried that all you have to do is remove obstacles domestically.

She also said, quote, to the Department of Justice here, you made your jurisdictional arguments, you made your venue arguments, you made your arguments on the merits, you lost. This is now about the scope of the remedy, right? This is a case that Miller is claiming they won. That's pretty unequivocal for a justice. However, she does not seem to think that it is within her power to request his return from El Salvador.

So she's calling for things to move quickly, right? They want to conduct depositions by the 23rd of April. She said, quote, cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I'm usually pretty good about it. Not this time. I'm going to be available if you need to do it odd hours or weekends. That's what I'm talking about. Anything short of a judge saying you have to go to Secod, remove him from the cell, put him on the plane and bring him back to America is going to be interpreted by the Trump administration to mean that they don't have to do that.

Yeah, they're going to weasel their way around it the same way you heard Stephen Miller weasel his way around every question and with truth being used as a flexible medium to shape a sculpture of their choosing. And like they've done that right. The word facilitate, I think most people who are first language English speakers have a fairly good grasp of what that means. And it doesn't mean like remove barriers domestically. That's what they've gone for.

The only way that he is getting out is a majority Supreme Court decision that is extremely explicit that directs the Trump administration to go to El Salvador and remove him from that prison. I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're getting that anytime soon. And as the judge said, every day he's there, irreparable harm is done to him. And

That's where we're at right now, right? With people arguing over the definition of a word as hundreds of people are locked up having done nothing wrong in a giant torture prison. And this is not the only person who we believe was quote-unquote mistakenly sent. There's reporting today coming out of Documented New York. Yeah, good outlet, by the way. A father of a 19-year-old legal immigrant from Brooklyn. This 19-year-old with no tattoos...

was kidnapped off the streets of New York. The quote from his father reads, quote, the officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building. One said, no, he's not the one. Like they were looking for someone else. One officer to be clear. Correct. Yeah. But the other officer said, take him anyway. Unquote.

And now this father, exactly a month later, is still looking for his missing son, who is disappeared into an El Salvador torture prison. Yeah, Jesus. Like I've said before on this show, like one of the things that I learned in The Darien Gap was how much people can care about their kids. And like this shit that I saw people do to ensure their kids have a better life, like

broke my heart in a way that war hasn't, that like anything else I've seen in my life hasn't. And it's like, honestly, really hard for me to hear stuff like that and, and like not react, just being really sad and really angry. Like it's fucking brutal. Things are looking a lot more grim in my mind than they were when we recorded that. Should you leave the United States episode? I still think the things I said there, I stand by and

I stand by the only recommendation I have is to create options for yourself. And I think those options should be created as soon as possible, especially if your citizenship is a topic of debate, according to the United States government. But even that will not keep you safe, as we've talked about today. And your options include creating networks to take care of one another, right? Like,

The things that will probably affect more of you than direct state violence are economic downturns, are recessions, right? Things like this, like those are things that you can take care of one another through. And like, you should plan to do that too. You should think about how you're going to pay your bills, how you're going to feed each other, how you're going to take care of your medical needs. Because I don't think that the world is going to want to keep doing business with a country that acts like this.

And both economically and in terms of its conduct towards migrants. So like your plans don't have to be to leave. Like your plans should also include what to do if things get really bad, like in an economic sense. I'm not going to tell you what that means, but it's all the stuff we've already talked about, right? It's mutual aid. It's all the, all the basic preparedness stuff that is not as big and scary as leaving the country, but is nonetheless like vital. Yeah.

We will continue to report on the Garcia case, other court cases regarding these 300 people renditioned to El Salvador and Seacott in the next few weeks. Yeah. Just to finish up, as things continue to get worse, people keep reaching out to us, which we appreciate. If you would like to, you can email us coolzontips at proton.me.

We will read it. We might not get back to you. Your email is not end-to-end encrypted unless the email that you're sending from is also encrypted. But you can reach out to us there. See you on the other side.

Thank you.

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Over the course of the many, many, many, many, many Union episodes we've done on this podcast, we haven't really done much coverage of just straight up how do you do a strike. So today we are going to be covering a pretty long running strike. We're going to say how many days it's been going. It's unclear when this episode is going to come out. So who fucking knows how long it'll be when you hear it. But anyway,

Yeah, with me to talk about this strike is Spencer Jordan, who is a rank-and-file member of the Urban Ore Workers Union. Spencer, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So this is, what day is it today? I should know this. April 15th. And as of April 15th, you've been on strike for 25 days? Yeah, that's just about right. Yeah, it started on the 22nd of March.

We held our strike vote like a solid 12 days before we actually went out on the picket line and won that strike vote with 14 yeses, a single no, and I think four abstentions. That's pretty good. Yeah. So 93% of those voting voted yes. Yeah. Which, good ratios, good ratios. I think like

Typically, you want at least mid-70s if we're going to do this kind of thing. But as listeners to the show, hopefully understand by now you can't just call a strike and have it happen. You have to do a whole bunch of organizing. So I want to start at the dynamics of the organizing of how this shop got going because this is a pretty small shop from the sounds of it. Yeah. Yeah. So do you want to talk a bit about what the basic...

process of getting this organizing started was like and what the sort of like social mapping looked like and stuff like that? Yeah, so the organization process started around like a year and a half before we actually had our unionization vote, which was actually, we had the vote in March and we got our win on April 7th, two years ago. So we actually just had our

to your birthday. Oh, happy birthday. But yeah, so preceding that was like, like I said, about a year and a half of organizing that involved, you know, the typical thing of like one-on-one conversations with like all the staff making the, you know, color-coded spreadsheet and everything, which all of this was not my,

my my purview I'm a lot more involved now than I was at the start of the process and I was approached by like one of our lead organizers really shortly after being hired just to kind of you know read the dipstick as to like my sentiments about it and whatnot I was pretty on board right away I mean you know like

I'm from the Bay Area, so... There are only two types of people from the Bay Area. We wouldn't be having one of them on the show. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I'm of the latter type. So, you know, being pro-union isn't like a foreign thing to my background. Uh-huh, uh-huh. You don't look like a tech worker. Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, especially like my family's from the Midwest and everything. So there's...

Yeah, my aunt actually just learned that she was like a clerk working for the railroads back in the day when railroad jobs were still like a big thing you could have. Anyways, but yeah, so I had had my own sort of like just observations of like, whoa, like what's going on in the workplace?

Aside from like my own just like predilection to thinking, you know, more worker power is better. Yeah. Also kind of seeing like some of the factors that precipitated it. Like, for instance, like when I was hired here, I was hired in my interview. It was the one of the owners.

And the manager of my department, my department being salvage and recycling department of Urbanor, which is kind of like not super public facing. We go to the dump and like root around through the garbage, like, you know, or whatever, get to get stuff for the store. But that manager, you know, he was there in the interview and we got to the portion where the owner explained that

what at-will employment is. Oh, boy. And she went, so, we're at-will here. So, Samuel, Samuel's my manager. Samuel, how long have you been here? 21 years? He's there, hands folded on the table. Yes. What at-will means is it could be tomorrow. I could say, you know, Samuel, it's been a great 21 years. I really appreciate all the work you've done. Today's your last day. What? Why would you say that?

And he has to sit there and go, Jesus Christ. And then she says, of course, likewise, tomorrow someone could come to me and say, hey, Mary Lou, it's been 21 years. I've enjoyed it. I'm quitting. So, you know, the sort of sword over his neck.

being cast as somehow equal to him not being indentured. Yes! What are we doing here? This also just, I mean, on the basic level, yeah, it's like, okay, your opponent can... I guess they are your opponent. Your boss can just instantly fire you for any reason whatsoever for any amount of time. And then also you could quit the job. And then secondarily, I feel like just as a management tactic, are

Are you like trying to piss off your support? And it's like, what? I have never had a boss like just do that in a hiring meeting. What?

Yeah, I mean, have you worked at like a sort of small mom and pop quote-unquote business before? Yeah, I mean, that's probably why, because I've usually had like larger... My shitty jobs have either been like government jobs or like larger companies. So there was less of the like...

I heard a line recently that I wish I remember where it was from. It might be a line from Star Trek. It's like one of the Ferengi rules. Treat your employees like family. Exploit them ruthlessly. Which I love. That's a traditional line in business, especially in small business. It's no stranger here. Yeah, that question of wanting to piss off your subordinates or whatever. It's a...

I don't know if pissing off is necessarily like the concern, but man, ownership here. Definitely. I've gotten the impression that they enjoy showing their power and I've gotten the impression that, um, sort of like uncertainty and like, yeah, my mom would call it jockeying for position that you have to do is a dynamic that they, I can't say, I really can't say they honestly, because the other owner, he hasn't, uh,

been very active in the business since my hiring, but at least Mary Lou tends to lean on. That's kind of like the special quality that you get with a small business and organizing in a small workplace is that you can see sort of in their public communications the way that...

the Zucks and the Bezos's and the rest of them feel about their employees. And, you know, you can get a sense of perhaps how they might act towards their employees if they like interacted with them on a daily basis. But in a small business setting, you really get a keen view into how like the power of the employer mixes very readily with, um,

a person's like predilection towards discipline predilection towards like personal what did you call it personal battling almost yeah well and that's and it's also like it's inescapable in a way that it isn't with like you know if you're dealing with people who are you know you're at a larger company you're not dealing with the person like there's an old chinese expression that's like

heaven is high and the emperor is far away. So, you know, it's like, you know, like a lot of times you're dealing with, okay, yeah, there is like, you know, your Zuckerberg is there, but he's like, he never interacts with you. But with this, it's like, no, the small business tyrant is right there in your face all the time and all of the weird petty shit that they want to do and all of this sort of like

And I would say this isn't just like a unique thing of small business owners. People in all positions, like in all portions of the class society, have in them kind of like the capacity for cruelty, and there's just people like that. But they don't normally have the ability to just do it to you directly in your face. And that's, yeah, and that's like, you know, this is what you've been talking about. It's like, yeah, you have these small business tyrants. Suddenly, in the same way that, I don't know, you're dealing with like

like one of the random King Louie's and you're like in the court and suddenly just like the fact that this guy doesn't like people going to the bathroom means that everyone around him doesn't get a, doesn't get, doesn't get a shit. Right. Like it's just like, yeah, it's weird. Yeah, no, exactly. It's like, it's actually an argument that, uh, she's deployed in her Reddit correspondence, which, uh, has been seemingly a pretty active part of her spare time that she's not spending at the bargaining table with us. You know,

you know, made this comparison of like, this isn't a question about oligarchs or whatever. And it's true. Like the small businessman is not an oligarch, but, uh,

the small business is a microcosm of like the larger capitalist social order. And while the small business man might not have the scope of power of the oligarch or like the actual capital resources of an oligarch, the behavior certainly rhymes. Yeah. And again, it's like, it's a lot of it is about, it's just how much power you have access to, right? Like,

lots of people can be like this, but only the few, the proud, the small business type get to do it. Yeah, totally. And, you know, ultimately the employer, wherever they are, they're in this privileged position of being able to, you know, you spend most people more than like a third of your life at work. Yeah. The employer has this unique power to dictate what that third of your life looks like. You know, we talk about,

I mean, shit, we don't. People are not so much talking about democracy writ large in the U.S. in the same way now that they used to. But, you know, you talk about this idea of like living in a democracy, but democracy ends at the shop door. Yeah. Yeah. And like the kind of power that these people have is something that like,

These people get to control when you can go to the bathroom, like what clothes you wear, like literally what you can do, what you can say at any given time. If you employed the exact level of control that your boss has over you on a state, it would be a totalitarian state. And yet everyone seems to think that this is sort of like.

You know, and this is an argument I've been making about, like, Trump, is that, like, yeah, this is what sort of Trump and Elon and, like, that whole cadre and, you know, if you want to go into the sort of ideologues behind it, too, this is what

people like Peter Thiel want when they say run the government like a business what they mean is that they want to import the sort of like just the pure tyranny of the workplace and expand it into the entire political system so that their their like sort of pure like totalitarian corporate rule can't be challenged yeah yeah I mean wasn't it Mussolini who coined the term the corporate state probably

Although it would not surprise me if it was like some other fascist theorist and Mussolini just started saying it because, yeah. But yeah, like that's, you know, that's a substantive thing here. And what this also means is that like, even in ways that are sort of hard to see, like a fight over democracy in the workplace, right, is a part of the larger struggle against all of the things that's happening. Because if, you know, if we're going to survive this,

And if we're going to make sure that we don't all live in a world where, like, if you say the wrong thing, you can be sent to a prison camp. Democracy, if you want this to survive, is going to have to march into, like, into the lair of the beast. It is going to have to go into the source of this tyranny itself, which is the workplace. And it's going to have to crush it there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said it very, very aptly there. Like, the corporate structure mirrors the totalitarian structure.

And, you know, not only does like fighting the corporate structure at the level of labor makes sense in that, right. Labor is what enables the flow of capital that, um, sustains the totalitarian state, but also, like you said, you're, you're, you're addressing the structure in its, um,

I don't know. I almost think of it as like the, you know, like Grendel's mother in the thing or whatever. And like, like, you know, the, the, the authoritarian thing is like, uh, is like Grendel maybe. And like Grendel's mother is like this capitalist hierarchical structure. Yeah. You know, you take it on with an insistence on workplace democracy as kind of Libby as that's, that sounds. Yeah.

Okay, speaking of capitalist totalitarianism, here are the ads that we are required to run by our corporate overlords. Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Let's hear them. And we are back.

So, let's get back a little bit towards the more concrete parts of the union, although I do have more to say eventually at some point about the way that sort of labor liberalism co-opted democracy in the workplace from, like, you know, the old sort of, like, anarchist idea of workers' control, right? But, okay, so one thing I wanted to talk about before we sort of get into the more formal stuff about the strike is I'm really interested...

to hear you talk about what the process of kind of onboarding you to get more involved in the union is, because this is something that like, okay, every functional union wants to do this. Like if, if your union is not trying to bring people like it's members, like more to get more involved in the union and become more of the people becoming like core organizers and becoming, you know, like the people who are doing your bargain, people are doing anything like your union is, there's weird shit about it. And you should probably like be looking into that.

But it's pretty hard. So yeah, can you talk a bit about the process of like how you were brought in and what sort of worked and what didn't? Well, I think ultimately like the easiest thing is a sort of ramping up degree of like responsibility within the organization, right? So like at the start, I would come to some of the meetings. I would miss some of them. I would be like, oh, I'm fucking so busy with work.

whatever is going on in my life. And, you know, I was supportive and sort of involved, but, you know, I wasn't like, I mean, I certainly wasn't doing things like this. And, you know, eventually one, we like kind of persisted as a union over a longer period of time. The necessity of involvement became more like obvious to me. Right. And that's,

That's a hard ask, you know, like you're organizing, you want momentum and you want, yeah, you want to be able to change your conditions for the better as soon as possible. Yeah. And with, with urban or, you know, lots of workplaces that need unionization have high turnover, right. And urban or is no different. And so I saw, you know, like some of the more committed elements of the bargaining unit fired, um,

or quit or whatever yeah and you know they would be replaced with other people and you have to begin the work of organizing over again and with some of them you succeed with something you don't yeah you know you have different dynamics i feel like the hiring procedures may have changed a little bit after one election but you know i can't say that for certain so the sort of like necessity of like

Keeping that, like, flame going, especially after we had won the election, we were in contract bargaining for a long period of time, made me feel like a sort of sense of, like, I need to be more active in this because, like, this is an important struggle. And, like, I see our, like, main organizers taking on, like, a fuckload of work. Yep. And, like...

needing more voices at the table needing more more uh needing more people to be more involved and so like a you know volunteered to like run for treasurer i was the only candidate yeah but theoretically i could have been voted down they could have been like i don't know about spencer and you know like ended up having like

a little bit more direct responsibilities. Like I was like receiving some of the donations to our strike fund. Once we started fundraising for the strike, I had to keep track of those and, you know, put them in a special bank account and then eventually take that money and get it to like the, the IWW branch, uh, hand it, hand a big check to Dino, um, that kind of stuff. And just like having like little things to be doing, like Spurs involvement, um,

other people you know became responsible for like parts of social media outreach making graphics stuff like that and um also like sort of i guess giving people the opportunity to leverage their individual connections within the workplace because every workplace is like clicks and groups and subgroups and all that um to leverage those connections in like

service of bettering everyone's conditions so like to a certain degree i've i've been like important as like an envoy to my particular department because it's our job takes us away from the job site or like from like the main the main work site often and stuff like that so there's less of a direct avenue for communication there yeah so i can say that's my experience yeah as far as organizing goes like i'm i'm easy you know i was already i was already believing in it yeah and like

There are others that it's been harder. I will say, though, that the strike itself is... I mean, a strike is a conflict. And when you're in conflict together, it's an extremely cohering force. Yeah. Which isn't to say that necessarily you want your unionization to come to a strike, but...

Perhaps like raising a sort of consciousness of like the fact that like you are ultimately like in conflict with the boss. Yeah. The boss doesn't want you to unionize. The boss doesn't want you to force concessions out of them. And that like as a union, we are taking on this like responsibility to look after each other's interests. Yeah. And to like support each other like tangibly in terms of like what we do and also intangibly in terms of like,

the kind of conversations we have around like morale planning and stuff like that, you know, to succeed together. I think those are like really potent, coherent forces and, you know, it helps to have a good, a good opponent, you know, the boss is the best organizer. And at Urban or it's, you don't go along without coming head to head with like the, the,

with conflict with ownership or with like ownership through the mediator of management. Like, although like support for the union might be divided a bit at the workplace. One thing that's pretty universal is like frustration with ownership. Yeah. So,

So, okay, speaking of a frustration with ownership, it is time for us to go to ads one last time. Oh, beautiful. But then after we come back, strike, strike, strike, strike. Strike, strike, strike. Just after this message. Oh, God. Okay, we are back from a bunch of people who almost assuredly do not want you to go on strike. Yeah, so let's get into the process of how you actually organize a strike.

Yeah, let's start from just like the very beginning. What are the kinds of things that were happening that, you know, made people think that you needed to do this in the first place?

So the strike itself is a result, specifically, like, this is a ULP strike. So it's in response to something that falls under the category of unfair labor practice, according to the National Labor Relations Act. And it's, you know, backed up by charges filed with the board, as opposed to, like, what's called an economic strike, which is a...

Strike that is specifically about economic issues of the workplace. So this is the specific ULP that's being cited for our strike is bad faith bargaining. And for us, what that's looked like is two years of completely stalled negotiations where we are basically being faced with a take it or leave it offer of the status quo in the vast majority of our proposals.

Bargaining is very, very slow and ownership has held tightly to the offense at us having unionized it all, which to my understanding is pretty typical of small workplaces. Ownership takes it very personally and

that personal feeling of betrayal or whatever becomes like a stumbling block in the negotiation process. I know that was the case with Moe's another bookshop in Berkeley that also unionized with the IWW. So

We've had our whole proposal on Ownership's Table for a year and a half now. We had started with bargaining proposal by proposal. They said, well, how can we possibly agree to any of this without understanding the full context, especially the economic context? And so we gave them the full proposal and they said, oh my God, how do you expect us to read all of this?

in time to bargain this is way too much how are we going to evaluate this all oh my god we got to do a proposal by proposal um so it's been really unclear to us if ownership has even actually like read the entirety of our collective bargaining agreement that we put on their desk yeah i know that in the past lawyers have the lawyers have said things like oh my

My eyes glazed over when I read your email, so I missed such and such part of it. It's literally your job. You're a contract lawyer. You have one job. Yeah, you would think like a lawyer would have like a little bit more than beyond like a tweet, tweet sized reading capacity. Well, they give anyone law degrees. Yeah. Or like ownership saying like, well, I just thought it was so ridiculous. I didn't feel the need to read all of it.

Stuff like that. Oh my god. To us, these readers, bad faith bargaining. Yeah, that's bad by like the standards of like

normal it takes two years to do a fucking contract because they're just not doing shit like good lord usually in those long contract negotiations by two years at least there's like been some progress yeah they've read the proposals like yes okay will will will your boss show up to your meeting an hour and a half late because they didn't bother to look through the proposals until literally right the time the meeting was going to start yes but will they have done it usually yes

Mm hmm. Yeah. And in fact, in in the sort of company propaganda where they're claiming that this like bad faith bargaining charge has no grounds, they're like ownership has come to like twenty five to thirty bargaining sessions, neglecting to mention there have been somewhere in the range of like fifty to sixty. And of course, half of them.

Maybe they've shown up to more than half. I don't want to be libelous, but yeah, but still like it's at the point at which you are failing to show up for any bargaining session. I think you can like, look, I have always advocated that if that advantage, but doesn't show up to a bargaining session, you should just be allowed to take the company because clearly they're not serious about it. But, uh, Hey, you know, they've been talking about a worker co-op for 20 years, not reformist reforms. Yeah.

But yeah, so those kind of things. And then like finally, like one of the bigger precipitating factors is like we've been trying to bargain over economics. Ownership has implied a lot of times that they cannot afford to pay what we're asking. They say it'll ruin the company. They say a company will go bankrupt. They say it's unsustainable. They say this and that. And then when they get to the table, they say we have never and will never argue inability to pay.

Because the thing is, is that to say inability to pay, right? It obligates you to furnish information and prove that. And they, for whatever reason,

Do not want to furnish financial information. So these have been some of the sticking points. And that's why we've been out on the picket line for about three weeks now. Still waiting for them to come to the table. God damn it. So, okay, let's talk about the process of how the discussions went for doing this. What did those sort of look like and how did you plan this thing out?

Well, I guess the process towards deciding that it needed to come to a strike was like, you know, that

That is a sort of thing that builds over a long period of time. You know, you see ownership doing bad faith bargaining, you go, what more conciliatory approaches can we take first? You know, can we try this? Can we try offering this to make, you know, can we try this display of good faith? Can we offer this compromise? One of the things that was a big part was of some of the not exactly contract related discussions, but like,

I should have been talking for a long time about a co-op transition that has never happened. You know, it's been 20 years. And, you know, now that we've unionized, they're like, our people who we were talking to about doing the co-op thing, they don't work with unions. And so the only way that there were going to be a co-op is if the union goes away. And so in response to that, we said, well, we're totally open to a,

transition to a co-op that involves the union and here is such and such organization. It was our lead negotiator who actually provided me information somewhere, the name of the organization, but here's such and such organization that actually specifically deals with union co-op workplace transitions was not received with interest. So it's like UMass' catalog of bad faith bargaining

And you end up in your strategy discussions with the whole unit testing the wires of like, when is too much? What's our red line that we need to take more direct action? And what that began with for us was first, well, if we're going to have a strike, we need funds for it. The IWW, yes.

is an organization that affords its unions a lot of freedom and a lot of mutual support and solidarity is not an organization with a huge amount of money yeah and so we did start with trying to get like a sense of like what we could get from you know the branches reserve and we moved on

From that to how we were going to fundraise and stuff like that. So we held informational pickets that had donations. We sold shirts, posters, stuff like that. We held like a big strike fundraiser. Hell yeah. I think something around like a month in advance of our, or it was maybe like a month and a half in advance of our, of our strike.

We also gave management a courtesy notice about this so they could pass it on to ownership, saying, hey, we've started fundraising for a strike in the hopes that being aware that we're taking active preparations to go on strike

would um facilitate bargaining sometimes it works i've seen i've seen it before i've seen it before sometimes it works yeah and uh sometimes you know sometimes you end up on on a podcast talking about how it didn't you never know until you try yeah you never know um

But we did, yeah, we did give them that sort of early warning. And our readiness to strike kind of like depended then on like where we were at in the fundraising process. So we continue soliciting donations, reaching out to various organizations in the area that are, you know,

pro-labor, you know, we've talked to like DSA and whatever, because, you know, they have their like workplace organizing committee. Yeah, I think it's EWOC. EWOC. Yeah. Yeah. And various other, you know, yeah, organizations that are pro-labor. And once we got to a point where we felt like we were reasonably like prepared to sustain a open-ended strike, because that's what we're doing. This is a strike with no set end date.

Then we announced our intention to hold a strike vote. We held our strike vote. Strike vote passes. The ownership was made aware at the bargaining session before the strike vote. So...

It was like the Monday before the strike vote, which is on, I think, I guess, Saturday. So in total, it was like around maybe like two weeks and change that they knew like definite possibility. Pass the strike vote. Twelve days later, the strike begins with unfortunately no bargaining in between. Good Lord. Yeah. The whole way you hope.

that they'll come to the table. You hope that they will come to their senses. Yeah. Take, take the risk seriously, take the risk seriously. And unfortunately this is not what's happened here. And I think part of that is maybe an age thing here. Ownership is, is in their eighties and they're pretty consistently held the view that like the union is like a bunch of young people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.

you know, even though like the age range of our union spans, the age range of the workplace, we've got people in their fifties and forties and thirties and twenties, you know, which is, which is of course the problematic group, but yeah, the young radicals. Yeah. So there's, there's been this sort of patronizing attitude that I think has resulted in like a real strategic failure on their part to seriously,

prepare for the strike or you know bargain to avoid it yeah one more fundraising thing that i just i just want to mention this for people if you're if you're trying to fundraise for your own thing something that's actually we've had a lot of success with up in portland is getting bands to do benefit shows so like because it's portland right like the local hardcore scene has a lot of bands that

you know, are just supportive of stuff. And we've done this for a whole bunch of different causes. And this can also be a good way to just sort of do fundraising things that are fun and also raise morale because...

Yeah, you're doing a show. Yeah, I was hoping to have that be more of a thing with our fundraiser, but... Yeah, it can be hard to organize sometimes. Yeah, the people I knew didn't get quite the response I was hoping from the community. If you are a hardcore band, if you are a band in Berkeley, there's still time. I believe in you. That is totally...

a good option. What we did, we ended up doing, there was music, but it was also like one of our organizers is really into cooking. He did like a barbecue thing, sold food, stuff like that, and had a raffle. A raffle is a great way to fundraise. For us, we like raffled off like stuff we have

But honestly, you can even do like a straight monetary raffle is still a great fundraising tool, you know, where everyone puts in money, the winner, the top three winners or whatever, get like a certain percentage of like the total pool and the rest of the pool is, is to the cause. It really simple.

Really effective. Yeah. There's a reason. It's not good, but there is a reason why a whole bunch of state education budgets are funded by the lottery. It does work. The people love to gamble. Much better. Yeah. Mia says, having turned off her lunch, her path of exile to lunch break to come to this interview. Yeah. Many such cases.

Okay, so let's, speaking of, I guess this is something that's been tied into sort of all of what we've been saying here, but yeah, let's talk about, you know, sort of maintaining the strike when it starts and sort of, yeah, what have been the processes of like keeping morale up and keeping people engaged and yeah. Yeah, I mean, definitely when you go into a strike, you want to go in with confidence.

a militant core group. You want to basically be sure that everyone is committed to holding the line until a collective decision is made. Otherwise you don't want people like peeling off. That's really bad PR for your strike. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and like the bosses will grab on that. So like, for instance, like,

You know, we have some people who are respecting our picket line, but chose not to pick it with us, which is fine as far as I'm concerned. But the issue with that PR wise is that now the bosses are saying in their like tallying up of who's working and who's not working. They're counting them as working. You know, they're like, oh, there's only. Yeah. Whatever. They've been saying eight people. I think it's more like nine or 10 were on the picket line.

But the rest of the employees are working. They count themselves as employees in that count, of course. And they count these people who are not crossing the picket line, but not on it also, as among that count of the rest of the employees that are working. What?!

And they've had the opportunity to really inflate that count because in a sort of, you know, classic move, really all the moves are classic. You know, you read your organizing books and you're like, can it happen here? And it does. So like we got a lot of new assistant managers after we won our...

Oh, God. So right now, like the composition of the workplace, right? Got 34 people, 15 managers. I really wonder when we're going to see the day where you have companies that have six, like non-managers and 55 managers. Like, I feel like we're not that far out. Well, we're leading the charge here. We have a department that's two people, a manager and assistant manager. Who's the assistant manager managing? Yeah.

Oh, God. So, yeah, you know, they've had these particular angles to...

you know, sort of do their propaganda from. And I mean, honestly, I think a big part of, again, the boss is the best organizer. And like a thing that keeps you committed on the line is like reading all this bullshit they say about you and knowing otherwise and being able to talk to each other and be like, have you seen this? Isn't this crazy? Like what the hell? Yeah. Also, you know, is this is where the sort of like,

seeds of organizing all the way that you start all the way back at the beginning of your union campaign become you know, they show themselves like really important again because like the start right anyone will tell you is just like getting to know people like being like, you know being on like a hey, how's it going kind of level, you know and Having like a personal rapport with the people you're on the line with is is

Vital just in the sense that, you know, obviously like, you know, each other, you're sort of friends, you're going to be more likely to stick up for each other, but also like you're out there nine hours walking in a circle with these people, um,

Yeah. You know, you gotta, you gotta have positive, strong relationships with them. You want to be able to have the kind of rapport where like, you can talk to people about like what they're feeling anxious about, you know, like where they're worried in like the strike strategy. Like, you know, you need to have that like trust between each other that you can have like an open dialogue about how it feels to be on the picket line. Cause you're not going to maintain morale if ever, if like,

everyone feels like they've got things they gotta hold in about it like yeah there's room to be like shit like are they gonna close the business like what are we gonna do and like sort of like talk through that from a from a place beyond like you know like what you're not letting speak into a crowd of a million people or whatever you're just like two people yeah going through a stressful experience together

Yeah, yeah. And you have to actually grapple with that in a way that's not the sort of like weird corporate, like we got to improve morale things. Like that's not what that means. It means like, you know, it means actually grappling and engaging with people's feelings and how and what they need in a moment. And yeah, and their fears and their concerns and...

Yeah, you can't just sort of brush them aside. You have to actually grapple with it because that's what doing this stuff means. Yeah, exactly. Having these authentic conversations with people. Yeah, that's a totally great point you bring up there. The HR speak, that's the boss's tool. And it's the boss's tool

to divide and create disunity. So you can't lean on that model for morale within your union. It just creates distrust. Yeah, I mean, I've seen that happen with unions where it's like, you guys did not do a good job of, like, talking to people about this and, like,

Yeah, and it can be really disruptive to attempts to do this. But on the other hand, if you do it well, it's the most powerful single thing that you can possibly do. Forging relationships that are based on

like the actual experience of having gone through struggle together and having had to like literally had to face your fields on the picket line. Yeah. Yeah. Like ideally, you know, the union is a, is a community and it's a community of interest, right? It's a community of, of, of work interest, but it is ideally a community. It's not a family, right? And it's certainly not, not, not a family in the way that the bosses will tell you the workplace is, but it is a community.

And it's a community in the way that an employer's idea of a community is fundamentally incompatible with. Yeah. There's this Vicki Osterwald line that I think about a lot from her book In Defense of Fluting, where she talks about how... I feel like it was Ferguson...

that this is about where the police chief is talking about the damage to the community and they keep saying our Walmart. It's like going into a Walmart and buying something is not a community. Those kind of relations are not actual community relations. But when the bosses talk about community, that's what they mean. They mean our collective community Walmart. They mean preserving the relation of extraction that they have. And

we are using the same word and reading something literally so radically different than that. And you have to make sure in the way that you're acting that that radically different meaning is clear. And it's funny you bring that up because that's just bringing to mind like

You see the difference in those attitudes, like when you're out there on the picket line, like interact, because, you know, our picket line, a really pivotal part of it, because there are so many managers in there that they're able to maintain this like skeleton crew is the community outreach part is like talking to every single person who's coming up and being like, Hey, how's it going? I've been on strike such and such long. This is what's up. Please don't cross the picket line. And yeah,

You know, I've noticed you get this real funny situation where there are the people who are like, I've shopped here for 20 years. You don't know what the hell you're talking about. I don't know you. And I have to be like, well, I'm normally at the dump getting the merchandise you're buying. And who attribute the entire... Attribute everything they like about the business to the bosses. And then there's the other part of the community that...

is coming by frequently and like hanging out with us on the picket line. You know, I pet the dog and we chat about what's going on. They're like, how's the strike going? They're like, you know, I know it's been rough on you guys for such and such. And like, these people are our shoppers too, right? But they like, it highlights that like sort of divide in like what you think of as like community and your responsibility to your community. Because like these people also love urban art and come here all the time.

But they recognize that it's the workers at UrbanR that create it every day. And it is a company that was founded by an individual. The individual still owns it. He did found it with his labor and all that. He did the labor back when it was only a few people and stuff like that. But ultimately...

a business, like any sort of social phenomenon, has to be constantly recreated in order to exist. And the people who do the work that makes it more than just a room full of garbage are us. And a lot of the regulars recognize that. And a lot of them flip me off as they cross the text line. Whatever. I think this is a good place to start coming to a close. This is a fundamental question about

What the nature of our society is going to be right like is is the fundamental nature of our society? That a community is a bunch of people who buy things and a bunch of people who make money from you buying things that you make money from the labor that you do Right and then take credit for the labor and take credit both financially for the labor and in public for the labor Right is that going to is our society going to just be a bunch of pure commercial relations with?

where a bunch of people get very, very rich off the labor of everyone else in the society and get to rule them as sort of like these petty tyrant kings? Or is it going to be a society where the people who produce the society control it, right? And that society is a democratic society, is an egalitarian society, is a society where people are free to do the things that they need to do, and people are free to...

you know, have a life where they can fucking pay for their groceries, right? Where like, you know, where they're not forced to go to the market for all of the things that they need to live, where you can survive in a way that doesn't involve like subjecting yourself to just a tyrant for like a third of your life. Yeah, where like the place that you spend like a third, yeah, a third of your life is a place where you actually have like dignity. Yeah, dignity and freedom and where

you know, where you don't have to go home at the end of the day of making your boss money, worrying about whether you're going to be able to eat or not. And it's, and that's also a society that does not involve again on the, at the very highest level, like you getting thrown into prison camps because your God King hates you. And we can do this. We could live in that society. Yeah. The demands are not that crazy. No, no,

And that's like the thing that we've encountered over and over again is this constant push and pull of people saying that like the expectation of bettering our conditions, whether it be like us on the picket line, just trying to get like a stable wage and just cause employment and stuff like that. Or whether it be, you know, those larger societal changes that like you're talking about. You just butt up against these people who have such like a paucity of imagination about what's possible. Yeah.

And like about the legitimacy of trying to make something better, the legitimacy of saying, sure, I can subsist on this, but you know, there's so much more that's possible. Yeah.

So I maintain that there's something more that's possible. Yeah, I think it's possible too. And that's the thing about this world, right? Is that our enemies have figured out that it actually can change. That's why they have to fight so hard. Yeah, but the thing is, the fact that it can change for the worse also means that it can change for the better. Oh, beautiful stuff. Okay, where can people find your strike fund? We'll also put it in the description. Oh, yeah, great. So...

It's on GoFundMe. I'll send you the link and it'll be down there. But also people can hit up our union Instagram. It's UrbanOrWorkers with underscores between the words. Urban underscore or underscore worker. We've got the link to our strike fund. And also, hey, if you're in Berkeley, you can sign up for a picket shift and you get to enjoy listening to me discourse for nine hours instead of one. It's great. It's fun. It's fun.

Pickets are cool and good. If you haven't been on one, you should go on one. They're great. They're great. Yeah, it's a good time. Toyota is the best resale value brand for 2025, according to Kelly Blue Books, KBB.com. That means when you buy a Toyota, you can feel confident that your investment will last. Toyota has dependable vehicles for any lifestyle, including the 2025 Tacoma, Tundra and 4Runner, the plug-in hybrid RAV4 and even the hot new Supra.

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Every morning brings a fresh new energy. This is today. And no matter what the day holds, we come to the Today Show for all of it. When things are tough, we talk about it. When there's something to figure out, we dig into it. And when there's joy, we celebrate it. Because today is where it's all happening. We get the best start to every morning because we start it together. Watch the Today Show with Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin weekdays at 7 a.m. on NBC.

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford, and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty.

When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty. And I said, that's exactly right. We want to give women meaningful beauty, which means each and every product is meaningful. It has a reason to exist. It's efficacious. You're going to get results. And then you just go out and live your life. Meaningful beauty. Confidence is beautiful. Learn more at meaningfulbeauty.com.

I was in Whole Foods the other day looking for a fun little bevy to go with my lunch, and I found my new obsession. SunSip is a gut-healthy soda from HealthAid, and they just dropped two new flavors. Dr. Bubbles is a fresh take on the doctor's signature blend of sweet fruit and subtle spices, while Cream Soda serves up velvety vanilla and sweet caramel. And the best part? SunSip has gut-healthy prebiotics, vitamins, and minerals, all with 40 calories or less.

Grab these new SunSip flavors only at Whole Foods in the beverage cooler near HealthAid Kombucha. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Dr. James Stout and Reverend Dr. The Honorable Robert Evans. That's right. That's right. Reverend Dr. The Honorable Evans, who is currently hacking up a fucking lung.

No idea why. I feel otherwise fine. Well, I'm sure you feel otherwise fine due to this great week in American history we've all been through together. Yeah. Which started with a meeting between President Donald Trump and El Salvador President Bukele on Monday.

On Monday morning in the Oval Office, where they discussed the possibility of the United States helping to build more Seacott-style facilities to disappear U.S. citizens and immigrants that the Trump administration deems criminals or terrorists. Yes. I mean, I keep getting asked, is this the panic moment? And I don't think panic...

is particularly productive. But like, yeah, this is the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is happening. The president's talking about sending citizens overseas to a concentration camp. Honestly, I'm on the verge of thinking it's okay to call it a death camp, but we just don't have the data yet. There's some very concerning satellite shots that appear to show piles of bodies. Yeah, that's from March of 2024. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but it won't have gotten better. No, no. Yeah. Yeah.

So I don't I don't know. This is this is about as bad as it could be, folks. We're in it. During that meeting, both President Bukele and the Trump cabinet argued that there is simply no way for people sent to seek God to ever return to the United States, coming up with a whole bunch of absurd ideas.

Observed reasons for why that is impossible due to foreign policy and safety of both El Salvador and the United States. Me and James did a whole episode on this earlier this week that you can check out on the It Could Happen Here feed. I'm going to move on to an update on the student crackdowns. So ICE has targeted a third green card holder for deportation based on pro-Palestinian activism.

Mohsen Marwi is a Palestinian from the West Bank who has lived in the U.S. with a green card for a decade. While studying philosophy at Columbia, he co-founded the Columbia Palestinian Student Union in 2023 with Mahmoud Khalil.

Marui was arrested by ICE last Monday, April 14th, at his citizenship interview in Vermont. Now, after Khalil was arrested last month, Marui went into hiding and he suspected that this citizenship interview could be a honeypot, but decided to go anyway after waiting a long time for this appointment.

His lawyers quickly filed a habeas corpus petition arguing his detentions unlawful and violates the First Amendment. A U.S. district judge issued an order hours later that he was, quote, not to be removed from the United States or moved out of the territory of the district of Vermont pending further order of this court. Zionist doxing accounts targeted Madawi in recent weeks.

I'm going to play actually this two-minute clip of Marwi talking. This is from December of 2023 on the program 60 Minutes. What was your initial reaction when you heard about the Hamas attack on October 7th? I could not believe what my eyes were seeing, where I see Hamas members getting into settlements and so on.

But also the first moment I saw that I put my hand on my heart. I started praying knowing that there will be a huge level of revenge from the Israelis. And I was praying that this will not be the result because it would be disastrous.

The night of the rally, I believe someone in the crowd said something very anti-Jewish, not just anti-Israeli, but anti-Jewish. Yes, this was as a walkout on November 9th. And a person who is not affiliated with Colombia, we've never seen him,

we don't know who is this guy comes down the stairs yelling "Death to Jews!" I was shocked and I walked directly to the person and I told him "You don't represent us because this is not something that we agree with" and directly what I've done

I took the megaphone and I gave a speech and I said, "We here are conscious, educated students and we know how to separate right from wrong." And what this guy has said is wrong. What this guy has said is clearly anti-Semitic against Jews. Anti-Semitic? To be anti-Semitic is unjust. Is unjust.

And the fight for the freedom of Palestine and the fight against anti-Semitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Yeah, I mean, he said everything that would make him a respectable protester, at least based on like what the fucking Dems were saying last year. Like there's nothing in there that's pro-Hamas. There's nothing in anything I can tell this guy has done that his advocacy towards terrorism, like,

But obviously that's not what matters. What matters is they have the ability to get him out and they're doing that because of his speech. He took a step back from protests in March of 2024 during the second wave of student protests at Columbia. Yeah, and I believe he didn't, isn't he like a member of the University Buddhist Club? Yes, part of why he took a step back was to focus on his role in the Buddhist Club as a, for I think the past two years he has been participating in that.

Yeah. Yeah, hard to see how, but I think as we're seeing it, that doesn't really matter. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, last Friday, a Louisiana judge ruled in favor of the Trump administration to allow the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, upholding the government's argument that the rarely used Cold War era statute of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows for the secretary of state to deport aliens that pose, quote, adverse foreign policy consequences.

The only, quote-unquote, evidence presented in court was a two-page memo written by Mark Rubio that alleges that Khalil's presence in the country threatens, quote, U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States based on information provided by the DHS, ICE, and Homeland Security Investigations regarding the participation and roles of Khalil in anti-Semitic protests and disruptive actions which foster a hostile environment for Jewish students in the United States, unquote.

So there's no real evidence in this document. It is just Mark Rubio's opinion for two pages. And this is the only evidence that ever has been held in court that resulted in the judge ruling in the government's favor. A lot of what we're seeing here is the natural conclusion to what was happening with like Vance last year, talking about Haitian immigrants and admitting like, yeah, it's not literally true, but like it's true to how we feel. So it's like fine for us to spread this lie. Like they're just declaring these people terrorists.

And even attempting to get evidence for that claim, like they certainly have no need to. And the media that

Like I'm seeing coverage on Fox particularly that's just repeatedly framing this as like the left is angry that like a terrorist got deported. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is the same stuff that we saw at the RNC where they referred to students as terrorists, like just completely, completely flat. Yeah. Like every single person at a college campus who is upset about a genocide or criticizes the state of Israel, that person is a terrorist. Yeah.

Lawyers for Khalil have until April 23rd to file an appeal to halt the deportation, and they plan to file an asylum case on his behalf. A separate habeas petition case is playing out in a New Jersey court.

This week, NBC News reviewed over 100 pages of documents from the federal government and Khalil's legal team containing information about his immigration process, work experience, and activism. These documents showed that the government used unverified tabloid reporting against Khalil and contained contradicting information.

Yep. So essentially using New York Post style publications as a pretext for ICE to execute arrests against people who are green card holders, legal permanent residents of the United States. We're going to go on break and come back to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Finally, finally, something fun.

All right, we're back. I'm going to throw to Robert Evans for an update on everyone's favorite roadkill consumer. Yes, yes. RFK Jr., he's not just strapping the carcass of a dead whale to the head of his truck.

And driving down the highway. Now he is, well, kind of launching a genocidal campaign against people with autism. Kind of doing a national eugenics program. Yeah. Kind of calling a large group of people in this country useless eaters. Jesus Christ. Yeah, fuck it. And the gist of what's happening is they just had a new quote unquote study come out that looked at like apparently rising autism rates. And again, I've covered this a lot. The reason why rates of autism are increasing is

Every credible scientist agrees is because we're looking for it more. And so we're finding more of it. And we have a broader understanding of what it is. RFK Jr. is obsessed with the idea, the image of autism as a disease that is spreading due to an environmental contagion.

And he is trying to make the case that this is a calamity. He has promised, the most recent promise he made is that by September, the government will release exhaustive studies that will identify the environmental causes of autism. And he made a statement, autism destroys families. More importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children. These are children who should not be suffering like this.

He has called autism a preventable disease, which it is not. While there is evidence that some of the factors that can be relevant in autism expressing are environmental, the vast majority of it seems to be genetic. There is no evidence, and there have been repeated studies, that it has anything to do with vaccines. He's posited a couple of other theories as to what causes it.

including mold and diet. And these are largely based on what are already kind of quack, both autism treatments and quack autism causes that are popular within the biomedical movement, the experimental biomedical movement, which is the fake autism medical industrial complex that we covered recently on the Behind the Bastards podcast.

One of the things I think is really worrying about the language that Kennedy is using is how similar it sounds to a lot of what you were seeing in the early 1930s out of the Nazi state. What we know of as the Holocaust, which is generally a term, generally primarily when people use that term, they are talking about the mass killing of Jews and other ethnic minorities in Central Europe by the Nazi state.

That got a lot of its start. And there's a couple of different places got its start. Obviously the wild concentration camps and the political concentration camps are in that heritage.

But when it comes to the actual mass killing of people, the very origin of that was in getting rid of the disabled, right? The term that was used in Nazi propaganda for these people was useless eaters. And this is the first time that the Nazis tested out gassing, right, in large numbers. And he hasn't used literally the term useless eaters, but he talks a lot about one of the terms he uses is

severe autism, right? Which is not the term that is popularly used now for people who have kind of profound autism, I think is the preferred term for people who do have a significantly higher degree of like disability as a result of their autism or that correlates with their autism, right? As opposed to the vast majority of people who can be diagnosed as somewhere on the spectrum who are able to like live independently, right? Right.

And Kennedy sort of does the thing that is very common within this community of sort of number one, correlating that to everybody with autism and talking about it as if it is a disaster that justifies any kind of response because the people who have profound autism aren't real people in his eyes. He made a statement, quote, these are kids who will never pay taxes. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write a poem. They'll never go out on a date.

Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. We have to recognize we are doing this to our children. And first off, having taught a lot of kids with profound autism, yes, they could play baseball. Like a number of them held jobs. Now, do a lot of them need assisted living? Sure. But like, number one, that's always been the case. There's no evidence that people with this kind of autism, that there's any sort of raise in this, right? What's raised is the number of people who are being diagnosed, right?

And he's using this kind of scare term, right? This idea that like parents, you need to be frightened that something is going to steal your children from you. Yeah. In order to justify the dehumanization of everyone with autism, as well as like radical biomedical experimental procedures that are going to do harm at scale to lots of kids.

One of his favorite new terms is epidemic denial, which is the term that he's using for people who

say that like this is not an epidemic this is something that we're now screening for more he's kind of kind of repurposing the language of like uh vaccine denial and whatnot as like a denial that this is sort of a an immediate crisis yeah that needs to be hit which i find interesting also like co-opting like covid conscious language yeah yeah like the way he and his his group were referred to during covid he's now using in the same fashion yeah

And it's interesting, his initial promise was that by September we'll know why autism rates are on the rise. That's not really a thing. You can't make science work that way. You can't guarantee that. Like you said, we already know because people are seeking out diagnoses. Right.

We have better awareness of it now. But he's kind of altered that recently being like, no, we'll have some answers by September. And, you know, we're going to get those answers by removing the taboo so that doctors won't get gaslit by blaming autism on vaccines or, you know, mold exposure or the like.

So that's what we can look forward to in the near future from our good friend RFK Jr., who definitely doesn't pay taxes or write poems. I just want to make that clear. I don't think either of those are particularly good bars for whether or not you're a human being, but he for sure doesn't do either. Also, frankly, I know way too many autistic people

Who write poems? Oh, tons of them. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, the writing poem thing was a really fucking... The Poet Laureate of Washington State since 2023 is a woman with autism. So, yeah, like I... Writing poems. Nonsense. Extremely common activity for my fellow...

My fellow autism people out there. Okay, okay, RFK Jr. Again, but he was talking about, you know, people with what he calls severe autism. But he also doesn't ever care to, like, specify his language because there's no benefit. That's not a real medical term. Yeah, and there's no benefit to his ideology in acknowledging that, like, well, most people who get diagnosed with autism...

may need some accommodations. It's a difference, right? It's a difference in the way your mind works, but they're fine. Like they're living healthy, happy lives. Yeah. I talk slightly differently in the cool zone work chat, which is kind of the extent of it for me. Yeah, that's the extent of it. Not really, but that is certainly an aspect. Yeah.

Speaking of the Department of Health and Human Services, they released a report page on their website for you, the vigilant citizen. Oh, yes. To report trans minors receiving health care. Finally. So another one of these snitching hotlines, this time on a federal government website, that I'm sure will only get real complaints sent to it and not the B-movie script. Not repeatedly the B-movie script. Yeah. Uh.

Speaking of trans people, I do have a few updates on some of the transgender stuff. During that meeting between President Bukele and Trump, they went on a small tangent about trans people where Trump said that he actually doesn't like talking about, quote unquote, men in women's sports because he wants to wait and save that issue to use for the next election. Amazing. Yeah. I'm going to play the clip.

And I don't like talking about it because I want to save it for just before the next election. I said, my people don't even talk about it because they'll change. And well, but I watched this morning. It was a congressman fighting to the death for men.

to play against women in sports. - That's like super interesting. Like very clear insight into how like Trump sees like the trans sports issue and treats it as this like election winning superpower. And like, certainly he is directing like the DOJ and with his executive orders. Like he still is targeting trans people, especially trans people like in school. So it's not that he's treating this as like a hands off issue,

to ensure that it can remain a hot-button thing for the next election. But I think in his mind, he doesn't want to stop Democrats from...

about this issue in a way. The more that they fight for it in his mind is what gives him ammunition for the next election, whether he's going to run for a third term or just Republicans, like MAGA stuff in general. But I think that it is an interesting look into his personal insight on this issue. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice just announced on Wednesday

Wednesday, April 16th, that they are suing Maine's Department of Education for not complying with Trump's anti-trans executive order by continuing to allow trans people to compete in sports, claiming that they are, quote, failing to protect women in women's sports, unquote, which they say violates Title IX. Mm-hmm.

The suit aims to get an injunction to force Maine to strip away rights from trans people in schools, to take away two winning titles from trans school athletes, and are considering to quote-unquote retroactively pull all funding that Maine has received.

Maine's Attorney General Aaron Frey said on Wednesday, quote, Our position is further bolstered by the complete lack of any legal citation supporting the administration's position in its own complaint. While the president issued an executive order that reflects his own interpretations of the law, anyone with the most basic understanding of American civics understands that the president does not create law nor interpret law, unquote.

So Maine and specifically the Maine governor are adamant that this is going to be an issue that's only going to be settled in the courts and in fact challenged Trump at a recent meeting to see you in court over this issue. We are going to go on break and then return to close out this episode of Executive Disorder. Okay, we are back. I'm now going to throw to myself and Mia to discuss tariff talk in a future recording. Tariff, I like it.

Welcome to Tariff Talk, the talk where I talk to you about the turf tariffs. So, all right, the big thing that happened last week in tariffs was that Trump exempted smartphones and electronics. There's a whole suite of electronics that are exempted from the 145% tariff.

Turf tariffs from Liberation Day. Now, there was still a 20% tariff on all these electronic goods from the earlier round of tariffs. In one of the initial rounds, there was a whole thing where he put a bunch of tariffs on. I'm so confused, though, because I thought it's 10% tariffs for non-Chinese companies.

Yeah, but, okay, so here's the thing, right? China... Is it additional or... Okay, so what's happening with these is that in the very, very first round of tariffs that went out, there was a 20% tariff on all Chinese goods. And so the Liberation Day tariffs, and then the subsequent retaliatory tariffs...

Pushed it, pushed all goods. Now, what, 250%? No, okay, we're going to get the 250%. That number's bullshit. Okay. But we're at 145% like tariff from the Liberation Day stuff. But that also had included an earlier 20% tariff. And you see why reporting about this is so fucking hard, right?

So that was stacked on top of that other tariff. So he's removed the Liberation Day tariffs, but there still are 20% tariffs on all iPhones and all the electronic goods that are still in effect. So the tariff rate for those goods is now 20 instead of 145. But this is where things get even more murky. So even before the exemptions for the semiconductor stuff had been released, Trump had been talking about imposing a bunch of tariffs specifically on semiconductors.

from all countries, which is going to, like, again, this is just awesome. If you want to just kneecap your entire economy, you put in...

a tariff on all semiconductors from other countries, which is what this is looking like. It's possible the levels are going to be that high anyways. It's again worth pointing out that there's a bunch of the parts of this production process that basically can only be done in Taiwan, which will presumably have these new tariffs on them. We don't know what they're going to be yet. They're coming in... Who fucking knows? So it seems like these tariffs are being withdrawn for now due to market sort of backlash, but...

probably they will come back at some point in the future. We're not 100% sure. There's also another thing I want to mention where, so the number that you said, the 250% tariff thing, so Trump tweeted that out, but that's fake. What that is, is that there are a couple of items, and I mean, when I say a couple, I mean like we're talking like single digit items here,

like things like medical syringes that already had like 100% tariffs on them. The 145% tariffs stack on top of all tariffs that were already in effect.

So there's like three or four items already had 100% tariffs on them. So when you stack the 145 on top of them, they're 250%. But again, it's like three things, right? So that's fake. On the other hand, substantively, and this is something that a lot of people have been talking about, the difference between 145% and 245%, isn't that relevant? Because at 145%, you stop doing trading? Yeah.

So it's, you know, the numbers at this point are just sort of in comedy levels. But yeah, so that's what's going on with the 250 number people have been going around from. It's not real. It's still 145 for all non-electronics goods, 24 electronics. There's also been a bunch of sort of China's been doing retaliatory stuff for a little bit, and they've been ramping up this program to restrict U.S. access to rare earth elements that are necessary for a whole bunch of advanced engineering, particularly sort of defense projects.

This is something that could genuinely devastate the American defense sector. Trump's plan for this is that he's threatening to use the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to impose even more devastating tariffs. Now,

It is genuinely unclear to me. Like, what is he going to do? Impose it a thousand percent tariff? Like, you need to buy these goods. You say that, Mia. And yes. He probably will. He probably will. Like, two weeks ago, a thousand percent tariffs would have been a joke. But no, they might. They might legitimately do a thousand percent tariffs. Why not? There's also been the beginnings of, on the U.S. end, sort of export restrictions imposed.

from chip exports to China and countries like NVIDIA and AMD. And this is a fucking big rip to the big rip to the fucking AI people. Eat shit, get fucked. Yeah. So that's roughly the state of the tariffs right now. More bullshit will happen. We'll be back on Tariff Talk next week with another round of unbelievably hideous turf tariff shit. But I want to move on to one more thing.

which is things that have been happening at the NLRB. So the NLRB, for people who are not regular listeners to the show, is the National Labor Relations Board. They were in charge of a whole bunch of things related to negotiations between employers and unions, or the people who certify union elections. They handle unfair labor practices disputes. And Doge effectively broke into the NLRB

and has seized a whole bunch of information that they shouldn't have. NPR broke the story and has been doing a lot of good coverage of it. So it came in, right? They technically had some kind of order saying that they were supposed to be able to come in and do this stuff, and they set up and they disable all of the security stuff and all of the sort of logs and all of the sort of stuff that's supposed to verify what someone's doing on a computer system. They go in and disable all of them.

They delete all traces of what they do. And this is a big deal because the NLRB has a lot of extremely sensitive data. It has extremely sensitive data on unions. It has a lot of extremely sensitive trade data on private companies. Now, the NLRB person who blew the whistle on this to NPR described how... So he complains to his superiors about Doge, again, just sort of breaking into this fucking office and just stealing all of this data. So he notices...

This program that they're building that's literally just called like backdoor, which is like, again, what you would do if you were literally running a hack. Right. And we'll come back to that in a second. So the NLP person complains to his superiors like, hey, these Doge people are just like stealing all of the data from this. And then like the next day, someone from Doge tapes to his door pictures of him and his dogs with like a threatening thing on it.

like drone footage of him and his dog like walking which is so fucking weird i i don't even know i don't even so yeah that's that's extremely alarming um this is this is they're they're just blatantly threatening a whistleblower yeah so so the other reason that this is really concerning is that so a lot of the corporate media is focused on the fact that there's a lot of trade information in there there's also a lot of very personal information about unions about union strength about size about tactics

about the history of negotiating things, about just where unions are and who's in them. And it's deeply unclear what Doge is going to do with this information, but it's not good.

And again, and I need to emphasize this, so I talked to a friend of the show, Maya Arsene-CrimeW, about this, who is someone who knows a lot about hacking, and I said to it, okay, so this is what you would do if you were just straight up, like, hacking the NLRB, right? Like, these are the things you would do. And they went, yeah, pretty much. So...

It's great. It's great. Yeah, the Doja just stole a bunch of information. Who knows what's going to happen to it? Who knows what's going to happen with their escalation of attacks on whistleblowers? But things bad. Things continue to go bad. Well, thank you for that uplifting story, Mia.

about Doge breaking into and stealing data from the NLRB and posting overhead drone photos of people's houses who threatened the Doge supremacy.

We're back. Thank you, future Garrison and future Mia. So it's my role here to update you on the border fascism, right? And that's what I'm here to do. Where I want to start this week is in the Roosevelt reservation. This is something that's been reported on a little bit. It's reeked largely by people who maybe only found out about it this week and, uh,

looked at the Wikipedia page and then wrote a story. The Roosevelt Reservation is a 60-foot easement that runs along the southwestern border of the United States from the coast of San Diego all the way to New Mexico. It doesn't cover the Texas border. I've written about it before for the Sierra Club and for Drilled News four or five years ago, and I'm going to include a link to the Sierra Club piece in the show notes. The Drilled piece is down now. They don't have that print side anymore. It was established in 1907 by Teddy Roosevelt and...

It was transferred for three years from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense by the Trump administration in 2019 using an executive order. This year, in 2025,

All of the Roosevelt Reservation that is not part of Federal Reservation land was placed on the Department of Defense jurisdiction. A lot of reporting seems to have missed this exemption for Federal Reservation land, which makes up a significant part of the border, especially in Arizona, right in the Tornadum Reservation. I'm going to quote from the language of the executive order here. Quote,

to provide for the use and jurisdiction by the Department of Defense over such federal lands, including the Roosevelt Reservation and excluding federal Indian reservations that are reasonably necessary to enable military activities directed in this memorandum, including border barrier construction and emplacement of detection and monitoring equipment.

The way I read this, it also doesn't limit to the reservation. It seems to include other federal land, right, which could include national monuments, national parks, the BLM and the national forest, all of which exist along the border. The Trump administration this week also obtained waivers. The waivers waive dozens of laws that have been limiting construction in the San Diego sector. I'd like to quote a little bit from that Sierra Club piece that I wrote because I think it

The aspect of the damage done to the sacred space of indigenous people is being completely overlooked by the legacy media in this, not perhaps surprisingly. So one of the laws waived was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was enacted by Congress in 1990 to protect and safely relocate native burial sites when construction takes place on sensitive sites.

The tribe in question should be consulted, and in the event remains or other archaeological objects are found, construction should be altered so as not to disturb the site. In the areas of San Diego where they are digging, what's called "midden soil" has been found. Midden soil is soil that contains evidence of cremated human remains, in this case of Kumeyaay people.

With this waiver, they don't have to comply with NAGPRO, Native American Graves Protection and Relocation Act, which means that they can continue digging through what are literally people's ancestors' graveyards. Here's another quote from that 2020 story. If this were another country's government destroying a region's holy land, the U.S. would go to war and the people would feel it justified, activist Thomas Barber told Sierra. But it happens here at home in front of us and we just turn away. Yep. We sure do turn away. Seems to be most of what we do these days. Yeah.

Yeah, it's not even... What bugs me is, like, not so much the folks, you know, not doing anything. I get that it's overwhelmingly horrible at the moment. It's that this doesn't even get reported. Yeah. Big outlets with a massive budget who are supposed to have a border reporter who's never fucking set foot on the border, doesn't take the time to talk to the indigenous people whose land the border crossed, right? Like...

doesn't take the time to hear their concerns, doesn't take the time to think about when you dig 30 feet into this ground to build your border wall,

that's 12,000 years of someone's history. How do they feel about that? And like, that is a failing of the legacy media. It has been a failing for a long time and it will continue to be one for a long time and pisses me off. Yep. I guess to talk more broadly then about this militarization of the Roosevelt Reservation and other public land, there's been some speculation about what this might mean. I don't think that you're going to see soldiers pointing their guns at the southern border and shooting anyone who comes across.

I do think it's likely a lot of the people who have been deployed to southern border so far are MPs, military police, right? And it's possible that those MPs will be able to detain people and potentially charge them with trespassing on a military installation. That would just be another string to the bow of their attempt to rapidly deport people because they already have many other kind of options through executive order of doing that, which they're already implying, right?

it might also make it easier for them to waive some of these other laws and to construct more surveillance equipment. In the Ebrigo Garcia case, which we've covered for several weeks now, the Supreme Court has unanimously asked the United States government to, quote, "'facilitate his return.'"

The US government has embarked upon a unique definition of the word facilitate, which it feels like means allowing him to enter the country and providing transport if El Salvador releases him. Bukele refused to release him, saying that doing so would be to quote smug like terrorists into the United States. Garrison and I did a whole episode about this yesterday that you can listen to.

Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen went to San Salvador, right? Capital of El Salvador, if you're not aware. He met with the vice president because Bukele is still out of the country. Van Hollen held a press conference right afterwards that I watched right before we recorded this.

In the press conference, Van Hollen basically said that he'd asserted to the Vice President of El Salvador there was no evidence nor any conviction of being a member of MS-13. And he asked the VP why he was holding Mr. Abrego Garcia. And the VP said, because the US is paying us to hold him. Yeah.

Yeah, they won't even lie. Yeah, no, he's not lying. That's why they're doing it. I believe that. Yeah. And credit to this Maryland senator for being the only one to do something. And it's not enough, and it's just one person. There are 300 people there, right? They're not even going for the hundreds of other innocent people who are there. It's one guy. But at least he's doing something, while the rest of the Democrats are collectively, I don't know, like voting for Trump's nominees. Yeah.

He asked to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia and was told that they needed more time. He said, I'll come back next week. They said they don't know if they can organize it in a week. He asked if he could call him. They said they didn't know if they could facilitate a call. They said maybe the U.S. embassy would have to be the one that requests that. So he has now requested that the embassy request that he be allowed to call Mr. Abrego Garcia and Mr. Abrego Garcia be allowed to speak to his wife.

Garet and I spoke about how it's not in the interest of the government of El Salvador to have people leave this prison and testify to the conditions that are in it. No one has ever left this prison. That we're aware of, yeah, that no one who's been detained there has left. Yeah.

the government wouldn't give him a date when he could meet Mr. Abrego Garcia or when he would be likely able to make a call. In a separate case, Judge Boasberg, who we've spoken about before as well, right, Judge Boasberg was the judge who issued the tentative restraining order on the rendition of People to El Salvador, which the government then ignored.

has found probable cause that the administration is in contempt of court. What does this mean? It doesn't mean, despite what you have seen on your timeline, that this will mean these people will be brought home. When they're found in contempt, they have two options, right? They can purge themselves of the contempt. And the way they would do that would be by providing habeas.

not by bringing all these people home, at least not yet, right? Or they could present the people who are responsible and then either an attorney could be appointed by the DOJ to prosecute them, I guess. I don't quite know how that were consistent. So the judge himself can appoint an attorney to prosecute them for criminal contempt.

again, like at least the guy's trying, I guess. No, I mean, like I got nothing to say against him right now. Like this is what they all should be doing. He went there. He's doing something and he's not mincing his words. He's saying that this man was disappeared. No. Yeah. And he's asserting that like they need to listen to the court. They are supposed to listen to the court. Yeah. Judge Ginez in, oh Ginez, who is

a judge on the district court that had its case sent to the Supreme Court for review in the Abrego Garcia incident also quoted the Merriam-Webster dictionary and said that the government's understanding of the word facilitate flew in the face of the common understanding of the word. Again, like I've seen it asserted like, oh, legal experts could disagree. Meanwhile, you've got the actual judge in the actual case being like, no, this is what the dictionary says. Your definition is ludicrous. I would caution people to be very careful looking at like,

blue check legal experts on x.com or people on blue sky oh god there has been so much misleading stuff about immigration law and the laws in these particular two cases and about the resort reservation actually just be really careful where you're getting your information especially on immigration law from maybe go back and check what that person was doing in 2023 when thousands of migrants were detained in outdoor detention camps because

Because I've seen so much misinformation and people understandably who aren't expert in this because it's extremely complicated are likely to be taken advantage of by people who are grifting off what is a moment when a lot of us are afraid and a lot of us are uncertain. So to be very careful what you're reading out there.

All right. I think that's all for us today on It Could Happen Here. Yeah, I think that's our new erectile executive dysfunction episode. Erectile order. All right. Well, we're fucking done. Go away. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Thanks for listening.

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