Labor’s decline over the past half century has devastated working-class communities, undermined democracy, and deepened the grip of big business over our work lives, our political system, and our planet,” Eric Blanc writes in his new book, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. “To turn this around, we need tens of millions more people forming, joining, and transforming unions”; however, to achieve that level of growth, “a new unionization model is necessary because the only way to build power at scale is by relying less on paid full-timers and more on workers.” In this episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore in Baltimore on March 27, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Blanc about his book and how worker-to-worker organizing campaigns at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are breathing life back into the labor movement.

Eric Blanc is Assistant Professor of Labor Studies at Rutgers University, an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, and director of the Worker to Worker Collaborative.

Additional links/info:

• Eric Blanc website, Facebook page, and X page
• Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) website
• Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, X page, and Instagram
• Eric Blanc, University of California Press, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
• Eric Blanc, Jacobin, “Bet on Worker-to-Worker Organizing”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Want to unionize your workplace? These worker-organizers have some advice”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, thank you so much, Analysis. Thank you as always to the great Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore cafe gathering space. Please, please, please support Red Emma’s however you can. We need spaces like this and many more now more than ever. And thank you all for coming out tonight. It’s a real shot to the heart to see your faces in these dark times. And we are here to talk about fighting the bosses, fighting the oligarchs, building worker power, and taking our world back. Does that sound all right to you guys? Oh, come on. I said who wants to talk about building worker power? Hell yeah. And we are here to jump into that discussion with a really, really vital new book by brother Eric Blanc. It is called We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, which you can buy right over there.

Our goal here is not to try to condense this book into a 30 minute talk. Our goal is to try to get you to read it, to think about it, to let Eric know what you think about it, use what’s usable in it, build on it. Alright, so Eric, I’m going to shut up and I want to toss things to you. There’s so much that I could ask you about here, but I wanted to start, since both of our books grew out of Covid—and the book that I’ve got over there, that Analysis mentioned, was interviews with 10 workers during the first year of Covid. And you have a really, I think, touching part in this book where you talk about the first call that you took as a member of what would become EWOC (Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee). And you talk about Enrique. I wanted to first ask if you could just tell us a little bit about that call, and you have a line here where you said, “without the resistance of workers like Enrique,” and I’ll let you tell what that resistance was, “many thousands more people would likely have died across the US.” I wanted to ask if you could take us to that moment: what was happening with Enrique, your involvement with it, and how this book grew out of it, but also, in that telling, can you say a little bit about how the story of Covid—when we’re not talking about government policy and total death tolls… What does that story look like when we look at it from the ground, through the stories of working people like the ones you spoke to in the book?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question and thanks to all you for being here. Thanks Maximillian for discussing, thanks to Red Emma’s. And yeah, going back, it’s interesting going back to that moment of crisis, I felt like the last few months I’ve had this visceral sense of almost deja vu of this very intense crisis. And trying to think what that looked like in early 2020, I had been labor organizer for the Bernie campaign. And what ended up happening is once Covid hit, we started getting inundated with workers reaching out from all over the country just saying, my boss is making me go in. Nobody has masks. My coworkers are being forced to come in because, so just give a concrete example. So Enrique is a meat packing worker in Pennsylvania and reached out because he knew that his coworker had covid had to keep on coming in because at that factory, if they had missed more than three days total, they would just get the boot.

There was no job protection. And so there was just a level of fear for people’s lives. That was a crisis for all of them. There’s hundreds of workers at this meat packing plant. And so they reached out to the Bernie campaign. And because I spoke Spanish, I ended up talking to Enrique and helping him for weeks and eventually months and trying to build a fight back campaign. And they ended up doing some really brave actions, including not showing up to work. They wrote an open letter and got over WhatsApp chat and got a huge number of their workers not to show up until basic safety demands were met. They won many of those through this struggle. So yeah, exactly that courage, that heroism because it was terrifying for them. A lot of were undocumented and they had no idea what was going to happen to them.

And so I just think about so many stories. You got no press, nobody ever heard about it. And we don’t even know the numbers of workers that did that basic level of collective action and militancy all over the country and frankly just saved so many people’s lives. And it’s exactly what you said. And it seems to me, again, just to bring it back to this moment, that there is a similar thing going on right now where people, the labor movement, we talk about it in general, but it does ultimately come down to these initial acts, the first people who are willing to speak out when other people aren’t. And it’s risky and it’s something I think is worth celebrating though in the hindsight when things seem impossible and things seem like everything is against us, you can see that those actions did make a real difference.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I know that obviously this story goes back before Covid and your first book, and you talk about this in your current book, you talk about the sort of lineage going to the red bread teacher strikes. You can trace that lineage even further back with the sort of revitalization of the Chicago Teachers Union. It depends on where you want to start the clock. But sticking with Covid for a moment, I wanted to ask if you could just condense a little bit, I don’t think we fully reckoned as a society with how much Covid fucked our brains and our society. Pardon my friends. But there are parts of that story that can get lost easily if we’re not looking at the shop floor struggles that emerged in response to it. So I wanted to ask first, since you talked about some of the major struggles that working people were facing in the midst of a deadly pandemic, so what was the organizing response to that that sort of led to this book in this argument that you make in it? And how was that sort of changing what had been the dominant trends in organized labor up until Covid?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a good question. And you’re right that the thrust of worker to worker organizing in some ways predates the pandemic. I would really would say this sort of wide scale worker led organizing. The first really big instance of it in recent memory we have was the 2018 teacher strikes that were initiated over these viral Facebook groups. And a lot of the dynamics we’ve seen in recent years were presaged there. But the pandemic sort of supercharged this all over the country because it showed overnight that the bosses didn’t care whether you died. And the organizing and the questions that led to this book, frankly as you mentioned, came out of that the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee emerged literally as a Google form that we had to set up because we were getting so many workers reaching out like Enrique who were just saying, give us any help.

Well, how can we fight back? And so we set up a Google form and connected these workers reaching out with volunteer organizers, a lot of people coming out of Bernie World, out of Democratic Socialists of America, out of United Electrical Left Union. And we were able to start building a really interesting project to help workers start. And the book in many ways comes out of this direct organizing experience. We’re just trying to figure out, well, how do you organize and help support large numbers of workers when you have very few staff? We were just volunteers, right? We didn’t have any staff at first. And then the question becomes, well, what kind of organizing matters are possible when you’re giving workers the tools to start self-organizing in a way that doesn’t require the traditional model where you have a full-time staff organizer, very intensely coaching every worker because that actually can be very effective, but we just didn’t have the staff to do it.

And I think we’ve seen that similar dynamic with a lot of the other early covid sparks. So Starbucks would be a classic example. Late 2021, they win one union election in Buffalo, New York to their great surprise, because this wasn’t a plan to organize Starbucks nationally. They had no plan on doing that. They were just trying to organize very modestly upstate New York, see if you could get some Starbucks, get other coffee shops at upstate New York. Well, to their great surprise, hundreds and then thousands of workers start reaching out nationally and saying, we want to do what you did. And if they had tried to do a staff intensive model, they just literally wouldn’t have had the ability to talk to so many workers. There weren’t enough staff, they had a couple staff barely. And so they had to have workers jump on Zoom to talk to all of their coworkers nationally. So you do get a sense then of the question of scale. How do you get enough workers? Organizing is not possible. These moments of crisis of urg through a very staff intensive way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s unpack that just a little bit more, right? You have a great line, many great lines, and I think one of the real strengths of this book is your ability to articulate very clearly. I mean these three points of analysis that help us, I think move past what have been very slow moving debates. And you succinctly put that Labor’s powerful approaches haven’t been scalable and labor’s scalable approaches haven’t been very powerful. So I wanted ask if you could unpack that statement a little more and then give us some sort of more of the concrete details about what a worker to worker organizing camp, what makes it different from say a staff model. I mean, you give the example of Bessemer, Alabama that was workers at Amazon leading a campaign, but with the help of an established union didn’t win. Then Amazon workers in Staten Island do a more work of the worker model and they win. So maybe we could use that as sort of the concrete example to show people what we’re talking about.

Eric Blanc:

Sure. So yeah, the argument is that both for labor and frankly for social movements more generally, I try to say that we’re in this impasse where the most powerful methods we have are too small scale. And so you have real, very strong unions that have been able to win very important gains for their members across the country. And so I actually don’t try to diminish the importance of staff or the importance of this model. The problem is that there hasn’t been a way to generalize that for reasons essentially of costs too expensive and takes too much time through staff intensive ways to organize tens of millions of workers that way. It’s true frankly for community organizing as well. You have a lot of really smart, deep base building organizations that haven’t had the mechanisms to build that power widely. On the other hand, you’ve had had then as a response to that scale issue attempts to go really big.

So you have things like our Walmart or Fight for 15, which in the labor world did make, they made some differences. They were able to get wage increases for a large number of workers, but they weren’t trying to do the traditional power building of deep organizing in which the ideas, the union is built from the workers from below by talking to your coworkers, building solidarity, having an organized committee. These basic building blocks of worker organizing were sort of dropped because the assumption is you couldn’t do that on a nationwide level. And so what you see in the recent period is the merging of this national scalable meeting, the moment using digital tools type ethos and structure, but combining that with really classic structures and tactics of deep labor organizing. And that’s really exciting. And I think the example I would give is maybe not Bessemer and Amazon because a little messy, all these are a little bit messy.

But just to give one other example of a worker to worker drive that I think is really, really sort of emblematic beyond Starbucks is the news. So not everybody follows the news guild, but this is one of the main unions that organizes in media and there’s been massive wins against really evil hedge funds that have taken over media companies. And the News Guild over the last five years has organized hundreds of newspapers in very intense battles. These are not easy fights by any means. You have people who’ve been striking for over a year in some cases currently as we speak. And they won through a thing called the Member Organizing program in which their ethos is every worker leader should be trained to do anything a staff person normally does. And so this is in some ways the thesis of the book is that it turns out worker leaders can do many of these things that traditionally we assume that only full-time staff could do.

So that’s concretely initiating campaigns. Crucially, it’s coaching other workers. Normally it’ll be a staff person has to coach another worker and how to build power. We hear workers are coaching other workers and there’s some staff in the background, staff and resources play a big role, but really it’s workers talking to other workers and then strategizing who’s making the big decisions over the campaign. Well, staff can be in there, but are workers going to have a decisive say? And that turns out it makes a big difference for workers’ ownership over their drives for their ability to not get burnt out. They feel it truly, the union is us. We are the union unions always say this. This is a classic thing that unions say. The question is actually how do you do it and how do you make it feel real and how do you make it be real? And I think that the recent worker to worker drives have put the meat on that in a way that traditional organizing hasn’t to the same extent.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that creates sort of opportunities for success that maybe we didn’t anticipate ourselves three years ago. I think a lot of what’s happened in that time has been surprising even to folks in the neighborhood world or I know so, but you are also very careful in this book to sort of make it clear. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. Don’t take away the wrong lesson here that union staffers are evil, bad, stupid people. Just flip the ways that we’re looking at this, understanding it. And in that vein, I wanted to sort of ask about the particular challenges that come with a worker to worker organizing model, what that lack of institutional support along with a labor law that’s stacked so heavily in favor of the bosses and anemic NLRB that now is I’m dysfunctional at the current moment. So what are some of the real drawbacks to a work of the worker model or what have we learned from the past couple of years about those?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, it’s a really good question. And I would say that the first thing is there’s really different varieties of worker, worker unions going as much to completely independent unions like in the Amazon JFK eight where they had no institutional backing or very little to worker to worker drives like Starbucks or the News Guild in which you have really driving things and having this worker to worker approach but with serious resources. And I think that one of the lessons of the book and the research and recent experience is that if you’re going up against the biggest companies, you do need actually this sweet spot of combined resources with the worker leadership that it’s very hard to win and to sustain your organizing without some level of institutional backend for basic reasons that you can imagine organizing is so hard. It’s so labor intensive that it’s easy to get burnt out.

It frankly is easy to get burnt out. And so I would say that this is both the power of the new model is that it depends on workers’ leadership, but then people have jobs, people have families. And so you have to have a realistic assessment of how far you can ask people to go. And it turns out they can go very far, but there’s still limits. There’s still limits to what you can do without any staff and union backing. So I think that’s one big lesson. And then I would say that one of the things we’re seeing right now is it’s a very open question about what new organizing in the private sector looks like under Trump. And I’m actually very optimistic about that labor can keep up its momentum. It might be through fighting defensive battles, you can win and defeat Musk and Trump.

That would be a historic victory, whether that will mean we’re going to get tens of millions of new workers in unions under the next four years. Those are separate questions. So I do think that we need to be sober about the ability to organize tens of millions of workers, doesn’t just depend on having the right models. There has to be some combination of right strategy, good organizing, and frankly favorable conditions, whether it’s in the political sphere or things like the covid crisis that can galvanize people. And so it’s not just a question of putting out the right ideas and then inevitably you’ll win. You have to have the meeting of the various conditions, and that’s not always clear how far you can go at a given moment. It’s an open question. Right now

Maximillian Alvarez:

We got about, let’s say 10 more minutes and then we want to open it up to q and a, but I thought it was really eyeopening for me and helpful for me to read in this book how you’re showing how this applies beyond later, and these are lessons that can be learned and implemented and built on in other social movements. I wanted to ask if you could unpack that a little more. What does Worker to worker organizing teach us about how we can improve on our existing social movements and build the ones that we don’t have, but also you give Sunrise movement as also another example of a different kind of model that doesn’t have the worker to worker ethos and actually suffered from that. So I was wondering if you could touch on that as well.

Eric Blanc:

Yeah. This goes to the earlier question of wide but shallow or a small, but deep, right? You have this impasse. The really big things aren’t powerful enough. And we’ve seen that in social movements in part because the big national campaigns we’ve had are still for the most part, imbued with kind of a nonprofit top down type structure in which you’re not building membership organizations. There’s not really a truly democratic structure to which people can sustain themselves. And it doesn’t mean that these aren’t effective. In some ways, the Bernie campaign was tremendously effective, but then Bernie closed up shop and the organizing went home. And similar with the Sunrise and some of these other distributed campaigns, it’s not to say what they did was unimportant, but if you’re not building membership democratic organizations in the process of these national campaigns, you’re really limiting your ability to build sustained power because people don’t keep on dedicating themselves.

They don’t keep on showing up unless they feel real ownership and have real ownership over the organizing. And so just to give a concrete example, as we speak, as we speak, you might be aware that there’s an authoritarian coup in our country and they’re trying to destroy all public services and they are rounding up people off the street. Did you see this at Tufts yesterday just for speaking out on Palestine? So it’s a pretty intense moment we’re in, and it’s worth thinking through. Well concretely, what does this mean for that? Because frankly, if we’re not talking about this moment, then I am not sure why we’re here. So I just want to be really specific about naming that. And to me, one of the limitations we’ve seen right now is that there’s so many people who are angry about what’s going on but don’t know how to get plugged in.

There’s not a clear onboarding mechanism to get literally the millions of people right now who are up in arms against what’s happening with social security or around democracy or free speech, any of these things. You need to have a mechanism to train up hundreds of thousands of new organizers. So to be really concrete, for instance, I love Bernie and AOCs rallies, they’ve been amazing. They show that people want to fight back. But the thing that was missing there, and this goes to your question, is a direct ask of people to get involved and organized. And that’s different than just showing up for another action. You basically need to give all the people who went to that rally to know that they need to get their coworkers and their friends and their family members to go to the next action. In other words, they need to become an organizer.

And you need to have a structure for those organizers to keep on organizing. That is the missing thing we have. We just tell people to go from one action to another, and then people go home and they don’t know how to develop themselves, and we’re not building sustained power. So one of the things that I’m working on now, there’s other people in this room who are even more involved, is the Federal Unionist Network, which is building this type of bottom up worker to Warrior Shout out to fund, which is building this kind of worker to worker network and the federal unionist to overcome these divisions and to really train up workers to fight back in conjunction with the community. And so that I think is a type of model that hopefully we can see replicated more widely. And one shout out is if you want to get involved, you should go to save public services.com. And I’m getting into it. And in Baltimore specifically, there’s a signup sheet there that everyone should sign up for it because the organizing starts now, if you’re not already involved, now is the moment. So please sign up. There’s an upcoming action that will get announced in the q and a.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, you anticipated me, brother. That was going to be my last question. But I’m really, you’re absolutely right. If we’re not talking about what we can do right now to stop what’s happening and what alternative future we’re fighting for that we’re not having the right conversation, we’re not in the game, and we need to get our heads in the game yesterday. And with the final sort of minutes that we’ve got, before we open up the q and a, I wanted to kind of hook that urgency to the other urgent question you’re addressing here, which is before the technical fascist takeover really got supercharged in this new administration, we were already facing the crisis that produced this monstrous administration and our monster politics, which is decades of neoliberal rot, corporate consolidation, mass inequality, climate destroying economics and politics, collapse in popular faith in the institutions of government to represent the people.

I could go on and on and on. And with that, a corresponding and even causative decline in organized labor power. So the less unions we have, the less organized workers are, the more the bosses win and the more the bosses start taking over society and making it such. And we’ve ended up here. So the urgency in your book, which you couldn’t fully anticipate the urgency that we’re feeling right this second, was like we are in a society destroying crisis that needs to be fixed by workers getting organized and in the millions, the tens of millions. And this is the model that can actually help us scale to that number. So I wanted to ask if you could drive home that point, why do we need to organize so many workers? Why does this model help us, and what does an organized working class mean for saving democracy and society?

Eric Blanc:

Yeah, that’s a great question slash maybe you also gave the answer in the question, but it’s the question. And I would say that the graph that is the graph to understand this is the relationship between income inequality and union density. The income inequality goes up when union density goes down. And that’s one reflection of the basic question of power. Do working people have power? Do corporations have power? And what is the relationship between these two? How much power do workers have? And we frankly had our power decline, decline and decline for decade. And that is why we’re in the crisis we’re in across the board. It’s why Trump was able to get elected. It’s why we’re in climate catastrophes, why we don’t have the power yet to stop the genocide and Gaza and Palestine. And so the urgency of this is no matter what question you feel most strongly about, no matter what issue it is, that is deeply rooted in the power imbalance between working people and the bosses.

And our best way to turn that around is through organizing ourselves as working people by the millions. And so that is a scale question. It’s a question of how you get to power that can actually defeat the fascists and the millionaires. And I think that one of the things I didn’t fully even anticipate in the book, and we was just talking about this earlier over dinner, is the extent to which this model turns out to be extremely important, even for the defensive battles. So if you just think about what is going to stop, what is it going to take to stop Musk in Trump’s coup, essentially, right? Well, it turns out there’s not enough staff in the labor movement to organize tens of millions of federal workers, right? If you’re going to organize tens of millions of workers generally, and millions of workers to fight back, the only mechanism to do that is workers start organizing each other.

Obviously you need to support the unions. We need the labor movement to be doing a lot more. So again, this isn’t to say we don’t need the unions, we need ’em doing a lot more. But I think the model to how we win in this moment, it’s going to look a lot more like the 2018 teacher strikes where when the workers lead from below, then the leaders in quotes of the official unions will follow if we do our organizing and we have to get to that kind of scale. And I’m personally optimistic. I was saying just before I’m actually, this is the least depressed I’ve been for a couple months because A, I’ve just been too busy organizing to doom scroll. But then there is actually, I think something about the moment we’re in where Musk and Trump are overreaching, what they’re doing is extremely unpopular.

It’s not a popular thing. It turns out to destroy people’s social security to take away their Medicaid. These, they’re playing with fire, they’re frankly playing with fire, and it’s up to us to make them pay and not just pay in the short term. They make it so that this movement that they have goes away for good. And I think that we can do that, but it’s going to require, at this moment, a leap of faith for everybody out there to go all in on organizing. Because the major obstacle we still have at this moment is so many people feel a sense of resignation and a sense of despair. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think nothing can be done, if you think Trump is all powerful, then you don’t go out and you don’t spend all your time organizing. And so you just have to, I think, believe that it’s possible. It is go all in and then history will would be made. And I think actually we in a very good position to defeat these bastards, but it’s going to take a lot of organizing and I hope that we do it all together.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Give it up, give it up for Eric.

Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine in Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, but for nearly five years several local Indigenous tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. Six land defenders, known as the “Thacker Pass 6,” are currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and have been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with two members of the “Thacker Pass 6,” Will Falk and Max Wilbert, about the charges against them and the current state of the struggle over the construction of the Thacker Pass mine.

Will Falk is a Colorado-based poet, community organizer, and pro-bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. Max Wilbert is an Oregon-based writer, organizer, wilderness guide, and co-author of the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It; he co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass.

In September of 2023, TRNN teamed up with award-winning Indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day, and Canadian independent media outlets Ricochet Media and IndigiNews to produce a powerful documentary report on the Indigenous resisters putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Watch the report, “Mining the Sacred: Indigenous nations fight lithium gold rush at Thacker Pass,” here.

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us in Nevada’s remote. Thacker Pass. A fight for our future is playing out between local indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities held bent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass. But for nearly five years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. In September of 2023, the Real News Network teamed up with award-winning indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day and Canadian Independent Media outlets, ricochet Media and Indigenous News to produce a powerful documentary report on the indigenous resistors putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Here’s a clip from that report,

Brandi Morin:

Rugged Serene, a vast stretch of parch desert and so-called Northern Nevada captivates the senses I’ve been trying to get down here for over a year because this beautiful landscape is about to be gutted. One valley here contains white gold, lithium, and lots of it. The new commodity the world is racing to grab to try to save itself from the ravages of climate change. Vancouver based lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine, which will operate for the next 41 years. The company is backed by the Biden administration, andout, its General Motors as its biggest investor, 650 million to be exact, but for more than two years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action BC says the mine will desecrate the spiritual connection she has with her traditional territories. And she spoken out to protected at the mine site. Now Lithium Americas is suing her and six other land and water protectors in civil court over allegations of civil conspiracy, trespassing and tortious interference. The suit seeks to ban them from accessing the mining area and make them financially compensate the company. So I just wanted to ask you about the charges that you’re facing. What are they? And when did you find out? Oh, oh man,

Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu:

I don’t even remember. Is it civil? Something trespassing and something about disobedience? I dunno. I didn’t really, I didn’t read the papers. I just threw them in a drawer. Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop. There’s 500 lithium mines coming. I just wanted my descent on record as an indigenous mother.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now the last voice that you heard there was Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, one of the six land defenders known as the Thacker past six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and had been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. Today on the Real News podcast, we are joined by two other members of the Thacker. Past six will Falk a Colorado based poet, community organizer, and pro bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. And we are also joined by Max Wilbert, an organ-based writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. Max is the co-author of the book, bright Green Lies, how the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. And he also co-founded Protect Thacker Pass. Max will thank you both so much for joining us today on the Real News Network.

Over the next half hour, we’re going to do our best to give listeners an update on the struggle at Thacker Pass, where things stand now and what people can do to help, because this is a critical story that our audience has gotten invested in through Brandy Morin and Jordy day’s. Brilliant reporting. But before we dig into the legal battle that y’all are embroiled in with Lithium Nevada Corporation, I want to start by asking if you could introduce yourselves and just tell us a little bit more about who you are, the work that you do and the path that led you to Thacker Pass.

Will Falk:

Yeah, I’ll start. This is Will Falk like you introduced me. I’m a poet, community organizer and attorney. I think my involvement in this kind of work started in my early twenties. I had some severe mental health issues and I found that going out into the natural world and listening to the natural world was the best medicine that I could find for those mental health issues. And while experiencing that, I realized that the natural world is consistently saving my life through offering me that medicine. And of course the natural world has given me and everyone I love their lives. So at that time, feeling the gratitude from that, I decided that I would devote my life to trying to protect as much of the natural world’s life as I possibly could. That has taken me to many frontline land defense campaigns and it’s often put me in allyship with Native Americans and other indigenous peoples who are resisting the destruction of their land.

So I got involved specifically with Thacker Pass after Max explained to me what was going on there. We both have spent a lot of time in the Great Basin and it’s an ecotype and a region that we both love very much. So when we found out that they were going to put this massive lithium mine on top of a beautiful mountain pass in northern Nevada, we decided we were going to try and stop it. So we went out to Thacker Pass on the very day that the federal government issued the last major permits for the mine, and we set up a protest camp right in the middle of where they were going to blow up the land to extract lithium. And we sort of had two goals. One, we wanted to stop the mine, but two, we wanted to force a bigger conversation about whether this transition to so-called green energy was actually green and whether we can really save the natural world by destroying more of the natural world, which is what it will take to manufacture things like electric cars and electric car batteries. But my involvement in this campaign is very much based in my love for the natural world and my recognition that everyone’s wellbeing is tied up in the wellbeing of the natural world. And this new wave of extraction for so-called green energy is just going to be another wave of destruction.

Max Wilbert:

Great to be on the show, max. Thanks for having us. I’ve been following the real news for years, so it’s great to finally have a chance to speak with you. I first became aware that there was a major problem in the environmental movement around 2006, 2005 when I went to an environmental fair in Washington state where I grew up and I came across a biodiesel Hummer out in the parking lot amidst all these organizations promoting protecting salmon and protecting forests and so on. And this was in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of this age where the whole nation, the whole world is grappling with empire and imperialism and war for oil. And to me, the problem with a Hummer goes far beyond the oil that’s in its tank. The problem gets to the minerals that are mine to create the Hummer, the mindset behind that that says that we need these massive individual vehicles to get around the world, the mindset of militarism and consumerism sort of wedding together in this conspicuous symbol of consumption. And so I knew at that point that there was a major problem in the environmental movement. I was just a teenager at the time. And so over the years I started to explore this more and more and started to question some of the orthodoxies around green technology as a solution to the global warming crisis and the broader environmental crisis.

I believe that these are very real and serious crises. It’s kind of unavoidable unarguable if you look at the way of the evidence and even just what we see and experience with our own eyes. But green technology as a solution is something that I really think is a problem. It emerges out of this mindset of industrial products, like things that come out of factories that you buy as the solution. And to me, I’m much more interested and I tend to gravitate towards simpler ways of living, lighter ways of living in relationship to the land that have emerged over many thousands of years in all kinds of different cultures around the world where people have had good relationships with the planet and the water and the other life around them. So when I heard about Facker Pass, I decided to go out and take a look at what was happening out there.

So I drove down, this was in the fall of 2020. I drove down there out into the middle of the outback in northern Nevada and spent a night or two camping up at Thacker Pass. And I just fell in love with the place the sun went down and the stars came out and the Milky Way shining bright across the sky and there are coyotes howling and bats flying around, and you can’t see a single light of a building or a city or anything for miles in every direction as far as the eye can see, which is a long way from the side of a mountain in Nevada where there’s no trees. There’s nothing blocking your view. And I felt like if I don’t try and fight for this place, then nobody else is going to because we’ve seen the mainstream environmental movement get very infatuated with these ideas that technology is going to solve all our environmental problems, that it’s going to lead us into some sort of utopian future. And so none of mainstream environmental groups have really challenged the rising threat of lithium mining and similar issues. That’s when I decided, you know what, we got to do something about this. I called up Will who was one of the few people who I know who I thought might be crazy enough to join me in the middle of the winter at a mile above sea level on the side of a mountain in Nevada to protest a mine. And he said, great, when do we start?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And can you just say a little more about when and how your efforts synced up with those of people living there, the members of the local tribes who’ve come together as part of this effort to stop the Thacker Pass Mining operation?

Will Falk:

Yeah. We had been up there in Thacker Pass trying to make as much noise as we could for I think six or eight weeks when some native folks from the closest reservation to the mine, the Fort McDermot PayU and Shoshone reservation came up and had seen some of the stuff that we put online and wanted to learn more about what the mine would do. And when they came up, that’s when we learned that Thacker Pass is a very sacred place to local native folks. It is known as Beha in the local Paiute dialect that translates to Rotten Moon in English. And the place name has contains some of the reason why Pima or Thacker Pass is so sacred. And there’s oral history that the Paiutes carry that talks about a massacre, a pre-European massacre that happened in Thacker Pass where some hunters were often in the next valley hunting and some people from a different tribe came and massacred the people there.

And when the hunters came back, they found their intestines actually strung out along the sage brush, and that created such a bad smell. And the past, if you’re looking at it from lower down in the basin floor, it looks like a crescent moon. So they named it ham. We also learned through Paiute oral history and confirmed it through documents that the Bureau of Land Management themselves possessed, that there was a massacre of at least 31 Paiute men, women and children in Thacker Pass on September 12th, 1865. This was a massacre that took place as part of what’s called the Snake War. This is a war that was fought primarily between settlers and minors, encroaching on PayU and Shoshone land in the 1860s. It’s been called the bloodiest Indian War west of the Mississippi. But I’ve always found it to be incredibly ironic that there was this massacre, the American government massacred Paiute people while they were resisting mining encroachments on their land.

And that was back in 1865. Now in 2025, the American government has issued permits to a mining company to erase the evidence of that massacre by destroying the site. There we realized that no one was making arguments on behalf of Native Americans in the litigation that had been filed against the Bureau of Land Management for permitting the mine. And so no one was telling the court about all of this sacredness and the permitting process that the Bureau of Land Management used was expedited under the Trump administration. This really isn’t a Democrat or Republic can issue because Biden took credit for that expedited process shortly after he came into office. But by expediting the process, they had not actually consulted with any regional tribes about the mine. And so many native folks in the area were just finding out about the mine months after it had been permitted by seeing stuff that we were generating from Thacker Pass. But I ended up agreeing to represent a few tribes to try and insert that perspective into the litigation to explain how sacred this place was, to explain how bad the government’s tribal consultation process was and to make sure people understood that this mine, that everybody wants to be so green is actually destroying native culture.

Max Wilbert:

So there we were on the mountain side at this point. This is June of 2021 and will begins to represent one and then two of the local native tribes, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony and the Summit Lake Ute tribe and is filing legal briefs from his laptop working inside his car and sleeping at night in the tent out on the mountainside, very difficult conditions to work in and doing it all pro bono, basically living on almost nothing as this is just a grassroots effort. And that’s what we went into it with the mindset. This is all during Covid. It’s very hard to get ahold of people, very hard to have public meetings or events and so on. So when we went out there, we didn’t know any of the indigenous people from the area. I had some other native friends from further east in Nevada and further south in different places and called them up and said, Hey, do you know anything about Pass and what’s going on there?

But they weren’t really local people from exactly that area. And so they said, no, sorry. So we just went out and we expected that we were going to connect with local people through the process of being out in the community and on the land. And that’s exactly what happened. We were able to build a really fruitful collaboration between the fact that Thacker Pass had the initial massacre, the Bema hub massacre, then the massacre that the US Army perpetrated the cavalry in 1865, and the fact that the place was occupied by native people for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. All kinds of campsites and archeological evidence of people’s occupation on the land there. Very significant sites, places where people hunt and gather wild foods and a place where people go to this day, well, I would say to this day, but you’re no longer allowed to go there because there’s a fence that’s been built. There’s bulldozers rolling and the land is being destroyed. So all the deer have been driven away. The pronghorn antelope, the Marmite, all the wildlife that people have relied on and had these relationships with for many generations, all the plants and herbal medicines and so on are being crushed or bulldozed out of the way as well. So it’s ultimately been a pretty heartbreaking fight as well. But it’s not unusual. It’s something that we’ve seen over and over again across what’s now the United States.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So let’s talk about the Thacker Pass six and Lithium Nevada Corporation’s lawsuit against you and four other land defenders, including some of the folks that our audience saw in Brandy Morton’s documentary. So you both Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, Bethany Sam, Dean Barlese and Paul Cienfuegos are being charged with civil conspiracy, nuisance trespass, tortuous interference with contractual relations, tortuous interference with perspective economic advantage. So what can you tell us about the substance of these charges and about how you’re all fighting them in court?

Will Falk:

Yeah, so I think one of the first things to understand is that on, we have to go back to an actual foundational law in American extractive industries, and that’s what’s called the 1872 General Mining Law, which was a law that was passed in 1872. It was passed partially to provide cheap leases to miners as a way to pay off the Civil War debt. And what that law did was it essentially said that mining is the highest and best use of American public lands, and that’s the way it’s been interpreted since 1872. So what this means is when a corporation locates valuable minerals on American public land, and I think the United States is something like 61% public land, if a corporation finds valuable minerals on that land, the 1872 mining law gives them an automatic right to mine those minerals to destroy the land where those minerals are, to extract those minerals.

The government does not have discretion to deny permits for these kinds of mines. It doesn’t matter if the place that they’re destroying is the most sacred place in the world to native folks. So what that means is that the lawsuits that we filed that we just talked about through the tribes with the tribes, those lawsuits that we filed, they never had the capability to stop the mine definitively stop the mine. All they had the capability to do was to force the government to go back and redo some part of the permitting process like tribal consultation. In other words, there is no legal way to stop public lands mines once corporations have found valuable minerals on that land. So that meant that once the lawsuits that we had filed against the Bureau of Land Management had failed and we had exhausted ways to try and force them to go back and redo that permitting process, the only real choice that we had left to try and protect Thacker Pass and all of the sacredness there was to engage in civil disobedience. So in 2023, we went out to peacefully protest, prayerfully protest the mine, and we did in fact interfere with some of the construction. We blocked some construction equipment from coming up some roads, and we apparently Lithium Nevada decided to move its employees to work on other parts of the mine that we weren’t at. And then we were sued for those actions.

It didn’t quite meet the legal definition of what they call a slap suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. But it very much worked in the same way we engaged in free speech, we engaged in our first amendment rights to protest our first amendment rights to petition the government for redress. But because we delayed some of the construction equipment from accessing the site, lithium Nevada sued us and was successful at achieving what’s called a preliminary injunction against us from returning to the mine site whatsoever. And it’s really important to understand that Max and I are not native, but we were sued with four other native folks. And those native folks, they descend from people who were killed in that 1865 massacre. And this means that they can’t go back to Thacker Pass to pray for their ancestors that were killed there. They’re not allowed to go back to their own homelands to mourn what has happened to Thacker Pass, but also when you’re sued like this in civil court, mainly what they call damages, if we lose the case, what we could owe is hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what a judge might order.

So Lithium Nevada was accusing us of things like that tortious interference stuff that you just listed out that’s a lot about, we were depriving them of fulfilling contracts with their contractors to come in and do the construction. We were forcing them to cause to spend money. These are the allegations to spend money that they wouldn’t have had to spend if we didn’t do that. So they’re asking a judge to get that money from us. But I think it, it’s really important to understand that there really is no legal recourse for fighting public lands mines. And it’s really insane where if you give mining corporations an automatic right to mine public lands and destroy sacred native land, and then the legal system also gives a corporation the power to file lawsuits against us that could cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re really talking about very thoroughly quieting any descent to these kinds of projects.

Max Wilbert:

Yep. It’s a little bit of double jeopardy. And we’ve talked about this all along. We were on a phone call with BC this morning who was in the video that Brandy did, and there’s a continuum between what happened in 1865 and what’s happening today, what was happening between 1864 and 1868 was a war that the US government waged on indigenous people of Thacker Pass and the surrounding Great Basin region in order to secure access to the resources of that region for settler, colonialists and corporate interests. And that process is continuing today. Now, when people in 1865 when people tried to protect Dacker pass from soldiers, they were massacred on mass. And today when indigenous people, descendants of those people who are massacred try to protect Dacker Pass, they’re, they’re either arrested, they’re fined, they’re barred by courts from going back to the land. And this is inherently a violent process because if those orders are ignored, then what happens is men with guns will show up and either take these people to jail or possess their assets and so on.

So this is an extended process of land seizure enclosure of what was formerly common land among those indigenous communities. It’s a process of the commodification of these landscapes. And now with the Trump administration will mention that this has been a bipartisan push that Trump in his first term streamlined the permitting for the Thacker Pass mine. So he pushed it through very quickly. Biden then claimed credit for it and decided to loan over 2 billion to the mining company and supported in all kinds of ways, including defending the project in court. And then Trump is now continuing that process. We’re seeing the removal of things like public comment periods being struck down, the environmental review process for future mining projects, which was already a very inadequate anti-democratic process that amounted to tell us what you think about this project and then we’re going to do whatever the hell we want.

Anyway, even that sort of truncated toxic mimic of a real democratic consensual process of community engagement is being completely undercut. And that’s what we’re facing in the future. Backer passes, passes being built right now. There’s literally thousands of mining claims for lithium across the state of Nevada and many more across the whole country. And we’re seeing a big expansion in rare earth mining, copper mining, iron ore mining, all kinds of different mining as well as the boom in fossil fuel extraction that we’re seeing. So it’s kind of an all fronts assault on the planet right now, and people who get in the way, endangered species who get in the way, the plan is just sweep them aside using whatever means are necessary.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that really leads into the somber next question I had for you both and it really building off what you just said, max, this is absolutely a bipartisan effort, not just in terms of ramping up domestic mining, oil extraction use of public lands, bulldozing like the very concept of indigenous sovereignty, which is as American as apple pie, I suppose. But on top of that, we also have the closing in of the state on efforts to oppose this and closing in on and repressing the methods of resistance from Jessica Chek to y’all in Thacker Pass to students protesting US backed genocide in Palestine. These are being categorized as domestic terrorism. So I wanted to ask, in this sort of hellish climate, what is the status of the fight over Thacker Pass and the fight for sovereignty on indigenous lands and the environmental justice effort to halt the worst effects of the climate crisis? What does that all look like today under the shadow of a second Trump administration?

Will Falk:

Things are pretty desperate right now. I think that as you were just saying, the Trump administration especially, but I think from here on out, I think each administration is going to figure out how to silence dissent, especially around anyone who is trying to interfere with the government or corporate access to the raw materials of industry like lithium, like copper, like iron ore, like aluminum. All these things that have to be ripped from the earth to create so many things, especially the weapons and war technologies that the United States uses. That’s a connection that I think really needs to be made. If the United States is going to continue sending weapons to Israel to conduct genocide and Palestine, there’s going to be a lot of public lands resources that are used to construct those weapons. If the United States does something like ramps up for war with Iran, it’s going to be a lot of public lands that are destroyed to create the weapons that are needed to fight that war.

And so I think that as American consumption continues to grow, as resources become harder and harder to come by and consumption intensifies, every administration is going to work to silence any interference with access to those kinds of things, that is absolutely not a reason to give up. It is a reason though for us to start to talk about our tactics and whether things like lawsuits and whether politely asking our senators to change their minds about things, whether this is really going to protect what’s left of the natural world. And while it is incredibly, incredibly hard work, we have to fight, there’s really no moral, there’s no other thing to do that allows us to keep our good conscience without fighting. And the truth is, if we fight, we might lose. We probably will lose. But if we don’t fight, we have no chance of winning, and we must fight to slow as much of this destruction as we possibly can.

Max Wilbert:

Yeah, well said, will. There’s a direct relationship between the destruction of the planet and the genocide and war that we’re seeing around the world. The links that I made earlier between the Hummer, for example, the military industrial complex, mass consumerism and resource extraction, and how that plays into imperialism and the exploitation of people all around the world, whether we’re talking about in the Congo or we’re talking about here in the United States, in these sort of rural hinterland, places like Thacker Pass where people get screwed over in a completely different way, but with similarities to what we see in Serbia, in Tibet, in all of these, in Mongolia, in all of these resource extraction districts around the world. And I think that we really need to break our allegiance to industrial capitalism to this way of living, this type of economy that we’re so used to right now, it’s really difficult because my food is in the fridge right over here. I’m reliant on the system. So many of us are. But the truth is that system is killing the planet and it’s killing all of us in the end. So I think the story of Thacker Pass for us is really about a transformation away from an industrial economy that is destroying everything to something that is much simpler and more sustainable.

It is been on my mind lately that during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, that fight was being conducted through legal means with community organizing and rallies and so on. And at a certain point, the apartheid state outlawed those forms of legal above ground organizing and the movement was forced for its very survival to go underground, to become clandestine and illegal. We’re not quite there yet, but we certainly seem to be headed there rapidly in this country where even what has previously been sort of well accepted means of protest and public dissent are being criminalized. And ultimately, I don’t know where that will take us, but I think too of the old JFK quote, which wasn’t about any situation like this, but he said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is a sense in which this sort of authoritarianism that we’re seeing, it leads only in one inevitable direction, which is that people will continue to fight back and resist. And we need to try and do that effectively because it’s not just principles or ideology or ideas that are at stake. It’s people’s lives. It’s our grandchildren’s future, our children’s future. It’s clean water, it’s access to the basic necessities of life, basic human dignity. All this is at stake right now and it’s imperative that we do something about it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And we here at The Real News will continue to cover that fight. And in that vein, max will, I know I got to let you guys go in a moment here, but with the remaining minutes that we have together, I just wanted to round out by asking how you and the other defendants are doing faring through all of this and what your message is to listeners out there about what they can do to help.

Will Falk:

Thank you for asking that about how we’re doing. Yeah, it’s been really scary dealing with the lawsuit and having the threat of hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines issued against us. And that’s a really scary thing, and that’s a heavy thing. It’s also, I think any sort of effective resistance is going to require us to make sacrifices, to put ourselves, our individual wellbeing at risk. And we absolutely have to do that in smart ways. But I think that it’s really important that people understand that we’re not going to save the planet without taking on big risks to ourselves and to our own wellbeing. And we can’t do this in a completely safe manner. And it’s not that we are the ones creating the unsafe conditions, but if we get effective, those in power are going to respond harshly. They’re going to respond violently. And I think this is kind of a deep, deep way to think about your question.

What can people do to help? I think one thing people can do to help is start to get clear in their own minds that no one’s coming to save us. No one’s coming to swoop in and stop the destruction of the planet. Just stop the destruction of communities. And we’re going to have to learn how protect ourselves and to create the change that we know is so massively needed. And I think that if we can really start to develop a culture, a larger group of people that understand this and don’t quit when the inevitable repression and retaliation from the government and corporations come, then we’ll have a bigger community of people that can keep doing this kind of work and the sort of loneliness that often comes with activism and social justice work. If there’s more of us who understand what that’s like, what it actually feels like to put yourself in those kinds of positions, then we’re going to be much more resilient as a resistance community. We’re going to be much stronger together. And so, yeah, my biggest thing, what can people do? Consider thinking about the fact that we are the ones that have to stand up for ourselves. Get your mind right, get your soul right to understand that it’s not going to be an easy path. We don’t get to do it and stay completely safe, but it’s absolutely something that we must do. And the more of us that can see things like that, the more we can all support each other and the more effective we can ultimately be.

Max Wilbert:

I can’t say it any better than that. Courage. If folks want to learn more about what’s happening at Thacker Pass, follow our legal case, donate to our legal support fund. You can find all that information@protectthackerpass.org. And we’re gearing up there too for the next mine, the next project. And as this legal case hopefully comes to a conclusion one way or another in coming months and years, we’ve got more work to do. And so we’re just going to be pivoting straight to that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to thank our guests Will Falk and Max Wilbert, co-founders of the group Protect Thacker Pass, and two members of the group of Land Defenders known as the Thacker Pass, six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation for protesting the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. We’ve included reference links in the show notes for this episode so you can learn more about the Thacker Pass six and the ongoing struggle there in Nevada. And before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News Network is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now. We’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. Please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and get more on the ground coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

While state officials and legislators have positioned Texas to be “the bitcoin mining capital of the world,” in small towns like Granbury, working-class residents living next to giant, loud, environmentally destructive data centers are the ones paying the price for Texas’s crypto boom. “None of us are sleeping,” Cheryl Shadden, a Granbury resident who lives across the street from a 300-megawatt bitcoin mining data center owned by Marathon Digital, tells TRNN. “We can’t get rid of this alien invasion in our homes…This is like being a prisoner of war. It’s like being tortured with loud sounds and bright lights and being sleep deprived.”

In this episode of Working People, we dive deeper into the reality of living next to crypto mining data centers like the one in Granbury, the unseen threats they pose to human and nonhuman life, and what residents in Granbury are doing to fight back. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with: Cheryl Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist and resident of Granbury, who lives right next to the site of the Marathon bitcoin mining operation; Dr. Shannon Wolf, Precinct Chair in Hood County, who lives about 3 miles from the bitcoin mine; and Nannette Samuelson, County Commissioner for Precinct 2 in Hood County.

Additional links/info:

• Protect Hood County website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “A bitcoin mine in Texas is “killing us slowly,” local residents say”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
• NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
• James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are diving back into a new sacrifice zone investigation that we began two weeks ago, and we’re returning to the small rural town of Granbury, Texas, which is about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. In the first episode that we did on this, I spoke with Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, and Karen’s parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, four residents of Granbury who all lived near the site of a giant 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation.

I mean, Danny, Nick, and Virginia literally live right across the street from that thing. And the Bitcoin mine itself, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida based cryptocurrency company uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers there from overheating on a daily basis. And many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their town, that they are developing negative health effects like hypertension, heart palpitations, tinnitus, migraines and more. And they say that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. And speaking of government officials, let’s not forget that Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in 2021, I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto and quote, and it was Republican governor Greg Abbott who said in 2024 that Texas wears the crown as the Bitcoin mining capital of the world.

But in small towns like Granbury residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’s crypto boom. In today’s episode, we dive deeper into the reality of living next door to crypto mining data centers like the one in Granbury, Texas, and the unseen but not unheard threats that they pose to human and non-human life and what residents in Granbury are doing to fight back. I was extremely grateful to get a chance to sit down and talk with Cheryl Shadden, a registered nurse anesthetist and resident of Granbury who lives right next to the site of the Marathon Bitcoin Mining operation, Dr. Shannon Wolf, precinct chair in Hood County, who lives about three miles from the Bitcoin mine and Nannette Samuelson County Commissioner for Precinct two in Hood County. Here’s our conversation recorded on April 27th, 2025.

Well, Cheryl, Dr. Wolf, Nannette, thank you all so much for joining us today. And as I told your neighbors in our last episode, it’s really great to connect with you, but I really truly wish we were connecting under les horrifying circumstances, but I’m really grateful to y’all for joining us today to help us and our listeners understand this situation on a deeper level and to show how it’s not even just the marathon Bitcoin mine that we’re talking about here. So we’ve got a lot to dig into here. And Cheryl, I wanted to start by asking if we could first get just a little introduction to you. You live right across the street from this Bitcoin mine, like the folks we talked to in the last episode. So could you tell us just a little more about yourself, where you live, what you do, and how your life has changed since this Bitcoin mining operation moved in right next door to you?

Cheryl Shadden:

Absolutely. Thank you, max. We really appreciate this opportunity. My name is Cheryl Shadden. I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist. So I work in healthcare when I’ve been here for over 30 years. My home was here long before crypto. Mine came in long before the power plants that they’re plugged into came in. So I’m living out here in the country with my horses and my dogs, and I just want a peaceful life. I want to be able to do my job, take care of patients, have my horses, ride them around and have a peaceful country life. In the fall of 23, I hear all of this noise. This isn’t just a little bit of the power plant noise. This is standing on the edge of Niagara Falls. This is sleeping with a vacuum cleaner. This is laying on a flight deck where jets are taking off, but the jets don’t take off.

They stay there and they keep running. And so when we first started hearing this noise, we thought, well, they’re just building onto the power plant here. That’s what all of this humming is. And it was just a slight hum in the background. And then the hum got worse and worse and worse. It felt like an airline invasion. None of us in this area knew what a crypto mine is. Nobody knew what a data center was. Nobody had any idea. And then as the initial owners sold out to somebody else and then sold out to somebody else, the noise got worse and worse and worse. Finally, by the fall of 23, we didn’t know what this was. Now the sound is invading our homes. It’s inside of my house with ceiling fans on and TVs on. You can’t think you’re motion’s sick, nauseated, you’re dizzy. You have a hard time getting out of bed.

You feel like you’ve got a concussion. And so then we realized that this is a crypto mine. Well, we didn’t know what that was, so we started looking it up and the process of all of that, I had family come to visit and they asked me their mom, what is this? And I said, well, it’s a crypto mine. They’re like, why are you living like this? What’s going on? How can you live this way? And I thought, well, how can my family come and see me from out of state and be appalled? Why am I not more appalled? Why am I not doing anything about this? So I started calling my commissioner and I talked to my constable and I said, what can I do? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what this is. What do we do? And so my constable said, you’re going to have to get community involvement.

If you want anybody to be aware of this, you’re going to have to get the community involved. I thought, well, I have no idea how to do that. So I started reaching out on social media and I was telling everybody what’s going on and posting videos and asking if everybody was sick or if anybody was ill. Next thing you know, neighbor, after neighbor, after neighbor in our county and the county south of it is telling me the same things that are going on with me and some are sicker and some are less sick and children are sick. And I thought, oh my God, it’s not just me. It’s so many people in this area. So I started reaching out and collecting health information on everybody. And when this happened in the fall, commissioner Samuelson said Yes, she’d already started getting complaints about all of this.

She was planning on having a town hall in January. And so I thought, well, I dunno how many people in this area are on social media. So I started driving house to house, house to house and knocking on doors and telling people, this is what’s going on. We have to do something. We’re having a town hall. Please come. I’m Cheryl. I’m standing up. I’m here. We have to do something. Oh my God. And so then Commissioner Samuelson had a town hall. It was well attended. There was standing room only and story after story of community member after community member after community member of the horrific things that they’re having to live with on a daily basis. Wildlife that’s gone, dogs that are having seizures, people that can’t sleep. One person said he lives near Shannon and the noise was so bad in his driveway at night, he said it would drop him to his knees.

None of us are sleeping. We have sleep disturbances. We can’t get rid of this alien invasion in our homes. We didn’t know what to do about it. And so it was a pretty heated town hall meeting. We had media there and we started reaching and from connection to connection to connection, I got in touch with Texas Coalition Against Crypto Mining and they got me in touch with Andrew Chow with Time Magazine. He did the first article we had here and got us some national interest and people are shocked that we’re living this way. And then with all of the media coming out and doing videos and interviews, it was horrific what we’re living through. This is like being a prisoner of war. It’s like being tortured with loud sounds and bright lights and being sleep deprived until you crack and you talk. It feels like being a prisoner of war, but I get the feeling that prisoners of war are treated better than we are here. This is not Okay.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Commissioner Samuelson, I’d love to bring you in here and ask like what the hell this was all looking like from your side, both as a resident and elected official. Could you help our audience understand a bit more where this crypto came from and I guess what the regulation situation is over there that has allowed such loud operation to operate so close to residents homes?

Nannette Samuelson:

Right. Thank you again for getting us all together. And again, I’m Nannette Samuelson. I’m the commissioner for Precinct two, which includes the unincorporated area that Shannon, Dr. Wolf and Cheryl and all the people that you’ve mentioned live in as well as the cryptocurrency data center. So I took office in January of 23 and almost immediately started getting phone calls about what is this noise I’m hearing out here? And I asked the person, well, tell me more about it. Do you have a decibel meter? What are the decibels? And so we just started collecting information. I started researching what the noise regulations were in the state of Texas and what we could do about it. And so the state of Texas does not give counties very much regulatory authority at all. If you live in a city, you can have a noise ordinance, you can have zoning for residential or commercial.

But in unincorporated parts of the counties in Texas, you have very little, we don’t regulate zoning. We don’t regulate noise. So all we have is to rely on is what the state calls a noise nuisance, which is 85 decibels or higher. That is industrial level noise. That’s not something that someone should be subjected to 24 hours a day, seven days a week without hearing protection. And that’s what I tell people that ask about this. I said, it’s like putting a leaf blower next to your bed and never turning it off and trying to live with that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, people go, if you go to NASCAR or something loud, you wear hearing protection and you know that in a little while you’re going to leave and go home to peace and quiet. These people cannot do that. They are subjected to this 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

So I started looking into it. So back to the history, and Constable Shirley and I, he bought a what I’d call an industrial grade decibel meter because there are decibel meters that you can download on your phone with an app, but those aren’t necessarily that scientific. So we bought an industrial grade commercial decibel meter and started taking readings all over this area all the way six miles away to right across the street right next door, Cheryl’s house, the neighborhood that’s right next door. And we contacted the owners at that time was generate capital, and then it was operated by us Bitcoin, so we started contacting them. So maybe I should back up and talk to you about how it started. You asked me that. That was before I took office, but let me go back to that. So as I mentioned, the county does have platting authority, but unless something is infringing on us, I’m sorry, a TDOT road, not us, but a TDOT road or it’s in a floodplain, there’s really not anything that the county can do to deny it as long as they have proper sewage and water.

So if you’re going to build a housing addition, you have to provide sewage and water, but this isn’t a housing. So as long as they have enough water for the two or three workers that are there and sewage for the two or three workers that are there, and it’s not in a floodplain, there was nothing that the county could do to deny it from being built. That’s how it got there. But when it came it, I was sitting in court, not a member of the court, but I was there as an audience member. And when they brought that to court, it was just Compute North, which is out of North Dakota where the original owners, and it was just called a data center and it was just going to have nine containers. And then they brought back the second development and it had more containers, but it was still called a data center.

The commissioners at the time didn’t really know what a data center was or cryptocurrency. What they said was they were going to harvest unused power to power a data center is what they were telling the court. So when I got there, it had already been well on the way actually Compute North went bankrupt in 2022, I believe, early 2022, and then generate capital, bought it out of bankruptcy, hired us Bitcoin to operate it and complete the development of it. And they went live in either late 2022 or early 2023, but it wasn’t totally built out. But that’s when I started getting the complaints. So we started working with US Bitcoin and they were actually very wanting to be good neighbors. They met with us. They came down here several times. Constable Shirley and I drove them around with our decibel meter and said, look how we’re six miles away and look at the readings that we’re getting.

And they were very open to whatever it is that we have to do to be good neighbors, we want to do it. They did build a wall, but as Cheryl knows, that wall ended up, it wasn’t a wall all the way around. It was a partial wall on the southeast side of the building of the plant right next to the neighborhood there. But all it did was cause the sound to ricochet off that wall and head straight to Cheryl’s house, and it just really amplified it. So I called, this is still US Bitcoin. I emailed or called him back and I said, did you get a performance bond on that or a performance requirement on that wall? Because if whatever they told you it was going to do to the sound, it’s not working, you need to get your money back because I’m getting more complaints now than I did before you built the wall.

And so they actually came back out, we drove around again, and then they said, okay, we’re committed to getting a new sound study. We’re going to do whatever it is we need to do. About two weeks later, he emailed me back and said, well, this was December of 23. We just found out we’re being put up for sale. So I really can’t do anything until I know who the new owners are. So it kind of just drug out until January. The sale closed, really kind of coincidentally, right before I had that town hall. So the new owners marathon, a couple of the people from Marathon actually came to our town hall and listened to heart wrenching Heart, heart-wrenching stories from all of these residents about what it’s like to live with this noise and the illness that they’re going. I don’t know if anyone’s brought up from the previous discussions that you had, but the doctor out of Portugal, Dr. Marina Alvez. Have you heard that name yet?

I have not. Okay. She is an expert in infrasound, which is sound waves that your ear can’t hear, but your body can. Your body is absorbing these sound waves, but your ear cannot detect them. So when you think about the 85 decibels, the 85 decibels is what your ear can hear. It’s not taking any measurement about what your body is absorbing that your ear can’t hear. So we started listening to getting more information from her studies and marathon after that town hall pretty much. That’s really the last conversations that I’ve had with them. They pretty much went radio silent. They did hire PR person. They said, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to first hire a PR person, then we’re going to put all these containers in dielectric fluid, which should decrease the noise and two or three other things. Well, they hired the PR person and that person has never called me, has never emailed me, has never even tried to get in touch with me, and they had an open house last Good Friday.

So that’s another story is they decided to have a town hall in April and they last year they announced it on Wednesday on social media for Friday, which was Good Friday, which didn’t give people very much notice. Plus it’s on Good Friday. So we all went because we were not going to miss an opportunity to speak to the marathon people. And I met the PR person and I asked her, I said, I’m the commissioner for precinct too. I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t tried to call me or contact me. And she said, well, no one told me I was supposed to, and she still hasn’t since then. My phone number’s on the county website, I don’t remember for sure, but I’m sure I gave her my card. I always do when I introduce myself, but still nothing. But so that’s been kind of the history of what’s happened.

And we tried. So one of the things that we did, because the counties don’t have regulatory authority, we started working with our two legislators, our Senator Birdwell and Shelby Slawson about getting something changed in the Texas law that would allow us more ability to put sound, noise, regulation, noise wouldn’t be called an ordinance because that’s what cities do. Counties don’t have ordinances in Texas. But some ability to allow our constable or our sheriff’s department to do something to monitor this noise level for the people that live there. Even if it was like at airports where it’s after eight o’clock at night and before eight o’clock morning, which doesn’t help Cheryl that much. She gets up at like three in the morning. But something that we could do, and we started last summer, we drafted a resolution at Commissioner’s Court, passed five zero. I took it down to a hearing last summer about the grid because the other thing that these cryptocurrency, as you probably know, the cryptocurrency data centers are a huge draw on the grid.

And so that was what the hearing was about. But I used that opportunity to say, in addition to the draw on the grid, this is what it’s doing to people’s lives. And I talked about the illnesses, but I said, which I don’t know if anybody’s mentioned yet, but I said, the people that live around here, their property is not just worth less. It’s worthless. They cannot sell their property even if they wanted to because nobody wants to live next to this constant noise. So we started working with our legislatures. I was on the phone with other senators, Senator Cole Kirst, who’s on the Health and Human Services Committee, Senator May Middleton, again, Brian Birdwell, they are just now here. We are almost at the end of the legislative session and nothing has been changed. So all of our efforts to work with the senator and the legislature and our representative, I don’t think that any bill is going to see the light of day that’s going to give us any more ability to help the people that live here live around this cryptocurrency data center. I don’t have a good feeling for it at all.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Well, I want to pick up on the Good Friday meeting. As Nanette said, we were all there and the first thing that happened was they demanded that we all sign in, give our email addresses and our phone number. So they were gathering information from all of us, and I refused to sign. And I was telling people, you don’t have to do that. And the marathon folks were saying, oh, yes you do. And I just walked in without signing. And a couple of other people did. But the other thing they did was they had plants that were standing in line as people were kind of waiting for others to sign in to get into the town hall. So they had planted attorneys and other that were officials at Marathon were all in line without telling us that that’s who they were. I just happened to recognize an attorney that I knew represented Marathon in line, and then they demanded that we sit at tables where one of their representatives was at.

And so they were wanting to gain information without telling us that they were trying to gain information from us. They wanted to know what the symptoms were. They wanted us to tell them what exactly our grievances were, but not for the purpose of helping us. It was for the purpose of just gaining information, probably to try to lessen the impact of the community’s outcry. That’s my belief from that town hall. They have done nothing. They presented information that could have been pulled, and actually I think it was pulled right off the internet. It was nothing that was thought out, but they made all these promises, this is what we’re doing. We’re in the process of doing this. Fill in the blank, whatever that was. And I don’t think they have done any of that. I might be wrong, Nanette and Cheryl, correct me if I’m wrong on that one, but it did not foster goodwill.

It actually made the majority of us highly suspicious of them. And remember, this is a multi-billion dollar company, and the folks that live out here in this precinct, they are good people, but they are really normal working class kinds of people. So we cannot fight in the court system, these kinds of these problems because they’re drowning us in all kinds of paperwork, all kinds of demands, and they refuse to give information, but they demand it from us. It is just a mess out here. But I have walked with Cheryl and Annette and others that are living out here since what, January of 23? Is that right? Cheryl? January of 24 was when I first became aware of what was going on out there. And I just remember standing outside. My husband and I drove out there and I stood across the street and it gave me an immediate headache.

My head was just pounding. And I had been out there maybe just a few seconds. I stood outside my car. My husband was also feeling it. He said that it was pounding on his chest, he said, and so we ended up leaving and my thought was, surely if somebody knew about this, they would be able to correct it, whoever this somebody was. And as I talked to people, our Constable, Shirley, Nanette, other people, Nanette, and I sat down in a meeting with our representative, Shelby Slauson, and I thought, okay, yes, now, now something’s going to happen. And nothing did, nothing did. And I think for people to understand Texas, Texas is really a live and let live kind of a place. We’re not going to tell somebody else how to live their lives. We just don’t want them to tell us how to live ours.

And so people really like to live in rural areas so that if we want to raise chickens or if we want to ride horses, or if we want to do whatever we want to do, it’s an okay thing as long as we’re not bothering other people. So I understand why people move into the rural areas. It’s a beautiful place out here. I also saw, just skipping a little bit, I also saw an interview, I think it was a B, C news where Marathon said, this is a well-established industrial zone. And that is a lie. That is a lie. This is not an industrial zone. This area out here, we’ve got all kinds of wildlife. We have bald eagles, we have golden eagles, we have endangered species out here. We’ve got horses and cows and farms and orchards and all kinds of stuff. It is a wonderful place to be out here. And as Cheryl said, they moved in on top of us. This is not an industrial zone, but they’re lying to people to justify them being out here. The other thing that I would say that your listeners probably would find interesting, the energy plant that owns the property that Marathon sits on was not running at full capacity when Marathon moved in. Cheryl, correct me if I’m wrong, they were running at two thirds capacity. Is that right?

Cheryl Shadden:

Correct. 66% capacity,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

66% capacity. And when Marathon moved in, all of a sudden they are running at full capacity. And so Constellation Energy has petitioned our state to build a new energy plant out here. So yet again, they are wanting to buy up ranches and other places in order to build more industry that the community does not want. And quite frankly, it’s making us sicker.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Cheryl Nanette, Dr. Wolf, I wanted to ask about, this is something that high up politicians in Texas have been championing for years. I mean, Ted Cruz said in 2021 that he wanted to see Texas become the center of the universe for Bitcoin and crypto, and Governor Abbott said that wears the crown as the Bitcoin mining capital of the world last year. I wanted to ask y’all, when they were saying stuff like that, were regular working folks around the state, you all, did they give you any sense of what that was going to look like? Did they tell you that this is going to be the reality of making Texas a Bitcoin mining capital of the world, the things that you and your neighbors are going through? Is that something people want? I mean, this isn’t like it’s a manufacturing operation providing jobs. This is a massive data center like creating massive amounts of noise and using massive amounts of water for something that’s harder to grab your hands around than a bigger industrial operation. So I just wanted to ask if you could just say a little bit more from your vantage points about the promise versus the reality of making Texas this crypto capital of the world.

Cheryl Shadden:

For me personally, living this life and living with this barrage of problems here, I feel like I’ve been sold out. So I notice that these crypto mines aren’t next door to probably Ted Cruz’s home or next door to Governor Abbott’s home. And when we started this initial battle and we’re emailing all of the regulatory agencies here in the Texas legislature and state, they’re like, well, nobody could help us. Nobody cared. Nobody wanted to listen. And so when you stop and think about it, technically we’re subsidizing this. Taxpayers are subsidizing this. The infrastructure that it takes to build electric lines to all of these crypto mines that’s subsidized by taxpayers and by you paying your electric bill, all of our electricity out here has gone up.

Now here in the state of Texas, crypto Mars don’t have to rate back when we’re struggling with excessive heat or excessive cold, or when a hurricane comes up through the Gulf of Mexico, they don’t have to regulate back. They don’t have to ramp back. But if they do, they buy their electricity on the cheap bargain, basement, bulk pricing, not what I pay, not what Commissioner Samuelson pays or Shannon or anybody in this area. So they buy their electricity on the cheap. Now if they sell it back to the grid by their own choosing, they don’t have to. This mine here is behind the meter so they can do whatever they want. They sell it back to the grid at inflated prices. And so who takes that in? The fanny is me, taxpayers and people that are paying their electric bills every day, consumers. So we’re actually paying the state of Texas to torture us.

That’s not okay. That’s not remotely, okay, come out here, stay the night at my house, sleep in my house, listen to this noise through shut doors and windows camp out in my backyard. I’d love to have you come stay with me and see what it’s like. It’s not just me, it’s everybody in this area. So you can tell us that this is going to be the crypto mine capital mecca of the United States, but the reality is they don’t care. This is big business in Texas. So that’s all they care about. And reality here, they’re taking a third of the power from this 1200 megawatt power plant, which is Constellation Energy’s Willo two, it’s a gas steam plant constellation doesn’t own the other power plant, which is Willo one, which is a gas turbine plant. So now that they’re drawing all of this power off of Constellation energies, Willo two, now they’re running at 99 6% capacity.

So since this has happened, now we experience valve blows on a regular basis. We had a valve blow that happened last week that went on for three days. And it’s not just extreme noise, honest to God makes you feel like you’ve lost their mind. So everybody in this area has hearing loss. One family had a child that was having seizures. They took a second mortgage and moved out. And so they’re struggling. People here have cardiovascular disease. One of my neighbors, the electrical system in his ventricle shorted out. He had to be resuscitated multiple times. Now he’s in the hospital right now having had a stroke. So it’s not just the noise, it’s the damage to our soft tissues, the damage to our blood vessels. Like Dr. Alvarez says, there’s so much damage here. And Governor Abbott doesn’t care. Ted Cruz doesn’t care. It’s big business in Texas.

Who cares if working class people like me get mowed over? It’s not next to their home. And so the reality is how do we fight that? So we’ve tried everything. We have a lawsuit with Earth Justice right now. That’s an injunctive lawsuit. Some of the people in this area have hired personal attorneys to fight for all of the detriment that’s occurred. My property values have decreased. So going through the checklist, I’ve gone to the Hood County Appraisal District and I’m contesting my property taxes again this year. So my property taxes were dropped 25% and a previous year they were dropped 25%. You’re going, wow, that’s great. Your property taxes have dropped 50%. The reality is that’s drop in the bucket of my property. I have absolutely no value at all. So people say, go ahead and move. You can move. How can I move? I’ve been here for 30 years. My home and my property are paid off. Nobody would buy this property. Nobody.

Nannette Samuelson:

And that just puts an exclamation point on what I told the Senate committee last summer is their property is not just worth less. It’s worthless. So one of the things that the reason that Senate committee had a meeting in summer, so in Texas, the legislature only once every two years. So they went into session in January of 25, and they’re about to be finished unless they call special sessions, they’ll be finished at end of May. But to get prepare for the legislative session, they had hearings last summer. And the hearing that this one was regarding was the grid because the head of the PUC had made a statement last June saying that the demand for electricity in Texas is going to double by 2030 due to data centers and Bitcoin. And so they started having meetings with the legislature to figure out, okay, how do we address this?

So yes, you want all this business to come here, but your infrastructure isn’t able to do that. Hold on, my husband is joining us. So the Texas legislature started trying to figure out how to address the impact to the grid from the Bitcoin and the data centers. One of the things that the legislature needs to do is, and I hope that some legislation will pass this legislative session that will put some type of, it’s called bring your own power kind of thing. But what that’s going to do is require battery energy storage systems to be installed with data centers and cryptocurrency, which those bring their own risks. Battery energy storage systems are at this point in time, lithium ion batteries. And just like with a Tesla or some other electric vehicle, if they start on fire, they cannot be put out with water. They have to just burn out.

And if you have acres and acres and acres of battery energy storage systems with lithium ion batteries, if a fire starts, it’s called a thermal runaway and it just heats up and heats up and while it’s heating up, it’s putting off all kinds of toxins into the air. So one, as Cheryl said, they’re currently drawing from gas powered power plants energy, but the legislature possibly if this bill passes, is going to require crypto and data centers to bring their own power, which means battery energy storage systems, or they can have small gas powered power plants on property. One of the things that is unique, sadly unique about our little precinct is that we have gas pipelines running through our precinct and we have access to the grid very close together. So that is why these projects are coming to our little part of Hood County is because of the gas pipelines and the grid, and so they can get the energy and they can dispatch the energy very quickly. I think that when Governor Abbott and Ted Cruz and all of the legislators that are talking about Texas becoming the crypto and the data center capital of the United States, I don’t think they realize the impact to people’s lives. And if this data center was out surrounded by 500 acres of industrial area or non-residential area, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But that’s not what’s happening. Texas in enjoys businesses. We are a pro business state, but not at the expense of people’s lives or their property. And that’s what is happening in this little community here.

Cheryl Shadden:

So here across the street from where I live, if you think about being on the streets south Baltimore, so Constellation Energy owns this property across the street. They’re the slumlord, the drug dealer on the street corners, marathon Digital. They own all that property there. They’re leasing their property to Marathon Digital, marathon Digital doesn’t own the property that they’re sitting on. So now you have Marathon Digital causing problems with the community, making us sick, dropped our property values, not allowing us to sleep at night. You have Constellation Energy who holds the lease, who is leasing this property. They don’t care that they have a harmful renter on their property. They don’t care. They haven’t done anything to mitigate the noise that it’s there. Now you have Constellation Energy wanting to put in eight turbine gas power plant right in the middle of all of this to cause more problems. So you start looking at all of the air pollution, sulfuric acid, sulfur, hexa, fluoride, ozone, greenhouse gases, and then you have the first power plant here, Wolf Hollow one wanting to extend their air permit and drop some more acid rain on us. So this is a huge problem here. This isn’t just a little bit of a noise problem. This is a huge industrial pollution problem that’s ruining people’s lives here.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I would also add to this, that regulation usually follows a problem. So regulation’s going to have to catch up with what’s going on out here. Now, as far as Bitcoin goes, I am pro-business as long as they’re not hurting people. I don’t really care if they have a Bitcoin plant, but they’re hurting people. So I’m not angry at Bitcoin itself. It could be any industry that’s doing this, and I would have a problem with ’em, Ted Cruz and Abbott. I’m with Cheryl. I’m frustrated with them, but I also agree with Nanette. I really want to believe that they have no clue the damage that they are encouraging out here. Now, perhaps they are aware, and if that’s the truth of that, then I have lost all respect for them. I do think that they need to hear people because we’re not quiet about this. They have to know that something’s going on out here, and I think that they need to come out here and talk to us.

I think this is a big enough deal that they need to come out here. I want to talk about the valves that are blowing and explain for some of your listeners that may be unaware, and Cheryl, you jump into because you understand this really well. Those valves are a safety mechanism that takes a lot of the pollutants, those really dangerous kinds of things from getting into the air. So when that valve blows, that means that safety measure that is in that particular place is not working. So when a series of valves blow, that means that we are getting contaminants into our air and we’re breathing them. Our animals are breathing them, they’re in the ground. These things are really important to understand. It’s not just the sound, it’s what is being released and we’re breathing it and it’s on our skin. And this is dangerous. I also want to talk about,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can I ask really quick, is that from the cooling operation that’s at the Bitcoin mine or is this from,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

This is the plant power plant. Its the power plant. So as Marathon is demanding more and more power, in order for them to do whatever it is that they do, the power plant right next door to it cannot keep up with it. And so it’s blowing their valves, which is the safety mechanism that keeps the pollutants from reaching the air and the people around us. So we are having this more and more and more, and now they want to build Constellation Energy, wants to build another bigger power plant. And we’re talking about an area that, goodness, I don’t even think it’s a mile around this. So we’re going to have three power plants and a Bitcoin mine. And there is talk about moving in another data center within a mile. So I cannot even imagine what this area is going to look like if they are successful.

Nannette Samuelson:

Dr. Wolf, what is the name of the California Battery Energy storage system that

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Was on fire? I looked that up today. And I want to say it was the one out of Monterey, but I don’t remember the actual name of it, but I think it was in Monterey, California, the one that caught on fire back in January of this year. Yes, hit that.

Nannette Samuelson:

Just look up battery energy storage system, fire California. And you’ll be able to see how the toxins that were in the air, the toxins that then were into the soil, the radius of the people that had to evacuate because of that. And that’s one thing, as I was saying, is snowballing into the other. The cryptocurrency is pulling and data centers are pulling so much power from the grid. One of the answers that the Texas legislature may do, or they may, the data centers themselves, may do it on their own. If their business model says this is cheaper or more cost effective is to bring those battery energy storage systems on their own property to how electricity markets work. When the demand goes up, the price goes up, demand goes down, the price goes down. So if I have a business that uses a lot of energy, then one of the things I can do to hedge that is to store my own power in these battery cells.

And then when the demand goes up, when Wolf Hollow can make more money selling their energy to the grid than selling it to me cryptocurrency marathon, I can offset that by storing my own power on my own property. And now I can keep running at full capacity because I’ve stored my own power in batteries. So then we have the add onto that, the risk of the fires with the battery energy storage system. So one of the things we’re looking into as a county is implementing some national fire safety protocols called NFPA 8 85 or 8 55. I’m sorry, I have to look that up to be sure exactly which one it is. But our fire marshal is in the process of working on that because we see this coming next. First, we have the regulation really lack of any regulation to do with noise. And now we have really lack of any regulation to do with fighting the dangers of fires or other situations that are caused by the batteries that are going to start being used to store the energy

Cheryl Shadden:

Well. And then let’s put these battery systems right next to a gas power plant, really make the explosion great,

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Right? Right. Talk about dangerous and then add that we have a volunteer fire department out here, the closest volunteer fire department to the existing best system that’s out here, battery energy storage system that’s already here. The closest fire department is 14 miles away. Their backup is 23 miles away. So imagine putting one of these right next to a gas powered electrical system or energy plant. Imagine what this is going to do to the community. This would be catastrophic. This is inhumane.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is. I mean there’s so many other words that I have for it, but at base it is inhumane, it’s cruel. It is absurd. And the thing that is really just pummeling my heart right now is how often I hear stories like these around the country, and this should be an exception. This should be the kind of thing we write about in history books as a really awful accident that happened one time and we learned our lesson.

Nannette Samuelson:

Like Aaron Brockovich comes, right,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. Yeah. It should not be the kind of thing that I’m interviewing people about every week from all over the country, from Red Hill in Hawaii to Cancer Alley in Louisiana to South Baltimore, 20 minutes from where I am to East Palestinian, Ohio to Granbury, Texas. This crap is everywhere. And that goes to, I wanted to, we only have a few minutes left here with each other and we’re going to have to do more follows. There’s so much more to talk about here. But I wanted to, in the last 10 minutes that we have here, talk about a few of these larger connecting points. And we’re talking directly to the audience here and to people who may hear this because I hear the same refrain that y’all have heard all the time. People say, why don’t they just move first and foremost, most people can’t do that.

You listening to this, do you have the money to just pick up and move somewhere? What if the house that you live in, you couldn’t sell? Like the people in East Palestine not only have their property values plummeted, they don’t want to sell them because they can’t in good conscience pass off a toxic home to another family. So what are they supposed to do? How could Cheryl pass off her home to someone who’s going to have to live across from this massive power plant and data center? So that’s the kind of situation that folks are in in terms of why don’t people just move? First of all, it’s a real huge burden that most working people can’t take on, but if they have to flee and become refugees from their own hometowns to save their lives, like the people we’ve talked to in Conyers, Georgia who had to flee the Biolab fire in September, that’s what they’re going to have to do.

But also as we’re pointing out here, where are you going to go? Because this stuff is everywhere. And if you’re fleeing one sacrifice zone, you may find yourself living next to a toxic landfill. You may find yourself living underneath the side of a mountaintop removal operation. And so when heavy rains come, you’re going to be getting flooded. Like the folks in Asheville, North Carolina we spoke to during Hurricane Helene. So there’s almost nowhere to escape to because we’ve let this stuff pervade our homes all around this country. But the other thing that I always hear that I wanted to give you all a chance to respond to, but I don’t want to make you responsible for it, so I want to really clarify that because it’s something that drives me nuts. As an admittedly, I am a lefty nut job. I grew up very conservative and it’s been a long road to the socialist that you see before you.

But I don’t care about any of that. When I go to towns and talk to people who are suffering through things that they did not cause, they did not ask for whether they’re Trump voters, non voters, Biden voters, anybody and people on the internet will say, well, they deserved it. They voted for this. Or their Republicans, who cares. Or when the fires in my home of Southern California burn whole neighborhoods, people say, well, they’re Democrats. Who cares? We got to stop thinking like this or we’re going to keep dying and our communities are going to keep getting destroyed while the rich assholes, pardon my French, who are causing all this pain are getting off. So that’s my little tirade here. I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any thoughts on that or on how to correct the thinking for people listening to this, knowing that these are the times that we’re in, people are going to say stuff like this and we here are trying to get people to cut through that noise and just care about the fact that flesh and blood, fellow working people, red state, blue state, whatever it is, our people, our neighbors, our fellow workers are hurting and we are being hurt as well.

That is what we should care about. If a car is on fire and someone’s inside you don’t go and ask who they voted for before you pull ’em out. If you guys could just talk to people out there who should be listening to what you’re saying, but are letting stuff like this get in the way, what would you say to them?

Cheryl Shadden:

Where is your humanity? If your family is hurt? Wouldn’t you want me to help take care of them? If you were broken down on the side of the road and you needed a hand, do you care who I vote for when I stopped to help you? When I’m doing your anesthesia and we’re taking your gallbladder out or your kid’s going to emergency surgery, I don’t check your voting status before I take care of you. We take care of people because we, that’s who we all are Now. I don’t care if my neighbors are pink with purple polka dots, I don’t care who they voted for. My community is suffering. I will do anything that I can to help the people in this area that are suffering. Some of these people can’t stand up. They are so sick. And you know what? Step up. Put your money where your mouth is, step up and be a human.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Yeah, I think for me it’s that you look at another human being and you have compassion for another human being. I don’t care where you go to church or if you go to church, you’re a human being. And I think that we need to be more mindful. I think the United States used to be like that some time ago. We just cared about people. And I think that we need to get back to that place where people are more important than industry. People are more important than your thoughts. People are just important and we need to stand up for each other, especially those who cannot stand up for themselves.

Nannette Samuelson:

Yeah, very well said. Both of you. There’s, I think Cheryl or Dr. Wolf said this early on is that the peaceful enjoyment of one’s property is a right that we have and that is not happening in this. They’re not able to peacefully enjoy their property and the respect business needs to respect individual’s rights as well as both of them said so. Well, we are humans. We all care about protecting each other and making sure that each other is safe. And when I became the commissioner, I had no idea that this was going to be part of what I was doing. I thought it was budget and making sure that the county offices are running smoothly and figuring ways to cut taxes and those types of things. And this became front and center right away. And like I said earlier, the stories that people told at that first town hall, what they’re dealing with, it’s just not right. I mean, industries should not be able to impact people’s health and their property without any consequences. Agreed.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, we’re going to have to have y’all back on. And to our listeners, we are going to continue our investigation into not just the Bitcoin mine in Granbury, Texas, but looking at the larger surrounds that includes other toxic polluters that folks are also dealing with. Just like here in South Baltimore, as you guys have heard listening to this show, it’s not just the CSX rail terminal that’s getting coal dust over everyone’s houses and in their lungs, they’re also breathing in the toxic pollutants from the medical waste incinerator and all the other toxic polluters concentrated in that part of the city. So we are going to do more follow-ups on and with folks from Granbury, but with the last minute or two that I have y’all, I just wanted to do a quick round around the table and ask if y’all could say, in terms of the struggle to hold marathon accountable and to protect people in Hood County, where do things stand now and what can folks listening do to help?

Cheryl Shadden:

For me personally, we thought we were battling. And so we have more and more battles every day. We thought we were fighting one arm of this octopus. No, there’s eight arms on this octopus that we’re fighting. Stand up for your next door neighbor, knock on their door, see how they’re doing. If you’re suffering from problems, your neighbors all are suffering as well. Stand up, take a stand. Tell them. No, it’s a shame you should have to fight for your life. But when I first started this, it was just a few of us standing here. Now I’m standing with a mighty, mighty group of warriors that actually care about one another. And so it’s not ideal. No, but now I’m not standing by myself.

Nannette Samuelson:

And Cheryl, did you talk about the incorporation already?

Cheryl Shadden:

I started off doing that. So one of the things that we’re trying to do is we’re trying to incorporate this area, this community, into a township so that we can develop statutes and taxation and environmental impact fees. So we’re giving this a really good, hard, strong try, trying to get control over our area. We need some control of our lives and what’s happening to all the people here.

Nannette Samuelson:

So what that will do, as I mentioned at the beginning, because cities have regulatory authority, zoning, ordinance, authority that counties don’t have, so that if they’re successful incorporating, they will be able to have ordinances and regulations, zoning because they will be a municipality inside of the county. So then that will take precedence over the lack of authority or ability that the county, we don’t have what, like I was saying earlier, it’s pretty much water, sewer, and that’s about it.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I think with the incorporation, just know that it’s not a done deal. I wish it was an easy thing, but we have a couple of hurdles and we have a person that can say no to us. So we’re a little nervous about that. That’s going to happen this coming week. And yeah, we could use prayer if you pray we could use your good thoughts. If you don’t, that’s okay. But one of the things that I do want to encourage everyone is if you see something coming in your neighborhood, tackle it early. Don’t let it get a foothold because then you’ve got a battle on your hands.

Nannette Samuelson:

And if you live in Texas, call your senator, your state senator, call your state representative, send them emails, call ours, call Senator Birdwell, call Representative Slauson and tell ’em you heard about this that’s happening in their area of responsibility and that their constituents are suffering and that they would support any change to the noise ordinance, regulation or setback requirements, things that would help the residents that live there. That’s what I would say. Call your state rep and your state senator. Call Shelby Slauson. Call Senator Birdwell. Tell him you heard about it. Here’s an ironic thing as Granberry just for what the third or fourth year in a row was, just voted the best historic small town in the United States we’re also the celebration capital of Texas.

Cheryl Shadden:

We’re celebrating air pollution.

Nannette Samuelson:

So that happened and here we are, this whole community of people that live around don’t live in the city limits of Granbury but live very close to in Hood County that are going through this struggle. And because like I said earlier, the proximity of gas lines, the proximity of the access to the grid, low property values, it’s coming. This isn’t the last project that we have in our little precinct.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas. Cheryl Shedden, hood County Precinct Chair, Dr. Shannon Wolf and Hood County Commissioner Nanette Samuelson. And I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has openly vowed to pour $100 million into campaigns to defeat progressive representatives like Cori Bush who have spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Chris McGreal writes in The Guardian, “after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza… AIPAC pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support [Wesley] Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.” After Bush was unseated in August, she vowed to keep fighting for justice, and she put AIPAC on notice: “AIPAC,” she told supporters, “I’m coming to tear your kingdom down.”

At the 2025 National Membership Meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez sits down with the former Congresswoman and key member of “The Squad” to discuss her re-election loss, the undue influence of organizations like AIPAC on our democracy, and Bush’s plan for fighting back.

Studio Production: Kayla Rivara, Rosette Sewali
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  We’re here at the Jewish Voice for Peace National Membership Meeting held in downtown Baltimore, and I am honored to be sitting here with Congresswoman Cori Bush, who just gave an incredible speech at the closing plenary.

Congresswoman, thank you so much for joining me. I know we only have a limited time here, and I wanted to ask, first and foremost, for our viewers out there who saw your re-election campaign be thwarted by $8.5 million from AIPAC, amidst other things, what would you say to folks out there who just see the results of that election and think, oh, well, she lost fair and square. What’s really going on underneath that?

Cori Bush:  Well, thank you for the question. First of all, there was no fair, there was no square. There was deceit, manipulation, lies, misinformation, racism, bigotry, hatred, vitriol, and it was all OK. There was nothing that was off limits as long as AIPAC got the result that they wanted. They didn’t care about how it ripped apart our community, how all of the years of organizing, so much of it was disrupted, and some of those bonds that people created, it completely shattered. They didn’t care about that. They don’t care about that.

They don’t care that I’m the same person that some of those folks marched with out on the streets of Ferguson during the uprising in 2014 and 2015. They don’t care that I am the one who protested the ending of the eviction moratorium in 2021 as a freshman out on the steps of the US Capitol to make sure that 11 million people weren’t about to be evicted from their homes when the government could have done something about it. They didn’t care about that. They wanted to discredit me because in discrediting someone that the people trust, then it pulls power not only from that person that they trust, but it pulls power from the people. So [the] over $8 million that they put in, plus those that they were working with, it roughly ended up being around $15 million, between $15 to $20 million, which is the numbers that we’ve seen.

And I just want to make this point. To use racism against me, to distort my face on mailers to make me look like an animal, to use lies about my family or me. The thing is this: if you’re doing the right thing and you’re doing it for the right reason, why can’t you just use truth? I have no problem with people running against each other. We’re able to do that. That’s how I won my race. I ran against someone I thought was ineffective. I felt like I could do more. I spoke about what I would do and how I felt I could do it. I spoke about my past and who I wanted to be as a member of Congress. The people believed it because the people saw me as that person, and I won.

Around $1.4 million. It took me that much money to unseat a 20-year incumbent whose father was in the seat for 32 years. So 52 years worth of a machine. I spent around $1.4 million to unseat. I won that race with over 4,700 votes. AIPAC and the groups that they were working with, they spent around $15 million. The person only won by less than 7,000 votes. So it took basically $15 million, 15 times the amount of money to unseat me that it took me to unseat someone who had a 52-year family legacy. So that was the depth of the deceit that they had to use.

And I’ll say this, never once did they say anything about Israel or Palestine. Never once did they use that in ads. Now, in front of people, they would call me antisemitic. People would say, well, what did she do? Oh, well, [inaudible]. I don’t have anything to show you. But what they would use in the ads was, oh, she’s mean to Joe Biden. She wants kids to drink contaminated water from lead pipes. Those were the things that they used against me.

And because it flooded the media, our local media so heavily because of the amount of money, because you will see four or five ads from my opponent and then only one ad from me, the people started to believe and they were wondering, well, why does he have so much money? Well, why does it…?

So that’s what it looked like, and that’s how they were able to deceive the community to make them think, oh, well, then maybe something is going on that we don’t understand. And then they also made people feel like, well, I’m confused, so maybe I’ll just stay home.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to ask another follow-up question on that because, of course, you and other members of the Squad are representative of a grassroots hope coming from a lot of the folks that we talk to and interview on a weekly basis. This is a hope over the past 10 years that there was still a possibility of making progressive change through electoral politics.

What would you say to folks right now who are feeling despondent, and after seeing AIPAC still, amidst all of that, unseat you, unseat Jamaal Bowman, the richest man in the world buying his way into our government right now, what would you say to folks who feel like we don’t have enough to take on their money?

Cori Bush:  Well, that’s what they want us to believe. They want us to fall into this place of feeling overwhelmed, believing the chaos. They want us to stop fighting. They want us to think that… Well, they want us to live in this place of fatigue. That’s why they keep ramming this train our way. But we can’t allow that to happen because what they understand is it’s actually the people who have the power. That’s why they have to do so much and push so hard and spend so much money because they understand that it’s really us who has the power. We just have to acknowledge it and understand it and figure out how to properly use our power to fight against this.

And so, yes, I was unseated, Jamaal Bowman was unseated, and I know that we know that they’re coming for more in 2026 and beyond. But the thing is, the movement is never one person or never a few people. Yes, we were working for more progressive change, and that’s an issue right now. But the other part of that is we need our actual elected officials who claim to be progressive, to actually be that. We need that, or stop saying that you are, because then you’re making people feel this way because they’re looking like, oh, these are our people, but what’s going on? Why aren’t they pushing? Why aren’t they fighting for this change?

So we need people to be your authentic self in this moment because the people are falling away from the Democratic Party because they feel the hypocrisy. People are saying, I don’t understand why you’re not fighting hard enough. You said this man is a fascist, he’s a racist, he’s a white supremacist, he’s authoritarian, he’s a dictator. He’s all of these things, but you’re not meeting the moment. You’re not meeting the threat with the proper opposition to it.

But when they also see that some of these same folks who are supposed to be our “leaders” take money from groups like AIPAC who are primarily funded by Republicans or who also endorse insurrectionist members of Congress, or people who supported insurrectionists, at least we feel, then the people are like, well, why should I believe and trust in you?

Also, if you are cool with allowing a genocide to happen on our watch in our lifetime with our tax dollars, if you are OK with that, then what is your red line? Because, apparently, death and destruction of thousands of people, it’s not.

So who are you? Is this the party of human rights and civil rights? Is this the party of equality and equity and peace? Is this that party? It is absolutely not if there is no no real opposition to what we’re seeing right now.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And just a final question. When you lost your reelection and you gave this rousing speech that you brought back into your speech today, you told AIPAC, “I’m coming to tear down your kingdom.” I wanted to ask, in closing here with the last minute I’ve got you, what does that mean? What does that look like? And for folks out there watching who want to see that, who want this undue money and influence out of our politics, what is it going to take to tear down that kingdom?

Cori Bush:  So one thing I won’t do is give all the secrets away. So I can’t give all of the… But what I will say is part of it is this, part of it is being here with the people. So Jewish Voice for Peace has 100% been a supporter of mine. And this didn’t just start after Oct. 7. We’ve been working with folks with JVP for years. This is not anything new, and we’ll continue to do that work.

But the fact that they continue to organize, other groups are organizing and calling out the name AIPAC. There are experts working on why there is this loophole that allows for AIPAC to do some of the lobbying they do. There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and I’m going to continue to do that work.

But the stuff that is more forward-facing, I’m going to continue to organize. I’m going to continue to make sure that people know. The PAC United Democracy Project is… We need people to understand the connection between them and AIPAC. So that’s where the money is going to flow from. It’s going to flow from UDP. We need people to know DMFI and know some of these other names, but we also need people to know that, in your local community, there are PACs being formed that are basically a smaller AIPAC, and their whole purpose is to try to be ambiguous, and so you won’t know that this is who they are. It is just like, oh, it’s this group that has all of this money that’s coming against this elected official that’s speaking out against the genocide. But they have all of this money, and so maybe they’re good. We want people to know. So educating people around the country as well.

I’m not going to stop fighting because AIPAC came for me. The thing is this: AIPAC didn’t make me, so AIPAC can’t break me. AIPAC didn’t position me, so they can deposition me. The thing is, I got there because the people put me there, but I was there for a purpose and a mission. So that’s the other part. So I knew while I was there in Congress that I was on a timer. I knew that I was only there for a purpose, for a mission. I knew that there was this urgency on the inside of me.

One thing that I would say to people all the time is I felt this weeping. Only inside of me, I always felt like crying. It never stopped, 24 hours a day. And it’s the thing that kept me moving fast. Like, OK, I got to do this. I got to do that. People in Congress will say, she’s championed all of these different areas. Why is she doing so much? That was why. I didn’t know that I would only be there four years, but I needed to get the work done, and I needed to be true to what I said, who I said I would be.

But also, I needed to be what I needed. That’s what I had to be what I needed when I was unhoused, when I was hungry, when I was abused, and all of the things. I needed that. I needed what my grandmother needed when she taught me that you never look a white woman in her face because of what she went through, the experience in Mississippi growing up, and my ancestors before her through chattel slavery. I needed to be what they needed. And I’ll never stop doing that because the thing is, it’s not about me, it’s who God created me to be. And that’s just everything for me, and so I’m not afraid.

The Trump administration continues to escalate its authoritarian assault on higher education, free speech, and political dissent—and university administrators and state government officials are willingly aiding that assault. On the morning of April 23, at the direction of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, law enforcement officers, including FBI agents, raided the homes of multiple student organizers connected to Palestine solidarity protests at the University of Michigan. “According to the group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items,” Michael Arria reports at Mondoweiss. “Four individuals were detained, but eventually released.” In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers from the University of Michigan and Columbia University about how they and their unions are fighting back against ICE abductions, FBI raids, and top-down political repression, all while trying to carry on with their day-to-day work.

Panelists include: Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO); Ember McCoy, a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank-and-file member of GEO and the TAHRIR Coalition; Jessie Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank-and-file member of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC); and Conlan Olson, a PhD student in Computer Science at Columbia and a member of the SWC bargaining committee.

Additional links/info:

• Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), University of Michigan website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website, Instagram, Facebook page, and X page
• TAHRIR Coalition UMich X page
• Legal Fund of Michigan Students for Palestine
• GEO Worker Solidarity Fund
• GEO Press Release: FBI and police raid homes of pro-Palestine activists, including a GEO member
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Michael Arria, Mondoweiss, “FBI and police raid homes of Palestine activists in Michigan”
• Alvin Powell, The Harvard Gazette, “Harvard files lawsuit against Trump administration”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Worse’ than McCarthyism: Trump’s war on higher education, free speech, and political dissent”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘A tremendous chilling effect’: Columbia students describe dystopian reality on campus amid Trump attacks”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our ongoing coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. Things have continued to escalate since we published our episodes earlier in April where I first interviewed Todd Wolfson in Chen Akua of the American Association of University Professors, and then interviewed graduate student workers at Columbia University, Ali Wong and Caitlyn Liss. Now many since then have praised the development of Harvard University standing up and challenging Trump’s attacks in a public statement titled, upholding Our Values, defending Our University.

Harvard’s president Alan m Garber wrote Dear members of the Harvard Community. Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11th letter was sent by mistake. Other statements and their actions suggest otherwise doubling down on the letters, sweeping and intrusive demands which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university. The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 5 0 1 C3 tax exempt status. These actions have stark real life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world. Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.

Now at the same time at the University of Michigan, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies raided multiple homes of student activists connected to Gaza solidarity protests as Michael Aria reports at Monde Weiss. On the morning of April 23rd, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies executed search warrants at multiple homes in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton Township, Michigan. The raids reportedly targeted a number of student organizers who were connected to Gaza protests at the University of Michigan. According to the group, students allied for Freedom and Equality or safe agents seized the students’ electronics and a number of personal items. Four individuals were detained but eventually released to rear coalition. A student led movement calling for divestment from Israel said that officers initially refused to present warrants at the Ypsilanti raid. They were unable to confirm whether ICE was present at the raid. A Detroit FBI office spokesman declined to explain why the warrants were executed, but confirmed that the matter was being handled by the Office of Michigan.

Attorney General Dana Nessel. Nessel has refused to confirm whether the raids were connected to Palestine activism thus far, but her office has aggressively targeted the movement. Last fall, Nestle introduced criminal charges against at least 11 protestors involved in the University of Michigan Gaza encampment. An investigation by the Guardian revealed that members of University of Michigan’s governing board had pressed Nestle to bring charges against the students. The report notes that six of eight Regents donated more than $33,000 combined to Nestle’s campaigns after the regents called for action. Nestle took the cases over from local district attorney Ellie Savitt, an extremely rare move as local prosecutors typically handle such cases. Listen, as we’ve been saying repeatedly on this show and across the Real news, the battle on and over are institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump Administration’s agenda will be decided.

And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond, but by how faculty respond students, grad students, staff, campus communities, and the public writ large. And today we are very grateful to be joined by four guests who are on the front lines of that fight. We’re joined today by Lavinia, a PhD student at the University of Michigan School of Information and an officer in the Graduate Employees organization or GEO, which full disclosure is my old union. Ember McCoy is also joining us. Ember is a PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan and a rank and file member of GEO and the Tare Coalition. And we are also joined today by Jesse Rubin, a PhD student in the School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University and a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia.

We are also joined by Conlin Olson, a PhD student in computer science at Columbia, and a member of the Bargaining Committee for Student Workers of Columbia, Lavinia Ember, Jesse Conlin. Thank you all so much for joining us today, especially amidst this terrifying reality that we all find ourselves in. I wanted to just jump right in and start there because since we have y’all and you are new voices in this ongoing coverage that we’re trying to do of these authoritarian attacks on higher ed, I wanted to start by just going around the table and asking if y’all could briefly introduce yourselves and tell us about what your life and work have been like these past few weeks and months as all of this Orwellian nightmare has been unfolding.

Lavinia:

Yeah. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, max for putting this together. So by and large, my life just continues to revolve around research. I’m actually on an NSF fellowship and that means that I basically spend all of my time in the office doing research. That being said, over the past couple of months, especially sort of in the context of organizing, a lot of what I and other grad workers at the University of Michigan have been working on is safety planning and mutual aid efforts related to immigration. And then of course in the past couple of weeks there’s been sort of this really alarming, as you said, escalation in repression by the state government of pro-Palestine protestors. So recently a lot of organizing work has also been related to that, but just to personalize it, the people who are affected by this repression, our friends, they’re coworkers and it’s just been extremely scary recently even just sort of trying to navigate being on campus in this really kind of tense political environment.

Ember McCoy:

So for me, this is kind a continuation of the organizing that I’ve been doing throughout the PhD and before I was vice president of the grad union during our 2023 strike, and there was a lot of infrastructure that we built and organizing models that we’ve changed, that we’ve talked about. Even I think on this podcast leading into the strike, which I think then we got a contract in September of 2023 and then pretty much right away ended up transitioning our work to be very focused on Palestine Pro Palestine organizing in collaboration with undergrad students after October 7th, which I think is really important for some of the infrastructure we built and organizing models we built, thinking about how we’ve been able to transition from labor organizing to pro-Palestine organizing to ICE organizing and all the way back around and in between. On a personal level, this week, Monday morning, I had a meeting with my advisor.

I told him, I promised him I was going to lock in. I was like, I’m going to do it. I need to finish. By August, two hours later, I found out my NSF grant was terminated. I study environmental justice, I have a doctoral dissertation research grant, and then I spent Tuesday trying to do paperwork around that. And Monday morning I woke up to my friend’s houses being rated by the FBI and safe to say, I’ve not worked on my dissertation the rest of the week. So yeah, I think it’s just important like Lavinia said, to think about how, I don’t know, we’re all operating in this space of navigating, trying to continue thinking about our work and the obligations we have as workers for students at the University of Michigan. It is finals week, so the raids happen Wednesdays finals started Thursday. And also not only continuing the fight for pre Palestine, but also making sure our comrades are okay and that they’re safe.

Jessie Rubin:

Hi everyone. It’s really nice to meet you Lavinia and Ember, and thank you so much Max for inviting us to be a part of this. My name is Jessie and I’m a PhD candidate at Columbia in the music department and also a rank and file member of Student Workers of Columbia. I guess to start off with the more personal side with my own research, I guess I’m lucky in that my research has not been threatened with funding cuts the same way that embers has been, and I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now. Ember much love and solidarity to you, but my research does engage Palestine. I researched the Palestine Solidarity movement in Ireland and this past year has definitely been a whirlwind of being scared that I could get in trouble even for just talking about my own research on campus, scared that if I share my research with my students, that might be grounds for discipline.

So it’s definitely been this large existential fight of trying to write my dissertation and write it well while also feeling like Columbia doesn’t want me to be doing the dissertation that I am doing. At the same time, I’ve been really invigorated and motivated through working with my fellow union members. I’m a member of our communications committee, which has obviously taken off a ton in the past few months with social media, internal communications and press, and figuring out how we as a union can sort of express our demands to a broader audience in America and around the globe. I’m also a member of our political education and solidarity committee, and that has been really moving, I mean really exciting to see how different members of our community and also the broader union work with other groups on campus through mutual aid efforts, through actions, through all sorts of activity to fight against this attack on higher ed. And lastly, I also joined our Palestine working group last year. Our union passed a BDS resolution, which then sort of necessitated the formation of our working group. And our working group has been working to think about what Palestine might look like in our upcoming bargaining. We are just entering bargaining and Conlin who’s here with us today can probably talk more about what that’s been looking like as they’re a member of our bargaining team.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should also be remembered from listeners from our previous episode with members of Student workers of Columbia. Don’t forget that the university expelled and functionally fired Grant Minor, the former president of Student Workers of Columbia, right before bargaining sessions opened with the university.

Conlan Olson:

Yeah, that’s right. This is Conlin. Like Jesse said, I’m a member of the bargaining committee at Student Workers of Columbia. I’m also a PhD student in computer science. I study algorithmic fairness and data privacy, which are sort of terrifyingly relevant right now. And in addition to our current contract campaign, just on a day-to-day organizing level, and we’re all really trying hard to build the left and build the labor movement among tech workers and STEM workers, which is an uphill battle, but I think is really important work. And I think there is a lot of potential for solidarity and labor power in those areas, even if at Columbia right now they feel under organized.

And in our contract campaign, we are currently, we have contract articles ready. We have a comprehensive health and safety article that includes protections for international students. We have articles about keeping federal law enforcement off our campus. And of course we have all the usual articles that you would see in a union contract. We have a non-discrimination and harassment article that provides real recourse in a way that we don’t have right now. And so we are ready to bargain and we have our unit standing behind us and the university really has refused to meet us in good faith. As Max said, they’ve fired our president and then we still brought our president because he’s still our president to bargaining. And the next time we went to schedule a bargaining session, they declared him persona non grata from campus. And so we said, well, we can’t meet you on campus because we need our president. Here’s a zoom link. And Columbia, of course refused to show up on Zoom. So we are frustrated. We are ready to bargain. We have the power, we have the contract articles and the universities refusing to meet us. So we are building a powerful campaign to ask them to meet us and to try to get them to the table and work on reaching a fair contract for all of our workers. Yeah, I think that’s most of my day-to-day these days is working on our contract campaign.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I just want to say speaking only for myself and full disclosure, I am a former GEO member at the University of Michigan. I got my PhDs there as well, and I remember after already leaving the university to come work at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I was still a BD, meaning I hadn’t fully finished my dissertation and defended it. Then COD hit in 2020 and our university was doing the same thing of amidst this chaotic nightmare that we were all living through. My professors and administrators were saying, Hey, finish that dissertation. And I think I rightly said, I rightly expressed what many of us were feeling, which was, Hey man, I’ve earned that goddamn thing at this point. Just give me the degree. I can’t imagine how y’all are still trying to write and defend your dissertations amidst these funding cuts amidst when the future of higher education itself is in doubt. So I would just say for myself and for no one else, just give PhD candidates their goddamn doctorates at this point, man, what are you doing? But anyway, ember Lavinia, I want to go to y’all and ask if you could help us break down the FBI and police raids out there in Ann Arbor Ypsilanti all around the University of Michigan. Can you tell us more about what happened, how the people who were detained are doing, how folks on campus are responding and just where the hell things stand now?

Ember McCoy:

And you did a really thorough job covering the timeline of what happened on Wednesday morning. So on Wednesday between six and 9:00 AM the FBI, along with Michigan State police and local police officers in the three different cities and University of Michigan police conducted a coordinated raid in unmarked vehicles at the home of homes of multiple University of Michigan pro-Palestine activists. And I think that’s very important to name because the attorney general who a democrat who signed these warrants that have no probable cause is saying that in their press release that the raids don’t have anything to do with University of Michigan campus activism, and they don’t have anything to do with the encampments, but the people whose home berated are prominent pro-Palestine activists at the University of Michigan. So trying to say those things aren’t connected is not at all, and there’s no charges, right? There’s no charges that has happened for these folks whose homes have been rated. And so it’s just a crazy situation to say the least. I would say people are doing as well as they can be. Some of their immediate thoughts were like, I need to figure out my finals and I no longer have my devices or access to my university meme Michigan accounts because of duo two factor authentication.

Yeah. So I mean, I think the organizing of course is still continuing. Another big thing that’s happened. I guess to scale out a little bit, what happened Wednesday is just another thing that has happened in this year long campaign where the Attorney General of Michigan, Dana Nessel, is really targeting University of Michigan activists Ann Arbor activists for pro-Palestine free speech. So as you alluded to, there are 11 people facing felony charges from the Attorney general related to the encampment raid. There’s another four people facing charges as a result of a die-in that we did in the fall. And so that is also all still ongoing and very much a part of this. So there’s almost 40 different activists that they’re targeting across these different attacks. And we actually had Thursday, we had a court date coincidentally for the encampment 11, and it was the intention of it was to file a motion to ask the judge to recuse Dana Nessel, the Attorney General.

She has already had to recuse herself from a different case due to perceived Islamic Islamic phobic bias. And she’s a prominent Zionist in the state. And so our argument is kind of like if she’s had to recuse herself from that case, she should also have to recuse herself from this case. They would fall under similar intent. However, when we were at that court case, one of the encampment 11 also was accused of violating his bond. So as a part of their bond, they’re not allowed to be on campus unless for class or for work, though most of them have been fired from their jobs at this point. And he was accused of being, he was surveilled on campus 20 minutes after his class ended and he was walking through and stopped allegedly to say hi to friends. So he was sent to jail for four days right then and there.

The judge and the prosecutor originally said they were trying to put him in jail for 10 days, but they didn’t want him to miss his graduation and wax poetic about how they didn’t want his parents to have to miss his graduation. So instead, they sent him to jail for four days and he got out Sunday morning. And so yeah, it’s been a lot, right? There’s all these different things that are happening, but I think the organizing still continues. People are very mobilized. People are probably more agitated than they were before. And after this, a bunch of us are heading to a rally at Dana Nestle’s office in Lansing. So I would say that it definitely hasn’t curtailed the movement for a free Palestine and the movement for free speech broadly in the state of Michigan. That was long-winded, but lots going on.

Lavinia:

That was such a great summary, Amber. Great. Yeah. I also just want to add that there has been a lot of repression on campus that doesn’t rise to the level of criminal charges or legal actions. Instead, it’s stuff like, for instance, one of my friends was pulled into a disciplinary meeting because he sent a mass email about Palestine or there have been many instances of police deploying pepper spray on campus against protesters. So there’s also just kind of this general climate of fear, which is reinforced in many different contexts on campus, specifically surrounding Palestine.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Conlin. Jesse, I wanted to bring you in here because as we discussed in the recent episode with two other members of your union, Trump’s administration really set the template for this broader assault on higher ed by first going after Columbia. So what is your message to workers and students on other campuses like Michigan who are facing similar attacks? What can we learn from Columbia that may help people at other universities be better prepared for what’s coming?

Jessie Rubin:

Great question. First and foremost, I would say the biggest takeaway is that we help us. It’s us who take care of each other. We can’t expect the university or the administration to protect the most vulnerable among us to protect our international students, to protect our research. It’s us who has to create the infrastructure to keep us safe. For example, it was the union that provided the most robust know your rights trainings and detailed information to support international students on our campus. While the university has pretty much stayed silent and offered completely hollow support, I mean, we saw this with our fellow union member, Ron Boston, who had her visa revoked for totally no reason at all, and the university immediately dis-enrolled her from her program and from her housing. So it’s really clear that the university does not have our safety as a top priority. And if anything, I mean the university’s response to the Trump administration has made it clear that they’re not just capitulating, but they are active collaborators. And I would say that we can expect the same from other universities. And through their collaboration with the Trump administration, through their appeasement, we haven’t gotten anything. Columbia has gone above and beyond here, and even still our programs are getting hit with funding cuts and this continued federal overreach.

Conlan Olson:

And I think this lesson that appeasement gets us, nothing also has a parallel lesson for activists. So as a union, as activists, we can’t just sit this tight or wait this out, we can’t stay quiet in order to survive. And I really feel that if we start appeasing or hedging our bets, we’re going to lose our values and just get beat one step at a time. And this is why our union has really not backed down from fighting for Ranjani, why we’ve not backed down from fighting for a grant minor. And it’s why we’re fighting for such a strong contract with really unprecedented articles to protect non-citizens, to keep cops off our campus, to provide for parents to ensure financial transparency and justice in Columbia’s financial investments. And of course, to get paid a living wage. I think as a union, we could have backed down or softened our position, but I really think this would’ve meant losing before we even start.

We are labor unionists. We are people fighting for justice. If we start backing off, we’re just going to get beat one step at a time. And I do think that our activism is starting to work. So yesterday, Columbia, for the first time named Mah Halil and most of madi for the first time in public communications, and they offered slightly more support for non-citizens. And so to be clear, it’s still absolutely ridiculous that they’re not doing more and really despicable that they’re only now naming those people by name. But we are starting to see the needle moved because of activist campaigns by our union, both to pressure the university and to just provide, as Jesse said, know your rights training and outreach to students on our campus.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ember, Lavinia, I wanted to bring you all back in as well and ask if you had any kind of thoughts or messages to folks at Columbia or people on other campuses right now. I mean, of course this looks differently depending on what state people are in and what university they’re at. But I guess for folks out there who are listening to this and preparing for what may happen on their campuses, did you have any sort of messages you wanted to let folks know?

Lavinia:

Yeah, so I kind of want to echo Jesse’s point that really we keep us safe. Many of these university administrations I think historically are intransigent in their negotiations with students. So for instance, with go, we had a 2022 to 2023 bargaining cycle where the university didn’t really budget all. And I think that in some way sort of set the precedent for what’s happening now, but I think we know in general, sort of the incentive structures for these academic institutions are really not set up to support what protects grad workers or students or really people who are just in the community. So that’s why things like safety planning or for instance within NGEO, we have an immigration hotline, those sort of community infrastructures are so important. So I just really want to advocate for thinking about how you as a community can support each other, especially in the face of new or more exaggerated threats from the government and the university.

Ember McCoy:

And if I could just add quickly too, I think one, I want to name that part of the reason we were so prepared this week is because we are following the footsteps of Columbia and our Columbia comrades. We’ve been able to do similar safety planning and set up these hotlines because we witnessed first the horrors that happened to you all. And I think that’s really important to be able to directly connect with you all which we had been previously, and to help other people do the same. And as Livinia mentioned, the reason we knew the raids were happening at 6:00 AM on Wednesday is because one of the people called our hotline called our ice hotline and our ICE hotline as Jail support hotline and we’re able to get people out because that’s an infrastructure that they knew about to try to suddenly get people’s attention.

And another one of the homes we knew they were being rated because we have a group in collaboration with community partners where there’s an ice watch group and people put in the group chat that there was FBI staging nearby, and then they watched people raid someone’s homes. And that brought out tons of people immediately to the scene. And so those infrastructures, many of them were actually for ice, and there was not ice in collaboration in the FBI raid. But I think it’s really important how those infrastructures which build off each other originally were able to protect us and us safe on Wednesday.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Gang, I wanted to sort of talk about the signs of life that we’re seeing. And y’all mentioned some on your campuses, like amidst all of this darkness and repression, and as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of folks around the country, a lot of folks that I’ve talked to in higher ed have been really galvanized by seeing the news that Harvard of all places is fighting Donald Trump’s attacks. It may not be perfect, but it’s something right. And I wanted to ask if there are more efforts that you’re seeing on your campus or other campuses that are giving you hope right now?

Conlan Olson:

I just want to say, so I happen to be a Harvard alum also, and I don’t want to be too down here, but I think that the way that we should think about Harvard’s efforts are really what Max called them, which is just a sign of life. I don’t have that much faith in our institutions. I appreciate the Big 10 movement and that we need a diversity of tactics here. But we should also keep in mind that yesterday Harvard renamed its diversity office and cut all of its affinity graduation celebrations in response to pressure from the federal government. Harvard remains invested in Israeli genocide and continues to suppress student protest. They fired the leadership of the Center for Middle East Studies last month. And so while I appreciate this sort of sign of life, I really feel that our institutions are not going to save us.

And so these days looking for inspiration, I’m far more inspired by activist movements by students, staff, professors, community members. So for example, yesterday just the same day that Harvard canceled these affinity graduation celebrations, students responded committing to holding their own, and we’re still seeing student protests, we’re seeing increasing faculty support for student protests, which is really important to me. We’re seeing mutual aid projects. We’re seeing legal movements to fight against visa ramifications. And so I think these places really from the ground up and from activism by the people at these universities are much more the things that are inspiring me these days.

Jessie Rubin:

I completely agree with Conland that it’s been so heartwarming to see the power of student movements, the power of working people movements on our campuses. It’s been heartwarming to see encampments starting to pop up again around the country even though the stakes are much higher than they’ve been than ever. Students are putting their bodies on the line, they’re risking expulsion, they’re risking arrest, they’re risking physical injury. And it’s really clear that no matter how hard our administrations try to stamp out dissent, including by expelling core organizers, that students keep coming out in and greater force and developing new tools to keep each other safe. And we see that this student pressure works. Just a few days ago, MIT was forced to cut ties with Elbit systems after a targeted campaign by a BDS group on campus. EL I is an Israeli arms company and has been a target in many BDS campaigns across the globe.

Ember McCoy:

Yeah, one thing I similarly, I similarly don’t want to be a downer, but one thing I think for us that’s been really present on my mind at least this week is the importance of also making connections between not just what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate the targeting of pro-Palestine activists, but what Democrat elected officials are doing in the state of Michigan to help support that. Dana Nessel, who is our attorney general is there’s all these articles and things and she’s coming out being like, oh, she’s a big anti-Trump democrat. She’s taking an aggressive approach to these ICE and these lawsuits. But at the same time, she sent Trump’s FBI to our houses on Wednesday, and she’s continuing to prosecute our free speech in a way that is really important to connect the criminalization of international students or international community members who are then that platform is then going to be able to be used, potentially could be used to by Trump’s administration.

And so there’s all these really important connections that I think need to be made. And for me, obviously what the Trump administration is doing is horrible, but it’s also really, really important that to name that this did not start or end with the Trump administration and it’s being actively facilitated by democratic elected officials across the United States. But I think one thing that’s a bright spot is I do think that activists at the University of Michigan and in our community are doing a really good job of trying to name that and to have really concrete political education for our community members. And I’m really inspired by the ways in which our community showed up for us on Wednesday and the rest of the week and the ways in which people were able to galvanize around us and act quickly and kind of test our infrastructures as successful in that way.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think the threats to academic freedom through things like grant withholding or threatening DEI offices or what have you, are I think waking up faculty in particular to sort the broader power structures which govern universities. And those power structures frequently don’t include faculty. So a lot of them are, I think being, I wouldn’t say radicalized, but awakened to the kind of undemocratic nature of these institutions and specifically how they can threaten their students. I mean, I know especially as PhD students, we do tend to work closely with a lot of faculty. And I think there is sort of an inspiring change happening there as well.

Ember McCoy:

One additional thing about Harvard is I would say I agree with everything Conlin said, and the University of Michigan has the largest public endowment in the country. We now have a 20 billion endowment. It’s $3 billion more than it was in 2023 when we were doing our strike. And part of I think why Harvard is able to make the statement so that they can around resisting Trump’s funding is because they have the resources to do so, and a lot of institutions do not. University of Michigan is one that absolutely does. And so I do think it helps us try to leverage that argument that what is the 20 billion endowment for if it’s not for right now, why are we just immediately bending the knee to the Trump administration, especially on a campus that is known to have a long legacy of anti-war divestment and all of these other really important things.

And two weeks ago, I think it was time is nothing right now, but we got an email from President Ono saying that the NIH is requiring that institutions who get grants from the NIH certify that they don’t have diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And this was a new thing, do not have BDS campaigns, that they’re not divesting from Israel, which is not only obviously one of the main demands of the TER Coalition, but has also been a demand that students on campus that geo has taken stand for decades for over 20 years at the University of Michigan. And so seeing that all being facilitated is really, really scary, and I think it’s really frustrating that the University of Michigan administration is doing what they’re doing. So I think for me, there’s just a little teeny glimmer of hope to be able to use that as leverage more than anything.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and as we’ve mentioned on this call and in previous episodes, I mean the Trump administration is using multiple things to justify these attacks, including the notion that universities are just overrun with woke ideology embodied in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, trans student athletes participating in sports. But really the tip of this authoritarian spear has been the charge that this administration is protecting campuses from a scourge of antisemitism that is rampant across institutions of higher education around the country. And of course, like plenty of university administrations have gone along with that framing and have even adopted policies that accept the premise that criticism of the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is tantamount to anti-Semitism, including Harvard. And so I wanted to just ask y’all, if you had a chance to talk to people out there who are buying this, what is the reality on campuses? Are they overrun with antisemitism and wokeness the way people are being told? What do you want people to know about the reality on campus versus what they’re hearing from the White House and on Fox News and stuff?

Jessie Rubin:

Yeah, I mean, I can start by answering as an anti-Zionist Jew, I would say that the schools are of course not overrun by antisemitism, but instead we’re seeing growing mass movements that are anti genocide movements, that are Palestine liberation movements, and that is by no means antisemitic. And on top of that, these new definitions of antisemitism that are getting adopted on campuses actually make me feel less safe. They completely invalidate my identity as an anti-Zionist Jew and say that my religion or my culture is somehow at odds with my politics.

Ember McCoy:

I mean, I would just echo what Jesse said. I think that’s something we’re definitely being accused of, right at the University of Michigan, like you said, the elected officials are Zionists, right? And so they’re weaponizing this argument of antisemitism on campus and while also persecuting and charging anti-Zionist Jews with felony charges for speaking out for pro-Palestine. I think for those listening really all, it seems so simple, but I feel like it’s just you have to really listen to the people who are part of these movements and look as who’s a part of it. Because I think, as Jesse said, it’s really an intergenerational interfaith group that have shared politics. And it’s really important to understand that distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism that is being inflated in really, really terrifying ways.

Conlan Olson:

And I would just say the encampments, especially last spring and now again this spring and student movements really community spaces and spaces where people are taking care of each other, and that is what it feels like being in campus activism these days. I feel cared for by my comrades and the people I organize with. And I think that when we say solidarity, it’s not just a political statement, it’s also something that we really feel. And so yeah, I would invite people worried about antisemitism or other divisive ideologies on college campuses to just listen to the students who feel cared for and who are doing the work to care for each other.

Lavinia:

Yeah, I think one thing that was really wonderful, at least about the encampment at U of M is that there were lots of people who I think did have this misconception that there was some relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and then upon visiting the encampment and seeing the kind of solidarity that was being displayed there, they sort of potentially were a bit disabused of that notion. Unfortunately, I think that’s part of why the encampments in particular were so threatening to university administrations and Zionist officials, et cetera.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, Lavinia, Ember, Jesse Conlin, there’s so much more that we could talk about here. But with the final minutes that I have, I wanted to focus in on the fact that y’all are unions and union members, and this is a show about and for workers. And I wanted to round things off by sort of talking about what role unions and collective labor power have to play in this terrifying moment. How can graduate student unions like yours and other unions like faculty unions and unions representing staff workers on campuses, what can labor organizations do to work together to fight this?

Jessie Rubin:

Sure. Thank you for your question. The first thing that I want to say is as workers, the most powerful tool that we have is our labor, and we have the power to withhold labor. We have to remember that we’re not just bystanders who the Trump administration can cross with no consequences. Graduate students, we produce their research that saves lives in human health. We write books that shape American life and we invent the things that America is so proud of. We also teach undergraduates, the university would just simply not run without its graduate students. So a strike poses a threat that simply cannot be ignored.

Conlan Olson:

And in addition to our work in higher education, the whole point is that we believe in solidarity, and that includes solidarity across sectors and across borders. And of course, mobilizing in this way is a huge task, but we’re seeing really inspiring work. For example, UIW Labor for Palestine is a coalition of workers in manufacturing to legal services to higher education, all fighting together against investment in Israeli genocide. And so I think that cross sectoral organizing both between grad students and other unions on campuses, but even unions, not on campuses at all, is really important. And I think working to connect people is a huge part of the work that needs to be done now.

Ember McCoy:

So I think we already little mentioned a little bit at the University of Michigan, what we built during our strike and the organizing model and the networks and community that we built at that time has directly supported our pro-Palestine activism and our ICE organizing and the combination of the two through things like safety planning department meetings, and then literally being the institutions that have resources to do things like set up a hotline or to have bodies that are mobilized and already connected to each other. And so a lot of it is, I don’t feel that we’re even reinventing the real wheel right now, right? It’s like unions are this space where this collective organizing and this solidarity and financial and physical and legal resources already exist. And so we should absolutely be leveraging those to protect ourselves and our comrades. And at the University of Michigan, I know this is not the case everywhere, including Columbia, but until two weeks ago anyways, there hadn’t been a unionized staff member who was fired. So while undergrad research assistants were getting hiring bands and being fired from their jobs, they’re not unionized, grad workers were not being fired. And I think a lot of that is in part because we have an incredibly strong contract. And it would’ve been really hard to fire someone who was a graduate teaching instructor last two weeks ago. There was a full-time staff member who was fired for something or for allegedly participating in a protest that happened before she was even hired or applied to the job.

She is a part of our new United Staff University staff United Union. Is that right? Vidia? Did I? Yeah, I think it’s university. Okay. Yeah. So she’s a part of our university staff, United Union. They don’t have a contract yet though. So she is in a position where she has people that can start to try to fight for her, but then they don’t have a contract. And so I think also for workers who are not yet unionized, this is a really critical time to be able to use that type of institution to protect workers because we are seeing it work in many places.

Conlan Olson:

And just to build on that, I think one troubling pattern that we’ve seen recently is people who are nervous to sign a union card because they’re worried about retaliation for being involved with labor organizing. And just to start, I think that fear is totally understandable, and I don’t think it’s silly or invalid, but I also think that we need to remember that people are far safer in a union than they are without a union. And so in addition to our power to withhold labor, we’re also just a group of people who keep each other safe. So we have mutual aid collectives, we run campaigns to defend each other, like the one that we’re running for Rani. And so lying low is just not going to work, especially in this political moment. And so yeah, I really want people to remember that unions keep you safe.

Lavinia:

I think empirically there has been sort of a duality in the organizing conversations that we’re having for GEO as well where people both see how dangerous the situation is right now and want to be involved, but at the same time, especially if they’re not a citizen, they don’t necessarily feel comfortable exposing themselves, I guess. So I think one thing that’s just important in general for unions right now is providing avenues for people who are in that situation to get involved and contribute, even if that’s not necessarily going to the media or speaking out in a very public way.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the last couple minutes that we have here, I wanted to end on that note and just acknowledge the reality that this podcast is going to be listened to by students, grad students, faculty, non university affiliated folks who are terrified right now, people who are self-censoring, people who are going back in their Facebook feeds and Instagram feeds and deleting past posts because they’re terrified of the government surveilling them and scrubbing them. And people are worried about getting abducted on the street by agents of the state losing their jobs, their livelihoods, their research. This is a very terrifying moment, and the more filled with terror we are, the more immobilized we are and the easier we are to control. So I wanted to ask y’all if you just had any final messages to folks out there on your campus or beyond your campus who are feeling this way, what would you say to them about ways they could get involved in this effort to fight back or any sort of parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with before we break?

Lavinia:

I think doubt is a wonderful time to plug in. So for people who maybe previously hadn’t been thinking about unions especially as sort of an important part of their lives or thought, oh, the union on my campus is just doing whatever it needs to do, but I don’t necessarily need to have any personal involvement in their activities, I think right now is when we need all hands on deck given the level of political repression that’s happening. And also just to maybe bring in that old Martin Eller quote about first they came for the communist and I did not speak up because I was not a communist, et cetera. I think it’s also just really important to emphasize that I don’t think any of this is going to stop here. And even within the context of pro-Palestine organizing at the university, it is basically escalated in terms of the severity of the legal charges that are being brought. Obviously bringing in the FB is kind of really crazy, et cetera. So I don’t think that this is going to stop here or there’s any reason to assume that if you are not taking action right now, that means that you’re going to be safe ultimately. Yeah,

Ember McCoy:

And I think I would add, like many of us had said in the call, I think it’s very clear that we keep each other safe. The institutions that we’ve built, the organizing communities that we’ve built are very much actively keeping each other safe. And I think we’re seeing that in many different ways. And it’s important to acknowledge that and see that we’re much stronger fighting together as a part of these networks than that we are alone.

Conlan Olson:

I think as a closing thought, I also just want to say I think it’s really essential that we expand our view beyond just higher education. And so let me say why I think that’s true. So people know about Mahmud and Mosen and Ru Mesa, but I also want people to know about Alfredo Juarez, also known as Lelo, who’s a worker and labor organizer with the Independent Farm Workers Union in Washington state. And Lelo was kidnapped by ice from his car on his way to work in the tulip fields about a month ago. He’s an incredibly powerful labor organizer. He’s known especially for his ability to organize his fellow indigenous mixed deco speaking workers, and he was targeted by the state for this organizing. I think it’s important to keep this in mind and to learn from campaigns that are going on elsewhere and also to contribute to them.

And also I want people to remember that it’s not all dark. And so one story that was really inspiring to me recently was that in early April, a mother and her three young children living in a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario and upstate New York were taken by ice. And in response, the town, which keep in mind is a predominantly Republican voting town, turned out a thousand out of 1300 people in the town to a rally, and the family’s free now. And so we’re all labor organizers. Turning out a thousand out of 1300 people is some seriously impressive organizing. And I think learning from these lessons and keeping these victories in mind is really important. Not only as just an intellectual exercise, but also solidarity is something that we do every day. So it’s for example, why we fight for divestment from genocide. It’s why we do mutual aid. It’s why we engage with the neighborhoods that our universities are in. It’s why we don’t just defend our comrades who are highly educated, who have high earning potential, but we also defend our comrades who are taken, whose names we don’t even know yet. And so I just think expanding our view beyond just higher education is both a source of wisdom and something that we can learn from and also a source of hope for me

Jessie Rubin:

Really beautifully said Conlin. And I just want to add that expanding our view beyond higher education also includes the communities that our campuses reside on. I mean, I’m coming from a Columbia perspective where my university is consistently displacing people in Harlem who have been there for decades in this project of expanding Columbia’s campus continues to this day, and it’s something that we must fight back against. It’s really important that we protect our neighbors, not just on campus but also off campus. It’s important that we get to know our neighbors, that we are truly fully members of our greater community.

Ember McCoy:

If folks listening are interested in supporting us here at the University of Michigan, and I hope our Columbia colleagues can do the same, we have a legal slash mutual aid fund for our comrades who are facing charges and who are rated by the FBI. It is Bitly, BIT ly slash legal fund, and that is all lowercase, which matters. And we’re also happy to take solidarity statements and Columbia SWC did a great one for us and we’re happy to do the same. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Ember McCoy and Lavinia from the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization and Jessie Rubin and Conlan Olson from Student Workers of Columbia University. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

A dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities: ICE agents are snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight; student visas are being revoked en masse overnight; funding cuts and freezes are upending countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure; students are being expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An all-out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by law enforcement, internet vigilantes, and even university administrators. Today’s climate of repression recalls that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist Red Scare in the 1950s, but leading scholars of McCarthyism and political repression say that the attacks on higher education, free speech, and political repression we’re seeing today are “worse” and “much broader.”

In this installment of The Real News Network podcast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of scholars about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks we’re seeing play out today, and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight them. Panelists include:

• Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American higher education, and a member of the American Association of University Professors national committee on academic freedom and tenure. Schrecker is the author and co-editor of numerous books, including: The Right To Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom; The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s; No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities; and Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America
• David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, host of the podcast Speaking Out of Place, and author of several books, including: Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back; The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age; and Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier
• Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan. Wald is an editor of Against the Current and Science & Society, he serves as a member of the academic council of Jewish Voice for Peace, and he is the author of a trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina Press: Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left; Trinity of Passion: The Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade; and American Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War

Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News and it’s so great to have you all with us. Higher education looks very different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education during the first Trump administration just a few short years ago. As you have heard from the harrowing interviews that we’ve published at the Real News interviews with faculty members, graduate students and union representatives, a dystopian reality has gripped America’s colleges and universities under the second Trump administration fear of ice agents snatching and disappearing international students in broad daylight student visas revoked on mass overnight funding cuts that have upended countless careers and our entire public research infrastructure, self-censorship online and in the classroom, students expelled and faculty fired for speaking out against Israel’s US backed genocidal war on Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, an all out assault on higher ed and the people who live, learn, and work there is being led by the federal government and aided by police, internet vigilantes and even university administrators.

Now, when you go digging into the darker parts of American history to find comparisons to the bleak situation we find ourselves in now, one of the obvious periods that stands out is that of McCarthyism and the height of the anti-communist red scare in the 1950s. In her canonical book, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the universities historian Ellen Schreker writes the following, the academy’s enforcement of McCarthyism had silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and snuffed out all meaningful opposition to the official version of the Cold War. When by the late fifties the hearings and dismissals tapered off. It was not because they encountered resistance, but because they were no longer necessary, all was quiet on the academic front. In another era, perhaps Schreker also writes, the academy might not have cooperated so readily, but the 1950s was the period when the nation’s, colleges and universities were becoming increasingly dependent upon and responsive toward the federal government, the academic communities collaboration with McCarthyism was part of that process.

My friends, we now find ourselves in another era and we are going to find out if colleges and universities will take the path they didn’t travel in the 1950s or if we’re going to continue down the horrifying path that we are currently on. Today we’re going to talk about the Trump administration’s authoritarian war on an effort to remake higher education in America, the historical roots of the attacks that we’re seeing play out today and what lessons we can draw from history about how to fight it to help us navigate this hairy terrain. I am truly honored to be joined by three esteemed guests. First, we are joined by Ellen Schreker herself. Professor Schreker is a historian and author who has written extensively about McCarthyism and American Higher Education, and she’s a member of the American Association of University Professors National Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

She’s the author of numerous irreplaceable books including her most recent work, which she co-edited called The Right to Learn, resisting the Right Wing Attack on Academic Freedom and other Titles Like The Lost Promise American Universities in the 1960s, no Ivory Tower McCarthyism and the Universities, and many are the Crimes McCarthyism in America. We are also joined by Professor David Plumal Liu Louise Hewlett Nixon professor in comparative literature at Stanford University. David is the author of several books including his most recent one, speaking out of Place, getting Our Political Voices Back. He is also the host of the podcast speaking out of place which everyone should listen to. And lastly, we are joined by Professor Alan Walt. Alan is an editor of Against the Current and Science and Society. He’s the h Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus of English Literature and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Wald is the author of a vital trilogy of books from the University of North Carolina press about writers and communism in the United States, and he serves as a member of the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and full disclosure here, I myself am a former student of Allen’s, but he really kicked my butt in grad school, so trust me when I say I don’t think you guys have to worry about any special treatment here. David Ellen Allen, thank you all so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I truly appreciate it and I wanted to just kind of dive right in and ask if we could go around the table and start where we are here and now from your vantage points, how would you describe and assess what’s happening to higher education in America right now? Would you describe this as fascism, McCarthyism, an authoritarian takeover or something else? And does it even matter what we call it at this point?

Ellen Schrecker:

We can call it all of the above and then some or as my favorite sign at the first really big demonstration I was at I guess about two weeks ago, make dystopia fiction again. That’s where we are, and I used to get all sort of into, was it McCarthyism? Of course, it’s not just one man, it’s not even just Trump, although he seems to have a sort of lock on authoritarianism of a certain what shall we say, manic type. But it’s the difference between what I’ve been studying for the past 40 years, I guess if not longer, is that now everything is at play during the McCarthy period, and I do use the term McCarthyism just because it’s sort of specifically located in the anti-communist red scare of the Early Cold War. We could call it the home front of the Cold War if you wanted, just focused on individual communists, their past, their refusal to collaborate with that iteration of political oppression. And today it’s much broader. What the Trump administration is doing is focusing completely on everything that has to do with higher education as well as pretty much everything that has to do with everything else. I mean, this administration is worse than anything I’ve ever seen as a historian or studied. The closest that it comes to really is the rollback of the Civil War, the rollback against reconstruction when people were being shot by the dozens, and we haven’t gotten that blood thirsty, but I’m scared to death.

Alan Wald:

There are two points that I want to make. First of all, as Ellen very effectively pointed out, we’re now in this kind of broad spectrum crisis every single day, everything’s happening all at once. It’s hard to get a fix on what the most important thing to me from my perspective and my experience, you can’t lose sight of what precipitated the current situation. Would it begin, and I referred to it as the antisemitism scare. It’s an obvious comparison to the red skin, but there’s a pretext for what’s going on today, and that started several a while back like October, 2023. That’s when the real assault on student rights and academic freedom began and was started under the Biden Harris administration that is Democrats as well as Republicans. They targeted pro-Palestinian speech in action with this exaggerated claim. They were claiming that there was an epidemic of antisemitism rampant on the campuses.

You hear those two terms over and over epidemic rampant, and they said it was an epidemic that was endangering the safety of Jewish students. Of course, Jewish students were in the vanguard. Now we’re not talking about a small number of real anti-Semitic acts. Those could have occurred if there were real anti-Semitic acts I’m against. I want to oppose ’em if we can accurately identify them. But what was happening was this kind of bonkers exaggeration, a conflation of militant anti-Israel and anti-Zionist critique, which it can be vulgar or sometimes simplistic and sometimes not very helpful, but it’s not antisemitism. And it became a kind of smokescreen anti antisemitism now that Trump administration is using to attack all these other things because it worked. I mean, for a while they were trying to use critical race theory and so on, but this antisemitism and for various reasons we can discuss that was a better smear.

Now the other question you raised that I’ll try to tackle briefly is just this, is it fascism? I’ve been in study groups where we go back and forth about this. Are we talking about fascism as a rigorous theoretical economic concept or is this fascism thing and a rhetorical advice because we want to sound the alarm or is it just an epithet? Everybody’s a fascist. Reagan was a fascist, Johnson was a Goldwater, everybody. And what does it mean if you call somebody a fascist? What does that imply in terms of your action? Joe Biden did not do any great favors when he called Trump a fascist. Then he smiles and hands the guy, the keys to the White House. Is that what you do when there’s real fascism? Some people would say that that kind of obscures the situation. So we have to be careful about these terms.

I don’t think rhetorical overkill will help things. But on the other hand, there is the resemblance to classical fascism and what’s going on in terms of a mass movement right wing, the usurp of political powers and so on. At the same time as I understand that there is a fascist aspect, this, and maybe it’s a kind of new fascism post fascism on the edge of fascism, probably it’s more like or band’s dictatorship over Hungary where he used economic coercion to undermine the universities, undermine the press, undermine everything. But one thing about this fascism cry, if we go back to McCarthyism, and Ellen knows this better than I do, they left and especially the communist movement said that was fascism. They said it was one minute to midnight and the communists, they did what you do when you think it’s fascism. They sent a layer of people underground.

They sent a whole leadership underground because that’s what you do when you’re facing fascism. And it looked bad. 1954, they had executed the Rosenbergs, they had the leadership of the party and a lot of the secondary leadership were in prison. Lots of people were being fired, terrible things were going on. And yet in 1955 in December, in the deep South, which is where things were much worse, the Montgomery bus boycott occurred under fascism supposedly September 19, I mean December, 1955. And in September 57, the Little Rock nine stood up and went to a school and faced down a mob and so on. And in 1960, the sit-in movement began. This is just shortly after we supposedly had fascism, and then of course 1961 of Freedom Rides 1964, the Berkeley free spoof free speech. We know this because some of us, we lived through all that. So if that had really been fascism as people were saying, then why did it disappear in this matter? And it was just a small number of people at first who fought against it. So we have to be careful about using that term fascism. I think it’s good to look at the comparison and gird ourselves, but we shouldn’t get too hysterical and think all us lost start leaving the country like certain professors at Yale have done. We have to gird ourselves through a tough fight. And there are a lot of ways we could wage this fight, which I’m sure we’ll get into in a future discussion.

David Palumbo-Liu:

Yeah, I mean, I would just say in terms of fascism, we think we can all agree to bracket it and refer to it because there are certainly fascistic elements in it. And the classic definition, or one classic definition, I suppose there are lots, a fascism is the collusion of the business in political classes. And you can see that precisely in Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, the intense privatization of everything in education, not just education, but any kind of public good. That’s the primary aim that Musk is driving for. And for Bannon, its immigrants. I mean, it’s a very racialized attack, feeding off America’s pretty natural racism and the attacks on brown and black people. And I’m thinking, I’m here for the list of, I’m here as a substitute, a last minute substitute for Cherise Bird and Stelli, and I urge everybody to read her book Black Scare Red Scare because she puts these two facets together historically beautifully.

But I think that’s this powerful conversions of these two things. And when it comes to universities, the fact that they’re attacking the funding, which is public funding, is emblematic of what we’re up against. And so that’s where I think I would like to respond to the fashion what we’re up against. It is massive. The other thing I would add simply because I’m here in Silicon Valley is techno fascism. We are dealing with an entirely different mediascape. So thank God for the Real News Network. It is all US alternative media. It is an incredibly important instrument in the fight against the mainstream media and Trump’s absolute mastery of playing that. So I think we have to understand the technological changes that have occurred to make the battle both more challenging, but also offer us different kinds of instruments.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, there’s so much to think about in just these opening responses from you all, and I want to dig deeper into the historical roots of this moment. But before I do, I just wanted to go back around the table really quick and ask if you guys could just tell us a little bit about what this looks like from your vantage point. What are you and your colleagues, your students, your former students feeling right now? I mean, David, we had you on during the student encampment movement last year, Alan, I was organizing in Ann Arbor during the last Trump administration. Things have, the vibe has shifted as my generation says. So can you tell us a little bit of just what this all looks like from your sides of the academy right now?

Ellen Schrecker:

I’ve been retired now for, I think it’s 12 years. And so my normal was a campus that is very different from all other campuses in the United States. It’s an orthodox Jewish institution whose sort of cultural, what shall we say, politics is that of the Zionist, right? So I could not do any organizing on my campus, not because I was afraid of being fired or anything like that, but I just never would’ve had any students in my classes. So that was that. But what I’m seeing now is absolutely amazing. It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, they are really out for blood, but on the same time, the pushback is amazing. During McCarthyism, there was no student activity whatsoever, or if there was, it was secret. And I think there was some, and it was secret. And then all of a sudden the civil rights movement sort of burst into full flower.

And there was a realization, I mean I do agree with Alan on this, that the civil rights movement ended McCarthyism, no question about it. All of a sudden the political establishment had to deal with real problems, not fake communist subversion. So hopefully the moment will shift and people will begin to think about civil liberties and constitutional freedom and free speech just like the good old days of the 1950s. But it’s still very, very scary and it shows you that we are living and have been living longer than we knew with a very powerful state. And I think I’ll leave it there

Alan Wald:

In regard to anti-Zionist activity, it’s kind of an amazing development. I came to University of Michigan in 1975. I was involved then in the Palestine Human Rights Committee, all three of us. And it was a terrible struggle. We couldn’t even get Noam Chomsky permission to speak on the campus when sponsored by departments. We had to use other means and so on. So to see a massive, relatively large anti-Zionist movement is inspiring and it is fed by a new generation of Jews that is unlike my generation. There was a generation of young people who were thoroughly indoctrinated in Zionism after the 67 war throughout the late last century whose eyes were opened mostly by operation cast led and the events in Gaza in the early 20th century. And now they’re angry that they were lied to and they’re kind of the backbone. I mean, of course there are Palestinians and other students involved, but an important element are Jewish students who realized that they were deceived about what’s going on in the Middle East.

So that’s good. There’s also a big upsurge of faculty activism in areas not seen before. As Ellen has documented, the a UP was not very nice during the 1950s. It kind of disappeared. A UP is terrific today. I mean, I dunno might have something to do with the departure of Kerry Nelson, but the new president is wonderful and the chapter here is vital and vibrant. And also the faculty senate at University of Michigan, which was pretty dormant during my time of activist politics, is now playing a terrific role, has a terrific leadership, but it’s not much around Palestine, I have to say. That’s why I’m worried about that issue getting pushed aside. They’re very upset about what happened with DEI, diversity and equity and inclusion here at University of Michigan because just overnight without any real threat from the government, they just dropped it and pretty much forced out the director who’s now moving on to another position.

And so people are upset about that issue and the procedure used and they’re upset about the other threats, although we haven’t actually had the removal of faculty from programs like they did at Harvard’s one. But the Palestine issue is not that central. And some of the things related to it, like the new excessive surveillance, which I guess Maximilian didn’t experience, but there are cameras everywhere now on campus. I mean, you can’t do a thing without being photographed. People are upset about that. Those kinds of issues are mobilizing people, but I am worried about somebody being put under the bus and a compromise being made around Palestine rights and Palestine speech.

David Palumbo-Liu:

I’m going to take the liberty of answering the question in rather a fuller form because I might have to leave. So I want to get some of these points and sort of picks up on what Alan said. But to answer your question directly, max, how is it like at Stanford? Well, the Harvard statement gave everybody a shot of courage and it was great. I fully support it. However, I find it very deficient in all sorts of ways, even while admiring it. I’ll tell you a short anecdote to illustrate what I’m talking about. We had a focus group in the faculty senate and I was sitting next to this person from the med school and she said, well, yes, it’s horrible. Everybody’s talking about their grants being taken away. That’s the real surgeons of a lot of faculty activities. My grants have been taken away, so she said five of my grants were taken away, but two got replaced after I went through this application process.

So maybe that’s the new norm. And I said, well, only in baseball is batting 400 a good thing. And she said, well, I’m in ear, nose, throat, whatever. Thank God I’m not in gynecology or obstetrics. Then I’d really be in my grants. And I said, well, I teach race and ethnicity. What are you going to say about me not even be able to give a class much less? So I said to her, think of this as structural, not particular. It’s a structural attempt to take over, not just the university, but everything public. And that’s something I think we really need to drive home to folks, is that unless we see all these struggles interconnected, and that’s one of the big problems with the university is it’s not that we’re woke, it’s that we’re removed. We are not connected to human beings anymore. We’re connected to our, too much of us and our ones are connected to research.

And Ellen mentioned Jennifer Ruth, who’s a strong ally of mine. The day of action was amazing. This was a national day of action that was put on by the Coalition for Action in Higher Education. And it combined not only labor unions, but K through 12. And it had a vision of what we could do that far exceeded the, I will say it, selfishness of some of our elite colleagues in our elite schools who are just there to keep the money rolling. All they want is to reset the clock before Trump sort of mythical time that things were fine, but it was fine for them. And if they don’t understand exactly what Alan said and what we all think, if we can’t protect the most vulnerable of us, then we are leaving a gaping hole in the structure so that protect all of us. And so we can’t throw Palestinians, immigrants, undocumented folks, queer throat folks to the machine saying, well, we will appease you with these things and this is what happens under fascism. So I really want to encourage people to look, check out khi, check out the new reinvigorated a UP, thank God that it has partnered with a FT. These are the kinds of things that I think, if not save us, at least give us a sense of comradeship that we are doing something together that can be productive at whatever scale.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to go back around the table and hopefully we can get back to you, David, before you have to hop off for your next class. But we already started getting into this in the first round of questions, but I wanted to go a bit deeper and ask, when it comes to the state and non-state actors converging to attack the institutions and the very foundations of higher education, what historical precedents would you compare our current moment to, right? I mean, it doesn’t have to just be McCarthyism, but even if it is, what aspects of McCarthyism or what other periods do you want to point listeners to? And also what historical antecedents have laid the groundwork for the current assault on higher ed? So Ellen, let’s start again with you and go back around the table.

Ellen Schrecker:

Okay, well, the main thing about McCarthyism, which is sort of a classic case of collaboration of mainstream institutions with official red baiters at the time, now it’s official, what is it? Defenders of the Jews, thank you very much. It’s that collaboration. McCarthyism did it very cleverly. I don’t think they intended it, but they had sort of McCarthy as their straw man. He was up there, he was a drunk, he was out of control. He was making charges against innocent people. And so they would say, oh, McCarthyism is dreadful. And then fire three tenured professors, and we are seeing that, or we were up until, if you can believe it, Harvard, I have three Harvard degrees. I want you to know, and I thought I loved every minute of it and thought I got such a lousy education. You can’t believe it. But that’s beside the point. That’s not what you go to school for anyhow. You go to school to stay out of the job market as long as you possibly can. But anyhow, what we saw throughout McCarthyism throughout the 1960s, throughout going way back to the beginning of the 20th century, is that your private institutions are collaborating with the forces of what will be called political repression.

Political repression would not succeed in the United States without the collaboration of mainstream establishment institutions, the corporations. I’ve been starting to have bad dreams about Jamie Diamond Dimon the head of Citi Corp that he’s coming after me next and they’re going to close out my credit cards and there I’ll be standing in line in the homeless areas. But what we’re seeing is and have been seeing and is the American form of political repression, is that collaboration between mainstream institutions, including the mainstream media, Hollywood certainly going along with depriving the American population of access to information they need. I mean, that’s one of our functions as a force for resistance is to give people the intellectual ammunition to fight back. And I think everybody else here would probably agree.

Alan Wald:

My view is that in the 20th century there’s always been this collaboration, but it had a lot to do with foreign policy. As I remember the World War I period when they fired professors from Columbia and other colleges is because they were anti-war against the first World war. And during the Little Red Scare, 1939 or 41, it was because of the hit Hitler Stalin pack to the beginning of World War I and so on, which the communists were opposed to US intervention and the allies and so on. Then during the McCarthy period, again, it was reinforcing US foreign policy in the Cold War and during the Vietnam period when professors were fired, Bruce Franklin and other people were persecuted. Again, it was US foreign policy and now today around the assault on Gaza and support of the Israeli state, and again, it’s US foreign policy. So I see that as a very consistent factor and at every stage, community groups, businesses, and eventually the universities found some way to collaborate in a process even in the red skier, which I think is the most obvious comparison.

The government didn’t do the well, government fired it. It had its own subversive investigation in the government, and they fired a lot of people and forced a lot of people to quietly resign. That’s very similar to the situation today. But in terms of the faculty and other places, they counted on the universities to do the firing. They didn’t send many people to jail. They sent Chandler Davis to jail because of the contempt of Congress, but the others were fired by the university and the public schools and businesses blacklisted them and so on. So there was this kind of collaboration that went all the way. And of course they counted on the private sector to jump in certain areas and do their dirty work. All those are red channels. Those were private investigators. That wasn’t the government. The government may have fed them names, but today of course, we have Canary mission and we have other organizations that blacklist people and publicize their names and so on. And of course we have these massive email campaigns against universities having speakers like Maura Stein, if she goes to speak somewhere about being fired, thousands of emails will suddenly appear and they’ll try to cancel or some way change the venue of her speaking and so on. So this kind of pattern of interventions is pretty much consistent and it pretty consistently involves the state working with universities and businesses.

David Palumbo-Liu:

Yeah. Well, I think that you asked be at the beginning where you asked us all what’s going on campuses and what’s really striking a lot of fear of course is ice. And I think back to the Palmer raids, the Palmer raids, which were sort of the beginning of the justice Department acting as criminals and the whole idea of during the red summer, for example, and Max, this whole stop cop city, the Rico case being pressed against the protestors, right? This imaginary notion that they were all conniving together like mafia when the actual mafia is in the White House itself. So I think the whole capture of the Justice Department by the fascist state is what’s going to be one of the most formidable things because, and we’re pressing our universities, there are laws about where ice can go and where not, but they’re turning. They’re not making any public statements.

Some universities are giving sort of surreptitious, covert good legal advice to people who are getting their measles roped. But this is what’s appalling to me. No university leaders are really coming out and saying, no, dad, God damnit, this is illegal. I mean, they’re not speaking truth, and that’s what makes the whole enterprise shaky and vulnerable to assault. The more you push back, the Japanese called it, well with the trade wars, it’s extortion. You don’t pay an extortionist. Columbia tried it and failed miserably, and yet other are lining up saying, well, maybe in our case it’ll be different. And that’s sort of the definition of crazy when you keep on doing the same thing expecting a different result.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that takes my mind to the antecedent question, right? Because we’ve mentioned the new leadership of the American Association of University professors. I myself just interviewed President Todd Wolfson on our podcast working people, and he talked about this, how the decades long process of corporatization and neoliberal about which you have all written, and Ellen’s written an entire book about this subject, multiple books in fact. But Todd pointed to how that process over the past four decades has contributed to making universities uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of attacks that they’re facing now, which is a bit different from the situation described in Ellen’s book about McCarthyism and higher education that I quoted in the introduction where Ellen, you mentioned that in the fifties this was a period where colleges and universities were becoming more dependent on the federal government, and so they were more vulnerable to the top down like power moves of the federal government at that time. So I just wanted to ask what that looks like now in the year of our Lord 2025 when I ask about antecedents. What are the sort of changes to the very structure of higher education that have led to universities capitulating to the Trump administration, like David was just saying, or not defending their students, not defending academic freedom as vigorously as we would expect them to?

Ellen Schrecker:

Well, we could start with the backlash against the student movement of the sixties, which was orchestrated in large part by certain right wing groups, within groups of billionaires and right-wing think tanks and groups of libertarian, sort of pundit types that are now becoming fairly well known within the academic community before they were operating secretly. Now, they can’t quite keep everything secret because a lot of smart people have been writing about this, and especially the key work here that I always push is Nancy McLean’s book Democracy and Chains, which really sort of chronicles the rise of these right wings, think tanks that are creating scenarios for how you take over a university and destroy it. And also of course, how you take over a legal system and destroy it and how you take over a political system and destroy it often through the use of hundreds of millions of dollars.

I mean, we are talking about very big rich people, many of them, shall we say in the oil industry. I mean, they’re protecting their interests and they’re doing a very good job of that. I have the feeling that Elon Musk just sort of sticks a intravenous needle into the federal Treasury and withdraws however much money he wants. That is always the image I have of how he’s operating. And so the federal government is incredibly important here in a way that it wasn’t in the 1950s, in the 1950s, they were just throwing money at higher education. This is a period that’s been called by many historians, the golden age of American higher education. Well, it was in a certain sense, but they sold their soul at the same time to McCarthyism. So we’re always looking at these amazing contradictions and trying to figure out, okay, what’s their next step?

Rather than thinking about what should be their next step? How do we fight back? How do we can’t go back to a golden age? There was no golden age. Let’s start there and say, how can we get something that is going to support a democratic system of higher education for everybody in America and then go on. We’re not. But unfortunately for the past 40 or 50 years, they’ve just been backpedaling. These higher education establishment has been seeding ground to the forces of ignorance, and now we’re stuck with having to fight back. And luckily we are fighting back, even if not necessarily in a way that we love, because seeding an awful lot of ground.

Maximillian Alvarez:

With the few minutes I have left with y’all, I want to talk about the fight back, and I want to ask y’all like what lessons we can draw from our own history, both the victories and the losses about what we’re really facing and how we can effectively fight it, and also what will happen, what will our universities and society look like if we don’t fight now?

David Palumbo-Liu:

Okay, so I’ll say add my two minutes and pick up actually from what Ellen said, because yes, it was the reaction to the student protest movements in the sixties that for one thing made student loans unforgivable. That was Congress’s little knife in the gut. But remember the trilateral commission that Samuel Huntington headed, and he actually published this scree called There’s Too much Democracy. And to answer Max’s point, my recommendation is to restore a sense of what democracy should look like. And that’s the only way to do that is not to stay in our ivory towers, but to draw the resources for democracy and instill the capacity for action in everybody and make it possible for everybody to see that nobody is immune from this. This is tearing down the common trust that we have with each other and substituting this oligarchy that is beyond scale. Thank you so much for having me on. I’ll let you continue your conversations, but it’s been such an honor and a pleasure to be with Ellen. And Ellen and Max, I’ll see you a bit.

Alan Wald:

Okay. Look, first of all, I think that Ellen’s making a good point about the no golden age. It’s not if the universities were terrific defenders of student rights during the 1960s. I was at Berkeley. I mean, when I arrived at Berkeley, the National Guard was occupying the city. It was not a very nice atmosphere. And even here at University of Michigan, I was involved in a 15 year struggle to stop divestment in South Africa and get a degree for Nelson Mandela, 15 years. It took us of constant protests and trying to get to the regents meeting which they would ban us from, or they’d move to secret locations and have a million excuses. Oh, we can’t give a degree to Mandela in prison. We don’t give it to prisoners. Of course, eventually they gave in and they did give it to him, but it took 15 years.

And I mentioned already the problem with Palestine rights on the campus arguing for that was hell. So it’s not been perfect. I mean, now they’re invoking all kinds of new rules and regulations about time and place and bullhorn use of a bullhorn that they didn’t have before, or at least they weren’t punishing people before. So it wasn’t so great. And in terms of university repression, yes, it’s much worse for the Palestine protestors for some other groups, eil their protestors, they seem to get away with all kinds of things. But in terms of responses, first of all, everybody is saying, we need unity. We can’t give in. If we give in, it’s like putting blood in the water. The sharks come after you even more. And I apologize to these sharks who are offended by comparison with the Trump administration. But yeah, so we all agree on that, but I am concerned about them giving in on this IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Everybody’s praising Harvard, wonderful, wonderful, but Harvard already agreed to that horrible definition and they set a precedent, and that’s going to happen at a lot of places. And that is the wedge that’s going to cut out free speech and free discussion. If you don’t know this definition, the International Holocaust Nce Association that’s being promoted by Congress and supported by the Trump administration and I think will become the law of the land for Adeem. You should look at it carefully because of the 11 definitions of antisemitism. Seven, refer to Israel. Now, anybody who does research on antisemitism and the US knows that most antisemitism is young men who get it from social media. They get these conspiracy theories and so on. There is very little antisemitism on the left. The left is involved in criticizing Israeli state racism. But in addition, these 11 no-nos for defining antisemitism say that if you call the Israeli state racist, you’re an antisemite and antisemitism is not on the campus.

So instead of refuting that claim that Israel is a racist state, which it seems that way, especially with their law saying that only Jews have self-determination and not Palestinians, and they have 60 or so laws on the books against Palestinians and Apartheid and so on, instead of trying to refute that argument, they’re just trying to suppress it. And they’re also trying to suppress any comparisons with Nazi Germany. Now, that’s not something that I myself do a lot, but you can’t have scholarship without serious comparisons. And there’s certainly good arguments that there are comparisons to be made. So they’re trying to silence these things instead of refuting them in intellectual debate. And once they do that and get that institutionalized, that’ll lead to a lot of other things. So we have to draw a line, and I think that’s one of the things we got to draw a line on the IHRA definition.

Ellen Schrecker:

I couldn’t agree with you more, but it’s really hard when I get up to talk to sort of stick it in there and make sure that I say, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza, this has to stop. But at the same time, I know there are people who maybe aren’t aware of Gaza. It’s too horrible. You can’t look at it or something. I don’t know. It’s a very hard issue to deal with because I know that people will stop listening to you. How do you talk to, you make alliances with people who don’t want to hear what you say when you have to make alliances with those people. I don’t know how to do it yet. I’m learning, but I’m curious. I would like to discuss that issue and probably argue with you about it a bit.

Alan Wald:

Well, I’m not sure where the argument is. I think that the pro-Palestinian rights movement has to be more disciplined. I much support what Jewish Voice for Peace does. That’s why I join them. I think that they’re focusing on Stop the genocide. Jews don’t do it in our name. That’s great. Some of the other groups that march around waving flags that people don’t understand the difference between a Palestinian flag and a Hamas flag. So they’re told it’s Hamas flag and they believe it, or they use slogans that are incomprehensible or mean different things. Or

Ellen Schrecker:

If

Alan Wald:

You put a bus sticker on somebody’s house because you want to show that that administrator’s a Nazi, people know that the Nazi sign is something that’s used to intimidate Jews. So it’s confusing. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that needs to be cleaned up. I think it’s just a minority that’s not acting in a way that says, what will convince people before you do something, what is going to win people over? So there are debates about where to draw the line. For example, Peter Byard, he came here to speak recently and he said, I believe it’s genocide, but if I use the word genocide, people, they’ll shut up. They won’t listen to me. They’ll put their hands over their ears. So I describe all the things that amount to genocide, but I don’t use the term maybe in some audiences you have to do that. Solidarity is not just showing your anger and showing your support, it’s also figuring out how to help people. In this case, we have to build a mass movement to get the Zionist state and the United States off the backs of the Palestinians so that they’re free to determine their own future and their own kind of leadership, which I hope will be a democratic and secular one, not a conservative right wing religious one like Hamas. But we have to get the US and the Israeli state off their backs first. And that means building a mass movement.

Ellen Schrecker:

I have been waking up in the morning reading the New York Times much too closely and feeling incredibly depressed, and recently I am somewhat less depressed. I can go right to my computer and start writing something. I can feel that maybe it’s going to make a difference because I’m seeing much more fight back against political repression that I, as a historian, and I’m speaking as a historian, never saw in the past in a similar situation. And I think that I used to sort of say, well, we must fight. We must have solidarity. But I’d never said, I have hope, and now I do have hope. I think we are on the upswing, that the forces of ignorance are now shooting at each other and shooting themselves in the foot and are beginning to really understand that they’re not going to win because nobody what they want. And that’s as simple as that. Thank you.

Alan Wald:

I don’t think I can add much, but one mistake Trump is making is he is attacking so many different sections of the society that we have the basis for a majority against him. I mean, he is firing all these people. He is screwing up the economy. He’s taking away healthcare. I mean, it’s not just the universities. So there’s an objective basis for a majority toe against him. We just have to find a way to do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to thank all of our brilliant guests today, professor Ellen Schreker, professor Allen Wald, and Professor David Pumba Liu for this vital conversation. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. Before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now, we’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. So please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

“I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for bitcoin and crypto,” US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2021. In 2024, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said Texas “wears the crown as the bitcoin mining capital of the world.” But in small towns like Granbury, TX, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth, residents are the ones paying the price for Texas’ crypto boom. Granbury’s 300-megawatt bitcoin mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent over 20,000 computers from overheating. Many residents say that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town—and that their concerns are going ignored by the company and government officials. In this episode of Working People, we speak with four residents of Granbury living near the Marathon bitcoin mine: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, Nick Browning, and Virginia Browning.

Additional links/info:

• Protect Hood County website
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “‘We’re living in a nightmare:’ Inside the health crisis of a Texas bitcoin town”
• Andrew R. Chow, TIME, “Noisy neighbor: Bitcoin’s hidden health cost” (Video Report)
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “TRNN wins 2025 Izzy Award for coverage of East Palestine, OH, trainwreck & chemical disaster”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘I had to move away from everything that I ever had’: Chemically exposed residents of East Palestine, OH, and Conyers, GA, have been left behind”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘This is murder!’: Industrially poisoned South Baltimore residents march on state capitol, demand help from Gov. Moore”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Steve Mellon, & Mike Balonek, The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Keaton Peters, Inside Climate News, “Texas leaders worry that bitcoin mines threaten to crash the state power grid”
• NBC News, “Inside the Texas bitcoin mine reportedly making residents sick”
• James Pollard, The Texas Tribune, “Texas Republicans want to make the state the center of the cryptocurrency universe”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are beginning a new investigation in our ongoing series where we speak with working-class people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. As you know from listening to the voices and stories in this series, sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that harm and even threaten life itself.

Sacrifice zones, as ghoulish of a term as that is, they can look a lot of different ways, and the sources of toxic pollution or environmental devastation don’t all look the same, either. It can look like the mushroom cloud that exploded from the derailed Norfolk Southern bomb train in the sleepy rust belt town of East Palestine, Ohio. It can look like the black coal dust covering the windows and porches and the wheezing lungs of urban residents like here in South Baltimore.

It can also sound different. And as we’ll discuss in today’s episode, sound itself and the entity producing it, intense, relentless, torturous noise can be the main thing that’s actually hurting people. And that’s what Andrew R. Chow, a technology correspondent for TIME magazine, found in the town of Granbury, Texas, about an hour southwest of Fort Worth.

“On an evening in December 2023,” Chow writes, “43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas, and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. ‘It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,’ she says. ‘That pain was worse than childbirth.’

“Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s five-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a ‘red beam behind her eardrums.’ 

“It didn’t occur to Sarah that symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing their symptoms, but they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area — And was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

“The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor — ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo — says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.”

So you guys should definitely read this excellent piece by Andrew Chow in TIME, and you should watch the companion video report, both of which we’ve linked to in the show notes. And I want to thank brother Andrew for helping me to connect with our guests today, who are all residents of Granbury themselves and who have all been affected by the massive 300 megawatt Bitcoin mining operation near their homes.

Now, the mine, which is owned by Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, uses a mix of liquid immersion and industrial fans to prevent the over 20,000 computers from overheating there. Many residents have said that it’s the constant sound from those fans that has made life increasingly unbearable in their small town.

In a statement to NBC News for a report that they did six months ago on the Bitcoin mine, Marathon said what companies, frankly, always say when I’m investigating stories like these: that they are doing nothing wrong, that they’re the best of corporate neighbors, that they’re abiding by existing laws, and that there’s no proof they’re the ones causing harm to the community.

“Since [Marathon] took operational control of the data center in April 2024,” the company said, “we have gone above and beyond what is required in a well-established industrial zone to ensure our facility is best in industry, including engaging third-party experts to evaluate sound levels and investing millions of dollars to reduce the perceived loudness of the facility. As a result, all levels measured around the facility are well below state and county law sound limits. There is no established link, medical or otherwise, between [Marathon’s] operations and the ailments that are being alleged,” the company stated.

So with all of that upfront, let’s do what we do best and take you right to the front lines of the struggle and get the story firsthand from the people who are living it. I am so grateful to be joined today by our four guests. Danny Lakey is a resident of Granbury, and he joins us today along with Karen Pearson, and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning, all long-time residents of Granbury.

Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, thank you all so much for joining us today. I really wish we were connecting under better circumstances, but I’m really, really grateful to all of you for joining us and sharing your stories with us. And I wanted to start by asking if we could go around the table and have y’all tell us a bit more about who you are and what you do and what your life was like before this Bitcoin mine came to your town.

Danny Lakey:  So I’m Danny Lakey. I’m originally from Arlington, which is east of Fort Worth, and it’s about an hour and 10 minutes from where I live now. I am the newest Granbury resident. My wife and I, four years ago, sold everything we had, wanted to move out to the country, get someplace where it was quiet and get away from the big city. Little did I know that it would be louder where I live now than where I came from. So in the middle of 8 million people in the DFW metroplex, I had about a third the noise that I have in an area where I’ve got 30 people within 200 acres, 300 acres. You can’t imagine what it is.

I will admit, because they want to say that they’re not violating any state laws. That’s a lie. Texas has a nuisance law that says if somebody does anything that hinders you from using your property as you intended to use it, which in my case was a retirement place for me and my wife to enjoy life, they’ve taken that from us. That is a violation of state law. So when they say that they’re not in violation of any laws, they’re not — But that’s a civil law. They are not currently in violation of any state laws, but the state laws are inefficient in Texas, anything under 85 decibels — In most cities [it’s] limited to about 40 decibels, to put it in that perspective. Airports are regulated to 65 decibels during the day, if you want to know how high the threshold is for us on the noise violations. And they’ve gotten very, very close, and we have readings where they’ve exceeded it. But we’ve not been able to prove it in court, so they can say they’re not in violation of criminal law. When they say they’re not in violation of state law, they are misleading people.

Nick Browning:  Well, when we came here, that’s what we wanted to do. We sold our place in Santa Fe, Texas right out of Galveston because this was nice and quiet out here. They moved in on top of us. We didn’t move in on them, and they moved. That thing is right across, the Bitcoin mine is right across the street from my property, and I’ve had decibels, 83 on my front porch, and sometimes at night I’ve had more than 83. And a vacuum cleaner’s only 55, and who in the world is going to go to sleep with a vacuum cleaner running all night long in their house? And that’s what it’s like.

I’ve been in and out of the hospital with all kinds of problems. I never had a problem before — And they think I’m old, but I’m seasoned. We’re not old. And my wife has been in and out of the hospital. They said it was a brain tumor, but, as it turned out, it was not a tumor. All the stuff was sent to the University of Michigan, and they still don’t know what it is. It’s not a tumor, it’s not cancer. And a month or so after I had her there the first time, we had to go back again and stay another five days.

So they are lying. They put a wall up, but that sound goes right over top of that wall. And a sound expert said, if you live right beside that wall, it wouldn’t bother you as bad. Well, we don’t live beside that wall. So they’re trying to get in good with Granbury. They furnished money for the 4th of July fireworks, and they furnished money for the parades, and this and that, and they gave the sheriff’s department a big barbecue. But they’re trash. They’re not good neighbors at all. And Constellation, the fire plant, is not either.

Virginia Browning:  Out here where we are, we’re in the middle of the country. We have wild animals every place, and we enjoy every one of them. Even the coyotes we don’t mind because we know where we live, but they have ran away the birds, all the animals. We don’t even have snakes. So you can see how the sound is destroying the environment out here with the little animals.

Besides our health, our health is terrible right now, but it is what it is at the moment. We can’t do too much about it. We’re fighting it. Everybody out here is fighting it. But big corporations, they seem to be able to just get their way and we are left behind in the rubble of everything, but we don’t like it. We came out here, our children lived here. We wanted to be here with our children and our grandchildren and grandchildren, but we don’t get that peace anymore. So it’s miserable. It’s absolutely miserable. And when we have to go in and out of the hospital all the time, doctors all the time, that’s an invasion on us too.

Nick Browning:  There’s a big water line that comes from Lake Granbury all the way to the Constellation power plant. And that steam, they take that water and they make steam to turn those turbines. Well, when they put some of that steam up in the air, it has all kinds of chemicals in it. It has lead, mercury, carbon monoxide, a mist of acid and everything. Well, some of the water that they send over the top and to go back through their [inaudible] fans and stuff, they condense that steam back to water, and they have a holding pond. That water goes in that holding pond. And then from there, when they get so much, it’s dumped into the Brazos River. Well, that Brazos River comes right around. It comes right back to Lake Granbury again, where there’s already been a content… They did a sample and there was lead content in there, but they don’t want that to get out.

So eventually, if they keep on doing what they’re doing now, Lake Granbury won’t be a good lake at all to fish in. You won’t be able to eat the fish because they’ll have lead content in it and they’ll have a mercury content in it, but they don’t want nobody to know any of that. They keep all that hush.

Karen Pearson:  So just to dovetail a little bit off of what mom and dad have said, being out here for me, and to have to watch what they go through is extremely stressful too. I know that oftentimes at night they don’t sleep. Their bedroom is upstairs, and so that noise just penetrates their bedroom at night. So that makes their days rough. Cognitively, it causes issues, the stress of every day, day in and day out task when you’re tired and you don’t have sleep, and then it’s so fragmented or interrupted throughout many days, it causes a lot of stress and wear and tear on them emotionally, and also their physical health.

Part of what I wanted to do in their last part of their life… They’ll say they’re seasoned, and they are. They’re very seasoned and very independent, as much as they can be. But over the last two and a half years, their independence has definitely declined. And so then I come in as some of their being their caregiver for different things. It makes it very difficult to watch what they go through because this is not what they intended for the second part of their life.

I was given a great part in the first part of my life by my parents, and part of my goal was to give them the best quality of life in their second part. That’s not happening out here. Like mom said, a lot of the wildlife has gone away. That’s something that they enjoy every day, is to feed the birds and the deer and different things out here, take off on the golf cart and go feed. But that’s becoming less and less.

So many other things as far as their health. Dad with respiratory issues. Going back to mom’s, the complications of the brain issue. It is true there’s not a lot of data, not a lot of research out there, bnd so they fall back on that. But the odd thing is that while they say we might can prove that they’re causing this harm, there’s so many people in the area that are having many of the same similar things going on. And here’s my question back is while we might not can prove it, but you can’t prove that it’s not either.

And to mom’s issue, that biopsy, I saw a 1.3 centimeter creature in her brain. It was there. And they did a brain biopsy, and the University of Michigan could not — It wasn’t cancer, thank God — It doesn’t have the cell tissue of a tumor, it didn’t have the cell tissue of a mass. And then back in December — That was in July of this last year — December of this year, she had another episode. And the tumors, that creature, whatever it was, it’s gone. So it’s not there. But now the doctor is saying, but there was seizure activity in her brain. We don’t have seizures in our family, and my mom has never had a seizure in her life.

And then in our community, we have had a little child that started having unexpected seizures, and they had to move out of the area. So there’s just so many, they’re not coincidences. There’s so many things that are going on around here that are impacting our community, and we are trying to stand up and fight, again, big companies as best we can with what we have.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Danny, Karen, Nick, Virginia, I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could tell that story a bit more about how things have unfolded in your lives from the time that you first heard about this Bitcoin mine to now. When did you start sensing that something was deeply wrong here?

Danny Lakey:  Well, I think for me, and probably for most of us, we started hearing some things late 2023, November, December, and it was getting louder, it was intermittent. We saw what was going up over at the plant. Everybody was debating on, is it batteries? Nobody really knew what it was. And then somebody finally took a picture and said it’s Bitcoin, and then showed another mine from another area of the same type of machine. So then we knew what it was and we started paying a little more direct attention to where the noise was coming from because up until then, we just thought that the electric plant that had never had a noise problem was having these crazy fluctuations and didn’t know what to think about it.

It continued to get worse. The Brownings say that they registered 82 on their property, or 80, higher than 82 on their property. The highest I’ve ever gotten is 82. The day it was 82, I was walking in my backyard, and I just looked at the plant, and I’m like, what in the heck is that? And then I felt like I got punched in the chest. For the next two days I had a heart arrhythmia and I was having some issues with my heart. I work in the medical field, and so I have doctors that I can call at a whim. I called my PCP and he said no — Because my wife was like, he needs to go to the hospital. And my PCP said, no, I think this is sound related.

Basically, judging from my history, I’d only had that once before I got a steroid injection and found out that I’m allergic to steroids. And so an allergic reaction to a steroid caused that heart palpitation. But when I had my heart checked out then, my heart is in perfect condition. So this was way out of the ordinary and it was completely from the sound. And that day I registered 82 decibels on my property, and you could actually feel the ground shake.

My wife started having blackouts. She wrecked her car six times in four months, lost her job, wasn’t able to work. She’s still not working, which has been about seven months now, just because of all the issues that it’s caused her within her body.

The strangest thing for me is, on any given day, if you just want to see something funny, just take me to any public place or whatever. Let me sit for about 10 minutes, and I’ll fall asleep. And it doesn’t matter if I just woke up, it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is, when it is, I can fall asleep within 10 minutes because I don’t ever sleep. I used to sleep through the night, through trains, dogs, it didn’t matter. Nothing was waking me up. And now I’m up two, three times a night. I don’t sleep well at all.

You don’t understand what kind of an impact that has on you, the constant barrage of noise. But if you look at work rules from any OSHA, if you’re exposed to certain amount of noise levels, the louder it is, the shorter time of exposure, and the longer time of exposure, the longer you have to be away from it. Well, we exceed all of that on a daily basis, 24/7, and unfortunately we can’t get away from it. And because of what’s going on, they’ve plummeted our property value so much I can no longer get from our property what I put in it. And that’s just ridiculous.

Nick Browning:  We noticed it in 2022 and 2023 and right on up till today. I’ve never in my life had any heart trouble and I started having high blood pressure. So I went to her doctor because she has a pacemaker, and her doctor told me there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong with my heart, but I take high blood pressure medicine every night that he gave me. And a lot of the doctors around here, they don’t want to get involved in none of this stuff. But it’s done a number on us.

And not only us, all of our neighbors [are] the same way. We got neighbors around here, people you wouldn’t believe that had a heart trouble. And I’ve been in a hospital, I had to go to the emergency room one time with my ears, give me a ear infection. I’ve been in the hospital twice for flu. They said flu and pneumonia. So man, it’s been something else. And we’re not the only ones around here. There’s people all around us in this area.

There’s a school about three or four miles over from us, and even they’ve had kids in school. It affects their hearing and art and everything else. And it’s really done a number on us. They say they’re not doing anything but they’re lying. It is.

Karen Pearson:  Like what Danny said, we heard noises, couldn’t identify exactly what it was. And at first too, when you hear something like that and you think it might be the gas plant, that’s a bit alarming too because we weren’t sure if something was about to blow up, take off or what. So then as time continues to progress, and if the wind changes, it blows from the south, or nighttime it’s louder than daytime, there’s so many different factors that cause the noise to ramp up more than others — And really depending on where you’re sitting in reference to the facility, too, and what portion of the mines that they have going at the time.

But once we started realizing that it was actually coming from the mine, we were a bit surprised that they were allowed to even come into the area without us even knowing what was going on. None of us had been notified publicly that anything was going to take place, or they were going to be expanding to a Bitcoin mine company. We had no idea. All of a sudden it’s just upon us, and then we are having to deal with what’s happening.

And then at that point, it was more about we started noticing people getting sick, and then we started getting sick in our own homes. And I work from home, so I’m here 24/7. And over the last year and a half, I’ve seen decline in my dad’s hearing. Again, all these things that have started to come about. And then when you start hearing about your neighbor having some of the same stuff that you’re having, again, it’s not a coincidence. There’s too many people out here just within a couple mile radius that’s all experiencing some of the same stuff.

You know, the best thing about all this, we didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. I didn’t know Danny, I didn’t know Cheryl, I didn’t know a lot of our neighbors. This has brought the community together very rapidly for us to join together. Because, I shared this earlier with you, it’s like environmental euthanasia. We’re all out here in this together. We hear when one person, one of our friends had a pulmonary embolism and he was fine. When things like that start happening or if we don’t hear from somebody in a few days, we’re like, OK, is everybody OK? We hear ambulance come down the road, we’re texting each other. Hey, is that going to your house? We never had to do that before. We are now on such hypervigilant alert about things. Fire trucks go by. Is there anything going on out at the plant? Again, we can’t live peacefully anymore. They’ve invaded that peace, and we all stay just hypervigilant all the time. And like Danny said, you don’t sleep. So the community out here is like a war zone, is what I also equate it to. And you never know what bomb’s going to go off next.

Virginia Browning:  I was just going to say when she said you don’t know what bomb’s going to go off next, and we know it’s going to go off and it’s going to hit one of our friends, even [if] the ones we don’t know personally. But the thing of it is when we speak, when we’re talking to you, we’re talking for all of us out here. Our voice is what you hear, but we’re speaking for them too. So it’s not just a few of us. It’s all of us. And we don’t know how to get out of this. It is just like she said, it’s a war zone, and we don’t have any kind of backup, and that’s what we want. We want backup, and then we want it cleared out.

Nick Browning:  Another thing we have is she and I are retired. We live on a fixed income, and we’re not the only ones. There’s a lot of retired people out here. They try to say that this is an industrial area, it’s not an industrial area, it’s home sites. That’s it. There’s no industrial area out here. But they moved in on top of us anyway. And when they got people coming out here to work on that plant, they shut that plant down. They’re not even running with those people working inside there. And another thing, when they find out if there’s a reporter or something coming, I don’t know where they get their information, but they’ll shut down. They won’t be running. But it’s extremely loud over at Danny’s house. It’s louder at this house than it is at our house. I don’t know if they live down in the valley.

And then we also have a whole bunch of Spanish people that live across the road from it. They live right next to that thing. And some of them have been getting sick, but they won’t say anything because they scared they’ll get in trouble because I don’t know if they’re legal or illegal, but they’ve been here for 30-some years so they’re my neighbors.

And when we first started feeding all the — I feed the deer, the squirrels, the animals. Starting off, I had anywhere from eight to 10 squirrels. Well, I had one squirrel left today. I don’t have any squirrels, and only just a few deer, and just about everything else is gone. There’s just very few animals around here. But when they find out a news reporter or somebody’s coming, they’ll shut down for two or three days and some of the animals have come back. But still no snakes, no, the bird population is way down. And I’ve been feeding them every day for the last 25 years out of here. And it’s just not happening. They’re just, they’re ruining everything.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I cannot help but hear the echoes of other sacrifice zones and other working-class residents who have been poisoned, polluted, abandoned, and are dealing with different circumstances, but very similar situations to what you guys are dealing with. It’s harrowing how similar these stories sound, and it’s so mind blowing how different the causes can be.

But I’ve heard from so many residents who live near concentrated animal feeding operations, chickens, cows. And they look at that and they know that the waste that these animals are producing and being housed in these massive lagoons and being sprayed over their neighbor’s farmlands, they can see that that’s all getting into their water.

The folks here in South Baltimore, I’ve seen the uncovered coal cars, car after car after car for miles on these CSX trains not covered, and the wind is just blowing this toxic coal dust all over the place. I’ve seen residents wipe it off their windows. And yet all the while they’re being told, oh, how do you know it’s coal? It’s not us. That could be any kind of black dust. Oh, you have respiratory problems? It’s probably because you smoked a cigarette two decades ago. The burden is always put on the residents, and it’s never put on the big, fat, obvious polluters at the center of these stories. It’s just maddening to hear another community going through something like this.

But I think one thing I wanted to ask about is when I’m talking to folks in these other areas and the industries involved, there’s always something that they can at least grasp about those industries. Like, OK, coal, yeah, it’s dirty, but we need it for energy and metallurgical processes. The chicken CAFO down the street, yeah, it’s gross and dirty, but people gotta eat chickens. I’ve heard these kinds of things. I wanted to ask, as you and your other neighbors started realizing what was happening in your town, what did you think all of this was for? Did you know anything about Bitcoin? What is it like to know that you’re going through all this for something like Bitcoin mining?

Danny Lakey:  That was a pretty hard pill for me to swallow at the beginning. It’s really rough because all it is is it’s profiting a corporation — And, obviously, the people who are in Bitcoin. But the Bitcoin mining people, they’re processing transactions. They’re doing data calculations at phenomenal rates and encoding and [decoding] and encrypting. It’s crazy. But that’s how they’re making their money. So it is just to enrich a corporation. Has no play on anything else.

It was more disheartening in Texas, obviously Texas is, we like to be the wild Wild West and we don’t want anybody bothering with our land and let us do our thing, but that’s if it doesn’t encroach on other people. And this does. And then the Bitcoin mining is part of Greg Abbott’s grand plan to get enough power to cover the state anytime we have peak issues, so we don’t have one of the snow issues like we had a few years back, that’s part of his plan. If they bring in the Bitcoin mines that drive the power, then they build more power plants that get to sell their power on a regular basis, but then they have more power on the grid for when there’s an emergency.

So I understand the process, but to do that, you have opened up a state that doesn’t have any regulations on this, so now they can move in. In Texas, if you are not in an incorporated city of some kind, there are no regulations. And so they don’t have any regulations. They don’t have to ask permission.

It’s why they say that they are in an industrial zone. They’re not in an industrial zone. They’re on a piece of property owned by the electric plant, and every square inch that borders that electric plant is either residential, farmland, agricultural, or used for cows or goats. It is an agricultural or a residential piece of property, every inch of it. And then they want to say, oh, it’s in a well-known industrial area. No, it’s on the grounds of an electric plant and you’re there so you don’t have to pay distribution fees to power running through somebody’s power lines to get to you and you can buy it by the gigawatt on the open market in Texas.

It was very disheartening because you’re no longer fighting the Bitcoin company, you’re fighting Greg Abbott’s master plan. And then we found out it was data centers now, which does AI, and they’re tying AI into our national defense. So now we’re fighting the federal government, the state government, and these stupid mining companies.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Do they say it’s going to bring jobs and economic stimulus or what? What is it that they’re actually… What are they doing besides using a shit ton of water — Pardon my French — And creating a shit ton of sound pollution right next to your homes and generating a shit ton of money for people who are not you?

Danny Lakey:  Well, and now with the more power, they’re about to build a third power plant, which is going to generate more air pollution. So we have water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, so we got the good trifecta going on. They also recently built a solar farm, and as great as good energy is, that heats the air up around it and it’s killing all the birds. So we’ve got increased temperature, increased air pollution, increased noise pollution, and increased water pollution. And what we’re getting out of it is about $8 million a year to the Granbury school districts. And when we appeal to Granbury and ask them to do it because we’re in the county, they have made it very clear we are not part of Granbury.

Virginia Browning:  The day that we read in the newspaper that all of this out here didn’t concern Granbury because we were not in the Granbury city limits, that was a slap in the face. They let us know we’re out here by ourselves, and they really don’t care about, Granbury doesn’t care about the country around the city. They don’t care about the part of Hood County that doesn’t say Granbury city limits. They just don’t care. And that’s where we are. We are out here floundering by ourselves. It’s like you’re in the boat in the middle of the ocean with no oars. That’s what we feel like.

Karen Pearson:  Danny says it a little more elegant than what we can as far as, I guess, some of the stuff that I think that the people in Texas are not really realizing. We have had so much ridicule and people saying that we’re just doing this because we want money and this and that. We’re doing this because we want our peace, but we’re also doing this because for future generations. And also in Texas, like what he mentioned, the Bitcoin plants are buying kilowatts at very, very low cost per kilowatt, saving it up, and then when the grid starts weakening and there needs to be more, they then go to the Bitcoin companies and buy it back from them at the consumer’s expense. We are the ones that have to pay for that extra kilowatts or whatever that they’re selling back.

Why is it that these companies who — And again, they’re not contributing to jobs in the area, they’re not contributing to the local economy out here where they’re located. I beg to differ that, I bet not even five of their employees even live here in Granbury or Hood County.

So all at our expense, they’re making money. The people in Texas are buying the electricity back at probably double or better rates whenever the grid goes down. And that’s what I don’t think people understand. It’s almost like the great Ponzi scheme is what it seems like.

It’s people like you that get the word out for us. That’s been what has helped us tremendously in this fight. Like mom said, we’re out here floundering all on our own, all together, sick as some of us are, trying to just be heard and give us our peace back.

Nick Browning:  They’re not allowed in China. They were run out of China, and so why did they come to Texas? It’s just a scheme is all it is, and we’re sick and tired of it. I don’t know what we can do about it. But they keep saying that they’re not harming us, but they are, every one of them. I think that people in town, their palms were padded and that’s why they said we’re not part of Granbury. We’re out here in Hood County out in the country out on our own. It’s a scheme. It’s just a scheme. That’s it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now I wanted to ask you guys with just the last few minutes that we have together — And again, this will not be the only time we cover this story, I promise y’all we are going to do follow-ups and I want to get y’all on panels with folks that we’ve spoken to from other areas of the country where they’re dealing with industrial pollution or other awful things that have upended their lives. So we promise everyone listening that we are going to stay on this story.

But with the time we have left in this episode, I wanted to ask if you guys could bring us up to speed on where things stand now and what, if anything, is being done to address your concerns. Have you gotten any help from local officials? Is that help coming from local organizations, community-led groups? What is being done and what needs to be done to help you guys get out of this hell that you’re living in?

Danny Lakey:  Well, we’ve had some help. We have a couple of county commissioners that are on our side that have helped us out. They helped get a study, but all we could get was about $6,000, so it was a very small study. We were glad to have it, but you need a bigger sound study in a bigger area than what you can do with six grand and we wouldn’t have been able to get any more out of it. So we were glad to get that.

We’ve gotten a lot of help from national media, some international media, and anybody that wants to come out and talk to us. We really, really, really appreciate people putting eyes on it because that’s about the only place we’re going to get some help.

We’re not going to get it from our county judge, kind of holds all the cards. He gets his little party paid for by people. Senator Birdwell, who is our state senator, he’s of no help. I had a 45-minute conversation trying to get them to not give a grant to the electric plant to expand the electric planning larger, and I thought he was on our side, and then 45 minutes later he voted against us. So he is not help. Our local congresswoman, she is not of any help.

We are getting some help out of Somervell County, which is our neighboring county, because they are impacted too. And everybody down in Somervell has been very, very helpful. So we want to put that out. There’s a lady by the name of Cheryl Shedden who is the driver of our bus. She lives a little bit closer to the plant than I do, so she gets it even worse than I do. And she’s been here quite a while. She is the leader of our ring. She keeps everybody motivated. So you gotta give a shout out to Cheryl for all the work she’s done.

We’ve got some good news. We’ve been in enough contact with people for litigation about various different things. One, we were fighting to get an injunction to try to get Marathon to stop the noise, bury it, put a building over it, move it out, I don’t care, but just stop the noise. You can do all the Bitcoin mining you want over there, I don’t care, but stop killing me with the noise. Earthjustice came on board to help us with that suit, and that is in progress right now, and we’re very grateful to them because they’re doing that free of charge. And so they heard about us and offered us our services.

We started a nonprofit called Protect Hood County. We had to do that because of litigation. They needed a leadership group. They needed a name. And so we got a 501(c)(3) status. We are currently trying to raise $5,000 to fight building a third power plant. Like I said, the state granted them money to build it. We were able to get enough people and enough written documents to where it’s the first time in the state of Texas that an air permit was not issued to a gas power plant. So they held off on issuing the permit, which made them forfeit their grant.

Now they’re going to reapply. And the permit has not been [inaudible]. It’s just going through a hearing process. We’ve got a meeting coming up with the state, and if we survive that, then we have to go in front of a judge and plead our case for a final ruling on it. We’ve had quotes from 25 to $75,000 when we finally found an attorney that says, if you get there, I’ll take it for five grand and get you in there.

But none of us are independently wealthy. I mean, we may have some land, but land in Texas is not expensive, and these are our retirement homes. We’re not sitting on millions and millions of dollars. I think the Bitcoin mine’s worth about 5 or $6 billion, and the electric company’s worth about $60 or $70 billion. So they’ve got some deep pockets and we’re having to fight ’em. But we did get that injunction to hold off on the air permit, which was a huge win. And we’re hoping that we have a meeting with Marathon, and we’re hoping we can have a little bit of a win before the end of the month.

But anything anybody can do, if you just want to read about it, you can go to protecthoodcounty.com. There’s a lot of information on it. Like I said, we have a 501(c)(3) status that, if anybody wants to help donate, we can’t thank you enough.

Again, other communities, other states, other areas are going to be fighting this because it’s no longer Bitcoin. It’s now data centers. And the federal government is leaking the power of AI as to how we’re going to fight China in the future and they want to stay ahead of ’em. And we have to have power to do it, we’ve got to have it all over the country.

So these things are not going away, and we need some fight to get some regulation on it. Let’s find a happy way to do it. It was mentioned before that China kicked them out, their data centers, they’re bearing in the South Sea because it cools ’em. And of course there’s no noise down there. So they’re burying them down in the ocean and then running the power to it, to their AI centers are coming back. I’m not saying we go that extreme, but there’s got to be a compromise in ruining all of our lives, and killing us slowly is not the answer.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that was powerfully put. And Karen, Nick, Virginia, I wanted to just toss it to you to round us out. I think Danny really underlined the most important point here. When I talk to people about why we do this coverage on this show, because for years, and even still, we talk to union workers. We talk to people organizing their workplaces. We talk to people in non-union shops about their lives and their jobs. It’s a show by and for working-class people.

And so some people will ask, well, why are you talking about a Bitcoin mine in rural Texas? And I’m like, well, who do you think are the people living around this place? They are our fellow workers. They are the people whose lives and ability to make a living are being upended by this. We haven’t even talked about what this is doing to the farmers who live around there or to anyone who’s trying to work the land around this Bitcoin mine and the way it’s impacting them.

But we’ve talked about how you all, as flesh and blood people, working people, retirees, how this is impacting you and your daily lives. So for everyone listening, just think about what it’s like to try to get through your day-to-day life, make a living while enduring this level of sound pollution, stress, and all the gaslighting that comes with it. That’s why we’re talking about it. Because this is wrong, and working people standing together is the only way that we’re going to get out of it.

I wanted to let you guys have the last word and ask if you had any final messages to the working people who listen to this show, the folks in other sacrifice zones who listen to this show, any final messages you wanted to send from out there in Granbury to the folks listening.

Karen Pearson:  We’re out here fighting for everyone, and there is a handful of us that are not giving up. We have big voices, and we have a lot of spunk in us. And like he said, Cheryl Shedden, she’s our rockstar team leader in all of this, and we’re motivated to stand toe to toe with them. We might not have the money for attorneys or whatever we would like to.

It’s kind of funny, those of us who, like Danny said, we own property and stuff, but they’re on a fixed income. I work 40 hours a week to make ends meet myself. And even when we are needing funds for small projects that we have to keep going with, I come to mom and dad and ask them, do you have $10? Mom will usually give me $20. I’m like, well, just give me $10. That’s all I need. She’s like, no, you just take this. Even on their fixed income, they still find it necessary to give into this because, again, mom’s been in the hospital several times and she still worries about her neighbor. She thinks there’s somebody else that’s worse off than what she is. So the sacrifices that we are all making to try to take care of each other is huge.

Like Danny said, go to the website, read on there, join, get on the mailing list. You can keep up with things there. We’re not attorneys, but you know what? We’re fighting this as if we are, there’s five of us that are going toe to toe up against this air permit and to try to, if we can’t block it, then we want to come in with some mediation and we want to put up some safeguards. We’re not stopping and we’re not giving up. And you can intimidate us as big as you want with your money or your corporation, but we’re not going to go away.

And I would say that to any community that’s fighting like we are. Stand up for your life because no one else is going to do it for you. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re standing up for our lives, the quality of our lives that we wanted and laid out for ourselves, and then also for the others who can’t fight for themselves. We’re not quitting and we’re not going away. So one way another, we’re going to keep plugging.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas: Danny Lakey, Karen Pearson, and her parents, Nick and Virginia Browning. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

One year ago, Columbia University became ground zero for the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment movement that spread to campuses across the country and around the world. Now, Columbia has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education, academic freedom, and the right to free speech and free assembly—all under the McCarthyist guise of rooting out “anti-semitism.” From Trump’s threats to cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia to the abduction of international students like Mahmoud Khalil by ICE agents, to the university’s firing and expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers union president Grant Miner, “a tremendous chilling effect” has gripped Columbia’s campus community. In this urgent episode of Working People, we speak with: Caitlin Liss, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a member of Student Workers of Columbia-UAW (SWC); and Allie Wong, a PhD student at the Columbia Journalism School and a SWC member who was arrested and beaten by police during the second raid on the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia on April 30, 2024.

Additional links/info:

• Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 website
• April 17: Day of Action to Defend Higher Ed website
• Mahmoud Khalil statement from ICE detention: “My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner”
• Allie Wong, The Intercept, “This is not about antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump dismantling the American dream“
• Grant Miner, The Nation, “Columbia expelled me for my palestine activism, but I won’t be silenced”
• Jonah E. Bromwich & Hamed Aleaziz, The New York Times, “Columbia student hunted by ICE sues to prevent deportation”
• AAUP letter to college and university legal offices: “Institutions Should Not Provide Student and Faculty Info To Enable Deportations”
• Alan Blinder, The New York Times, “Trump Has Targeted These Universities. Why?”
• Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, “‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish”
• Alice Speri, The Guardian, “‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors”
• Annie Ma, Makiya Seminera, & Christopher L. Keller, Associated Press, “Visa cancellations sow panic for international students, with hundreds fearing deportation”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Kill these cuts before they kill us’: Federally funded researchers warn DOGE cuts will be fatal”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are continuing our urgent coverage of the Trump Administration’s all out assault on our institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn and work there. Today we are going deeper into the heart of authoritarian darkness that has gripped colleges and universities across the country and we’re talking with two graduate student workers at Columbia University. Columbia has become ground zero for the administration’s gangster government style moves to hold billions of dollars of federal funding hostage in order to bend universities to Donald Trump’s will to reshape the curricula culture and research infrastructure of American higher ed as such and to squash our constitutionally protected rights to free speech and free assembly, all under the McCarthy’s guise of rooting out supposed antisemitism, which the administration has recategorized to mean virtually any criticism of an opposition to the state of Israel.

The political ideology of Zionism and Israel’s US backed genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians just one year ago. Columbia University was also ground zero for the student-led Palestine solidarity protests and encampments that spread to campuses across the country and even around the world. It was exactly one year ago that the first Gaza solidarity encampment began at Columbia on April 17th, 2024 and that same month on more than one occasion, Columbia’s own president at the time minutia authorized the NYPD to descend on campus like an occupying force, beat an arrest protestors and dismantle the camps. Now fast forward to March of this year. On Friday, March 7th, the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia claiming that the move was due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students. The very next day, March 8th Mahmud, Khalil was abducted by ICE agents at his New York City apartment building in front of his pregnant wife and disappeared to a Louisiana immigration jail.

Khalil, a Palestinian born legal resident with a green card had just completed his master’s program and was set to graduate in May. He had served as a key negotiator with the university administration and spokesperson for the student encampment last year. He’s not accused of breaking any laws during that time, but the Trump administration has weaponized a rarely used section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, invoking the Secretary of States power to deport non-citizens if they supposedly believed their presence in the country could negatively affect US foreign policy. Just days after Khalil’s abduction, the university also expelled grant minor president of the Student Workers of Columbia Union, a local of the United Auto Workers, and that was just one day before contract negotiations were set to open between the union and the university. On March 13th, I was expelled from Columbia University for participating in the protest movement against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, minor rights in an op-ed for the nation.

I was not the only one. He continues, 22 students, all of whom like me had been cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, were either expelled, suspended for years or had their hard earned degrees revoked on the same day all for allegedly occupying a building that has been occupied at least four times throughout Columbia’s history. And then there’s Y Sao Chung, a 21-year-old undergraduate and legal permanent resident who is suing the government after ICE moved to deport her, following her arrest on March 5th while protesting Columbia’s disciplinary actions against student protestors. I mean, this is just a small, terrifying snapshot of the broader Orwellian nightmare that has become all too real, all too quickly at Columbia University and it is increasingly becoming reality around the country and things got even darker last week with the latest development in Mahmood Khalil’s case as the American Civil Liberties Union stated on Friday in a decision that appeared to be pre-written, an immigration judge ruled immediately after a hearing today that Mahmud Khalil is removable under US immigration law. This comes less than 48 hours after the US government handed over the evidence they have on Mr. Khalil, which included nothing more than a letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that made clear Mr. Khalil had not committed a crime and was being targeted solely based on his speech. He’s not yet scheduled for deportation.

Listen, this isn’t just a redux of McCarthyism and the red scare. It has elements of that absolutely, but it is also monstrously terrifyingly new. I don’t know how far down this road we’re going to go. All I know is that whatever comes next will depend on what people of conscience do now or what they don’t do. Will other universities cave and capitulate to Trump as quickly as Columbia has? Will we see instead faculty, staff, students, grad students, parents, community members and others coming together on campuses across the country to fight this or will fear submission silence and self-censorship went out? What is it even like to be living, working and studying at Columbia University right now? Well, today you’ll hear all about that firsthand from our two guests. With all of this going on, I got to speak with Caitlin Liss, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University and a member of Student workers of Columbia, and I also spoke with Alie Wong, a PhD student at the Columbia Journalism School, and a student workers of Columbia member who was arrested and beaten by police during the second raid on the Gaza solidarity protests at Columbia on April 30th, 2024.

Here’s my conversation with Caitlin and Allie recorded on Saturday April 12th. Well, Caitlin, Allie, thank you both so much for joining us today on the show. I really appreciate it, especially in the midst of everything going on right now. And I basically wanted to start there and ask if you could tell us from your own firsthand experience as student workers at Columbia, like what is the mood on campus and in your life right now, especially in light of the latest ruling on Mahmud Khalil’s case?

Caitlin Liss:

Okay. Yeah, so thank you for having us. I’m happy to be here. The mood on campus has been, you probably won’t be surprised to hear pretty bleak, pretty bad. We found out yesterday that Mahmood Kalila is not going to be released from jail in Louisiana. I think a lot of us were hoping that this ruling that was coming up was going to be in his favor and he would be released and be back home in time to be there for the birth of his baby. And it didn’t happen. And I think it’s just another horrible thing that has happened in a month, two months of just unrelenting bad news on campus. So stuff is feeling pretty bad. People are afraid, especially international students are afraid to leave their house. They’re afraid to speak up in class. I hear from people who are afraid to go to a union meeting and even those of us who are citizens feel afraid as well.

I mean, I wake up every day and I look at my phone to see if I’ve gotten a text message telling me that one of my friends has been abducted. It’s really scary. And on top of the sort of personal relationships with our friends and comrades who are at risk, there’s the sense that also our careers are industry are at risk. So, and many other members of student workers of Columbia have spent many years dedicated to getting a PhD and being in academia and it’s increasingly starting to feel like academia might not exist for that much longer. So it’s feeling pretty bleak.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I would definitely agree. And again, thank you so much Max for having us here. It’s a real pleasure to be able to share our stories and have a platform to do that. Yeah, I would agree. I think that there is a tremendous chilling effect that’s sunk in across the campus. And on one hand it’s not terribly surprising considering that’s the strategy of the Trump administration on the other. It is really a defeating feeling to see the momentum that we had last year, the ways that we were not only telling the story but telling it across the world that all eyes were on Columbia and we had this really incredible momentum. And so to see not just that lack of momentum, but the actual fear that has saturated the entire campus that has indiscriminately permeated people’s attitudes, whether you’re an American citizen or not, whether you’re light-skinned or not, has been something that’s been incredibly harrowing.

I know that after Mahmood, I at least had the anticipation of quite a bit of activity, but between that ranjani the other students and Columbia’s capitulation, it actually has gone the opposite way in that while I expected there to be tons of masks on campus after Columbia agreed to have a total mask ban, there was no one when I expected to see different vigils or protests or the breakdown of silos that have emerged across the campus of different groups, whether they’re student groups or faculty groups, I’m just hoping to see some kind of solidarity there. It hasn’t, and I think it’s largely because of the chilling effect because that this is the strategy of the Trump administration and unfortunately it’s such a dire situation that I think it’s really squashed a lot of the fervor and a lot of the fearlessness that many of us had prior to this moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It feels like a ice pick to the heart to hear that, especially knowing not just what we saw on campuses across the country just a year ago, but also the long tradition of campus protests and universities and higher education being a place of free speech, free thought free debate and the right to protest and lead with a moral consciousness like movements that help direct the whole of society to see that this is what is happening here now in front of all of us. And since I have so much more, I want to ask about the past month for you both on campus, but while we’re on that subject that Allie just brought up about the expectation right now, which I have heard echoed a lot of places online and offline of why aren’t there mass protests across higher ed in every state in the country right now, you would think that the generation of the sixties would do just that if Nixon had tried such a thing. And a lot of folks have been asking us why aren’t we seeing that right now? And so I wanted to ask if y’all had any thoughts on that and also if that would in your mind change things like if you saw other campuses that weren’t being targeted as intently as Columbia is, if you saw students and faculty and others protesting on behalf of what’s happening to you, would that change the mood on campus you think?

Caitlin Liss:

I mean that there’s a few things going on. Part of it is, like Allie said, the chilling effect of what’s been happening is making a really large percentage of our members and people in our community afraid to publicly take action. International student workers make up a really big percentage of our membership, and a lot of those people are afraid to even sign their name to a petition. In my departments. We sent a joint letter to the departments about what was going on, and a bunch of students didn’t want their names appearing on this letter that was just being sent the chair of the departments. So the chilling effect is real and very strong, and I think that that’s preventing a lot of people from showing up in ways that they might have done otherwise. I think that another part of it is just the kind of unrelenting nature of what’s been happening.

It has been one horrible thing after another and trying to react to everything as it comes in is difficult, but I don’t think it’s the case that we’re not doing anything. We are doing quite a bit and really trying through many different avenues to use our power as a union to fight back against what’s happening. We are talking with other unions on campus, we talk to other higher ed unions across the country, and so I think that there is quite a lot going on, but it does sometimes feel like we can’t keep up with the pace of the things that are happening just because they are happening so quickly and accumulating so fast.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I mean I would definitely agree. I think that it’s the fire hose strategy, which has proven to be effective not just on Columbia but across the nation with the dismantling of the federal government attack on institutions, the arts, the legal processes and legal entities. And so I think that again, that that’s part of the strategy is to just overwhelm people with the number of issues that would require attention. And I think that’s happening on Columbia’s campus as well. If we take even divestment as an example where it was a pretty straightforward ask last year, but now we’re seeing an issue on campus where it’s no longer about Palestine, Israel divestment, it’s about immigration reform and law enforcement. It’s about the American dream class consciousness. So many of these different things that are happening not just to the student body, but to faculty and the administration.

And so I think that in terms of trying to galvanize people, it’s a really difficult ask when you have so many different things that are coming apart at the seams. And that’s not to say it’s an insurmountable task. As Caitlin mentioned, we are moving forward, we are putting infrastructure in place and asks in place, but I think it’s difficult to mobilize people around so many different issues when everyone already feels not only powerless but cynical about the ability to change things when again, that momentum that we had last year has waned and the issues have broadened.

Caitlin Liss:

Just in terms of your question about support or solidarity from other campuses, I think that one of the things that has been most dispiriting about being at Columbia right now is that it’s clear that Columbia is essentially a test case for the Trump administration. We were the first school to be and are still in many ways kind of the center of attention, but it’s not just us, but it feels like the way that Columbia is reacting is kind of setting the tone for what other universities and colleges can do across the country. And what Columbia is doing is folding, so they are setting an example that is just rolling over and giving up in terms of what other colleges can do. I think we’re seeing other universities are reacting to these kinds of attacks in ways that are much better than Columbia has done. We just saw that Tufts, I think filed some legal documents in support of Ru Mesa Ozturk because she is a student there.

Columbia has done no such thing for Ranjani, for Uno, for Mahmood. They haven’t even mentioned them. And so we can see other universities are reacting in ways that are better. And I think that that gives us hope and not only gives us hope, but it gives us also something to point to when people at Columbia say, well, Columbia can’t do things any differently. It’s like, well, clearly it can because these other universities are doing something. Columbia doesn’t have to be doing this. It is making a choice to completely give in to everything that Trump is demanding.

Allie Wong:

And I would also add to that point, and going back to your question about Mahmood and sort of how either us individually or collectively are feeling about that, to Caitlin’s point, I think there’s so much that’s symbolic about Columbia, whether it has to do with Trump’s personal pettiness or the fact that it was kind of the epicenter of the encampments list last year. I think what happened with Mahmood is incredibly symbolic. If you look at particularly him and Ranjani, the first two that were targeted by the university, so much of their situations are almost comical in how they planned the ambiguity of policy and antisemitism where you look at Mahmud and he, it’s almost funny that he was the person who was targeted because he’s an incredibly calm, gentle person. He provided a sense of peace during the chaos of last year. He’s unequivocally condemned, Hamas, very publicly condemned terrorism, condemned antisemitism.

So if you were looking for someone who would be a great example, he’s not really one considering they don’t have any evidence on him. And the same thing for Ranjani who literally wasn’t even in the country when October 7th happened in that entire year, had never participated in the protests at most, had kind of engaged with social media by liking things, but two really good examples of people who don’t actually quite fit the bill in terms of trying to root out antisemitism. But in my mind it’s really strategic because it really communicates that nobody is safe. Whether you’ve participated in protests or not, you’re not safe, whether you’ve condemned antisemitism or not, you’re not safe. And I think that plays into the symbolic nature of Columbia as well, where Trump is trying to make an example out of Columbia and out of Columbia students. And we see that very clearly in the ruling yesterday with Mahmud.

Again, that’s not to say that it’s not an insurmountable thing, but it’s disappointing and it’s frankly embarrassing to be a part of an institution that brags about its long history of protests, its long history of social change through student movements. When you look at 1968 and Columbia called the NYPD on students arrested 700 students, and yet it kind of enshrines that moment in history as a place of pride, and I see that happening right now as well where 20, 30, 50 years from now, we’ll be looking at this moment and Columbia will be proud of it when really they’re the perpetrators of violence and hatred and bigotry and kind of turning the gun on their own students. So yeah, it’s a really precarious time to be a Columbia student and to be advocating for ourselves and our friends, our brothers and sisters who are experiencing this kind of oppression and persecution from our own country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Allie, Caitlin, I want to ask if we could again take that step back to the beginning of March where things were this terrifying new reality was really ramping up with the Trump administration’s freezing and threatening of completely withholding $400 million in federal funds and grants to Columbia just one day before Mahmood Khalil was abducted by ice agents and disappeared to a jail in Louisiana thousands of miles away. So from that point to now, I wanted to ask, as self-identified student workers at Columbia University, how have you and others been feeling throughout all of this as it’s been unfolding and trying to get through your day-to-day work? What does that even look like? Teaching and researching under these terrifying circumstances?

Allie Wong:

For me, it has been incredibly scary. As you mentioned, I was someone who was arrested and beaten last year after the second Gaza solidarity encampment raid and have spoken quite publicly about it. I authored a number of pieces around that time and since then and have been pretty open about my involvement being okay serving as a lightning rod for a lot of that PR stuff. And so for me, coming into this iteration of students battles with the university, it’s been really scary to kind see how many of the students that I was arrested with, many of my friends and colleagues are now either being targeted because of their involvement or living in the fear of being targeted because there is an opacity around what those policies are and how they’re being enforced and implemented. So it really does feel quite McCarthys in the sense that you don’t really know what the dangers are, but you know that they’re there, you’re looking over your shoulder all the time.

I don’t leave my house without wearing a mask just because through this whole process, many students have been doxed. Both Caitlin and myself have been doxed quite heavily through Canary mission and other groups online, and many folks have experienced offline behavior that has been threatening or scary to their own physical emotional security. And so that’s been a big piece for me is just being aware of my surroundings, being mindful of when I leave the house. In many respects, it does feel like I am growing in paranoia, but at the same time I consider it a moral obligation to be on the front lines as a light-skinned US citizen to be serving as a literal and figurative shield for my international brothers and sisters. And so it’s an interesting place as particularly a US citizen to say, what is my responsibility to the people around me?

What’s my responsibility to myself and keeping myself and my home safe? What’s my responsibility for sticking up for those who are targeted as someone who has the privilege of being able to be a citizen? And so I think it’s kind of a confusing time for those of us on the ground wanting to do more, wanting to help, wanting to offer our assistance with the privileges that we have and everyone’s level of comfort is different, and so my expectation is not that other people would take the kinds of risks I’m taking, but everyone has a part to play and whether that’s a visual part or a non-visual part, being in the public, it doesn’t really matter. We all have a part to play. And so given what we talked about just about the strategy of the Trump administration and the objectives to make us fearful and make us not speak out, I think it’s more important now than ever for those of us who are able to have the covering of US citizenship, to be doing everything in our power with the resources we’ve been given to take those risks because it’s much more important now in this administration than it’s ever been.

Caitlin Liss:

And I think on top of the stuff allie’s talking about, we do still have to continue doing our jobs. So for me, that is teaching. I’m teaching a class this semester and that has been very challenging to do, having to continue going in and talking about the subject matter, which is stuff that is very interesting to me personally and that I’m very excited to be teaching about in the classroom, but at the same time, there’s so much going on campus, it just feels impossible to be turning our attention to Ana and I hear from my students are scared, so part of my job has become having to help my students through that. I have heard lots of people who are trying to move their classes off campus because students don’t want to be on campus right now.

ICE is crawling all over campus. The NYPD is all over the place. I don’t know if you saw this, but Columbia has agreed to hire these 36 quote peace officers who are going to be on campus and have arresting power. So now essentially we have cops on campus full time and then on top of all of that, you have to wait in these horrible security lines to even get onto campus so the environment on campus doesn’t feel safe, so my students don’t feel safe. I don’t think anyone’s students feel safe right now. My colleagues who are international students don’t feel safe. I had a friend ask me what to do because she was TAing for a class and she wasn’t allowed to move it off campus or onto Zoom, and she said, I don’t feel safe on campus because I’m an international student and what am I going to do if ice comes to the door?

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in that situation. And so the students are scared, my colleagues are scared. I’ve even heard from a lot of professors who are feeling like they have to watch their words in the classroom because they don’t want to end up on Canary mission for having said something. So that’s quite difficult. Teaching in this environment is very difficult and I think that the students are having a really hard time. And then on top of that, I am in the sixth year of my PhD, so I’m supposed to be writing a dissertation right now, and that is also quite difficult to be keeping up with my research, which is supposed to be a big part of the PhD is producing research and it’s really hard to do right now because it feels like we have, my friends and my colleagues are at risk right now, so that’s quite difficult to maintain your attention in all those different places.

Allie Wong:

Just one more piece to add because I know that we’ve been pretty negative and it is a pretty negative situation, so I don’t want to silver line things. That being said, I do feel as though it’s been really beautiful to see people step up and really beautiful to see this kind of symbiotic relationship happening between US students and international students. I’m at the journalism school, which is overwhelmingly international, and I was really discouraged when there was a report that came out from the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about a closed town hall that we had where our dean, Jelani Cobb more or less said to students, we can’t protect you as much as I would love to be able to say here are the processes and protocols and the ways to keep yourself safe and the ways that we’re here to support you, but he just said we can’t.

And he got a lot of flack for that because that’s a pretty horrible thing for a dean to say. But I actually really appreciated it because it was the most honest and direct thing he could have said to students when the university itself was just sending us barrages of emails with these empty platitudes about values and a 270 year history of freethinking and all this nonsense. That being said, I think that it was a really difficult story to read, but at the same time it’s been really beautiful to see community gather around and clinging together when there are unknowns, people taking notes for each other when students don’t feel comfortable going to campus, students starting to host off campus happy hour groups and sit-ins together and things of that nature that have been really, again, amazing to see happen under such terrible circumstances and people just wanting to help each other out in the ways that they can.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Caitlyn, Allie, you were just giving us a pretty harrowing view of your day-to-day reality there as student workers of Columbia PhD working on your PhDs and dealing with all of this Orwellian madness that we’ve been talking about today. When I was listening to you both, I was hearing so many kind of resonances from my own experience, just one sort of decade back, right? I mean, because I remember being a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration and co-founding for full disclosure, I was a member of the grad union there. I was a co-founder of the campus anti-fascist network. I was doing a lot of public writing. I started this podcast in that sort of era, and there were so many things that y’all were talking about that sounded similar from the fear of websites like Canary Mission, putting people’s names out there and encouraging them to be doxed and disciplined and even deported.

That resonated with me because it just ate nine years ago. That was groups like Turning Point USA, they were the ones trying to film professors in class and then send it to Breitbart and hopefully get it into the Fox News outrage cycle. And I experienced some of that. But what I’m hearing also is just that the things we were dealing with during the first Trump administration are not what y’all are dealing with now. There is first and foremost a fully, the state is now part of it. The state is now sort of leading that. It’s not just the sort of far right groups and people online and that kind of thing, but also it feels like the mechanisms of surveillance and punishment are entirely different as well. I wanted to ask if y’all could speak a little more to that side of things. It’s not just the university administration that you’re contending with, you’re contending with a lot of different forces here that are converging on you and your rights at this very moment.

Caitlin Liss:

Yeah, I mean I think the one thing that has been coming up a lot for us, we’re used to fighting Columbia, the institution for our rights in the workplace for fair pay. And Columbia has always been a very stubborn adversary, very difficult to get anything out of them. Our first contract fight lasted for years, and now we’re looking at not just Columbia as someone to be fighting with, but at the federal government as a whole. And it’s quite scary. I think we talked about this a little bit, about international students being afraid to participate in protests, being afraid to go to union meetings. We’re hearing a lot of fear from people who aren’t citizens about to what extent participating in the union is safe for them right now. And on the one hand you want to say participating in a union is a protected activity.

There’s nothing illegal about it. You can’t get in trouble. In fact, it’s illegal to retaliate against you for being in a union. But on the other hand, it doesn’t necessarily feel like the law is being that protective right now. So it’s a very scary place to be in. And I think that from our point of view, the main tool we have in this moment is just our solidarity with one another and labor power as a union because the federal governments does not seem that interested in protecting our rights as a union. And so we have to rely on each other in order to fight for what we need and what will make our workplace safe.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I was wondering, Allie, if I could also toss it to you there, because this makes me think of something you said earlier about how the conditions at Columbia, the structure of Columbia, how Columbia’s run, have sort of made it vulnerable to what’s happening now or the ways that Columbia talks about itself versus what Columbia actually is, are quite stark here. And connecting that to what Caitlin just said, I think it should also be understood as someone who has covered grad student campaigns, contract campaigns at Columbia and elsewhere, that when these sorts of strikes are happening when graduate student workers are taking action against the administration, the first ones that are threatened by the administration with punitive measures including potentially the revocation of their visas are international students. They have always been the most vulnerable members of grad student unions that administrations have actually used as leverage to compel unions to bend to their demand. So I make that point speaking only for myself here as a journalist who has observed this in many other times, that this precedent of going after international students in the way the Trump administration is like didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Allie Wong:

Exactly. Yeah. So I mean I think if you even look at how Trump campaigned, he really doubled down on immigration policy. I mean, it’s the most obvious statement I can say, but the high hyperbole, the hatred, the racism, you see that as a direct map onto what’s happening right now. And I think that’s part of what maybe isn’t unique about Columbia, but as we’re starting to see other universities take a stand, Caitlin mentioned Tufts. I know Princeton also recently kind said that they would not capitulate. So there is precedent for something different from how Columbia has behaved, and I think you see them just playing exactly into Trump’s hands folding to his kind of proxy policy of wanting to make Colombian example. And it’s a really disappointing thing from a university that prides itself on its liberal values, prides itself on its diversity on protecting students.

When you actually see quite the opposite, not only is Columbia not just doing anything, it’s actively participating in what’s happening on campus, the fact that they have yet to even name the students who have very publicly been abducted or chased out of the country because of their complicity, the fact that they will send emails or make these statements about values, but actually not tell us anything that’s going to be helpful, like how policies will be implemented when they’re going to be implemented, what these ice agents look like, things of that nature that could be done to protect students. And also obviously not negotiating in good faith. The fact that Grant was expelled and fired the day before we had a collective bargaining meeting right before we were about to talk about protections for international students, just communicates that the university is not operating in good faith, they’re not interested in the wellbeing of their students or doing anything within their power, which is quite a tremendous power to say to the Trump administration, our students come first. Our students are an entity of us and we’re going to do whatever we can in our power to block you from demonizing and targeting international students who, as you said, are the most vulnerable people on our campus, but also those who bring so much diversity and brilliance and life to our university and our country.

Caitlin Liss:

And I think on the subject of international students, you, you’re right that they have always been in a more precarious position in higher ed unions. But on the other hand, I think that that shows us what power we do have as a union. I’m thinking. So we’ve been talking a lot about to what extent it’s safe for international workers to stay involved in the union, and our contract is expiring in June, which is why we’re having these bargaining sessions and we’re talking about going on strike next fall potentially. And there’s a lot of questions about to what extent can international students participate now because who knows what kind of protections they’re going to have? And I’ve been thinking about the last time we went on strike, it was a 10 week strike and we were striking through the end of the semester. It was the fall semester and we were still on strike when the semester ended.

And Columbia said that if we didn’t come off strike that they weren’t going to rehire the workers who were striking for the next semester. So anyone who was on strike wouldn’t get hired for a position in the spring semester and for international students that was going to affect their visa status. So it was very scary for them. And we of course said, that’s illegal. You can, that’s retaliation for us for going on strike. You can’t do that. And they said, it’s not illegal because we’re just not rehiring you. And it was this real moment of risk even though we felt much more confident in the legal protection because it felt like they could still do it and our recourse would have to be going to court and winning the case that this was illegal. So it was still very scary for international students, but we voted together to stay on strike and we held the line and Columbia did not in fact want to fire all of us who were on strike, and we won a contract anyway, even though there was this scary moment for international students even back then. And I have been telling people this story when we are thinking about protections for international students now, because I think that the moral of the story is that even under a situation where there’s a lot more legal security and legal protection, it’s still scary. And the way that you get over it being scary is by trusting that everyone coming together and standing together is what’s going to win and rather than whatever the legal protection might be.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Caitlin and Allie, I have so many more thoughts and questions, but I know that we only have about 10 minutes left here and I want to use the time that we have left with y’all to sort of tug on the thread that you were just pulling there. Caitlin, looking at this through the union’s perspective or through a labor perspective, can you frame these attacks on higher ed and the people who live, learn and work there through a labor and working workers’ rights perspective, and talk about what your message is to other union members and other people who listen to this show who are working people, union and non-union, why this is important, why they need to care and what people can do about it.

Caitlin Liss:

It’s very clear why it’s important and why other workers should care. The funding cuts to Columbia University and other universities really threaten not just the university, but the whole ecosystem of research. So these are people’s careers that are at risk and careers that not only they have an interest in having, but careers that benefit everyone in our society, people who do public health research, people who do medical research, people who do research about climate change. These are really important jobs that the opportunities to pursue them are vanishing. And so that obviously is important. And then when we’re looking at the attacks on international students, if m kil can be abducted for speaking out in support of Palestine and against the genocide and Gaza, then none of us are safe. No worker is safe if the governments can just abduct you and deport you for something like that.

On the one hand, even people who aren’t citizens are protected by the first amendments, but also it’s not clear that that’s where they’re going to stop. I think that this is a moment that we should all take very seriously. I mean, it’s very serious for the future of higher education as a whole. I feel like we are in sort of an existential fight here. And at the moment, Columbia is just completely welcoming this fascist takeover with open arms and it threatens higher ed as an institution. What kind of university is this? If the Middle Eastern studies department is being controlled by some outside force who says what they can and can’t teach, and now Trump is threatening to put all of Columbia under some consent decree, so we’re going to have to be beholden to whatever the Trump administration says we’re allowed to do on campus. So it is a major threat to higher education, but it’s also a threat I think, in a much larger sense to workers all over the country because it is sending the message that none of us are safe. No one is safe to express ourselves. We can’t expect to be safe in the workplace. And it’s really important that as a labor union that we take a stand here because it is not just destroying our workplaces, but sort of it’s threatening everyone’s workplace.

Allie Wong:

Exactly. That’s exactly what I was thinking too. I know it’s such an overused word at this point, but I think a huge aspect of this has to do with precedent and how, as we were mentioning, Columbia is so symbolic for a lot of reasons, including the fact that all eyes are on Columbia. And so when Columbia sets a precedent for what can and cannot not be done by University of Administration in caving to the federal government, I think that sets a precedent for not just academic institutions, but institutions writ large and the workers that work in those institutions. Because what happens here is happening across the federal government and will happen to institutions everywhere. And so I think it’s really critical that we bake trust back into our systems, both trust in administrations by having them prove that they do have our backs and they do care about student workers, but also that they trust student workers.

They trust us to do the really important research that keeps the heartbeat of this university alive. And I think that it’s going to crumble not just Columbia, but other academic institutions if really critical research gets defunded. Research that doesn’t just affect right now, but affects our country in perpetuity, in the kinds of opportunities that will be presented later in the future, the kinds of research that will be instrumental in making our society healthier and more equitable place in the future. And so this isn’t just a moment in time, but it’s one that absolutely will ripple out into history.

Caitlin Liss:

And we happen right now to be sort of fortunately bargaining a new contract as we speak. So like I said before, our contract is expiring in June. And so for us, obviously these kinds of issues are the top of mind when we’re thinking about what we can get in the contract. So in what way is this contract that we’re bargaining for going to be able to help us? So we’re fighting for Columbia to restore the funding cuts we’re fighting for them to instate a sanctuary campus and to reinstate grant minor, our president who was expelled, and Ronan who was enrolled, and everyone else who has been expelled or experienced sanctions because of their protests for Palestine. And so in a lot of ways, I think that the contract fight is a big part of what we’re concentrating on right now. But there’s also, there’s many unions on Columbia’s campus.

There’s the postdoc union, UAW 4,100, there’s the support staff and the Barnard contingent faculty who are UAW 2110. There’s building service employees, I think they’re 32 BJ and the maintenance staff is TW. So there’s many unions on campus. And I think about this a lot because I think what we’re seeing is we haven’t mentioned the trustees yet, I don’t think, but recently our interim president, Katrina Armstrong stepped down and was replaced by an acting president, was the former co-chair of the board of trustees Claire Shipman. And in many ways, I think what we’ve been seeing happening at Columbia is the result of the board of trustees not caving, but welcoming the things that Trump is demanding. I think that they’re complicit in this, but the board of trustees is like 21 people. There’s not very many of them. And there’s thousands of us at Columbia who actually are the people who make the university work, the students, the faculty, the staff, thousands of people in unions, thousands of non-unionized students and workers on campus as well.

And we outnumber the trustees by such a huge amount. And I think that thinking about the power we have when we all come together as the thousands of people who do the actual work of the university as opposed to these 21 people who are making decisions for us without consulting us that we don’t want, and that’s the way we have to think about reclaiming the university. I think we have to try and take back the power as workers, as students, as faculty from the board of trustees and start thinking about how we can make decisions that are in our interests.

Allie Wong:

One more thing that I wanted to call out, I’m not sure where this fits in. I think Caitlin talking about the board of trustees made me think of it is just the fact that I think that another big issue is the fact that there’s this very amorphous idea of antisemitism that all of this is being done under the banner of, and I think that it’s incredibly problematic because first of all, what is antisemitism? It’s this catchall phrase that is used to weaponize against dissent. And I think that when you look at the track record of these now three presidents that we’ve had in the past year, each of them has condemned antisemitism but has not condemned other forms of racism, including an especially Islamophobia that has permeated our campus. And because everything is done under the banner of antisemitism and you have folks like Claire Shipman who have been aligned with Zionist organizations, it also erodes the trust in of the student body, but then especially student workers, many of whom are Jewish and many of whom are having their research be threatened under the banner of antisemitism being done in their name. And yet it’s the thing that is stunting their ability to thrive at this university. And so I think that as we talk about the administration and board of trustees, just calling out the hypocrisy there of how they are behaving on campus, the ways that they’re capitulating and doing it under the guise of protecting Jewish students, but in the process of actually made Jewish students and faculty a target by not only withholding their funding but also saying that this is all to protect Jewish students but have created a more threatening environment than existed before.

Caitlin Liss:

Yeah, I mean, as a Jewish student personally, I’m about to go to my family’s Seder to talk about celebrating liberation from oppression while our friends and colleagues are sitting in jail. It’s quite depressing and quite horrific to see people saying that they’re doing this to protect Jews when it’s so clearly not the case.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I wanted to ask in just this final two minutes that we got here, I want to bring it back down to that level to again remind folks listening that you both are student workers, you are working people just like everyone else that we talk to on this show. And I as a former graduate student worker can’t help but identify with the situation that y’all are in. But it makes me think about the conversations I had with my family when I was on the job market and I was trying to go from being a PhD student to a faculty member somewhere and hearing that maybe my political activism or my public writing would be like a mark against me in my quest to get that career that I had worked so many years for and just having that in the back of my mind. But that still seems so far away and so minuscule in comparison to what y’all are dealing with. And I just wanted to ask as act scholars, as people working on your careers as well, how are you talking to your families about this and what future in or outside of academia do you feel is still open to you and people, graduate student workers like yourselves in today’s higher ed?

Caitlin Liss:

I mean the job market for history, PhDs has been quite bad for a long time even before this. So I mean, when I started the PhD program, I think I knew that I might not get a job in academia. And it’s sad because I really love it. I love teaching especially, but at the end of the day, I don’t feel like it’s a choice to stop speaking up about what’s happening, to stop condemning what’s happening in Gaza, to stop condemning the fascist takeover of our government and the attacks on our colleagues. It’s just I can’t not say something about it. I can’t do nothing, and if it means I can’t get a job after this, that will be very sad. But I don’t think that that is a choice that I can or should make to do nothing or say nothing so that I can try and preserve my career if I have to. I’ll get another kind of job.

Allie Wong:

Yeah, I completely agree. How dare I try to protect some nice job that I could potentially have in the future when there are friends and students on campus who are running for their lives. It just is not something that’s even comparable. And so I just feel like it’s an argument a lot of folks have made that if in the future there’s a job that decides not to hire me based off of my advocacy, I don’t want that job. I want a job based off of my skills and qualifications and experience, not my opinions about a genocide that’s happening halfway across the world, that any person should feel strongly against the slaughtering of tens of thousands of children and innocent folks. If that’s an inhibitor of a potential job, then that’s not the kind of environment I want to work in anyway. And that’s a really privileged position to have. I recognize that. But I think it’s incredibly crucial to be able to couch that issue in the broader perspective of not just this horrific genocide that’s happening, but also the future of our democracy and how critical it is to be someone who is willing to take a risk for the future of this country and the future of our basic civil liberties and freedoms.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Caitlin Liss and Allie Wong of Student Workers of Columbia, and I want to thank you for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you Allall back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. And we need to hear those voices now more than ever. Sign up for the real new newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

International students are being abducted and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Life-saving research projects across the academy are being halted or thrown into disarray by seismic cuts to federal grants. Dozens of universities are under federal investigation for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests. In today’s urgent episode of Working People, we get a harrowing, on-the-ground view of the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center; and Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, AAUP Council Member, and Peabody-award winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.

Additional links/info:

• April 17: Day of Action to Defend Higher Ed website
• American Association of University Professors (AAUP) website
• Federal Unionists Network website
• AAUP letter to college and university legal offices: “Institutions Should Not Provide Student and Faculty Info To Enable Deportations”
• Alan Blinder, The New York Times, “Trump Has Targeted These Universities. Why?”
• Oliver Laughland, The Guardian, “‘Detention Alley’: inside the Ice centres in the US south where foreign students and undocumented migrants languish”
• Alice Speri, The Guardian, “‘A huge cudgel’: alarm as Trump’s war on universities could target accreditors”
• Joy Connolly, Chronicle Review, “Colleges must stand together to resist Trump”
• Collin Binkley, Associated Press, “More than 50 universities face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti-DEI campaign”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Kill these cuts before they kill us’: Federally funded researchers warn DOGE cuts will be fatal”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are taking an urgent look at the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. As we’ve been covering here on the show and across The Real News Network, the Trump-Musk administration’s attacks on workers, workers’ rights, and on democracy as such are, frankly, so broad, wide-ranging, and destructive that it’s hard to really sum it all up here. But colleges and universities have become a key target of Trump’s administration and a key battlefront for enacting his agenda.

The world of higher ed looks and feels a lot different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education just a few short years ago. International students like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts are being hunted, abducted, and disappeared by ICE for speaking out against Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians.

Hundreds of international students have had their visas and their ability to stay in the country abruptly revoked. Dozens of investigations into different universities have been launched by the administration because of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests, which the administration has dangerously deemed antisemitic and grounds for denial of federal funding.

And the administration has, indeed, frozen federal funding as a means to bend universities to Trump’s will. So far, Alan Blinder reports this week at The New York Times, “Seven universities have been singled out for punitive funding cuts or have been explicitly notified that their funding is in serious jeopardy. They are: Brown University, which the Trump administration said stood to lose $510 million; Columbia, which is hoping to regain about $400 million in canceled grants and contracts after it bowed to a list of demands from the federal government; Cornell University, the target of a cut of at least $1 billion; Harvard University, which has approximately $9 billion at stake; Northwestern, which Trump administration officials said would be stripped of $790 million; The University of Pennsylvania, which saw $175 million in federal funding suspended [in response to] its approach to a transgender athlete’s participation in 2022; and Princeton University, which said ‘dozens’ of grants have been suspended. The White House indicated that $210 million was at risk.”

The battle on and over our institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump administration’s agenda will be decided. And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond. It will be decided by how faculty respond, how students and grad students respond, staff, campus communities, and you in the public writ large.

We’re going to be covering that fight continuously here on Working People and at The Real News Network in the coming months and years. And we’re taking it head on in today’s episode with two guests who are on the front lines of that fight. I’m honored to have them joining us together. Returning to the podcast, we’ve got Todd Wolfson, who currently serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. Todd is associate professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and he’s the co-director of the Media Inequality and Change Center, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School [for] Communication and Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information.

We are also joined today by Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who serves as a council member for the AAUP. You likely already know Chenjerai’s voice. The man is a radio and podcast legend. He’s a Peabody award-winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. He’s the co-creator, co-executive producer, and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War, and so, so much more.

Brother Todd, brother Chenj, thank you both so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate it. And I want to just dive right in. I want to start by asking you both to keep pulling on the thread from my introduction to the show just now. I tried to pack in as much information as I could, but really this is just scratching the surface of things. So can you both help our listeners better understand the full scope of what is actually happening across higher ed in the United States right now?

So Todd, let’s start with you, and then Chenjerai, please hop in after.

Todd Wolfson:  You did a pretty good job packing in a lot of information in the short bit, Max. And yeah, it’s like drinking from a fire hose right now. I characterize the main attacks as there’s about five streams of main frontal assaults on higher ed. One is an absolute attempt at the destruction of our biomedical research infrastructure and then our broader research infrastructure from there. And National Endowments of the Humanities just announced a 70% cancellation of all their grants.

But the biggest funding agency that’s taken the biggest hit is the NIH, which is the biggest biomedical research funding organization in the world. In the world. And at this point in 2024, they’d given out $6 billion in grants to do research on cancer and to do research on the Alzheimer’s and strokes and pediatric oncology and diabetes and all the things we all need so that when we go to the doctor they have cutting edge therapies to save the lives of ourselves and our parents. Now that $6 billion is $2.7 billion. That’s how much they’ve given out in 2025, less than half. So if we project that out, the NIH gives out $40 billion in funding for research on issues, biomedical health research, we expect something like $20 billion. So a $20 billion cut in research is what we’re looking at. And again, it’s primarily targeted at the biomedical infrastructure, but this is also National Science Foundation grants, it’s National Endowment of Humanities grants. It’s all the critical things that we need. So that’s one bucket.

The second bucket is extreme attacks on our students. You flagged it: abductions of students in broad daylight, Mahmoud Khalil, who you mentioned, I think there’s about eight or nine students now that have been abducted in broad daylight and whisked into an ICE underground prison system, usually hundreds of miles from their home, often with no charge, maybe the slightest charge of some pro-Palestinian organizing or protest work or even editorial work — Which is their right of freedom of speech, absolute right, and getting whisked off.

But those folks who they’ve abducted are just scratching the surface. Over the weekend, over this past weekend, the number is something like 600 visas were revoked across the country. We think at least a hundred of them were college, graduate, and undergraduate students. So not all of that’s hitting our colleges and universities, it’s bigger than that, but it’s probably the largest sector taking this hit, and we’re trying to figure it out.

At Rutgers, my home institution, 12 students got their visas revoked. And the folks who got their visas revoked this past weekend, they’re not on record for anything. We think it’s country of origin and connected to the Muslim ban 2.0, but we’re not even sure. So that’s a second.

And just to be clear about these attacks on our students, the goal is to outlaw protest. This is the first step in the strategy. They’re weaponizing antisemitism to go after pro-Palestinian protestors. This is a first step, and they want to see, they’re testing the water, and they want to see how far they can take this. Just yesterday they floated deporting US citizens. So they’re going to keep pushing this, and the goal is to shut us up.

The other things I’ll just flag really quickly that should be on folks’ radar as also happening, as we know, they’re also attacking universities for DEI-related grants and programs, and that’s been a massive attack. It was one of the first executive orders.

So for instance, we have a researcher who is doing research on the diversity of wheat crops, the genome in wheat crops. That research? Canceled, because the word “diversity” is in it, and they don’t want diversity, any sort of DEI. And so plant genome diversity is part of DEI now, and it’s ’cause of the Keystone Cops, and they’re doing this through keyword searches.

But it gets more serious than that. They’re also canceling research on infant mortality rates. We want to understand why there are differing infant mortality rates in urban or suburban or rural settings, in Black communities and white communities and Latinx communities. They won’t allow that research anymore. Or literacy rates, they don’t allow differing literacy rates in urban, suburban, rural communities because that’s diversity research. So there’s DEI attacks.

And then the last attack I’ll flag, and I’ll let Chenjerai come in, is the attack on our institutions writ large, and that’s the stuff that we’re seeing at Columbia and we’re seeing at all these other universities that you laid out. It’s not simply to weaponize antisemitism, to threaten cuts in the biomedical research and weaponize antisemitism. It’s bigger than that. They want to be able to control these institutions, and the first step is Columbia bowing. And so now they expect these next six to bow, and on and on from there. The goal is for them to come in and tell us what we can research, what we can teach, what our students can say and learn. So it’s a real attempt at massive control. And again, they’re looking at Hungary in Europe, and they’re getting much of their strategy here. So those are four major buckets of attacks going on. I’m sorry, get in there, Chenjerai.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  First of all, I think you laid it out real well. And also I’ll just say, much respect to you, Max, to Working People pod. I’ve been a longtime fan, real excited to be here.

So I just want to step back a little bit and talk about, we have to really look at why this is happening, and if you look at these cuts, it points to a little bit about why they’re doing this. First of all, they’re lying about what higher education is, and I think that’s really important. They want to cast higher education as a place that is only for a certain kind of elites, but that’s not true. Higher education is where so many families in America, across America, different communities, not just in rural communities, cities, where people are sending their kids because they want to have a fair shot, their family members because they want to have a fair shot. So that’s one component.

They also want to actually restrict higher education to people, imagine a certain kind of classes that they think don’t matter. But we have to understand [that] higher education is a lot of things. Higher education [is] healthcare facilities, not just places where health research is being done, but also where health workers are working, in places where people are nurses, doctors, people who are nurses’ aides and doctors’ aides. All those kinds are working at healthcare facilities that are a part of higher education. And in some communities, those are the only healthcare facilities, and they reach out into the community.

And like I said, speaking of labor, universities are places where people of all kinds of different folks work. They want you to think about this caricature of the woke student and then the woke, out of touch, elite professor. But, of course, a lot of people working in universities are contingent faculty, people who are teaching an incredible load and do not have the kind of job security that we would like them to have. You have staff, you have food facilities, cafeteria workers. So in many places, universities are public, universities are [a] huge employer for the state, a huge amount of that is happening. So they are really central.

This is not to say at all that higher education doesn’t have problems, but I think with everything with this administration — And if you look at the AAUP and some of the incredible, exciting coalitions we’ve been building around labor and higher education, we were already trying to address some of these changes that these outside agitators would like to do to control our institutions and make them places, [in some] cases with administrators being complicit with that.

So that’s just one thing. But I want to say that they’re lying about what it is, but also when you look at what they’re attacking, so for example, if you look at these cuts to the NIH, this is not some kind of austerity where they’re doing this because they want to help taxpayers. This is ideological. They want to replace public science with corporate science and they want to defund fields that they can’t control, especially ones that address systemic health disparities or things like the social determinants of health, reproductive research, things like gun violence, climate health, mental health.

Look at these cuts that happened yesterday. I think Cornell and Northwestern are not verifying everything, they’re still trying to figure out what’s going on in these cuts that happen. But you just look at it and go, some of the stuff that’s being cut is cancer research. They received stop work orders to stop cancer research. So when we say these cuts kill, it’s serious. It’s not hyperbole. And I think that that’s really important for folks to understand.

And just one other thing I’ll say is, but not only in the STEM fields. Why are they so obsessed with, for example, gender and queer studies in the humanities? Partially because they understand that when people study those fields, they expose how gender gets used as a political category to maintain state control using sexuality and kinship and labor. They understand that in the humanities, the research around race, around the real history of America, they understand that when people understand that, when people understand history, they’re like, oh, then they’re less vulnerable to some of the moves that they want to make and the ways that their policies harm people both here and abroad.

So I think disabilities. They don’t want people studying disability studies and really understand how some of these market logics harm people who are disabled or people who are chronically ill, and then what that has to mean for health infrastructure because, again, they want to reformulate this society according to what profits billionaires.

So I think that when we look at these cuts, part of our battle is that — And I think what’s happening now in an unfortunate way, is we’re seeing people come together around a real understanding of why it’s important for this research to continue, why it’s important for it to be protected from Elon Musk or people like RFK or whatever, and what higher education really is.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Todd, Chenjerai, I want to ask if you could take us even further into your lifeworld and your experience of all this chaos that’s happening in higher ed right now at the hands of the Trump administration. We were talking in that first section about the scope of this attack. I want to ask if you could tell us about the experience of the attacks. How have you both personally been processing this as it’s been unfolding in your capacities as professors, but also as representatives of and leaders of the AAUP? What are you hearing from your colleagues in the faculty? How are students responding to this, and other members of the community?

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  Well, I guess I’ll jump in. There’s so much. One thing I’ll say is that there are Todd and a number of other leaders in organizations like Higher Ed Labor United, some people in the AAUP who are not necessarily positioned in the leadership in the way that we are now, and other folks who are working in a coalition which we now have called Labor for Higher Education. So many people, and people at different AAUP locals were already in a fight about the direction higher education is going in.

As someone who just came into the academy… As a professor, I started my first appointment around 2013. What I saw was I worked at universities where the whole faculty had been casualized and didn’t have the ability to speak up. And I saw what the effects of that were. I saw they were living in fear because the way the contract structure had been set up, they had to beg for their jobs every year. They didn’t have protections, they didn’t have the benefits they needed, and in the Southern states, they had real obstacles to organizing around collective bargaining.

So I saw what that meant for people, though. I saw what that meant, for example, with the custodial workers [at the] university, they didn’t have a place they could go to appeal and push back on things that the administration might be doing with them. And then I moved through to different institutions — I was at Rutgers, for full disclosure, briefly — And I saw the opposite of what it means when you have a wall-to-wall union and what it means actually to go through those struggles and all those other kinds of things. So I just want to say that it was really interesting that so many of us were in this battle. I was still learning and getting involved with it.

When these cuts hit, what you saw was everything that we had already been talking about escalate to a whole new level, and then with these new pieces involved. And for me, it looks like talking to colleagues who were doing HIV research or cancer research, seeing them at an informal event and they’re almost in tears because their whole research infrastructure, they have to figure out if they’re going to fire people. There’s a diverse array of postdoc students [for] who not only their education but their jobs are in flux. They’re thinking about the people that they serve, and they’re in a panic state.

It is not easy to get an NEH grant or an NIH grant. You put a lot of work into doing that, and then that work sustains both the communities and some of those institutions. I’m seeing people, some of these grants, for example, are grants that function at multiple institutions, so they helped to create an infrastructure for people to do powerful, important research.

A lot of research, by the way — And this is, I think, also if you look at it, is one way people tend to think about a place like Cornell — But you gotta understand some of that research was in innovation. Some of it was even in national security stuff. So that’s the kind of stuff that I was seeing be people say, oh my God, how do I keep this work going? What do I do? Scrambling, panicking. And the idea that the Trump administration is doing this to somehow make America more competitive, to protect working-class, vulnerable people, is absurd.

And then to talk about the DEI stuff that was coming down, we’re in the discussion now about the cuts, I would say… It’s fascinating and very clarifying to watch these folks try to roll back a hundred years of civil rights progress in the most flagrant and obvious ways. There’s no way I can say it. How, as a journalist, your job usually is to try to translate something that’s not quite clear. This is so crystal clear. People see it. They see what you’re not allowed to talk about. They see who’s getting fired.

And then the final thing I’ll say is that when it comes to the issue of the free right to protest. Students who stood up on the issue of Palestine, I’ve been in meetings with colleagues who are talking about students and colleagues hiding in their apartments. People are being advised by their lawyers to hide in their apartment because they’re not sure what’s going to happen if they come out. I’m at NYU. Any time those ICE vehicles or certain kinds of police vehicles pull up, you see a wave of terror go across the [campus], snatching people off the street.

So to try to function every day in that context and do the work that we want to do, as a faculty member, I want to tell my colleagues and my students that it’s going to be OK, but the only way that we can actually make it is to organize. And it’s good ’cause we are organizing, but it’s horrifying.

Todd Wolfson:  Thank you, Chenjerai. I want to start where you left off. It doesn’t perfectly answer your question, Max, but it needs to be said here, which is the 60 to 70 years of divestment from higher ed and the fascist threats to higher ed in this moment are deeply entangled, and that’s something that needs to be clearly understood and discussed more.

Divestment started at the moment when schools like the University of California system and CUNY were free. They were free in the ’70s, in the ’60s into the early ’70s, and people of color were getting access to free higher ed for the first time — Or a highly subsidized higher ed — For the first time in this country’s history. And in the same moment, those same universities around the country were the backbone of the ’60s in the protests, whether it’s the protests against Vietnam or for the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther Party, each one of these had — The Berkeley free speech movement — Was deeply… Universities were critical to them.

So at first it was a racialized and political attack on our universities that started in the ’60s and ’70s. Reagan was governor of California, and he said, quite directly, we can’t let the working class get educated for free. That was said. And that led to divestment from our institutions, first in California — Again, Reagan was like, we got to do something about those radicals, radical hippies in Berkeley. And so they divested and they forced students to start paying for their higher ed. So that happened.

And lo and behold, the right-wing attack on higher ed led to a full-scale neoliberal corporate ideology within higher ed, where our institutions became more and more dependent on a corporate logic, a neoliberal logic to run themselves. Which meant, to Chenjerai’s point, more contingent faculty, higher tuition rates, higher and higher and higher tuition rates, $2 trillion student debt, bureaucrats running our institutions, and, importantly, mission drift. They don’t remember what the institution is for because they’re so tied to corporate America ideology. And so no longer are these institutions the bedrock of a public system, a common good system.

And so fast forward to the fascist attacks on our institution which we’re outlining right now. They had already hollowed out the core. They had already hollowed out the core. And that’s why Columbia bows the knee in one second flat. That’s why our presidents go down to Washington DC when they’re called by the Educational Workforce Committee and they cannot respond with a clear vision of what higher ed is about, and they get end run by right-wing ideologues in the Senate and in Congress.

So it’s important to flag that there’s a deeply entwined relationship between fascism, right-wing ideology, authoritarianism, and neoliberalism, which isn’t really well talked about, which is what has put us in this situation. I’m sorry, I just want to go into that. It’s got to be flagged.

Now, to your question, I have never seen a climate of fear like this in my life anywhere, anywhere in my experience. We’re getting hundreds of emails every single day from faculty, from staff, from students. I need a safe place to stay, to Chenjerai’s point, I need a safe place to stay. That’s half of our discussions right now is people need safe places to stay; I don’t know if my research project is going to be cut; I’m not going to get tenure; I’m going to have to change careers because [of] a loss of funding; I’m going to be sent home and I’m not going to be able to come back and finish my degree.

These are the kind of discussions we’re having, and it’s not like once in a while. It’s every single day, multiple times a day. The fear is palpable and it’s purposeful. It’s purposeful. They’re trying to destabilize us, they’re trying to make us fearful, and they’re trying to get us all to bow down to what is a fascist threat to our institutions. So that’s the situation we’re in.

But I’m seeing something else too, and this is what gives me a lot of hope, is that fear is turning into anger, and that anger is turning into action, and we need more of that. We need the people who are the least vulnerable, US-born citizens, people with tenure, to stand up and step into this battle full-throated, not only for ourselves but for all of us, for higher education, for democracy, but also for the vulnerable students who dared to speak out for a free Palestine and now are getting dragged away in handcuffs by ICE agents. It’s on us to do that and continue building that power.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Guys, we were just talking about how the long path to turning universities into their contemporary neoliberal corporatized versions of themselves, that all predated these attacks. And it has, as you both pointed out, made institutions of higher ed especially vulnerable to these sorts of attacks from the Trump administration.

I wanted to tug on that thread a bit more by asking about the workforce and what the campus community looks like after decades of neoliberal reforms. Because this was something that I dealt with as a graduate student and political organizer at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration. We were trying to rally members of the campus community, and in so doing had to come up against the fact that you have students who, unlike the student activists of the 1960s, who now having to make the calculation of whether or not they could afford to get suspended or even miss a class because they are paying tens of thousands of dollars for this tuition. So that right there is already a complicating factor in the political minds of people on campus, especially students.

But you also have, Chenjerai mentioned the ways that faculty in higher ed over the past 40 years, we used to have around 75% of the faculty be tenured or tenure track and only 25% being non-tenure track and “contingent” faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, so on and so forth. That ratio is completely flipped, and the vast bulk of the teaching workforce in higher ed is made up of so-called contingent faculty, and that puts a lot more pressure on those faculty members to not get involved in political activity for fear that their paychecks and livelihoods and professional reputations will be tarnished and they’ll be out of a job.

So these are just some of the realities that one has to deal with trying to organize on a campus in the 21st century. I wanted to ask if you could, for folks listening, talk about that more and what it looks like from the faculty side. So as you all on your campuses are trying to respond to this moment, what role is the AAUP playing in that? For folks listening, could you just say what the AAUP is, but also what the difference is between, say, a tenured professor and an adjunct professor and their involvement in this fight right now?

Todd Wolfson:  So I’ll just lay out what the AAUP is real brief. So AAUP is over 100 years old. John Dewey, one of the great US scholars, was one of the founders of it. And when it was first — And this is why it’s a complicated organization — When it was first established, it was a professional association for faculty, and it probably was like that for its first 50 years. But in 1970, or about that time, it also started unionizing and building collective bargaining units. And so it has been a layered history of first a professional association, layered on top of that, a union, a national union for faculty in particular.

And so today it is both of those things, but from my vantage as the president who comes out of a strong union at Rutgers, I think, in this moment in time, it needs to act less like a professional association and more like a union. It needs to build power, it needs to organize, and it needs to fight, fight not only up against the threats we face right now with the Trump administration, but also fight to reimagine what higher education is for and about — Which I’d love to get to, but I’ll say one other thing about this and then quickly talk about faculty and then kick it to Chenjerai, which is we have 500 chapters across this country on every type of university, in community colleges, two-year institutions, at four-year publics, four-year privates, in Ivy League institutions, every type of institution. Out of those 500, about 400 of our chapters are called advocacy chapters, they don’t have collective bargaining rights, and about 100 are unions.

An important thing for your listeners to know is in private universities, faculty, tenured faculty, do not have the right to unionize, but in public universities, they do. So it’s a strange bifurcation. And so there are a few places where faculty have unions in private institutions, but almost the entirety of tenure-stream faculty that are unionized are unionized at our public institutions.

So then I’ll just say one other thing for folks to know, which is, unfortunately, AAUP used to primarily cater to tenure-stream faculty. Our leadership, we do not believe in that. We believe in everyone fights together, wall-to-wall, coast to coast. And so we’re really fighting to reframe that. It’s not just about faculty. We need to build with faculty. We need to build with our postdocs, our grad workers. We need to build with our undergrads, we need to build with our custodial staff, professional staff, tech, across the board, our medical workers. That’s the only way forward. That’s the only way we build the power necessary to fight back.

And the last thing I’ll say is that the professoriate, the faculty in this country, you flagged it, and it’s important to know, it is not what they say it is. The majority, at least the plurality of faculty, are contingent. Most of them are adjunct faculty, which means part-time. And most of them are applying for their jobs semester after semester every semester with no benefits, zero benefits. And so we have adjunct faculty that are teaching six classes in a semester at six different institutions up and down the Eastern Seaboard. So the teacher is one day in a school in upstate New York and the next day teaching in Philadelphia. That’s the situation. And they’re lucky to scrape by with 60 grand a year and no benefits.

So the story they tell about what the professoriate is and the reality of the professoriate couldn’t be more different. And it’s important to understand that when we think about our institutions today. But I’ll let Chenjerai get in there and talk a little bit more about that.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  I want to go back to something Todd says. I can’t help but make this a little historical. This is not actually not unprecedented, and it’s really important for people to understand that this is part of a historical trajectory that has to do with neoliberalism.

I was reading recently and talking, actually, with Ryann Liebenthal, incredible book called Burdened. One of the things that lays out is that in 1979, some conservatives got together at the Heritage Foundation and were like, we’re going to start to lay out a plan. And they laid out a plan, what ultimately became a series of publications called Mandate for Leadership. They launched the first one in 1980.

That did a lot of things. Mandate for Leadership was broad, it didn’t just focus on higher education. But actually the first thing you gotta understand is Project 2025 was a part in that series. So people talk about Project 2025 like it came out of nowhere. No, it was a part of things that started, and it’s not like they never had a chance to implement it. The attacks, cuts, similar types of things that were implemented that were planned out in this early ’80s version of Project 2025 were actually implemented [under the] Reagan administration.

Now, one of the many things that did was it gutted federal support for higher education, including things like student loans, and actually transformed a lot of, I would say, including student support. Because one of the things that happened during that period was that a lot of the federal grants… I think if you would’ve looked going back to the ’40s, only like 20% of the federal money that came in was targeted toward a loan structure where people would have to repay it. After the ’80s where they realized that they could actually turn student debt into a product, it became like a centerpiece. But that was just one of many ways in which you started to see this divestment of states, of the federal government from public education support.

And so yes, to your point, that has meant that all these people, that has meant that our faculty, so many of the faculty, are insecure. And I want to be clear, the reason, part of why I bring that up is that they were very intentional about the idea that people who are insecure are going to be less political. People who are in debt are going to be less political. They’re not going to be sure and they’re going to have to make very careful decisions about how they can fight, if they can fight. And some of it is even just being overloaded with work. As you try to pay back this debt, as you try to do it, you might not even have time to get your mind around it, if that sounds familiar to anybody.

And for this reason, this is one of the ways, I just want to be clear that these attacks don’t just touch people currently in the academy, they touch both the cuts to funding — I’m hearing from parents who are unsure what disciplines their folks should go into. So they’re actually trying to shape it where, at a time when we need massive amounts of doctors, we have emerging health threats that are happening. People are like, I don’t know if I want to go be a doctor because I’m seeing the funding being cut at the elite places where I would’ve done that. So it affects things [at] that level. And then the funding available affects families who have to say, am I going to be able to get that support I need? So how do we fight? So that’s more and more [why] people are being drawn into this fight in this way.

You’re seeing all these people being attacked and, in a way, they are taking a step toward building our coalition for us because I think they’re overreaching. When you hear all about all these people being affected, all these people feeling insecure, for me, that’s the coalition that we want to organize.

Now, on a note of organizing, let me say a few things. Higher education is, on the one hand, higher education is like any other kind of workplace. You have some people who are very engaged, who’ve been pulling their weight, who’ve been leading the fight, and you have some people who maybe are just focused on their jobs and haven’t yet seen themselves as organizers.

But I would say, in this situation, what we’re trying to do across workplaces, including, and what our organizations are doing, is inviting people in and saying, hey, see how these battles that you’re fighting at an individual level, at a department level, whether you’re a parent, whether you’re a community member who doesn’t want to see that medical research cut, see how this is part of a larger fight.

And where I think higher education, interestingly, isn’t a place to lead is that the way I’ve been learning from leaders like Todd, leaders from Labor for Higher Ed, HELU, even leaders at AFT, people who have a long history of organizing, labor has a set of strategies that we can use that is not the same as people coming out into the street. I was excited to see people at our days of action all over the country. I was excited to see people at the hands-off protests, hundreds of thousands of people in the street, but coming out into the street is not enough. We need a repertoire of strategies which include things that can create real leverage, things people cannot ignore.

And so, in a way, what the AAUP is leading is we’re actually showing people that repertoire of strategies. We have a legal strategy, incredible legal counsel, it has been rolling out lawsuits that are moving through the system. We know that the legal strategy by itself is not going to be the thing that does it, but it buys us time. It slows things down, and it shows people that we know how to throw a punch. And at the same time where we’re building the power that we need to take real labor action, we’re doing educations and teachings.

So in that way, what I’ve seen is that there’s times when people don’t necessarily know really what I do as a professor or they’re like, oh, you off and a professor in the books. Now I’m seeing people who are outside of the academy saying, we love the way that higher education is leading at a time when folks don’t know what to do, or maybe they don’t know what to do beyond simply coming out into the street. Which, again, I encourage. You ain’t going to hear me be one of these people talking about people… Well, I don’t know, the demands weren’t clear enough.

No, listen, this is a time, honestly, to think like an organizer, not like — I’m just going to say it — Not like a social media influencer. Social media influencers build currency because you just point out, you dunk on people. Look, if there’s somebody who voted for Trump and they see it’s wrong now and they’re like, I want to get involved in changing it ’cause I don’t like what I’m seeing, I want to welcome that person in. I’m not here to dunk on you. I don’t get nothing but dunking on you on clicks and likes. But if you join our coalition and become part of it and spread the movement to your people, we get stronger and we can fight this.

That’s what we’re trying to show people, our version of that with the way that we’re organizing. And again, I’m learning this. In a way, I’m newer to this than other people, but it’s really exciting to me to feel like there’s something we can do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Todd, Chenj, I have so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a few more minutes here before we have to wrap up, and so I want to make them count. I wanted to, in this last 10 minutes or so, focus in on three key questions: One, if the Trump administration is not stopped, thwarted, frustrated in its efforts to remake higher education in this country, what is the end game there? What are our colleges and universities and our higher ed system going to look like if they get what they want?

The next question is, and then on top of that, the situation that people are in is needing to defend institutions that already had deep problems with them, as we’ve been talking about here. And you can’t just galvanize people by saying, we got to defend the norms and institutions that were already in place. That’s the same university system that saddled people like me with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, that we’re not exactly chomping at the bit to save that system in its current form. So what is the alternate vision? What is the future of higher education that y’all are fighting for and rallying people around?

Then the last question is how do we get there? What can folks listening do to be part of this, and why should they get involved before it’s too late?

Todd Wolfson:  Look, I think it’s really clear what the Trump administration’s goals are here. And they’ve taken this out of hundreds of years, a hundred years of history of authoritarian and fascist regimes. And one of the key sectors that these regimes always target is higher education, always. I think most recently it is Viktor Orbán in Hungary. But you can peel back our history and you’ll see it has happened before in many different moments when fascist forces are on the march.

And so the reason why higher ed is targeted is because it’s an independent formation that can offer — Not always, and imperfect — But can offer a counter political ideology, and it needs to come under control of the state because otherwise it is a danger to the state’s ability to push forward fascism, in particular, an educated populace. And so there is a real goal here at the biggest level to slow down enrollment numbers, take over the way higher education is done so that we are not a counterforce to fascism in this country. And so it is a clear path towards that. This is not the only institution that they’re going to target and go after, but it’s one of the key institutions that they will go after and target.

Labor’s another, which is why labor unions in higher ed are at such a critical crosshair. Another is college students and protests from college students, who have always led this country, have always been the mirror, showing a mirror to us and showing us what we look like and been a moral beacon for us. There are real aspects of higher ed that are really, really dangerous or threatening to a Trump administration and what they want to achieve.

And so if they get rid of higher ed or they take control of it, I think it is a step towards, it’s not the entirety of, but a critical step towards authoritarianism. We could call it fascism, we could call it postfascism, we could call it an illiberal democracy. There’s a lot of ideas going around about what exactly we’re in, and I think it’s a complex merger of a host of things, but I think wherever they’re trying to go, it means less voice, less power for all working people, and getting rid of the higher ed is a way to get there.

And so I’ll just say two other things in this short time to you, which is, one, higher ed has never been perfect. Let’s just be clear about some of its worst moments in history. Our great land grant institutions — Which are great, one of the great things about America, American higher ed system, which Lincoln dubbed the people’s colleges, or along those lines, were all based on taking off stolen land from Indigenous people. That’s clear. That happened. And those same Indigenous Native folks didn’t get to enjoy and use those universities to advance their lives. So they merely were extractive from the people who were here first. But then also post World War II, the GI program, Black people didn’t get access to it the same way white soldiers coming back did.

And so always at the heart of this institution has been racism and classism and sexism has been coded into our higher ed. So we should be clear about that. And we don’t want to build a new higher ed that replicates those problems. We need to reimagine it. But we need to reimagine it building off what we have now. We can’t just say tomorrow we want something wholly new. We have to take steps. People are getting their livelihoods from these institutions, they’re finding ways to have social mobility through these institutions, so we need to build through them.

And what our vision is is a fully funded public higher education system. Fully funded. Nobody should be going to college and coming out in debt. Nobody. And there needs to be an end to student debt. We need to end the debt that has already been accrued. That’s better for all the people who have that debt, but it’s also better for our economy writ large, for you, Max. We gotta get rid of your debt too.

And then we have to make sure that people who work on our campuses work with dignity. Right now, that is not the case. Too many people, as we already discussed, are working across six institutions, scraping together a living, and we have to end that. We have to make sure everyone who works can have long-term, dignified employment. And we have to make sure that we fully fund and increase our funding to our HBCUs, our minority-serving institutions, our Tribal colleges and universities.

And we forgot to say this, the attack on the Department of Education defunds those institutions, so that also is another line of attack that I forgot to mention. So we want more funding for those groups, and we want more funding for science, more funding for arts.

And so that’s the kind of higher ed we want to build. We want to build that higher ed as one which has shared governance so that the students and the faculty and the staff of our institutions govern our institutions, not business bureaucrats that now control them. So that’s a vision we want to put forward.

And the last thing I want to say is we have a way to get there, but the first step has got to be responding to Trump. We can’t build the vision of higher ed that we all want without first standing up to fascism.

Chenjerai said this, and my heart sings when he says this, because we’re on the same page: Protests are great — They are not going to stop fascism. They will not stop fascism. The courts are great. Thank God. They’ve done a good job for us so far in holding up some of the worst aspects of Trump’s illegal moves — They will not stop fascism. We are going to have to scale up our organizing. Higher ed is going to have to build with other sectors, federal workers, K-12 workers, healthcare workers, immigrant workers, all under attack in different ways. And we’re going to have to figure out the demands we need to make and the militancy we’re going to have to take, the militant moves we’re going to have to take to force them to stop.

And that’s going to mean risk, but there is no other way forward. And so that’s what AAUP’s committed to. That’s what Labor for Higher Ed’s committed to, and that’s where we’re trying to go, and we need other sectors to join us to get there.

Chenjerai Kumanyika:  Todd really said it. I would just add two points to that. When you see what’s being cut and what’s being attacked, you’re getting a glimpse of the future of what it is. You could go to places like Hungary, you could go to a lot of places where these things are a little bit more developed and see what this looks like there, and I guarantee it’s not something that we want.

But there’s two points I want to make, which is that one of the things about worker power across sectors is that workers, when they’re in control, can say, this is what we want the institutions that we work in to do, and this is what we don’t want them to do. Workers can govern the direction of institutions. When you see Amazon workers and tech workers who are stepping up saying, we don’t want to be involved in making technology that’s supporting genocide or that’s supporting oppression or data extraction here at home. That’s worker power, workers saying, let’s get together and dictate what happens. As opposed to administrator or, I would say, billionaire executive power, which is organized around a completely different set of priorities.

And the same is true in the academy. One of the dangers is that if you look at the various org parts of labor at the university, folks are also saying, this is what we want, our universities to be on the right side of history, doing powerful and important work. We do not want them to be involved in suppression. And if you don’t like what you see at Columbia, where you see them bending the knee and then you see them actually becoming complicit, in a way teaching the Trump administration what they can do, what they’re allowed to do, that’s a consequence of not having sufficient worker power. And you’re going to see more of that. So you’re imagining not just what’s going to get removed, but now imagine that universities are really deployed as an arm of fascism in all its different formations. So that’s one thing that I think is at stake.

The second thing I would bring up is that higher education battles are so important because everything that we want to try to make this world a better place is interwoven with higher education. So if we want to defeat the urgent threat of climate change, that takes research, people who are finding the solutions, precisely the kind of research that’s being taken. So that’s not just about what’s happening at universities, it’s about the climate stakes for everybody. And most of the people that affects are not in the university, but the university research and making sure you’re having real research on that, is central to that.

When you talk about healthcare, fighting for a world where we do have healthcare for all and understanding what that healthcare needs to look like, the university is crucial for that. Todd already mentioned the NIH was responsible for almost, I think, basically all the therapies that came out that were useful in the last decade, really. So you can’t talk about healthcare without talking about it.

When you talk about labor and this emerging regime where labor protections and technology, trying to understand what is this actually going to look like. People producing real research like our colleague Veena Dubal, who’s looking at what actually is happening with these algorithms for real and how are those algorithms going to affect things as these people try to Uberize the entire planet and create a situation where people don’t have benefits and all that, that research is also being done at the university.

I just laid out three right there: Working conditions, healthcare, climate change, and we could go on. What about art? What about the things that bring us joy in life? Where people have the room outside of the corporate factory to actually explore and produce wonderful things, art and music and culture, all those things.

So to me, what’s at stake is literally that future. And as higher education workers, it’s up to us to make sure that, as Todd is saying, we want to fight for the conditions of education, that it really is working for the common good, but also we have to fight back this monster. And I’m terrified right now, I gotta say. It is OK to say you’re scared by what I’m seeing, but I’m also encouraged. And when you’re scared, you gotta lock arms with your people and walk forward anyway, and that’s what I’m seeing people stepping up and doing.

Todd Wolfson:  We have actions on April 17 throughout the country. I think over about a hundred institutions across the country are taking part in our April 17 actions. So please come out or organize your own action. It’s being driven by the Coalition for Action in Higher ed, which is a lot of amazing AAUP leaders. We will also be engaging in Mayday organizing. And then this summer we want you to come to your AAUP chapter, your UAW local, your CWA local, your AFT local, your NEA local, your SEIU local, whatever it is, however you can plug in, and then you need to reach out to us. We’re going to do a summer of training that’s going to prepare us for what needs to get done in the fall, and we need every single higher ed worker.

And one other thing, if you aren’t a member of AAUP, now is the time to become a member and join us in this fight. And if you don’t have a chapter, you need to build a chapter on your campus, and we will be there with you every step of the way. We have a campaign called Organize Every Campus, and we will help you build your campus chapter and build your power so you can fight back at the campus level while we collectively fight back at the state and national level together. So join AAUP today. If you’re already in a union, get involved in your union, and we’ll see you on the front lines.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Professors Todd Wolfson and Chenjerai Kumanyika of the American Association of University Professors, and I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you, it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

On Tuesday, April 8, unions, unionized federal workers, and their supporters around the country mobilized for a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education programs. As organizers stated on the Kill The Cuts website:

“By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding NO cuts to education and life-saving research.”

In this on-the-ground edition of Working People, we take you to the front lines of the Kill the Cuts rally that took place in Washington, DC, and we speak with workers and union representatives whose lives and work have already been affected by these cuts.

Speakers include: Margaret Cook, Vice President of the Public, Healthcare, and Education Workers sector of the Communications Workers of America (CWA); Matt Brown, Recording Secretary of NIH Fellows United (United Auto Workers Local 2750); Rakshita Balaji, a post-baccalaureate researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Amanda Dykema, shop steward for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1072 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Additional links/info:

• Kill the Cuts website
• NIH Fellows United website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “What’s really behind Trump’s war on federal unions?”
• Jocelyn Kaiser, Science, “NIH under orders to cancel $2.6 billion in contracts”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

I got work. Who protects us? We protects us. Who protects us, who protects us, who protects us? We protects us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to another on the Ground edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I’m here in Washington DC right in front of the US Capitol Building where dozens of local union members and union leaders just held a rally as part of a national Kill The Cuts Day of Action. Similar protest rallies were held today from California to Illinois to New York. Organizers called for the National Day of Action to raise awareness and fight against the Trump Musk administration’s cuts and proposed cuts to federal research, health and education. As the homepage of the Kill the Cuts website states by cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care.

The Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding no cuts to education and lifesaving research. The National Day of Action is sponsored by a plethora of labor unions, including the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the Communications Workers of America, ame, SEIU, the Debt Collective and more. I came down to the DC action to talk to union members about this fight and what their message is to the Trump administration, to the labor movement and to the public.

Speaker 3:

Alright, we’re our last speaker. We have got Margaret Cook, who is the vice president of the Public Healthcare and Education Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America. Let’s give it.

Margaret Cook:

I am a little short. Let me move this back a bit. Good afternoon everybody. Yes, I am your last speaker and I promise I won’t be like a Baptist preacher. I’m not going to keep you for another hour. My name is Margaret Cook and I am the public healthcare and education worker sector Vice President of Communication Workers of America representing over 130,000 state municipal and higher education workers across the country in Puerto Rico, including thousands of researchers, lab technicians, public healthcare clinicians and nurses, and thousands of additional support and wraparound staff, many of whom have seen their work shut down, cut off, and possibly killed by these cuts. You’ve heard from all of these people about today. Cuts that are illegal, cuts that are unethical, cuts that are immoral cuts that are unacceptable, cuts that are fatal. And I don’t mean just figuratively

Speaker 1:

Because

Margaret Cook:

As you’ve heard today, these cuts to research that will, these are cuts to research that will save lives. And so our message is pretty clear today. Kill these cuts before they kill us. I’m proud to stand here today with all these other members and leaders from labor who are going to work each day to deliver care and discover solutions for each and every one of us, which is a lot more than you can say for the people who are doing the cutting. You got the world’s richest man on one hand and the world’s most arrogant man on the other.

These men are living in a fantasy world, which may explain one of the reasons why they are so hostile to science. I’ve sat back and I’ve listened to them talk about how they need to cut back on the size of our federal government and to do so by going on a rampage against these workers who are doing some of the most critical and vital work that our government does. Well, what they aren’t telling you because they’re liars and cheats is that today the size of the federal workforce is the smallest it has been since the Great Depression at just over 1.5% of the jobs in this country, years of plundering public dollars for corporate greed, decades of austerity and slashing and burning the public good has left our government smaller than it has ever been, and these jackals aren’t done tearing away at it. And for what? Let’s cut the crap on the racist dog whistles about DEI, setting aside for the sake of argument, the fact that we do need to address inequality and injustice. Are you really telling me that the cuts to people working on cancer research is about DEI, that the cuts to people working to deliver vital aid and care is about DEII see right through it and I know you do too.

The reality is we need more public investment, not less because what is it that our investments really do? What these workers do is they discover, they educate, they provide care, and they prevent and act in emergencies, in labs and research settings across this country, these workers are discovering cures and treatments for diseases that threaten all of us. My grandfather died two days ago from stage four cancer, and my mother currently has stage two in campuses and schools. They’re educating and helping elevate the knowledge of future generations in clinics and hospitals and public service facilities. They’re delivering care to people who need it and in dire straits from outbreaks of viruses like measles. Measles, y’all.

These are people who put themselves at risk to protect the rest of us, and that’s who Trump and Musk and a bunch of kids without any real world knowledge and experience are trying to fire Trump and Musk whose genius lies and putting their name on work and breakthroughs of other people and then have the nerve to charge rent for it well enough. This money is the public’s and we demand that it be used for the public good. Not one penny less. No. I firmly believe for us to meet the incredible challenges and realize the potential of our country, we need so much more public investment. That’s why we’ve got to unite across our unions, across all kinds of work and across our communities to stand up, speak out, resist these attacks, and defend the services and work we do for the people we serve and work for. Lives are on the line. These cuts are wrong. So I say again, kill these cuts or they’ll end up killing us. Thank you.

Matt Brown:

My name is Matt Brown and I’m the recording secretary for NIH Fellows United. We’re a local of the UAW number 27 50.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Matt, thank you so much for talking to me, man. The kill cuts rally just concluded here. The Senate building is right behind us, but for folks who aren’t here right now and are listening to this, can you just say a little bit about what we just witnessed? What brought you guys out here today?

Matt Brown:

Of course. Yeah, max, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the pod and what brought us out here is saving the completely devastating cuts that are currently happening to publicly funded research here in the US at NIH Fellows United. We’re members of the intramural scientific team at the NIH that are working on things like carrying cancer and making treatments for diabetes, and we’re partnering up with all the folks that are being affected by the cuts to the extramural side of the NIH. So all of the universities and other institutions that receive grants to work on those same things outside of the NIH. And yeah, it’s been really great to see all of these people come together to save the life-saving work that we’re all doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Say more about the extent of these cuts and the impact on research intra and extramural. I guess give listeners a sense of how deep this goes and what the impacts are really going to be.

Matt Brown:

This is truly an existential crisis for biomedical research in America. Flat out the cuts to the intramural program have seen thousands of jobs cut from the people that support the science that we do. And on the extramural side, the cuts that we’re seeing to grants these so-called indirect costs, it’s a bit of a jargon term that can be hard to parse, but really that goes towards supporting the life-saving research that we do. The cuts that we’re seeing are going to decimate the amount of research that we can get done on these awful diseases that people face. And like I said, this is an existential question, do we want biomedical research to continue or not?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what about, let’s talk about the flesh and blood workers who are making this research happen and the working people who benefit from that research. Who are these cuts actually hurting right now?

Matt Brown:

These cuts are going to affect every single person. Historically, scientists and researchers have been considered somewhat apolitical quote because, hey, who doesn’t know somebody that’s been affected by cancer? Right? It’s pretty easy to fund cancer research because it can be so devastating. And so yeah, everybody’s going to be affected by this. It’s not just the researchers here at NIH and Bethesda. It’s not just the researchers at universities, but it’s going to be every single person who has or has known someone with a really awful life altering disease.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what’s the message? What was the rallying message that we heard here today for folks in attendance and folks who aren’t in attendance? What are these unions doing to fight back and what are you saying to other folks about how they can get involved?

Matt Brown:

Well, really what I think the rallying call is, is to look around us. It’s look at who are the people that are trying to save each other’s lives. Here it’s the organized workers that are involved in biomedical research around the country. We’re not hearing things from NIH leadership. We’re not hearing things from university leadership. We’re hearing things from the organized researchers who are getting their butts out here to try to save what we do. And that’s really what this is, is it’s about getting as many people out here as possible and all moving in the same direction to not just save our jobs and not just save science, but to save lives around the country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And last question. I mean, there were a number of different unions present here and represented here. What does it mean that this is such a crisis, that it is bringing together different sides of the labor movement and uniting around a common fight?

Matt Brown:

Absolutely. And actually that’s a very special question to me because as NIH Fellows United we’re one of the unions that was part of organizing this as well as reaching out to other universities, one of them being my former bargaining unit with teachers and researchers United, which is local of UE 1 97. And so

Yeah, it’s been really special to see people come together and not just start organizing the workers in their own workplaces, but reaching out to everybody else in their own regions, in their own careers and making sure that we’re all pointed at the same thing, which is saving lives. This is obviously not some sort of move towards government efficiency, that everything that the Trump and Musk administration is doing right now is entirely done to antagonize workers and make us feel like we’re hopeless. But things like today show us that we’re not and we need to continue doing things like this along in the future to make sure that they can’t move on with their destructive agenda.

Rakshita Balaji:

So hi, my name is Rakshita Balaji Currently I’m a post-baccalaureate fellow, a researcher at the NIH. So what that means is I’ve been spending the last almost two years now post-graduation from getting my undergrad degree working at the NIH and getting training in order to prepare myself for success in my next step of my career stage, which is to go to graduate school and I’ll be a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania coming this fall. So what I’m interested in is neuroscience research, and that’s what my career trajectory has been so far.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, congratulations on your acceptance and good luck. We need you out there. For folks who are listening to this who only see an acronym when they hear NIH, I’m not asking you to sort of describe everything that goes on there, but could you just give folks a sense of who actually works in the NIH and what kind of work is being done there?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, this is a great question and a question. I actually had myself when I was young and going into the NIH or the National Institute of Health, I was 22 when I joined, and I actually also had no idea what goes on behind those gates. And it turns out what I’ve learned so far is that the N NIH is full of awesome people who are passionate about their work, but they’re also not, maybe the scientists you think of in the media that work isolated in a lab in an ivory tower doing crazy experiments. These are people who have families, people who have loved ones who have been affected by diseases and people who really want to make a difference in healthcare in America. And so I just want to first make the point that the NIH is full of regular people who just happen to love what they do and love science, just like everyone in this country is passionate about what they work on.

And so National Institute of Health is comprised by a bunch of different sub institutes. So they’ll work on things like allergies and diseases, cancer, pain, neuroscience, looking at neurodegenerative diseases, looking at aging. There’s a bunch of different types of research that’s going on in order to serve every subset of someone’s health profile and all of the different types of diseases or different afflictions that people can have throughout the us. And what’s also really special about the NIH in particular is their ability to use their knowledge and their resources to target diseases and conditions that are not necessarily as prevalent. So for example, rare diseases where people oftentimes don’t always find care in their own physician settings or don’t always find the right answers, just going to the doctor that doesn’t have the research or the exploratory privileges that people do at NIH. So for example, we look at diseases where the population of people that suffer from them can be so small, yet they don’t go ignored because our clinical center has people who are specialized in learning about specific genetic mutations or specific, I think that’s, yeah, specific genetic mutations for example, or specific diseases that don’t always get studied.

And so the NIH not only tries to serve the general public in terms of looking at complete profiles of people’s health, but they also can target their resources to looking at things that oftentimes go under the radar and give care to people who oftentimes don’t find answers whenever they go to the doctor and they actually find those answers in possible treatments at the NIH.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Could you tell folks listening what these cuts, everything Doge and the Trump administration are doing, what does this all look like from your side of things and how are you and your colleagues been responding to it? What do you want folks on the outside to know about what it looks like on the inside?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so the first thing that really comes to mind when I was thinking about these cuts, especially what’s happened February 14th, April 1st, it’s almost like a trap door. You’re sort of walking into work, you’re getting prepared. Maybe you got your kids ready for the day, maybe you got up and made breakfast and lunch and you made sure that everyone was ready, you got into work and suddenly the four just falls apart beneath you because you no longer have access to your work email. You no longer have access to your data. You are no longer as appreciated as you thought you once were as a federal employee, and all of a sudden you are left stranded without a job, maybe on administrative leave, not knowing if you’d have the chance to come back. And it sort of is almost like a disappearing act is what it really felt like for no apparent reason.

And that’s the worst part to hear that the numbers are the most important thing. How many people can they get rid of? How many people can they actually eliminate? Rather than thinking about how many lives are actually just being torn from underneath people? That’s kind of all I can describe it as. It’s a really strange disappearing act. You don’t know, we had the manager of our building, someone who takes care of our building when we have leaks or have issues with our labs, be fired on this random day and then reinstated the next. It’s all very chaotic. And this chaos is preventing us from actually being able to move forward with our work, which might’ve been the goal, but actually ends up harming way more people than just us doing the work, but the people that we’re trying to serve. So that’s the best way I can describe it. It was immediate, it was forceful, and it was completely and utterly uncalled for. I mean, we had people who were dedicated employees for over 10 years, 20 years, just suddenly say, I’m no longer able to come in. People who couldn’t even email anyone telling anyone that they were fired and had to shoot texts to people that they knew because they were immediately locked out of their computer. I mean completely. It just felt like a huge slap in the face.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think the response from so many people has been fear and shock, and it’s almost been immobilizing because there’s so many executive orders, so many cuts, so much bad news hitting us day after day, which we know is part of the quote, flood the zone strategy. But what we are seeing, especially in recent weeks is anger, mobilization, organizing and the coming together like today of different unions. So there are different kinds of actions that folks are taking, whether it be going to these town halls and screaming at their elected officials or writing emails or doing mass protests. What we’re seeing here today is more about what unions and what workers can do when they come together with their labor power to fight this. So I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about that. What is the message here about what workers and unions in these agencies and what the labor movement can do to fight back against the Trump agenda?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so I think the first word that comes to mind is solidarity. I mean, we’ve now seen that an ultimate betrayal take place from our own employers and from our own administration showing us that we’re not valued. And so the only solace and the primary solace that I think is the most powerful has been within one another. We come into work, the morale has been extremely low. It feels like you’re trudging through molasses just trying to get one day to the other. And really all you can do with all that pent up frustration in order to not let it implode you is to actually share it with others and to bring community about it. And I think the most important thing that our union has brought about is that sense of solidarity, that sense of information, connection, network, especially when the actual protocol for all of these things has been so unclear going from a fork in the road to a riff, more acronyms might I add. The only place that we can really get answers is by sharing information and having open lines of communication with one another. And so the community that we fostered, I think that’s our strength and that’s what we want to preserve through all of our labor movements and unions is to understand that knowledge is power and we’re not afraid to share it with one another. We’re not afraid to speak the truth time and time again and to talk about our experiences and we will not be shut behind a door and left out of this conversation anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what comes next? I guess for folks listening to this, what’s your message about why this is the time to get involved and what they can do?

Rakshita Balaji:

I think with regards to when is the time, my only answer would be when else is the time? This whole period of time since the inauguration has felt like an avalanche, like you mentioned, it’s a barrage of information that usually makes little to no sense and has harmed so many people. So what other time do we have? I think because the only question I’d have, when else do we come out and do this as we need to be active and keep pushing back in the moments that things are happening and that’s how change occurs, what people can do. I think if you’re hopefully angry just like we are, you can call your representatives, keep telling them the stories, especially if you have been a victim of these removals from your job or a victim of the lack of funding for your research or even how this administration has been shaking up your life.

Those are important stories. Your story is as important as everyone else’s, and to not undervalue the power of your voice, whether it’s calling your representative, showing up to these protests, being in unison and harmony with other people, because not only will you find solace in that, but you’ll create strength and to look and try to plug into your local communities as well because typically you’re not the only one who’s going through this. And you can definitely find people who are willing to help you, willing to give you information and speak up. Don’t be afraid to ask questions whether it’s about, regardless of, for example, if you’re worried about things related to your immigration status, if you’re worried about things related to how your funding’s going to work, how you’re going to receive, are you going to receive a pension? These questions that have gone unanswered, echo it as much as you can because through those echoes, you’ll find answers within other people and eventually those echoes will be heard by people who can do more to help make a change and actually protect us from these kinds of ridiculous actions.

And again, if you’re angry, I think anger only will boil up inside of you if you let it fester. So the best thing to do is to release it at places like this, find local movements, do some searching, and look for places you can actually get your voice heard. And I promise that you don’t, don’t feel like you need to be someone special with the name or an acronym that helps you move forward. Just let yourself be heard and give yourself grace during this time too. And I hope that together we’ll be able to make this change together. Don’t lose sight of the power we have within one another when it feels like we’re being towered over. We actually are on an even playing field if we have each other, and we can begin to even that out in numbers if not in position.

Amanda Dykema:

My name is Amanda Dykema and I am a shop steward with AFSCME Local 10 72 at the University of Maryland College Park.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Amanda, thank you so much for talking to me today. I know you got a lot going on and the crowd is dispersing, but I wanted to ask if you could just tell us a bit about what we just witnessed here and what brought all these folks out here to DC today?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah, well, I think you saw people from all kinds of different unions and different kinds of workplaces who are all impacted by the same thing, which is these cuts that are happening to research and medicine and scientific innovation and education, and they’re hitting all sectors. And what we’re seeing is at the University of Maryland, faculty’s grants that were approved and have been ongoing for years being abruptly terminated with no cause. We’re seeing faculty grants that went in last year not being reviewed on review panels and we’re seeing cancellation of programs that have had huge impacts for things like expanding the STEM pipeline to people who have been historically excluded from it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What’s on the ground impact of this? What would you want folks to know who are maybe just hearing about that and they’re saying, oh, that’s good. That’s eliminating waste. It’s getting rid of woke programs. What do you want folks to know about what these cuts are actually doing to your members and the people who benefit from their work?

Amanda Dykema:

So my members at the University of Maryland, we support all university services. You can see my t-shirt says we run this university. And so what it does for our members is those of us who work for research centers are concerned about the futures of their jobs. And for our students, we’re seeing student workers who are being let go because the funding’s not there anymore. For students who were looking for careers in these sectors who came to the University of Maryland to learn how to do this kind of research, if a research lab gets shut down, they’re not able to learn how to do that. They’re not able to prepare for grad school, they’re not able to go on. But mainly what we’re seeing is a chilling effect that faculty, students, and staff really have to work together and get organized to fight against. They want people to stop this kind of research. They want people to be scared, and we are here to get organized and work together so that we can fight against that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What are the long term effects? If that doesn’t happen, if these things go through unchallenged, what are the long-term effects going to be for the University of Maryland specifically and higher ed in the United States more broadly?

Amanda Dykema:

That’s a big question. I’ll give it my best shot. The University of Maryland is a preeminent public research university. It’s the flagship of the state, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding every single year, and it funds all kinds of work. We heard today from a climate scientist. I work really closely with a lot of people in the College of Education who do work on K 12, and we have researchers in the humanities, in history, in museums, in data science. All of those agencies that fund that type of work have been subject to significant cuts, and those people will not be able to do their jobs or there’ll be a greatly reduced scope and the trickle down effect or the very obvious effect of their research. And when it comes to broader impacts on society, we’re not going to see those things. We’re not going to learn what is the best way to teach kids what is the best way to create climate resilient communities? We’re not going to learn those things if we don’t have this research funding.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what was the message today about how workers and unions can fight back? I mean, it was really powerful to see so many different unions represented

Amanda Dykema:

Here,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so that in itself seems significant. But I guess where does it go from here? What can rank and file folks listening to this do to get involved?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah. Well, the number one thing, I’m going to say it every time is get organized. If you have a union at your workplace, join it. We’re more powerful together. If you don’t have a union at your workplace, work on getting one because we’re not going to be relying on whether it’s the president or whether it’s university administrators. We can’t rely on them to protect us. We have to work together to protect ourselves. But otherwise, the thing I really heard today was a lot about medical advances and people’s health. We’re going to see, if someone is not familiar with a research university, they might not know what this means, but if they go to their doctor and there’s not a clinical trial available for their diagnosis, they’re going to see what it means. And so I think what we’re trying to do now is reach out to our legislators who, the thing I haven’t said so far is that research is a huge economic driver for every state in this country.

And so we’re reaching out to our legislators to say, not only on its merits should this research be funded, but this is going to gut communities. This is people work in these labs and then they go and they spend their paychecks in their hometowns. And so what we’re asking is for people to understand that this isn’t a kind of an ivory tower thing that only impacts universities. It’s a thing that impacts everyone in this country. Senator Markey talked about health doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, and so people need to realize how this will impact them and their loved ones.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, which is like the largest or one of the largest employers of that entire state.

Amanda Dykema:

Exactly. I’m from Michigan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah,

Amanda Dykema:

Now that you’re listeners will care, but yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and any final messages that you have because we are also at the same time that these cuts are being pushed through experiencing a violent, vicious state crackdown on the very right to dissent against such things to speak out against such things, and universities are becoming the flashpoint for that war on free speech.

Amanda Dykema:

Well, I think the other reason we’re all here today, the people who came to this rally, we work at agencies like NIH and institutions like the University of Maryland, and we have to pressure our administrators to stand strong in the face of this. Trump clearly wants to stifle free speech, but what is a university, if not a place where people learn and grow through free speech expression and exposure to ideas. And so if that’s really our value, we have to call upon not only our legislators, but our administrators at these institutions to stand strong.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank the guests who spoke with me today. It’s cold out here in DC and I’m about to head back home to Baltimore. But I also want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism like this that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez reporting from Washington DC. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

The Real News Network (TRNN) is honored to be one of the 2025 recipients of the Izzy Award, recognizing “outstanding achievement[s] in independent journalism/independent media,” for our on-the-ground documentary report, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH,” directed by Mike Balonek. On behalf of TRNN and our entire team of grassroots journalists and movement media makers, I am beyond grateful and humbled to accept this prestigious award. I am equally honored to share this award with journalist Steve Mellon of Pittsburgh Union Progress, who co-hosted the report with me, and who has done more in-depth, consistent, and humane coverage of the East Palestine train derailment and chemical disaster than anyone else in the country—all while he and his colleagues have been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette since October 2022. TRNN continues to stand in full solidarity with our striking colleagues, we condemn the illegal strike-breaking and union-busting actions of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s owners, and we call on our fellow media organizations to do the same. 

I am admittedly apprehensive about accepting an award for our coverage on this catastrophic and preventable tragedy when people living in and around East Palestine have had their lives upended and are still going through hell. Chris Albright, the resident who spoke to me and Steve Mellon in this documentary report while we sat in his dining room, was just hospitalized again and spent the past weekend in critical care due to heart-related issues caused by the derailment. Some people we spoke to while filming in East Palestine last year have since had to move and leave everything behind to save their and their family’s health, becoming refugees from their own hometowns. 

“Nothing has changed,” Ashley McCollom, a displaced East Palestine resident, told me in February. “It feels like the town is basically the same, the reactions, the uncomfortable feeling, the stress… you can clearly smell something’s not right.” I would like to take the opportunity of this award announcement to reiterate the same plea I’ve been making for two years: Please don’t forget about East Palestine. Don’t look away, don’t give up on these people, as so many politicians, pundits, and unaffected members of the public have. They are working people just like you and me, they are our neighbors, and they desperately need help. Please, I beg you, help them. And one way you can help right now is by watching, listening to, and sharing their stories with everyone you can. You can also listen to what residents have already explicitly demanded, which neither the Biden nor Trump administration has given. 

None of these residents did anything to deserve this nightmare, they did not cause it, yet they are the ones paying the unimaginable price for the corporate greed and government negligence that did. And it’s not just the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestine. As we have shown in our extensive, ongoing coverage of and interviews with working-class residents living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones”—from communities throughout South Baltimore that have been poisoned for generations by rail giant CSX Transportation and dozens of other toxic polluters concentrated in their part of the city, to residents in Western North Carolina, whose lives and towns were devastated by Hurricane Helene, to residents living near Conyers, GA, who have been affected by the nightmare-inducing chemical fire at the BioLab facility in September, to so many other communities—this life-destroying scourge is coming for all of us. And it’s going to need to be us, the ones in the path of all this reckless and preventable destruction—working people, fighting as one—who are going to stop them.

We at TRNN accept this award proudly as recognition of our dedication to the people of East Palestine, to our neighbors and fellow workers at the center of these all-too-frequent national tragedies, and to the work of lifting up their voices and reporting on their stories truthfully, transparently, and fearlessly. But these stories are not over, and the work is not done until people get justice, until the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires poisoning our communities are stopped and held accountable for their crimes. And you have a role to play in shaping that outcome—we all do. What happens next depends on what you and others do about it, how you turn the information and perspectives we provide through our journalism, and the connections we facilitate on our platforms, into action. 

That is our team’s stubbornly held belief and the shared mission we embody in all the work we do, from our on-the-ground documentary reporting around the world to the investigative, grassroots journalism and human-centered storytelling we produce regularly on Police Accountability Report, The Marc Steiner Show, Rattling the Bars, Inequality Watch, Working People, Edge of Sports TV, Solidarity Without Exception, Stories of Resistance, and more. We don’t give up on people when the news cycle has moved on, we don’t abandon critical stories just to chase clicks; we keep coming back, we keep listening, we keep reporting, we keep connecting people we meet through that reporting, and we keep doing everything we can to make media that empowers others to be and make the change they’re waiting for. Moreover, rather than see one another as competitors, we commit to collaborating with similarly mission-driven outlets—from Pittsburgh Union Progress to our partners in the Movement Media Alliance, of which TRNN is a founding member—to carry out our mission in the most impactful ways and to better serve and empower the public.  

At TRNN, we don’t just tell you about what’s happening in the world and expect you to simply react to it; we take you to the heart of the action where people are making change happen, and we encourage you to do something with it. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. TRNN is journalism and human-centered storytelling for people who are doing something and for people who want to do something but don’t know where to start. It starts here, now, with you, with us. We are working to change the world, and that work is gruelling, expensive, and time-consuming, and we cannot do it without you.

 If you appreciate our award-winning journalism, then please become a supporter today. 

Thank you to the Park Center for Independent Media and to the award committee for honoring us with this Izzy Award. Thank you to all of our supporters who make our work possible, and thank you to everyone fighting wherever you are to make change and justice inevitable. Lastly, thank you to the people of East Palestine for opening your hearts and homes to us, and for trusting us to share your stories with the world—we won’t stop, and we won’t forget about you. 

For more information about how you can help the residents of East Palestine, OH, email us at contact@therealnews.com.

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever, 
Maximillian Alvarez
Editor-in-Chief & Co-Executive Director, TRNN

Last week, President Trump escalated his administration’s war on the federal workforce and workers’ rights when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions across the government. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has sued the Trump administration over the executive order.

In response to these intensifying assaults on federal workers, agencies, and critical programs like Social Security, unions, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups, and people of conscience will be participating in protest actions in locales across the US on Saturday, April 5. In this episode, we speak with James Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service, a veteran, and a member of the Federal Unionists Network, to get a firsthand account of the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers, agencies, and the people who depend on their services.

Additional links/info:

• Federal Unionists Network website
• Indivisible website
• “Hands Off!” National Day of Action (April 5) website
• Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes, “Trump Goes Nuclear on the Federal Workforce”
• Tyler Pager, The New York Times, “Trump Moves to End Union Protections Across Broad Swath of Government”
• Daniel Weissner, Reuters, “Union Sues to Block Trump from Ending Collective Bargaining for Many federal workers”
• Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, “Curious How Trump’s Cost Cutting Could Affect Your National Park Visit? You Might Not Get a Straight Answer”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone’: A dire warning from fired federal workers”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximilian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes this month and my co-host Mel er, will be hosting again in May. Today. We continue our coverage of the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. In the last episode that I hosted at the end of February, I spoke with current and illegally fired employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, as well as the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and we spoke in that episode about what was then a newly launched assault on federal workers, government agencies, and the people who depend on them by President Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and the unelected head of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge Musk has been granted immense power to cut government agencies and their federal workforce and unprecedented access to sensitive government and citizen data.

Now that assault has continued, it’s hard to sum up the scale and scope of the damage that Trump and Musk are wrecking upon our government and our government workers and contractors right now, all ostensibly in the name of increasing efficiency and rooting out so-called wokeness. But to give you a sense at the top of the show, here’s the latest report from Newsweek. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced across numerous federal agencies. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a major restructuring plan. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than a thousand scientists and other employees according to the Associated Press. It has also been reported that the Internal Revenue Service or IRS plans to lose about 18,000 employees, about 20% of its workforce.

Meanwhile, former postmaster General Lewis DeJoy told Congress that 10,000 workers at the United States Postal Service would be cut. The Department of Education has announced plans to lay off more than 1300 employees while the Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting 80,000 jobs. According to an internal memo obtained by the AP in March, the Pentagon reportedly plans to cut its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people. At least 24,000 probationary workers have been terminated since Trump took office, according to a lawsuit filed by nearly 20 states alleging the mass firings are illegal. In March two, federal judges ordered 19 federal agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers. Meanwhile, about 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for receiving pay and benefits. Until September 30th and last week, president Trump escalated his war on the federal workforce when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions and agencies with national security missions across the federal government citing authority granted to Trump under a 1978 law.

And as the AP reports affected, agencies could include the Department of State Defense, veterans Affairs, energy, health and Human Services, the Treasury, justice and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Now, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has already sued the Trump administration over the executive order to end collective bargaining across the federal workforce. In response to these attacks, union’s, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups and people of conscience around the country are also showing up to local and national protest actions. They’re showing up to town halls with elected officials and making their voices heard, signing petitions and writing letters to their representatives. And one such engaged group includes the Federal Unionist Network, an informal association of federal unionists and their allies on their website. The Federal Unionist Network say plainly that Elon Musk is trying to steal the federal government slashing public services, firing essential workers, and handing power to billionaires like himself.

It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and we won’t stand for it. Through a mass action campaign, federal workers and community supporters will challenge every illegitimate and unjustified layoff. Instead of letting Musk steal their jobs, they’ll show up for duty with a clear message. Let me work. I serve the American people, not the richest man on earth who nobody elected to be my boss. To get an inside view of the Trump Musk administration’s attacks on the federal government and the federal workforce and why you and every working person should care about it, and to talk about who’s fighting back, how they’re fighting back, and what people can do to get involved. I’m honored to be joined today by James Jones. James is a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service based in North Carolina. He’s a veteran and a member of the Federal Unionist Network. James, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Man, I really appreciate it.

James Jones:

Hey, it’s my pleasure, max. Thanks for inviting me.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, it’s an honor to be connected to you, although of course, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, which we’re going to dig into over the next 50 minutes. But I wanted to just start here at the top, just getting your response to all this, especially since we’re talking just days after Trump’s executive order to end collective bargaining rights for workers like yourself across the federal government.

James Jones:

Well, I think as far as my union, I’m an A FG member with local 4 4 6 out of Asheville, North Carolina. I live in Boone. We expected a lot to happen from Trump’s first term. He did things to attack our union the first time, and we expected him to do it again, albeit maybe not on this level, but I think maybe some people at the national level of a FG would probably, they probably counted on what was going to happen even with some of the atrocious things he’s done already, a FG and my local both. We’ve been fighting a FG national, they’ve sued the Trump administration over several of these illegal acts he’s done after he came on after his inauguration, like firing a bunch of probationary workers and some other things. And the courts have sided with the unions a FG, especially over some of these illegal acts.

And I think if you read the order, I didn’t read it closely, but it did mention a FG in that order is EO banning collective bargaining for these agencies that are so-called entwined with national security. So to me, it sounds like it’s retaliatory against the unions, the NTEU, the FFE and a FG for bringing suit against Trump because they’re fighting back and we’re fighting back at the local level. We’ve held several rallies in Asheville. We had a town hall here in Boone. Our representative Virginia Fox never showed up. We had a packed house of 165 people and she never showed up to address the constituents in her district, which was expected because we’re a dot of blue and a sea of red here in Boone, North Carolina. So she usually avoids meeting with her constituents in Watauga County. And this Saturday, April 5th we’re we have a mass march in rally in downtown Boone to address the attacks on all these agencies and what it means for the American people. So I’ll be there at that as well.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I definitely want to make sure that we talk a bit more later in the show about the attempt to repeal collective bargaining rights as if you could just sign that kind of thing away and talk about the fight back in more detail ending with the day of action coming up at this weekend. But I guess before we get there, let’s take a step back because so much as I read in the intro, so many federal workers are being impacted by this and the amount of people who depend on their labor is incalculable at this point. But when you start reading just the thousands, the numbers and the thousands of folks who are losing their jobs or getting fired or what have you, it’s really easy to lose sight of the human beings behind every single one of those numbers. And I wanted to ask for folks who are hearing those numbers, but they’re not hearing the human beings behind them. If we could just talk a bit more about your time working as a federal worker and in the National Park Service. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, how you got into doing that work and what up until, I guess recently that work entailed?

James Jones:

Yeah, so I started working with the Park Service in 2002. I served in the military prior to that, went to college, got two degrees and decided I didn’t want to do what I had gone to college for, a lot of folks do, I guess, and just took a job with the park service doing maintenance work, and I’ve worked here on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina my whole career. So yeah, I started out as a wage grade eight employee. I worked my way up to a wage grade 10. I’m still a wage grade 10 today, and I enjoy taking care of the park. I enjoy where I work. We have, it’s called the Moses Cone Estate. It’s about a 4,000 acres state that’s part of the parkway proper. There’s 26 miles of historic carriage trails that I maintain. And then there’s some other areas that we try to do historic preservation work to keep the facilities up like the cone manor and the carriage barn and the historic apple barn and that sort of thing.

Over the years, I mean since I’ve been there in 2002, there’s just been a steady decline of money. The budget basically has remained static over that timeframe. It’s increased a little bit over the course of say, 23 years. The budget has remained static, which is basically a budget reduction, cost of living, cost of doing business keeps going up, but your budget remains static. When you lose people to retirement, you’re really not able to cover that position sometimes because you’ve got to cover the cost of living raises, the cost of insurance, and all these other things go up. So over that span of time, we’ve actually lost employees in great numbers. And if you remember back in 2013 when they passed that sequestration bill, the Park service I think in general lost about 30% of the workforce then, and we’ve really never retained that number of employees back since that time.

And so now we’re faced again with a possible 30% cut under DO’S proposal to cut the park service. We’re already lean. I always joke and say, we’re not down to the bone anymore, we’re down to the marrow. We can’t really operate anymore unless we get more money and people and equipment and things to do our job. So it’s been a struggle, especially for the last 12 years, and people are noticing with the proposed doge cuts and what they’re saying about the park service people here in this area, most people love the outdoors. We’re in the mountains. They’re turning out, they’re turning out and protesting this stuff. They don’t want to see their parks decline further than what they already are. They want their parks to be taken care of. And when you still, I think the maintenance backlog now is something like 16 billion for the whole park service. They just don’t have any money to maintain a lot of the facilities and trails and roads and such. So this is just another blow. It’s another gut punch to an agency that’s already suffering from a lot.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask a little more about what you were just talking about, right, because I think this is really important for folks to understand that it’s not as if Elon Musk and Donald Trump have come with their axes and hatchets and started making cuts to fully funded agencies. Like you were describing how your agency has been losing budget and people for your entire time working there. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what that translates to on a day-to-day level for folks who are still working for the Park service when they have to now deal with an underfunded, understaffed agency and what that looks like for folks who are coming to take advantage of the parks and enjoy them.

James Jones:

Well, I’m sure President Trump and Elon Musk don’t visit national parks and some of the other billionaires that he’s appointed in his cabinet, I am sure they don’t visit those areas public lands because they own their own land. They probably own as much land as some national parks having capacity as far as acreage. But yeah, so any given day in the park service at my park particularly, and I’m sure it’s park wide, I know people that work in different parks around the country, you just don’t get all the work done. I mean, things that need to be tended to, there’s a priority list. Obviously. You got to do the things that take priority over other things. So if you don’t have enough people to take care of what needs to be taken care of, that gets put to the wayside. And then the important things like cleaning restrooms, cutting trees out of the roads so people don’t get the trees driving 50 miles an hour through the park.

I mean, picking up trash. I mean, I don’t do those things, but I do more of the skilled labor. But even then, you’ve got these systems, these infrastructure systems in the park service that are outdated and most of ’em need to be replaced. Water systems, sewer systems, electrical systems. Most of the park service have antiquated systems. I mean, they’re running, some of these systems are probably 60, 70 years old. I mean, they’ve been upgraded some over the years, but a lot of these systems just need a total replacement. And so when more people visit the parks, which is the case year after year, population increases, more people come. We’re not upgrading these systems. We’re not building newer facilities, bigger facilities. We’re not making more parking lots for people because there’s no money. Then it takes a hit, and we have to shut these systems down sometimes because they’re overwhelmed. The water system can’t keep up. Our sewer systems can’t keep up. People park all over the place now they’re beating the sides of the road down the shoulders of the road with their vehicles, and we don’t have enough rangers to enforce a lot of the rules and regs on the parking anymore. We’ve lost a significant number of law enforcement people. So yeah, it’s a problem, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t change course and protect our parks.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I want to ask kind of a follow-up question to that. That is really for anyone listening who is still sort of buying into the justifications for this that are coming out of the Trump administration all over Fox News, all over Musk’s, social media, platform X, all that stuff, what would you say to folks out there who are still convincing themselves that, oh, it’s a park. You don’t need that many people. I can just go and walk around. What do I need all these government aid workers for or beyond that, people who are pretending that flesh and blood working people like yourself, maintaining our parks are somehow like this part of this evil deep state bureaucracy?

James Jones:

Well, we’re not. We’re working people. We live in the same communities as these people do. Our kids go to the same schools, they go to the same churches. We go to the same grocery store, whatever. I mean, we’re all part of the community. We’re not some sort of evil sect or cult that we have ulterior motives in the Park Service or any other federal agency for that matter, to do harm to people. And this notion that government workers are lazy, that one always floors me because I know plenty of people in government service that work hard and they’re dedicated to their missions. I sometimes think the public may not understand the depth of some of the work government workers do, because a lot of it is different than the private sector. Government doesn’t operate to make profit. We’re here to serve people. This notion that we should run government like a business, I don’t buy that.

We’re not a business. We provide services. And since we’re not in the business of making a profit, then maybe some people see that as they’re not motivated enough to work hard because they’re not making money. Well, that’s not true. I myself, and I know a lot of other people that could quit government tomorrow and go to work in the private sector and make more money, but we don’t because we enjoy public service. We enjoy providing. Me personally, I enjoy, I take pride in my work I do at Mile Park. I know people come there, they enjoy my area of the park. They tell me a lot. I know people in the community and blowing rock where I work. They tell me, you do great work here. This place is nice. I mean, I take a lot of pride in that, and to me that’s more important than making another $10 an hour somewhere. That’s my take on it. And I think I can speak for a lot of other federal employees and a FG members too that work in different agencies with that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, I’m curious, again, given that you’ve been doing that work for decades and you’ve seen so many kind of changes in American politics and the ways that the population talks about government workers. I mean, I remember what was it like over 10 years ago in Wisconsin, like Scott Walker and the Republicans really rammed through a lot of these same anti-labor policies, including eventually turning Wisconsin into a right to work state in a large part based on vilifying government workers in the ways that you’re talking about. So this problem is not new. I mean, I grew up conservative. I remember us talking about government workers this way when I was a kid. I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about how deep that goes and how it’s impacted you and other government workers and what we need to correct in the ways that we understand the work and lives of our federal workforce to stop falling into these traps that lead to us just not caring when we slash budgets year after year, we lay off more people year after year. It feels like this has been a slow building crisis that’s now just reached a critical point, but the roots of that run deep all the way through your career.

James Jones:

Well, max as well as I do, a lot of politicians hate labor unions. And it’s pretty obvious why, because unions traditionally have always been the tip of the spear to fight corruption. Greed read these businesses that prey and exploit on people’s vulnerabilities. I mean, it’s been going on for well over a century. Labor unions have had to fight and scratch for everything for their members. As Frederick Douglass said back in the 1850s, power concedes nothing without demand. And it’s true. They’re not going to give up anything. The billionaire class, they’re not going to give up anything. They’re just going to keep taking. And it is just sheer greed. It seems to me like a disease. I think the message needs to be that these people, and I think Bernie Sanders does a good job of messaging when it comes. He’s always harping on the billionaire class, these people are greedy.

They want everything you have. They can’t ever get enough. I think he was on the Senate floor yesterday and maybe the day before addressing the Senate, how he’s traveled the country and how so many Americans are fed up with the economy. You have two Americas, the ones with everything and the ones with nothing. I think that has to be the message. And as far as government workers go, we need to be in that category. We’re working people. We are not special people. I think the other problem is too, the government has to abide by the law.

President Obama, when he was in office, he had the standing that the federal government was a model employer, that we did everything by law, by Reg, did the right thing. And I think that we need to get back to that. But in order to do that, there is a lot of, sometimes what people perceive as waste is just the government doing what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of private companies, I’ve worked in the private sector, they don’t always do what they should be doing. They try every which way in the world to circumvent the law. Cause it costs ’em money if they have to abide by all these policies that the government imposes on ’em. But a lot of these policies are for good reason. They protect people health and safety. Look at osha. When I was a local president, I worked closely with OSHA because when you work for an agency like mine and even the va, and I know people that work at the va, the VA try to cut corners on safety and health, and you’ve got to have some sort of safeguard and check on that. And some people might view that as waste for one example, that it shuts down production so the OSHA guy can come in and check out on everything. But I mean, it’s just the way things have to work.

Yeah, the messaging’s just got to change with federal workers and state workers and local workers. We’re not lazy people. A lot of it’s just things we have to go by through legislative action and law and that sort of thing.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and it makes me think about what you were saying earlier, right, about the fallacy of wanting government to be run a business. That may sound good to certain people in theory, but as someone who my entire job is interviewing workers in the public and private sector, I can tell you that most workplaces are dictatorships where your working person does not have any rights, let alone the right to make any demands on their employers without losing their livelihoods. And so why would we want that to be the model of our government? I think there’s really something missing for folks who really aren’t making the connection between this is how businesses are run and this is how they treat their workers in America, and this is how it’s going to look if that takes over government entirely.

James Jones:

Yeah. To me, corporations are tyrannies. There’s no democratic process with corporations private power. They have a board of directors. They make the decisions. I mean, there are some companies like the automotive industry, the big three where they’re unionized and the UAW has a lot of power and they have good collective bargaining agreements, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t enjoy those benefits and privileges that they have now through a contract. So at least with the government and in unionized workplaces, you have due process with the federal government. It’s a little more restrictive. We can’t bargain over certain things like wages, healthcare, that sort of thing, but we can still bargain over a lot of things that affect our working conditions. And if that’s taken away, then these agencies, a lot of ’em run just like a corporation. They’re a top down. You have no rights. I mean, you have certain rights. I mean, I shouldn’t say that you still have certain rights as a federal worker without a union, but I would prefer to have a union contract over any kind of administrative procedure that I’m granted. I’ll put it that way, because I’ve seen both. I’ve seen how both work. I’ll take my union any day over that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask if you could just follow up on what we were just talking about. For folks out there listening who may not fully grasp the differences between unions representing government workers and other unions that they may have heard of the Teamsters, UAW. Could you just say a little more for folks out there about what the role of a union is for a federal workforce like the National Park Service where you work?

James Jones:

Yeah, so federal unions, they’re like private sector unions, trade unions. They’re there to protect the workers. They’re there to promote better working conditions and that sort of thing that we’re no different in that regard. A FGE, my union, I’m sure NTEU and FFE, they’re there to bargain collectively bargain with their respective agencies, better working conditions. And that can be everything from a grievance procedure to disciplinary adverse actions over time. Your lunch break, when you’re going to take that, your 15 minute breaks. And I want to say something real quick there. Some people don’t realize this. The federal government does not have to give you two breaks during your workday. We have that in our contract. We get a 15 minute break between the start of the shift and lunch and get another 15 minute break between the end of lunch and the end of the workday.

A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t have to give you that. We have that in our contract. I mean, it’s those little things like that that make a difference. And I’m not saying some of these agencies might be very good and it doesn’t matter, but management comes and goes, and believe me, their solicitor and their HR departments tell ’em what they can get by with than what they can’t get by with. I would much rather have that contract that outlines how they’re going to treat their workers and not having that at all. So generally speaking, most unions, that’s what they’re looking to do is to promote good ties with management, improve the working conditions. We just can’t do certain things. Like the big one is strike. We can’t strike, which is, I get it, you’re a public servant. You go on strike. I mean, the taxpayers, basically, they’re paying you to work. So that was laid out in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

The other ones are we can’t negotiate pay, we can’t negotiate the amount of leave we get all that is set by Congress. Congress. You probably, a lot of people realize that every year the president presents a budget, Congress approves the budget or they go back and forth until they get a budget. Federal employees usually get, depending on inflation, we usually get two, three, 4% cost of living raise at the end of the year for the following year. That’s set by Congress and the president. We can’t negotiate over that. A lot of private sector unions can, the UAW, the Teamsters, those big unions, they can strike their employer. If they don’t lock what’s happening, their membership votes to strike, they go out on strike. We can’t do that. So we don’t have a lot of power as related to some of those private sector unions. But we still have power as far as establishing certain things, certain rights in the workplace.

And the billionaire class can’t stand that. They pretty much destroyed the private sector unions. I think union density now in the private sector is 7% the last number I looked at or somewhere hovering around that. So we’re now, yeah, it’s probably lower. North Carolina is one of the lowest states. I think it is the lowest state when it comes to union density. The state I’m in, the public sector, unions are up, I think around 30 some percent, maybe close to 40, and they want to get rid of that power. These billionaires, they want to take that away. Just two years ago, we had a decertification drive at my park where a disgruntled employee brought in the National Right to Work Foundation to represent her to decertify the union at my park, and we beat it. And these people, I think the National Right to Work Foundation, they’re backed by the Koch brothers and other big money interest. It doesn’t even matter if these federal employee unions are part of their company, which they’re not. But they know if they can keep undermining that power structure, it helps their cause. And that’s why it’s so important that we fight this and win it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and there’s clearly some power on top of that that has been frustrating, the Trump administration in terms of the power of federal unions to stall or stop or challenge or reverse these decisions coming from the White House and through Trump’s administration. I wanted to ask from your vantage point from your union, why is he going after the unions and your collective bargaining rights? Trump is claiming that this is a national security issue. Do you believe that?

James Jones:

No, I don’t. It is already in the Civil Service Reform Act. Certain agencies can’t unionize that are involved with National Security, FBI, the CIA, national Security Agency. And then there’s some other smaller agencies out there that kind of fall under that umbrella. Maybe I think some of the department homeland security folks, law enforcement types, I’m not sure, but I think there’s some of those that are excluded. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same old playbook. They use this broad umbrella of saying, alright, all these agencies, I’m going to declare part of national security. They’re not part of national security. I mean, already in the law that there’s certain agencies excluded from unionization because they’re already involved with that. And I fought my own agency over this a few years ago. We had a guy, he was an IT when I was the local president, and they had him mislabeled as non bargaining unit as a non bargaining unit employee like management or HR employee.

And he asked me one day, he’s like, Hey James. He said, I want to join the union, but they say I can’t because I’m non bargaining unit status. And I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in it. So when I inquired about why they had him labeled as such, they said, well, he sees sensitive information because he’s an IT guy. Well, so what? He’s still eligible to join the union. So I had to file an unfair labor practice and enforce the agency to classify him as union eligible. And so he joined the union, but I mean, they come up with all these, I mean, it’s no different than what Trump’s doing. They come up with all these excuses, these legal arguments that, oh, well, we got to exclude all these people now from collective bargaining, I mean wasn, that wasn’t the reasoning. The reasoning was because a FG and other unions have beat him already on two big cases.

One was the TSA, the other was the probationary people that were getting fired, I’m sorry, the TSA people. That’s still pending, but the probationary employees, and then they filed the suit on the deferred resignation program, which they had to backpedal on that quite a bit. So it is retaliatory for sure. I mean, I would think any judge or judicial panel would see that and say basically what you’re saying about national security, it’s overly broad. It doesn’t apply here because we’ve already got that in the, it’s already covered by, and secondly, it’s clear retaliation. They even mentioned A FGE in the order that they’re thwarting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Well, that’s just too bad. That’s what unions do, protect their members, right? I mean, yeah, it’s insane. It is, but we’ll still be here.

Maximilian Alvarez:

And the thwarting of Trump’s agenda thing, two kind questions on that one. If this executive order just sort of became totally the law of the land and collective bargaining rights were gone from these federal agencies, what would that look like for workers like you and what would that mean for executing Trump’s agenda without the unions getting in the way? Why are they doing this?

James Jones:

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I think there’s so much animosity at this point. Unions are still going to do what they’re going to do and they would still fight. You would just have to keep filing actions against the government, against his administration, still follow your contract, still file grievances, whatever you needed to do, LPs, et cetera, on fair labor practices. And then wait it out until he’s out and then have your day in court then and bring it all back. I mean, of course I’m not an attorney. I don’t know if they outlaw collective bargaining for these agencies. I don’t know how that would work as far as getting any kind of recourse or being made whole. It probably wouldn’t even happen, but I think they would would still be a lot of resistance toward that. Another thing is, if he’s successful at this, that’s going to be a green light for big corporations to basically go after their unions.

Just like the PATCO strike in 81. I’m old enough to remember that strike. I was 10 years old and I remember watching it on tv and my dad, he was a factory worker, unionized factory worker, and he said, we’ll never get another contract, a good contract because of this. And he was right. That company, he worked for the union basically. Every time they’d go to negotiate a new contract, they just kept losing. They had to concede things. The company would say, they’re going to shut the plant down. They’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. And it’s just been a steady decline since the PATCO strike. Basically, the Reagan administration said, we’re going to turn a blind eye. You guys want to break labor law. Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it. And that would be the same thing today, if they’re successful with this EO that he just signed s strip away collective bargaining rights. But much worse, I think

Maximilian Alvarez:

I work in the news and it’s impossible to keep up with all these executive orders, right? We’ve talked about on this show, I mean, that’s very much part of the strategy. The flood, the zone overwhelm. People hit people with so much bad news that we just become immobilized and unions may challenge some of them while others get through. It’s been a very dizzying couple months. I wanted to ask what the last two months have looked like from your vantage point in Boone as a government worker in a union that represents workers across different agencies, like from Trump’s to now. Could you just give us a bit of a play by play on how this has all unfolded in your life and how folks are reacting to it?

James Jones:

Yeah, obviously there’s been a lot of uncertainty, especially for folks that probationary folks after he was inaugurated and they first proposed firing all the probationary workers because they were easy to get rid of, easier to get rid of, and that hasn’t worked for him. But still, even these folks that are probationary, they’re still hesitant because they don’t know. Even though a lot of ’em got reinstated, they’re still going to do a RIF probably down the road. Who knows? I mean, I’m sure they will with certain agencies. I can’t speak for my agency. I know they’ve offered another round of voluntary buyouts and voluntary early retirement. But yeah, it’s been stressful. Even folks like me that have a lot of time, and I could have taken that first round of deferred resignation program when they offered it, but I don’t want to retire right now. I’m just 53 years old.

I’ve still got a lot of years left, and I’ll retire on my terms, not their terms. That’s the way I look at it. But yeah, I can’t imagine some of these folks, these folks that are just now getting into the government, they’re scared. They’re scared they can’t plan. I mean, I’ve heard of stories where people moved all the way across the country to take another job. These are people that have 5, 10, 15 years with the government. They took a new job. They were put into, they accepted a new job series, which basically your probationary period starts over. Anytime you leave a job series, go into another job series, you still have a one year probationary period. And then to get fired after you’ve had that many years in to say, well, you’re no longer needed, even though you’ve been a good worker and you’ve had good performance ratings, I mean, it’s crushing for those people, I’m sure.

And not all those people got their job back either. I think out of that 24,000, I think only 16,000 were ordered reinstated. So I can’t imagine having to moving into a new job, federal job, two 3000 miles away where I was at and then told You’re fired after you’re trying to resettle in an area. I mean, it is just cruel, inhumane. It’s just unbelievable. But yeah, as far as my agency goes, we don’t have a lot of people anyway. As I mentioned earlier, we’re down to the marrow. I call it the marrow instead of down to the bone, but I think we lost one probationary worker. That’s all we had when that order was signed. And that person is reinstated, to my knowledge, has been reinstated, but I don’t know what’s to happen with this Vera. The voluntary early retirement authority that came back out and the vsip, the Voluntary Separation Incentive payment Department of Interior offered that.

They excluded my job series on maintenance. The Department of Interior excluded a bunch of jobs from that where you couldn’t retire early law enforcement, firefighting, wildland firefighting, and then the park service excluded just about all the maintenance positions. So I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, so I tend to think with maintenance, the reason they did that is because we don’t have many people anyway, so if they get rid of all the maintenance, just close the parks because you’re not going to be able to go in the park because nobody’s going to be there to do anything. Yeah, but there’s a lot of other jobs I’m worried about that they’re going to try, try to riff. They’ll try to do a riff. If they don’t get the so-called 30% reduction, which nobody seems to know what that means, there’s been no guidance issued. 30% of watt, 30% of this park, 30% across the board, 30% of a certain cap of money that they need to cut. I mean, who nobody knows. It’s kind like one of those things they, they’re just flying by the seat of their pants and doing things, whatever they feel like when they feel like it. So that’s the uncertainty of it too. You don’t know,

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, we talked at the top of this episode about the fact that you yourself are a veteran, right? That you’re union local. A FGE also represents workers at the VA over there in North Carolina where you are near Boone. I wanted to ask just a little bit about that, how all of this is hitting you as a veteran who has served your country and also served your country like working for the Park Service while we’re also seeing these devastating cuts to the VA and so many veterans who are being affected by these cuts outside of the VA even as well.

James Jones:

Yeah, the va, I’m disabled, so I use the VA for all my healthcare, dental, health, vision, the gamut. And one of my providers, I do telehealth quite often just because it saves me from having to drive to Asheville, which is an hour and a half drive and Hickory’s about an hour drive. So I’ve been doing a lot of telehealth appointments over the years and now that a lot of that’s gone because of the return to office mandate. A lot of these counselors and some other people were able to telework at home to treat veterans, especially with mental illness stuff, therapists, certified mental health counselors, that sort of thing. They were working at home and even some of the people in admin that I know that work at the VA national that do billing, they were able to work at home and do billing and this notion that we got to get everybody back in the office because they’re not doing anything.

Well, that’s a total lie and a myth. The VA uses tracking software on these folks that do telehealth. They know when they’re working, they know when they’re not working. They’re not at home doing nothing or doing the laundry or on the treadmill or whatever these people think. I mean, they’re being tracked. They have to meet their production quotas. But now since they’re back in the office, especially like with the care with Veterans Care, now I’m having to wait longer to get an appointment for my mental health counselor because now he has to drive 45 minutes to work to the nearest facility. And you say, well, that’s not much. Well, that’s time. He could be at home working, helping another veteran. I mean, I don’t understand where they get this, that people that telework or work remotely don’t do anything because I’m pretty sure most of the federal government, especially the bigger agency, well even the Park service, we had some folks at Telework, they have tracking software.

They know what they’re doing. I mean, if they’re not working, if they’re down less than more than 10 minutes, they get a text or an email. What are you doing? I mean, I don’t know how it works. I don’t telework, but I’ve been told that by many employees that our union represent. There is accountability with that system. But yeah, that’s just one thing. The other thing with Veterans Care, I think President Biden ordered about 60,000 people hired after the PACT Act was signed in 2022. They needed those people to file more claims to help process claims that veterans were filing after the war in Afghanistan ended in sometime in 20 21, 20 22, I can’t remember right after Biden took office, there’s been a flood of veterans from that era, from Iraq, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have come into the VA fold. Thousands of veterans, tens of thousands of veterans, and this administration’s proposing to go back to the 2020 levels of VA staffing.

Are you kidding me? You’ve grown the veteran population tenfold since then. It is not like Secretary Collins. The VA secretary said something the other day on TV about the VA’s not an employment agent. See, dude, dude, you’ve got all these veterans coming back from Afghanistan that are filing even veterans like myself. I filed on the PACT Act. I’m a Gulf War vet. I filed on the PACT Act as soon as it was passed. There’s some Vietnam era veterans that have filed under it. I mean, you’ve got a flood of claims being filed and plus people with real health issues, me included. I’ve got breathing problems. I’ve got all kinds of issues from my surface in the Gulf floor. It’s all connected. And for them to propose to reduce 80,000 positions in the VA system, they call it bloat or waste. It’s a farce. They’re basically sticking their nose up in the air to all of America’s veterans, the people that went over and served their country and sacrificed everything.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I mean, even just hearing that it’s my blood boiling, I can only imagine what it feels like for you and other people who have actually served in the military. I have not. Right, and it really brings us to the point that we’re at now, right? Where I think the rage is really setting in. For the past two months, there’s been a lot of fear, understandable fear. I am a brown tattooed man in the state of Maryland where someone who looks like me just got abducted and disappeared to a fascist colony in El Salvador under a administrative error by the Trump administration, and now he’s going to sit there and languish for who knows how long. I mean, the terror is real. We’re all feeling it in different ways, but I think after two months, the anger is really starting to boil up as well, the need to do something, the need to fight back, the need to speak out, and also the developments that have frustrated the Trump administration’s agenda both in the courts and elsewhere.

So we find ourselves at a very critical moment here at the beginning of April, and I wanted us to sort of end the discussion on that. I could talk to you for hours, but I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could say more about how you got involved in the Federal Unionist Network, what local unions like yours are doing to fight back and what folks out there listening, whether they work for the government or not, whether they’re in a union or not. What’s your message to folks out there about why they should care about this and what they can do to get involved in the pushback?

James Jones:

Yeah, it’s not just an attack on federal workers. I mean, when the administration attacks, federal workers are basically attacking the American people because federal workers serve the American people. We’ve heard this over and over and over again, but it has to be said again, if you don’t have federal workers, you’re not going to have clean air and water. You’re not going to have safe food. You might not get your social security check. You might get it delayed. I mean, all this is up in the air. Your national parks close or they’ll be restricted to where you can’t access all parts of the park BVA services for Veterans Healthcare Benefit claim processing. That’s going to be reduced, and this is for people that don’t even work for the government, the FAA, they keep our airline, our airways safe, our border people that keep, hopefully they’re keeping the border safe and vetting people that are actually dangerous, that this stereotypical myth that everybody that comes across our border is some kind of criminal is just insane.

That’s scary too. Well, just like you mentioned earlier about the person that they arrested, I think it was in New York the other day, or the El Salvadorian guy, they took what’s next? They’re going to arrest American people, American citizens because they think you might be linked to the Venezuelan gang or something, and like you said, they’ll languish and you sit there in jail without any kind of due process. I mean, it’s just a matter of time if people don’t start fighting this, and I think they are. I mean, it is really, I think in the last two months we’ve seen the tides start shifting. People are starting to get involved, and I work with a group here, it’s called Indivisible Watauga, and I think it’s a nationwide group, indivisible. They’re kind of organizing these marches I think for April 5th, one of the many groups. And I’ve talked with a lot of my friends in Indivisible and in the county where I live, and we’ve been doing a lot of grassroots organizing.

I mean, I’ve been doing it through my union, through these people, but I think that’s what it takes is a collective effort. The united front across the community, your community and the nation to fight this. And I think we’re going to be okay, but it’s going to be a fight. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but we can’t rest. We can’t rest. We’ve got to keep the pressure mounted for as long as it takes. I don’t think the courts alone are going to be our savior. I think they’re important and I think they’ll keep things somewhat between the guardrails, but I think the major power here is going to be us. We the people. If you can get out on April 5th, I think it’s a nationwide effort. Find out where April 5th rally is going to be a hands-off rally march slash rally. I think they’re happening everywhere and I think there’s going to be a huge turnout, and I think it’s going to send a direct message to Trump and Elon Musk that we’re not going to take it. You want to try to be a dictator or king or whatever you’re wanting to try to be. It’s not going to work out for you because we live in a democracy and Americans like their democracy and they will fight to keep it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, James Jones, veteran and a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The rise of the internet and personal computing once inspired utopian visions of how technology could improve society. These days, that kind optimism is sorely lacking from the conversation. The internet has gone from a sprawling web of thousands of websites and subcultures to an increasingly homogenized and monopolized space dominated financially and politically by a handful of billionaires, whose reach now extends into the federal government. In his new novel, Picks and Shovels, author Cory Doctorow brings his readers back in time to the 1980s, the pioneering days of PCs and the internet—and the egalitarian visions of technology’s role in the future that proliferated decades ago. In a special discussion hosted by Red Emma’s Bookstore in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Doctorow dig into his new novel, and its place in the wider discussion on tech, inequality, and capitalism.

Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: David Hebden

Transcript

Cory Doctorow:  Thank you very much. What a pleasure to be in an anarchist bookstore. I grew up in a Marxist bookstore, print shops, which are a little staid. They don’t have as many comic books. It’s very nice to be in a bookstore, a radical bookstore where the ethos is if I can’t read a cracking fantasy I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to give you a chance to give us an overview of this book and talk about where it came from. But before we get there, a question I’ve been really wanting to ask you for a while, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed with emotion holding this book, thinking about what it means, thinking back to young Cory the IT worker crawling around desks, and in the early days of the internet, and how much writing meant to you throughout your entire life. And of course, as someone who interviews workers all day, it makes me think of all the great works of literature that are unwritten and living in the tired brains and exploited bodies of working people all around us. And so it’s a real remarkable thing to be holding one of those works of literature in my hand.

I wanted to ask, just to start, as someone who’s written so many different kinds of works, nonfiction, fiction, science fiction, what has fiction writing, what has it given you that other forms of writing [haven’t]?

Cory Doctorow:  Well, I think that there are all these issues that are on the horizon. I’ve spent most of my life, the last 23 years, working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation on these issues of tech policy that are a really long way off before they’re urgent, but you can see on the horizon that things are going to be very bad if we don’t act now. And when they’re that far off, everything seems very abstract and cold, and it’s hard to get your head around why you should be worked up about it. There’s stuff in the here and now you gotta pay attention to.

And this is broadly the problem of activism in the 21st century. This is the problem of climate activism. Eventually, everyone believes in climate change. But if you believe in climate change because your house is on fire, it’s kind of too late.

And upregulating the salience of things that are a long way away, very technical, very abstract, it’s hard to do with just argument. And you don’t want to wait until people are in the midst of it, if for no other reason than the difference between denialism and nihilism is paper thin. If we spend a decade arguing about whether anyone should be caring about the crashing population of rhinoceroses, eventually there’s just going to be one of them left, and you’re definitely going to agree that this is now a problem. But at that point you might say, well, why don’t we find out what he tastes like? Because there’s only one left. So getting people to care about this stuff early on, it’s very hard.

One of the things that science fiction is really good at is interrogating not just what a gadget might do, but who it might do it for and who it might do it to. The difference between a thing in your car that warns you if you’re drifting out of your lane and a thing in your car that rats you out to your insurance company because you drifted out of your lane. It’s not the technology, it’s the social arrangements that go around it.

We are at the tail end of 40 years of technocratic neoliberalism that is really grounded in Margaret Thatcher’s idea that there is no alternative, which is really a way of saying don’t try and think of alternatives, that there’s only one way this could be. Someone came down off a mount with two stone tablets and said, Larry Sergei, thou shalt start mining thine log files for actionable market intelligence.

These are not decisions that had to be made in one way, and they’re not decisions that we can’t unmake and remake in new ways. One of the things that fiction does is let you explore an emotional flythrough of a virtual rendering of a better world or a worse one, both of which can inspire you to do more or to take action now, to upregulate the salience of things that are a long way away.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So you’re saying fiction is the shortest distance between the fuck around and find out stages of history?

Cory Doctorow:  Well, look, you need both. You don’t want to just build castles in the sky, you need a grounded theoretical basis. And the other thing about science fiction that I think is amazing is it’s the literature where we welcome exposition. Exposition gets a bum rap. They’re like, oh, exposition is always bad, show don’t tell. The reason we like showing and not telling is because it’s fiction writing on the easy level. Showing intrinsically is dramatic in a way that telling is not, so it’s much harder to make it interesting. But you get 6,000 words of Neil Stephenson explaining how to eat a bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon. I would read 20,000 words of that. I would tune in to a weekly radio broadcast about it because he’s so good at exposition.

And so, science fiction can integrate some of that theory, but you also need the theory part. This is a radical bookstore. It has an amazing comic book section. It’s also got a lot of theory.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, let’s talk about Picks and Shovels. Tell us a bit about where this book specifically, a Martin Hench novel, came from, and give us a quick overview of it.

Cory Doctorow:  So, I write when I’m anxious, it makes the world go away. I disappear into the world of the mind. And so I’ve been doing a lot of writing. During lockdown, I wrote nine books. I live in Southern California, so I spent all of lockdown in a hammock in my backyard writing.

And one of them was this book, Red Team Blues. And Red Team Blues had a very weird conceit. I somehow came up with the idea of writing the final volume in a long running series without the tedious business of the series. I thought there’d be an exciting energy, that last day of summer camp, final episode, M*A*S*H feeling of getting to the finale of a long running series without having to do all that other work.

And I didn’t know if it would work or not, but I sent it to my editor, who’s a really lovely fellow, but not the world’s most reliable email correspondent, and I hunkered down to spend a couple months doing other stuff waiting to hear from him. But the next morning there was an email in my inbox, just three lines: “That was a fucking ride. Whoa.” And he bought two more, which is great, except that Red Team Blues is the final adventure of a 67-year-old forensic accountant who spent 40 years in Silicon Valley unwinding every weird, terrible finance scam that tech bros could think of over the whole period of the PC revolution and beyond. And he has earned his retirement by the end of Red Team Blues. He gets called out for one last job, and now it’s time for him to sail off into the sunset. I didn’t want to bring him out of retirement.

I mean, there is some precedent. Conan Doyle gave us back Sherlock Holmes, brought him back over Reichenbach Falls. But that was because Queen Victoria offered him a knighthood if he’d do it, and my editor at the time was a vice president of the McMillan company. That carries a lot of power, but you don’t get to knight people.

So I decided I would tell the story out of order, and that you don’t really lose any real dramatic tension if you know that there’s something that happens chronologically later which means that the character must be alive. Broadly speaking, you know that about every mystery or crime thriller series that you read. But by telling it out of sequence, I get a bunch of plot stuff for free. I don’t have to worry about continuity because I’m not foreshadowing, I’m back shadowing. Anytime two things don’t line up, I can just interpose an intermediary event in which they’re resolved. It turns out that when you’re doing this, the more stuff you pull out of your ass and make up and then later on figure out how to work out, the more of a premeditated motherfucker you seem to be and people get really impressed, it’s great. It’s a great cheap writing trick.

So this book, Picks and Shovels, it’s Marty Hench’s first adventure. It starts with him as a classic MIT screwup. He’s in the computer science program in the early ’80s, and he is so busy programming computers that he’s flunking out of computer science. And so he ends up becoming a CPA, not because he’s particularly interested in accounting, but because the community college CPA program now has a lab full of Apple II Pluses, and he really wants to go play with those.

So after getting his ticket, he and his genius hacker roommate move to Silicon Valley at the height of the era of the weird PC. Because when PCs started, they were weird. No one knew what they were for, who was supposed to sell ’em, who was supposed to buy ’em, how you were supposed to use them, what shape they were supposed to be.

I grew up in Ontario. As you heard, I’m a Canadian. We’re like serial killers. We’re everywhere. We look just like everyone else. And the Ministry of Education in Ontario had its own computer that booted three different operating systems, including a Logo prompt, and it was in a giant piece of injection molded plastic with a cassette drive and a huge trackball like a Centipede game at the arcade. It was a very weird PC.

Marty Hench ends up working with some very weird PCs. There’s a weird PC company called Fidelity Computing. The setup sounds like a joke. It’s a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi who started a computer company. But the joke is it’s a pyramid scheme and they use parishioners to predate upon one another, extract money from each other, and hook them into these computers that are meant to drain their wallets over long timescales because they’ve been gimmick so you can’t get your data off of them. The printers have been Reese Sprocketed, so they’ve got slightly wider tractor feeds so you have to buy special paper that costs five times as much. They’ve done the same thing with the floppy drives. And this is making them millions.

And three women who work for them have become so disenchanted that they’ve decided to repent of their sins and rescue all of the parishioners they have sucked into this pyramid scheme with a rival computing company. So these three women, a nun who’s left her order and become a Marxist involved with liberation theology, a queer Orthodox woman whose family’s kicked her out, and a Mormon woman who’s left the faith over opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, starts a company called Computing Freedom, whose goal is to make interoperable components: floppy drives that work with their floppies, floppies that work with their floppy drives, printers that work with their paper, paper that works with their printers, printers that you can plug into their computers, computers that you can plug into their printers, all of the things you need to escape the lock-in of these devices and see in computers the liberatory potential that I think so many people saw, as opposed to the control and extraction potential that, unfortunately, so many people also saw.

And as Marty falls in with them, they discover that the kind of people who are not above making millions of dollars stealing from people who trust them because they’re faith leaders are also not above spectacular acts of violence to keep the grift going. And so what starts as a commercial dispute becomes a shooting war. And that’s the book.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So like you said, there’s a punchline setup where a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an Orthodox rabbi walk into a bar and start a PC company. And I was thinking about that a lot when I was staring for a long while, before I even got to the book, at the copyright page where it says, “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” And I wanted to ask, in the context of that disclaimer, where the question of faith and the exploitation of faith in this era, what it’s speaking to that is either a creation of your mind or a real situation that you’re addressing fictitiously.

Cory Doctorow:  So remember that the early 1980s were a revolutionary moment, or maybe a counter-revolutionary moment. It’s the moment in which all of the things that we’re worried about today started. So it’s the first election that Evangelicals came into the electorate in large numbers because Reagan brokered a deal with Jerry Falwell to get Evangelicals into the Republican coalition. So this is the beginning of political activism among religion.

It is also the moment at which pyramid schemes are taking off, especially within religions. I tell the story in the book, but there’s a company called Amway. Amway is one of the most toxic of the pyramid schemes we’ve ever had. It was started by Rich DeVos, who’s Betsy DeVos’s father-in-law, and his partner, Jay Van Andel, who ran the US Chamber of Commerce and was the most powerful business lobbyist in the world. And ironically, Richard Nixon had had enough of their shit and was getting ready to shut them down through the Federal Trade Commission when he got defenestrated.

And Jerry Ford, who’d been their congressman, came in and ordered the FTC to lay off on them. And the FTC crafted a rule, the Amway rule, that basically says so long as your pyramid scheme operates like Amway did, it’s legal. So anyone from your high school class who’s found you on Facebook and tried to sell you essential oils or tights, they’re just doing Amway for tights or essential oils. Amway has become the template.

And the reason that Amway was so successful is it married pyramid selling to religion. Religion, especially religions that are high demand or that have a high degree of a demand for fertility where you’re expected to have large families, these are institutions that require a lot of social capital for the parishioners to survive. If you’re in a religion where you’re expected to have 10 kids and you’re also supposed to tithe 10% of your income to the church, you are really reliant on other people to help take care of your family and vice versa.

And so they live on social capital, and a pyramid scheme is a way for weaponizing social capital, extracting it, vaporizing it, turning it into a small amount of one-time cash, and then moving that up to the top of the pyramid and leaving nothing behind.

I just heard a really good interview on the Know Your Enemy podcast where they talked about how pyramid selling, it’s like the Bizarro World version of union organizing because pyramid selling is organized around finding the charismatic leaders within a community who other people rely on, teaching them how to have a structured conversation that brings other people into what they’re doing, except — This is where it goes off the rails — Because a union organizing conversation is about building solidarity, whereas a pyramid selling conversation is about vaporizing it.

And so this crossover of technology, which is always a fertile ground for ripping people off because things people don’t understand are easy to bamboozle them with. People think a pile of shit sufficiently large always has a pony underneath it. And it has this nexus with religion and the takeoff of pyramid schemes and this moment of Reaganomic transformation of the country. You put all those things together, you get a really rich soil that you can grow quite a story out of.

And I didn’t know that it would be echoing this moment of counter-revolution that we’re in now, that they would coincide so tightly. But really this is also a book about people living through things like the AIDS crisis, where it’s an existential crisis because their government has decided that not only they don’t care whether they live or die, the government’s decided they want them dead.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to return in the end, before we go to Q&A, to that, the echoes of our current moment thing. But before we get there, my wife, Meg, who’s a worker-owner here at Red Emma’s, is from Michigan, and so she has to hear me complain about this more than anybody every time we’re driving back to Michigan and we’re on the goddamn toll roads throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio. I get so irrationally angry at the existence and concept of toll roads. Every time we’re passing through them I’m like, this is so stupid, not just the existence of ’em, but you see the systems and behaviors that coalesce and harden around a stupid idea and become our accepted reality.

In so many ways, that’s the relationship that we have to tech. You are returning us to a time in this novel, like you said, the era of the weird PC, the 1980s, where so much of what we accept now as settled, concrete fact was not settled at all. So why return to that time, and what is the world that you explore in this novel?

Cory Doctorow:  It was a very contingent moment. Not only did no one know what the PC was for, there was a lot of argument about what the PC could be for. Notoriously, there’s this moment where Bill Gates publishes an open letter in all the computer hobbyist magazines called “A Letter to the Computer Hobbyists” in which he says, look, I know that since the dawn of the first computer hobbyists and computer science as we understand it, the way that we wrote programs is the way we do science: You publish the program, other people improve it, they read it, they understand it, they modify it, they use it themselves.

However, history stops now. I and my buddy have copied a program, that was progress. We made our own basic compiler or basic interpreter for a PDP, I think it was. So we copied someone else’s idea. That was a legitimate act of copying. You must not copy our program — When you do that, that’s piracy. And from now on, nobody copies anyone. All the copying is done.

And it’s this moment where you see this division in the two cultures between people who think of it as a scientific enterprise, which means that it has this degree of peer review, information sharing, building, standing on the shoulders of others, and this idea of it being an extractive industry, and one where it’s like we’ve planted all the corn we need, now we can eat the seed corn. We’ve got all the cool ideas that we needed to make by sharing ideas, now it’s time to just have whoever was holding onto the idea when the music stopped be the person in charge of that idea forever and ever. And we’re still living through that. We’re living through evermore extreme versions of it.

And actually one of the things I’m very interested in at this moment, and one of the echoes of the moment that this book is set in, is that we are at a moment of great upheaval, a crisis. Milton Friedman said in times of crisis, ideas move from the periphery to the center. He was a terrible person, but he was right about that. His weird ideas about dismantling the New Deal and turning us all into forelock-tugging plebs who attended our social betters and cleaned their toilets are finally bearing fruit now. For decades, people thought those were terrible ideas, but he was like, when the oil crisis comes, when whatever crisis it is comes, we’ll be able to do this.

Well right now, Trump is our oil crisis. He’s about to make everything in the world 25% more expensive, or more, with a series of tariffs. And when those hit, all the countries in the world that have signed up to not allow people to jailbreak, modify, copy, and improve the big tech products, who signed up to make sure that every time a Canadian software author makes an app and sells it to a Canadian software user, the dollar the Canadian software user pays makes a round trip through Cupertino and comes back 30 cents lighter, all those things that other countries have signed up to do, we can throw them out the window because we signed up to do them on the condition that we get free trade.

So we can be performatively angry at Elon Musk about the Nazi salutes — He kind of likes that, he’s into the attention — But if it was legal everywhere in the world to jailbreak Teslas and get all the subscription content, all the stuff that you have to pay every month for free, and that took his absurd valuation-to-earnings ratio down to something much more realistic, and prompted a margin call on all the debt that he’s floated to buy Twitter, and so on, that’s going to really kick that guy in the dongle.

So I really think that we are at this moment where some of the things we wanted to do back then that were taken as red back then, that we exterminated over 40 years, that they’ve never really gone away. They’ve been lurking in the background all along. And I think — I’m not saying Trump is good or that this is a good thing that Trump is in office, but I am saying when life gives you SARS, you make sarsparilla, and this is our chance.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’m thinking about what you said about the timeline of the narrative, and you know how we’re all going to end up if you zoom out long enough. And in so many ways, there’s that tragic sense that you get reading this novel and feeling that unsettledness of the ’80s knowing that the endpoint is Aaron Swartz and the state’s attack on him. The endpoint is people like Eric Lundgren, who was one of the first people I ever reported on for The Baffler who printed the very free discs that come with every PC to let you just reboot the system if it fails. He wanted to print those and give ’em to as many people as he could so they knew how to do it, and Microsoft charged him with, basically, manufacturing new OS systems, and he went to prison. So there’s that tragic sense of fatalism knowing where that memo from Bill Gates, where it ended up.

And so I guess I wanted to ask how we really got from this open, weird potential to such a cold system of capture.

Cory Doctorow:  The five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. I think that there’s a revisionist history of that moment that says there were people who were really excited about computers but hopelessly naive. They thought if we gave everyone a computer, everything would be fine. Those techno optimists are how we got here.

I don’t think that’s true. I don’t recognize that account when I think back to those moments and those people. For example, nobody founds or devotes their life to the Electronic Frontier Foundation because everything is going to be fine. You have to, on the one hand, be very alive to the liberatory potential of computing, but also very concerned about what happens if things go wrong. It’s both. It’s not just [that] these can be misused, but these can be used as well.

And I think that if there was something we missed — And I do think we missed it — It was that competition law, antitrust, was dying as the computer was taking off. Literally, Reagan went on the campaign trail when the Apple II Plus went on sale. And we had these decades of tech consolidation, not by making better things, but by buying companies that made better things, making those things worse, but also capturing regulators so that people can’t escape. Making it illegal to reverse engineer or modify things so that you can get away from them.

So you look at a company like Google. 25 years ago, Google made a really amazing search engine. I don’t want to downplay that. It was magic. You could Ask Jeeves questions all day long and you’d never get an answer nearly as good as the answer you would get out of Google. But in the years since, the quarter century since, when Google has grown to a $3 trillion market cap company, it has had, depending on how you count, between zero and one commercial successes of things that it made on its own, and everything that it does that’s successful is something it bought from someone else.

It made a video service, it sucked: Google Video, it’s gone. They bought someone else’s video service: YouTube. They bought their mobile stack, they bought their ad tech stack, server management docs, collaboration maps, GPS. Everything except the Hotmail clone is something that they bought from someone else. They’re not Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re just like rich Uncle Pennybags. They just go around, they buy everyone else’s ideas up and wall them off and lock you in with them. I think we missed that that was going on.

And we missed it because there was an echo of the antitrust enforcement that carried forward through those years. So in 1982, which is more or less where the action of this story starts, Ronald Reagan decides that he is going to go ahead and break up AT&T. AT&T had been under antitrust investigation for 69 years at that point. He let IBM off the hook. IBM had been through 12 years of antitrust investigation at that point. Every year, they spent more on outside counsel to fight the US government than all the lawyers in the DOJ antitrust division cost the US government. They outspent America for 12 consecutive years. They called it antitrust’s Vietnam.

And in the end, they did get off the hook. Reagan dropped the case against them. But they were also like, well, obviously we don’t want to get in trouble again, so when we build the PC, we’re going to get someone else to make the operating system. That’s where we get Bill Gates. We’re going to make it out of commodity components so anyone can make a PC.

And Tom Jennings, who has a cameo in this book, he is, in addition to being a really important person in the history of computer science, is also a really important gay rights activist, and published a seminal zine called Homocore. There’s a scene in the book where he’s quietly selling issues of Homocore in the corner of a Dead Kennedys show. Tom went into a clean room and reverse engineered the PC ROM for Phoenix, and that’s where we got Dell, Gateway, Compact, and so on.

So you get this moment of incredible efflorescence where there’s BBSs everywhere because AT&T is not crushing modems, everyone’s making a PC. Digital Equipment Company, which is this titan of computing, keels over and gets bought with money down the back of the sofa cushions by Compact, which is a company that had barely existed 10 minutes before. Things are really dynamic back then. Everything is changing.

I think that’s what we missed, was that, actually, we weren’t going to do the antitrust work that would keep things dynamic after that. That was the last time we were going to do it. We try with Bill Gates, and it did get us somewhere. With the Microsoft antitrust investigation, conviction went very well, and then G.W. Bush gets in and he drops the investigation. But it was this amazing time. And it let Google exist. Microsoft didn’t do to Google what they’d done to Netscape. And so we got this incredible new kind of internet company. Things were really dynamic.

And what we missed was that the dynamism was being sapped out of the system, that these companies were aspiring to become monopolists, and the people who would’ve stepped in to prevent them were no longer on the job. We were operating on the presumption that monopolies are intrinsically efficient, that if you see a monopoly in the wild, it means it’s doing something good, and it would be incredibly ironic to use public money to destroy something that everybody loves.

And so that’s how we get to this moment, and it’s how we end up with widespread regulatory capture. Because a hundred companies in the sector, they can’t agree on what they want their regulators to do. They can’t even agree on where to have their annual meeting. This is how tech got its ass kicked by entertainment during the Napster wars. The Napster companies, the entertainment companies, they were much smaller than tech in aggregate, but there were seven of them. They were all like godparents to each other’s children. [Their] kids played on the same Little League team. They were executors of each other’s estates. They were in the same polycules. They were able to run a very tight game around 200 tech companies that made up the sector then who were a rabble and who could be divided and conquered.

And so, when the sector concentrates like this, it gets its way. And that, I think, was the great blind spot that we had, that we would end up in this moment now where monopolies are the norm, regulatory capture is the norm. Markets don’t discipline companies because they don’t really have competitors. Governments don’t discipline companies because they have captured their regulators. Workers no longer have power. I mean, tech workers had power for decades because they were in such short supply. And if your boss asked you to screw up the thing, you’d miss your mother’s funeral to ship on time, you’d say, fuck off, and go get a job across the street with someone who paid more.

But 260,000 tech layoffs in 2023, 150,000 in 2024, tens of thousands this year. Facebook just announced a 5% across the board headcount reduction — And they’re doubling executive bonuses. That’s a good one. Tech workers aren’t telling their bosses to fuck off anymore.

And so all the things that stopped tech from turning into just another industry, that dynamism that meant that if they made us angry at them, we could do something about it, we could switch, we could go somewhere else. All that stuff is vaporized by the collapse of antimonopoly enforcement. And it led the pack, but we now see that in every sector.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to just tease that out a little more from the consumer side. It felt like all of us have lived through the timeline where it felt like we could tell tech to fuck off and say, I’m going to go buy a Blackberry instead of this. They’re like, I’m going to go buy this MP3 player instead of an iPod. Now it feels like we’re living in the period where tech’s telling us to fuck off and accept whatever they give us. And I think that speaks to the delayed reaction from us as consumers to what was happening, what you’ve just described.

And our blindness to that was, in part, because it felt like, as consumers, tech was still giving us what we wanted. That dynamic period you talked about, and the companies and products and personalities that emerged from that, all fed into this deep-set technomodernist conceit that better technologies are going to win out in the market and become dominant in our lives because they are better, more efficient, the people making them are smarter, so on and so forth.

So I wanted to ask, how has Silicon Valley, as a real-world entity, become what it is because of that deep-set cultural conceit that we have about it, but also how does its trajectory over the past 40 years reveal the falseness of that conceit?

Cory Doctorow:  Well, the reason that it seemed so plausible is that it was true for a time, in the same way that if you show me a 10-foot wall, I’ll show you an 11-foot-tall ladder. If you show me a printer where the ink costs 30% over margin, I’ll show you a company willing to sell you ink at 15% over margin. But the expansion of laws that made it illegal to do that reverse engineering that would break the digital lock that stopped you from using third party ink or going to a third party mechanic or exporting your data –

Or when Facebook kicked off, it had a superior product to MySpace. It was like MySpace except they promised they would never spy on you — I don’t know if you remember this — And their pitch to people was come to Facebook, we promise we’ll never spy on you. But the problem was that everyone who was already using MySpace had a bunch of friends there. And you know what it’s like, you love your friends; They’re great people, but they’re a giant pain in the ass. And you cannot get the six people in your group chat to agree on what board game you’re going to play this weekend, much less get 200 people that you’re connected to on Facebook to agree to leave when some of them are there because that’s where the people have the same rare disease as them are hanging out, and some of them are there because that’s where they plan the carpool for Little League, and some of them there because that’s where their customers are, or they’re performers and that’s where their audience is, or they’ve moved from another country and that’s how they stay in touch with their family. It’s really hard to get those people to go.

Facebook cut through that Gordian knot. They gave people a scraper, a bot. You gave that bot your MySpace login and password. It would pretend to be you at MySpace several times a day, grab all the messages waiting for you, put them in your Facebook inbox, you could reply to them and push ’em back out again. If you did that to Facebook today, they would nuke you until you glowed. You’d have violated Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You’d be a tortious interferer with contract. You’d have violated their trademarks, their copyrights, their patents. The rubble would be bouncing by the time the bombs stopped. And so this is how you end up in a situation where the same callow asshole, Mark Zuckerberg, can maltreat you much more without paying any penalty. And so he does.

Printer ink is my favorite example of this because it’s just so visceral. HP really invented this. It’s against the law to refill a printer cartridge or to use a third party ink cartridge, not because those things have ever been prohibited by Congress, but because all the printers are designed to detect whether you’ve refilled your cartridge or used a third party cartridge, and modifying the printer, bypassing the access control to modify the printer, is illegal under Section 1201 of the DMCA. $500,000 fine and a five-year prison sentence for trafficking in a device to remove that. And so, HP has just been raising the price of ink along with other members of the cartel. Ink is now the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a special permit. It runs over $10,000 a gallon. You print your grocery lists with colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.

This is how we get to this moment. These companies that are not run by more evil or wicked people, but are just less constrained, are able to act on the impulses that they have to exploit you, to rip you off, do bad things because no one tells them no. We all know people who have gotten in a position of authority where no one could tell them no and abused it. We are living through that politically right now. That is true all the way through movements, societies, and economies. When you take away the discipline and the responsibility and accountability to other people, then even benevolent people get crazy ideas and do bad things. And people who are malevolent but were getting something done that we all enjoyed then can have their craziness fly. And it’s bad for them too. This is how you get Steve Jobs going, well, I’m going to treat my cancer with juice cleanses. If no one can tell you no, you’re being an idiot, you have to do it differently, everything goes wrong.

Maximillian Alvarez:  So we got about 10 minutes, and I want to make sure that we end before we go to Q&A with the passage, bringing us back to the book and reading a passage there. But while we’re on the subject of malevolent evil people and what they do when no one tells them no, I wanted to ask, since we’ve got you here and we’re all freaking out for the same reasons, how we interpret this. Elon Musk is doing to the federal government what he did to Twitter and we were all laughing about a year ago, with the same logic of laying off thousands of federal workers — I’ve interviewed some of them at The Real News, it’s heartbreaking — And talking about replacing ’em with AI. So how do we make sense of this, and how do we make sure, where is this going to go if no one tells them no, if we don’t stop them?

Cory Doctorow:  Well, you know the joke about the guy who goes to the therapist and he says, I’m really sad and I just can’t seem to shake it. And the therapist says, well, I’ve got good news. The great clown Pagliacci is in town. You should go see him tonight. Everybody who sees Pagliacci comes away with a smile on his face. And the patient says, but Doctor, I am Pagliacci.

I feel this way when people ask me about Elon Musk. Look, I am in the same chaos and demoralizing stuff as you. And there is a saying from Eastern Canada: If you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here. That saying gets more true every day. As an activist, I try to focus on the places where I think we can get a lot of leverage and change stuff, not because I can see how we get from there to solving all of our problems, but I feel like the difference between optimism and pessimism, or just the fatalistic belief that things will get better or worse irrespective of what we do, that hope is this idea that if we change things somewhat, if we ascend the gradient towards the world we want to live in, that, from that new vantage point, we’ll be able to see new ways to climb further and further up that gradient.

And so that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for what we can do right now that improves the lie of the land so that maybe we can, from there, see something else that we can do, and something else.

Right now, I think it’s going against the international order of trade. I really do think this is our moment for this. I especially think that this is the case because you can easily see how countries could be stampeded into it. So my friend Carolina Botero just wrote a couple of editorials in the big Columbian daily about why Columbia should do this, should jettison all of its IP obligations under its trade agreements with the United States.

And I’ve been talking a lot to Canadians. I was just there giving a lecture and talking to policymakers in Canada. When I told them this, they were like, oh, well, if Columbia does it first, we might not be able to make as much money as we would if we were the first ones off the mark. Mexico’s in the same boat. Mexico’s facing the same 25% tariff as Canada. There are so many places that are deliberately allowing Americans to rip off their own people and holding back their own domestic tech sector that might make locally appropriate, more resilient technology by adapting technology themselves that I really feel like this is our oil crisis. This is where we can get something done.

I don’t know where it ends with Musk. One of the things that is crazy about this moment, and for the last 10 years, is that we live in a kind of actuarial nightmare of a political system because everyone is so old. We are just a couple of blood clots away from majorities flipping in both Houses. And it’s funny, but it’s totally true. It’s weird that a country that organizes a designated survivor in a bunker during the State of the Union so there can be some continuity can’t figure out how to have a talent pipeline that has anyone in it that doesn’t have a 13% chance of dying of natural causes in the next year.

So things are really unstable in lots of ways. I could easily see Elon Musk ODing on ketamine. We are in this very weird moment where things could go very differently at any moment.

And so what I’m bearing down on, what I’m putting my chips on right now, is figuring out how to get countries around the world to start thinking about what it would mean to raid the margins of large American companies as a retaliatory measure for tariffs instead of retaliatory tariffs, which just makes things more expensive in your own country, which, if there’s one thing we learned from the last four years in every country around the world, if you are in office when things become more expensive, you will not be in office come the next election. And so this is a moment where you can do something that will actually make everything cheaper for the people in your country.

And here in America, I think this is going to bleed in. There’s no way to stop a Canadian company that makes a tool, like a software tool, that diagnoses cars that you plug into a laptop with a USB port that you plug into the car, from selling that to American mechanics. So long as there’s payment processing and an internet connection, they’ll buy it. And the thing is that if you destroy the margins, if you globally zero out the margins of the most profitable companies in the S&P 500 in their most profitable lines of industry — And these are the firms that are really at the core of the corruption of our political process — I think this changes facts on the ground in America for the better as well.

And so I’m not saying this is where everyone else should be, and I freely admit that I’m a crank with one idea, and this is my idea, and I’m going to work on it, but I am more excited about this than I’ve been in a long time because I really can see a way of doing this. I used to be a UN rep. I’ve been in treaty negotiations. You ask how you carry on and persevere when it’s hopeless. It was hopeless then. We were just there because you couldn’t let this stuff happen without a fight. And every now and again, we won for weird reasons, which we just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and we could give things a push when they were already unstable, but mostly we lost.

But after 25 years of doing it, I’m like, oh wait. There’s a lot of groundwork we built in those years, and there’s a lot of constituencies that we know how to reach, and there’s a lot of people who are more worked up about this stuff than they were a long time ago. And maybe this is the moment where we can actually make a huge, durable change.

One of the things that I think is so demoralizing about what Musk is doing is that it’s so hard to rebuild the institution after it’s gutted — But one of the things that I’m very excited about is that it will be so hard to rebuild these institutions if we can gut them. So I feel like Steve Bannon calling himself a Leninist. I’m a leftist Freedmanite.

Maximillian Alvarez:  As an alumni of the University of Chicago, I don’t know what to do with that [laughs], but we love our crank, Cory, I know that much. And I really love and appreciate what you said earlier.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next year, two years, four or five, 50 either, but I know where we’re headed if we do nothing. I don’t know what’s going to happen because that side of the story has not yet been authored by us. I want to return us to that question of authorship. I want to return us back to the question of this text and finish with the text, because I think one of the things that gave me was at least more of an understanding that things are not as settled as they seem. The fates of everything is not as assured as they want us to believe.

Cory Doctorow:  Actually, you know what? I summarized the bit that I was going to read, so I think I should yield my time for Q&A. Let’s not do the reading.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s just do that. Go read the book. It’s a really great book. Let’s give it up to Cory Doctorow, everybody.

The shaky ceasefire in Gaza is entering the final days of its first phase, but the genocide of the Palestinian people has not been paused. On Feb. 25, Israeli tanks stormed Jenin, the heart of the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank, for the first time since the Second Intifada. From Donald Trump’s declarations that the US should “own” Gaza to promises to deport pro-Palestine student activists, the new administration’s intentions to accelerate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and criminalize solidarity with Palestinians have been made clear. Abby Martin, independent journalist and host of Empire Files, joins The Real News to help analyze how war on Palestine is expanding and evolving.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Fear that Israel is preparing to unleash the same people destroying population, displacing civilization, erasing force that it unleashed on Gaza for 15 months, beginning just days after Israel and Hamas began Phase one of last month’s fragile ceasefire in Gaza, the Israeli military has sent troops, bulldozers, drones, helicopters, and heavy battle tanks into the Northern West Bank, United Nations. Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez said on Monday that he was gravely concerned by the rising violence in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers and other violations. Palestinian writer and journalist, Miriam Bardi told democracy now this week that what we are seeing in fact is a green light of annexation. What is happening right now, she said in the West Bank is defacto annexation of lands. This Israeli offensive, the so-called Operation Iron Wall, is one of the most intense military operations in the West Bank since the height of the second Infa Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation.

Just over two decades ago, Israel’s defense minister Israel Kaz, said this week that 40,000 Palestinians have been forced out of the refugee camps in Janine Tu and Hams. All activity by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in those areas has also been stopped. Now, Katz made it clear that this is not a short-term operation. In a written statement, Katz said, I instructed the IDF to prepare for a long stay in the camps that were cleared for the coming year, and to not allow residents to return and the terror to return and grow, we will not return to the reality that was in the past. He said, we will continue to clear refugee camps and other terror centers to dismantle the battalions and terror infrastructure of extreme Islam that was built, armed, funded, and supported by the Iranian evil axis he claimed in an attempt to establish an Eastern terror front. Now, I want you to keep those statements from Israel’s defense minister in your head as you watch this next clip. This is actually from an incredible documentary report that we filmed in the now empty Janine Refugee Camp in July of 20 23, 3 months before October 7th. The report was shot produced by shot and produced by Ross Domini, Nadia Per Do and Ahad Elbaz. Take a look.

Nadia Péridot:

The Real News Network spoke to Haniya Salameh whose son Farouk was killed by the Israeli army just days before he was due to be married.

Speaker 3:

Far

Nadia Péridot:

Like many of Janine’s residents is a refugee of the 1948 Zionist expulsion of people from across Palestine. Today, these depopulated villages either remain empty or have been raised to the ground to make way for Israel’s settlements. Palestinians are banned from returning to these

Speaker 3:

Homes

Maximillian Alvarez:

With these tanks and bulldozers rolling through the occupied West Bank right now with Israel launching new attacks in southern Syria this week with the ceasefire in Gaza, still very much in danger of collapsing before phase one of the deal is set to end on Saturday and with Donald Trump still joking that it would be best if the US took over Gaza. The bubble has officially burst on any pre inauguration hopes that people had that Trump’s presidency would somehow usher in peace in the Middle East and an end to the humanitarian horror of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from what remains of occupied historic Palestine and the United States’ support for it. Quite the opposite in fact. And not only that, but here in the so-called West the United States, Canada, Europe, we’re seeing a corresponding surge in state and institutional repression of free speech, the free press and the independent and corporate media sides speaking the truth about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and our government’s complicity in it.

We are also seeing a surge in the criminalization of Palestine solidarity protests and attempts to classify solidarity with Palestine as support for terrorism. So listen, we need to get real about where we are right now, what we are facing, and how we can keep forging forward, fighting for what’s right and good and beautiful in times of great darkness and great danger, like the time we’re in now, fighting for peace in a world of war, fighting for life in a culture of mass death. And that is why I could not be more grateful that we’ve got the great Abby Martin on the live stream today to help us do just that. You all should know Abby by now, but in case you don’t for some reason and you’ve been living under a rock, Abby Martin is an independent journalist and host of the Empire Files, an interview and documentary series that everyone needs to watch and support.

She’s the director of the 2019 documentary, Gaza Fights for Freedom and is also directing a new documentary called Earth’s Greatest Enemy, which examines how the United States Empire is not only a primary contributor to climate change, but the central entity that imperils life on earth. Abby, thank you so much for joining us again. It’s always so great to have you back on the Real News. I want to start with the latest horrifying developments in Israel’s war on Palestine. Can you walk us through what we’re seeing and perhaps what we’re not seeing in the West Bank right now?

Abby Martin:

I mean, I think your intro did a really great job at laying out the current situation Max, and thank you for the intro. To me, that was wonderful. Look, it’s very clear that whatever ceasefire deal was negotiated, that the annexation and the green lighting of the further annexation of the West Bank was part of the sweetheart edition to that ceasefire deal. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen, just completely transition from Gaza to the West Bank where extremist settlers in tandem with Israeli soldiers are clearing out entire refugee camps and villages and at an expulsion rate that we have never frankly seen before. I mean, 40,000 Palestinians being expelled just over 35 days is just extraordinary. And this is happening almost on a daily basis. We’re at the barrel of a gun. Dozens of Palestinians are being forced and rejected from their homes. We’ve seen 60 Palestinians be killed in this timeframe.

Several children, just over the last week, we saw two Palestinian children being gunned down. This just is happening at such a rapid pace. It’s very dizzying, and it just seems like there are no measures in place whatsoever to stop this rapid annexation and this whole operation Iron Wall. It’s very clear that the ultimate goal is to clear out as much as possible and just have the plausible deniability, oh, it’s settlers. Oh, it’s Hamas fighters. Oh, well, we have to do it because of the violence that’s happening. I mean, again, if you don’t get to the root of the violence, it’s just going to erupt. It’s a tinderbox and it’s a pressure cooker. So all of the things that are happening as a result of the clearing out of these villages and refugee camps, it’s an inevitability. So you’re going to see waves of attacks, whether they be knife attacks or suicide bombings or like the inert bombs that didn’t explode and actually kill people on those buses. I mean, all of these things are inevitabilities. Once you engage on a full scale invasion and war to the native population, that’s already under a very extremely repressive police state dictatorship that prevents them from doing anything at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Could you say just a little more on that last point you filmed there in the West Bank, you’ve been there, you’ve reported on it many, many times. I guess for folks who maybe haven’t looked into the West Bank as much as they’ve learned about Gaza over the past two years, could you just say a little more for folks who are watching this about the state of life as such in the West Bank before this operation Iron Wall began?

Abby Martin:

Yeah, and a perfect example of that is this current ceasefire deal, phase one where people may be asking themselves how is it possible that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners really their hostages in their own right? How is it possible that there’s so many hundreds of Palestinians being held and being released at the behest of Hamas’ demands? It may be confusing to some to see just a couple dozen hostages from the Israeli side being released for hundreds of Palestinians. Well, the answer is basically the fact that there’s this repressive police state style dictatorship that wantonly just arrests hundreds of people, detains them, arbitrarily, keeps them without charges or trial, and that’s precisely what we’ve seen, ramp up and escalate in the aftermath of October 7th, hundreds and hundreds of Palestinians, including dozens of children and women, not to take away the revolutionary agency or political agency of women, but it is just unbelievable how many people have been detained arbitrarily and held.

Why aren’t they called hostages? I have no idea. But it just again, just kind of paints the picture of what Palestinians are living under. They cannot raise a Palestinian flag. They cannot practice any political activity. It is crazy. I mean, they can set up arbitrary checkpoints, resort these people’s lives to a living. Hell set up just random blockades that can reroute people just take hours out of their day just to make their lives extremely uncomfortable. But it just goes far beyond that. I mean, raiding killing Palestinians arbitrarily having no recourse whatsoever. You certainly cannot have armed resistance. I mean, anything that can be construed as a weapon in these people’s homes or cars can just subject you to not only humiliating tactics, but also just being thrown in prison. I mean, we’re talking about such a crazy level of control that simply the David versus Goliath, just symbolism of throwing a rock at a tank. There’s a law on the books that can put a Palestinian child in prison for 20 years for simply throwing a rock at an armed tank. So these are the kind of measures that have been in place since 1967 when this military dictatorship was imposed illegally. And ever since then, we’ve been placated as Westerners with this promise of a two states solution, which has just been a cover for the continued annexation of the West Bank and under Trump, we’ve seen just a complete rapid green lighting of just continuing that policy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I mean, I did not want to incorporate it as a visual element in this live stream because frankly, it’s too ghoulish and horrifying to give any more airtime to. But I would point folks, if you haven’t already seen it, to an AI generated video that our president shared on his truth social account, promoting the transformation of Gaza into a luxury beach front destination filled with skyscrapers, condos, bearded belly dancers like Monde Weiss reported the video shows Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sunbathing together in Gaza, Elon Musk eating hummus, the area being converted into resort called Trump, Gaza, a golden Trump statue and children running from rubble into picturesque beaches. What the hell, man? I mean, I guess where do you even find your center of humanity in such an inhumane timeline?

Abby Martin:

I mean, that’s what’s so creepy about it. It’s the dizzying spectacle of it all. And I feel like Trump, I feel like he was much more dialed in 2016 personally because he was less senile and whatever. He was younger and more astute. But now it does seem like he’s kind of, he doesn’t give a shit. I mean, he is just going for it and letting all of these crazy outliers just take the government for a ride. I mean, Elon Musk, this AI stuff, it’s like by the time that you’re trying to unpack this press conference where he is sitting next to this grinning genocide fugitive talking about how Gaza is a hellhole and how you’re going to get, why would you want to go back to Gaza? You’re just going to get shot and killed next to the grinning genocide fugitive, who did it. I mean, once you unpack that, he’s already signed another thousand executive orders once you try to make sense of this AI generated video of Trump’s golden head on a balloon, and kids running out of the rubble into a more attractive version of Elon Musk eating hummus and peta.

I mean, they’ve already done this, that and the other. So again, it’s the spectacle. It’s like no response is the good response. It’s so difficult to even maneuver this new political landscape even for us who follow it for a job. I mean, a perfect example is the sig. He twice the Nazi salute from Elon. I mean, it’s like, what is the appropriate response to this? Because they will just gaslight you and say what you see isn’t reality. And so by the time you’re like, no, no, no, that’s a Nazi salute. No, no, no, it’s like they’ve already done this, that and the other thing. So it’s such an insane time to be living and to navigate this political space, and I just keep comparing it to the mass hallucinations. Everyone’s relegated to their own framework of reality. The algorithm boosts whatever it is that you want to justify as that reality, and that’s kind of our respective mass hallucinations that we’re wading through. I mean, I feel like I’m living in reality, and that’s why I’m so aghast and horrified by everything. But

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, that’s why I wake up screaming every night. And in fact, so much of our politics is a war on the means of perceiving reality. It is a war over the narrative of what we’re actually seeing. And from everyone’s watching a plane crash down the road in Washington DC and it’s immediately a battle over is this DEI or is this something else? Is the fires in my home state of California? Is this A DEI thing? Is this climate change? The war over the means of perception, I think is really the terrain upon which so many of us are fighting or forced to fight in the 21st century. And I definitely want to circle back to Trump Musk and how we navigate all of this here at home in the second half of the discussion. But I guess before we move on, I wanted to bring us back to the West Bank.

You mentioned the gaslighting, right? You mentioned the ways that that war on perception, the top down narratives handed to us by the very villains who are committing genocide and destroying our government and so on and so forth. I am not drawing an equivalence between our situation and that of the occupied Palestinian. But I think in your amazing conversation and interview with the great Muhammad el-Kurd about his new book, I was learning so many lessons from him that feel very relevant to us today, particularly the gaslighting and the sort of top down effort to turn the victim into the terrorist. I wanted to play that clip really quick from Muhammad el-Kurd. This is a clip from Abby show, the Empire Files, which she interviewed Muhammad on recently. So let’s play that clip and let’s talk about what this can tell us about how to navigate what we’re up against now.

Mohammed el-Kurd:

Yeah, and I think the average person, anybody with common sense would understand that defending yourself against intruders, against colonizers, against thiefs, against burglars, against murderous regimes is a fundamental right that you are entitled to defend yourself and your family. And actually across history, people who have done so have been hailed as heroes. But violence itself is essentially a mutating concept. It’s something to celebrate when it’s sanctioned by the empire, and it’s something to pearl clutch out when it’s done by natives, by these young men in tracksuits. But again, this is, it’s not like a fundamental western opposition to violence or militias or whatever. It’s a rejection of any kind of political prospect for the Palestinian, because anytime the Palestinian has engaged in armed resistance or has engaged in kinds of resistance that have extended beyond the bounds of what is acceptable to a liberal society, that those are some of the only times we have been heard.

So what does that say about the world and what does that say to the Palestinian? When we are told time and time again, the only time people are going to listen to us and talk about us and put us in their headlines is when we engage in violent resistance. But ultimately, this is about the rejection of Palestinian. Armed resistance is about a rejection of a Palestinian national project is about a rejection of actually ending the occupation. Everybody can sing every day about ending the occupation, but when it becomes real, we are terrified of it. We lose our compass. We refuse, we refuse to even entertain it. For years, maybe all of my life, I’ve been hearing about a two-state solution while Israeli bulldozers eat away at our land in areas that are supposedly under Palestinian authority control. It’s like a circus where they’re just telling us these narratives to buy time while they’re creating facts on the ground, while they’re setting greedy the terms of engagement and creating the roadmap for the future while robbing us of any kind of future.

And while sanctioning even our ambitions, even our intentions, even our hopes and dreams. You know what I mean? There’s also a hyper, when we say defanging of Palestinians, it’s not just taking our rifles and vilifying our freedom fighters, but there’s also an interrogation of our thoughts. They ask us, do you condemn this and do you condemn that and do you want to do this, and do you want to throw Israelis into the sea? And what’s your issue with those people? And it’s never about actually engaging with you in a certain political uplifted discourse, but it’s about making sure you concede to the liberal world order before you are even allowed entry to the conversation. And that needs to be,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Everyone should go watch that full interview first thing. Second thing, everyone should go read Muhammad el-Kurd’s book by Haymarket Books. Perfect victim. Third thing, Abby, I’ve got just some questions I want to throw at you really quick. Can you talk about that clip, what Muhammad’s saying there and how this applies to what we’re seeing in the West Bank? A lot of these refugee camps, yes, they’re where freedom fighters lived, but also a bunch of regular people who have nowhere else to go. So can you help folks apply what Muhammad’s saying there to what we’re seeing unfold in the West Bank, but also how this applies to us here? It does feel eerily reminiscent of the right wing in this country, condemning violence of Black Lives Matter protesters while celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse shooting them. Right? That double standard does seem to be very much at play here. So I wanted to ask if we could talk about it in the context of the West Bank first and then bring it back home after that.

Abby Martin:

Absolutely. I think, look, it’s really, really clear to understand that the West Bank is under illegal occupation and under international law, Palestinians as well as other people under occupying forces have the legal right to armed resistance that is enshrined in law. And so when you’re looking at a place like the West Bank that hosts houses 3 million Palestinians, and a lot of people are resisting naturally, so of course, I mean, that’s going to be an inevitability you’re going to resist if you’re denied basic human rights, denied clean water, denied mobility. I mean, when you’re living under this harsh repression where you can’t even celebrate the hostages coming home, you can’t grieve, you can’t publicly mourn. You can’t erect a flag. I mean, it’s absolutely insane what these people are subjected to on a day-to-day basis. And given the genocide that we’ve seen erupt in Gaza, the unending slaughter of children, I mean, obviously Palestinians are united front despite the political schisms and divisions.

And so you’re going to see resistance in the West Bank, especially when you see full scale mobilizations to invade and annex your land illegally. And so it’s actually a legal right to see resistance mobilized against Israeli invaders. So first and foremost, we need to zoom out and realize not only is this an egregious and flagrant violation of just the ceasefire, the idea of a ceasefire that Israel considers a ceasefire, just no one reacting to them constantly violating the ceasefire, whether it be in Lebanon or Gaza or in the West Bank. They can just go on and do whatever they want with complete impunity. And the second that a Palestinian fights back, oh, they’ve broken the ceasefire. Oh, the deal’s off the table. It is so disgustingly. But when you zoom out from that, I mean, yeah, Palestinians have the right to resist. So what you’re seeing in refugee camps, what you’re seeing in places like Janine is resistance, legal resistance actually.

So when Israel uses that as a precursor to then further colonize, it’s just absolutely dumbfounding because it’s just completely violating every single law in the books, and this is what they’ve done for decades. And they’re ramping it up under the cover of the ceasefire of the genocides saying that Hamas fighters are on the ground. Oh, well, they did this. So of course we need to go and eject thousands of people from their homes say that they can never return. And it’s gaslighting upon gaslighting, but it’s also just a refusal of just basic reality and the facts that we know to be true Max. When you apply that to the United States, it is just such a double sighted. I mean, it just a completely absurd notion that we worship. We’re a culture of violence. We worship war. I mean militarism and war is so ingrained in the psyche of American citizens, especially in the wake of nine 11.

It’s just a constant thing. But it’s only the good arbiters of violence. I mean, of course, the US military can do whatever it wants around the world as long as it’s doing it in the name of democracy and human rights. If Ukrainians resist against evil Russia, give them all the weapons in the world, turn it into a proxy war where we’re throwing Ukrainians into just making them cannon fodder. I mean, it’s absolutely insane. But when you’re looking at just the basic tenets of what would you do if someone came to your home and said, get out, this is my home now because the Bible says that it is from thousands of years ago, get the hell out at the barrel of a gun. What would you do? What would your family do? Obviously you would band together and resist like anyone would, especially Americans. I mean, we’re talking about a country that has stand your ground laws that if you just go up and knock on the wrong door, you could get shot and killed legally.

So it is just the paradoxical nature of propaganda. It does not make sense and it does not equate, and it’s only because of the deep, deep embedded dehumanization of Arabs and specifically Palestinians. And this has been part and parcel with the war on terror propaganda, the deep dehumanization of just Arabs and Muslims in general, and Palestinians are just, I mean, it’s absolutely absurd how much they’ve been dehumanized where people, even my fellow colleagues as journalists don’t even consider Palestinian journalists, journalists. So it’s a disgrace upon disgrace. But I think what Muhammad’s talking about is so many salient points there of just the utter hypocrisy of the way that we perceive violence. And when it comes to actual decolonization and liberation, which are concepts that make liberals feel uncomfortable, they’d rather keep Palestinians in a perpetual victimhood and treat them as if they just need aid instead of need freedom. Because when you talk about what that actually means, it means fighting back. It means resisting this unending violence and slaughter. What do these people think it means? So what does that actually look like? How does that play out and how is it successful? And that’s why history is so sanitized, and these things are just rewritten by the victors because they don’t want to teach us the hard lessons of how entire countries and peoples have been victorious and have been liberated from empires and from their colonizers in the past.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man, I think that’s powerfully put. And I just wanted to emphasize for folks, when Abby was asking us like, what would you do if someone came in and pointed a gun at you and said, get out of your home. That happened to Muhammad, that happened to him and his family. He became a very prominent international voice, like while settlers were taking over their home from the states. So we’re not asking a rhetorical question here. This is a real question. What would you do in that situation? And in terms of how those rules of engagement he talked about are set by this by definition, hypocritical by definition, like Ill intended entity that does not want us to win, that does not want us to have a leg to stand on. We’re seeing that being baked into this kind of repressive apparatus that is spreading out across the so-called west here to make an example, claiming that Palestine solidarity encampments on a college campus are a threat to the safety of Jewish students while Zionists beating the shit out of student encampment.

Students who are encamping on campus is not categorized in the same violent way. So keep that in mind because I want to kind of focus in here on this sort of the state of repression back here at home as the war across over Palestine. The war on Palestine intensifies because over the past two years, even with the ruling elites in government and this whole imperialist capitalist warmaking establishment doing everything that they could to maintain the longstanding, unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal occupation, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while all of that has been going on, we have seen a sea change at the base of societies around the globe, and especially here in the United States, the explosion of the Palestine solidarity movement, mass protests in DC and around the country, the student encampment movement that I mentioned, but the empire is striking back. As you know, Abby, the reactionary ruling class answer to all of this grassroots opposition to Israel’s war on Palestine has been to criminalize the methods of that opposition and to even criminalize and legally recategorize solidarity with Palestinians itself as anti-Semitic, anti-American, and even supportive of terrorism like here in the United States.

For folks who may have forgotten in the first weeks in office of his new administration, president Trump signed an executive order to deport foreign university students who participate in Gaza solidarity protests in a chilling quote fact sheet that accompanied the executive ordered the White House said quote to all the resident aliens who joined in the pro jihadist protests. We put you on notice, come 2025, we will find you and we will deport you and quote, but this is not just happening in the us. Our colleague, Ali Abu Nima, Palestinian American journalist and executive director of the online publication, the Electronic Intifada, traveled to Switzerland last month to give a speech in Zurich. And after being allowed to enter the country, Abu Nima was arrested by plainclothes officers, forced into an unmarked vehicle, held incommunicado in jail for two nights, and then he was deported from the country.

And in Canada, things were getting very dark very quickly. pro-Palestinian Canadian author and activist, Eves Engler was jailed this week for criticizing Zionist influencer Dalia Kurtz on the social media platform, X Kurtz accused angler and his posts of harassment. And he was jailed by Montreal Police for five days. And all of this is happening back in Toronto. The largest school board in Canada has taken steps to adopt the institutional recategorize of Zionists as a protected class and anti-Zionism as antisemitism. And we actually asked our friend and colleague, the brilliant Toronto-based journalist and founder of On the Line Media, Samira Moine to give us a little update on that story. So let’s play that really quick, and then we’re going to go back to Abby.

Samira Mohyeddin:

The decision by the Toronto District School Board to receive this report on antisemitism is dangerous for a number of reasons. The most important being is that the report conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and moves to make Zionist a protected class of people under the anti-racism policy. So basically a political ideology such as Zionism will now be protected as anything else, will be like race, religion, gender, sexuality. It will fall under that realm, which means that to criticize a political ideology such as Zionism will mean that you will be falling under someone who I don’t know, is critical of someone’s religion, critical of their sexuality. It will actually make it so that this is a weaponization of people who criticize the actions of Israel, which is a state. So this is very dangerous, and we don’t know what sort of effects this will have, what effect will it have on teachers who are teaching history, who are teaching social studies? Does this mean that they can’t criticize Israel? What does this mean for Jewish students who are critical of Israeli actions? Will they be penalized? So there’s a whole realm of things that the Toronto District School Board really doesn’t have answers for yet, and we’re really waiting to see how receiving this report or what even receiving of the report means, what impact it will have, both on parents, on students, and most importantly on teachers who really don’t know how to navigate such a thing. And so this is very, very dangerous.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Okay. Abby Martin, what the hell is going on with all of this? How are you seeing, I guess, the broad sweep of all this repression?

Abby Martin:

I mean, even before the genocide in Gaza, I foresaw the writing on the wall because I myself was engaged in this litigation against the state of Georgia for their anti BDS law. So I knew that states were taking measures to preempt the wave of Palestine solidarity that they inevitably knew would come. And that’s why we’ve seen consulate officials and the Israeli lobby officials going and essentially seeking to undermine our first amendment rights, the constitutionally protected right to boycott a country that was enshrined during the Montgomery Bus boycotts during the civil rights movement. So I knew that pro-Palestine speech was among the most repressed, among the most criminalized because of these laws. And we’ve seen attacks on college campuses even though there’s this kind of notion that right wing speech is what’s heckled and suppressed and repressed on college campuses. I think it’s very clear as day, especially in the wake of the Gaza genocide, that pro-Palestine speech is the most repressed and criminalized speech in the country, even though we have the sacred First Amendment, which unfortunately places like the UK doesn’t.

So you’re seeing raids and arrests of journalists like Aza Wi Stanley from the electronic ADA as well, who was also his electronic communications were seized. I mean, people like Richard Medhurst, they are being arrested and detained with their communications seized and their devices seized under these absurd counter terror powers. I mean, usually the charges don’t stick at the end of the day, but it’s just meant to create a chilling effect and to cement that repressive state where you feel like you can’t even do your job as a journalist. So even though we have the First Amendment, it is not doing much to protect us, especially with what’s happening on college campuses. I mean, the threats even from Israeli government officials saying, you’re never going to have a job again. I mean, it’s just absolutely insane. I don’t even know the words to describe this political climate because like Muhammad articulated so well, it is living in someone else’s hallucination.

It’s like living in a fever dream imposed by someone. It’s just like, what are we even talking about here? You’re telling me that saying from the river to the sea is a terrorist incitement to genocide. While I’m seeing genocide, I’m logging onto my device and seeing a genocide. But you’re saying that people’s words for liberation is the threat. So it’s just this topsy-turvy reality that we’re trying to wade through. Meanwhile, people’s lives are being ruined and destroyed. People are being suspended, expelled. I mean, their jobs are being taken away from them for just speaking facts and just trying to stand in solidarity with people who are being repressed and occupied and killed, and what’s happening to journalists. I mean, the fact that Western powers, European powers are more concerned with criminalizing pro-Palestine journalism and speech, and they are stopping a genocide, really just says it all, doesn’t it?

These institutions, these global bodies that have been in place for the last 70 years to try to prevent the never again to try to stop genocide, at least in the era or the auspices of, and these same institutions have just been made a mockery of by the same states that have created them. I mean, I think we know at this point the rules-based order in these international bodies. It was never designed to really have egalitarianism or to protect all peoples who are oppressed. No, it was to protect and shroud the west with impunity. And when it’s a western ally that’s committing genocide in plain day, well, we see exactly what these institutions are designed to do. And we’ve seen the threats, the ICC sanctions against the members of the court, their families, what’s happening in South Africa from the Trump administration. It is an upside down world where drone bombings are not terrorism because that’s just seen as normal day-to-day operations of the empire, and its junior collaborators and its colonial outposts.

But words and incitement, all of these things are unacceptable. And so that’s what you’re seeing. You’re seeing an extreme policing of our language and intent, intent. Meanwhile, the people who are ruling the world, the global elite, can do whatever they want out of the shadows, plain as day, commit genocide and ethnic cleansing and boast about it and make all of us just scurry like mice trying to catch up. Meanwhile, we can’t say shit. And so it’s a war on the mind. It’s a war on our thoughts. It is beyond even an information war. I mean, it is a war on reality itself,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And those of us who are trying to report on it mean we didn’t even mention it, but there’s on top of everything, there’s the nonprofit killer Bill HR 9 4 9 5 or the stop terror financing and tax penalties on American Hostages Act that already passed the House of Representatives going to pass the Senate at some point. But that’s another thing that I think about daily because I am the co-executive director and editor in chief of a nonprofit journalism outlet. And this bill if passed, would effectively give the Trump administration the ability to unilaterally declare that orgs like ours are terrorist supporting, not because we’re providing material support for Hamas or anything like that, but because our speech, the way we report honestly about the genocide in Palestine is being re-categorized as support for terrorism. And so we could lose our nonprofit status that’s going to kill most nonprofits that get targeted.

It won’t kill all of them, but it’ll be a massive financial hit. But also the leaders of those orgs could be held personally liable. They could be attacked, like this is something that I have to think about and talk to my family about all the time. I mean this plus the firings of tenured professors at universities threats to deport foreign students who are participating in protests, locking up journalists for social media posts. This is a really intense and dark time. And while all of this is happening, Elon Musk and is leading a techno fascist coup in our government, and I want to end there in a second, but by way of getting there, since we’ve got you on, and since you mentioned it, Abby, of course, you, Abby Martin, were famously at the center of this critical free speech battle against Georgia Southern University when the university rescinded the offer to have you deliver a keynote speech because you refuse to sign a BS contract that illegally stipulated speakers were forbidden from openly supporting any boycott of Israel. So I wanted to ask if, just by way of getting us to the final turn, if there are any lessons that you learned even from just the decision to fight that we could really internalize and need to internalize to face what we’re facing today?

Abby Martin:

Yes, I think it’s a multi-pronged battle, and we have to utilize every arm of the fight. I mean, the courts are absolutely one important facet that we need to utilize. I think if there were plaintiffs in every state taking on these BDS laws, then hopefully it will go to the Supreme Court, even though they said that they didn’t want to hear it. Right Now, there are enough mixed verdicts that would bring this to the attention of the Supreme Court, and I think if anyone is trained in constitutional law, well, we don’t know about these Trump appointees, but I mean anyone who knows the Constitution would say it’s very clear these are flagrantly unconstitutional laws, and hopefully we would put an end to it. But I think that they’re just so desperate and they know that it’s going to take, it’s a long slog to challenge all these laws, but we absolutely have to have in every single state.

And that’s just one part of it, max. I mean, the media, obviously, the fact that Elon Musk has taken over our town hall, he is, I mean, on one hand what Trump and Elon Musk are doing is kind of exposing the incestuous relationship with the so-called legacy media and the way that the political establishment operates within it. But on the other hand, it’s very scary because they’re maneuvering it all to consolidate it with the right wings, sphere of influence, and using this kind of populist fake news rhetoric to do that. And that’s very disturbing and damaging because as leftists and people who are trying to do citizen journalism for grassroots organizing and things like that, we are in for a very tough road ahead because we don’t have billionaire funding like they do. But I would say my biggest lesson learned is that we have to take on every part of the battle they have. I mean, they’ve planned for 50 years taking over the institutions, taking over the media and taking over the courts, and we are 10 steps behind and we have to do everything in our power. And that means day in and day out. It’s not pulling the lever every two to four years. It’s being a part of this active struggle to maintain democratic rights, human rights, and try to have some sort of international solidarity with the people living under the boot of our policies.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s keep talking about that in this last 15 minutes that we’ve got here. One of the many folks that I’ve been thinking about a lot since Trump was inaugurated, really wondering what your analysis of all of this is. And so many of us are trying to figure out and articulate what is actually happening. I just interviewed three federal workers, two of whom were illegally fired for the podcast working people. We published it yesterday. Folks should go listen to what they have to say. It’s really important. But even there, we’re talking about battling the narrative that Musk himself and Trump and the whole administration and Fox News and these rejiggered algorithms on social media that are platforming and pushing more right-wing narratives. All of that is saying that this is all done in the name of efficiency that Trump and Musk are out there cutting government waste, attacking the corrupt deep state that’s getting in the way of the will of the American people. But if you talk to federal workers, they’re like, no, that’s not what they’re doing at all. They are slashing the hell out of it. They are just non-surgically destroying government agencies, laying groups of people off and throwing the government into disarray. None of this is done in the name of efficiency, and we shouldn’t even be taking that at face value when the guy who’s telling us that it’s being done in the name of efficiency is giving Ziggy salutes on public stages. So maybe we should stop assuming as the great

Abby Martin:

Adam Johnson said, it’s a stiff, armed, awkward gesture,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Stiff arm, Roman stiff

Abby Martin:

Arm, Roman salute in an awkward gesture.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is nuts, but it’s just like, maybe the point being is, hey, maybe this guy is acting ideologically, maybe he’s acting self interestedly. Why do we keep buying the narrative that he’s acting uninterested in just the name of efficiency? That’s insane. It requires us to ignore the reality in front of our faces. But again, I wanted to bring us back to this point because everything we’ve been talking about now from tanks in the West Bank, the potential of the Gaza ceasefire falling apart, criminalization and crackdown on free speech and protest across the west, all of that is happening while like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and the unelected destroyer of government agencies is literally and figuratively like on a maniacal chainsaw, wielding rampage through the institutional guts of what remains of liberal democracy and the administrative state. And so this all feels so overwhelming, and I think most folks, because they know what you just said is right, that we’re playing so far behind and they have seemingly all the control, the impulse is going to be to close off to protect what’s ours, to hide, to silence ourselves. So I wanted to ask you, with those last few minutes we’ve got, what is your analysis of what’s happening in our government right now and what does this all mean for how do we move forward and keep fighting for what’s right and good, even though it’s getting really perilous and really dangerous out there? Oh

Abby Martin:

My God. I mean, it’s really difficult. And looking at the lessons gleaned from the Iraq war era when I was radicalized and activated to do media work and activism, what was different about that time was the fact that there was a more multi-pronged kind of united front with a lot of libertarians who were disaffected, a lot more like right wingers who hated the Bush administration. There seems to be a cult-like emergence of the sycophant, worshiping of a figure like Donald Trump. And that’s what’s so disturbing about MAGA in general and by proxy, someone like Elon Musk, a South African oligarch as well as the whole PayPal Mafia, all these oligarchs from South Africa coming over here and just seizing government control, which is completely illegal. I mean, that doesn’t even really need to be said, all the unconstitutional nature of what they’re doing, but it’s just so perplexing because of the way that he’s been able to siphon support from people who historically would not necessarily just worship a billionaire.

I mean, back decades ago it was the Republican party was kind of cartoonishly, just so detached from the working class because it was just so clearly just a party for billionaires and tax breaks for the wealthy. But because of the abject failure of the Democrats to form any sort of opposition, I mean, what is their project 2025? There is no goal. There’s no vision. They’re scrambling to figure out how could they even stand in opposition to what’s going on their 10 steps behind, but because of their failure and their ineptitude and the lies and the propaganda and the media manipulation and the war, the war on terror, because they’ve failed so horribly and mirrored Republicans on so much naturally, you’ve seen this kind of faux populism reroute a lot of disaffected people into the Republican party. And for the first time we saw people who were under a hundred thousand dollars or less actually vote en mass for Trump.

This is an unprecedented shift, a tectonic shift in how these parties have really played out. So I would argue the failure of the Democrats have driven people into the hands of Trump, and it doesn’t matter if it’s fake or not, they want someone to blame for their problems. And they look at Trump and they say, yeah, immigrants, trans people, sure, whatever will help solve my basically buffer my reality. They want people to say what is wrong and who’s doing it. That’s why Bernie resonated so much. I mean, he pointed to the oligarchic class, he pointed to the people, the actual robber barons who consolidated all of the wealth during the Covid era, but now we’re in this really bizarre, weirdly entrenched new Trump regime where he’s folded in all of the tech overlords, who, by the way, all the DEI rhetoric and all the people who are like corporations are woke, woke and liberalism have taken over and dominated our culture.

Actually, it was just the notion that women should have rights and gay people should be out because you saw the virtue signaling completely go by the wayside. The second that everyone resigned to the fact that Trump was going to be president again, what happened with Google, don’t be evil. All of these people who were actually protesting the Muslim ban and had really strong rhetoric against Trump back in 2016, they’re completely folded in just seamlessly because it never was about that. It was all virtue signaling. They were always right wing. They always didn’t care that Trump was who he is. I mean, it really is just so obvious. The ruling class never really cared about Trump or his policies or the threat of fascism or the erosion of democracy. They just cared that he was a bull in a China shop. He was just unpredictable. He was uncouth, and all they care about is that peaceful transition of power, and the system just keeps going, and the status quo just keeps churning on.

And that’s why January 6th was such an abomination for them. It wasn’t because of anything else. And so now I think everything’s been exposed. Everything is clear as day. That’s why we don’t see anything. There’s no actual opposition forming. And when you look at the grassroots and all the mobilized efforts, I mean, I think there’s such a fatigue with activism because for the last 15 months, people have been out in the streets opposing biden’s subsidization and oversight of genocide. So now we’re supposed to go and fight tooth and nail against the fascist takeover of the government. It’s like, God damn, for the last 15 months we’ve been out in the streets and no one’s been listening to us about stopping genocide. So I mean, it’s such a dizzying, disorienting time intentionally, the shock and awe of this mass firings of federal workers, the thousands and thousands of federal workers, it’s so clear as day what they’re doing.

They’re just gutting in the interim. They’re trying to do as much damage as they can because they know that the time that the courts basically do their jobs, it’s going to be too late. Trump has stacked enough courts at the end of the day, and Republicans have that. Even if there’s a million challenges legally, the damage is going to be done. You can’t pick up the pieces and just go back to the way things were. And that’s the intent. For all intents and purposes, they’re trying to gut any sort of semblance of institutions that care for people. Cruelty is the point. Poor people, elderly people, disabled people, those are who are going to be the brunt of these services that are being cut. The veterans affairs, I mean, all these people from the crisis hotline, all these veterans who are calling with suicidal ideation, those people are being cut Medicaid.

I mean, the statistic flying around 880 billion, that’s the entirety of Medicaid. So when they’re talking about, oh, these budget cuts are going to cut 880 billion from this one committee, yeah, that’s the entirety of Medicaid. Who is that going to affect 73 million Americans? I mean, the shortsightedness of all of this is just astonishing, but that’s not the point. They know how much damage it’s going to do. They don’t care. They want to gut everything and privatize everything, the post office, the va, every last bastion of government services that work that are good and healthy for a democratic society, and it’s going to do so much damage. I mean, just the environmental damage, the environmental damage. And what’s so funny, all of the discussions, people like to take everything that Trump says at face value. They’re like, oh, well, he says he wants to cut the Pentagon budget in half.

Oh, well, really, because on the other side of his mouth, he’s saying the exact opposite, that he wants to increase the Pentagon budget for this, that and the other. And when you look at what Hegseth is saying about what they’re actually cutting, it’s all the climate change initiatives that they were all the cursory attempts to try to placate environmentalists like, no, no, no. We’re greening this global military empire. So it’s just all, it’s so bad in every way, but I would just urge people to just not feel overwhelmed with the barrage of news, the rapid fire nature of the algorithm. Our brains are not meant to digest news in this way or information in this way. Let Max and I do it. Let us do it. Don’t get overwhelmed by the day to day just paralysis of the shock and awe of what they’re doing because that’s the intent. You cannot get paralyzed. You cannot just detach yourself from this. We have to be plugged in to the capacity that you can. We have to all be plugged into how we can all make a dent in our lives and let Max and I do the dirty work of sorting through the propaganda on the day to day. But it’s going to be a really tough road ahead, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It is, and I appreciate everything that you said, and I just kind of had a final tiny question. I know we got a wrap, but on that last point, because Abby and I, our whole team here at the Real News, everyone you see on screen and also everyone, you don’t who makes everything that we produce possible. We’re going to keep manning our posts. We’re going to keep doing our work. We’re going to keep speaking the truth. But as you have learned from this conversation, there may be a great cost to pay for that. And I think that’s also something that we all need to sit with and think about because people don’t ask to be kind of in the moments in history they find theirselves in, but how we respond to those moments defines who we are as people, as generations and as movements. And so Abby, I didn’t go to journalism school.

I don’t know if you did. I never set out to be a journalist. I never thought I would find myself sitting in this chair as the executive director, co-executive director and editor in chief of a nonprofit journalism outlet. But if I can think back to even my early days, the through line from then to here, I was raised by great people who taught me to stand up for what’s right and speak my truth, especially speak it unwaveringly in the face of those who want to shut me up. And I’m not someone who shuts up easily. That’s probably why I’m here. That’s why Abby’s doing what she does. If you try to shut her up, she’ll file a lawsuit against your ass and win it, right? I mean, but there’s a non-zero chance that being who we are, doing what we do, because we’re going to do it.

We’re going to do it for you. We’re going to do it because it’s right. There’s a non-zero chance we could end up in prison for it or have our outlet shut down, but that just is what it is. And so Abby, with that kind of on the table, I just wanted to ask if you had any kind of parting words to folks out there who depend on our journalism, folks out there who do journalism, any final notes about the real state that we’re in, what we’re facing, but also how we need to be kind of stealing our hearts to keep fighting for what’s right and not allowing ourselves to be silenced, even though they’re going to try really hard to do so?

Abby Martin:

Absolutely. I mean, it’s going to be so hard for just average Americans and workers who are suffering the brunt of these policies. Obviously it’s going to be really hard for them to engage in the struggle because they’re worried about how they’re going to survive day to day. They have no savings and their living paycheck to paycheck, and it’s just going to get worse. I mean, look, I became a journalist out of necessity because I saw the failure of the institutional media and the legacy media and the drive to the Iraq war, and I realized that it didn’t matter if I was standing in a street corner with a sign. I mean, no one’s going to hear what you have to say unless you advocate through a media avenue. I mean, you have to utilize the tools that we have available to speak these truths, to speak powers truth to power, to hold, power to account.

And we’re in a very dystopian era where again, words are considered terrorist incitement, especially when it comes to pro-Palestine advocacy. I run a nonprofit as well. Empire Files is a nonprofit, and it’s this paradox where you have our job revenues and our ability to tell this information potentially being threatened with shut down. Meanwhile, you have charities very active and lucrative, being able to fund people from America to go over and take over a Palestinian family’s home, like literally, nonprofit charities can go fund a genocidal army to kill Palestinians for sport. So that’s the world that we’re living in. It’s a very topsy turvy world set by actually a crime syndicate and a global mafia. And the enforcer is the US military. I am in a place of privilege to the point where I can at least speak these facts. We’re not living under a totalitarian dictatorship yet where our First Amendment is completely gone.

So I will continue to speak out and speak these facts and hold power to account and speak the truth as I see it and not be played or propagandized by the billionaire class. I am happy that at least we can rise above this deep seated propaganda where they’re telling us black is white and saying, no, this multi-billion dollar propaganda apparatus does not work on me. And we’re able to see things clearly, and we’re going to speak those truths clearly no matter where they take us, because Max, I think you and I both know that even though it’s a dangerous road ahead, we’re not going to stop doing our jobs. We’re going to speak truth to power, and we see what’s happening to our colleagues. But you know what? I’m going to keep speaking truth to power because my colleagues are being gunned down, mowed down systematically.

And so until that threat is on my doorstep, you’re not going to be able to shut me up, man. You’re not going to be able to shut me up because my friends are being killed. And I take that very seriously because a threat to justice anywhere means that injustice is still rooted everywhere. So we have to keep fighting because we can’t stop. We’re going to let these criminals win. We’re going to let them destroy the planet and kill off the sake of any viable habitat for our children. We’re going to let that happen. No. Yes, the odds are stacked against us. Yes, the institutions have completely been hijacked by these maniacs, these genocidal maniacs and sociopaths. But that’s not enough to stop us. We have to keep fighting. We have no other choice. And even if we lose, well, we sure as hell tried. We sure as hell tried, and we owe it to every person on this planet that is living under the boot of our policies that doesn’t have the privilege of being an American citizen.

That’s just dealing with the brunt of the effects of sanctions, of war, of bombings, of this economic terrorism. We owe it to them and we owe it to the kids that we’ve brought into this world. We cannot stop, max. We cannot stop. And history has been stacked before. Yes, the crisis is more existential with the environmental calamities that we’re facing, but we’ve been in deep crises before slavery, the civil rights, I mean, not people literally living in abject slavery. We have to continue to fight for the better future that we know is possible. I would not be able to live with myself if I gave up. It’s not an option. It’s not an option.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Wholeheartedly agree sis. And I love you, and I’m in solidarity with you, and I’m as scared as I think I’ll ever be, but I’m not going to stop either. So it’s an honor to be in this struggle with you and to all of you watching again, we will continue to speak truth to power, and we will continue fighting for the truth and speaking that truth to empower you because that is also why we do what we do. Because when working people have the truth, the powerful cannot take that away from us. And it is the truth that we need to know how to act because we are ultimately the ones who are going to decide how this history is written. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years, but I know what will happen if we regular people, people of conscious do nothing.

If we do nothing, I can tell you what’s going to happen. But what happens next is up to us and Abby, the Real News, all of our colleagues who are out there fighting for the truth. We’ll keep doing that as long as we possibly can to empower you to be the change that we need to see in this world because this world is worth fighting for and the future is worth fighting for, and it’s not gone yet. So thank you all for fighting. Thank you for caring. Abby Martin, thank you so much for coming on The Real News yet again, thank you for all the invaluable work that you do. Can you please just tell folks one more time where they can find you, how they can support your work? And then I promise we’ll let you go.

Abby Martin:

Max, thank you so much. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, the love and the family are in the struggle. And for people who may be feeling really isolated out in the middle of nowhere and feel, what can I do? I’m totally just immobilized from all of this. The paralysis from our political state of affairs, I mean, reach out. It is literally the most important thing you could do is reach out to your like-minded people in your area, go on meetup groups, figure out what people are doing to just generate activism with whatever issue because that is where the love and the family and the friendships are is the struggle and getting involved, and that’s going to take you out of this kind of atomization that the system imposes on us. I love Real News Network. I’m so honored to be on Anytime Max, I’m honored to call you a friend in a comrade. People can find my work at Empire Files, the Empire Files tv, and also our new documentary is going to come out this year. I’m really excited about it. Earth’s greatest enemy.com. Thank you so much again.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, thank you sis. And all you watching that is the great Abby Martin, if you are not already, please, please, please go subscribe to her channel. The Empire Files support the work that she’s doing, and please support the work that we’re doing here at The Real News. We cannot keep doing it without you, and we do it for you. So please, before you go subscribe to this channel, become a member of our YouTube community, please donate to The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more conversations like this and more coverage from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. And for all of us here at the Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez signing off. Please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever. Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

In this urgent episode of Working People, we focus on the Trump-Musk administration’s all-out assault on federal workers and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. “At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration,” Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein report in The Guardian, “most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.” In today’s episode, we take you to the front lines of struggle and hear directly from three federal workers about what is happening inside the federal government, why it concerns all of us, and how federal workers and concerned citizens of all stripes are fighting back. Panelists include: Cat Farman, president of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Union, Local 335 of the National Treasury Employees Union; Jasmine McAllister, a rank-and-file CFPB Union member and data scientist who was illegally fired two weeks ago; and Will Munger, a rangeland scientist who works across the intermountain west and who, until this month, served as a postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. 

Additional links/info: 

• CFPB Union website, 
• Federal Unionists Network website, Bluesky page, and Instagram  
• 5Calls.Org website 
• Ed Pilkington & Chris Stein, The Guardian, “US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Elon Musk is making technofascism a reality before our eyes”
• Democracy Now!, “‘Grand Theft Government’: Federal workers send SOS over Musk’s DOGE, mass firings & service cuts”
• Emily Anthes & Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times, “Mass federal firings may imperil crops, cattle and pets”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all. Today we are focusing on the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. We are recording today’s episode on Monday, February 24th, and things just keep getting more hectic, absurd, and terrifying by the minute. As Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein reported this morning in the Guardian quote, at least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections.

In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock on effect on the American economy. Now, this already chaotic situation got even more chaotic this weekend when as Pilkington and Stein continue, Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire turned White House sanctioned cost cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or faced dismissal. The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign authorized by Donald Trump to dramatically downsize the federal government. Musk’s Ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the first federal organs, Musk and his team on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency infiltrated after Trump was sworn in, the message gave all the US governments more than 2 million workers, barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points and in a post on X Musk indicated that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

The order provoked instant chaos across the government with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways, workers in the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department were told to comply with the email. And CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all of its employees to respond to the musk email by its deadline that included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents. Several other agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director Trump Loyalist Cash Patel asked agents to please pause any responses. Now, this is a fast moving crisis with long-term consequences that concern all of us, but we cannot understand this crisis if we are swimming in seas of misinformation and if our mainstream media channels and our social media feeds are just not giving us the information that we need, or they’re actively suppressing our access to the voices of current and former federal workers who are on the front lines of struggle right now and on this show and across the Real News Network, we are doing everything we can to counteract that.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing today to help us navigate this mess and to help us figure out how we can fight back before it’s too late, not as red or blue or non-voters, but as fellow working people, the working class of this country, I’m honored to be joined today on the show by three guests. Kat Farman is president of the CFPB Union, which is local 3 3 5 of the National Treasury Employees Union, and they represent workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal, an agency that was effectively shut down by the Trump Musk administration two weeks ago after having clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks and credit card companies for defrauded customers. We are also joined by Jasmine McAllister, a rank and file CFPB Union member and a data scientist before she was illegally fired two weeks ago, along with around 180 employees at the CFPB.

And last but not least, we are joined by Will Munger. Will is a rangeland scientist who works across the Intermountain West and around the world. Before the Valentine’s Day massacre, he served as postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. Kat Jasmine will thank you all so much for joining us today, and I really, really wish that we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, but I’m so grateful to have you all here with us and in the first 15 minutes here, I want to start with where we are right now as of this recording on Monday, February 24th. By the time this episode comes out later this week, we’ll presumably know more about the fallout from Musk’s absurd mandate to federal workers this weekend and about who complied and who didn’t. I wish it could be taken for granted that people see right through all of this, that they see federal workers like yourselves as human beings and understand the incalculable impact that this techno fascist coup and all these firings are going to have on all of us that they see Musk and his drugged out, neo-Nazi insane clown, CEO posts and nakedly self-serving corrupt behavior, and they see him for what he is and that they see the Trump administration and all this oligarch led destruction and reordering of our government, our economy, and our society to serve their profit and power motives.

But we know that we can’t take that for granted because Musk Trump, Fox News and the entire ripe wing media apparatus, the social media algorithms controlling our feeds, they’re all pushing the narrative that this is righteous vengeance against the anti-American deep state against wokeness and waste, and a lot of people are buying it. So can we start by going around the table, having y’all briefly introduce yourselves and walk listeners through what this has all looked like for you three over the past week or so and what you want people to know about what’s actually happening to our government in real life in real time?

Cat Farman:

Yeah, thank you, max. Thanks for having us and thanks for being a voice for working people and for the working people who are under attack, specifically in public services working for our federal government. And that includes not just federal workers, but people who work at contractors. There are a lot of private contracting businesses that people are losing their jobs there because Musk is attacking those jobs too. There’s a lot of working people under attack right now. So I’ve been working at the CFPB now for 10 years, and when I got this job, I was excited because I had been working in tech before that, going from small company to small company, just trying to get my foot in the door and prove myself and also get compensated for the work that I do. And one of the things that I struggled with working in the private sector was I wasn’t really finding a lot of opportunities where I live in Philadelphia and the opportunities that did exist were very corporate in nature.

It was a lot of building websites and application software for companies like Ben and Jerry’s or Papa John’s, and those are kind of cool, fun projects to do. But it felt like what it was, which is I’m just being exploited to create something for someone else’s profit, and I’m spending a lot of my life and my time building and crafting very detail oriented code bases and designs for someone to just sell pizza, and it didn’t feel very useful. So I was really excited to find that the folks at CFPB were hiring and that it was to do work using my skills and my technology background to actually provide a socially useful service to the public. So I’ve worked on projects like the consumer complaint database website, which is where before two weeks ago, any person in the USA who had an issue with your big bank, your financial service provider, your mortgage lender or servicer, your student loan servicer, if they were not responding to you because they don’t, right?

They have bad customer service experiences on purpose. They want you to give up. Instead, you can come to the CFPB, you used to be able to submit a complaint or call us, do it on our website and we would require a response from the company in two weeks. That is not happening anymore, but that’s the kind of service that I got to work on and use my skills for good. So we were talking about someone like me who grew up in small town in East Texas, and I was lucky to have internet growing up in that small town. And then to get to use those skills and have a career in that, but find the jobs are wanting few and far between, don’t pay as well as we were told tech skills can get and they’re kind of miserable. And then to be able to come into public service and actually give something back with those skills and know that all the time and effort I’m putting, working 40 hour work weeks or longer, it’s actually doing something useful for society.

That was just a huge shift in my career that I was so excited about and coming into working at the bureau, been there for 10 years, and then realizing also a lot of the benefits that I in my head always ascribe to a government job, stability, security, a decent pay, even if it’s not as high as a private sector, but it’s going to be enough benefits like retirement. We have a pension. These things that I associated with government jobs, they come from unions. It was actually our union contract that got us those and unions fought and won those and have protected those. And unions remain under attack for decades. And in the federal work sector, it’s one of the last sectors that’s got higher than average numbers of unionization. I think it’s still only a third of the sector that’s unionized though, right? So it’s like 34% instead of 10% of Americans in general, but it’s still a higher percentage.

So I learned a lot about unions. This is the first union job I had all the things that made my family from Texas really excited that here I was. I moved to the big city far away and then I was able to get a good stable government job. They knew what that meant, all those things that represents to them. They come from unions and union contracts. So having that for the first time too had been just a total shift and getting involved in our union to fight to protect those things under the first Trump administration and then since to expand on them when we’ve had opportunities to, and then now here we are where the entire sector is under attack. It’s been eyeopening and it’s also been quite a joy to realize we rest on all this labor history that brought us here to where we are today, but also to see that we still have much to learn from that past if we’re going to be able to even survive the current moment.

We have this revived labor movement in this country and federal workers have been a part of that. CFPB union is a part of that. And I believe that is one reason we’re under attack right now. And that’s something that I hope listeners understand that we’re being targeted because we’re unions, because we’re labor and that these attacks are on the right wing that are trying to paint us as faceless DC bureaucrats or suits in Washington are lies meant to obscure the reality, which is where are your neighbors, where your family, your friends, where your community members who are working people and our services that we provide serve working people. We provide those services to the public for free funded by the government. And that means Elon Musk can’t make a buck off of it. And so when he comes in to shut down the CPB to steal our data and to fire our workers illegally when we are the ones who would be regulating his payment processing plans for x.com, it’s because he doesn’t want us standing in the way of him making a buck. And he has no need for any public services for people who are just working, people who want public goods to be provided to them so that they can have a little bit of a shot against the big that we regulate or the financial companies, what Elon wants to be.

That is what he’s doing. He’s seeing no value in the public services that federal workers provide, and if he can’t make a buck off it, then he’s going to find a way. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Thanks Max. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I wanted to address the first part of what you were asking. So you had mentioned this language that it’s like anti wokeness and the deep state and waste and all of that. And to be honest, I think that’s a distraction and that’s just excuses that they’re using to do what they really want. When you think about who these people are, they have dedicated their whole lives to accumulating wealth and power. They want to keep doing that. It’s like a machine that can’t be satisfied and they’re bad bosses. They’ll make people work in factories in a natural disaster. You think of tech jobs as being cushy, but then once people start to get more bold and organize and try to start unions at their tech companies like mass layoffs, no, it’s not stable. So yeah, I think that they do really want to attack the idea that you can have a stable, dignified job.

It might not make as much money as you could elsewhere, but it’s stable contributes to public life. That idea is threatening to who they are as bosses and what they are in the labor market. So I think that’s threatening to them as well as just organized labor in general. So their strategy to execute on destroying organized labor, destroying the federal services, destroying the federal workforce and making them the only big bad bosses in town. Their strategy to do that is to cause chaos and confusion. So you’d mentioned some headlines from this weekend and yeah, I think maybe you also mentioned that I was legally fired two weeks ago that firing was illegal. I feel like the news is covering it as layoffs. It’s something that’s allowed to happen as routine. It is possible to have a reduction in force in the federal government, but it needs to be thoughtful.

There’s rules and processes for how this is normally followed. If you want to take that kind of action and do it thoughtfully, which they’re completely ignoring, and in terms of what it looks like on the ground, it does feel chaotic and confusing, especially when it’s kind of hard to sort your attention because I feel like I’ll try to be like, okay, a lot’s happening, but I’m going to focus on what I can do and what’s in front of me and what’s in my control. But then I’ll get texts from like, oh, my parents, they saw a headline and they’re like, oh, did you know Elon Musk is saying people resign if they don’t reply to this email? But Elon Musk is not in our chain of command. That’s something that I think is being covered as just a fact when that’s not anyone’s boss. And you’ve seen a diversity in responses from different agencies. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

In fact, if this were in a bizarro world where Republicans did not have a trifecta control of the government, you would have folks on the other side of the aisle screaming about the illegality of all of this. But essentially what the culmination of that GOP trifecta is, is that no one in Congress is doing anything about the blatantly illegal actions of the unelected richest man in the world taking a meat cleaver to our government agencies.

Jasmine McAllister:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think in the absence of leadership from Congress, I think it’s really on each of us as individuals either as federal workers or just American citizens, to do what’s within each of our individual power. So one thing that our union has been really good about is reminding people their rights and their obligations in terms of legal orders. And so one thing that we’ll say is there’s all these rules about what sort of information can be shared where and who gets access to what. And there’s a lot of details there, but if you’re a federal worker listening to this, just remembering I do what my boss tells me to do, and if I’m getting an order from someone who’s not at my agency or not in my chain of command, I ask my boss, is this an order? And I think it violates x, y, Z rules and they can correct you, but don’t do anything that’s illegal and don’t comply. Don’t be scared into complying just because you’re scared. They’re trying to cause chaos and confusion. It’s working, but we need to remain clear-eyed about what our processes are to make our democracy work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Will I want to bring you in here. We had Kat and Jasmine giving their on the ground accounts of the past couple weeks. I’m wondering what that looked like from your vantage point, not being in DC, but being directly impacted by this same top-down takeover.

Will Munger:

Sure. Well, thanks for having us on Max and Jasmine and Kat, my heart goes out too. And solidarity, this has been a really hard week for everyone. We’re definitely all in this together. I want to paint you a picture of the landscape where I work. I work and live in rural Idaho and Montana. I work with mostly ranchers who are working on public lands as well as the public land managers who are responsible for those public lands, as well as a number of scientists who are doing research and science for the betterment and management of those public lands. And so in my day-to-day job, I talk with ranchers about the issues that are facing them. These are complex issues in the west, there’s multiple jurisdictions, and it’s not just about producing food and fiber for the American people, but also there’s a number of new ask that are being asked of farmers and ranchers to conserve biodiversity, to help mitigate climate change, to deal with rapidly changing rural communities and land fragmentation.

So the challenges facing America’s farmers and ranchers are numerous, and having a federal agricultural research service is so important because we can do public interest research that the private sector isn’t able to do. And so me and my team were actually on our way back from the Society for Range Management meeting where we had been talking with ranchers and public land managers from around the country when we got the call that we were getting fired. And we were actually really shocked and surprised is so many people were. But one thing that I think is unique about my experience is I’m a young scientist. This is my first year in the service. I defended my dissertation in April of last year. And like Kat was talking about, to come from a rural community be able to have a federal job is and be able to serve your community is something that’s really important.

And a lot of young people are really excited to be here because day in day out, we hear from our stakeholders about how important the work that we do is. And when we got the news that we had been fired, it was just a real shock for us because we had been at this conference where we were getting really great feedback while we were hearing from our stakeholders that we were performing at a very high level and actually addressing a lot of the challenges that they’re facing. So it’s pretty dispiriting. But I think the thing I really want to uphold and really call attention to is the impact that these mass terminations have on rural communities out west. A lot of these communities are public lands communities where the people that were fired in this live and work in their livelihoods are interwoven with these lands, these rangers, firefighters, and also locksmiths, mule packers, educators. It’s a real range of people that have been hit by these. And some ranger districts that I’ve heard from have lost 50% of their crews, entire trail crews have been decimated. And over the last week, there’ve been a number of protests in these small towns. This is McCall, Idaho, Flagstaff, Arizona, my hometown of Logan, Utah. Hundreds and thousands of people are coming out in these small towns to say, Hey, these are public servants who serve our interest, who are taking care of our public lands, and we’re going to stand up for them.

Our stakeholders have been really active in making calls to the higher powers it be. And I think this is important because these are no democrats. These are mostly red states. These are mostly conservative agricultural communities, and they feel like projects that they have put a lot of time and effort into are being attacked here. And I think that that’s really important to recognize is that this is a moment where we can really bridge the urban rural divide and listen to each other and really think about what is the point of public science, of public service and what are the goods that brings? And I think this is a real clarifying moment. And the other thing I want to really highlight is the impact to young workers. I coached the range team at Utah State. I’m in contact with a number of young workers around the west, and they are really feeling decimated where these entry level jobs, these probationary positions that were terminated, this is our pathway where young people find their place in the world and can be compensated and rewarded for serving their communities.

And to cut that off is really cruel and not efficient at all. And here’s the real deep irony about calling this governmental efficiency is that so many of these programs are because of years of experience that this works. We responded to the Dust Bowl by creating conservation districts and watershed science so that we don’t have the impact of the Dust Bowl anymore. And our public land servants who are working on the range of issues that our communities are facing are really public servants who deserve to be supported. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we’re raising our voice and making these connections between rural America and what’s happening back east and in our cities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a quick step back and help listeners hear what we’ve been trying to get them to hear since the very first episode of this podcast that your fellow workers doing the unsung work that makes our whole society and economy run are human beings just like you. Can we go back around the table and have each of you just talk a bit more about how you personally got into doing this work, what that day-to-day work entailed before all of this madness with the second Trump administration and how that work contributed directly and indirectly to the public Good. I

Cat Farman:

Came into CFPB 10 years ago now as a web developer and technologist and looking for purpose. And I think that’s really common for people of the millennial generation. And we grew up in a time when we were told, if you go to college and find meaning and passion, there will be jobs and a good life waiting for you on the other side. And then we saw the lie of the 2008 financial crash and the great recession, and that was not the case and that there was no magical great American dream waiting for us after all. And in fact, to the extent that it ever existed, they were doing everything they needed and wanted to do to take away any of the foundations of that. And that includes bailing out corporations and big banks instead of American homeowners who lost their houses in that crisis and lost their jobs.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I feel I got to state, just as a disclaimer, as folks who listen to this show know my family was one of those, the very first interview I ever did on this show was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, talking about what it was like for our family to lose the house that I grew up in. So I feel like I have to say that for if nothing else, to make the disclaimer, but also to make the point that this impacts millions and millions of us.

Cat Farman:

Yes. And so I hear Will speaking about how the fact that these jobs exist that we’re talking about, that will and Jasmine have been unjustly legally fired from now that these careers exist, that these services exist for the public good is because we’ve learned from past disasters, like you said, the Dust Bowl, that’s the Great Depression. And then with the Great Recession, one of the lessons was there needs to be actual oversight in a central agency of government of these Wall Street banks that they don’t crash the economy and screw over the American people on such a scale again. And that includes regulating the mortgage market and auto loan market lenders and financial products. And that’s what CFPB was created to do. So I hear a lot of patterns, a lot of these services. There were a reason that we were created was because there was a moment, a history of greed and disaster resulting from that greed. And so here we are again. Greed is attacking these and creating disastrous economic effects already on American people. So we already know this history, it’s repeating. We’re in this new gilded age where the billionaires are running away with everything again and seeing if they’ll get away with it. So I think it’s important to remember that history and look back and see what’s going to be necessary for us to put a stop to this coup that’s happening and this corporate takeover of public good.

But yeah, so came to work at CFPB, it was in that context of the sort of disillusionment of being a working person realizing I’m going to have to work the rest of how long of my life and seeing the fallout of the economic, the great recession, and that impact on me and my generation friends and family members too. And again, Jasmine and Will talking about too, and then seeing opportunity in finding a public service job that’s got some security behind it, and that is meant to actually provide a social counterbalance, these forces of greed, corruption, corporate malfeasance, fraud by the billionaire and CEO class. So I’m still very proud to be able to do that work and it is motivating in a way that getting up in the morning to sell pizza every day is not and never was in those previous private sector jobs that I had.

One of the other differences I found too is that the small business tyrant experience is real. I worked for the small business tyrants at previous jobs and they have these little fiefdoms and there are not a lot of protections for workers in those kinds of jobs in this country. The difference is vast between working at those kinds of workplaces and going and working in public sector. And something too, and this is something shameful about some of these places I worked in technology, they shut out people of color, women of color, people like me from these industries, and I had never worked with a black coworker until I worked at the CFPB in technology. I never had a technology job where I had a black colleague in Philadelphia. So that kind of shameful discrimination and industry-wide creating hass and have nots who has access to certain kinds of work and salaries that come along with that, right? That’s something that in the public sector there are a lot more rules, regulations, and there’s a lot less segregation because of that. And I think that’s really key too, to keep in mind a part of the reason that we’re under attack right now is this is federal workforce is one of the more diverse and representative of the American people generally in all areas of demographics. And that is something that billionaires don’t want and certainly racist people like Musk and Trump are against too.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jasmine, I want to come to you and ask if you could pick up where we left off and just say more about how you got into working at the CFPB, what that work entailed and how that work contributed to the public good.

Jasmine McAllister:

Yeah, so I was doing pretty similar work at the state level before coming to CFPB. So I was at the New York State Attorney General’s office similar to CFPB. CFPB has a law enforcement function among other functions. So I was doing law enforcement at the state level for all types of laws in New York state. So like labor laws, voting rights access or some of the things I worked on as well as consumer financial protection. So an everyday person when they interact with their auto lender, what sort of rice do they have and how do they make sure they’re not getting cheated? So that was the type of work I was doing beforehand and I spent many years building those skills up. It’s pretty complicated work. I’m a data scientist and when you investigate these companies, it’s not like they’re sitting around saying, yeah, sure, this is how we’re breaking the law.

It’s pretty complicated. The lawyers have to develop their legal theories and then they talk to us and we say, okay, what type of data might exist? If we look at that data, how can we tell what’s really happening? It’s usually millions of rows of data that we have to link together. So yeah, it’s a pretty specialized skillset that I developed elsewhere and it was pretty competitive to get the job. More than a thousand people applied to my posting and my team had four people hired from that thousand. So yeah, so it’s pretty complicated work and it’s pretty hard to find the skills for this. And all four of us, me and my coworkers, we had to take a technical test that was pretty difficult. We all hit the ground running right away, but then I talk about it being an illegal firing. The excuse that they gave is that it’s performance based. So for new hires, it is possible to fire them for performance based issues, but they fired all new hires in one day at 9:00 PM and it’s just not possible that all of us we’re not performing our jobs, and that’s really just a loophole that they’re trying to use to bully people, and it is illegal. What happened,

Cat Farman:

We have supervisors too who had no say in these firings, right? So your supervisor didn’t say your performance was bad. They didn’t even ask your supervisor because that wasn’t one. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Well, and my specific supervisor saw this coming. So my specific supervisor was proactively thought that this administration would do this and was sending emails up his chain of command all the way to the director saying, Hey, I know they’re going to try this tactic. These people I would vouch for. It was very difficult to hire them. His supervisor, supervisor agreed. Everyone who would normally have the power in a decision like this to evaluate performance has said no. The performance was extraordinary for these four people. And I think that’s true for all 180 of us who were fired. We have in writing, I have a proactive supervisor, but other people, there’s supervisors now are saying, I would be a reference. Their supervisors are posting on LinkedIn trying to help people get jobs. It’s clearly not performance based and they’re just trying to bully us.

So anyways, that was a tangent. But yeah, I’ve always been interested in holding power to account. I’ve always been interested in balancing out the power imbalances that exist in the world. And yeah, I’ve been doing that data work for a long time. I started doing it in CF PB six months ago. Some of the cases I’ve worked on since joining have to do with illegal overdraft fees. So one such case, it’s the biggest credit union in the country. They provide services to military families and they were doing this thing with illegal overdraft fees where it would say one balance in your account when you make the payment. So you’re like, okay, I’m at the grocery store, I’m looking at my basket. Can I afford this extra item? Oh, cool, I have $40 in my account. I’m going to make sure I’m under that $40. You pay your grocery bill and then the next day you see that actually the way that the transactions were posted in the order that they came in means that by the time that your $35 grocery bill hits your account, actually it was less than that by that time, and now you get an illegal overdraft fee.

So that’s not supposed to happen. That’s deceptive. And that’s something that CF PB got them to stop doing. And we won money for people who were cheated in this way. There were other things happening at this company too where you’re like, okay, cool, I need to buy something, but my friend owes me money. They send me a Zelle payment and then I buy the thing I need to buy, but actually the Zelle payment won’t be posted until the next business day. And that’s something that they were not forthcoming about disclosing. And these are military families. I think that that’s something that is a pretty sympathetic, I think that this sort of thing happens to people across the country and that’s why CPB exists to protect anyone. But the fact that this was happening to military families is an extra layer of they’ve served their country and now the institution that would protect them from this sort of predatory behaviors being abolished.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I mean it really underlines a point that we’ve been making throughout the conversation here that will brought up even earlier, right? It is like maybe people are cheering this kind of top-down government destruction on for partisan reasons, but it is going to have fully nonpartisan effects for all working people regardless of what state they live in. And will, I wanted to bring you back in here and ask if you could talk a bit more about the communities you serve, the work that you do there and how that work is as much in the public interest as what we’re talking about here with the CFPB, even if it’s not something that folks know about or see if they don’t live in a rural redder district.

Will Munger:

So the constituency that I work with are mostly ranchers who are working on a mix of both private and public lands. And on these public lands are multiple resources that are public. And so for example, there’s a huge demand for restoration of species like grizzly bears and wolves and bighorn sheep, which puts sometimes that into conflict with ranching families. So for example, there’s a disease transmission issue that happens between domestic and wild sheep that causes a pneumonia that can destroy wild sheep populations. And so doing really important genetic research, epidemiological research as well as community-based research to figure out how can we restore bighorn populations and have domestic sheep grazing, what’s the right combination? That’s one example of a lot of these complicated, both agricultural and public lands management issues, and obviously wolves and grizzly bears and the introduction of large carnivores in the Intermountain West is another huge issue that are impacting people.

And I think I also want to recognize that a lot of my stakeholders who I’ve been talking to and I’ve been doing qualitative research, interviewing a lot of people, so have a little bit of a grounds to stand on. They do see that there have been too many regulations. They do see their livelihoods diminished and they do want to see some reform. And so that is really important to acknowledge that that demand is out there as well. However, the group that I was working in was specifically created to address these complex public lines challenges by organizing collaborative science efforts rather than having a top-down loading dock model of science where a scientists say, oh, we have the silver bullet. Here’s what these communities have to do. We’re working with ranchers saying, what are the issues that are important to you and how can we work together to make science that is relevant to your livelihoods, to public lands, conservation issues, and be able to find that sweet spot?

And so our project has been years in the making. It takes a lot of work to build relationships both with livestock producers as well as environmental groups who have had conflict with those public land agencies and ranchers. So it takes a lot of time to build that trust and then it takes a really specialized set of specialized team that has geneticists, fire ecologists, social scientists, collaborative experts and facilitators to make these things happen. So these efforts take years and a lot of public investment to turn a page on these issues. And so when you come in and decimate that, that has a real impact on people.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing letters from different wool grower organizations, different stockman’s organizations, different public lands, employee unions who are saying a very similar thing, which is these public servants are serving our interests, our livelihoods, our public lands, and we want to stand up for them because these projects have direct impact on our livelihood. And I think that’s the really important thing to drive home here, is that this is not a political game in the rural west. These are operators who are working on thin margins. These are wildlife populations that have been endangered and are in a route to recovery, and we need really innovative science to keep those things happening. The other part I think that is really important that goes back to some of the larger political economic changes, is that we’re seeing changes in public land ownership out west.

We’re seeing efforts to take over public land, and we are also seeing billionaires buying up working ranches and turning it into resorts, and it’s third and fourth and fifth and 14th homes. And so that both destroys working ranch livelihoods, but then also destroys that wildlife habitat. And so there’s I think, an opportunity to combine some convergences. Where can we build new political coalitions that can bring forth a vision of what might unite us, what might really help take care of rural communities going into the future? And so both Kat and Jasmine were talking earlier about it’s a little disorienting right now. There’s just so much new, so much feed, and that’s the flood the zone strategy, right? It’s the shock and awe that makes us just forget that we are in a web of relationships that are connected and responsible to each other. And so I think what I really want to emphasize is that our relationships make us strong. And whether that’s a union working in a big city, whether that’s a community group working out in the rural west, we need to uplift that next generation and continue to take care of each other during this hard time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Kat, Jasmine will, there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a little time left. And in that time I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could say a little more about who’s fighting back right now and how, right? Is it unions, your unions, other unions will mentioned earlier that the stakeholders that you work with on a day-to-day basis or writing letters to the federal government urging them to not continue with these cuts, these layoffs, this top-down destruction. Are there elected officials who are leading a fight? Can you tell folks more about who’s fighting back and how? And I also wanted to ask by way of rounding out if you had any parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with about why they need to care about all of this, how they can get involved in that fight, but also who and what we’re fighting against and who or what we’re fighting for here.

Cat Farman:

Well, thank you, max. We’re fighting for ourselves. One of my union comrades today put it perfectly. It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone. This is about a billionaire and his rich buddies seizing power and getting rid of anything they cannot profit off of no matter the collateral damage because it does not personally affect him. What he doesn’t care. So that’s what’s at stake. And we’re not exaggerating when we say that. I think who’s organizing, who’s fighting back, who’s doing what, definitely I’ve seen workers being the first to sound the alarm, and we’ve tried to do that as well at CFUB Union. We know we’re under attack. We’ve been under attack since we were created because we regulate the biggest banks in the world and we give Americans money back when they get ripped off by these banks. We are the agency that sued Wells Fargo and got people money back from Wells Fargo fraud.

So of course we were under attack again under this second Trump administration. And so what’s gratifying is to see workers are still and continue to be fighting back every day and sounding the alarm about the implications for all of us not waiting for us to lose all these services before we sound the alarm and warn people. Now we know that social security, Medicare, Medicaid, these pillars of what’s left of a welfare state in this country that provides some security for people in old age or in ill health, that these are under attack and they’ll be in the next on the chopping block. So we have to fight back. We don’t really have a choice, right? People subsist on government public services because they’re public good. That was democratically created by the people for the people. That’s not to say that everything in government matches that ideal, and we’re always going to have to work hard to reach full democracy in this country and everywhere.

And that battle always seems to come down to the people versus the greedy, wealthy business owners who don’t care about democracy or public good because they can’t make money off of it. So what we’re doing is continuing to be in the streets and in the courts and everywhere where we need to be on the podcast, on the radio shows to sound the alarm, fight back, get people to join our fight. So CPB Union, we’re hosting pickets multiple times a week all over the country. One of the things that people don’t realize about this fight is that federal workers, most of us are outside of dc. It’s 80% of federal workers that work and live outside of the capital of Washington. So I think all of us on this show right now, we work and live outside of DC so we are representative of that and we are doing actions all across the country too.

So CFPB Union, we have workers in 40 states. We have a lot of folks who are the ones that go into banks to make sure that they’re following the law that live in rural communities, small towns, small cities, big cities all across the country if someone in Hawaii. So we have people everywhere. And what we’re doing along with our pickets DC and New York on Thursday is we’re also having events outside of our regional offices. That’s Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco. We are also going to Tesla dealerships where those are to bring the picket and the union and the fight to where Musk makes his money too. And we are going outside of the big banks. So everyone’s got a big bank in your town, no matter how small or there’s a big bank probably near you, you can go outside and info picket and tell people what’s going on.

Just tell people, did you know that this bank is operating lawlessly for the last two weeks because of Musk and this government corporate takeover that’s happening? That means that no one’s watching the big banks to make sure that they’re following the law. So if are you really going to trust your paychecks and your savings and your dollars with a bank that has zero oversight right now? That is what’s happening. The biggest banks in the country are not being supervised. The laws are not being enforced at those banks. We’ve been told to stop working. So for two weeks they’re operating without any oversight or accountability to the American public. So we invite folks to join us and post on social media. When you do that, spread the heat around where it belongs, do town halls and wherever you are, your local congress member needs to feel the heat bully your local Congress person, bully your local Republican. They need to take the heat for this and answer to what’s happening. What are they doing to stop it? Bully your local Democrat too.

Jasmine McAllister:

They all need to stop it.

Yeah, I definitely agree, Kat, you said that it’s not Elon Musk fighting the government. It’s really all of us fighting for ourselves. One thing that someone had mentioned to me this morning that I knew but kind of forgot just how many people are directly impacted by this, there’s us who work in the federal government, but also a lot of local state, local government, state government and nonprofits for land on federal funding as well. So in my role at the union, I’ve been trying to just build as many connections as possible either within the union or since I live in New York with other federal workers who live in New York, or after the conversation this morning, I’m like, I should try to figure out a way to build a relationship with people who are at these other levels of government or nonprofits that also their jobs are also on the line and their work is on the line and the services they provide to people might go away without this.

Yeah, and I think that’s related to what Will had said about our web of relationships making us strong. I think thinking about, okay, whose interests are aligned with mine? Who can be my allies, who can be in my coalition? And at a very broad level, I think that’s the whole 99%. I think they try to distract us with these different social issues and the different buzzwords, but it’s actually the 99% against the 1% or even the 0.01%. It’s a handful of guys versus the rest of us. So I think that, yeah, and this is maybe a tangent, but I feel like after the 2016 election in my more liberal leftist community, there was kind of a lot of chatter of talk to your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. And it’s like, that’s not what relationship building looks like and you’re just going to further push each other away if you have a big fight at Thanksgiving, I think about who you have access to and who you can influence and do that in a way that’s true and respectful to the relationship you have and the love that you hold for each other. I think that’s really important. And yeah, I mean I think there’s some of us who are in unions and can go through that bridge or our jobs are aligned, but there’s also people where it’s just like your family, whether or not they realize it does have interest aligned with you if they have to have a job to pay rent or a mortgage and eat food. So I think also just thinking about your relationships and then one quick plug, five calls.org makes it really easy to call your congress people and other representatives

Cat Farman:

Five calls.org to bully your local congress person.

Will Munger:

Well, I think those are some great steps and the town hall thing I think is really important right now, particularly in rural communities for folks who are impacted out west, showing up at these protests down at the courthouse, talking to your coworkers, talking to the folks at the bar, talking to the folks at your church. I just think we got to have this conversation from the bottom up. I’ve been reading a really great book by Robin Wall Kimer called The Service Ferrets about reciprocity and abundance in the natural world, and she’s a Potawatomi ecologist and really kind of brings a lot of indigenous science and to the table. And one thing that has really struck me in this web of relationships is whether it’s responding to climate change attacks by billionaires, pandemics, bottom up mutual aid where we’re taking care of each other, making sure no one falls through really, I think is that’s the jam in this social movement that’s got to come and whatever the political outcome, the more we can build relations with each other, with people who are different than us, who might speak a different language, who might have a job that’s different than ours.

I just think the powers that be these billionaires, they want us separated, they want us hating on each other and any way that we can find solidarity from the bottom up to reimagine how we get through this period together, but then also continue to thrive together in the face of all the challenges that we’re up against, I think that that’s something that we can be able to practice day in and day out and we’ve got to stick together on this one, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, KA Farman, Jasmine McAllister and Will Munger. I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

As we cross the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia has launched its largest drone attack in Ukraine to date, and Israeli tanks are rolling into the Occupied West Bank for the first time in decades. US President Donald Trump has issued repeated threats to “take over” and “own” Gaza, “buy” Greenland, and “absorb” Canada as the “51st state.” Even the fiction of the US-enforced “rules-based international order” has collapsed, and a new, terrifying world disorder—one that more closely resembles the geopolitical periods preceding World Wars I and II—is emerging. 

This new era is characterized by heightening inter-imperial conflicts between great powers like the US, Russia, and China, and emerging regional powers, the rise of far-right and authoritarian governments around the globe, and the accelerated drive of those governments to annex and take over other countries, deny their populations the right to self-determination, and plunder their resources. But this tectonic shift in 21st-century geopolitics has, in turn, provoked growing struggles for self-determination and national liberation. From Palestine to Puerto Rico, from Ukraine to Xinjiang, how can working-class people in the United States and beyond fight for a different future and an alternative world order founded not on imperial conquest, war, and capitalist domination, but on solidarity without exception among all poor, working-class, and oppressed peoples who yearn to live freely and peacefully? 

This is Solidarity without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network, in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network, hosted by Blanca Missé and Ashley Smith. In the inaugural episode of this series, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez joins Missé and Smith to dissect how the world order has changed in the three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how the simultaneous unfolding of the war in Ukraine and Israel’s US-backed genocidal war on Palestine has revealed both the centrality of anti-occupation struggles for self-determination in the 21st century, and the need for global working-class solidarity with all oppressed peoples waging those struggles.

Pre-Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Blanca Missé, Kayla Rivara, Ashley Smith
Studio Production: David Hebden
Audio Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

Music Credits: 
Venticinque Aprile (“Bella Ciao” Orchestral Cover) by Savfk | https://www.youtube.com/savfkmusic
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcript

[CLIP BEGINS]

Rafael Bernabe:  My support for the Ukrainian people to self-determination doesn’t mean that I necessarily support the policies or even support the government of Zelenskyy. What it means is that it is up to the Ukrainian people to decide what government they have — Not for Putin to decide that or anybody else but the Ukrainian people. That’s what self-determination means. They decide what kind of government they want to have, which is what we are also fighting for in Puerto Rico, which is what we are also fighting for in Palestine and everywhere else.

[CLIP ENDS]

[THEME MUSIC]

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is Solidarity Without Exception, a new podcast series brought to you by The Real News Network in partnership with the Ukraine Solidarity Network. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and I’m sending my love and solidarity to you, to all poor and oppressed people around the world, and to all who yearn and fight to live freely.

Blanca Missé:  And I’m Blanca Missé. I teach at San Francisco State University. I’m with the Ukraine Solidarity Network and the Labor for Palestine National Network, and I also organize with Workers’ Voice. I’m really excited to start this podcast because we see the old world order crumbling, and we need to figure out how to put forward principle politics to defend working people’s rights and struggles in the US and all over the world. And we want to share with you all the discussions we’ve been having with Ukraine activists, Palestine solidarity activists, immigrant rights activists, and labor folks in the US.

Ashley Smith:  I’m Ashley Smith. I’m a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and also a member of the Tempest Collective. I think this podcast is incredibly significant, especially with Donald Trump’s assumption of power in Washington DC, because I think it’s accelerating the development of what we could call a new world disorder; of a stagnant world economy; heightening interimperial conflicts, especially between the US, China, and Russia; and a rise of far-right governments and authoritarian governments all around the world, which is accelerating an annexationist drive to take over countries, deny them the right of self-determination, which is provoking struggles for self-determination and national liberation in response.

So the questions that we want to address in this podcast is how do we oppose all imperialisms from the US to Russia to China, but most importantly in the US, how we oppose US imperialism without extending support to its rival imperialisms? How do we build solidarity with all oppressed peoples and nations fighting for self-determination, from Puerto Rico to Ukraine to Xinjiang? That is, how do we build solidarity without exception, not only with struggles of national liberation, but also struggles of working-class people and oppressed people from below throughout the world.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Reporter 1:  Good evening, and we’re coming on the air at this hour with breaking news. After the US warned all day of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, that it was imminent, Vladimir Putin has just addressed the Russian people moments ago, announcing what Putin called the start of a military special operation, in his words, to demilitarize Ukraine.

Reporter 2:  The Russian president says A military operation is now underway in Eastern Ukraine. Ukraine has declared a state of emergency.

Reporter 3:  The full-scale invasion that intelligence officials had been warning about for weeks is now underway, and there are reports of explosions and attacks at several major Ukrainian cities.

Reporter 4:  Ukraine’s president has been calling on civilians to fight, appealing for help while this assault is unfolding across Ukraine. Global leaders are responding with stronger sanctions.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  February of 2022 was an intense time in the world, and there was a lot going on in the world before Russia invaded Ukraine on the 24th of February. Here at The Real News in January through February of 2022, we were covering stories like the electoral victory of Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Borich and the Canada “trucker convoy”. We were covering this incredible story of Mexican autoworkers at a GM plant in Silao, using the provisions of the renegotiated NAFTA to wage this heroic effort to vote out their old, corrupt union and vote in a new, independent union. And I was interviewing folks involved in that struggle from Mexico.

The Starbucks union wave was really kicking into high gear at that point. I was interviewing workers at stores here in Baltimore and around the United States. And I had just conducted what would become my first of many, many interviews with railroad workers here in the United States — And that was after I learned that a US district court judge had blocked 17,000 railroad workers at BNSF railway from striking on Feb. 1.

So that’s where I was and where we were as a news network leading into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. But when that invasion happened, there was this real chilling sense of history, that something was changing, something irrevocable had been broken, and that things were never going to be what they were on Feb. 23, 2022.

Ashley Smith:  I guess I was shocked but not at all surprised, because, I think, if you go back now three years, it was really clear that the world was changing rapidly. And I did a lot of on-the-ground organizing through all the years Trump was in power. And then we were a year into the Biden administration. And what really struck me is this massive wave of struggle that swept through the United States under Trump, lots of it was co-opted, neutralized, and taken over by the Democratic Party, and the movements collapsed around us.

In particular, Black Lives Matter really went from one of the biggest social uprisings in US history to dissipating before our eyes. The Democratic Party successfully co-opted that big, enormous wave of struggles behind a project that I saw as hardcore imperialist in its very nature, a project to rebuild US capitalism and rally Washington’s allies for a great power confrontation, in particular with China and Russia.

And during that time, I was writing a book about all of this with several co-authors called China and Global Capitalism that was an attempt to explain this developing period in history that we were living through. And we were writing that book right when China and Russia struck their friendship without limits agreement. And that showed from the other side of the interimperial rivalries that another camp was forming in opposition to the US.

So then when Russia invaded Ukraine soon after that friendship pact, I really wasn’t surprised by it at all. And really because the war had been going on since 2014, the actual beginning of the war wasn’t three years ago in 2022, it was back in 2014 when Russia took over the sections of Donbas and the Crimea and had been trying to figure out how to annex the rest of the country.

And Putin was doing this for clear reasons that had to do, in part, with response to NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but more importantly, I think, in response to the democratic uprising within Russia itself, the pro-democracy movement, the attempt to address the class and social inequalities inside Russia itself. And so Putin turned to increasing authoritarianism at home and an explicit imperialist project abroad to reclaim not the Soviet Union’s project, but the great czarist project of the 19th century. It’s not an accident that his big heroes are czars of that period.

And I totally agree, Max, I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine ushered in an epochal shift in world politics that has shaped everything in every corner of our globe all the way through till today. That is a new epic of annexation imperialism which is coming from Russia, from China, from the US, smaller regional powers. And in response to that, it’s triggering a new epic of struggles for national liberation and self-determination, which are going to be at the heart of all international political discussions.

Blanca Missé:  When I tried to rewind to February, 2022, many of us here were, I mean at least I was coming out of a big fight against austerity measures in my university after COVID. The preunfolding of what we’re seeing a little bit with this massive attack to the Department of Education, to public universities, there’s been a long time coming of a restructuring of social services and an attack on free speech, academic freedom.

So I have to say I was shocked and stunned by the February invasion. I agree with Ashley that the war technically had started in 2014. But I’m from Europe, I’m Catalan, and I’m in conversation with my family in Barcelona, friends in France, in Italy, in Portugal, and for all of us Europeans from the old world to see tanks back invading territory and trench building and alarms for bombs and people going into the refuges, it sounded like a real situation, like we’re back to the 20th century wars, which a lot of the US propaganda in Hollywood is telling us that the wars are going to be driven by drones and precision weapons, and there you have all this huge human capital and life being murdered, slaughtered at the front.

That was a huge shock to me, and I started rethinking what is happening. Many of the first explanations were Putin has gone crazy. This guy is out of control. And this explanation of one person just being crazy in power, it does not hold long enough to explain this war. And you see, it’s pretty clear that since Putin arrived to power, he radically transformed the Russian state. He turned the Russian state into an imperial state. He concentrated all of the power, all of the industries, he squashed all of the opposition, and he needed to preserve this area of influence to sell its gas, its oil, to extract resources, to submit all of these areas of Belarus, the Baltic states, Ukraine, with huge debt deals. And any attempts to contest that, like it was in Maidan in Ukraine, or even the beginning of the opposition in Russia, prompted him to invade Ukraine.

When you start understanding more the geopolitical, social, economic history of this part of the world, then the invasion makes total sense. I thought there was a beginning and an after because this war kept going on and on, and many of us thought this is going to just be two, three months and they’re going to negotiate. And we’re in year three of this war. And this was compounded also with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which was restarted last year after the October events.

And so I do agree fully with Ashley that the way I was processing this, first I joined the Ukraine Solidarity Network. It was crucial for many of us active to have conversations with Ukrainians and with Russians who were also educating us and exchanging with us their views about what’s happening in the world. So we were trying to form a collective, internationalist viewpoint so we could process things across countries.

And also I started reading a lot of history, maybe because I’m a nerd, and I realized that our world right now is not anymore this “stable” US hegemonic world. As Ashley was saying, it looks more and more like the pre-World War II world with rising empires competing with each other and trying to steal land and colonies — At the time they were colonies, today they’re not, they’re supposedly independent countries — But they’re trying to annex them to put them under their thumb for control of their resources, of their markets, of their populations.

So I am still processing the war, and the war is getting more and more complicated because it is enmeshed in this world mess. How could you explain that we have North Korean troops fighting today on the Russian front? We need to be able to unpack all of this mess and be able to explain it clearly to working people so we can find a sense of direction, a sense of understanding of our history, and a sense of agency. And I think the goal of our podcast and also doing this reflection is how we can win back agency in this country to stand up for our rights.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, and it is very much the soul of this podcast series. That really is our goal here, is to help you all navigate what has become such an unnavigable, or seemingly unnavigable, terrain, where you have these competing allegiances and things pulling at your heartstrings, when we want to lead with a basic humanitarian principle of defending life, defending people’s right to national sovereignty.

I wanted to take us back down to February of 2022 and what people were seeing and what was making sense and what wasn’t at that time. For most people — And the national polling really bore this out at the time — The question of who the bad guys were here, who the good guys were, and what the evil deeds were seemed pretty apparent on its face: Russia violating the national sovereignty of Ukraine, Russian troops entering Ukrainian territory, opening fire on Ukrainians, and committing the basic war crime of invading another country. And again, on its face, this is what people were seeing, this is what was being reported, and the question of who deserved our solidarity and why was seemingly pretty clear cut.

But as you guys already alluded to, there was an immediate discourse battle unfolding here where a lot of complicating factors were being introduced, whether they be the role of NATO expansionism and the US involvement in the 2014 coup, where you guys pointed out this war really started in 2014. The US had a lot of direct involvement in that. There were facts circulating about the far right neo-Nazis. Putin himself was claiming that this was a campaign of de-Nazification in Ukraine.

And so all of these interceding points start coming into the basic vision of your average person who’s seeing a sovereign country being invaded by its powerful neighbor. And these interceding factors served, at best, to complicate the official US narrative about the war. But at worst, they served to justify what Russia was doing. And I think somewhere in the middle, for many, the point was to essentially justify a lack of solidarity with Ukraine and a basic conviction that this was not our problem.

Ashley Smith:  I think the surface, gut-level response of most people to seeing a country invaded was of solidarity with the victims of such an invasion. And I think it’s very important to affirm that gut instinct of solidarity because that provides a guiding light for people through the points of confusion about the origins of the war, the nature of Ukraine, the politics of Ukraine, and the nature of its struggle for self-determination.

And a few things about that. There is no doubt that NATO expansion set the stage for this, in part. But as I said earlier, the motivations of Putin were laid out numerous times in speeches that he gave over and over and over again that said this war was about proclaiming and reclaiming a Russian empire, and that entailed the eradication of an entire national state and national people: the Ukrainian people.

Now, those Ukrainian people rose up in resistance, legitimately so — Not just the government but the vast majority of the people — All the way back in 2014 and then again in 2022. And one of the things that’s very important to say about the so-called coup in 2014 was that it wasn’t a coup, that this was a national popular uprising of the vast majority of people against a government that was essentially aligning itself with Russia, and therefore threatened the people in Ukraine with an authoritarian regime that they fundamentally rejected.

And when the government attempted to crush the protests in opposition and brutalize the population, it transformed into a national popular uprising that drove the government from power. Which to Russia felt like a threat because what it showed is the agency of people to fight for their rights against an authoritarian regime, which, back in Russia, was ominous for Putin. So Putin had the ambition from the very beginning to set an example for the Russian people that if you rise up against the dictates and program and project of Putin’s regime, it will be crushed in blood.

And the more you read about Ukraine, the more clear it becomes that this is a genuine progressive struggle for national liberation. Now, that doesn’t mean that there are not lots of complexities within Ukraine, but frankly, there’s lots of complexities in every single nation state around the world.

And sometimes when I heard people talk about the right in Ukraine, I was like, oh my God, we live in the United States where we had Donald Trump, so it was a bit rich to hear people pick points about the politics of Ukraine. And the more you read about the actual politics inside the country, the more marginal, actually, the right is in the society. That doesn’t mean it’s not a threat, but it’s the Ukrainian people’s fight to deal with their own right wing, which is our responsibility here in the United States to deal with our own right wing.

And the final thing I’ll say about this is you don’t have to have perfect victims to grant solidarity to people. And I think this is a very important point that Mohammed El-Kurd makes in his new book, Perfect Victims, about the Palestinian people’s struggle for national liberation, because they don’t have to be perfect victims to have solidarity extended to them, nor should Ukrainians. We should be in solidarity with Ukraine’s struggle and Palestine’s struggle for self-determination, with all the complexities of their societies recognized, and understanding that only Ukrainians and Palestinians can deal with those problems, and it shouldn’t mean that we deny them our solidarity.

Blanca Missé:  When you see a country being invaded, you have your gut reaction to say, I side with them. And I think in the United States we have several added complexities. I think we have maybe different guts or different ways of feeling that are compounded because, on the one hand, most of the folks who maybe are indifferent or are questioning whether we should support Ukraine, they don’t deny that what is happening to Ukrainian people is horrible.

The hesitations come from the fact that, in the United States, we have such a long history of our US government leading wars at home and abroad. So then suddenly when they see a bad actor doing a bad thing, but they see the US government taking the side of the victim, they’re saying, maybe there is something fishy here. And that is an understandable conflict.

And then because one logic would be the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and that’s something we’re trying to unpack here. The enemy of your enemy doesn’t have to be your friend. It can also be another enemy that is going to come after you.

And so this very mechanical gut reaction when you have these two competing things, I think — And that was a case for all the racialized populations in the United States, that they were feeling maybe less identified with the plea of the Ukrainian people, not because they’re not human, but because they were suddenly surprised and, actually, angry that their own government, who has been oppressing their communities and their own people at home, suddenly wanted to drop everything and find money that supposedly we don’t have; we don’t have money for schools, we don’t have money for social services, we don’t have money for healthcare, and then send all of this money to Ukrainians. So that didn’t help.

And so this is why it’s so important, and it has been so important for our Ukraine Solidarity Network work to do everything from a standpoint of independence from the US government, independence from the Trump and Biden administrations, because we’re not here about backing any government or state. We’re here about building working-class solidarity from below, direct worker-to-worker, people-to-people connections.

And the other thing I want to add here, when there was this reaction of not a problem, most of the time working people in the US — And this is particularly white people — It’s not their problem what happens in the world, right? It is their problem when it comes to their pockets. But there is a socialization about we around the world, we are the ones who deserve all the wealth, and we can extract the wealth of the rest of the world and make all these cheap products abroad for slavery wages, and plunder the resources of the world so we can have a way of living. [This] makes it that we don’t care about what happens in the rest of the world because in everyday life we have to care about what happens to the working class in the world. We could not sleep for the nightmares that we would have about what our standards of living and our consumption conditions require.

So there is also something, there’s two perverse ways in which the US capitalist system and the US state has socialized us and desensitized us not to care. One is because we are US-centric, born and raised to be US-centric and not care about the rest of the world and not spend money abroad when there are needs at home. And the other thing is that we also have a lot of folks who have been so much damaged, tortured, aggressed, harmed, hurt by the US empire, that their first gut reaction is to be against any cause the US government supports.

And we have to deal with all of this mess, of all of this. And it’s important to call it gut reactions and say how we start unpacking, validating the way people think, of course, but then start showing them the way other people are feeling and thinking, and trying to put these two things together so we can build internationalism and solidarity for below.

It is difficult work, but this is why we’re doing this podcast, because we think this work must be done, and it can be done together if we have productive conversations across the different sectors of our class internationally.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Another condition that your average working person in America is in, living in the heart of empire, being subject to a capitalist dominated society and an imperial war machine installed in our government. People, over ,get really, really tired of getting jerked around and lied to and feeling duped. And the better angels of their nature are being exploited by the people in power to justify doing awful things. And I think that that’s where also you get this malaise that so many of us feel.

One of the, I think, other factors to consider is that, for your average person, the decision about what to think about this was also broken into two choices: Is my duty here to do something to stop this, or is it to have the right position on it? And I think that that’s actually symptomatic of the broad powerlessness that we are raised to feel in this country when we sense that we have so little influence over the power structure that we are finding out has had a hand in NATO expansion, that has had a hand in creating the crisis that we’re watching unfold on our televisions, our impulse is just throw our hands up and say, I don’t want to associate myself with this crap. And in that position, you can gravitate towards the one thing you do have, which is the righteousness of your own perspective.

And so when you’re in that mode, you latch onto these reasons to not care, to not give your heart so willingly to a cause like we did after 9/11, like we did in Vietnam, like we did in Desert Storm. People remember what it felt like to learn how wrong we were in those days gone by, and we don’t want to make that same mistake again.

And so when we hear that there are far-right Nazis in parts of Ukraine, that’s enough of an excuse to write off an entire population. When we hear that, once again, the US has had a strong hand over years and decades in creating the crisis that is unfolding now, we throw up our hands and say it’s the US’s fault. We don’t want to deal with it.

So I think that that reaction from a lot of folks is more symptomatic of our learned powerlessness in a craven, imperialist society that is constantly looking for our emotional validation of its imperial exploits and people refusing to give it, but doing so by writing off an entire population that needs our solidarity.

Ashley Smith:  I think what you’re saying, Max, is really important because there’s a healthy knee-jerk suspicion of the US government that is the legacy of the absolutely criminal history of US imperialism, all the way back to the 19th century, from the Spanish-American war to today, in which they lie, cheat, and steal to make profit through plunder of other countries and military dominance and manipulation of debt and gunboat diplomacy and fake alibis for wars, et cetera. So there’s a good knee-jerk suspicion of the US government, and I think that’s particularly concentrated, rightly so, among progressives.

But then it can lead to the kinds of problems that you’re describing, of not thinking our lives are bound up with people in Ukraine, and that the Ukrainian people don’t deserve our solidarity and support.

And I always come back to Martin Luther King’s famous statement as part of his opposition to the Vietnam War when he said that a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And I think we have to internalize that because I think we need a healthy knee-jerk anti-imperialism towards the US government, but also towards other governments and imperial powers throughout the world.

In this case in particular Russia, because I think Russia set a precedent that is now spreading, that is that you can have an imperialist war to annex and eradicate an entire country that first started in Europe, the first ground war in Europe since World War II. Now you’re seeing that spread with Israel and its using a logic of colonial annexation that’s eerily familiar from what Russia said about Ukraine. Because if you put what Netanyahu says right next to what Putin says about each country they’re annexing and colonizing, they’re eerily similar. And if you look at what Trump is now saying about Gaza, the ethnic cleansing and seizure of Gaza — Not only Gaza but Greenland, Panama, and if God can believe it, Canada as the 51st state.

So there’s a whole logic of a territorial imperialism and annexation that Russia’s war initiated globally, and it’s why our interests as working people and progressives here in the United States are bound up with Ukrainian people’s struggle for self-determination. Because if they lose in their struggle, that sets a precedent for powers to go after other subject peoples and nations all around the world.

And what’s most eerie right now is that Trump is rewarding Russia’s aggression and saying, sure, you can have 20% of Ukraine. That’s fine. We’ll sit down and make a deal over the heads and without the involvement of Ukraine’s government, let alone its people. That is eerie. That’s what Netanyahu and Trump are doing about Palestine. Who knows what’s going to happen between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump about Taiwan. Who knows what’s going to happen in Latin America and Panama and Greenland. We’re entering a very ominous phase, and it began, really, with the invasion of Ukraine. That’s why, whether we like it or not, our lives and destinies are bound up with the struggle of the Ukrainian people.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Exactly. And to even look backwards at the Biden administration’s handling of this, again, I think what you’re describing with Trump still puts your average American in a similar position because we had just clearly stated evidence that, under the Biden administration, that while we may, from our gut impulse, want to support Ukrainians fighting against this imperialist aggression, defending their national sovereignty, their lives, their communities, and that was the official line that we were hearing from Washington, DC, throughout the media. But then you also get these media clips from then Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who, in April 2022, told reporters:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin:  We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So right there you have, in the center of those two statements, you have your average working person trying to square that contradiction: Is this about supporting Ukrainians fight for their lives or is this about putting them in the firing line as cannon fodder so that our enemy Russia weakens itself slaughtering the people that we are in solidarity with? What is your average person supposed to do in that situation? What are they supposed to think?

And so you have those contradictions swirling around in general, but you also have other contradictions that clash, I think, are the deeply held principles of people who might describe themselves as on the left or having more leftist and progressive principles that they try to live by that are in seeming conflict in a situation like this and our clear-cut principal opposition to Nazis anywhere. So yes, of course if there are and where there are Nazis in Russia, Ukraine, anywhere, fuck them. But they are not the entire population, just like the Nazis who are literally marching on the street right now in the United States of America do not represent the entirety of the US population.

But you also had, for instance, within Ukraine, necessary critiques of the Zelenskyy government, of the wartime policies that have squashed labor rights, that have sold off more resources and terrain within Ukraine to other countries and private firms that are looking to take advantage of this situation. And so again, if you are, say, someone more on the left than not and you support unions and workers’ rights, and you are seeing them be violated in Ukraine by its own government, you have this difficult question to untangle. And I actually thought that in this great interview that Bill Fletcher did for us at The Real News in September of 2023 where he spoke with Olesia Briazgunova, the international secretary of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, she actually puts this into great perspective. Let’s play that clip.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Bill Fletcher Jr.:  I’d like you to explain to US workers who might say something like this: The Zelenskyy government is neoliberal, it’s reactionary. Yes, I don’t agree with the Russian aggression, but I don’t agree with the Zelenskyy government. I don’t think we should give any support to anybody. What would you say to someone that raises that?

Olesia Briazgunova:  I want to emphasize that there are two different issues: Issues of war, genocidal war that includes massive killings of people, mass graves, torture, killing of children, deportation of children, people who are activists, human rights and labor activists under the threat of captivity in the occupied territories. So it’s two different issues. Yes, we need the support in this direction of fighting for decent work and labor standards. We need your solidarity. But to fight for workers’ rights, we need to survive. We need to survive and ensure that workers’ right to life is ensured. And then, of course, we will fight for better working conditions and decent work. And maybe in peaceful time, it would be more easy to promote our agenda within the social dialogue.

[CLIP ENDS]

Blanca Missé:  The US government, the Biden administration has been weaponizing the principle solidarity American people felt for Ukraine, to actually use it against Putin, the Russian state, and weakening it. But it is even more perverse than that because all of these aid packages that were presented in Congress, which supposedly is money that we are sending to support Ukraine, if you look at the fine print, a third of each of these packages was just to restock the US military with more advanced weapons, giving huge contracts to the major war corporations. Another third was to boost NATO, to boost the CIA, to boost international surveillance. Only a third of what remained was to send material aid to Ukraine, which mostly what they send are the old weapons that are not really useful so much in combat today. Not the most advanced ones, not the airplanes, the ones they need to discard.

So they have been using the Ukraine war in two ways. One is, as you were saying, Max, to use the lives of Ukrainians as cannon fodder to weaken the Russian economy. They have also weaponized the war to impose sanctions on Russia to make it more difficult for Russia to upgrade its industry, its military production. But they also have been lying to American working-class people, telling them that this is about Ukraine [when] this is about boosting their own war machine.

And we have to be honest, we have to explain what’s happening. That does not mean we do not stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian working class. That does not mean we oppose material aid. But we need to explain the aims of this material aid. We need to explain the strings that come attached while we are on the material military side of the Ukrainians, and we fully agree that they need airplanes, weapons, tanks, anything they need to protect the sovereignty of the territory.

As Denys Bondar said in Episode 1, you cannot fight an invasion with pillows. You need weapons. That’s absolutely true. I think the perversity of the US imperial agenda went a step further, and we’ll talk about it later today when we talk about what happened once we combined what’s happening in Ukraine, what is happening with Palestine. Because the last aid package for Ukraine that was proposed by Biden was proposing the same package with aid for Israel and for the militarization of the border to further criminalize and repress immigrants in the United States. So the cruelty, the cynicism, the twisted mindset of the US empire that is supposedly here to support Ukraine, but is, in fact, using this war and the Ukrainian people and the working-class folks in the US to further its imperial aims, it’s absolutely disgusting and outrageous, and we need to be able to denounce it while we build solidarity for Ukraine.

And one of these things you were saying, Max, about this split between being a commentator of what’s happening versus being actively involved, we see that in a lot of the movements here, and I think it has to do with the fact that working people in the US feel really politically disempowered. I think the biggest manifestation of that is in what is supposed to be the most democratic country in the world, the political life is dominated, since the Civil War, by two huge parties which are controlled by money and by major corporate America, and working people don’t have an outlet. There is not a worker’s party. There’s no independent political parties. You go anywhere in the world, you run for elections, you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10 parties. You have coalition governments. Here in the US, folks have kind of accepted that they have to be ruled by one of the two evils.

And when you have interiorized that there is no good that could come from politics, that you have no political agency, that we cannot be in charge of running our country, but we have to defer to one of the two evils, it is logic that the mentality of the lesser of two evils gets applied to read the rest of the struggles, always speaking the less of the two evils.

And I think that’s important to remind ourselves that when we’re doing all of this work to stand in solidarity without exceptions, the first duty we have in the US is to stand in solidarity with ourselves, with working people in the US, to start challenging this imposed hegemony of the bipartisan system in our country so we can finally begin to articulate, one day, independent working-class politics for working people in the US too, not only for the struggles of the oppressed abroad.

I think these things are connected. Our incapacity, most of the time, in the US to read and understand the complexities and the class struggle dynamics of the wars and the conflicts and the national liberation movements and the democratic movements abroad is linked to our conditions here in the US and our political life in the US, which is really poor, and is made poor by the US state to make sure that we do not have a rich political life of debate or struggle of experience with the system so we can eventually liberate ourselves one day.

Ashley Smith:  We should never underestimate the cynicism of the US government, whichever party is in power. I always think of the great quote from the American socialist John Reed who said, Uncle Sam never gives you something for nothing. He comes with a sack of hay in one hand and a whip in the other, and the price will be paid in blood, sweat, and tears by the oppressed.

I think we should keep that in mind always when we talk about the US government because the quote you read from the general, Austin, explains very clearly what the US is about, which is totally different than what the Ukraine Solidarity Network and movement is about. The US wants to use Ukraine for its own purposes to weaken Russia and to impose its agenda on Ukraine, which is not in the interest of the Ukrainian people. Because one of the things, to add to what Blanca said about the aid packages, they all came with debt attached to them, and the price of neoliberal restructuring and privatization of the Ukrainian people’s government, social services, and economy, and opening it to the plunder of multinationals, including US multinationals, which Donald Trump drew the logical conclusion by saying that he wants to buy half the country’s minerals — Or not even buy it, just get it through plunder.

So I think there’s the cynicism of what the US is up to we need to be clear-eyed about. Because as we oppose Russian imperialism and its annexationist drive in Ukraine, we should have absolutely no illusions of what the US government is about in Ukraine or anywhere on the planet. They don’t respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, whether under Biden or Trump. They’re after their own interests, not the interests of the Ukrainian people. And they have supported Zelenskyy, who is a neoliberal, who wants privatization, restructuring, and has agreed to all these debt deals for his own corporate backers’ interests.

And that’s why our solidarity is always with working people, with oppressed people in Ukraine and everywhere on the earth, because they have a different project than the capitalist governments and corporate rulers and far-right governments that rule over them, and that’s about liberation. And so our project is collective liberation from below with no illusions in any imperial power or in any existing government anywhere on the planet.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that you both really importantly hit upon one of the common causes of our intellectual incapacity to see the world for what it is and see what’s right in front of our eyes. We reduce entire populations to the figureheads in their state houses and the official policies reported in the media, and we lose all ability to see things like class, to see the different power structures in a given society that don’t mean that because Zelenskyy said X every Ukrainian believes it and is undeserving of our solidarity. This top-down enforced hypocrisy has been so viciously on display from the time that Russia invaded Ukraine till now, and even before.

And before we head into the break, I wanted to play this clip from then President Biden, which was from April of 2022, that really makes the point here.

[CLIPS BEGIN]

President Joe Biden:  I called it genocide because it becomes clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian. And the evidence is mounting. It’s different than it was last week, the more evidence is coming out of literally the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine. And we’re going to only learn more and more about the devastation. And we’ll let the lawyers decide internationally whether or not it qualifies, but it sure seems that way to me.

Reporter 5:  Good evening, and thank you for joining us. At dawn local time, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented and large-scale surprise attack targeting dozens of locations in Israel. Right now, Israeli authorities say at least 200 people in Israel have been killed. The Gaza Health Ministry says 232 Palestinians are dead.

Reporter 6:  The death toll across Israel and Gaza has topped 1,300 as the bloody conflict stretches into its third day. Israel today announced a total blockade on Gaza, including food, water, electricity, and fuel. Over 800 people have been killed in Israel, over 500 in Gaza. Thousands more have been injured on both sides of the separation barrier. Hamas says it’s taken over a hundred hostages, including civilians and Israeli army officers. The Israeli prime minister has told Gazans to leave, though it’s unclear where they’d be able to go, vowing to all but decimate the besieged territory.

[CLIPS END]

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now, we’ve already mentioned earlier in this discussion Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, particularly on the besieged open-air prison of Gaza, which really rose to new heights after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel. We are going to discuss that in more depth in the second part of this episode, and it’s going to be baked into everything that we’re discussing over the course of this series, which itself will end on the anniversary of Oct. 7 with an episode concluding this series focused on Gaza-Palestine.

Right now, in this episode and in this series, we’re trying to walk ourselves and our listeners from the Russian invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, all the way up to present day. And in that vein, I think in the period between Feb. 24, 2022, and before Oct. 7, 2023, we were already seeing, and many were calling out, the apparent double standards and the political and humanitarian inconsistencies that would really come to a head when both of these wars were playing out simultaneously in front of the global public.

And from the jump, these double standards were blisteringly, almost shockingly apparent in the way that many mainstream news outlets were covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of course, there was the infamous example when Charlie D’Agata of CBS News really said the quiet part out loud in the early days of the invasion:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Charlie D’Agata:  But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — City where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  And that was by no means an exception. This was a pervasive, racist double standard that was so taken for granted that the people expressing it apparently felt no reserve or shame in just saying these “quiet parts” out loud. Like Daniel Hannan, as well, of The Telegraph, who wrote at the time, “They — ” Meaning Ukrainians — “seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. […] War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”

Now, of course, these double standards were being called out immediately. And in fact, the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association released a blistering response to this pervasive coverage that we were seeing at the time. And that statement reads, in part, “AMEJA condemns and categorically rejects orientalist and racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilized’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict. This type of commentary reflects the pervasive mentality in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world such as the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It dehumanizes and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected. 

“Newsrooms must not make comparisons that weigh the significance or imply justification of one conflict over another — Civilian casualties and displacement in other countries are equally as abhorrent as they are in Ukraine.”

This double standard was pervasive not just in mainstream media, but it was even leaking into social media and the discourse that we were having at the time of the Russian invasion before the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s genocidal, scorched earth response.

You even had viral videos of a young Palestinian, of the famous Ahed Tamimi, who was arrested at age 16 in an altercation with an IDF soldier. That took place in 2017, she was actually in prison for eight months in Israel after that. But you saw a viral video, which was viewed more than 12 million times on TikTok alone, of Tamimi confronting this IDF soldier, but people were showing it as a Ukrainian girl standing up to Russian troops. And that also highlighted not just the racist double standard in the mainstream media, but the media illiteracy of users of social media who couldn’t even understand the double standard that they were embodying in holding up a Palestinian woman as an example of a Ukrainian standing up to Russians.

But it wasn’t just the media, of course. The racist double standards that were really coming to the fore after Russia’s invasion and before Oct. 7 were also made grimly apparent in the treatment of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian refugees who were fleeing the war.

Just to give you a few examples, in March of 2022, we republished this piece by Adam Bychawski, which was titled “’19th-century Racism’ at Ukrainian Border” and reads, and I quote, “Indian students in Ukraine who spent days stranded at the Polish border have told of ‘19th-century racism’ as they watched Ukrainians’ pets allowed to cross before they were. ‘It all comes back to black and white’ said medical student Muhammad, speaking from a hostel in Lviv on Tuesday. ‘They are Europeans and we are just Indians.’ Muhammad, originally from New Delhi, said he and hundreds of other foreign students had been denied access to the Polish border and forced to return to the city, 40 miles away, a few days earlier.”

There was also this example from another piece that we published at The Real News in March of 2022 by the great Molly Shah who wrote about Yemeni students who were fleeing Ukraine. And she writes, “The journey out of Ukraine for both Ahmed and [Mohammed Talat] Al-Bukari was incredibly difficult. They faced racist discrimination at many points during the journey, something that Jarhum — ” Who works with the group Yemenis and Ukraine — “says is a common thread running through most of the stories from Yemenis she worked with. ‘The discrimination on the border was… crazy,’ she said. ‘They prioritized women and children and Ukrainians over all other nationalities.’

“After a 26-hour bus ride from Kharkiv to Lviv, followed by a six-hour bus ride to the border, Ahmed was shocked when he was told he would not be allowed to cross. ‘They asked us if there were Ukrainians in the bus and there were no Ukrainians, [so] they forced us back seven kilometers to the gas station where non-Ukrainians congregate,’ he said, describing the Kafka-esque series of steps he went through before finally being permitted to cross the Polish border. ‘We waited in line for 18 hours, no sleep and no bathroom.'”

And of course, it wasn’t just people trying to enter Poland and nearby countries to Ukraine. NPR reported from here in the States in July of 2022 “Thousands of Afghans that were promised US visas remain on the run from the Taliban. The Biden administration, however, quickly cleared red tape for Ukrainians after Russia invaded Ukraine.” Highlighting again the horrific, racist, and hypocritical actions of our government to selectively sympathize with white Ukrainian refugees while leaving the Afghans that the US had already promised visas to, leaving them out in the cold while seizing on the political opportunity to welcome Ukrainians, thus again pitting people’s natural solidarity for one over the other.

Blanca Missé:  I want to say something about this double standard because double standard in the media, it’s a nice way to put it. I want to go back to what I mentioned about the second aid package for Ukraine that was conditioning aid to Ukraine to aid to Israel and aid to the border. Because, in fact, it’s not just a double standard like, oh, we give money to these, but we don’t give money to them. It is even more perverse and cruel. It is if you want to save the Ukrainian people, you need to sacrifice Palestinian lives and immigrant lives. It’s the lives of those ones in exchange for the lives of these ones. And that is, in a nutshell, the core of imperialism, the core of the politics of any imperial state that is not only putting populations in competition but is asking those who are in need, if you want my help, it needs to come at the expense and sacrifice of these other parts of the population.

And so it’s not only the divide and conquer, it’s as if we need to become each other’s the transactional tool to legitimize the genocide of another people to prevent the genocide of one people. This is also the logic of austerity. This is a zero-sum game. There is not [enough] for everybody.

And what we’re trying to say all over and over is that, yes, we can save everyone. Yes, we need to stop all of the wars. Yes, we need to stop all of the genocides. But the system makes it impossible for us to do that because to stop all of the wars, all of the genocides, and have resources for everybody, will require that we working people take control of the system so we can dismantle it, so we can be in the driving seat.

And so in order to even prevent this question from being raised, the framing is a framing of double standard, but even worse, one in exchange of the other. It’s either this, either that. And I think that’s exactly the logic that we are trying to fight back against so we can put forward a true logic of solidarity without exceptions.

Ashley Smith:  I just wanted to add to what Blanca was saying about the hypocrisy of the United States and Joe Biden, the idea that, at the same time he’s posturing as in favor of a rules-based order that he’s defending, in the case of Ukraine, he’s enforcing, collaborating in a joint genocidal war against Palestine. And what I think that blows up is the idea that we have anything that could be called a rules-based international order. If you really think about it, the US rules-based international order had Vietnam, had the countless invasions of independent countries by the United States: Panama, Haiti — Many times in Haiti — The war on terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And what the US has done in Palestine in particular is such an obscenity and has really delegitimized anything that could be called a rules-based international order.

And imperialists and autocrats all around the world are taking advantage of that and display a similar kind of hypocrisy and double standard. So if you think about Russia posturing as against what is being done in Palestine while it does the same thing in Ukraine, all the powers of the world have these systematic examples of hypocrisy.

And I think the worst is around the question of migration. The racism of the border regime cannot be overstated. It’s impossible to overstate. You look at what the US is doing on the US-Mexico border and the selective treatment of Ukrainians versus the treatment of people from all over the world, especially from Global South countries and, in particular, racialized countries. The racist double standards are there for all to see. The European Union does the same thing. If you look at what the European Union does in the Mediterranean, it’s guilty of mass murder of North African refugees fleeing for sanctuary.

One of the things that struck me most powerfully is when I did an interview with Guerline Jozef, who’s a leader of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, and she looked at the double standard that the US applied between Ukrainians and Haitians on the US-Mexico border, and she said very simply, of course Ukrainians should be let in, but so should Haitians. We should be treated with the same standards of respect and dignity of every other human being. And the conclusion of that is the border regime should be smashed. We should have open borders and the free movement of people until we can really challenge what is a fact, is the free movement of capital at the expense of workers of the world.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s beautifully put, Ashley, and beautifully put by Guerline. Again, the response to seeing this racist double standard by which white Ukrainians are welcomed into the country while Haitian migrants, Latino migrants, migrants who are not white Ukrainians are treated horrifically and counted as lesser than human. The response is not to then say Ukrainians should be treated that way too, it’s that we should all be treated to the same universal standard of humanity. That should be the conclusion, but so often we are pushed and prodded and encouraged to feel the opposite.

And I think, honestly, that is the way that the United States and Israel, at the top echelons of their imperial governments, were expecting people to react after the Oct. 7 attacks and Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza that has been going on ever since. They were probably, I think, expecting that Americans especially would feel the same way towards Palestinians and Israelis as we’ve always been taught to feel. But that, of course, is not how things went.

And so I want to ask by way of getting us up to Oct. 7 and up to present day, how you guys feel the unfolding of the war in Ukraine, the unfolding and public display of these racist double standards, how do you think all of that set the stage for how people were going to perceive what was to happen in Palestine, in Israel in October of 2023?

Blanca Missé:  In the particular case of Palestine and Israel, the US state had been funding the state of Israel since its inception, and socializing among the US population the fact that we are identified with Israeli people, they’re a legitimate people too, in a state, they are a nationality there, and they’re one of us. They’re the only democracy in the Middle East. We keep hearing this and this. There’s coded language: They’re the only white people like us in the Middle East.

So we are already predisposed by all of these layers of ideology, of discourse, of double standards to immediately extend our solidarity with any Israeli victims and deny humanity and solidarity to Palestinian victims and survivors. The very fact that we are already, even before the Oct. 7 attacks and what happened, we have been supporting the war machine, the occupation, the apartheid regime, and the genocide, the ongoing, slow genocide that Israel has conducted on Palestinian people without ever having any qualms or any major public debate in the US.

When the US was supporting the war in Vietnam, there was a big discussion in the US started by the anti-war movement about who the US should privilege and support. But this discussion has never really happened at the mass level in the United States. There has been a Palestinian solidarity movement that has been reinvigorated since the Second Intifada with the radicalization of youth around the creation of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, the tremendous success of the BDS campaigns. So there has been a beginning of an incipient resistance among specifically younger people who have been questioning these double standards.

But we cannot see that the majority of the US population has been seeing this as a double standard. They have rather considered that almost an Israeli is closer even to them than a Ukrainian. And I think that was the framework that was already in place, that people were, again, having these gut reactions to what happened on Oct. 7.

Ashley Smith:  I think that there have been two responses to Israel’s genocidal war. There’s been the establishment response: bipartisan lockstep support for the eradication of the Palestinian people. This is a genocidal war, it’s a joint genocidal war by the US corporate military imperial establishment and Israel’s state, and there has been no debate about it across the political spectrum at the top, or only a handful of people dissenting.

Down below, I think we’ve seen a sea change within the US population towards Palestine, and I think it’s the expression of 15 years of radicalization that people have undergone at the base of society in opposition to all the problems: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, The [Red State Revolt], solidarity with Standing Rock, another wave of Black Lives Matter, and all the Palestine solidarity that kept flashing up through that period from the Second Intifada on and the BDS movement, all of this converged.

And, I think, in particular, Black Lives Matter and the growing consciousness among a new layer of Black radicals about the Black Palestine solidarity that has gotten organized, intellectual expression, people like Angela Davis writing books, drawing attention to it.

So there were the preconditions among a new generation that has been born of the radicalization since the great financial crisis of 2008. That was the preconditions for the explosion of solidarity with Palestine.

The other thing is the deep cynicism about the US government and what it does in the world born of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The deep suspicion among working-class people too, because the number of people that came back maimed, wounded, permanently impacted, and their families permanently impacted by the tens of thousands of soldiers deployed to that war meant there was a bedrock of suspicion.

And so people could see the hypocrisy. Not in the majority, as Blanca rightly says, but a surprising, much larger minority including of Democratic Party voters under a Democratic Party administration that was for a ceasefire. So I think there were preconditions that were built up from below that challenged the establishment’s commitment to this genocidal war, and it gives you tremendous hope.

The thing that’s striking is that there was very little crossover in terms of mass popular consciousness of sympathy with Palestine and sympathy with Ukraine because people saw the manipulation that the US was doing in the case of Ukraine and were suspicious of it in the case of Palestine. They saw the manipulation and fundamentally opposed it. And I think what we’re trying to do in this podcast is get people to see across that division and see the common bounds of solidarity between all oppressed, occupied, and terrorized populations, from Ukraine to Palestine.

So really I think the Palestine radicalization is one of the things that has torn the cover off of US imperialism and torn the cover off of the so-called democracy in the United States. Look at what has happened to Palestine solidarity activists on campuses, in cities, and communities across the country. We are being criminalized because of the threat this movement poses to the US government’s sponsorship of the genocide and its use of Israel as its local cop to police the Middle East to make sure that the US controls the spigot of the world’s largest reserves of oil in the world.

So I see the Palestine solidarity movement as one of the tremendous hopes for anti-imperialism in the world, but not without challenges politically that we need to overcome, in particular on overcoming any selective solidarity within the movement, and instead winning a method of solidarity without exception.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk about that a little more by way of bringing us around the final turn here, and talk about how the need for this podcast series itself really came roaring out of the contradictions that we were feeling, seeing, hearing, experiencing in the moment that we’ve been in over the past two years, when Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and Russia’s imperialist invasion and war on Ukraine have been occurring simultaneously on the same timeline in the world that we inhabit. Because this is, again, made complicated for your average person who may be seeing and hearing on the news quotes like this from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Copenhagen on Oct. 9 of 2023:

[CLIP BEGINS]

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy:  These days, our attention is focused on the Middle East. No one can ever forget what the terrorists did in Israel, thousands of missiles against peaceful cities, shooting people in cars on the roads, men, women, children. No one was spared, streets covered in blood. Israelis themselves, Israeli journalists who were here in Ukraine, who were in Bucha, now seeing that they saw the same evil where Russia came. The same evil. And the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine. The intentions declared are different, but the essence is the same. You see it, you see the same blood on the streets, you see the same civilian cars shot up. You see the same bodies of people who have been tortured.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  Now, of course, there’s a political reality here where Ukraine is dependent on US support to maintain its war effort to stop the Russian invasion. And so by default, if not by ideology, the Ukrainian government is going to have to jump on whatever side it thinks that the United States is going to be on in this Israel-Palestine “conflict” so that it doesn’t mess up its one lifeline to keep fighting its fight against the Russians. And so we want to name, there are multiple reasons why Zelenskyy would make this claim.

But for your average person who’s hearing that claim, again, it forces your soul into this sort of your car stalling out and you don’t know where to go because you have the president of Ukraine effectively trying to square this circle and compare the plight of Ukrainians fighting against the Russian invasion with the plight of Israelis who are, in Zelenskyy’s own terms, the ones who are being victimized by this terrorist invasion coming from Gaza, coming from Palestine.

And perhaps in years past that may have been an easier sell, but it wasn’t this time. That was not a line that, in fact, like you guys were saying, a lot of regular people were not buying this comparison.

Ashley Smith:  I think the shortest thing to say about Zelenskyy’s statement is he has it precisely upside down and backwards because the analogy is between Ukraine and Palestine, not between Ukraine and Israel. The analogy on the other side is Russia and Israel. Those are the annexation aggressors in this circumstance. Russia on its own invading and annexing and occupying Ukraine, and in the case of Palestine, the US and Israel invading in a genocidal war against the Palestinian people. So the analogy and the solidarity is the exact opposite of what Zelenskyy said.

It’s important for us in the Ukraine Solidarity Movement to say that because Zelenskyy did a disservice to international anti-imperialism by making it that upside down and backward analogy. If he had said the right thing, then there would’ve been more sympathy with Ukraine’s plight from the insurgent movement from below. And that points to the importance that our solidarity is not with Zelenskyy’s government, but with the people in Ukraine.

And that said, I think there are a couple of things that we have to do to explain where Zelenskyy’s position comes from. First of all, he’s Jewish, and that’s important for all this stuff about Ukraine being a Nazi country. It’s got an elected Jewish leader of the government, so there’s a predisposition to identify with Israel and Zionism. There’s also the fact of a large migrant population, settler community of Ukrainians in Israel, one of a large population there.

That said, Ukraine traditionally has respected the sovereignty in the UN of Palestine and has advocated, whatever you think of it, a two-state solution for Palestine. That’s been the official position of Ukraine — Which I disagree with. I think we should have a secular democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all and the right of Palestinians to return.

I think the most important thing, though, is what the Ukrainian left did in response to this, which was to issue a statement of solidarity and opposition to the genocidal war conducted by Israel. And Commons Journal produced that, distributed, large numbers of Ukrainian intellectuals, trade unionists, and activists, and leftists signed onto that, and they did webinars to try and articulate a different position that gets the bonds of solidarity correct between Ukrainians and Palestinians against the aggressors that they face.

But that just shows that politics is not simple. You’ve got to work at it, and you’ve got to orient people and win arguments. And there’s a live debate in Ukraine about all this that has gotten better over time as the war in Gaza has exposed itself to the Ukrainian population. More people in Ukraine are more sympathetic with Palestine than at the start of the war when Zelenskyy made this upside down and backward statement.

Blanca Missé:  Actually in the US, our Ukraine Solidarity Network put out a statement in solidarity with Palestine. And actually, we didn’t put only one statement, I think we [put out] three or four statements. And the importance of that is that as we saw the use of this country rising against the genocide, taking tremendous risks in the campuses, including on my campus, the only condition for us to link up the struggles is to assert from the beginning solidarity with without exceptions.

And the first question the Palestinian movement is going to ask is, OK, I will support your fight against Russian invasion, but will you support my fight for Palestinian liberation? Will you support our demand to end all USAID to Israel now? If you want aid for Ukraine, will you support the demand to end all USAID to Israel now? Because in the same way your people are dying under the bombs of Putin, our people are dying under the bombs of Netanyahu. But the crime is that the bombs of Netanyahu, they’re paid for by the United States, they’re fabricated, they’re built in the United States, many in the state of California where I work and live.

So to be able to, as Ashley says, in many ways, move away from these very top-down, simplistic, opportunistic narratives, to rebuild a more complex, but in the end, also connecting what we were saying with a universal and simple feeling of solidarity. There is a lot of unpacking to do, but most of the unpacking we need to do is to destroy and undo the compartmentalization of struggles that has been put in our heads and reconnect with some fundamental feeling and sense of solidarity, of compassion, of being together and say, I see you struggle. You see my struggle. We might not speak the same language, we might not have the same appearance, but we do understand that we’re going through each other.

What Zelenskyy said and did, it’s tremendously opportunistic, but he’s not the first leader to do that. It might seem as a shock to us, but during the Japanese invasion of China during World War II, there were also opportunistic sectors of the petty bourgeois elite, the Black elite here who were rooting for Japan because they wanted to be against the US. But rooting for Japan meant sacrificing the national liberation movement of the Chinese, and we had a huge Chinese immigration community in the US. So that position was also separating the Black movement from the Asian movement.

Or even worse, during World War II, the Egyptian elites were trying to figure out whether they will support the Nazis or they will support the British because they were calculating who might win the war. But those were opportunistic self-interest positions of these national leaders, elites, economic elites who, like our imperialist governments, they don’t believe in solidarity without exceptions. Nobody from below could in their right mind say, fine, let’s side with the Nazis. Fine, let’s side with Putin’s invasion. Fine, let’s side with Israel’s genocide. That will not be a defensible position ever. But these elites are training us to be calculating.

And again, I go back to this thing: can we save our lives at the expense of these others? Is this a trade we’re willing to make? And this calculating mindset is the number one mortal enemy of the struggles of solidarity. And that’s the point we’re trying to make over and over in our movements. And that’s also the main reason behind this podcast. Instead of calculating, let’s start thinking and let’s start feeling what we have in common to fight for a common liberation.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and as you both said, in so many ways, the need for that message, the need for this series and the need for folks to hear the voices they’re going to hear, the discussions they’re going to hear over the course of this podcast series really emerged out of not only the conflict between people’s solidarity with Ukrainians that was not being equally applied to Palestinians after Oct. 7, but also in the other direction within the growing movement of folks who were in solidarity with Gaza, with Palestinians, was not equally applied back to Ukrainians. And so that itself presented a clear case for why we needed to talk about this and figure out why.

But on that note, I think one thing that we’ve mentioned here that maybe we don’t have time to go into in as much depth on this episode, but has clearly been a major factor over the past two years in public opinion shifting on Israel and really shifting towards solidarity with Palestinians. A lot of that we saw happen in real time.

We saw mainstream Western journalists who were all stationed in Israel while all the Palestinian journalists were being slaughtered in Gaza, and journalists were not being let into Gaza. And so you had this Iron Dome attempt to maintain the long hegemonic narrative of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, as the United States’s permanent ally, as Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims in general as less than human, the terrorist aggressors who hate us and hate democracy because of who they are. You saw that line be enforced and reinforced in the ways that the media was covering the Oct. 7 attacks, the lies that were spread all the way from our White House down the Hasbara propaganda that was being unthinkingly regurgitated through Western outlets, through the mouths of Western diplomats and politicians.

But it didn’t hold, it didn’t have the command over the public mind that it would have in years past. And a big part of that was because regular people were seeing the counter evidence on their phones over social media. They were seeing the livestreamed genocide unfolding in Gaza, on TikTok, on Twitter, on Facebook, you name it.

But there really were insurgent realities, insurgent narratives, like breaking apart that US-Israel media-enforced consensus over the past two years. And when people in this country, people I know, people I grew up with, people like myself who, for years, for our entire lives, never questioned that line about Israel, about its rightness, about its right to defend itself, all that stuff. Here in the United States, you had so many members of the population finally be ready to ask about the other side, to learn about the other side in a way that we’ve never been before.

And when we were ready to finally see that other side, to finally admit that perhaps we did not know the whole situation, people had a wealth of literature, of interviews, of coverage of BDS and Palestine solidarity movements to learn from when they were finally ready to take advantage of them. I don’t think that folks had that when it came to Ukraine as readily available to us if and when we started asking similar questions.

But all of that is to say that in the two years since both Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza and Russia’s continued war in Ukraine have been occurring simultaneously, in as much as the openings that have presented the opportunity for people to feel more solidarity with their fellow workers and human beings in Palestine, what does that look like for Ukraine? What does that look like for Haiti? What does that look like for other parts of the world where the story’s not going to be the same?

And in fact, there was, I think, a really important point made by Daria Savrova in a panel, a Haymarket panel on Ukrainians who were in solidarity with Palestinians, asserting that we do not need equivalence for solidarity. We don’t need the situation in Ukraine to be exactly like the one in Palestine to feel that solidarity.

Ashley Smith:  Yeah, I think, Max, you’re entirely right. There doesn’t need to be an equivalent experience of exploited and oppressed people to have the basis of solidarity. I think that point that Daria made is really important because if you look at what Russia has done in Ukraine, it’s horrific, like the mass murder in Bucha, the destruction of an entire city of Mariupol, the bombing of hospitals, the bombing of schools, that’s horrific. It’s not on the scale of what Israel has done in Palestine. And a lot of other wars and other experiences of countries under national oppression and experiencing exploitation aren’t identical, but you don’t need to have the identical experience to identify with people undergoing exploitation and oppression.

And in fact, that’s the hope of humanity, is that those of us down below among the working-class majority, the oppressed majority of the world, we have a basis for solidarity and common struggle and common identification. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this catastrophic moment in global capitalism that we’re living in, in which the scale of the crises and the problems and the wars from Ukraine to Palestine to Congo to Sudan to you name it. We are in an existential moment, and we have to have the hope and the trust in the workers of the world, the majority of the world’s population, that we can forge bonds of solidarity that can challenge all the governments that stand above and enforce this order. In particular, the big powers, the Europeans, the US, China, Russia that stand atop this mess. But that’s the hope of humanity is the bonds of solidarity which don’t require equivalence and identical experience.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and as we’ve already said in this episode, the need for that robust sense of solidarity, that durable sense of solidarity, the ability to know what we’re fighting for in a world that is spinning increasingly out of control is more necessary now than ever because we are living in that existential moment, as you said, Ashley, where it is a new and terrifying era in which the violability of national sovereignty is fully back on the table — And that’s not to say that it was off the table before. The US has been violating countries’ national sovereignty since our settler ancestors came here and genocided the Natives who were here, to say nothing of the wars in Iraq, the wars in Vietnam, the coups in Latin America, all across the world. We’re not negating that.

But we are saying that we are definitively in a new geopolitical era in which even the fiction of the US-enforced international rules-based order has fully collapsed. We are living in a time where Donald Trump can say that he wants to absorb Canada as the 51st state, that he wants to take over Greenland from Denmark, that he wants to turn Gaza into a real estate development, that he wants to retake the Panama Canal. Again, it is not just the United States that is making these kinds of proclamations, it is a world breaking apart under multiple competing imperialisms. This is the reality of what we call living in a multipolar world.

But for that reason, the question of what national sovereignty, what the right to it and the right to defend ourselves and our lands really means in a time like this. I wanted to ask if you guys could say a little more about what listeners who are living through this monstrous moment that we all are living through, what they’re going to get out of this series and why it’s important.

Blanca Missé:  We are in a new world order that is still evolving and reconfiguring itself. It’s not like we know the shape it’s going to have, but we know there’s a huge geopolitical crisis. And I think in the midst of this turmoil, we need to be able to resist against all the regressive politics, the wars, the genocides, our own government, the US government, is going to carry out at home and abroad, and at the same time oppose all the regressive politics, wars, genocides that rival powers like China and Russia are going to carry out. And not only China and Russia — We also have the rise of regional powers that are collaborating with them and also oppressing people abroad.

And so when we talk about solidarity without exceptions, first, we need to have an understanding of what brings us together and how to articulate this solidarity. And more importantly here in the US, we need to also provide avenues for working people in the US to stand in solidarity with other struggles without relying on their government, without siding with their government. Obviously refusing to side with sponsoring wars, genocides, sanctions, tariff wars, but also being suspicious of some supposed aid packages and good aims they might have abroad. And the only way to do that is by developing a mutual understanding from below of what solidarity means.

And this is why we’re going to be bringing guests who are international guests, some of them are US-based, who are knowledgeable about the struggles of liberation, who have been active in the struggles of liberation, and also have been thinking through the complexities of developing solidarity without exceptions. And we’re all going to be learning together how, in the midst of this turmoil, how to collectively rethink from below what international solidarity is with a working-class perspective.

Ashley Smith:  I want to go back to the moment that we’re in, because I think Trump has ushered us into a whole new phase of geopolitics, that he’s declared an American-first imperialism, a kind of unilateral annexationist, frankly, colonial imperialism that we haven’t heard articulated from the White House in a long, long time. And it’s not isolationist, it’s certainly not pacifist. It’s essentially saying might makes right — The US is going to use its hard power all around the world to get its way in an authoritarian fashion at home and a brutal, unilateral imperialist fashion abroad.

Max went through the list that Trump ticked off. He does want to annex Panama, Greenland, make Canada the 51st state, take over Gaza. These are not just idle threats. He’s really trying to implement them as policies. And this kind of authoritarianism is growing in every country all around the world, particularly in the historic great powers and the new powers. We are really headed for a global clusterfuck of interimperialist antagonisms unlike we’ve seen except in the run-up to World War I and World War II. More annexation, more war, more conflict, more militarism, increased military budgets all around the world. That’s going to produce increasing authoritarianism at home against our rights as working-class people and oppressed people like we’re seeing under Donald Trump, and more aggression abroad like we’re seeing under Trump. But not only Trump, all the other powers are doing the same kinds of things.

And what we’re going to be exploring is how we can bind together through a politics of solidarity, the national liberation struggles, the struggles for self-determination of oppressed peoples, and the struggles of working-class people politically throughout the world. So we’ll be exploring all these themes.

In the first round of episodes we’ll be talking about Ukraine, which we’ve been discussing today in detail, but we’ll do it with special guests from Ukraine about Ukraine’s struggle. We’ll also be then following up with Puerto Rico and then with Syria, with people who’ve actually just come back from the Syrian people’s victorious toppling of the Assad regime. But these episodes are going to be a part of many unfolding over the next year that are going to explore the politics of solidarity and solidarity without exception, which I think has to be the bedrock, the first principle of our collective liberation globally.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. Well, I cannot wait to listen to them. And Ashley and Blanca, it is such an honor and a privilege to be producing this series with y’all. For everyone listening, you can find new episodes of Solidarity Without Exception right here on The Real News Network podcast feed. Get it anywhere you get your podcasts. Keep an eye out for those new episodes that Ashley mentioned, which will be coming out every two weeks from now.

And then we’re going to take a little break, and then we’re going to bring you a new batch of episodes. But again, this series is going to be continuing over the course of this year. Please let us know what you think of it. Please share it with everyone that you know, and please support the work that we’re doing here at The Real News Network so we can keep bringing you more important coverage, conversations, and series just like this. Ashley, Blanca, solidarity to you.

[THEME MUSIC]

We kick off the new season of Working People with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with the people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones.” In this episode, TRNN editor-in-chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of guests about the ongoing public health crises in East Palestine, OH, where a Norfolk Southern train derailment in Feb. 2023 changed residents’ lives forever, and in Conyers, GA, where residents continue to deal with the toxic fallout of a chemical fire that broke out in Sept. 2024 at a facility owned by pool chemical company BioLab. Panelists include: Ashley McCollom, a displaced resident of East Palestine; Hannah Loyd, a displaced resident of Conyers; and Kristina Baehr, a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. 

Additional links/info: 

• Ashley’s Facebook page
• Ashley’s GoFundMe page
• Hannah’s Facebook page
• Just Well Law website 
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Everytime we come back, we all get sick’: GA residents affected by September BioLab fire are still going through hell”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, ““Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together”
• Steve Mellon, Pittsburgh Union Progress, “Vance visit on derailment’s second anniversary leaves residents wondering, ‘Who has our backs?’”
• Grace Gibson, The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, “Hawaiʻi’s Red Hill Water Crisis Isn’t Over”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. We’re broadcasting today’s show on 89.3 WPFW out of Washington dc, the home of jazz and justice. For folks across the DMV, my name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes for the month of February and my co-host Mel er will be hosting next month. Today we are kicking off our new season with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, more working people live in sacrifice zones today than we realize and more of us are being set up for sacrifice than we’d care to admit.

And unless we start banding together and doing something to stop it, the best that we can do is sit and hope that our community won’t be the next one to be upended by an explosive train derailment or a toxic chemical fire. The best that we can hope for is that our homes are not the next to be destroyed by evermore frequent wildfires and evermore destructive hurricanes that we and our families won’t be made sick by some massive waste incinerator or petrochemical plant, some industrial hog farm or fracking operation landfill or military base near our homes. You may think it won’t happen to you, but neither did so many of the residents that we’ve spoken to over the past couple of years. This ongoing investigation began two years ago when I started speaking with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio, a small working class town about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, February 3rd, marked the two year anniversary of the day that changed their lives forever when a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in their backyard on a frigid Friday night, followed three days later by the disastrous criminal and unnecessary decision by Norfolk Southern to pressure emergency responders and contractors to empty five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride and set them on fire, releasing a massive black death plume and exposing residents to toxins that have been making them sick ever since, like carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, and even phosgene gas.

And late last year, I began speaking with residents living in and around Conyers, Georgia, who have been living through a hellish situation that is both distinct from and eerily similar to East Palestine. At the end of our last season, I interviewed three local residents who have all been affected by the nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about half an hour outside of Atlanta. And the fire broke out on September 29th, 2024. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs fourth in the last two decades, and residents have described experiencing breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, skin rashes, and other negative health effects after being exposed to the fumes from the fire. Ashley McCollum is the very first resident of East Palestine that I connected with two years ago, and Hannah Lloyd is the first Conyers resident I connected with. Today I am truly honored to have both Ashley and Hannah with us on the show together. And we are also so grateful to be joined by Kristina Baehr. Kristina is a community safety lawyer with Just Well Law. Thank you all so much for joining us, and as always, I wish we were speaking under less horrifying circumstances and we are sending all of our love and solidarity to you and your communities. Ashley, I want to come to you first here. We just crossed the two year anniversary of the derailment. How are you and your family doing what has happened since we last spoke?

Ashley McCollom:

Well, first Max, I’d like to say thank you for having myself and others on here to be able to speak. It’s been a long stressful ride. Nothing has changed that. It feels like the town is basically the same, the reactions, the uncomfortable feeling, the stress you walk in, you can clearly smell something’s not right. So it has been going consistently the same and it feels like we don’t know what safe is and everyone’s confused and running a mile a minute and we’re getting nowhere.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Ashley, you yourself, you had to move, right? I mean since we last spoke, you had to get out of your home, is that right?

Ashley McCollom:

Yeah, but you still have to deal with the burden of what happened your forever home that you don’t want to put that forever problem on someone because we don’t have clear answers of what we can do. But I mean, I continue to pay a tax on something that I don’t want to put on someone else, and I don’t know if I’m okay doing so and haven’t had the right directive from anyone involved in the incident that happened on February 3rd.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. And I want to dig into this more and we will over the next hour. But Hannah, I want to come to you because you are one of the voices that our listeners last heard at the end of last season. And I wanted to just ask if you could tell our listeners about what’s been happening in your life and in Coner since we last spoke a few months ago.

Hannah Loyd:

Well, one thing that has recently happened is the fire chief resigned and we’re not sure why. And they are still running, but they’re not manufacturing is what they’re stating. Since we talked last I up and left my house and I had to move away from everything that I ever had, and I’m better, but I’m not, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. I mean, could you tell people a little bit about what that was like? I can only imagine what you’re going through leaving your home. We talked about the health effects that you were feeling living near Conyers. I mean, have those lifted since you’ve left? I mean, I guess, yeah. What wait are you carrying now that you’ve had to leave your home to escape this tragedy that you did not cause?

Hannah Loyd:

So since we’ve left, yes, we’re better, but every time we go back to get more stuff that we need, we get re-exposed and we get sick again. The last time we went, me and my daughter went up and within a couple of hours she was vomiting. She had a surgery performed when she was six weeks old. She’s not even supposed to vomit. So if she does vomit, that means something serious. So that means that whatever it is is still there and it’s almost like it’s getting worse. So not only was she sick, I was sick. So trying to pack more stuff up and be sick and all that stuff, it’s just hard. And you know what you have to do for your family and your kid, but you also know that there’s just no one holding any accountability still. So you just have to figure out what you have to do somehow get it done and just do it. That’s the only way I had three doctors tell me plus her, so four, to leave the state that that’s all that I could do to get better. And we did because we had no other choice. My daughter was sick and she’s three. So when a three-year-old can’t really express things but say, I’m sad, I’m itchy, I hurt. And then you go somewhere else and she’s happy and she’s laughing and she’s fine. That tells you right there, something’s not right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

God, I’m like,

Hannah Loyd:

That’s the big two changes since I talked to you last.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m just, again, I’m getting really emotional here because as a father, I can’t imagine what’s going through your heart in that situation. And of course you got to do what you got to do to protect your family. But Christina, I want to kind of bring you in here on this because escaping danger is not accountability for the people who have caused residents like Hannah and Ashley to leave their homes. I want to ask first if you could say a little more about the kind of work that you do and about your involvement in the case of East Palestine. What have you been seeing from your side as a community safety lawyer about the situation that folks in East Palestinian are really facing right now?

Kristina Baehr:

Well, I’m a survivor of toxic exposure myself, and so I started a little law firm called Justwell Law to help other families, and now I get called into sick communities all around the country and I help them unite and rise up and take on the bad guys. And I’ve done that now in Hawaii representing the Red Hill victims against the United States Navy. We won that case. We had a trial in May, and now we’re waiting on the judgment so that those people can get paid and move on with their lives. And then while that case was on hold, I got a call from an expert in East Palestine and invited me to come and meet Ashley and some of her comrades in arms. And I heard a familiar story. I heard about doctors not treating people. I heard about the EPA lying to people and telling them that it was safe when it wasn’t.

I heard about tests not being done properly and not testing for the right things, which drives me insane. And I got fired up. And when I went that December night, I had not a single client, but I was willing to represent any one of them, just any one of them. And I started talking to more people and more people. And now I represent 744 of them. And we filed on Monday in an enormous case, first in Ohio, and we’re seeking a jury trial and then separately in DC claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act against the EPA and the CDC because the EPA and the CDC have to stop coming to communities and telling people that it’s safe when it’s not, and looking at sick people and telling them that they’re not sick. There’s a movement of families around the country, including Hannah and Ashley and many, many others who are standing up and saying, no more, we’re not going to do this anymore.

We are not going to allow you to poison our families and we’re going to stand up not just for ourselves and our community, but for the next community. And one of the things that I think is so beautiful is seeing Ashley and Hannah’s relationship, and likewise, my clients in Hawaii knew the clients at Camp Lejeune, knew the families at Camp Lejeune. There is this club that none of us ever wanted to join, but it is a fierce and loyal community and people are ready to take a stand against institutions, and I’m just here to help them. It’s their movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I feel intense solidarity with you on that front as a journalist who’s been connecting with these folks that way, but hearing the same things that you’re hearing, I keep telling people it feels like I’m investigating a serial killer because I keep hearing the same things from communities across the country, whether it be causes of the pollution, the gaslighting about how it’s all in their heads, the sort of ways that communities are split apart between the people who are feeling the effects and the people who are not all that stuff. You can only interview so many people from what feel like disparate, disconnected communities and start hearing them describe the same things before you start putting these connections together. And I guess before we have our first break, I wanted to ask if just on that point, what you would want folks listening to this to know as someone who has spoken with community members in Red Hill, spoken with community members in East Palestine, I guess what’s the sort of big message folks need to understand here about how widespread this is or what the real kind of situation we’re facing is in this country?

Kristina Baehr:

It is very real, and that’s what I want people to know. I looked at my own testimony recently. I testified before a jury about the people who poisoned my family. And when I looked back at what I wanted that jury to know is I wanted them to know that it happened, that it’s real and it can happen to you. And I just had this. And when this happened to me, I had never, for me, it was toxic mold, but I had never heard of Stacky. I never, I have two Ivy League degrees, my husband has three, and neither of us have even heard the words. And there is a reason for that. There is a massive coverup in this country. There are people who are trying to influence, there are people who say that there are acceptable limits of whatever X is, right? And so you just talked about the gaslighting, but this is how it plays out. The federal lawyers at Red Hill stood up in front of a judge and said, judge, there was never enough fuel in the water to make anybody sick. It was always within acceptable limits, and it didn’t even affect half of the waterline. Therefore, anybody who says that they were sick or believes them to be themselves To have been sick were psychosomatic. I mean, These are federal officers [who] called my 7,000 clients who had rashes, vomiting, diarrhea, kids who had welts on them, esophagus that were burned, pets that were throwing up. All of them are psychosomatic, all of them. And of course, that’s what they said about me in my own case. I was just as stressed out mom during C, right? In every case, they say the same thing. It’s all within acceptable limits. And therefore, anyone who says they’re sick really is suffering from a lot of stress. Well, what caused the stress, dude, right? It makes me so angry because I hear that same thing day in and day out, this BS about acceptable limits. And no, I know that Ashley and people in East Palestine are sick because I hear the same symptoms, the brain fog, the short-term memory loss, the intense sweating in the middle of the night night. My clients in Hawaii had migraines, and now the United States is finally issuing the paper that says, oh yeah, according to our own data, there were more migraines amongst Red Hill families and there was more burning of the esophagus. This is true. This is historical fact. And when you come in and you hire experts to say otherwise, you are denying a historical event and it’s deeply unsettling. And the EPA and the CDC in particular have to stop looking at sick people and telling them they’re crazy.

That’s my soapbox, but I will continue to proclaim it from the mountaintops that this is real and it really affects people. And why can’t we show up in East Palestine with people to help? Why do we have to show up at Red Hill and take tests of water and say that it’s all non-detect when we just didn’t test for the right thing? Right? Literally, the Navy and Hawaii stood up and said, there’s no indication the water is not safe. People could smell the fuel. They knew there had been a fuel release right next to the well, but the officers in charge had the audacity to tell the people at town halls that there was no indication the water was not safe. So I get these people at deposition and I say, well, tell me sir, is the smell of gasoline, is that an indication? It’s not safe?

Of course it is. And what I think you’re doing, and I’m doing, and everyone here is doing, is we are bringing common sense to these issues. We are speaking in plain English about what is actually happening and we need to continue to do it. And so you’re doing God’s work by bringing these issues to light, by bringing these stories to light because they’re real. And it can happen to us and we are next, unless the people in charge follow their own safety rules, unless the institutions actually follow their own rules, it will happen again. And so I’m proud of the families that are rising up and saying not on our watch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, I want to come back to you here for a second because as folks know, vice President JD Vance just visited your town this month on the anniversary of the derailment, and as a Senator Vance teamed up with Democrat Sherrod Brown to put forward the Railway Safety Act in response to what Norfolk Southern did to you and your town. Now, that Bill effectively went nowhere, but when Vance was in East Palestine earlier this month, he did vow to the cameras that more action would be taken particularly on holding Norfolk Southern accountable and implementing new rail safety measures. So let’s take a listen

Vice President JD Vance:

And you can be damn sure that over the next six months you’re going to hear a lot from the vice president of the United States and the entire administration. If Norfolk Southern doesn’t keep these promises, we are going to talk about it and we are going to fight for it. And so certainly I think that we can say with confidence, the president shares my view that we need some common sense rail safety. And yes, that is something that we’re going to work on over the next couple of years.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So that’s what Vance said. Ashley, how did that trip go? How did folks in town respond to the vice president being in East Palestine?

Ashley McCollom:

He has been here multiple times before. Any help is good help to the community. I mean, people look at different colors, different sides, it doesn’t matter. Anyone that’s willing to help and hopefully things can go through a lot and they should be because we’re just one example as to why these should have been put in place beforehand. And I hope that he comes back and makes as many visits as he did before to help us and get these things put in place because we were all just people sitting in our town enjoying our normal evening. And because this wasn’t there and things weren’t done correctly, we’re now here in this situation talking to you. And granted, all of us enjoy talking to you, but it shouldn’t be a situation that it should come to this and we should be going through it because we already see this big disaster. So it would be a good idea for things to be put forward quicker if possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As we’ve talked about ad nauseum on the show with residents of East Palestine, with residents here in South Baltimore who are also being polluted by another rail company that’s CSX transportation, we’ve spoken with them on the show, so I’m not going to go into the whole kind of explanation here, but you guys who listen to the show know that when we say the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine was avoidable, it’s because we’ve heard directly from railroad workers that they are chronically understaffed, overworked. There aren’t enough guys to check the cars to make sure that faulty systems like the one that the train had with its bearings don’t end up with trains on the track that shouldn’t be there. You have people in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. You have safety layers done by union workers across the rail industry who have been getting laid off having more work piled onto fewer people for years, right?

All of these top-down corporate and Wall Street minded decisions to cut costs and boost profits have translated to a railroad system that has over a thousand derailments a year, and workers fleeing the industry on mass because they can’t take this anymore. And they keep warning that more catastrophes like this are going to happen. And so of course we would be hypocrites if we didn’t say we were in favor of more rail safety of more accountability for these companies. And frankly, I don’t give a crap if the person helping residents of East Palestine has a D or an R next to their names, just help. These people need help. That’s all we care about right now. But to this point, it’s not just rail safety that community members need. And Christina, I wanted to ask if you could say a little bit about the other needs that folks in town and around, let’s not forget, it’s not just East Palestinian, Ohio, it’s the Pennsylvania side, it’s folks from miles around. What do folks need that are not going to be addressed by more rail safety and more accountability from Norfolk Southern?

Kristina Baehr:

I think more than anything, they need healthcare. When a disaster like this happens, why can’t we come in and teach doctors how to treat toxic exposure? Why can’t we talk about how to detox the body? Why can’t we talk about some of the signs that you might look out for, things that might happen down the road instead, the EPA comes in and says it’s going to be in and out of your body in 48 hours. I don’t know if you have heard this Max, but I’ve heard that at every site, okay, well, vinyl chloride in and out of your body in 48 hours, jet fuel in and out of your body in 48 hours, where is this 48 hours coming from?

What scientific ground is there for this 48 hours vs. That’s not true and people are sick and let’s help them get better. We know how to treat toxic exposure. We know for example, that there are people who are exposed to these chemicals in their vocations. What are the treatment protocols we’ve developed for those people? What are the blood tests we have had them take? How about just c, b, C count for people? Can we help them get better? And instead, we come into these places and we tell the doctors not to help anybody. So I think that we need some real medical care and from doctors who care, from doctors who care.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it should really be noted that this is explicitly what residents have been asking for demanding. There are coalitions like the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition, folks from in town calling for the President Biden and now President Trump to issue an emergency declaration for East Palestine, which would unlock a suite of federal resources including guaranteed healthcare for all affected residents who are bioaccumulation these toxins in their bodies. They’re feeling the effects of them. I was standing in East Palestine last year, I could smell the damn chemicals. I could taste the metallic stuff in my mouth. Imagine living in that stuff for two years and being told, ah, it’s all washed out of your system. I mean, this is the kind of gaslighting that we’re talking about here, but you can feel the lie just by standing in the middle of the street if you’re there in East Palestine. And Hannah, before we go to another break, I wanted to ask you what if anything has been done to address the causes of the Biolab fire and the impacts that it’s been having on your community?

Hannah Loyd:

I mean, everything is real. Kind of like we can’t talk about it until the lawsuit or whatever because the county turned around and sued by a lab, so they say, oh, we can’t have any updates or anything to say until this is resolved.

Kristina Baehr:

Sorry. No, after Hannah talks, I want to answer that. That is bs.

Hannah Loyd:

So we’re just here every day living in it. In the beginning we had updates and this that, and we all knew it wasn’t right, and then it was like radio silence. And then the new commissioner came in and she was worried about the jobs of the people that were there. And now something’s been put out about the people that work there have the option to either retire with some kind of guaranteed salary forever. Everything’s real hush hush. So to be honest with you, I don’t know because we don’t know because they haven’t said anything. But it’s toxic there. Nothing’s changed. It’s toxic.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, we got to go to a break in a second, but yeah, I know you add something you want to hop in on to follow up on that.

Kristina Baehr:

There is no legal basis to stop communicating and speaking truth to the people who are there. And what happens is the bad guys always do that. They say, well, their investigation’s pending, and therefore everyone has to be silent. And that is, there’s no legal basis for that. And it’s unfair to the communities that litigation is about accountability and truth and transparency. And for the bad guys to come in and say, we’re going to shut it all down just makes it even worse.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to, in this second half gang, talk a bit about the special and important circumstances that have led Hannah and Ashley to you guys have actually connected over social media and it’s really incredible that we have you both on together. Having interviewed you separately in East Palestine and in Conyers, I wanted to ask if Hannah, you could just tell us a bit more about that. How did you and Ashley find each other? What was it like for you to be going through what you’ve been going through in Conyers and then find someone like Ashley, who knows what it’s like to go through that and what have you guys been talking about in that time?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, honestly, once I started learning things about different disaster areas and started hearing about East Palestine, east Palestine, I started watching YouTube videos. I think it was one, it may have been, I don’t remember who did it, but it was, I watched some on here there and I was like, I’m literally going through the same exact thing as her everything. And so I just messaged her and just kind of went from there. And she has been the biggest mentor, helper how to get bring pop out of my kids’ hair. I have literally been so honored to have met her even though I’ve never met her in person because she has helped me through some of the hardest days that I never thought that I was going to have to go through things that she learned in her area with kids and her own kid that she was able to teach me that I had no idea why my kid was screaming. And she told me why. And it was right. And I mean, She’s become family to me, to be honest. And I am just so thankful that I was able to connect with her just through social media from a disaster that literally uprooted all of our lives. And we talk sometimes every day. Sometimes we go weeks without talking. You just never know. And we don’t always talk about disasters. We talk about stuff to do with my kid that I never even thought of how to make something simple for dinner. I mean, we talk about it all, so it’s not always disaster related. But she taught me about chemicals, dioxin, what to ask my doctor to test me for what? To ask my doctor. Things that I never thought I would have to ask anyone or my doctor. And so I’ll say again, it’s literally been an honor her to be my friend.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, what is it like to get a message like that having gone through what you’ve gone, I have to imagine it’s both bittersweet because it’s like it’s happening again, but you can hear how much it means to someone like Hannah. What is it like for you to get a message like that?

Ashley McCollom:

It’s emotional because a lot of what she mentioned, I remember those times and going through that and being confused with everyone else, and I had people reach out to me that became my mentors the same and help me through it. And even like how she said, we can just talk about normal things because it’s nice to know that we went through similar things and have that break away to still be people, still be moms, still take care of a family out of every curve ball. This has thrown both of us from watching an entire plant catch on fire and not knowing is it safe, is what is going on normal. Hey, I went through that. Don’t be ashamed to ask. A lot of people need that need to understand we were there. I mean, the community understands. We understand each other and it is a privilege to meet Hannah and so many people and to be there and have that support because it feels like you have no other support but each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess if there are folks watching this right now who are living near a landfill that they suspect is making their contaminating their water, making them sick, if there are folks listening to this who are saying they are describing what I’m feeling the same way. Hannah, you felt that when you watched Ashley. I guess what would be your message to folks out there right now who maybe believe that it’s nothing or maybe it’s all in their heads? What would you advise them to do?

Hannah Loyd:

Well, I mean, some people it didn’t affect and some people it did, and some people still are unsure. I mean, if you are really unsure Or you’re on the fence, message me. I’ll talk to you. I mean, I have no shame in anything. I lost everything I ever had. I mean, can’t. I’ll be here. I’m here. I’ll talk to you. I may have to call Ashley and ask her. I may not know, but I’ll talk to you. I’m here. I have people in Max, Christina on our other interview, we talk to her. So I mean, we all kind of help each other I guess. So if you’re in doubt, just reach out because even though you may Not be for sure, think it’s in your head, just if you want to know, just ask Ash.

Ashley McCollom:

Don’t ever be ashamed to ask anything, especially in this, don’t ever be ashamed or don’t ever feel like you’re the only one because you’re not. Just remember that you’re not the only one. And it does get hard and it gets lonely and it gets tough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Christina, I want to kind of toss that to you as well. Again, as someone who’s seen this from your side working as a lawyer, but hearing these stories from folks in affected communities as far away as Hawaii to here in Ohio or anywhere else, what would you say to folks who are maybe feeling that or thinking that as they’re hearing us talk right now, what would you advise folks to do if they suspect they are also being contaminated poison, lied to about this stuff,

Kristina Baehr:

Look for The helpers and look for the truth tellers, and they’re always there. And when I was in Hawaii, I showed up in the midst of it. I mean, not November, it happened in November, but I was there the first week of January. And so I was there to help point people to the test that Ashley’s talking about to say, here’s what you need to ask your doctor. I’m showing up in East Palestine a little bit late just because I was invited late and these events kind of happened around the same time, so I was focused on Hawaii. But in each case, there are truth tellers. There is someone who worked for the railroad who tried to get on neighborhood pages and warn people about what they were being exposed to. There are good people and there are people who are telling the truth and find them and then follow them and ask questions and find each other, find the helpers, find the truth tellers, and find each other.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And on that, I think again, this is really important, powerful lessons for folks listening in Washington take to heart. And before we go to our break, Christina, I have one more question that you sort of referred to earlier in our conversation. I think it’s still really hard for a lot of average Americans to confront the reality that their government is not looking out for them. I’ve heard it from affected communities who trusted the EPA when agents were telling ’em, you’re fine. And then they keep accumulating the evidence in their bodies that they’re not fine. So before we go to our final break, do you have any other kind of thoughts you wanted to share on that, about folks who are still trusting of the agency that was set up to protect us against things like this? How do we manage the sort of the truth tellers, the whistleblowers, the folks who are there who want to help residents mixed in with all these other interests that maybe don’t?

Kristina Baehr:

It was hard for me to come to terms with as I was, I used to represent the United States, and I believed I was one of the good guys and I think I was charged with doing the right thing. And so when I had people standing up in federal court, these lawyers saying that it basically didn’t happen. I was personally upset because our country is supposed to represent us. Our country is supposed to do the right thing in those circumstances, our federal officers are supposed to tell the truth. And then I learned, actually, that was a really good for me from a litigation perspective. I’m so glad they took that approach. And I hope that the railroad does the same thing because a jury and a judge, it doesn’t go far with them. But I think you’re going to learn when you’re faced with this to start trusting yourself too.

So I said find the truth tellers, find the helpers, find each other, but also find yourself because you know your mama heart or your dad a heart knows. And so trust yourself over the institutions around you, and then trust the people that you trust. And what we’re finding when I gave the example of it’s like kids are in a school and they’re smelling smoke, and the firemen came and said, stay where you are, you’re fine. That’s how the Navy acted in Hawaii. That’s what’s happening when the EPA shows up to these communities. They’re more interested in getting the economic world back on track than they are in protecting the people. And I think all of us have a lot of distrust after everything that happened with Covid. And we all learned a little bit to trust ourselves over institutions. And that’s not a bad lesson, but I also believe that these institutions can change, and I think that there are good people within them. So when you look for the helpers, you can look for the helpers in the institutions too. They’re there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Ashley, Hannah, Christina, in the final kind of 10 minutes that we have to, I wanted to focus in on where we are as of now, February, 2025. What do you, your families and your communities still need? What are the needs that are not being met? Right? Yeah. We mentioned earlier in the episode that JD Vance went and visited East Palestine on the two year anniversary of the derailment, promising that there will be more developments in terms of the Trump administration’s focus on railway safety, on holding Norfolk Southern accountable. But Vance also explicitly said that a disaster declaration, and I quote may have been very helpful 18 months ago. I don’t know that it’s still helpful today. Let’s talk about what your community still need, who is trying to meet those needs and what people watching and listening can do to help. So Ashley, I want to start with you and then Hannah, we’ll go to you

Ashley McCollom:

For how long we’ve been doing this and it doesn’t get easier. I remember doing the first interview with you and I feel like I’m not as emotional as I was in the beginning because now I’m really getting into that reality and it’s stagnant it, and there’s no help. We need either a disaster declaration or we need to be put on the national priority list because people shouldn’t still be sick. People shouldn’t feel uncomfortable in their home. Home is where you feel safe and comfortable and no one’s feeling safe and comfortable. If you’re questioning, is this from that health insurance, great, we could do that. But when you treat those things and you put those people right back into those places, how much good is that going to do? I mean, some of us are still displaced. I feel like we need help for those people that are struggling. I don’t know how to do that. I mean, there are some great people that are doing food drives for people that are less fortunate and really put everything out there for the people in town. I mean, this is a little bit bigger than what we could even anticipate.

I don’t think it’s safe. If I get sick in my house, if I go into my house, I’m sick. I mean, I’d love to move forward. Our animals get sick. They stayed in there for a day, they’d come back vomiting, they come back with excessive bowel movements, almost like when you change a dog’s dog food or they’re really sick. I mean, these are serious issues. We’re seeing serious things go on and for where we were in the beginning to now, it’s just progressing. I mean, we need some things. Looked at again and looked at more thoroughly and looked into these residents homes because we are a part of the environment. No matter what disaster you’re in, no matter how long time has passed, we are a part of that environment. We make the impact. And these people need to live there. We need to live there. And if you can’t, it’s not an environment anymore for humans.

Hannah, how about you?

Hannah Loyd:

That was pretty powerful. So I mean, like I said, I mean they earlier, they’re just kind of there and they’re not, they briefly address things. They have never ever even said they’re sorry or hold accountability or any of that. So that’s out the window, whatever. I just think that the county, the company, everyone just needs to take accountability for what happened. This isn’t the first time, it’s the fourth time people are there that are deathly sick. I mean, they’re sick and they have no other choice but to stay there unless someone just comes and rescues. I mean, we we’re almost like silence. Now it’s not really a big topic anymore. Nobody’s really talking about it. When I had to meet with a new doctor because I’m having new issues with my liver, which is very, very scary. And he said, oh yeah, I remember when that happened. My eyes were burning and all this. And I said, yeah, imagine being three years old and that happening. No one is understanding or taking accountability. They just want us almost to

Speaker 4:

Be quiet. Quit talking about it. But I mean, honestly, I think

Hannah Loyd:

That the citizens there now that are still there, they don’t know what to do. They don’t know where to go. They don’t know how to even seek legal counsel with getting out because a lot of people are elderly people. They have nothing but their little social security check. And these are people that I grew up knowing and to see them so sick, it’s just heartbreaking and knowing I got up and left my house. So it’s almost like we just need help somewhere for these people that can’t get the help or have the means or anything. I mean, there’s a couple little different groups that are having meetings and going to churches and meetings and all this, but I mean, I don’t think that anyone is really hearing them, if that makes sense. So we just need to be heard. Again, doctors need to be guided in what and how to treat the patients because they’re the ER doctor to know that day how to treat me. And then all these other doctors don’t know what’s going on. Something doesn’t make sense. So the doctors need to know how to do the care. They need to know how to treat people. They need to know what to help people get out. Like me, my kid, get out.

So we just need to and know what’s going on. Don’t tell us that we can’t talk about it because the county’s suing and we can’t tell you why or any kind of progress. Just give us an update. Y’all did that in the beginning. Why can’t we have it now? What happened to where we can’t know anything, if that makes sense.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It does. It makes grim necessary sense, right? I mean, it’s the bare minimum of what people should expect. And we can’t even get,

Hannah Loyd:

I say, like I said at the first show with you, max, even just, I’m sorry, still haven’t even gotten that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, by all appearances, it looks like we’re heading in the exact opposite direction of where we need to go in because when we use the term sacrifice zone, which is a horrible ghoulish term in a just world, that term would not exist. But when we’re saying that, what we mean is what you’ve just heard Ashley and Hannah describe it is an area where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself and have been left to flounder there to either move if they have the ability to or stay, wait and die. And that is unacceptable, and that is how we are treating more and more of our communities, whether they be in the path of toxic industrial pollution or like in intensifying weather events through manmade climate change.

The thing that is consistent is that working class communities, working people just living their lives are having their lives obliterated and having no help when they need it most. And we as a people, as a class, as humanity need to do something to band together and say, enough is enough. In the final minute or two that I have you guys, I wanted to just go around the table and ask if you had any final messages on that front to people listening to this and watching this, whether they live in a sacrifice zone or not. What do you want folks to take away from this conversation? How can we fight back and what’s going to happen if we don’t? So I guess, Ashley, let’s start with you, Hannah, and then Christina, please close us out.

Ashley McCollom:

It doesn’t hurt people that are sitting there and do not have a disaster or aren’t aware of a superfund around you. It would be good to be knowledgeable of those things. It would be good to get your water tested, your well tested, get your house tested, make sure that your heirs clean because if this happens, there’s no basis for you to have a guideline to refer back to. There’s nothing that helped us. Now, if we would’ve had our soil tested, who does that? But maybe it might not be a bad idea to spend that little extra money to have that safeguard. If this does, and it more than likely will, depending on how close you live to a rail site, a big factory, any truck could be driving down the road and spill and your normal evening could be like mine, and one minute it was there and the next it’s gone.

And as much as I like the connections I’ve made, I don’t want someone to have to reach out to me and be another Hannah. I appreciate these relationships I’ve made and I’d like to make more, but not on these circumstances. And I don’t want to see anyone else suffer and be confused and lost and be two years in a camper, not knowing where you’re going to go. This should not be anyone’s lives. Prepare yourself if you can do it, it doesn’t hurt. And be considerate of other people. Understand we’re not all going through the same things. Be kind to your neighbors because one day everything could change.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I mean, just

Hannah Loyd:

What she said, just be kind. We live in this world full of hate and it’s just getting worse, unfortunately. But yeah, just don’t ever hesitate to do things that you may think if you’re a mama, trust your mama gut because it’s always going to be right. If you think you’re crazy, you’re not. It’s real. It’s very real and it’s very scary. And I don’t wish this on anyone ever. I don’t wish this on any kid. I don’t wish this on any animal. I don’t wish this on anyone. But unfortunately it happens due to the negligence of people that are either not trained correctly or being short-staffed or other things that can have accidents, but just do your research if you’re going to move. Ashley helped me when I was moving. She’s like, make sure you look so you search Superfund sites, stuff like that. Make sure you know where you’re going because you don’t want to move from one disaster zone to another disaster zone. Well, who would’ve that? Because I didn’t. I just was trying to get out. So I mean, yeah, she said just connect with people, make friends be nice. Everyone is going through something you don’t know what someone’s going through. Just be nice. And there’s people out there that have gone through it or are going through it and can help you and will be there for you. I will.

Kristina Baehr:

I think that there’s a role for the law here too. I still believe in the rule of law. I still believe in our American jury system and American juries are entrusted with enforcing the safety rules. But the system only works if the people are brave enough if to bring the claims. And so I hope that one way we can help these communities is to show up and help them bring the claims because the law is about compensation for people who have been victims of negligence or worse of fraud. There’s more than just negligence here and deterrence of the bad conduct in the first place, prevention, and you can’t have one without the other. I hope that the law can be one tool in these communities for people to come together and demand change and demand truth, and demand accountability and demand the compensation that they need to get out of the contamination.

Because if you are in a contaminated house, I promise you, please make plans to leave. Do whatever you can to leave. And I know some of you think you can’t afford to leave, but you can’t afford to stay. I’ve had clients who have died in the house is I told them to leave. So one of my firm is called just well, because I truly want people to be well. And my hope and prayer for all of you who are affected from exposures is that you would get well enough to get help and to help others and to get out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week, and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to our three incredible guests today, Ashley McCollum, Hannah Lloyd, and Christina Bear. We’re going to see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the other great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Within the first month of the new Trump administration, the federal government has already become nearly unrecognizable. Operating through the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been given carte blanche to wage war on every part of the government that stands in the way of the business and investment needs of the billionaire class. The ongoing attacks on the Treasury Department, the Department of Education, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are just the opening salvo of a broader, darker plan to remake American society and government to serve the interests of the largest corporations and most powerful oligarchs. On this week’s livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez will speak with organizers of the emergency rally that took place on Monday outside of the CFPB building in Washington DC to protest the Trump administration’s moves to effectively shut down the agency. Then, we’ll speak with media critic and TRNN columnist Adam Johnson and tech critic Paris Marx about DOGE’s attacks on democracy, Musk’s agenda, and the grim future of technofascism materializing before us in real time.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

The Trump administration has effectively shut down the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the very agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal. Since its creation, the CFPB has clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks, credit card companies, and other predatory financial institutions for defrauded customers. Russell Vought, an unabashed Christian nationalist, founder of the far-right think tank the Center for Renewing America, a primary architect of Project 2025, and Donald Trump’s newly Senate-confirmed acting director of the CFPB, ordered all agency staff in an email Saturday to stop working and to not come into the office.

Hundreds of federal employees and protesters mobilized for an emergency rally in front of the CFPB headquarters near the White House in Washington DC on Monday. Democratic lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters spoke at the event, which was organized by progressive organizations Indivisible, the Progressive Change Institute, MoveOn, Americans for Financial Reform, and the National Treasury Employees Union Local 335, which represents CFPB workers.

Here’s Sen. Warren speaking to the crowd on Monday:

[CLIP BEGINS]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren:  This fight is about hardworking people versus the billionaires who want to squeeze more and more and more money. And now, now is our time to put a stop to this.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  On Tuesday night, just 24 hours after that demonstration, dozens of CFPB employees were notified over email that they had been fired. For his part, Elon Musk, richest man in the world and unelected head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, celebrated the shuttering of the agency, posting Sunday night on X, the platform that he owns, Musk wrote “CFPB RIP” accompanied by a tombstone emoji.

Now Musk, it should really be noted, has a big fat obvious conflict of interest here. Just last month, his site X announced a partnership with Visa to offer a real-time payment system on the platform. And yes, the CFPB would’ve been scrutinizing the whole thing in order to make sure that users weren’t scammed and didn’t have their sensitive information stolen. Now it won’t.

But the wrecking balls that Musk and Trump are swinging through the government right now are doing incalculable damage that goes far beyond the CFPB as we speak. Trump’s administration appears dead set on manufacturing a constitutional crisis if and when they openly defy court rulings, ordering them to halt their numerous illegal moves to shut down agencies, seize operational control of government finances, and to access everyone’s sensitive government data. There’s very much a Silicon Valley esque move fast and break things strategy that’s being applied here.

And the big tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley who threw their full support behind the Trump-Vance ticket have much more at stake here than just Musk’s payment system on X. Through Trump, Musk, J.D. Vance, and others, Silicon Valley and its technofascist oligarchs are waging a coup of their own right now, rewiring our government and our economy to serve their business and investment needs and to accelerate the coming of the dystopian future that they envision for all of us.

Over the course of this livestream, we’re going to break down this technofascist takeover of our government that’s unfolding in real time. We’re going to talk about what the consequences will be and how people are fighting back. In the second half of the stream, we’re going to talk with media critic, Real News columnist, and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast, Adam Johnson, and we’re also going to speak with Paris Marx, renowned tech critic, author, and host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us.

But we’re going to start right now with the chaos at the CFPB and the protest action outside the DC agency headquarters on Monday. We’re joined now by Aaron Stephens. Aaron is the former mayor of East Lansing, Michigan, a senior legislative strategist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and he was an organizer of Monday’s CFPB protest.

Aaron, thank you so much for joining us, man, especially with everything going on. Can you start by just giving us and our viewers an on-the-ground account of Monday’s action? How did it get organized? What did you see and hear on the day, and what were the real core rallying messages of the event?

Aaron Stephens:  Yeah, thanks for having me. So this is a really difficult time. I think that everybody’s dealing with a fire hose of news, the Trump administration taking actions, especially taking actions on Fridays, Saturdays to try and get away from the news cycle, to hide some of the worst things that they’re doing during the times when people might not be paying attention.

But we got news that some of the DOGE, those, I think, 20-something-year-old tech folks got into CFPB and started accessing some really sensitive data that the CFPB has and were looking to shut down the agency. You have to remember that Elon Musk, back when Trump first won reelection, tweeted that the CFPB was a redundant agency and one that needed to be deleted in the first place. So this is something that we were expecting to see, but of course we didn’t expect things to happen in the way that it did.

This is an agency that, DOGE, of course, is Elon Musk, is not an elected person. There’s been no act of Congress to authorize anything that’s been happening over at the CFPB, but we saw basically a takeover of the agency. People being told stay home, people being told don’t work.

And so we quickly mobilized with some of our congressional allies and some of our allies like Indivisible, MoveOn, the union folks, and Americans for Financial Reform to show that this was not going to be something that folks just stood by and let happen. We had about a thousand people there, maybe more, many, many members of Congress.

And I want to highlight the fact that it wasn’t just members that care and talk about consumer protection every single day. You had freshman members like Yassamin Ansari and senior members like Maxine Waters who are on the financial services committee, and Elizabeth Warren who, obviously, is the matriarch of this agency, but a lot of support from within the party here to really push back on what’s going on. The core message being that we’re not just going to stand by and let Elon Musk take over at this agency, and we’re not going to let what is really the financial cop on the street die in the darkness.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk a little more about that. For folks who weren’t at the rally or for folks who are maybe not fully up to speed on what the CFPB itself does or did, let’s talk a little more about what the CFPB does, why it was created. And as much as we don’t want to speculate, of course we can’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but if we have a shut down of CFPB, what is that going to mean for people?

Aaron Stephens:  I think you really have to look back at why this agency was created. This agency was created after the financial crisis in the late 2000s. This is an agency that is meant to hold banks and corporations and financial institutions accountable for malfeasance and advocates for consumers when they are wronged. This is an agency that, for instance, somebody who has been paying their mortgage on time, but the bank has been misapplying those payments as late and then their house got foreclosed on, they go to the CFPB. And the CFPB is the one that steps in and says, actually, you guys were in the wrong here. We’re going to keep this person in their house. They are the people on the street advocating for consumers. So getting rid of an agency like that is going to leave millions of Americans without somebody to go to.

I want to point out some of the numbers here. The CFPB has returned over $20 billion to consumers. It has a billion dollar a year budget and it has returned over $20 billion to consumers just on actions against corporations that have taken advantage of them alone. You have folks like Wells Fargo that have been taken action against, and they’ve had to pay back $2.5 billion for misapplying mortgage payments, like I mentioned before, and a lot of other actors that are, quite frankly, in the tech space, which Elon Musk is very, very related to, that are seeing action taken against them as well.

And so you can see the throughline there. Not having this agency protect consumers will mean that corporations will have a much, much easier time stealing from consumers and not having any kind of retribution against them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I guess this is as much a disclosure as anything, because it’s very hard to sit here as a journalist, as editor-in-chief of The Real News Network talking about this, but I’m also someone whose family lost everything in the financial crisis. I’ve been open about this my whole media career. It’s where my media career started. We lost the house that I grew up in. This agency was created because so many millions of families like mine got screwed over in the 2008 financial crash, and now here we are, 15 years later, being told that shuttering this agency is a win for, I don’t know what, efficiency…?

Aaron Stephens:  For who? If you talk about efficiency, again, I’ll point out $20 billion returned to consumers, a billion dollar a year budget. That’s efficient to me. And we’re talking about an agency that is literally dedicated to protecting consumers. So the only thing that I could say this would be efficient for is helping big corporations take advantage of people. There is no other reason to go after an agency that is dedicated to making sure that people have a fair shake in a financial system that is usually difficult to navigate and sometimes, unfortunately, as we’ve seen many, many times in the past, takes advantage of consumers. There’s no reason to go after an agency like this other than to make it easier for those folks to do that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a really important point, and I want to build on that in a second and talk about what the attack on the CFPB tells us about the larger attack that’s happening across the government right now. But I would be remiss if I didn’t ask if you’ve heard anything from the folks at the CFPB who lost their jobs this week, or anyone that you were talking to on the ground on Monday. Our listeners want to know.

Aaron Stephens:  I want to couch this and make sure that the point of this really is to talk about the consumers that are affected by this, but there is a really important story that is not probably going to be as told, which is that there are civil servants that dedicated their lives to basically saying, you know what? — And many of them have very similar stories to you. I saw somebody get taken advantage of, my family got taken advantage of, and now I’ve dedicated my life to fighting for consumers, and this is the agency that I’m part of. All of those people got an email that said, your work’s not important, stop doing it.

And so that’s why so many workers showed up on Monday. And their message was very, very simple. It was, we just want to do our job. We just want to protect people, let us do our job. You’ve got hundreds of people that they’re probably not making as much as they might be able to in the private sector, and they’re doing their best to try and protect people, and they’re just basically being told this isn’t important anymore.

As part of a larger plan, we’re seeing the same playbook at different agencies. I’m not going to be surprised as Elon Musk goes and attacks Social Security, attacks the Department of Education. These are services that affect working families everywhere across the country, and you don’t see him having the same kind of vitriol to a large corporation that’s taking advantage of people. It’s very, very clear that what’s going on right now is they’re dismantling the agencies that are protecting people just to give tax breaks and give an easier time for billionaires to take advantage of consumers.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s tease that out a little more, because I would hope that that is the clear and obvious message that people are taking away from it. But you know as well as I do that, it’s not that easy, unfortunately. We’re going to talk about this in the second segment with Paris Marx and Adam Johnson, but this is as much a war over what Musk and Trump are doing as it is over the perception about what they’re doing.

And so I see people all the time, people I know, people I’ve interviewed, people in my family who are right-leaning or maybe politically independent, who are still very much buying the Musk and Trump line that this is all being done in the name of efficiency, rooting out longstanding corruption and wokeism and all that crap.

So I wanted to ask if, in good faith, if we want to talk to folks who are feeling that way and thinking that way, what does the attack on the CFPB, how does that fit into the larger project that you just described? How can people take that and what’s going on at the Treasury, and just what the hell is going on here and what’s the end game?

Aaron Stephens:  Let’s talk through some of their playbook, because what Elon Musk and Donald Trump will do is they will find one little line item budget thing that they know they can message on, and they will say, look at this inefficient spending, and it’ll be like $10 million in a budget of a billion. And they’ll say, look at this inefficient thing, this is the thing that we’re cutting. And they won’t talk about the millions and millions of dollars going to help consumers. But that’s the thing they’ll talk about so that way they can message to folks, no, no, no, look, we’re cutting. We’re cutting and we’re being efficient. But the reality is that they’re saying that publicly so that way behind the scenes they can cut the things that help people.

And so I think that the CFPB is, and one of the reasons why we are so passionate about it, is because there are so many stories of people being helped by this agency.

I’ll give another random example, although there are literally thousands. People that went to a for-profit college that was not accredited, took out large loans for this, and the CFPB helped state AGs sue that for-profit college, which led to not only money going back to those folks, but also loans being forgiven. Those are people that would’ve been in debt for probably the rest of their lives for a degree that wasn’t even accredited, and that’s the CFPB, that’s what they’re doing.

One of the reasons why I think centering this agency in this fight is a very, very good thing to do is because there are thousands of stories of people really going out there and seeking help from the CFPB and that agency doing the right thing.

One of the rules that they most recently announced, which is a great rule which is now being attacked by congressional Republicans, is their medical debt and credit reporting rule. You’re talking about folks that, for those who don’t know, when you have an amount of medical debt, it goes on your credit report and it can significantly impact your life in the future, not being able to get a mortgage or not being able to get a car. And sometimes those procedures are just not things that you can control. And the statistics have said it and the studies have said it over and over again: Having medical debt does not actually have any real determining factor on whether or not you’re going to be paying back car loans or house loans, and it really doesn’t affect anything. In fact, Experian has even said that publicly.

And the CFPB said, you know what? This should be something that we address. We should not have medical debt [be] something that is reported on their credit report. And there are thousands of stories of people saying, I had a procedure done in the ’90s. It was out of the blue, I couldn’t control anything about it, and now 20 years later, I can’t get a house. I have two kids and I can’t get a house. Those are the people that are affected by closing this agency.

And so I think centering those stories is really, really important in this conversation. And just talking about, really, who is Elon Musk and Donald Trump on the side of? Is it on the side of that person that is trying to get a home for their two kids, or is it on the side of the banks that just want to make sure that they can make every last dime out of these consumers? And I think the answer’s fairly clear to that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s powerfully put. And we do need to center these stories, if only to get people out of the hazy miasma of Trumpian rhetoric and actually see the reality in front of them. We were talking about this two livestreams ago, a day after the horrific plane crash in DC where over 60 people lost their lives. But that was another clear-cut example where the government bureaucrats, the deep state, useless, evil, faceless folks in the government are actually air traffic controllers. They’re working people who are making sure our planes don’t crash when we come in and out of an airport. They’re also the people in the CFPB, the NLRB, talking to workers about organizing every day. If you just look at this in terms of big awful government but you’re not actually seeing the details, we’re going to be sleepwalking into even more dangerous stuff.

And I want to hover on that point for a second because for people who are not right in the middle of this, people who don’t live and work in DC, and even for people who aren’t employees of the government and they’re really only seeing this from the outside through the media and social media, I wanted to ask you, since you were there, you’re in it, how are people who work in government responding to this? What is the range of emotions that you’re hearing and seeing from your colleagues there in DC?

Aaron Stephens:  I do live in Michigan, so I go to DC fairly regularly, but I’m here on the ground in the wonderful, greatest state in the country. There’s folks that are there that are terrified. They get an email one day that says, don’t come into the office, you’re working from home. Get an email the next day that says stop your work entirely.

And I think it’s very important that we engage the union in this protest too, because those are real folks that have families, jobs, lives that are completely in limbo because there’s an unelected billionaire that decided that he wanted to tweet to delete the CFPB, and that’s a really scary reality to live in currently.

To your earlier point about people not really feeling or understanding what a government employee is, I want to point out, I was a mayor back in Michigan, and I think that people have different opinions about different levels of government involvement, but I’ll tell you, when the pandemic hit and you needed those folks out there making sure that people were getting access to vaccines or access to rental assistance or whatever else it was, those are government employees, they’re doing their job. And those backbone, really important things for society are what government employees do. I think we can have discussions about where we can direct policy or direct money more efficiently, but shutting down agencies that are dedicated to protecting people is not the way that we need to go about things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  There’s a larger complicated point here to be made, but I have faith that we can manage it because we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Two things can be true at once. What’s happening right now is a catastrophe, and plenty of government agencies have drawn justified criticism and ire from working people across this country. I’ll be the first to say it.

I talked to working class people living and fighting in sacrifice zones around the country, people in Michigan, people in Baltimore, people in places like East Palestine, Ohio, who have been polluted by private industry, government-run sites, all this crap. The point being is that that is what the Environmental Protection Agency was created in response to a half a century ago. The Cuyahoga River was on fire every other month, and toxic pollution was rampant, and people across the country rose up and said, the government needs to do something about this. And it was fricking Nixon’s administration who created the EPA and actually had an understanding that you need to have a level of enforcement there that gives people confidence that this agency is actually doing what it says it’s doing.

Now over the last 50 years, both parties have contributed in one way or another, either by just cutting the budget, vilifying the agency, or leaning more towards the interests of the corporations that the agency’s supposed to regulate. And so you end up with people like the folks I talked to in these sacrifice zones not trusting the EPA at all, because the EPA is telling them that they’re fine and they can stay in their homes while they and their kids continue to get sick.

And so that is the situation that we are in with so much wrought that has been created in well-meaning or established-for-good-reasons agencies. But that doesn’t mean you throw everything out with the bathwater. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, otherwise we’re going to have nothing left at the end of this.

Aaron Stephens:  Right. And I want to put a fine edge point on that. What we’re not sitting here saying is that everything is perfect, but look at where they’re targeting. They’re taking the frustration that people have that’s valid with government or the way that things are happening right now, and they’re using that frustration to attack agencies that are just holding corporations accountable. Where is the energy from them going? It is not going to address people’s actual concerns about government. They’re taking the, again, valid concerns that people have about the way that things are right now, and they’re saying, great, my solution is to give away tax breaks to billionaires. And they’re doing it in a more couched way.

But the reality is if they cared about people being taken advantage of, then the CFPB would be enhanced, not taken away. And you see where they’re diverting their energy into cutting, and it’s for public services for working families. It is not that real angst — And again, real angst — From people that are just angry at the current situation and the way things are. So they’re taking advantage of folks’ fear, unfortunately.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That, in many ways, is the political difference here between this MAGA-fied Republican Party and what I guess we would tend to call the Democratic establishment, not the whole party itself, but very much the ruling side of the party.

Trump, for all of his lies and the scapegoats and fictive enemies that he creates, is still identifying and speaking to those touchpoints of neoliberal system failure that people feel in their real lives. What is our counternarrative? What is the opposite vision of the future and governance that is being offered instead of the wrecking ball that is the Trump administration? That’s a question that all of us need to sit with.

And it’s a question that leads into, we only got about 10 more minutes here before we move into the next segment, but I didn’t want to let you go without asking about what this all means for the Democrats who are still in office right now, this party that people are looking to as the core institutional opposition to what Trump and the GOP are doing right now.

Axios dropped a story, which I’m sure you saw, earlier this week, sparked a lot of justified outrage all over the internet. And this article said, “Members of the Steering and Policy Committee — with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in the room — on Monday complained” about pressure from activist groups, including ones that helped organize Monday’s action and are putting them. They’re really pissed about the pressure these groups are putting on them to get off their butts and do something. And there was a quote from this Axios article that said, “‘It’s been a constant theme of us saying, “Please call the Republicans.”’” And that was from Rep. Don Beyer from Virginia, basically throwing up their hands and telling their constituents, hey, we’re in the minority now. There’s nothing we can do, go call the Republicans.

Is this the pervasive attitude from Democrats on the Hill right now that you’re hearing? Who’s fighting back? And tell us more about the work that you’re doing with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee to be part of that fight back.

Aaron Stephens:  I think it’s important to note, I think everybody’s seen the responses to some of that article, but also the positive responses to our rally on Monday where Maxine Waters and Elizabeth Warren stood up and said, we’re not going to stand by. Or Maxwell Frost trying to get into USAID. People want to see Democrats fighting back. They feel like, at this moment, they are getting just hounded with news every single day from a different Trump administration action that is going to harm them in the long term or in the short term, and they want to know that their representatives are fighting back.

And so I think that some of that frustration is just going to manifest in people calling their Dem representatives and being like, what are you doing? And I think it’s important that Dem leadership hears that. I think that we as an organization are going to continue trying to channel our members to make sure that action is being taken on the Dem side and that we’re using every single tool in the arsenal, whether that be in the funding fight or whether that be pushing stateside, pushing on AGs and the courts. Whatever it is, people need to see Dems fighting back.

I certainly agree that this is a Republican agenda and we need to be holding them accountable for what they are doing. But again, people need to see Dems fighting back. And if they don’t see that, then they’re going to feel like they’ve been abandoned by the party that claims to be the ones that’s fighting for them.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Picking up on that, for folks out here who are watching and listening to this stream, what would be your message to them about why they should fight back and the ways they can? It could be calling your elected representative, but for folks who are maybe feeling like they’re not getting anything out of their representative right now, but we don’t want to leave folks feeling hopeless and powerless, that is never our aim. What’s your message to the folks around you, the folks you talk to these days about why they need to fight, not give up, and the different things that they can do to hold this administration accountable, preserve the things in our society, in our government that need to be preserved? What’s your message to folks right now?

Aaron Stephens:  My one big message is we need more stories being shared. There are millions of people in this country that have been impacted that are on Medicare and would be in a very, very bad situation if that was reduced, or Social Security, or again, had good action taken by the CFPB, or had their grocery store saved in their local community because the FTC stopped a merger. Those things, those stories need to be amplified.

And I think that it’s important that people are not just apathetic about the situation. I know that it’s difficult given just how much is going on, but show up to the town hall for your congressional member, stage a protest, do it in your own district. We need to be showing that, again, we are not going to stand by and let this happen.

And quite frankly, I think that Democrats need to see that when they do stand up and when they do take real action that they have support. I think they do just based on what the response was to this rally and what happened at USAID. But I think that we need to be also, while still calling out the folks that are maybe a little bit quieter, we also need to be celebrating the folks that are out there fighting the fight and make sure that folks know that if they do stand up, they’ll have backup. And I think that’s important to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. Well man, I want to have you back on soon because there’s so many other big questions to talk about here: What’s going to happen when we hit the debt ceiling crap again? What can we expect in the coming weeks, months, and years of this administration? We’re only one month into this thing, so we gotta pace ourselves, but we gotta know what’s coming ahead so that we’re not constantly immobilized by the onslaught of news on a given day. So having that long view, I think, is important for all of us. And I do want to have you back on to talk about that in more depth.

As we close out, I did want to ask if you had any thoughts you wanted to share on that, or if there were any other upcoming actions that you wanted to point people to? I’m hearing that there’s a national day of action that federal workers are going to be participating in on the 17th. Are there agency demonstrations that you know happening in DC? Just anything like that that you wanted to put out there before we let you go. And also tell folks about where they can find you.

Aaron Stephens:  Yeah, so feel free to find me on Twitter, @AaronDStephens — I’ll still call it Twitter — And go to boldprogressives.org, sign up for our listserv. We’ll send out action alerts on protests and different things that are going on there. We’re also going to be collecting stories from folks that are affected.

And I think, again, just because we have those connections in the Hill amplifying those of offices, so they have things to really push for, and they have a little bit more ammunition when they’re having these conversations on the Hill is important. And as you said, fortunately, it’s a marathon that feels like a sprint right now with everything going on. We just need to keep it going. I’d be happy to come back on. Thanks for having me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Thank you so much, man. We really appreciate you being here. I appreciate the work that you’re doing. We hope to have you back soon, man. Thank you again.

Aaron Stephens:  Thanks so much. Have a good one.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Alright, gang. So we’ve got another hour in our livestream today. We want to thank again Aaron Stephens, senior legislative strategist with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who was one of the organizers of Monday’s protest outside the CFPB. Thank you to Aaron. Please follow him on X, or Twitter, if you want to stay up to date with Aaron.

And now I want to bring in our next two guests here. They’re longtime friends of The Real News. We’ve interviewed them separately a number of times. I’ve had the honor of being on Citations Needed. Adam himself writes for The Real News. So I’m really, really grateful to see your faces and to have your critical voices here with us, guys.

And I just want to make sure, for folks who are watching, if you are living under a rock and you don’t know about Paris and Adam’s work yet, I actually envy you because you’ve got a lot of great work at your disposal. But Paris Marx is a Canadian technology writer whose work has been published in a range of outlets including NBC News, CBC News, Jacobin, and Tribune. They’re also the host of the acclaimed podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, which everyone should go listen to, especially right now. Paris is also the author of the excellent book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, which was published by Verso Books in 2022.

And we are also joined by the great Adam Johnson. Adam hosts the Citations Needed podcast, which everyone should also listen to. And Adam writes at The Column on Substack. He is a columnist for us here at The Real News. You should read every column he’s ever written for us because they’re all bangers and all critical media analyses. And he also writes for other outlets like The Nation.

Paris, Adam, thank you both so much for joining us today. We got a lot to talk about, and you guys are exactly the folks I want to be talking to about it. But I wanted to just, by way of transitioning from that first segment with Aaron into our discussion, if you guys had any comments on Musk, Trump, and votes attacks specifically on the CFPB, and any thoughts you had on why they’re going after the CFPB that maybe we didn’t cover in that first segment.

So yeah, Paris, let’s start with you, and then Adam, we’ll go to you.

Paris Marx:  Sure. Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that the CFPB is low-hanging fruit and something easy for them to take on. We know that the right has not liked this agency for quite a while, and then we can also see that an agency like that is going to hinder some of what Elon Musk and these other tech billionaires want to be doing. We know Marc Andreessen, for example, has been angry at this agency and blaming it for debanking people in crypto, which is probably not true, but is one of these conspiracy theories that he has embraced.

Elon Musk, of course, has ambitions of moving Twitter or X into payments and financial services and things like that. It is not a surprise to me that he would want to take on the CFPB right as he is getting into an area like that. And of course, as I understand, the CFPB has also looked into Tesla in the past and issues with Tesla. So yeah, it’s not a surprise to me that he wants to take on this agency, and I think we’re going to see him take on a lot of other ones as well and try to dismantle them too.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Adam, what about you? Were you surprised? You look surprised. You don’t look surprised at all [laughs]. Oh, wait, you’re muted, brother.

Adam Johnson:  My apologies. I want to start off by saying I thought that the intro, Max, you gave at the top of the show about 37 minutes ago was excellent. I don’t usually kiss ass to my host, but that was very, very well written, established the stakes. I thought that was really well done. I forget because you edit me, but you should do more writing. It was very good. It’s a complex thing to break down, and I don’t usually kiss the ass of the host, but I’m doing it.

But to answer your question, yeah, I mean, look, he’s obviously going after the liberal administrative regulatory state. These are all the Project 2025 wishlist, Silicon Valley wishlist of people they want to go after. He is going after it in a different way than previously. He is going after it in a way that is obviously not legal, which is another way of saying illegal. He is doing it in a way that is blatantly illegal, knowing that there’s not really any mechanism to hold him accountable. They are now openly and flagrantly violating judges’ orders, district judges’ orders. My guess is it’ll have to be escalated to the Supreme Court.

And again, as your previous guest mentioned, the fire hose element is because liberal good government groups and progressive groups only have so much resources, so everyone’s putting out fires. As you know as an editor at a progressive publication, that’s what these last three weeks have been, is just putting out a series of fires. That’s part of their strategy because they have far more resources. And of course, as you also mentioned as —

Maximillian Alvarez:  OK, so we lost Brother Adam for a quick second, but he’ll be back on. But yeah, I mean that is something — Oh, wait, do we have you back, Adam?

Adam Johnson:  Did I fall out?

Maximillian Alvarez:  You froze for about 30 seconds there, but go ahead and pick right back up.

Adam Johnson:  So sorry. I apologize. I said, while Democratic leadership in Congress has been largely a no-show, although that’s changed a little bit lately… Oh shoot.

Maximillian Alvarez:  OK.

Adam Johnson:  Hello?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. So little. Hey, man, it’s a livestream baby. So technical issues —

Adam Johnson:  I’m not sure why my wifi says it’s operating at full capacity. I’m not sure what’s going on. I apologize.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, you’re good, man.

Adam Johnson:  I was in the middle of my denouement, and now I’m interrupted. Now I feel —

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. Give me the denouement, baby.

Adam Johnson:  Well, now there’s a lot of pressure to make it a good denouement. No, I was saying that governors had pushed back, but they are attempting to dismantle the liberal state that they know they couldn’t possibly dismantle through Congress or other legal means.

Because here’s the thing, and this is, I think, a dynamic people have to appreciate, which is that Musk can try to do a few dozen illegal things and then what’s the pushback? He gets some court order that says, no, you can’t do that, but he can’t lose anything. It’s not like he’s going to go to prison, and to say nothing to the fact that he’s obviously abusing stimulants and surrounded by a bunch of Nazi Zoomers who are egging him on. So he’s very much high on his own supply. But he can’t lose, he can only be curbed. And so from his perspective, he’s thinking, what are they going to do, take away my birthdays? He can illegally try to shut down whatever department he wants, Department of Education, Department of Labor, to get rid of the NLRA and the NLRB, whatever, name it, because what does he have to lose by doing that? Nothing.

The only limiting thing is two things: Number one, how much resources they have on their end, but two, it will ultimately be congressional Republicans, because it’s very clear, obviously, Trump can’t run again. Musk doesn’t give a shit if this harms the long-term Republican Party brand. The only real counterforce here, other than lawfare, which Democrats are doing and ought to do, which is suing them, as well as these progressive groups like Bold Progressives and others, is that Republicans do have to run in 2026. And if they’re running on putting grandma on cat food, that doesn’t sound as good as going after whatever woke chimpanzee, transgender studies or some other bullshit they make up.

So right now they’re doing this… This is the project, this is the Heritage Foundation’s wet dream, and this is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing these full-blown assaults on the liberal and administrative and regulatory state because it serves Silicon Valley, it serves non-Silicon Valley, the wealthy in general. Again, we’re getting $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. We’re doing the 2017 tax cuts on steroids. This is why most billionaire money went to Trump and Republicans, despite their faux-populist rhetoric and token attempts to make taxes tip-free for waiters or other such trivial nonsense.

And so they’re just going to go until somebody stops them, because why not? Again, what’s the downside? It’s Trump’s. It’s not like Musk is going to get arrested for violating the law.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, no.

Adam Johnson:  And even if he did, Trump would just pardon him. And this is why — Sorry, real quick I want to say one thing. This is why the Jan. 6 pardons were so key, because it’s a signal to every right-wing vigilante and every hardcore right winger that they can pretty much do anything they want that’s illegal so long as they are advancing the MAGA cause, and they can expect to not be held accountable so long as it’s a federal and not a state crime. So as long as they go from Kansas to Nebraska and commit a crime pursuant to Trumpism, Trump will pardon them no matter what, even if they have a record of all kinds of horrific crimes.

And so that kind of vigilantism and that kind of lawlessness is completely taking hold. That is an escalation from previous… The policies themselves are boilerplate Republican policies, but the extralegal, extrajudicial tactics are an escalation, they’re new. And we’re seeing some of the ways in which Democratic leadership either can’t or won’t be prepared to really address it on those terms.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And it’s even been, like you said, from the first time Trump was elected eight years ago to now, there has been a notable and concerted evolution of the MAGA movement to basically state sanction vigilantism. And you can see the examples of that, not just in Donald Trump and J.D. Vance cozying up to known vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse or the guy who strangled the poor man in New York on the subway.

That celebration of typically white men vigilantes, but also baked into the MAGA-fied legislation that’s been creeping through state Houses all across the country where you see the weaponization of citizens’ impulse for vigilantism as a necessary part of executing the policy. That’s why you get abortion laws in Texas that are encouraging everyday citizens to sue anyone who helps with an abortion, even the Uber driver who drives you to the clinic.

These types of policy points are making the point that Adam made there where you have a party that is not just pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists for their crimes against the country and their violent crimes, but also sanctioning this type of vigilantist mode of politics in other policy areas as well.

I do want to come back to that in a few minutes, but I wanted to, before we get too far afield, come back to the big question that I wanted to ask you both because it’s a question that I feel is at the center of your respective areas of expertise. It’s in that Venn diagram overlap, and it’s something that I’ve been getting asked from our viewers a lot about. So I want to ask if we could break what’s going down now from this angle, because this is as much a war over what Musk and Trump are doing in practice as it is a war over how people perceive what they’re doing and how they want us to perceive it.

I have seen plenty of right-leaning people that I’ve interviewed from sacrifice zones and unions from around the US sharing Newsmax posts that are framing this all as a heroic, historic moment. And Musk is out there rooting out corruption, and I’ve seen others sharing Musk memes with his resting rich face and the texts saying, “‘They’ Lied and Stole from you for Years, and now ‘They’ — ” All caps — “want you to be ANGRY at D.O.G.E. from PROVING it. LET THAT SINK IN.” So this is the war that’s going on right now.

Paris, I want to start with you, and then, Adam, kick it to you. How would you describe the difference between what Musk and Trump say they’re doing and what they’re actually doing right now?

Paris Marx:  Well, it’s a gulf, right? But I feel like it depends on what you’re looking at. These are people who are talking about making government more efficient, making it work better, but actually they are embarking on a major austerity program in order to gut the US federal government and, in particular, the aspects and the departments and the agencies within the federal government that they have personal distaste for.

And not just them personally. Certainly, Elon Musk and his companies will have certain agencies that they want to go after and certain programs that they want to go after. But Adam was mentioning before, we can see the outline for this kind of program in the Heritage Foundation and these other right-wing groups that have been wanting to, basically, launch this campaign against the federal government for a very long time, to remake it.

By bringing in the tech industry and bringing in someone like Elon Musk, you get the ability to frame this as something that tech is doing to give it this framing that it is modernizing the government rather than taking it apart. And in particular, as they are starting to try to do mass layoffs, people often point to what Elon Musk did at Twitter as a comparison for what they’re trying to do with the federal government, where Elon Musk came in, laid off a ton of staff, most of the company, and then kept it running.

And they want people to believe that the government is a ton of fraud, a ton of waste, that you can just get rid of all these workers and then you’ll still be able to provide the services that the US government provides, run the government as it is, because there’s just all these useless bureaucrats who are around. Which is a right-wing narrative that we have been hearing for ages. This is not a new thing.

But what they’re also doing as they embark on this project is to say, yes, we’re going to gut all of these workers, but also now we’re going to roll out these incredible AI tools that are going to be able to do all the work of these various workers to provide these services. Because look, AI has become so much more powerful over the past couple of years. They’ve been spreading these really deceptive narratives about how AI is reaching this point where it’s going to be nearly as powerful as a human being, and it has this understanding that it didn’t have before, and it’s so much more capable.

And a lot of that is bullshit, but it really helps with this larger program to say, we are going to gut the government. We are going to bring forward this massive austerity program, but it’s okay because technology is now going to fill the gap because technology has gotten so much better. To present this as inherently a technological problem, not so much a political one, where they are using technology as a form of power against all of these workers and against, really, the American public as they embark on this massive transformation of the government.

And so far it has been focusing on specific agencies, but we’ve already seen the suggestion from people like Elon Musk that they’re going to have to go after Medicare and Social Security and these other programs that so many Americans rely on. It’s not just going to end at these things that they perceive as only being about the culture wars and things like that. It’s going to expand much greater as they continue down this road.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I have so many thoughts on that, but Adam, I want to toss it to you.

Adam Johnson:  So from the beginning of this stupid DOGE narrative, I’ve been pulling my hair out because the way it’s covered is the exact opposite of the way it exists in reality. I often compare it to the Biden ceasefire talks. It’s just a fictitious alternative reality that has no basis in fact. And the media’s running with it because if you’re powerful, editorially speaking, you’re assumed always to have good faith, even if there’s facts that completely contradict reality. So any skepticism is seen as being too ideological, too outside the lane of mainstream reporting.

So about two weeks ago, I wrote an article criticizing the media covering DOGE as a “cost cutting” or to find waste and abuse, these ostensibly postideological, tech-savvy, as Paris said, and we can get into that, the use of the ways that we’re doing a whole episode on the ways in which AI becomes this moral laundromat where you say, oh, we’re going to fire a bunch of people, which sounds evil, because don’t they have jobs? Oh, don’t worry, we’re going to replace them with AI. But it’s bullshit. Everybody knows it’s bullshit. It’s a way of firing people so they can have more control. These so-called bureaucrats, which is to say those who are part of the liberal and administrative state they loathe because they want to be able to fucking pollute rivers without anyone giving them any flack.

And the way the media covered this was, again, this is someone in Elon Musk who, if you follow his Twitter activity, which everybody in media does because mostly they don’t have a choice, he jams it in front of your fucking face. He posts right-wing white nationalist memes all day from 4chan. White genocide is a huge, “hashtag white genocide is a huge part” of his worldview. He’s obsessed with knockout game type lurid, VDARE, straight up white nationalist propaganda, has been doing this for years. Inauguration day, does a goddamn Sieg Heil three times, clear as day, non-negotiable, not even ambiguous, not well, maybe — No, no, clear as day does a Sieg, Heil — Oh no, it was just a troll. Oh, it was a Roman salute. Again, you can’t ironically murder someone. You can’t ironically do Nazi propaganda. You either do it or you don’t do it, OK?

So you would think this would be, OK, let’s interrogate what he means by waste and abuse. Is this how some bean counter at the OMB sees it? Is this someone, one of these admittedly right-wing think tanks like a center for tax fairness or one of these Peter Peterson Foundation? No, to him, waste is an ideological assertion. Fraud is an ideological assertion. 

Keep in mind, he’s been lying for weeks about fraud, citing public fucking databases that are already online as if it’s some great revelation that he’s found, oh, they did this, they spent this so-and-so USAID or State Department or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, it’s a public database and it’s not fraud, it’s just how government spending works. So he’s been overtly lying for weeks.

And yet, as I wrote on Feb. 3, this is how it was covered. The New York Times, they referred to DOGE as, “finding savings”, “budget cutters”. In a later article, they wrote “cost-cutting effort”. They called it “an efficiency panel”, “a cost-cutting project”. The New York Times wrote on Jan. 12, 2025, “DOGE is a cost-cutting effort to seek potential savings.” Washington Post did the same thing. “Government efficiency commission”, “non-governmental fiscal efficiency group”, “the efficiency group”, “proposed savings”. So here’s someone with overt neo-Nazi ideologic — OK, maybe that’s too hard for you. We’ll say far-right tech billionaire, whatever, someone who’s overtly ideological, and he’s consistently treated like someone who’s genuinely concerned with finding efficiencies.

Now, finally, after weeks of this shit, again, spreading outright lies about USAID — As much as I’m not particularly a fan of them, but just lying about them outright, completely making shit up out of context, accusing congresspeople of getting money from these organizations for some outright lurid conspiracy theories that, if he wasn’t the richest man in the world, we would say, this guy’s just an anonymous crank on Twitter, just completely made up horseshit.

They’re finally — They being the media — They’re starting to finally publish articles that commit the ultimate sin of reportage, which is the I word: Ideology, mentioning ideology. That this is not some postideological, postpartisan attempt to find deficiencies, but is, in fact, a right-wing attack on the liberal and administrative state for programs and departments that have been duly funded by the federal government. And a lot of these programs, of course, were begun under or continued explicitly by the Trump administration, but we can talk about the first one, we can talk about that later.

So here, finally we have The Washington Post — This is Aaron Blake — “Trump and Musk can’t seem to locate much evidence of fraud”. So now we’re finally pointing out that there’s no actual fraud, that them just calling everything fraud is like the Michael Scott “I declare bankruptcy.” You can’t just say it’s fraud. That’s a legal claim.

And so for weeks they’ve been saying there’s this fraud, and Musk uses this word all the time, fraud, fraud — OK, well, if there’s all this widespread fraud, Musk, then why has the Trump DOJ not arrested anyone? Because there’s no fraud. There’s just spending they don’t like, which they’ve now rebranded fraud. And then Reuters says “Musk’s DOGE cuts based more on political ideology than real cost savings so far”. So finally, after weeks of taking this at face value and in good faith — Which, again, is the holiest of holies, especially if you’re rich and powerful — Not if you’re, by the way, an activist, then you’re, as I note in my piece your ideology is…

I compared it to an article written about Democrats as part of a police reform panel, they referred to them four times as progressive, five different times as activists. So their ideology is put on the forefront. But if you’re a megalomaniac billionaire who shares white genocide all day that you took off white supremacist websites, ideology is just not mentioned. It’s not mentioned why you’re going after programs. They can say DEI — As long as you say DEI, not the N word, you can get away with anything, even though clearly this is racially motivated. Clearly it’s about chaining women to the stove. Clearly it’s about hating people with disabilities. Clearly it’s about hating gay and trans people. He fucking loathes trans people, posts antitrans shit all day.

So just now, I’m not in the business of complimenting the media, and it’s still obviously not nearly sufficient, but we’re just now seeing a pivot from people being like, oh, well maybe this isn’t about efficiency. Well, OK, it would’ve been nice had you done that before he destroyed several different federal programs. But we’re now seeing people realizing that indulging this premise of efficiency, which morons like Ro Khanna consistently do, boggles my mind. I mean, I know why. He’s got terminal lawyer brain and he fundraises with a lot of these Silicon Valley billionaires, so he has to play stupid –

That we’re like, OK, clearly this is a right-wing attack on the liberal and administrative state. It is entirely ideological to the extent to which you can even do efficiency nonideologically. Even that premise is suspect. But for someone who does a Sieg Heil on national TV, again, had you told me a month ago, well, Musk is going to do a very clear Sieg Heil on national TV and nothing’s basically going to change, and the ADL is a fucking shakedown operation, who he paid off a few years ago, is going to come to his defense, I’d say, now, clearly there has to be some limit to this. He can’t get away with anything. No, he’s got half a trillion dollars, he can pretty much get away with anything.

So we’re just now seeing, finally, people being like, oh, maybe his ideology is actually what’s motivating this rather than this… Again, I could go on and on. I have all these articles just in The New York Times cost-cutting panel, cost efficiency panel, reducing waste, fraud, abuse. It’s like this guy is sharing the most manic fucking right-wing chud conspiracy theories, completely misrepresenting how you read government spending documents and misrepresenting how you read RFPs, accusing Reuters of — By the way, he did that after Reuters wrote that article. I think that’s why they did it — Because an unrelated company owned by the same corporation did a defense contractor RFP on, I think, data protection or something. Not related at all to anything sinister. Completely takes it out of context, just consistently fucking lies all the time. Just straight up Alex Jones shit.

But because, again, because he’s so rich, he’s so powerful, people kept deferring to him as some kind of neutral expert, and it was literally driving me fucking crazy because sitting there watching this going, are we going to mention that he’s a white nationalist? Isn’t this kind of relevant since he’s going after specifically groups related to racial justice, civil rights, and, of course, anyone who, as you noted, anyone who undermines his bottom line ,just as a person who’s extremely rich?

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, I got three quick things I want to say, then, Paris, I want to come back to you real quick. But the first is I would read the crap out of an Adam Johnson tongue-in-cheek weekly Low Bar Award where Adam Johnson rewards a publication for doing its basic-ass job of reporting the facts about something [laughs]. I would read that.

Second is just a note on the fraud thing and speaking, again, if we’re talking here as media critic, tech critic. In a former life, I was a trained historian, and so, for obvious reasons right now, I’ve been going back to my bookshelf and pulling all of the big history books that I have on the McCarthy period and the Red Scare, and I can’t help but hear what I feel are the very obvious and hackneyed echoes of the McCarthy period, when Sen. McCarthy’s there saying, I hold here in my hand a piece of paper with the names of communists in the government. And then you got this dickhead Musk out there saying like, oh my God, you won’t believe all the fraud I’m finding. I’ve got it all written here.

Adam Johnson:  He keeps doing these lurid, vague, conspiratorial appeals to some secret list he has, and it’s like, where? What are you talking about? And the evidence they share is just shit that was published already. It’s been online, been online because of good government sunshine law liberals, by the way. He’s just doing Alex Jones shit. He’s doing Alex Jones shit, but he’s so rich you can do it and no one cares.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, and Paris, I have a question for you about that because, like I said earlier, this is a real struggle here over what the great Cory Doctorow would call seizing and controlling the means of communication. We’re not just talking about, like Adam said, not just rich billionaires. We’re talking about people who control the infrastructure and platforms upon which we communicate and commerce every single day.

And so, as much as this is the 21st century new digital politics that we’re all swimming in now, who controls the means of communication and who controls the means of public perception is really critical. And I bring this up because I can’t help but notice that, as we’re talking about here the narrative that Musk, Trump, Vance and their donors from Silicon Valley are trying to spin about this, I think your average person with a basic common sense can see the bullshit — But so much of them are not seeing it because they’re getting news on platforms that aren’t showing it. Or the algorithms are keeping them locked into echo chambers that are going to keep the points that we’re talking about here out of sight, out of mind.

I wanted to ask if you could talk about that side of things, as ridiculous as the top-down narrative about DOGE, about the government takeover that’s happening right now, what should people be considering about how these big tech overlords and their accomplices in the government are trying to also adjust our variability to see the truth for what it is here?

Paris Marx:  Yeah, it’s a frustrating one, and I feel like it’s not a uniquely social media discussion. If we look at news, we can see how, whether it’s cable news or radio, has been taken over by the right for years, and then they unleash similar strategies to try to shift how social media works, these narratives that cable news was too liberal and conservative voices were not present there or not as well represented. Meanwhile, you had Fox News pushing out these right-wing narratives. And good —

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, keep going. Sorry. Sorry. Keep going.

Paris Marx:  Yeah, sorry. Meanwhile, you had Fox News pushing out these right-wing narratives and all the liberal media adopting these framings and starting to talk about the issues that were being pushed by the right. What you had, very clearly, the right saw the opportunity to do this on Facebook and other platforms, where they kept saying that conservative voices were being silenced on Facebook or on Twitter, or because people were being moderated when they were posting hate speech, and things like that. And it was no real surprise that people on the right were being moderated much more for those things because they were much more likely to be saying them.

But even still, think years ago, you had Mark Zuckerberg going on this tour of America to talk to conservatives and all this kind of stuff to show that he was not going to give into censorship, and the types of things that he’s talking about in a much more animated way today. I feel like we have this narrative that there has been this shift in the social media landscape in the past little while with Mark Zuckerberg getting rid of the fact checkers and getting rid of everything that he considers woke at Meta, which I think was more of just an opportunity for him to get rid of a bunch of things that he didn’t want to be doing and to lay off more workers, which they’ve already been doing for a while now.

But we’ve seen social media companies already abandoning those sorts of things for a while before the election, up to a year or more ago. And there was a brief moment where they were doing some additional moderation during the pandemic in that period.

But for a very long time, these companies have been quite committed to these right-wing notions of free speech. Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan, who is now in an even more powerful position at the company, a Republican operative, they stopped Alex Jones’s initial banning on the platform for ages, kept pushing it off. They didn’t want to see Donald Trump be banned, all these sorts of things.

Social media is positioned as this place where we can all post what we want to post, and anyone can publish what they want on there. But the reality is that these are environments that are shaped in order to ensure that right-wing narratives are the ones that are being encountered most often by people, that the algorithmic recommendations are ensuring that you’re in that kind of an ecosystem unless you have explicitly tried to opt out of it. But even then, you’re still going to see a lot of this stuff.

And they are platforms that are premised on engagement in order to get ad profits. And what you do in order to make your ad profits is to piss people off a bit and serve them more extreme content so that they begin interacting with the world in that way. I think we saw that very clearly during the pandemic, when you saw people’s brains basically get fried. And it’s not solely because of social media that happened. There are many different reasons that these things have occurred.

But I think even just recently, if you think about before the holidays, people were losing their minds over all these drones that were like in the sky in the United States. This was a huge thing, and it was a big conspiracy theory, and even the mainstream media were covering it as though it was a real thing that people needed to be concerned about and not some bullshit that they needed to debunk. These are not just right-wing platforms, but platforms that spread a whole lot of bullshit that people end up believing because of the way that the information is presented and the ways that average people don’t have the media literacy that those of us who are constantly engaging in these things might. And even then, I would say that we occasionally fall for some bullshit as well. We occasionally see things that we might want to believe and then need to check into it and say, ah, damn, that was bullshit as well.

But anyway, that’s just a long way of saying that I think that these platforms, I called Facebook a social cancer recently, and that’s not just because of the recent changes that Mark Zuckerberg has made, but I think that these platforms have been very socially detrimental to the discourses that we have. And that’s not to say that traditional media is the most amazing thing in the world. Adam has a whole show where he discusses why that is not the case. But I think that we’re living in this media environment that is very polluted, that has a lot of problems with it, and the independent one that has been set up as the solution to it is often very much funded by these right-wing billionaires as well. And if you want to maximally succeed in the new media environment that’s being set up, you’re encouraged to be a right-wing piece of shit instead of to really hold power to account.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Adam, I know you got thoughts on that. Hit me.

Adam Johnson:  So here’s a fundamental problem, which is that the right wing embraces populism in the most superficial and aesthetic sense. They’re good at $50 million of condoms in Gaza, all these little thought memes, they’re extremely good at that, disseminating that to everybody. This idea that, again, Musk speaks in these demagogic or pseudo populous terms about he’s taking on the bureaucrats and the establishment — Again, he’s fucking worth $450 billion, but he’s taking on the man. Trump does this, obviously, very well.

And establishment Democrats and liberals run and are allergic to any form of populism. So naturally they’re going to fail in a media ecosystem where that kind of thing is currency, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. It is a party run by PR hacks and lawyers and eggheads, and they don’t speak in those terms, they don’t speak in that language, they don’t know how to fight back. And when someone within that milieu who’s better at speaking in those terms, whether it be Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, tries to defend the liberal administrative state, it can work, but it’s so rare.

And then meanwhile, you have people like Chris Murphy and talking about how, oh, actually Biden’s going to deport more people, and USAID is how we destroy China. And it’s like, well, that’s not a very populist framing, that’s just ratcheting up the racist machine.

And so there’s an asymmetry of what kind of rhetoric you employ. And again, Democrats, I think by design, just don’t have those kinds of [inaudible] talking points, the $50 million in condoms to dollars or whatever. They are talking about gutting $880 billion from Medicare and Medicaid. They’re talking about raising the retirement age. We’re talking about doing a lot of extremist right-wing shit.

And for a variety of reasons, liberals and Democrats have been unable to really message around that. They are a little bit better over the last week or so. But there hasn’t been a way of framing this as an elite attack on the liberal administrative state because liberals, for 30 years, have run away from the idea of government as something that’s good, something that actually protects you, that keeps your water clean, that makes sure that these fucking speed-addled billionaires don’t wreck every part of your life.

And I think what you see in the messaging asymmetry, the media ecosystem asymmetry, people did all this lamenting about why is there no liberal Joe Rogan? Why is there no Democratic media ecosystem? And it’s like, because the media ecosystem on the right embraces its extremists because they know, ultimately, it doesn’t really undermine their bottom line, whereas liberals’ fundamental project is disciplining, managing, and marginalizing the left, and partisan liberal content is just inherently going to be fucking boring. How many times can you spin for various unpopular policies rather than having a genuine space where you attack them?

And I think that plays into a similar dynamic here. So when we talk about why Musk has been good at messaging this, again, he goes on Joe Rogan, Rogan’s been doing a fucking six-month-long Musk puff fest about how great he is. This is someone who does have a huge working-class listenership. And they’re reframing themselves again, as Trump successfully did. And the cognitive dissonance of all these people being multi-billionaires is just something you put aside in your fucking brain somewhere. These are the rogue billionaires who are actually out to help you.

It’s what I call the, I dunno if you saw that Jason Statham film [The] Beekeeper. It’s this distorted vision of who’s fucking you over. It’s liberal bureaucrats and other billionaires, but not the good billionaires. And there’s also some cops, but some cops are good, and it’s really actually the deep state, but it’s USAID that’s really running the show behind the scenes, not the DOD or the CIA.

It’s obviously this warped vision because people, again, as you note, Max, in your intro and elsewhere, people have a vague sense that there is a system fucking them, and they need it to have a name and a face. And liberals don’t do that. They do this facile Republican billionaires — Oh, but they can’t reject billionaires because when the guy who just won the DNC said, we’re going to find the good billionaires, so we are going to take $50 million from Bill Gates, we’re going to take $50 million from Michael Bloomberg. So we can’t really have populist politics, so we have to turn it into this partisan schlock.

And I keep going back to Norman Solomon’s definition of neoliberalism, which is a worldview of victims but no victimizers. There’s never a fucking bad guy. And the extent to which there ever is a bad guy, it’s just this, again, it’s this particular billionaire here. It’s not a form of class politics. So it’s all very frustrated and limp and half-assed and doesn’t really resonate like the faux populism of the right.

To say nothing of the fact that they just have more control over social media, more control over, obviously, billionaires run the media, so there’s going to be a natural asymmetry that you can’t really do much about just by virtue of who funds things.

But you’re seeing that play out, and they are winning the messaging war to a great degree. Liberals have a liberal sort of elite media, your centrist media, New York Times, Democratic leadership in Congress. What’s the first thing they did after Trump won? You had Joe Scarborough go on TV and say, we’re going to work with Trump. We’re going to do bipartisanship. You had Hakeem Jeffries say, we’re going to work with Trump, we’re going to do bipartisanship, the minority leader. And there wasn’t a sense of, oh, we’re going to resist this time.

New York Times did a profile about how big liberal donors, Reid Hoffman, all these guys, Michael Bloomberg, are pulling back. They’re not really donating to the so-called resistance because, unlike last time, it can’t be filtered into this neoconservative project like Trump is.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’ll say though, maybe one small bit of grace that we’ve gotten compared to the last time Trump was elected is we don’t have to suffer through year after year of mainstream media pundits saying today is the day Donald Trump became [crosstalk] [laughs] —

Adam Johnson:  Oh, well, yeah, that’s where a lot of the money went. They went through the conspiratorial Milleritism — Or as I ironically call it, Muelleritism. He’s going to come and he’s going to rescue you, and we’re all going to be saved at the 11th hour, and here’s an AI picture of Trump in prison clothes, and we’re going to get him.

In a way, that can create space for a genuine resistance where you do try to reorient a party that does address people’s root issues and economic issues and these genuine issues rather than the Liz Cheney brand. But I think that the point is that we’re going to work with Trumpism. Because whenever they say bipartisanship, nine times out of 10, or 99 times out of 100, they’re not talking about saving the spotted owl or preserving a natural — They’re talking about punishing Gaza protesters, increasing militarism against China. They’re talking about antiwoke stuff. That really was a bipartisan thing. Much of what Trump is executing is just an extreme version of what The Atlantic magazine and New York Times opinion pages have been advocating since, frankly, #MeToo, to some extent, George Floyd, which is like, oh, the wokes got too cute. They got overaggressive. We need to put them back in their place. And they view Trump as someone that could instrumentalize to do that.

So then Musk comes in and does this. And again, a lot of these austerity things Musk is doing is just kind of Bull Simpson on steroids. These are things that a lot of rich Democrats and rich Democrat donors wanted anyway, they just didn’t want it to go this far. And so to the extent to which Democratic elites and the media and Democratic leadership in Congress, again — Less so governors — Are responding now and actually are defending the liberal state, not just spooky stuff at USAID, but the very idea of a liberal state, I think it is coming from bottom-up pressure. I think it’s coming from these, not partisan hack groups, from genuine protests. I think you do see a liberal resistance, in a true sense, liberals.

There was a point where hardcore Democrat pundits on social media, total hacks, people that defended the genocide for 15 months would come on and be like, so are they going to do anything about this? And it’s like, yeah. And so they began to alienate even some of the more hardcore MSNBC set, and I think that’s why you’re seeing the shift now a little bit more.

Not to, God forbid I’m positive, but I do think, again, the lawfare stuff has always been there. A lot of the governors have been there. I hate Gavin Newsom, but he’s been suing, defending trans rights, the attorney general of California, Pritzker. These guys have been suing. It’s not like people are doing nothing.

But actual Democratic leadership has had no consistent message. They have no little $50 million in condoms to Gaza meme stuff. They have nothing to really counter the narrative that Musk is somehow taking on the deep state or elites of nebulous origin, even though he himself has $20 billion in government contracts. So he’s not the elite. It’s unclear.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I want to hone in on that point, actually. I wanted to underline this in red pen, and I know folks in the live chat are asking about it, and it’s on all of our minds, but definitely worth noting here. In rapid pace, I’m going to read some quotes from other outlets that make this point. The Lever reported this week, “Elon Musk’s [Department of] Government Efficiency was reportedly canceling Department of Education contracts in the name of frugality.” As that was happening, “Musk’s rocket company was [this week] cementing a NASA contract adding millions of dollars to its already massive deal with the space agency. […] The new ‘supplemental’ contract dated Feb. 10 adds $7.5 million to SpaceX’s NASA work, according to the Federal Procurement Data System records. The overall transaction obligated $38 million to Musk’s company, as part of its overall deal with NASA.”

This is to say nothing of Musk’s other companies like SpaceX, which, Reuters reports, “SpaceX provides launch services to the Department of Defense, including the launch of classified satellites and other payloads. SpaceX’s CEO Gwynne Shotwell has said the company has about $22 billion in government contracts.” But it’s also important to note that “The total value of Musk’s companies’ contracts with the DoD are estimated to be in the billions [of dollars],” but we don’t know because a lot of them are classified. But you could go through, again, the obvious, what should be the obvious conflicts of interest here, is Musk is going in there like a bull in a China shop, saying he’s rooting out corruption and waste while he’s still securing contracts for himself and his companies.

And the other story there that folks were talking about this morning was, as The New York Times and first the news site Drop Site reported, that apparently the State Department had plans to buy $400 million worth of armored Tesla Cybertrucks, which caused a massive uproar. As of right now on Thursday, Musk has denied those reports and is calling Drop Site fake news, doing the standard like, oh, I’ve never heard of this, that never happened thing, even though it was written on the State Department’s procurement forecast for the 2025 fiscal year, including $400 million of “armored Tesla cars”.

So there’s a whole lot more we could say about that. But Paris, I wanted to come to you because there was another quote that I came across that I think people should really recall right now, and this was a quote from Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, who said that DOGE is a “revolution”, one that will be “very good for Palantir in the long run”. And this was something that Alex Karp said on Palantir’s fourth quarter earnings call.

And so this brings us back to the question of, again, the Silicon Valley oligarchic network that birthed J.D. Vance’s political career, that threw ungodly sums of money behind the Trump and Vance ticket, that are embodied in the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, that were sitting there in the rotunda on Trump’s inauguration day. You had Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Musk all there.

I wanted to bring this back to you, Paris, because, could we describe this as a capitalist coup by the big tech oligarchy? Are they trying to essentially force society and the market to become more dependent on their version of AI? Are they trying to force us to become dependent on crypto even though no one fucking wants to? How do people navigate that question? Is it that concerted? Are they using not just Musk, but Trump and the whole administration, to effectively take over our system of government so that they rewire our whole society to fit their needs?

Paris Marx:  Yeah, absolutely. And I don’t think that’s a big surprise. I think that that has been a project that they have been engaged in for quite some time now. It’s just they have an enormous amount of power and wealth that they can use to further force this onto everybody. And it’s not that this kind of tech oligarchy is unique in that way. I think that if we look at the United States, we can see that powerful capitalist interests have always been very influential in shaping government policy and what the government has been doing, and also what the wider society looks like in order to benefit themselves and their industries.

My book that I wrote was about the transportation industry, certainly looking at what Silicon Valley has been doing recently, but also going back to the early days of automobility and where you see these auto companies and these various interests working together to ensure that communities in the United States become dependent on automobiles because it’s great for the oil business and it’s great for the auto business and so many of these other industries that are associated with it. As we develop this mode of suburban living that is very consumer oriented, there was a concerted effort to create a particular kind of society that was going to be very beneficial to a lot of capitalist interests.

And right now what we see is these capitalists in Silicon Valley making sure that they are trying to remake the United States in their interests, in the way that they want to see it, and it looks like it’s going to be a total mess because they don’t have a very good understanding of how society actually works. They think that because they can code, or even just understand code to a certain degree, that they understand everything, and that is not the case. They’re very narcissistic people.

But you mentioned Palantir and Alex Karp. I was listening to an interview with an executive at Palantir just the other day where they’re talking about how they think it’s very essential for the Department of Defense to increase competition in the development of arms and weapons, because not just does that take the defense primes, the major companies that currently provide weapons to the US government and the US military, down from their current pedestal, but also opens the way for Palantir, Anduril, for these other more tech-framed startup companies to get in on some of those Pentagon dollars.

That is one of the things that they are very focused on in that sector of the tech economy. And a lot of these major tech companies are also reorienting to sell more AI to also develop more defense products so that they can tap into all of this money that the United States spends on defense.

And of course, they will promote that as a savings because one of the things that they always point to is SpaceX, to say, look, SpaceX reduced the cost of launching, and now the United States has this much easier ability to get things into space. And when you note that the United States is becoming dependent on SpaceX in a way that actually has people really concerned, that’s not a worry to them because they just say, oh, well, other companies could compete on cost, but they’re not. So the problem isn’t with SpaceX, it’s with everyone else.

And that is something that we’re also seeing, as you mentioned NASA, is NASA is going to be a focus of Elon Musk and the DOGE agency. There were reports today that DOGE people are now going to NASA to look through the books, and the acting NASA administrator is welcoming them to do that. And it seems quite clear that they are going to seek to remake NASA around Elon Musk’s priorities and SpaceX’s priorities in particular, potentially even the cancellation of the space launch system, which Boeing, and I can’t remember the other company that’s working on that, but essentially to cancel that and to make sure that SpaceX is going to get more business out of it.

So everywhere you look, they are trying to remake things in order for them to benefit from it. David Sachs, who is the AI and crypto czar, says that stable coin legislation is their first big priority. So to try to legitimize the crypto industry and to make sure that it’s easier to roll out crypto and these products throughout the US economy and financial system, despite the fact that we saw how scam laden this whole industry is and how these venture capitalists benefited from it.

We have reporting that Marc Andreessen, despite the fact that he’s not very public facing, he does a lot of interviews and stuff, but he’s not out talking a lot about what he’s doing with the administration, but reportedly he also has a lot of influence in the policies that are being pushed forward.

So a lot of these tech billionaires are trying to make sure that the changes that the Trump administration is going to bring forward are going to be in their interests, and that the things that are going to make them money and increase their power are things that are going to be pushed forward in the next little while.

That is not a big surprise, but we need to be aware of those things if we’re going to be able to push back on them properly and try to ensure that the tech industry isn’t able to remake American society in the way that it would want to see it, regardless of what that means for everybody else. Because I can guarantee you that, just as people have been increasingly waking up to the harms that have come of this industry and these tech companies over the past few decades, despite the fact that they were long positioned as increasing democracy and freedom and convenience and all this stuff, that actually there are a whole load of issues that have come of the transformation of the economy with these digital services because these people don’t really care about average people or the consequences of what they do. They’re capitalists. They’re just trying to make their money and increase their power.

Adam Johnson:  That’s what makes this whole deep state framing so goofy. These are all defense contractors. Palantir was co-founded by the CIA through its In-Q-Tel fund in 2003. Peter Thiel was on their original board of directors the year before he put the first big money into Facebook. This is someone who’s deeply into the so-called deep state Pentagon contract, CIA. It’s all fucking a show. It’s all an act. This is this victimization link of the deep state’s after them, and it’s like, you are the fucking deep state. And this is what they want. They want control over the government.

And a lot of progressives have said, why has DOGE not gone after the Defense Department? And I think that’s a little bit of a trap because I think they will go after the Defense Department in a very particular way, in the same way Josh Hawley holds up DOD bills because he wants to rename bases after Confederate generals. I think they’ll go after it for anti-“DEI” stuff to go after trans people, Black people, they’ll do that. They’ll call it efficiency, but they’ll do the racist disciplining aspect. But they’ll also just get rid of defense contractors that aren’t them.

Again, they’ll put it under the auspices of modernization, AI, all this slick dogshit to make it seem like it’s, oh, they’re just streamlining things. But it’s because they want to pay back a lot of their buddies in Silicon Valley. And some of these companies they perceive as dinosaurs, whether it’s Boeing or Lockheed Martin or whatever, will probably lose out on contracts to some of their Silicon Valley. They have a ton of money in defense contractors.

So I think they’ll do that. And maybe that’ll shave off, at the end of the day, a couple billion. But ultimately it’s just a power grab. It’s got nothing to do with genuinely taking on the power of the deep state or power of the CIA or power of the Pentagon. These guys are not interested in that. They are interested in the raw exercise of American imperial power, just like every other capitalist. They want to do it their way. If anything, it’s maybe a civil war within the defense contracting world, but it’s not going to meaningfully push back on the Pentagon.

So when people like Ro Khanna, and to some extent even Bernie Sanders, they get all cute saying, why don’t you defend, go after the Defense Department? I’m like, man, be careful what you wish for, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to purge it of fucking Black people and give their contracts to their buddies. So again, because all this is just in bad faith, it’s got nothing to do with efficiency, obviously. Clearly, in case it wasn’t obvious [laughs].

Paris Marx:  No, I think the thing to always remember is you think about the history of Silicon Valley, and when we think of Silicon Valley today, we think of the internet companies and digital technology and all this stuff, but Lockheed Martin and missile manufacturers and all that stuff have always been there. They were where the first microprocessors went, to go into these missiles. This relationship has always been there, and we’re seeing it very much come to the fore at the moment.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Guys, this has been a phenomenal conversation, and I could genuinely talk to you for two more hours, but I know I’ve got to wrap up and let you go. And so by way of a final, not a question to answer right here, but just maybe looking ahead to the next stream when we can get you guys back on to talk about this, let’s not forget that the world does not stop and end with the United States.

What happens here is also going to depend on what technology from China and other parts of the world do. And we’ve been seeing that there are plenty of companies, governments, people around the world who are salivating at the chance to make American capitalists and America itself pay the price for all of our bullshit in past years, decades, and centuries.

So I wanted to ask if you had any leading thoughts for things that people should keep an eye on when they’re also trying to get a handle on this subject? What outside of the US, particularly when it comes to China, should we also be factoring in here?

So let’s make that a final note. And also tell folks where they can find you and take advantage of your brilliant work after we close out this stream.

So yeah, Paris, let’s go back to you, and then Adam, we’ll close out with you.

Paris Marx:  Sounds good. Yeah, absolutely. China is the big competitor at the moment when it comes to technology because it has been able to actually develop a proper industry because it’s protected a lot of its companies, so it was able to do that. We recently saw the AI market get this big scare when a Chinese company called DeepSeek developed a more efficient generative AI model that had all these very energy intensive American companies running and getting nervous. I don’t think it’s ultimately going to change a whole lot.

But I would also say in this moment where you have Trump flexing the power of the American government and making it so that the exercise of American power is very short term and very transactional, that you have a lot of countries that were previously aligned with the United States that are still aligned with the United States getting more and more pissed off, I would say, with the US and the American government. I’m in Canada, so obviously I’m thinking about that a lot these days as we hear about major tariffs being put on Canada and Mexico and talk of Canada being a 51st state.

But you also hear what Donald Trump has been saying about Panama, about South Africa, about different parts of Europe, Greenland, Denmark, not to mention his new plan to take over Gaza, apparently, and turn it into a wonderful resort or something.

As the United States says more of these things and turns off countries that have been its allies, I think that there’s also an opening there, as we see the relationship between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley and these tech billionaires, for other countries to come together and to say, not just fuck the United States, but fuck Silicon Valley as well. And we can develop our own technologies to compete against this and increasingly try to reduce our dependence on American digital technology and these tech companies that we were told we had to be dependent on because of this moment and how the internet was supposed to work in this new neoliberal era that increased American power.

So I guess maybe it’s more of a hope. We see the Europeans getting increasingly frustrated. I know Canada is very frustrated, and I’m sure a number of other countries are as well. And I hope that that becomes actually some sort of a broader movement, for these countries to try something different rather than just keep being dependent on the United States. But we’ll see where that ultimately goes. I think China right now is obviously the one to watch in this area, but I hope it will expand beyond that as people get fed up with the US.

And on that, of course, Tech Won’t Save Us podcast is where I am most of the time. Usually I tweet or post on Bluesky these days. And I also have a newsletter called Disconnect.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Which everyone should subscribe to. And I can’t stress enough, go listen to Tech Won’t Save Us. You’ll learn a lot that you’re going to need right now to understand what the hell is happening.

Adam, let’s close out with you. Any final thoughts on that? And where can folks find you?

Adam Johnson:  This is, again, this is an example. What is fascism? It’s imperialism turned inwards. I think they are so high on their own ideological supply. They’re getting so greedy, they don’t understand that the liberal state, such as it is, all these DEI programs — The actual ones, not the racist canard — This is all to preserve capitalism. It’s an HR device. They’re trying to help you.

But Musk and these right-wing oligarchs, they’re so in their own world, they truly have developed what Cass Sunstein refers to pejoratively as a crippling epistemology. They’re so warped in their mind. It’s like going after USAID. It’s a soft power. It’s a regime change [laughs] like [inaudible]. Yeah, it does important work, but that’s not really why it’s there.

And I think that this level of myopia, I think we’re seeing this play out, and they’re so used to just consuming and consuming and consuming that they will let the world burn if it can get them an extra 5%. The smart billionaires, the ones who don’t really see much difference between $100 billion and $150 billion, who understand that, who donate to Democrats, who understand that they’re a fundamentally conservative force, are just losing the day. And they’re not really, they don’t have that much skin in the game, and they just will keep consuming and consuming until there’s nothing left to consume.

Even if, again, they blow up the very — It’s like when they talk about AI. The way they talk, you would think they don’t need consumers or people. It’s humanity without humans. It’s a very dark vision of the world. And Musk really does exemplify this. He is the epitome of this. He views everyone as an NPC. He’s the main actor. People either work for him or they’re in his way.

And this is a general pathology in Silicon Valley. It, again, it’s not everybody, but it’s a lot of ’em. This kind of Randian dark vision of the world of dog eat dog. And they don’t understand that savvy capitalists know how to adapt and throw the little piggy some slop, and they don’t even want to do that. So I think they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction in certain ways. And the question is, what force will emerge to counterbalance that dark vision? And right now, I don’t see that happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But I think the question itself is one we all need to sit with because we need to be the authors of that counter story. What is it? How are we telling it? How are we fighting to make it a reality? That is our task, but we know the story that these oligarchs want to tell and the role that they want us, as minor characters and cannon fodder, to play in their story.

And so we want to end on that note, as a call to action to all of us. What is the story that we are telling to counteract this technofascist takeover that ends with the potential destruction of civilization as such, the planet that we live on, if not checked. What is the check? What are we prepared to do? What are we going to do to fight for a better future that’s still worth living in for ourselves and our children? We need to answer that question in a hurry.

And I really cannot thank enough all of our incredible guests today on the stream: the great Aaron Stephens, Paris Marx, and Adam Johnson, who have contributed to making this a phenomenal conversation. I hope that you all learned as much from it as I did.

Please give us your feedback in the live chat. Reach out to us over email. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Become a donor and a community member today, because your support directly translates to us getting to do more shows like this, doing more weekly reporting on workers in the labor movement, on the people victimized by the prison-industrial complex, people victimized by the police, and this gross system of inequality and endless war. We are on the front lines holding a microphone to the folks who are fighting the fight there in the middle of the struggle.

And so we can’t do that work without you and your support. So please let us know how we’re doing. Please let us know what you’d like us to address on future livestreams, and other guests that you want us to have on.

But we do these streams for you. We do them to hopefully empower you and others to act in this moment, because if we don’t act and we let this all happen, we are headed towards a very, very dark place. We’re in a dark place right now, but things can still always get darker. So please fight however you can for the light, and hold it up, and we’ll be right there with you.

For The Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez thanking you for the whole team here, everyone behind the scenes who is making this stream happen. We are with you, and we thank you for watching, and we thank you for caring. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.

[Outro] Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories, and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

Trump’s threats of tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico have wreaked havoc on US relations with its closest trade partners. While the tariffs against Canada and Mexico have been deferred by a month, lasting damage has likely been done to US relations with the only countries with which it shares land borders. The fallout of the trade spat is already remaking Canadian politics, with many wondering whether the dispute has truly ended given Trump’s repeated calls for the US to annex its northern neighbor. How will all of this shape Canada’s already tumultuous political situation, with Justin Trudeau having just announced that he was stepping down as the country’s Prime Minister, with a high-stakes national election in October looming, and with Canada taking its own rightward political turn led by Pierre Poilievre? What impact will these trade wars have on working people across North America, and how can we fuse our common struggles across borders? 

Andrea Houston of Ricochet Media, Desmond Cole of The Breach, and independent journalist and founder of On The Line Media Samira Mohyeddin join The Real News for a cross-border discussion on US-Canadian relations, and the urgent need to build solidarity among US and Canadian workers in the face of Trump’s destabilizing agenda.

Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

President Donald Trump sparked waves of panic, confusion, disbelief, betrayal, and anger this weekend after announcing on Saturday that he would be imposing 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada, and a lower 10% tariff on Canadian oil, natural gas, and electricity. Trump’s announcement also included new 10% tariffs on Chinese goods.

Now, these are in addition to existing tariffs on Chinese products, and already two thirds of all US trade with China is around under 20% tariffs, which Trump imposed during his first term. And the Biden administration actually raised tariff rates to 100% on electric vehicles, 50% on solar cells, and up to 25% on select products like EV batteries, critical minerals, steel, aluminum, and face masks.

Now, Canada and Mexico are the two largest trading partners of the US. China is the third. Together, they account for over 40% of all imports into the US, according to data from the United States International Trade Commission.

Now, tariffs are taxes imposed by the government on imported goods, and those taxes are paid to the government by the American buyers of those foreign goods. Often, those higher costs are passed on to the consumer either because prices for the same goods are now higher and businesses just don’t want to eat those costs themselves, or because domestic supply of those goods decreases as a result of the tariffs and the demand in price in the domestic market increases. Either way, the point is that we would feel the brunt of it.

Now, Trump repeatedly waved away concerns that the cost of his tariffs would be borne by regular people already hurting from punishing inflation and an ongoing cost of living crisis. On Friday before announcing the new tariffs. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that tariffs don’t cause inflation, they cause something else. Let’s take a listen.

[CLIP BEGINS]

President Donald Trump:  Tariffs don’t cause inflation. They cause success. They cause big success. So we’re going to have great success. There could be some temporary short-term disruption, and people will understand that…

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So that short-term disruption is worth it and these tariffs are necessary, according to Trump, in order to correct what he has long called an unfair trade arrangement between the United States and the rest of the world — And to supposedly force America’s neighbors and trading partners to do more to stop illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl into the United States. The White House actually said on Saturday after announcing the tariffs, “The extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, constitutes a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). […] President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”

So Trump’s tariffs on all Chinese products already went into effect at midnight on Tuesday, and Beijing quickly hit back. As The New York Times reports, “The Chinese government came back with a series of retaliatory steps, including additional tariffs on liquified natural gas, coal, farm machinery and other products from the United States.” It also said it had “implemented restrictions on the export of certain critical minerals, many of which are used in the production of high-tech products. In addition, Chinese market regulators said they had launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google.”

Now, Canada and Mexico, on the other hand, managed to avoid the same fate as China — For now. At the 11th hour after this whole melodramatic Trumpian spectacle played out into Monday, President Trump spoke with Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, and Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and agreed to a 30-day pause on his tariff threat. At 5:00 PM on Monday, Trump posted to Truth Social: “I am [very] pleased with this initial outcome, and the Tariffs announced on Saturday will be paused for a 30 day period to see whether or not a final Economic deal with Canada can be structured. FAIRNESS FOR ALL!” he wrote in all caps.

So Trump’s line about reaching a final economic deal with Canada is pretty much a direct sign that this was never just about immigration and fentanyl. And minutes before Trump’s announcement on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau posted himself on the platform X: “I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border. In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada-US Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.”

So what does this deal with Canada to avoid this week’s tariffs actually mean in practice? What deals are going to be struck, and what concessions are going to be extracted in the future under Trump’s tariff threats? What the hell is going on, and what does this all look like from the Canada side? How will all of this shape Canada’s already tumultuous political situation, with Trudeau having just announced that he was stepping down as the country’s prime minister, with Canada now facing its own high-stakes election in October? And with the country, like many around the world, taking its own hard right turn — And with a very Trump-like, but also very uniquely Canadian, far-right figure ascending in Pierre Poilievre? What impact will these trade wars have on working people across North America, and how can we help each other understand what’s happening with an international perspective? And how can we fuse our common struggles across borders?

We’re going to dig into all of this today, and I really could not be more honored and excited to have this incredible panel of journalists, media makers, colleagues, and collaborators joining us today from across the border in Canada.

Joining us today, we’ve got Samira Mohyeddin. Samira is a journalist and broadcaster and founder of On The Line Media. We’ve got Desmond Cole. Desmond is a journalist based in Toronto, and he is currently working with The Breach, an independent media outlet in Canada. He is also the author of the bestselling 2020 book The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power. And last but certainly not least, we’ve got Andrea Houston, who has spent more than two decades as a journalist, human rights advocate, and journalism instructor. Andrea is currently the managing editor of Ricochet Media in Canada. She is also an instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University School of Journalism, where she developed and teaches Canada’s first ever queer media course.

So Samira, Andrea, Desmond, thank you all so much for joining me on The Real News today. It’s been a hell of a week, but I’m so grateful to have you all here.

Desmond Cole:  Thank you.

Andrea Houston:  Thanks for having us

Maximillian Alvarez:  As always, I wish it was under better circumstances, but I could not think of a better panel to help us dig in to all of this.

Before we really dig into the real meat and potatoes of the deal that was struck this week and what this all means moving forward, I want to do a quick round around the table, and take us back to this weekend. I want to ask what this all looked like and felt like from where you guys are sitting. Because after Trump’s announcement on Saturday, like he was squeezing lighter fuel onto a barbecue, Trump escalated fears about what’s behind this massive impending trade war with Canada when he posted on Sunday on Truth Social: “We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason,” Trump says. “We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and we have more Lumber than we could ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND,” he writes in all caps, “NO TARIFFS!”

So Samira, Desmond, Andrea, what do you see when you see our president posting batshit stuff like this? Walk us through what this weekend was like for you. Samira, let’s start with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  It’s just full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Canada’s not going to become the 51st state. It’s just absurd. We do, just on a daily basis, there’s about $3.6 billion worth of trade coming across the borders. So America needs Canada just as much as Canada needs America.

What I can say, though, is that what’s really interesting is seeing this Canadian nationalism, because we’re not really rah rah rah, sis boom bah type people here. We’re quite muted in our patriotism. So there’s a lot of buy local happening, grocery stores putting up signs showing you exactly what is and isn’t Canadian — These are Peruvian grapes that I’m enjoying. So that’s been really interesting to watch.

I didn’t go through the weekend thinking, oh my God, the tariffs are coming. That is not something that scares me, but I’m seeing the ripple effects of the politicians here and how they’re responding. Like our premier here in Ontario manufactured hats saying “Canada is not for sale”. all the politicians are finding ways so that they could flex their patriotic muscles. That has been really interesting to watch for me.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, it’s like truly the Trumpian age where everything is a branding opportunity, for Christ’s sake. Andrea, what about you [laughs]? And then Desmond, let’s go to you.

Andrea Houston:  I think for me, like Samira, I was less focused on the tariffs and more focused on some of the other announcements that were coming out that were absolutely gut wrenching and sickening and heartbreaking all at once. What we’re seeing right now is a fire hose of news. We’re just seeing constant bad announcements, bad decisions, and executive orders meant to confuse and overwhelm us.

So what I was really focused on was the USAID cuts and the loss of foreign aid and the impacts of that, the devastating loss of life that we’re going to see. I sit on the board of a small NGO in Uganda, an LGBTQ NGO in Uganda, and it’s just one of many that will likely see the impacts of this. Everything from HIV-positive people not getting their meds, which could result in a generation of babies being born who are HIV positive because their mothers didn’t get the medication for even a pause. That is the devastation that this can have. That is really what I was focusing on and absolutely in pain over, what this is going to have on a global stage.

We are seeing an unelected, unaccountable non-American who is directing some of the most important political [people] in the world and how it impacts the lives of everyday people, not just in America, but around the world. He’s even called USAID evil. This impacts 25 million people who are living with AIDS around the world, HIV/AIDS, who are suddenly, without warning, cut off from life-saving medications. This is nothing short of a crime against humanity.

Honestly, all of this has been, in many ways, predicted. This is all playing out very much in how, at least, I have been saying it’s going to play out. And many people that I’ve gone to parties with have heard me talking like, we’re going to see a dictator probably rise in North America. Trump is going to come back. Trump is going to win again. To me, this is not shocking. All of this, watching the history of especially the last 10 years, shows that this has all been written out for us. We’ve seen the patterns of this. So it’s really surprising to me how so many Americans seem really blindsided by all of this. This is an assault on democracy by far-right extremists, and I think the only way we have to fight against it is doing exactly what we’re doing right now, is talking in very frank terms about what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a dictatorship rise.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that was beautifully, powerfully put.

Desmond, how about you, man? What was this weekend like for you? What are you seeing when you’re seeing all this shit?

Desmond Cole:  Thanks for the invitation, Max, and it’s really great to be here with Samira and with Andrea.

The circus is back in town, isn’t it? Here we are. I think that the game of people like Donald Trump is to suck all the energy from the room, is to try and force everybody to pay attention only to them. Nothing exists except what they want. Trade is no good because trade benefits two sides instead of only the United States. Me, me, me, he baby trying to grab every toy at the same time. We’ve known what this is about and we’ve seen it before. I find it exhausting.

So it’s not about pretending it’s not happening and tuning it out, but I have been trying, since last weekend, to think about what are the things that are going to be missed in the wake of this crisis? What are we, on a domestic level in Canada, marginalizing while we turn so much energy and attention towards this threat of tariffs?

We have a provincial election happening in Ontario right now. Our premier, Doug Ford, wanted, initially, to have an election early — You can call your own elections here in the parliamentary system of Ontario and of Canada — So Doug Ford chose to decide to have an election earlier than the end of his term, and he wanted to run against Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, because Justin Trudeau is very unpopular and very weak right now. So Ford’s idea was, I’m going to have an election and I’m going to campaign against this other guy in another jurisdiction who will make me look strong by comparison.

Then, of course, Justin Trudeau announced that he was resigning, so now you can’t campaign against him anymore. What do you do? And here comes Trump, and here comes the tariff threat. And so Doug Ford says, ah, I’ll just pivot to running against the president of another country, and I’ll talk about how I’m going to keep you safe from him and all of the threats that he poses to business and to our economy.

And it’s working out quite well, I have to say, strategically, for Doug Ford. The only problem is that we have a dramatically underfunded healthcare system in Ontario that’s been devastated by COVID and no one’s talking about it. We have, I don’t even want to call it a housing crisis because the housing situation in Ontario is happening on purpose to the benefit of landlords and developers, but against the interests of, particularly, tenants. We have an explosion of homeless people, of tents popping up in every town and city across the province of Ontario because people cannot afford to pay rent anymore. These things are becoming secondary to how do we fight Trump? How do we all fight Trump? Even if the premier, for example, doesn’t negotiate directly with Trump on a daily basis, and that’s not his job, it’s still all funneling down towards this conversation.

We’re also seeing things like Pierre Poillievre has been mentioned, the Conservative leader who wants to take over for Justin Trudeau, and we’ll probably be having an election at the federal level shortly. That conversation has shifted as well because Pierre Poilievre for, what, two years now, has been telling us that the next election in Canada was going to be about whether or not we have a carbon tax, and he can’t do that anymore because this conversation about tariffs and protecting ourselves from America has become so dominant that it’s like if you don’t play into that paradigm now, you’re not really talking about anything.

So it has changed the conversations that we’re having here politically, and I don’t think that that’s for the better because while we do have to address the issue of tariffs and our trade situation with the United States, we’ve got a lot of other things going on in this country. We can’t live or die by whether or not we buy fruits and vegetables from our country instead of America, whether we support Galen Weston and corporate billionaires in Canada instead of supporting corporate billionaires in the United States. That’s not going to really materially change things for us.

So I had some fun on Twitter on Sunday memeing about having to give up my Cherry Blasters and Oreos because of this intending trade war. And I do try to have a little bit of fun and lightness with it because I don’t want to talk about this shit. I want to talk about the things that I do as a journalist on a daily basis that relate to immigration, housing, policing, things that are affecting people in their local communities, the rates of welfare and disability. I want to talk about the things that allow people to live a decent life here on the day-to-day. And again, I’m not saying tariffs don’t factor into that, but we cannot eschew the rest of our political responsibilities to fight the president of another country.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a really powerful and poignant point and something that we mentioned on a previous livestream with Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini, and a subject that I spoke with Sara Nelson about, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants. And Sara, let’s not forget, became a household name during the Trump-led government shutdown in 2019 when she called for a general strike to end the shutdown. And within a day the shutdown ended after 35 days, the longest shutdown in US history.

And out of that example, Sara really gave us a poignant lesson that you were articulating there, Desmond, is that we cannot define our struggle solely by how we respond to Trump. We have to have a shared basis of understanding of what we are fighting for as working people, what our needs are and our methods of getting those needs met. It can’t just all be reactive. We have to be moving forward and advancing the clearly defined causes that unite working people across red states, blue states, union, non-union, and even across North America and beyond. If we don’t have that shared basic understanding of what we’re fighting for, then we’re going to be exhausted by the end of year one of the Trump administration because all we’re doing is fighting against what’s coming, and there’s always more coming.

So we’re going to talk about this more as the stream goes on. Before we talk about the details of the trade deal and what this portends moving forward, I want to use a few minutes here to address some of what you guys were already bringing up because we have folks tuning in across the United States and even in Canada — The Real News was actually founded in Canada, so it’s all in the family here. But we know that folks in the US and Canada do not have the shared basis of understanding of what’s going on in Canadian politics right now.

And so I want to just spend a few minutes here clarifying our terms and letting folks know, especially here in the US, what the basic context is. What do they need to understand right now about Canadian politics for the rest of our discussion to make sense? You mentioned Poilievre, we mentioned the upcoming elections and how this is already changing the dynamic. Do we all have a shared understanding of what a tariff is? So let’s take just five to eight minutes here to just clarify any terms that we feel need to be clarified for everything else to make sense. So Samira, let’s start again with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  A tariff is a tax on goods coming from another country. That is what a tariff is. Actually, I’m constantly looking up what a tariff is. But this is not something that just affects Canadians. When you put a tariff on us, it affects Americans. What is so asinine and absurd is that Trump never talks about the fact that the tariff affects the domestic business that buys that product. So American business owners will be just as affected by high tariffs on Canada. That’s the absurdity of what Trump is doing. But that’s never talked about, unfortunately, when he talks about this.

And then at the same time, you’re seeing very different reactions to this imposition of tariffs when it comes, if it comes, from the different political parties here. Poilievre, for instance, has taken this route that many people have talked about before, but which is to reduce the barriers that are here between interprovincial businesses. So we have provinces here in Canada, and there are barriers that they’re pushing to have taken away. For instance, if I’m in Ontario, I can’t get wines from British Columbia because the LCBO has this sort of monopoly on what comes in and what goes out. So that’s the route that Poilievre is taking in pushing back on this. But everyone is wearing a different patriotic hat in looking at how to respond to tariffs.

And then you have Mark Carney, who’s showing himself as being the outsider. He’s supposed to take over. He’s the new running for the Liberal leadership — We have a leadership race here, also, as you said, Trudeau has stepped down. So there is that aspect too. Carney was running the Bank of England. He was running the Bank of Canada before. So everybody is coming at this in a different way.

But I really firmly believe that Trump is just doing this whole tariff thing to divert attention away from, really, a coup that is taking place within America. And I know that some people say, oh, he is just an idiot. I say that at times, but I firmly believe that this is dangerous. I really think that people do need to respond to what is happening and what Trump is doing. And if it’s not taking to the streets, I really think that something needs to happen in the US.

And I hope this is a bit of a wake-up call, not only for people in the United States, but for people in Canada. I have a lot of friends in the food industry, for instance, who for years have been talking about us producing, being more self-reliant in terms of production of food products in supply chains. I firmly believe that this needs to be a bit of a wake-up call for all of us.

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s pretty wild to be having this conversation while an unelected oligarch and the richest man in the world and his technofascist Silicon Valley broligarchs who are cheering it all on are storming my government an hour away. But what we’re trying to do on these streams is channel our focus. Our focus is a form of resistance. As we said, if we’re all frenetically responding to the endless bad news that’s coming, we can’t stay focused on a given thing. And so of course we are focusing today on Trump’s trade war, the tariffs, the relationship between the US and Canada. But we can’t ignore the fact that that conversation is happening in a context where the corporate-led coup is happening as we speak. So we’re trying to balance those two things, of course. But yeah, I really appreciate you underlying that point.

Samira Mohyeddin:  I’m only saying that because I keep thinking of what Andrea said about the global implications of this beyond Canada and the US. She brought up USAID, for instance. It’s not just Trump. You saw Marco Rubio today, Elon Musk yesterday saying they’re thieves. This is very dangerous, and this is how fascism starts. These little trickles keep coming at you until [they’re] a massive wave and you don’t even know what to focus on because there’s so much coming at you all the time.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And with all that, it’s even easier to lose, again, the context we need to understand any given subject like the tariffs here. And so in that vein, are there more points here that folks watching in the US need to understand about the rise of Poilievre, the rightward turn, and the key political issues in Canada right now that we should get out on the table before we dig into the deal that was struck this week?

Desmond Cole:  Well, can I try a couple of things, maybe, in terms of myth busting. Trump has been saying repeatedly that there is all of this fentanyl, particularly, flowing from Canada into the United States. The numbers that we have here in Canada is that between 2023, October, and September, 2024, the United States seized 19-and-a-half kilograms of fentanyl coming across the border from Canada. Fentanyl, we know, is one of the most potent drugs out there, so 19-and-a-half kilograms of fentanyl can certainly do a lot of damage, but I could fit 19-and-a-half kilos of fentanyl on the desk that I’m sitting in front of.

If you compare that with Mexico, US border agents seized about nine-and-a-half thousand kilograms of fentanyl from the Mexico-US border. I don’t think I could fit that on this desk — And that’s not to scapegoat Mexico, by the way, because most of the drugs coming in the United States are coming through ports and places that are just normal business areas. They’re coming on planes. The idea that this is just a strictly border issue is a complete fabrication of Trump. He has also —

Maximillian Alvarez:  And smuggled in by Americans [laughs].

Desmond Cole:  Sure, of course.

But Trump also says there’s all these people pouring into the United States. He loves the specter of so-called, as he wants to say, illegal people. I reject that term out of hand. We’re talking a lot about goods being able to move across borders. People ought to be able to move across borders freely as well. But again, it’s just a myth that there are all of these people entering the United States from Canada without any kind of permissions or visas or supervision.

What’s actually happening, and has been happening throughout the Trump administration for a long time, but particularly during Trump, is that when he does these anti-immigrant fearmongerings, when he says he’s going to get ICE to deport 20 million people, they actually come to Canada, they come to our country. It’s the opposite of what he’s saying. So that’s another maybe important thing for an American audience to know. And again, I’m not saying that because I want to demonize anyone crossing any borders. I’m just trying to tell people what the facts of the real conversation here are.

And maybe a final thing for people to think about is this idea of trade between two countries. Trump says that there’s a huge trade deficit between Canada and the United States, meaning that services and goods go across the border both ways, as Samira was saying. But basically, the United States exports more goods to us in Canada than it receives back the other way. And for Trump, that’s a huge problem.

Like… Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m getting it backwards already, see, because I’m not an economist, the trade deficit is — I had to even write notes because it’s not like I talk about this stuff every day — But basically there’s an imbalance in how much the united exports to Canada versus how much it imports, and Trump thinks that that’s really bad. The only thing is when you buy goods from another country, you get the goods. It’s a trade. That’s the whole idea. So this idea that Canada is somehow screwing over the United States, or I think in the clip that you played, Max, that we’re being subsidized — No, that’s called business. I don’t have a trade deficit with the grocery store because when I go to the grocery store, they feed me and I have food in my house.

But again, to this narcissist called Trump, as long as someone else is getting an equal, fair exchange, it’s a ripoff. America should get all the benefits, every benefit should come to America and no benefits should go to anyone else. Everyone should buy America’s goods, but no one should receive any benefits back the other way.

So I think it’s important for people to understand trade not as some zero-sum thing the way that Trump is trying to paint it. But this is the largest, actually, trading partnership in the world. And the idea of doing these punitive tariffs, Europe and the European Union is essentially founded, in part, on the premise that this destroys countries. This makes countries want to go to war with each other. This makes it so much more likely that there’s going to be political strife and instability. So when you start fucking around with tariffs and trade, you’re making other kinds of problems and conflicts — Between your allies, by the way — Far more likely.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I’ve got two more clarifying points I want to throw in there, building off what Desmond said. And then Andrea, I want to come to you after that and ask if we could talk a bit more about how this is already reshaping the political landscape in Canada as we head into the federal elections later this year. But two other —

Andrea Houston:  I was just going to jump in on something that both of them were talking about with regard to trade and that these are just taxes. And it’s actually something that the left in Canada, at least, many, many years ago, back when the trade deals were first being crafted, the left in Canada was talking about imposing tariffs on many of these American companies back then. And maybe we would be in a different scenario today if, say, American tech companies had tariffs or taxes imposed on them when they were first rising up. Maybe journalism wouldn’t be on the chopping block the way it is currently. There’s a lot of industries, oil and gas immediately comes to mind, that we’re not taxing them nearly enough — In fact, we give them money, we give them subsidies. We give them billions of dollars in subsidies.

So I think you’d find a lot of people on the left in Canada, and probably in the US as well, would be very much in favor of dramatically raising the taxes and tariffs on some of these industries, lumber and all these other things that we do trade as countries, the more harmful industries.

I just want to make sure that that was put out there, and especially with the Online News Act here in Canada, there’s a lot that’s pro-tariffs that we could be doing that we can’t talk about right now because we’re inundated with terrible Trump news.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Tariffs are a commonly used tool. It could be used for many purposes. The United Auto Workers Union president, Shawn Fain, just came out with a statement this week saying that the UAW is in favor of tariffs that are going to help the auto manufacturing industry. They’re not blanket bad or blanket good one way or the other. But Fain did also say that he explicitly rejects workers in America being used as political ploys in this trade war to demonize immigrants and further Trump’s anti-immigrant, fascist agenda.

So there is more nuance here than what we’re getting in a lot of the news reports, and certainly from them what we’re getting from the White House. So we want to be clear about that too, building off what Andrea was saying.

And we also gotta be clear about one other thing when it comes to tariffs here, because the tariffs are not just Trump’s method of diplomatic strong-arming. They are, in fact, a key policy that makes the rest of his project work, going all the way back to his previous administration.

Let’s not forget that the singular achievement, the biggest achievement from the first Trump administration, was a giant tax cut in 2017 that the Congressional Budget Office estimated, at the time, would cost $1.9 trillion over 10 years. Trump has already vowed to make the 2017 cuts permanent, and to even add on more tax cuts in his new term.

These are tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich and corporations. These are tax cuts that are coming on top of the Bush era tax cuts from 20 years ago. All of this is eroding the tax base that pays for the shit that our government needs or that it is spending money on. And we gotta make up for that loss somehow, especially as the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before that, keeps shelling out money to the military-industrial complex. Trump wants to build his border walls, mobilize law enforcement. All of that costs money, and tariffs are one of Trump’s main answers to the problem of where do we get the money when we’ve been cutting all the taxes of the rich and eroding the American tax base for so long?

That’s where you and I come in. As we’ve said, consumers, people in these countries, working people like you and me, are going to feel the brunt of these tariffs, especially if they’re not offset with increased manufacturing and all that stuff. So if and when those costs are passed on to you and me, it’s not just that we are the ones who are being hurt by the trade war, it’s that the pain that we are feeling in our wallets is paying for these goddamn tax breaks for the rich. That is also another thing to talk about here when we’re talking about tariffs and who they’re actually hurting. That needs to be understood before we move forward.

And also, as Desmond pointed out, and Samira did as well, there is a distraction element here, and Trump already signaled that. He claims that these tariff threats were to fight illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl. And then on Monday when he struck this deal with Sheinbaum and Trudeau, immediately said that we’re going to pause for 30 days until we have this new economic plan with Canada. So it wasn’t about immigrants, and it wasn’t about fentanyl, or it wasn’t just about those, it’s about restructuring the relationship between these countries.

And that may help explain Trump’s childish, joking but deadly serious lines about Canada should become the 51st state. I recognize this line, as I’m sure you guys do, having grown up in the same generation. Let’s not forget, as I’ve said on this stream, I grew up deeply conservative. My conservative friends and I in the early aughts loved punching Canada as the 51st state or America’s hat. These tired, old, conservative jokes are constantly recycled through Trump’s mouth.

And so there is an element there that I think we also need to pay attention to. When Trump makes these proclamations and invokes that outdated bullyish humor, what he is trying to do is, basically, take school-yard dick measuring bully stuff and scale it up to the level of international diplomacy because that’s what he wants out of Canada, for Canada to become the subservient sidekick, held under America’s arm and getting a noogie and giving us whatever we want. And that’s what he needs the relationship between Canada and the US to be for so much of his other policy goals to actually work.

So like Samira said, Canada’s not actually going to become the 51st state, but in invoking that line, Trump is doing this schoolyard bully politics that is going to have real long-term implications that are going to not just affect Canadians and Americans, but are going to ripple across the world.

OK. So with all of that, I want to turn to what this is going to mean for Canada and Canadians in the coming months. We’ve already addressed the fact that this is hitting a bombshell in an already tumultuous time in Canada. I wanted to ask if we could dig into that a little bit more.

And Andrea, I want to come to you, and then Samira, then Desmond. But yeah, guys, give us a little more, tell us a little more about who Pierre Poilievre is, what these elections represent, how the new Trump administration is changing the political dynamic in your country.

Andrea Houston:  Pierre Poilievre is somebody that is a type of leader that Canadians are not used to. This is not a traditional Canadian political leader. He could be described as the most online political leader that we’ve ever seen in how he conducts himself, how he runs his campaign. It is very American to a lot of Canadians.

And with regard to Poilievre and his rise in Canada, again, you can point to our history as the roadmap for this, very similarly to how we can point to American history as the roadmap for Trump. While Canada has certainly done more to look back on our history and the road to reconciliation — We have a truth and reconciliation process that we have gone through, but it’s barely scratched the surface. And there’s a reason why it’s called truth and reconciliation, not truth, reconciliation and accountability.

Many people in Canada, myself included, and people in my circles, I put the blame for where we are right now on the shoulders of both Liberals and NDP — In many ways especially the NDP — For not responding to the moment and not standing up to Poilievre in ways that would have maybe been a clear resistance to this onslaught.

I’m talking back when he first started to really rise up as the leader. Around the trucker protests, there were moments when we could have had a different outcome to the road that we’re currently on. The NDP had numerous opportunities to swing extremely left, doing the kind of policy initiatives that Desmond talked about with housing and climate and populist policies that would’ve really launched a challenge to Poilievre and the populism that he has put forward that is clearly popular in Canada. Especially out West, this loyalty to oil and gas, connecting the oil and gas industry to Canadian patriotism and the dominionism that we do see coming out of the histories of colonialism and white supremacy, it’s all connected.

When you study these systems, it’s not surprising where we are right now in both of our countries. Both countries have undemocratic voting systems and our leaders have done everything to maintain that status quo. Even in Canada, when we had a few elections ago, the Liberals ran on changing the voting system. That was the main point of 2015’s election, saying this will be the last run on first past the post. First thing they did when they were elected is they reversed that policy, like, nope, we’re not going to do that after all. As soon as they figured out that if they did change the voting system, then it would ensure that it wasn’t just a Liberal and Conservative, likely majority, government in power. So all of these moments of opportunism, these missed opportunities from the left have all played into this.

And then, of course, this fragmenting of the left, the populace, has also played into this. We don’t have a solid anti-war movement to stand up against Trump. Where’s the media to really highlight the left in Canada? I don’t think I’ve ever seen really left-wing perspectives on our mainstream media. So we have only ourselves to blame for creating an environment that is fertile for a far-right extremist like Pierre Poilievre.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Samira, Desmond, anything you want to add to that before we talk about what comes next?

Samira Mohyeddin:  Pierre Poilievre is a man for these times, and I firmly agree with Andrea that we created this monster, because I don’t think people responded to him the way they should have. He has really become a figure, he’s almost like the little brother that Trump wouldn’t let in the room when they were growing up together.

Pierre Poilievre recently did this interview with Jordan Peterson, and I think it was like 12 hours long [Cole laughs]. I couldn’t sit through the entire thing. But it was all about wokeism and DEI. And these are the same things that you’re hearing in the US across the administration right now in the United States: Wokeism is the enemy; Diversity, equity, inclusion are the reasons why planes are going down. This is what we’re actually seeing replicated in our country. And a lot of the politicians who know that it’s wrong — And I’m speaking about the Liberals and the NDP — Are not pushing back on it the way they should be.

I know that a lot of the things that Pierre Poilievre says are ridiculous, but they’re also dangerous because they’re not being taken seriously. It’s unfortunate because, in a lot of ways, I like to think that Canada is better than that, but we end up just replicating what our neighbors to the south are doing politically, unfortunately.

Because you have figures — And I don’t know if we’re going to touch on this, but I think it’s really important that Gaza, Palestine, what’s happening over there has really influenced and affected our politics here. A lot of our politicians here in Canada are using what is happening in Gaza as a platform for themselves to try and garner support in the federal election that is coming up. And a lot of them are making some big mistakes in the way they’re responding.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, yeah, say a little more about how.

Samira Mohyeddin:  You’re seeing people, like we have a member of parliament here named Kevin Vuong who runs as an independent in the federal politics. He has really made this his thing. He even traveled to Israel, and we had a whole bunch of our politicians, our prime minister didn’t go, but a whole bunch of these low-level politicians going over to Israel and then chirping all over social media about this person is an antisemite or that person is an antisemite, and they’re getting a lot of support from communities because of that.

And we’re not seeing our more left-leaning like the NDP party rising up and speaking out against this in the way that they really should be. They are not responding in the way that they should be.

You’re hearing people, say, for instance, recently the reaction to Trump saying that we’re going to own Gaza and we’re going to make a Riviera of the Middle East there, et cetera. Poilievre, for instance, didn’t even respond to it. He had nothing to say, but the Liberals came out and said, we believe in a two-state solution. How can you say you believe in a two-state solution when you don’t even recognize, officially, the other state, meaning Palestine? Canada voted at the United Nations to not recognize it. It didn’t recognize Palestine as a state. So how can you say you believe in a two-state solution when you don’t even recognize one of the states that you say that you believe there’s a solution to?

And the NDP [leader] Jagmeet Singh did come out and say that this is a preposterous thing that Trump is saying. But why are we only reacting when Trump says something? The same NDP is not allowing their member of provincial parliament, Sarah Jama, to come back into the fold.

So there’s a lot of talking out both sides of their mouths here. And I don’t think people are taking what is happening seriously, because a lot of people on the Progressive Conservative side are winning ridings because of their responses to what is happening in Gaza.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to hover on this point for a second. It reveals a lot for the larger conversation that we’re having here. And we’ve got another 30, 40 minutes here on the stream, so I want to zero in on this. Because, as you all have said, there are so many mirror reflections of the political reality in the US that are being reflected in Canada. But there are also many ways in which Canada is not the United States, and so many times, especially here in the US, we just assume what’s happening here and the conditions that we have here are the same as they are up there, and that is not always the case.

For example, the latest statistics just came out showing that the United States is now in single-digit union density numbers, meaning that less than 10% of workers across this country are in a union. Canada has around 30%, which is where we used to be at our height back in the ’50s and early ’60s. So you can’t just talk about the labor movement in the US and Canada as if they’re the same thing.

So the point I’m trying to make here is that when it comes to the role of Gaza, Israel and its genocidal US- and Canada-supported war on Gaza, and the right of Palestinians to exist, I wanted to ask in terms of how that is shaping the political scene in Canada. What factors are the same? Is Israel’s lobbying influence relatively similar in Canada as it is here in the United States? Is the crackdown from universities to the media on pro-Palestinian, antigenocide voices following the same playbook? Is the involvement of big tech — You guys have had Facebook intervening in your news feeds in a way that we haven’t in the past couple years. So I just wanted to, through the question of Gaza, try to answer some of those other questions about how circumstances in Canada are very similar to what they are here, and also how they are not.

Samira Mohyeddin:  In terms of the university campuses, it’s identical. We haven’t gotten to the place where we’re speaking about Zionism as a protected class of people. I think NYU and Harvard both now are seeing Zionists as a protected class like any other race, gender. So we have a political ideology being protected, and that is unheard of. We haven’t done that here yet. However, I can tell you that there are numerous professors, numerous students who have been chided for speaking out against genocide, deans, provosts bringing people in. And the students who were in the University of Toronto encampment were actually taken to court. They were part of an injunction that the university got to have the encampment disbanded.

So we don’t have things here like APAC, but we certainly have CIJA, the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs. They may not be doling out the same amount of money that politicians in the US get, but they’re still getting free trips to Israel, and they’re still getting some funding. So it’s like a little baby replication. We just don’t have that type of funding. But we haven’t gone there yet. The UFT has not adopted IRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism with critiques of Israel, but we certainly had our Canadian Broadcasting Corporation use that term, use that definition when they recently gave a workshop to their journalists. So these things are happening here, just not on such a grand scale.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Desmond, what about you, man? I see you shaking over there. You got a lot to say. It doesn’t have to necessarily be about Gaza, but yeah, hop in here. Are there other aspects that are similar or distinctly different that you want to highlight, or other areas in which this is reshaping the political map in Canada that you want folks to pay attention to?

Andrea Houston:  Sorry, is that for me?

Maximillian Alvarez:  So I was tossing it to Desmond, just because I feel like I skipped Desmond by accident.

Desmond Cole:  No, no, no. That’s OK. I mean, it’s public, so I might as well say it on this stream. I’m one of, I believe just over 100 people in the city of Toronto, anyway, who have been arrested, and I’m still facing charges because I participated in a Palestine solidarity demonstration last January. We are being treated for these acts as though we are not just allegedly breaking the laws of Canada, but that we are also doing something specifically harmful to the Jewish communities in Canada. That’s the allegation.

And I say that specifically because there’s been a lot of conflation, as Samira said, with this idea that if you speak out for Palestinian life and liberation in this moment, it’s because you are an antisemite, because you want something specifically bad to happen, not even around Israel, but to Jews all over the world wherever they happen to be, including in Canada. An absurd claim.

So I’ve been caught up in that. I’ve been reporting on other people who have been caught up on it. Samira has been doing some of the best work in this country around that, and we salute that.

It’s been a really awful climate. Canada’s been an enabler of the United States and of Israel. Canada’s sent weapons to Israel in the last 15 months, but the partnership is decades old. Canada’s policy towards Israel and Israeli aggression inside of Gaza and Palestine, they align pretty, I think, directly. Israel makes the decisions about what’s going to happen in that region and its allies, Canada, United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, they say, what do you need? How can we help you? To the detriment of the Palestinian people.

It’s a little different here, I think, because the Muslim population, the Arab population — Not so much the specifically Palestinian, but the Muslim and Arab population in this country has a fair amount of influence, a growing, I would say, amount of influence in Canada, has people elected in government, has large organizations that have a voice, and is part of a lot of conversations that can put a lot of pressure on the government.

And I think Canada has tried to tread a little more carefully than Joe Biden did in the United States during his time. Canada has tried to portray itself as being more even-handed, even signaling towards the formal end of this conflict, that maybe it was going to start withholding some weapons in some circumstances, that maybe it was going to change its votes at the UN in some circumstances in order to signal to people that it was getting frustrated with Israel’s ongoing siege. But for the most part, I think those things have been similar between the two countries.

I actually wanted to go back to this idea of the trade and the things like this because we were talking about Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the federal Conservative Party.

So he just recently came out this week with a statement about what he wants to do with fentanyl. He’s trying to appear as though he’s taking Trump’s fake claims about fentanyl very seriously and that he’s going to do something about it if he’s elected prime minister of Canada. So now he has a proposal that says if he becomes prime minister, he’s going to propose a legal change that if you’re caught selling 20 to 40 milligrams of fentanyl, you’ll automatically receive a 15-year sentence — So we are reviving the war on drugs that has existed in this country for decades that we’ve been trying to fight so hard to get rid of — And then he says, if you have 40 milligrams or above, then you get an automatic life sentence. This is his proposal to try and demonstrate how tough he is.

And I bring that up because I want to demonstrate that there are consequences for how people say that they’re going to pursue remedies to this trade war between the United States and Canada that are going to have really, really bad, harmful outcomes. This policy by Poilievre, he’s so stupid. He claims that that policy is to target who he calls “drug kingpins” — A kingpin carrying 20 milligrams of fentanyl. That’s somebody who’s probably got that amount of drugs to feed a habit, to sell a little bit to some people around them and to have some for themselves. That’s what 20 milligrams is. It’s not a kingpin of drugs.

But because of the specter raised by Trump and because conservative forces in this country want to be seen to respond to that, now we have a renewed front on the war on drugs when we should be going the complete opposite direction. So I just want to say that to talk about some of the impacts that it has domestically on us to have to deal with these things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I really, really appreciate those points. And I do, in this last half hour, really want to channel our focus on what this is all going to mean for working people, regular people who are trying to get by in a world that is making it increasingly hard for us to do so, and now we got all this shit piling on top of us.

But for your average viewer, I want us to talk about what we’re facing and how we actually see our fates as necessarily intertwined. And whatever we do to resist this and get out of it is going to need to be done with a cross-border sense of solidarity that allows us to see beyond our own domestic sphere.

So I want us to talk about that in this last half hour. But by way of getting us there, Andrea, I did want to toss it back to you in case you had any other thoughts about how this week’s bombshell is reshaping the political map, how we got the current political map in Canada that we got — Why is Poilievre ascending and so popular? What explains this right-wing drift that maybe we haven’t covered yet? Anything like that that you wanted to get on the table too?

Andrea Houston:  Well, the short answer is white supremacy [laughs]. That is the short answer. Oil and gas, I think, is a big part of this. I think that it binds both of our countries, and we can see that in the groups that have been at the forefront of the Project 2025 document, the Heritage Foundation and the Atlas Foundation, and a lot of these far-right groups that are, some of them started in Canada, some of them started in the US, but they definitely work in both countries, and they’re very much interconnected in the lobbying efforts that they do. So I really think that we have to follow the money like good journalists do, and we follow that money through the groups that are advocating and lobbying and pushing for these wild policies, these crazy policies.

I mentioned American exceptionalism before, but there’s also Canadian exceptionalism. This idea that we as North American white people have more claim to the land, more claim to policy, more claim to direct how things should happen around the world, where the money should flow and who should benefit. And I think that when we really name this, this is not just an American problem, this is a Canadian problem. And again, it’s how both of our intertwined histories have really played out.

I actually do think that Canada could become the 51st state. I actually do think that there is a real possibility that Canada could be annexed. I think our resources, particularly our water and our oil and gas and natural minerals, the minerals that power the EVs and phones and all that other stuff, the green transition, as it’s like to be sold to us, I think, is extremely appealing. Whether Trump is smart enough to understand the wealth that he can glean from Canada, the people who surround him most certainly do.

And I think that that is a plan for him. Whether he knows how to strategically execute that plan, I don’t know. But I do think that that is absolutely on the table is something that could happen, and I don’t know what Canada could really do to stop it, to be honest with you.

Samira Mohyeddin:  — Burn down the White House, we’ll burn down the White House again [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  But that is, I think, a really crucial point. Because we are in a new era. Whatever it is, we know it’s not the old one. This is not neoliberalism, this is something new. This is a 21st century where the inviolable discourse that we grew up with is very violable right now, by which I mean the very concept of national sovereignty and a country’s right to exist and not be invaded. We grew up believing that, yeah, we don’t do that anymore. But here we are in 2025, Trump’s talking about taking Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal, annexing Canada as the 51st state.

Now, of course, the tragic, comic irony of all this is that Indigenous people here in North America will remind us, like people in the Global South around the world will remind us that we have been violating other countries’ national sovereignty and right to exist in perpetuity. That is what we have been doing through our imperial exploits for decades.

But that also helps explain what’s happening now because folks watching may have heard the refrain that the empire is coming home. It always comes back. And that is, in many ways, what’s so shocking to people right now. We could, 20 years ago, be perfectly fine with compromising and violating the national sovereignty of a country like Iraq, but now when we’re talking about doing it to Canada, suddenly everybody is spooked because it’s so close to home.

But to Andrea’s point, I think it really does behoove us to consider this as not just Trumpian bluster and not just sound and fury — Though it is a lot of that too — But when Trump says he wants to take Greenland, it’s not for nothing. It’s because Greenland has all the goddamn minerals that we want and want to take for our economic future as green technologies become in higher demand, to say nothing of the shipping routes and the military strategic positioning of Greenland as climate change gets worse and as the ice melts and opens up new routes that we want to have control over.

So there is a logic underlying these ridiculous claims about Trump wanting to take Greenland, or even Trump wanting to take Canada, whose biggest export is crude oil, right?

Desmond Cole:  Can I say something though? Because yeah, maybe there’s a certain logic there, but these are allied countries. These are countries that, as Trudeau was trying to remind everyone the other day, have gone to war together and have died alongside each other. These are countries who are part of the Five Eyes. These are countries that are part of NATO. The idea that Canada is the number one threat or conquest in the eyes of the United States right now is pretty fucking stupid, I’m sorry.

At the end of it, we’re not the target. We’re being played with like so many other countries are being played with because I think that there’s a certain strategic chaos that Trump is trying to sow, as has already been said here, because it also helps him domestically. Looking like he’s beating up on all these other countries helps him look strong at home, and it distracts from things that are happening at home. It’s very convenient for him to do that. We just can’t formulate a politics about worrying about whether or not we’re going to be annexed.

Why would you annex your partner when they’re having such nice… Trump was the one that negotiated the USMCA trade agreement just five years ago with Trudeau and with Mexico. The idea that he’s not getting everything that he needs, or that country isn’t, or that they’re going to upend everything. We have to remember some of these things.

When Trump says, I’m going to put troops in Gaza, does the United States actually want to send people there? Does the man who campaigned on saying that all the wars were going to end and all of this nation building was going to stop? Is he really going to be able to turn on a dime and convince people, actually, we just have to start putting boots on the ground in all these other parts of the world? We’re going to be following this little toy on a string for the entire four years if it goes like this. I do think we have to be somewhat careful.

And just to the other point that was being brought up before about leftist or leftish entities in Canada, like the New Democrat Party, the NDP — I’m guilty of what I’m about to say, so I’m speaking as much to myself as I am to anyone out there listening — But the only way that the NDP is ever going to accept a leftist agenda is if there’s essentially a socialist takeover of that party, or if they collapse and there’s a new party that comes up in their place. That’s it. The people who run that party today don’t share the socialist values that maybe some of us do. They just don’t. And they’re not going to take socialist positions out of political opportunism.

I’m saying that knowing people like Sarah Jama, who’s been brought up in this conversation, who are formerly part of the NDP, who really believe this stuff, who are actually trying to shift politics in a more socialist, egalitarian direction. Those people are the minority. And the reason that I still orient a lot of my thinking towards the NDP is I know that there’s people like that in there, and it’s like y’all are trapped because you’re in an entity that wants to bring you along for the ride but is not about to move to the left.

And so when I say this, I’m thinking for Canada, and I’m thinking for Americans who had some hope in Bernie Sanders a little while back and who’ve been looking to the Democrats and being really disappointed that the Democrats don’t stand up to Republicans. We have to stop asking political entities that don’t explicitly have a socialist or leftist agenda to do so out of pragmatism. It’s just not going to happen.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I think that’s really, really clearly and powerfully put, brother. I think something that we all need to sit with, and something that folks here in the States are trying to work through too.

Because when we say the left, I don’t know who that means here or what that means. I think a lot of folks are waking up to the reality that we and others have been warning about for years, which is, if Trump comes back, or even if Harris wins and the Democrats prove that they can win without the Bernie wing of the party, then where does the left live? What is the left? Are these terms even useful anymore in the world that we’re living in? That’s a subject for another livestream. But these are the questions that we are asking ourselves right now.

But more than that, and again, sticking with the theme here, we’ve got to be looking and thinking and acting bigger. There is no sizable left in the United States to mobilize that, even if it was mobilized around a united front back in the ’40s, could take on the raid forces that are taking over the government right now. It does not exist.

And so if you want to fight this, and if you want a world that is different from the one we’re careening towards, you need to stop trying to organize the left. You need to start trying to organize the working class. You need to get out there and talk to your neighbors, workers, union, non-union, anyone and everyone that you can to bring us around a shared basis of fact-based reality, like basic human rights and principles, the most essential shit that actually unites us.

But as far as what that means on the institutional left in this country, again, even if we have an answer to that, it’s a combination of DSA, nonprofits, community orgs, all of which are doing invaluable work, but none of which actually have the size and capacity to be a robust bulwark against what’s happening right now. So I think we do need to really have some hard questions.

Samira Mohyeddin:  We need small acts from millions of people, and I firmly believe that that is what needs to happen. I’ll just give you an example, Max. We live in a country here in Canada that has a lot of monopolies in different sectors. So for instance, Desmond brought up the Weston family. This is a family here who owns multiple grocery chains, and they were involved in… What was that bread? [Crosstalk] They were fixing the price of bread?

Desmond Cole:  …Price fixing, yeah.

Samira Mohyeddin:  OK. That’s a reason to have a revolution if you’re in France. People in Canada need to understand the power that they have. There was a whole movement — The chain is called Loblaws — There was a whole movement to boycott Loblaws. Right now when these tariffs, they were talking about them, there is the Independent Grocers Federation here in Canada, 7,000 independent grocers. I firmly believe that people should just stop shopping at these big grocery stores and support the mom and pop shops on the corner. Trust me, their produce is amazing. They may not have certain things, but you don’t need that right now. I really think that people need to start doing these small acts of being more conscious of where they spend their money, what they do with it, and who they’re giving it to. It makes a difference.

BDS — And I’ll bring this back to Gaza again — BDS makes a difference. Companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s are hurting right now, and they have been upfront that it’s hurting them. So I think people need to realize the power of their own pockets.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I think that’s a great lead-in to this final turn around, the table. I wanted to ask, A, we did pose the question about the deal that was struck between Canada and the US this week, and it feels like there’s a lot of sound and fury there. There are some additional resources being committed, but a lot of the details of this new economic plan between Canada and the US have yet to be seen. We’re going to find out in the coming weeks.

But I think one of the key questions that’s come out of this discussion is what other concessions will Trump be able to extract out of Canada and Mexico to align them with his own policy priorities to avoid these tariff threats in the future? And so that’s a question that we all need to be asking ourselves moving forward. So if any of you have something to say on that, this last turn would be our time to do it.

But also the soul of the question I wanted to ask, given that we’re all in the media, we all work in independent media, we are all trying to report on the stuff that matters, and we all believe that people with good information are the stewards of democracy. They’re the ones that we’re trying to inform so that they can safeguard the society that we’re trying to build here and take care of themselves and all that good stuff.

Point being is that as media makers, as people in North America facing this shit, and as people who live in countries that so much of what happens in the coming years here in the United States is going to depend on how Canada and the US respond to it and vice versa. So with all that in mind, how do we get ourselves, everyone watching right now, the folks that we do journalism for, how do we get people to see our fates as intertwined and to see these domestic issues through an international lens, and what opportunities does that give us to resist what’s coming?

So there’s a lot there. Please take whichever question you want. Don’t answer all of them, but anything you guys want to say in this final round. Samira, I’ll start again with you, and then Andrea, then Desmond, close us out.

Samira Mohyeddin:  I’m talking too much. Start with Andrea [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, Andrea, we’ll start with you.

Andrea Houston:  OK. I think the left has to start with a new baseline. I think we need to recalibrate what it means to be on the left — Problematic with that term as it is, obviously. But I think the baseline for any movement going forward, for us to collaborate and come together, cross borders, but also globally, we have to agree on democracy and human rights as a baseline, and that has to also be an anticapitalist analysis.

The problem with, as Des was talking about with the NDP and has been a concern for the left in both of our countries, is that the left isn’t anticapitalist. The Democrats in your country are not anticapitalist. They’re very much very pro-capitalist, which is breeding all of these issues.

We can’t all agree on something. Whether we’re talking about Gaza, whether we’re talking about housing, whether we’re talking about corporations and corporate tax rates, whether we’re talking about any of these issues, climate change, the fundamental facts of climate change, we can’t agree on because of capitalism. We have to make concessions to corporations. We have to create these kangaroo courts that corporations can go to and say, well, these climate activists are cutting into my profits, and therefore they can take activists to court. Activists are going to jail because they’re standing up for human dignity, for the possibility of future generations to have a future. God forbid.

I think we need to recalibrate, recalibrate what it means to be a left-wing person, what it means to support democracy and human rights. We’re living in not just tumultuous times politically, but tumultuous times in our world. I don’t have to tell anybody listening or anybody on this panel the reality of the climate crisis, but it’s so much worse than what we’ve been told. So much worse. We are living in a collapse, and I think we need to recalibrate how we talk about the climate crisis.

We are living in an era of collapse, and everything that we’re seeing, from the rise of dictators, from the shift to far-right politics all around the world, to the rise of antigay laws, an increase in antigay laws in places like Uganda, to everything that we’re seeing right now can really be traced back to we’re living through an era of collapse. Metacrisis is actually what it’s called by climate scientists. So a lot of what I’m seeing is filtered through this lens.

And I agree with Samira. Small acts, we need much more people to come out and do those small acts. Take to the streets, join us in protest, stand up locally, get to know your neighbors, mutual aid, all of those things. But we also need big acts. I’m reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline right now, and I know I’m late to the game, but I want big acts, I want to see people take big swings. I want people to really put their bodies on the line, their lives on the line. That’s what it’s going to take.

I wouldn’t ask anybody to put themselves in danger, but I think that we are going to all face that in our life at some point over the next five to 10 years. Whether we actually see the collapse of our democracy, I think that’s possible. I think that’s on the table. Whether we’re seeing collapses of economies all around the world, we’ve already seen that. More displaced people, more refugees, more economies in disarray.

And so it’s really important that we recalibrate how we talk about these issues, and we stop being a slave to capitalism, and we stand up and say unapologetically what this means and what is coming down the pipe. Don’t be afraid to be that annoying person at parties. I know I have been for many, many years, so I think it’s totally fine. But I do think that building the big tent of workers of different movements, LGBTQ people, women, civil rights movements all around the world, we all have to come together under a uniform to help humanity and human rights and democracy. That has to be the baseline.

Samira Mohyeddin:  And not be cynical about those two words too, because we’ve allowed the right to take those two words and ruin them where you see human… The entire rules-based order and all of these things. I mean, the West went and died in Gaza. So these terms that we’re using, we have to breed life into them again because they’ve been killed in such an abhorrent way. And I’m all for big acts, big acts, but I’m just one person.

What I can say though, before I let Desmond come in here, is to support your independent local media, support the people who are talking about these things, who are covering these things. You have to pay for journalism. It’s not free. We do this work. It’s exhausting. Sometimes there’s only one or two of us. It may look like there’s a lot of us on a team, but sometimes there’s only one or two people, and we’re trying to bring these stories to you. They’re important. And when we do, don’t call us alarmist. Shit’s crumbling, and we’re just sounding the alarm. So don’t shoot the messenger.

Desmond Cole:  A couple of things. So when it comes to what’s going to happen now with the relationship between the two countries, I don’t want to make too much of a big prediction here, but I do feel like Trump has played a lot of his hand when it comes to Canada and the United States. I don’t think he’s going to be dangling the tariffs Sword of Damocles over our heads every month for the next 18 months or something. He went for it. He got some disruption. He got some really weak concessions — Because remember, Trudeau already said he was going to do a bunch of things at the border before this threat, and when he announced the fentanyl czar and all these things, he just re-announced all the things that he had already promised he was going to do.

So I don’t know that Canada’s going to be reaching back into the bag to find all of these new concessions for Trump going forward. I think he’s gotten a lot of what he’s going to get already. Like I said, I don’t think harassing Canada for the next four years is his plan. This is good for him for now. He’s getting what he needs right now. We’re in week four of this man’s administration — I don’t even think we’re four weeks in. It’s just felt that way. So I think we’ve seen a lot of what we’re going to see on this, and things will hopefully start to recalibrate.

I do agree with Samira that there are opportunities now, that this conversation has sparked a weird kind of nationalism. It takes a lot to get Canadians fired up about living in their own country, but somehow this conversation has managed to do that. And if we’re able to take that energy… The Breach just had an interesting podcast conversation last week with Stuart Trew, who’s at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, and he was talking about [how] this really feels like Green New Deal conversations again, where we’re looking at, for example, we say Canada’s not for sale, and then we say, please buy our oil. Please keep buying our oil. Don’t mess with oil. You know what I mean? It’s very, very silly.

But if we weren’t so oil reliant as a country between our relationship with Canada and the United States, that might make us a little secure in the future, that this wouldn’t be able to happen again in the same way, we wouldn’t be able to be threatened again. So there are opportunities to do things like that.

There are opportunities not simply to buy local — And by the way, there was this really funny list out there telling people to go and for example, don’t shop at Starbucks because it’s American, shop at Tim Horton’s, a good Canadian brand, which has been owned by a Brazilian company for several years now [Alvarez laughs], right? So we gotta brush up on our nationalism because there’s a lot of phony shit going on out there right now. People don’t actually know as individuals what to do. Nor should they, because it’s not your individual responsibility to stop Trump and tariffs.

But you might want to try and use this opportunity to start thinking about how do we support people to have decent jobs in Canada, not just buy some products that have a Canadian flag on them, but actually support better labor in this country? Because what corporate interests want to do in this moment is they want to be like, you know how we should fight back against these tariffs? We should lower taxes. We should get rid of all of the regulations. We should do all of the things that the corporate agenda always wants us to do, and that’ll help.

But I think we need to actually be pushing backwards in the other direction and being like, wouldn’t it be great if Canada was a place where we were providing better jobs? Wouldn’t it be great, with all of these threats of deporting people in the United States, if Canada was thinking how we could support people, how are we going to support queer people, particularly trans people, who are so under assault in the United States? A lot of them are going to try and leave America, and no one can blame them for doing that because of all of the legal crackdowns that are happening. I know people in this country who have been making plans before Trump got elected. How are we going to support trans people coming here and starting a new life because it’s not going to be safe for them to exist as themselves in the United States any [longer]?

These are things that we can do as we continue our work and try to continue taking advantage of this moment and what this moment is revealing to us about some of the problems of how we live.

But yes, I agree also with this idea that small acts can mean a lot. Working in our communities locally can mean a lot. It can mean a lot more than people sometimes give it credit for. We talk about a lot of big issues on conversations like this, and it might feel alienating to people, but there’s always something happening in your local community, whether that be around housing or rents that are really expensive to pay and tenant organizations getting together to support one another, or whether that be about local food issues. There’s always something happening in your neighborhood where you can begin or continue planting these seeds, meeting people, having conversations and organizing. So it’s not all bad news and it’s not all bleak, and we wouldn’t be able to continue doing this work if we didn’t have some hope that something could change in the future.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. I think that’s a beautiful point to end on. We are coming up on our time here. Before we wrap up formally, one more time, I really want to thank our incredible guests, Andrea Houston of Ricochet Media, Desmond Cole from The Breach, and Samira Mohyeddin of On The Line Media. And I want to personally urge all of y’all out there to please support their work and support their outlets because we need them now more than ever, but our work cannot continue without your support.

And that is certainly true for us here at The Real News as well. We need you to become a Real News member today. Your membership and your support directly translates to more journalism, more livestreams like this, more interviews with frontline workers and people brutalized by the police, Indigenous land defenders, more documentaries from Gaza, India, Canada, the US, and beyond. We’ve been publishing this stuff year after year, but we can’t keep doing it without you.

So don’t forget to subscribe to our channel. Hit the bell icon so you never miss one of our new reports. And remember, we do not get YouTube advertising money or accept corporate funds. Our survival depends on you. You keep us going, and together we can keep covering the stories that matter, the stories that others won’t cover.

As we close out today’s livestream, I got one more thing I want to say on the topic of independent media and the importance of journalism that still believes in truth and showing the truth and taking together everything that we’ve been talking about tonight and everything that’s going on around us right now.

These Trump trade wars, the mass deportations, the emboldened fascists and outright Nazis who are mobilizing online and offline right now, Trump’s horrifying and publicly stated plans for Gaza. These Musk-led technofascists and Silicon Valley broligarchs carrying out a coup on what’s left of our democracy, taking over and shutting down whole government offices, accessing and potentially exposing basically all of our sensitive data and our bank accounts. And when you add onto this the fracturing of the digital media ecosystem that we had when Trump was last elected eight years ago with top-down decisions from big tech about injecting AI slop and misinformation into our feeds, or removing news on Canadian Facebook feeds, with people fleeing platforms like X and Facebook that they feel are compromised, and with pages and accounts on those platforms getting banned left and right, and with all these pieces falling into place, setting up a free speech-smashing McCarthyist witch hunt on pro-Palestine antigenocide voices, protests, media outlets, nonprofits.

I honestly can’t tell you I know what’s going to happen in the coming months and years. None of us can. But I want to close with what I do know. After interviewing workers for years, I know and have seen the indelible truth upon which the entire labor movement is based, that none of us has the power to take on the bosses alone, but we do have the power to take them on together. As individual subjects, as individual media outlets, none of us can fight what’s happening and what’s coming on our own. We are simply outmatched and outgunned, and that is a fact.

And that is why every move these oligarchs make, every message they send through their right-wing propaganda machine is specifically designed to put us in the powerless position of atomized, isolated, angry, anxious, distrustful, and fearful individuals. They need working people to be divided for all of this to work. They need us to not give a shit about Canadian or Mexican workers so that we cheer on these tariffs that are going to hurt them and us. They need us to not give a shit about immigrants or to actively see them as our enemy for these fascist immigration raids to continue and these concentration camps to be constructed, all while the billionaires, bosses, corporations, tech firms, and Wall Street vampires are robbing us blind. They need us to not give a shit about union workers and the value that unions have for all of us so that we remain indifferent to the fact that Trump is doing corporate America’s bidding right now by smashing the National Labor Relations Board and effectively rendering most of labor law and workers’ rights null and void in this country.

You want to resist this? Start by resisting every urge that you have, every urge you’ve been conditioned to feel, resist every tempting command you get from people like Trump and Musk and Poilievre to see your fellow workers as your enemy. Canadian workers and their families, Mexican workers, Americans, immigrant workers, trans and queer workers, union and non-union workers, workers who live in red states and who live in blue states. They want us to focus on what makes us different so we don’t realize how much more we all have in common with each other than we do with fucking billionaires and zealots who are smashing everything and refashioning our government right now and our economy in order to keep empowering and enriching themselves at our expense.

But we need to do more than resist right now on the individual level. We need to build a real and durable infrastructure that will enable us to survive and resist long-term as a collective, an infrastructure that is welded together by solidarity and tangible commitment. We journalists and media makers across the US, Canada, and Mexico need to form a North American Free Press Alliance with the explicit goal of not only defending journalism, free speech, and the people’s right to the truth, but to create a common ground where working people across our countries can find informational stability, where we can find each other and work together on a shared plane of fact-based reality and commitment to basic-ass human rights.

We need to harness our existing tools and assets to build the infrastructure for a network that will connect us across borders, languages, and algorithmic echo chambers, provide collective protection against censorship, and provide working people in North America with news, stories, context, and analysis that helps us understand what’s happening in our own countries and across the continent through an internationalist lens and with an unwavering commitment to truth, class solidarity, and humanity, and a livable planet.

And that network must not and cannot be existentially dependent on these oligarch-controlled social media platforms. Doing this, I would argue, is not only necessary as an emergency measure to ensure our survival, but it is necessary for all of us to fulfill our duty to the public as journalists, and to carry out our missions as media-making outlets that exist to inform the public with the truth, and to empower people to be the change that they’re waiting for.

But we won’t do any of this if we just sit and wait. I know that much. I know that competition between journalists and media outlets right now will be a death sentence. Solidarity and collaboration will be our salvation, if we choose it. If we don’t stand together, if we just focus on protecting our individual organizations and our subscriber lists and followers, it will be that much easier to pick us off one by one. And for your own sake and for all of ours, don’t let them. Take action now. Get off the sidelines and get into the fight before it’s too late.

For The Real News Network and for the whole crew here who has made this livestream happen, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Please take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.

From the attempt to broadly freeze federal grants and loans to high-profile firings at the National Labor Relations Board, TRNN Reporter Mel Buer and Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez break down this week’s chaotic directives from the Trump administration and what they will mean for working people and the labor movement. Mel and Max also lay out what we know about the tragic collision of a US Army Black Hawk helicopter and American Airlines regional passenger jet, Trump’s broad attacks on federal workers, including air traffic controllers and members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and how those attacks have been going on long before Trump. Then, from the historic union victory by Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia to Kaiser Healthcare workers on strike in California, we will highlight key labor stories taking place beyond the chaos in Washington, DC. 

Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley

Transcript

Maximillian Alvarez:  Welcome to The Real News Network, and welcome back to our weekly livestream.

All right. Week two of the new Trump administration has been a characteristically chaotic one. But make no mistake — While this all feels kind of familiar because we have the last Trump administration to compare it to, from the avalanche of executive orders and the baffling press conferences to the spectacle-filled Senate confirmation hearings, the past two weeks have brought us, undoubtedly, into historically unique and unfamiliar territory.

We can see that just by looking at this graph from Axios comparing the current administration’s pace and number of executive orders to those of past administrations — Including, I might add, the first Trump administration.

As Erin Davis notes, “In his first nine days in office, President Trump unleashed a flurry of executive orders unlike anything in modern presidential history. […] Trump’s reshaping the federal government with a shock-and-awe campaign of unilateral actions that push the limits of presidential power. Only President Biden and President Truman have issued more than 40 executive orders in their first 100 days in office. So far, Trump has signed 38 after less than two weeks.”

And the shock and awe effect is very real, and it’s very intentional. Faced with a barrage of executive orders and administrative shakeups, some that are purely theatrical BS, others that are deadly serious and could trigger full-on constitutional crises, from pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement yet again, to declaring a national emergency at the Southern border, to pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. There’s just too much here to process at once. Our brains and our hearts get overwhelmed and we end up immobilized.

But our goal with these livestreams, and with all of our Real News productions, is to do the exact opposite. That’s why today my Real News teammate Mel Buer and I are going to focus in on a few key stories from this week that have direct implications for workers, our lives and safety, our rights in the workplace, and for the labor movement writ large. Mel and I are going to try to use our skills as reporters with long histories of covering labor, including on our weekly podcast, Working People, to answer your questions and give you the information, perspectives, and analysis that you need so that you can process this, you can get mobilized, and you can be empowered to act.

All right. So Mel, what are we digging into?

Mel Buer:  OK, so we’re starting with three pretty major headlines from this week. The first is going to be last night’s horrific plane crash in DC. It’s the deadliest on US soil in over 20 years, where 64 civilians and three military service members are dead. There’s a lot we don’t know, and new information is coming through at a pretty fast clip. So we’ll lay out what we do know and why that matters.

Then we’re going to get into the most pressing headlines coming out of the White House as it relates to Trump’s executive orders, namely the funding freeze fiasco and what that means for workers here in the US.

And then we’re going to talk about the recent shakeups at the NLRB: General Counsel Abruzzo’s firing and the abrupt termination of the NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, and what that means for the future of labor organizing in this uncertain moment.

When you look at these stories together, they reveal a lot about how this administration sees government workers, contractors, and the working people around the country who depend on their services, how it’s approaching governance, using union busting and antiworker tactics from the private sector, and how explicitly targeting the agencies and precedents that exist to enforce labor law and protect workers’ rights has become a key issue for this administration.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, so let’s dig into the most pressing story that we’re all thinking about right now. Let’s talk about what we know and what we don’t know about this horrific plane crash. We are going live right now at 4:00 PM on Thursday. As I speak, President Donald Trump is holding another press conference, his second today. It’s a live briefing on an FAA debrief. So there’s going to be things said at that briefing that we can’t comment on now, but we will, of course, follow up on this story, and we’re going to try to give you as much of what we know now.

Let’s start with the basics. What do we know, what’s happening? The AP reports the basics here. A midair collision between an Army helicopter and an American Airlines flight that was coming from Kansas killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft. The reasons for this crash, the causes of it, are still under investigation. That is the official word. So we want to temper all of our collective expectations here and allow for the investigatory process to proceed so that we can get more information. Now, of course — We’ll comment on this in a minute — That hasn’t stopped many people in the government from opining and blaming and directing blame at what they perceive to be the causes of this horrific crash. We’re going to talk about those in a second.

So AP continues in their report, which was updated this morning, at least 28 bodies have been pulled from the Potomac River already. Others are still being searched for. The plane that carried 60 passengers and four crew members included a number of children who were training to be in the Olympics in skating one day.

This is a truly, truly tragic and horrific loss, and those families will never be whole again. We send our thoughts and prayers to them and our love and our solidarity, because let’s not forget what really happened here. People lost their lives.

So John Donnelly, the fire chief of the nation’s capital, announced that they are at the point where they’re switching from a rescue operation to a recovery operation. This is very similar to what we experienced here in Baltimore in March of last year, when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed — And Trump and Republicans tried to blame that on DEI too. We’ll get to that later — But there was a harrowing number of hours where loved ones and community members were hoping against hope that their loved ones who were working on that bridge — These were immigrant construction workers working in the middle of the night who, as we reported here at The Real News Network, received no warning that they were about to meet their deaths [to] a ship that was about to crash into the bridge they were working on. So we were in that same wait-and-see mode too, where hoping to retrieve living people turned into trying to recover deceased people. And as per the official notice, there are no expected survivors. This is a recovery mission, not a search and rescue mission.

As Mel mentioned, this is the deadliest air crash over US airspace since the 9/11 attacks that happened in 2001. Collectively, those attacks killed 2,996 people on the day of the attack. There’s no immediate word, as I said, on the cause of the collision, but officials have said that flight conditions were clear as the jet arrived from Wichita, Kansas, with US and Russian figure skaters and others on board. A quote from American Airlines CEO, Robert Isom, he said, “On final approach into Reagan National, the plane collided with a military aircraft on an otherwise normal approach.”

Now, a top Army aviation official did say that the Black Hawk crew was “very experienced and familiar with the congested flying conditions of Reagan National Airport.” For those who don’t live in and around DC, this is an extremely busy airport in a densely populated part of the city that has been increasing air traffic for years. Mel and I will talk about that more in a minute.

But point being is that, from the American Airlines side, from the military side, there appeared to be no interceding conditions like extreme weather that may have caused this crash that we know of so far. Investigators are going to be analyzing the flight data that they can retrieve from these two flights before making their final assessment.

The transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who was sworn in this week, said that there were “early indicators of what happened”, but he declined to elaborate on those, pending a further investigation.

Now, I’m going to wrap up here in a sec. As I mentioned, President Trump is giving a second press briefing as we speak. He gave another one this morning. I’m sure many of us saw it, or at least saw the headlines [on] it, because in this press conference, where the leader of the country is expected to lead, Trump did what Trump does best and blamed everybody else. Without evidence, Trump blamed the air traffic controllers, he blamed the helicopter pilots, and he explicitly called out Democratic policies at federal agencies. Trump claimed that the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, was “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under diversity and inclusion hiring initiatives.”

So as usual, the typical boogeyman of DEI being the thing at the root of all of our problems was the thing at the root of Trump’s press conference this morning. And MAGA Republicans have wasted no time reaffirming this line. And we’re going to talk a little more about that as the stream continues.

But those are essentially the basics of what we know and what we don’t right now. This is an unfolding story, but we think it does have a lot to tell us.

So Mel, I want to toss it to you to give us some of the broader context here that maybe people aren’t seeing, and they’re sure as hell not hearing from the White House press briefings right now.

Mel Buer:  Well, I think it’s important to note here that, just like with our railroad reporting that we did in 2022, that oftentimes what we’re looking at is a breakdown of policy among decision makers. We know that the AFA-CWA, and other unions that are involved in the aviation industry have been sounding the alarm about needing to have better staffing conditions at airports across the country. Those conditions have been worsening at least since 2013, so through successive administrations — Including the Trump administration where you had the chance to solve that problem and chose not to.

And especially in this DC airport, Freddie Brewster, Lois Parshley, and David Sirota wrote for Jacobin that “[…] lawmakers brushed off safety warnings amid midflight near-misses and passed an industry-backed measure designed to add additional flight traffic at the same DC airport where [the January 29] disaster unfolded.”

So really, I think the point that I’m trying to make here is that, while the aviation industry is trying to bring more flights into these airports — Which are welcome. We want to be able to reduce the congestion in terms of wait times for flights, having more options as consumers for traveling across this country — That also needs to come with heightened safety measures in terms of better staffing in the air traffic control towers.

Unions in the aviation industry have been really fighting for this for the last number of years. Just like with our railroad reporting, what we learned with the railroads was that lack of staffing and disregard for tried and trusted safety measures leads to accidents. And tragically, this is what happened here. That isn’t to say that folks aren’t fighting for this. That’s the big point that I want to make. And I think that, unfortunately, Trump’s blaming of these various groups really is not, to put it as lightly as possible, not helpful.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And it’s also not helpful, let’s also be clear, falling into the partisan trap of trying to blame Trump for all of this too. Because, as we are trying to show here, and as we show in our work at The Real News, these are longstanding problems that have had bipartisan support for many years. Trump is definitely making these problems worse, but he is not the originator of the problem. You can see that in the question of understaffing.

Now, of course, a number of pundits and politicians have pointed to the fact that, just last week, Donald Trump put a hiring freeze for federal employees, which would include hiring new air traffic controllers at a moment when we’ve been experiencing an extended air traffic controller shortage. We’ll talk a bit more about that in a second. But also, of course, Trump’s firing of high-level officials, even the heads of the TSA, the FAA, and members of the very commissions that are there to ensure air flight safety.

So, of course, the impulse is to look at that and see, well, see, Trump did this last week, and now this week we have a plane crash. It’s a little more complex than that.

As I speak to you now, there is a live update from The New York Times that came out just 10 minutes ago. Sparse on information, but the information reads: “Live update: Control tower staffing was ‘not normal’ during deadly crash, FAA report says. An internal report suggested that the controller on duty the night of the accident was doing a job usually handled by two people.”

And so what we are trying to show y’all is that that situation did not come from nowhere, and it is not a situation that is, sadly, particular to air traffic controllers. This is something that Mel and I hear in the worker interviews that we do in industries around the country, the crisis of deliberate understaffing in critical industries, including those that have a direct bearing on our own public safety.

And like with the railroads Mel mentioned, to refresh your memories, a couple years ago, if we all recall, the US was approaching its first potential railroad strike in 30 years. We had been interviewing railroad workers across the industry: engineers, conductors, signalmen, carmen, dispatchers, all of whom were telling us different versions of the same story, which is that the corporate consolidation, the government deregulation, and the Wall Street takeover of the rail industry had created this process that has built into a crisis over decades, where the railroads have become more profitable than ever by cutting their costs year after year after year.

So what does that mean? It means cutting labor costs, cutting safety costs, making those trains longer, heavier, piled with more dangerous cargo, while having fewer and fewer workers on the trains, and also fewer and fewer workers in the machine shops, checking the track, in the dispatch offices.

The point is that when these layoffs happen, when these corporate restructurings happen, when these policies are implemented in key industries like logistics industries, like aviation, you are not just firing people, you are removing layers of security that are there for a reason. And you’re doing so for the benefit, the short-term benefit of higher profits, while the long-term costs are borne by the workers in those industries, the public that is being hurt by them, and even by the customers who use those industries. Rail shippers are as pissed off as rail workers are right now.

So the point being that Mel and I hear this in education: teacher shortages, more students piled onto fewer teachers leading to worse education outcomes; healthcare: hospital workers who have been burnt out before COVID, even more so since COVID, more patients piled onto fewer nurses leading to declining quality of care, treating patients more like grist for the mill: Get ’em in, get ’em out. This is a system-wide problem. We are seeing the effects across the economy, and we can see it here in this tragic plane crash that has claimed the lives of nearly 70 people.

In fact, this is much like the horrific train accident that occurred in East Palestinian, Ohio, on Feb. 3. The anniversary’s coming up, the two year anniversary of that. And the workers on the railroads warned us that something like that would happen, and then it did — Just like workers in the aviation industry, as Mel mentioned, have been warning us that something like this would happen, and now it has.

But we have been dancing on the lip of this volcano for a long time. We’re just waking up to the reality now. I want to underline this point by quoting from a really great Jacobin article that was published in 2023 by Joseph A. McCartin titled “The US is Facing a Growing Air Safety Crisis. We have Ronald Reagan to Thank for It”. Again, this was not published this week, this was published during the Biden administration. McCartin makes the very clear point that “On March 15, 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) held a ‘safety summit’ in McLean, Virginia, gathering more than 200 ‘safety leaders’ from across American aviation to discuss ‘ways to enhance flight safety.’ What prompted the unusual summit was, by the FAA’s own admission, a ‘string of recent safety incidents, several of which involved airplanes coming too close together during takeoff or landing.’” And McCartin also notes in that same article that “A recent internal study by the inspector general of the US Department of Transportation found that 20 of 26 critical facilities (77% of them) are staffed below the FAA’s 85% threshold.”

So again, don’t get it twisted. What Trump is doing is making the problem worse. It’s pouring gasoline on the fire, but this fire was burning before Trump came into office.

And Mel, as you said, this is something that we’ve had workers in these industries decrying for many, many years. And this is also something that we need to have a long, historical view on. Because as McCartin mentioned in that article, we do have Ronald Reagan to thank for a lot of this.

And I wanted to hover on that point for a second because, as we know, one of President Ronald Reagan’s most infamous acts in his first presidential term was to fire striking air traffic controllers, over [11,000] of them. It was a significant, massive percentage of the existing air traffic controller workforce in 1981. Not only did this unleash a new age of union busting across the private sector and elsewhere, but it also is directly relevant to what we’re talking about here. Because when you fire that many air traffic controllers, as Reagan did, this was 11,000, approximately 70% of the controller workforce at the time, that Reagan fired in 1981 and then tried to replace.

So a point that maybe we don’t think about but that actually connects to the air traffic controller shortage now is that when you, in one year, eliminate 70% of that workforce and then you replace it with new hires in the next two to three, four years, you are creating, essentially, a generational problem where those new hires in the 1980s are retiring in 30 years, and then the process starts again, where suddenly you have a massive aging out of the existing workforce and a dire need to replace those understaffed agencies.

So we are still feeling the staffing ripple effects and the safety impacts that has from Ronald Reagan’s original firing of the air traffic controllers. We have not fixed that problem. And as we’ve said a number of times, air traffic controllers continue to be chronically understaffed, which means all of us who fly are flying at their mercy, and our safety hangs on the overworked shoulders of understaffed air traffic controllers across the country right now. And I don’t know, does that make you feel safe, Mel? It doesn’t make me feel safe.

Mel Buer:  No. I take the train. I already have enough air anxiety.

The reality is, I think, as well when you’re talking about, particularly with the PATCO strike, but in any industry where there is high turnover, there is not really a space for the concentration of expertise. PATCO is a huge example of this where you have career air traffic controllers who have amassed, collectively, hundreds of years of collective experience and how to work this industry and do it safely. And you’re training new hires who may or may not have the same experience, or you’re shuffling folks into these departments. You’re not going to get the same level standard of expertise. We see it in healthcare, we see it in really any industry that has high turnover, from the people who make your coffee drinks all the way up to the engineers who make your planes that you ride on. So this is a huge problem, and we will discuss this a little bit later when we’re talking about what’s going on in the federal government as well.

But that is an important point to make, that what we’re seeing with this lack of staffing is really a lack of expertise. The ability to have internally these checks and balances that create the safety conditions that we rely on in order for us to live our lives without fear of falling out of the sky, literally. So that’s a really important point here.

And again, unions like the AFA-CWA and the machinists who work with Boeing are acutely aware of that and are willing and able to bolster this workforce. But you cannot attract a new generation of smart, capable, hardworking, willing people to buy into this industry and provide their expertise to this industry if you don’t have a competitive job to offer them. And that happens a lot in healthcare as well.

So it’s a top-down problem. It’s not that folks don’t want to do these jobs, it’s really, is this job going to be doable? Am I going to be able to pay my bills? Is my family going to be OK? Am I going to be able to get a pension? Am I going to be able to do this job, to the best of my ability, without working 120 hours a week and get paid nothing, functionally, for it?

And again, these unions are really acutely aware of this issue and are bargaining hard to solve these problems. Unfortunately, in many cases, they’re coming up against an intractable management who cares more about increasing profits for shareholders than actually creating a workplace that is competitive and that is also operating at a higher standard.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk a little bit while we’re closing out this section. It does hook into another key subject that we wanted to talk about today, which is Trump and the Trump administration’s all-out attack on federal workers, and the vilification of federal workers as nameless, faceless, useless, even evil bureaucrats of the deep state who need to be chucked out, fired, eliminated, disciplined.

And if we’re not understanding who those people are and what they do, that may sound good, and people are going to cheer on Trump’s policies. But what we’re trying to say here is that we need to have a clear-eyed vision of actually who these people are, what they do, and how it directly impacts our lives. And the point being is that you cannot solve these potentially society-destroying, society-imperiling problems if you are not correctly diagnosing the problem itself.

That is why the attacks on DEI and the harnessing of DEI to create an explanation for all of this is really, really sinister. Because, like I said, they tried to do this when the Baltimore bridge collapsed. They blamed it on DEI here too. When the LA fires, where Mel and I are from, our homes are burning and have been burning for the past two weeks. And while we’re trying to talk to our loved ones and find out if they’re OK, this whole media cycle is blaming the fires and the destruction on DEI and woke Democratic policies. Now this plane crash happens, these people die, and immediately, before their bodies are retrieved from the Potomac River, Donald Trump is out there from the White House press office saying that it was DEI that caused the problem.

I don’t know how it can get any more obvious that this is political snake oil. It is a built-in perennial excuse crafted by the very same corrupt business lobbies and politicians who are endangering our lives for profit so that they can quite literally get away with killing us and then blame it on a fictional boogeyman. We can talk about the issues with DEI — We’ve got plenty of them — But trying to explain tragedies like this through a DEI-only lens is nuts. It’s stupid. It is ignoring the realities that are screaming in our faces and in the workers who are living those realities and who are telling us what the problem is.

There’s something really telling about that because this attack on DEI and this attempt to turn DEI into the catchall explanation is, in fact, capitalists, their own fake solution to the problem that capitalists themselves have created, capitalizing on the pain that they have caused through decades of rampant union busting, layoffs, disciplining of labor, focusing on only maximizing short-term profits for executives and Wall Street shareholders while putting us all at long-term risk by removing necessary safety measures and checks and balances and accountability, the onslaught of deregulation over the course of decades.

The point being is that I want to be very clear and apparent here. I grew up conservative. I’ve said this many times. I’ve been open about it on our show, on this network. And so, I have a living memory of being a Republican and championing other Republicans throughout the ’90s and early aughts who kept saying we need to break the backs of unions. We need to privatize government. We need to unleash the genius of the free market and deregulate as many industries as possible so that the genius of the market can lead us to a better society. I believed in all that stuff. I cheered it on.

And it’s like no one remembers that the same Republicans, Trump himself included, who cheered this on 20 years ago, the same corporations that didn’t want to take ownership over it are now trying to turn around and blame DEI for the things that they got what they wanted. It screwed up society the way that people were saying it was going to. And now the same people who profited from that, the same people who pushed that policy are turning around and trying to create a boogeyman in DEI and wokeism to get off scot-free.

And we are letting them, the corporate criminals, the Wall Street vampires, the corrupt politicians who have put us in this dangerous position, get off scot-free and convince us to blame our neighbors and coworkers and policies like DEI for the problems that they’ve created. That’s absurd.

I want to bring us to the way to fight this is not in a conceptual, policy-only way, but to, again, look at the ground level and understand who and what we’re actually talking about, and where the problems are and where they are not. I think that this horrific tragedy really points us, instructively, to a couple of core truths that are deeply relevant as we watch what the Trump administration is doing right now, using the corporate crafted language of inefficiency and bloat and overstaffing, they’re importing these tactics from the private sector into government. It reveals how that kind of thinking from the private market fundamentally misunderstands what and who the government is.

The evil bureaucrats of the deep state, they are people like the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee that Trump fired last week. They are the overworked air traffic controllers that are making sure that our planes don’t crash while they’re getting no sleep. They are the civil servants throughout the government who are being pushed to voluntarily resign and who are being reclassified under Schedule F so that they become at-will employees who are easier to fire. You may not like the government for many justifiable reasons, but without the people who make it work, nothing works for us.

I want to show how the leaders in labor, folks in labor that Mel was talking about, have actually been telling us this for many years. On The Real News here last week I interviewed the great Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA AFL-CIO. If you recall, Sara Nelson became a household name during the Trump-led GOP-led government shutdown of 2018 and 2019, 6 years ago. It was the longest government shutdown in our country’s history.

And Sara Nelson steps out of the world of organized labor and into the public limelight as this shutdown, which furloughed 300,000 federal workers while keeping 400,000 federal workers working for 35 days without pay. So people like air traffic controllers working all that time while also working second jobs so that they could feed their families. We were at the verge of another horrific tragedy like this back during the government shutdown in 2018, 2019.

But Sara Nelson and the flight attendants were the ones who were making that point, because in DC it was all, oh, this is about Trump’s border wall, this is not about Trump’s border wall. It was the same kind of thing like we’re talking about DEI and wokeism now, but we’re not talking about the actual goddamn problem.

So let’s tee up these clips of Sara Nelson speaking to the public in January of 2019 making that case during the longest government shutdown of US history.

[FIRST CLIP BEGINS]

Sara Nelson:  We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities, and they are being hurt.

This is about our safety and security, and our jobs, and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you. There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today.

[SECOND CLIP BEGINS]

Sara Nelson:  We are calling on the public on Feb. 16, if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown, for everyone to come to the airports. Everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  I would highly recommend that everyone watching this stream, live or after the fact, go watch that full interview that we did with Sara Nelson. Listen to what she says and apply it to the situation that we’re seeing now. Especially those final words, that this is not about an ideological battle between Trump, MAGA and the deep state and wokeism and DEI. This is about a corporate class of tyrants who are destroying the people, jobs, and agencies that our basic safety and needs depend on.

There’s something, I think, really important here about the lessons that unions and labor specifically can teach us about what’s going to happen here, who’s fighting back against this.

Mel, I wanted to toss it to you to give folks a few points about that before we move on to the other stories.

Mel Buer:  Well, it’s like I’ve been saying. Unions across this country, in small shops, in large shops, in regions, all across the country, from a small coffee shop that’s taking on Nestle to the UAW getting plants reopened in Illinois, all of these struggles are tapped into what I think is a really key thing that we as labor reporters pay attention to, which is to say, workers are experts in their own workplace. They know what’s working, what’s not working, because they’re there every day, and they have generally pretty good ideas about how to improve these industries for the people who work in them and for the consumers and the individuals who are touched by these industries.

So when you see these labor struggles where you might, oh, I don’t know, disagree with tactics or find certain things to be a little odious, or you’re not sure why a certain thing is being offered in a contract or in a bargaining session or on a picket line, you might open up a conversation with those workers, if you’re there, and ask them why it’s important. Because ultimately, from the federal government all the way down to the smallest shop in your city, individuals know what’s going on, and their ideas might actually improve our lives.

And that’s really what the AFA-CWA is trying to do, is what the machinists tried to do at Boeing. We’re seeing this play out in successive industries all across this country. Especially now in this new administration that has already styled itself through its actions as being adversarial to the labor movement, it’s important. It’s important for us to pay attention to these things.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Just to underline what Mel just said there, again, as two reporters, co-hosts of Working People who talk to workers about this stuff every single week, if we sound like broken records, it’s because we keep hearing the same thing from all these workers and we’re trying to get people to listen to them.

But that’s a really, really critical point here. If it feels like there’s no solution to these problems in DC right now, that doesn’t mean there’s no one fighting for a real solution. Over 30,000 machinists, as Mel mentioned, went on strike at Boeing late last year. Let’s not forget Boeing’s role in all of this. Let’s not forget the Boeing planes that have been falling out of the sky over the past decades, and the way the same corporate Wall Street brain disease that took once the most vaunted airline manufacturer in the world, had the best reputation for its product in the world, how it went from that to being the laughing stock of the world and the kind of plane no one wants to get on because we’re all terrified that the plane’s going to fall out of the sky.

Who’s fighting for that? And how did that happen? It didn’t happen overnight. But the workers who went on strike at Boeing last year, they’re fighting to have a say in that. They’re fighting to have a say in the corporate policies that have put all of us in danger. Just like the railroad workers were not only fighting for pay for themselves and better time off policies for their families, but they were doing that so that they could actually do their jobs well and safely and not put us in danger when their trains are bombing past our T-ball games.

So there is an inherent connection between what workers in specific industries, unions in specific jobs, are fighting for that we have a vested interest in, and we should really think about that, not only in terms of why we should support those struggles, but what that says about alternative pathways for solutions when it feels like the bipartisan politics in DC are presenting none.

So just wanted to underline that great point that Mel made. We got more to talk about here, but if nothing else, we hope that you take that point away from what we’re saying here.

Mel Buer:  I think a great way to move forward in this conversation is to take a moment here to break down what’s been going on over the last week at the federal level. One of the big things — And it’s been probably the most dominant in headlines over the last five days or so — Is this funding freeze fiasco that’s been going on.

On Monday night, the Trump administration sent out a late night memo essentially freezing all federal grants and not allowing them to be dispersed to the states and organizations that were scheduled to receive them.

Keep this in mind when we’re talking about this, as I’m sure you’ve read about over the last couple of days, but these are funds that Congress has already approved for disbursement to all 50 states. State governments use these funds for a wide variety of items, from SNAP benefits to Pell Grants for students, to research grants, and everything in between, to the tune of trillions of dollars. These grants pay the rent for workers, they keep folks employed, they keep families fed. In the last couple of days, representatives and governors from states all over the country have registered their alarm and outrage at the move, and they began maneuvering to try and kill the order before it had a chance to really be implemented.

But I really do want to underscore something here, as I would like to read a piece from this memo that was sent out and ultimately rescinded as of yesterday, to underscore the breadth of it and also what may have caused some pretty intense confusion.

So this is a quote from the original memo that was sent from the Office of Management and Budget, and it says “Financial assistance should be dedicated to advancing Administration [sic] priorities, focusing taxpayer dollars to advance a stronger and safer America, eliminating the financial burden of inflation for citizens, unleashing American energy and manufacturing, ending ‘wokeness’ and the weaponization of government, promoting efficiency in government, and Making America Healthy Again [sic]. The use of Federal [sic] resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve. 

“This memorandum requires Federal agencies to identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements. 

“[…] To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”

Now, here’s the issue with this. This was the issue that many people have pointed out, and that is the subject of many lawsuits as well, is that this is very broad. And I’m taking a little bit of a charitable reading here, but I really shouldn’t. It’s nonsense is what it is. It’s called impoundment. It’s been illegal for many, many years, that the federal government, specifically the executive branch, cannot withhold these funds on the basis of political differences, which is essentially what this is when you include things like woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.

And understandably, 23 states sued to create a temporary restraining order on this, which was a big piece of news on Tuesday, that there were moves from a variety of different places to try and stop the implementation of this directive and, ultimately, the executive order as it stands.

Why does this matter? This is what running the government like a business looks like. It’s not how you run a government, Max. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s an absolutely ridiculous idea, and I think a lot of people agree.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. I mean, again, I’m smiling because as a younger me who used to be a full-fledged Republican, loved the idea of running government like a business. And it just baffles me the more that I’ve grown and learned and seen in the world just how dumb I was to believe that that was a right-headed way to look at things.

I’ll touch on that in a second, but let’s step back. When we’re asking why does this matter, there are two key points here that Mel teed up that we really want to drive home. The first reason why this matters is because it is blatantly unconstitutional. But that on its own, sadly, doesn’t mean a whole lot to a lot of people out there today.

So if we just say, oh, it’s against the Constitution, what do we mean when we actually say that? If there’s one thing that every 4 to 5-year-old in this country knows about our country and our national mythology, it’s that America was founded because our ancestors didn’t want to be ruled by kings anymore. They did not. They had spent generations, centuries living under top-down, feudal-style, king-type power structures, and it sucked. It was a bad way to run societies.

And so we came to this new world and created a more democratic system — I say more democratic, not fully democratic. We know there are plenty of reasons in American history for why we were never a full fledged democracy. But the promise of democracy was meant as a direct refutation of the proven evils and inefficiencies of kingly rule. And so that’s why we have the damn system that we have set up, as imperfect as it is. There was a point to it.

So that’s what we mean when we say it’s unconstitutional, is it is violating that basic social contract upon which this whole country is founded, where a president should not have, by definition and by principle, the unilateral authority to govern by shooting [from] the hip through executive orders and totally circumventing the power of the purse that Congress has been democratically endowed with. There is a reason why the House has the power of the purse, why Congress has that power, because it’s meant to be the most beholden to the people, the most representative of the people. And so the people should, in theory, be the ones with that control over how this country spends its money.

And so the president, by definition, by principles, should not have and does not have the authority to just freeze trillions of dollars that have already been appropriated by that democratic, or more democratic, system and just decide that they’re going to halt that, freezing. They’re going to review stuff, and they’re going to determine who gets their funding and who doesn’t. That’s what happens in corporations, that’s what happens in, again, societies run by kings and queens. That’s not what’s supposed to happen in a democratic society, and there’s a reason for that.

So when we say it’s unconstitutional and that matters, there’s a really deep principle at work here that we should not be ruled by the whims and unilateral authority of one person. I think that’s a good thing. Again, otherwise, everything that all of us have ever learned in school about our country and why it’s good is wrong. So there’s that.

But then, there’s also another reason why this matters that Mel mentioned. This just really underlines the stupidity, the inappropriateness of thinking of government like a business, thinking of things like the US Postal Service in the terms of the private market and not thinking about the essential service that a functioning postal service provides to a functioning democracy. That is what the postal service is there to do: to make sure people get their damn mail, not just the people who can afford it. And so if you’re judging things like the US Postal Service by its profit margins or its returns on investment and you’re not including that social investment and that social benefit, that political benefit, then you’re not going to be able to assess the success of that agency or the government writ large.

I wanted to tee up a clip that we had pulled for a previous section, but I think it’s really apt here. It’s a clip from James Goodwin, who is the policy director for the Center of Progressive Reform. Now, I actually spoke with James when I was guest hosting an episode of Laura Flanders’s show — Shout out to the great journalist Laura Flanders and her show, Laura Flanders and Friends.

So Laura and I spoke with James last summer about Project 2025, its authors, its plans. But also one particular aspect of Project 2025, which is Schedule F, which is the order that Trump has already brought back in that recategorizes thousands of federal employees who have certain worker protections that are there for a reason, reclassifies them as at-will employees, the same way that most workers in this country are, you can be fired [snaps fingers] like that, without just cause.

So I asked James what the effect of this was going to be if these federal workers, with their worker protections, were suddenly made at-will employees under this regime, what effect would that have? So let’s play that clip really quick.

[CLIP BEGINS]

James Goodwin:  So what makes the foundation of our administrative state is the people, professional, apolitical experts. This is something we started building in this country in the late 1800s to replace what was known at the time as a spoils system. These jobs were essentially done by friends of the president or people in political power, and that was just a breeding ground for corruption and incompetence. This is what Schedule F would do, is it would return us to this system.

And so under this proposal, we would take all these experts, these tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, attorneys, what have you, we’d fire them. Who they’re getting replaced with is somebody whose only real skill is unquestioning loyalty to the president.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  So we’re not on the campaign trail anymore. This is no longer a what-if situation, this is happening. This is what they’re doing now. Russ Vought, one of the primary authors of Project 2025, is having his hearing right now to be in charge of the Office of Management and Budget so that he can implement the things that he has laid out, and the other authors of Project 2025 have laid out in Project 2025 itself. But we don’t have to get into that. The point being that let’s talk about this now that it’s actually happening instead of is this going to happen or not?

The point to really make here is what James said. Again, you can have all the justifiable problems that you have, that we have with the government as such, with certain government agencies that are not working properly or doing enough to serve the people. We all get that. But when you take the people who are actually making the government work as much as it is and you turn them into an unprotected, easily fireable class of employee who are, again, through this memo that was sent out to over 2 million government employees asking them to voluntarily leave the government while also pushing folks back to work in person, trying to get them to leave, all reclassifying workers under Schedule F so they could be more easily fired. The cumulative effect here is to purge the government of nonideologically-aligned federal workers and restock what’s left of those agencies with Trump-aligned loyalists.

This sounds great when you’re thinking in 21st century terms of running government like a business. But as James rightly points out, we’ve had this before. It’s the whole reason that the civil service exists. Because in the 18th century, we had a system that’s working like how Trump and his administration want it to work now, where appointees were loyalists, friends, family members, and it was a corrupt nightmare, and nothing got done, and people were furious about it. So they spent the 20th century trying to get the government to not be that. Now we’re going back. That perspective’s important. That’s why this also matters.

Mel Buer:  Yeah, agree. I think this makes a… I don’t know. It’s a rising mass of corruption that is just getting larger the farther we get into the Trump administration, they have a very clear policy agenda that they, I think, know that they might not realistically be able to slam through via legislative means, which is why the executive orders are happening in this way. Because they know that many of these bills that they would like to see happen will not get passed. They’ll get stopped. They’ll get sued out of existence. So the best thing they can do is do an executive order.

And this is what’s happened with this particular federal funding freeze memo. The outcry was really big this week. We had governors going on the TV to say, this directly affects my constituents. These people rely on unemployment insurance and SNAP benefits, WIC, and everything else in order to make sure that their families are fed. I’ve been receiving phone calls from panicked constituents for two days. This is not OK. There needs to be some pushback.

What ended up happening is there are multiple lawsuits that have been filed, including one where, I think, 23-plus states filed a lawsuit against this directive. They’re trying to get a judge to grant a temporary restraining order on it. After that lawsuit was filed, the White House rescinded that memo yesterday, and the White House press secretary, Leavitt, took to Twitter to clarify that it was just the memo itself that was rescinded and not the original order to begin to examine which federal funding could be frozen based on the investigations that they want to do into these appropriations. Lawyers took that, quite reasonably, I would say, to mean that the lawsuits they filed were still worth pursuing.

I know there was some confusion on social media yesterday that the memo being rescinded meant that the entire executive order was rescinded, and the press secretary’s clarification on Twitter keyed us into the fact that it was just the memo itself and that they were absolutely planning on continuing to move forward with the directives in the executive orders relating to this.

So lawyers made that case to Rhode Island US District Chief Judge John McConnell yesterday, and they quoted that tweet in their case that, despite rescinding the memo, the plans were still in place to freeze funding at some point in the future, if not in the next week. The judge agreed and allowed that TRO suit to proceed.

So where we’re at with this right now is that the memo has been rescinded. The plaintiffs in this case, for a temporary restraining order, the lawyers representing 23-plus states refiled their suit last night that seeks to prevent any blocking of federal financial obligations now and in the future, and also prohibits any reissues of the now rescinded directive. So the White House can’t, or the Office of Management and Budget, cannot put out another memo under different wording. They can’t wiggle their way around it by directing only some agencies to freeze their funding while this TRO is in effect.

So they’ve submitted this proposal to the judge. The DOJ has 24 hours to respond — Which, as of right before we went live, I don’t think they have responded quite yet — And then the judge will signal that a ruling is likely going to come at some point in the next couple of days.

So if he grants this TRO on this particular thing, that means that, for at least 14 days, there is no federal freezing of the funds. It means that SNAP benefits will be funded. It means that Pell Grants will be paid out. It means that federal Work-Study will still be available to students at universities, and all the way down the list. That TRO proposal also says that, if needed, they can extend that by another 14 days. So what we’re looking at is 14 to 30 days. Presumably it gives additional lawsuits the chance to move forward with this, or the Trump administration can take the L and back away from this policy and rescind this executive order.

I think this, amongst the 38 that have been filed — And I’m sure more that will be signed today and tomorrow and the next day — This seems to be the one that really kicked up a lot of dust and also kicked the opposition into gear a little bit more than what we’ve been seeing over the last two weeks to three months, because it really is confusing and broad, very, very broad, and affects a lot of people. So in terms of that litigation, hopefully it’s successful. We’ll see in the next couple of days.

One thing that I do want to end on with this specific issue is that there’s a lot of information that’s blurring past your [timeline]. We’re getting headlines every other day about some absolutely obscene, harrowing directives coming out of the White House, and they’re coming at this breakneck speed. There is a tracker that you can follow. Just Security publication has a tracker specifically about executive orders that the Trump administration is putting out and any litigation that is trying to challenge those orders in the future, including updates. They have a pretty solid team that’s doing this across the board, not just about the executive orders, but the tracker that they have is specific to that.

And I know that I was looking yesterday on Bluesky trying to find someone who is aggregating all of this, because you can only listen to so many group chats before you start getting stuck and spiraling a little bit because the information is… We will just say that there’s so much of it. So I found this tracker, I went through it, and I think it’s really great. We’ll put a link in our description, we’ll drop it in the chat for you, because if you’re like me and you want to stay informed, but you want to stay informed without doom spiraling and see how folks are actually challenging these things to varying degrees of success, then that’s a good place to start, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And again, please let us know here at The Real News, in the live chat now, reach out to us on social media. Email us. That is our explicit goal too, as I said at the top of this livestream. It’s more important now than ever when it is an explicit tactic of this administration, it is an explicit prerogative of the social media platforms that we use to bombard us with information so that we stay on those platforms waiting for the next bit of information to come. But we’re not actually doing anything with that information except consuming it, fearfully reacting to it, or angrily reacting to it, and then moving on quickly to the next thing. And the more of us who are in that position, the less mobilized we are as a populace.

We here at The Real News believe that people, real people, working people across this country and around the world, are the solution to the problems that we’re experiencing. We are the ones who are going to work together to build the world that works for all of us. We fundamentally believe that you, me, everyone watching this is part of the solution.

We want to provide information, updates, analysis. We want to give you access to the voices you’re not hearing: the workers on the front lines, the people living in these sacrifice zones, the people brutalized by the police, the people brutalized by our broken healthcare system and our war industry that is wreaking death and destruction across the planet. We are trying to bring you in touch with those people, those voices, the movements that are trying to address them, and to get you to feel that you are part of that, and to understand that you can be part of these solutions.

So we want to hear from you if we’re doing a good job of that, and if there’s other kinds of information, other voices, other perspectives that you want us to provide so that you feel more empowered to act and to do something and to be part of the solution here. So please do also reach out to us and share with us any suggestions or recommendations that you’ve got there.

We’ve got about 25 minutes left in this livestream. We also want to hear if this was helpful to you. We are not going to be able to get to some questions from the live chat itself today, but we have been sourcing questions from y’all leading up to this livestream on social media. We have a text service that you can get Real News updates on through text messaging. Folks have been sending us great questions ahead of this livestream through that service, and you can learn more about how to sign up for it in the live chat right now.

So we are going to end in a few minutes. Mel and I will step back a bit and assess based on these questions that we got before the stream began in the final 15 minutes here.

But before we get there, I know, Mel, there is another key story that we’ve both been really concerned about, but you really want to impress upon viewers why this is one of those headlines passing your timeline that you should actually focus on.

Mel Buer:  Yeah, so in the last week or so, there’s been a bit of a… I hesitate to use the word shakeup, but there have been some changes with the NLRB. And what we’ve been seeing is that NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo was fired. Honestly, I think most folks were expecting that. There was a changeover.

What she does is she’s the top adjudicator, prosecutor, investigator for the NLRB. She’s been really good at bringing forth some really important policy changes and also rule changes that really have helped workers organize. She’s been really tough on bosses, and holding corporations like Amazon’s feet to the fire. We kind of expected that to happen. It happened when Biden took over in 2021. There was a shakeup there with the general counselor, if I [remember] correctly. And so we kind of expected that to happen.

What is surprising is that the NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, was also fired. She was appointed in December, I think, appointed and confirmed in December. And she is the first Black woman member of the NLRB. She is also supposed to keep her job through the next couple of years. As it stands, the NLRA and the various policies do not have provisions. These board members are not at-will members. They’re supposed to serve out their term unless there is some sort of malfeasance or a specific event that someone can point to in the administration to fire any member of the board. You can’t do it. So it was very surprising to see Gwynne Wilcox fired at the beginning of this week.

There is a statement here from the AFL-CIO president, Liz Shuler, that I want to read a little bit here that says, “President Trump’s firing of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the board, is illegal and will have immediate consequences for working people. By leaving only two board members in their posts, the President has effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board’s operation, leaving the workers it defends on their own in the face of union busting and retaliation. Alongside the firing of NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, these moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize.”

Now this is important, and we’ll talk about this just in a moment, about what exactly the NLRB does on a granular level. But the way that the NLRB essentially operates is that the board is the adjudicators. They make decisions on union elections, they make decisions on investigations into workplaces. They make decisions on unfair labor practice charges that will bring consequences against employers when they treat their workers badly, break the law, retaliate, fire workers for union organizing, any number of things.

In order for the board to operate, there has to be quorum. So of the five members, there has to be at least three appointed working members of the board. Right now there are vacancies, which is also surprising. Normally, in the normal course of things, an incoming president will use those vacancies to shift decision-making. There were two vacancies on the board that would’ve, I think, if you’re talking about the strategy here, would have changed policy at the NLRB by itself.

Now there’s only two members of the board after Gwynne Wilcox has been fired, which means the board doesn’t have quorum. They do not have the authority to make decisions until they have quorum. So any of the things that the board could do to uphold the NLRA, which is to say the enforcement of the law that protects worker rights in this country, can’t happen until a new person is appointed and confirmed or until Wilcox is reinstated, which she has indicated that she will pursue whatever legal avenues that she has to be reinstated to fight this firing, because again, it’s illegal. It’s illegal what Trump did. I’m not trying to create this doom spiral, but this is concerning. It’s very alarming, and it’s important that we underscore that.

I know that there are folks among the labor movement who would love to see the Wild West of labor organizing return. We may actually see that at some point in the future. But at the moment, what we have with the NLRA is workable. It’s not great, but it is workable, and it does keep individuals employed. It keeps individuals from getting hurt on the job. It keeps individuals from being fired for organizing. And if we don’t have an NLRB that can enforce that because it’s been hobbled by this particular thing, it’s not great, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No. I forget who the quote came from, I think it was a Democratic legislator, but it was like, the message right now is workers are on their own. And functionally that is correct, because the NLRB, insufficient as it is — And we have reported on that too. We’ve reported on how understaffed, underfunded the NLRB is and has been for years. We’ve reported over the years about how the NLRB should be more aggressive in enforcing labor law. Again, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. The NLRB cannot be perfect, but things can be a lot worse without it. We’re capable of having that conversation.

But we need to understand also what that means in real terms. And so I want to tee up a clip here from Mel and my’s podcast, Working People, where I spoke with workers at the National Labor Relations Board, like rank and file workers, labor lawyers, people who are doing the work of the agency and who are also both representatives in the NLRB union.

So this was actually an interview that we did when we were approaching the threshold of a government shutdown in, I think that was September, 2023. Remember, that was the congressional Republicans internal fighting over more spending cuts, border security, no military aid to Ukraine. It was a high-stakes fight between McCarthy and Matt Gaetz. So it was in that period that I spoke with Colton Puckett and Michael Billick, legislative co-chairs of the NLRB union and full-time NLRB workers, about just what it is that they and other NLRB staff do and the role that that work plays in our daily working lives. So let’s listen to that clip right now.

[CLIP BEGINS]

Colton Puckett:  At a high level, the core functions that we do that, I think, most folks that know about our agency know about what we do, and that’s we investigate unfair labor practice charges. So someone believes that their employer or their union has violated the law in some way. They can file a charge with us, and we investigate it and figure out whether or not the charge has merit. That’s a big portion of the work we do, and I’ll talk a little bit more about what that means.

But another big thing that we do is we run union elections, essentially. And so when workers come together, they decide, we want to form a union, we want to join a union, they’ll file a petition with us. There’s a certain process that entails. And then when it comes time to actually hold the election, we in the field go to wherever that election is taking place and we make sure that it’s done, and done in as fair and impartial a way as is possible.

And then the last thing we do, another big thing that is part and parcel with unfair labor practice investigations is we try cases. So if we find that there is merit to one of these unfair labor practice charges that we get, we always will try to settle a case, of course, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. So that means we actually go to trial before an administrative law judge and we litigate the case and we try and prove the violation. And it’s similar to, it’s not exactly like going to federal court, but it’s the same general idea. And so that’s another big portion of the work that we do.

And so that’s the big three things at a very high level. But I think sometimes getting into the day-to-day, some of that can get lost.

As field staff, I think Mike mentioned at the top, we work in offices spread all around the country. We are essentially the front line of the agency for working people all across the country. That means that we interface directly with workers every single day, whether that’s a charging party, we’re trying to help them figure out how to e-file their evidence, for example, or figure out what they need to send to us that might be useful versus what not to, or if we’re just answering questions about where their case is in the process or what certain processes means because a lot of this is legalese, and we don’t expect everybody to know exactly what an unfair labor practice is. That’s a big portion of the work we do.

One of the things that we do, there’s one in every regional office, there’s an information officer on duty every day. You can call your regional office — They might not answer immediately, but leave a voicemail and you will talk to a live person that day, and they will walk you through any questions that you have. If you want to file a charge, they can assist you in preparing the charge and informing you how to do that. And I don’t necessarily know that a lot of other federal agencies have that type of direct person-to-person interaction in that way.

And so that’s a big thing that we do. We talk to folks all the time and then just try and help them understand what it is we do and what it is their rights are.

[CLIP ENDS]

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. So that’s not nothing. That’s not evil bureaucracy. That’s real shit that real working people depend on. In the final minutes here, Mel and I wanted to drive this point home, because we could be playing clips for the next five hours of real world examples that real world workers have told us on our podcast about when they needed the NLRB to adjudicate an injustice, a violation of their rights, and how important that was to their livelihoods, how important it was to their union drive, how important it was for the labor movement itself. But that’s what we’re trying to get y’all to see is that this is not just conceptual, nameless, faceless bureaucratic stuff. That’s what they do. That’s what folks at the NLRB do.

And just to give one example that was the first field report that I did when I started here at The Real News in the middle of COVID in 2020. Let’s not forget that early in 2021, one of the biggest stories in the country was that workers in Bessemer, Alabama, majority Black, deindustrialized Bessemer, Alabama, with twice the national poverty rate, that they were leading the charge to form the country’s first unionized workforce at an Amazon facility. Now, we know that they ended up being unsuccessful in that union drive, but that drive sparked so many of the other labor struggles that we’ve reported on over the past few years, including [contributing] to the Amazon Labor Union’s successful unionization drive in New York.

And so that’s a real world example. I was there on the ground, Mel was talking to these workers, I’ve talked to these workers, I’ve been in their union hall. They tried to hold a union election, which is their right, that is their democratic right, to vote on whether or not they want a union, even if it is at the second largest private employer in the country and one of the biggest international behemoths in the world. These workers had that right and they exercised it.

And the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered in that election by placing a US Postal Service mailbox on Amazon property right in front of the employee entrance with the Amazon cameras pointed on it. And so the NLRB said, hey, that’s not a free and fair election. This is intimidation, this is surveillance. You guys have to have another election. They had that enforcement ability to give workers in Bessemer another chance, a fair shot at a union election.

So that’s just one example of a high-stakes ruling that both shows how Amazon is a much bigger behemoth than the NLRB can take on its own. But that ruling really mattered for workers who were really fighting for what they believed in.

Mel, I know you’ve seen tons of others. Are there any few you want to highlight here real quick?

Mel Buer:  Well, I think I want to just, I could name ’em all up top of the bat. We can do Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Strike. It’s a ULP strike. We can do half of the walkouts at Starbucks started with ULPs fired because bargaining wasn’t starting fast enough. We can talk about pretty much, I would say, a sizable chunk of a worker’s ability to withhold their work legally begins with the filing of a ULP.

And the NLRB has to reach a certain place with that, where you are filing this grievance and you say, we have checked our boxes and we’ve filed this ULP that says bargaining is not going well. The company’s bargaining in bad faith, which means they are not actually giving a good faith effort to sit across the table and work through this contract negotiation like we are. They have actively endangered workers, for example, at Starbucks during the LA firestorm. They have enacted policies that are retaliatory. They have held captive audience meetings.

When we are trying to form a union, all of these rulings that the NLRB rules on are designed to free and fairly investigate these complaints and then to actually offer some sort of recourse for workers, whether that means ordering management back to the table and telling ’em to stuff it and get the job done, or whether that means enacting no captive audience meetings in workplaces. Whether that means allowing individuals to be on company grounds to organize off hours, to pull in people and have conversations to work on a union campaign that’s gone public. All of these things are what the NLRB helps us do. And there are dozens, dozens of people, dozens of campaigns that I’ve talked to, that I’ve reported on [just] in the last year where the outcome, in some way or another, depends upon what the NLRB can do for them.

That’s just the place that we’re in. That’s the recourse that we have right now. We have to thread that needle and to use the law, as inadequate as it is, to our benefit, and be able to work within that and use the NLRB as an agency for what it’s there for. Which is to say, often I look at the NLRB’s policies in the last 10 years or so. When we have a board that is really pro-worker focused, a lot of things can happen.

Final example I’ll give is that in 2017, the NLRB was full of pro-business folks that Trump had appointed. During Trump’s administration, and then the subsequent administration after, there was really this watershed moment with graduate student organizing where, during Trump’s administration, there were restraints on which type of graduate students could organize on college campuses. That rule changed in the last five, six years as a result of a more pro-worker NLRB makeup, and there has been an explosion in new organizing on university campuses that we didn’t see before. By some metrics, it is the fastest and most consistent organizing that has happened in this country in the last five years.

So it underscores the importance of what this agency can do for us as workers, and what this agency can do for us as a workers’ movement. And so when it’s hobbled by an administration, as it has been in the Trump administration, things become exponentially more difficult.

My fellow union workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette waited for a year and a half for a decision on the ULP that they filed. They’ve been on strike for over three years at this point, trying to get the company at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to bargain fairly and to stop playing games with their health insurance and their livelihoods. And the NLRB is really the thing that’s driving those consequences so they can get back to the table and get back to work.

So as much as we want to sit here and say that, oh, it’s just another bunch of feckless bureaucrats — No, it has real world implications for how we can organize in the future. And I truly believe that, in terms of movement building in this country, the labor movement is an integral part to that, for all its faults. That institution needs to use the tools that it has at its disposal.

So when an administration — Any administration, because I’m not saying that Democratic administrations in the past haven’t used the NLRB as a cudgel, haven’t deliberately underfunded it and understaffed it because they are also only pro-worker in name, but not really in action. It’s important for us to be able to uphold this institution because it helps us maintain some semblance of control over our workplaces, at least for now. We will see what the next 10, 15 years look like.

As Hamilton Nolan has said, the Democrats squander their chance to really rebuild the labor movement — I agree — And we are now in single digits a little bit in terms of union density, but we’re not cooked by any stretch of the imagination. And if we can pay attention to and internalize the fact that some of these agencies and the work that they do is actually really useful for our movement building, then I think we have a better chance of staving off the worst impulses of this fascist government.

Maximillian Alvarez:  No, I think that’s powerfully put, Mel. Just again, a plea to everyone watching: If you’ve been watching our reporting over these past few years or other people’s reporting on the Starbucks union drive, the Amazon union drive, but not just those; healthcare workers going on strike for their patients, teachers and educators going on strike for their students, their communities, manufacturing in the auto industry and beyond. John Deere workers, journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, entertainers at Medieval Times. These struggles of working people where people like you and me have realized that if they band together, exercise their rights, form a union, and work together as a union, that they can actually change their lives, they can change their circumstances, they can even change our society’s circumstances, like the machinists going on strike at Boeing or the railroad workers fighting for rail safety that impacts all of us, like we were talking about earlier in the stream.

All of that is going to be so deeply impacted by a nonfunctional NLRB or an NLRB that is functional but actively hostile to the workers’ side of the struggle and is doing the bidding of the employer class. I don’t know what the stories we report are going to be. I don’t know what the workers we interview are going to say in the coming years if that is the case, but I promise you it’s not going to be what it’s been in the past few years where workers have seen this groundswell, and they’ve wanted to be part of it, and they’ve seen a path to unionization with an NLRB that actually is functional enough to serve the needs of working people trying to exercise their rights. We are not in that territory anymore.

So even if you don’t give a shit about anything in DC — Which I would totally forgive you for — If you give a shit about the labor movement and working people, this is going to impact that, this is going to impact you.

And we don’t know what the ripple effects are going to be to the business class, to the private sector, to all the employers out there who now know that workers are on their own like they did after Reagan fired the PATCO strikers in ’81. We don’t know what the cascading effect is going to be if employers decide to go more on the offensive in squashing unionization efforts, more on the offensive in rolling back workers’ rights, treating workers like shit, knowing that they’re going to have fewer options for recourse through the NLRB. So if nothing else, let’s remind ourselves that that matters. That concerns us, our neighbors, our coworkers.

But also that we, as Mel said, are not cooked here. We are not powerless here. We have a vested interest in the story, and we ourselves are part of the outcome. I say I don’t know how this is going to shape out because I don’t know what you are going to do about it. I don’t know what everyone watching this is going to do about it, but that’s going to determine what the outcome is. And so, again, if anything, we want to leave y’all with that note that this is meant for you, for us to figure out what we do next.

And with that wrapping up the 90 minutes where we’re looking at these key headlines, I wanted to just have 10 minutes of bonus time here so that we could, Mel, take a step back and breathe a bit and address these really great questions that some of our supporters and viewers sent into us that helped us think about how to frame this livestream. In a way we’ve been trying to answer the questions over the past 90 minutes, but I wanted to just toss these out there and get your thoughts — And also what you guys in the live chat think about this.

But one of the key questions that we got from Giovanni R., which was really great, which was, “How much do you estimate this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards?” So we started addressing that now, and we’re going to talk about it a little more in a second, but that’s one key question that we’ve been trying to answer here.

Another question that we got from David B., which I think is also really crucial, is David asked, “Will labor only present a front for or a front of resistance and fight back, or is it actually going to push the limits of what we as working class people need and demand? Will labor stop seeing the Democratic Party as the vehicle for that fight back and resistance? Will labor exert itself as if it understands and believes that the laboring class is the sine qua non of production and wealth?” Great question. So much that we could say about there. I want you guys watching to think about that.

And the last question that I wanted to throw up on the screen here, which helped us prepare for this livestream, was from Edward S. And so Edward wrote to us saying, “When will the unions educate their membership about labor history and that the GOP is their foe? It’s atrocious that a huge percent of union members vote for Trump.”

So Mel, I wanted to, now that we’ve gotten through the last 90 minutes, do you feel like there are any other lingering answers to those questions that we didn’t get to, or things that are really sticking in your mind?

Mel Buer:  I think I’ll start with the first one, with Giovanni’s. Maybe we can do a couple of minutes for each one. I think when we talk about how much this regime will affect what’s left of workers’ benefits and safety standards, I think one thing that I’ve learned over the course of my reporting, whether it’s been on OSHA agencies in California, or in the healthcare industry on the West Coast, or the railroad industry in the Midwest, or wherever else, is that oftentimes these agencies can be equipped with the ability to maintain safety standards, to maintain workers’ benefits, and oftentimes there’s no political will to maintain those.

Subsequent administrations may cater to lobbyists, to understaff these agencies, to re-appropriate funds away from these agencies. Just like anything else in the government, you need money to operate. And if you’re being appropriated less and less money each year, that means you’re hiring less and less OSHA inspectors each year. That means there’s less OSHA inspectors to handle the complaints that happen that are called in, and then they start making hard decisions about which ones to investigate and which ones not to — Or it sits on a waiting list, as what happens with the NLRB, where oftentimes, for example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette complaint was essentially on a waiting list for investigation for over a year because there’s just not enough people who have been tasked with investigating these things.

I think what we’ve been talking about, Max, is there’s a bit of a breakdown in the system itself that perpetuates these problems. Something that happens a lot is that workers see this breakdown in an acute area like the aviation industry, like the agriculture industry, like the healthcare industry, and the fight at their disposal is, for example, I just did reporting in Southern California on the Kaiser health system and mental health professionals who are still on strike after 100 days, who saw these breakdowns in the system that was disproportionately affecting their patients because there weren’t enough people getting hired. And these are critically, acutely mentally ill patients who require regular treatments who aren’t getting that — Illegally so, in the state of California.

And so what they do is they view these as workers’ rights issues, patient issues or workers’ rights issues in the healthcare industry. So what do they have at their disposal? They went on strike. Their contract expired, and they’re not going to get off the picket line until they get one written in stone, in paper, signed by Kaiser, that these conditions will cease being as horrendous as they are because that means that they can take care of their patients better.

So in that sense, subsequent administrations have done something to the effect of deregulating portions of the industry, [and] they create serious problems. The railroad strike happened, almost happened under the Biden administration and was stopped last minute. If you talk to some railroad workers, they aren’t happy about that. They feel like they lost leverage because the Biden administration stepped in at a critical time where he could have said, actually, I don’t have to do this.

So I don’t know, man, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Obviously we are looking down the barrel of four years, at least, of extreme MAGA GOP policies that have their own ideology. Obviously, they have their own plan, and a lot of us are going to get left out in the cold.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Or the heat. I wanted to jump in on that point too, because when I think about what these conditions are going to be for our fellow workers, current generations and future generations, to answer Giovanni’s question, I guess what we would say is what railroad workers told me and Mel when we first started investigating that story years ago. Every single worker we talked to told us the same thing at the top: What you need to understand is this goes way back.

And so, if anything, that’s an argument for why all y’all out there should stop fucking watching mainstream political news, or even independent news junkie stuff that only focuses on bipartisan politics and follows the news cycle of Washington DC, because it rots your brain and you lose the ability to think like a real, regular person.

Now, when you talk to other real, regular working people, you get a better frame on the problems that we’re experiencing. And so when railroad workers are saying, here’s the problem, now here’s how far back this goes, and that’s how far back our memories go because we’ve experienced it, and that is decidedly different from the political election cycle.

And this is something that we’ve been bringing up on our reporting here over and over again, is that Donald Trump, Biden, these last few election cycles have been characterized by a sort of like, what did the previous administration do that the next administration’s blaming them about and overturning? And why are people voting for Trump? Because they’re mad at Biden and his policies. But really what we are talking about here in the political world is that voters are responding every two to four years to a crisis that’s been building for the last 40, 50, 60 years.

And so the cumulative effects of this death by a thousand deregulatory cuts, that is what we’re trying to get a handle on here, because that is the frame you need to have to understand how conditions have gotten this bad and why, as Mel said, they’re probably going to get worse before they get any better. From the air traffic controller staffing shortage to the industrial pollution of communities in sacrifice zones around the country from East Palestine to South Baltimore.

This stuff starts happening in more and more places year after year when unsexy, uninteresting legislation gets passed through, it’s not really a blip on people’s radars when it happens 15 years ago. And then 15 years later, you end up living next to a lake that you can’t swim in that you’ve swam in your whole life. Public policy bioaccumulates. It accumulates in our bodies, it accumulates in our jobs, it accumulates in our communities. It doesn’t all happen overnight.

I guess that’s the point I’m getting at, is that we are still in the process of experiencing and feeling the full weight of decisions that have already been made, that were made in Trump’s last administration and Biden’s last administration and Obama’s administration — And Reagan’s administration. We are still finding out the repercussions of those decisions that have already been made, and we are laying the groundwork for even more impactful decisions to hurt us well into the future.

And that’s why I jumped in when you said that we’ll be left out in the cold, and I said, or even in the heat, because that’s another storyline that we follow here too. What are workers and workers’ rights and labor unions going to do as the climate crisis continues to spiral out of control, which it sure as hell is going to the more we do this drill, baby, drill, pull out of the Paris Climate Accords while LA is burning, western North Carolina is obliterated by hurricanes. We are barreling in the exact opposite direction.

But what makes me think of that example is that I remember when the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s attempt to require workplaces of over 100 people to have COVID vaccine mandates, or for folks who didn’t want to take the vaccine, that they did regular testing. The Supreme Court said that they rejected that order and it was hailed as a victory for the antivax crowd, for the Trump MAGA crowd.

But what you and I saw, Mel, and what we talked about, because we actually read the ruling, was that the Supreme Court said because COVID-19 is a general condition, that it just exists in the world, no one employer can be responsible for implementing these kinds of policies to address it.

And so what they were doing was laying the groundwork for getting employers off scot-free as the climate gets worse, as people are working in hotter conditions, when they’re dying in the summer heat, or they’re breathing in toxic chemicals. And basically, we have set the stage for employers to not be liable for our deaths when they’re putting us regularly at hazard in our working conditions as the climate crisis worsens. That’s what I’m trying to point to is these decisions are going to have ripple effects for generations.

So there are things we can do now, but we have to have a full, clear sense of the problem. And that’s what we’re going to try to keep taking apart and analyzing piecemeal in these livestreams, in our reports. Like I said at the top of this livestream, our goal is to not get overwhelmed by the news cycle, but to practice focus, to use our journalistic tools to give you the information you need to act and not be immobilized and hopeless. And so that’s what we’re working on doing and doing better here.

We really want to hear from you guys, and let us know if we are doing better, if there are things that you’d like us to see, do, people you’d like us to have on, subjects that you really need help breaking down in our team here, not just our journalists, but our incredible whole team of editors, producers, studio technicians, let us be usable to you. Let us know what you need and we will use our skills to try to help.

But ultimately, you are the solution. You are the one who is going to determine with your neighbors, your coworkers, your fellow working people, what happens in the future, what kind of future we are leaving for our children. And so our job here at The Real News is to make sure you’ve got what you need to make change. And we want to hear from you, and we want you to hold us accountable if we are not following through on that.

And so please let us know what you thought of this livestream, let us know what you’d like us to cover in future livestreams, and please keep sending questions so that we can keep answering them better and more directly. Because we’ve got so much to say on it, but ultimately what matters is that we’re saying what you are looking for and need to hear and not just listening to ourselves talk. That’s the goal here. That’s what we at The Real News are here to do.

We are a team that is here for you, and we’re a strong and mighty team. And Mel, I could not be more honored to be on this team with you guys in the back, our whole studio team: Adam, Cam, Dave, Kayla, Jocelyn, James, looking at the live chat, everybody on this team is here to help, and we are here for you, and we really appreciate your support, and we look forward to seeing y’all next Thursday when we go live again.

But until then, please support our work so that we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations like this. And more important than ever, take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

As fires continue to rage in Los Angeles, news of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza are raising hopes across the world. All this comes as Trump is about to enter office, ensuring that the system responsible for these catastrophes will continue. Mehdi Hasan, founder of Zeteo News, and Francesca Fiorentini of “The Bitchuation Room” podcast join The Real News as the world burns, and seems on the edge of an even greater conflagration.

Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome to the Real News Network and welcome back to our weekly live stream. You can catch our team here live every Thursday, and you can find us reporting on this channel every week, lifting up the voices and stories of real people on the front lines of struggle around the world and bringing together a diverse, wide array of truth tellers, analysts and fighters for global working class justice. So be sure to subscribe to our channel like this video and share your thoughts with us in the live chat right now. Alright, well, happy New Year and all that 2025 has wasted no time throwing us back into the burning trash heap of history, and we’ve got no time to waste here. So let’s get rolling. We’ve got two powerhouse guests joining us today. Returning to the channel, we’ve got the one and only Francesca Fiorentini, correspondent, comedian, and host of the Situation Room podcast.

Francesca is also the former host and head writer of the Web series News broke on AJ Plus and she hosted the Special Red White and who on M-S-N-B-C. And joining us for the first time, we’ve got the one and only Medi Hassan world renowned broadcaster, former host of the Me Hassan Show on M-S-N-B-C, an author of numerous books including Win Every Argument, which was published in 2023. Medi is also a Guardian US columnist and he is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of the Vital News Outlet eo. We’re going to start today’s stream in my home of Southern California where cataclysmic wildfires, which continue to explode in frequency and severity due to the manmade climate crisis, have killed at least 25 people displaced, tens of thousands obliterated entire neighborhoods and scorched wide swaths of the landscape. The entire region was on high alert this week with the National Weather Service warning that a new wave of intense winds could cause explosive fire growth.

But there’s some relief here in the latest reports. According to the New York Times this morning, dangerous winds were subsiding in the Los Angeles area on Thursday, delivering a boost for firefighting efforts, even as frustration grew among displaced residents desperate to return to their neighborhoods. After more than a week of devastating wildfires, nine days after the Blaze is ignited, no timeline has been announced for lifting many evacuation orders that have affected tens of thousands of Southern California residents. The Palisades Fire, the largest in the area, had burned nearly 24,000 acres and was 22% contained as of Thursday morning. According to Cal Fire, the Eaton fire covered more than 14,000 acres and was 55% contained. Now as the fires burn here at home across the world, Palestinians who have somehow managed to evade the civilization erasing fires of Israel’s genocidal assault for the past year and a half are rejoicing at the bombshell news that the bombing may finally end in a stunning development.

As Jeremy Scahill writes at Drop Site News, an agreement on a deal that will halt at least temporarily Israel’s 15 month long genocidal assault on Gaza was announced on Wednesday to scenes of celebration by Palestinians and Gaza. The agreement is divided into three phases, each spanning 42 days, and outline specifics on the first phase, including prisoner swaps, Israeli troop withdrawals, allowances for displaced Palestinians to return to their homes while leaving the details of the ensuing two phases to be determined through future negotiations. The deal will take effect on January 19th. The terms of the agreement being negotiated are nearly identical to what was on the table last May when outgoing President Joe Biden first announced it in his farewell address from the Oval Office last night, president Biden very noticeably tried to take credit for the deal being reached, but reports from inside Israel itself tell a very different story.

The Israeli newspaper Harts reported this week that Israeli sources say that the involvement of the incoming US administration led by Trump’s aggressive Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, revived hostage talks with Hamas. While Netanyahu’s propaganda machine claims that Trump has left him no choice. What happens inside his coalition will determine whether the Prime Minister approves the deal. So what does this all mean for Palestinians and Israelis, for the world and for us working people here in the heart of US Empire? What does that tell us about the legacy of the outgoing Biden administration and about the new international order in the Trump 2.0 era and with Trump’s inauguration just days away, what will next week reveal about what we’re actually facing in the coming four years with a second Trump administration and a fully magnified GOP effectively controlling all branches of government? So to dig into all of this, I want to go to our amazing guest, Medi Hassan and Francesca Fiorentini.

And a quick note to all of you watching live. We’re going to be talking with Medi and Francesca for the next hour, but we’ll be responding to your questions from the live chat in the last half hour of the stream. So if you’ve got thoughts or questions, please share them in the chat. Alright, Francesca, I want to come to you first sis, because you are back home in LA right in the middle of the madness and we’ve been following your social media updates on the wildfires for the past week. And first of all, I really just want to say that I and the whole Real news team have been thinking of you, your friends, your family, and we are sending you all our love and solidarity in these apocalyptic ass times. I want to ask if we can start with having you just lay out what the past week and a half have been like for you, what you want most people who don’t live in SoCal, to know about what you and others there have been seeing, feeling, experiencing, and where do things stand now,

Francesca Fiorentini:

That’s a huge question, but thank you so much for having me back and thank you for yes, all the kind words. And my heart also is going out to all the people who have lost everything. My sister-in-law lost everything and her family, but so many people are in this position and I just want everyone to know that we’re relying on mutual aid and solidarity from communities. That is what is happening. That is who is around right now. People are coming back to their homes, but the air quality is not okay. The A QI doesn’t measure things like toxic chemicals burning from electronics or toys or old homes that might have asbestos in it. There’s no way to measure that. Nobody’s out here telling us how to stay safe, what to do, helping us with air filtration systems, which can often be incredibly expensive. It is all person to person.

It is Facebook mom groups to community organizations that were already on the ground. I actually recently just did a piece for EO specifically about the people who are coming together in this moment to literally save lives. And one of those people are day laborers, migrant day laborers, shout out to the day Laborers Organizing Network and the Pasadena Worker Center. They are organizing day laborers who often have experience in things like landscaping. They know how to handle a chainsaw to get rid of some of this debris that is blocking people’s homes, has fallen on their cars, on and on and on. It is the people, and I hate that. I hate that we only have one another, but also it is a reminder that we are all we have. That push comes to shove. We are woefully unprepared in this country for this kind of climate chaos.

We are woefully unprepared as we were under covid for the kinds of pandemics that will be, again, all too commonplace with our public health infrastructure completely decimated and it’s only going to get worse. So it is really gutting, it is apocalyptic, it is scary, but it is also heartening. And the silver lining is to see some of this solidarity. And I think honestly, people just getting offline stop participating in the conspiracy theories and which again, are really, really running rampant right now. There is a lot more to say about what happens next. I’ll just say that LA has a massive fight on our hands and to me it also plays into the questions that have arisen ever since the 2020 George Floyd uprising about where our money in this city goes. Now, I want to caveat that by saying that no amount of money could have stopped a hundred mile winds spreading embers here and there and just lighting fire after fire after fire.

That is climate change. But on an LA specific level, we have a budget that is out of control, skewed towards the cops. We need to change that. And so many grassroots organizations here have been blowing the whistle. And as our elected officials become more representative, you’ve got a shout out to YIs Hernandez on city council who Soto Martinez also to Naia Ramen and finally recently elected Isabelle Rado. All of them are progressives and three of them who were in office at the time voted against that budget that gave more money to the police than any other place. So there is a national conversation we can also talk about that I’d love to talk about, but that is what’s happening here locally. There’s a fight ahead of us and it is on every front.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, Francesca, and just to everyone watching not from Southern California, I am sure the images of the Santa Ana winds blowing those embers was quite shocking. They are nothing new to us, but this speed and this late, or I guess this early in the year that is, I remember my own parents being evacuated from their house in 2008 because the Santa S had blown embers over to our side of Brea and the fires were getting close to our home. This happens all the time, but the speed, the intensity, the ferocity, the fact that these winds are blowing this much in January when normally there’s something we expect in the fall like these to say nothing of the mega drought that we’ve been in the southwest for the past 25 years. I mean, there is so much to talk about here.

Francesca Fiorentini:

I’ve only lived here for a few years and I literally don’t know when the Santa Ana winds are supposed to happen every year. It’s like, no, it’s supposed to be in October. No, they’re in August. It’s very funny that no one actually knows when they’re happening. But yes, what hasn’t happened is rain in nine months

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess the Santa Ana’s are just year round at this point. So not great folks. And I also want to highlight what you said, Francesca, about just the impact of the diss and misinformation and medi. I want to come to you on this question in a second because it really strikes me as someone who was interviewing folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina in the wake of the hurricane a few months ago. They were saying the exact same thing about how Trump’s tweets, about fema far right conspiracy theories about anything immigrants, that it was actively hurting relief efforts and that those relief efforts were largely being driven by mutual aid, by people on the ground. So I want folks to really take that to heart and think about what that means for us as a society that is going to be facing compounding cataclysms more frequently.

Now, medi, I want to bring you in here first to give you a chance to respond to anything that Francesca said there. But also as someone who has worked in the upper echelons of broadcast news, I really want to get your perspective on how the media has responded to these fires from the manufacturer of bullshit. Pseudo stories driven by whatever Trump or Musk said about the fires to the media’s proven unwillingness to report on these environmental disasters in a continuing context of climate change. And actually in a searing piece that we published at The Real News earlier this week by columnist Adam Johnson, Adam points out that a survey of nightly news coverage from the first full day of the LA Fire showed that in 16 minutes of coverage, A-B-C-N-B-C and CBS Nightly News broadcast did not mention climate change once in their Wednesday morning coverage of the LA fires.

Neither the New York Times Daily Podcast nor the New York Times Morning newsletter address climate change at all. Severe weather events when they’re reported on at all, typically because they’re within the US are indexed in the oh deism genre of reporting where politics and human decision-making are stripped away entirely. And all one can do is look on helplessly and say, oh dear, there’s no villain victims, but no victimizer, no political actors or politics at all. And above all, no explicit or implicit call to action just agency free human suffering that may sort of kind of be linked to erratic weather patterns with no sense there’s anything the viewer or reader can actually do about it. It’s just vaguely sad and everyone is expected to chip in a few dollars to GoFundMe gaw at the suffering and move on to the next extreme weather event right around the corner in a matter of weeks. Meam, please, your thoughts on the media response to the California wildfires and your advice for viewers about how we need to navigate this chaotic information ecosystem to get the answers we need in times of emergency.

Mehdi Hasan:

It’s a very troubling time when it comes to media misinformation. I am somebody who believes that most of our issues that we have in society right now do go back to the media, right? I’m one of these people who thinks that we need to have long, hard conversations about the information era that we’re in. I think people on the left have not done that. I think people on the right are enjoying the fact that people on the left haven’t done that. It’s became fashionable for a while to say, oh, you can’t blame the media for everything. Now look, a lot of this comes back to how you get your info. You mentioned earlier about the pseudo manufacturing of bullshit news. Adam’s spot on in his piece about the O ideaism and the idea from liberal media that if you talk about climate change, you’re talking about something political, right?

The right have so successfully turned science into a partisan issue that you no longer can talk about vaccines or climate science or any other obvious undeniable scientific issue without sounding like a liberal or a progressive or a leftist. It’s actually genius on their part that they’ve managed to turn science, objective science into a right left issue. And so of course, the liberal media cowed by the right doesn’t want to touch issues that they think at a time of storms, at a time of tornadoes, at a time of fires. You can’t talk about politics and therefore you can’t talk about climate change because climate change is coded political. And that is the success story that they’ve done on the liberal media side, of course, on the right wing media side, what they have done. And Adam mentions no villain, no victimizer, that’s the liberal view of the world. The right are the masters of understanding the importance of having a villain, right? What they have done so successfully is they’ve tapped into human beings basic psyches, basic fears, and understood that for any political crisis you have to have a bad guy. Democrats have failed to do that. Liberals have consistently failed to do that. The right have rightly understood the need for a villain. Now, the villains they’ve picked are horrible Mexicans, Muslims, trans kids, foreigners,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Immigrants, DI caused the fire

Mehdi Hasan:

DRT, and they apply that model to any crisis. It doesn’t matter what it is. So fires come along. I tweeted this earlier this week. It’s actually kind of admirable from a kind of, if you put your evil genius hat on, you have to admire the ability for the right to turn in a matter of days, some might say hours, an issue of objective, climate change, natural disaster. What do we do about this policy-wise into, no, it’s about the water hydrants and the pressure and the water hydrants and it’s about the number of helicopters. And why don’t we have drones in the skies? And why was Karen Bass in Ghana? And we can go down the list of what they’ve managed to do in terms of empty reservoirs and DEI, firefighters and all of the rest.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Why didn’t they use their weather machines?

Mehdi Hasan:

Why didn’t they use their measurements to control it for good, not evil? And that is actually admirable. I’m sorry. It’s amazing because a lot of people, I think 10 years ago, five years ago would’ve said, wait till climate change starts hitting the us. Wait till people start dying from it, then everyone will be forced to take it seriously. Actually turns out, no, even if you’re losing Americans in front of your eyes, they can make you look elsewhere. That is the power of propaganda. And in the old days, it would’ve been Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Today it is Elon Musk and social media and Mark Zuckerberg and Co and Musk has of course been driving a lot of this. There was that hilarious moment where he asked firefighters about water pressure. They were like, no, we were good on water. But that is the power of propaganda and misinformation.

And I was talking to a colleague earlier about this. We’ve had the right so successfully hijack the debate about media information, say it’s censorship, censorship. And Mark Zuckerberg last week came out and said, censorship, we’re going to get rid of our fact checking. And actually, no, I’m sorry. The debate has to be about content moderation. It has to be about responsible journalism. When people are dying, we can have inane abstract debates about free speech, but people are dying in a pandemic. Yeah, I do want Facebook to take down posts saying, put ivermectin in your body or inject yourself with disinfectant. Yeah, I do want people to be able to say, you know what? In the middle of a hurricane in North Carolina, don’t stay in your home because if you leave the government are going to seize your property, you might die even the local Republican congressman at that time. So I do think when people’s lives are on the lines, it’s very easy to have abstract First Amendment discussions. But in public emergencies, we can’t just have unlimited misinformation and people say, oh, that’s authoritarian. No, it’s how it’s always been

Until very recently when these libertarian freaks pretend that there should be no restrictions on their lies and gaslighting. So look, we need to have hard conversations about all this stuff. The moment Elon bus bought Twitter in 2022, that in itself told us the Democrats and the liberal side of the spectrum were not ready for this fight. The fact that they just rolled over and can you imagine if George Soros next month tried to buy Fox? You think the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress will be like, yeah, free market. Do what you want to do though they would do everything they could to stop it because they understand the power of those platforms. Liberals and leftists have not understood the power of those platforms,

Francesca Fiorentini:

Right? Or the efforts to reign them in move so glacially slowly, although they begin, and that inevitably if you don’t actually break up big tech, it will just get eaten by a bigger and bigger and bigger fish. And I want to just say that just on social media, misinformation and disinformation, it’s truly leading to online vigilantism that is terrifying so that everyone thinks that they are a particular sleuth to find out who started the fires, likely a downed power line. You dumb idiots, everything else that started wildfires here in this state of California. It’s a down power line. Okay? So just to say that it is really getting into a terrifying level of vigilantism and people are using apps to do exactly this. So it’s taking misinformation and applying it in real world and making citizens arrests and things like this.

Mehdi Hasan:

But also just to go back to your original question about what can people do who are not crazy freaks. I think people watching this need to understand that A, don’t play the game, participate in the kind of crap that Francesca highlighted and you’ve highlighted, but also, I mean the death of expertise and respect for expertise. I mean, look, I’m on the fence on this one. Elites have lied to us for a long time. A lot of foreign policy experts got us into Iraq and defended Gaza. But I do worry since the pandemic, when you saw Dr. Fauci became the villain of the right, not Donald Trump, the man who said, put disinfectant in your body, not Republican politicians who refuse to mask or do basic mitigation measures, but Fauci became the villain of the right wing movement. Scientists started going around with bodyguards. People like my friend Peter Hotez in Texas had people turning up at his home to try and film him. I think that is a reminder of there’s a great meme doing the rounds. Last week I was a covid expert This week I’m an expert on water pressure in California.

Speaker 4:

People

Mehdi Hasan:

Log in and overnight everyone on Twitter becomes an expert on whatever the de jore story is. That’s a real problem. Social media is really empowered, and Bill Bird did a great line on Jimmy Kimmel the other night saying some fuckhead in his underwear in his mother’s basement is now suddenly the world’s expert on California water pressure systems like get a grip on everyone, especially in the US where academia is seen as some kind of shadowy force. People are ivory towers are not to be trusted. It is really weird that we don’t go, oh, there’s a crisis about wildfires. Let’s ask the wildfire experts what we should do. There’s a crisis about covid. Let’s ask vaccination experts and disease experts and infectious disease experts watch No in this country. Let’s ask a pundit on cable news. What we should do.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, I mean there’s a lot to say. I do just want to talk about really quickly, just add to me’s point about a villain and creating villains. And obviously we know that the villain in the LA fire story is the fossil fuel industry, and that is so clear. But there’s a lot of sub villains within that. And right now you’ve got Republicans who are talking about tying aid relief for California to a budget that would enshrine the Donald Trump tax cuts four billionaires into law. So double whammy, quite literally the 1% that gave us these wildfires that giving us these once in a century flood, they’re going to enshrine that 1% even more. So the enemy is the billionaire class, and it is no clearer than when you look at climate chaos and what the billionaire class continues to, but people bring on all of us. Go ahead.

Mehdi Hasan:

Frankly, people just don’t see it, right? This is the problem right now, it’s obvious it’s the billionaire class. It’s obvious it’s the fossil fuel industry, but I’m talking about even apolitical people, not like fox junkies, but such as the power of the social media discussion and the background noise and such as discipline of the right wing media machine and rightwing pundits and rightwing politicians to say the message in unison in a way that Democrats or liberals or leftists don’t, is that today, for example, if you ask people, oh, California, was it really bad? Should there be condition? I think the average person would say, yeah, yeah, but what about Texas? It’s mismanaged. What about Texas? I don’t hear the same. We don’t talk about Texas in the same way. Max mentioned at the start, 25 people are dead. That’s 25. Too many. I’m sure that death hole’s going to go up in Texas. 250 people is the government’s death to 700 is the unofficial death toll from the slow storms. A couple of years back when Ted Cruz fled to Cancun, right when the Texas power grid shut down, there were no consequences from that. No one talks about tying aid or conditions for Texas. There were no political people like Karen Bass’s career is over. Greg Abbott got reelected after that. Ted Cruz got reelected after that. Why? Because again, liberals in the left are not very good at creating villains in the same way that the right does

Francesca Fiorentini:

Because they often receive money from the exact same class that the right does. I mean, we have villains set out before us. Look, the fact is the matter is that 10 years ago we didn’t have names like Elon Musk or Mark Andreessen or Sam Altman or whomever else, other billionaires who were in the rooms with Donald Trump. We didn’t have those names. The income disparity was already concentrating, but we didn’t have the names.

Mehdi Hasan:

Now

Francesca Fiorentini:

We’ve got literal names. These emblems of late stage

Mehdi Hasan:

Capitalism, they’re literally going to be sitting on stage next week in the inauguration.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yes. And we still can’t name them. And I just want to say Democrats are not off the cuff here. I just want to shout out that the Lever had an incredible report about how the California Insurance Commissioner, who oversees fire insurance in this state has received contributions from the insurance industry and is currently in 2023, passed a reform that would allow the buck to be passed to consumers versus the insurance agency because insurers are leaving California, we all know this. They’re leaving Florida, they’re leaving everywhere, and instead they’re

Mehdi Hasan:

Not leaving Florida. Florida is a perfect place in America. What are you talking about?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Well, actually, ironically, Florida has more checks and balances looking at the insurance industry there than in California. So all to say Ricardo Lara is his name. He’s going to be throughout LA if you see him and if he’s giving you a good information, great, alright, but also he has taken money from the insurance industry to specifically pass reforms that would make consumers premiums go up and let them off easy. They would have to do very, very little. They have to try to cover people for two years, 5% more coverage. But if it gets too expensive, they’re going to leave. Meanwhile, they’re literally hiring private firefighting forces that are protecting the buildings that they insure to say nothing of the Republicans like Rick Caruso, who also hired private firefighters to protect his property and wants to be mayor. So again, it always gets worse and we are going to see that come Monday how all of this is going to get worse.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And just to add one more thing there on just how absurd this entire situation is and how villainous it is, and then I want us to kind of pivot and talk about Gaza here in the next half hour. But my colleague Dave Zin was talking to us about this earlier this week. It’s like the Monday night football game that the Rams were playing was supposed to take place in Los Angeles. It got moved to Arizona. Everyone on the media, in the sports media was talking about, oh, what a great effort it was to move this game to the State Farm Stadium in Arizona when State Farm are the pieces of shit who just revoked a bunch of people’s home insurance a month ago before these fires. It is absolute madness. And one more point I wanted to make because me, you mentioned the need for expertise and verifiable information and authoritative information.

I want to also compliment that with information and firsthand accounts and stories and human faces of the working people who are being affected by this. And that is what we do here at The Real News. I remember when the Baltimore Bridge collapsed last year and all these same pieces of shit were on right wing media saying, oh, it was DEI that caused the mismanagement here. That collapsed the bridge. I was there talking to the immigrant workers who were coworkers of the men who died on that bridge. I was talking to longshore workers about how the shipping industry has made these container ships bigger, filled with more dangerous materials. Two to 3% of them are only abiding by US port regulations. The others are flags of convenience ships. Like we’re not talking about that. Instead, people are running around talking about bullshit like DEI. The same way that I was talking to folks in Asheville who were dealing with the effects of that hurricane the same way I talked to folks who were living near Eagle Pass in Texas who had a bunch of right wing idiots show up in their town and cause more disruption than the undocumented immigrants who were supposedly crossing the border.

But then all these right-wing nut jobs got there and there was no one there. I mean, I want folks East Palestinian, Ohio where the train derailed. I’ve been there multiple times. I’ve interviewed countless people from that community Immediately once that train derailed and those people’s lives were turned upside down and they are still sick, they are still suffering. I talk to them every week. It was a media circus over who’s more to blame for this Trump or Biden, who’s going to get there first? Trump or Biden. Everyone just cares about that. And then they stopped caring about the people who were right at the center of it. And that includes you and me and any one of us who are in line to suffer this kind of catastrophe in the future. And sadly, there are going to be more of them whether they’re caused by industrial accidents, climate change, what have you.

Mehdi Hasan:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, please.

Mehdi Hasan:

What you’re saying is we didn’t do enough coverage of James Woods’s house. Almost burning down what you’re saying, the real

Maximillian Alvarez:

Story. Yes. I’m saying my heart bleeds certainly for James Woods, but I will say on that note that I am deeply disappointed in so many people on the so-called progressive left who were talking about my home southern California as if these fires only burned James Woods’s house and that they were something to be celebrated when I’m seeing people who are being displaced who live in homes that they couldn’t afford to buy now, but maybe they’ve been there for a generation and the property values have gone up. So they’re not all these rich people that you’re pretending like are sympathetic characters

Mehdi Hasan:

Conversation perhaps for another day. But having worked at M-S-N-B-C and seen CNN how it goes, I say this as someone who moved to the US from another country, there’s also an east coast bias with our media, right? The West Coast is another country for people in New York and DC LA is not the same value, important status. I think I saw something a week ago in the midst of all the LA Fires houses destroyed 27,000 acres. I think apartment block was on fire in New York and it was live footage suddenly from this one building in New York on fire. And that’s always going to be the case. One building in New York will always get more coverage in the entire city outside of the east coast. And there is that longstanding problem, bipartisan problem. Forget right or left, there is east coast bias amongst our media. That’s the

Francesca Fiorentini:

Fact. Yeah, for sure. And also just really quickly, I mean, I was tuning into local news for the first time in a real ever because you’re watching local news and you’re like, oh, okay, obviously I’m using my husband’s family’s login to get to the log. That’s

Mehdi Hasan:

What good news was made for fire trucks, things on fire,

Francesca Fiorentini:

But right, but exactly. But again, a lot of people have, don’t have cable or don’t just don’t have their TV set up or whatever, only doing streaming. And so then for breaking news, and this is why the ownership of Twitter is incredibly important. They are going to Twitter. And if you’re not doing any fact checking on social media, then we are so

Mehdi Hasan:

Far, Twitter used to be a great place in a crisis. Now it’s the worst place in a

Francesca Fiorentini:

Crisis. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Speaking of terrible places, I want to turn our eyes to the other side of the world where we have been watching one of the greatest crimes of humanity unfold over the past year and a half on platforms like Twitter. I want to turn to Gaza and Israel, where as of right now, there is both hope and trepidation about whether or not this truce deal reached this week will actually be accepted and implemented by Israel. The Associated Press reported just this morning, a last minute crisis with Hamas holding up Israeli approval of a long awaited agreement to pause the fighting in the Gaza strip and release dozens of hostages. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens of people across the war ravage territory. The Israeli cabinet was expected to vote on the deal Thursday, but Netanyahu’s office said they won’t meet until Hamas backs down accusing it of reneging on parts of the agreement in an attempt to gain further concessions.

Without elaborating on that, a senior Hamas official said, the group is committed to the agreement announced by the mediators medi. I want to come back to you here and then Francesca, please hop in after we still don’t know if this ceasefire deal will take effect as planned this Sunday. The next 72 hours are going to be very critical and very intense. But if the deal does take effect, what will this mean and what will it not mean for Gaza, for Palestinians and for Israel and Israeli society? And that is the single most important question right now. So only once we’ve all addressed that, then let’s talk about what these developments tell us about the legacy of Biden’s administration and what the hell we can expect in geopolitics and the Trump 2.0 era.

Mehdi Hasan:

I mean, they’re interlinked in the sense that I’m thoroughly cynical about everything that happens in the Middle East, and I’m very cynical about the Israeli government because they’re a group of very cynical people and all American negotiators, whether the Democrats or Republicans don’t have the best interests of the people at Gaza at hand. Let’s be honest about that. Look, if this is real in any shape or form, even in a temporary form, that’s a good thing. Because even if you get an hour where a bomb stop falling, that is some kind of relief for one of the most depressed peoples on earth. The Palestinians of Gaza who spent the last 16th months being Genocided, right? Having their capacity to continue living existing, destroyed in front of our eyes, live streamed to us as the Irish lawyer for the South African government said exactly a year ago at the ICJ, this is the first genocide where people are live streaming their own genocide, begging for help from the rest of the world.

And a year later, here we are with no change. So if we’ve even got an hour of a pause, I’ll take it and Palestinian and Gaza will take it. Now, that doesn’t mean though we have to start celebrating and cheering and suggesting that there’s peace in the Middle East, peace in our time. That’s bullshit. And I’m very skeptical about this deal, not just because Netanyahu today said they’re not going to vote on it, not just because Ben Vere his far right terrorist, convicted terrorist. National Security Minister has threatened to resign if the deal goes through, and that means the Netanyahu government would fall and Netanyahu is all about self-preservation. But separate to that, just look at the deal itself. A, it’s the exact same deal that was on the table in May of last year that the Israelis rejected, but the Americans lied and said, Hamas rejected be.

It involves three phases, right? 42 days for the first phase, 42 days for the second phase. It’s really the second and third phases where the actual long-term impact of this kicks in, in terms of withdrawal of Israeli forces, in terms of any kind of humanitarian reconstruction. Those two phases, a lot of people are saying, we will never get to, right? Netanya is only interested in phase one if we even get to phase one where you do a limited release of prisoners and then he goes back to bombing net. Neil has made it very clear that he’s not going to stop the war. He doesn’t want to stop the war, and that’s why he’s never been interested in a ceasefire. He’s only interested in pauses. So some people spent the last 24 hours attacking me on social media because I was one of the people who said, Trump will be worse on Gaza than Biden.

So there’s a lot of gotcha moments going on right now said, well, look, Trump was better. He did it in 24 hours. What Biden couldn’t do in a year, I would say, let’s wait and see. Right? I’m old enough to know that Donald Trump is not what you think is not what you see. And people who have celebrated Donald Trump early tend to find egg on their faces. So I hope I’m wrong. I hope that in a year’s time or six months time, people will say, Mary, you were wrong. Donald Trump was much better for the people of Gaza than Joe Biden, but the man is not even president yet. Please stop the premature celebrations. Let’s see if this ceasefire happens on the Sunday. Let’s see if it holds. Let’s see if it actually delivers peace. Let’s see if we get any kind of reconstruction, because stopping the bombs is only one part of it.

Garzas cannot continue to exist in a place that is uninhabitable, which groups experts say will take, what, 80 years to rebuild 42 million tons of rubble. So I want to see what happens first. Already today, we’ve seen Donald Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor, waltz, Michael Waltz, I think his name is saying that we support Israel’s right to go back into Gaza whenever they like. We’ve seen Marco Rubio, who’s going to be the Secretary of State saying he’s going to lift all sanctions on the settlers that Joe Biden brought in the limited sanctions on the limited far right settlers. So this is far from done, the people who think it’s all done now of being very naive and have learned nothing from the first four years of Trump. But look, having said all that, I know you want to get into it a bit. Clearly Trump’s done more than Biden in the last week in terms of applying pressure. That’s undeniable. And it’s embarrassing for Joe Biden and the Democrats that that’s the case.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, think, oh, Francesca, please hop in.

Francesca Fiorentini:

No, no, no, go ahead.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, I was just going to say, I think everyone is rushing to do the thing we were just talking about in la, right? It is like rushing to have a take on what’s happening while it’s still unfolding, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. And so I think everyone, especially on the MAGA Trump side, is trying to kind of sell this as a Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan hostage kind of moment before we even know if the deal’s going to be accepted.

Mehdi Hasan:

Well, it simply, you mentioned the hostage Treasury because of course in 1968 you had Nixon, Vietnam, and Kissinger. We discover later that Kissinger was treacherous and was passing messages to the Vietnamese saying, we’ll do a better deal. Don’t stop the war now. And many more Americans and Vietnamese, of course, and Cambodians and lotions died because of that. We know that in 1980 now, and there’s a great new book from Craig Unger on this that Jimmy Carter was very close to getting the hostages out of Iran, but Ronald Reagan said to Iranians, don’t do it. I’ll give you a better deal and I’ll get you weapons. And this may be the third time that happened. We know that Netanyahu and Trump met at Mar-a-Lago last year. We don’t know what was discussed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump said, make sure you hold off till I’m office.

So I get the credit. We know Trump doesn’t give a shit about Palestinian life. It’s all about his ego and showing that he is a deal maker. He’s a successful president. He wanted this done by January the 20th. By the way, it’s not going to be done by January the 20th. Can I just point that out? Everyone? I love the way we grade Donald Trump on a curve, even the left grades Donald Trump on a curve. He literally said he wanted all the hostages released by January. There won’t be hostages won’t be released by January the 20th. The deal only begins on the 19th. So this is the man who also said he would end the Ukraine War in 24 hours. Right? Good luck with that. Apparently it’s going to be over on Monday night. So this is the kind of bullshit that unfortunately left us to have allowed Trump to be graded on a curve about. And like I said, I hope to be proved wrong, but to say that I’m wrong right now, or that those of us who warned against Trump on the issue of Gaza are wrong because there’s this ceasefire deal that hasn’t been even implemented or voted on by the Israelis yet. Calm the F down.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, no, I 100% agree, but I will say I was surprised when I heard it came through. I was like, oh, completely shocked. And it’s amazing that Netanyahu hasn’t even agreed to it, that it hasn’t even gone forward. But the narrative of Trump got a ceasefire is already out there. Right. And again, messaging, right, what we talked about earlier, they masters. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, it’s the kind of the Bill bar. There was no collusion headline. Everyone was like, oh, okay. There was no collusion and that made it. That’s the headline. And so Trump got this, but again, I was reacting to it sort of in real time on my show, and I was like, damn, it really does. And here’s the thing we need to be very careful about, not as Nora Kott lawyer, a Palestinian lawyer, awesome academic said, don’t give Trump any flowers on this. It is really a revelation of Joe Biden and the inability to actually get a ceasefire after the professing of working round the clock. I mean, I think maybe the differences between the Nixon and the Carter examples medi is that I don’t know if Joe Biden really was working on a ceasefire around the clock. I mean, I don’t think he was actually invested.

Mehdi Hasan:

He certainly didn’t apply pressure. I mean, this is the deal, to be fair to Biden, this is the deal that they put on the table that the American,

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yes,

Mehdi Hasan:

He never applied the pressure. I wrote my first column for The Guardian last February, and it was a column about how Ronald Reagan called man be in 1982 when the Israelis were Besieging Beirut. He saw a child on TV with no arms. He rang be and said, this is a Holocaust. And be said, how dare you use the word Holocaust, but no one called Reagan and Antisi in those days. You could say that. He said, this is a Holocaust. You need to stop this now in 20 minutes. The Israelis stopped bombing Beirut. I said, at the time, in February of 2024, Biden can make a phone call and end this genocide. The very serious people, the very savvy, smart people. Oh, no, it’s not that simple. You can’t do that. Actually, you can, right? Steve Witkoff went to Israel and said to Netanyahu, it’s got to be done in time.

I don’t care if you’re on a holiday, but look, how much of it was pressure, how much of it was mutually beneficial behavior by Netanya and Trump? We don’t know yet. The thing about Trump is half the things come out in memoirs and books. We have reporters sitting on stories that they write about in bestselling books like a year later. You’re like, why didn’t you tell us that at the time? How many New York Times and Washington Boast and Politico reporters have done that? So I would like to hear what happened at Mar-a-Lago last year. I would like to hear what was actually said between Witkoff and Netanya. How much of it was pressure and Netanyahu’s arm being twisted? How much of it was Netanyahu and Woff and Trump saying, this is good. We’ll make it look like you pressured me into this because it’s mutually beneficial for it to happen this way.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Sure. And obviously, who knows the back deals that were promised around the West Bank and annexation and the Miria Adelson money and all that,

Mehdi Hasan:

The Israeli press called a gift bank. Francesca, they’ve said that Trump gave

Maximillian Alvarez:

Lifting sanctions on Pegasus, which could come in very handy for an authoritarian regime. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, a lot of these details are going to come out in the wash, but I think one distinction that came up in the great interview that Jeremy Scahill did on Drop Site news yesterday with Palestinians reacting to the news was a sort of distinction that when it comes to Biden, he’s very merits ideological in this regard. Like he’s expressed himself as a full fledged Zionist who wants his legacy or wanted his legacy to kind of be pegged to standing with Israel. Whereas Trump’s is more transactional, and this guy’s got a whole lot of things he wants to do right here. He’s seen how much Gaza has tanked. Biden’s administration hampered that administration. He doesn’t want have to deal with that. I do think that’s a useful distinction while, but I wanted to ask what you guys said.

Mehdi Hasan:

Can I just jump in very briefly, just push back a little bit. I hear that that Trump is transactional. The implication of that is that there is some consistent strategy to what Trump says or does. I refuse to accept that Trump is only consistently inconsistent. So okay, he’s transactional in the sense that he’s a businessman. He likes to make money for him and his kids. He likes to do deals and wrote books about it and sees himself as a dealmaker. I get that. But in actual reality, the man is a narcissist. He’s a dumbass, he’s an ignoramus. He’s a vain, thin-skinned little man. And the idea that people can’t manipulate him, he is absurd. He’s the most easily manipulated politician of our lifetime. So when people say, oh, well, he’s transactional, he’s not an ideological Zion. Even if I accept all that, which I’m not sure I do, he’s surrounded by people who are, you’re telling me that Marco Rubio, and as I say, Michael Waltz, and what about Mike, Mike Huckabee Huckabee now who says there’s no such thing as Palestinians.

There’s no such thing as a West Bank. I just want to know what’s Mike Huckabee thinking for the last 48 hours? He’s okay with this. Clearly stuff has been going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. There is long-term ramifications that we don’t know about, and I think we have to really be skeptical of this idea that somehow Donald Trump’s going to just do deals with the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris, and that’s why he’s different to Biden. Who’s this lifelong Zionist? No, I mean, first of all, he’s not even fricking president yet. We’ve got four years of shit coming down the line. Talk to me at the end of four years, if at the end of four years, Palestinians are free, if at the end of four years Iran hasn’t been bombed, if at the end of four years there isn’t another genocide in Yemen, then fine. I’ll be the first to come on here and say, I was a hundred percent wrong about Trump. But come on, if we learn nothing from the first Trump term,

Francesca Fiorentini:

I mean, I think transactional can be taken in two different ways. Transactional, it sounds like diplomacy, but I think when people say it right, when people say it, it’s more like anything for flattery. And to me, I think he is able to read the room, I think, and there’s a line from one of his rallies over the last year that really stuck with me where he said, he goes, well, and Biden, he’s terrible on Israel. He hates Israel, hates the Jews. He was basically trying to, he does the brow beating of Jewish voters. So he was saying he hates Jews, but I guess he hates Palestinians a little bit more. And there was a smile, and I was like that because even he knew what he was saying was bullshit, and that actually Biden is helping genocide the Palestinian people. And there was that smirk as he understood that all of the Democratic voters that now you got Paul proves that so many people voted on Gaza.

Mehdi Hasan:

I mean, in that sense, he’s an evil genius. The man is both an Ior Aus and an evil genius. I mean, he went to Dearborn, Michigan, which Biden didn’t dare to go to Kamala Harris didn’t dare to go to, he went to Dearborn, Michigan and said, I am a peacemaker. I will bring peace to the Middle East. Liz Cheney will get Muslims killed. Don’t listen to Liz and Kamala. I’m the peacemaker, right? And people lapped it up, which is nonsense. Go back and look at Trump’s first term again. I know Americans have the memory of a goldfish. The guy increased bombing in Iraq, bombed Syria, increased drone strikes in Pakistan, and Somalia helped MBS genocide. Yemen, except I can go through the whole record. The idea that Donald Trump was some kind of anti-war anti interventionist candidate is a complete myth. But again, as you pointed out with the Bill Barr report, he’s transactional. He didn’t collude with Russia. He’s a master of getting these one line narratives about himself out there, which somehow people stick to. He’s Teflon Don,

Francesca Fiorentini:

And it’s more than him. I mean, I think medi that it is this desire for a demagogue to just take the reins. And I think everyone has that. I mean, I’d load to think that I would have that in, but there is even liberals or liberal media, there’s like, Hey, maybe he’s such an idiot. He’s smart there,

Mehdi Hasan:

Strong man. I mean, I spoke to No Gaana Paul yesterday in our live town hall as aeo, the Israeli journalists, and she said, look, even Israeli leftist politicians are buying into this idea that he was a strong man who came in and just beat up Netanyahu and made him do it. And she didn’t buy that narrative either. But even leftists, see that. And by the way, one thing I would say about the American left is what I’ve seen over the last few days and during the election campaign, is in the desperate desire to kick Joe Biden, which I totally get and understand, I’ve got a piece coming out in about 10 minutes on Joe Biden’s awful legacy on Gaza. The problem is where I split with some of my fellow leftists in America is this idea that in order to do Biden down, you have to promote Trump.

This idea that Trump is, I can be very critical of everything Biden did without drinking Kool-Aid about Donald Trump. And that is what Im seeing now in the last few days. The reason why we’re seeing the narrative of Trump, the peacemaker, Trump did this cease. It’s not just the right pushing. There’s a lot of people on the left trying to attack Biden by saying, look, Trump did what you couldn’t do. And I get all that, but that only helps the Trump narrative. Like I said, we don’t know the backstory to the ceasefire deal yet. I don’t know if it’s real. I don’t know if Trump went and twisted Benjamin net Neo’s arm and made him do something he didn’t want to do. We don’t know what was offered in return. We don’t know what the long-term consequences are for Gaza and the West Bank, but they’re again, graded on a curve. It’s not just the right and liberal media that grade Trump on a curve. I think progressives do it too, because we are understandably so frustrated with the Democrats

Francesca Fiorentini:

That

Mehdi Hasan:

We give Republicans a pass on things we wouldn’t give Democrats a pass on.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, I agree with that. I think we’re trying

Mehdi Hasan:

To cajole anti the entire establishment.

Francesca Fiorentini:

I think there’s a desperation to cajole the liberal, whatever the Democratic leadership to be like, see what a little bit of backbone

Speaker 4:

Might

Francesca Fiorentini:

Get, which is fair that I think. But you’re right. There’s a slippery slope there, and absolutely it can play into the same. Trump did a thing narrative that we know is bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right? And I want to make one point and then throw one more question before we got to let Medi go. I know you only got a couple more minutes, man, but I would point people to a very instructive interview that I did with Sarah Nelson, the president of the Flight Attendants Union, who famously became a household named six years ago in the midst of the longest government shutdown, led by Trump in the GOP ostensibly to secure billions of dollars for his stupid southern border wall. And the government was shut down for 35 days, 400,000 federal workers went to work during that entire time without pay. And it was this high stakes game of political brinkmanship as every government shut down inevitably is. But Sarah, I had Sarah on and asked her what we could learn from that moment, from that struggle going into the next four years.

And I think she really rightly pointed out something that I want to introduce to the conversation that we’re having right now, which is we are going to get trapped in this kind of same bipartisan bullshit cycle if those are the only two terms that we have to define our political values, our struggle are the things that we’re actually fighting for. Whereas Sarah rightly pointed out that even though Trump is coming and we are going to have to be on the defensive, we’re going to have to come to the aid of our immigrant neighbors, our trans and GBTQ folks, neighbors. Everybody who is under attack needs to be protected. But if we are just responding to the Trumpian news cycle, we are not fighting for the working class with principal consistency and with strategy. And Sarah, I would again point people to that interview. I’m not going to go into it all now, but really listen to what she’s saying and take to heart what that’s going to mean going into these next four years, and how we have to define our terms as a class, a global working class, and what we need and who’s getting in the way of it, Democrat, republican, whatever, and keep fighting consistently for what we need.

And in that vein, looking ahead at the next four years, with the last few minutes we’ve got Medi, I wanted to ask you both if we could look ahead to next week’s inauguration, sticking with this theme of geopolitics and international relations in the Trump 2.0 era. And as I said before, friend, you’ve been talking about this quite a lot, and I really appreciate it and medi you as well. So let’s talk about first the Trump effect has impacted countries around the world from Argentina to El Salvador, Italy, India, Brazil, over the past eight years since Trump was first elected. And let’s help our viewers understand this global right word shift that is really happening here. What does it mean for instance, that Trump has invited far right leaders to attend his inauguration, like President Na Bke from El Salvador,

Speaker 4:

Argentinian,

Maximillian Alvarez:

President Javier Malay, Victor Orban, prime Minister of Hungary and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Maloney, and that some like Malay are actually going to be there on Monday. Medi, please hop in.

Mehdi Hasan:

So I’m glad you mentioned this. I mean, I’ve been tearing my hair out for almost a decade now, trying to point out that this isn’t just about Donald Trump in the United States. This is a global phenomenon. You can’t understand it in isolation, but you do need to understand that Donald Trump, because by virtue of the US being the US, is the symbol of it, is the leader of it, is the inspiration for it is the guiding star for it sets the benchmark for it. So whether you’re Narendra Modi in India, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, or Erdogan in Turkey, or Orban in Hungary, or Putin in Russia, or Lapan in France, or Farage in the uk, go down the list, Malay in Argentina, Bolsonaro in Brazil, they look to the United States for inspiration. They see what Trump gets away with. They try and do the same, and it’s remarkable. I used to do a show for Al Jazeera English called Upfront, a weekly show where I interviewed politicians around the world. One thing I noticed in 20 17, 20 18 20 19 was the politicians I was interviewing from Africa and Asia all started sounding like Trump. They were all saying the same. They were literally echoing. Why not? Why wouldn’t they look at America? They go worked in the us, why can’t we do here?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Didn’t do Ter say fake news. Wasn’t that his,

Mehdi Hasan:

All of those lines, fake news and all of that stuff about enemy of the people and all just downright lying about what’s in front of your eyes. All of that. I started noticing in interviews I was doing with politicians around the world. That is the Trump effect globally. And that’s why it was so important to try and stop Trump from coming back to office, not just for the United States, but because of the symbol and the message it sends around the world because of the power of this networking. When people talk about domestic extremism, it’s not domestic, it’s transnational, right? White supremacy, supremacy of all forms, racism, fascism is transnational. It is very global. We are seeing liberal democracy on the decline in the retreat and migrants and Muslims especially demonized across the Western world. So it is really important to pay attention to all these connections and see who Donald Trump is sponsoring and propping up and understanding that this is a common struggle wherever you are in the world.

And to go back to your point about Sarah Nelson, I would tie that into here to make a final point, which is we have to stick with our principles, right? That is what’s key. What worries me now is in an age of social media, we’re very cultish. We are very partisan. And that’s not just the right, the right, they’re way out there, but the left liberals, progressive centris, are not immune to the online disease of cultism and partisanship, right? This idea of politics as a football game, I support my team, not your team, and I’ll turn a blind eye to my team’s successes as long as I’m attacking your team. That’s a problem, right? Politics is not about personalities, it’s about issues, it’s about principles. I think that is the only way we get through this era. I went on Blue sky yesterday and I saw a long list of prominent liberals saying, thank you, Mr.

President, for getting this ceasefire deal. What? That’s as bad as the MAGA people saying, Donald Trump is peace of our times, right? We got to get away from this idea of holding up politicians or political parties and saying, I support them. No, no, no, no. You support principles and if they’re in line with your principles than you get behind them. And I think that is what we’ve forgotten. And social media is making much, much worse by kind of treating everything as a kind of putting you in your echo chamber, putting you in your tribal bubble. And if we’re going to survive the Trump era, if we’re going to survive fascism, we have to stick to principles, not people and politicians.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Fran, real

Francesca Fiorentini:

Quick, before you hop in

Maximillian Alvarez:

Credit for wanted,

Francesca Fiorentini:

Is that what I’m hearing? I think that’s what I’m hearing. Many.

Mehdi Hasan:

Exactly. He is the Mandela of our,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I just wanted to hop in because Medi, I know you’ve got to go, but I wanted to really, really encourage everyone watching. If you are not already, please go support eo. Thank you Medi. Can you please let folks know what you guys are doing, what you got coming up, and where folks can find you.

Mehdi Hasan:

So we have got a lot going on right now. xeo.com, ZETE o.com is our place come do support or subscribers. We’ve got some amazing documentaries coming out on Gaza and Palestine very soon. We’re rolling out some amazing new contributors next week, many of whom viewers of your shows will know. We’ve already got some great contributors like Naomi Klein and Baam EF and Owen Jones already in our stable, but we’re adding to that for the Trump era. And we have a wonderful podcast that just won an award. We are not kidding. So we are doing a lot. We appreciate your support and we appreciate the plug.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Appreciate the work that you do, brother. It’s an honor to be in the struggle with you and I’ll see you on the other side, man. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Bye man. Bye-bye.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, Francesca Fiorentini, I’m dying to hear your thoughts on the Trump effect over the last eight years and how this is all coming to a head in his inauguration next week with potentially a lot of foreign diplomats and even heads of state showing up from the global populist, right?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Yeah, I mean it’s chilling and it also, I think to Sarah Nelson’s point, and I’m really glad you brought that up. I think we need to have fighters on every single flank, I don’t know, war terminology, but on every single battlefield. So there have to be people who are pushing against the barrage of misinformation that’s going to be coming from Donald Trump. There have to be people fact checking. There have to be people pushing back on these narratives. There have to be people who are watching what he does and what his administration is doing. That’s going to be critical. But for so much of our sanity, we need to be building. We have got to build. And that can even be with your neighbors. It can be with your community members and your schools and your churches and your synagogues and whatever it is. We have to create spaces of real, again, mutual aid and solidarity.

It’s the only way we are going to sort of mentally survive, but also physically, quite literally as we’re talking about LA fires and people surviving thanks to the goodwill of their neighbors and their communities, we need to make sure that locally, that locally we’re electing the right kinds of folks, that we are holding people to account that we’re pressuring Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, but from the left that we have again, these amazing new progressive leftist city council members that can be the next generation that so many Democrats have fought so hard, whether it’s the squad nationally or on a local level to make sure that progressive stay out of politics. So I super agree with Sarah that I hate the reactive doom loop that we can get into. One thing, and I don’t want to knock it, but one thing that people on the left do often is look at right wing news outlets and right wing influencers and sort of make fun of them.

And I do think it’s important, but sometimes I think about the world upside down. Imagine if right now there were right wingers who watched everything we said, and then they made clips and videos based on the outlandish things. We said, we need a green new deal. And I’m like, that’s power. I’m tired of giving right wing mouthpieces more power by highlighting their bullshit. I’m like, what are we building? What are the scary things we’re singing? What are the real socialist plans that we are creating and enacting? You know what I’m absolutely for defund the police. Fuck yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s enact it. The right says we did. No, we didn’t. So these are the kinds of things that I’m interested in building and on my show habitation room, having activist organizers, thinkers who can build that now to Trump’s global fascism. I got to say it’s not just, I don’t want to give Trump too much credit because you look at someone like naive B and you’re like, this dude is his own little creation like El Salvador who has basically consolidated power, political power in his country.

He was able to break through the two party system of, I mean it was mostly a two party system by just demagoguing them, saying, turning on them and using his own independence. I think as a weapon and as sort of a badge of honor, which a lot of people are responding to and has now enacted sort of this scorched earth incarcerate first policy on the communities of El Salvador. And depending on who you ask, many El Salvador are very on board for it and very okay with it because they think it’s cleaned up the streets. Nevermind what happens 10 years later, nevermind when people have been incarcerated for decades. There’s no job opportunities when they come back. Nothing’s improved in the economy in El Salvador, right? But it is fascinating because this little crypto king demagogue is, I mean the Trump Jr came to his inauguration. So did Matt Gaetz came to the naive inauguration. What the hell? So the US is actually looking at countries like El Salvador, like Israel, the countries where we’ve propped up their militaries, we’ve assisted with their genocides and saying, what can we learn? We want to build walls here. We want to lock people up indiscriminately here in the us. I think there is a scary authoritarian symbiosis happening between these figures.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to talk about this a little bit more in the last half hour that we’ve got, and I’m going to circle back to it in a sec. But I wanted to let you all know watching live that we’ve got Francesca sister Fran on for the next half hour. Brother Meti had to hop off, but we are here to answer your questions or respond to your comments. So I’m going to be throwing some of those up on the screen in a second. So please, if you’ve got questions for Fran or for me, please throw them up there and we’ll tackle them as many of them as we can get to in the next half hour. But a note on the naive B thing, Francesca, because we’ve got a real problem on our hands here. And again, I appreciate the hell out of you for actually being like one of those prominent voices who is talking about this regularly and getting people, your audience to think about the world beyond our own individual scope. Think about the world outside of the US borders, and in fact, it would tell you a lot about what’s happening here as well.

But we’ve also reported on what’s happening in El Salvador. We had a really powerful video report published by the great Latin American based journalist, Mike Fox from El Salvador s

Francesca Fiorentini:

Such a good podcast. Everyone should listen to it. Tell me the name of it again, remind people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the one that we put out last year was called Under the Shadow, which was an incredible podcast series that I would highly encourage everyone who’s listening or watching this go binge that whole series. And also listen to Mike’s previous series, which we produced with him in partnership with Nala, the North American Congress on Latin America called Brazil on fire, specifically go find the episode near the end of Brazil on fire where Mike investigates the rise of the evangelical right in Brazil and talks about how this right wing evangelical pro Bolsonaro group is pretty much saying what the evangelical nut jobs here are saying about Trump. So if you want to look at that Trump effect, if you want to hear it in audio form, it’s there in Mike’s podcast, Brazil on fire and a lot more is there in his podcast that we ran last year under the shadow.

But also to circle back to naive Bke and El Salvador, we published a standalone documentary report that Mike did there about b’s dragnet arrest, first sweeps. We talked to family members of those who have been disappeared in these sweeps who are completely innocent, but maybe they got tattoos, maybe they’ve been accused of being affiliated by a gang or maybe they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this is the real problem that I wanted to get your thoughts on. Fran, and you already touched on this, right? There is a parallel here to Trump and the US that we can learn from because Trump, as we know, didn’t come from nowhere. I mean, you have to have a long brewing crisis of legitimacy in the existing system, economy culture to create enough of a desire in people for something as extreme as Trump or bouquet or what have you. And in El Salvador, we can’t pretend that that wasn’t the case. We can’t pretend that working people, poor people were not just devastated for years by drug cartels, by gang violence. This impacted them every single day. And now the functional difference for your average working person in El Salvador, as we’ve heard from them, is I can walk on the streets. My kids can go to school. I don’t feel as afraid anymore. And naive, B, the proto fascist neofascist guy who has accomplished this is the most popular politician in the world right now, but like you said, he’s still serving the needs of capital while addressing some of the needs of the people through draconian measures. And then people, he’s incredibly popular because of that.

What do we do with that? I guess another way of asking that question is what do we do if someone like Trump remains incredibly popular over the next four years? How do we intervene in that? What is the left’s place here?

Francesca Fiorentini:

I mean, I obviously am no expert on El Salvador, but I do just mean to what I hinted at before, there’s only so long you can lock people up and we all know what happens. And it has happened in the United States, that is where gangs are formed. So the odious MS 13 formed, wasn’t it in Los Angeles formed in a prison. So when you lock people up, you are contributing and you treat them like criminals even if they are not criminals to say nothing of how we should be treating criminals. Let’s put that aside. You will create people who are violent, who are gang members who don’t when they come out of prison and you have not helped them reintegrate into society or have offered any kind of job opportunities to say nothing of prohibited them from being employed simply by the fact that they were incarcerated.

What do you think is going to happen? So for me, the bhel model’s really interesting because the US is not El Salvador. Okay? We are not being terrorized by cartels no matter what your Facebook aunt says that is not happening. But what’s interesting about the right in the US is that they’re able to convince us that yes, we are being terrorized by migrants and cartels and it’s happening in Springfield where they’re eating cats and dogs and they’re killing innocent young white victims. And we’re going to pass the Lake and Riley act. And we are convinced that somehow we are El Salvador. And I think any Salvadorian would come here. In fact, they do want to come here precisely because it is safe. So what are you talking about? It is just very funny that the US suffers from this imagined doom and this imagined crime when crime is down.

And so again, back to la, these moments when you’re like, oh, all I got to do is go out, talk to my neighbors, meet people, see the solidarity, see the comradery, and I am suddenly not afraid anymore. I’m not sitting at home just watching local news and getting freaked out. So I think it is our job, while the US is still a relatively safe place because we could get to the levels of El Salvador. That’s what happens when your elites do not invest in their people for decades and decades and decades. But our job is to break through, to humanize specifically, I think the people who’ve been left out of the system, which are unhoused people, the people who are victims of late stage capitalists, greed, and systems not working for them. It’s to hold accountable. Our democratic officials specifically who are still neoliberal actors and who still take corporate donations, it’s to primary them.

It’s to unseat them. It’s to say their way is leading us down the primrose path. Back to fascism. Don’t pull a Biden Newsom, don’t pull a fucking Biden bass. Don’t pull a Biden, don’t deliver us into the hands of Rick Caruso. Don’t deliver us in the hands of a Republican governor so you can seek higher office. So these are all the sites that we need to fight on because it’s not just the global demagoguery. It’s happening in every single place where you have very feckless politicians who might be smart. Newsom’s a smart guy, he knows what he’s talking about, but he also knows that he’s never going to pass Medicare for all for California, that he’s going to skirt environmental regulations so that rich people can rebuild their homes in places they probably shouldn’t build. So we’ve got time on some of these areas.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and the crazy thing that we’ve got here to make your point that yes, the United States is not El Salvador working, people are not being terrorized by drug cartels ravaging the streets. But the thing is working, people are being killed and terrorized by cartels. They’re just the ones in boardrooms. They’re the ones in dc. They’re the ones who are stocking up the Trump administration right now. They’re the people that everyone was righteously pissed off at after the United Healthcare CEO was assassinated, right? I mean, the cartels are here, they’re running the show, and we are all feeling it in one way or another. They are poisoning our water and buying off politicians to do nothing about it. They are corporate capturing the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, which is why we now all have PFAS and other forever chemicals like microplastics all in our bodies, which is, but to your point, at the same time, the right wing fear machine is constantly trying to convince working people that the dangers are here at eye level. The dangers are around the corner. They’re living in your neighborhood, they’re in your children’s schools, they are your fellow workers who are responsible for your misery, not the people. They’re DI.

They’re

Francesca Fiorentini:

DI. Yeah. And I think that is, and that is so, and this is what I, God, if there’s, you know how we each have the one thing we’ve said a million times over, if there’s one thing that I want people to know of, if my political pecking order, the first thing I want to say is that identity politics are radical. They were developed, identity politics was spearheaded by black feminists who wanted intersectionality, who said, we can tackle capitalism, we can tackle racism, and we can tackle sexism. We can do it all together. That’s identity politics. The problem is Democrats have used hollow empty identity politics only in the form of representation as a stand-in for the real radical identity politics of having not just again, the Cornell Westly black faces in high places, but actually passing legislation that positively affects black communities and poor communities and women.

I mean, the one place that we are like El Salvador in the United States in the year 2025, I visited there and I did a whole piece about how they’re locking women up for having miscarriages because abortion is criminalized because the rights of the fetus are enshrined in the constitution, max. I’m telling you, we are headed there in this country. They will enshrine the rights of the fetus, the rights of the unborn into the US Constitution. And guess what? Then all people with uterus become second class citizens, period. And it is fucking terrifying. And we could be sentenced to 30 years to life. I spoke to women who were in prison longer than their rapists who got them pregnant in the first place. That’s what they were accused of is miscarrying slash abortion. But all to say, I forgot where I was saying before that. You know what I mean?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. You’re spiting fire. And I kind of wanted to build on the emotion here because I’m feeling what you’re feeling. I know our audience is feeling it, and we’re all feeling a lot of shit right now. And I kind of want to dig into that real quick. And again, I’m looking at questions in live chat and comments. We’re going to be throwing them up. But on that last point, I want to ask if we could maybe just break the fourth wall here. And I have a question for you, Fran, which is right now, what do you think your most unproductive fear is and what your most productive anger or where your most productive anger is coming from? I mean, I guess for us to be a little sort of internally mindful of where our emotions are coming from and where they’re driving us. I am not telling people out there don’t feel anything, but don’t be overwhelmed by those feelings, but also know how you can harness those feelings and when those feelings are harnessing you for other ends. So yeah, I guess just sort of an open question right now, what’s the most immobilizing, unproductive fear that you’re feeling now? And what’s something that’s galvanizing you?

Francesca Fiorentini:

Most unproductive fear is America’s cooked. We need to go by, how do I get out of here? How should I take my child and leave somewhere where the air is cleaner and there aren’t guns in people’s hands? And somewhere that respects her bodily autonomy and her rights. That’s where my maybe unproductive fear is at. And my productive fear is when I squarely plant myself in my place, and I say, you live in a neighborhood, a community, a city. You have an elected official. You can talk to them, you can go, you get involved. There are groups that have been working in the cities that we all live in and the towns we all live in for generations. Plant yourself in this moment in history and get to work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that’s beautifully put. I don’t want to add anything onto that I think was amazing. Well, let’s bring in some comments here from the live chat. A lot of these aren’t even questions, just folks really expressing a lot of things in the live chat that I want to make sure we name here. But we’ve got one comment here from Kevin Tuey. I do know the severity. 8% of Americans, 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Again, if you need a bigger example of why the kind of red state, blue state MAGA Democrat thing is just horse shit, neither of them have a 78% hold on the population that’s working people, blue, red, independent, who are getting screwed over by this economic system. I think that’s very rightly pointed out. And let’s see,

Francesca Fiorentini:

We’ve got, and I think that’s the resurgence in labor organizing too, is like we have enemies. We’ve got a villains list. Your boss is part of it, your landlord is part of it. That is how you’ve got Elon Musk in your life. They are your boss, they are your landlord,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And they run things like bosses. In fact, if you want to learn about and you want a good sense of what we’re in store for in the next four years, and in fact what we’ve been moving towards over the last 40 years, like look at labor struggles, look at how bosses respond to workers when they get uppity and try to exercise their rights. Like they get squashed, they get fired, they have their rights violated, they get intimidated. They’re subjected to unsafe working conditions regularly, yada, yada yada. This is the kind of boss governance that Trump and his cabinet Musk. I mean, that is how they think. They don’t think about us as human beings. We are at best human shaped widgets that can do things for them, but our lives do not matter to them.

Francesca Fiorentini:

No.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And on that, let’s throw a few more comments here. So yeah, I mean I think this is timeless, but well put by Black Rain, you can tell the greatness of a nation by how they treat the less fortunate.

Speaker 4:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

On that note, it’s important to underline as Fran and Medi and I have been in this live stream, that we need to not just think about the United States as the center of the universe here. And in fact, there’s going to be a real interesting dynamic going on between the NAFTA countries, Canada, the US and Mexico. And right now you’ve got Mexico’s new president, Gloria Scheinbaum saying explicitly on the so Klo in Mexico City that we have to prioritize the poor for the good of all. That’s kind of to the point of the comment that we just read. And Fran, I’m curious how you’re looking at the soul of that statement and also how Mexico and shine bomb’s government are going to be a player in the next four years. I

Francesca Fiorentini:

Mean, again, I wish I could only do Latin American politics. I like it way better than American politics. So I am no expert, but I have been really heartened by shine bounds rise to power her posturing, her being able to sort of stand up to Trump, but also say we’re willing to work with you. And then of course, in the LA fires, most recently sending 75 firefighters and other national forestry and disaster relief workers and officials to Los Angeles and saying, we believe in solidarity. We are a nation of generosity and solidarity. Max Trump, the Mexicans are rapists and criminals is about to assume office on Monday. And the president of Mexico wants to be in solidarity with us. I mean, it is crushingly.

I don’t even know. I don’t have words for that kind of treatment when we have treated them so opposite. And so I think that there’s a model there. I don’t think it’s an accident. She’s a woman. But again, hey, look at me playing the identity politics card. But I think it shows you that her administration and AMLO enjoyed a certain amount of support already from the people what they had done and delivered for the Mexican people clearly bore out. And so that she can get away with saying, when we help the poor, we help everyone imagine if what would happen in this country, all the Jesus lovers would be like, Ew, gross poor. I don’t believe in poverty. No, no, no, no, no. I’m in the prosperity gospel. God delivers to those who are rich more riches. And I think we had the beginnings and the fits and starts of that in Bernie Sanders. But I dunno about you Max, but I’m still in the post-election haze where I haven’t fully decided to support the Democratic party. I’m still like Uhuh. They have to do a lot to earn my vote and trust and we have to do a lot to change them. So if you don’t let us change you and transform you then and get out of the way, then we’re going to have a problem.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest, that’s where I am. I mean you and so many others that we’ve spoken to on this channel. I mean, I think I’m not naive and I grew up a deep red Republican in Southern California in Orange County. I spent the first half of my life a Latino orange county, very outspoken Republican,

Speaker 4:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now I’m a lefty socialist nut job years later. That was a long ideological journey that really began or really turned in the financial crash and great recession in the 2008, 9, 10, 11, that range. Those were the years that really changed my life, changed my family’s life. Those were the years where the system that I thought I could work hard in and be rewarded for showed how nakedly the deck was stacked in favor of the fuckers who got bailed out for causing a crisis that led to millions of families like mine losing everything, including the home that I grew up in.

Speaker 4:

I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Was working in warehouses in factories 12 years ago, not knowing what the hell I was going to be doing with my life. But that period I think was really important in sort of breaking a lot of that ideological crust that I had. Maybe it was the sort of optimism of youth. Maybe it was also still the last drags of the post Cold War era where it felt for many of us, the US was going to have a big enough pie for all of us to get a piece

Francesca Fiorentini:

And make a good life for us. Sure, you just work hard enough you can get that piece. And now, I mean it’s amazing people now I think there isn’t even that if you work hard, I think everyone left right? Doesn’t matter where you stand. You understand that working hard is not going to deliver. Now it’s about how do I get the cheat code for this life so I can at least not even be rich, but just be comfortable. You need a cheat code to even own a house, right? I need a cheat code. And often that cheat code is a shortcut by bashing minorities and immigrants and women and whomever else who I think has a little bit of something that I want. And so just when I really empathize with people who believe in crypto, and again, I’m not here to knock it. I know a lot of people have it, but it’s like I understand the impetus to like, well, look, if I just play this lottery a little bit, maybe I can get out of the dregs of where the majority of people in this country are at. And in that sense, the right wing narrative of you too can be a billionaire tomorrow. I mean, they’re really just pedaling one massive Ponzi scheme, except there are bodies that have to be, that are being claimed in the process

Maximillian Alvarez:

That hit like an ice pick to the chest. And I know we only have a couple more minutes

Here, but I want to circle back to something you said when we were talking about the productive and unproductive fears we’re dealing with now. And I think this also hooks into some of the comments and questions I’m seeing here in the live chat. So I want to put up two here in succession. One, I think a really pointed question from the brindle boxer, it’s beyond depressing. How do we get out of the doom loop considering what we’re facing in four days? And the brindle boxer just want to let you know we are with you. We’re all feeling that. And I want us to end on that question while also kind of highlighting this other comment from Black Reign, again about the need to intervene on the local level and do what we can to hold politicians accountable, not just react to Trump, but all those people throughout the political hierarchy with names and faces and positions and emails and phone numbers. There’s actually a lot that you can do when you see the spread of power instead of just believing that it all resides in one person over here in Washington dc.

Speaker 4:

And

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I kind of wanted to end on that note, Francesca, and give you the final word here. We don’t have to give everyone a playbook of everything they can do. As we say here at The Real News all the time, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something more often than not that something is going to be in your area in the circles, you have influence in your community, in your apartment building, in your workplace, in your district. So I wanted to just ask for your final thoughts on that, Fran. Not just how people can get more involved locally, but what doing something in your real physical world, offline, why that is so crucial to fighting the larger forces that we are going up against right now.

Francesca Fiorentini:

I mean, every time there’s a demonstration, every time there’s a protest, every time you go out and you make your sign and you listen to a speech and your legs are hurting and you can’t hear the speech and whatever, I really feel that every time I do that, every time I’m with community, I feel much better. I feel mentally prepared and physically and mentally not alone. So I do think protest has a place in the world. We know it has power. Concedes nothing without a demand, never has, never will. But it’s also for our own nourishment. I feel nourished when I am in community, whether it’s chanting, whatever, a slogan or a song, but I also feel nourished. I feel like I have a couple moments of maybe happiest moments in Francesca’s last 10 years and some of the other than my child being born, obviously two moments stick out.

One fundraiser for the I Napa 43 disappeared students, teacher students in Mexico who disappeared in 2015, I believe. And I was at a fundraiser back then in San Francisco, and it was obviously, this is a terrible thing that happened. It should be incredibly depressing. But there was the food, the music, the number of people that came out, the activists and organizers and community leaders that hadn’t seen each other in so long. But this awful event brought us together and we were dancing and we were raising money and we were just in it. And it was truly one of the nicest nights I’ve experienced. Another day in this last year comes to mind when a pro-Palestinian market took place, sprung up in la. I don’t know the organizer’s name and I apologize, but there was everyone selling kafis and pins and cute hats to doing henna tattoos to selling their delicious food from all over the world, amazing, affordable plates. And then you had the poetry and the music and you’re just like, this is it. I feel so fucking seen. I feel so fucking support. We’re not here all chanting, Rob, we’re not getting mad. We’re not having a meeting. We’re eating good food. We’re listening to beautiful music. We are making art. And I know this sounds corny, but I’m telling you, it was like it was intergenerational. I brought my daughter like, don’t, don’t. Don’t sleep on building community and having fun. Allow yourself to be joyous even as we resist.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think it was beautiful, powerful words by the great Francesca Fiorentini. If y’all are watching and you are not subscribed to Francesca’s show the Situation room, you really need to go correct that asap.

Speaker 4:

Francesca,

Maximillian Alvarez:

I cannot thank you enough for the spending this hour and a half with us. I can’t thank the great Hassan enough for joining us for that first hour. Again, if you’re not subscribing to EO and following the great work Me’s doing and all the folks at eo, including now contributors like Francesca herself, who has a great piece out on the LA fires and the people helping in the midst of tragedy, go watch that video, subscribe to eo, follow Francesca Fran, what are you going to be up to? Where can folks find you? Just final plug here before we

Francesca Fiorentini:

Close out. Yeah, yeah. Look, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays live, 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern youtube.com/franny. Theo fran, I fio o. My name is too long to write it all out. And you can listen as a podcast habitation room. We try to have comedians and then activists and experts and thinkers and all that, and we try to be fun and be a little reverent. Go see live comedy guys. I’ll be at the Ice House in Pasadena next Wednesday, 7:30 PM Tickets are still available. It’s going to be a great show. I’m calling it New World Disorder, a Night of political comedy. So come out to that if you’re in the Pasadena or LA area,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. So everyone out back home, go check that out. Follow Francesca’s work. Fran, I can’t wait to have you back on the channel. Sis, really appreciate you taking the time now.

Francesca Fiorentini:

Thank you, max, as always, for the pointed questions and just your passion, we love it. We see it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you, sis right back at you means the world to me and to all of you watching, I don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next year, or in the next four to eight to 50 years. In fact, none of us do because that story has yet to be written. I want to kind of close on this thought here because we cannot give over the power of writing history before it’s even been written, right? You can’t ask what the next four years will bring with the assumption that we are just going to be waiting and responding to whatever is passed down from on. High. History is always written in that dialectical space between top and bottom, from the grassroots, from the upper echelons, the struggle over power. We are part of that struggle. What happens next depends on what we all do now, how we respond to it, the demands that we put on power, not just the ways that we respond to the whims of power, right?

I mean, so think about that. Think about the power that you have that your community has, the power you can build with your community, with your coworkers in your workplaces and beyond. You are not powerless here. We are not powerless here, but we will be way less powerful if we already concede the point that what happens in the next few years is just out of our hands. It’s not. And that is what we here at The Real News are committed to people, power and people in general. We are about you and your communities. We are about people around this country and around the world. And we believe all human life is sacred and worth fighting for, and that we all deserve a world better than this. And that we are the ones who are going to make that world happen. And we at The Real News are going to be there covering your struggle as you make it happen. We’re going to be there on the ground. We want to talk to you about what you’re going through and how others can help. So please support our work, subscribe to this channel, reach out to us and let us know about your stories so that we can help lift them up and help them reach more people. And above all else, please take care of yourselves and take care of each other, solidarity forever.

Donald Trump will once again be inaugurated as president in just a week’s time, and the lessons of workers’ victories from his past administration provides an important roadmap to the fight ahead. In 2019, flight attendants organized to end a government shutdown that threw airports around the country into chaos. Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, joins The Real News for a look back at the 2019 shutdown fight and how unions can give workers the tools they need to fight back over the next four years.

Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

On January 20th, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America. As I sit with you here now, I can feel the pull of what’s coming. It’s like we’re fast approaching a waterfall. We really don’t know what’s on the other side, but big changes are coming one way or another. We don’t know how the next four or eight or even 50 years will play out because that story has yet to be written. What happens next depends on what we all do now.

But if we want to be the authors and protagonists of that story, not just names and stories written by some sociopathic, billionaire oligarchs or religious fanatics, not just numbers on a corporate spreadsheet or in a passing news report, then we got to be very clear about what we’re fighting for, what side we’re fighting on, and we got to learn from the past about how to fight effectively and win.

And today on The Real News, we are talking with someone who knows a little something about fighting and winning. Sara Nelson is one of the most prominent and widely known labor leaders in the United States and around the world, a United Airlines flight attendant since 1996. Sara has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA AFL-CIO, a union representing over 50,000 flight attendants at 20 airlines since 2014.

But it was exactly six years ago that Sara Nelson became a household name. If you all recall, six years ago in January of 2019, the US was in the midst of the longest government shutdown in our history, a shutdown that lasted 35 days. It was the second government shutdown that took place during Donald Trump’s first term, and the shutdown centered on Trump’s demand that Congress approve $5.7 billion in federal funds to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.

The shutdown resulted in around 380,000 federal workers being furloughed with an additional 420,000 federal employees forced to work without pay until the end of the shutdown. While working people suffered and Democrats and Republicans in DC played their game of high stakes political brinkmanship, Sara Nelson stepped into the national spotlight and called on the labor movement to intervene.

Sara Nelson:

We are here today because we are concerned about our safety, our security, and our economic stability, our jobs. For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is they’re air traffic controllers, they’re food inspectors, they’re transportation security officers and law enforcement. They’re the people who live and work in our communities and they are being hurt.

This is about our safety and security and our jobs and our entire country’s economic stability. No one will get out of this unscathed if we do not stop this shutdown. Leader McConnell, you can fix this today. If you don’t show the leadership to bring your caucus to a vote to open the government today, then we are calling on the conscientious members of your caucus to do it for you.

There is no excuse to continue this. This is not a political game. Open the government today. We are calling on the public on February 16th if we are in a day 36 of this shutdown for everyone to come to the airports, everyone come to the airports and demand that this Congress work for us and get politics out of our safety and security.

Maximillian Alvarez:

In a speech she delivered while receiving the MLK Drum Major for Justice Lifetime Achievement Award from the AFL-CIO on January 20th of 2019, Nelson went even further and called for a general strike to end the shutdown and to support the 800,000 federal employees who were locked out or forced to work without pay.

She said, “Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe. What is the labor movement waiting for? Go back with the fierce urgency of now to talk with your locals and international unions about all workers joining together to end this shutdown with a general strike.”

Nelson’s fiery calls to action hit the political world like a lightning bolt. And after a month of political gridlock with the threat of a general strike now on the table, Trump and the GOP caved and ended the shutdown on January 25th.

What can we learn from this pivotal and historic struggle from Trump’s first term in office? What can it teach us about the struggles that we will face with a second Trump term and a fully megafied Republican Party effectively controlling all branches of government and what lies in store for workers in the labor movement itself as we careen into our uncertain future?

To talk about all of this, I’m honored to be joined today by the one and only Sara Nelson herself. Sara, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News, I really appreciate it.

Sara Nelson:

Happy to be with you every time, Max.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right back at you, sis. And we need your voice now more than ever, and I really appreciate you making time for this with everything you’ve got going on, which we’re going to talk about at the end of this interview.

But right now, as those clips that we played in the introduction show, yours was a powerful and essential voice rising from the labor movement at a critical moment during the Trump and GOP-led government shutdown back in 2019. It was, as I said, the longest government shutdown in US history, and this struggle really showed why we need labor movement militancy, and it showed what workers can do to flex our power to change the partisan and political terrain.

So I wanted to ask if you could take us back to that moment during the 2019 shutdown. Let’s remind our viewers and listeners what was actually happening, what was at stake and what was going on in your world, in your heart as all of this was unfolding and why you stood up the way that you did.

Sara Nelson:

Well, Max, every government shutdown is a threat to flight attendants and anyone in the aviation industry, we’re very, very aware of that because you have people like transportation security officers and air traffic controllers coming to work without a paycheck, which is incredibly stressful.

The first thing you learn in safety is remove all distractions. What could be more distracting than not getting a paycheck for going to work? And so as we saw this coming on, we started to define the problem right away. And what we saw in 2018, because this started just before Christmas in 2018, and you would think that people would have a little bit of empathy, but what Donald Trump had done is that, oh, they’re not missing a paycheck yet. This is no big deal. They’re going to get paid and back pay.

And so there was already a division. What we had to do was define the problem, and I want to be really clear about this. This is a really important thing. Define the problem. Set your demands, back up your demands with what you’re willing to do to get them and add urgency. And so the very first thing that we did was we worked very, very closely with the other aviation unions and even the rest of the industry.

Very early in January, I happened to be at an aviation conference with everyone in the room and from manufacturers to airlines, to suppliers to general aviation. I mean, people were worried about this who were flying private jets, right? And aviation unions, we got together and defined all of the issues about why this was a problem to have this shutdown.

There were not safety specter inspectors in place. There were not safety inspectors to sign off on new aircraft for delivery. There was not safety inspectors in place to sign off on pilot licenses where they’re getting their renewed certifications so they could go back on the job.

The issues and the ramifications around this are endless. The other thing that happens is all the work on any modernizing or fixing problems, that all gets put to the side. So as the government shutdown goes on, the safety net stretches to the point where there are holes, and that became more and more dangerous as that shutdown went on.

So we defined that problem. On January 10th, we actually published a letter that had never been published before by the entire industry. Everyone had signed this. These are people who usually fight with each other every single day on Capitol Hill and in the workplace, but we were united around that and nobody remembers that part of the story, but we put that out there. We started having press conferences.

AFGE, they were telling the stories of the workers. These were not just nameless, faceless bureaucrats, like I said in that speech, these were real people that people could see were sleeping in their cars at the airport, not because they didn’t have a home to go home to, but they didn’t even have money to put gas in their car.

And so they were so dedicated to their jobs and the fact that they were forced to come to work because as we knew from Patco, they’d just be fired or possibly sent to jail if they didn’t. And so they were sleeping in their cars because they didn’t have any more gas in their cars to go home and come back and still going back to work in the morning. These are the kind of stories we were able to tell.

And AFGE actually got a hold of a memo that went down through some of the agencies from the administration saying, you are not to say that you were struggling during this shutdown, you are not to share your stories. You’re supposed to tell everyone. You’re just fine. And it’s only because the union was in the workplace that we were able to give workers cover and say, that is baloney. We’re telling the truth. We’re telling the American public what this means to them.

And that is a really important part of this story because that needs to happen in every contract fight that needs to happen in every legislative battle, whether it’s local or federal. We need to be ready to define the issues. And we can do that because nobody knows this work and what it means to our communities and to everyone around us better than working people do. So we got to take that in.

But I kept saying to people, what can we do? What is going to get their attention? And you talked about it. He wanted the money for the southern border wall, and that was what was holding up the package deal. Well, I got to tell you, that was bullshit. Okay? That was racist fear-mongering to try to divide the country further, have people focused on this issue over here when what was really happening was this was Trump trying to get what the GOP had been trying to get for 50 years.

And that is privatize every function of government because if there had been an aircraft accident, if there had been a terrorist attack, there would’ve been incredible weight that had been added to the administrative office of the president and the executive office, and the president would’ve been able to say, I’ll fix it and privatize everything. It’s not working. So we’ll do that. And if nothing happened, of course, it would give more to the narrative of, oh, this is just a bureaucratic mess in government, so we don’t need it so we can shut it down.

So let’s be very clear, Project 2025 was at the heart of that government shutdown. That was already the plan that they were trying to put in place. We see it in black and white now that they’re trying to dismantle these functions of government because what does that do? That makes the most vulnerable, even more vulnerable, which makes people desperate, which makes people agree to things they would never agree to otherwise, just to get fresh air, just to be able to try to feed their families.

And so we cannot have a labor movement that is in a desperate place. We have to be defining the problem and setting our demands. That’s what we did there. And I’ll tell you what, on January 24th, the Senate and the House took a vote that did not pass. The same thing that passed the very next day. And it wasn’t until we had said, we’re ready to strike. We’re calling on everyone else to strike.

And a few flights started to cancel LaGuardia because 10 air traffic controllers signed in for their job and said, “I physically can’t go on. I cannot do my job.” People talk about it calling in sick. No, these are people who have such a stressful job that when they come to work, they leave their phones outside, they go into dark rooms, they have to retire at age 56, and they have to sign a note every single day that says I’m fit for duty.

And they couldn’t continue to sign that they were driving Ubers at night to try to take care of their families. They missed another paycheck just the day before. And so when these flights started to cancel, we said, “Leader McConnell, can you hear us now?” And all of a sudden when there was no political solution about a southern border wall, supposedly there was a solution within a couple of hours because the GOP recognized that workers were going to get a taste of our power, and that was the thing they were more scared of than anything.

So they ended that government shutdown before people could truly take in that when we take action together, we take control of the agenda and we can set forward the policies that matter for working people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh, yeah. I really want to underline in red pen again in case anyone is forgetting what happened. It was union workers who ended that shutdown. It was workers who applied the pressure that got the people in DC to actually do what they were supposed to do.

And I want to hover on that for a quick second, Sara, because I think, like you said, every government shutdown is a threat to our safety. People don’t think about all the ramifications, but during a 35-day shutdown, you start to see what the effects are. But in every-

Sara Nelson:

Yeah, seniors are going to get kicked out of their housing because that program was down. HUD was down. But workers everywhere were talking about this. And what I also saw there was I was talking about this in interviews as I was going from one part of DC back to our office and the cab driver, when I handed him money, I’ll never forget this.

I handed him the money and he grabbed my hand through the little window of the cab and he had a tear rolling down his cheek and he said, “Thank you. You’re fighting for me too.” Because no one was coming to work. There were no cab fares to be had. This is all related. We’re all in this together.

And what I noted in that moment, especially as this all started, was that we had been suffering for 40 years of an attack on the strike and attack on unions, an attack on working people while the rich got richer, our wages stayed flat, productivity went through the roof.

And that was because Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981, sent many of them to jail and told the rest of the country, all of corporate America, that it was open season on unions. And the labor movement did not respond the way that we should have been. We should have understood that even though Patco endorsed President Reagan and people were pissed about it, even though they had demands that were demands that were better than the rest of ours, they were fighting for a 32-hour work week.

And people were like, “Oh, they’re greedy.” And all this stuff. There was all this messaging. The fact that we let that happen, the rest of us have been suffering ever since because of the attack on that strike, because the attack on working people. And so this moment in the government shutdown was also about righting that wrong and resetting the course for working people to understand that an injury to one is an injury to all, and it is a ripple effect.

And if you don’t get out there and stand up with the most vulnerable people, they’re coming for you next. And that’s what we saw. We’ve seen it. We need to know that we learned that, and hopefully we’re not going to ever allow that to happen again.

Maximillian Alvarez:

On that note, that’s also what makes 2019 such a pivotal moment, both in terms of the Democrat, republican, bipartisan political side of things, and as you mentioned, the labor movement politics within unions 40 years after Patco, right? Or nearly 40 years after the Patco strike. You were really kind of stepping into a moment where these two things were converging.

And I just wanted to ask a little more about that. Because in every government shutdown, it’s basically a waiting game opinion to see which party gets blamed for the shutdown and caves to the public pressure and gives into the demands of the other side. And that’s kind of what we were watching unfold six years ago.

But then people’s imaginations changed because a new player entered the chat. You and the movement and workers and unions showed that it’s not just Democrats and Republicans who have a say in what happens here. And so I wanted to ask what that moment meant for the breaking of people’s political imagination and why that’s such an important lesson for us to take to heart now.

But also if you could speak a little more on what state the labor movement was in at that point and what willingness the organized labor movement writ large was willing to play and why this was such a step forward calling for a general strike, like urging more militancy like you did six years ago.

Sara Nelson:

Well, I want to be really clear that that was on the backs of the Chicago teachers in 2012 being willing to say under Karen Lewis’s leadership, the word strike again, being willing to organize in a way that brings the entire community to the fight and helps the community understand what that fight was about. And that strike inspired then West Virginia teachers to go out on an illegal strike.

They didn’t even have collective bargaining rights, but they defined the problem so well that not a single county executive was willing to go to court to sue them over illegally going on strike. And they brought everyone to the fight by defining that problem and having everyone understand it was everyone’s problem. And they went out and they built so much power that they not only got a contract for themselves with those races, they got raises for all the other public employees in West Virginia.

And that set up a spark that lit all over the country with the red for ed strikes. And I think it’s really important actually to recognize that because working people are not red or blue working. People live everywhere. And if we confine ourselves to, oh, we can only force the people that we think might have a conscience, and the people who have traditionally said they’re with working people with the applause lines like, “Labor gave us the weekend, labor gave us the eight-hour day.”

Hello? Look the fuck around. Nobody has a weekend anymore. Nobody has an eight-hour day. Stop it. What we need to be talking about is collective bargaining. We need to be talking about worker power. We need to be talking about taking care of people. And so going into that shutdown, we already had grocery who had taken on a huge strike. Teachers all over the country, there had already started to be an awakening in the labor movement to labor power.

So we took that moment and ran with it. This wasn’t like a game. I lost my friends on 9/11 and I was in our office one day during this fight, and it’s all we were doing. We were updating dating our leaders every sing day, I was talking to the other labor union leaders every single day, talking to the president of the Air Traffic single day.

And we kept people informed, we did town halls for our members, but some people have to let off a little steam and have a little fun. And my communications team, I heard them laughing down the hall. And I got to tell you, I’m almost embarrassed to tell this story, but I went shooting down the hall and I said, “What’s so funny? There’s nothing that’s funny. Somebody’s going to die and it’s going to be on our watch, and I’m not going to stand for it. We can’t stand for it.”

And so we knew that this was as mu on us as it was on those federal workers, and we had to take Stan going into this moment with Trump. There was already this labor militancy was moving and people were about labor’s power that was starting to take effect. But we also had to recognize that it’s not the politics. We have this big argument in how much do labor unions spend on politics every year and how much do they spend on organizing?

Where would we be better served? Democracy doesn’t just sort of exist in this great land of like, oh, if everybody shows up and votes, it’s all going to be okay. They are controlling our politics with their money. Every single corporate entity has lobbyists on the hill talking to these people every single day. And I’ll tell you what, Democrats and Republicans are subject to pressure from their constituents if their constituents understand what the fuck they’re doing.

So we have to not think about this as red and blue or purple whatever it is. We have to think about it from the point of worker power, defining that problem, setting our demands and making sure that we’re holding every single representative accountable. They answer to us. We don’t wait to hear from them what the plan is, they answer to us.

And so that is a really important point going into this administration. We cannot assume that Trump and his band of fascists have all the power here. We have power and they have claimed that they’re for working people. We’re going to use that to our advantage. You see Bernie Sanders saying Trump said one of the campaign promises was to cap credit card interest rates at 10%. Let’s do it, man.

Let’s go hold these people accountable. Don’t just sit around and wait for the bad shit to happen. Let’s go on offense here. And we have a real opportunity to do that with labor and awakened labor, a burgeoning labor movement. Starbucks workers and Amazon workers who were on strike over the holidays showing the power of labor, not looking at this from a lot of people saying, “Oh my God, going into their bunkers next four years, terrified, worried about all these things.”

No, we’re going to keep taking action. We’re going to keep doing what we need to do and we’re going to keep tackling capital. Because the problem here is that capitalism is in control and capitalism has gone to a place where there is no check on it without labor. And capitalism doesn’t give a shit about any human being. It’s only about extracting as much profits as possible.

And we see that very clearly. The other thing that’s been really defined since that first Trump presidency is just how bad the inequality is and just how gross it is that there is someone like Elon Musk who could practically double his wealth in the time from the election until now. That is insane. And we can’t just let that go on. We got to attack that right where it exists.

We got to organize at Tesla, we got to organize at Amazon. Workers have to rise up. That’s what we’re going to have to do. And frankly, I actually think we can make some great gains if we really get on this and understand this. And we also have to understand that when they come for our sisters and brothers and union and siblings who they don’t want to have here because of the color of their skin, that is a fundamental, one of the four Ds from the Union Busters, divide, delay, distract and demoralize.

And they’re going to do that to try to continue to distract us, to make us believe that we’re at odds with people that don’t look like us or we don’t have the same experiences. And we have to understand that taking on those fights too is tackling those union buster tactics that are going to weaken labor. We cannot stick our head in the sand and think that’s not our fight.

And so anyway, as we take on all of this, and we really understand that when we follow that formula of defining the problem, setting the demands, backing it up with what you’re willing to do and understanding the urgency of the moment to get everyone’s attention, we can actually win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to pick up on that point about how the attempts to divide us are going to be central to everything moving forward. As you said, going after immigrants, going after trans people, these are the proverbial low hanging fruit, but these are also human beings that our fellow workers are being convinced are their enemies, while our actual enemies are destroying our planet and enriching themselves in corrupting our democracy, yada, yada, yada.

But another category of worker that is going to be ostracized and in fact already is, our government employees. And you were really making that point years ago that these were not nameless, faceless, useless bureaucrats. These were human beings providing essential labor. And this is what we can expect in the coming months pretty immediately. Because you mentioned holding Trump to his campaign promises.

It was so apparent to me, and I think everyone with two brain cells that Trump was trying to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, acting like he had no idea what it is. Then he gets elected, turns right around and reappoints the primary author of it to lead his staff while also appointing a bunch of Project 2025 authors all throughout his cabinet.

So first off, he was telling you, the voter, fuck you, I got what I wanted and now I’m going to do what I said I wasn’t going to do. But I think it is telling, you mentioned the union buster tactics, and this is a type of governance that we can actually learn from how bosses and CEOs operate to understand how these people think about government and think about us.

And one of the linchpins of Project 2025 is a union buster tactic is to take tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of federal employees, reclassify them, make them easier to fire, make it harder for them to object to directives that are coming from the Trump administration, yada, yada, yada.

I wanted to ask as one of our first salvos in this fight where the Trump and the GOP, Fox News, all the arrayed forces in the MAGA movement are going to try to do what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin 10 years ago and pit the public against public sector workers.

So what can we learn from the fight in 2019 that can help people not fall into that trap of saying, yeah, fuck those guys. This is all government waste and I don’t need to care about these people?

Sara Nelson:

Well, for example, if you actually believe that you’ve earned your social security benefits and it should be there for you, and it shouldn’t be cut, it shouldn’t be undermined, then you have to defend the federal workers. A lot of people are talking about the fact the federal workers are going to be at the tip of the sphere of the labor movement. They’re going to face the first onslaught of attacks.

But we can’t just keep it defined that way. That’s sort of like saying, we’re going to tweet hashtag Pro act every day and hope that it passes. And so I think that what we have to do is we have to talk about the work that they’re doing and what that means in people’s everyday lives. And that is going to bring the, that’s going to build power that’s going to bring the community to these fights because it’s not just about the attack on workers’ rights.

That’s really about just trying to make it easier to dismantle all of these social programs that keep that basic safety net and needs to be strengthened. Let’s face it, it’s one of the worst in the entire developed world, but if we care about these programs, we got to talk about that’s what they’re trying to do. Because if they move the social security offices, this is another tactic for them and say, oh, it’s too expensive to have that in DC. We’re going to move it actually to another state.

Those workers have to decide, am I going to uproot my family and go to that other state? This is another way that they’re going to try to very quickly get rid of people, and we have to understand the programs that they’re trying to dismantle too. The VA, our veterans need a hell of a lot more care for what they have been put through on the front lines of battle, and they want to dismantle the VA which has a higher rating than any other hospital or healthcare program in the country.

And so we really have to be very clear about what these attacks mean and not just be lulled into a place that’s saying, this is just about worker rights that is popular. Everyone wants to be in unions, but people don’t really understand that. They can’t really identify with that. We have to make this real to people and what it’s going to mean in their lives about why these attacks on federal workers is going to affect them and their families and hurt them and understand that this is all of our fights.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I have so many more questions and I could talk to you for hours, but I know you’re a busy woman. I got to let you go in a few minutes. So I wanted to just, by way of wrapping up, kind of ask the big scary question here about what are working people and the labor movement actually facing with the second Trump term?

I think people are maybe naively saying they’re saying we got to organize, but in a naive sense, without considering all the ways that a anti-labor NLRB is going to make it a lot harder for people to organize unions on the shop floor kind of thing. So we got to be clear-eyed about what we’re actually facing.

And I wanted to ask from your vantage point, what are we actually facing as working people as a labor movement that has already suffered four-plus decades of direct attack? But also, to ask if you could round us out on bringing us back down to the ground floor here and talk about the organizing efforts that you and your union and your members are involved in right now and why people should care about that and what they can do to get involved in that as a way to flex the power and to remind themselves that we are not powerless moving into these next four years.

Sara Nelson:

So first of all, I just want to note that we have laws in place. We have the NLRA, we have the Railroad Labor Act that we work under. We have the FLRA for federal employees, and the laws are slightly different in each of these areas, but those laws were all put in place because there was mass disruption that led to corporations wanting to have laws that would give them some order, would give them an ability to resolve disputes.

So the attacks to try to dismantle the NLRB, to try to dismantle the NLRA altogether is a little bit laughable because workers actually flex their power a hell of a lot more when there were no restrictions on the strike, when there was no restrictions on how they could actually fight the boss. And people are angry. People are together, and so they should be very, very careful about what they’re doing in order to dismantle these laws because they’re going to unhandcuff workers too.

But it is difficult. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish about this. This is very difficult because when you are asking a worker to stand up in their workplace, there’s a lot of fear there. They got to take that paycheck. They have a family that’s counting on them or other people who are counting on them. Maybe it’s roommates because they can’t afford to live alone on the wages that they’re making. And so it can be very fearful.

But I think about the warrior met strike at the beginning of the last four years and what those miners went through in Alabama and how that unfair labor practice strike that they went out on, they got confirmation later after the strike had been broken by the company that they were right, that they were in the right, the law was on their side, but the state was not. The state governor used troopers with tax funds from the people who lived in that state to escort scabs from other states to go in and break that strike line.

There were injunctions that put the union at a place where they had to be, I think it was 900 feet from the entrance to any mine. Well, let me tell you, this is in the hollers of West Virginia that’s out in the trees somewhere. And so they did everything they could to try to take away workers’ power in that fight.

And I think that we have to recognize that we’re going to have to organize no matter what and help people understand the Mother Jones call to action that she gave us when she said, if you only understand that you hold the solution to the whole problem in the palm of your hand.

If for example, every worker were to simply hold up and stop working, the capitalists would yield to any and all demands because the world could simply not go on. The anarchists never wanted to sign a contract because they wanted to have the power to strike whenever they needed to. They’d get the provisions in place at the workplace, and the next time the company screwed up, they’d go out on strike again.

And so sometimes these contracts and these rules actually undermine worker power if we truly understand that in our hearts and our heads. And I’m not saying that that’s the model we should follow, but we have to recognize that there is real power in that when there’s a consciousness in the workers and that solidarity that runs through all of working people that can really hold these people to account.

And that’s what we can do. So we’re organizing at Delta, most of the airline industry organized with the pilots in the 1930s. The rest of the workers mostly organized in the 1940s. We’re 80% organized in our industry. Imagine what this country would look like if every industry had 80% of workers and unions. But we are organizing, there are over 28,000 flight attendants.

I just got word that Delta plans to hire more to try to dilute because they’re very worried that we’re going to get to a vote here. We have more momentum than we’ve ever had. We’re in a big push to try to file so that we can have jurisdiction under the current National Mediation Board. And it’s really tough because under the RLA, you have to sign physical cards and get a majority of those cards. And those cards are only good for a year.

And if you have churn like that, when Delta hires more, they have the new people who just came out of company training who have just been through the whole union busting integration with the company. And then the people who are more seasoned will take the leaves to be off, the unpaid leaves and be at home. And so there’s a lot of hurdles in place, but we’re making more inroads than ever at Delta.

And imagine finally taking on this company that has been able to make more money than any other airline off the backs of the workers because they have total control there and winning in Atlanta. And that winning turns into more winning. When workers saw all across this country, when workers saw baristas standing up at Starbucks, this sparked an entire movement because people are saying, oh yes.

Not only are these workers willing to do this but it seems like these are workers that wouldn’t have any power because these jobs are not really necessary. They’re all the ways that we have defined work to try to undermine the value of that work, that is the epitome of a Starbucks barista. And yet, these workers have shown their value by taking action, organizing together and calling an entire nation to be behind them in this organizing campaign. That’s where we need to be.

But I’ll tell you something else, the kind of organizing that we need to do is not going to be done just by the unions that exist today. If every single union did spend the amount of money that we’re spending on Delta organizing, it still wouldn’t be enough to meet the demand of people everywhere who want to join a union.

So the other thing that I’m working on is a project called Union Now that would essentially for those of you who are familiar with Super Charge E-walk, be a place where any worker can call up and get help to organize their workplace but also get help with with organizers, communications with attorneys, and have that backing through that first contract.

And this would not be an intention to build up a membership base. This would be an intention for Union Now to actually put itself out of business because you get everybody into their unions, you get their contracts in place, and we’ve got to have that kind of focus. We’re going to be doing massive fundraising around this to try to make this work and stand this program up.

It’s the kind of thing that we need right now to build worker power and have the kind of worker power that we need to put in check capitalism that has run amuck and has us in a place where a guy who’s building a dick rocket to head off to Mars while he leaves the rest of us on a burning earth is held to account because the working people in his workplaces hold up any more profits that he can possibly make.

“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor unions had fallen almost completely out of the public mind, it turned out that they were central to all our most fundamental problems.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore on Dec. 6, 2024, Max speaks with Nolan about his new book, what the ongoing war on workers’ rights and unions tells us about the “fucked up” society we’re living in, and what lessons labor can teach us now about how to fight and win, even in the darkest of times. Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL–CIO, also makes a special guest appearance in the second half of the episode.

Additional links/info below…

• Hamilton’s website, Facebook page, and X page
• Hamilton Nolan, Hachette Books, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor
• Red Emma’s website, Facebook page, and Instagram
• David Dayen, In These Times, “Meet the militant flight attendant leader who threatened a strike—and helped stop Trump’s shutdown”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Analysis:

Mic check. Mic check. We’re going to go ahead and get started with tonight’s event. It is always, always, always good to see you at Red Emma’s bookstore Coffeehouse. There are many things you could be doing. The weather cleared up nicely, cold as hell, but it was a beautiful afternoon, so you might’ve been somewhere else. You chose to be here with us in community and in the struggle capitals, and that is never lost upon us. I’m the poet known as analysis. Welcome on behalf of the entire team Hamilton. Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who was written about labor, politics and class war for publications such as Gawker in these Times, the Guardian and More. Speaking of Gawker Media, he helped organize them in 2015. That became the first yes, yes, yes. First online media company to unionize. He’s based in Brooklyn, New York has a publication called How Things Work, and you can find that at his website, hamilton nolan.com, Hamilton nolan.com.

We are joined in conversation this evening by Red Emmas fan. Max Alvarez is the editor in chief of the Real News Network, the host of the podcast, working people, PhD in history and comparative literature from University of Michigan and does so much more, writes for so many things. Speaking of writing, we have one copy. How many copies did I say? One copy of Max’s book, the Work of Living. Where can people talk about their lives and dreams and the year That World ended This right over there. So you should get that along with tonight’s book. We are so glad to get into this labor history. It is very important. I need y’all to give up some real radical roof rays and red ass noise for in conversation with Max Alvarez and presenting the hammer power. I love this subtitle. Listen to this Power inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Y’all make some noise for Hamilton Nolan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, thank you so much analysis. Thank you once again to the great Red Emma’s Cooperative Bookstore coffee house and gathering space. This is a really important space for our community, so just wanted as always to thank our hosts and encourage y’all to please support Red Emma’s because we need places like this to plan the next steps, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in the second part of our conversation today. And I couldn’t be more grateful to be in conversation with my man, Hamilton Nolan about that because I often find myself looking to Hamilton for answers or guidance or even just a little dose of strength that I can kind of get to help me get out of bed and keep fighting. Hamilton is a role model for so many of us in the labor journalism and labor media world, and I’m so proud of him and everything that he’s done, especially this incredible new book that we’re here to talk about today, which as analysis said is called The Hammer Power Inequality and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. Hamilton, thank you so much for joining me today and Baltimore brother and welcome.

Hamilton Nolan:

Thank you and thank you Red Emmas. This is my first time at Red Emmas and I love everything about this place already, so I’ll definitely be back and thank you all for coming and thank you Max, who by the way, if you all don’t know, is definitely one of the best labor journalists in the United States America, and we are lucky to have him here in Baltimore, so thank you for having me.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you, brother. That means the world to me and who boy do we got a lot to talk about, right? I mean, I’m thinking we’re never going to be able to sum up the richness and depth and importance of this book in a 60 minute talk, right? That’s an unfair aim to have in any book talk. So I want to encourage everyone first and foremost to please buy and read this book. If you are finding yourself, like me feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, fear, anger, resentment, all these heavy feelings that you don’t know what to do with, but you are looking for something to do, you were looking for more that you can do to fight back and to keep us from falling further into the abyss. I would highly recommend that you start with this book and you’ll find a lot of hard truths and a lot of warm comfort in it through the stories of our fellow workers, past and present and through Hamilton’s fierce and righteous perspective.

And so Hamilton, I want to by way of introducing the book sort of jump into the moment that we’re in right now because everyone is sort of looking at the past eight to 10 years to try to understand what the hell happened in this country that not only led us to elect Donald Trump president the first time, but now a second time with a fully magnified GOP controlling effectively all branches of government. And there are a lot of different narratives about the last eight to 10 years that cherry pick stories about the working class and their politics, our politics and so on. I wanted to ask you, Hamilton Nolan, what does the last eight to 10 years in this country look like through the lens of labor and through the lives of the working people that you report on for a living?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, thank you, man. It’s a great question and obviously one I’ve thought about a lot and you’ve thought about a lot, probably everybody in this room has thought about a lot. I think I’m going to cheat a little bit because I’m going to go back a little bit farther because I think you have to go back a little bit farther to really answer that question. And I will go back to the end of World War II 1950s in America. It’s going to be short though. I’m not going to talk that one, but the context being that after World War II in this country, one in three working people in America was a union member, and what did that produce that produced what is looked back on now as the golden age of America? Ironically, look back on by Republicans in particular, I was like, wow, that’s the time we need to get back to one in three working people in this country was a union member and America was prosperous, but that level of unionization in this country meant that the prosperity that America had was widely shared.

So we had the greatest shared prosperity for a good 20 to 30 year period. It was really a golden age in the history of America. All that prosperity was widely shared because working people in this country had the power to take their share of that wealth thanks to high levels of unionization. And over time the decline of unions in America in the mid 1950s about one in three workers was union member. Today it’s one in 10, and that’s been a slow downward decline for all those years, and particularly beginning in 1980 with the Reagan era. I was born in 1979. So this kind of the story of my lifetime is that we saw this inequality, crisis, economic inequality, crisis in particular start to rise up in America. And of course Reagan’s assault on unions and worker power was a big part of enabling that. And there’s a really famous chart that a lot of you probably seen, and one line is the decline of union density in America.

It goes down like that. And then the other line is the rise of the wealth held by the top 10% in America and it goes up like that and it’s perfect mirror images, perfect mirror images. So those two things are not coincidental. Those two things are one enabled the other. And so I think to bring it up to today, I think that it’s just the nature of societies that inequality can only rise for so long before stuff starts to break and stuff starts to break down, the social contract starts to break down, the political system starts to break down. People stop believing in the American dream because it becomes increasingly obvious that the American dream is kind of a sham. And I think that is the environment that fostered a guy like Trump who is not only a Republican, but also like a conman and just clearly a scam artist and all the sort of worst qualities come to the fore.

But I remember I covered Trump when he was running in 2016 and 2015, and one thing that always stuck with me from the 2016 election was that in West Virginia, which was one of the highest states in America for voting for Trump in the democratic primary, Bernie won every county in West Virginia. So what is that? That’s people being like, we need something different. We need the most different thing that we can find. And I think that is what’s led us to Trump the hollowness of what neoliberalism produced in this country, the failure of America to share his prosperity, crushing unions crushing working people’s ability to get their fair share of the wealth that this country produces, which is still, by the way, the most wealth any nation in the history of the world has ever produced we’re rich as hell. It’s just that all the money goes to the very top. All those things I think conspire to form atmosphere where a guy like Trump can rise up. And I guess the story of the last election is that in those eight years, the opposition did not rally itself to fix the underlying problems that contributed to Trump getting in the first place. So here we are.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I want to tease that out just a bit more, right? Since it’s, again, this is in the air that we’re breathing right now, it’s everywhere, especially if anyone’s like, I understand why you would maybe not be following the news so closely these days because exhausting. So I do understand that, but it’s all that anyone’s talking about right now. So I do want to sort of ask you if you could also take this and respond to the discussions and debates that are being had right now from mainstream news all the way to independent channels like ours all across social media, Democrats abandoning the working class and reaping what they’ve sown, Republicans having this quote, great realignment and a lot of working people supporting Trump and maga. And you really, I think helped us understand some of the complex reasons that might happen. But I want to ask you if you have, what you feel is missing from those debates right now, especially in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory.

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean, I do think one thing that’s not getting really enunciated enough or made clear enough, especially in the discussion after the election of the sort of alleged working class shift to Republicans, and some of it was real. I mean, there has been a real certain amount of shift of lower income votes to Trump, but one thing that didn’t get brought up, and especially in the ways that the Democrats panic about that, and a democratic political consultant is probably the least equipped person in the world to solve that problem. They’re all millionaires who live in dc. But I mean, what I think didn’t get talked about enough specifically was that the union votes still went to Democrats by the same healthy margin that it had in the past. So actual union members did not shift to Trump, not that Harris was so great or anything, but the actual union vote stayed to the left.

And so I think that, and I’m a broken record maybe, but when we talk about, oh, the working class, how are we going to bring the working class back, raise union density, get more people into unions, and you get people into organizations that actually can do political education, people’s relationship with politics can’t just be seen ads on tv. I mean, that’s not politics. And politics is being in an organization that can help people fight for their own interests, whether it’s electorally, whether it’s in the workplace or anywhere else. Unions are the foundation of that in America. The labor movement is the foundation of that. Even though it’s gotten very weak, it’s still demonstrated even in the last election when working class people shifted to the right union members didn’t. So unions are an essential ingredient to American democracy. And when we talk about the declining in unions, it’s not just a story about economics. It’s not just people aren’t earning enough money anymore. It is a story of the loss of power, the loss of regular people’s ability to exercise power, political power in particular. And so I think that’s something that has not been discussed enough, at least in the mainstream news though I’m sure on real news. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, we got you baby. And I want to come back to the union question in a second, but I think you make a tremendously important point, right? Given the sort of post World War II context that you gave us in the beginning all the way up till now, and like you said, our lifetimes are effectively the arc of this decline. We are sort of like and bear the living imprints of Neoliberalism’s like rise and fall, and we bear in our family stories and experiences like the effects of a failed ideology, well failed for us. But for the past 40 years, that has been what working people across the board have experienced, and whether they are joining unions or trying to form unions in larger numbers than we’ve seen in a generation in recent years or going on strike, whether they’re burning down police precincts or voting for explicitly anti-establishment politicians like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, that being the linkage that there’s an anti-establishment rage harnessed in there, all of those things are sort of different and even interlocking responses to a crisis that’s been building for our entire lifetimes.

And I think that’s what drives me so nuts about the ways that the media talks about politics and then those of us who consume the media learn to think about politics and it limits the scope of how we can think. George Orwell wrote this a century ago, I’m not saying anything new here, but I think that’s such an important point because if you don’t have that deeper historical context, if you don’t understand that what people are responding to every two to four years, they’re responding to a crisis that’s been building for 40 or 50. And so in fact, what’s more telling about our political situation, not just here in the US but around the world, is that we are in what many analysts are calling an anti incumbent period. Because again, what we just lived through the past three election cycles we haven’t seen in our lifetime where the incumbent party was voted out each time.

Hamilton Nolan:

I mean a two party system which we have, which unfortunately, and I think the older I get, the more I realize how bad a two party system is shitty system. But in a two party system, every election is a referendum on reality. And so if reality sucks, you get that pendulum nature that we see in America and that we’ve seen for much of the 20th century and into this century as well where the ping pong and back in America, we don’t have parties that have 40 year runs on top of the government. Why is that? Because all the dissatisfaction with the status quo is always going to be channeled to kicking out the party in power.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And again, traced along that timeline from when you were born to now, not only has union density just plummeted down to barely 10% in this country, but with that is all the neoliberal poison that has eroded the very foundations of our society, our democracy, everything, corporate consolidation, deregulation, privatization, globalization. These processes have been building up and accumulating. And it’s not that it’s anything new, it’s just that it’s taken this long for so many working people to feel it at this level, I think. And so that, sorry, did you have something to jump in on? No go. Because I think that leads us to where and why unions became such a central point for you, and in the same way that they become a central point for so many people in recent years looking for hope. Yeah. So talk about your path to understanding unions as an important institution. You didn’t start there. You didn’t set out to be a union guy

Hamilton Nolan:

And both of us, the fact that we sit here and talk about union so much is weird in media, in politics, unions are still considered this sort of niche story off to the side. And when I started and became a journalist, I didn’t start out to be a labor reporter. I was just like, I want to write about why is America fucked up? Why the rich get richer in the poor, get poorer? Why is there homeless people sleeping on the street and then there’s rich people in the penthouse, basic super basic stuff that all of us are like, why is that so broken? And over the years as I reported on all those things, I found myself repeatedly being drawn back to issues, to labor issues, to worker power, to the decline of worker power and the consequences of that and the ripple effects of that, and learned about the history of unions and the history of labor and the way that that had affected our economy, the way that that had affected our politics.

And over the years, just pursuing the threads of those really basic questions. Why is America broken in the ways that it’s broken today? I ended up becoming a full-time labor reporter because I found over and over again that labor issues were at the center of all those questions. The inequality crisis was directly spawned by the attack on labor power in this country. And the inequality crisis is the thing that was destabilizing our country in all the ways that manifest in a million different ways, including Donald Trump and a lot of other things. So I mean, I just sort of increasingly covered labor over the years because I was like, wow, this stuff is so important, so important, so important. And at the same time as I was looking around the media and being like, nobody’s really talking about this that much. I mean, people cover politics in really stupid ways, and there’s not that much attention on things that are actually more, in many cases, a union election is more consequential than a political election in the sense of the impact that it’s going to have not just on the lives of those workers, but the ripple effects going to have through the economy, the way it’s going to change the balance of power economically in a city, in an industry.

Those things have long-term ripple effects down through years and through generations, and they change families and they change people’s lives, and it’s a very, very undercover aspect of America in the media, in journalism. And so I think one of the reasons I kept on writing about labor over the years was just like nobody else was. Not nobody you were doing it, but relatively speaking, not that many people are writing about this stuff. That was actually really important, and that’s still true today, unfortunately.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just a small aside, please, please support any and all labor journalists that you follow. Support Hamilton Substack. Please support the real news support freelance writers like Kim Kelly, support great labor writers. Publishing for places in these times, Jacobin all over the place, local papers, the people doing the beats in their local area, they’re the only person covering labor stories. Support it, please. Otherwise it goes away.

Hamilton Nolan:

Max, how did you get into labor?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I’ll sort of give a condensed version that hooks into the union question for the same reasons that you do. I feel a little weird when people ask my opinion about unions or I’ve become known as a union guy or someone who knows a lot about unions because I interview a shit ton of union workers and cover a lot of labor stories, but that is not where I started covering labor. I started the podcast that I’m still doing working people. Years ago when I was still a broke grad student, we were living in Ann Arbor, and I say a joke that I almost started the show as a ruse to get my dad to talk about losing our house and losing everything that I had grown up with, losing the American dream in his mind because for years it had just eaten our family away.

It had taken my father away from me, the lights rum, but no one was there. My parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and that was so stunning to all of us. I was working at warehouses as a temp worker 12 years ago when this was all happening. It was really bad. And we grew up deeply conservative Republicans pro capitalists. The crash was a huge ideological crash for us because we saw how much the system we believed in and that we believed we could work within to make a good life for ourselves was so nakedly rigged in favor of the very people who had caused millions of families like ours to lose everything. And it was our going government bailing them out, and it was our media saying, Hey, the economy’s great while I’m sitting there on a couch with my dad in the house we were going to lose in two years.

So I started doing labor journalism on my podcast because I did not want my father to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And I kept doing the podcast because I saw how much, and I knew how much pain you accrue as a human being in such an inhuman system that chews us up and spits us out until we have nothing left to give that gets us accustomed to being paid so little and treated so poorly and what that does to your heart and your psyche. I wanted people to have a space to talk about that and to tell the stories of labor through the human stories of regular people. And it was years in the making that I came to understand a, people don’t deserve this. Well, I mean, I knew that from the beginning, but there’s something they could do about it. And that’s how I came to understand, oh shit, they had unions. I am seeing people come to the same conclusion. I’m seeing how they’re improving their lives by struggling together to exercise that, right?

Hamilton Nolan:

It’s really like one of the best parts of being a labor journalist. The stuff that we do, and you would probably agree with this, I don’t want to speak for you, but it is just like when I was at Gawker during the recession out of 2008, 2009, I did this series of unemployment stories. So I just had people who had become unemployed right in and tell their story. We published this every week for 40 weeks, 40 week long series, hundreds and hundreds of people telling their own stories. I got more thank you notes from people about that than probably anything I’ve ever written. And I didn’t write any of it. It was all their stories. And just giving people the ability to tell their own stories is such a blessing. And in unions, when I’ve been on book tour most of this year, I’ve been like all over the country and everywhere I go, I meet people who would just be like somebody who has worked in their union for 20 years, 30 years, been a member, been active, been elected, been a shop steward, whatever it is, and nobody’s ever told that person that was important that you did that it was actually important.

And so I think that’s what we do. We’re very lucky because in a sense you get to let people speak and you also get to tell people that they’re legitimately important in a way that they might have never even heard before.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. I mean, I am reminded of it week in and week out, just how much we all need that and how little we all get it. And there’s a hopeful note in that because that’s a gift that we can all give one another, listening to each other and talking to each other, showing your scars, telling your stories. That’s how workers learn that they’re being paid different rates all the way up to, again, the raw human stuff. That is, that’s what labor journalism is about. It’s not about unions, it’s about people struggling for a better life, a good life, and that manifests in the need that you can’t move anymore because of a work-related injury. So you can’t play T-ball with your kids, the life quality of life you lose because of someone else’s greed and negligence. I mean, it comes through in stories like that.

And there’s so many in Hamilton’s book, there’s so many in the work, in the articles he’s written, the interviews that I’ve done. And I think we all have a duty to sort of try to reconnect with each other on that human level for nothing else, to remind one another that we’re not alone. We’re not worthless. We deserve better than this. And every life is beautiful, and people need to be seen that way before they can see themselves that way and believe that they can even fight for a better world and that they deserve one. And so in that regard, I wanted to bring, I actually brought a prop, which was like, I didn’t expect this to be so relevant, but I have here in my hand for those listening to this, a cup from Tudor’s Biscuit World in West Virginia. I won’t go into the backstory of how I got this cup, but I found myself in Huntington, West Virginia and saw this restaurant that looked like a throwback to the eighties.

And I was like, oh, shit, I want to get a biscuit and I’m going to get a cup. But then I read your book and I was like, I wanted to throw the cup at the wall. So I wanted to ask, just by way of, again, really bringing us back to the book, there’s a really important story here about Tudor’s biscuit world. I wanted to ask if you could tell us a bit about that, the incredible person at the center of it, and also what this story says about everything you’re talking about, both the need for unions and also the reality that working people are up against when they try to exercise their rights.

Hamilton Nolan:

So the book is about, as you said, the gap between the potential that unions have to really, and I completely still believe today, and the seed of this book was being a labor reporter and getting involved in unions myself, organizing my workplace and all this stuff. And you’re like, wow, unions are so powerful. Unions are the tool. All these things that were broken, here’s the tool that can fix ’em all. This is so great. We just need to give everybody unions and we’re going to fix all these problems. And then you get involved in the actual labor movement and you start looking around, you’re like, this shit is broken, and that shit’s broken and they’re not organizing and nobody has unions and people don’t know about you. And it’s like it’s all a mess. So the gap between the potential of unions to sort of save this country innocence, and then the reality of the labor movement and organized labor being broken in a lot of ways is kind of the seed of this book.

So one of the chapters in the book I want to write about just something which should be one of the most basic things that anybody can do, which is a person organizing their own workplace. Every union started somewhere. And generally it started with one person who’s like, we should have a union here. So I went to West Virginia. Tudor’s Biscuit world is like, if any of you’re from West Virginia, you already know what it is, but it’s like West Virginia’s homegrown fast food chain biscuits and breakfast and stuff like that. People love it. In West Virginia, there was a woman named Cynthia who worked at a Tudor’s biscuit world, tiny town called View West Virginia. She had grown up in a union family. Her dad was in a union. So she, like many people in West Virginia, which has really strong union culture, knew about unions, had connections to unions.

And after she retired, she got a job at Tudors of Biscuit World. She was there for a while and she was like, these people aren’t paying our overtime. My colleagues aren’t getting their time off. The manager’s abusing us all. And she was like, we need a union. Her dad was in a union to her, it was a very natural thought to have. So she was like, I’m going to unionize this tutor’s biscuit world. She called her husband’s union, which was like the operating engineers. They were like, we don’t really do Tudor’s Biscuit world, but eventually put her in touch with the guy at UFCW who agreed to help her out with this organizing campaign, came out there to Elk View, helped her run a union campaign inside tutors, which little did she know at the time was one of the only fast food union campaigns in the United States of America.

I mean, you could count on one hand the number of even organizing drives at fast food stores in the United States at that time. So very, very unique thing that she was doing, even though to her it seemed completely natural and normal. And as she went to organize this workplace, which probably had 25 workers at this tutors, tutors sent in the union busting team, the corporate union busting team arrived, and new managers start showing up at work. And this is a very, very small town, LVUS Virginia. And so people start getting threats. Some people start getting bribes, we’ll give you a watch, we’ll give you a promotion, vote against the union. One person at one point, somebody knocked on their door and their kid was getting ready to go to I think the University of West Virginia, and they were like, the scholarship might be in danger if you vote for this union.

That was the kind of thing that was happening at a freaking fast food restaurant. And so when the vote came around and people got fired, of course, and they lost the vote by only a couple of votes, and failed to successfully unionize this tutors and filed a bunch of unfair labor practice charges, which got upheld, but everybody went and got new jobs because you’re getting paid $8 an hour, $9 an hour at this job in the first place. So it’s just such a story of an uphill battle. And the thing that she set out to do was so basic. It’s something that ideally really, you should be able to do that in a day. You work at a bookstore, you talk to the people that you’re like, we should have a union set up the election. Bam. That’s how easy it should be to form a union at your workplace. And the reality of what a struggle was for her, I think is illuminating story for us and also for the labor movement itself and for the labor movement to look at and be like, why are we unable to provide the resources that people need to successfully accomplish this thing at a fucking 25 person fast food restaurant, much less a 2,500 person factory or on and on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I want to drill down on that for a second because I think there are two crucial points there. One, about the reality of the past few years and the uptick in organizing, the increasing militancy, the creativity of strike strategies, the voting in of more democratic caucuses and major unions like the UAW and Teamsters and so on and so forth. So there’s been a lot of movement in the movement over the past few years, and we’ve been there covering it, and it’s exciting, and that’s how a lot of people know who we are. But one of the things that constantly freaks me out and stresses me out and bums me out is that we are still living in a kind of time and place and media ecosystem that conditions us to have no long-term memories, no long-term commitment to struggles that even we deeply care about.

And we see the results of that when strikes the Pittsburgh Post Gazette are still going on, and people have forgotten about ’em, just like we forgot about the coal miners in Alabama. And they effectively lost just like everyone loved the Starbucks drive, but they’re still fighting for first contracts. A lot of those stores that got closed aren’t reopened. A lot of people’s lives have changed and they moved on. We keep talking about the labor wave as if it’s still going unabated, but we’re not dealing with the reality of that people trying to exercise that right, have run into over these past few years. But then there’s also, and this is what I wanted to ask you about on the larger labor, organized labor side, all the way up to the leadership of the a Ffl CIO, current president, Liz Schueller said at the convention that our goal is to organize a million new workers in 10 years. That is such a small dream for such a big crisis. So I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on that. And also we need to be dreaming bigger. What are the bigger dreams that workers and the movement need to be having right now?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, I mean, today 10% of workers in America are union members. That’s the last stop before single digits,

And there’s no stop after single digits. That’s the last stop on the elevator. So we are in a fucking crisis, man. And the first thing is the world of organized labor, which still, by the way, has 16 million people in America and unions have billions of dollars. And there is a considerable amount of resources in organized labor, even though it’s been weakened for many decades. They need to see it as a crisis. First of all, the leadership of the institutions of organized labor, and I compare it a lot to climate change because it’s like this slow moving crisis. It gets a little bit worse every year, but it goes slow enough that you can kind of ignore it. So it gets a little bit warmer every year and the water comes up this much, but you can kind of ignore, it’s not in your house yet.

And the same way union density goes down every year, 0.2%, 0.3%. If you’re running a union, you can kind of ignore that. It’s not really destroying what you have, but over time, that leads you to oblivion. The first thing we really need is a sense of urgency among the leaders of the labor movement. And then we need them to open the checkbooks and start from the premise that we need to double the amount of union members in this country. We need to organize the next 10 million people. What you touched on the story of Liz Schuler, the A-F-L-C-O convey, I went to the a Ffl CO convention in 2022, which is like the presidential convention of the labor movement. And there was a new president taking over the Scheller, and she made a big splashy announcement for her introductory speech taking over the A-F-L-C-O. And her big announcement was, we are going to commit to organize a million new workers in 10 years.

And everybody clapped, it’s like a million sounds big. And so I pulled out a calculator and did about one minute worth of math. And it turns out that if you unionize a million new workers in 10 years, union density will continue to go down because it’s not even enough to keep up with the new jobs that will be created in that time. So the goal, the aspiration of the biggest institution in the union world was to keep declining. And that to me is so emblematic of the fucking problem at the center of organized labor. And it’s interesting because at the same time as a labor reporter, you can go all over the country and meet the most inspiring people you ever met in your whole life in unions, in the labor movement, organizers, local presidents, activists, workers, all these people, brave people, smart people fighting, dedicating their life to this cause. I mean, there’s a bazillion incredibly inspiring stories and incredibly inspiring people inside the labor movement, but the farther up you go, the less inspiring it tends to get. And one of the things I read about in my book is I followed Sarah Nelson, who’s a great labor leader, the head of the Association of Attendants, and she sort of wrestled with the question of how to be a leader of this movement. She’s sitting right there, by the way, she’s in the house tonight.

But I think the importance of that was sort how do we wrestled the leadership of this movement into the right place, tons of great people in the labor movement, and yet the leadership is so disappointing and it’s hurting us and it hurts us every year continually until we figure out how to fix it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, you anticipated my final question before we open it up to q and a, but if I can, I actually wanted to pose my final question to both you and Sara. A) because, yeah, Sara Nelson features heavily in this book and you learn a lot about Sara, her career and just what an incredible human being and fighter she is and what she’s fighting for. But also, if we recall, we saw this woman on the news a few years ago during the first Trump administration, during the government shutdown saying, fuck this. We’re going to general strike till you assholes get back to work. And that’s what stopped the government shutdown. So I really don’t want to put you on the spots here, but I kind of do and kind of already have. I wanted to ask both of you guys, what can we take from the first Trump administration to really get our heads and hearts right for the fight ahead, moving into a second Trump administration, but also again, in the vein of dreaming bigger, what do we need to correct or expand in this next dark period that we didn’t do in the last administration?

And then I’ll ask everyone to applaud and we’ll open up to audience questions. But yeah, Sara, I would love if you could answer that question as well.

Hamilton Nolan:

Alright, I’ll give a quick answer and then you can give a more inspiring answer or whatnot. I mean, we got to get more. The response to where we’re going is to get more hardcore. And the thing that makes me fearful in this moment is not, and I don’t think the people in this room are going to be the problem. I mean, if you’re sitting in this room, we’re probably fairly copacetic in the sense of when you’re faced with fascism, you have to organize more, build the labor movements stronger, fight more or fight back harder. But I think that the Democratic Party, for example, and the portion of this country that coalesces around the Democratic party, there’s going to be a big section of that whose impulse is going to be to compromise this time and to the way that strong men like Trump work is like he makes it so pleasing him is the only way to get anything done.

And so there’s a very powerful incentive for people in the world of politics on all sides to start kissing his ass, start licking his boots, start compromising. You see the president of the Teamsters taking buddy buddy pictures with him. Why is that? It’s because it’s like, well, this is how you get things done in this. But all that does is empower him more. And so it’s like a downward spiral where you give the strong man more and more power. So I think we got to fight harder. I don’t know if we will, but Sarah, what do you think?

Sara Nelson:

All right. Glad I had some bourbon for this. No. Okay, so Max, I could give a lot of answers to this question. First of all, I just want to say that I was back here getting emotional because these two men were sharing very personally and very openly about why this shit matters. And anyway, that was some good stuff, max. That was some good stuff. Okay. So what I’m going to say though is that of course, we got to organize more. We got to take this on. We got to fight, fight, fight. We got to do what Mother Jones said. She said she told the ludlow strikers after they had been gunned down and their tent, that they were sleeping in the cold depths of the Colorado winter while they were on strike against the co barons. And their intensity was burned and women and children were burned in the process.

She came to Ludlow and she said, you will fight and win. You will fight and lose, but you must fight. And part of the story that’s not ever told is that actually minors came with guns and a lot of spirit in their hearts to chase the militia out to chase the Colorado National Guard out, and they set up their own government there in Ludlow for the next six weeks, and they had their funerals and they took care of each other. And ultimately that went away. But that part of the story is never told. And so that is the power of our solidarity. But what did those people learn from that fight? I mean, they were out in that tent city to start with because the coal company was not even following the laws of the state at that time. They were, in some ways, they were just fighting to just enforce the law because they were all immigrants who spoke 28 different languages in that tent city.

And one of the reasons for that is because the co Barrons thought we’re going to hire people from different countries who won’t be able to communicate with each other because that is also going to be a way to make sure that we don’t have a union come in. And what they don’t understand at that level, and I’ve met these people, right? I’ve been in a lot of board rooms. They do not have the corner market on smarts, let me just tell you. But what they don’t understand is that when there’s a mine explosion and the mothers are left to tell their children that not only are their fathers not coming back, but they’re not sure how they’re going to be able to take care of them because none of the mothers can get work. They’re going to have to find another man in order to survive, and they’re trying to comfort their kids and figure out how they’re going to put their lives back together.

You don’t have to speak the same language to understand what’s going on in the heart. So that’s how the union was built. And I think about the last Trump administration, and I’ve really worked at not saying his name, no, it’s really fucking important. Let me just be clear, because our union learned after Carl Icahn fired all the TWA strikers in 1989, that we had to have a different way of striking. And so we looked at creative tactics and we created this strike tactic called chaos, create havoc around our system. And the idea was that we were using this provision of the railway Labor Act that had never been used, that allowed for intermittent strikes to go on strike and off strike. And we decided we would add an element to this, the element of surprise, we were not going to tell you when or where we were going to strike.

And so at Alaska Airlines in 1993, we struck seven flights and brought this deeply anti-union company to its knees who wanted to settle a contract overnight by fax machine that gave the flight attendants a 60% raise. We asked them if they wanted to meet and talk about it. They said, no, no, no. Every time we meet with you, something bad happens. We just want this over with. And so when I’m watching the government shutdown and seeing what’s going on there, and they’re saying that this is because Trump wants to build his southern border wall for security, for national security for our country, that was a bunch of bullshit. It was a 50 year campaign by the GOP to try to privatize everything in our country because if there had been a terrorist attack, that would’ve accrued incredible power to the executive to say, I’ll take care of it.

We’re going to make all these changes. If there had been an aircraft accident, same thing would’ve happened. If nothing had happened, they would’ve said, see, it’s a bunch of bureaucracy that we don’t need, and so we’re going to privatize. And so that was really what was at stake. And once we understood that this was not a political discussion between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, this was actually an attempt to try to distract people’s so much with the racist fearmongering, xenophobic, racist fearmongering, and keep people focused on all of that and create his own chaos campaign. I’m like, I know this one. We’re going to create a little chaos too. And so we set about talking about a safety strike for flight attendants, and we called on the rest of the labor movement to talk about a general strike because there were 800,000 people either out of work or forced to come to work for free, and another million contract workers who were just out of work with no hope getting anything in return.

This was a crisis and everyone could see it. And the cab driver in DC as I’m talking about this from one place to another, and I’m getting out of my cab and handing him the money, he turns around and grabs my hand. He’s got a tear going down his cheek and he says, thank you. You’re fighting for me too. You don’t think about this shit. But there was no work going on in DC so he didn’t have any cab fairs, so he couldn’t make a living for his family. So it’s all connected and we’re all connected, and if one person is mistreated, we’re all mistreated. But what we have to understand with this next incoming administration is that we cannot talk about Trump. We need to talk about the people who created Trump, the people who are going to give Trump power like you were talking about, and we need to hold them accountable, every one of them.

And we can’t think people think about this stuff in terms of red states and blue states. That’s bullshit. There’s working people everywhere, working people to be organized everywhere, working people to defend everywhere. And that’s how we need to approach this next administration. So the one thing I will say is that during that time, people were like, oh my God, which is what always happens in chaos campaigns. They don’t know where the ball is. So they’re like, oh my God, this is amazing. And one thing we learned is that instead of the typical strike coverage where it will say, how long can the union hold out? People are going to start crossing the line the next day, or people are not going to be able to hold out. They couldn’t say that because we weren’t telling ’em when or where we were going to strike, and they didn’t have their normal playbook. So all of a sudden they had to report on the issues that the workers were fighting for. And so we took control of the narrative, we took control of the schedule, we took control of the situation, and that’s what we as working people can do if we understand that this is all of our fight. But during that time, all these reporters were covering this and they were like, wow, this is amazing. And the one person who asked the question, yeah, but how are you fucking going to really do this was Hamilton Nolan.

So when he said, I’d like to write a book and I’d like to follow you around for a year, I was like, I don’t know. I is. This guy’s going to see right through me. And you did follow me for the worst year of my life. Thanks very much for doing that. But no, I mean, this is a really important book, and if all you do is read the intro and the last chapter, you’re going to know how to fight this next administration and how to take this on. But if you also want to hear some really inspiring stories about people who are trying to make this work and people who have won fights against all odds, read this book. And then the last thing I’ll just say is that laws do not give us power. We have power when we decide to come together and use it. Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s give it up for Sarah Nelson and Hamilton, Nolan, yo

Sara Nelson:

And

Hamilton Nolan:

Max Alvarez.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, man. I’m like, I’m crying, I’m cheering. I’m like, there’s a roller coaster here. So we want to open this up to questions. We know you all have questions for Hamilton, please, yeah, flag analysis down so we can get your questions and everyone can hear ’em also. Yeah, the recorder is going. We will have the audio for this published at the Real News. So if you’d prefer to ask a question but not on recording, Hamilton and I will be available afterwards.

Analysis:

And there’s so much to get into, so much thank you for such a rich discussion that we could talk for hours. Guess what, we don’t have ours. So we want to keep our questions and comments relatively brief and truncated so that we can get a few in. And we have one question here, and then we’re going to take a couple more hands.

Audience Member 1:

And I apologize because usually I don’t do this and I talk shit about people who do. But I’ve got three questions and you don’t have to take, I’m going to ask them, but you don’t have to take any of them. We can take one. So there are not red states and blue states, but there are red counties and blue counties. How do you do the organizing in those red counties? Two is that we’ve had a number of folk like Susan, but also high powered folk like feign at UAW, who’ve actually taken a different approach to labor. Could you talk about their approach to organizing? And then there are three different identities that we’re trying to navigate as workers. So one is our identities as consumers, the other is our gender identity. And then finally, and I think it’s most important actually, is our racial identity because all those things are related to organizing and how we think about ourselves as workers. How do you think about how our successful unions navigating those identity dynamics? Again, you don’t have to take any of them, but the questions are still important.

Hamilton Nolan:

I try to give a sort of broad answer that maybe touches on most of them at least. I think the thing about red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties goes to the heart of why this stuff is so important, particularly in this time that we’re in, where that is held up as such a strong divide in this country. And every election gets stronger. The two sides of the media, the two sides of politics, the two sides of everything. And people think that that is an unbridgeable gap, that this country is going down a road that we’re going down that is actually getting worse and worse, and the divide is getting starker and starker between red and blue. And when, to me, the one thing that can bridge that gap and that can close that gap and erase the distinction between red and blue is the labor movement.

Because I’ve been all over the country, I’ve been in red states and blue states and red counties and blue counties, and working people have common interests. And the fact that the labor movement is weak and that people don’t have access to unions is why they don’t think about that. And they don’t think in those terms. They think in terms of Fox News and CNN and M-S-N-B-C, and that’s not the real story, and that’s not the real story of politics is not Democrats and Republicans. It is working people building their power. And so I think the labor movement gets more important, the starker that red and blue divide gets, because it is the one thing that can bridge that gap and bring working people together. I always think of when the Warrior met coal strike was going on in Alabama, which was the longest strike in America, they had a big rally in Brookwood, Alabama, way out in country Alabama.

Sarah Nelson was there, a bunch of labor leaders were there, and thousands of united mine workers were there. This is country ass Alabama, and it was the most integrated event that I have ever been to in my life. I grew up in the south. I’ve never been to an event that integrated apart from maybe a football game. And this was everybody in that community there. And they were all talking about the evil private equity firm that was stepping on the necks of the workers. And I guarantee that most of those people were probably Trump voters. Oh, no,

Sara Nelson:

I’m sorry. I went to the first week of that strike, and at that first rally, people were real skeptical about the union. They were pissed, so they were out on strike, but they were not sure that they liked their union. And it was not an integrated event. The black workers were over here, the white workers were over here. They were all staying about as far as they could from the union stage where we were having this rally. And they were not talking about who the villain was either. They were just mad. And so after being on strike for six months, I’ll hand it back to Hamilton because that’s what we have to recognize too, is that when we’re out on the picket line and we are defining our issues together, suddenly what our differences are don’t matter as much anymore because we’re all human beings fighting for the same thing.

And you suddenly start to see people differently and you start to hear their stories too. You start to understand those stories better, so you start to understand why the strike matters to them, and then you start to feel connected to why you’re not just fighting for yourself, but you’re fighting for the person next to you too. And so this is where we have the opportunity to break through these gender identities and race identities, and not to wash them away, but to celebrate them and find the strength in that. Because I’m telling you, max, I’m going to fight fucking harder because I heard your story about your dad. That’s what this is about.

Maximillian Alvarez:

There you go. I mean, yeah, give it up and to pile on here, I mean, I can’t stress enough that this is the conclusion that you come to doing the work that we do at the Real News, right? I mean, you hear these stories week in, week out. You can’t help but be affected by them, and you can’t help but feel a duty to not give up on people and to help them fight the fight that needs to be had so that this kind of shit doesn’t happen on the regular. And this is by way of addressing a question about red counties, blue counties, and where the rural urban divide really kind of comes into that. Because like Hamilton has for this book, I mean, we are out there not just interviewing union workers in dense urban areas. We are out there reporting on family farmers in Wisconsin who are the last few hanging on as big agriculture has taken over the entire rural landscape and wipe generations of knowledge, of pride, of land ownership off the board and swallowed it up into the gaping maw of corporate America.

It’s still there. It just looks a little different. And the names on the sides of the trucks are different in rural America, but the same monster is destroying the fabric of our society, whether you live in a red county or a blue county, I see it all the time, not just in the conditions that workers are living under the declining quality of life and access to basic public services and higher cost of living, yada, yada, yada. But I’ve been in deep red Trump country, places like East Palestinian, Ohio, sitting on the stoops of deep red Trump voting Republicans who will say to me, he is like, yeah, look, I don’t care that you’re a socialist weirdo from Baltimore, but because you’ve been there talking about our stories, you’ve been interviewing us, you’ve heard what we’re going through and you keep showing up. And then we got unions to show up and we got environmental justice groups to show up.

We got residents from other sacrifice zones or people living near other rail lines who didn’t want to happen to their communities. What happened to East Palestine? And it was like when, to Sarah’s point, the Hamilton’s point when we’re all there standing in a room talking about the shit that is impacting all of us and how we are all effectively fighting off different tentacles of the same corporate monsters and Wall Street vampires and bought off like corrupt government systems and bureaucrats. I mean, we realized very quickly how much all the shit that they used to divide us and how it all comes down to that human connection and sharing stories that melts that shit away like that. And then when you work in common struggle to address those things, you build the working class consciousness and movement that everyone keeps talking about. There’s some great recipe.

What’s the messaging that we got to get to get a working class movement? There’s no fucking message. Just go and be there for each other, fight for one another, struggle together. See one another as human beings who deserve better than this and who are in fact the solution that we are waiting for all of us, right? You do that, you learn more about each other. You become less scary to your coworkers who look different from you, right? I mean, you’re forced to stand next to a burn barrel and talk stories about your kids in school and you realize that they’re friends and you deal with a lot of the same shit. You build solidarity through struggle, not through carefully curated messaging that I think you got to touch grass to do that. You got to talk to people to do that. You can’t just do that all online.

You can’t do it in your own little reality bubbles. We’re all living in those reality bubbles. So whatever we do, it has to help people break out of them because our social worlds have gotten so much smaller over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and that went into hyperdrive with Covid. More people went underground or socially distanced and more of their connection to the outside world was being mediated by a screen. And so we’re seeing people sharing the same physical plane, but they’re not living on the same plane of reality. And that is a big reason why Grifters like Trump and the GOP are so able to convince working people that their neighbors are their enemy. You break that through struggle. You break that through being there. You break that through being the face behind the headline and behind the kind of scary archetypes that people are fearful of. Sorry, that was a long answer.

Analysis:

I’m watching our time, so let me just take, I know we had a couple hands, I just wanted to see what the hands were in the room. So one, two. So I’m going to come here and then I’m going to move right that way.

Audience Member 2:

Thanks for this inspiring discussion. Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is kind of related to what we’re talking about is that we’re in a moment of record distrust with the government and with media and the Trump administration has made clear their plan to demolish what’s left of our social safety net. And so I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what the next steps are going to be. It was a poll that found that people, people’s leading source of election news is other people, they’re not going, people are avoiding the news, they’re not trusting the news, they’re going to social media. So you’ve talked about the of organizing and unionizing and building solidarity. What I want you to dig into more is how can we use that to actually reach people and educate people and build trust and actually get information out to people who need it to hear it.

Hamilton Nolan:

I don’t know if you figured that out. Let me know because journalism is, that’s what journalism tries to do. That’s what journalism is. That’s what Max does every day. That’s what I do every day. And you have a career in journalism and you’re constantly thinking about the very question, well, we got all these great super important stories. How do we make everybody listen to ’em? How do we make people care about this? How do we make people read this? How do you make people see this? The only answer I know I could make up an answer, the only answer I know is just keep doing the work. Just keep doing the work. Just keep writing the stories. Just keep recording the interviews. Just keep publishing the podcast. Just keep putting it out, keep putting it out. And over years it will come to people. And I’ve been in a million, just like Max has panel discussions and meetings and blah blah where people are like, what’s the magical solution to make these story make everybody learn about the Starbucks union and blah blah?

You just got to keep telling the stories and telling the stories and telling the stories and write this story and write this book and write the next book and do this podcast and do the next podcast and keep talking. And for us, and that goes for everybody. If you think this stuff is important, tell somebody else. Talk to somebody else. You write the story, you do the story you tell the people. This spreads by word of mouth, it spreads through the media, spreads through independent media. There’s not a magical solution. But the thing we have going for us is that this shit actually is important and it actually is dramatic and actually is a good story and actually is something that people want to know about and need to know about. And that spreads through the power of itself.

Analysis:

See, we’re going to take two more right here and here.

Audience Member 3:

Alright, I’m going to steal 30 seconds for a quick relevant announcement. I work with the Baltimore Amazon Workers Support Network and organizing campaigns are one on the inside. Often what a support committee can do is kind of minimal, so we chip away as best we can. But there’s one thing that I want to let you guys know about tonight. We’re trying to find people who might be salts at Amazon. Assault is a person who takes the job in order to help with organizing a union. We have some friends on the inside, especially down at Sparrow’s Point. So if anybody here is interested in the work of our committee or might be assault or might know somebody who’s looking for a job or labor sympathetic or whatever, we’re trying to find people to get our friends on the inside some support. And I have one quick question and I’ll get right to it.

It’s pertinent to Amazon. To Amazon. And what about your title? I’m surprised that you guys have never gotten around to talking about why that title The hammer. Yeah, we do have a lot of different identities to work with, but some of us believe that working people should be at the heart of the matter and there’s a reason for that. The potential power of working people. Amazon, for example, fits into the whole discussion about what they call choke points, which is mainly a transportation warehousing. Amazon calls ’em fulfillment centers. Were just off the longshoreman strike. There was the railroad workers. The postal service, it seems to me has been just a scratch away from something breaking there. Old thirties song that the farmer is the man that feeds them all, but the transportation workers are the people who move it all. So that’s one kind of pressure point. I’d like to get you on that topic of choke points or any other pressure points.

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, thank you. First of all, it’s salting Amazon, a noble thing to do with your life. I hope somebody here does that. And then when you finish, you call me a max and we’ll write a story about it. So thank you for that announcement. The book is called The Hammer because a union is a tool, a union is a tool that you wield to express your own power that you already have. When you give people the means to have a union, you’re not telling ’em what to do. I’m not telling you what position you should have. I’m not telling you what you should ask for. I’m not telling you what you want, what you should fight for. It’s giving people the means to exercise their own power. And all workers have labor power inherently. We all have power as workers because we can all not work. That’s the heart of our labor power. But the only way to exercise that power is to have the union. You got to have the hammer to do the work. And so the labor movement is a hammer to me. It’s a tool that we need to give everybody to exercise their own power.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think there’s a really, that dovetails with how I was going to respond to your question, right? Because I think I want to get to the choke points point in a second. But I think one of the pitfalls there, which you obviously know about, you guys are strategizing about this, but I’m more talking about the average person who’s cheering this on but doesn’t know a lot about how it works. I think that people who don’t know how organizing works and don’t talk about it, but they see it and they cheer it on and they see the power that we all see in unions in the labor movement, but again, have less first person contact with the realities of that, it becomes more of a strategy that forsakes the human reality that everyone needs to, we need to organize everyone everywhere. I mean there’s a moral political and in fact a self-fulfilling need to have that mentality that can be forsaken if we only focus on the most strategic points and people can then lower in their head the priority of someone organizing it.

Tudor’s biscuit world, obviously if we’re trying to take down capitalism, yeah, the choke points are more important for the amount of damage we can do. But in terms of the people harnessing the power that has been left slumbering inside of us or wasted away for our employers, the power that we actually have to make the world and to remake the world again into something better. I mean, that’s the power that you see in the eyes of people who take that fateful step in their workplaces to say, we deserve better than this and we’re going to be the ones to do something about it. We are going to change our circumstances and not just be, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, the listless play things of enormous forces. We take that step into our own power. And I see every day Hamilton sees, Sarah sees, you guys see in Amazon, when people start doing that shit themselves and they start working together, they see in fact the power that they always had.

But that if so many of us feel powerless, it’s because we’ve never experienced that. Maybe we’ve never exercised it. Maybe we’ve been, I didn’t know about unionization when I was a warehouse worker. I thought you either quit and find another job or you stay and take it. So that step, getting people to take that step into believing that they have power and that they do have power, like every working person, everyone needs to feel that be part of it. We need to fan those flames anywhere and everywhere they are because that is the larger necessity for building a grassroots working class movement of movements. People like leading the charge. That’s how we put the working class at the center. Now to quickly return to your question about choke points, again, I think there is such a huge argument for why salting at Amazon is such a noble and necessary calling right now.

And it’s what we were talking to workers about in Bessemer, Alabama when they were trying to unionize on Staten Island when they were unionizing is that look at Amazon, look at them taking everything over. I watch who watches football. Has anyone seen how much Amazon’s got its tentacles into the NFL? I mean, this is the second largest private employer in the country. This is one of the biggest international behemoths that’s only getting bigger and bigger and bigger owned by one of the most wealthy people in the history of the world. And we as working people have fucking no say over what they do. They just keep encroaching more and more into our lives. And so it was a band of workers in Bessemer, Alabama, hollowed out de-industrialized majority black, like twice the national poverty rate, Bessemer, Alabama, who were leading this charge to bring Amazon to the table and say, we are going to have a say in what you do. That’s why this is fucking important. It’s a testament to the very thesis of Hamilton’s book. You want to wield that hammer against Jeb Bezos, go salted Amazon, build that power. And then my larger point is that we just need to build it anywhere and everywhere that we can.

Analysis:

Let’s take this last question.

Audience Member 4:

Good evening. And I want to thank you first for the message and I’m seeking tools because we already have a union, but we have the public sector and the private sector. And because of the Janus rule, you have people that work with us that don’t pay the union dues. So I’m looking for tools to fight that, to fight the people that don’t want to pay into the union. But because we are union representatives, we still have to represent them. And I don’t mind representing everybody, but we can’t fight in the public sector. Does that make any sense?

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah.

Audience Member 4:

And I probably wouldn’t be here tonight if it wasn’t for my coworker here who’s very young and so excited about coming here tonight because she wants to be in the neighbor movement, but we don’t have any tools to fight with. So we here to find tools.

Hamilton Nolan:

Yeah, it’s a great question. And Janice, what you mentioned is the Supreme Court ruling that made the whole public sector right to work. Meaning that if you have a union or workplace, you can’t force anybody to pay union dues. So you get a situation where you can have a union and people can choose not to pay dues and they become what we call free riders and they’re basically, they get the union contract and they don’t pay their fair share and it can eat away the power of the union. And that’s what you’re experiencing and what people like you in public sector unions all over the country experience. I think one aspect is, one thing you see is that people who go through an organizing campaign and they go through that struggle to win the union, they tend to be really jazzed up and fired up about the power of the union.

But sometimes when there’s a union that’s been in a workplace for a long time and people just get hired into it, they kind of take it for granted. They take that contract for granted. They don’t really appreciate the struggle that went into building that and winning that and maintaining that. The work that people like you got to do just to maintain the power of that union. And so it can become hard to inspire people. And what I saw reporting in my book and reporting all over the place is that unions in right to work states, unions that are successful in right to work situations. They just do a shit load of internal organizing all the time. Meaning that they are constantly talking to the members of that union about what the union is doing, why it’s important, why you need to come to this meeting, what the meeting’s about, what issues are facing us, what issues is the union fighting on.

Everything. You have to constantly be talking and internally organizing the people in that workplace. There’s a chapter in my book about the culinary union, Las Vegas, which is a private sector union, but it’s in a right to work state. Nevada’s a right to work state, and yet this union has managed to successfully organize the entire casino industry in Nevada, the entire Vegas strip. They’re one of the most powerful unions in Nevada. And how do they do it even though it’s right to work and people could choose not to pay dues. They do it by constantly, constantly, constantly talking to all the members in that union. They got lists, they’re coming to your apartment and knocking on your door, hi, I’m here from the union, I’m here. We’re having a citywide meeting four times a year. We’re getting everybody together in the union. We’re talking about our issues. So it’s just work, work, work, work, work. Constant, constant talking to people. And I don’t think there are any shortcuts to that process. And it can be a real pain in the ass as you know if you’re doing that work is hard. But just talking to people about what the union is, what is it doing, why it’s important, and why they need to pay those dues and what they’re getting for those dues is the path that I see work in unions that make that work. Powerful,

Powerful.

Analysis:

I was trying to figure out what word I wanted to choose, but your words are the right coda for this discussion that has been very, very necessary. Loved all the questions they were necessary questions and the beginning, not the end of a conversation this evening, but certainly the beginning. Some more convos and organized. I need you all to give up a final red Emmas round of applause for Max Alvarez and Hamilton Nolan.

Hamilton Nolan:

Thank you Red Emma’s. Thank you, Max Alvarez.

On Dec. 7, working-class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods marched through the streets of Annapolis and delivered a giant stocking full of coal to the Governor’s mansion. They are demanding Gov. Wes Moore intervene in a generations-long struggle to stop rail giant CSX transportation from polluting their bodies, homes, and communities with toxic coal dust.

CSX is not the only polluter in South Baltimore: industrial areas near Curtis Bay house oil tanks, a wastewater treatment plant, chemical plants, landfills, the country’s largest medical waste incinerator, and more. But a recent air quality study confirmed what residents have been complaining about for generations: Coal dust from the CSX Transportation coal export terminal is present all over Curtis Bay. CSX has denied culpability and called the study “materially flawed.” Residents say they’re fed up with the company refusing to take responsibility for the coal dust, and with the city government for ignoring their cries for help for years. So they are demanding that Gov. Moore and the Maryland Department of the Environment deny CSX’s operational permit for the coal terminal, a permit that the MDE has been reviewing for renewal.

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez, Norma Martinez
Post-Production: Kate Lindsay, David Hebden

Transcript

Annapolis March: “What do we want? Deny the permit!  When do we want it? Now! And if we don’t get it? Shut it down! If we don’t get it?  Shut it down! If we don’t get it… Shut it down…”

Maximillian Alvarez: Working-class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods marched through the streets of Annapolis in early December, and delivered a giant stocking full of coal to the Governor’s mansion. They are demanding Governor Wes Moore intervene in a generations-long struggle to stop rail giant CSX transportation from polluting their bodies, homes, and communities with toxic coal dust.

Nicole Fabricant: Governor Moore will not come to see the tragedy of Curtis Bay, so we have brought the community to Governor Moore.

David Jones: It’s a little different here in Annapolis. I can actually take a deep breath and don’t feel like I’m gonna throw up or choke. So that’s a good thing. So if you could please make the air like it is here in Annapolis in my community, or even a little bit better, I think myself and others would really appreciate that.

Phil Ateto: Governor Moore is treating Curtis Bay like a sacrifice zone, which is the opposite of his campaign slogan and pledge to ‘leave no one behind.’ Governor Moore, you are leaving Curtis Bay behind… Governor Moore, meet with the Curtis Bay community, reject the coal pier permit, and keep your commitment to communities across Maryland. 

Maximillian Alvarez: CSX is not the only polluter in South Baltimore, but it runs uncovered coal trains through the same places people live in, and it operates a massive coal terminal in their backyard. Between the Curtis Bay Coal Pier and the CONSOL Energy Baltimore Marine terminal, served by both CSX and Norfolk Southern railroad, the Port of Baltimore is the second largest coal export port in the United States. Dozens of South Baltimore residents, community association members, and allies from climate justice movements across Maryland brought a message to Governor Moore from their communities: deny CSX’s operational permit for the coal terminal, a permit that the Maryland Department of the Environment has been reviewing for renewal.

Shashawnda Campbell: You wouldn’t dream that you’d have to come somewhere to say, ‘Please stop poisoning me,’ right?… And it’s even worse that the community that’s been dealing with this burden for decades, decades upon decades—spills, leaks, explosions—time after time after time have to also be the ones to come here to say, ‘We need help.’

Dave Jones: So this will never come out of my lungs, ever. This is probably what’s gonna cause my death. I’ve never been in a coal mine in my life, and I guarantee you when they cut me open, I’ll look like the coal miner that’s been there his whole life.

Shashawnda Campbell: When we think about when somebody [is] doing something violent—we see it and we’re like, ‘We gotta stop that!.’ This IS violence. This is violence against our community.

Dave Jones: This is murder. This is murder on a grand scale. The amount of cancer rates in my community are disgusting! And I, for one, am done. So I am pleading to our governor to please do something about this, sir. Please do your job!

Maximillian Alvarez: A recent air quality study confirmed what residents have been complaining about for generations: coal dust from the CSX transportation coal export terminal is present all over Curtis Bay. Coal dust contains heavy metals that can be lethal, including selenium, chromium, arsenic, mercury, and lead. 

Matthew Aubourg: We’re finding science that is supporting what community and what residents have been saying for decades… We shouldn’t need to be bringing this evidence to the table in the first place. What residents are experiencing, what people are seeing every day—that should be enough to make the change that’s needed in the community.

Maximillian Alvarez: The year-long study was released by the Community of Curtis Bay Association, South Baltimore Community Land Trust, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland and the Maryland Department of the Environment. Yet CSX still claims the study was flawed and denies the results, and CSX also says it is abiding by existing regulations and meeting the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Residents say CSX is full of it, that the study is not flawed, and that their bodies bear the proof of the deadly pollution the company denies. 

Shashawnda Campbell: We are here fighting for the community, to say, ‘It’s not OK to have this coal terminal right next to communities and not doing anything to stop it.’ And so we need Governor Moore to come out and actually stand with the people and hold this facility accountable for the harms that it has caused.

Maximillian Alvarez: CSX reported over $14 billion in total revenue last year, and a net profit of ​​$3.72 billion.

Dave Jones: I don’t understand how you can justify profits over someone dying 20 years earlier than they’re expected to be, or getting cancer and having a horrible rest of their existence for the time they have left…

The first thing you can do is declare a state of emergency for environmental injustice, and then we can go from there. What that looks like down the road, I don’t know. But I know the only way that we’re really gonna change this is if … we don’t get rid of these industries, is to change the status quo of what they get fined for being bad actors.

Shashawnda Campbell: So we are calling for our governor—our governor [who] says so much about reducing greenhouse gasses and this and that—to actually stand on your words and do it. And you can do it single handedly by holding this coal terminal accountable by denying their permit so that coal terminal is not functional.

Maximillian Alvarez: At a community meeting in November, in which Maryland Department of the Environment officials and a CSX representative were present, residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods like Cherry Hill, Westport, Mt. Winans, Lakeland, and Brooklyn, shared fiery testimonies. They unanimously expressed anger and frustration towards CSX, and many urged the MDE to reject the operating permit for the CSX Transportation Coal Export Terminal. The agency says it’s amending the existing permit to impose stricter requirements on the railroad giant’s operations, and that it can enforce these restrictions with fines and even litigation, but does not have the authority to shut down CSX’s operations.

Halyna Mudryj: I invite the people who work for CSX, those in charge: Please, come and live in our community.

Jeffrey Barnes: MDE is ignoring us, and you, for years. There’s no question that the coal dust is poisoning our communities, causing cancers. That’s not a question. And yet we come here every year, and what do we say? ‘Please, you’ve got to stop this poisoning of our community.’ This is something that the state should do.

Melanie Thomas: This is not just a Curtis Bay issue. Every community where that coal train passes through, you are being impacted too. Do y’all hear me? Every community that a train passes through carrying coal, you are being impacted too. Because it’s not just an isolated incident or an isolated area that we are talking about. We are talking about lives, we are talking about communities, miles and miles of people—people living and breathing like you and I—that are being affected each and every day by these fine particulate matters, these particles that we are breathing in day after day.

Maximillian Alvarez: Standing here in Curtis Bay, South Baltimore, where a seemingly endless CSX locomotive is slowly pulling car after car after car of uncovered coal containers.

Angie Shaneyfelt: So that’s the coal pile that we’ve been fighting for years and years and years. And literally right here, this white siding, is my house—about a football field, football field and a half, away from my house.

Maximillian Alvarez: Angie Shaneyfelt lives just up the street from the CSX coal terminal. She and her family have been dealing with the realities of living in a “sacrifice zone” for years, like not opening their windows for the past 16 years, but it was after an explosion at the coal pier in December of 2021 that she got actively involved in the fight to hold CSX accountable for its toxic pollution. Again, CSX is not the only polluter in South Baltimore: Industrial areas near Curtis Bay house oil tanks, a wastewater treatment plant, chemical plants, landfills, the country’s largest medical waste incinerator, and more. But Angie says that everyone knows what the constant black dust in the community is, the harms it causes, and where it’s coming from. 

Angie Shaneyfelt: So this is my windowsill, covered porch, totally black fingers now. Undisturbed. And it’s even up, it’s all the way up in here.” [shows finger and looks at the camera] … And this is 16 years now, since 2009, that we have not opened our windows fully to breathe fresh air, because the fresh air is not fresh. It’s coal dust, dirty.

We are here in Curtis Bay community—a community of people, different kinds of people, all different walks of life. Most of the people around are renters. And we’re not that far away from the coal pile right there. I’ve lived here 16 years. And we don’t… everybody’s in, inside. Even on a nice day—inside. Because we don’t like this dust and breathing it in. Nobody should be breathing in this dust.

Right here, right next to the coal, like less than 1,000 feet away is where the community starts. When we had the explosion, people’s windows were shattered out of their house, out of the frames. So crazy. And [we’ve] not gotten anything, really, since then. The only thing we get is doubt: ‘No, it’s not dust, it’s not coal dust, it’s something else.’ But we know what it is. Generations have fought this, and we’re gonna keep fighting it.

Maximillian Alvarez: For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez reporting from South Baltimore.

“In late September,” Timothy Pratt writes in Capital & Main, “a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta, lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage. The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated in Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred, and in surrounding areas… Smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness and skin rashes in the days that followed, along with a deepening worry about their community’s safety… The fire was pool-chemical company BioLab’s fourth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as “generational rage” among residents.” In this installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed—where we speak to people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones”—we speak with Hannah Loyd, Christina O’Connor, and Jeramie Julian: three residents who live near, and have been directly affected by, the September fire at the Conyers BioLab facility.

Additional links/info below…

• Christina’s Facebook page and TikTok
• Hannah’s Facebook page
• Conyers, GA, Facebook group: Helping Our Health
• Timothy Pratt, Capital & Main, “Chemical fire at Atlanta-area plant sparks local movement against BioLab”
• Holly Yan, CNN, “Weeks after a chemical plant inferno, nearby residents say they’re suffering prolonged illnesses and financial upheaval”
• Status Coup News, “POISONED Georgians DEMAND toxic chemical plant close after chlorine gas inferno”
• Joi Dukes, FOX 5 Atlanta, “EPA whistleblower on BioLab debris testing: ‘You can’t find what you don’t look for’”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, ““Let’s unite!”: Poisoned residents of America’s sacrifice zones are banding together”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH (DOCUMENTARY)”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘Towns are gone’: In Helene-devastated Asheville, NC, volunteers battle misinformation and ‘apocalyptic’ wreckage”
• Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times / The Real News Network, “Scenes from a sacrifice zone: South Baltimore residents fight back against industrial pollution”

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hannah Loyd:

I am Hannah. I’m originally from Conyers, Georgia. I grew up there and went to school there and graduated there. When I graduated, we moved to Oxford, Georgia, and then when I got married, my husband and I moved to Walnut Grove, Georgia, and we have a 3-year-old daughter and we were affected on the day of the fire with the chemical cloud shifting with the weather. And the fire was said to have been put out, but the cloud was said to have shifted and it was coming in our direction. So we knew then that something wasn’t right after we had already planned to just stay inside for the day anyways, we had planned to go to some festivals and stuff, but we saw on social media and on the news about them being on fire again. So we just decided to stay inside and did not know that the cloud was going to shift in our direction until we were made aware on the news that it had shifted.

Christina O’Connor:

My name is Christina and I did not grow up in Conyers, Covington area, but I moved to Covington in about the first week in August. I saw it was going to be a fresh start for me and kind of where I’m at in my life and my rebuild season. And so I found a beautiful seven acre home and was able to rent that and was just living life and enjoying my piece. When on September 29th, the biolab explosion happened and it was just me renting. I had roommates, I had my kitty cat there at the house in Covington, but I had left to go to work had, at the time I owned a cleaning company and I heard about the fire at 5:00 AM I saw something about it and I thought, Biolab, what’s that? I was that a science thing? What is the biolab? I didn’t even know what that was really.

But I went out and I went to work and it was close to Conyers. It was in Covington, but closer to Conyers. But I was still kind of unaware. I was unaware of what happened. And so I went to work and my clients and I left. And on the way home, I stopped at Publix and this was in Covington, and I got out and I could just feel like people were just looking in the sky. And then I got out of the car and I’m like, someone just feel weird. And I got out and I could smell the smell that I couldn’t really place what exactly it was. And I was like, well, that’s odd. And I still didn’t really realize, okay, what is this? What’s going on? And so I went home and my roommates were outside. There were a couple of dogs that were actually lost, and we were walking around the neighborhood trying to find their home.

They were walking around, so we were walking around outside, unbeknownst to us in these chemicals, they were coming because were coming towards the section of Covington, and I’m closer to Hannah over in that area, and I’m probably, I don’t know, 20 miles. So yeah, so after we walked around outside, tried to find the dogs at home, I got back inside and a couple of hours went by and I was hearing things I guess on the news or social media. I don’t really watch the news, but I was hearing about this chemical fire, and then I started hearing people, okay, turn off your air. And so we did that. We turned off our air, but by this point it was very strong outside. The smell was strong and by this point I could taste and feel it inside the home, inside the home. And so I told my roommate, we got to get out of here.

They were telling people shelter in place. They were telling people, I think to evacuate, but my instincts told me, we got to go. This is in the house. I can’t stay here. And so we ended up leaving and it kind of goes from there. I evacuated and I can tell more from my perspective as far as driving through it. I can tell you what happened to my car. I can tell you trying to find a city to escape to because it was kind of like back and forth. I tried to go to McDonough to my daughter’s, but it kind of followed me the way that the chemical plume, the chemical, they moved around. They’re not just contained to Rockdale County. So they moved all around. And so I tried to go back actually, but it was just too bad. I couldn’t stay there.

Jeramie Julian:

Hi, my name is Jeremy. I remember hearing about, I don’t watch the news, but I remember hearing about the fire and I grew up in Rockdale, graduated high school, and all I could think was, oh, well, here we go again. It is something that’s happened three or four times before, and I live far enough away that it didn’t really affect me the day of, but I kept seeing it on social media that I followed the progress of it and people were having to evacuate their homes, and it was just like this horrible scenario. But again, I didn’t live close enough that it affected me at the moment until one morning I was outside when there was a comet that was close enough that you could see it as one of those, see it every 80,000 years from Earth kind of things. And my eyes started burning after a while and I can’t smell from a previous injury that I’ve sustained, I can’t smell, and I didn’t really think too much of it then just dry eyes for whatever reason. But the burn didn’t go away, it just stayed with me. So I wound up digging around on Facebook and one of the Morgan County Facebook pages and started seeing multiple people talking about being able to smell the chemicals and smell the chemicals. And that’s basically where the beginning of my issues, health issues started from it. And I’m a good 40 to 45 mile drive away from Biolab and it got here and it’s affected me

Maximillian Alvarez:

All. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers and friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate, and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got another crucial installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, sacrifice zones broadly understood are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly intensifying effects of manmade climate change in a more just and less cruel society. The very concept of a sacrifice zone would not exist, and yet in America in the 21st century, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and systematized government abandonment. If you’ve been listening to our reporting over the past year and a half, you already know this. You’ve heard it in the interviews that we’ve done with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio where a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed two years ago.

You’ve heard it in the stories of working class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods that have been poisoned for generations by rail giant CSX transportation, as well as dozens of other toxic polluters concentrated in their part of the city. You’ve heard it in the firsthand accounts of people on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina, whose lives have been forever changed by the devastation of Hurricane Helene in September. And in this episode, you’re going to hear it from three folks living near Conyers, Georgia and who have all been affected by the disastrous and frankly, nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about a half hour outside of Atlanta. Now, I know you all saw the photos and videos of the fire when it first happened back in September because as soon as the fire broke out on September 29th, so many of you sent me emails and dms about it.

And I just want to say I really appreciate you guys doing that. And please, please continue to send us tips and possible connections so that we can keep reporting on vital stories like this. As always, the most important thing here is that people out there hear directly from affected residents themselves and that we are lifting up their stories and their voices, and we’re going to turn back to our incredible panel of residents in a minute. But before we do that, just to make sure that you have all the background context you need on the fire, I’m going to read at length from a great piece that will link in the show notes that Timothy Pratt recently published in the publication, capital and Maine. Now in the piece, which is titled Chemical Fire at Atlanta Area Plant Sparks Local Movement against Biolab. Pratt writes, in late September, a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage.

The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated. In Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred and in surrounding areas, smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, and skin rashes in the days that followed along with a deepening worry about their community safety. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs forth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as generational rage among residents. Some are now turning to activism for the first time joined by Atlanta area, mostly black led community groups. The population of Coner is nearly two thirds black, causing some in the community to argue that the repeated industrial accidents at the Biolab facility are an example of environmental racism. The result, an unusually fast-growing grassroots movement led by residents fed up with a company that they say has jeopardized their health and the environment for decades.

They also blame local, state, and federal authorities for failing to inform the community about the accident’s cause and impact in a timely or transparent manner. Many residents want to see the Biolab facility, which is one of the largest employers in town permanently shut down. Short of that, they seek to prevent future accidents. Biolab declined to comment directing capital in Maine to its website, which asserted the company’s commitment to supporting affected residents. The cause of the most recent fire was still under investigation as of November 1st. According to the company’s website, the response of the company and environmental regulators to the fire has been cold comfort to residents of Conyers and surrounding areas who are demanding to know if their health is at risk. Locals have been confused about the accidents, reach and immediate and long-term impacts. Rockdale County where Biolab is located, lifted shelter-in-place, orders in mid-October after the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the accident site had been cleaned and levels of chlorine in the community’s air met federal standards.

In the days following the fire, Sally ing professor at the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering reported high levels of chlorine and bromine in the air galvanized by the incident. Residents of the small city and surrounding counties have gathered more than 11,000 signatures supporting a shutdown of Biolab, nearly two thirds from the Conyers area, a Facebook group called Stand Against Biolab. In Rockdale County, Georgia has attracted 1600 members. Local farmers are organizing amongst themselves, and residents are connecting with people in other communities affected by industrial disasters, including East Palestine, Ohio, which was exposed to toxic fumes after last year’s Norfolk Southern train wreck. So to talk about all of this, I sat down with Christina, Jeremy and Hannah, three residents living near the side of the Biolab Fire in Georgia. Here’s our conversation, which we recorded on December 1st, 2024.

Well, Hannah, Christina, Jeremy, I can’t thank you three enough for joining us today on the show. And I cannot express enough how truly sorry I am that you, your families and your community are going through this. As I’ve mentioned to you three already, as I mentioned in the intro, the number of people that I am connecting with, who are dealing with circumstances like the horrific circumstances you’re dealing with, the people in East Palestine, Ohio are dealing with the people in South Baltimore are dealing with. It just absolutely breaks my heart. And I just wanted to say from all of us to all of you, we are with you and we are sorry you’re going through this, but our listeners want to know what you’re going through and how they can help. And that’s what we’re going to do here today as we’ve had our listeners asking us about this since it happened in September.

And I’m so grateful to the three of you for joining us on the show and helping our listeners understand what’s really going on over there in and around Conyers, Georgia. And to just sort of extend what y’all were talking about in your introductions at the top of the episode, I wanted to go back around and ask if you could just tell us more about the day of the fire or the week of the fire. I know y’all were saying some of you live closer, some of you live farther away, but just from your vantage point when this was all first going down, could you just sort of narrate for our listeners what it was like to live through this, what you were seeing, feeling, hearing, experiencing? Hannah, let’s go back to you.

Hannah Loyd:

All right, thank you so much for having us on. So the day of the fire, I actually had gotten up kind of early and was just looking on social media and saw people posting about Biolabs on fire. And honestly, I was just thinking kind of Jeremy was like, oh gosh, they’re on fire again. What could be on fire now? So I was just kind of like, okay, this is a little bit bigger than their normal kind of little fires. So we got up and it was a Sunday and we had planned to go and do some kind of, it was the beginning of fall, so there were some fall festivals that were starting that day. And after I saw that, I was just like, we probably need to hold off on that and let’s just stay inside. This seems to be a bigger fire, so I don’t know how far this is going to spread, so we probably should stay inside.

So we stayed inside. That was in the morning, that was around nine or 10, but the fire had started around five, and I had already known about it. And then my daughter, she’s three, she needed milk. So this was around three. I was like, I’m just going to ride to the gas station real quick in Walnut Grove, and we’re about eight or nine miles from Biolab. So I got in the car and I went to the gas station, but when I got to the stop sign, I looked up and I saw the cloud kind of in front of me, and I was like, okay, that’s the chemical cloud. So I knew I needed to get home quick, and I ran in the store, and at that point, I kind of started having some shortness of breath and felt dizzy, but I didn’t think anything about it.

I didn’t want to over stress myself. So I went in the store and I got in the milk and I drove home, which was in a three or four minute drive. So I came back home and I started having a lot of shortness of breath. I started feeling like there was mucus building up in my esophagus and in my throat. And at that point, I was able to look at my husband and kind of show him I needed help, but I couldn’t verbally tell him that I needed help. So at that point, he had already called 9 1 1. So 9 1 1 got there to my house and they came in, I was in my bedroom and they came in there and they took my oxygen and my oxygen was okay, but I was having trouble breathing. So the paramedics came because the firemen came first, and then the paramedics came and they were like, if your breathing treatment isn’t working, you should probably go to the ER room.

So I really didn’t want to because I didn’t think that it was that big of a deal, but I decided at that point it was probably best that I go because I never really had that feeling before where it felt like I was suffocating. So I got to the er and then the ER doctor came over to me and I was just kind of talking to him. They had given me an IV in the ambulance, and it was the IV Benadryl that they gave me. So by the time I got to the emergency room, I was able to talk to the doctor and I was just talking to him. And he told me that he told me at least two of the chemicals that were in that cloud, which was the chlorine and the bromine. And he did say that last one, which is, I can’t think of the name right at this moment, but it’s some kind of acid, some chemical.

And I asked him how he knew exactly what was in the cloud, and he said, because the patients from Piedmont Rockdale were going to be transferred to Piedmont Walton because they were going to have to shut down the hospital. But then they decided this was about four o’clock. So they decided at that point that it wasn’t safe to take the patients out of the hospital in Rockdale and transfer them to Walton, which is Piedmont Walton, which is in, that’s in Monroe, which is the next county kind of up to. They kept saying the cloud went to the northeast. That was the hospital kind of to the no northeast area. So the doctor, I talked to him about the chemicals that were in the cloud, and he treated me. And then I talked to another doctor who’s on the board up there at the hospital, and he’s actually the one that told me they were going to send the patients from the one hospital to that hospital.

And then they sent me home that day because there wasn’t really much they could do for me. And then two days after that, my daughter, who’s three became affected and she started showing signs of having basically what they consider a chemical attack because there’s no real way to diagnose what’s really happening. I mean, he basically told me if you were a person that was having an asthma attack, but refer it to a person who’s having an attack with chemicals. And so since then, it’s been over two months now of us having to go back and forth because tried to leave a couple different times to get away, but every time we come back, we all get sick. And when I say all, I say, me, my husband and my daughter, because I mean just the chemicals they’re on, I just say on our stuff. I mean, they’re all over our stuff. And so basically that night when the cloud set, when it became dark, it kind of sat on top of all of our stuff. And so my daughter who has mild eczema, she became affected two days later because when you have eczema, you’re sensitive to certain stuff. Anyways,

Christina O’Connor:

Okay, so let’s see. Well, so that night, because I was smelling and smelling what was in the air and I was tasting and feeling it in the house, even with the air off and I was getting phone calls from concerned friends, I decided that I needed to evacuate. And so my roommate, I took one of my roommates, she’s younger and she left. We ended up leaving, packing up what we could, and we left and went to my daughter’s in McDonough, which is south. It’s probably, I don’t know, maybe an hour south of that location. And my eyes by that point, they were burning. They were burning and itching, and I could just feel it, I could taste it. It’s just almost undescribable, these chemicals and this chemical burn. And so we were driving, we had to drive kind of through Conyers to get down there, and I was just getting a headache.

It developed that night, and I had that headache for days and days after, and my eyes burned for days after I kept washing my eyes out and I just couldn’t get relief, couldn’t get relief. And I just started feeling I kind of dizzy, just kind of bad, just feeling fatigue and just I knew it was just a bad feeling. But the next morning I just started getting fearful and I was I having some car trouble? So I was like, well, let me run out and get some breakfast tan. Maybe I just need to go trade in my car. I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I drove down Terra Boulevard in McDonough and I could see the chemical cloud and it was terrifying because I thought, I’m trying to get away from this, and it’s followed me to my daughter’s house, and it was terrifying.

And so I just began, it just was very anxiety producing to know that, okay, where do you go to escape this? First of all, I can’t go home or is it safe to go back home? Do I stay here? Where do I go? How do you run from a chemical plume because you don’t know which way the wind blows. And so at some point, I think the following day we went back home, but again, we had to drive kind of through Conyers and the smell just absolutely overpowering. And I believe that driving through there, that’s when the chemicals got into my car, my hvac, because we didn’t have the air on or anything, but I think that my HVAC system, I think that’s when it got exposed. And it was just even with masks on, it was just over overpowering just to be around that.

But we went back home and my sister at one point, my sister came and she spent the night and she’s like, no, you’re not crazy. Not, I can definitely tell this is in this house. I can feel it. I can taste it. At that point, I’m like, okay, maybe I’m just being paranoid, maybe I’m not really, it’s not really as bad in the house. But she confirmed to me that yes, it was. And so from there, we just had to leave. I just had to leave again, and I packed up what I could, but I left some belongings. I couldn’t take everything. And so at that point, I just had to leave and find fresher air. And so I came up to Cherokee County area, but by that point I was very sick. I had to end up going to the ER because I was dizzy and I was fatigued.

Some of the same systems symptoms, my eyes were burning and I was passing out, actually passed out at one point and then I was hospitalized after that because after I went to the er, they didn’t really know how to treat that. She didn’t really know what to give me. So she prescribed me an anxiety pill and she prescribed me a steroid at the urgent care. And then I just had some trouble with my insurance getting the prescriptions. And by that point I was just very anxious and very upset. And then no one really would take it seriously because I was in another county and they didn’t experience that. So the fact of walking through that alone basically because besides my sister, she knew, yeah, this is really what’s going on, but to explain to somebody that’s not really experiencing that or walking through that, they don’t really understand what you’re going through.

And so I kept feeling bad, kept feeling bad, and finally I was like, I need to go to the emergency room. I need to go to the hospital. Something is not right. These headaches, they won’t stop. And so my sister took me to the hospital and when I got there, they thought that I was having a stroke. And so they ended up keeping me for three days. And of course the MRI didn’t show a stroke, but they still did not really, they didn’t really do anything for me. They were like, okay, you’re not dying. You didn’t have a stroke. You might’ve had an exposure to the chemicals or whatever, but they didn’t really helpful. And so they discharged me and at that point I had to figure out, all right, where am I going to live, first of all, and I had nowhere to go.

And so I was able to stay with family, luckily until I wasn’t, and then I just had to scramble and figure out, okay, where am I going to live? And it affected my work because I didn’t know I was trying to work, but I was sick and I didn’t know where am I going to live. And so it was just a nightmare to walk through. When I was having PTSD, I was having nightmares about chemical plumes and it was terrible. It was honestly the worst thing to have to go through. And so I still am not able to go home. I’m still temporarily homeless, displaced. I have another family member that I’m staying with currently, but I just had to decide that I can’t stay there. So I told my landlord, I put in my notice and I went back for my things, and that was a couple weeks ago.

And like Hannah was talking about the chemicals, they’re floating around and if they’re floating around, they’re in your clothes, they’re on your things. So when I went there to move them, I was even itching when I picked up these things that had been sitting there since September 29th and they were making me itch. They made a rash. I remember my arms having a rash on them when I was just even moving my things out. I ended up having to throw away a lot of things. I ended up just leaving some things because it just affected, it affected me, but I don’t right here, I want to go into the fact that it didn’t affect some people. And I don’t know if you guys, Hannah guys experienced that too because it didn’t affect everybody that way. They might’ve had some symptoms, but for other people it affected people way worse.

Jeramie Julian:

I was affected a week or so after the initial fire there, which never seemed to go out magically, and I was overexposed because I can’t smell, and it was dark outside the morning that I was out there and I was looking for this comment and I was just breathing this stuff in, and because it was dark, I couldn’t see what would look like a normal fog, but it obviously was the chemicals in the air until I started really, really getting concerned about my eyes burning so bad. And then I started looking around on Facebook, saw in a Morgan County group, there was multiple people talking about it and the sun comes out and boom, you can see it. It’s obvious that it’s there. It’s just floating like a fog. And that lasted for half the day, and later that day, the sensation never really went away. I noticed that my breathing started getting worse throughout the day. I have asthma, but it doesn’t really bother me that bad, but just really, it was really hard for me to catch my breath. And eventually I wound up having to go to the emergency room from what felt like an anaphylactic shock sensation. I couldn’t even swallow as my throat was so raw. I had eaten some crushed glass kind of sensation, and they gave me the Benadryl steroid shot and the IV

Speaker 5:

Drip for dehydration and sent me home

Jeramie Julian:

With, they all recognized at the hospital here in Morgan County what was going on, and they were all very familiar with the fire and they sent me home. I had some prednisone to take, and then was it the next day or the day after that, I went right back to the hospital because my blood pressure in my heart rate worked head shot through the roof. I saw a different doctor there in the emergency room, but they were all, again, very familiar with what’s going on and the side effects from all these things. They let me go. Then after everything had calmed back down, let me go home. And I looked at my release form and it said anxiety attack, and I couldn’t help but just laugh. And I went and found the doctor that we had just had this conversation about all these side effects from the chemicals in the atmosphere and cardiac dysrhythmia is a side effect. And he said, oh, well, I’ll change it in the system. So it’s almost like they didn’t want to admit it or talk about it or just act like it didn’t exist, even though I just spent the last few hours there talking to them about it

Speaker 5:

And they were all in agreement with it. Then

Jeramie Julian:

I came home and luckily I live far enough away where it didn’t affect me continuously. It was amazing that the wind was able to blow it after that far out from the date of the fire, that there was still enough of it and the atmosphere that it was able to come 45 ish miles away and affect me that day. And that was basically just kind of the beginning of the problems. There was the itchiness, the dry eyes, which leading to vision issues, the heart issues, random rapid heart rate and blood pressure issues, shortness of breath, blood in my nose. It’s just been this crazy debilitating thing. And like Christina was saying, it doesn’t affect everybody because people obviously still live in Con and they’re doing okay-ish for the most part. I mean, I do know some person that’s slightly homeless living in a little shed, and she’s saying her skin is on fire

Speaker 5:

All the time, but it’s been

Jeramie Julian:

Incredibly debilitating and every time I go back to Conyers or even Covington to church or the doctors there, the gastroenterologist, that was another thing. I was just feeling really sick a lot, sick to my stomach, fatigue, muscle fatigue, tired, drunk, the drunk sensation. It’s very disorienting, kind of a vertigo sensation that I get and a weakness where I feel like I’m walking through water. I feel weighted down hard to lift my legs or even lift my hands while I’m sitting in a chair and

Speaker 5:

Is just been really, really bad. And

Jeramie Julian:

None of the doctors really want to dig into it or take it seriously again or do the right tests for anything. They just, oh, well, here, you’ll be fine. Try

Speaker 5:

This, that or the other. And I don’t know what to

Jeramie Julian:

Do. I don’t know how to make these symptoms go away. Like I said, every time I go back anywhere near there, it kind of magnifies the symptoms all over again. And I just feel like I’m constantly starting over from ground zero,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Man, first of all, I want to thank you all for being so honest and open and sharing all that with us. It’s really hard to hear, and for everyone out there listening who’s having as hard a time as I am listening to it, just try to imagine what it’s like living through it and no one should be subjected to this. This kind of thing should be a chapter in worst case scenarios in our history. And yet it feels like a recurring segment in American history where we’re like, we’re hearing these kinds of stories over and over again. And I want to be careful not to equate every situation, every community’s different, every source of contamination is different as we’ve been trying to cover on this show, but I’m sure everyone listening to you guys is hearing the same echoes that I am of what folks in East Palestine and around East Palestine, Ohio have told us over the past year and a half, right?

All the way down to that last point, Jeremy, that you brought up Christina, about people experiencing symptoms differently. This is a thousand percent what has also happened in and around East Palestine. Some people can smell the chemicals. Some people, some people are experiencing all kinds of symptoms. Some people appear to be fine. And that’s really played into a lot of the division, a lot that the company has helped sow in the town itself because it’s like you’re pitting people who feel fine against people who don’t, and then people who don’t feel fine are bullied by their neighbors even for faking it. I mean,

Christina O’Connor:

Sometimes their family also have to throw that in there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, I hope and pray that out of these constant catastrophes that we as a society, as a people can start to understand that human beings are different. That’s what makes us beautiful and complex. But that’s what also makes situations like these so tough because I mean, it was like covid for some people. Covid was a small cold. For some people it was the thing that killed them. We know this.

Jeramie Julian:

My mom got it, and they sent her home basically with vitamin CD and zinc and said, here, boost your immune system. She coughed for a day and then that was it. And then other people, according to the media, I don’t personally know anybody myself that has died from it, but apparently it was really, really bad for some people. Covid was,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I bring this up to just because what you guys are describing that creates a powder cake situation where folks who are experiencing symptoms like you are really in a difficult position, not just because of what you are feeling and trying to get answers from your doctor, but also because some people are not feeling it. I have just seen in so many of these different instances where the companies that are at fault are going to try to leverage that against you.

Jeramie Julian:

Oh yeah, the minority now or the black sheep. And it’s not just that, and it’s not just the physical ailments, but the financial ailments as well. Those who can’t work because of it, who basically can’t lost their houses temporarily because of it. The multiple doctors hospital trips I’m taking was prescribed something from the neuro-ophthalmologist called X dvy, I believe is what it’s called. And it’s over $700 for a little bottle of eye drops to help my eyes not be dry anymore. And it’s an experimental drug. I can’t just go down the street to the pharmacy and get it. I had to wait, and then they would ship it in the mail after I go through this process and this process.

Christina O’Connor:

Jeremy, I have a question for you. Have you tried any type of holistic treatment that actually worked for me? I did activated charcoal and some other supplements and things like that, that actually made me feel better. Eventually,

Jeramie Julian:

I’ve just been using the normal little eye drops from Walgreens and stuff, but it’s like that worked for about five minutes. And even these things, I’m supposed to use these for six weeks, these eyedrops, and I’m in about week one and a half, and I’m really not telling all that much progress, honestly. And like I said, every time that I go back towards Conyers Covington, it just, and I went to Honey Baked Ham in Coner to get Thanksgiving stuff, and my eyes have just continuously gotten worse since then. My vision has just been getting worse and drier and more of a tunnel vision kind aspect and very grainy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Can I ask if I could bring the rest of y’all in here and let’s keep kind of filling this in for listeners. Could you say a bit more what’s happened or not happened since the original fire in late September? I guess, what have you been told by government agencies, by the company itself? How are you and others in your community doing after this? Are people trying to put it in their rear view mirror? Are they dealing with health effects? I just wanted to ask you if you could say a little more, and Hannah, let’s jump back to you and kind of go back around the table, but anything else that you guys want to let listeners know about what the fall at has been since the fire was in our newsfeeds and in the headlines in September, it kind of faded away, but obviously the reality has not faded away and you guys are still living through it,

Hannah Loyd:

So they really aren’t talking about it much anymore. In our local media that I’ve seen or heard, I mean they talked about it for probably the first couple of weeks maybe, and then they just quit talking about it. I would say primarily I’ve gone over and seen more about it on TikTok more than anything and just where people are starting to post their personal experiences of it because it has just gone back to business as usual. There ain’t nothing. There’s nothing to see. Everything’s okay, which it’s not and it’s not okay. We had to leave the area at least three times, three different weekends we left the area and I would say just coming back each time within the hour, I could personally tell a difference. My daughter, she’s three, so she can’t really tell me. I have to kind of just go by her actions and how she’s acting. I can definitely tell that when we are away from the area she acts, she feels better. But when we get close to the area, she’s kind of irritated, I guess you would say. But there’s not really much I can do because I can only leave town so many times.

And when you were saying earlier about just things being said about by your neighbors and stuff like that, I’ve definitely had things said about me by my neighbors. I know for a fact, which is really sad. People you don’t even know, just saying things that they don’t know the full circumstance about why I had to call 9 1 1 that day, or why I had to call 9 1 1 a couple days later. It shouldn’t be anybody’s real concern unless they’re really actually concerned. My parents live eight minutes from me and only eight miles from Biolab, but the way that the chemical cloud went and then it shifted, it kind of went up and around their area, so their area isn’t as affected. So it’s kind of different over there, if that even makes sense. So when you have a chemical cloud that’s going in a certain area and it’s going in that area, when the day is ending, those chemicals are going to start to set to the ground.

So then when you wake up the next day, those chemicals are going to be right there on top of the ground. And then there’s going to be people that understand it and people that don’t understand it. People in my family don’t understand it as much as I understand it because I actually have been through it. So it’s a hard thing to try to navigate through because you yourself are going through it, but you have someone else in your family that lives only eight minutes up the road and they’re not going through it as much as you’re going through it because of the way that the cloud went and the way that it didn’t go over their house as much as it went over your house. So like I said, we’ve left the area just three different times, three different weekends just to try to get away to try to get some kind of relief in a sense.

But that was in the beginning, that was, it’s been about two months now since the actual fire. So that was in the beginning. So the first couple of weekends we left town, but since then we’ve been back and now it’s getting cold. And it seems like for some reason, as it’s getting colder, it’s making things worse. Our symptoms are getting worse, our breathing is getting worse, things are getting worse. And I don’t know the scientific meaning behind that. I’m sure there’s a scientist that could come on here and say, Hey, this is why that’s happening. And if there’s someone out there that could tell me that, that would be great because it’s something when the climate changes, things are different. When it’s hotter outside, its things are worse as far as symptoms. When it’s cold outside, things are worse. So there’s no real happy medium, I guess. And when I say things are worse, things are kind of worse in a different way. And I don’t know, it’s something to do with the time of day and the way I guess the chemicals set in certain areas. I’m not sure. But it’s been about two months going over two months now, and things are still the same in my area. I know for sure. So I know things are different for different people.

Christina O’Connor:

So what’s happened since, okay, so I mean for me initially the bad feelings that I was having, the eyes and just the headaches, a lot of that subsided. I think that treating it holistically and naturally, I think that that helped me. I still have a little bit of tingly and a little bit of dizziness, but I do follow with my doctor on that. But I know so many people that are still suffering, that are still sick that I talked to that live down there. And Hannah was talking about how some people are affected and some aren’t. I know I had other roommates that lived in the same house that were like, we’re fine. We’re not affected. What are you talking about? Not. And they were younger, and I’m a little bit older, but it’s so crazy until you actually experience that yourself to walk through that.

So just the anxiety and just the PTSD from the whole experience and then not being able to go back to your home, the home that you love and that you found so much peace in that just ripped away from you. It’s just been hard. And to have to just rebuild and start over and your work is affected. So then your bills start piling up and those chemicals that are in your car, you don’t have to drive around with a mask on and my car and my window’s down and it’s like, this is insane. And I talked to a lawyer and they’re like, well, go rent a car. Well, I can’t do that because that’s expensive. How long would I have to rent a car for? That’s crazy. And I don’t know if we’re talking about lawsuits or whatever, I know some people are doing the class actions and all of that because I see a lot of people, they’re jumping on the class actions and that’s fine, whatever, to each his own, whatever you feel like you need to do.

I have contacted one, I have contacted a lawyer and I’ll be pursuing what I can, but really it’s not about money for me. Yes, I have suffered so much. I’ve had a lot of loss. I lost the place that I live. There’s cost and car repairs. I’ve replaced my air filter, I’ve replaced cabin filters. I have to go get a quote to figure out, okay, how do I remediate these chemicals out of my car so that I can drive around and not be subjected to more toxic chemicals? That’s making myself even sicker. It’s like there’s cost in that. I would love to go get another car, but I can’t afford that.

So yes, I’ve contacted a lawyer, yes, I got sick. I’m not about the money though. It’s not for me about the money. It’s just about raising awareness and the fact that maybe you don’t have symptoms now, but who knows down the road you might have symptoms. And yeah, our friends in East Palestine, I’ve made friends with people in East Palestine, probably we know some of the same people. I know Christina has been a very big support for me walking through that. And she’s still suffering a year or over a year later, she’s still suffering. So I’m saying that to say just because you’re sick now doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be sick down the road. And I think that the media has downplayed and downplayed. They didn’t even tell us what the chemicals were for. I mean, it took Scott investigating and coming on the ground like he did in East Palestine to tell us like, okay, this is actually what we’re dealing with. Let’s not cover that up. And the whole EPA thing, it’s like, I guess so deep. It really goes so deep and it’s like I’m just so tired of these companies putting profits over people. It’s just not right. And so I’m honored and I’m happy to be a part of bringing awareness to this tragedy and it’s happening all over. So I just have to say that,

Jeramie Julian:

And I’m in agreement. Thank you for the opportunity to bring awareness to stuff. And I always try to, the half glass full thing, there’s always a silver lining and I always try to look for the good in something, even if it’s bad. And that’s what this could be, could turn into is some way to stop companies like this from just bulldozing over

Speaker 5:

The common people who are the ones that are really suffering. It

Jeramie Julian:

Is been crazy. Luckily, like I said, I live far enough away where me and the people around me aren’t really, don’t seem to be affected anymore. I need to get my water tested because I have well water and there’s a possibility that there’s some slight trace minerals in something that could just kind of be underlying or prolonging condition. And yes, definitely going to be looking for a lawyer. I’m not trying to get rich. I don’t think anybody’s going to get a million dollars out of it, but it is a financial burden on those who were seriously affected by it and who continue to be. And that’s the thing is we don’t know how long out into the future or these symptoms going to last. How bad can they get? How bad is this really for your heart or your eyes or your lungs? Who knows what it could turn into in the future.

I’m thankful for the doctors that I’ve seen. I’m thankful for the medication and trying to get well, but it just doesn’t stop though. From my point of view, it’s just this ever occurring thing because it’s still in the atmosphere. There’s still something there. And who knows what all there was, who knows? How does that ever get out of the atmosphere, out of the air? Hannah, like you’re talking about, that’s I think they did the curfew at nights was because during the day when it was warmer, it all rose into all the chemicals and everything rose up into the atmosphere. Then at night when it cooled down, they all lowered back down. It’s just a tragedy on so many different levels, but everybody want to act like it didn’t happen. There’s petitions to have the place closed down. Well, obviously hasn’t worked yet. What do we have to do to force these incredibly dangerous companies to shut down or to move to a much, much safer location that’s close enough to Atlanta where it could affect millions of peaks of people probably, or possibly.

Speaker 5:

It’s really sad

Jeramie Julian:

For us, for the ones who have to suffer and we don’t have a voice so much in the big scheme of things. I’m not trying to sound political, but the buddy buddy thing, I won’t say government’s involved in any of it, but I don’t know. I mean, what do you do? What can you do against something like this to prevent it from happening again or the suffering of other people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s like we mentioned already, this is not the first fire that has happened at this one facility. They’ve had multiple fires as we mentioned in the introduction. Same way that after East Palestine, people are realizing there are over a thousand train derailments every year, just like they could happen in a major population center.

Jeramie Julian:

This, we need the need to start talking about it to continuously bring light to it and bring awareness to it because for people who don’t know somebody personally involved, it’s just kind of, oh, that stinks for them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I really can’t thank you three enough for after all you’ve gone through and all you continue to go through for being willing to come on, talk to us, share your story so openly and vulnerably. And like I said in the beginning, like we are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you all and everyone down there, and we’re not going to give up on y’all. And so I want to assure listeners that this is not the last time that we’re going to be talking with Hannah, Christina, and Jeremy talking about Conyers and the bio lab fire. We want to do more follow-ups on this. And I know I got to let you guys go here in a minute and there’s still so much to talk about. So I want to save some more for the next time that we have you on. And I want to make that sooner rather than later.

But for this kind of final round in the last few minutes that I’ve got you three, I wanted to ask kind of two questions. One, as we try to do with every episode of this show, we want to tell folks who are listening what they can do to help. We don’t want people to just listen to a sad story, feel bad, and then move on. We are trying to get our fellow workers off the sidelines and get involved and be part of the solution because it’s us. It’s the working people who are being impacted by all this crap in communities around the country and around the world who are going to need to stand up to the companies, to their bought off officials and the government. I mean, we’re going up against Goliath here, and it’s going to take solidarity among working people who are on the front lines of this corporate malfeasance, this government malfeasance, this media silence.

We need to band together and stick together and fight for one another. And so I wanted to ask if we could end by just, if there’s anything folks can do to help, even if it’s just continuing to spread the word or anything that you guys in your community need that they can act on. I wanted to ask if we could end on that note and also wrapping a second question into this final section, which is really important for me, and I imagine for all of you, but whenever we do a new investigation into another sacrifice zone or another industrial accident or something horrific that has put our fellow workers in the kind of hell that you guys are living through, we don’t want to reduce you and your communities to this awful tragedy that happened to you. We want to remind folks, this is a whole community.

These are lives, these are generations that have been turned upside down because of something that was not your fault. And so I wanted to ask in this final round, if you could a start by just telling listeners a little bit about your life, the community there, what you want folks to know about your community that they’re not hearing when we are only talking about this horrible chemical fire. What do you want people to know about your life there in and around Conyers? And then as a kind of final note, what can folks listening do to help? So Hannah, let’s start back with you. Christina. Jeremy round us out.

Hannah Loyd:

So I mean, just the community around here. We’re small town people. We’re just, every weekend there’s usually some kind of small festival going on, or with the holidays now, there’s a bunch of probably parades and stuff like that going on. So I mean, there’s people that are able to attend those things and be okay, but then there’s people like me that cannot partake in stuff like that because of the risk of just being outside. And to be honest, it just sucks. So I mean, the holidays, I’m trying to make the best of it because supposed to be a good time and a fun time and all that, but it’s just having to deal with the, we’re still having effects from everything we’re still having right now as I’m talking. I’m itching. So we’re still having side effects and we’re still having issues because of the fire as we go into a holiday season. But we’re all trying to move on and make sure that life goes on as it should. But as Christina said, we had Scott down here testing, and I actually had Scott at my house doing testing on my pool water. He took one of my pool floats that basically melted almost. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

This is Scott Smith, correct?

Hannah Loyd:

Scott Smith, yeah, Scott Smith. Sorry. This is Scott Smith. So he tested my pool water. He tested my soil. He took one of my pool floats that, like I said, basically melted, which those are made to withstand these chemicals. So when it melted, and I didn’t even know who Scott Smith was until I saw a post of him at the local VFW pond testing the pond water, which he already brought back the preliminary results of it being chloroform and chlorine, and it has a whole list of stuff. So I can only imagine what just my preliminary results are going to be when he gets those back. So I just contacted him via Facebook and he just happened to message me back. And he came out here and he tested that and he took my pull foot with him and he told me he’d get back in touch with me when he got the results.

And that was probably the end of October-ish. So it takes a while to get those back because those tests just by themselves, those cost a lot of money. So for someone to come down here and just be willing to voluntarily test our stuff is just amazing. So as far as what people can do now, I really honestly, I don’t know, I guess just spread, share this out, spread the news. There’s a lot of different groups that have tried to come together and there’s a lot of division that has been made, like you said, max, a lot of division in the community that has been made because of this catastrophic event. And that’s okay because at the end of the day, I’m only here to spread awareness. I’m not here to try to create any kind of chaos or any kind of drama or anything like that.

I’m here to share what I’ve been through. I’m here to share what’s helping me. I’m here basically what they call DIY, do it yourself stuff that has helped my kid with, well, her doctor says she has mild eczema, but he doesn’t really know if she does or doesn’t. So he’s just treating it as that. So just different things that I’ve done to try to help my kid get through it, which it’s more of an emotional thing than it is. There’s a lot of physical that goes to it, but it’s a lot of more emotional stuff than it is actual physical. So I mean, this isn’t over, and it’s a long way from being over, especially like I said, when I knew that there was possibly still offgassing going on. And then I saw a video of it actually going on a couple days, either before or after Thanksgiving. So they still have the chemicals on site and they’re still trying to get rid of them, and there’s a lot of them that they have to get rid of. So I mean, basically just keep listening for updates. Hopefully we’ll have more better information next time. Don’t know. I hope it’s not worse information. I don’t know.

Christina O’Connor:

I just wanted to say it starts with just understanding and raising that awareness and just educating people. I know people right now that are still having symptoms. They’re still suffering and they don’t even really know what to do. I don’t know, doctors, they don’t know. So just educating. We’ve got two come together as people and just have some understanding and some compassion. I don’t know what that looks like exactly, but educating, do the research. If you’re a doctor to determine how do I treat these people or the mental health side of it, like Hannah mentioned, it was traumatic to go through these things. Traumatic and people don’t even realize the trauma that they went through. They don’t even know, and so just really educating people and just bringing awareness to the situation, just being the change you want to see. I don’t know what that looks like across the board, but I just think we need to stop putting profits before people and just be kind human beings.

It just starts with kindness. I don’t know what that looks like as far as organizing things that we could do, just like social media pages that we’ve organized and just ways that we can speak out. Hannah mentioned TikTok. I’ve started speaking out on TikTok actually, and I would love to do YouTube. I would love to learn any way that I can to help be an advocate for people and speak for people that can’t speak up. I’m very blessed that I had family to help me and take me in because if not, I would be on the street somewhere because I couldn’t stay in those chemicals. It was killing me literally. And so I don’t know the long-term effects of what that exposure is going to do to me.

Hopefully I pray that that’s, I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to have long-term exposure and side effects, but a lot of people do. A lot of people are. A lot of people are still going through it, so just raising awareness like Hannah was talking about, just pushing it out to as many people as we can to make, to change, to reach. I don’t know if our senators, some of that’s been organized a little bit, so who are the people that we need to get in front of to talk to that’s going to listen to us? That’s what needs to happen.

Jeramie Julian:

It needs to get out there. It needs to get out there. Call your local politicians. I live in a small rural town. There’s a ton of farmers around me. There’s no telling what effect that this has had on the cattle. There’s a ton of testing that needs to be done on more than just humans at this point. Is it somehow going to be leached into the meat after they’re processed in the big picture? How broad is the harm or destruction from this one chemical fire? There’s a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done.

Speaker 5:

Oh, yeah. I need

Jeramie Julian:

To send Scott some of my well water. I need to get some bottles for that, but yeah, that’s all I can say is call your local politicians. Sign the petitions, share your stories and make your voice heard on any outlet that you can.

Christina O’Connor:

I don’t want to induce fear, but with people speaking out, I know friends of people in East Palestine and sometimes people that are speaking out, I don’t know. I have a bit of fear about being so vocal about it because I see people being shut down and sometimes alive, and so it’s kind of scary, but I’m ready to sign up for that because I believe in standing up for this cause and yeah, like Jeremy said, what are the other effects of the livestock and the frogs that are dying in the pond that Scott was testing? Well, it’s in the water and we’re drinking. It is just like, it goes so deep. It goes so deeply. People need to stand up. Stand up, stand up.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Christina, Jeremy and Hannah for trusting us and our listeners with their heartbreaking and enraging stories and for sharing their experiences so openly with us. Please, I’m begging you all, don’t forget about them. Don’t forget about East Palestine. Don’t forget about South Baltimore. Don’t forget about Asheville and other areas impacted by this year’s hurricanes. Don’t forget, don’t wait for something like this to happen in your community and it may already be happening. Don’t roll over and accept this unacceptable status quo. Fight back. We have to fight back because we are the only ones who can stop this. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring and I want to thank you for being the change that we are all waiting for.

We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real new newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.