The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report: Breaking News Edition. As we always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. Now to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible.

And today, we will achieve that goal by reporting on a disturbing story that has been growing more and more alarming as it unfolds. I’m talking about the current ordeal of cop watcher Long Island Audit.

As you already know, Long Island Audit, also known as SeanPaul Reyes, has been covering police misconduct for roughly five years. His provocative videos and creative tactics have garnered him millions of subscribers and a huge audience, but it has also attracted the attention of law enforcement, according to SeanPaul. And some of that attention could have significant consequences for him and his family.

This comes on top of a broad demonetization of cop watching and auditing videos. So to unpack what’s happening and the consequences for SeanPaul, we will be speaking to him shortly.

But first, I want to turn to my reporting partner about the importance of the First Amendment and the pushback he encountered from law enforcement during his reporting. Stephen Janis, thank you so much for joining me.

Stephen Janis:

Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Taya Graham:

Well, unfortunately, I dragged you inside to talk about something a little disturbing.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, very, very disturbing. And when I was reading what Sean had sent us about what’s happening to him, I was thinking about some of my own situations. Just recently we were reporting on the firing of the first Black police chief of Pokemoke City, which is a small town on the Eastern Shore. We were investigated as part of a grand jury investigation into an interview we tried to do with one of the witnesses in the case, and they made our lives miserable. But I think the point behind it was that they wanted to prevent us from reporting on this story. The witness had lied, the prosecutors were basically covering up and they didn’t want us to know about it. And the way they intimidated us was impaneling a grand jury and starting to investigate us and lawyers telling me they’re going to show up at your work, they might show up at your house, but they’re going to show up.

And fortunately, the judge in the case though it was absolutely invalid and it never went forward. But we were very much on the verge of it, very least being called in front of a grand jury, which has all sorts of fraud implications. So I really, really have problems with the idea of law enforcement criminalizing speech or dissent. And I think that’s why we need to unpack this in detail and understand what’s really going on here and the implications that go beyond just SeanPaul’s work and his career, but the implications for all people who use the First Amendment as a tool for their reporting or their dissent or anything.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely. I think everyone out there needs to care about the First Amendment. You have to exercise your rights or you’re going to miss them when you lose them.

All right, so let’s bring in our guest, Long Island Audit. SeanPaul, thank you so much for joining us.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to be on with you guys.

Taya Graham:

So first I have to ask you, how are you doing?

SeanPaul Reyes:

I wouldn’t say I’m paranoid, but I’m definitely cautious. I’m definitely vigilant of my surroundings now. My life has definitely changed. My family’s life has definitely changed from this information that has been revealed and just being cautious and obeying the law like normal, just hoping that evil people don’t do evil things.

Taya Graham:

So SeanPaul, you’ve received some pretty disturbing messages. I’m going to put one on the screen and read a little, but I’m just going to say something first. While we can discuss the nature of the threats, we cannot name or disclose any information that would point to a particular person or even hint at a particular agency. And the reason for this is clear. At this point, we cannot confirm this information. And for all we know, it could simply be a way to scare or intimidate you, but we feel that it is noteworthy because of the far-reaching implications if it’s true. However, we also have to abide by our journalistic ethics and not disclose something about a specific person or entity that is so far unproven or that we have not ourselves confirmed. So we’re just going to keep that in mind as we discuss this.

So I’m going to put up the first threat and Cam, if you could put up Long Island Audit JPEG one and then two as I read.

I hope this email finds you well. If I didn’t write this email and something happened to you, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. At the same time, I’m not a supporter of yours or agree with the tactics you choose to expose police, politicians and the like. I also don’t like or agree with violence. With that said, let me get to the point of my email. SeanPaul, you are in grave danger. Your home is about to be raided sometime soon during the month of September. From what I understand, a search warrant will be approved to search for some investigative paperwork that you illegally got or received. The warrant will be also used to search for communications between you and other cop watchers.

I believe this warrant will be served by [redacted]. You are being investigated for being the leader of an anti-police government terrorist group. You’re probably wondering how I know this. OK, Sean, just even reading that just made my stomach knot up. How did you feel when you received this message? And since you’ve received it, have you learned anything else about what might happen?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Well, this was the second message in a line of messages that I received as far as warnings go. When I read this one, what stood out to me the most was the fact that they’re not even a supporter, allegedly. Again, I don’t know. I can’t confirm who these people are. I can’t confirm that they are who they say they are, rather. The people that they claim to be do exist, but I can’t confirm who they are. I’m working on that now. But these people are terrified and they don’t agree with what’s happening to me. They don’t agree with my tactics, as you heard, but they don’t agree with violence, and they believe that the government is going to be using violence in order to chill my free speech and intimidate me and stop me from asking questions. And that’s always concerning to me, especially because I live with my wife and my two young children who are three and four years old, and it’s definitely something that they didn’t sign up for and it’s not something that should be acceptable under our Constitution, under our First Amendment.

This should not be happening, this kind of threats.

Stephen Janis:

You know, Sean, journalists come into possession of all sorts of documents. What is the nexus of this warrant? What exactly could they be trying to do or trying to get from you or what could they use as fodder to get a judge to approve this? It sounds pretty farfetched to me, but I was just wondering if you had any idea of what they might be trying to do here.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah, Stephen, it is farfetched, and I have no idea. I’ve racked my brain for hours trying to figure out what exactly is this evidence that I illegally obtained, allegedly. I have no idea. Everything that I’ve ever obtained has been legally and through the FOIA process, either through the federal FOIA process or New York State FOIA commissions. It’s always been legally obtained through open records requests. So I have no idea. Again, it’s just concerning to me that this would happen.

And the circumstantial evidence that comes along with it, these emails are that the Suffolk County District Attorney Ray’s Attorney’s office he did in fact subpoena 14 months of my financial records from various social media accounts that have been confirmed to me, Facebook, TikTok, Google. There could be others. They do not have to let you know. The reason why I know that they requested 14 months from those particular social media agencies companies is because the social media companies themselves advised me that they were going to be handing over this information, but there could be bank accounts. My lawyer tells me there could be a myriad of other options of them trying to get financial. And on a violation trespass, which doesn’t even amount to a crime, it’s a violation of law no different than a parking ticket or a speeding ticket, for them to request such substantial information, financial information from me leads me to believe that there’s more going on here than a trespass violation And it’s financial records, RICO, go hand in hand. So it’s definitely something that’s concerning to me and my attorneys and I are watching out for.

Stephen Janis:

Well, just to make a finer point here, I would come into possession of all sorts of documents as a reporter, like homicide records, stuff that wasn’t public, but it was never illegal. You can’t prosecute someone if someone… You could prosecute a person who leaked it possibly, but of course these are state records, so they’re not classified to begin with. But you can’t prosecute someone if someone came to your doorstep and dropped off a bunch of internal records from, say, any police department, that’s not illegal, right? I mean, that’s like First Amendment journalism. I mean, it sounds kind of sketchy.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah, it definitely is sketchy. Again, I’ve only ever obtained documents legally. I haven’t even obtained anything sensitive or anything where the general public wouldn’t have access to them anyway. And like you said, Stephen, if somebody came and dropped something off at my house that was confidential information, not subject to FOIA, as long as it’s not top secret classified, we’re talking about state documents here, I don’t see where the crime would be. But again, that hasn’t even risen to that level. Everything I’ve ever received has been in the course of investigations through open records requests.

And at the end of the day, they know that. I mean, they have to know that. I don’t know what type of case they’re trying to build. I’m not a criminal. I do not engage in RICO, don’t have some criminal enterprise. I’m a law-abiding citizen with a company incorporated in New York state. I pay my taxes. Everything is legitimate about me. So I’m not really worried about the strength of a case that they can bring against me, but you can indict a ham sandwich is that old saying that you can indict a ham sandwich and on a RICO case, that would be hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees. And as I always say on my channel, the process is the punishment. So I wouldn’t put it past them to just do it. We’ve seen it with this federal government already in different instances and the weaponization of the justice system. But to use it, that’s what makes it even more concerning for me is that we’ve seen it happen before. So now I’m not on the list of the friendly people to the administration for my views on ICE, for law enforcement with Lucivillo and my criticism of Suffolk County Police Union. So there’s a lot going on and I know that I’m innocent. I haven’t committed any crimes, but it’s definitely concerning, especially for my wife and my family, my mother, my children. It’s concerning information, especially the violence part of it.

Stephen Janis:

It’s totally understandable. And it’s very scary that they’re going after your financial records, which seem to me completely irrelevant to anything that they’re going to, whatever they’re pursuing. Go ahead, Taya, sorry.

Taya Graham:

No, I was just thinking if you’re guilty, you need one lawyer. If you’re innocent, you need two. Honestly, this is incredibly disturbing.

Now, you did mention that you might have some lawyers. It sounds to me like you might need a team of them. And if you don’t have lawyers, how are you prepared to defend yourself if worst comes to worst and you’re actually are raided?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Well, I do have a New York state attorney already. His name is Jacob Uriel. He is always on retainer for my company and for myself personally for any sort of criminal charges or civil things that are happening, but I would need more than just him. I would hire a team. There’s one thing that I would never do is be facing down the barrel of fraudulent, made-up RICO charges and take that lightly. So I would have to do what I have to do. Again, the process is the punishment. If I got to take out loans and I have to do what I need to do, a home equity line of credit to be able to pay for this legal defense, whatever needs to be done is going to get done. And that’s why I made the video that I did where I spoke about this because at the end of the day, if they have a valid search warrant, I’m not going to stop them.

I’m not violent. They can search my property. Whatever the warrant says they need to search, they can search. I have nothing to hide. I’ve not moved anything from my house since learning this. Nothing has changed about my routines because there’s nothing to change. But the only thing that concerned me was the allegations of using some sort of SWAT team in order to enter my house. And again, more process is the punishment to intimidate me, intimidate my family. And I think that’s a very dangerous, volatile escalation that doesn’t need to happen even if they are investigating some sort of RICO case. And I wanted to make that clear to the public that I’m not a threat to law enforcement. Law enforcement knows that. I’m not engaging in any criminal activity, but I will comply with any court order for a search warrant or anything like that and we can handle it in court.

But to terrify my family with flash bangs and entering in at 3:00 in the morning is just not necessary.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I mean, I’ve watched a ton of your videos. I’ve never seen you engage in violence or even threats. Have you ever, as a cop watcher, threatened to do something violent or acted in any violent way during a cop watch? I mean, is there anything that you’ve ever done? And I’m just asking for the record here to make sure it’s on the record, depending on what happens. Have you ever?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. So in my entire career, I’ve never made any threats of violence or engaged in any acts of violence or even used profanity against law enforcement officers, which is my First Amendment right. I don’t believe that that serves the purpose of what I’m trying to accomplish. And I think the results of my activism and my journalism speak for themselves when police departments till this day continue to invite me to do trainings with them, ride alongs, district attorney’s offices, police departments, all facets of law enforcement want to come together with me and show that they are transparent, that they’re willing to learn, to hear a different perspective, not because I’m some sort of law or legal expert, but because I’m a real life person who has garnered a lot of supporters and I’ve dealt with a lot of police interactions from across the country, from New York to California and everywhere in between.

So I think they value that insight. Until this day, I receive requests to do trainings with law enforcement officers. So if law enforcement agencies though I was some sort of threat or had any sort of violent intent, they wouldn’t be wanting to work with me. So no, my videos speak for themselves, Stephen. I’ve never even cursed. I’ve never even raised my voice. I can defend myself and I can have my little quick witty remarks, I would call them witty remarks. But as far as violence, no, I’ve never engaged in violence and I abhor violence and I always want people to be peaceful because it distracts away from the message of accountability and transparency.

Stephen Janis:

And it’s funny, Sean, we know a lot of cop watchers who curse, but I noticed that you don’t even curse. You keep it pretty friendly. I mean, even in the —

Taya Graham:

Keep it professional.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah.

SeanPaul Reyes:

There was one time I was doing a cop watch in Connecticut and somebody, an officer, a state trooper had somebody pulled over on the side of the road. This was just recently, a couple weeks ago. And I told him, well, thanks for not spitting in my face. Because of course, Brian Fahey, the former sergeant spit in my face. And he looked confused and he said, well, why would I do that? You’re one of the most polite auditors I’ve ever seen in my life. He was like, you’re a very nice guy. And I’m like, well, there you go. There’s one of them. But again, and there’s a lot of law enforcement officers out there that support me behind the scenes. This is how I get a lot of this information. And again, because they know I’m not anti-law enforcement. I’m anti the apparatus of the police unions, the administration in protecting misconduct by officers, by not having accountability or transparency in these investigations.

Taya Graham:

I’m really glad we put that on the record, but let me just read the next communication you received, once again, with all the identifying information redacted. Quote, “They’ve been doing a lot of digging into your past and your family’s past. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but undercover officers are following you. But that’s not the most alarming thing that they’re doing. They’re currently in talks with the Department of Justice trying to figure out possible federal crimes they can prosecute you with. They’ve come up with a plan to arrest you and prosecute you on a RICO case. When I heard this, I couldn’t believe it. I even said, ‘Do you really believe you can indict him on RICO?’ They laughed and said, ‘Absolutely.’ The goal isn’t even to have you found guilty. They want to make you spend all your money defending yourself and at the same time, make you the national poster child for YouTube domestic terrorists. I know this email may shock you, but I’m telling you, they’re coming after you hard. You have no idea the reach these people have. I hope this email helps you protect yourself against these people.”

OK. Again, let me just get your reaction when you received it and did you think it was legitimate?

SeanPaul Reyes:

So I received that email first before the second one, but my reaction was the same. I receive a lot of shocking emails. I’ve received many death threats. I don’t speak about them all the time because it’s unfortunately a part of society. There are some sick individuals out there who will threaten your children, who will threaten your family members, your own life, and engage in some sort of hateful just vengeance against you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s sick. And I don’t talk about that all the time, but when I’m getting these sorts of emails and they all seem to have common threads: RICO cases, federal cases, poster boy for YouTube domestic terrorism, and they’re coming from separate people, separate email addresses, email addresses that have been created years and years ago. Again, I’ve looked into this a little bit, and we do not know for a fact if these are actually legit or they could be coming from the people just trying to scare me, but it’s definitely intimidating to me and concerning because my family’s at stake here, that I can defend myself and I can hire lawyers and the people have my back, but I would just hate it.

It would be something that I couldn’t even comprehend if my three and four-year-old boys, who actually look up to the police at this point and they see them as heroes, and I don’t want to disillusion them from that at three and four years old and traumatize them. Or even my wife who’s dealt with her own tyranny back in her home country that she fled to come here. She was a patriot in her country. She loved freedom and to see this. I’ve had mass law enforcement officers from Nassau County come to my house before and try and run me off the road. And these are things that have been happening to me, these intimidation tactics, trying to pick you up on a Friday night so you have to spend the weekend in jail, holding you for eight hours on a desk appearance ticket, which should only take like an hour.

These are the kinds of intimidation tactics, scare tactics that I’ve seen that law enforcement will unfortunately engage in to get you to stop talking about what they don’t want you to talk about. They hate the First Amendment. These individuals particularly hate the First Amendment. They don’t like what I do. They don’t like that I make money while doing it and they want to stop that at all costs. I’m going to keep fighting. I’m going to keep speaking truth to power because if I give up, all these people, millions of people have given me a voice, a strong voice, a platform, and if I give up, I feel like I would be letting them down. So I’m going to keep fighting, but I’m going to remain vigilant, and I’m going to continue speaking truth to power, but I have to be careful for my family because that’s where my loyalty lies first.

Stephen Janis:

I mean, this is a horrible thing to contemplate, but have you talked to your family? Have you prepared them at all? Have you told them about these messages, and have you told them what to prepare for? I mean, it’s a horrible question. I hate to ask it, but I know there are real consequences of just even these threats themselves are sort of you having to shoulder the burden. Have you talked to them about it?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. It’s unfortunate that I had to explain to my wife, my sister, my mother, my brother, all of these different things on secure lines, because I don’t know if they’re even listening to my phone at this point, but I had to let them know, and they’re obviously very concerned. And I think the saddest part and the most unfortunate that broke my heart is I had to prepare my children because I didn’t want them… My main job is to protect them from any sort of trauma or any set of issues. And I’m friends with law enforcement officers, so there’s been law enforcement officers that come over my house with their guns and their badges that my children have seen that they’re friendly with. And I told them, Daddy’s friends with the police. You know this, right? Yeah, you work with the police. Well, daddy’s friends with the police and if the police ever come here, it’s because they just want to work with daddy.

Don’t be scared of the police. They’re our friends. Don’t be scared. You’ll be fine. So in case some sort of raid happened or anything like that, I didn’t want my kids to… And that was a hard conversation. I got to tell you, Stephen, it was a hard conversation to have with a three- and four-year-old trying to get them to understand police are good, they’re our friends, and don’t be scared of them that maybe they want to talk to us or come visit how my lawyer visits. Because I have a bunch of friends that are lawyers, police officers, et cetera, and they come and visit and we have a good time and they play with the kids and they bring their kids over and some menace to society I am, apparently. It’s ridiculous what’s going on. Nobody should have to feel this way. And the difference is that when I believe that these law enforcement officers do receive death threats and things like that, because it’s just on both sides, the internet and people are just unhinged and they have a lot of anger, pent up anger built up on both sides.

And I call that out and I make sure in my videos, I say, please be peaceful. Do not engage in this kind of violent rhetoric and threatening rhetoric with law enforcement officers. It’s not productive and it’s going to get you in trouble. It’s going to hurt the movement. They’re going to label us domestic terrorists. They’re already doing that on the federal side. We’ve seen people film the police and DHS agents will say now, hey, congratulations, you’re now on a domestic terrorist list.

So me being the poster boy for domestic terrorism in the United States, according to the federal or state government or whoever, I feel like they could have found somebody better because I work with the police and that will come out once they try and label me that.

But I think what really happens is what’s really going on here, Stephen and Taya, is that they understand that I’m more of a threat to their sort of system than somebody who’s filming outside of a restaurant or whatever the case may be because I’m looking into their finances, $15 million for the PBA. I’m asking the questions about these hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements. I’m speaking at the public meetings, and they see that as a threat. And it’s not a violent threat, it’s just me exercising my rights peacefully. That’s all I’m doing and they don’t like it.

Taya Graham:

I know Stephen has had direct experience with taking a look at the financials of police officers and having the hammer come down on him through his editor.

Stephen Janis:

We were the first publication that published the overtime earnings of the Baltimore City Police Department back in —

Taya Graham:

And they were not pleased.

Stephen Janis:

That was like 2007. We got death threats. They called our office and threatened us and it was scary.

Taya Graham:

Tried to get Stephen fired.

Stephen Janis:

And then the next day they arrested my editor on bogus charges and threw him in jail. So when you touch the money… I’m not saying touch the money.

Taya Graham:

That’s the third rail.

Stephen Janis:

But when you start to expose spending, how much police make and how well they do as per taxpayers, yeah, that’s when things get dicey. Yes.

Taya Graham:

Yes. Yeah. When you start showing the salaries, when you start showing the overtime —

Stephen Janis:

I totally forgot about that.

Taya Graham:

When you start showing take-home cars, that’s when things get really bad. And for the record, his editor was arrested for holding a gun inside of his own home. So that’s a whole other story [crosstalk], maybe sometime we’ll share.

Stephen Janis:

It’s a long story. The charges were eventually dropped. But the point wasn’t, as you point out, not to throw him in jail and convict him of a crime that was not a crime. The point was to scare him and to scare us.

SeanPaul Reyes:

That’s what they do. They’ve done it. They’ve used tactics similar when I rented… The reason why I owned a 14-foot LED billboard truck in the first place is because when I used to rent them for protests, the district attorney’s offices would send subpoenas for felonies for documentation to these billboard truck companies.

Taya Graham:

Oh, wow.

Stephen Janis:

Really?

Taya Graham:

It was done not because they were investigating some sort of felony, not because they cared about the contract or anything like that. It’s because it was used as a tool to intimidate these companies to say, hey, if you rent the billboard truck to Mr. Reyes, you’re going to keep getting subpoenas. We’re going to look into your financials. We’re going to make sure you’re on the up and up. And that’s the whole reason why I bought my own billboard truck so they couldn’t intimidate people. But now they’re just working to intimidate me. They hate the billboard truck, and I get it. Nobody wants a billboard truck in front of their residence, in front of their city hall, in front of their police department. But guess what? It’s my First Amendment right. It’s the only tool that I have for accountability, for transparency, and I’m going to use it to the fullest extent because it’s my right.

You know what? Let me take a look at the RICO statute. I’m going to have —

Stephen Janis:

Yeah, let’s take a look because this RICO thing is very strange.

Taya Graham:

Yeah. And to me, this is very scary. I know this has previously been weaponized against folks in Cop City in Georgia.

Stephen Janis:

Yes, that’s a good point.

Taya Graham:

I also saw it was possibly going to be weaponized against some cop watchers in Texas. I think HBO Matt was part of that crew. So I know the RICO statute can be kind of scary. So we’re going to have Cam put JPEG 4 on the screen. Now, this law is pretty complicated, but the gist of it is, and the most important aspect of it is, is that the idea of a predicate crime, and that’s basically sort of a core component of the law. So I’m just going to go through and read what it means.

So “predicate acts, unlawful predicate acts that can form the basis of a RICO charge include state felony crimes involving acts or threats of murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, obscenity, or dealing in a controlled substance. Predicate acts also include over 100 federal crimes, among them bribery, various forms of fraud, money laundering, embezzlement, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and trafficking in persons.”

OK, so there’s a lot to unpack here, but I don’t see “using a camera to film public officials” on this list. I mean, how can they turn what you do into any of these crimes?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Well, the way I see it is I’ve seen them turn a traffic sign into notice of a no trespassing sign. I’ve seen them do magic in the criminal justice system. I’ve seen them twist things and come to different conclusions that a rational, logical person wouldn’t do. So I don’t put it past them. I was talking to my lawyer the other day, and this is not… They’re the most evil people ever, these people that are trying to do this, so it’s not like I’m giving them any tips or anything, but they would say, well, he gave me an example. Well, you need a criminal enterprise. They’re going to say that it’s Long Island Audit Inc. that’s generating you this money and your actions, you, by exercising your First Amendment right, you are intimidating elected officials to stop them from carrying out their duties. And it could be as simple as that, money coming in for “intimidation,” what they’re alleging is some sort of intimidation, which is really just First Amendment protected speech, criticizing your government, protesting your government.

And they’ll try and twist that somehow and try and find a crime. And again, you can indict a ham sandwich. So they’re going to be able to do this if they really want to. The question is how long will it take me to get justice and to be able to fight back against this? And that’s their whole game, in my opinion, is the process is the punishment. They didn’t arrest your editor to try and get him to go to prison. They did it to scare him. They did it to make him hire an attorney, make him waste his money. These are why they do these things. And that’s why people that speak truth to power are so important. I’m so grateful and honored to have so many people who have come to my back to support me and help me because this is what they’ll try and do, but the people have my back and I’m going to keep moving forward.

Stephen Janis:

OK. I just want to put a finer point on this. Now, there was something I was thinking about with this whole thing and this whole idea that you’re terrorizing people. If the union president doesn’t come out of that office building, there’s no story. If Brian Fahey doesn’t come out of his house when you knock on the door, just ignores you, none of that ever happens. That’s two that I can think of where if they had just ignored you, it’s all over. There’s no video. There’s no nothing. They participated in this. You weren’t able to, let’s say, walk into someone’s home or office. You knocked on a door in both cases, said, I want to speak to someone, and then they decide to come out and confront you, but they could have just stayed inside their house. It wasn’t like you did anything other than knock.

I’ve watched these videos in great detail. You just knock and ask to speak to someone. That’s not intimidation. That’s not any form of trying to harass or impede or obstruct. It’s asking to speak to someone. That’s a basic First Amendment right. But if they don’t come out and confront you, then there’s nothing that happened. They could easily have neutralized you by simply ignoring you. What do you say to that?

SeanPaul Reyes:

I mean, that’s what happens time and time again. That’s the whole reason that this channel is what it is. The Long Island audit is what it is. It’s the overreaction and the lack of control of their emotions from people in power because they’ve been getting away with it for so long, and then they run into somebody like me with millions of people who support me and millions of people who are going to watch the videos and see it, and they’re going to look bad and their ego gets the best of them in the moment. Even Brian Fahey admitted to the law enforcement officer on the scene that he didn’t handle it right. He knew that after the fact, but at the end of the day, I am just knocking or I’m going somewhere and I’m asking questions and their ego, their lack of control to control their emotions, it just escalates this situation to something criminal.

And then they want to play the victim. And that’s the worst part is that they blame me for their own actions. If I knock on your door and you pull a gun, you spit in my face, somehow I’m the one that was convicted of a crime in that whole scenario. It doesn’t make any sense. The gaslighting is unreal because all I did was knock on the door and then halfway back, making my way back to the public street, a man comes out with a gun, spits in my face. He has no criminal record and I get convicted of a misdemeanor over a private road, dead end, no trespassing sign that apparently means — Dead end no turnaround sign, excuse me.

Stephen Janis:

Think about how those videos would be if they hadn’t come out. It would be just you knocking the door, I guess they’re not here, going out, getting back in your truck and driving off, or police union headquarters, getting back in your truck and driving away. So take those components as they are. There’s nothing illegal or terroristic or anything about knocking on a door and asking to speak to someone.

SeanPaul Reyes:

It’s also not trespassing to walk away from the police union headquarters, but I was charged with it anyway. They will do whatever. HBO Matt, Taya, you brought him up. He was charged with organized crime. These things are ridiculous, but law enforcement agencies, the system itself will try and protect it. And we’ve had law enforcement agents that I’ve spoken to that have told me IA and all these different accountability apparatuses, they’re not for accountability. They’re meant to protect the badge. They’re meant to protect the image of the police officers and let them get away with as much as they possibly can. And it’s unfortunate, and that’s what they do, though.

Taya Graham:

Something I was thinking of when Stephen said if the police officers were just able to deescalate, to handle their emotions, then there wouldn’t be any video. But unfortunately, there are a lot of officers that don’t seem to, let’s say, understand people’s First Amendment rights, which is why there’s so many cop watching and auditor channels. Have you heard anything more about the demonetization of cop watchers and auditors? Have you heard any more about how widespread it is, and have you been able to appeal, and just how are you adapting? Because I believe your channel was demonetized, is that correct?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. So my channel was demonetized on the same day as everyone else. And the police union president Lucavila was actively talking about getting YouTubers demonetized on radio programs. So as far as how widespread it is, it seems to be as widespread as it is because it’s a lot of people. I haven’t talked to every single one of them. I’m very busy. I’m very worried about my life and there’s a lot going on right now, but seems like it’s caught a lot of people in the First Amendment auditing community and including myself. And I have filed an appeal, and the person who responded to my appeal said something very interesting and I actually conferred with other auditors and other YouTube channels who have sent appeals that if they got something similar back, but they’re saying that they’re looking, in short, they’re saying he said that we’re going to look into this. We understand that you’re frustrated. I hope you and your family are safe, SeanPaul.

Stephen Janis:

What?

SeanPaul Reyes:

So I though that was a little strange.

Stephen Janis:

That’s what YouTube said to you?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. YouTube representative when they put in my appeal said, SeanPaul, I hope you and your family are safe.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Stephen Janis:

Woah.

Taya Graham:

That’s very odd.

SeanPaul Reyes:

So I though that was interesting. And no other YouTube channel received some sort of hope you and your family are safe kind of deal. The rest of it was pretty much generic we’re going to look into it, but it was definitely interesting.

Stephen Janis:

So wait, and you talked to other auditors and they didn’t receive that message?

Taya Graham:

They did not receive a similar message of, I hope you and your family are safe.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. Nobody got the hope you and your family are safe except for me out of the people I’ve talked to. So I thought that was definitely interesting given what’s going on. And again, I don’t want people to think people are like, oh, he’s connecting this with this, with this, with this and trying to sell us this. I’m not trying to sell you anything. This is my life. This is my theory based on all of the circumstantial evidence, based on these sources. I’m just trying to put two and two together the best I can. If I have a smoking gun, you guys will be the first to know, but it’s just definitely strange. And I’ve been navigating it. The people have been supporting me over on Patreon and it’s been very successful there. And I’ve been doing a lot of behind the scenes stuff. I’m uploading a video today.

And if I become funded by the people, directly by the people, I think I can accomplish a lot more. So I’m not deterred. I’m not distracted. I think if I’m completely people-funded by the people who want to see what I do, it takes away all of the fighting for the algorithm, trying to chase the algorithm, making sure a video is not too long, not too short, has the right moments, whatever. It just frees me up. So I’m excited for the new chapter of my life while I will be on probation during this new chapter. So that’s been a lot to get to, to get used to.

Stephen Janis:

On probation?

SeanPaul Reyes:

On probation for one year.

Stephen Janis:

Probation from what?

Taya Graham:

I think this is for the bench trial for allegedly trespassing on the [crosstalk] property.

Stephen Janis:

Why don’t you go to that question because he already answered my question. Yeah, go ahead.

Taya Graham:

I was going to do that.

Stephen Janis:

OK. No.

Taya Graham:

OK. Let me start over then. So actually I’m glad you mentioned the officer, you knocked on the door and the officer came out of the house, held a gun, spit in your face. That, I believe, was your interaction with Connecticut State Trooper Brian Fahey. Now, I believe you were convicted after that bench trial for trespassing, and I think you’ve hired an appellate lawyer. Can you tell me kind of what your next steps are to fight this case?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Sure. Yeah. So I hired one of the best appellate attorneys in the state of Connecticut, John Shorn, and he’s argued hundreds of times in the Connecticut Appellate Court and the Connecticut Supreme Court. He knows what he’s doing. I have full confidence in him. He believes this verdict to be, I guess, I don’t want to say what he actually said. He definitely disagrees with this verdict wholeheartedly, and he’s very opposed to the judge’s logic regarding the private road, dead end, no turnaround sign and how that under the law is somehow sufficient notice and not a vehicle sign. So he’s very passionate about it. I’m grateful to have him on my side. And we’re actually currently right now at this moment trying to get my probation stayed. I was sentenced to 90 days in jail, suspended with one year of probation. And that probation’s being carried out here in Suffolk County where Lou Savillo, the president of the police union, is very influential here in this county.

And I do not want to be on probation here in Suffolk County, but it is what it is. I am. And it’s already affected my life and it’s affecting my job and my journalism. I can’t travel when I want to. I have to ask permission, and I’ve already been told no for a preplanned trip that I had.

Stephen Janis:

Where were you going to go? What happened?

SeanPaul Reyes:

I was actually going to Washington, DC. I was going to go with my attorney and we were going to go over there and just document what’s happening in DC. Haven’t been in DC in a while. He wanted to go to a couple museums. It was more like a personal/business trip, and it was just too short notice for my probation officer and they told me no. So that was unfortunate.

Stephen Janis:

They said, no, you can’t go to Washington DC?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah.

Stephen Janis:

Really?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. They said, no, you can’t go to Washington, DC.

Stephen Janis:

And what was their reasoning for that?

SeanPaul Reyes:

They said that it didn’t give them enough notice to make some sort of pass or something like that because obviously I didn’t know I was going to be on probation, so I planned this trip and I’ve planned other trips well in advance. And now that I’m on probation, I need some sort of permission from these individuals to be able to do anything about my job. So my attorney, John Shorhorn is actively right now, he filed the notice of appeal today and notice for a stay of probation because his argument is going to be, well, this is going to affect not only him, but his employees, his journalism, his company in a very significant way when we can just put a pause on it. And if we somehow lose, he can always serve the probation later. It doesn’t affect anything. He’s no public safety threat or anything like that.

So we’re trying to get it stayed for now so I can continue to work and do what I need to do.

Stephen Janis:

Well, what’s preventing them from saying no every time? I mean, is there any process for this or they just can just say no for whatever reason they want?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah, they can say no for whatever reason they want, I guess. I spoke to my attorney. There is a process where I can go to the court and ask them, but that’s going to cost me money for have my attorney argue that and then time and then you get the judicial approval because the judge is the ultimate arbiter of what I can do on probation. But just on a day to day, it’s going to be the probation officer here in Suffolk County. So it’s definitely interesting. They can come into my home. They don’t even need a search warrant anymore. They can come into my home whenever they want with whoever they want. They can search your

Taya Graham:

Car anytime, right?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah. They can search my car anytime they want. They don’t need any warrant or probable cause or anything right now. So I was told in those same emails that you read, I was told that the Lucivillo and these individuals were communicating with the state’s attorney. Again, I don’t know. I don’t have proof of that. I’ve put in FOIA requests. I’m waiting on everything, but I doubt even if I’ll even get anything, if there is anything. But I heard that they were communicating, which my lawyer says wouldn’t be that. If I’m facing a case here in New Suffolk County and I was facing a case, they would communicate and everything like that. Just the though of Brian Fahey and Lucavillo talking on the phone terrifies me. I mean, it is not a good lie. I don’t know what they would want to talk about, but it can’t be good.

I can’t imagine.

Stephen Janis:

What pretext do they need to search your car or go into your house? Is it none? There’s none. None?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah, there’s nothing. Because I am on probation right now for a trespass crime, one of the lowest crimes in the state of Connecticut or anywhere really, nonviolent property crime that again, the circumstances I argue I didn’t commit it, but we’ll see what the appeal does. But even just for that, I have a year, a year. If I didn’t have a family or anything, I might have just chosen to do the 90 days and been done with it then because it’s kind of ridiculous that they’re going to have control over my entire freedom for one year. They can go in my car whenever they want. They can walk up to my door and come inside my house whenever they want. They don’t need warrants and no judicial checks and that’s for a whole year. So it’s going to really affect my work, but I guess I just have to work more from home and focus on the Suffolk County government.

I’m sure they’ll love that. What

Stephen Janis:

Does your appellate lawyer think about the implied consent and the Supreme Court precedent in terms of knock and talks and things like that? Does he think that applies in this case?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah, that’s a great question, Steven. He thinks that it is ridiculous. Again, my lawyer is very grandiose and he speaks a little differently than I do, but he thinks it’s ridiculous that the judge would equate some sort of animosity as evidence of lacking a knowledge for license or privilege. Because the way my attorney sees it, and it’s the same way I see it, is animosity and unfriendliness is something separate from a license or privilege to do something. You could have animosity with anybody, a family member, you could have a bitter fight with a family member. The

Stephen Janis:

Family member comes to

SeanPaul Reyes:

Your door to apologize and they knock on your door to apologize and say, “Hey, I’m sorry, but you’ve never once told that family member they can’t come to your house. Are they trespassing because you had this sort of history of animosity?” To us, to me and my attorney, it doesn’t make really any sense, the license or privilege part, how they connect it with animosity part. And that’s to put to the side with a sign. But yeah, Florida v. Jardines doesn’t mention any animosity, just mentions a customary

Stephen Janis:

License. What you point out is a highly subjective judgment. And to me, that was a very weak piece of legal reasoning. And I’m not a lawyer, but I thought tying those two together in some sort of sequential if then was extremely weak and almost amateurish in the interpretation of the law because what he’s opened up is all sorts of traps within the law itself because it would be very easy to construe, let’s say, a hostile relationship with almost anybody. You could say, “I don’t like my postman. I don’t like Democrats or whatever. I don’t like Republicans, so they shouldn’t have known they shouldn’t come in my house because I had a Trump sign out there.” I mean, the implications of that ruling – That’s

SeanPaul Reyes:

A great point. According to this judge, if you had a Trump sign and you were a Democrat and you were a Democrat looking to knock on that person’s door, you would be committing the crime of criminal trespass. There’s no difference between my case and my case.

Stephen Janis:

And the whole point of the law is to think of consequences of making certain sort of assumptions and in a component of a law. And that what he did is a very, very weak because he didn’t think about these things. There’s so many ways that could be applied in a completely anti-First Amendment or I would say unconstitutional way. Yeah, I

SeanPaul Reyes:

Agree.

Stephen Janis:

I think your appeal is extremely important actually to precedent and

SeanPaul Reyes:

Case law. So does my attorney. He says that the law can’t be interpreted this way. That’s why he’s very passionate about it. He says, “This is not the way the law should have been interpreted and this sets a bad precedent, so we’re going to fix this.” And I have full confidence in him. He is one of the best. He knows what he’s doing. He knows what he’s talking about. And I’m confident that the conviction will be reversed and be issued a judgment of acquittal and that’ll be a great day for me because that would mean I’m no longer on probation.

Taya Graham:

Just to ask, you mentioned what a great lawyer you have. And as far as I know, really good lawyers are pretty expensive. So I’m just curious, you said the phrase, and I think this is so true, the process is the punishment. Well, my question is how expensive is this process and how many steps are there in the state appellate process? Because I’m not familiar with all the steps of it.

SeanPaul Reyes:

So to answer your second question first, you get an automatic appeal right to the appellate court, to a lower appellate court in Connecticut. And then you have the right to ask for an appeal to the Supreme Court of Connecticut, but you don’t have a right. They can deny you. It would depend. But right now we’re working on the first appeal that I have a right to. He’s argued before them hundreds of times. He just got somebody new trial in August. Again, he came highly recommended. I looked into his cases and he is somebody that normally would get between 30 and $50,000 on this sort of appeal on a regular case, depending on how serious it is. He is actually offered, and I told him I was going to be transparent with him with this number and I’ve been transparent with my Patreons over there and he charged me 15,000 for the appeal.

So while that’s a lot of money – He cut

Taya Graham:

It in half.He cut it

SeanPaul Reyes:

In half for you though. A lot of money. Right. Because he finds this case very interesting and he wants to do it himself. So when one of the best wants to do something like this, and I would’ve figured out a way to pay him whatever he asked for that day, but he’s at 15,000 and I was very appreciative for that. And again, because you write the process, the process is the punishment. They don’t have to spend money on these appellate attorneys. They’re already getting paid by the taxpayers to do this. The amount of money this trial costs, everything altogether. Another thing that he said was ridiculous is the four protective orders for a hundred years, criminal protective orders against the entire Fahey family for a hundred years. It’s a property crime, a nonviolent property crime. I never even had any dealings with Sergeant Fahey’s daughter or his son.

They’re adults, but I’ve never met them. I didn’t even know they existed till recently. So for them to have a hundred year order of protection against me is ridiculous, as my lawyer would say. It’s ridiculous.

Taya Graham:

That’s amazing. I’ve never even heard of a 100 year protective order. I have seen body camera video of women literally getting knocked unconscious by men and they can barely get a restraining order. That’s the sad part. And yet you knock on a door and now there’s a hundred year protective order against people that you’ve never actually interacted with. That is just astonishing to me.

Stephen Janis:

Let’s hope there’ll be a headline. Protection order expires for oldest living cop watcher 100 years later.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Yeah, hopefully I can make it that long. You’ll be

Stephen Janis:

A 103-year-old man. I’m

SeanPaul Reyes:

Guessing around 30. It is sad. It is sad that there are people, victims of domestic violence, whether they’re male or female. Correct, male or female. And it’s impossible, almost impossible, very difficult for them to get a criminal protective order, a permanent one for longer than a year. But yet I got 104, 100-year ones. And even police officers, police officers get shot, beat up by individuals and they don’t get protective orders against the people they arrest. That just doesn’t happen that way. But yet I knocked on a door of a police officer and him and his entire family get a hundred-year protective order. We’re fighting against that too. Not that I care because I don’t plan on ever going back to knock on his door, but I know that I no longer have the license or privilege now, not then, but it’s just more abuse of the process.

It’s the system protecting itself, the judge protecting the cops, the state’s attorney protecting the cops. Anybody else would’ve been arrested for felony threatening felony crimes that day for what Brian Fahey did. And he was charged with a very light disorderly conduct charge that was erased from the system. So I’m just going to keep fighting for accountability. We’re going to have depositions are coming up next in the Fahey case for the civil lawsuit and just going to keep moving forward.

Stephen Janis:

So before we go, I have one more question. And I always want to ask you this question because whenever we post a video about you, the passion is unbelievable. You have passionate supporters and very passionate critics. And I just want to give you the opportunity to answer your critics who say, “Well, all he does is harass people for clicks and views and there’s no real substantive part of this work.” What do you say to them and why are they wrong?

SeanPaul Reyes:

Well, again, I would say to them first and foremost, because I know how passionate they can be.

Don’t be so passionate about me. I’m just some guy on the internet. I’m nobody to you, or at least I should be nobody to you. The people’s opinion, your opinion doesn’t really mean much because my opinion, I care about my friends and family’s opinion of me. And I do read the comments and most of them are supportive. But to answer their question about what I’ve accomplished, what have I accomplished? I’ve worked with the police departments. I’ve helped First Amendment auditor, whatever you want to call me. You call me whatever you want. You can’t say that I haven’t worked with the police on a serious level across our country, district attorney’s offices to help bridge that divide. I’ve exposed mayors for engaging in fraudulent misconduct where they’re voting on bills that they’re receiving the money to. I broke that story myself. The FBI is looking into it.

I’ve spoken to the FBI in Florida about that story. It’s a crazy story. I’ve had mayors rip down signs from city halls. There is so much that I… And the most important thing is when I’m out on the street, I never run into these other passionate people, thank God. But I do run into a lot of people as I travel the United States, whether it’s at an airport, a rest stop, wherever it may be. I always tell me, “Well, thank you. Thank you so much. I’ve learned so much from you. I’ve learned how to control my emotions. I’ve learned that I need to step out of a vehicle. I’ve learned that there’s certain things that I have to comply with, other things I don’t.” And that, to me, that has happened dozens of times at this point. And if that only happened once, it would’ve been worth it for me, my five-year career, because if I could teach somebody how to exercise their rights, there’s nothing more important in our country than our constitution and our rights.

So it’s something that, especially now, especially when it’s being tested by the federal state governments, it doesn’t matter. Again, I always tell people this, it’s not left or right, it’s up and down. And the quicker that we, the people, really understand that, the quicker we can come together and stop fighting each other and start really trying to demand accountability and transparency and that laws are passed to benefit the people, not the corporations, not the elites. We’re too busy fighting each other. So I would hope that they would hear me out, come on my side. I would love to debate them. If they want to debate, it would be my honor to do so. I want to bring people together. I don’t want to tear people apart. And if you think I just do it for clicks and views, I’m not even getting paid on YouTube anymore, so I can’t say that.

I mean, that’s a lot. I still post on there, so I’m not doing it for clicks and views on YouTube. But again, I think it’s such a red herring because every single news media outlet is looking for clicks and views because why wouldn’t you want somebody to hear your story?

Taya Graham:

Exactly.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. And you got to get paid for the work. And

SeanPaul Reyes:

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a utopia where everybody gets

Taya Graham:

It.

Stephen Janis:

I know. No.

Taya Graham:

You know what? I’m really going to hold onto what you said. It’s not left or right. It’s up and down. And the sooner that we figure this out, the better our country is going to be. We’re going to be able to work together. I really, I love that so much. That is just the perfect way to end this conversation.

Stephen Janis:

And true. And quite true.

Taya Graham:

It’s so true. That just rang so true with me. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, SeanPaul.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Thank you for being here. No problem. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It’s always a pleasure and I would love to come back on. Yeah,

Taya Graham:

Please. Oh, absolutely. We are going to continue to follow your story and of course request that you keep us informed and updated as much as you can.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Will do. Promise.

Stephen Janis:

Thanks, Sean.

SeanPaul Reyes:

Thank you

Stephen Janis:

Guys.

Taya Graham:

Thank you so much. So Stephen, that was a fascinating – It was. But deeply troubling conversation. And something I just want to point out is how tricky probation can be. There are so many holds that can be put on you. Essentially, the civil rights that you’re used to living with every day are just suspended. Your car can be searched at any time. You can be pulled over for not putting on your turn signal. Next thing you know, your car is being tossed. They can come over to your house and search your house. Also on probation, it can mean urinalysis testing to see if you’ve been drinking alcohol or taking any kind of chemicals or drugs. So basically the civil rights that you’re used to having are just completely gone, let alone the fact that you have to ask permission before you travel and you can just be told no.

Stephen Janis:

They can basically lock Sean down for the duration at this point. I don’t see why they let him go anywhere at this point, given the animosity they have towards him in Suffolk County. So this is very, very concerning. And have

Taya Graham:

You ever heard of a 100-year protective order? No.

Stephen Janis:

Have you

Taya Graham:

Ever heard of

Stephen Janis:

That? No. And I’ve covered a lot of trials and a lot of different types of legal situations. And no, that has never come up in any court process that I have covered as a reporter over the past 23 years.

Taya Graham:

There are absolutely brutal cases

Stephen Janis:

Of

Taya Graham:

Domestic violence where I’ve never seen a protective order like that. And it could have saved the person’s life.

Stephen Janis:

Right. And I think that this shows that there’s a tremendous amount of concern about SeanPaul with the law enforcement that seems to be disproportionate. Although I wonder to a certain extent is the fact that he has some power himself because he has a very big audience and that audience reacts to what he does. And perhaps that’s why they’re fixated upon him, not for any specific reason of what he does, but the audience that he has, which is quite extensive. And I think that’s perhaps why they treat him that way.

Taya Graham:

And I also think when you start investigating money, when you start investigating someone’s pockets, what that overtime looks like, if they’re getting take home cars, if they’re getting any kind of perks, when you start looking at people’s money, that’s when you can get into real trouble with the government.

Stephen Janis:

Absolutely.

Taya Graham:

And just to your point about the role of people who are less than pleased with Sean, that’s actually pretty important. By reacting to him, they actually create the story. And the best way for there not to be a story about you, for there not to be a Long Island audit video about you is to just ignore him, which begs the question, why can’t they do that? Why can’t they just ignore him? I mean, I was just sort of imagining when you were talking about it earlier, what would’ve happened if Lucivillo just never exited the building and confronted SeanPaul? There would simply be nothing for him to post. I

Stephen Janis:

Mean,

Taya Graham:

Stephen, what do you think is going on here?

Stephen Janis:

Well, I was thinking about this a lot while we’re talking to Sean, because that’s really sort of the critical question. What is it about him that’s so threatening? And I think he’s exposing the sort of authoritarian impulses of law enforcement in this country and the power, the power that they actually wield. And they are used to being able to wield that power pretty much unfettered. If I get a $10 million judgment against me, I can still keep my job or I get convicted of a crime, I can still keep my job. The money and the power is extensive and it’s just unaccustomed to being challenged on that level. Most mainstream media organizations generally tend to work with police because they want the tip on the latest crime or the serial killer or something, and that’s very important. But Sean’s doing an aspect of journalism that doesn’t normally get done, which is a sort of accountability.

Even in our town, since I stopped reporting on overtime, there’s not a lot of reporting about police overtime or take home cars. People generally, mainstream media journalists don’t really pay much attention to that. And I think because Sean is challenging that underlying power structure, which starts with resources, government resources and taxpayer money, the pushback has been massive because that’s what really drives all this. I mean, the $1 billion budget or whatever he was talking about for Suffolk County police, or we talked about in the previous show, that’s a lot of power. That’s a lot of power to have that kind of influence. And the police union in Suffolk County, they all are paid by taxpayers not to be police, but to be union officials. That’s a lot of power. The overtime is a lot of power. The very generous pensions, it’s a big, big lucrative system.

And when you start looking under the hood, I think that’s when it gets dicey for reporters. I know it did for me. That’s very true. And I’m sure in some ways, I think that’s one of the reasons Sean is experienced. He is sort of getting underneath a massive source of power that really goes unexamined quite often.

Taya Graham:

And you know what? I think that’s what unfortunately can make cop watchers really annoying to police is when they start looking at budgets, when they start looking at the money, when you start looking into their pockets, that’s when things can get really dicey. And so SeanPaul is just part of our ongoing coverage of the copwatching movement across the country. And we have been reporting on this very colorful and obviously controversial group of YouTube activists for almost seven years. I mean, it’s been an interesting journey documenting this spectrum of disorganized, but potent dissent. It tests us. It provokes us. It measures the health of our First Amendment right. And what it shows is what’s possible when the average citizens pick up their phones and point them at people who are unaccustomed to being watched. Yes, it’s not always pretty. It’s not always comforting, but it is vital to our ongoing dialogue about how to hold power accountable.

And that’s really the point. We might not always like it or the form that it comes in, but that process, keeping power in check is vital. It is vital because we want a government that serves at the consent of the people, not the other way around. Now, if you are interested in Copwatchers or the idea of YouTube activism, you can watch our documentary, I Am But the Mirror, the story of American Copwatching. And we’ll also put a link in the comments where you can watch it for free. It’s free on Fossam. And also, please don’t forget to send your tips and your videos and your story ideas to par@therealnews.com. Of course, you can always reach out to me directly at TeusBaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. We want to thank you for joining us for this very special episode of the Police Accountability Report. And as always, please be safe out there.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And today we are going to Terlingua in West Texas, right on the US-Mexico border and right next to Big Bend National Park. As the Texas Tribune reports, “Since President Trump returned to office in January of 2025, his administration has renewed efforts to erect border barriers in parts of the US-Mexico border that don’t currently have any. That includes the Big Bend region in far West Texas, home to the Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, both of which the Trump administration has targeted for border security infrastructure. Historically, the region has recorded the fewest illegal crossings along the entire Southwest border, but the Trump administration has awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts to build some form of infrastructure to deter illegal border crossings, while telling concerned West Texas residents that they will not build a border wall or fence in the national park.

Local residents, environmentalists, and a bipartisan group of elected officials, including sheriffs and county judges, have still asked the administration to stop all construction.”

Jules Taylor:

According to the website of the community advocacy group, No Big Bend Wall, 2.1 billion in contracts have already been awarded for wall construction in Presidio and Hudspeth counties. Over 500 private landowners stand to lose access to the Rio Grande due to the proposed border wall. Construction is planned for Texas gems, including Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the Department of Homeland Security is waiving 31 federal laws, including National Environmental Policy Act, National Historic Preservation Act, Native American Graves Protection and Reparations Act, and Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So to talk about what the hell is happening on the US-Mexico border, we are really grateful to be joined on the show today by a panel of folks who are on the front lines of this story and who are joining us from in or near Terlingua, Texas. Thank you all so much for joining us. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Yolanda Alvarado:

I’m Yolanda Alvarado. I’m a fifth generation cattle rancher and the regional director for Conserve Big Bend: No Big Bend Wall.

Crystal Allbright:

Hi, I’m Crystal Allbright. I live in Terlingua, Texas. I’ve lived here 36 years. My husband and I own a bicycle shop and have outdoor gear as well as art. We’ve operated the river for 29 years, but we’ve phased that out for now. I’ve visited the area since I was a young child and love it very much.

Sara Ryza:

I’m Sara Ryza and I have the Desert Air Motel in Sanderson, Texas. It’s a renovated 1960 motel in Sanderson, which is a gateway town into Big Bend. So while the national park and the state park are kind of the anchor places that bring people into the region, they’re going through gateway towns to the region and into the park. And so a big part of this area is tourism and there are a lot of independently owned small businesses that are concerned about what all of this is going to do in the short and long term for tourism.

Scott Whitener:

My name’s Scott Whitener. I was a former superintendent on the Big Bend Ranch State Park along the river corridor located along the river road, which is just along the Rio Grande and covered about 50,000 acres of the front country of the state park side. I have been going to the Big Bend for 30 years. My wife fell in love with me there, I think, to check and see if that’s still true. But I currently live in Marfa, which is in Presidio County. I also am a property owner in three of the six counties in the affected area in the Big Bend sector. And yeah, this is near and dear to my heart, my family’s heart, and it will remain that way.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

My name is Sharron Reed Gavin and I also live in Terlingua with my husband. We moved there in 2013 full-time. We had both loved the Big Bend independently of knowing one another. My first time to go there, and this is before most of y’all were born, but was 1976 and went with some friends with the canoe and we wanted to do the river. And there weren’t such things as desert sports really at the time, but we found some good folks like Crystal and her husband who would help us get down to the river and go on it for a while. But I have six grandchildren and that’s why this is so important to me, also for my neighbors and all that love the Big Bend. There’s not a lot being done to save it by our elected officials, but I think all of our voices matter.

All of these people are working so hard at their real jobs and on top of it, especially what Yolanda and Sarah are doing with No Big Bend Wall. It’s just all of these people are doing full-time jobs and doing a full-time job with no Big Bend wall, and I just appreciate them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and we genuinely appreciate all of you for being here and talking to us about this. I’m just incredibly sorry that you and your community are going through this, that our country is going through this. It’s like every week it’s another horror show, but I really want to zero in on what you were just talking about, Sharon. I’ve never had the pleasure of going to see Big Bend or being in this part of the country. I really hope to correct that soon. But this is, from what I’ve seen, one of the most just beautiful places on God’s green earth. But for those of us who are not from there and for folks who are listening who have never been there, I want to ask if y’all can describe what our listeners can’t see for themselves. Tell us more about this area and what it’s like to live and work there.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah, so I’m not directly near Big Bend National Park. My family ranches in the Big Bend region and that starts from Hudspeth County and it goes all the way to Valverde County. But we have ranches in Hudspeth and Presidio and near Jeff Davis. And we’ve been out here for hundreds of years and it’s really just quite desolate. You could see four hundreds of miles just desert and no one around. It’s a really serene environment and it’s also really harsh to be in the desert. It’s filled with rural communities. No communities are huge out here. We have very few ambulances, small schools. My children go to a school with 35 students from kindergarten to high school. So it’s just a really small time, small town, rural environment. And we throw on tourism and people going to the National Park and passing through these small areas. So even though we are small in size or small landowners, it still feels big.

It still feels connected to the rest of America because we still have all these visitors and people coming through.

Sara Ryza:

It also feels like time slows down here. You can relax and it’s kind of the call of the desert. You wouldn’t expect that you would love it so much if you weren’t originally thought of yourself as a desert person, but it’s also, it’s very gritty. There’s a grit to the people that live and work here and a lot of the business owners have several businesses. We also have a liquor store and also we’re part of this bigger region, but we’re also our own little communities. And in Sanderson, it’s Terrell County that’s getting vehicle barriers going through our county, which is only 20 miles to the border to the river, but that’s all private land. So we’re connected geographically to the river where we are, but also to the region through the tourism. It’s all really interconnected.

Crystal Allbright:

Yeah, I agree with both Yolanda and Sarah. It’s very remote and fairly isolated, but we all are connected. In the national park, I like to describe it as three biomes. There’s the mountains, the Chisos mountains, and then there’s the open expanse of the desert, and then there’s the river corridor that connects us all. So if you start at Yolanda’s Ranch and drive the Chispa Road all the way through Presidio and to Terlingua and then up through Alpine and then Marfa, you can make a big loop. You can do Fort Davis and Sanderson. And so we’re all connected. This has brought us together in so many ways from learning about each other’s businesses and lives as well as participating in the community meetings, whether it’s a town hall or a commissioner’s meeting or a groundwater meeting. We’re all working together to learn ways that we can delay the construction, which we prefer to call destruction of this area that we love.

Scott Whitener:

We all have to continue agreeing with each other because everybody else before me said it way better than I think I will. But at the same time, a few days ago I put it into perspective. I looked at all the population in all of our six counties that are affected right now in the Big Bend sector, and there’s like 23,000 people. You know how many square miles there is in those six counties? 23,000 square miles. Think about that. That’s a one person per square mile. Could you imagine being anywhere that allows you to have that type of expanse? We are all connected by this region, honestly. We all know what each other are doing because we love it out here. We love one another and it’s trampling on our freedoms, it’s trampling on what we love, and this government overreach is, it’s destroying our way of life, but we’re not going to let it.

And I’ll continue to say that, but at the same time, it’s made this community bigger, better, stronger. And I can’t say enough about the people, the place, the sunrises, the sunsets, the mountains, the open expanse, the plains. This is a special place, and if you haven’t been down here, you don’t have to come because like Austin used to say, “Hey, come for the fun, but don’t move here, please.” We do love the visitors. We love having people down here, but you live out here for a reason and we share this place with one another because it’s not any of ours, but it sure is ours to share.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

And the only thing I would add to that is you asked what it would look like to people who haven’t been here and everybody’s kind of hit that nail on the head, but it really is something that you can’t understand until you see it in person. And my favorite other place in the world is the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and I promise they have nothing on us, absolutely nothing. But we also, the beauty is here, but there’s archeological sites, there’s historical sites. They’re not paying any mind to those. They even started working on one of those sites and were interrupted. Yolanda, I can’t remember if it was by you or somebody else out near you, but the scale of the destruction and the history and the things that we absolutely cannot replace, it’s mind-boggling. And then everybody said this too about how we are all working together and we may be different and love our isolation, but boy, you step on this anthill and you’ve got a lot to contend with.

The thing that makes me feel really good about it though is this group isn’t going away. These people across the country who have banded together to fight this wall, they’re here to stay. They’re here to stay and the people are going to make their voices heard, and I think just at the end of the day, get this to stop.

Scott Whitener:

I don’t work for the state park system anymore, which is why I can be on this podcast and talk as much shit as I want. Pardon my French. But I actually work for an animal rescue. We rescue dogs out of shelters one tail at a time. We cover an area about the size of South Carolina, even bigger than our six sexers. So we save a lot of shelter animals and abandoned animals, and probably that’s what 40 to 50 to 60 hours of my week is. And then the other waking hours is fighting this.

Crystal Allbright:

I said earlier that my husband and I have a bicycle shop and we worked in the river outfitting business. We work six to seven days a week all day long. And again, using that time, especially when people come through the shop, we have displays about what’s going on in the area and we encourage people to voice their opinions about what’s going on and contact representatives. We use our space to show photographs of some of the destruction as well as to help raise money for these organizations that are working so hard to stay on top of what’s going on.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah. I’m a cattle rancher, as I mentioned. I manage all my family’s ranches, and so I work every day outside in the desert. I work with mother nature. I work with the animals with droughts, with floods, the rain, any type of environmental issue you can think of a hundred and plus degrees outside or freezing outside. So my everyday working life and what it has been for the past almost 10 years has just been me and the desert, me and the animals, and that is my job. And carrying my family’s legacy, it has been my responsibility to be a steward of the land and continue that and teach my children how to take care and live out here, take care of the desert, the ranches and the animals, what it means, what you can use the plants for. So yeah, that’s basically what I do all day.

And then now I am fighting the border wall as the regional director, spending a lot of my time behind a computer now, but here we are.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

Yeah, I’ll say one thing. None of these folks work nine to five. I mean, I’m retired and that’s very fortunate because I have some more time to help on the no wall fight, but none of these people work nine to five. I can’t even imagine the number of miles that Yolanda drives or Scott used to do when he was with the state park or Crystal on their river trips. It’s mind-boggling. I do know where Crystal lives, and you have to love it out here to drive from where she lives into Terrlingo. It may be like seven miles, but it can take you up to 30, 40 minutes. So these people are working before and after work and during the working hours.

Jules Taylor:

National borders everywhere in the world are deeply political constructs with complicated histories, and the US-Mexico border is no different. I mean, it’s been a political talking point our entire lives. Can you talk to us about what it’s like to live somewhere that is so regularly charged by political narrative and policy battles and tell us why that’s different now?

Yolanda Alvarado:

Well, historically, the river down here in this part in the Big Bend sector, it’s been so isolated and desolate that we don’t have many crossings here, as you mentioned. So for many years up until almost recently, and still actually today, the communities on the river are on both sides. So you see Presidio and Ohinaga sharing a river, you see Bokias, we are one community. So politically, not until the first border wall came through, it wasn’t something that we even thought about for us and my family and the ranchers because we’ve always just been safe out there. We’ve been alone and we’ve been one community with the other side of the border that was Pilates, Mexico. And it wasn’t until, I guess, Bush, he built a fail billion dollar wall that’s actually on my aunt’s property. And that’s when we started seeing, for us anyways, in this region, it being more politically charged.

And even then at that time, I don’t believe anyone looked at the Big Bend region close to the National Park and said, “We need a wall here.” So I personally felt a little separated from what was going on in other places. I mean, me and my family never thought in a hundred years they would try to put a wall where we are because it just doesn’t make sense at all. It’s like you go down there, I even took the border patrol agents, the head director, infrastructure project directors of the Border Wall Project, and they said, “Yolanda, I see what you’re talking about because that’s how ridiculous it looks in person when you get off of a map.” We did see when Kersey Nome was a Homeland Security Director, we started seeing Stryker military vehicles, the army lining the border. Still today, I’m passed by Army people.

Our border’s completely militarized now. So it was a very isolated, safe place. And now I have to worry about running into a Stryker military vehicle hitting me on the way to the ranch. And most of the time I find them napping in their trucks because it’s so quiet and they don’t have anything to do. I see them on just, there’s actually a weightlifting area where they’re bored and they’re lifting weights because there’s no emergency on the border, yet our military’s deployed in our own homes, in our own backyards, filling up all the hotel rooms in these small rural communities already causing damage to tourism. So it’s been interesting watching it in real time. I was sitting on our back porch less than half a mile from Mexico on the Rio Grande reading that we were in a state of emergency and within the week we had military driving in and showing up at our property.

I even had military personnel drive through our gate in the middle of the night because they were just messing around, driving really fast. So it’s been a really interesting experience watching it in real time, not on the news saying like, “Oh, we have an emergency. Oh, there’s the military. Now we’re getting a wall.” It’s been really crazy and at the very least, such a disturbance to our peace or what was peaceful.

Scott Whitener:

This should make every taxpayer mad, and I’m only going to put it into perspective. I won’t put names under the bus. I live in Marfa, which everybody poo-poos Marfa just because it’s fun to do it anyway, and I get it. We’re a little art community, everybody’s a little bougie, whatever. I live in an old train warehouse, which it’s fun. Anyway, but I go down the street and I have the US military staying at a place that costs $285 a night minimum, and they’ve been staying there full-time since February of 2026. They use the pool, they use the weight room, all the things that people in this community can’t afford to use. Our US military is occupying that hotel and they’re not paying hotel taxes, they’re not helping the community, and they’re showing up to the pool and drinking at the bars. And it’s like, what are they defending?

And when we ask them, “What are you doing here?” They said, “We’re here to help this place. We’re here to defend you guys.” And I’m like, “Defend me from what? Art critics?” I mean, certainly it should make any taxpayer mad of what’s being wasted down here. These guys cruise around all day, all night and do nothing. And I’m not dogging the military, I’m dogging the decision. And it’s going on all over this region and it’s despicable.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, it’s going on all over the country, right? I go to Washington DC this week and there are a bunch of board national guardsmen just walking around. It’s like, what the hell are we doing?

Yolanda Alvarado:

Really an insult on, I think, our military service also. My sister’s in the Air Force, and I mean, it’s insulting to even separate them from their families, deploy them in the United States, separate them from their families. They’re off on a mission, but it’s really there’s no mission down here. There’s nothing going on. But yeah, millions and millions, if not billions of our taxpayer dollars are going towards this. So I’m glad you said that, Scott.

Sara Ryza:

Yeah. It feels like an upside down world where before it was like, yeah, we’re safe. We didn’t even think about our safety, but people that don’t live here, that don’t work here, they’re talking about how it’s a scary place. We have to put up physical barriers. And so it’s created a narrative that is not what reality was. And now in addition to people thinking that we need a wall, well, now people think that, well, if they needed a wall, then it probably wasn’t safe. So why am I going to visit there? There’s so many other national parks, so many other places that people could go on a trip, and it’s really messing up our tourism and the economy that drives on the tourism. And while contractors coming in, the military coming in, that’s not an investment in our communities and in this long-term economic development.

Anybody that thinks that might be good that it could bring in money to our towns or to our county, that’s just a very shortsighted view and it hurts us in the long run.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

And when you were talking about being politically charged, I mean, it all goes back to the false pretense that we need a wall because of the border crisis down here. It’s all bogus. There is no border crisis. The border crisis right now are the construction workers or as Crystal said, the destruction workers. But yeah, I think that’s really important. This isn’t needed. It’s all about our president rewarding the people that are funding him for his political office, and it’s not doing this community any good whatsoever. It’s harming it significantly. One of our Texas state senators has a bill called the Fed Act, which is supposed to protect landowners specifically in West Texas from federal overreach, yet he hasn’t said a word about the overreach that’s happening here. So yeah, I better stop because it really makes me mad.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I mean, I was going to ask y’all to, let’s get more mad, right? Because I mean, Jules and I have also been talking to fellow Texans who are dealing with data centers in their damn backyards now, all over the place. It feels like local control is just being ripped away and people are just having, whether it’s a border wall, whether it’s a data center or some other polluting piece of crap in their community, we get no say in it and they’re just steamrolling everybody. Because I wanted to sort of ask y’all, if you could speak to the non-Texans who are listening to this, right? We all know that there’s a, speaking of narratives, there’s a narrative in this country that makes a lot of people assume that Texans would be for this, that Texans would be shooting their guns into the air and say, “Yeah, let’s build a big border wall.” What do you want to say to people who think that about you?

Sharron Reed Gavin:

Come down and see for yourself. It’s nothing like the narrative that you’re hearing. Nothing at all.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah. I mean, the data center border wall is so correlated. It’s the same fight that everybody’s been starting to fight across the country. So the only difference is that say it’s Boise, Idaho, and the only difference is the president saying there’s only rapists and murderers coming to Boise, Idaho. We need a wall around it and not a data center. It’s the same correlation. So we were just painted this black. We were already painted black, and that’s why people are not really opening their eyes to the issue, but it is exactly like you said, it’s just like having a data center show up in your community and taking your natural resources, jobs, all of the above. So to speak to the greater America, one thing I’ve been saying is that they declared a national emergency to waive laws to do this project. Who’s to say they’re not going to do it in Boise, Idaho?

Who’s to say they’re not going to say, “Oh, we see this emergency here. Let’s deploy the army and build and do whatever we want to these Americans. Forget American sovereignty, forget whatever existed.” It’s disgusting, the overreach. So I think everyone in America should be upset about what they’re doing to abuse this power to take advantage of American citizens, Texans. It’s not right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Weren’t we raised to hate this stuff? Didn’t we all learn in school that this is exactly the kind of thing that as good red-blooded Americans we should despise and fight against? And you got ICE agents in unmarked vehicles wearing masks, driving all over people’s property, being peaceful protestors. I mean, just the violation of rights and property and everything, it’s mind-boggling.

Sara Ryza:

Right. In Terrell County, there’s a $2.6 billion contract over the Big Bend five project, which bans all of Terrell County, some of Brewster, some of Valverde. It’s not the 30-foot wall. It’s four and six-foot tall steel bollards that’s the vehicle barrier system to stop vehicles from crossing. This is on the other side of canyons, the river, the wild and scenic river right there. It’s canyons. And so they’re putting this vehicle barrier up saying it’s to stop vehicles, but vehicles aren’t crossing and people can go under it. So it’s not stopping people. It just doesn’t make sense and it’s a waste of taxpayer money and it just does not make any sense. But it’s back to this narrative that if somebody says that we need it, then I guess half the country’s going to believe it.

Crystal Allbright:

Just my take on it is my life here has spent a lot of time on the river and never had a bad experience. Usually people were hungry, starving, needed water, but just the thought of losing access to our river, the river we share with Mexico, it is appalling to me that we wouldn’t have access. We want border security, but we were already secure before. And a lot of that was because there’s several villages along the river. Prior to nine eleven, it was an open border and you could go across and have lunch at the villages and people would share news about what was going on. If there was something bad going on, we would learn from the people that lived there. And then after nine eleven, the border was shut and then we were cut off from our friends. We still get together once a year on Mother’s Day and we go to the river and bands play on each side.

They take turns, a band in Mexico and a band in the United States and they take turns playing and the families come together and we eat, we sing, we laugh, we dance, and we get to do that one day a year. And to have the idea that they’re going to come in with whether it’s vehicle barriers or walls, it just cuts us off more from friends and family that live in Mexico. I just agree with the sheriffs and the border patrol that can talk to us that they’re doing a good job already and that just more the technology that they can use to detect people crossing and being able to get to them, they could use more drones and maybe a helicopter that sure doesn’t cost $7.46 billion, which is how much they’re trying to spend on 517 miles of riverfront in Texas. And just the whole idea of landowners along the river, farmers, ranchers losing access to the water, again, we’re all saying it doesn’t make sense and we think we’re pretty logical people.

So I just want them to slow down, think about what they’re doing and start believing in the rule of law again.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah. Speaking on the border security we have, as a rancher, I got a new four-wheeler. I was chasing cows near the border in the middle of nowhere. And border patrol knows me. They know my truck, they know pretty much what I do, but this was new to them. They were there within 10, 15 minutes, found me in the middle of nowhere and was like, “Oh, it’s just you, Yolanda. All right, have a good day.” That is a response time already. And I was going really fast on that four-wheeler. So just the idea of them being able to come in and take land away from landowners to ruin this entire region when we already have a very secure border. I mean, if you look at CBP, the Customs and Border Patrol Instagram right now, they just posted a video that says the border is secure. Even they’re admitting it at this point.

It’s comical, but they’re getting away with this at a national level because again, for me, and I’ve said this from the beginning, I’m very vocal about it. I think it’s a very racist agenda. It’s very anti-Latino. It’s very anti-brown. That’s why we can see ICE getting away with kidnapping people, murdering them in the street because they’ve pushed this anti-Latino narrative for a long time now since Clinton era, Bush did it and even Obama did it and it’s getting worse and worse. So people are turning a blind eye to it and it’s really frustrating because just as Crystal described, it’s not what it seems like here. We are communities, we are families, we are one on the river, and it’s really deserving to watch in real time of how people are being treated just for this agenda. And honestly, in the very end, it’s just so people can make some money at top.

It’s for these large contract deals. It’s to sell beds to detention centers. It’s all of the above. And we are just a byproduct of this huge anti-Latino showboat.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

Sometimes people will ask if they haven’t been down here on some of these chats and all, is it safe down there? Do you feel safe down there? I said, “We feel perfectly safe. We haven’t locked our door in 13 years. We don’t even know where the key is.” But then I also say, “I feel a lot safer here than I do going to Dallas or I do going to DC or some other place. This place is safe.” And if you took the amount, and Yolanda, you can probably correct me, but somebody did a calculation of the amount they’re paying, the seven however many billion dollars versus the number of people who have crossed, it comes out to something like $500,000 a person or $50,000 a person. I’m not a mathematician, but it’s ridiculous that that’s where our taxpayers’ money is going.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah, it’s definitely the higher number. I believe it’s more over a million a person per apprehension, but it is $14 million a mile to build this border wall in our region. That’s our taxpayer dollar. So my family’s property, we’re going to have, I believe, a new fence, a 30-foot bollard wall that’s costing taxpayers. On our property alone, rough math, almost a hundred million dollars just on our property. That’s our new fence. So the cows aren’t going to go to Mexico anymore, but it is actually ridiculous what is happening and how much money’s being spent.

Sara Ryza:

Isn’t it 17 million per mile, right? Is that right? I think that’s the number, 17 million per mile. And the entire county budget for Terrell County is less, just less than 2.5 million for the entire year for the entire county, but they’re spending 17 million per mile.

Jules Taylor:

The last time I was there in Terlingua, I realized that water is scarce as a resource. It’s something that y’all could use more of. Sometimes power would go out or power did not seem like it was necessarily in all places. So when y’all talk about these huge numbers going on in terms of… I just think about how better that could be used within your communities to make better the lives of the people who choose to live there. And instead it goes to this godawful cause that helps no one hurts everyone who lives there and is completely unnecessary and ridiculous. And if you just were to look at the landscape of where they are intending to place it, like you mentioned, Yolanda, it doesn’t make sense, like vehicle barriers on the other sides of canyons. I mean, it just all sounds like a giant shit show, and I’m sorry that everyone’s having to live through this and deal with it.

And in terms of how the community of Terlingua is, man, I remember being there last year, there’s the Boathouse and there’s a Starlight Theater and there’s DB’s Rustic Iron. And I was reading somewhere in the Texas Tribune, there are actual signs that all these businesses have put up where if you are working with the contractors, we don’t want your business here, please take it elsewhere and you’re not welcome. And I just think it’s incredible the way that the businesses and the people who live out there have sort of been galvanized by this entire ordeal. As a wrap up question here, where do things stand now, like upcoming events? What can people, listeners do to get involved and what’s the current status now? Because I understand that the actual construction was paused and I think I remember reading today the pause ceased or something. Can we get an update on where things stand at this point and how listeners can help?

Sara Ryza:

It’s really easy to get mad and it’s nonsense, but the way that we’ve come together has been really great. We’re stronger than we thought we ever needed to be. We didn’t know we were going to need to be this strong, but the businesses, there’s a business network, we come together, we’ve talked about all of this. And the thing that has helped us, I know you want an update on the construction, but what we’re working on is fighting for tourism. That’s helped kind of shift the narrative because yes, we’re fighting against the wall and all of that, but we’re also fighting for something. Crystal reminds us all the time we’re fighting for what we love. The businesses are fighting for tourism. So the thing that people can do is to keep coming, keep coming to Big Bend, support the local businesses, come to the parks, even watch what’s going on if construction resumes.

But there’s a big tourism campaign called Big Love for Big Bend that reminds people that when you come to Big Bend, you’re supporting these businesses and these independently owned restaurants, gas station, grocery stores, motels. So that’s in addition to writing representatives and a lot of other things that they can do, a really huge thing would be to keep visiting Big Bend.

Yolanda Alvarado:

We just took a trip to Washington DC. We talked to lawmakers. We were trying to wrap our minds around what are they saying? What are they doing? And the biggest thing that stuck out was all of them have said they’ve received phone calls, they’ve heard from their constituents, and it’s huge no matter where you are outside of Texas to keep calling your representatives and let them know that putting a wall or any infrastructure in Big Bend will hurt you as well and it’s not needed and that’s not where you want to spend your taxpayer dollars. And we’re working on some bills and things there to hopefully halt that. And on top of that, our coalition, Conserve Big Bend, we started a landowner coalition and we have almost over half of the landowners on the border in our coalition who is against the wall. And we just filed a lawsuit a couple weeks ago against the federal government.

So it’s landowners versus DHS and we’re taking it all the way to the top. It was filed in DC and we’re hoping to see another TRO there and hopefully we can halt construction. We are challenging the waivers, letting them know that they can’t just come in and claim a national security and take away all of our rights. So yeah, aside from other small events we’re working on, that and donating to all the people who are working hard, it’s not just No Big Bend Wall, but there’s so many people in Terlingua all over. Anyone who even shares an Instagram post or Facebook post and talks about what is happening helps us. This is all really good and really helpful.

Crystal Allbright:

There’s another hearing tomorrow in El Paso. So some of the people originally scheduled for this podcast are in El Paso with the lawyers getting ready for that tomorrow and hopefully that will pause it again. We have not seen construction resume, but there are people watching for that. I think they’re just still waiting, but they’re still not talking to us. That’s been a big thing. The lack of transparency has been really aggravating. If they would just talk to us and we could give them ideas on alternatives for what’s going on, that would help. In Terlingua from February, we started having rallies on Saturdays and this Saturday is our 32nd rally. People come from all over and join us. We’ve had people from New York and California and Florida, Atlanta, all over Texas come and join us. And then in the big cities on Sundays like Houston, Dallas, they’re having rallies there as well.

So the moment they started bulldozing at Santa Elena Canyon, finally the news broke out to a bigger audience, even though we had been chipping away at that for six months. So more people are aware, but we just keep spreading the word.

Scott Whitener:

Yeah. And being able to attend the ones in Terlingua are at the rally at the Y is always special. That kicked it all off. And the bigger point here, and that was amazing, and what’s happened after that has been even more amazing. But if you’re talking about how can people help right now, not only attending those rallies at the Y, but what we’ve been doing, and everybody on this call and everybody’s in El Paso, I talked about how big this area is. The people on this call and the other people, our constituents out here have been driving to county meetings, city councils, groundwater meetings. You go to every single one of those, and I think every American should be paying attention to what’s going on down here. I know people are objecting to AI data centers, but looking at the gas, paying $4.50 a gallon, we’ve got people that are retirees thriving on social security, people that are part-time workers, part-time, anything, seasonal workers, because this is all tourism.

People are showing up to these county meetings and holding the people we put in office, holding them to account to do what we ask them to do because it’s bullshit. I’m sorry, you can bleep that one out. I mean, it’s bullshit. I keep saying it. It’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, man. Go for it. Let it fly.

Scott Whitener:

It’s bullshit that they keep going and they’re not listening to… We have the county commissioners probably scared to object to anything when we show up with 150 people that drove from all over the place. Like last week, I mean, we are calling people out that have been sitting in a La-Z-Boy enjoying their county judge position, their commissioner position, their city council mayor, people that just thought this was going to be easy and they can just check the box and say, “Hey, yeah, y’all go ahead and we’re just going to go bulldozer here because nobody lives out here because like I said, 23,000 square miles with 23,000 people.” Oh yeah, this isn’t like a city full of liberal dims or something that are going to object to everything. It’s us and we’re pissed and we’re going to keep showing up. And that’s what everybody, not only in the state of Texas, but definitely in the Big Bend region is doing it on their own.

And they’re out and my wife’s in El Paso, which is two and a half hours away right now. People in Terlingue in El Paso right now, which is five hours for them. People just need to show up and I think the gig is up. I mean, I’m done. I mean, I’m done with this crap.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. Before we go, I do want to give you an update on this story that occurred after we recorded the conversation that you just heard. As Martha Piskowski reported on October 6th in Mother Jones, “Federal Judge Kathleen Cardone granted a preliminary injunction Friday to halt construction on the border wall in Texas’s expansive Big Bend sector, including the national and state parks. Cardone read a brief order from the bench after hearing more than four hours of testimony from conservation groups and residents of the Big Bend region, known internationally for its dark night skies, abundant biodiversity, and rugged river canyons. Cardone said that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in at least one of their claims and to suffer irreparable harm if construction continues. Her ruling stops border barrier construction in the entire Big Bend sector until the federal government complies with all applicable laws.

The ruling applies to all of Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the border along the Rio Grande in the rest of the sector. The injunction will remain in place while the court considers the lawsuit, which was filed in April.” So the struggle is still very much not over, but that is huge news and that is a huge win. I want to thank our guests in and around Terlingua, Texas, near Big Bend National Park, Yolanda Alvarado, Crystal Albright, Sarah Riza, Scott Whitener, and Sharon Reed Gavin. And if you want to learn more about what our guests are doing out there in West Texas and you want to connect with them, please use the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And Jules, I actually wanted to ask if you could give our listeners the scoop on an event that is happening in Terlingua this month that you are a part of.

Jules Taylor:

Yes. This month from October 15th to 18th, I will be taking part in the TerrLingua Music Bash. I believe there’s about 40 different artists spread across half a dozen or so venues, which are different businesses there in Big Bend. It’s all a benefit for school that’s out there. I mean, it’s all a really good cause. My friend John Whipple puts it on and it’s all free admission. So if you’re anywhere near TerrLingua on the 15th through the 18th, come hang out. There’s also a Day of the Dead costume parade that we’re going to do, which is also really super cool. But yeah, I can’t wait to be back out in Big Bend. I can’t wait to be back out in Terrlingua. It’s just a fantastic place and you can’t really describe how wonderful it is until you go there and then you’re just kind of at a loss for words.

When folks say you have to be there yourself to experience it and it has nothing on the north side of the Grand Canyon, I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon too. This Big Bend is where I want to go every October for this music bash, and this will be my second year going.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

You heard it here first, folks. Our Texas co-hosts and guests say Grand Canyon ain’t shit. So thank you so, so much again to all of our incredible guests, and thank you to Jules for helping us put this incredible panel together. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We will see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle across the US and around the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Mark Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Mansa Musa:

Welcome to the edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, which started in Oakland in 1966. Today, I’m honored to be joined by Billy Jennings, AKA Billy X, well-known archivist in Oakland, member of the Black Panther Party, a photographer who runs the official Black Panther Party alumni website called It’s About Time. Thank you for joining me, Billy.

Billy X Jennings:

Hey, thanks for having me again. Good morning to everyone.

Mansa Musa:

And as we talked earlier, I was in different spaces and hoping I had met you while I was in Oakland. So this would more or less be like a reunion, but this is my first time meeting you. I’m really honored. I heard a lot about you. I know a lot about your work, and it’s an honor to be able to interview you about the party and some of the things and some of your experiences.

Billy X Jennings:

Okay.

Mansa Musa:

Please introduce yourself to our audience, who you are and how you came to be involved in the Black Panther Party.

Billy X Jennings:

Well, my name is Billy X. Jennings. I’m a member of the Black Panther Party. I joined in 1968 when I was 17 years old. And I came about joining the party because I’m from a historical town in Alabama in the South where most original members came from the South and migrated to California. So I came from a place called Hopson City, Alabama. And the tradition there, Hobson City have had the right to vote since 1890. And we were one of the only black municipal cities, little towns that could vote and had that right to do that. And so I came from a very strong area that had embedded that kind of thought into my mind. And when I traveled to California and I saw the Black Panther Party on TV for the first time in 1967 when they went to Sacramento, California, it blew my mind.

I was in high school at the time and I immediately changed our social… We had a social club called the Buccaneers. I changed it to the Panthers the next day. I didn’t know anything about the party with just that symbolism and how they stood up to the police and read their demands and so forth. It made a change happen in me. And it wasn’t until I graduated from high school, I decided to move to Oakland. And when I moved to Oakland, it was during the time that Huey knew the trial had just started and I was going to a college that’s two blocks away from where Huey was going on trial at the courthouse. And when the trial started, we would hear them saying Free Huey off the preg, free Huey. And I went over there one day and I was reading a book simultaneously at the same time called The Audible Malcolm X.

So what I read, I had read in the book already, but I heard Bobby Steele speak at a rally for Huey and they were saying the same thing. So it got me really interested in the party. And so I started going to the rallies to Free Huey. I met some Panthers and then they said their Panther office was going to open in my area. And when it did, I went down and joined, became a Panther in training and I’ve been working with the party ever since.

Mansa Musa:

Okay. And take us back to the party’s founding because you came in two years after its founding. And also you came in to your own observation and to what we know to be a fact, you came in at a point where they had just started to become on the radar of the feds, but more importantly, they was definitely on the radar of the Oakland police, LA police. And so talk about what was it like to be able to be in that space and ultimately find yourself in a position to be the bodyguard for Huey Newton once he got out.

Billy X Jennings:

Well, my process started at the very beginning. In 1968, there was a certain method the party employed. Before you became a Panther, you had to become a Panther in training, which requires six to eight week training. They give you a list of books that has about 35 different books, about books by Franc Fanon, Mao Saintong, Che Guevara, Pruma, and other revolutionaries to read. And you had to attend political education class on a weekly basis. Panthers at that time was required to read two hours a day. A Panther had to secure and have what we call technical equipment. Technical equipment was a firearm of some type, because at that time I joined the Black Panther Party, it was called Black Panther Party for self-defense. Later on, we dropped off the self-defense, but at that particular time, the party was engaged into patrolling

Police officers in the community, observing them and making sure they don’t beat and brutalize people. So the first six weeks is reading and studying and learning the rules of the Black Panther Party. And then you’re given a section. The city is divided into different sections. I worked in the section four in East Oakland. Section four had a section leader. They had a geographical area that they were responsible for. And so I was in section four. At that very beginning when I first started, we were theorizing about the breakfast program. It hadn’t came about, but we were still looking for geographical locations to have these breakfast programs in the future. So we did that. And every Panther is required to sell the Black Panther Party newspaper, which is the voice of the party. And at that time, the party was growing tremendously by leaps and bounds.

We had people flying into California from Kansas City, Chicago, New York, all to get this education. Before you can open up a chapter of the Black Panther Party or a branch of the Black Panther Party, you have to come to Oakland first and get educated. And you have to meet the leadership. The leadership has to eyeball you and find out your level of consciousness, what type of person you are before you can go back and represent the party. So this whole process was going on. People were flocking to the party. The party got so big that in 1969, we had put a stop on membership and we call that particular part of the party’s history the purge because the party had grown… I mean, the party was attractive. I mean, black coats, leather coats, I mean sunglasses and Afros at the same time. So this was a big thing for our culture.

At the same time, our culture level was rising even in music. James Brown had a record out in 1968 that elevated people’s social conscience, I’m Black and I’m proud. It moved people from the level of being a Negro, because that’s what the newspapers and that other people was referring us to. But in our community, we’re referring to ourselves as Black or African. And when James Brown came out with Black and I’m Proud, you could never go back to ever saying he was a Negro no more. There was different progress being made, but James Brown couldn’t sing no song like that. It wasn’t for groups like the Black Panther Party. Groups like The Shot Light Can’t Sing got to give more power to the

Mansa Musa:

People

Billy X Jennings:

Like the Black Panther Party, paving the way to educate people to lift up their consciousness. And so my role in the party, I came up as a Panther in training. I became a officer of the day, which is the person who runs the office. And from there I was transferred to central headquarters. Now, my name came about because my captain at that time was a legendary Panther called Robert Bay. Robert Bay ran the East Oakland office. Robert Bay was also an age of the central committee. And when Huey Newton got out of jail in 1970, the central committee made Robert Bay his permanent bodyguard and assistant. Now, I worked in that capacity as well after Huey got out of jail, mostly going to… I went to court with Huey on a daily basis because he was let out on appeal. He wasn’t just let out.

He had to go back to court and defend himself. And so my job became that. And also at the same time, I became to the Newton family. Mr. Newton, Mrs. Newton, I lived three or four blocks from them. I would walk over their house around the corner, mow their lawn. I’d be taken to the pharmacy, driving to doctors because they’re old people and they don’t drive so much. So that became my responsibility and me and Huey’s relationship grew behind that. So we had good personal relationship.

I worked central headquarters. Working at central headquarters was key to who I am today because I know Panthers from everywhere because every Panther had to call the central headquarters on a weekly basis or if the office gets ready or they need lawyer resources and stuff like that, I pick up the phone, write on the messages or tell them what they need to know. So I know Panthers from almost all the chapters and branches. And so I worked that group for a while. Then I was drafted into Bobby Seal’s campaign when he ran for mayor of open. I ran Bobby Seal’s campaign office in East Oakland. And it was an organizing event on the highest level the parties had ever been. I mean, the party is known for organizing, but to go into electorial politics and do what we did for a first time basis, it changed over.

Even though Bobby lost that election, it changed openly because it opened up so many doors. Part of his job was to kick down doors because we were the Vanguard. We had lead to struggle and there’s other people who follow behind us. I mean, our life was constantly in threat because we were on the front line, police department, clientele pro, all those things aimed at members of the Black Panther Party. So not only did we have the burden of dealing with the system, we had to deal with the authorities as well.

Mansa Musa:

Talk about, and you’re familiar with Eddie Conway, right? And so Eddie Conway, when he got locked up, he organized a chapter for the Black Panther Party in the prison, which I became a part of. And everything you outlined, as you was talking, I was reflecting on, we had to read at least two albums. We had every aspect of the thing that you outlined as what the party was doing, Eddie had us doing the same thing. We had political education classes, we had military classes, we had first aid classes. All our class was structured around an environment that we was in, and our technic class was finding a hole to get out of prison by any means necessary. So we had that type of mentality. So Billy, as an archivist, you have a lot of distortions in terms of the images that’s being projected of the party and it’s been dubbed Panther Porn, and just to note that it’s images that’s being perpetuated by the federal government, it’s images that’s become more idolization of the party versus the images as an archivist.

What would you say is the most positive or how would you characterize the imagery of the party as from an archivist in terms of educating people and raising their conscience? I see you with a shotgun. I know you in Sacramento. I know why you in Sacramento and I know why you coming out like that. That’s a good thing. But then I turn around, I see somebody standing on the corner. They got a picture of somebody standing on the corner with their mug broke and they got a bandela on and it had nothing to do with organizing, had nothing to do with raising people’s conscience. It’s got more to do with projecting the image of a thug, for lack of a better word. Talk about that if you can.

Billy X Jennings:

Well, the party was vilified on the highest level from the government who lied on us continuously to the media that used disinformation to scare people. The big image they had was, oh, these Negroes, they have guns. They’re angry. They hate white people. That’s their basic pitch on everything. Let it be Republican New Africa or any Black group, they paint them as very threatening group. And because we had guns, I mean, there was nothing… It wasn’t against the law in California to have guns, to have them in public long as they was not loaded, which we knew that. So the images they printed of the Black Panther Party was to vilify us and to scare white people and to frighten Black people. So it was all a part of their method to control who we were. They were trying to identify who we were. We could only define that.

We defined our own selves. And so that’s why we started a Panther newspaper in 1967 to get our voices and views out. So even though we had Time, Newsweek, Life Magazine, the Black Panther Party was cranking out close to 250 to 300,000 copies of papers per week into the community to combat this disinformation about the Black Panther Party. The 10 point program outlines what the Black Panther Party was all about, what we stood for.

Only on one aspect, which is 0.97, we talk about defending ourselves with guns. Other

Than that, we’re talking about social change in all levels, in education, housing and so forth. That was a threat to them because they did not want anyone to rocking the boat and we are rocking the boat. We are waking people up from their deep sleep. I mean, we’re telling people to read. We’re showing people what books to read. We are the Vanguard. People are following us. They didn’t want that. We had people in the white community, they wanted to join in with us. We had people from the Latino community, they want to join with us. You had people from around the world reading the 10 point program and looking at the positive aspect of the Black Panther Party. And that’s how we get the New Zealand Panthers and the Panthers from Africa and Panthers from India and the UK because of our social programs, how we was dealing with the oppressor here.

And so they follow those same examples there. They started social program, they started demanding and fighting for their rights. And that’s what the oppressor hates. They hate for people to wake up. And we were waking up big time in the 60s with the music, the culture, the back to Africa, who we are. How could you be a Negro in 1970 after all has been presented before you? So those things have changed. The party was a part of that change, that

Mansa Musa:

Consciousness. Talk about, because to your point, I remember reading the paper and when United Farm Workers, the party was one of the first papers to one, educate people on what their issues were, two, organize the boycott certain wines that they was taking and exploiting their labor and not giving them equal pay. So talk about the party’s social contribution to raising people’s concept, but more importantly, the elasticity of it, because can you see some of the influences today? Oh,

Billy X Jennings:

Definitely. Definitely. I can see the influences of the Rainbow Coalition. And that was something that Fred Hampton talked about. I could see the coalition building of the Black Panther Party. We’re working with the Brown Beret, the Young Lords, the Young Patriots. We’re working with the welfare rights groups. We’re working with the BSU, the Black Student Unions on campus. We’re working with prison groups. There was a number of prison groups throughout the country that started Black Panther Party off in San Quentin, in Algeria, Raway and other prisons because the ideology of the Black Panther Party was strong. What we were talking about, there was backbone to it. Everything we did was dialectic materialism, right? We were dialectic people. We looked at things from all sides. We just didn’t look at things in one side. Black Panther Party was an international group from the very start. Dewey and Bobby were international.

You can look at our reading list, those 35 books that come from Fanon, that’s from Africa, Mao Zeitang from China. So there was all kind of influences in the party. And so it was a big job just working to educate and organize people on all levels. Because in our community, action speaks. People learn in various ways, but in our community, people relate to action. They see something, they learn from it. Just like the breakfast program. We started the breakfast program in California and within two weeks it was a national program because people said, “Hey, we can do that here. This is how they did it. We can do it here.” The party set examples that people could follow in every aspect. We were on the forefront of fighting racism on all levels.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Fort Worth, Texas, and we’re talking about a fellow worker named James. As Maven Navarro recently reported in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “After leaving Oklahoma, James Gardner built a life for himself in Fort Worth. Now he could lose it all. When Gardner walks into doctor’s offices to receive treatment for his terminal liver failure, he has to ask staff to remove all the air fresheners for his skin condition. Gardner has multiple chemical sensitivity, which he says was caused by his time as a concrete specialist working with two-part epoxy resin. The illness causes him to break out anytime he gets around chemicals, air fresheners, perfumes, cleaning supplies, and paint spark allergy flare-ups that can last for 10 days.

Concrete work is known to cause health problems. Cement plants can also cause respiratory or cardiovascular issues according to the Environmental Protection Agency. James Quigg first met Gardner in high school in Oklahoma where he was given the nickname NDN after enduring bullying for being Native American and kids calling him Indian. A few of Gardner’s friends started calling him NDN or Indian, and it stuck. Now, Quig started a GoFundMe to help prevent Gardner from losing his house. As he is unable to work and has faced challenges receiving disability, Gardner was denied disability the first two times he applied for it. It wasn’t until his third application that he was approved because of his internal organs shutting down.” So to talk about all of this, I am truly grateful to have James Indian Gardner himself and James Quigg, who they have given me permission to call them “NDN” and “Quigg,” friends since high school, both here on the show with us today.

Thank you guys so much for being here. It is really, really great to be connecting with y’all. And my God, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances and I’m so sorry that you’re going through all of this. And NDN, as much as you’re comfortable, I want us to make sure that we focus a good chunk of time today talking about what you’re going through now, where things stand now and what people listening can do to help. But we’ve got 50 minutes here and I really want listeners to get to know you and your lives more, your friendship and all the things that make you, you, not just these horrible people and jobs and systems that have done all this unforgivable damage to you. So NDN, start us off. Tell us the story of you and what brought you to Fort Worth. And then Quigq, hop in and tell us your story and how it intertwines with Indians.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I’ll start with a nickname “NDN” and then I’ll go from there. So as you were saying, back in school, kids were making fun of me and bullying me, and my principal called us into the office in my freshman year, said, “You guys can’t call him an Indian anymore. You’re being racist.” And one of my friends stood and said, “We’re not calling him Indian. We’re calling him letter N, letter D, letter N.” And he says, “Well, I can’t do anything about that.” And it just stuck and I’ve always enjoyed it. A lot of people are like, “He’s not just a Indian, he’s the Indian. There’s only one of them running around.” As far as career goes, I am third generation doing precast concrete with the passion. I’ve always enjoyed doing concrete. I’ve loved it. Being able to take the raw elements of earth and forging it into something that’s going to last and help the world is phenomenal to me.

I relocated down here to Fort Worth to actually do the McKinley Stadium, which is my third stadium to be a part of. Years ago, I was working for a company that dealt with a very strong epoxy resin and only 4% of the people that are exposed directly to it will develop an allergy to it. And with the company, it’s easier for them just to pay you off than it is to change their safety protocols, which shouldn’t be the way, but it’s cheaper for them that way. And over time, my symptoms and my condition got worse and worse and worse because it just doesn’t stop once you’re out of the environment of that specific thing. I remember one time they laid a new asphalt in front of my house here on the road and I broke out for a week because of the adhesive and the tar and the asphalt and I couldn’t avoid it because I was in my own home.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I have so many questions about that specifically because I don’t know if you guys know about it, but on this show specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with working people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals from work, from industrial disasters near their homes, all this kind of stuff that poor and working people are being exposed to daily. I mean, I was just filming in South Baltimore last night where residents just like you guys, but here in Baltimore are fighting trash incinerators that are blasting toxic chemicals into the lungs of their children. So this is definitely something that we’ve talked a lot about on the show, but I do want to talk about what that looked like for you, Indian, on a day-to-day working level. But before we get there, I want to go deeper into some of the lore here. Take me back to where you guys were in high school where you first met.

Quigg, who was this guy in high school when you met? And NDN, same question about Quigg.

James Quigg:

So Indian is a grade above me. So I came in as a freshman. He was already an established sophomore. He had a cool car. It was painted. He had some lady. Did it have a female on the hood and it had the universe? I mean, you couldn’t miss this car.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You had a low rider?

James “NDN” Gardner:

No, actually, it was a 91 Chevy Cavalier and anytime I’d get bored, we would just re-spray paint it. It was all animal print once. Once it was all hippied out, make love, not war. Even at one point I gave all the kids an art paint pens and we just wrote quotes over the entire car. People would stand there and read it for hours. It was just something to do. So

James Quigg:

You’d see this car. I’d see the car around before I was even in high school. So then you see, oh, this is the cool guy with the cool car. And then he’s always hanging out in the courtyard and he’s always got this group of girls because he’s just very didn’t try very hard, I guess. And honestly, I don’t think we liked each other necessarily in the beginning. It was just he had this girls that I was trying to hang out with, talk to, and he just didn’t really like the new guy, the new skinny white dude that was hanging around.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You got to earn your keep, baby.

James Quigg:

It took a couple years.

James “NDN” Gardner:

He really had to. And most of these girls I’ve been friends with for years, so I was very protective of them because they were my friends. And here’s this scrawny kid coming in trying to ask them all different kinds of things and get involved. I’m like, “Hey, hey, you don’t need to be around here right now.” But eventually he warmed over to me and I warmed over to him.

James Quigg:

Yeah, I was saying hope I was best friends with his cousin for a couple years. Then probably what, sophomore, not sophomore, junior, senior year, we started maybe hanging out a little bit more. You invited me to your house.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I had a house that most people weren’t allowed to. I was very young and I lived on my own, so it was just me and this trailer house at 16 years old. So a lot of parents didn’t even allow their kids over to my place. And they spray painted up too in the walls.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I don’t think my parents wouldn’t allow that either, but that would be exactly the house we’d all want to go to. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, can I ask how you ended up having your own kind of place when you were 16?

James “NDN” Gardner:

My parents separated and it was a choice of either do I go live with my dad or do I go live with my mom? And I was already working full-time at the time, and I bought a trailer house on state auction and moved into it. And it was just simpler that way. My mother ended up moving back in with me a few years later, but it was just more convenient. So like I said, I already had the income coming in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What were you doing back then for work?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Back then? Well, my first job was working for the Department of Wildlife through a program called ATEC, which was American Indian Education Training Association. They took Native Americans and put them at federal buildings and gave them summer jobs. So that got me experience. Pretty much I was doing property management, mowing the yard, stuff like that, but I got to do a lot of really cool stuff with them because I was, “Hey, let’s grab him and take him with us to go do this fish survey or let’s go explore the bat caves and do a survey out there.” And so it was very fun as a youth to have that. And then I went straight from that to Home Depot, working at Home Depot as a pro associate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So paint a picture for me. When you guys were back there in Oklahoma, are we talking kind of small town Oklahoma, medium town, city? Yeah, paint a picture for me.

James “NDN” Gardner:

So Bethany, Oklahoma at that point was the very edge of Oklahoma City. So it’s pretty much small town. I knew all the police officers, they all knew me, not because I was in trouble, just because there wasn’t a lot of us running around. And of course it was the late ’90s, early 2000s, so we were always getting into some sort of trouble as we all did back in that time.

James Quigg:

Oklahoma is a pretty small, big town. I think less than a million people in the whole city, probably less than that now, but I mean it takes what, 10 minutes or less to get down into the heart of Bricktown, downtown Oklahoma City. I mean, it still is small town, but it’s trying to be bigger than it really is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I come from Southern California, the land of endless lights and sprawl from the beach to the mountains. So everything feels small town to me to some extent. But to be honest, I kind of got a lot of love for the small and medium-sized towns in the country. I don’t think I gave them enough credit when I was younger, but the older I get and go visit more, the more fascinating they are. But I wanted to ask in that vein, we’re talking about Oklahoma. I guess we’re talking in the colonial project of the United States of America, so everything is ironic, but living in a state named Oklahoma and going to a school where you make fun of Native American kids feels so ironic and ridiculous that I don’t even know what to do with myself. But was that normal Indian? I mean, what was the kind of ratio?

Were there a lot of indigenous kids going to school there?

James “NDN” Gardner:

No. No, there wasn’t. In high school, there was maybe five of us altogether. I mean, there’s not a lot of us left. It’s sad to say. I was fortunate enough to run into… I mean, we just kind of all clicked together because, oh yeah, you’re native too. Cool. What tribe? What’s your family line? But the whole reason why we were in Oklahoma City is that my father was one of the Native Americans you hear about in the past being adopted off the res for a very low amount of money. And then he was adopted with four other siblings, all native from different tribes raised by a white man in the city. So yeah, there just wasn’t a lot that made it to the inner city area at that time. They all stayed out near the reservations, near the small towns like Carnegie and Adarko. So being inside the city, yeah, there wasn’t a lot of us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I take it from the origin story of your nickname that it wasn’t a very kind place to Native kids like you?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Oh, no, no, no. I remember once I was 14 walking down the street and the cops pulled me over because they had an APP put out on a Native American with long hair. I just happened to be a Native American with long hair. And they picked me up and took me down to the police station, which was just three blocks from my house. I wasn’t the person they were looking for. The person they were looking for had robbed a gas station and he was in his late 20s and I was 14. We stood out, so you either knew who we were or it’s just the way it was.

James Quigg:

It’s true. And what they only taught us in school about Native American culture is just an annual field trip we take to the Cowboy Hall of Fame and they’d show us the statues and talk about the Trail of Tears.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But there’s a lot to this story that I identify with in certain ways. I don’t know what that’s like Indian, but I know what it’s like to be a bald, scary looking Mexican dude in America. I’ll take looking like Quigg over looking like us on a normal day if I don’t want to get stopped by the cops. But that’s all the more reason why it just fills my heart when I hear stories of comradery and lifesaving solidarity, even among kids who are standing up for a friend. Tell me more about that, both of you, the stepping in to sort of reclaim the name and to say this is not how we’re going to do things. This guy’s our friend, not our enemy.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Oh yeah. I mean, Quig is my white guy. I always joke with people like, “I got my white guy. He’s right here. I’m safe. I don’t need a card. I got a whole person.” And I mean, he’s always had my back. Once we really connected and I realized that this is somebody that I needed to be part of my life and everything he’s done for me over the years, I can’t live up to. I try.

James Quigg:

I seriously doubt that, brother. I have computer smarts and I can do techie stuff, but this guy is the dude if you need any help. I mean, I’ll go back to last year, we had a leak in my daughter’s bathroom and it was coming down in the guest bathroom and I was like, “I don’t know what the hell to do, man. It’s just coming down.” And he just hopped in his car and he brought all his tools because he’s just that guy. And so he came and he helped me change the drywall. And as he’s doing this and helping me with all the stepping outside because I got to spray some kills on the wood, I mean, he’s getting hives, he’s getting blisters. I’m feeling incredibly guilty and he’s like, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get it done.” But he’s just that kind of guy and it’s been like that anytime I’ve needed him.

He’s just always there. And it’s not just me, it’s everybody. He’s helped damn near everybody that we know, either with a place to stay, help fixing their car, mowing a yard. It doesn’t matter. He’s a helper, he’s a doer, and that’s just something I’ve always admired from him.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s genuinely beautiful to hear you guys say that, right? Because first and foremost, I’m thinking just as three men in the country today, we don’t say this enough to each other and we don’t allow ourselves to be that for each other. And so I just wanted to kind of honor the beautiful friendship that you guys have, having each other’s backs for this long is a marvelous thing. And I’ll be honest with all of you listening, Quig reached out to me about Indian’s story and told me about it, and that’s how it got on my radar. So these guys have been together for years and they’re still looking out for each other, and I think the world will be a better place if we all do a little more of that for each other. And Quig, even you telling that story reminds me that we’ve still got so much to talk about here, Indian, about your working life and the conditions and chemicals that you were exposed to that are now collapsing your health and your quality of life.

So that’s normally what we talk about on this show is I talk to workers and I say, “Tell me about your working life.What does it look like on the job?

For people who’ve never worked in this line of work, what does it entail?” Can you kind of take us a little bit on that journey and then tell us about the kind of work hazards that you were exposed to?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. The company where I was working for made burial vaults and the poncho that they used went on the liners of the burial vaults to seal it to the concrete so it maintain a watertight sealness for 50 to 100 years. That’s what they were concerned about. The people working in there that were alive being exposed to a hazardous chemical to keep somebody that’s going to go in the ground from being exposed to the elements of the ground was more important to them than the people actually doing the job because there was other things that could have been used that was more efficient but cost more money.

And after my initial exposure with this company, I was still passionate about concrete. I still wanted to do concrete, but I had to relearn what companies I could work for, where I could work at, and how I could do it because now I got to change everything. I can’t be around anything that has sold chemicals. I’ve got to be in open environments. And one of the things, I was also a journeyman iron worker because every now and then you get tired of staring at gray when you do concrete long enough. And back to the whole having lung and breathing respiratory issues, as a journeyman iron worker, I was working on the Devon Tower, which is the tallest building in Oklahoma City, and I was going from the ground up a thousand feet every day, and I had developed acute altitude sickness from just working on the outside of the building every day.

But a lot of that was contributed because they did a long biopsy on me to test me for silicosis, which is from concrete dust. And I did have some concrete dust built up in my lungs at the time. And that’s just because not wearing enough protection when you should wear protection because old school concrete guys just get the job done, which I got no problem getting a job done, but it should be done safely, effectively, and efficiently, not the other direction around, efficiently and safety being one of the last concerns. So after no longer working for the company that caused my initial, and I didn’t realize how bad I was going to get over the years, because initially it was just adhesives in general. Then it got where I couldn’t even put a bandaid on without breaking out from the adhesives as I am now.

I actually have to order special medical stuff when I do get a cut so I can seal myself and not have a reaction to it for a long period of time.

James Quigg:

He has to take his own adhesives to the ER when he’s got to go to the ER because of his terminal liver failure, otherwise he’ll break out from that.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. Even going in for a procedure, they put an EKG machine on me. I’m going to break out from every point where the EKG machine is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Even the tape on my fingers or to monitor my heart rate and my breathing will make me break out. So I travel with my own medical stuff now. It

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sounds like hell.

James “NDN” Gardner:

It is. It made me a shut in for quite a while because going to Walmart, going to the grocery store, luckily there’s DoorDash and things like that now where I don’t have to get out and get exposed. But again, like I said, it made me change how I worked in concrete. I went to places that had super structures that worked outside, still making beautiful things with concrete, but eventually the skin allergy, the multiple chemical sensitivity just overtook everything. I did work for a trailer company for a little while working three days a week because they knew my skin issue, they knew my thing. So I would go there whenever they needed something welded or something wired that they couldn’t figure out. But again, now I’m going to this place to work on a trailer and that trailer might’ve had paint in it. It might’ve had construction debris.

I can’t even walk into a Home Depot or a Walmart or Lowe’s. Fast food restaurants get me pretty good too. And as much as I love old people, they’re a little heavy with that perfume.That’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

Putting it mildly, man. And yeah, I’m sure so many of us don’t even realize all the spaces that we walk into where those irritants are, but if you start breaking out in hives the second that you’re exposed to it, you start realizing that actually there are a lot of places you can’t go. And that is just something that I think so many of us don’t have to think about. But when you’re in your position and you have to think about it, it must be just genuinely overwhelming at times.

James “NDN” Gardner:

T-Mobile has their own scent of air freshener. So when you open a T-Mobile store door, it puts a little spray into the air for a sensory thing. I understand how that can be with marketing. Oh, this is what T-Mobile smells like. I’m getting a new phone. And I didn’t know that till they rolled out with that and I went into a T-Mobile and next thing I know I’m being sprayed and now I’m breaking out in hives and I’ve got a leak.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man. So as we sort of get to the situation that you’re dealing with now, I’ve heard from you a number of things already. We’re talking silicosis, we’re talking exposure to epoxy resin generating a chronic skin sensitivity, right? I mean the altitude sickness that you developed on the job. I guess if you had to sort of sum it up, if you could, what conditions do you have now that came from working in this country, from being exposed to things or repetitive actions to things? I guess I wanted to try to collect all that for listeners and ask what is the kind of sum total of all the crap that you’re dealing with from all the jobs that you’ve worked?

James “NDN” Gardner:

If the MSDS is laid out and has its certain rules and regulations, if the company will abide by the MSDS correctly, I would’ve never been overexposed.

James Quigg:

What’s the MSDS?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Material safety data sheets. It tells you about the hazardous of the chemicals, what you’re supposed to be wearing and be doing to you’re not hurt by it and it doesn’t affect you. And most companies, yeah, we’ve got an MSDS. It’s in a book on the wall over there. You can go look at it if you want to. And then they tell you to go to work. And I was guilty of doing that to people too. I’m like, “Well, yeah, the MSDS is over there, but just put this little mask on.” In reality, they needed a respirator instead of just a dust mask and went on with the day to get the day done. Things have changed a lot now than how bad it used to be when me starting off in the industry of concrete and everything else, because again, it was you’d stand in a cloud of dust grinding and just put on some safety glasses and hold your breath.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and let’s talk about when these health conditions started piling up and to the point that you needed disability checks and then had to navigate this Kafka-esque system that doesn’t work to try to get the aid that you need to live. Tell us more about the kind of crisis that you’re in now and all the people who are supposed to be helping you right now but aren’t.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. I mean, even going to the social security office to file for disability, I would sit there breaking out because I’m waiting for long periods of time in the line in a room full of people with chemicals on. So it became I have no choice. I have to go do this. I’ve got to go file this paperwork and I filed the paperwork and I wait and I wait and I wait. And then, “Well, we want to send you to this doctor.” Well, I call the doctor’s office. I’m like, “Listen, I can’t just go in there and they don’t abide by those rules.” They’re like, “No, you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to wait, you’ve got to go through this.” Even now, I’ve got some doctors that really help me with my situation and make sure the days that I’m scheduled, that nobody’s wearing perfume and that it’s going to be a nice, clean environment for me.

And then I have other doctors that could care less, but I’ve got to go through them because the social security’s telling me, “Well, you need to go to this guy and get tested for this.” I mean, they just did an allergy test on me, and part of the allergy test, the bonding agent in the allergy test is an adhesive. So I tested positive for everything, even though I told them I’m an adhesive and yeah, it just has to be on my skin for a few minutes to test me for allergies. Well, that’s still an adhesive on my skin for a few minutes. And I ended up having to get an epishot in the middle of the test, which now became an inclisive test.

James Quigg:

And I do want to clarify that Fort Worth Star Telegram’s article, I don’t believe he’s been approved for disability yet.

James “NDN” Gardner:

No. No, I haven’t been approved yet, but since we’ve gotten the articles, they’ve started reaching out to me more instead of me having to wait and call them. So now we’re actually communicating back and forth for the first time, but I’ve been denied twice.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the situation, as I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong, is that you now, because of what you’ve been exposed to over the course of your working life, are no longer able to work and you are disabled by those things you were exposed to, but you have received no money from the disability office. Your life is in limbo right now.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yes, I am in limbo. And the first two times I was denied because they did not recognize multiple chemical sensitivity as a disability until the past five years. And I’ve been dealing with it for 10 years now. So it wasn’t recognized as a disability. Now they’re starting to, “Well, what do we have to do to prove that this is a disability?” And because of my skin always having to fight these battles and me being on experimental drugs, trying to overcome with it, and part of being native is that most drugs aren’t made for a 40-year-old Native American guy. They’re made for a 40-year-old white man who has years and years of antibodies built up in the systems where if I get a flu shot, I’m ending up with walking pneumonia, where if Quigley got a flu shot, he’s just fine the next day because it’s more developed.

So my body started shutting down because of it’s trying to fight all the time, always battling, always battling my skin, always fighting, led to me having internal organ failure. I go in for another surgery on Monday, which will be my 10th surgery this year alone because my body’s just shutting down.

But yeah, I’m just in limbo. But now, so I was able to refile for social security with the internal organ failure and the liver failure and the terminal diagnostics now. So it’s not even really taking the multiple chemical sensitivity into effect with my disability. That’s just added to it now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I guarantee that there are going to be folks that I know who are going to listen to this and they’re going to reach out and they’re going to say, “You’re damn right it’s a disability. They have it. A lot of the residents I was talking about who have been exposed to these chemicals, now they are so hypersensitive to these chemicals and they bioaccumulate and they make them feel worse and their kids are getting sick or staying sick or they haven’t been not sick for years at this point. And it’s just this kind of hell that they’re living through. And I can’t help but think of all the other workers like you who are exposed to this stuff. I mean, in the year 2026, black lung is on the rise in this country. There are men our age dying from coal mining or other forms of silicosis because of the stuff they’re inhaling, the lack of PPE they’re getting, just this whole system of grinding people down to dust and subjecting our bodies to the most toxic conditions just to make a buck.

And it’s so systemic, but it impacts us in so many different ways. And I kind of wanted to just ask you guys about that.What does this all say about the daily realities that working people are going through in this country? And especially if you’re disabled or indigenous or both?

James Quigg:

Well, I’ll say that invisible disabilities are easily ignored. That is one thing that Andy and I both have in common. You look at both of us on a normal day, you don’t see a disability. You don’t see a multiple chemical sensitivity in him. You don’t see type one diabetes in me. So it’s easy, kind of out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, except for the people that have to deal with it day in, day out when they wake up to when they go to bed.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I feel like in a way I was robbed because I always wanted to provide for my family. I always wanted to work hard and make a living. And because I was working hard and making a living and the companies that I worked for ignored safety protocols, I can no longer do what I want to do for my family and be there for my family the way I should have been allowed to. And a lot of working people, that’s all we want to do is make ends meet, survive and enjoy life and enjoy the little things. And to not be able to do that now because a company wanted to make more money isn’t justified.

James Quigg:

I mean, it’s true. America is built on the backs of people like Indian and a lot of people just use them as stepping stones to get to the future.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that was beautifully and powerfully and put and it’s so depressingly true. I mean, Jesus, we just passed the 25th anniversary of nine eleven and we’re learning about all the things that not just first responders, but people all over New York were exposed to and lied to about for years later. This is unacceptable at every single level and we can’t keep accepting it. We’ve got to do something about it and we got to start by taking care of each other. And I wanted to bring us there for the final turn here because I know I can’t keep you guys for much longer, but I wanted to ask where things currently stand. I mean, you guys already gave us an important update from the Fort Worth Star Telegram that apparently Indian still hasn’t received anything from the disability office and he was denied two times before that anyway until his organs started shutting down.

Then he got some movement, but where does that leave Indian now? Where does that leave your family now? And what are folks doing in response? What can folks listening do to help?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Right. I mean, to back it down, sage up, pray to whoever will listen.

James Quigg:

Yeah. We’re kind of waiting to see what disability says. Hopefully he gets an approval and he’ll get some sort of back money so that he can get caught up with his bills because the bills haven’t stopped. The mortgage hasn’t stopped. They’re still trying to foreclose as far as I know because he’s terminal. They’re trying to get at least the ability for him to stay in his home and not be evicted. But that doesn’t solve a problem. That just pushes it down the road and it leaves it for his kids when Indian’s no longer here to help. But as far as what’s keeping him afloat has been this GoFundMe the last month or so, just from the kindness of strangers. Indian spent his life helping anybody and everybody. That doesn’t mean that those people are in positions to be able to help financially or monetarily in any way.

Indian’s always been that person to support others.

It’s just there’s nobody there maybe outside of myself that’s able to help him in that sense. And so we were sitting around his cousin, my other best friend and his mother on his birthday, what, six weeks ago, something like that, sitting around the kitchen table trying to figure out how do we stop this foreclosure? What can we do? Can we get a loan? Can we try to refinance? Can we refinance his mom’s house? Can I afford to purchase the home on my own? And realistically, none of us, we couldn’t do any of that. So I went home frustrated that we had to do this on his birthday, kind of cried about it a little bit and said, “Fuck it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make a GoFundMe. I’m going to tell my friend’s story the best that I can and see if people are willing to respond.” Just try to show the world the kind person and generous person he’s always been and hopefully karma will come back tenfold on him.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Indian, I want to give you the last word here and it can really be anything that you want, but I guess if you could know that you’re speaking to fellow workers around the country who listen to this show, who work in industries like this and industries that unlike this, if you could talk to those folks who are working jobs like this now or folks out there who could help, what would you just want to leave them with?

James “NDN” Gardner:

My family’s got a motto. If someone needs help, you help. You don’t ever respect anything in return. Whether it’s an old lady crossing the street, somebody on the side of the road with a flat tire, any situation. Somebody needs you to help them push a car or you notice your neighbor’s grass is too tall and you know he hasn’t been feeling well the last few weeks. Nothing’s going to cost you but time. Time is all we have for each other and let’s enjoy it and spend it and help everybody together. We’re all in this together. This is one world, one life. We’re all part of this. We’re all part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, James Indian Gardner and James Quigg. You can get in touch with them and keep up to date with Indian story by using the links that we’ve included in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we can’t do it without you. So thank you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle across the US and around the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our other great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m here at Red Emmas at the Baltimore Book Festival, and I’m sitting with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal. Brother Mark, it’s so great to have you back here in Baltimore, man. I know I only got you for a second, and we’re talking about your incredible new book, Save a Seat for Me, Notes on American Fatherhood. And I was thinking as another father in America in 2026, I wanted to ask you, it doesn’t take PhDs like we have to know that we’ve got a real fricking crisis in this country with men and masculinity and masculine culture and fatherhood, or we have a whole lot of crises that men are experiencing but aren’t dealing with well. So what do you make of all this? What do we do about it? And how can your book help us get there?

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

I think we have tried, America has tried to raise generations of warriors, if you will, to be on the front lines of American imperialism. And you can’t be human to do that. You can’t think, you can’t question, you can’t be vulnerable. So what we have done is raise two or three generations of men in America who don’t know how to be human, who don’t know how to lead into full range of who they are. We’ve been socialized to show up only certain kinds of ways, anger, rage, the ability to follow directions. Things like vulnerability are made fun of at the highest levels.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And those of us who are very vulnerable people have been made fun of.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Because of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Because of that.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

We’ve been made to think that our responsibility in a capitalist system has literally been reduced to only making money, that our only value. And I think about this a lot as a Black father, my own father, that I’m sure he thought that his only value to me was making sure that I was fed and clothed and taken care of. And I get all of that, but I needed much more from him. As a father, I needed to be more than that for my daughters. And so I think when we look at young men who are clearly feeling so much with no outlet, their outlets become dangerous behaviors, self-directed violence,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Toxic online cultures,

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

All kinds of addictions, alcohol, Percocet, weed, porn. I mean, we can name all these things and understand it. And the fact that so many of the young men in the world today, their lives are what they can connect with on their handheld device. They don’t actually have relationships with people in the real world, don’t see a value in that. And I don’t know how we sustain that. I don’t know how we sustain our humanity in a situation where we don’t value human relationship anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s like you see that the path that we’re on as a society or what’s left of a society is being driven by the sociopathic, psychopathic, bloodthirsty –

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Or just plain evils.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just plain evil maniacs who want a future where they get all the benefits of human society, but don’t have to deal with any of the humans in it. Whether they’re thinking of like, oh, AI is going to replace all their jobs and we’re going to get all the money. They’re not thinking about what the heck that’s going to mean for us. They’re just going to push us into slums and prisons and police us, hunt us, surveil us. That’s their big goddamn plan. And I think you put it so powerfully that it’s like so many men out there have the same human needs that we all have and we’re feeling them so acutely the more isolated we are, but we’re looking to find, we’re seeking inhuman avenues.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

I mean, think about all the folks who are in relationships with chat bots. I mean, it’s surreal. I can’t have a relationship with an actual person. I don’t desire a relationship with an actual person. I need to have a relationship with some facsimile, some avatar that somehow that’s more meaningful to me than having a relationship with a person.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And I think even as a editor in chief and co-ED of a media network, as a media star, we recognize there’s only so much you can do online. You got to get the hell offline and you got to meet each other back on that level of shared humanity and shared reality because that’s the only way we’re going to deal with anything, anything in this country.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

And that’s why the Baltimore Book Festival is really important. First of all, not only just a reminder, someplace that’s celebrating the written word, obviously, but folks coming together in community. We have to get back to a culture where we share in community. We read together, we listen together, we debate together instead of these media silos. I’m going to have this debate over here on this network and you’re going to have this debate over there and never the twain shall meet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and final question, but it goes really to the heart of your book. Here in Baltimore, I see this every day. I feel it as a father, but right down the street from where I live in Mondamin, earlier this summer, there were six youth who were caught on camera just beating the hell out of an elderly member of the community, a former Black Panther. It was horrific. I’ve interviewed this man and the community that’s trying to help him, but clearly everyone who is showing up to help is seeing in that video the deficit of guidance, of fatherhood, of love.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Of respect. Basic respect.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what can we do about that in our everyday lives at the person to person level?

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

We have to be willing not just to be witnesses to these experiences or commentators.

We have to intervene and feel comfortable enough to intervene. Whoever sat down with those young men, first of all, to explain, because the easy part is to say, no, this man was important to our movement in the past. The more difficult thing is like, no, this man is important because he’s another human being and you should value life and his humanity. But if they are young men who do not value their own humanity, don’t see their own humanity, they’re going to reproduce that behavior over and over again. And so we have to have the willingness because it’s real easy to go, I’m just going to build my life in this silo and protect my family and I get it. But to take that next step to say, okay, I might not be able to talk to all six of these brothers, try to talk to two of them.

Begin that process, that one-on-one conversation that can blossom into something that’s much more significant.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Michael Fox:

Hi folks. This is your host, Michael Fox. Before I get started, I wanted to let you know that I have big news. First, this season of Under the Shadow has been nominated for three podcast Signal Awards. It’s really exciting, and you can help us by heading over to signalaward.com and voting for Under the Shadow. I’ll add direct links in the show notes that will take you straight there. Second, last week I launched a new website called Pan American Dispatch. It’s a project of the Real News. We’re translating daily articles from Portuguese and Spanish into English for a US audience. Over the next two months, we’ll be exclusively focused on covering the Brazilian elections and Trump’s attempts to sway them. That is what this entire episode is about. And if you want to get all of the news about what’s happening in real time, please consider subscribing to our Substack.

You can find us at panamericandispatch.org. We’re also on X, Blue Sky, Instagram, and TikTok. Our handle is @PAdispatch. Okay, that’s it. I hope you enjoy the show. On May 26th, 2026, a 45-year-old Brazilian senator named Flavio Bolsonado met with US President Donald Trump at the White House. Flavio is the presidential candidate for the far right in Brazil in the upcoming elections in October. This is what he had to say at the annual conservative political action committee meeting in Texas earlier this year.

Flávio Bolsonaro:

And let me look you in the eyes and tell you, we will win.

Michael Fox:

Flavio is the son and political heir of the former far right president Jair Bolsonado, a close ally of the US president. In the meeting at the Oval Office in May, Flavio Bolsonado reportedly asked Trump to designate the Brazilian drug gangs, Primero Commando de Capital and the Commando Vermelio as foreign terrorist organizations. After the meeting, Flavio spoke to the press.

He said, “I asked President Trump emphatically to designate as soon as possible the PCC and the Commando Vermelio as foreign terrorist organizations.” This might not seem like such a big deal, but it is. The United States has sometimes used that very designation as the pretext to invade or interfere in foreign countries. The US placed the Venezuelan gangs, Trende Aragua and Cartel de los Soles on the list back in 2025, and fighting those alleged terrorists was one of the excuses the United States used for invading Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicholas Maduro on January 3rd of this year. In other words, this designation carries weight.

Trump agreed to Flavio’s request. Just three days after meeting with Flavio Bolsonaro, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that those two Brazilian gangs would be added to the list of foreign terrorist organizations. Flavio responded in a letter to Rubio, thanking him for the classification and offering to place his transition team at the disposal of the White House if he’s elected. For months, the United States has been escalating the pressure on Brazil in the lead up to the presidential elections with the goal of helping to lift Flavio Bolsonaro to the top office. Just a few weeks after the State Department put the Brazilian gangs on the terrorist list, Trump shared an article on Truth Social that said Brazil was his next big challenge. Less than a month later in July, Trump imposed new 25% tariffs on Brazilian goods. In August, Trump revoked the US visa of the Brazilian ambassador.

It was an apparent tit for tat after Brazil denied visas to two US State Department officials who planned to travel to Brazil to meet with former President Jair Bolsonaro. I could go on. The point here, as many people have pointed out, is that there isn’t just one thing that Trump is doing to try and sway the vote in favor of Bolsonaro. It’s a whole combination of moves, like a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces taken alone, and it’s just a random assortment of colors and shapes. But when you start to put the pieces in place, a picture begins to emerge. See, Trump allies have won big elections across Latin America. In recent years, right-wing candidates have taken back or held onto power in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Bolivia, and Peru. And they’ve done so with the help of US President Donald Trump, who’s thrown his weight around to boost right-wing candidates, and also with the support of bot farms and shady electoral campaign practices linked to Washington and Mar-a-Lago, as we looked at in the last episode.

Donald Trump:

But on this historic day, we come together to announce a brand new military coalition to eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region.

Michael Fox:

Many of those countries have now joined forces in Trump’s shield of the America’s alliance, but there are a few holdouts, and Brazil is one of the most important.

Alexander Main:

The upcoming election in Brazil is really going to be extremely consequential for the entire region.

Michael Fox:

Alexander Main is the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Alexander Main:

Brazil is the country with the largest economy, biggest population in Latin America, and it’s also one of the few countries that is still holding out against US pressure, pressure to align with the Trump administration’s agenda in the region.

Michael Fox:

The first round election is on October 4th in just a couple of days, and the runoff will take place three weeks later on October 25th. Bolsonaro is facing off against the longtime workers’ party icon, Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva. He’s the current president and he’s running for reelection. I have been covering the campaigns here in Brazil in recent weeks. I’ve attended rallies for both Lula and Bolsonaro. Today, I’m going to walk you through what’s at stake, and most importantly, how Trump is exerting underhanded pressure on the country ahead of the vote. As a leak document showed last week, the Brazilian Intelligence Agency has raised the risk of external influence and interference by the United States and Brazil’s 2026 elections to a “critical level.” According to the report, there is a trend of escalating pressure on Brazil and a quote, “selective intensification and reconfiguration of the pressure exerted by the United States.” It’s a textbook example of foreign election interference today, a multifaceted jigsaw.

People are concerned, but they’re also standing up, and that’s what makes this episode so interesting. It’s happening in real time. You have Trump attempting to sway the vote, and you also have people pushing back.

Like Lula’s recent speech at the United Nations where he told the US president that Brazil will not be the backyard of any country.

Or this woman, a small farmer who I spoke with at a Lula rally in Southern Brazil. “We’re not afraid of Trump, “she said. “We know what he wants to do and we’re not going to let him. We are the resistance. We’re not afraid of him, just like Lula isn’t afraid. Lula showed us that we are not less than any country,” she said. That and so much more in a minute. This is Under the Shadow, an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad in the past and the very present. This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA. I’m your host, Michael Fox, longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist, the producer and host of the podcast’s Brazil on Fire: Stories of Resistance and my new series, The Battle for Free Speech. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad, and most often sadly, it is not for the better. Invasions, coup, sanctions, support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does. This is season two of Under the Shadow Trump’s attack. Episode 15, election meddling in Brazil.

Okay, before we dive into the allegations of election interference, let me set the scene. To do that, I want to take you back to a month and a half ago to the launch of the campaigns here in Brazil. I was in Sao Paulo covering Lula’s kickoff. Some of this section of the episode is based off of reporting I did at the time for the world and the real news. It’s August 16th, 2026. Tens of thousands of supporters of President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva are packed into May 1st stadium in Sao Paulo. Among them is Sida Maya. She’s the secretary of women’s public policies in the nearby municipality of Maua.

“This is living history,” she says. “I’m participating in a historic moment. It’s a great feeling and we’re going to elect Lula.” Next to her, her husband Valmirmaya holds back tears. “It’s emotional, “he says. Lula’s campaign chose this stadium to kick off his run for a fourth and final term as president. This is where Lula got his start. In 1979, Lula was a young leader at the ABC Medal Workers Union. He led an iconic strike and rally at this same stadium. The workers won and it marked the beginning of the end of the country’s military dictatorship. Valmir Maya was there then and he’s here now.

“We wanted what we got,” he says, “to transform Brazil into a democratic country. That was our struggle, and Lula was the expression of this.” Inside the stadium, President Lula strode onto a long stage wearing a Panama hat and a white shirt. From the bleachers, he seemed to float above the sea of supporters in red, the color of Lula’s workers’ party. Lula’s top campaign promise has always been about battling hunger. Over the years, he’s lifted millions from poverty, increased access to education, health, and infrastructure, in particular in impoverished Northeastern Brazil. Lula told the crowd that there was much work left to be done, that they had to think of the future. He said they had to invest even more in education, that he wanted to continue to develop jobs and industry for Brazil. 300 miles to the east, Lula’s challenger, Flavio Bolsonaro, launched his campaign on Copacabana Beach in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.

“Come with me and rescue our nation,” he said, “God above everyone, Brazil above all.” Flavio Bolsonaro has attacked the left and promised to fight crime and insecurity, cut bureaucracy, promote private business and privatizations, and develop close ties with the United States. Much of his rhetoric and that of his supporters is wrapped in a religious language of good versus evil.

“You are the son of hope,” said a pastor at his campaign launch. “You are the first born. You received the legacy of representing your father, and now for everything that is sacred on the face of the earth, honor your father. “The savior trope goes over well with his evangelical supporters, an important base for Bolsonaro and other far-right politicians in Brazil, as we looked at in depth in my 2022 podcast, Brazil on Fire. Blase Narujo is a youth pastor at an evangelical church in a working class neighborhood of Sao Paulo. He joined others on the streets in mid-August to promote Bolsonaro and other far-right candidates running for local office.

He said,” I believe that Flavio Bolsonado is the only viable candidate who can beat Lula and the workers’ party. “I’m a Christian here,” he told me. “I behave as a Christian, but I’m also a political activist here on the streets to defend my beliefs,” he said. Flavio Bolsonado also has powerful support in high places, in particular, as we heard earlier from Donald Trump. If you remember, the US president is a longtime ally of Flavio’s father, Jair Bolsonado. Jair is currently on house arrest. He was first barred from running for office for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Last year, the Supreme Court convicted him of plotting a coup to return to power. Before his rise as the leader of Brazil’s far right, Jair Bolsonaro was a backbench congressman for decades, outlandish, but mostly obscure. And then he ran for president.

Speaker 5:

There are a few things that drew inspiration for you.

Jair Bolsonaro:

Very special guy. Turned out to be a great friend of mine.

Michael Fox:

Bolsonaro fashioned himself after Trump. In fact, in Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign in 2018, international media often called him the Trump of the tropics. He and Trump met a number of times while they were both president.

Jair Bolsonaro:

And I think we can say that Brazil and the United States are as close or closer as they’ve ever been.

Michael Fox:

Last year, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil in part because of the country’s criminal trial against the former president.

Donald Trump:

They’re treating President Bolsonaro very unfairly. He’s a good man. I know him well. I negotiated with him.

Michael Fox:

And let me be honest, there are many supporters of Bolsonaro who look up to Trump and want him to use his leverage to help their candidate, Jair Bolsonaro’s son and protege Flavio Bolsonaro. On September 7th, members of the far right in Brazil hit the streets across the country to rally for Flavio. I covered the march in the southern Brazilian city of Florianopolis. There, numerous people told me how much they admired Trump and how grateful they were for his support. Adalberto Luis de Santos is marching with a blue hat with the insignia of the United States. He and his wife are draped in Brazilian flags. “We’re hoping for support from the United States,” he said. “I believe Trump can help us. All Brazilians need the support of someone from abroad. “. “Trump is really important,” another man in the march told me. “The external pressure is very important.

“. A woman in the march carrying a flag and a yellow hat told me,” Just the simple fact that Trump is in power and acts democratically in favor of freedom makes all of the difference for our people. “.

“We don’t want Brazil to turn into another Venezuela,” she said. “I’ve heard that narrative countless times in Brazil and during elections in countries across Latin America for years. It’s the ever-present boogeyman of so-called communist Venezuela, but fear of the Venezuelan fate took on an even more serious dimension after the US invasion of Caracas earlier this year. The sentiments of so many Bolsonaro supporters are a sign of just how polarized the political debate is and how much the far right in Brazil looks up to the US president. Two weeks later, I covered another rally in the same city, this one in support of President Lula.

People had a lot to say about Trump and his efforts to influence their presidential decisions. I asked them, “Are you afraid of what Trump and the United States could do during this election to try and support Bolsonaro?” “Yes, I’m really afraid of that, “said one man carrying a Lula flag. “They want to take away our sovereignty. They want to invade our lands. They want to take what is ours and let Brazil be a colony of another country.” “Of course we’re afraid, “said someone else,” but we believe that Lula is well ahead in the election and we won’t allow Trump to destroy the election. “What do you think about Trump and are you concerned that Trump might try and do something with the elections here in

Speaker 7:

Brazil? Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of his work here in Latin America that we are very scared. Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Argentina. So we are very scared because Latin America is being contaminated by him and his work, so it’s very scary and we don’t want him in here or anything with him.

Michael Fox:

People have a lot to be concerned about. When I was in Sao Paulo in August, I sat down with Igor Fusser at a cafe near Palista Avenue. We’ve known each other for years. He’s a professor of foreign relations at Brazil’s ABC Federal University. I asked him how he sees the US actions against Brazil at this moment.

He said, “This is not just about the United States trying to remove the government of a left-wing party, the workers’ party, or a left-wing leader, which is Lula. It’s about subjecting Brazil to the policies of the United States, and Brazil being the largest country in Latin America is precisely the biggest obstacle to the American project of global dominance of the Western hemisphere,” he said. Remember, over the last year, as we’ve looked at throughout this podcast, Trump has pushed the United States into a new era of dominance over Latin America, the likes of which the region has not seen in decades. Boat strikes in the Caribbean, the US invasion of Venezuela, and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro, the oil blockade on Cuba, and Trump throwing his weight around and meddling in elections across Latin America. It’s all justified by a renewed Monroe doctrine. Here’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, underlining that point.

Pete Hegseth:

President Trump has established the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Don Roe doctrine, and the war department is implementing it as fast as we can.

Michael Fox:

Brazil is the latest battleground. It’s playing out in the open and behind the scenes. It’s early August. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism is meeting in Sao Paulo. At the meeting circulating in the crowd are staff from the US Consulate in Sao Paulo, their mission to woo Brazilian journalists into conversations about the country’s electoral process and the state of “freedom of expression” in the country. This was reported by several independent journalists at the conference and then published by independent journalist Leandro DeMori, the former executive editor of The Intercept Brazil. According to Demorti, three journalists at the event confirmed the actions of the consular officials. Two journalists said they were offered assistance with US visas if they needed them, even though the meetings with the officials about the country’s elections were to be held in Sao Paulo.

Washington has leaned on two key narratives to demonize Brazil in recent years. One, that freedom of expression is under attack in Brazil because of its attempts to reign in social media disinformation, and two, that the country’s electoral system is faulty and prone to errors. Both of those claims are false. Brazil has long held certified free and fair elections, and freedom of speech is alive and well, although Brazil embraces a more inclusive harmonious definition of how the freedom of speech fits into the country’s other laws. Episode 12 of this series goes deeper into those claims and their fallout. DiMorti’s reporting about the recent journalism forum brings up more questions than answers. What were the consular officials trying to achieve? Did some journalists take the bait? If so, how will this be weaponized? We don’t have answers, but it’s another piece of the scrambled jigsaw puzzle.

Here’s another, and it’s just one example of how the meddling campaign has been building. In mid-September, less than two weeks ago, Flavio Bolsonaro’s brother, Eduardo, met with President Donald Trump at the White House. As we looked at in the last episode, Eduardo is a former congressional representative who now lives in the United States. The Brazilian Supreme Court sentenced him earlier this year to four years in prison for his actions in the US, lobbying the Trump administration to intimidate the Brazilian judiciary amid the trial against his father. According to reports, Eduardo traveled to Washington to ask Trump to impose sanctions on members of the Lula government and the Supreme Court, including Justice Alexandre Morais. If you’ve been following Brazil or my reporting, you might remember that Morais was the justice that led the trials against the dissemination of fake news in the country and also against Jair Bolsonaro.

Jair Bolsonaro:

Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.

Michael Fox:

Last year, the US sanctioned Mordice for supposedly carrying out human rights abuse, including arbitrary detention. Those sanctions were lifted four months later, but they were a thinly veiled retaliation for the trial against Bolsonaro and also Morais’s fight with ex-owner Elon Musk, which we looked at in depth in episode 12. There is no question the battle over Brazil right now is also taking place online and Silicon Valley is playing its part.

On Wednesday, September 23rd, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, took down President Lula’s Facebook page and blocked his campaign from running political ads. The platform gave no justification for the move. Lula’s workers’ party and his electoral coalition demanded answers. Lula’s campaign asked for the immediate return of the account. The campaign’s lawyers told the platform that the restriction “poses a serious risk to the candidate’s level playing field in the election.” The head of the Workers’ Party national communications team, Eden Valadaris, said they hadn’t ruled out taking the case to the superior electoral court. He wrote on X, “Brazil’s electoral contest, its campaigns, and its vote cannot be left to the mercy of the political preferences of the big tech companies whose supposed programming errors only hit and harm one campaign and one candidate.” One candidate, meaning Lula. By the next morning, the page was back up, but Lula’s electoral coalition said Meta’s actions harm the presidential campaign.

Remember that Meta was founded and is run by Mark Zuckerberg. He’s a close ally of President Donald Trump.

Jair Bolsonaro:

Thank you very, very much.

Michael Fox:

In fact, he was at Trump’s inauguration for his second term alongside the heads of Apple, Google, Amazon, and of course, Tesla and ex – CEO, Elon Musk. I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. Zuckerberg got rid of fact-checking at Meta in early 2025, just before Trump came into power last year, and that’s important because there are now fewer constraints on the spread of fake news or misinformation on the platform. In late August, Amnesty International tested this lack of guardrails in Brazil. It sent 15 different AI-generated election-related political disinformation ads to Facebook to see if the platform could discern between truth and falsehood. Meta failed to block most of them. A similar test run by the eco movement in Brazil in mid-September showed that nearly 90% of the disinformation ads it attempted to run on Meta were approved, including “AI ads depicting execution style threats against lawmakers and calling for a stop the steal style coup.” And I want to say one more thing about the role of Silicon Valley’s big tech platforms.

They are paying attention to what’s happening in Brazil. Here’s just one example. Last year, lawmakers and a congressional committee in Brazilia were discussing a bill on AI regulation. According to the fact-checking agency, Ausfatos, big tech lobbyists visited committee members more than 80 times over a five-month period. The tech company that met with members in Brazilia the most was Meta, which made more than a third of those visits.

There’s another layer to all of this, another puzzle piece if you like. In the last episode of this podcast, I took an in-depth look at the work of the Argentine political strategist, Fernando Cerimedo. Remember, Serimedo has led right-wing digital campaigns across Latin America, and he did so with the help of Washington and Trump’s former campaign manager and digital strategist, Brad Parscali. This is what he had to say earlier this year in Mar-a-Lago when he was presented an award for best Hispanic Political Consultant of the Year.

Jair Bolsonaro:

I want to say something in English. Thank you to Brad Parscale for believing me all the time and give me your technology and Tim Don for the fighting in Latin America against socialism. Thank you, Brad.

Michael Fox:

Serimedo is now in prison on charges that he tried to kill his girlfriend. According to her, he hired the hitman to silence her. Serimedo also faces charges of illicit enrichment and other crimes, but his digital campaigning and the bot farms that he’s deployed in elections up and down the hemisphere haven’t necessarily gone away, nor have his deep ties to the right in the region. Remember who presented that award to Cerimedo? It was Eduardo Bolsonaro, the brother of Flavio Bolsonaro. They reportedly have known each other for more than 15 years. Now, just this week, Washington sanctioned Bolivian Attorney General Roher Mariaka, who is prosecuting the Serimero case,

He defended his country sovereignty and vowed to continue the investigation despite the apparent attempt to intimidate him. I mention all of this to say that just because Serimedo is now in jail, it doesn’t mean that these types of digital influence campaigns heavily fueled by an inter International far right aren’t happening. As I mentioned last time, Serimedo is just one piece in a puzzle, a cog and a wheel, albeit one very important cog. But actions pushing disinformation online are still happening. We just don’t necessarily know from who or where. Here’s one example. About a week ago, the Brazilian journalistic outlet Ajencia Publica reported in conjunction with Aos Fatos that AI farms were fueling the far right agenda in the lead up to the elections. The bots had created 255 profiles and made over a thousand posts. Agencia Publica reported that the network had “achieved 58 million views, expanding the reach of posts supporting the Bolsonaro family and attacking the Supreme Court.” It’s a strategy known as astroturfing, using artificial engagement to give the impression of a real surge in grassroots support.

All of this happened over one month between August and September. According to the investigation, one of the main nodes of this AI campaign was linked to the Instagram account Leo Indio Bolsonaro. That is managed by Leonardo Rodriguez de Jesus. He is Flavio and Eduardo Bolsonaro’s cousin. He was investigated by Brazilian officials for his role in the 2023 attempted coup. A warrant for his arrest was ordered in 2025. He fled the country. He’s reportedly now in Argentina. The point is this, these campaigns are happening. We often just don’t hear about them until after the fact.

Maria Marta Bruno:

Well, I’ve been voting since 1998 and I have never seen such level of interference of foreign interference in Brazilian elections.

Michael Fox:

Maria Marta Bruno is a journalist with Agencia Publica, the outlet I mentioned earlier. If you remember, I spoke with her in the last episode as well about Serimedo.

Maria Marta Bruno:

It reminds me a lot of what I have read in history books and what I have learned on the Brazilian dictatorship and the very clear role that the US developed from 1964 to 1985 when the military dictatorship in Brazil took place. There was never since the end of the dictatorship such open intervention.

Michael Fox:

Maria says there have been a lot of headlines lately mentioning diplomatic tension between Brazil and the United States, but she says what we’re seeing goes far beyond that.

Maria Marta Bruno:

Because given the gravity and the timing of the recent facts, I would say that it constitutes a clear interference in our process.

Michael Fox:

She highlights Trump’s tariffs on Brazil both last year and this year, which she says are wrapped into defending former President Jair Bolsonaro. She points to the numerous meetings between Flavio and Eduardo Bolsonaro with top officials in Washington over the last year, the US sanctions against Supreme Court Justice Alexandre Morais and so much more. And she says there are two other big reasons why the United States is so interested in Brazil. The first is China.

Maria Marta Bruno:

The US intentions to reduce China influence in Latin America. We all know that China, it’s a key partner for Brazil and for other countries in the region.

Michael Fox:

The second is rare earth minerals, stuff like neodymium, dysprosium, or terbium. Yeah, I don’t know what they look like either, but they’re used in EV motors, green energy technologies, military equipment, and other industries. Brazil is home to somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the total rare earth reserves in the world. It’s second only to China. In April, a US company bought up the Brazilian firm Ceja Vergi, which mines rare earth minerals in Brazil. After his meeting with Trump in May, Flavio Bolshinaro promised to work with the United States on mineral extraction. “We are the only real alternative to China for a free world,” Flavio Bolsonaro said. “Under my government, there will be long-term strategic partnership with the United States in this sector with protected investment and shared reindustrialization between the two countries. Flavio also promised that if he is elected in his first month, Brazil would join President Trump’s Shield of the America’s regional coalition.

Brazil will join the shield of the Americas together with the United States, “he said,” and countries across the region, forming a great hemispheric alliance against terrorism and organized and transnational crime. “This is Brazil’s place. It is the protagonist of the security of the Americas side by side with free and sovereign nations, he said.

Maria Marta Bruno:

And we know that the US is very interested in what we have and the reserves that we have. So it’s very significant, it’s very important, and we know that the US is following closely the development of the presidential elections here because they will certainly determine what will be the future of the diplomatic relation between US and Brazil in the upcoming years.

Michael Fox:

In the face of all of this, Brazilians are responding none louder than President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva.

Jair Bolsonaro:

The assembly will now hear and address by his excellency, Luis Inacio Lula Da Silva, president of the Federated Republic of Brazil.

Michael Fox:

The day is September 22nd, 2026, New York City. Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva walks to the podium at the United Nations to kick off the 81st General Assembly meeting. Without mentioning him, Lula speaks directly to US President Donald Trump. “Brazil does not fit into anyone’s backyard,” he says. Lula denounces Trump for attacking democracy, interfering in elections and using military force to acquire material resources across Latin America. He closes his speech with a nod to the upcoming high stakes elections in Brazil. On October 4th, he says, “Millions of Brazilians go to the polls to decide their future. They will not just elect the president of the republic, state governors, and representatives of the legislative power. They will decide between democracy and denialism, between if Brazil is going to move toward a future of more opportunities or return to a past of exclusion.”. He says Brazil will have free and transparent elections as it always has with broad freedom of speech.

He denounces the spread of disinformation online, in particular coming from outside the country, which he says is an attempt to “disrupt the debate.”.

“We have a modern and robust electoral system,” he says. “We have a plural citizenship and a free press. We will not allow the enemies of democracy, both internal and external, to attack the popular will. Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians. Brazil will continue to be a sovereign country. No one, no one will take us away from this path, “he says. It’s Lula’s response to Trump and the world as the country faces incredibly important elections, elections that Trump and the United States have been attempting to influence. Brazilians have been vocal online and in the streets against Washington’s pressure, and recently they actually got some support from a group of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. On September 24th, just last week, Senator Bernie Sanders and 30 Democratic members of the US House of Representatives sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They accused the Trump administration of waging a pressure campaign against Brazil ahead of the first round vote.

Illinois Congresswoman Delia Ramirez led the congressional effort. They write, “We are writing to express our grave concern regarding the administration’s coordinated effort to threaten our strategic alliance with Brazil and undermine the Western Hemisphere’s second largest democracy ahead of its upcoming presidential election in October 2026. Over the course of President Trump’s second term,” they write, “We have seen US officials engage in a sustained multifaceted campaign of interference and destabilization in Brazil. They point to the shocking 50% tariffs Trump levied on the country last year amid the country’s trial against Jair Bolsonaro. They also underscored Trump’s appointment last year of Darren Beattie as a senior advisor on Brazil issues in the State Department. Beattie, a noted far-right extremist and white supremacist,” they write, “came into this post with a clear record of public statements signaling an overt ideological commitment to undermining Brazil’s democratic institutions.” The congressional representative singled out Trump’s current tariffs, his meeting with Flavio Bolsonaro at the White House, and his designation of the Brazilian drug gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

They write, “Given the Trump administration’s repeated military strikes in the region, justified in part by alleged foreign terrorist organization threats to US security, the designation has also fueled fears of potential US military intervention.” They recall comments from White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt last year that threatened Brazil could potentially face the United States’ military might.

US military action in Brazil isn’t likely, but it’s not out of the question. Nothing is under Trump’s Dunro doctrine. The lawmakers highlight that Brazil is just the latest in a quote, deeply troubling pattern of interference by the United States in foreign elections, including in Argentina, Honduras, and Columbia. Rather than helping defend democracy, they write, the United States is acting as an agent of interference and destabilization using diplomatic economic and political pressure in ways that risk weakening the country’s democratic institutions, undermining confidence in Brazil’s electoral process and inflicting further damage on our relationship with a strategic US ally and trading partner. They demand that Washington commit to recognizing the certified election results. Here’s the thing, the stakes are high. Remember Igor Fusser? He’s the professor I met at the Sao Paulo Cafe. He told me, “It’s clear that the United States is doing everything and will do everything possible to prevent the reelection of Lula in the next elections.” And Igor told me there was a reason for that, because if Flavio Bolsonaro wins, he will bow to Trump and the United States.

Igor says, “Brazil will become a country under the tutelage of the United States, a colony or almost a colony of the US as already happened with Argentina, Columbia, Venezuela, and many others. And if Lula is victorious in these elections, we will live a very intense period of confrontation between the two countries,” he says. And Igor has a really interesting analysis here. He says, “The US dominance over Latin America imposed by Trump is analogous to the control of the Soviet Union over the Eastern block countries during the Cold War under a Russian foreign policy imposed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezniv in 1968.” He says, “Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, all of those countries were formally independent nations with their own government, their own laws, their own representation in the United Nations, but these countries were not autonomous. They didn’t have sovereignty. Any movement that they made that clashed with the interests of the Soviet Union was repressed.

Some of them were even invaded,” he says. “So we’re living in Latin America, a Breznev doctrine, capitalist, imperialist, dictated by Donald Trump. “That is why this election is so important. Brazil is the outlier, the counterweight to the United States and the region, and the US is fighting hard to bring it to heel.

We’re going to see this all unfold not in a couple of months or weeks, but in just a few days. The first round of the election is on October 4th. Brazilians are voting for their president and vice president. They’re also voting for all of the country state governors, all 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies, two-thirds of senators, and more than a thousand state assembly seats. Lula is ahead in the race, but he appears shy of the 50% needed to win outright. If no presidential candidate wins more than half of the vote, it’ll go to a second round. There, polls show the margin between Lula and Bolsonaro even tighter, and it will undoubtedly be a tough campaign. The second round, if it’s needed, is on October 25th.

That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow. Things are going to get intense in the coming days. Please consider following our new website, Pan-American Dispatch and our social media accounts for ongoing reporting on Brazil and these elections. Some of the reporting in this episode was based off of stories I produced recently for the world and The Real News. Many thanks to those outlets for all that they do. Let me remind you that if you’re craving even more backstory here, you can always go back and listen to episode 12 of the second season of Under the Shadow about Brazil’s fight against fake news in the country and the US attempt to roll it back. And please also consider checking out my 2022 podcast about Brazil under Bolsonaro. It’s called Brazil on Fire. It’s still totally relevant today. You can find that wherever you listen.

As always, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox.

There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. You can find a ton of content there exclusively also for my supporters. If you’re looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both in communities within the United States and abroad, please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. The theme music is by my band, Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing song playing right now is off our 2024 album, Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. Under the shadows of co-production of The Real News and NACLA, it’s produced in partnership with Global Exchange. This episode was written, researched, reported, and produced by me, Michael Fox. The script was edited by Heather Geis.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are talking about labor unions, why they are important, why they have always been important for working people, and why they are more important now than ever, and why you should be part of one. In their new book, Fired Up About Unions, veteran labor educator, organizer, and writer Cole Rockharts writes, “We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history. At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big. These workers are fighting not just for themselves, but for their communities too. Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and we’re really basing this conversation on Cole Rockhart’s great new book, which everyone should go read.

You can find it using the links in the show notes for this episode. And I’m really grateful to have Cole Rockarts themselves joining us on the show today. So Cole, welcome. Congratulations on this important book. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about the book and where it came from?

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. Thanks, Maximillian. It’s really exciting also to hear someone else read it because it’s just been in the ether for such a long time, so thanks for that. It’s very cool. So Fired Up About Unions, which again, you can get at BTL between the lines in Canada or AK Press in the US or your local library, give it an order there, really examines what unions are, demystifies the myths around unions, that we don’t need them, that they’re outdated, that young workers can’t be organized or different types of workers can’t be organized, and really lays the groundwork of why unions have become so weak in our respective countries in Canada and the US, and talks about why young people can be the antidote to all of the problems facing work and really unions themselves. Unions aren’t perfect, but if we take the view that unions are made up of people and we recognize that our coworkers are just regular people and we all ultimately want the same things, and that’s higher wages, protections at work, health and safety on the job, and better, that’s the great place where we can start to come together and change not only our individual situations, but as I say in the book, our communities and even beyond.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. And we’re going to be talking about how to do that, how to do better, get better, and fight better from the shop floor and beyond. And I’m so grateful with Cole’s help that we’ve pulled together an incredible panel of folks here, union organizers and members from across Canada and the US. And we’re going to dig into all this now, but first I wanted to ask if y’all could introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Hassan Husseini:

My name is Hassan Husseini. My day job is a national negotiator with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is the largest federal public sector union in Canada. As such, I’m also unionized member of Unifor Local 2025. Unifor is a merger of a couple of private sector unions in Canada, one of them being the Canadian Auto Workers that split from the American Auto Workers Union back in the 80s. And I am also a member of the National Steering Committee of Labor for Palestine Canada. I’ve been active in social justice and labor movement for 30 plus, maybe more years. Happy to be here. Thank you.

Tina Oh:

Hi folks. My name is Tina Oh. My pronouns are she/her. I’m joining in from Halifax, Nova Scotia here in Eastern Canada. My role is organizing coordinator with Service Employees International Union Local two. We’re the only national SEIU division in Canada, but I also have a role as vice president for Eastern Canada. So the region is all of Atlanta, Canada, Newfoundland, PI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Really happy to be here.

Alex Raymond:

Hey y’all, I’m Alex Raymond. I am a mental health worker out of Richmond, Virginia, United States, and I am just a regular worker organizer, very new to the labor space, but very fired up to be here.

Cole Rockarts:

My name is Cole Rocker. My pronouns are they/them, and I am a longtime union staffer, although the veteran brand doesn’t sit well when Hassan’s in the room. I’ve been working for labor unions for the past 10 years, and that’s been in Canada and the US. And I’m now a labor educator at a healthcare union in Los Angeles. And I am the author of the forthcoming book, Fired Up About Unions, which is about why young people can change the working world and the labor movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. So maybe we need an updated taxonomy. We got veterans here and then we got legends with Hassan. So we got the full spectrum here, baby. And I’m so grateful to have all of you on and to hear all of your perspectives on this important subject. So I want to dive right in and ask y’all, what have unions meant to you over your lifetime? What did you know or not know about unions before being part of one? And I’m asking that as someone who does a labor show now, but knew jack shit about unions for most of my life.

Alex Raymond:

I kind of want to just directly responding to that, that was sort of my experience, that labor organizing in mental health, that’s really not a thing. But over the years that I’ve been in this industry, almost 15 years coming up this November, we just see wages decrease the amount of patients or clients that we are responsible for increase expectations going up while benefits go down. And a lot of us just silently accept that. We get into this line of work because we care and it almost feels like a betrayal to the work that we’re so committed to, to even think that better is possible. But it had always been a discussion. And growing up, my dad, he was an organizer with SEIU in Boston during his residency, and he would always tell me this story when he was laid off for labor organizing, that it was just the proudest moment of his professional life when all of his coworkers came to his shitty Boston apartment and they essentially shut the hospital down.

There was a lot of anxiety about what that would do to patients, but there was a lot of camaraderie and that’s something that’s missing nowadays. We’re struggling to get by and we deserve better. And I think that sort of bubbled up over the last couple of years. And a group of us got together a couple years back and we started organizing from the ground up, literally Googling how to make union. And we came into contact with a lot of people that have a lot of expertise and thank God because we needed all the help we can get. And we went from zero union density to more than zero and growing each and every month. And we formed a union here in Richmond, Virginia with Teamsters Local 322. And now there are unions with United Automotive Workers within our industry as well as National Union of Healthcare Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers.

And we’ve had to learn what all those acronyms mean and what they can mean for people in our field. And it’s been a huge thing. But from my perspective growing up, I’d always thought that was such an important thing to do, but just never really knew how to go about doing it.

Hassan Husseini:

From my experience way back when I first became unionized, and I think it’s still with us today, the thinking about unions is that it’s only about money. It’s only going to put more money in your pocket by increasing your wages from what you had before you were unionized. And to me, the thing that struck me, and I think it’s still with me today and in the organizing campaigns that I was involved in, it is really important for us to recognize and talk to workers about the fact that it’s about increasing your power in the workplace. It is about working class empowerment, and it is about some of the things that Cole just rhymed off with respect to health and safety, with respect to being valued in the workplace, giving your voice on so many different committees, and taking away the power, the exclusive power that bosses have without a union.

So I didn’t know that at the beginning. I came in, I though, okay, my wage will go up a little bit, not knowing that it’s going to give me so much more empowerment both individually and as a collective within the workplace. And that is something that opened my eyes to huge possibilities for that particular workplace I was in, but for the working class generally. And that lesson is still with me up to this point. I think things are getting even worse in terms of capitalist bosses propaganda that we can give you a little bit of a bump in your wages. You don’t have to go to unions because they know that when you unionize, you have more power in the workplace and that’s what scares the shit out of them.

Tina Oh:

Hasan, I’m just going to piggyback off that because I think that last point you just mentioned about how non-union workers are still gaining and benefiting off the winds of union workers is so relevant and I think that’s how I want to answer this question. It’s going to take me a second to get there, but I’ll get there. So my family moved to Edmonton, Alberta when I was two years old. My sister was five and it was just my mom and my dad. There was no other kind of family support systems that my parents had in Canada nor in Edmonton. So that like many non-economic migrants, that meant working traditionally low wage service jobs.

My parents have never worked a union job in their working careers in this country. And one of my dad’s longest held jobs was as a housekeeper and a janitor at the Western Hotel, and that was a non-union job. But the reason why that’s relevant is that that job, even though it was non-union, it was the first job that my dad had that gave us health benefits. It was the job that ended up getting us permanent residency so that we could stay in the country. And the reason why, of course, that connects to unions is because the work of the private sector hotel unions that have raised the industry standards to the point that these non-union hotels cannot recruit workers without offering health benefits, without offering them a pathway to permanent residency. And so I think about that job, especially now that I work for a janitor’s union, SEIU Local two, half of our membership is janitors, private sector contracted out janitors.

And now that I’m in this role and I think back to my childhood and the horrors really that my parents had to face in their working careers, I know absolutely without a doubt in my mind that our lives would’ve been better had my dad had a union at that hotel or any union really. And at the same time, I also can see how our lives still greatly benefited from the wins of the working class that have progressed the labor movement to the point where non-union jobs are still offering health benefits and whatnot. So I just wanted to leave that there.

Cole Rockarts:

I think for me, it’s a bit of a combination of all these things. As my co-podcasters have just said, a union can be the difference between having healthcare or not, having benefits or not. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that my mom was unionized. She was a teacher for many years before she retired, and it wasn’t until I started getting involved in my student movement. And in Canada, the student union system is quite different than in the US, and I think the US should absolutely steal this idea from Canada. But many of our student organizations that fight for lower tuition fees or free tuition or more rights for international students or different campaigns of equity on campuses are unionized. So my first foray into having a union was starting to work at the student union and run all these campaigns as a student organizer.

And so it wasn’t until I started getting involved that I had this conversation with my mom about, “Oh, there’s this union.” And I was told to go to a meeting because there’s free pizza and I wanted free pizza. And she said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been involved in my union. I was a shop steward.” I was like, “What the hell is a shop steward? What does that even mean? And it’s essentially the person that represents the workplace while they’re actually working in there, and you can go to them with questions about your contract or different issues you’re having.” And I said, “What? You were a shop steward?” She was like, “Yeah, I used to carry the book and the book is the contract.” And I said, “I didn’t know that.” She said, “Yeah, I’ve been out on strike. I’ve been on the picket line.” And so it was years later that I realized like, “Oh my God, my parent has been a union member, has fought for these things, and it’s because of her that I have the life that I have.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s always so fascinating to me to hear stories like yours and the stories that folks have shared with me on this show for the past nine seasons. I always tell folks that I am endlessly fascinated in the stories of our fellow workers who take that step to do something, to change their conditions, because I lived most of my life not knowing that that was an option. Like most people in this country, I’m talking about the US here, when I had crappy jobs, whether they were in service or factories, warehouses, retail, I thought I only had two options. If the job sucked, I could either just stay, grin and bear it, or leave and try to find something better. I didn’t know there was a secret third thing you could do and band together with your coworkers and fight back and stay and fight to improve things.

And so to me, anyone who takes that step, especially in a country where working people are so routinely reminded and conditioned to believe that we are powerless, anyone who says otherwise and does otherwise to me is a hero. And not just that, but the way it changes your perspective on things to take that step, to organize, to bring your boss to the bargaining table, that really changes a lot of the ways that you look at the world and yourself and the work that you do. And I wanted to turn that into a question for y’all. You talked about this a bit in the first round, but I wanted to ask if you could go a little deeper and say how it changes your life at work and beyond when you become part of a union or join a union drive. Did it change the way that you guys all look at your own work in life when you did that?

Tina Oh:

For me as a young person that started labor work, I think I was 21 at the time when I first got my union job. And of course, previous to that, I was part of the student union like Cole was. And we’re living in a time where obviously we can talk about all these crises that are happening, global crises to mention that, and union work really helped make the world make more sense, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of young people, and when I reflect back to what I was thinking through when I was 21, and I’m not saying obviously I’ve got it all figured out now, certainly don’t, but I think a lot of young people are probably really confused and puzzled by all these kind of disparate crises when obviously they’re all interconnected. And maybe we could even say that they are interconnected, but it wasn’t really until I really immersed myself and understood how power works and the history of the gains that workers have made to really push the needle to where we are today.

Things really just started to click. And now when a new crisis happens in the world, it’s just less confusing for me. And I think that’s relevant because that feeling of hopelessness I think really gets reined in when you are in a fighting union because that fighting union is then about solutions and it’s about optimism and it’s about hope. And it’s also about, yeah, we might lose, but we’re just going to get back up the next day and fight again. And so that clarity really became clear when I was part of a union drive and helping workers form unions at their workplace. And seeing the transformation happen to them was so transformative for me because I’m seeing it in real time, ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah. Tina, hearing you say that, especially that piece about hopelessness was something that was deeply more so than I think I’ve even been aware of in my personal experience of work and working up until the idea that there could be something better came up in my working with this organizing that we’ve done recently. Meeting people across the country that are fighting for change and are in the exact same position. We are inexperienced, we are outnumbered, we are dealing with a very effectively organized managerial group that wants nothing more than to see us lose. And then seeing people like Sean and Noah out in Massachusetts, workers out in California coming together, Jane and Colin out in Marilyn, all these different people that I would not have met had not been for this organizing work changed a lot of that hopelessness into a deep sense of optimism that’s going to be really, really hard to lose.

And that I think is the most important way my life has changed since participating in organizing. And I see it at home, at work. We have this current style of people coming in and out of care work and healthcare, and it’s hard on us. We’re job hopping a lot, but it’s really, really hard on the clients that we serve. We work predominantly for little kids and somebody comes in, they build a relationship with you, and then you can’t afford to work the job anymore, you get burned out. And that’s devastating for those young people, and we want to change that. And since we’ve started organizing, we’re seeing turnover rates decrease. These people believe that better is possible and that possibility is brought into existence through our collective action. We alone can’t formulate what a solution might look like, but collectively we’ve found answers and we’ve put them into practice, not just in one location, but in lots of other locations.

And we’re seeing people pick up the banner with us, and it’s just been one of the most inspiring, if not the most profound experiences of my life. And hearing you speak on that just reminds me why I’m part of this fight.

Hassan Husseini:

This is a really good segue because most of you have done the organizing part, which is the hard part to organize workers into unions. My role as a national negotiator is that I come in to work with these newly organized group of workers to get in place a first collective agreement, which is challenging in and of its own, but it’s during the negotiations for a collective agreement. Well, actually it is during the organizing drive that you see their power and a recognition of the power that they have really come into fruition. But it is also a different kind of a very, very rewarding process when you’re working collectively with workers, trying to get a new collective agreement and seeing the bosses push back to put language in collective agreements that gives them more rights, more powers, more protections, more provisions. This is where you see that they are solidifying their power in the workplace and there’s nothing like it because at times when we’re negotiating new terms, and I’ve negotiated terms in the new collective agreement in the university sector, in the gaming industry, right now I have a group of firefighters in an indigenous community in Southwestern Ontario that I just came back from starting negotiations with them.

And you’ll see that their questions is that, “What do you mean we can put language in the collective agreement that is better than the minimum standards?” It’s like, yes, you are organized in order to do that. Minimum standards, you’re protected by it anyway, but your collective agreement, it relies on your power in the workplace, your power in the community, and you’ll see the relationship with their coworkers, their relationship with the boss, their relationship within the community completely changes. It gives them the confidence, it gives them the power, it gives them the power that comes with the fact that when they’re sitting at the bargaining table, no matter what, they’re equals to that boss. And of course, when the boss goes back to the workplace, they try to play games, but you cannot put back, what is that expression, the genie in a bottle or something?

They’ve recognized their power and they’re willing to take that extra steps in order to keep building on it and to demonstrate it in the workplace and outside the workplace. And there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing like it when work is recognized, I want to go Tina’s original point, recognize the power that they have in the workplace and in the community. And I’m privileged, I feel, that I get to work with workers to try to put together collective agreements that give them that extra power.

Cole Rockarts:

Yeah, I’ll just pick up on something Hassan said in his current negotiations about raising the minimum standards. And as organizers and workers, we talk about expectations a lot and great folks have written about raising expectations, so I won’t go into too much of that. But when people realize that not only can they raise the floor at their job, like Alex said, that he could change the mental healthcare industry and the ability for him to have consistency with his clients, with the kids that he’s trying to serve, that’s very mission-driven work. And we see all the time workers in organizing drives, particularly in healthcare, but lots of places, education where they say, “Well, I don’t know if I could do this because I would put the kids or the patients or whoever it is at risk.” But a lot of these campaigns are about connecting, “Well, this would actually make things way more sustainable for the work that I’m trying to do.

This would make me stay. This would help raise my wage so I can provide for my family.” All of these things go back to that question of power. And so when I think about how it changed the way I look at work and life, particularly now coming from Canada and the US, there is an entire industry that is dedicated to crushing workers’ ability to do this. And it has a lot of money behind it. It has a lot of politicians behind it. I mean, the US, we look at right to work states. We look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada right now and the attacks on trying to privatize our healthcare, which is a big no-no in Canada.

We workers, workers historically fought for all these things to get a public healthcare system to get funding. And so I think this’ll go to a little bit about the power that we’re up against, but we also talk about how we don’t have, and it’s because of people crushing unions, we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have the ability to match dollar for dollar what our bosses are doing, but what we do have is people power. And so I think I was lucky enough to get into it at 20, but since moving here, even in the past few years, I’ve completely changed the way that I see power and what workers are up against as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I mean, in the good old US of A, I mean, we have many rights on paper, but not in reality. And I’m constantly telling folks that you have a right to be a part of and form a union and collectively bargain in your workplace in this country. But in this country, that’s basically saying that Frodo Baggins has a right to go into Mordor, right? I mean, the opposition that you’re going to face, the pain that you’re going to be put through, the system that’s going to chew you up and spit you out just for exercising that right is going to take a lot from you and your coworkers, and you need to be prepared for that. And that’s what I wanted to talk about here in this round. Let’s talk about the hard stuff because we’ve seen over the past few years, over the course of me doing this show, I’ve heard it in the stories we’ve reported, this boom in energy around new labor organizing from the Starbucks workers to the Amazon workers, to the independent union movements, to the revivals within the established unions like the UAW, the Teamsters, some of the historic strikes that have happened in Canada in the past five years.

A lot is clearly happening, but at the same time, I think a lot of folks who got swept up in that energy over the past five years have also come to the hard kind of realities of unions aren’t perfect. Labor law is stacked against you. There’s going to be a whole lot of crap that you’re going to have to go through, but it is worth it. And so I want to talk about that with you guys and sort of address head on these real issues that folks have had or will face when trying to organize. So let’s talk about what people are really going to be up against when they try to unionize today in the US or Canada. And if someone’s listening to this, what do they do when their union sucks or union officials break their heart and screw them over?

Hassan Husseini:

You’re right. There are a lot of unions that, to put it in your words, can break your heart. But I always say having a union, even a shitty union is better than not having a union at all. Because even with a shitty union, there are mechanisms that you can do internally within your union in order to challenge those leaderships that are not willing to fight a good fight on your behalf, but collectively on behalf of all the workers and the community. So definitely I think we’re all on the same page or should be on the same page that unions are better than no unions whatsoever. But we also need to recognize that there are a lot of sellout unions or leaderships within unions that are no longer willing to fight a good fight. They’ve become part of the institutionalized capitalist system. They’ve lost the vision and they don’t advance anything more than protecting their careers.

And they have forgotten that unions are, after all, also political organizations of the working class. And they’ve lost that. And that’s where you see some unions or some leadership within unions making decisions that end up harming workers that they’re supposed to represent. But it’s not the end of the world because I always say that what you need to do as workers, the union is yourself. So you organize internally, you organize in order to bring democracy back into your union and your workplace. And you organize to take over, to take back those unions from those careerist elements within the union movement. Those who are willing to and understand and have class consciousness and they are fighting a class war to go back to the classics. This is the reality of it. And they’re not going to advance a lot of workers if they compromise with the employer on some fundamental issues.

And so our work is premised on the fact that we believe in the power of workers, but we also need to be very realistic about what kind of unions we’re dealing with. And also in my work in organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle and Palestinian workers, I’ve realized that the connection between those unions who are taking better positions in solidarity with international workers around the world is very much connected to how much they’re willing to fight for their own members and for the working class in Canada or the US. And those who have sold out when it comes to the class struggle in their own workplaces and communities and in Canada and the US, you find them that they’re not willing to actually be in solidarity internationally. They may pay lip service, but they don’t do anything concretely to honor that global picket line of the Palestinian people.

And as it was before, the people of South Africa that fought against apartheid. So they’re connected. Good fighting working class unions that have clarity of purpose are also clear on the local, on the national and on the international issues. And we have no choice but to continue to fight a good fight internally to make sure that they stay on the straight path or the left path rather.

Tina Oh:

I want to hear from you, Alex.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, I’m itching to jump in on this one. So what you’re up against, you hear, especially when you’re new to this, “Hey, there’s the NLRB, you have these rights and the NLRB will adjudicate if there’s any unfair action taken against you by your employer.” But my boss, Lindsay Thompson straight up fired me in writing for labor organizing and that’s still in NLRB hell. And we’re expecting a ruling any decade now, probably 2035, 2045, my grandkids will get a decision passed down. So I mean that’s the reality of it. And I’ve got some comrades that have similarly experienced pretty nefarious dealings from their employer because who’s going to stop them? They fire you, you’re kind of done for. And then on the heels of that, my union internally was going through a little bit of drama precisely when I got fired. And that happened to create a really perfect storm that weakened our bargaining unit and set us up for a lot of trouble going into 2026.

But what is the solution? To quote the adage, don’t mourn, organize. And I remind myself that these things, these institutions that exist today were built by the literal blood of people that were massacred and organizing in significantly more difficult conditions today. I lost a job, I got a new job. I wasn’t brutalized in the ways that you encounter in the history book. So not discounting the struggles that people are facing today, it’s just that the solution remains the same, which is you organize. And my union, we organize internally, brought it up to the local president. They got it fixed. He’s out there on the line with us, every opportunity he’s got. And they’ve done an incredible amount to organize with us. And not just Brian Payton with Teamsters Local 322 and a huge chunk of amazing UPS workers, Jennifer Hancock, those folks coming out, making sure that we’re all right and that this group of workers gets represented fairly.

But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially their caucus of rank and file electrical workers, it’s an internal caucus that has come together and shown up for workers in Richmond and across the country in really profound ways. If there’s a worker struggle in town, there’s going to be hard hats there. And I think it’s that kind of ethos that we need to really embrace. One worker’s struggle is my struggle and it’s been really hard. There was an understandable amount of almost desperation when we did everything right and the employer is just able to break every rule and get away with it. But I think it taught us a very valuable lesson, which is that you don’t just win a vote and then you’re all done. You organize not just to win a contract, but then to enforce it and then to be able to have the capacity to show up for other workers because there’s not just one fight and then you’re done.

This is a global fight. The cause of every member of the working class is our cause. So this is the fight of a lifetime, not just for a contract or a vote or some particular grievance. So I think it’s been hard, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons and we’re continuing to learn. And a lot of that is because of the very cool people that are on this panel today. So shout out to y’all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and obviously the fact that we have such an incredible panel of folks from Canada and the US, and Cole, you came from Canada to the US. I was wondering if you could also wrap into this question the differences of the situations and the things that folks are going to face in the US versus Canada while we’re answering this question.

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. I think I have two different parts to this answer. The first is that I think in Canada we have a different history when it comes to not only our labor movement, but our political parties. I think in the US, you folks are locked into the two party hell, that is the Democrats and the Republicans. Our system in Canada is multi-party and we had a labor movement that formed a political party that became the new Democratic Party, the NDP. And those were the folks I mentioned earlier that led to Medicare, healthcare being public in this country. And I say that not to give a knighthood to politicians because we know that everything that we’ve won in any country has come from workers pushing for that and pressuring that and always will be, always has been. And so I think that’s one of the big differences.

And obviously in the negotiation realm, when you don’t have to think about Medicare or healthcare being part of the contract and you can instead think about the things in Canada that haven’t gotten into that system like drug care, prescriptions, it changes the negotiation landscape for sure. I think the other big difference is the matter of density. And I mentioned the word density earlier, but that is how many workers percentage-wise are unionized within a given population. So in Canada, that is much, much higher. In the US, it’s brutal and it shows all of the things that have –

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re below 10% now, I believe. That’s

Cole Rockarts:

Correct. And I’ll just say to your listeners, the Economic Policy Institute put out this amazing report about what would change if union density in the US was higher. And the reality is we would have healthcare. We would have about, give or take, 7,000 extra dollars a year in your pocket. And I don’t know about anyone else on this call, but I think people could use 7,000 plus dollars a year.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that’s $7,000 a year that you would get in your contract versus the kind of fantastical fake $5,000 that President Trump is promising you if you just believe him and vote the way he wants in the midterms.

Cole Rockarts:

Exactly. And I’ll just say quickly on that, studies have shown that in countries where there are strong labor movements, there are more democracies. Even if we look at the US, we see that in right-to-work states, there are more attacks right now on the voting system than there are in states with higher union density. And so that’s kind of the first part of the answer to my question. But the second part is how is Canada and the US different? They’re not. Workers in Canada and workers in the US coming from both places, they’re not that different. They want the same things. They want higher wages, they want benefits, they want good jobs, and they want clean air and for the AI overlords to not ruin the planet and put a data center in their backyard. And so same as it ever was, workers, no matter the country, if they can get enough power, they can change things and make things better.

Tina Oh:

Everything yes, that Cole just said, a thousand percent. I just want to say genuinely, SEIU, it’s a giant of a union, one of the biggest in the US. And so when I look at my comrades in the US, not just in SEIU, but US unions in general, I really don’t have a problem in saying, I genuinely think it is harder to organize in the US than it is in Canada. And I don’t mean to say that as good or bad, as simple as that. But I think where in Canada workers have made gains like card check, which is a one-step unionization system. All you have to do is sign a union card. There’s no vote. Where there’s successor rights in the three biggest provinces of our country. So Quebec, Ontario, BC, the most populated provinces have successor rates. That means contracted workers when there’s contract flip that the new employer has to hire them on and keep their contract.

Those are two really sizable, genuinely… Those are huge wins, legislative wins that workers have made in this country. And it has, for maybe a less sophisticated word, I think it does actually produce some lazy organizing when I compare it to my comrades in the US who have to strike for recognition or right to work states where the dues aren’t guaranteed. And part of that lazy organizing is it can get dangerous, of course, because we know, just as Cole said, the bosses are the same. The power that they have will absolutely crush us. Our dollars can’t compete. Our legal can’t compete. And so when organizers on the ground, whether it’s a member organizer, worker organizer, staff organizer, is taking these shortcuts, we know we’re going to get hit by those shortcuts down the road because a fight is coming guys. A fight is always coming. And so I think it’s a really important, I think, moment for Canada-based organizers where even though we’ve made those gains like card check-in successor, that we do the right thing, which is to develop and recruit the best leaders we can in our organizations and keep it a fighting organization.

And that means yes, there might be shortcuts, but we’re actually going to do the really rigorous spade work that is required to build a fighting union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. I thought that was all beautifully and powerfully put, y’all. And it bears mentioning that you could say the same thing about unions here just a little farther back in our history. I mean, the union density in this country at its height was around 30% or a little over. I mean, unions built the middle class, they gave us the weekends. We know all the talking points, but then that middle class gave up on the struggle. They cared more about their middle class existence, their specific contracts. They lost that sense of working class solidarity. And here we are 40, 30 years later with the results. Union density below 10%, wages have been stagnant or declining, cost of living has been going up, power has been shifting to the top away from the bottom. So I think the real takeaway message from Canada to the US to everywhere is don’t get complacent.

The struggle has to continue, and I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours about how to continue that struggle. And I’m so grateful for the conversation that we’ve had, but I know we have to wrap up here. And so I wanted to finish with a big picture question that y’all have touched on in this conversation, but for folks who are listening to this right now and saying, “Yeah, that all sounds great, but why should I care about unions now in the year of our Lord 2026 when the world is on fire and everything sucks and these oligarch nut jobs are taking over everything and destroying the planet?” So what would you say to folks in closing who are still in that head space?

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, what I would say is why you should care about a union now is because things have already gotten to a point where we’re feeling the everyday economic ramifications of those decisions. And whatever inertia is kind of keeping us moving in this direction, if we can overcome that, if we can come together, we can identify any solutions that need to be found and start putting them into practice so that we can build a future that we want to be part of. And I know that sounds like fanciful language, but every small step in the right direction is also a step we’re not taking in the wrong direction. And it feels difficult. It feels impossible. It feels exhausting when you think about it individual terms, but you’re not alone. People like me don’t know a ton. I’m sitting on a panel today with Hassan, Cole, Tina, and you, Max, and there’s a lot of expertise out there and you’re not alone.

So nothing weaker than the feeble strength of one. We got this together.

Hassan Husseini:

Very briefly, I think that for all the reasons that you spoke about Maximilian, it’s for all these reasons, because the world is run by not oligarchs, it’s for the reason that they’re destroying the planet, the reason that we have Trump in the White House and Mark Carney in Ottawa that are governing on behalf of banks and corporations and the super rich. It’s for all these reasons that we need unions if for nothing else to equalize things, to make sure that they fight for working people on the shop floor, but also they continue to fight for better society, for all the working class. And also they continue to make sure that international solidarity is not just a performative thing, but a real element of the work of unions. And without unions and without organizing and without that kind of mass democratic organizations that we value so much, that we will fall back even more.

And so from that perspective and because of that, unions are a lot more critical today than in my opinion, they were 50 years ago or 60 or 70 years ago. And we finish on the adage again that an injury to one is an injury to all. So this is not about individual protection, it’s about a collective work, a collective organizing and collective protection and collective empowerment.

Tina Oh:

I think a good union organizer knows how to answer any question with the answer being union. And so to me, it’s why should people care about unions? Well, it’s less about why people should care about unions, more about do you want a better life for you and your family and your loved ones? If so, the only answer is union. And I believe that. We just talked about the trickle down effects of increasing union density is that we live in a better society. There’s healthcare improvements, education improvements, life expectancy, I’m sure. And so I think that question that Cole talked about, workers in US, Canada, across any border, they want a better life for themselves and their families. I don’t know a single ordinary working person that doesn’t. And the answer to that question is going to be union.

Cole Rockarts:

Couldn’t agree more. I think the answer is unions. If we look at the world being on fire, what’s going to protect workers that are going out in increasingly record-breaking heat working outside if they’re postal worker, construction laborer, what is going to do that? Is the boss going to say, “Oh, I’m recognizing it’s a bit hot and unsafe out there. This doesn’t need to get built today. This work doesn’t need to get done.” No, bosses are going to continue to try and extract as much as they can. So that’s one example. If we look at this mass global movement in many countries, unionized dock workers have stopped the ports and refused to unload Israeli cargo.

The struggle of the anti-war movement, the struggle for basic protections of not dying on the job, and yes, the individual and materialistic thing of wanting more money in your bank account so you can pay your rent, so you can buy food, so you can get the basic necessities, all comes from having a strong resourced infrastructure. And the only thing that working people have in this country right now is a union. And so that would be my answer. Why should you care about unions now? It is literally the only thing that working people have on our side. And that’s not big you union, that’s you and your coworkers coming together to push for more and to fight the boss and to hopefully win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Hassan Husseini of the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Labor for Palestine Canada, Tina Oh of SEIU Local two in Halifax, Canada, Alex Raymond of Teamsters Local 322 in Virginia, and Cole Rockhart’s veteran labor educator and organizer and author of the excellent new book, Fired Up About Unions, which everyone should go read. And you can learn more about the book using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing weekly at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories of people on the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and The Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really, really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

MANSA MUSA:  Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.

Joining me today is Andrea James, activist in every sense of the word. I want to say abolitionist, but she’s an activist in every sense of the word, organizing, and is currently running for the governor of Massachusetts.

Thank you for joining me, Andrea.

ANDREA JAMES:  Thank you for having me. It’s really great to be back in your studio, and just to have the privilege of being a part of how you disseminate information. It’s really an honor to be here, and I thank you for this opportunity.

MANSA MUSA:  And we want to go on record right now saying that here at Rattling the Bars, we recognize that it’s a so-called two-party system. And we recognize that, when you’re dealing with electoral politics, that if you’re not a traditional Democrat or Republican or so-called Independent, according to their definition, you’re not going to get the recognition. So we are here primarily to level the playing field. It’s not our endorsement of it, it’s more opportunity for her to talk about her candidacy, why she’s in this position, why she’s running, and what she expect. 

And with that being said, introduce yourself to our audience, Andrea.

ANDREA JAMES:  Well, I want to say thank you for introducing me as an abolitionist. I mean, I am an abolitionist. I have had a direct experience that causes me to understand that this country has had more than 250, but 250 recognizable years of incarceration of prison and prison building and incarcerating people in cages. And actually, I believe in direct experience and that that’s what leaders should have, some level of direct experience so that there’s an urgency around the issues that need to be worked on. And so I’ve had the experience of incarceration myself personally, and I happen to know, having lived in a women’s prison, that they only cause further harm and that they are antithetical to getting us to a place of having whole, healed, and healthy communities and people. So I am a prison abolitionist, absolutely. And thank you for referring to me in that manner.

Why I’m running has a lot to do with that experience in 15-plus years specifically. Decades prior to that in my lifetime came from a family, African American family of Civil Rights folk breaking color barriers and so forth in law, in the field of medicine. My grandmother was the first Black nurse in the city of Boston. I’m from a community that is the most incarcerated community in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. We’ve been in Massachusetts for seven generations, in the same old house in Roxbury for five generations. 

And so why I’m running is this alchemy of these life experiences that have brought me to where I am in my life today with my understanding of these issues and also who I am today. And that includes all of my life experiences, not just the highs that I’ve reached and the accomplishments that I’ve had and the academic achievements that I’ve had the privilege to be exposed to, but also my incarceration, which has been one of the most important experiences of my life that propelled me.

This was 20-plus years ago. I made a mistake in my law practice. I wound up on a prison bunk in federal prison for wire fraud. And what I received and learned from that experience after having been a criminal defense attorney, after having worked my entire adult life on ending mass incarceration and bringing attention to that issue and then having the direct experience of myself of living in a prison, I knew immediately after being surrounded by all these women, I had to survive 24 months of incarceration. I was laying next to, head to toe, head to toe, head to toe on a prison bunk next to sisters who had been in there for 24 years. I mean, I knew. 

My parents were researchers of people of African diaspora. When I was a kid, they were traveling all over the world with us, showing us different cultures of our people. And one of them was a trip to Gorée Island, where we saw where they enslaved African people, put them into caves, waited for ships to come, load them on like cargo, and take them to every single place on the planet to work as labor. And when I was in that prison, I wrote a book, a memoir called Upper Bunkies Unite. And because I was on a top bunk and I remember looking up over this sea of Black women and being like, damn, the first thing that came to mind all those years later was Gorée Island, was how they stacked us.

And so I’m running for all of that, and I’m running for more of the immediacy of creating change right now. I’ve been going to the Massachusetts state House for 15 years writing policy, writing legislation, giving of my voice, my experience, to panels and state legislative hearings and congressional hearings, and being trotted out for all of the things on the federal level policy. And enough is enough. Enough is enough. 

And I have done every piece. I’m older. I’m older. I believe in pouring into our young because they’re brilliant. They have a language now that like, what y’all talking about, but I like how it sounds. But we need to break the ceiling of the caste system that they expect us to continue to live under. And I refuse to do it any longer. I refuse to be made a chump in an electoral process that is not addressing the needs of the people that are millions, that, actually, in Massachusetts, have become the majority of people who are dissatisfied with either of the establishment parties, meaning the Democrats or the Republicans, that 67% of voters in the commonwealth of Massachusetts have become unenrolled. 

Now, does it mean that they’re all the way over here, prison abolitionists and to the left and progressives like I am? I don’t even call myself a progressive because that’s been co-opted in so many ways to help democratic socialists get into office and so forth that do not go far enough for me. However, we need to be a part of this in more ways than just being on the table. 

We need to shake up. I mean, you talk about rattling the bars, the electoral process needs to, those bars need to be rattled. We get people into office and they think the job, the hard work, was getting elected — Which is an arduous process even when you have their millions of dollars, which we don’t — But still too many of our electeds have gotten into office and they thought getting into office was the job. And then term after term after term, they’re just comfortable. It’s like, they have a job. They have a nine-to-five that they go to.

MANSA MUSA:  Let me ask you this here.

ANDREA JAMES:  Yeah.

MANSA MUSA:  OK. So, you already clarified the so-called progressive. We agree that the term in and of itself says one thing, but the behavior says something else. But you are running as an Independent. Now juxtapose that against Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has ran as the longest Independent, but how do you see yourself when you say you’re Independent? Is your Independency similar to Bernie Sanders, same, or are you saying Independent in fact and not in theory?

ANDREA JAMES:  I’m Independent in fact. I mean, I’m running on issues.

MANSA MUSA:  Come on.

ANDREA JAMES:  I am not running on any party platform, and I refuse to be constricted by a party platform. I unenrolled because I was a member of the Democratic Party, I was raised by strong Black Democratic women over the generations in my family. I unenrolled because I thought it was unconscionable what the Democratic Party has become. And I believe that it is a duopoly between the Republican parties and the Democratic parties.

That being said, I wasn’t running on any party because I’ve seen the party that I expected to do, carry the water and make the noise on behalf of the issues that are affecting so many people. When they weren’t doing that term after term, elected position after elected position, I decided the party platforms are not going to carry the work that needs to be done. So I said, I’m going to work on these four issues.

Now I care about a lot of other issues, trust me. But right now in the compounded crises that people are going through, everyday people are going through in the communities like mine across the country, but specifically across the commonwealth of Massachusetts, we’re a commonwealth. It’s different when you’re a commonwealth, that means of the people. We become a corporate wealth. And our campaign is it’s the commonwealth, not the corporate wealth. We are under the oppression and control of a corporate agenda right now in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. So wealthy donors and corporations are getting the focus and the attention that working families, underemployed, unemployed, formerly incarcerated people, people who have gone through a state of struggle, the focus should be on. We’re a commonwealth. But I’m running on four issues.

MANSA MUSA:  Come on, talk about it.

ANDREA JAMES:  So that it is very clear because they’ve co-opted the term “affordability.” They’ve listened to our language and taken our language, both the Republican and the Democratic candidate, and morphed our abolitionist language into their establishment party agenda. 

So I said, I’m not dealing with none of that. I’m an Independent, meaning I am running on issues, not any sort of party platform or party identity. We don’t have an Independent party in Massachusetts. We’re just called unenrolled/Independents. So it’s not even that I’m running on a platform called Independent. I’m running on four issues: housing, universal healthcare, childcare, and equitably funded education. 

Why those issues? Because I am the voice of the people who have been just tamped down into a caste system that is only growing and widening. So before it used to be all of us, Black, Brown. We have a wealth gap in the commonwealth of Massachusetts that is astounding that nobody even wants to talk about. It’s always like, why has it got to be about race? Because everything is about race, baby [Musa laughs]. And so we’ve got to discuss that. But we’ve got an unemployment rate that is double for Black people in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. 

And so, these are things that we have to talk about, but the issues that I’m running on are issues that would create an immediate lift. I call it lifting from the bottom and closing the gaps. When you talk about unaffordability, it is at a crisis level in this state and around the country, but housing, universal healthcare, childcare, and equitably funded education immediately gives economic empowerment to the people, the millions of people just in the commonwealth of Massachusetts alone, the wealthiest state in the country, that has been completely left out of that.

So, we have nurses and firemen right now who can’t afford places to live. And so it has expanded. It’s no longer just formerly incarcerated people who got no chance in hell — That’s got no chance in finding support, I should say. We still make it, but in finding support in climbing out of that hole they tried to bury us in and get back on our feet and raise our children and bring our families back together and restitch the fabric that they’ve shredded economically, family-wise. But it’s expanded to a lot of the middle class, so to speak, who are now feeling the same level of pain, even as they still are intact and have their jobs and may have a house or may be able to figure out how to pay their rent, but really are not making a living wage themselves.

And so housing, universal health care, why universal health care that’s single payer health care. I’ve traveled the world in the work that I’ve done as an expert on women and incarceration. I’ve talked to parliaments in different countries about the issue. I’ve visited women’s prisons all over the world. And while doing that, I have had the experience of those countries and their major cities and how they address policy. Well, housing is a number one thing in many of these places, but also they have universal healthcare. They’re not beholden to what we’re stuck with, which is the CEOs who make $200 million, with a M, a year who run health care companies in the United States. And we have no benefit of it. We pay high premiums, we have deductibles, and most of the time we have to ask if they’ll fix something for us and it’s denied.

And so universal healthcare is one way to immediately infuse some economic stability in the families and in the everyday people in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. If we have single-payer health care, which means the state takes over completely — Which we are uniquely poised to do here because Massachusetts already controls its own health care market — And so the only reason we don’t have it is that because the governor and the other leadership in the commonwealth of legislature are beholden to the wealthy donors who are the CEOs and their rank and file who donate money to these campaigns. Because there is no other way to explain in the commonwealth of Massachusetts where we already control our own health care marketplace, where it does not make fiscal sense or it’s not fiscally responsible to not have single-payer health care, that we still have it, except that we will hold in place because of the lobbyists, the health care industry, and the CEOs that make us have to pay all of this money for health care that does not produce the level of health and wellness that we deserve.

MANSA MUSA:  OK. Let me ask you this here then. OK, so you already acknowledged that you got this wealth gap, and you got in terms of the political structure. So how are you managing being competitive in the sense of being able to get out and get your message out unless are you getting PAC money? Are you getting corporate money? So how are you funding your campaign? How do you see it? Because like you say, you up against, just to your own point, it ain’t commonwealth, it’s corporate wealth. If it’s corporate wealth, right?

ANDREA JAMES:  Millions and millions of dollars. Millions of dollars. The Republican candidate in this race, there’s three of us. First of all, mainstream media is beholden to the Democratic Party and they only refer to her. And in reference to the Republican candidate running against us, they only refer to one opponent running this race against our current Democratic governor. There’s three of us. There’s not just two. So mainstream media plays a huge role in completely blocking. 

Took 10,000 signatures, they didn’t think we could get it as an independent candidate. We got 13,311 certified signatures from the secretary of state — Certified at the secretary of state’s office, which means I am on the general election ballot on Nov. 3. 

Mainstream media has refused to include me in anything. We did our first mainstream media interview that aired Sunday morning, the very first one, but yet that same network is hosting one of the few debates that the current governor, Mara Healy, has agreed [to do]. They left it up to her. They let her do all the deciding. There’s three candidates, but she’s the one that got to decide where she was going to show up. Fine. They’re excluding me from the debates, the mainstream networks. I’m a candidate. I am on the ballot, and I am being excluded from being in the debate. 

When I asked the other network that I just did the interview with, why had they not invited me into the debate between the gubernatorial candidates? And they said, because the people have expressed that they only want to hear from the establishment parties. Well, that’s interesting in Massachusetts where 67% of the voter roll are currently unenrolled Independents. So who are you talking to?

And so, it doesn’t matter. What Donald Trump is doing right now with mainstream media on the national level, CNN and all them, he just kicked them out of the press [inaudible] their credentials, and they’re on the sidewalk outside of the White House trying to do an interview, being fed information from inside the press room. That’s exactly what these networks are doing to me by inviting us into the debate and allowing the voters to hear the messages, to be informed voters, and not just mainstream media being able to determine who gets to be heard and who doesn’t get to be heard. That’s violation of constitutional rights, of [the] First Amendment, there’s a plethora of wrongness with it, and that shouldn’t happen.

And so then we got to talk about the money, right? So the current governor’s a millionaire, but she also has millions of dollars that have flowed into her campaign by corporations, the CEO. And then all you got to do, it’s all public knowledge. Anybody can look at ours, they can look at theirs, and you can see where the money’s coming from. And it’s all the wealth and power in the commonwealth and people of wealth and power who want to make sure that the Democratic platform stays intact.

Now look at the Republican candidate that’s running against us. He’s got a $31 million mansion in Montana somewhere, a summer home in Montana. But he, at the start of his race, said, I’m putting $10 million into this race. So they’ve got commercials running, they’ve got all kinds of stuff that we don’t have. So the only thing that we have is an opportunity to be blessed, to be invited into opportunities like this, like what you have always provided for us at Rattling the Bars, but it’s about boots on the ground. And that’s one thing that our style of organizing didn’t change because it shifted to electoral politics.

So we know how to do this. It’s still hard because you have to pay for signs. You have to pay for, even though — Here’s an example. I don’t know if you can see it because my screen —

MANSA MUSA:  Yeah, I can see it.

ANDREA JAMES:  But throughout this entire campaign, our money has been spent on toner and paper. You know what I mean? Because we’ve been talking to Independent candidates, Kshama out in Washington State, and just talking to their campaign managers about how y’all getting this done against multi, multimillions of dollars that are just, they’re not even talking about us yet because they don’t want to give any rise to the awareness of people that there is a person like myself running. So they’re just suppressing everything else by covering everything with signs, with commercials, things that we just don’t have. 

So we’re doing our best. We’re boots on the ground. It took them two days to get 10,000 signatures to get back on the ballot. It took us months because we were grassroots. I stood outside in the rain, the heat, the snow, whatever for months, personally asking people if they would sign my ballot sheet. But also it gave me an opportunity to have conversations with people about what’s their pain points, what do they need in their lives to create joy? It’s not just about the struggle we’re going through, but where are the investments to create joy in the lives of the people of the commonwealth, all of us.

So it has been a really — And then again, Massachusetts is a blue, blue state. We got a blue governor, which is another reason why I ran because I’m like, hold up. The line in the sand for me was we went — So, Massachusetts was one of three states up until 2000 that allowed incarcerated people to vote, full access to the ballot. They took that right away from incarcerated people in 2000 because the brothers inside of a men’s prison here called Norfolk State Prison started to organize themselves. And they started to organize themselves because of the hard draconian sentences that more of these young brothers were starting to come into the prison with these real heavy sentences hanging over them, young. 

And so the Legislature was predominantly white and male was like, oh wait, you going to organize yourselves and your families on the outside? We make 7% of the population, Black folks in Massachusetts. We make up 51% of the carceral population. First of all, make that make sense. Math ain’t mathing, OK?

So they said, we’re going to strip you of the right to vote. And they did. They had to move heaven and earth. They had to change the Massachusetts Constitution to strip us of the right to vote inside.

Now, we have been fighting to reinstate that ever since. And so, they got a congressional hearing in one of the sessions, and we went and poured our hearts out. And with my testimony, I lined up the fact that this is voter suppression. This goes back to denying Black people the right to vote whenever you have a disproportionality in the numbers of Black folks in the state and the levels of incarceration, on and on. Well, they didn’t even reconvene after the hearing to discuss it. It never made it out of committee. It was what every other piece of our legislation that we have worked on over decades went to what they call “went to study.” 

That was it for me. Y’all ain’t even going to huddle and discuss this after we came in and poured our hearts out about why it’s important as people who have had direct experience with incarceration for people inside to vote. I was a mother. I had a 5-month-old little baby boy when they made me go into the prison, a 12-year-old daughter, and young adult, a son and two daughters. I had good reason to still have my right to vote.

MANSA MUSA:  Right. Answer this here, Andrea. And I want you to put yourself in this space, your candidacy in this space. So when we was at the Free Her March, I asked you about that, and this is what you said. You said when we first started this, the first time we came down here, we had a hundred people. The day that we was down there, we had blocks and blocks and blocks of people. We had Freedom Plaza flooded. So that’s one. I want you to put your candidacy in these two spaces. How do you see your candidacy in this light?

I was in Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts, I think year before last, where they was doing a showing of the movie called “The Strike,” where they shut down Pelican Bay, where the men shut down. How do you see your candidacy in terms of you was in a prison where they was treating y’all like animals, y’all made y’all minds up when y’all got out, when y’all got in a position to change the narrative, you was going to change it systematically and continuously, you changed it. Her movement. 

When I was down there where the buses was at, I ran into a lot of sisters I had dealt with and interviewed. Everybody was energized. Strike. They organized this strike throughout California under a situation where they ain’t even had the ability to communicate. So put your candidacy under that type of light.

ANDREA JAMES:  Well, we did. We started our work as incarcerated women inside of a federal prison and we were like, You know what? We don’t hear nothing about us, the separation of us from our children, whatever. So we organized ourselves in that prison, and we didn’t have no way of… We were writing letters and sending kites outside, whatever we could do to raise awareness of the issue of the incarceration of women and our separation from us from our children. But if you look at the life of a woman on a prison bunk, every issue that we are fighting for has been a factor that led them to that prison bunk. The lack of housing, the lack of health care, the lack of education, the lack of childcare, the lack of resources for the most vulnerable among us. And so that’s the first thing.

The second thing is I’m older. I’m older, and they want to create a narrative, and have created a narrative, that we have no more value and we don’t count. And the issues that we’re talking about, nobody should listen to because we have incarcerated or formerly incarcerated as part of who we are. And because of that, we just valueless now. We have no more authority. We cannot be accountable. We cannot be relied upon to run these institutions, to run these states. 

And they have these positions like Qiana Johnson, county clerk. What? Come on now. We got the first formerly incarcerated Black woman who is now the clerk in Prince George’s County. This is what we talking about. We’ve got a new Black woman mayor in Washington, D.C. because of the rallying and the intense work that Black women did, formerly incarcerated Black women did, to change that and put new leadership into that seat. 

So I want to be that. Let me break the mold. You know what I mean? It’s a win-win for us as far as I’m concerned because I’m challenging that. Yeah, they’re like, oh, now they started out only writing stories. There’d be one page of a story when I announced my candidacy a year ago and the whole page was filled up linking my case and talking about my transgression of wire fraud and went to federal prison as a lawyer and one little line that said, oh, and by the way, she’s running for governor.

So I’m like, OK, somebody has to step out and kind of be like, OK, I’m the whipping post. You know what I mean? Because I’m going to push back on that. And what? I don’t have time to talk about that. I have time to talk about why it’s important to have people with direct experience who actually know and have the urgency, the transparency, the accountability that it requires that we don’t currently have from our current legislature, from our current governor, particularly in Massachusetts. Massachusetts just received the Black Hole Award in the country. That means the least transparency in any state in the United States. The least. We have the least effective legislature in the entire country. So we have to do something different. 

And they’ve made it impossible pretty much if you have a felony conviction to run for things. You can’t be a state legislator for the felony conviction in Massachusetts, but guess what they didn’t think anybody would have the nerve to do as a formerly incarcerated person? Run for governor. But also I’m not a politician. I’m a community organizer, and I have no interest in making a career out of starting from school committee and working my way up and sitting around in the state legislature. I’m going straight to the top.

MANSA MUSA:  To the top. Yeah, that’s right.

ANDREA JAMES:  Where we can get the things moving that we need to have moving. And so if this just tills the soil, I have had so many sisters in our network across the country say, hey sis, I’m going to run for office now. You’ve inspired me. That’s what I’m talking about.

MANSA MUSA:  One thing for sure and two things for certain, you got a broad network in terms, I seen the response that you got from men and women coming out that’s in this space. So what kind of feedback, because you told me earlier that you’ve been traveling across the state. And I want to say this, because Massachusetts got the misnomer of being a progressive state, the Kennedy and whatnot, but talk about what kind of response you getting from the people that you’re talking to across the state. And I know you going everywhere, every crevice. Talk about the response you’re getting from the people that’s going to be responsible for you getting elected, because I believe you can get elected and you will get elected.

ANDREA JAMES:  Well, those are the communities that I’m in where no other politicians seem to go. The people who represent those communities go there when it’s election time and then they become the untouchables. Nobody sees them or hears from them. I’ve been in the western part of the state, which is closer to New York than it is to Massachusetts. They wear Yankees caps as opposed to Red Sox hats because they are completely disconnected. I’m talking about what’s the Springfield, Holyoke, Chicopee, these towns that… I was in Holyoke last year and this sister said to me, you came all the way out here. And I was like, of course I came out here it’s a part of Massachusetts, isn’t it? She was like, nobody comes out here. They can’t even tell you who the governor is in those parts of the state. And it’s mostly Black and Brown. Black, Brown and poor. And they’re feeling like they don’t even vote. 

And so we have this tiny, tiny base of predominantly Democrats who are holding a party platform in place. There’s not enough Republicans in Massachusetts to make that matter. And they are predominantly white. They do not have the direct experience of struggle economically, and they have co-opted the term “progressive,” and they go to things like No Kings and hold signs because that’s the only kind of way that they’re feeling like they could make a difference. They will never vote for me. And so I’m like, if you vote for me, I would love, great, you have a choice. We just want you to know that. I [inaudible] communities that are in the housing developments, you know what I mean? Up in the projects. I’m knocking doors there. I’m talking to people in towns where people are like, Don’t nobody vote out here. And I’ve never voted. But we’ve been simultaneously doing a voter registration drive along with this campaign from day one.

We have a false belief amongst the majority of formerly incarcerated Black men that I’ve found out running this race over the past year that do not even know that they can vote because they’ve been told when they leave the prison. Massachusetts, if you’re felony conviction in a state prison, they took the right to vote. But the minute you walk out of that door, if you were registered before, all you got to do is go and vote again. If you aren’t registered, you can register and vote in the next election. We can vote as formerly incarcerated people in Massachusetts as long as we are not currently serving a state prison sentence for a felony conviction.

If you’re in jail in Massachusetts, you can vote. You can vote while you are serving a misdemeanor sentence in a county jail, access to the ballot. Do they have it? No. So those are the people that we’re talking to.

And again, we live. I get it. So many people have said to me, Black people have said to me, sis, I don’t vote. I would vote for you, but I can’t vote. I’m formerly incarcerated. We correct that and say, You can. We get them registered. We tell them, you don’t have to go into the voting place. You can get a mail-in ballot. You can do all these things. The other piece of that is no matter what, too many Black and Brown folks have said to me, I don’t even believe in the process, sis. I don’t vote. 

And now my response to that is one in six Black children in the commonwealth of Massachusetts go to bed hungry. 30,000 children, predominantly Black and Brown and poor kids, sleep in a car or under some makeshift shelter every single night in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. If they still go to school, they go to schools that are woefully, unequally funded, underfunded, and they just had more teacher layoffs.

If you say to me, I’m asking you, I’m an elder Black woman running for office. We’ve never had a candidate like me. I’m asking you to get engaged just to vote. Just vote. Vote for us. Vote for our issues. If I’m wrong, I’m willing to step out of the electoral process and to do. What are you doing? When I tell you that, do you have children? Most of them tell me yes. Do you care about the Black child over here who’s going to bed hungry every night, that’s sleeping on the street? If you have a better way to approach that, I’d like to know. If you have an alternative to getting somebody like myself in the governor’s seat to create immediate significant radical change that is going to start not from a budget that they’ve created that has no transparency, that nobody knows if it’s true, if it’s not true, that we voted for an audit that we can’t get.

We don’t know how much money’s there. We don’t know who’s deciding where money should be allocated. If you don’t understand the power to not start from a budget that we don’t even know if it’s true or not, but instead start from the issues and the people that need the support the most and make that the priority for the work and where the money is being spent. Then tell me what you have as an alternative for me to make sure as a mother who raised Black children, as a grandmother who now has grand babies and is from a community that the fabric has been shredded by all of these systems, you tell me what your proposal to me is so that I’m not wasting my time any longer so I can make sure that these Black babies and these poor families, white, Black, Brown, whatever, we don’t have any more children who are hungry and sleeping on the street.

MANSA MUSA:  Andrea, tell our audience as we close out how they can get involved with your campaign or how they can get more information rather about your campaign.

ANDREA JAMES:  We don’t have millions of dollars. We barely have any dollars. Our money comes from mostly poor, formerly incarcerated Black, white, Brown women who just are urgent to create change in their own families and communities who are struggling just to feed their kids, find a place to live and the whole bit. AJFOR — That shows my age. My kids were like, Ma, why didn’t you just put the number four? Because I didn’t know — So ajforma.com, that’s our website. You go there, there’s a volunteer form, there’s a donate button. No amount is too small. We get $5, $10, $15, $20 donations, and that has carried us for whatever we’ve been able to get the signs, whatever we’ve been able to do. We’re doing lit drops right now. Lit drops are where you carve out turf and you literally drop in literature like this so that people know we’re running and knocking on doors, door knocking.

Anybody who’s run campaigns like we have to stop prison builds and so forth, you’ve door knocked with me. Come and stand with me and door knock for this campaign now. It is change. And so that’s how they can. Ajforma.com, hit us up, send us an email, whatever you want to do, ajames@ajforma.com. All the information’s on our website. And we’ve got 45 [days]maybe, I don’t know, Nov. 3 is the election day. We are in the 11th hour, and still too many people in the commonwealth of Massachusetts who want or are looking for change don’t know about this campaign because mainstream media has intentionally left us out. And so we need help. We need boots on the ground who can go do a standout for us, disseminate our lit for us, put a yard sign if you have a yard or a window sign if you have a window. We need to raise awareness and we need to do it right now.