Episode 2: The People V. UC: Thomas Harvey and Mark Kleiman

Episode Transcript
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Intro (00:04):
Welcome to the Lower Frequencies, a podcast brought
to you by the UC Ethnic StudiesCouncil.

Sean (00:21):
Hi, my name is Sean Malloy.
I'm a professor of History andCritical Race and Ethnic Studies
at the University of CaliforniaMerced, and a member of the UC
Ethnic Studies Council and I'llbe co-hosting today's podcast
with Christine Hong, a professorof Critical Race and Ethnic
Studies at the University ofCalifornia Santa Cruz, who is

(00:41):
also a member of the UC EthnicStudies Council.
Christine?

Christine (00:47):
Over the past two years, as the University of
California has waged war againststudents, faculty, staff, and
community members who haveprotested and organized against
Israel's genocide ofPalestinians and Gaza, lawyers
have assumed critical positionsin the trenches of the struggle,

(01:08):
defending the people of the UCfrom criminalization,
deportation, police brutality,harassment, loss of work,
reputational harm, and otherforms of administrative violence
by UC leadership and the state.
Who are these movement lawyers,and what is movement law?

(01:31):
How has this band of tirelessdefenders kept the people safe
against the UCs genocidalinterests and repressive
investments?
What insight do these lawyersfurnish into a politics of the
present, particularly withregard to the fascistic assault

(01:52):
on education?

Sean (01:55):
In the first of what will be an ongoing series entitled
"The People Verse the UC" wespeak to two lawyers who have
played vital roles in defendingmembers of the UC community, and
to whom countless of us aredeeply indebted.
Mark Kleinman and Thomas Harvey.
And if we could start Mark andThomas by having you introduce
yourselves briefly.

Mark (02:16):
Sure.
I'm Mark Kleinman and whateveryou hear about me later, I am
innocent.
I got kicked out of high schoolfor passing out anti-war
leaflets I had written eons agoback during the Vietnam War, and
quickly discovered that movementlawyers who had my back allowed

(02:38):
me to do my work.
And I'm delighted to repay thefavor.

Thomas (02:43):
I'm Thomas Harvey.
I'm a civil rights attorney.
I started doing this work rightafter graduated from law school.
In 2009.
I started a nonprofit calledArch City Defenders that
provided.
Criminal and civil legalservices to unhoused folks
primarily.
And then connected them withsocial services to address
housing and treatment and jobsand transportation and things

(03:07):
they really needed.
I was doing that when Mike Brownwas murdered in Ferguson and our
organization shifted supportingorganizers and activists and
protesters who were arrested.
And essentially since that time,that has been my work is as a
lawyer supporting campaigns bothlocally and nationally while I

(03:27):
was at Advancement Project andthe bail project, and then
trying to figure out ways tohelp them with their organizing
defend people from lawsuits,defend people from criminal
charges, bring lawsuits when wecan to try to attack the state
to redUCe its capacity to cagehuman beings.
And since I've been in LosAngeles I've been in the last

(03:48):
year working with Mark and asmall group of lawyers, a sort
of informal legal collective tosupport pro-Palestinian
protestors across the state ofCalifornia, but primarily at a
couple of the UC campuses.

Christine (04:03):
You've already begun to answer this question, but I
wonder if you could delve moredeeply into your own.
Political trajectory.
So both of you are lawyers whoare firmly in the trenches of
movement work.
And Mark, I really do wonder ifyou've ever Voya your own FBI

(04:28):
file and you have been fightingfire with gasoline since 1984.
So could each of you shed somemore light on what prompted you
to get involved in movementdefense work both in the first
place and at multiple differentpoints along the way?

Mark (04:51):
Yes.
I have FOIAed, my FBI fileChristine, it came to 463
heavily redacted pages.
Among other things, I discoveredthat it started a week after my
15th birthday.
When I showed up at a picketline in front of the federal

(05:12):
building in West Los Angelesthat depending on the nature of
the encounter, my height variedfrom five foot nine to six foot
two.
I'm like a gumby.
If I was more aggressive andintimidating, I got larger,
which was cool.
I discovered that I refused toadmit to owning a car.

(05:34):
And that while in Eugene,Oregon, I had founded an
organization I had never heardof whose members sat around in a
more or less natural state anddiscuss the relationship to
society.
And I read this and I'm thinkingyeah, were we stoned?
Were we naked?
What does this actually mean?

(05:54):
And it was a vivid introductioninto what happens if you let
people like this write thingsthat get created and entombed in
a permanent record.
My sense of involvement justcame instinctively as an
alliance with underdogs and withmarginalized people and being of

(06:19):
a certain vintage, I was 15years old when the Student
Nonviolent CoordinatingCommittee actually had a button.
That they had out that said"Mississippi Vietnam Freedom is
the same all over." And it was acrash encapsulization of the
principle of the indivisibilityof justice.

(06:40):
And it made sense early on.
As a movement activist, I reallyrelied on people to have my back
so I could work as unimpeded aspossible.
Didn't go to law school untilthe Reagan era.
And decided to spend some yearsreally honing my skills as a

(07:07):
trial lawyer in high stakes,controversial litigation, doing
some movement work on the side.
Originally nice uncontroversialstuff police misconduct cases
government firing ofwhistleblowers, corporate firing
of whistleblowers that sort ofthing.

(07:27):
And I finally realized that A, Icould be doing a lot more of
this and ought to be, and bespecially.
In an environment where anybodywho dared breathe.
The P word about Palestine wasgetting trashed as an

(07:48):
antisemite, as a white maleJewish lawyer, I have all people
had an obligation to stand upand say something about the
horrible outages that wereoccurring.
And that, and a steady diet ofpolice cases were the first

(08:08):
steps on the road to sin anddegradation.
For the last seven years, I'vebeen spending a lot of my time
defending professors, defendingstudents, defending other
activists.
And of course, after thebreakout in Kaza October of 23,

(08:30):
I saw a sign that reallyepitomized the whole thing for
me.
Somebody had in red paintsomewhere in a New York subway
station that painted"anyone elsestruggling with that work
genocide balance?" And I justthought, yeah that would be me.
And it's working on these caseswith Thomas and some other

(08:54):
brothers and sisters around thecountry is now about three
quarters of what I do.
And I have to say, I can't thinkof a greater bunch of people to
be working with.
As horrible as the repressionis, and as exhausting as it is,

(09:14):
it's really uplifting to be inthe trenches with the activists
and the scholars and the otherlawyers who were locked arm in
arm trying to hold our line here

Sean (09:29):
For the benefit of our listeners, we should mention
that Mark Kleinman is six twoand devastatingly handsome.

Mark (09:37):
Only if you use a unique form of measurement.
Thank you, Sean.
You're hired as my agent.

Christine (09:44):
I'm can vouch for that too.

Mark (09:45):
Aw.
Thank you, Christine.
That is the short form versionof this.

Christine (09:51):
The movement that we're describing.
It strikes me that this is anunusually scrappy and very smart
lot of people.
And I'm constantly grateful tobe backed up by legal
powerhouses who are working inthe trenches.

(10:12):
Thomas, I know that yourtrajectory also involves a move
across the country, and youdetailed quite a bit of your
journey to being a movementlawyer for people who are
embattled within the UCspecifically around Palestine
solidarity organizing.
But could you add some moredetail and texture to the count

(10:34):
that you were giving before?

Thomas (10:36):
I think for me, one of the key moments was I was in a
PhD program at University ofCalifornia Irvine.
And I started at, right afterSeptember 11th it was a PhD
program in French and we werestudying the French Algerian
conflict.
And so in class I was readingabout, torture and terrorism and

(10:58):
water boarding.
And then in the United States wewere having this conversation,
right?
And the context was 1960s Franceand Algeria versus 2001.
United States.
And it was eyeopening to me in avariety of ways especially as
someone who was studyingliterature, but eventually that
conversation about how do younavigate moments like this

(11:22):
turned to the law.
The law ended up being a prettybig part of what those
conversations were about.
At some point during my time inthat PhD program the Bush
Administration's Office of LegalCounsel changed the definition
of torture.
Which had, wast stood precedentfor I think nearly 60 years at

(11:42):
that point.
And added this intentqualification.
So that, if we were justquestioning you and happened to
crush your spleen that's nottorture.
But if we were intending tocrush your spleen in order to
get you to respond to a questionthat might be torture.
And so that really set me off ona path of thinking a lot about

(12:05):
international law, internationalhumanitarian law, the law of
war, armed conflict, et cetera.
And I began to think moreseriously about going to law
school.
And eventually I did that.
I was 34 when I like Mark, Ithink later in life, went to law
school, started after thatexperience and, then I would say
two key things happened.
One is I was still continuingthis study of international

(12:27):
humanitarian law andinternational law, and I did a
program in Costa Rica studying alot of resolution to armed
conflict in Central and SouthAmerica.
And I was having a beer with oneof the professors and we were
all asking what do you do if youwant to be working in
international law?
And he said, you never know.
You might see violations ofinternational law in your own

(12:49):
backyard.
And when I went back to schoollaw school, I was a intern at
the Public Defender's officethrough a clinic at St.
Louis University School of Law,taught by an incredible criminal
offense lawyer Sue McGraw, whowas very influential.
And I just think any human beingwho walks into criminal court
and sees a group of almost allblack men chained together at

(13:13):
the hand and feet and marchedinto a jury box and treated like
they're not human beings wouldreact pretty strongly to it.
And I think the less connectedyou are to the legal system, the
more shocking it is to watch.
And then every layer after thatwas more shocking the way the
judge treated people, the waythey said, do you want a lawyer

(13:35):
or a public defender?
The way people were asked ifthey had money to hire a lawyer
and they were denied from thepublic defender if they made
more than$500.
It was just a sort of cavalcadeof things that were deeply
shocking to me.
And I thought, yeah these looklike human rights violations to
me, right here in my ownbackyard.

(13:55):
And then one of the roles youplayed as an intern was to
interview people.
And every person I interviewedneeded stuff that lawyers
couldn't help with.
They needed medicine forconditions.
They had, they needed a job,they needed housing.
And I thought, really, on mybest day, the best thing any
lawyer here could do is get thiscase dismissed, but it would

(14:16):
still leave all these otherthings.
And they'd walk out in the worldwith this in the same moment of
crisis.
And that led me to thinkingabout starting an organization
that could provide more thanjust the legal services.
And then, as I said what we sawwas a systemic issue with the
way the legal system created andexacerbated homelessness in St.

(14:37):
Louis.
And it was through the court,people were extracting money
from, again, almost all blackpeople, all poor people charged
with low level violations youwouldn't even think were crimes.
And they would jail them forweeks and months at a time.
And when Mike Brown wasmurdered, people went out to the
streets to protest.
The first thing they said was,I'm here for Mike Brown.
The police have been, shootingus and killing us forever.

(14:59):
And the second thing they saidwas, these cops have been
locking me up and these judgeshave been taking money from me
my whole life.
And so we had this overlap withthe work we'd already been
doing, and we began to justrepresent protesters who were
arrested.
They were in the same municipalcourt dungeons that our unhoused
clients were in.

(15:19):
And they had slightly moremoney, but not enough to pay
these fines and fees.
And that sort of 10 months ofthe Ferguson Rebellion and the
Ferguson Uprighting Rising mademe see that the law on its own,
lawyers on their own could neverreally achieve very much.
I don't mean they can't mitigateharm, I don't mean they can't
individually intervene and helppeople in important ways.

(15:42):
But I do mean that if you wantbroader systemic change, the
legal system on its own cannever achieve that.
And aligning yourself withmovements and finding ways to
contribute as a lawyer has justguided the rest of my legal
practice since then.
And then last year I left anonprofit I was working at
because I read about the protestat UC Irvine where I'd attended,

(16:07):
where they had, called in 22different police departments to
attack these students who weredemonstrating and.
I just reached out and asked ifI could help.
And since then similar to Mark.
I haven't been doing anythingelse.
It's just been working on thosecases, whether it's helping
people with their studentdiscipline, criminal defense
people who've been sued in civilcases, defending them.

(16:29):
And then also we've had ahandful of moments where we've
been able to actuallyaffirmatively sue the UCs for
the treatment of people and thepolice.

Christine (16:38):
Mark you started organizing as a teenager, at the
federal building, handing out,pamphlets and political ed and
we think about that moment of,mass galvanization and protest
against the Vietnam War in termsof its revolutionary nature.

(17:03):
But the flip side of that isNixon and Reagan's Law and Order
regime.
I'm thinking too, Thomas, whenyou're speaking, you, Sean and I
were in grad school at the sametime and post nine 11 you also
see a reverberation of history.

(17:24):
Cointel Pro gets substantiallyresurrected, albeit under a
different name and the PatriotAct.
So could I just ask you both toreflect on the ways in which
those key moments when you werecoming into political

(17:45):
consciousness were also times inwhich the legal apparatus was
consolidating in both obviousand less obvious ways to ensure
repression of radical struggle.
I often think about the factthat one thing that gunks up

(18:06):
movements is precisely whatyou're describing, Thomas, the
wearing down of people who areout in the streets, people who
are organizing, people who arewriting, people who are doing X,
y, or Z, they get gunked up inthe legal system.
I guess it's a two partquestion.
One to think about, the VietnamWar era, what emerged out of

(18:30):
that in terms of legalrepression and also the 9/11
moment?
What was the domestic criminalcorollary to the war on terror?

Mark (18:44):
Repression works because it frightens people when there
are enough people, as you saw inLos Angeles, just, over the last
couple of weeks.
Who are willing to say after ECummings,"there is some shit I

(19:04):
will not eat.
I will not kiss your fuckingflag, the model breaks down.
It breaks down because there areyou, there are only so many
people who are able to engage inthe prosecutions, crank up the
gears of firing and tormentingfaculty members and students, et

(19:25):
cetera.
So with the repression comesnumber one excess that makes the
state appear ridiculous.
At UCLA Thomas and I and some ofour colleagues were looking at,
as an example, 42 students whohad been Ziptied and cited when

(19:48):
they told me what the citationwas, I said, send me some of
them.
Conspiracy to loiter was thechurch.
And as law partner pointed.
Loitering, the whole point ofgoing to college, that's what
you're supposed to do.
So first of all, the overreachimmediately creates more allies

(20:13):
and allies that we would notnecessarily have thought we were
gonna have.
Second, courage really iscontagious.
The people who are willing tosay, fuck it, I'm taking this to
trial, I dare you and arewilling to deal with the
consequences matters.
Third, in the long term.

(20:37):
There's tremendous pressure thatgets put even on liberal.
Politicians to then try tocorrect some of the excesses.
I was part of a small team oflawyers that ultimately got
Matulis Shakur out of prison.

(20:57):
It would not have happened aseasily were there not people in
the government who realized howinsane it was that 36 years
later he was still behind barsand he was the only person still
imprisoned for what the BlackLiberation Army was doing when

(21:21):
all of the B'S white allies hadbeen released decades before.
A point we completely made.
So it is a dynamic process andit doesn't surprise me that the
repression is back.
It's just a matter of or pushingback on it again and trying to

(21:43):
contain it for a while.
I think it may have been RebeccaSonet who reminds us that,
people used to believe in thedivine right of Kings too.
None of this shit lasts.

Thomas (21:56):
Thomas.
I think when you initially askedthe question, I was thinking
more along the lines of the rolethat lawyers play in creating
repression.
It's very clear that in everyrepressive regime, there were
lawyers writing the rules,writing the laws, going to
court, and saying they were okayuntil they flipped into, overt

(22:18):
fascism and authoritarianism.
And so the Bush Administration'soffice of Legal Counsel and
Department of Justice plays ahuge role in setting up not only
the kind of repression that wesaw, especially against Muslim
communities at that time, wherein an echo of what's happening
right now, people were literallybeing snatched off the street

(22:40):
into kidnap vans.
It was in response to a momentof jingoistic patriotism in the
country.
So that's like forgotten in someways.
But that structure that theycreated and all of the defenses
that the Department of Justiceraised against their indefinite
detention, their removal thereimprisonment at Guantanamo Bay,

(23:03):
that is exactly the reason it'sso hard to get people who are
being stashed off the streetstoday.
For them to be able to exerciseand your right to challenge
their attention.
So many of these mechanisms andavenues to challenge attention
were foreclosed through thatfight by the Bush Administration
Department of Justice that nowit's virtually impossible.

(23:24):
And now we're gonna have thesame effect.
The other legal tools that werecreated at that time is this
anti-terrorism framework, whichwe're gonna see a lot more of,,
it's already happening in casesthat mark's involved in and
other friends of mine areinvolved in.
One thing I did wanna say, thefirst mention of terrorism in
any federal statute is aboutPalestine.

(23:46):
So this entire history in theUnited States of talking about
terrorism is about Palestine pis the first organization
designated as a terroristorganization.
It's just before we get toSeptember 11th, 2001, we've got
an infrastructure that, isalready sanctioning at the
behest of overtly Zionistgovernment officials and

(24:09):
electeds a whole system that'screated and exists.
And then we have September 11thand we take it up at a notch,
and now we have this and thesethings all sort of work on a
continuum back and forth.
But the notion that we canelevate protest and dissent into

(24:29):
terrorism and conspiracy issomething that has existed
before, but got transformed intoentirely different and
universally supported frameworkthat would allow us to root out
these in quotes, terrorists thatwere in our country.
And we're gonna see that moreand more now too.
So when you first ask thequestion, I was thinking about.

(24:50):
The way lawyers always play arole in this, I agree with Mark
that there's an ebb and flow andthat the state always
overreaches.
What I'm a little morecircumspect about is whether or
not people are ready in thosemoments to organize people into
different action.
I think it's right.
They always over overreach,overreact and their violence

(25:13):
stuns people.
But I think if you just asked,someone in 2001 if you could
ever imagine the National Guardand the DHS and there was no
DHS, right?
That didn't even exist.
This part of this wholeinfrastructure never existed
before.
And now they're just coming intosuburbs in Southern California

(25:35):
and going to Home Depots andkidnapping people off the street
in mass.
And people are rightly shockedby it.
But I also think even thoughit's shocking, it's less
shocking now than it would'vebeen prior to this regime that
was created that allowed forthem to have the idea that
there's an in an institutionthat has the right to via your
fourth amendment rights if youare within 100 miles of the

(25:56):
border, just didn't existbefore.
And now you have this wholemachinery that's created in 2001
and then affirmed by everypresident, right?
It's every liberal president,ever conservative president.
No one has ever reigned that in.
And now we're dealing with thoseconsequences.
Because so much of my work hasbeen with organizers and

(26:17):
activists, I'm hopeful thatpeople are gonna be able to be
out at the otherwise silly, nokings protests, right?
But people with more radicalpolls could be there catalyzing
people into different movements.
We were talking with some ofour.
Clients in the UCLA case, andthey mentioned that it was at
the end of the No Kingsauthorized, permitted

(26:40):
immediately at the end, thepolice then started brutalizing
people.
And so there were these, peoplewith more centrist politics who
were there and then gotsubjected to this incredible
violence.
And they didn't experience itfor hours while they had this
magical thing called a permitthat allowed them to voice their
opinions.
And then it got taken away.
And the same people, they werehigh fiving for letting them

(27:03):
exercise their first amendmentrights.
We're shooting them Now I thinkthose people are gonna be
radicalized, right?
But who's gonna be there tobring them in to other moments?
We hope that by, virtue ofrepresenting people, defending
people, we're gonna be able toconnect them with movements too.
That's one other thing that wecan do as lawyers when we do
find people who just say, I gotshot and I'm hurt and I'd like

(27:24):
to potentially see if I can getsome money damages for that.
We can then potentially connectthem with people organizing.
But these moments I agree withMark, are really critical.
I'm just left wondering are wegonna bring those other people
in and how are we gonna bringthem in a moment to expand the
people's ability to resist.

Sean (27:45):
I think that's a sobering and really important point to
drive home that state overreachcreates opportunities, but it
doesn't necessarily guarantee aresult or even the willingness
to take action and the importantwork that organizers and lawyers
and everybody in the movement isdoing to try to connect those
dots for folks.
I was also really struck Thomas,in your account of how your

(28:08):
personal journey in some waysmirrors something that we teach
in our classrooms about theconnection between the here and
the there.
The, imperial violence of theglobal war on terror, but also
the quotidian violence in placeslike Ferguson.
Oftentimes done with weaponsthat were originally purchased
for the Global War on

Thomas (28:26):
terror.
Yeah, I've neglected to mentionthat one of my experiences there
was being out at protest andbeing tear gassed that happened
to me a few times, but ithappened virtually every other
day to people.
And eventually people figuredout that those weapons were
created by the same company,that Israel was tear gassing
Palestinians and that the St.

(28:47):
Louis County Police Departmentwas trained by the IOF and had
these, journeys there.
And that created these amazingmoments of solidarity where
palestinians were tweeting toFerguson protestors about how to
handle the tear gas.
It was really just an amazingthing.
With the frontline organizersand activists, they created a
trip, sort of Ferguson,Palestine relationship.

(29:10):
And that was an incrediblemoment too.
And it really got into a wholeother area of political
conversation in St.
Louis that had not, to myknowledge, previously been
happening.
There were a lot of Jewish faithleaders who had come out to the
front lines of the focus andprotest.
But after this connection withPalestine came up, there were

(29:31):
some divisions and some realchallenging conversations.
And to your point about thesesmall scale, but very impactful
repression that was going on atthese municipal courts, it
shouldn't be lost on anyonethere's a legal system in Israel
that allows people to challengethe detention of Palestinian
prisoners.
It doesn't work, right?
But there's this fake thing thathappens and lawyers go and they

(29:55):
try to get people out.
And there's this patina oflegitimacy.
To what's happening there.
And I don't think you have tosquint very hard to see the same
thing even before the Trumpadministration, if you are poor
and black or brown in thiscountry, you were dealing with
something very similar to what'snow been expanded by the Trump

(30:15):
administration to a largernumber of people.
And the idea that we're livingin a fascist, repressive society
is obviously not new.
It wasn't new to my clients inSt.
Louis.
That was just their life.
And to some of them, it was cutethat white people in suburbs had
begun to see this after MikeBrown was murdered in, someone
burned down a Quick Trip.
But they had known that theirwhole life.

(30:37):
And I think that organizers wereable to leverage that moment of
conflict into a broaderunderstanding and achieve real
change in St.
Louis.
And to Sean, what you weresaying I just hope that is what,
we're gonna be able to catalyzenow too.

Sean (30:52):
We should segue to present events.
I do want to issue an officialclarification on behalf of the
Lower Frequencies podcast.
Thomas Harvey is also six feet,two and devastatingly handsome.
I.
Alright let's take things to thepresent.
These are obviously some veryrepressive and difficult times
for everybody.
We are focusing todayparticularly on education and

(31:14):
the way in which students andeducational spaces have been
under relentless attack.
And so much of the attention onthat attack is focused on Trump.
But I know for those of us whohave been involved in these
struggles at both the universityand K through 12 level they will
tell you that this kind ofrepression is not new, nor is it

(31:37):
unique to Trump.
And this is particularly truewhen it comes to ethnic studies
education.
And we're curious from yourperspective as lawyers who have
been involved in these struggleswell before Trump took office,
if you can shed some lightspecifically on the role of
Zionism and of Zionistorganizations in laying the
groundwork for the currentassault that we are seeing on

(32:00):
education.

Mark (32:00):
To my mind there are several ways this has to be
contextualized.
The first involves the completerollback of public support for
education.
Because as public supportrecedes, especially in non STEM

(32:21):
areas where there's historicallybeen a lot of corporate interest
or governmental interest what'sleft is donor support.
And to the extent to which donorsupport is vulnerable to
political pressure it reallymagnifies the voice of anybody

(32:44):
with money.
One of the UC professors I'verepresented, and it's right in
the charge and right in thefindings that one of the
disruptions of centraluniversity functions she stands
accused of is disrupting donorrelations which is amazing, and

(33:11):
to depart only momentarily fromthe question of, zionist
influence and its role.
This is to my mind, a perfectexample of why corporate and
fascist overreach breeds its owngrave digger because it may be

(33:33):
easiest and lowest profile forthe university to repress people
who are speaking up againstgenocide and kaza over this.
But once the principle thatupsetting donors is a hanging
offense is established what doesthat do when you talk about

(33:55):
agribusiness, what does it do?
When you talk about big pharma,what does it do when you talk
about private equity taking overhuge schwabs of real estate, et
cetera, et cetera?
The biggest piece of what Ithink is driving the Zionist
role in the attack is bothquasi-religious, and I'll

(34:20):
explain what I mean by that in asecond, and also profoundly
generational.
The joke that Israelis tell isthat the great number.
Of Zionists believe the onlything they believe in is that
this land was promised to them.
They don't believe in anythingelse, literally that a

(34:43):
tremendous number of IsraeliJewish people are Jewish by
heritage and inclination, butnot profoundly religious, which
is one of the things that makesthe claim that Zionism is a
sincerely held religious beliefto my mind, so problematic and

(35:06):
also Frankely so annoying.
I say generational in the sensethat there is an acute
realization that the youngergeneration, Jews in the United
States under the age of 40 havebeen lost to the Zionist

(35:28):
project.
That even though there may besome residual emotional
affinity, when asked the the keyquestions there were a plurality
of younger Jews say, yes, thisis an apartheid state.
Yes, it's genocide.
And when you break the conceptof Zionism down and unpack it as

(35:52):
something that in tunes the ideaof Jewish supremacy, American
Jews are appalled by that whichis not even a generational
problem.
So the trick is, to my mind, howdo you extract or rescue
university based projects fromthis kind of influence and

(36:15):
control?
And I am Frankely at a loss forany easy or happy talk solutions
to that.
I think it is going to be a realongoing struggle.
The problems, as I see it arenumber one, financial using
California and UC as an example.

(36:37):
Were run by a governor who haspresidential aspirations and his
decisions are made based on afinancial calculus.
Number two, there's thetremendous amount of influence
that Zionist donors have in theUC system everywhere.

(37:01):
Early on in the encampment atUCLA and eight figure donation
was pulled from the medicalschool.
You've got, as an example, theDiller Foundation at UC San
Francisco, which has basicallyfinanced so much of UCSF, along

(37:22):
with incidentally financing thecanary mission.
Incidentally, financing theDavid Horowitz Freedom Center,
incidentally, financing, aha, etcetera.
That extraction is, likecampaign finance until private
money is out of electoralpolitics.

(37:44):
Electoral politics are a deadend for us until public money is
back in the university.
We are always, I think, going tobe fighting a terrible rear
guard action here.
Trying to rally people whobelieve in principles of justice

(38:05):
and principles of free inquiryand discourse.
And the only thing I hope isthat as the current generation
of American Jews in theirthirties and forties age into
all of that money that theypreserve some of the politics

(38:28):
that they have now.
I think a lot of the panicwithin the Anti-Defamation
League, the panic within apac,the panic within the Democratic
Party is based on therecognition that the clock on
this is ticking.

(38:49):
And the question we have to dealwith both internationally and
here in the US is, just how manymore lives will be lost, and how
many more careers will be ruinedbefore, the generations change
and it says time up, but I thinkit's going to be a while.

Christine (39:10):
Mark, I think you're absolutely right that we're
seeing a broad structuraltransformation of the American
University.
I wanted to also point out that,in looking at the demonstration
operations team series ofsituation reports that were

(39:33):
released by UC Santa Cruz aspart of an ACLU lawsuit, we
realized that part of thedemonstration operations team
was the development office.
What role does the developmentoffice have on DOT, but I also

(39:54):
wanted to say that, we have aninstitutional edifice that was
shaped profoundly by the ColdWar.
Public money meant federalgovernment support.
Federal government support wasinitiated.
Sean and I were talking aboutthis to some of my students.
In a course that I teach ondemonetizing, the university,

(40:17):
that support was initiated withManhattan Project.
And the dependence of researchuniversities on the federal
government has everything to dowith this devil's bargain
between the corporate warindustries the federal
government and academicresearchers on the STEM side of

(40:39):
things.
This is all otherwise known asthe Iron Triangle.
We have principles that we tryto use to safeguard the
possibility of speaking out inacademic spaces, academic
freedom, the First Amendment.
But the edifice that we inheritis also profoundly imperialistic
and profoundly repressive.

Thomas (41:01):
Yeah, I think it's really important to note exactly
right that some of the relianceon the federal funding is very
clearly tied to the university'srole in prodUCing the technology
and the materials for Warmaking.
To the question of the, theZionist organizations.
So in, in the work we've beendoing, what we see over and over
again is places like Batar,places like the ADL, places like

(41:24):
Canary Mission, places likeStand With Us the Brandeis
Center.
There's, a handful of keyplayers that are pursuing a
variety of different statutesstrategies to weaponize
antisemitism in order to producebroader goals.
I think in essentially,Christine, to your point, just

(41:46):
to destroy the universitystructure such as it is with its
flaws, right?
But they wanna see it diminishedeven further.
And I think part of that has todo with just ending the
university system writ large,but especially certain
professors capacity and abilityand space to teach.

(42:07):
We don't even to talk abouttheory, just talk about history.
And imagine a, a course onMiddle East studies or
Israel-Palestine conflict, orjust the history of Palestine
without talking about Zionism.
Defining Zionism not as,Israel's right to exist.
If you did that according tothe, preliminary injunction in

(42:28):
the central district here in theFrankel versus UC Regents case
that's anti-Semitic.
And students who were in a classlike that would have under this
injunction, I think every rightto say they've been excluded
from the classroom by virtue ofthe content of the course.
So I think that's not anaccident.

(42:48):
I think it's helpful for me topull out a little bit of the
Zionism context and think aboutjust the way Christopher Ruffo
was so sUCcessful in demonizingCRT and how that is about
education and that is abouthistory and how imagine trying
to pass policies in this countrywithout a reference to the

(43:10):
enslavement of, humans and thesystems that were created
subsequent to that.
That's essentially the kind ofthe, a historical, a contextual
world that the currentadministration and these
organizations would like us tobe living in.
From my perspective on theeducation platform.

(43:31):
It has been this concertedattempt to diminish, eliminate
people's space to talk about alegitimate history of this
country.
And you see an analogous thinghappening right now in the
science and context.

Christine (43:49):
There's no question that educational spaces have
emerged as a frontline, butsometimes I find myself asking a
frontline of what, but I wantedto give space to you, mark, to
speak about some reallyimportant victories that you

(44:09):
have been central to.
On November 30th, 2024, afederal district judge in
California dismissed a lawsuitthat was brought by an LA based
Zionist group.
And there was a Trump lawyerinvolved as well against the
liberated ethnic studies modelcurriculum consortium, and

(44:33):
United Teachers Los AngelesUnion.
Mark, you served as the leadattorney representing the
defendants in this multi-yearcase.
Could you speak to us a littlebit about the background of the
case, how you won, and what thisvictory might mean for the

(44:56):
currently still embattledstruggle for ethnic studies K
through 12 education inCalifornia more broadly?
And do you have any updates onthe case?

Mark (45:07):
Thank you.
All of the above.
So I was the lead counsel forLiberated Ethnic Studies.
UTLA had its own set of, I haveto say, fabulous lawyers labor
law firm in Los Angeles calledBush Gottlieb.
That was rock solid on the corequestion, which is the ability

(45:27):
of teachers to figure out whattheir students need in a
curriculum, design it and teachit without this kind of insane
interference.
Because UTLA had taken a strongposition in favor of including

(45:50):
first of all in favor ofrequiring ethnic studies as part
of the curriculum, and in favorof including discussion of
Palestine as part of thecurriculum.
There had been, unsurprisingly abig battle within the union over
this because there was a loudminority of UTLA members who had

(46:18):
great personal difficulties withthis.
Enter from stage far right, aTrump lawyer from Philadelphia
who pulled together somethingcalled Concerned Jewish Parents
and Teachers of Los Angeles.
They filed a completely unhingedcomplaint.

(46:40):
I've gotta say the complaintpuzzled everybody on our side
who was involved because theseare well-trained lawyers who had
gone to mainstream law schoolsand they had completely lost it.
Some 40 paragraphs in thecomplaint were dedicated to an

(47:01):
exec of the Old Testament.
The Song of Psalms, the Talmud,commentary on the Talmud.
Yes.
We'd never seen anything quitelike it before.
This was their effort to claimthat a curriculum that mentioned

(47:24):
Palestine was inherentlythreatening and would be
upsetting to Jewish students andtherefore violated civil rights
statutes, elements of theCalifornia education Code, et
cetera.
It was at the time the leadingedge of what has now become

(47:46):
quite common, which is theweaponization of false claims of
civil rights violations to tryto silence discussions that
people don't like.
Not unlike that court clerk inTennessee who refused to issue a
marriage license to a gaycouple, et cetera, et cetera, et

(48:07):
cetera.
And it's the invocation ofreligion as a justification for
hatred.
I would note parentheticallythat to the extent to which
there's an effort to implementeither Christian or Zionist
surreal law in the UnitedStates, the people who complain

(48:31):
about Muslims trying to enforcesurreal law in the country only
prove that yes, every accusationis in fact a confession, which
is what is going on here.
The pushback from both theLiberated Ethnic Studies

(48:51):
consortium and UTLA took severalforms.
The first being that none of thepeople who claimed to be so
aggrieved about this hadchildren who were in any of
these classes.
None of the teachers who claimto be so aggrieved about this

(49:16):
were being asked to teachcourses that had curriculum
materials they were upset about.
This is a really important pointbecause it represents what I
call both the terrorist andanti-Semitic imaginary.
There's an entire fantasy worldout there where the answer to

(49:38):
every question we might raise isHamas.
And somebody put it ondiscovering that we have a
Palestinian flag hanging in ourfront yard, somebody pointed out
that what this means is thatsomebody's going to show up and
claim that my house was promisedto them 3,500 years ago, and

(50:01):
that if I don't understand thelogic of this Hamas which was
pretty much the plaintiff'sanswer to everything in this
lawsuit.
So we opposed this on multiplegrounds.
One was none of these people hadany real skin in the game, but.

(50:26):
There is a constitutional rightthat students have that has been
recognized in the Federal Courtof Appeals for our region, the
Ninth Circuit to receiveinstrUCtion and receive
communication, and that this wasinterfering not just with what
the teachers wanted to do, butwith what students ought to be

(50:49):
able to learn.
The third major prong of attackwas education is supposed to be
uncomfortable.
If it's not uncomfortable,you're not doing it right.
And if people aren't wrestlingwith ideas that are troubling to
them something very wrong isgoing on.

(51:13):
The judge ultimately acceptedall of those premises, although
it took two and a half years andreally created tremendous angst
amongst the liberated Ethnicstudies consortium.
All the time the case was goingon.
The Zionist multi-ethnic studiesmovement in California was using

(51:40):
the lawsuit to frighten schooldistricts locally.
To frighten teachers locallysaying, look what we're doing to
them in the Central District ofCalifornia.
If you implement this here,we'll sue you too.
Which makes the victoryimportant on two levels.
The first level is that itshowed that the basis for the

(52:05):
lawsuits was unsurprisinglyfraudulent.
The second level is that in thefederal courts, in this
district, if you sue somebodyfor speaking in a public forum

(52:25):
of almost any sort about amatter of public importance or
public interest and the personyou're suing, in this case, the
teachers and the LiberatedConsortium can file a special
motion to get the lawsuit thrownout saying, you are using this

(52:45):
frivolous lawsuit to suppress myfree speech, make me hire a
lawyer, make me do all of thesethings.
It's a bogus lawsuit and notonly should it be dismissed, but
you should pay for my lawyers.
The judge agreed with that.
And between the two groupsawarded the lawyers some$570,000

(53:12):
in legal fees.
The plaintiffs are appealing thecase to the ninth circuit, so
they don't have to pay yet, butwe have made them go and get a
bond to secure the payment andthe bond's coming to some three
quarters of a million dollars.
So it's costing them somechange.

(53:32):
And it's not the lawyers whobrought that case who have to
pay for the bond.
It's actually the individualplaintiffs, which is important
because if you are a lawyertrying to recruit people to file
one of these bogus lawsuits, youpretty much now have an
obligation to say, by the way,if this doesn't work, somebody

(53:56):
may come and own your house orput a brick on your pension, et
cetera, et cetera, which we'rehoping will have a deterrent
effect on some of his nonsensein some of these suits in the
future.
And this smarter Zionist lawyersare now really trying to avoid

(54:19):
any state law claims that wouldbe subject to these lawsuits and
just look at federal law claimswhich Thomas and I have both
gotten stuck defending already.
He's been able to get one of hisclients out of a couple of
these.
They've still got me by theankles.

(54:41):
The message to the Zionist legalcommunity is basically sooner or
later you're gonna reach the ffo stage of FAFO and you'd
better get your clients readyfor that eventuality.

Sean (54:58):
I wanna move on now to talk about the University of
California and a case involvinga close personal friend of mine.
Both of you recently secured avictory in court against UC
Regent Jay Sures.
Could you tell us a little bitabout the background leading up
to this victory?
Who is Jay Sures?
Why does everybody hate him?

(55:20):
And last but not least why theoutcome in this one particular
case might be significant beyondthe case in question.

Thomas (55:28):
So first I wanna say that Ben Oli was the lead
attorney on this case, and I wasco-counsel in the case.
Mark was there as a witness andsupport and advised us also, but
Ben carried the laboring oar onthis case.
So I just wanna make, be clearabout that, but I'm happy to
share that the background and WAlittle bit of what happened.

(55:49):
UC Regent Jay Sures is thisfigure who prior to the moment
that I got involved in thiscase, had been pretty notorious
among the protesters and thefaculty, given his strong
pro-Israel positions and hiswillingness to leverage that
against professors and studentsthroughout the UC system who

(56:10):
dared to ask the university tostop profiting from the weapons
that were sold to Israel to killchildren and bomb hospitals and
committed genocide.
Not only that, but he's a memberof the LAPD Foundation board and
then the, vice chair of UnitedTalent Agency and very
politically connected and hassaid some menacing things that

(56:34):
we were able to get into ourlawsuit where in response to the
faculty's positions, he saidevery option should be on the
table.
And this included this displayof this large bullet on his
table as he's saying that.
And it's just really been aperson who's been very willing

(56:54):
to engage in this politicalconduct and leverage his power
and his money and his influenceto try to destroy
pro-Palestinian protest and anykind of dissent on campus.
So that's prior to this moment,but I.
In March a protestor was servedwith a lawsuit trying to get a

(57:15):
civil restraining order againsthim by Jay Sures who went to
state court and tried to getthis restraining order,
prohibiting the student fromcoming to his house and going to
campus et cetera.
And the way this process worksis you go to the judge first and
you give your best version ofthe facts, which would mean the
most exaggerated version, right?

(57:36):
Like an uncontested, mostexaggerated version depicting
the other person as the worstperson in the world.
And sure, as his lawyers went tothe judge and asked that, and
the judge said, no, that doesn'tarise to the level of issuing
one of these orders.
So then you serve the person andyou say, we're gonna have a
court date and we're gonna havea hearing.
I represented the student alongwith Ben.

(57:58):
We went to court and we filedthe similar motion mark was just
talking about that allowed us tochallenge this lawsuit as
ridiculous in an attempt by apowerful person to suppress
speech political speech thatthis person doesn't like.
There are a lot of silly thingsthat came out of this.
For example, students had cometo this man's house and
protested and there were say 75maybe students.

(58:21):
No one got cited, no one gotarrested.
But Jay Sures was only able toidentify one person and that's
the person that he sued.
And he called this person theringleader of a violent mob that
attacked his wife and hisfamily.
And if you know this student,he's one of the most gentle kind

(58:41):
people you'd ever meet.
He also probably weighs 110pounds dripping wet.
And is not a, the ringleader ofany kind of mob so in this case,
it was, utterly ridiculous.
The arguments they were making.
This was a hate crime to come toJay Sures' house because j Horus
is Jewish.
This is all offset by the factthat the student and the other
protestors went to Jay Sures'house.

(59:02):
'Cause he lives within a handfulof miles of UCLA's campus and he
is the only region that liveswithin a handful of miles of
UCLA's campus.
So it's easy for students whodon't have a car to get there.
And for some who do have a car.
It was antisemitic because thestudents had a large banner that
said, Jay Sures, you will pay toyour final day.
And it had images of pigs headson it.

(59:24):
Those are according to Jay Suresand his lawyers, an anti-Semitic
trope.
They had included a fuzzy imageof this in the exhibit, in the
court case, we found theoriginal image, it's very
clearly a pig with a police haton top of his head.
And the judge had topainstakingly explained to these
lawyers that people who protestagainst police oppression since

(59:45):
the early sixties have beenusing an image of a pigs head
with a police officer's hat onits head to symbolize the
police.
These lawyers also took greatpleasure in what they thought as
their latitude to say the Nword, full word in court three
times with a young black womanas the clerk and another black

(01:00:05):
staff member in the courtroom.
And this is the quote from acase, but there's absolutely,
positively no reason to havesaid it in court.
And they allege that, instead ofa pigs head and red painted hand
prints on the wall if it werenooses and white sheets, we
wouldn't even be talking aboutthis.
And the judge had to again,point out yes, but that's not

(01:00:27):
what it was.
These two things are not thesame symbols against police
repression and symbols that arealmost universally understood as
meaning your hands have blood onthem because of the death and
the mass death and the killingthat you have helped facilitate
are not antisemitic in theirnature.
So we won that case.
We were able to get theirunderlying lawsuit dismissed.

(01:00:50):
There were more bonkers thingsthat happened, but I'll leave it
at that for now.
And in Mark's case, they werealready able to get an order
ordering.
The other side to pay theattorney's fees.
We've just submitted a motionrequesting the attorney's fees
are statutory, but the judgestill has to determine how much
will be paid.
So in, in the best case scenarioJay Sures will be paying Ben and

(01:01:13):
i's attorney's fees, somethingon the order of a hundred
thousand dollars, hopefully.
Which will be a great moment.
It would be the greatestRobinhood moment I've ever been
able to, have, get Jay Sures,who does an idiotic thing, is
told it's idiotic, refuses inhis hubris to admit its idiotic.
Hires an expensive law firm hasfive lawyers come into court,

(01:01:36):
pound the table and talk abouthow Jay Sures is the victim of a
single student's protest andthen lose, and then have to pay
us to represent more protestersfor free later on down the line.
So I hope this is how it worksout, out.
We'll see at the end, but i echomark's sentiment that I think it
would be malpractice of anattorney representing people

(01:01:59):
trying to bring claims like thisto not point out the result in
the case that Mark was a part ofand the case that Sures bought,
because these are prettysignificant fee awards mark's
much larger.
But these are big numbers evento people who are as wealthy as
Jay Sures.

Mark (01:02:18):
If I may very briefly add we're movement lawyers.
We're not greedy lawyers.
We're prepared to extend anoffer to the people who owe us
these fees that we will cut oreven drop our fee claims in
return for the release ofseveral thousand Palestinian
prisoners which I'm sure JaySures could arrange.

(01:02:42):
Probably.
Just saying the author's outthere.
Jay call us.

Thomas (01:02:49):
We're flexible.
We would love to, to dosomething bigger, but it's
really important for thestudents to know that, people
have their back and are gonnatry to defend them when things
like this happen and people tryto bully them like this.
And at least for now, the law onour side in a case like this.
And I think it's important to,to try to take advantage of
those moments.

(01:03:10):
We were able to get in some ofthe advocacy of the students in
the pleadings.
If we win, I think we will, tryto publicize this more so that
people understand what theresult is and bringing lawsuits
like this to try to crushpeople's right to dissent
against a policy and investmentsthat are leading to the killing
of hundreds of thousands ofpeople.

Christine (01:03:30):
I know that Sean was crushed because he loves Jay
Sures.
But Sean and Jay Sures have longbeen pen pals.
I don't know if you knew this.

Sean (01:03:42):
He's a good buddy.
He writes me letters sometimes,and he does the courtesy of
doing it on Regent's letterhead,which I find really flattering
that I deserve that kind ofattention.

He wrote a letter in 2023, a richly giving letter,
something that I like to sharewith my students.
We take out our red pens.
We like to mark up the lettercircle claims that have no basis
in Facticity.
Sean had written on behalf ofthe UC Ethnic Studies Faculty

(01:04:14):
Council and we submitted aletter to UC president Michael
Drake, and to the Regents.
Because both Drake and thenchair of the Regents, Richard
Leib had submitted a statementin October that expressed

(01:04:38):
concern and support strictlyabout Israel.
And so we pointed out how deeplymorally and ethically flawed
this letter was, and inresponse, J has offered these

(01:04:59):
claims.
And so this is someone who atthe United Talent Agency,
specializes in news media andnews celebrities.
He's previously worked withpeople like Don Lemon.
He's has some sort ofaffiliation with Anderson

(01:05:19):
Cooper.
And he said that our oppositionto the regents and the
president's characterizationintentionally ignores the
reality of the situation.
And he describes the reality ofthe situation as Hamas killing
babies.

(01:05:40):
Children of all ages, theelderly, the disabled, and
people from all walks of life,not only killing them, but
raping them, torturing them,maiming them, mutilating them,
decapitating them, and burningthem alive.
So this is one claim that hemade.

(01:06:01):
Another claim that he made wasthat Hamas builds its
infrastructure underneathschools and hospitals, mosques,
apartment dwellings.
And so that any destruction ofcivilian infrastructure is not

(01:06:24):
the responsibility of Israel,but actually is the
responsibility of Hamas andPalestinians.
Here's someone who has aremarkable incapacity to control

(01:06:44):
his temperament.
It's actually recorded back intothe early 1990s when he threw a
shit fit about a malfunctioningSony cell phone and dragged a
bunch of people into this.
And he threw such a shit fitthat it was written about in the
New York Times.
But he's someone who, as yousay, Thomas is a high ranking

(01:07:11):
corporate figure in the UnitedTalent Agency.
He also plays a role in terms ofthe LAPD, he's everywhere.
He, also at UTA represents theAnti-Defamation League.
I didn't know that the ADLneeded talent agents.

(01:07:32):
The other thing that he does ishe is the chair of the board of
directors of Triad, the LosAlamos labs.
What are his qualifications forthat?
The other question that we haveto ask is, why is that not a
conflict of interest?
He's sitting on the regions.

(01:07:54):
I realize that is very muchbusiness as usual, but we still
have to pose that question.
He's been behind numerouspolicies that we've had to deal
with, trying to limit whatfaculty can say, where we can
say it.
And now seems to be potentiallyinvolved as well in efforts to

(01:08:18):
limit what faculty could say intheir personal social media.
I wonder if either of you haveany other comments that you
would like to add about JaySures

Thomas (01:08:30):
I would just note that we were able to get this letter
in as part of the lawsuit that,you just described.
And the quote that helped usframe that he was, ideologically
committed was that he would doeverything in his power to
prevent your goals, right?
The goals of the faculty membersto talk about what's actually
happening in the world.
It is just another example ofhis hubris that he says these

(01:08:54):
things and then when people wantto protest him for those
statements, it's antisemitismthat he claims has motivated it,
not his very explicit public,condemnation of prop Palestinian
advocacy whether it be studentsor faculty.
It was a really outrageousmoment to see this person in
court.

(01:09:14):
Mark and I have done a lot ofstudent conduct meetings and
hearings, and I think theseuniversity officials have gotten
used to the sort of ridiculousfarce version of their internal
student conduct process andbelieve that's how the world
operates.
With a different judge.
It might've been that way.
We were fortunate, I think, tohave a pretty reasonable court

(01:09:34):
who held them to basic standardsand principles of law.
It was very surprising to them.
They were shocked by it.
So it was a nice moment.
And yeah he's a prettyfrightening figure with all this
power related to the police, thegovernor, the UC Regents and the
Los Alamos stuff.

Mark (01:09:52):
One of my favorite lines from a Bob Dylan song from the

sixties contains the lyric: "money doesn't talk, its swears. (01:09:56):
undefined
Obscenity who really cares.
Propaganda is all phony."There's a reason people like
this get on the board ofRegents.
And it, to my mind really raisesa much broader issue of

(01:10:22):
governance in California.
education is as fundamental apublic utility as anything else.
Why are people who are simplyable to give vast sums of money
to somebody's political campaignable to get into positions of

(01:10:43):
power where they're makingpolicy that controls the lives
of tens of thousands of facultyand staff and over 150,000
students and graduate studentsin the state of California.
We have an elected insurancecommission in California because

(01:11:06):
there was a referendum campaignto take appointment of the
insurance commissioner out ofthe hands of the government by
constitution, even Supreme Courtjudges who the governor appoints
get, have to sit for reelection.
Why should Gavin Newsom orArnold Schwartzenegger, or

(01:11:28):
Ronald Reagan or Pete Wilson getto make these insane decisions
that then control the lives ofso many of us?
If education is a public good,why doesn't the public voice
factor into this somewhere?

Is very interesting to hear you speak Thomas about.
Jay Sures is having to be in aspace where reason prevails,
because the academic senatechair prior to the current one
described the Regents as MadKings.

(01:12:08):
I thought it was a very aptdescription.
Both of you are lead attorneysin a suit that was filed on
behalf of students, faculty, andstaff at UCLA in March of this
year.
Can you speak about thebackground of that lawsuit, why

(01:12:28):
it came about, and what you hopeto achieve in court?

Thomas (01:12:33):
Yeah, I can start.
So we both have gotten to knowstudents and faculty and
community members who werebrutalized in the Palestine
solidarity encampment on April30th, by Zionist mob attackers,
and then by the police the nextnight.
I'd say it's also motivated by aseries of reports and lawsuits

(01:12:54):
that were filed in the housecommittee investigating
ostensible antisemitism oncampuses.
They effectively gave twosentences to describe this four
plus hour long, brutal,relentless assault on hundreds
of students that went on live tvwhile police and private

(01:13:17):
security stood by and didnothing.
We have a 300 paragraph lawsuitthat describes those events.
They gave it two sentences.
Similarly some students at UCLAfiled a lawsuit called Frankel v
UC Regents, and they gave it onesentence.
And I think that completedismissal of the overwhelming

(01:13:39):
violence that occurred on UCLAas a campus by a mob of people
who called themselves Zionists,some of whom called themselves
white supremacists.
A group composed of, what youmight think of as middle class
and above like wealthierbusiness people attacked these
students and faculty andcommunity members and viciously

(01:14:01):
beat them because they wereprotesting against the genocide
and the university's involvementin it.
And between, the end of Apriland beginning of May, 2024 when
we filed our lawsuit, which wasMarch of 2025, I.
There hadn't been very muchproactively done on behalf of
those students.
While to, to your earlier point,Christine, that the internal

(01:14:22):
sort of legal system, studentconduct system had really been
grinding these students down.
And subjecting to, one of thebest versions of the process is
the punishment that I've seenoutside of Ferguson.
And that Frankel v Regentslawsuit has this depiction of
the encampment as this hotbed ofantisemitism.
They call it a, Jew exclusionzone.

(01:14:44):
And Mark and I both knew that,there were any number of Jewish
faculty and students who hadhelped create the encampment,
and that there was a Passoverceremony and there was a Seder.
And it was this beautiful,wonderful space of learning that
was an extension of theuniversity for many people, and
actually taught people, I thinkthings maybe they were unable to
be taught inside theuniversity's walls.

(01:15:04):
And the university's response toit was both to allow.
People to verbalize theirstudents and faculty, but then
to invite and call the police todo the same thing.
So that, I would say is theorigin and the impetus of it.
From our perspective somethingaffirmative needed to be done on
behalf of the students and thefaculty.
We watched in horror as thepeople did this on video and

(01:15:25):
then never got charged with acrime and setting aside anyone's
sort of belief in the criminallegal system.
It's shocking to see videotapeof people assaulting and beating
people live on TV and then watcha CNN reporter go to their
houses and talk to them on CNNand have the police do nothing.
Nothing at all.
And so at a minimum, we wantedto, bring civil suits against

(01:15:48):
these people to try to get somesmall measure of justice for
what happened to them.

Mark (01:15:54):
There are two related lessons.
I draw, first of all andforemost what Thomas said.
This was outrageous.
In 60 years of movement work,I've never witnessed as
prolonged and uninterrupted anattack on a demonstration ever.

(01:16:20):
Having represented demonstratorswho in other situations who were
having bottles and glassesthrown at them, responded to
defend themselves, werethreatened by a Zionist counter
demonstrator who raised a 26pound stanchion up over his head

(01:16:43):
and ran toward them like a, itwas a war club, and actually hit
one of them with it.
They got charged in a heartbeatwith a vicious anti-Semitic
attack, assault with intent tocommit great bodily harm and
hate crime enhancements.
Here you've got all of thisevidence of this, and as Thomas
said, the state doesn't seem tocare.

(01:17:05):
They're turning a blind eye toit.
The other blind eye that I thinkhas to be mentioned is the
people who lay claim toprogressive politics and lay
claim to social justice monikersbut have accepted positions

(01:17:29):
within the UCLA administration.
One of the great heartbreaks ofthis, in addition to the
brutality that everyone faced.
Was watching somebody who prideshimself as being a fighter for

(01:17:50):
social justice and someone whounderstands the importance of
decolonizing academia and hastalked about it and written
about it, doing theadministration's bidding because
he's now part of theadministration.
It's one of the disturbinglessons that there is to learn

(01:18:16):
that even the people who werespect and rely upon are not
necessarily immune fromco-optation when the time comes.
I have asked Thomas and a coupleof friends of mine to promise me
that if ever I falter and looklike I've been bought out there

(01:18:39):
to wait until I'm speaking inpublic and let me have it with a
cream pie at the very least.
The worst part of the assault isthe weaponization of the term
campus safety.
Because campus safety now meansthat if you have people who want

(01:19:05):
to show a documentary,ironically enough about the
encampments and can't get a roomat UCLA to show it.
So they show it outdoors in theevening with a projector and a
bed sheet is the movie screen,riot clad police storm, the

(01:19:28):
event pronouncing the bed sheetand the two metal poles holding
it up to be a an unauthorizedstructure attacking students,
putting some of them in thehospital et cetera.
And you can see the invocationof campus safety as a term now

(01:19:51):
being used in the modificationsof the academic policy manual as
an excuse for muzzling facultyand censoring faculty.
Campus safety is a marvelouslyelastic term in an era where,
words no longer mean whatthey're supposed to mean.

(01:20:14):
I keep thinking of thatdisturbing passage in Louis
Carroll's, Alice in Wonderland,where Alice is pointing out that
words are being badly misusedand she protests that if words
don't mean what they've alwaysmeant, we can no longer have
discourse.

(01:20:35):
And either tweedle dumb ortweedle D puts her off saying
"the question, my dear, is notwhat words mean.
The question is, who has thepower?
Nothing more, nothing less." Andit is the bastardization of
these terms, like thebastardization of antisemitism

(01:20:58):
that is, such a perversion ofreality.
We brought the suit both as aneffort to send a message to UCLA
and the powers that be and theZionist mob they allowed on the
campus, but also to send amessage to all of those students

(01:21:21):
and faculty who were terrorizedand then brutalized.
That, yeah, there are people whowill have your backs and that
who Frankely give a shit aboutwhat is going on and that we're
not going to let this be sweptup and forgotten about.

(01:21:44):
And neither of us are goingquietly.
I am very lUCky to be in theleague of people like Thomas and
some of the other lawyers inthis who have neither a sense of
self preservation nor a sense ofproportion.

Part of this is making me think about what kind
of archive are we leaving ofthese struggles?
When I was looking at the dailyencampment situation reports
pulled together by thedemonstration operation team.
It was like viewing somethingthrough a warping lens, and I

(01:22:26):
wondered if someone were to viewthis as a primary source.
Historian in the future, whatwould they take from this?
It always strikes me that thesebattles that we're waging are
battles on the terrain ofinformation.
And I always think about the waythat intelligence is weaponized

(01:22:49):
information and it's never abouttruth.
It's about superiority it'sabout power setting the
narrative.
Tom, you're talking about thecongressional hearings and it
was so crazy making to see thebrutal warping of reality and

(01:23:11):
the imposition of.
A regime of truth, throughpeople like Elise Stefanik, who
refuse to acknowledge thatthere's a genocide happening by
a genocidal state, Israel,against a people, Palestinians,
in Gaza.
But instead forcing every singlehead of a university that was

(01:23:37):
arrayed before her to submit toa line of questioning about
hypothetical antisemitism.
And then to realize that throughthe ADL, any protest, arguing
Palestinian right to life wasunderstood and warped as an act

(01:23:59):
of antisemitism and logged assuch, categorized as such.
And those uncomfortable truths,mark, they remind me of what you
were speaking about earlier,which is that with regard to the
liberated case, the presumptionwas students who are

(01:24:20):
beneficiaries of structuralviolence should never feel
uncomfortable, should beinsulated, have a right to a
safe space.
I wanted to say too, Thomas,that at the UC Santa Cruz
encampment, we had in theaftermath a people's graduation

(01:24:42):
ceremony.
I had the honor of reading thenames of the students and their
majors.
And the extraordinary thingabout this wasn't the creativity
of the camp names-- they arevery creative.

(01:25:02):
It's the fact that 50% of thesestudents are STEM majors.
In lockstep compliance with theregents about never straying
from their syllabus, I suspectthat largely on the stem side of
things, people did not strayfrom their syllabi.
What happened was studentslooking for a space where

(01:25:27):
critical discussion could be hadcame to the people's
universities in the encampments.
That certainly was true at UCSanta Cruz.
It wasn't just that theencampment was an extension of
the university it was actually acritical alternative to the
university.
Mark, you introduced me to oneof the people who was brutalized

(01:25:52):
during that counter protest.
I was horrified to see thatperson's visible injuries.
Also at UC Santa Cruz there werestudents who were beaten.
There were students who had zipties so tight that a blood clot
went to, in one case, thestudent's brain, the student

(01:26:15):
suffered a stroke and thestudent went from using a cane
last summer to now using awheelchair.
But there is no concession onthe part of the UC Santa Cruz
administration.

(01:26:35):
That, that sort of violence wasinflicted upon protestors.
So I just think that the workthat you're doing in challenging
the brutal narrative of power isso essential.
Just really thank you for doingthat work.

Thomas (01:26:54):
Can I quickly add something to that?
This Frankel case is a goodexample of what you're talking
about, of creating a narrativethat then passes for truth and
then gets referenced in newsarticles, gets referenced in
other lawsuits, gets referencedin reports.
And one of the most amazingthings about this lawsuit is the

(01:27:16):
plaintiffs, when they writetheir initial complaint, they
say the combination of eventsthey alleged effectively created
a Jew exclusion zone, but theeffectively just disappears in
any subsequent conversationabout the"Jew exclusion zone."
Any reasonable person thinkingabout a Jew exclusion zone would

(01:27:37):
think, oh, they were actuallypreventing people from walking
through this encampment or fromgetting into buildings, et
cetera.
And even in the lawsuit itself,it never says that.
I've read this lawsuit dozens oftimes now, and what it says is
almost exactly to your point,Christine, it says the

(01:27:58):
encampment included peoplesaying things like"from the
river to the sea" and havingsigns about genocide and saying
that Israel Zionists.
And because that made me souncomfortable and because I
believe in the Jewish state ofIsrael, I didn't think I could

(01:28:19):
go to that encampment withoutbeing required to disavow
Israel.
That's what this says.
It exists all as Mark put it allin the imaginary for them and
one of the plaintiffs in thelawsuit says that you said a
safe space, which is, oftenthought of as a sort of a way to
negatively characterize leftpeople as wanting a safe space.

(01:28:43):
This one of the plaintiffs saysthat she went into a classroom
and people were wearingterrorist scarves by which she
means kafis.
And she felt so uncomfortablethat she felt excluded from
class.
And so she doesn't want to bearound things like that.
And that's what this lawsuit iseffectively about.
But it turns these discussionsof how they felt and what they

(01:29:06):
believed and what they fearedinto something that happened in
part because UCLA does notdefend the lawsuit, but it's
very much along the lines ofwhat you're saying.
And it's frightening to see,because now if you look at a
reference of this, it just says,A judge ordered UCLA to stop
excluding Jewish people from itscampus, and no one's gonna go
read this, 400 paragraph lawsuitto see how thin it is.

(01:29:31):
And given that UCLA just,capitulated there's no one
that's contesting it.
We're trying to, but there hasbeen no meaningful opposition to
the narrative that's now becomethe truth about the UCLA
encampments.
And I'm sure this is the samewith every encampment right?
I'm positive this is exactlywhat has happened everywhere
there's been an allegation ofantisemitism within these
encampments.

Mark, were you going to add something?

Mark (01:29:54):
Yes, just very briefly, the claim that somehow a symbol
makes it impossible for someoneto study or someone to work is,
I believe going to be the nextphase of part of our fight.

(01:30:16):
We have talked to facultymembers who have been asked to
leave departmental committeesbecause Zionist senior faculty
are uncomfortable being in thesame room as them which is just
an amazing form of exclusion.
There are a couple of medicalresidents who are mostly through

(01:30:42):
their program at UCLA who hadbeen trashed for having put on a
lunch and learn program that wasvery well footnoted and
documented And it went up to theBoard of Regents.
One of them got footnoted in oneof the reports from the House

(01:31:08):
Inquisition committee or reportsto the committee There's a, an
instructor at Berkeley Law wholeft a class he was co-teaching
and would not return to itbecause a student had a symbol

(01:31:28):
of Palestine on their phonecover and of course was using
their phone during the lecture.
It's this sort of thing.
This is the tee up to claimingthat speaking out against
genocide creates a hostile workenvironment for the genocide

(01:31:49):
heirs.

It's extraordinary that what is getting
criminalized or at leasttargeted as an area of possible
discipline is any affirmativeassertion that Palestinians have
a right to life.
So we are being asked toparticipate.

(01:32:15):
In these spaces of education, inthe erasure of the Palestinian
people.
And really actually, if you lookat Raphael Lakin's struggle for
the world, understanding whatgenocide is, it wasn't just the

(01:32:37):
destruction of a people, it wasa destruction of the spirit of a
people and their capacity toreproduce themselves as a
people.
And in so many ways, we arebeing enjoined to be complicit
in the destruction of thePalestinian people.

(01:32:59):
Just briefly in terms of theWeinberg case against some of
the U-C-L-A-S-J-P members andothers I almost had to laugh at
moments.
It's so ridiculous.
The assertion that one of theplaintiffs was walking through

(01:33:20):
the encampment and lost anearbud and that the earbud
subsequently appeared in atracking device, which suggested
that it didn't just stay on theground after it fell out of his
ear, but actually someone stoleit.
Because it could be tracked andthen someone else's phone case,
the cover got scratched.

(01:33:41):
Really the beos is hard todescribe.

Thomas (01:33:45):
Since we're talking about how these absurd things,
let me just share that in theFrankel lawsuit, they depict a
series of images that they saystand for antisemitism, that
UCLA was already a hotbed ofantisemitism before, and the
silliest one of all is they saythere was a piece of paper with
the words loudmouth Jew on it.

(01:34:07):
And then they show an image ofit and it's very clearly the
name of a chapter in a book.
But they say this was leftoutside of a Jewish professor's
house.
Then they say there was a bookwith a swastika on the cover.
And if you just read the writtendescription, you're like, oh,
this is alarming.
Like loud mouth use swastika.
This could really terrifypeople.

(01:34:27):
These are.
Symbols of antisemitism, andthen they have an image of the
book, and it's Philip Roth, thePlot Against America, which is,
a book written by arguablyAmerica's best known Jewish
author that is a warning toAmerica about antisemitism.
And they've perverted this to bean antisemitic trope.

(01:34:52):
It's not as if the swastikaindependently isn't, but they
have the book cover it says, thePlot Against America, Philip
Roth.
And it's just decontextualizedand presented as a symbol of
antisemitism.
I went to this conference andpresented on this, and it was a
conference that law versusantisemitism, and it was Jewish

(01:35:12):
law faculty from around thecountry.
And it turns out like a lot oflocal members of the Jewish
community came alsonon-academics came to this
conference.
And there was like a big laughat the crowd when I presented
these symbols.
So anyway, these lawsuits asMark said, his has got like
passages of the Torah, and thenit just is absurd, some of the

(01:35:35):
things that have been alleged inthese suits.
But the sad reality is if no oneresponds, if no one challenges
them, if no one spends the hoursand hours and hours reading
through them and writing aresponse that tries to
effectively dismantle thosearguments, they just to get
accepted is true.
And that's the terrifying thing,for all of us.

(01:35:58):
It's very difficult to make thetime to do it, to find enough
lawyers to do it and to do itwell, and a real challenge right
now.
Even though they are ridiculous,if someone doesn't say this is
utterly preposterous on its facethe court will just say, oh,
these allegations are acceptedas true for the record.

We are locked into a constant state of defense,
speaking of which, you have bothbeen involved in visionary
ambitious ways, in an attempt tohold the university accountable,
but I have seen you both spendcountless hours addressing

(01:36:39):
sometimes conduct issues, beingin conversation with students
and periled faculty.
You have extended your supportfar and wide.
Could you just for the purposeof our listeners, catalog some
of the ways in which you've beencalled to defend people within

(01:37:02):
the UC against a hostileadministration

Mark (01:37:09):
Oh God.
How can we count the ways?
I'll start with UC San Diego andwork my way north.
An MD PhD student at UC SanDiego Med School wears a kafi
pattern scrub cap in the surgeryand is yelled at angrily later

(01:37:32):
on by a recently returned IOFsoldier who also is a UC San
Diego radiology technician whobelligerently is yelling, I can
wear whatever the fuck I want,but that's racist.
And the student at UC San Diegois now on the defense of being

(01:37:57):
subjectively graded down in somevery unfair ways by faculty who
have written viciouslyIslamophobic screeds before
moving north.
Thomas can speak much betterthan I can to all of the stuff
that's going on at UC Irvine.

(01:38:20):
So I will just step over thatfor a second.
UCLA, we've had literally scoresof, student disciplinary
hearings.
One of the things they have donein some cases is say, until this

(01:38:41):
hearing is resolved, you're notgetting your transcript.
One of the students daily Bruineditor, who wasn't even at the
encampment is a protestor.
She was out doing her jobdocumenting UCLA's failure to
protect its students andfaculty, which of course, upset
the powers that be mightily.

(01:39:03):
She should be starting lawschool this fall.
She's not because UCLA won'trelease her transcripts because
they sat on her disciplinarycharge for 13 months before
finally getting to a hearing.
She, of course, was nevercriminally charged with anything

(01:39:24):
at all, nor should she havebeen, she was just out there.
They are threatening her with afour quarter suspension
nonetheless on absolutelytrumped up charges.
The hearing for her took a fullthree hours.
The prep for the hearing tookseveral days.

(01:39:45):
We have lecturers and facultywho have now been threatened at
UCLA with, yet undefined formsof discipline.
There are faculty at UC SanFrancisco who've been fired.
Just outright fired for theirsocial media publications and

(01:40:08):
for what they have done in termsof long form articles for the
press.
This looks like the McCarthyarea writ large and the point
that I think needs.
Being made about the red scarein the fifties was that although

(01:40:33):
it was ostensibly aboutcommunism, it was actually an
attack on all of the people whohad fought for social justice in
the thirties and forties, whohad fought for the rights of
women in the workplace.
And it was an effort to drivewomen out of the federal
workforce who had fought for therights of black people and

(01:40:57):
racial minorities.
And it was an effort to suppressthat.
The same way that the scareabout communism was being used
then, we are seeing the scareabout Hamas being used as the
point of the spear to attackethnic studies, attack academic

(01:41:24):
freedom, attack any recognitionof human rights.
We have to defend the individualstudents and individual faculty
members.
First of all, just as humanbeings it's the minimal right
thing to do.
The second is the regents andthe donor class would love to

(01:41:53):
make examples of you all, and bymaking examples of you all who
are the most upstanding, hammereverybody else down and frighten
them into submission.
And we can't allow that becauseyou are standing up and speaking

(01:42:14):
up for populations andprinciples that would otherwise
go voiceless.
And our job is to keep them offyour back.

And Mark, you've really done that.
Thomas, you as well.
We have drawn on your strength.
Thomas, I wonder if you want toadd to this catalog.
I know you've participated atall levels, both of you.

Thomas (01:42:41):
I don't have a whole lot to add substative to that other
than to say the same thingshappening at UCI.
We filed lawsuits.
I've gone to dozens of studentmeetings and hearings.
I've done the same thing atUCLA.
It is just an endless grind forthese students and for the
dedicated faculty members whoare agreeing to accompany them

(01:43:02):
and work with them and prepthem.
And it is just a lot of time.
And I would say, I think it'sreally important for people to
know that they are completelyfarcical.
They are not serious in any way.
The sort of middle managementbureaucrats that they dispatch
to handle these meetings are notempowered to make decisions.

(01:43:25):
So if you if you wanted tonegotiate something, they're
unable to give you a decision.
If you pointed out they werewrong about the allegation, they
can't dismiss anything.
The terms they used to describethe conduct violations have no
definitions.
If you ask them what thedefinition, they don't know.
It's really Kafka ask to beaccused of something, find out

(01:43:47):
that the policy didn't exist onthe day that you were alleged to
have committed it, and that theydon't know what the terms mean
and that even though you've justdemonstrated those two things,
they won't dismiss it and don'thave the power to dismiss it.
And instead what they do is theygo to an nameless faces boss
somewhere, and that person thensays, okay, what about something
else you may have done on thatday?
Instead of doing the right thingand just being dumb with this.

(01:44:10):
And I think the other thing tonote is that their position
would be that these are contentneutral violations of time place
and manner restrictions or thebroader, pacos code of student
conduct.
But it's very obvious that thisis overwhelmingly, if not only

(01:44:33):
being used to attackpro-Palestinian protestors.
Eventually we're gonna be ableto see that we're gonna file
some records requests and figureout if anyone else during this
time has gone through thisprocess and how many of those
people have and what the resultsare.
But right now it doesn't doanything for these students or
trying to finish theirundergraduate degree, trying to

(01:44:53):
finish their graduate degree.
These professors who have manyother responsibilities, not to
mention me and Mark and otherpeople who have done this, but
it's an endless, indefiniteprocess that can end with a
suspension or an expulsion I toorepresent someone who has been
waiting more than a year, shegraduated last year, she's done

(01:45:15):
and doesn't have her degree.
And in part because they justrefuse to schedule the hearing.
Not because this couldn't havehad a resolution, but because
they delayed the resolution.
And so you've got a bunch ofpeople who have done a lot of
work, hard work to completetheir studies at UCLA or in the
middle of studying at UCLA, andthey jeopardized all of that to

(01:45:39):
say,"could you stop using themoney that we pay intuition to
invest in companies that murderpeople during a genocide in
Palestine?" That's what they'vesaid, and the allegations are
effective that they said itslightly too loudly or on the
wrong sidewalk.
And for that these students andthese faculty members are

(01:46:01):
risking their jobs and theiracademic careers and their
livelihood and their mentalhealth in a variety of ways.
It's really just disgusting tosee I've seen it in a lot of
different contexts.
But to see a university who Ithink we all can imagine at some
point in the future touting thefact that they had these
protests on campus like they didthe free speech movement

(01:46:22):
unironically pretending that theUC system supported the free
speech movement in the way thatthey used to advertise to
students.
You could imagine that happening15 years from now saying there
was a robust protest movementhere and inviting some of these
persecuted students back tospeak about it.
So if they've gotten theirdegree, if they haven't been
expelled.

(01:46:43):
But it's a really vile processrun by soulless middle class
bureaucrat They're the kind ofpeople who would deny you your
treatment for cancer because youdidn't fill the form out in
triplicet.
That's who's running theseprocesses.

Sean (01:46:58):
Thomas and Mark, one of the things that really struck me
listening to you recount all ofthese cases is how I think
almost every single one of theminvolves events that happened a
year or more ago.
And I know we started out bytalking about how we don't want
to exceptionalize the currentmoment and the current
administration, but I would liketo hear your thinking about

(01:47:19):
where we're at now.
Because the legal system takes awhile to work, and so you'll be
dealing this time next year withthe cases that are just coming
up now.
Looking at the currentadministration and the current
legal landscape, what are thethings that most concern you?
What are the things, if any,that give you hope in our
current and near futurepolitical environment?

Mark (01:47:41):
Let me just raise a discussion that Thomas and I of
our colleagues in the biggerUCLA suit earlier today in terms
of what some of the problems arein the landscape, putting aside
the fact that this is all unpaidlabor that we're doing.

(01:48:02):
And we're ignoring that.
We had a discussion with ourcolleagues earlier today about
the UCLA suit, the experts wewere going to have to hire the
tens and twenties of thousandsof dollars we've already spent
on video and software andinvestigation.

(01:48:23):
Everybody is feeling theprecarity of this and wondering
are they going to have jobs?
We've got our blood, sweat andtears into this.
I listen to, the HouseInquisition Committee people and
I listen to Marco Rubio and Iwonder where is that Qatari and

(01:48:46):
Iranian money?
We're certainly not seeing itand we have no idea how we're
going to be financing theselawsuits.
My current business model is tofind the right freeway entrance
and have a sign that says,"willsue for food." It's challenging
to figure out how we're going tomake this work on an ongoing

(01:49:11):
basis.
What we're counting on is thefact that there's a community of
people for whom this work isimportant and who are going to
dig in and help us see thisthrough.
I'm personally committed to thelawyerly version of price tag

(01:49:35):
attacks.
This is a scorched earthdefense.
Everybody's gonna get theirmonth in court with us and we're
going to make them work andscratch and claw for every
effort they want to make tosilence the faculty, the

(01:49:56):
students, and the otheractivists.
And we're just going to have tocount on the fact that there are
enough other people who willcome in and have our back.
Plan B, of course, is to hope weget adjoining cells.

Thomas, did you want to add?

Thomas (01:50:14):
There are some sobering costs that have nothing to do
with paying a lawyer that areinvolved in litigation if you
want to do it and do iteffectively and it has been a
pretty broad attack that we'vebeen trying to bring in addition
to the defense.
We're gonna figure out ways toraise that money for those
costs, not only for the suitagainst UCLA, but there are

(01:50:36):
several other lawsuits as well.
I've always worked for free orpaid low wages at nonprofits, so
this is not new for me.
It's what I expect.
I think that's the same forMark.
I think Mark is remarkable amonglawyers who are committed to
movement in the sense that he'sfigured out a way to have a
private practice that helpspeople and doesn't do harm in

(01:50:59):
the way a lot of private legalpractices do and make time for
this work.
But my assessment and Mark isfar too humble and doesn't sleep
and refuses to accept theparameters of reality.
My assessment is now those twothings are at odds with one
another and there isn't time forthe private practice'cause
there's so much of the free workand that the private practice

(01:51:21):
stuff is because of thisadministration less viable.
I think that's an increasingreality for all of us.
I think it's worth noting thatin the past I've represented
unhoused people I've representedpeople were alleged to have
assaulted law enforcementofficers, people in prison,
people in jail.
And I have always been able toget law firms involved to cover

(01:51:46):
the kind of costs we'redescribing.
And you can't get it with thepro-Palestine work.
It's just a completely differentworld.
And then add in suing theUniversity of California, which
is an employer for at least onsome temporary basis many of
these law firms And so they'renot gonna sue UCLA or the UC
system overall, then add on likeallegations to antisemitism and

(01:52:09):
then just do you support thesort of politics of these
people?
You're talking about a verynarrow field of people who can
do it.
And that's the differentexperience for me in my legal
career is I've representedpeople with radical politics for
a long time and you could alwaysfind firms that would say, yeah,
that's in our tradition we dothese terrible things during the

(01:52:29):
day and represent like the oilindustry or the tobacco
industry.
But we also have these likeidealistic young attorneys who
we want to fool into believingthey're not doing evil all the
time.
They'll do work on your cases.
And it's been our experiencethat it's impossible to find
right now.
If you guys know somebody, letus know.
'cause we would love to find afirm that would throw in with

(01:52:50):
us.

Sean (01:52:52):
That actually segues to a question I wanted to pose.
If there are folks listening tothis who maybe aren't lawyers
but are hearing about this andwould like to support the kind
of work that you and Mark andother movement lawyers do, are
there ways people can be ofassistance to you?
Obviously the best would be somecracker Jack lawyers to help you
out, but if there are folks whoare not lawyers but would like

(01:53:14):
to support the kind of workyou're doing, is there any way
they can do that?

Thomas (01:53:18):
Donations are always helpful.
We have a website set up for theUCLA case called People v.
UCLA.com and there is a way tomake donations there and we
would appreciate that.
It would be great to go towardsthese costs.
It would be incredibly helpful.
The other thing is we havecobbled together a small group
of lawyers and legal workers andpeople and we've been able to

(01:53:41):
make pretty good use ofvolunteers.
So if there are people who areinterested in helping out, so
they don't have to be lawyers,be great if they were lawyers we
have been able to figure thatout and we've got one of our
team is volunteered to leadthose offers, coordinate those.
But if they emailed me or Mark,that would be great.

(01:54:01):
And we could coordinate withthem.
My email is just T as in Thomas,B as in boy, H as in Harvey,
legal@proton.me.
And I'd be happy to connectpeople and take those inquiries.
And sometimes just doing someresearch, doing a little bit of
data analysis.
At some point we might needsomeone to physically take

(01:54:21):
documents somewhere'cause I justdid that the other day and it
costs$200 to courier thesecopies to the court of something
they could have printed out ontheir own, but they require it
to be sent by me.
It's things like that, somebodywith a printer who's willing to
print stuff off and lives closerto a courthouse would've been
extremely valuable on that day.
So I think there are a varietyof different things and I think

(01:54:43):
Mark and I are creative enoughto work people in to places that
would fit.
I would say our overarching needis for paralegal support lawyer
support too.
But there are so many thingsthat we spend time working on
that if we had one, dedicated,skilled, this is like an

(01:55:03):
invaluable person, I thinkanybody who's done this knows
that this is like the key personin all legal work is like that
really skilled, knowledgeableparalegal would save a ton of
time and energy.

Sean (01:55:16):
That's great, thanks, and we'll be sure to put that link
in the show notes for folks todonate and we will also put
Thomas your email address inthere for folks who might want
to get onboarded and help offerto support your work.

Thomas (01:55:30):
I think the website is a nice place.
It's got the complaint, it hassome of the news articles.
And this is not created by us.
This is created by students andcommunity member, plaintiffs who
put this together and it is animportant place for them to be
able to communicate why theywere protesting and what
motivated them and why theywanted to go out there and what

(01:55:50):
the background is.
So I think it's a cool resourcethat they created.

Mark (01:55:54):
What's so hard is that western white European culture
is so individualistic ratherthan communally oriented, that
the impulse is to think aboutwhat impact some catastrophic

(01:56:17):
event that has led to perhaps ahundred thousand dead is having
on me.
And it's not about that, butthat's really bred in the bone
of our culture and our way ofthinking about things and

(01:56:39):
experiencing ourselves.
And it always humbles me tospeak to people who were raised
with a radically different ethosand recognize that some people
grow up believing that the.

(01:57:00):
Most important thing they can dois for the people in their
community.
And every time I get tired orcranky I try really hard to
remember that.

Sean (01:57:15):
Thank you, Mark and Thomas, not just for your time
with us today, but for all ofthe tireless effort you have put
into defending the students,faculty, and staff at the
University of California over,in Mark's case at least many,
many years.

Thomas (01:57:32):
I've enjoyed the conversation.
It was really nice to be able totalk.
thank you for giving me achance.

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