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

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

In the first of a series on “The People v. The UC,” The Lower Frequencies welcomes movement lawyers Thomas Harvey and Mark Kleiman to discuss their tireless work defending the students, staff, and faculty of the University of California from repression.  Mark and Thomas discuss what brought them to movement law, their work in defending ethnic studies from Zionist attacks, and their battles with the UC, including a successful court action against Regent Jay Sures and an ongoing lawsuit on behalf of those in the UCLA encampment who were brutalized by Zionist counter-protesters and police.  If you are interested in supporting their work, you can donate at the link to the UCLA lawsuit below or email Thomas Harvey at tbhlegal@proton.me.

Links:

The People for a Free Palestine v. UCLA (please donate to support this case if you can)

Liberated Ethnic Studies Lawsuit Dismissed

Transcript

Intro: 0:04

Welcome to the Lower Frequencies, a podcast brought to you by the UC Ethnic Studies Council.

Sean: 0:21

Hi, my name is Sean Malloy. I'm a professor of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Merced, and a member of the UC Ethnic Studies Council and I'll be co-hosting today's podcast with Christine Hong, a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, who is also a member of the UC Ethnic Studies Council. Christine?

Christine: 0:47

Over the past two years, as the University of California has waged war against students, faculty, staff, and community members who have protested and organized against Israel's genocide of Palestinians and Gaza, lawyers have assumed critical positions in the trenches of the struggle, defending the people of the UC from criminalization, deportation, police brutality, harassment, loss of work, reputational harm, and other forms of administrative violence by UC leadership and the state. Who are these movement lawyers, and what is movement law? How has this band of tireless defenders kept the people safe against the UCs genocidal interests and repressive investments? What insight do these lawyers furnish into a politics of the present, particularly with regard to the fascistic assault on education?

Sean: 1:55

In the first of what will be an ongoing series entitled"The People Verse the UC" we speak to two lawyers who have played vital roles in defending members of the UC community, and to whom countless of us are deeply indebted. Mark Kleinman and Thomas Harvey. And if we could start Mark and Thomas by having you introduce yourselves briefly.

Mark: 2:16

Sure. I'm Mark Kleinman and whatever you hear about me later, I am innocent. I got kicked out of high school for passing out anti-war leaflets I had written eons ago back during the Vietnam War, and quickly discovered that movement lawyers who had my back allowed me to do my work. And I'm delighted to repay the favor.

Thomas: 2:43

I'm Thomas Harvey. I'm a civil rights attorney. I started doing this work right after graduated from law school. In 2009. I started a nonprofit called Arch City Defenders that provided. Criminal and civil legal services to unhoused folks primarily. And then connected them with social services to address housing and treatment and jobs and transportation and things they really needed. I was doing that when Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson and our organization shifted supporting organizers and activists and protesters who were arrested. And essentially since that time, that has been my work is as a lawyer supporting campaigns both locally and nationally while I was at Advancement Project and the bail project, and then trying to figure out ways to help them with their organizing defend people from lawsuits, defend people from criminal charges, bring lawsuits when we can to try to attack the state to redUCe its capacity to cage human beings. And since I've been in Los Angeles I've been in the last year working with Mark and a small group of lawyers, a sort of informal legal collective to support pro-Palestinian protestors across the state of California, but primarily at a couple of the UC campuses.

Christine: 4:03

You've already begun to answer this question, but I wonder if you could delve more deeply into your own. Political trajectory. So both of you are lawyers who are firmly in the trenches of movement work. And Mark, I really do wonder if you've ever Voya your own FBI file and you have been fighting fire with gasoline since 1984. So could each of you shed some more light on what prompted you to get involved in movement defense work both in the first place and at multiple different points along the way?

Mark: 4:51

Yes. I have FOIAed, my FBI file Christine, it came to 463 heavily redacted pages. Among other things, I discovered that it started a week after my 15th birthday. When I showed up at a picket line in front of the federal building in West Los Angeles that depending on the nature of the encounter, my height varied from five foot nine to six foot two. I'm like a gumby. If I was more aggressive and intimidating, I got larger, which was cool. I discovered that I refused to admit to owning a car. And that while in Eugene, Oregon, I had founded an organization I had never heard of whose members sat around in a more or less natural state and discuss the relationship to society. And I read this and I'm thinking yeah, were we stoned? Were we naked? What does this actually mean? And it was a vivid introduction into what happens if you let people like this write things that get created and entombed in a permanent record. My sense of involvement just came instinctively as an alliance with underdogs and with marginalized people and being of a certain vintage, I was 15 years old when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee actually had a button. That they had out that said"Mississippi Vietnam Freedom is the same all over." And it was a crash encapsulization of the principle of the indivisibility of justice. And it made sense early on. As a movement activist, I really relied on people to have my back so I could work as unimpeded as possible. Didn't go to law school until the Reagan era. And decided to spend some years really honing my skills as a trial lawyer in high stakes, controversial litigation, doing some movement work on the side. Originally nice uncontroversial stuff police misconduct cases government firing of whistleblowers, corporate firing of whistleblowers that sort of thing. And I finally realized that A, I could be doing a lot more of this and ought to be, and b especially. In an environment where anybody who dared breathe. The P word about Palestine was getting trashed as an antisemite, as a white male Jewish lawyer, I have all people had an obligation to stand up and say something about the horrible outages that were occurring. And that, and a steady diet of police cases were the first steps on the road to sin and degradation. For the last seven years, I've been spending a lot of my time defending professors, defending students, defending other activists. And of course, after the breakout in Kaza October of 23, I saw a sign that really epitomized the whole thing for me. Somebody had in red paint somewhere in a New York subway station that painted"anyone else struggling with that work genocide balance?" And I just thought, yeah that would be me. And it's working on these cases with Thomas and some other brothers and sisters around the country is now about three quarters of what I do. And I have to say, I can't think of a greater bunch of people to be working with. As horrible as the repression is, and as exhausting as it is, it's really uplifting to be in the trenches with the activists and the scholars and the other lawyers who were locked arm in arm trying to hold our line here

Sean: 9:29

For the benefit of our listeners, we should mention that Mark Kleinman is six two and devastatingly handsome.

Mark: 9:37

Only if you use a unique form of measurement. Thank you, Sean. You're hired as my agent.

Christine: 9:44

I'm can vouch for that too.

Mark: 9:45

Aw. Thank you, Christine. That is the short form version of this.

Christine: 9:51

The movement that we're describing. It strikes me that this is an unusually scrappy and very smart lot of people. And I'm constantly grateful to be backed up by legal powerhouses who are working in the trenches. Thomas, I know that your trajectory also involves a move across the country, and you detailed quite a bit of your journey to being a movement lawyer for people who are embattled within the UC specifically around Palestine solidarity organizing. But could you add some more detail and texture to the count 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 of California Irvine. And I started at, right after September 11th it was a PhD program in French and we were studying the French Algerian conflict. And so in class I was reading about, torture and terrorism and water boarding. And then in the United States we were having this conversation, right? And the context was 1960s France and Algeria versus 2001. United States. And it was eyeopening to me in a variety of ways especially as someone who was studying literature, but eventually that conversation about how do you navigate moments like this turned to the law. The law ended up being a pretty big part of what those conversations were about. At some point during my time in that PhD program the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Counsel changed the definition of torture. Which had, wast stood precedent for I think nearly 60 years at that point. And added this intent qualification. So that, if we were just questioning you and happened to crush your spleen that's not torture. But if we were intending to crush your spleen in order to get you to respond to a question that might be torture. And so that really set me off on a path of thinking a lot about international law, international humanitarian law, the law of war, armed conflict, et cetera. And I began to think more seriously about going to law school. And eventually I did that. I was 34 when I like Mark, I think later in life, went to law school, started after that experience and, then I would say two key things happened. One is I was still continuing this study of international humanitarian law and international law, and I did a program in Costa Rica studying a lot of resolution to armed conflict in Central and South America. And I was having a beer with one of the professors and we were all asking what do you do if you want to be working in international law? And he said, you never know. You might see violations of international law in your own backyard. And when I went back to school law school, I was a intern at the Public Defender's office through a clinic at St. Louis University School of Law, taught by an incredible criminal offense lawyer Sue McGraw, who was very influential. And I just think any human being who walks into criminal court and sees a group of almost all black men chained together at the hand and feet and marched into a jury box and treated like they're not human beings would react pretty strongly to it. And I think the less connected you are to the legal system, the more shocking it is to watch. And then every layer after that was more shocking the way the judge treated people, the way they said, do you want a lawyer or a public defender? The way people were asked if they had money to hire a lawyer and they were denied from the public defender if they made more than$500. It was just a sort of cavalcade of things that were deeply shocking to me. And I thought, yeah these look like human rights violations to me, right here in my own backyard. And then one of the roles you played as an intern was to interview people. And every person I interviewed needed stuff that lawyers couldn't help with. They needed medicine for conditions. They had, they needed a job, they needed housing. And I thought, really, on my best day, the best thing any lawyer here could do is get this case dismissed, but it would still leave all these other things. And they'd walk out in the world with this in the same moment of crisis. And that led me to thinking about starting an organization that could provide more than just the legal services. And then, as I said what we saw was a systemic issue with the way the legal system created and exacerbated homelessness in St. Louis. And it was through the court, people were extracting money from, again, almost all black people, all poor people charged with low level violations you wouldn't even think were crimes. And they would jail them for weeks and months at a time. And when Mike Brown was murdered, people went out to the streets to protest. The first thing they said was, I'm here for Mike Brown. The police have been, shooting us and killing us forever. And the second thing they said was, these cops have been locking me up and these judges have been taking money from me my whole life. And so we had this overlap with the work we'd already been doing, and we began to just represent protesters who were arrested. They were in the same municipal court dungeons that our unhoused clients were in. And they had slightly more money, but not enough to pay these fines and fees. And that sort of 10 months of the Ferguson Rebellion and the Ferguson Uprighting Rising made me see that the law on its own, lawyers on their own could never really achieve very much. I don't mean they can't mitigate harm, I don't mean they can't individually intervene and help people in important ways. But I do mean that if you want broader systemic change, the legal system on its own can never achieve that. And aligning yourself with movements and finding ways to contribute as a lawyer has just guided the rest of my legal practice since then. And then last year I left a nonprofit I was working at because I read about the protest at UC Irvine where I'd attended, where they had, called in 22 different police departments to attack these students who were demonstrating and. I just reached out and asked if I could help. And since then similar to Mark. I haven't been doing anything else. It's just been working on those cases, whether it's helping people with their student discipline, criminal defense people who've been sued in civil cases, defending them. And then also we've had a handful of moments where we've been able to actually affirmatively sue the UCs for the treatment of people and the police.

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 terms of its revolutionary nature. But the flip side of that is Nixon and Reagan's Law and Order regime. I'm thinking too, Thomas, when you're speaking, you, Sean and I were in grad school at the same time and post nine 11 you also see a reverberation of history. Cointel Pro gets substantially resurrected, albeit under a different name and the Patriot Act. So could I just ask you both to reflect on the ways in which those key moments when you were coming into political consciousness were also times in which the legal apparatus was consolidating in both obvious and less obvious ways to ensure repression of radical struggle. I often think about the fact that one thing that gunks up movements is precisely what you're describing, Thomas, the wearing down of people who are out in the streets, people who are organizing, people who are writing, people who are doing X, y, or Z, they get gunked up in the legal system. I guess it's a two part question. One to think about, the Vietnam War era, what emerged out of that in terms of legal repression and also the 9/11 moment? What was the domestic criminal corollary to the war on terror?

Mark: 18:44

Repression works because it frightens people when there are enough people, as you saw in Los Angeles, just, over the last couple of weeks. Who are willing to say after E Cummings,"there is some shit I will not eat. I will not kiss your fucking flag, the model breaks down. It breaks down because there are you, there are only so many people who are able to engage in the prosecutions, crank up the gears of firing and tormenting faculty members and students, et cetera. So with the repression comes number one excess that makes the state appear ridiculous. At UCLA Thomas and I and some of our colleagues were looking at, as an example, 42 students who had been Ziptied and cited when they told me what the citation was, I said, send me some of them. Conspiracy to loiter was the church. And as law partner pointed. Loitering, the whole point of going to college, that's what you're supposed to do. So first of all, the overreach immediately creates more allies and allies that we would not necessarily have thought we were gonna have. Second, courage really is contagious. The people who are willing to say, fuck it, I'm taking this to trial, I dare you and are willing to deal with the consequences matters. Third, in the long term. There's tremendous pressure that gets put even on liberal. Politicians to then try to correct some of the excesses. I was part of a small team of lawyers that ultimately got Matulis Shakur out of prison. It would not have happened as easily were there not people in the government who realized how insane it was that 36 years later he was still behind bars and he was the only person still imprisoned for what the Black Liberation Army was doing when all of the B'S white allies had been released decades before. A point we completely made. So it is a dynamic process and it doesn't surprise me that the repression is back. It's just a matter of or pushing back on it again and trying to contain it for a while. I think it may have been Rebecca Sonet who reminds us that, people used to believe in the divine right of Kings too. None of this shit lasts.

Thomas: 21:56

Thomas. I think when you initially asked the question, I was thinking more along the lines of the role that lawyers play in creating repression. It's very clear that in every repressive regime, there were lawyers writing the rules, writing the laws, going to court, and saying they were okay until they flipped into, overt fascism and authoritarianism. And so the Bush Administration's office of Legal Counsel and Department of Justice plays a huge role in setting up not only the kind of repression that we saw, especially against Muslim communities at that time, where in an echo of what's happening right now, people were literally being snatched off the street into kidnap vans. It was in response to a moment of jingoistic patriotism in the country. So that's like forgotten in some ways. But that structure that they created and all of the defenses that the Department of Justice raised against their indefinite detention, their removal there imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, that is exactly the reason it's so hard to get people who are being stashed off the streets today. For them to be able to exercise and your right to challenge their attention. So many of these mechanisms and avenues to challenge attention were foreclosed through that fight by the Bush Administration Department of Justice that now it's virtually impossible. And now we're gonna have the same effect. The other legal tools that were created at that time is this anti-terrorism framework, which we're gonna see a lot more of,, it's already happening in cases that mark's involved in and other friends of mine are involved in. One thing I did wanna say, the first mention of terrorism in any federal statute is about Palestine. So this entire history in the United States of talking about terrorism is about Palestine p is the first organization designated as a terrorist organization. It's just before we get to September 11th, 2001, we've got an infrastructure that, is already sanctioning at the behest of overtly Zionist government officials and electeds a whole system that's created and exists. And then we have September 11th and we take it up at a notch, and now we have this and these things all sort of work on a continuum back and forth. But the notion that we can elevate protest and dissent into terrorism and conspiracy is something that has existed before, but got transformed into entirely different and universally supported framework that would allow us to root out these in quotes, terrorists that were in our country. And we're gonna see that more and more now too. So when you first ask the question, I was thinking about. The way lawyers always play a role in this, I agree with Mark that there's an ebb and flow and that the state always overreaches. What I'm a little more circumspect about is whether or not people are ready in those moments to organize people into different action. I think it's right. They always over overreach, overreact and their violence stuns people. But I think if you just asked, someone in 2001 if you could ever imagine the National Guard and the DHS and there was no DHS, right? That didn't even exist. This part of this whole infrastructure never existed before. And now they're just coming into suburbs in Southern California and going to Home Depots and kidnapping people off the street in mass. And people are rightly shocked by it. But I also think even though it's shocking, it's less shocking now than it would've been prior to this regime that was created that allowed for them to have the idea that there's an in an institution that has the right to via your fourth amendment rights if you are within 100 miles of the border, just didn't exist before. And now you have this whole machinery that's created in 2001 and then affirmed by every president, right? It's every liberal president, ever conservative president. No one has ever reigned that in. And now we're dealing with those consequences. Because so much of my work has been with organizers and activists, I'm hopeful that people are gonna be able to be out at the otherwise silly, no kings protests, right? But people with more radical polls could be there catalyzing people into different movements. We were talking with some of our. Clients in the UCLA case, and they mentioned that it was at the end of the No Kings authorized, permitted immediately at the end, the police then started brutalizing people. And so there were these, people with more centrist politics who were there and then got subjected to this incredible violence. And they didn't experience it for hours while they had this magical thing called a permit that allowed them to voice their opinions. And then it got taken away. And the same people, they were high fiving for letting them exercise their first amendment rights. We're shooting them Now I think those people are gonna be radicalized, right? But who's gonna be there to bring them in to other moments? We hope that by, virtue of representing people, defending people, we're gonna be able to connect them with movements too. That's one other thing that we can do as lawyers when we do find people who just say, I got shot and I'm hurt and I'd like to potentially see if I can get some money damages for that. We can then potentially connect them with people organizing. But these moments I agree with Mark, are really critical. I'm just left wondering are we gonna bring those other people in and how are we gonna bring them 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 overreach creates opportunities, but it doesn't necessarily guarantee a result or even the willingness to take action and the important work that organizers and lawyers and everybody in the movement is doing to try to connect those dots for folks. I was also really struck Thomas, in your account of how your personal journey in some ways mirrors something that we teach in our classrooms about the connection between the here and the there. The, imperial violence of the global war on terror, but also the quotidian violence in places like Ferguson. Oftentimes done with weapons that were originally purchased for the Global War on

Thomas: 28:26

terror. Yeah, I've neglected to mention that one of my experiences there was being out at protest and being tear gassed that happened to me a few times, but it happened virtually every other day to people. And eventually people figured out that those weapons were created by the same company, that Israel was tear gassing Palestinians and that the St. Louis County Police Department was trained by the IOF and had these, journeys there. And that created these amazing moments of solidarity where palestinians were tweeting to Ferguson protestors about how to handle the tear gas. It was really just an amazing thing. With the frontline organizers and activists, they created a trip, sort of Ferguson, Palestine relationship. And that was an incredible moment too. And it really got into a whole other area of political conversation in St. Louis that had not, to my knowledge, previously been happening. There were a lot of Jewish faith leaders who had come out to the front lines of the focus and protest. But after this connection with Palestine came up, there were some divisions and some real challenging conversations. And to your point about these small scale, but very impactful repression that was going on at these municipal courts, it shouldn't be lost on anyone there's a legal system in Israel that allows people to challenge the detention of Palestinian prisoners. It doesn't work, right? But there's this fake thing that happens and lawyers go and they try to get people out. And there's this patina of legitimacy. To what's happening there. And I don't think you have to squint very hard to see the same thing even before the Trump administration, if you are poor and black or brown in this country, you were dealing with something very similar to what's now been expanded by the Trump administration to a larger number of people. And the idea that we're living in a fascist, repressive society is obviously not new. It wasn't new to my clients in St. Louis. That was just their life. And to some of them, it was cute that white people in suburbs had begun to see this after Mike Brown was murdered in, someone burned down a Quick Trip. But they had known that their whole life. And I think that organizers were able to leverage that moment of conflict into a broader understanding and achieve real change in St. Louis. And to Sean, what you were saying I just hope that is what, we're gonna be able to catalyze now too.

Sean: 30:52

We should segue to present events. I do want to issue an official clarification on behalf of the Lower Frequencies podcast. Thomas Harvey is also six feet, two and devastatingly handsome. I. Alright let's take things to the present. These are obviously some very repressive and difficult times for everybody. We are focusing today particularly on education and the way in which students and educational spaces have been under relentless attack. And so much of the attention on that attack is focused on Trump. But I know for those of us who have been involved in these struggles at both the university and K through 12 level they will tell you that this kind of repression is not new, nor is it unique to Trump. And this is particularly true when it comes to ethnic studies education. And we're curious from your perspective as lawyers who have been involved in these struggles well before Trump took office, if you can shed some light specifically on the role of Zionism and of Zionist organizations in laying the groundwork for the current assault that we are seeing on education.

Mark: 32:00

To my mind there are several ways this has to be contextualized. The first involves the complete rollback of public support for education. Because as public support recedes, especially in non STEM areas where there's historically been a lot of corporate interest or governmental interest what's left is donor support. And to the extent to which donor support is vulnerable to political pressure it really magnifies the voice of anybody with money. One of the UC professors I've represented, and it's right in the charge and right in the findings that one of the disruptions of central university functions she stands accused of is disrupting donor relations which is amazing, and to depart only momentarily from the question of, zionist influence and its role. This is to my mind, a perfect example of why corporate and fascist overreach breeds its own grave digger because it may be easiest and lowest profile for the university to repress people who are speaking up against genocide and kaza over this. But once the principle that upsetting donors is a hanging offense is established what does that do when you talk about agribusiness, what does it do? When you talk about big pharma, what does it do when you talk about private equity taking over huge schwabs of real estate, et cetera, et cetera? The biggest piece of what I think is driving the Zionist role in the attack is both quasi-religious, and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second, and also profoundly generational. The joke that Israelis tell is that the great number. Of Zionists believe the only thing they believe in is that this land was promised to them. They don't believe in anything else, literally that a tremendous number of Israeli Jewish people are Jewish by heritage and inclination, but not profoundly religious, which is one of the things that makes the claim that Zionism is a sincerely held religious belief to my mind, so problematic and also Frankely so annoying. I say generational in the sense that there is an acute realization that the younger generation, Jews in the United States under the age of 40 have been lost to the Zionist project. That even though there may be some residual emotional affinity, when asked the the key questions there were a plurality of younger Jews say, yes, this is an apartheid state. Yes, it's genocide. And when you break the concept of Zionism down and unpack it as something that in tunes the idea of Jewish supremacy, American Jews are appalled by that which is not even a generational problem. So the trick is, to my mind, how do you extract or rescue university based projects from this kind of influence and control? And I am Frankely at a loss for any easy or happy talk solutions to that. I think it is going to be a real ongoing struggle. The problems, as I see it are number one, financial using California and UC as an example. Were run by a governor who has presidential aspirations and his decisions are made based on a financial calculus. Number two, there's the tremendous amount of influence that Zionist donors have in the UC system everywhere. Early on in the encampment at UCLA and eight figure donation was pulled from the medical school. You've got, as an example, the Diller Foundation at UC San Francisco, which has basically financed so much of UCSF, along with incidentally financing the canary mission. Incidentally, financing the David Horowitz Freedom Center, incidentally, financing, aha, et cetera. That extraction is, like campaign finance until private money is out of electoral politics. Electoral politics are a dead end for us until public money is back in the university. We are always, I think, going to be fighting a terrible rear guard action here. Trying to rally people who believe in principles of justice and principles of free inquiry and discourse. And the only thing I hope is that as the current generation of American Jews in their thirties and forties age into all of that money that they preserve some of the politics that they have now. I think a lot of the panic within the Anti-Defamation League, the panic within apac, the panic within the Democratic Party is based on the recognition that the clock on this is ticking. And the question we have to deal with both internationally and here in the US is, just how many more lives will be lost, and how many more careers will be ruined before, the generations change and it says time up, but I think it's going to be a while.

Christine: 39:10

Mark, I think you're absolutely right that we're seeing a broad structural transformation of the American University. I wanted to also point out that, in looking at the demonstration operations team series of situation reports that were released by UC Santa Cruz as part of an ACLU lawsuit, we realized that part of the demonstration operations team was the development office. What role does the development office have on DOT, but I also wanted to say that, we have an institutional edifice that was shaped profoundly by the Cold War. Public money meant federal government support. Federal government support was initiated. Sean and I were talking about this to some of my students. In a course that I teach on demonetizing, the university, that support was initiated with Manhattan Project. And the dependence of research universities on the federal government has everything to do with this devil's bargain between the corporate war industries the federal government and academic researchers on the STEM side of things. This is all otherwise known as the Iron Triangle. We have principles that we try to use to safeguard the possibility of speaking out in academic spaces, academic freedom, the First Amendment. But the edifice that we inherit is also profoundly imperialistic and profoundly repressive.

Thomas: 41:01

Yeah, I think it's really important to note exactly right that some of the reliance on the federal funding is very clearly tied to the university's role in prodUCing the technology and the materials for Warmaking. To the question of the, the Zionist organizations. So in, in the work we've been doing, what we see over and over again is places like Batar, places like the ADL, places like Canary Mission, places like Stand With Us the Brandeis Center. There's, a handful of key players that are pursuing a variety of different statutes strategies to weaponize antisemitism in order to produce broader goals. I think in essentially, Christine, to your point, just to destroy the university structure such as it is with its flaws, right? But they wanna see it diminished even further. And I think part of that has to do with just ending the university system writ large, but especially certain professors capacity and ability and space to teach. We don't even to talk about theory, just talk about history. And imagine a, a course on Middle East studies or Israel-Palestine conflict, or just the history of Palestine without talking about Zionism. Defining Zionism not as, Israel's right to exist. If you did that according to the, preliminary injunction in the central district here in the Frankel versus UC Regents case that's anti-Semitic. And students who were in a class like that would have under this injunction, I think every right to say they've been excluded from the classroom by virtue of the content of the course. So I think that's not an accident. I think it's helpful for me to pull out a little bit of the Zionism context and think about just the way Christopher Ruffo was so sUCcessful in demonizing CRT and how that is about education and that is about history and how imagine trying to pass policies in this country without a reference to the enslavement of, humans and the systems that were created subsequent to that. That's essentially the kind of the, a historical, a contextual world that the current administration and these organizations would like us to be living in. From my perspective on the education platform. It has been this concerted attempt to diminish, eliminate people's space to talk about a legitimate history of this country. And you see an analogous thing happening right now in the science and context.

Christine: 43:49

There's no question that educational spaces have emerged as a frontline, but sometimes I find myself asking a frontline of what, but I wanted to give space to you, mark, to speak about some really important victories that you have been central to. On November 30th, 2024, a federal district judge in California dismissed a lawsuit that was brought by an LA based Zionist group. And there was a Trump lawyer involved as well against the liberated ethnic studies model curriculum consortium, and United Teachers Los Angeles Union. Mark, you served as the lead attorney representing the defendants in this multi-year case. Could you speak to us a little bit about the background of the case, how you won, and what this victory might mean for the currently still embattled struggle for ethnic studies K through 12 education in California more broadly? And do you have any updates on the case?

Mark: 45:07

Thank you. All of the above. So I was the lead counsel for Liberated Ethnic Studies. UTLA had its own set of, I have to say, fabulous lawyers labor law firm in Los Angeles called Bush Gottlieb. That was rock solid on the core question, which is the ability of teachers to figure out what their students need in a curriculum, design it and teach it without this kind of insane interference. Because UTLA had taken a strong position in favor of including first of all in favor of requiring ethnic studies as part of the curriculum, and in favor of including discussion of Palestine as part of the curriculum. There had been, unsurprisingly a big battle within the union over this because there was a loud minority of UTLA members who had great personal difficulties with this. Enter from stage far right, a Trump lawyer from Philadelphia who pulled together something called Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles. They filed a completely unhinged complaint. I've gotta say the complaint puzzled everybody on our side who was involved because these are well-trained lawyers who had gone to mainstream law schools and they had completely lost it. Some 40 paragraphs in the complaint were dedicated to an exec of the Old Testament. The Song of Psalms, the Talmud, commentary on the Talmud. Yes. We'd never seen anything quite like it before. This was their effort to claim that a curriculum that mentioned Palestine was inherently threatening and would be upsetting to Jewish students and therefore violated civil rights statutes, elements of the California education Code, et cetera. It was at the time the leading edge of what has now become quite common, which is the weaponization of false claims of civil rights violations to try to silence discussions that people don't like. Not unlike that court clerk in Tennessee who refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it's the invocation of religion as a justification for hatred. I would note parenthetically that to the extent to which there's an effort to implement either Christian or Zionist surreal law in the United States, the people who complain about Muslims trying to enforce surreal law in the country only prove that yes, every accusation is in fact a confession, which is what is going on here. The pushback from both the Liberated Ethnic Studies consortium and UTLA took several forms. The first being that none of the people who claimed to be so aggrieved about this had children who were in any of these classes. None of the teachers who claim to be so aggrieved about this were being asked to teach courses that had curriculum materials they were upset about. This is a really important point because it represents what I call both the terrorist and anti-Semitic imaginary. There's an entire fantasy world out there where the answer to every question we might raise is Hamas. And somebody put it on discovering that we have a Palestinian flag hanging in our front yard, somebody pointed out that what this means is that somebody's going to show up and claim that my house was promised to them 3,500 years ago, and that if I don't understand the logic of this Hamas which was pretty much the plaintiff's answer to everything in this lawsuit. So we opposed this on multiple grounds. One was none of these people had any real skin in the game, but. There is a constitutional right that students have that has been recognized in the Federal Court of Appeals for our region, the Ninth Circuit to receive instrUCtion and receive communication, and that this was interfering not just with what the teachers wanted to do, but with what students ought to be able to learn. The third major prong of attack was education is supposed to be uncomfortable. If it's not uncomfortable, you're not doing it right. And if people aren't wrestling with ideas that are troubling to them something very wrong is going on. The judge ultimately accepted all of those premises, although it took two and a half years and really created tremendous angst amongst the liberated Ethnic studies consortium. All the time the case was going on. The Zionist multi-ethnic studies movement in California was using the lawsuit to frighten school districts locally. To frighten teachers locally saying, look what we're doing to them in the Central District of California. If you implement this here, we'll sue you too. Which makes the victory important on two levels. The first level is that it showed that the basis for the lawsuits was unsurprisingly fraudulent. The second level is that in the federal courts, in this district, if you sue somebody for speaking in a public forum of almost any sort about a matter of public importance or public interest and the person you're suing, in this case, the teachers and the Liberated Consortium can file a special motion to get the lawsuit thrown out saying, you are using this frivolous lawsuit to suppress my free speech, make me hire a lawyer, make me do all of these things. It's a bogus lawsuit and not only should it be dismissed, but you should pay for my lawyers. The judge agreed with that. And between the two groups awarded the lawyers some$570,000 in legal fees. The plaintiffs are appealing the case to the ninth circuit, so they don't have to pay yet, but we have made them go and get a bond to secure the payment and the bond's coming to some three quarters of a million dollars. So it's costing them some change. And it's not the lawyers who brought that case who have to pay for the bond. It's actually the individual plaintiffs, which is important because if you are a lawyer trying to recruit people to file one of these bogus lawsuits, you pretty much now have an obligation to say, by the way, if this doesn't work, somebody may come and own your house or put a brick on your pension, et cetera, et cetera, which we're hoping will have a deterrent effect on some of his nonsense in some of these suits in the future. And this smarter Zionist lawyers are now really trying to avoid any state law claims that would be subject to these lawsuits and just look at federal law claims which Thomas and I have both gotten stuck defending already. He's been able to get one of his clients out of a couple of these. They've still got me by the ankles. The message to the Zionist legal community is basically sooner or later you're gonna reach the f fo stage of FAFO and you'd better get your clients ready for that eventuality.

Sean: 54:58

I wanna move on now to talk about the University of California and a case involving a close personal friend of mine. Both of you recently secured a victory in court against UC Regent Jay Sures. Could you tell us a little bit about the background leading up to this victory? Who is Jay Sures? Why does everybody hate him? And last but not least why the outcome in this one particular case might be significant beyond the case in question.

Thomas: 55:28

So first I wanna say that Ben Oli was the lead attorney on this case, and I was co-counsel in the case. Mark was there as a witness and support and advised us also, but Ben carried the laboring oar on this case. So I just wanna make, be clear about that, but I'm happy to share that the background and WA little bit of what happened. UC Regent Jay Sures is this figure who prior to the moment that I got involved in this case, had been pretty notorious among the protesters and the faculty, given his strong pro-Israel positions and his willingness to leverage that against professors and students throughout the UC system who dared to ask the university to stop profiting from the weapons that were sold to Israel to kill children and bomb hospitals and committed genocide. Not only that, but he's a member of the LAPD Foundation board and then the, vice chair of United Talent Agency and very politically connected and has said some menacing things that we were able to get into our lawsuit where in response to the faculty's positions, he said every option should be on the table. And this included this display of this large bullet on his table as he's saying that. And it's just really been a person who's been very willing to engage in this political conduct and leverage his power and his money and his influence to try to destroy pro-Palestinian protest and any kind of dissent on campus. So that's prior to this moment, but I. In March a protestor was served with a lawsuit trying to get a civil restraining order against him by Jay Sures who went to state court and tried to get this restraining order, prohibiting the student from coming to his house and going to campus et cetera. And the way this process works is you go to the judge first and you give your best version of the facts, which would mean the most exaggerated version, right? Like an uncontested, most exaggerated version depicting the other person as the worst person in the world. And sure, as his lawyers went to the judge and asked that, and the judge said, no, that doesn't arise to the level of issuing one of these orders. So then you serve the person and you say, we're gonna have a court date and we're gonna have a hearing. I represented the student along with Ben. We went to court and we filed the similar motion mark was just talking about that allowed us to challenge this lawsuit as ridiculous in an attempt by a powerful person to suppress speech political speech that this person doesn't like. There are a lot of silly things that came out of this. For example, students had come to this man's house and protested and there were say 75 maybe students. No one got cited, no one got arrested. But Jay Sures was only able to identify one person and that's the person that he sued. And he called this person the ringleader of a violent mob that attacked his wife and his family. And if you know this student, he's one of the most gentle kind people you'd ever meet. He also probably weighs 110 pounds dripping wet. And is not a, the ringleader of any kind of mob so in this case, it was, utterly ridiculous. The arguments they were making. This was a hate crime to come to Jay Sures' house because j Horus is Jewish. This is all offset by the fact that the student and the other protestors went to Jay Sures' house.'Cause he lives within a handful of miles of UCLA's campus and he is the only region that lives within a handful of miles of UCLA's campus. So it's easy for students who don't have a car to get there. And for some who do have a car. It was antisemitic because the students had a large banner that said, Jay Sures, you will pay to your final day. And it had images of pigs heads on it. Those are according to Jay Sures and his lawyers, an anti-Semitic trope. They had included a fuzzy image of this in the exhibit, in the court case, we found the original image, it's very clearly a pig with a police hat on top of his head. And the judge had to painstakingly explained to these lawyers that people who protest against police oppression since the early sixties have been using an image of a pigs head with a police officer's hat on its head to symbolize the police. These lawyers also took great pleasure in what they thought as their latitude to say the N word, full word in court three times with a young black woman as the clerk and another black staff member in the courtroom. And this is the quote from a case, but there's absolutely, positively no reason to have said it in court. And they allege that, instead of a pigs head and red painted hand prints on the wall if it were nooses and white sheets, we wouldn't even be talking about this. And the judge had to again, point out yes, but that's not what it was. These two things are not the same symbols against police repression and symbols that are almost universally understood as meaning your hands have blood on them because of the death and the mass death and the killing that you have helped facilitate are not antisemitic in their nature. So we won that case. We were able to get their underlying lawsuit dismissed. There were more bonkers things that happened, but I'll leave it at that for now. And in Mark's case, they were already able to get an order ordering. The other side to pay the attorney's fees. We've just submitted a motion requesting the attorney's fees are statutory, but the judge still has to determine how much will be paid. So in, in the best case scenario Jay Sures will be paying Ben and i's attorney's fees, something on the order of a hundred thousand dollars, hopefully. Which will be a great moment. It would be the greatest Robinhood moment I've ever been able to, have, get Jay Sures, who does an idiotic thing, is told it's idiotic, refuses in his hubris to admit its idiotic. Hires an expensive law firm has five lawyers come into court, pound the table and talk about how Jay Sures is the victim of a single student's protest and then lose, and then have to pay us to represent more protesters for free later on down the line. So I hope this is how it works out, out. We'll see at the end, but i echo mark's sentiment that I think it would be malpractice of an attorney representing people trying to bring claims like this to not point out the result in the case that Mark was a part of and the case that Sures bought, because these are pretty significant fee awards mark's much larger. But these are big numbers even to people who are as wealthy as Jay Sures.

Mark: 1:02:18

If I may very briefly add we're movement lawyers. We're not greedy lawyers. We're prepared to extend an offer to the people who owe us these fees that we will cut or even drop our fee claims in return for the release of several thousand Palestinian prisoners which I'm sure Jay Sures could arrange. Probably. Just saying the author's out there. Jay call us.

Thomas: 1:02:49

We're flexible. We would love to, to do something bigger, but it's really important for the students to know that, people have their back and are gonna try to defend them when things like this happen and people try to bully them like this. And at least for now, the law on our side in a case like this. And I think it's important to, to try to take advantage of those moments. We were able to get in some of the advocacy of the students in the pleadings. If we win, I think we will, try to publicize this more so that people understand what the result is and bringing lawsuits like this to try to crush people's right to dissent against a policy and investments that are leading to the killing of hundreds of thousands of people.

Christine: 1:03:30

I know that Sean was crushed because he loves Jay Sures. But Sean and Jay Sures have long been pen pals. I don't know if you knew this.

Sean: 1:03:42

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 of attention.

Christine: 1:03:52

He wrote a letter in 2023, a richly giving letter, something that I like to share with my students. We take out our red pens. We like to mark up the letter circle claims that have no basis in Facticity. Sean had written on behalf of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council and we submitted a letter to UC president Michael Drake, and to the Regents. Because both Drake and then chair of the Regents, Richard Leib had submitted a statement in October that expressed concern and support strictly about Israel. And so we pointed out how deeply morally and ethically flawed this letter was, and in response, J has offered these claims. And so this is someone who at the United Talent Agency, specializes in news media and news celebrities. He's previously worked with people like Don Lemon. He's has some sort of affiliation with Anderson Cooper. And he said that our opposition to the regents and the president's characterization intentionally ignores the reality of the situation. And he describes the reality of the situation as Hamas killing babies. Children of all ages, the elderly, 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 burning them alive. So this is one claim that he made. Another claim that he made was that Hamas builds its infrastructure underneath schools and hospitals, mosques, apartment dwellings. And so that any destruction of civilian infrastructure is not the responsibility of Israel, but actually is the responsibility of Hamas and Palestinians. Here's someone who has a remarkable incapacity to control his temperament. It's actually recorded back into the early 1990s when he threw a shit fit about a malfunctioning Sony cell phone and dragged a bunch of people into this. And he threw such a shit fit that it was written about in the New York Times. But he's someone who, as you say, Thomas is a high ranking corporate figure in the United Talent Agency. He also plays a role in terms of the LAPD, he's everywhere. He, also at UTA represents the Anti-Defamation League. I didn't know that the ADL needed talent agents. The other thing that he does is he is the chair of the board of directors of Triad, the Los Alamos labs. What are his qualifications for that? The other question that we have to ask is, why is that not a conflict of interest? He's sitting on the regions. I realize that is very much business as usual, but we still have to pose that question. He's been behind numerous policies that we've had to deal with, trying to limit what faculty can say, where we can say it. And now seems to be potentially involved as well in efforts to limit what faculty could say in their personal social media. I wonder if either of you have any other comments that you would like to add about Jay Sures

Thomas: 1:08:30

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 us frame that he was, ideologically committed was that he would do everything in his power to prevent your goals, right? The goals of the faculty members to talk about what's actually happening in the world. It is just another example of his hubris that he says these things and then when people want to protest him for those statements, it's antisemitism that he claims has motivated it, not his very explicit public, condemnation of prop Palestinian advocacy whether it be students or faculty. It was a really outrageous moment to see this person in court. Mark and I have done a lot of student conduct meetings and hearings, and I think these university officials have gotten used to the sort of ridiculous farce version of their internal student conduct process and believe that's how the world operates. With a different judge. It might've been that way. We were fortunate, I think, to have a pretty reasonable court who held them to basic standards and 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 pretty frightening figure with all this power related to the police, the governor, the UC Regents and the Los Alamos stuff.

Mark: 1:09:52

One of my favorite lines from a Bob Dylan song from the sixties contains the lyric:"money doesn't talk, its swears. Obscenity who really cares. Propaganda is all phony." There's a reason people like this get on the board of Regents. And it, to my mind really raises a much broader issue of governance in California. education is as fundamental a public utility as anything else. Why are people who are simply able to give vast sums of money to somebody's political campaign able to get into positions of power where they're making policy that controls the lives of tens of thousands of faculty and staff and over 150,000 students and graduate students in the state of California. We have an elected insurance commission in California because there was a referendum campaign to take appointment of the insurance commissioner out of the hands of the government by constitution, even Supreme Court judges who the governor appoints get, have to sit for reelection. Why should Gavin Newsom or Arnold Schwartzenegger, or Ronald Reagan or Pete Wilson get to make these insane decisions that then control the lives of so many of us? If education is a public good, why doesn't the public voice factor into this somewhere?

Christine: 1:11:46

Is very interesting to hear you speak Thomas about. Jay Sures is having to be in a space where reason prevails, because the academic senate chair prior to the current one described the Regents as Mad Kings. I thought it was a very apt description. Both of you are lead attorneys in a suit that was filed on behalf of students, faculty, and staff at UCLA in March of this year. Can you speak about the background of that lawsuit, why it came about, and what you hope to achieve in court?

Thomas: 1:12:33

Yeah, I can start. So we both have gotten to know students and faculty and community members who were brutalized in the Palestine solidarity encampment on April 30th, by Zionist mob attackers, and then by the police the next night. I'd say it's also motivated by a series of reports and lawsuits that were filed in the house committee investigating ostensible antisemitism on campuses. They effectively gave two sentences to describe this four plus hour long, brutal, relentless assault on hundreds of students that went on live tv while police and private security stood by and did nothing. We have a 300 paragraph lawsuit that describes those events. They gave it two sentences. Similarly some students at UCLA filed a lawsuit called Frankel v UC Regents, and they gave it one sentence. And I think that complete dismissal of the overwhelming violence that occurred on UCLA as a campus by a mob of people who called themselves Zionists, some of whom called themselves white supremacists. A group composed of, what you might think of as middle class and above like wealthier business people attacked these students and faculty and community members and viciously beat them because they were protesting against the genocide and the university's involvement in it. And between, the end of April and beginning of May, 2024 when we filed our lawsuit, which was March of 2025, I. There hadn't been very much proactively done on behalf of those students. While to, to your earlier point, Christine, that the internal sort of legal system, student conduct system had really been grinding these students down. And subjecting to, one of the best versions of the process is the punishment that I've seen outside of Ferguson. And that Frankel v Regents lawsuit has this depiction of the encampment as this hotbed of antisemitism. They call it a, Jew exclusion zone. And Mark and I both knew that, there were any number of Jewish faculty and students who had helped create the encampment, and that there was a Passover ceremony and there was a Seder. And it was this beautiful, wonderful space of learning that was an extension of the university for many people, and actually taught people, I think things maybe they were unable to be taught inside the university's walls. And the university's response to it was both to allow. People to verbalize their students and faculty, but then to invite and call the police to do the same thing. So that, I would say is the origin and the impetus of it. From our perspective something affirmative needed to be done on behalf of the students and the faculty. We watched in horror as the people did this on video and then never got charged with a crime and setting aside anyone's sort of belief in the criminal legal system. It's shocking to see videotape of people assaulting and beating people live on TV and then watch a CNN reporter go to their houses and talk to them on CNN and have the police do nothing. Nothing at all. And so at a minimum, we wanted to, bring civil suits against these people to try to get some small measure of justice for what happened to them.

Mark: 1:15:54

There are two related lessons. I draw, first of all and foremost what Thomas said. This was outrageous. In 60 years of movement work, I've never witnessed as prolonged and uninterrupted an attack on a demonstration ever. Having represented demonstrators who in other situations who were having bottles and glasses thrown at them, responded to defend themselves, were threatened by a Zionist counter demonstrator who raised a 26 pound stanchion up over his head and ran toward them like a, it was a war club, and actually hit one of them with it. They got charged in a heartbeat with a vicious anti-Semitic attack, assault with intent to commit great bodily harm and hate crime enhancements. Here you've got all of this evidence of this, and as Thomas said, the state doesn't seem to care. They're turning a blind eye to it. The other blind eye that I think has to be mentioned is the people who lay claim to progressive politics and lay claim to social justice monikers but have accepted positions within the UCLA administration. One of the great heartbreaks of this, in addition to the brutality that everyone faced. Was watching somebody who prides himself as being a fighter for social justice and someone who understands the importance of decolonizing academia and has talked about it and written about it, doing the administration's bidding because he's now part of the administration. It's one of the disturbing lessons that there is to learn that even the people who we respect and rely upon are not necessarily immune from co-optation when the time comes. I have asked Thomas and a couple of friends of mine to promise me that if ever I falter and look like I've been bought out there to wait until I'm speaking in public and let me have it with a cream pie at the very least. The worst part of the assault is the weaponization of the term campus safety. Because campus safety now means that if you have people who want to show a documentary, ironically enough about the encampments and can't get a room at UCLA to show it. So they show it outdoors in the evening with a projector and a bed sheet is the movie screen, riot clad police storm, the event pronouncing the bed sheet and the two metal poles holding it up to be a an unauthorized structure attacking students, putting some of them in the hospital et cetera. And you can see the invocation of campus safety as a term now being used in the modifications of the academic policy manual as an excuse for muzzling faculty and censoring faculty. Campus safety is a marvelously elastic term in an era where, words no longer mean what they're supposed to mean. I keep thinking of that disturbing passage in Louis Carroll's, Alice in Wonderland, where Alice is pointing out that words are being badly misused and she protests that if words don't mean what they've always meant, we can no longer have discourse. And either tweedle dumb or tweedle D puts her off saying"the question, my dear, is not what words mean. The question is, who has the power? Nothing more, nothing less." And it is the bastardization of these terms, like the bastardization of antisemitism that is, such a perversion of reality. We brought the suit both as an effort to send a message to UCLA and the powers that be and the Zionist mob they allowed on the campus, but also to send a message to all of those students and faculty who were terrorized and then brutalized. That, yeah, there are people who will have your backs and that who Frankely give a shit about what is going on and that we're not going to let this be swept up and forgotten about. And neither of us are going quietly. I am very lUCky to be in the league of people like Thomas and some of the other lawyers in this who have neither a sense of self preservation nor a sense of proportion.

Christine: 1:22:01

Part of this is making me think about what kind of archive are we leaving of these struggles? When I was looking at the daily encampment situation reports pulled together by the demonstration operation team. It was like viewing something through a warping lens, and I wondered if someone were to view this as a primary source. Historian in the future, what would they take from this? It always strikes me that these battles that we're waging are battles on the terrain of information. And I always think about the way that intelligence is weaponized information and it's never about truth. It's about superiority it's about power setting the narrative. Tom, you're talking about the congressional hearings and it was so crazy making to see the brutal warping of reality and the imposition of. A regime of truth, through people like Elise Stefanik, who refuse to acknowledge that there's a genocide happening by a genocidal state, Israel, against a people, Palestinians, in Gaza. But instead forcing every single head of a university that was arrayed before her to submit to a line of questioning about hypothetical antisemitism. And then to realize that through the ADL, any protest, arguing Palestinian right to life was understood and warped as an act of antisemitism and logged as such, 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 presumption was students who are beneficiaries of structural violence should never feel uncomfortable, should be insulated, have a right to a safe space. I wanted to say too, Thomas, that at the UC Santa Cruz encampment, we had in the aftermath a people's graduation ceremony. I had the honor of reading the names of the students and their majors. And the extraordinary thing about this wasn't the creativity of the camp names-- they are very creative. It's the fact that 50% of these students are STEM majors. In lockstep compliance with the regents about never straying from their syllabus, I suspect that largely on the stem side of things, people did not stray from their syllabi. What happened was students looking for a space where critical discussion could be had came to the people's universities in the encampments. That certainly was true at UC Santa Cruz. It wasn't just that the encampment was an extension of the university it was actually a critical alternative to the university. Mark, you introduced me to one of the people who was brutalized during that counter protest. I was horrified to see that person's visible injuries. Also at UC Santa Cruz there were students who were beaten. There were students who had zip ties so tight that a blood clot went to, in one case, the student's brain, the student suffered a stroke and the student went from using a cane last summer to now using a wheelchair. But there is no concession on the part of the UC Santa Cruz administration. That, that sort of violence was inflicted upon protestors. So I just think that the work that you're doing in challenging the brutal narrative of power is so essential. Just really thank you for doing that work.

Thomas: 1:26:54

Can I quickly add something to that? This Frankel case is a good example of what you're talking about, of creating a narrative that then passes for truth and then gets referenced in news articles, gets referenced in other lawsuits, gets referenced in reports. And one of the most amazing things about this lawsuit is the plaintiffs, when they write their initial complaint, they say the combination of events they alleged effectively created a Jew exclusion zone, but the effectively just disappears in any subsequent conversation about the"Jew exclusion zone." Any reasonable person thinking about a Jew exclusion zone would think, oh, they were actually preventing people from walking through this encampment or from getting into buildings, et cetera. And even in the lawsuit itself, it never says that. I've read this lawsuit dozens of times now, and what it says is almost exactly to your point, Christine, it says the encampment included people saying things like"from the river to the sea" and having signs about genocide and saying that Israel Zionists. And because that made me so uncomfortable and because I believe in the Jewish state of Israel, I didn't think I could go to that encampment without being required to disavow Israel. That's what this says. It exists all as Mark put it all in the imaginary for them and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit says that you said a safe space, which is, often thought of as a sort of a way to negatively characterize left people as wanting a safe space. This one of the plaintiffs says that she went into a classroom and people were wearing terrorist scarves by which she means kafis. And she felt so uncomfortable that she felt excluded from class. And so she doesn't want to be around things like that. And that's what this lawsuit is effectively about. But it turns these discussions of how they felt and what they believed and what they feared into something that happened in part because UCLA does not defend the lawsuit, but it's very much along the lines of what 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 its campus, and no one's gonna go read this, 400 paragraph lawsuit to see how thin it is. And given that UCLA just, capitulated there's no one that's contesting it. We're trying to, but there has been no meaningful opposition to the narrative that's now become the truth about the UCLA encampments. And I'm sure this is the same with every encampment right? I'm positive this is exactly what has happened everywhere there's been an allegation of antisemitism within these encampments.

Christine: 1:29:52

Mark, were you going to add something?

Mark: 1:29:54

Yes, just very briefly, the claim that somehow a symbol makes it impossible for someone to study or someone to work is, I believe going to be the next phase of part of our fight. We have talked to faculty members who have been asked to leave departmental committees because Zionist senior faculty are uncomfortable being in the same room as them which is just an amazing form of exclusion. There are a couple of medical residents who are mostly through their program at UCLA who had been trashed for having put on a lunch and learn program that was very well footnoted and documented And it went up to the Board of Regents. One of them got footnoted in one of the reports from the House Inquisition committee or reports to the committee There's a, an instructor at Berkeley Law who left a class he was co-teaching and would not return to it because a student had a symbol of Palestine on their phone cover and of course was using their phone during the lecture. It's this sort of thing. This is the tee up to claiming that speaking out against genocide creates a hostile work environment for the genocide heirs.

Christine: 1:31:50

It's extraordinary that what is getting criminalized or at least targeted as an area of possible discipline is any affirmative assertion that Palestinians have a right to life. So we are being asked to participate. In these spaces of education, in the erasure of the Palestinian people. And really actually, if you look at Raphael Lakin's struggle for the world, understanding what genocide is, it wasn't just the destruction of a people, it was a destruction of the spirit of a people and their capacity to reproduce themselves as a people. And in so many ways, we are being enjoined to be complicit in the destruction of the Palestinian people. Just briefly in terms of the Weinberg case against some of the U-C-L-A-S-J-P members and others I almost had to laugh at moments. It's so ridiculous. The assertion that one of the plaintiffs was walking through the encampment and lost an earbud and that the earbud subsequently appeared in a tracking device, which suggested that it didn't just stay on the ground after it fell out of his ear, but actually someone stole it. Because it could be tracked and then someone else's phone case, the cover got scratched. Really the beos is hard to describe.

Thomas: 1:33:45

Since we're talking about how these absurd things, let me just share that in the Frankel lawsuit, they depict a series of images that they say stand for antisemitism, that UCLA was already a hotbed of antisemitism before, and the silliest one of all is they say there was a piece of paper with the words loudmouth Jew on it. And then they show an image of it and it's very clearly the name of a chapter in a book. But they say this was left outside of a Jewish professor's house. Then they say there was a book with a swastika on the cover. And if you just read the written description, you're like, oh, this is alarming. Like loud mouth use swastika. This could really terrify people. These are. Symbols of antisemitism, and then they have an image of the book, and it's Philip Roth, the Plot Against America, which is, a book written by arguably America's best known Jewish author that is a warning to America about antisemitism. And they've perverted this to be an antisemitic trope. It's not as if the swastika independently isn't, but they have the book cover it says, the Plot Against America, Philip Roth. And it's just decontextualized and presented as a symbol of antisemitism. I went to this conference and presented on this, and it was a conference that law versus antisemitism, and it was Jewish law faculty from around the country. And it turns out like a lot of local members of the Jewish community came also non-academics came to this conference. And there was like a big laugh at the crowd when I presented these symbols. So anyway, these lawsuits as Mark said, his has got like passages of the Torah, and then it just is absurd, some of the things that have been alleged in these suits. But the sad reality is if no one responds, if no one challenges them, if no one spends the hours and hours and hours reading through them and writing a response that tries to effectively dismantle those arguments, they just to get accepted is true. And that's the terrifying thing, for all of us. It's very difficult to make the time to do it, to find enough lawyers to do it and to do it well, and a real challenge right now. Even though they are ridiculous, if someone doesn't say this is utterly preposterous on its face the court will just say, oh, these allegations are accepted as true for the record.

Christine: 1:36:15

We are locked into a constant state of defense, speaking of which, you have both been involved in visionary ambitious ways, in an attempt to hold the university accountable, but I have seen you both spend countless hours addressing sometimes conduct issues, being in conversation with students and periled faculty. You have extended your support far and wide. Could you just for the purpose of our listeners, catalog some of the ways in which you've been called to defend people within the UC against a hostile administration

Mark: 1:37:09

Oh God. How can we count the ways? I'll start with UC San Diego and work my way north. An MD PhD student at UC San Diego Med School wears a kafi pattern scrub cap in the surgery and is yelled at angrily later on by a recently returned IOF soldier who also is a UC San Diego radiology technician who belligerently is yelling, I can wear whatever the fuck I want, but that's racist. And the student at UC San Diego is now on the defense of being subjectively graded down in some very unfair ways by faculty who have written viciously Islamophobic screeds before moving north. Thomas can speak much better than I can to all of the stuff that's going on at UC Irvine. So I will just step over that for a second. UCLA, we've had literally scores of, student disciplinary hearings. One of the things they have done in some cases is say, until this hearing is resolved, you're not getting your transcript. One of the students daily Bruin editor, who wasn't even at the encampment is a protestor. She was out doing her job documenting UCLA's failure to protect its students and faculty, which of course, upset the powers that be mightily. She should be starting law school this fall. She's not because UCLA won't release her transcripts because they sat on her disciplinary charge for 13 months before finally getting to a hearing. She, of course, was never criminally charged with anything at all, nor should she have been, she was just out there. They are threatening her with a four quarter suspension nonetheless on absolutely trumped up charges. The hearing for her took a full three hours. The prep for the hearing took several days. We have lecturers and faculty who have now been threatened at UCLA with, yet undefined forms of discipline. There are faculty at UC San Francisco who've been fired. Just outright fired for their social media publications and for what they have done in terms of long form articles for the press. This looks like the McCarthy area writ large and the point that I think needs. Being made about the red scare in the fifties was that although it was ostensibly about communism, it was actually an attack on all of the people who had fought for social justice in the thirties and forties, who had fought for the rights of women in the workplace. And it was an effort to drive women out of the federal workforce who had fought for the rights of black people and racial minorities. And it was an effort to suppress that. The same way that the scare about communism was being used then, we are seeing the scare about Hamas being used as the point of the spear to attack ethnic studies, attack academic freedom, attack any recognition of human rights. We have to defend the individual students and individual faculty members. First of all, just as human beings it's the minimal right thing to do. The second is the regents and the donor class would love to make examples of you all, and by making examples of you all who are the most upstanding, hammer everybody else down and frighten them into submission. And we can't allow that because you are standing up and speaking up for populations and principles that would otherwise go voiceless. And our job is to keep them off your back.

Christine: 1:42:26

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

Thomas: 1:42:41

I don't have a whole lot to add substative to that other than to say the same things happening at UCI. We filed lawsuits. I've gone to dozens of student meetings and hearings. I've done the same thing at UCLA. It is just an endless grind for these students and for the dedicated faculty members who are agreeing to accompany them and work with them and prep them. And it is just a lot of time. And I would say, I think it's really important for people to know that they are completely farcical. They are not serious in any way. The sort of middle management bureaucrats that they dispatch to handle these meetings are not empowered to make decisions. So if you if you wanted to negotiate something, they're unable to give you a decision. If you pointed out they were wrong about the allegation, they can't dismiss anything. The terms they used to describe the conduct violations have no definitions. If you ask them what the definition, they don't know. It's really Kafka ask to be accused of something, find out that the policy didn't exist on the day that you were alleged to have committed it, and that they don't know what the terms mean and that even though you've just demonstrated those two things, they won't dismiss it and don't have the power to dismiss it. And instead what they do is they go to an nameless faces boss somewhere, and that person then says, okay, what about something else you may have done on that day? Instead of doing the right thing and just being dumb with this. And I think the other thing to note is that their position would be that these are content neutral violations of time place and manner restrictions or the broader, pacos code of student conduct. But it's very obvious that this is overwhelmingly, if not only being used to attack pro-Palestinian protestors. Eventually we're gonna be able to see that we're gonna file some records requests and figure out if anyone else during this time has gone through this process and how many of those people have and what the results are. But right now it doesn't do anything for these students or trying to finish their undergraduate degree, trying to finish their graduate degree. These professors who have many other responsibilities, not to mention me and Mark and other people who have done this, but it's an endless, indefinite process that can end with a suspension or an expulsion I too represent someone who has been waiting more than a year, she graduated last year, she's done and doesn't have her degree. And in part because they just refuse to schedule the hearing. Not because this couldn't have had a resolution, but because they delayed the resolution. And so you've got a bunch of people who have done a lot of work, hard work to complete their studies at UCLA or in the middle of studying at UCLA, and they jeopardized all of that to say,"could you stop using the money that we pay intuition to invest in companies that murder people during a genocide in Palestine?" That's what they've said, and the allegations are effective that they said it slightly too loudly or on the wrong sidewalk. And for that these students and these faculty members are risking their jobs and their academic careers and their livelihood and their mental health in a variety of ways. It's really just disgusting to see I've seen it in a lot of different contexts. But to see a university who I think we all can imagine at some point in the future touting the fact that they had these protests on campus like they did the free speech movement unironically pretending that the UC system supported the free speech movement in the way that they used to advertise to students. You could imagine that happening 15 years from now saying there was a robust protest movement here and inviting some of these persecuted students back to speak about it. So if they've gotten their degree, if they haven't been expelled. But it's a really vile process run by soulless middle class bureaucrat They're the kind of people who would deny you your treatment for cancer because you didn't fill the form out in triplicet. That's who's running these processes.

Sean: 1:46:58

Thomas and Mark, one of the things that really struck me listening to you recount all of these cases is how I think almost every single one of them involves events that happened a year or more ago. And I know we started out by talking about how we don't want to exceptionalize the current moment and the current administration, but I would like to hear your thinking about where we're at now. Because the legal system takes a while to work, and so you'll be dealing this time next year with the cases that are just coming up now. Looking at the current administration and the current legal landscape, what are the things that most concern you? What are the things, if any, that give you hope in our current and near future political environment?

Mark: 1:47:41

Let me just raise a discussion that Thomas and I of our colleagues in the bigger UCLA suit earlier today in terms of what some of the problems are in the landscape, putting aside the fact that this is all unpaid labor that we're doing. And we're ignoring that. We had a discussion with our colleagues earlier today about the UCLA suit, the experts we were going to have to hire the tens and twenties of thousands of dollars we've already spent on video and software and investigation. Everybody is feeling the precarity of this and wondering are they going to have jobs? We've got our blood, sweat and tears into this. I listen to, the House Inquisition Committee people and I listen to Marco Rubio and I wonder where is that Qatari and Iranian money? We're certainly not seeing it and we have no idea how we're going to be financing these lawsuits. My current business model is to find the right freeway entrance and have a sign that says,"will sue for food." It's challenging to figure out how we're going to make this work on an ongoing basis. What we're counting on is the fact that there's a community of people for whom this work is important and who are going to dig in and help us see this through. I'm personally committed to the lawyerly version of price tag attacks. This is a scorched earth defense. Everybody's gonna get their month in court with us and we're going to make them work and scratch and claw for every effort they want to make to silence the faculty, the students, and the other activists. And we're just going to have to count on the fact that there are enough other people who will come in and have our back. Plan B, of course, is to hope we get adjoining cells.

Christine: 1:50:11

Thomas, did you want to add?

Thomas: 1:50:14

There are some sobering costs that have nothing to do with paying a lawyer that are involved in litigation if you want to do it and do it effectively and it has been a pretty broad attack that we've been trying to bring in addition to the defense. We're gonna figure out ways to raise that money for those costs, not only for the suit against UCLA, but there are several other lawsuits as well. I've always worked for free or paid low wages at nonprofits, so this is not new for me. It's what I expect. I think that's the same for Mark. I think Mark is remarkable among lawyers who are committed to movement in the sense that he's figured out a way to have a private practice that helps people and doesn't do harm in the way a lot of private legal practices do and make time for this work. But my assessment and Mark is far too humble and doesn't sleep and refuses to accept the parameters of reality. My assessment is now those two things are at odds with one another and there isn't time for the private practice'cause there's so much of the free work and that the private practice stuff is because of this administration less viable. I think that's an increasing reality for all of us. I think it's worth noting that in the past I've represented unhoused people I've represented people were alleged to have assaulted law enforcement officers, people in prison, people in jail. And I have always been able to get law firms involved to cover the kind of costs we're describing. And you can't get it with the pro-Palestine work. It's just a completely different world. And then add in suing the University of California, which is an employer for at least on some temporary basis many of these law firms And so they're not gonna sue UCLA or the UC system overall, then add on like allegations to antisemitism and then just do you support the sort of politics of these people? You're talking about a very narrow field of people who can do it. And that's the different experience for me in my legal career is I've represented people with radical politics for a long time and you could always find firms that would say, yeah, that's in our tradition we do these terrible things during the day and represent like the oil industry or the tobacco industry. But we also have these like idealistic young attorneys who we want to fool into believing they're not doing evil all the time. They'll do work on your cases. And it's been our experience that it's impossible to find right now. If you guys know somebody, let us know.'cause we would love to find a firm that would throw in with us.

Sean: 1:52:52

That actually segues to a question I wanted to pose. If there are folks listening to this who maybe aren't lawyers but are hearing about this and would like to support the kind of work that you and Mark and other movement lawyers do, are there ways people can be of assistance to you? Obviously the best would be some cracker Jack lawyers to help you out, but if there are folks who are not lawyers but would like to support the kind of work you're doing, is there any way they can do that?

Thomas: 1:53:18

Donations are always helpful. We have a website set up for the UCLA case called People v. UCLA.com and there is a way to make donations there and we would appreciate that. It would be great to go towards these costs. It would be incredibly helpful. The other thing is we have cobbled together a small group of lawyers and legal workers and people and we've been able to make pretty good use of volunteers. So if there are people who are interested in helping out, so they don't have to be lawyers, be great if they were lawyers we have been able to figure that out and we've got one of our team is volunteered to lead those offers, coordinate those. But if they emailed me or Mark, that would be great. And we could coordinate with them. 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 connect people and take those inquiries. And sometimes just doing some research, doing a little bit of data analysis. At some point we might need someone to physically take documents somewhere'cause I just did that the other day and it costs$200 to courier these copies to the court of something they could have printed out on their own, but they require it to be sent by me. It's things like that, somebody with a printer who's willing to print stuff off and lives closer to a courthouse would've been extremely valuable on that day. So I think there are a variety of different things and I think Mark and I are creative enough to work people in to places that would fit. I would say our overarching need is for paralegal support lawyer support too. But there are so many things that we spend time working on that if we had one, dedicated, skilled, this is like an invaluable person, I think anybody who's done this knows that this is like the key person in all legal work is like that really skilled, knowledgeable paralegal would save a ton of time and energy.

Sean: 1:55:16

That's great, thanks, and we'll be sure to put that link in the show notes for folks to donate and we will also put Thomas your email address in there for folks who might want to get onboarded and help offer to support your work.

Thomas: 1:55:30

I think the website is a nice place. It's got the complaint, it has some of the news articles. And this is not created by us. This is created by students and community member, plaintiffs who put this together and it is an important place for them to be able to communicate why they were protesting and what motivated them and why they wanted to go out there and what the background is. So I think it's a cool resource that they created.

Mark: 1:55:54

What's so hard is that western white European culture is so individualistic rather than communally oriented, that the impulse is to think about what impact some catastrophic event that has led to perhaps a hundred thousand dead is having on me. And it's not about that, but that's really bred in the bone of our culture and our way of thinking about things and experiencing ourselves. And it always humbles me to speak to people who were raised with a radically different ethos and recognize that some people grow up believing that the. Most important thing they can do is for the people in their community. And every time I get tired or cranky I try really hard to remember that.

Sean: 1:57:15

Thank you, Mark and Thomas, not just for your time with us today, but for all of the 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: 1:57:32

I've enjoyed the conversation. It was really nice to be able to talk. thank you for giving me a chance.