Chapo Trap House - BONUS: Michigan Raids on pro-Palestine Students

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Felix speaks with Nora Hilgart-Griff from the TAHRIR Coalition and Liz Jacob from the Sugar Law Center for Social and Economic Justice about the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel collaborating with the Trump DOJ in a series of raids on pro-Palestine students at the University of Michigan on April 23. Liz and Nora give background on Nessel's previous intimidation campaign at the university, the administration's attempts to repress the student movement against the genocide, TAHRIR Coalition's work on divestment, and much more. You're going to want to hear this whether you're a Yooper, a Detroiter, or even a recently incarcerated jewel thief who assumed the identity of a sheriff so he can stare at his ex-girlfriend in a small Pennsylvania town where everyone is a violent criminal. Update: On Monday, 5/2/25, all charges against the students have been dropped. Legal fund for the students facing charges from Nessel's office https://chuffed.org/project/um-palestine-legalfund Background on the raids https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/24/michigan-attorney-general-dana-nessel-campus-gaza-protests TAHRIR Coalition's campaign to drop the charges https://tahrirumich.org/dtc The demands of the students https://tahrirumich.org/demands Guide to the University of Michigan's economic links to Israeli genocide and occupation profiteers https://tahrirumich.org/research/endowment-guide

If you have been following the news or following some of the coverage on our show, you have taken note of a pattern of jackbooted dragnet enforcement attempts by both large American universities, state governments, the federal government, of course, sort of in line with that. Starting on April 23rd, Dana Nestle, the attorney general of Michigan, announced raids in concert with the FBI on the University of Michigan, targeting members of the Tahrir Coalition, a Palestinian activist group composed of students at the university. For people who've been following it before, they know there had been another raid at the University of For people who'd been following it before, they know that there had been another

raid at the University of Michigan six months prior. But even for people who had been following this and had been following the Mahmood Khalil case, all the other horrible infringements of people's rights and process, this one stood out as a particularly draconian and completely indefensible intimidation campaign. It has received some national coverage here, but really not to the degree that it should receive either because of Nestle's political affiliation or the fact that people may just think it is a local story and not something that does in fact have potentially very, very terrifying national consequences. But to try and get some more eyes and ears on it, I am happy to be joined today by Nora,

who is a member of Tahrir, a student at the University of Michigan, and Liz Jacob from the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, who provides counsel for TRIER in their capacity. Thank you, thank you guys for joining us so much. Yeah, thank you for having us. Just to get us started off, could you run us through what happened

with these raids on the 23rd, both like in your respective capacities as a student and legal counsel? Yeah. So functionally, to describe the situation for those who might not know, starting at around 630 in the morning at three separate locations in the area, so Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Canton. FBI, local jurisdictions of law enforcement. So, you know, Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Canton PD and university police showed up at five different residences to conduct raids on the people who were there.

They confiscated electronics, they held or detained the people who were at the residences. In one case they broke down a door, they were pretty reticent to share warrants, none of the warrants contained probable cause, and just a really scary sort of violent intrusion by the state onto a family, people in their pajamas, students who had state of blade studying for their finals. So certainly a really, really scary escalation in terms of the repression that has occurred at the university and related to the university and particularly the ongoing repression from Attorney General Dana Nestle. Now, what was the rationale for the FBI being involved?

Did Nestle come out directly and say, okay, there's a, you know, there's a foreign government thing or there, you know, this is a hate crime? Or did she even her or her office, did they even try to provide any rationale for that? I can jump in here and Nora, please jump in if I miss anything. But going back a second, Felix, to your other question, so I got involved, as Nora mentioned, this started at in the early mornings on Wednesday last week, I got involved because I got calls from students that the FBI was knocking on their door.

Folks had no idea what this was about. Folks had no idea what prompted this, and as Nora mentioned, not everyone even got to see a search warrant before their door was broken down. As an attorney who provides legal support to pro-Palestine protesters on the university's campus, one thing that I will say about our students and our community members out in Ann Arbor is they know their rights. They understand that they have the right to see a search warrant before, not after, before law enforcement actually comes into their home. They know how to review those warrants and they know how to enforce their rights with law enforcement, and that's really a testament to the movement they've built out in Ann Arbor. So folks knew

to look at those warrants. When they looked at their warrants Felix, they were really shocked because those warrants did not name probable cause. So at the time folks had their homes raided, they had no idea what these raids were about. They didn't know what was prompting this. They didn't even know what crime they were potentially alleged to have committed. So under Michigan law, there is an exception where probable cause does not have to be listed if it would be so detrimental to law enforcement's efforts that probable cause is listed that it would actually undermine the investigation itself, right? If folks knew what they were being investigated for. That is the exception the attorney general claimed in having these warrants not list

probable cause. So at the time of these raids, put yourself in the in the minds of those protesters. The FBI, multiple jurisdictions of local police, and state police officers are at their door. We're talking in some cases almost a dozen officers at one house, and folks have no idea what they're there for. What comes out over the course of the day is some whispers from the attorney general's office to press, not to the protesters whose home she has raided, not to their legal counsel. It's whispers to the press that they are investigating what they are claiming is multi-jurisdictional vandalism. At that time on Wednesday, we had no idea what that meant, right? I do not know

multi-jurisdictional vandalism as a standalone crime. I have no context as an attorney providing counsel what the even acts of alleged vandalism are on the day itself that folks are being raided, right? This feels like a euphemism to my office and the folks that we're working with for the Attorney General to try to justify the FBI's presence. Multiple jurisdictions within Michigan is still within Michigan, right? That's still the jurisdiction of local police and state police. There is no indication to us what raises this to the level of needing the FBI involved in addition to several different officers from different jurisdictions of local and state police. What we get the next day is a press release from the Attorney

General, again claiming this like multi-jurisdictional vandalism. Her office lists out multiple instances of vandalism throughout southeast Michigan, many of which I had never heard of, and many of the folks that I've talked to have not heard of, and she's trying to allege that that's what was being investigated. Again, no actual naming a probable cause, no actual communication from her office or the FBI to the people impacted by the raids themselves. This is her going to press and trying to paint some sort of story of criminality, some sort of story of vandalism, without actually providing that information to the folks who were raided. And that raises the question, right, if it was so important to your investigation not

to list probable cause on the warrant, how can you go to press the next day and provide a full account of the vandalism you're investigating if you could not do so to the folks who actually raided the day before? It makes the whole warrant feel very flimsy and that underlying probable cause feel all the more suspect to us when we don't even know what the actual underlying probable cause is and she's willing to talk more to the press than to the people she may be targeting, who if they even knew what they were being targeted for, could start to muster their defense. So it's not only a phishing expedition to try to find some kind of alleged criminality to put on these protesters. It is a phishing expedition intended to inspire fear, intended to inspire the idea that

if you speak up for Palestine, if you care about fighting a genocide, the FBI can show up at your door and you're not even going to know why. Yeah, that is sort of the thing I took away from extreme outside perspective, right? That when I read these articles and like the first thing you see, when you see the headlines, when you see the images accompanying them, whether it is national press or local press, it is FBI state raids on University of Michigan students. And for most people that just passively read this or scrolling by and they see FBI raids on Career Coalition, they think, oh my God, the FBI is involved? Okay, it must be like, you know, like I asked if Nessel alluded to, like, is there a foreign

government involved? Is some horrible act going on? Is there, you know, is there like a terrorism or hate crime angle? And to hear her come out and say, this is a multi-jurisdictional vandalism investigation. I mean, I'm sorry, but multi-jurisdictional vandalism is what they do in the fucking Revenge of the Nerds movies. Or after University of Michigan football game. Yeah. Like, I have never heard that as something that is in the purview of the FBI, much less like a state prosecutor, like an

attorney general of a state the size of Michigan. Like it just seems like a clear, like dual function, right? To, as you said, like put yourself in the shoes of the students to terrify them into, you know, whatever, like the entire reason that you wake someone up and isolate them and push them up against the wall. And yeah, to just for people who are just passively noticing this to think, okay, I guess they did something really shitty. Yeah. And I think Dana Nestle is sort of, she's engaged in what I would say is a very difficult balancing act right now, because she has recruited the FBI just sort of exclusively for the purpose of terrorizing people. You know, like that, that is the intent, especially when you're talking about vandalism,

right? And it's notable to me in the Attorney General's press release that the FBI is not actually mentioned at any point, which is very intentional, I think, because Dana Nessel, who is a Democrat, has been working really hard over the last few months to position herself as this strong defender of the state of Michigan against the Trump administration. And so it would look really bad for her to draw attention to the fact that, I mean, like the F in FBI stands for federal, right? And she called them up. And so she has now exposed not just the people who are raided, but all of the communities that those people live in to the FBI, to the Trump administration.

And so I think, you know, you have to question how much of a bulwark against this administration she's actually going to be if in private she is sort of happy to collude with them when it serves her own ideological interests. And also to the point of this idea of multi-jurisdictional vandalism, one thing I think about a lot, because obviously there are a lot of news outlets who want to focus on that. And I think it's really important to reframe the fact that she is working really hard to make vandalism the narrative. And it's because she doesn't like the narrative that we in the coalition and that pro-Palestine activists sort of across the United States have been dedicated to, not just for the last year and a half, right, but for decades, like, you know,

as long as Israel has been occupying Palestine, which is a narrative of people, right? Like, human beings, just like us, who have been under brutal occupation for decades, who are now undergoing a genocide, who themselves are no strangers to having their homes raided, being under constant surveillance. And I really worry that whenever, now that this idea of vandalism is taking center stage, you know, even before anyone has been convicted by the attorney general, anyone has been convicted by the Attorney General, even, you know, before all of this has come to a close that she's pursuing. She, if we're talking about, if we're talking about property, instead of talking about people, she, she is already winning. Zionists in the United States government, you know, are already winning if they are able to turn our attention away from people which are the far more important conversation and the conversation that they do not want us to be having.

Right, yeah. Now, this is, it is pretty similar to the playbook used with Columbia and used on the federal front with the Mahmoud Khalil case and others. It is to take this, you know, this thing that for a liberal, for someone who aspires for possibly national office or higher office in Michigan, like Dana Nestle or any other similarly ambitious democratic figure, this thing that is, it is too much of a contradiction for American liberalism. If you have a normal human reaction to parents having to find the remains of their children in plastic bags to identify them by individual sets of teeth, the biological warfare that Israel inflicts

on Palestinians by purposely housing people that they know to be infected with contagious diseases with people that they know they will be releasing, to the other abuses that they inflict on Palestinians, they abduct both in the West Bank and really all over. If you have a normal human reaction to that, even if you say that, hey, I'm not all that ideological, I'm not this or I'm not that, if you see those images like a lot of Americans have, and you see the words that the Israeli government, that Israeli civil society has

used to describe their actions, and not defend them, but brag about them. If you have a normal human reaction to that, you are not, you are excised from liberal institutions. They can't defend doing that because it is, it flies in the face of everything they said, um, go from two, from 2022 onward about Ukraine. It flies in the face of the resistance stuff to Trump one and now the, the growing resentment against Trump too, and his growing unpopularity and the political cash that you get out of opposing that, especially as an attorney general. So yeah, they have to, they have to make it about, well, you know, neither here nor there about Israel and Palestine, but you can't stop people from going

to class. They did vandals. Something where they can make it murky enough that you are now arguing about, in this case, property, in the case of Columbia, you know, whether people were screamed at or prevented from going to class or not, whatever the fuck, to obscure the actual issue, which is even for someone who is ideologically committed to this, is Nestle. She knows she cannot directly defend it. to this is Nestle. She knows she cannot directly defend it. Yeah, absolutely. It's the entire mindset, I think, is reliant on, like, first, an incredible cognitive dissonance. And then also this appeal to, I don't know what to call it, respectability, right? Like, you can't yell at people. You can't care about dead babies in that way because it's not polite.

Well, just to go back a bit to Nestle personally in her capacity as attorney general and her involvement with sort of similar campaigns of intimidation at the University of Michigan. I alluded to it at the beginning, but about six months ago, October of last year, I think it was, there were some people on the University of Michigan Board of Regents asked her to bypass the DAs in the counties

that the University of Michigan overlaps to prosecute some students along similar lines. Could you give us a little bit of background on those raids? What was attempted there? Does that now seem like it was kind of like a, a, um, a test case for her more, uh, for a more ambitious and, uh, even more draconian action, or was that just sort of entirely self contained? I think I'm going to mostly hand this off to Liz, but I am going to offer just a tiny bit of context. So Liz can speak more to the sort of legal intricacies of how bizarre this is, that this has ended up with the Attorney General.

And I just want to frame it a little bit by talking about in November 2023, there was a sit-in at the administration building on the University of Michigan campus that resulted in over 40 arrests. And the University of Michigan Police Department forwarded all of those over to the Washtenaw County Prosecutor's Office with requests for charges. In some cases, multiple different charges and pretty serious pretty serious charges, especially as you're thinking about the context of like people sitting in an office singing songs. And the Washtenaw County prosecutor ultimately only moved forward

with four out of 40 something. And two of those resulted in much reduced plea deals and two of those went to a youth diversion program. And I think this is what really sparked what I'm going to hand off to Liz to talk about. But I think the University of Michigan Regents were incredibly frustrated that they did not get serious criminal charges against all 40 something of those students out of the Washtenaw County prosecutor. It was this sit-in ended up they called in like nine

or ten different jurisdictions of police. I think someone counted 65 police cars and then the Regents did not get the charges that they wanted. Yeah, I can jump in here and also to give some context. And again, this may be too much background, but let me just get this all out there, right? The University of Michigan has had an extremely active movement for Palestine well before October 7th, 2023. There have been legacy groups on campus for years.

There have been students who consistently have called out the system of apartheid that has impacted Palestinians, have called out the incredible human rights violations that Palestinians have lived through for generations, right? Like this is a movement that has existed on Michigan's campus for quite a long time. However, since October 7, 2023, we have seen university administration and the regents tweet pro-Palestine protesters in an entirely different way. The University of Michigan is one of those schools, like Columbia, like Berkeley, like UCLA,

the kinds of school that lifts up and not only talks about the protests that happens on campus, say they respect free speech, they celebrate it, right? I didn't go to the University of Michigan, but in my time representing students and being on that campus, I am stunned by how many buildings you see that are celebrating legacies and histories of protest, how many murals you find on that campus that are celebrating the folks who came before, who fought against the Vietnam War, who fought for Black liberation, who fought for Indigenous communities. these are the kinds of things this university lifts up and celebrates for everyone except pro-Palestine protesters.

So since October 7, 2023, what we have seen is this radical departure of the university and its regions from celebrating protests to saying, you disagree with us, we are going to do everything we can to repress your speech. And this is a public school, right? This is not Columbia in a private school context where their administration can act like a fiefdom. This is a public school, right? That is an arm of the state that is accountable not only to its students, but to the communities that fund it.

So what we've seen is multi-pronged repression, just like Nora's talking about. The school, through the school's own channels, the University of Michigan, has targeted protesters through student discipline, through targeting the SJP chapter safe on Michigan's campus, through targeting folks through these arcane trespass bans that effectively ban students from their classrooms and ban community members from being able to walk the streets of Ann Arbor, and they have been terminating and firing workers for speaking out outside of their work time. This is all happening through the university and their administration and the regents. The regents have decided that's not enough, right? They're not able

to punish protesters for their speech enough based on the tools that they have at their disposal on campus. So they tried to outsource that, right? Nora talked about the work they tried to do to outsource criminal charges to the Washtenaw County prosecutor, and they have similarly outsource that, right? Nora talked about the work they tried to do to outsource criminal charges to the Washtenaw County prosecutor, and they have similarly outsourced much more successfully to Attorney General Nessel. Attorney General Nessel has very close relationships to a number of the regents. That is evidenced both in campaign contributions that she has received from six of the eight regents that are the current regents, the people who lead the University of Michigan, and connections on the basis

of law practice, right? It's not just money. She's close friends. She has close working relationships with many of the regents. So what we saw is when there was that decline from the Washtenaw County prosecutor to be more adversarial, to bring more criminal charges, what did the regents do? They shopped around to find someone who would take on their pet project, undermining pro-Palestine speech. So they shopped this to Attorney General Nessel. We saw that she was willing to bring charges against several protesters who were involved in the University of Michigan's encampment. Right? All of those charges are baseless and they're really trying

to test this line between constitutionally protected free speech and public order. That's where Ness was trying to draw the line. In the same way right now we're seeing her try to draw this new line between constitutionally protected free speech and all these alleged acts of vandalism that she's trying to pin on students at the University of Michigan. It is a similar situation where we see the Regents frustrated again and not being able to punish enough, trying to outsource their repression campaign to the Attorney General and trying to get her to bring some kind of charges, some kind of intimidation tactic through her office.

Liz, I'm very glad you made that distinction because I think it is, at least with how this is played out at American universities, specifically ones that have storied histories according to their own administration, to their own official materials of protest, of opposing US foreign policy, law enforcement actions, whatever. This is a recurring pattern that we have seen with the institutional response to all this in the past, you know, two years or a little less, which is that most other things, it is not that like the members of the administration of these institutions that they necessarily agree 100% or ideologically aligned all the time or the administration is ideologically

monolithic, but they understand that there is a sense of propriety in allowing for there to be like these exact same types of actions, these exact same types of expressions by students. And we literally just talked about it on the episode we recorded today. With anything else, whether it was protests that we saw in in 2020 with movements before that, with anti-war movements in the 60s and 70s with the anti-apartheid movement. Even if the institution had economic or ideological or both links to whatever, they understood that coming down and cracking heads

sort of ruins their image as this liberal bulwark against whatever reactionary administration or forces as this cultural force for American liberalism. And they would go, okay, we're having a blue ribbon committee and we're going to talk to the student leaders about this or this. And this is not to say, of course, that these issues are illegitimate or that they are beloved by the administrators, but that this one is treated differently, that there is no level of either, you know, kid sessions in the protestors' speech or their demands or anything that could change this level of repression. Because it is for whatever set of reasons, whether it is the ideological convictions of the people running these institutions, whether it is

where American liberalism is at now, or just the fact that this, none of this can be rationalized and they just, they want people as afraid as humanly possible to even bring it up. There is no level of that here. It's pretty remarkable for anyone who is, who, who, who's aware of the history of these places. I wanted to go back a little bit to the FBI involvement, and I think that's incredibly telling that Nestle in her whisperers to the press did not allude to the FBI's involvement. Has there been anything from the FBI itself, either, you know, whatever offices they have in Michigan who are associated with this most recent raid or anyone on the national level,

explaining their rationale in what is purported just to be apparently a... apparently a, uh, I get this reminds me of Kamala Harris's multi multinational drug, uh, drug cartel thing that you would always say during town halls, multi-jurisdictional vandalism, fucking clunky phrase. I've never heard it before. Yeah. We haven't gotten any kind of like official press release or anything from the FBI. What I will say, so the warrants were authorized by the attorney general's office.

They were signed by a judge in the 45th district court here in Michigan, based in Oak Park. That's like what we know from where the warrants were initiated. Every indication it's from the AG's office, which from a legal perspective, right, we don't have all the answers. What that tells us is it's likely the prosecuting agency will be the state AG, and it's likely, again, not definite because we have not

received any definite information, but it's likely that the FBI is involved in an investigatory capacity. But I do think that's a really important point that we, one, don't know for sure what the scope and bounds of their involvement is, and then two, this is Trump's FBI. What reason do we have to believe that they would stop an investigation, right? If they decided they wanted to go deeper, if Trump woke up one day and realized, I want to mess with students at the University of Michigan more, the FBI could claim federal jurisdiction and seek their own charges in addition to or instead of Attorney General Nessel. And that speaks to just how dirty and disgusting it is

for her to have invited the FBI in to our homes and into our communities. Because it's not just this idea that, you know, they're escalating law enforcement. This is all the more militaristic of an attack. That is true. And this now like the attorney general does not have the ability to keep this in her hands.

If the federal government decides they want to go deeper, she's exposing to folks at risk. She made a bunch of claims to the press that ICE was not involved in trying to draw a line in the sand between cooperating with Donald Trump's ICE agency versus cooperating with his FBI. And there is no line, right? She chose to invite President Trump's militaristic forces through the FBI into Michigan homes and into Michigan communities. That is a choice she made that puts our communities already on the front lines at even greater risk. That is an insane needle for her to try to thread.

That no, it's not ICE, it's the FBI because I mean the Trump administration, the federal government under the Trump administration does not federal government under the Trump administration does not seem too worried about that jurisdiction. We have Marco Rubio and the State Department talking about one guy's immigration status and his green card. I don't think they'll go, okay, they're over the county line. They don't have the DHS involved. Guess we'll get them next time, boys.

I just, I don't know how she thinks anyone who has paid any degree of attention to this will buy that. Well, you know, and not only that, but we just had the arrest of a judge by the FBI over an immigration issue. So, you know, these institutions are working together constantly all the time. And I think more than anything, she is counting on people to not look too much further into the issue.

I mean, I know that as I have seen online discourse over the events of last Wednesday, people see FBI and they assume that it is the Trump administration. She is trying so hard to, she has made the effort to take on these cases, she is like pursuing the prosecution and the repression of pro-Palestinian activists relentlessly, and she's hoping that no one will notice it was her, I think, or that no one will take the time to make the connection, which in some senses is working for her, which is why we need to be very clear about it. And I think that also, you know, it does speak a little bit about, too, what you said before. As you were talking about the Palestine exception, essentially, there is no other issue that

seems to bring this response out of universities. I won't say out of the government. But there's clearly something different here. And I think a big part of it is that support for the occupying Israeli state is super, super bipartisan. And that there are also these... there's a reason, you know, we talk about sometimes that Palestine is the center of so much of what we're working towards as we talk about building a better, more just world. And I think about, you know, one of the demands

of the Trier Coalition is divestment. And we have done an incredible amount of research into the university's financial connections to Israel. The University of Michigan has the largest public endowment in the country at this point, like 20 billion dollars, I think. And we found things like there's Atanty, which is an Israeli-based spyware technology company that also happens to have an exclusive contract with the Michigan Department of Corrections for monitoring. So things like ankle monitoring technology, and you have Elbit Systems, which there's been some great coverage of that lately, but they have deployed Elbit drones at the US-Mexico border. They

have unmanned aerial vehicles that border protection uses. They have these integrated fixed towers, sort of a virtual wall at the US-Mexico border, I think in particularly Arizona. And the selling point, right, is that all these technologies are essentially battle-tested already. You know, they're billed as proven to prevent infiltrators, and they're talking about Palestinians in Israel and then sold to the United States to prevent illegal immigrants. And they share this fear-based marketing of preventing terrorism. And now we've sort of touched on three issues that I would say are totally bipartisan in the United States, right? Like mass incarceration is bipartisan as much as some people would like to pretend it's not. Militarized border is bipartisan.

And of course, the perpetual funding of Israeli apartheid and occupation and genocide is a totally bipartisan issue. Yeah. And you do still, I mean, it's much less frequent now than it was 10 years ago, because there has been, I mean, really a sea change in American opinion, strongly among like liberal and left-leaning and democratically registered Americans, but also, I mean, pretty much across the board, a collapse in support for Israel among actual voters and not-electeds. But the thing that you used to get sometimes when you would talk about this, if you cared at all about this issue, during the global war on terror

or even during the Obama administration or during Trump won and people would use it to defend Biden, to defend Harris, they would go, well, look, you know, I think like these guys are like probably, they're probably in the wrong this stuff is bad but you know at the end of the day this is just this is a foreign policy thing and I don't think we should like we should let it get in the way we should we shouldn't let the the the perfect be the enemy of the good that

type of thing it's just a foreign policy. And the thing that I would say to those people, and this has become much clearer now than it was at any other time, even though this has always been the case, a country where we're just completely on board with all this, all of the horrible things that we have talked about on this episode that people have seen first and second hand either through being there or through video or any other type of accounting of these atrocities. A country where we're, hey, we just gotta, we just got to facilitate this. We said we would be their ally. That is a country where you can, it's just okay to do anything to anybody. And we're seeing it now. The function of Israel as this incredibly repressive ethnocracy, where if you are

outside of the selected racial category, anything can be done to you. It is, as you alluded to, unfortunately, this very grim way to market weapon systems and computerized surveillance and now AI targeting and all these horrible things and vicious technologies that are being brought here, but also to gauge, okay, what is the least defensible, most horrific-seeming thing that we could theoretically get away with? And they're not just doing that because someone asked. Everyone wants to know that. Anyone still in Israel's corner very badly wants to know, okay, what's the worst thing we could do? And there's no, there's no separating them.

A country where we're still facilitating this and allowing this to happen. That's not a country where I'm like, they're not, you're not going to get, um, okay, there's a still a Zionist, uh, federal government, but we're going to get healthcare. No, they think that's okay to do to somebody. So they think it's okay to do to you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The Imperial boomerang, right?

Which goes hand in hand with the marketing of we've tried it on them. And we're seeing that now. Like homes are rated, have been rated for years and years and years by militarized forces of the state in the West Bank. And that is what happened here in Michigan on the orders of the attorney general. And it is really frustrating to feel like it's so hard to get through to people that, I mean, firstly, you should not be consenting to the state of affairs for anyone, right? Even if it's not you, I think we should all care

about Palestine and be moved by Palestine and do everything that we can for the cause of Palestine just for its own sake. But also people seem to struggle to realize that if you say yes there, you are next. And if we have an Attorney General here who thinks it's fine to send the FBI to come break down your door at six, seven in the morning because you talked about Palestine and she has been very public that she is not a fan of people talking about Palestine and tomorrow she could decide that she dislikes something else. And so I think if people cannot invest for or have not yet invested for the moral obligation that we have to Palestinians who are people just like the rest of us, they should care

if there's any possibility that they disagree with the people who can send the FBI to your door on any topic. Unless you think you're 100% aligned with the opinions of those officials, you should be thinking about this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's a morally cancerous position to go, well, hey, it's over there. But, you know, that I think it's sort of like it is the last resort of someone who, for one reason or another, they think it is inherently embarrassing to either care about something or to still be emotionally moved by something that happens to someone, just that it's, for one reason or another, it's uncool. Uh, and it, you know, it's a, it's a thing that people are more

telling themselves than you. But yeah, it just, it doesn't even, it does not even hold up. It never has, but it is especially clear now. To bring things back to Nestle and, uh, the, the case at hand, what is she claiming, her and the state's attorney office, what are they claiming is this vandalism that they've talked to the press that are supposedly the reasons for these raids, for the FBI's involvement in everything? Yeah, I can jump in here. What we've gotten from the Attorney General's office, again, is via press release.

It is not via any actual communication to anyone impacted by these raids or to anyone that they even think based on probable cause could be involved, right? There's nothing at that level right now. What we have is a press release that links to pictures of words on buildings. You cannot even make out the buildings. I don't even know where these are beyond what she has provided on the press release and the dates that they are alleged to happen. So that's all we have with respect to what is the alleged vandalism, where is it? This is again like individual pictures of individual homes and she's on the press release itself means like the location. That's all we have, right? We have a date, we have a location, we have a picture of some words on a wall. I don't know anything about the actual damage that was caused from this. I don't know anything

about who was impacted, how were they impacted. I don't know anything to that level, and I don't know anything about who was impacted, how were they impacted. I don't know anything to that level, and I don't know anything about who was involved, right? And, you know, as an attorney who's provided support to a lot of folks advocating for Palestine across the state, I will tell you, the movement for Palestine in Michigan is not limited to the campus of Ann Arbor. There are people who care about Palestine passionately principally and in a multitude of ways across the state of Michigan. People of Michigan care about people in Palestine. People in Michigan care about other people and care about their communities. When I look at the Attorney General's press release what I

see is you know a lot of people in Michigan care about this issue and they seem like they took different actions. That's that's all I get from this press release. I don't know anything about how students at the University of Michigan are involved. I don't know anything about how these events are connected. To me, as like a lay person seeing this press release, because that's what I am seeing this, this is something that went out to the general public. This is all we have. All we know is people spray painted some places and they included some language related to Palestine on that spray paint. And that's really all that we know from this press release.

I mean, this is sort of the method you use when you are like purportedly like going after a drug cartel or terrorism suspects or something like that, where it seems like just going off of the amount of people that they detained, the types of warrants that you alluded to where they don't list the probable cause and just the, yeah, the sheer, the sheer like violence and surprise mechanism of the raids and their scale, that like, the raids and their scale that like this is the only thing where you would do that with spray paint someone spray painted a building somewhere. I mean is the hope here that they like enough people that they they they round up in these dragnets that like someone will be I don't know intimidated enough to go okay I'll tell you what you want to hear basically or is it just I don't know, intimidated enough to go, okay, I'll tell you what you want to hear basically.

Or is it just, I don't know. Another thing I thought was maybe that it is sort of a mirror to Israel's behavior itself. We're used to this pattern with Israel where they will, you know, whatever military incursion, they'll go as far as they'll go until America kind of yanks the chain. But then they, you know, in this case, no one yanked the chain. So they didn't, they just, there is no plan besides like kill as many people as possible. With this, it does, my first estimation was, okay, like maybe they're hoping for that, that someone will be scared enough to go, okay, here, like, I'll confirm anything that you accuse. I will be your, you know, I will say anything. But like the fact that she seems like embarrassed by bringing in the FBI, not even mentioning

it in the initial press release and using them for, yeah, spray painting buildings does make me think that there is a bit of a, that maybe she kind of doesn't know what she's doing. I don't know. It's really hard to, I've never really seen anything quite like this. This is kind of remarkable. Yeah. I mean, that's like certainly how it feels. He likes especially supporting students and also like being a lawyer, right? I have done community movement lawyering.

I've talked to a lot of community movement lawyering attorneys across the country and folks are shocked by this behavior, right? It's not, this is not the kind of thing that we normally see. What this feels like is a mix of fishing and intimidation, right? Intended to throw a wide net and see who she can catch in it. Maybe she'll land on something, maybe she won't.

That's like the way she's approaching this, it seems. From our perspective, it also feels like what this is really about is intimidating and trying to repress the movement for Palestine. To try to put in people's minds throughout the state of Michigan. If you stand up for Palestine, if you take a passionate stance and speak out against a genocide, you could face the FBI at your door. You could face an investigation that goes on who knows how long, and potentially you could face criminal charges based on whatever kind of investigation they do. We still have not heard anything from the attorney general's office regarding charges. We still don't even know the scope of this investigation, and that creates this culture of fear, this culture of uncertainty, and this killing effect throughout communities in

Michigan. And Michigan is a state like Michigan, Detroit, the whole part of southeast Michigan we're in. This is the heart of the labor movement. This is a part of the country that has always spoken loudly, that has centered the leadership of workers, community members, and especially black movement leaders in Detroit. This is a state and a community that speaks out and that fights. It is intentional to target Michigan. It is intentional to target Ann Arbor, and it is intentional to target southeast Michigan. It's not just repressing speech about Palestine as we're talking about, it's a warning sign that there is more repression to come. Right?

Like Trump is very clear, right? He doesn't want dissent for any of his policies. Targeting Michigan, targeting the hearts of our movement, is a chance to try to cut us off early. That's why it's so important to North Point people see the targeting of Palestine as the canary in the coal mine. This is a moment for anyone, regardless of what you care about, to realize that if your right to free speech is this weak, if an attorney general can put out a press release claiming a bunch of acts of random vandalism, might be connected, they might have

something to do with these people, she won't tell them what, but she will send the FBI to their door. That is terrifying. This is terrifying and should be a wake-up call to anyone in the state, anyone in the country who thinks that they live in a free country. You don't if this is the way the state can act. If this is the way that every level of government from local police to the federal FBI can target protesters for their speech? None of us are free. None of us are safe. Yeah. Sadly, both Nestle's position and the position of the federal government, it does, it reminds me of something that we've seen, um, with a lot of these immigration cases that the state department has involved themselves in, it all, again, it does kind of go back to a phenomenon that we saw in Israel with

the way that their civil society took care of any opposition, any, uh, organized left that had any numbers over the last 40 or 50 years. It isn't necessarily that they are, they're going out there and they're always trying to find like, you know, okay, who is like the least defensible person involved in this movement? Like who's the the least, you know, who would be the least popular if we brought him before the country? It is more so that there's just like this deliberate arbitrary nature to the entire process and to the enforcement, to the prosecutions, to who they pick up, when, how they do it, that the thing they're communicating isn't like, okay, if you cross this line, you forfeit your rights, you forfeit everything in your life, you forfeit any hope to return to normalcy.

That used to kind of be how things would work in places where there were these incredibly draconian acts by law enforcement and, you know, different administrations that there was a unspoken line they felt that people would cross. But now it's deliberately unstated. And it's just you, you grab up whoever for whatever reason, because you would rather have... you're communicating to everyone who is currently in the movement, who has ever thought about it, who has been moved by any of it. There's nothing you can do. There is no line. You have already crossed the line by caring about this at all. Maybe we'll come and get you, and we'll just we'll say it's for whatever reason that you did whatever thing. It doesn't matter because just the fact that you are you are there there's nothing you can do.

So don't even fucking think about it. It's you know, it is the same reason that Israeli military targets medical professionals that they want people to not just, you know, not just be afraid to lead or fight back, but they want to de-incentivize even giving a shit, even trying to help in any way. You're not safe. If you're even in any proximity, you're not safe. I think that's exactly correct, right? Like, once you have spoken about Palestine, once you have criticized Israel, you have already done

enough of the wrong thing in the eyes of the university and in the eyes of the state. You know, when I think about the absurd repression from the university against pro-Palestinian speech on sort of all levels. There was someone who was disciplined for talking about Palestine in their email signature, right? And it goes all the way up to the charges that Nessel was already pursuing against pro-Palestinian protesters prior to these raids. So, 11 in

relation to the University of Michigan encampment, which was violently raided by police, they utilized deep freeze, which is a combination of pepper spray and tear gas, considered one of the most intense of this category of substances. People got chemical burns, people were in respiratory distress, people went to the ER, people broke bones, there were concussions. And so that is the first 11 charges

filed by the attorney general. And then three more announced later on in In relation to a protest that was hosted at Festifall, which is just a sort of yearly activity by the University of Michigan For clubs and organizations and new students where Tahrir was hosting, and like a lot of community there as well, a die-in. People were lying on the ground while someone read the names of dead children.

Like that is what people were doing is they were quietly lying on the ground while someone honored the names of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of babies and one-year-olds that have been murdered. And so that is enough for the attorney general to come and to charge you with misdemeanors and felonies?

Correct me if I'm wrong. I think there is, is it on the fourth that there is supposed to be a hearing with whether Nestle should recuse herself and whether she's successful or not, whether the state is successful in this or not, it does seem like she's very clearly like thrown her a lot here. Beyond any like political ambition she has in the state, beyond whatever profile she gained. I mean, if people don't remember, Nessel sort of rose to prominence in liberal democratic circles in, I think, 2023, opposing

a, it was, it was in Hamtramck a ban on LGBT flags or something like that. I mean, she made her name on this, you know, freedom of expression. And it was happening at the same time that DeSantis was ascendant. And it's like, she's very clearly like thrown her a lot completely in the other direction. It does seem like she cares about like, intimidating people on this specific issue, more than she cares about anything else. And I, you know, both for the Democratic Party in general and liberal institutions, I don't know what that augurs. Whether it will be, you know, complete collapse under the weight of those contradictions or what. But it is, yeah, I mean, it's, if you had asked me 10 years ago, if they would screw themselves this hard and their own, you know, institutional sense of propriety, I don't think I could have predicted this at all.

I don't think anyone could have. And I mean, you sort of make the point that what Nestle is doing is kind of a microcosm of the choices of the Democratic Party on a national level, right? Like, we will throw it all away to defend a genocidal apartheid occupier state and nothing else matters and we'll shoot ourselves in the foot. And in Nestle's case, probably, I would say also in the Democratic Party's case, but certainly in Nestle's case, I mean, I think that this will be her legacy. This and her absolute bungling of the Flint water crisis prosecutions. She took that over when she became attorney general and failed to hold literally anyone accountable for the poisoning of Flint's water. And so she's

not going to have justice for the people in Flint as a feather in her cap. And when you really think about it, like, I guess she's trying, you know, she's one of the tens of state attorney generals who are suing the Trump administration over various executive orders. But functionally, she has not done much that is outstanding. And so throwing her full weight behind, brutalizing and prosecuting students and community members who have done nothing except say genocide is wrong. I think that is going to be Dana Nestle's legacy. And you know, I won't speak to the entirety of national politics, but I think there are plenty of parallels there. Yeah, that's really interesting that you brought up

the bungled prosecution with Snyder and everything related to the Flint water crisis. Something that I wanna hear from both of you, but originally a question sort of directed towards Liz, I was wondering the thing that I have sort of directed towards Liz, I was wondering, the thing that I have sort of kept thinking of both with the immigration cases before this and the original set of raids months ago, and now this especially is how it does all kind of go back to the excesses of the federal government during the global war on terror.

The worst mechanisms, the worst things that were done during both terms of the Bush administration. I thought about Hamdahn versus Rumsfeld, which was the instance of, I think it was a German national. I think he might've been here on a green card who was renditioned in Santa Guantanamo in a completely mistaken identity. The government admitted that they had made a mistake, but that they, you know, he couldn't get any restitution for the horrifying thing that was done from, done to him and the years of his life that were taken away on national security grounds,

that they just couldn't go forward with it. But I'm not a lawyer. So Liz, I was wondering what your opinion on this, just from someone who actually is one, the groundwork they laid back, you know, 20 years ago and the how much just failing to prosecute people for violating laws on torture and due process contributed to this. Yeah, it's a great question, Felix, and I appreciate that you're taking us back to 2001. I do think that's a really important place, to connect the present

moment too, and to see like there's a shared history here. The Bush administration ran so now Trump can sprint, right? And that includes the Democrats in between, right? This kind of action that we're seeing of increased surveillance and repression of speech is not new, but we are seeing it expanded. So going back to the Bush administration, and you can cut me off here, honestly, if I go too long, but. No, not at all. I think there's like five big things I would highlight from the Bush administration. I will save you the case law of getting super specific,

but I have a dear friend from law school who is a progressive veteran and does a lot of thinking about the Bush administration and kind of the impact that had on our present day. So in conversation with him over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about this a lot. And there's kind of five big things that stand out to me from how the Bush administration's war on terrorism, war on terror, kind of prepared us for where we are now, and the choices we made as a society at that time.

Right, so under the guise of national security, under the guise of fighting terrorism, the American people, in so many ways unwittingly made a deal with the devil in the form of choosing to give up so much of our free speech and protest rights in what we were told was going to keep us safe and was going to protect us. But what in reality is selling out our communities to the state. So there were a couple ways that the Bush administration was able to do this. One, we see the passage of the Patriot Act. I'm sure folks are really familiar with that. But one of the big things we want to think about with the Patriot Act in the present moment is there is a huge expansion of government surveillance power in the digital realm.

The ability of the government to monitor communication, internet activity, financial transactions, and all of that with reduced judicial oversight. So what that was doing was giving the FBI, it was giving the federal government a lot of tools to be able to repress speech as people not only actually got monitored, but they had the fear of monitoring. This was an escalation under the Patriot Act of what we had already seen in previous administrations in how, for instance, the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, other radical movements were targeted by the state, right? Like Cointel Pro and other groups that targeted radical organizers,

especially organizers of color, their example is what was built on by the Bush administration with the passage of the Patriot Act. Along with that, right, we have this passage of material support laws that really broadly expand and interpret this idea of material support of terrorism, which actually criminalizes and limits certain forms of speech and association. Because just by talking about this thing, or just by supporting this kind of group or this kind of person, automatically that is terrorist support. Without a real investigation into, wait a second, is that actually a terrorist group or is that a group in a country that has a freedom movement that might look different than

what the US expects, right? Or that is not aligned with US state interests but is not a terrorist group but simply like a different kind of freedom group in another country. What we also see at the same time is an expansive surveillance and monitoring. So it's not just this digital surveillance, we also see much expanded use of the FBI's ability to use national security letters to collect information from individuals without having to get as much judicial review. We also see things created like the NSA's terrorist surveillance program that is expanding and increasing monitoring of political and religious groups. In particular, I think about that time, the war on terror.

What did that justify? That justified a lot of heightened surveillance onto Muslim communities, Arab American communities, and South Asian communities. I am South Asian. I remember being a kid after 9-11, and the kind of surveillance that my family went through was one of the things that I think shaped shaped me the most as a person, right? Seeing that change in who was targeted, why, where we had this assumption of criminality, where we had this assumption of terror, and who was a terrorist, right? We see an expansion of this faith into racially profiling Muslim, Arab, and South Asian

communities in a way to be frank and to be clear was building on the legacy of the kind of repression the U.S. government already had against especially Black and Indigenous activists. So what we saw targeting South Asian, Arab American, and Muslim communities was an expansion, but it wasn't new and we can't lose that. It's not just the Bush administration go back to Reagan, go back even further, and you see the targeting of Black radical movements that laid this foundation as well. Then the other thing that I'll just lift up really fast, thinking about the Bush era, is number four, really thinking about protest restrictions.

Under the Bush era, we really see this development of what we now call free speech zones that are trying to confine protesters to designated areas. What was the Bush administration trying to do? They were trying to limit the ability of people's speech to reach other people, to reach people in the middle, to reach people who might not be as aware, and to actually decrease the audience of who protesters could engage with. We also saw an increased militarism of how the police impacted and collaborated and worked across state, local, and federal lines. We saw a lot more of this interaction starting in 2001 of federal police, state police, local police responding to protests.

We started to get used to this idea that protests require cops, that cops are as normal a part of protesters as having signs. The way that our society has changed now to see police force, and especially heavily militarized police forces, out on our streets and out at our protests, is a result of the Bush era investment in mass policing and protests, and also leading to mass arrests and preemptive detentions at major events, right, like political conventions and things like that. How do you shut down protests before they get really big? How do you surveil the protest groups so much that you know who's involved? How do you make sure that

people feel so scared to express speech, especially when it's controversial, that you cut protest off before it even starts? So a lot of those efforts that we saw in the Bush administration we see at scale now, right? Like I mentioned, we see such regular presence of police at protests. We've accepted that as a cost of expressing our free speech, is that the cops are there. That's a choice we don't have to accept, that's not a world we need to live in. We don't need this much militarism when people are expressing their views.

When people are sharing and having dialogue, so much of the decline in our society of being able to actually talk about hard things and grapple with uncertainty and work through differences is made harder by this huge police presence anytime we try to have a protest or demonstration. In addition, the kind of surveillance that we're seeing, you know, one thing that was very clear from the search warrants and from the actions more broadly that we've seen against pro-Palestine protesters across the country is that folks are being surveilled if they are known pro-Palestine protesters. That is not a new

take. Folks have been saying that at Columbia, they've been saying that at UCLA, they've been saying that at other campuses. If you are a pro-Palestine protester that is known in your community, there's a chance you may be getting surveilled. And that's a compromise that for some reason we accepted in 2001 that's been accepted, that's been taken so far, right? This compromise of national security, fight terrorism, let us surveil you. We need that compromise and we shouldn't have, right? As a society, as a people, because we're seeing it now taken even further than even Bush expected. So I

think those are some things that are like really important to highlight. There's a lot more if you are interested, I think it's probably outside of scope, but around detention, the assumed criminality of different folks, and you know, detention at Guantanamo and things like that. But I do think it's important to bring some of those connections together. And that was like my point number five, just in thinking about the ways that immigrants are being treated right now in this moment too, and tying those thoughts together. Right. And this goes back Felix to some of your points earlier about the parallels between Israeli society and US society.

What are we trying to do right now under Trump? What is his administration trying to do? Create an apartheid state between citizens and non-citizens. Create so much fear and uncertainty for folks who are undocumented and even folks who are documented non-citizens, where there is so much fear and there is almost like a second class of law. Like a criminal traffic ticket for a non-citizen could be a deportation order under Trump if he chooses to revoke your visa. And trying to see that we're creating two different systems of law in the immigration context that is not isolated from the context of Palestine either. What immigrants are being subjected to the most scrutiny right now? Those who have dared to speak out for Palestine, those who have dared to call

the US government accountable. And I think we can't lose those connections and all of this like goes back to the Bush era, take it back even further and really think about the ways black activists were targeted in the 60s and 70s, take it back to the Red Scare, take it back to the way more broadly this country has looked at dissent, right? And that's really where we need to start our analysis

and that's where we need to keep our focus. That's a great explanation. And yeah, it's a very good point that, yeah, it certainly predates the global war on terror and that they're, you know, both the Red Scare and, you know, state and federal actions against the Black Panthers, against, you know, Malcolm X uh the the nation of Islam and the the form it took back then um I mean that is that that last thing particularly is the whole very strange can of worms but that is a incredible explanation of the connections between all of that I uh but particularly I think that point about the second order effects of surveillance, right? It isn't that they think that they are going to nab every single person who is, you know, saying anything that could be even remotely used to justify their detention at any given time. I mean, even with the horrifying leviathan of data

collection and the automized ways they have for sorting these things now, it's just, I mean, the sheer volume of it is overwhelming, especially now. It is more so that second order effect that if you know that someone is listening in, what are you less likely to do? No one really knows until it happens, until it becomes a thing that they feel they actually need to worry about. It's all part of a pattern of, it's all part of a pattern of, you know, making it, you know, making it too much of a gamble for some people, they hope, to register any type of emotional investment in any of this. I will say that both talking to younger people who are younger than me or anyone else on the show, who have been involved in this movement, both at American universities, just outside of that or anything, the thing that I have found incredibly encouraging is that, and I want to refrain from this kind of, you know,

X or Y generation will fucking save everyone and everything will be fine. But there does seem to be a very clear headedness among younger people involved in this movement now over both the intents of the federal and state governments, of the universities, what they are facing and the stakes involved here that I did not quite see during the time I was in school, the Occupy movement before that. And it is, I don't know if it's because they've been exposed to a lot of things on a larger scale than previous generations, or if it's just the simple fact that it's the promise of like being replicated as upper middle class success stories that that cannot quite be promised anymore. And they just, you know, American institutions just kind of have nothing to offer

except we maybe won't brutalize you if you don't stick your head out. I'm sure it's any, it's a number of things and everyone has different reasons, but it is a very of things and everyone has different reasons, but it is a very encouraging thing to see. And just to that end, Nora, I wanted to, wanted for you to talk a little bit about the goals of the movement of Tahrir and from your perspective as someone involved there, what people who are hearing this, who are moved by this, what they can do, either people in the state, outside of it, wherever?

Yeah. So I guess first I'll say the coalition, obviously, primarily we've talked about our work in pushing the University of Michigan to divest from Israel and from companies that profit off of Israel's surveillance of Palestinians and its war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank historically and currently. We also are looking to establish a People's Audit of the Endowment. As Liz raised, this is a public university and through some lobbying in the 80s and 90s, really is not subject to the sort of financial disclosure that you would expect for a public institution.

Twenty billion dollars at a public institution and they are not transparent whatsoever. They have actively tried to obscure where that money is invested. And so we would like a people's audit of the endowment. And then finally, the one thing that I think is really notable is we have seen the regents sort of act as authoritarian rulers of the campus in the past year and a half, not just in relation to Palestine, but also in relation to getting rid of DEI, sort of a lot of this compliance in advance with Trump administration demands without any input from all the other stakeholders that make this institution

what it is, right? From students, from faculty, from staff. And we used to have shared governance at the University of Michigan. It was a bylaw and the regents let it expire in the, I want to say early 80s, but I could have gotten that wrong, because of a years long tension with students at the university, because the regents wanted to establish a university police force in response to student protest movements of the 60s and 70s and because of their feeling that calling local

police on protestors, student protestors, sort of gave the impression of an invading army and it was very bad publicity, which I think Felix, you stated like very early on in this episode. And so the reason that today, faculty and staff and students do not have a voice in this university or its policies is because shared governance was abolished in order to have a private campus police force. And so the abolition of campus police is also one of our demands. And I think that. I feel like I don't get to talk about that enough and sort of outside my work with the coalition. That is something I care a lot about.

So I wanted to raise it in terms of of people listening, I would say, and I hope we can link this with the episode, but to please donate to our legal defense fund. We have obviously, there are no charges in relation to these raids, but because we have no information from the attorney general, no probable cause on these warrants, It's hard to know what's coming. We have the 11 from the encampment. We have the three from Festifal. One of the individuals from the encampment was recently jailed for four days because he, it was alleged by City Shield, which is a plainclothes surveillance company that the

University of Michigan has hired. They've spent around $850,000 to follow and film and harass pro-Palestine protesters. One of these City Shield plainclothes, I don't even know that they're officers, goons, alleged that this individual had violated the conditions of their bond, which allowed them to be on campus for class, and they did have class, but the result was because of this private surveillance hired by the university,

they were ultimately jailed for four days. They were just released this past Sunday. And so I think that has obviously had incredible impacts on that individual's life. All of this has had incredible impacts on the lives of the people facing charges, the people who were raided. So I would say say first and foremost,

the Legal Defense Fund is a great and really appreciated place to start. We'll have links for that and more in the episode description that people can go to. Before we go, is there anything else anyone would like to add? I was just gonna lift up in addition to and exactly in line with what Nora just said,

you know, it's not just the University of Michigan's administration, their president, president Ono and their regents are working against students. They are, as we discussed, working with the attorney general's office, closely coordinating with her to try to criminalize folks' actions. But in addition, they are spending hundreds of thousands and in fact millions of dollars on private security and outside consultants to also target students, right, and try to repress the campus-based movement for Palestine. So like Nora mentioned, they have this $850,000 contract with City Shield that is in effect

these plainclothes individuals following around pro-Palestine protesters and surveilling them. In addition to the surveillance they're already getting access to as a result of cooperating with the state government and now the federal government, the university is paying, using student and taxpayer dollars to have private security follow students around. That's insane. In addition, they're also spending thousands on consultants like Grand River Strategies. Omar Torres of Grand River Strategy Solutions is a particular consultant they've hired to go after students via the student disciplinary process. They have hired a consultant Stephanie Jackson to target SAFE, that's the SGP chapter, on the University of Michigan's campus with almost

one million dollars for each of these individual consultants for them to target students. The university is outsourcing at every level their repression to these consultants, to these private security companies, to the state attorney general's office, because it is so so terrible for them to have folks speak up for Palestine and speak out and call for divestment. That should show everyone everyone another red alert for democracy. For our state governments and public universities, our state bodies, for our state bodies to be using public money like this is astounding. As Edmund and Nora have said this, as they continue to fund and support Israel and companies that have close ties and benefit from

their relationships with Israel. Right? This is about taking money out of war, genocide, and war profiteering. And we're seeing the universities doubling down on their investment in repression profiteering, right? Like with these consultants, with these private security firms. And those are really connections that we need to draw out and elucidate, because it's the exact same thing that we're seeing at the governmental level, right? We're seeing all these private military contracts, we are seeing all these weapons contracts from both the US and Israel.

We're seeing that happen on a on a micro scale at these university campuses, as they try to militarize and increase their own police forces, even as they're spending thousands and thousands of dollars of state-payer resources on repression from their actual police forces in CDG offices and county prosecutor offices. They're still trying to spend even more on these private security forces, and I do just think that's critical to underscore. And I guess as well as the question of the resources of the state of Michigan, what does it cost for all of us who live here to bring out the FBI against people to utilize the resources of the Attorney General's office? There's a cost there too. And I think that money could be spent in ways that Michiganders care about a lot more and that would benefit

Michiganders a lot more. The consultants who, brought in to, I mean, this is something that, uh, we had on a grant Milner from Columbia to talk about this and he brought up the same thing. That is one of the weirdest fucking things I've ever heard of that they, they bring in someone who essentially is like a mercenary prosecutor but for their own universities, like bylaws and everything. Shouldn't like you guys know that? I mean, first of all, but like, second of all, like the thing about the private security

following around students, someone who I know who is familiar with all this told me about that earlier this week, and that is, I mean, that is particularly horrifying. Well, and if you can believe it, it's not actually even the only private security company that the university has hired. They've also hired one called Liberty Security, primarily to keep watch over the DAIAG. But, you know, they carry out other tasks to intimidate people just going about their business in their daily lives. But we think we're looking at over $4 million with Liberty Security and City Shield and Grand River Solutions and Stephanie Jackson and Omar Torres all combined.

And also, you mentioned that you had heard sort of about a similar outside disciplinary consultant from people at Columbia. It's the same guy actually. Omar Torres on both campuses, same dude. Oh my goodness. This is all he does, I guess. How the fuck do you end up in that career niche? I mean, I know a podcaster, right?

But no, there are some professions I can look down on. I'm sorry. No, but it's insane. It's insane. It's like, like, a principal skinner as a mercenary. It's so fucking weird. Yeah. I mean, it builds off what we've seen, you know, our office also does quite a lot of labor and employment work and it builds off what we see with these union busting firms, right? Like who are the particles of capitalism almost who will try to latch onto anything that represses popular movements, represses communities, and tries to profit off of it?

And that kind of behavior needs to be called out and folks need to shine a light on it because the University of Michigan, like in hiring these consultants, they don't even want to get their own hands dirty as they target students, right? Like they're willing to hire outside consultants, they're willing to hire private security, they're willing to hire private security,

they're willing to outsource it to the AG to keep their hands clean as they try to repress speech on their campus. And that's just not something we can let them get away with. And not just to keep their hands clean, I think, but because it is in their interests and not in the university's interests.

And they had to get sort of their outside guy because no one who is actually a part of this campus contributes to this campus, had any interest in initiating or carrying out those disciplinary proceedings because it is exclusively at the service of the regions and their ideology. Yeah, that is, I mean, it's part of another pattern that is very noticeable with this

specifically. And what happened six months ago with the regents directly approaching Nestle and her office that anyone who, yeah, is directly involved either in the employee or as a member of the community as a student Whatever anyone in any position of authority In the actual community that the university exists in They yeah, no, they do not want anything to do with this So they are they have to resort to spending millions of dollars on these mercenary forces. I mean, it is just while talking about the, you know, the contradiction, carrying apart liberal institutions,

it's kind of a perfect thing to bring in someone whose job is to, to know the rules of the institutions specifically so that they can like boot people out or intimidate them without Somehow like this will not tarnish the name of the name or the brand of the university itself I mean that really is the perfect act for all of this right there Well, um, I just wanted to uh yeah, again, thank you guys so much. I'm really glad we were able to do this. I have not seen as much coverage about this nationally, though I've seen some more in the last week that I just haven't seen as much as I think there should

be for such a, not, I mean, not just like draconian and horrifying case, but something that is pretty indicative of where American institutions are now and how they are trying to reconcile all of this with their, with, you know, decades and decades of stated beliefs. Yeah, absolutely. And because this is relevant to everyone, given the audience that may be listening to this, people might not need the reminder, but you know, if you're listening and you do,

this is relevant to you. It is absolutely relevant to you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, none of these things are self-contained and anything done in one institution, it can be done to yours, it can be done to someone you know. This is, yeah, they are trying to figure out how best to terrify, punish, and isolate people for having a normal human reaction to a genocide. I do think, you know, the lesson that folks should see from this, one, is pay attention, repression is happening all over, the movement for Palestine is under attack, but I do hope folks also take away.

The example from the campus movement at the University of Michigan is that the movement is strong, is that students and their communities around them are supporting each other, right? When the FBI raided these homes, neighbors were out in the street watching. Community members showed up from across the state to make sure those people were okay and to make sure that the law enforcement had eyes on them and to hold them accountable. Folks in the days that have happened since the raids have been stepping up and taking care of each other. They have brought each other food, they have kept each other safe, they've made sure folks have the resources they need to finish their exams because they got raided by the FBI in the

middle of finals. And I do think it's important to underscore like the movement at the University of Michigan is strong and it's only getting stronger. In the face of oppression, students are supporting each other, their community members are standing together. I do think that's important to lift up and I'll just say our office has been supporting the students. We've been so proud to be able to support the campus movement. We are also fighting back in every legal channel we can. We have filed to date three lawsuits against the University of Michigan for these patterns and practices of repression of speech. We brought one case back in December holding the university accountable for their unconstitutional weaponization of student discipline and student organization discipline to try to silence pro-Palestinian speech on

campus. We filed another case early this year in partnership with the ACLU of Michigan targeting the trespass ban policy that the university has used to effectively ban protesters from parts of the campus in an attempt to try to silence speech. And then just today, we filed a third case against the University of Michigan. In a blatant attack on workers' rights, the university has fired eight individuals, eight workers, because they attended pro-Palestine protests. That is, the only reason that they were fired was because they chose to attend pro-Palestine protests on the university's campus. So we literally just filed that lawsuit today. Several student workers, one full-time worker, has been impacted by the university

targeting them for their employment just because they chose to attend their protest and they didn't just lose their current job. Folks are being blacklisted forever from getting a job at the University of Michigan because of their pro-Palestine speech. That is getting a job at the University of Michigan because of their pro-Palestine speech. That is abhorrent. The University of Michigan is one of the biggest employers in the state of Michigan. That is a blatant attempt to try to make someone's exercise of speech in support of Palestine a thing that could impact their career and their livelihood for the rest of their life.

So we are fighting back, and I do think that's a lesson to take from the movement at the University of Michigan and from the state of Michigan altogether. We stand up and we support our neighbors, we support and take care of each other. And the student movement has really shown that and how they've taken care of each other and continue to keep up the fight. I do I really appreciate you uplifting that Liz, because I think everything is terrible everywhere all the time

is also not the message that I would want to leave people with. And I think it's one, repression happens and repression with this degree of effort and investment when what you're doing is working, when the movement is a threat to the status quo of United States imperialism, right? Like this is happening because our work is not meaningless. This is happening because our work is making a difference. And I won't say too much more because you said most of it, but the last week, you know, having witnessed and been a part of this community in person on the ground is an astounding example of the power of communities and the ways that we can protect each other and provide for each other outside of institutions that are

designed to fail us. And so I think it is I think it is really hopeful and I think it has been a vision of what the world can be and that we can start to build that world outside of the structures of the state, even as, you know, I still think we should fight to improve the structures of the state, but also we can do it right here, right now with each other. I think that's a perfect point to wrap things up on that all of this is obviously like very grim.

And, you know, if anyone's reaction to it is fear, either at the uncertainty, either at, you know, what it pretends for, for the future, for, for anything, uh, that's completely understandable, but you know, the, the grimest things I've ever seen in this country weren't, um, times where, you know, the state and, um, institutions went out of their way to, uh, try and intimidate people like this. It is times when they didn't have to. It was not even on their radar. And these are not the acts, these are not the statements or the posture of an ideology or a political constituency or project that it feels incredibly certain in its future or its future viability. They would not be doing any of this if they thought they were in a strong position. It doesn't make any of this

any less awful for the people that are facing it and their friends and family. But it is a reminder that what you do does actually matter and does reverberate. We're going to have links for everything that Liz and Nora alluded to during the episode and during this wrap up, that they'll be in the description. Anyone who wants to help support Tahrir, who was moved by any of this,

you can go to the links in the description. But yeah, no, I imagine this is not the last time that we're going to be talking about this case and similar patterns of behavior across American universities and institutions. But Liz and Nora, thank you guys so much. I'm really glad we got to do this. Yeah, thank you, Felix. It was it has been great to talk to you. Thanks, Felix. We appreciate your time. Thanks for watching guys!