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The Activated Podcast, Santee, CA (2026)

01/18/2023

IMPORTANT PSA: DO NOT trust PSL to defend or protect anyone if you’re headed to Santee today to defend trans rights. The local fascists always get extra rowdy when there is an action in East County. They will leave people vulnerable if something goes down, seen it happen we too many times whenever there is a counter in East County over the past 2.5 years. Stay safe everyone.

11/16/2022

No surprises here.

Via

Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, announced he is running again for president in 2024

"I am announcing my candidacy for president of the United States," Trump, 76, said flanked by massive American flags, at his Mar-a-Lago club and home in Palm Beach, Fla.

The announcement — and official filing — comes just a week after the 2022 midterm elections, which saw a lackluster performance from Trump-backed Republican candidates in key Senate races and competitive House elections. As a result, Democrats were able to retain control of the Senate.

"America's comeback starts right now," Trump said, claiming, "Your country is being destroyed before your eyes."

The dark vision hearkened back to Trump's inauguration speech of a country suffering "American carnage" and in need of him to fix it.

Trump running sets up a potential rematch against President Joe Biden, who will turn 80 on Sunday and says he intends to run for reelection in 2024.

11/15/2022

In the largest work stoppage of the year, thousands of academic workers at the University of California system went on strike Monday over the university system’s bargaining practices with their union, which is trying to secure higher wages.

Some 48,000 teaching assistants, postdocs, researchers and graders on the front lines of teaching and research at California’s prestigious public university system are seeking a minimum annual salary of $54,000 and increased child-care benefits, saying they do not earn enough to live in the state. They also accuse the university of not bargaining in good faith with their union, the United Auto Workers.

“At every turn, the university has sought to act unlawfully at the bargaining table, which is preventing us from reaching an agreement,” said Neal Sweeney, the president of UAW Local 5810, which represents more than 11,000 UC postdocs and academic researchers.

The University of California strike is also the largest academic strike in higher education in U.S. history, according to the UAW.

The bargaining units that represent UC academic workers said university leadership has illegally made changes to pay and transit benefits without consulting the union. They also alleged that the university has refused to provide necessary information about who is in the bargaining unit and has otherwise obstructed the bargaining process. Negotiations have been underway for more than a year.

The strike threatens to disrupt classes, research and grading ahead of final exams at the UC system’s 10 campuses. Students would have to rely solely on professors for grades, teaching and other one-on-one instruction.

In the days leading up to the strike, some tenured UC professors said they had the right to cancel classes during the work stoppage and spoke out in solidarity with academic workers.

11/12/2022

Nearly 48,000 University of California academic workers — the backbone of the vaunted higher education system who research, mentor and teach — are poised to strike Monday in a labor action that could shut down some classes and lab work just weeks before final exams.

In what would be the nation’s largest strike of academic workers, four UAW bargaining units representing teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars, academic and graduate student researchers, tutors, fellows and others are set to picket from 8 a.m. at all of UC’s 10 campuses. The campuses are scheduled to remain open and plan to continue instruction and operations.

The workers are demanding significant pay increases, with many saying they are struggling to afford housing near their campuses, which are located in some of California’s priciest real estate markets.

Other demands include childcare subsidies, enhanced healthcare for dependents and longer family leaves; public transit passes; lower tuition costs for international scholars and better accessibility for workers with disabilities.

Graduate students — who serve as teaching assistants, tutors and readers — are demanding $54,000 annually, a wage increase that would more than double their average current pay of about $24,000.

The unions are alleging that UC has violated labor law by bypassing the bargaining system, and unilaterally changing working conditions for certain workers. They have filed 23 unfair labor practice charges with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. The board has issued complaints in three of those cases.

11/11/2022

The plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to overturn President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness program has herself been a beneficiary of debt cancellation, in the form of a Paycheck Protection Program business loan worth over twice the maximum amount covered under Biden’s program.

Myra Brown, one of two plaintiffs in the Texas lawsuit, owns Desert Star Enterprises Inc. Desert Star, which appears to be a sign-making business, was granted a $48,000 loan, of which $47,996 was forgiven on April 27, 2022. By comparison, Biden’s student debt forgiveness program provides a maximum of $20,000 in forgiveness if the person seeking relief received a federal Pell Grant and $10,000 if it wasn’t a Pell Grant. Brown argues in her case that she is being harmed by Biden’s debt relief order because she is not eligible for it; her student loans were originally funded by private companies.

Brown’s case is one of a flurry of right-wing lawsuits aimed at ending Biden’s student debt forgiveness program. Though many have been dismissed due a lack of standing, this one has not. A Donald Trump-appointed judge, Mark T. Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, has indicated he wants to fast-track it.

Student debt relief advocates say the lawsuits are astroturf efforts by right-wing political organizations. “These sham lawsuits are blatantly manufactured by billionaire-funded right-wing organizations whose only purpose is to play dirty politics,” Braxton Brewington, spokesperson for the Debt Collective, told The Intercept. “These plaintiffs aren’t actually harmed by student debt cancellation, they’re simply willing to be political pawns for dark-money groups who will do anything to prevent working people from having financial breathing room.”

When The Intercept contacted Brown for comment, she responded via text message with a picture of a printout reading “we have no comment” and directing any inquiries to the Job Creators Network, a conservative advocacy organization bankrolling the lawsuit. The Job Creators Network was founded by the CEO of Home Depot and funded by the conservative Mercer Family Foundation.

11/07/2022

An 18-year-old s*x trafficking victim who pleaded guilty to killing a man she said r***d her escaped from a women’s center where she was serving her probation sentence.

Pieper Lewis was seen walking out of the building at the Fresh Start Women’s Center in Des Moines shortly after 6:15 a.m. Friday, and at some point that day her GPS monitor was cut off, according to a probation violation report.

A warrant was issued for Lewis’ arrest and the probation report asked for her deferred judgment to be revoked and have her original sentence imposed, KCCI reported. She could face up to 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors had called the probation sentence she was given in September merciful for a teen who endured horrible abuse, although some questioned the $150,000 restitution she was ordered to pay. A GoFundMe campaign raised over $560,000 to cover the restitution and pay for her other needs.

Polk County Judge David Porter told Lewis that her probation sentence “was the second chance you asked for. You don’t get a third,” the Des Moines Register reported.

If Lewis had successfully completed five years of closely supervised probation her prison sentence would have been expunged.

Lewis pleaded guilty last year to involuntary manslaughter and willful injury in the June 2020 killing of 37-year-old Zachary Brooks, a married father of two. Lewis was 15 when she stabbed Brooks more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment.

Lewis has said that she was trafficked against her will to Brooks for s*x multiple times and stabbed him in a fit of rage. Police and prosecutors did not dispute that Lewis was s*xually assaulted and trafficked.

The Associated Press does not typically name victims of s*xual assault, but Lewis agreed to have her name used previously in stories about her case.

Via

11/06/2022

Body cam footage of a legally blind man being arrested for “resisting arrest” a week ago by Columbia County Sheriff’s deputies in after one of them stopped him claiming his walking stick was a gun.

Original Video: https://youtu.be/k5yNlwCQpO0

11/05/2022

The Department of Homeland Security launched a failed operation that ensnared hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. protesters in what new documents show was as a sweeping, power-hungry effort before the 2020 election to bolster President Donald Trump’s spurious claims about a “terrorist organization” he accused his Democratic rivals of supporting.

An internal investigative report, made public this month by Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, details the findings of DHS lawyers concerning a previously undisclosed effort by Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, to amass secret dossiers on Americans in Portland attending anti-racism protests in summer 2020 sparked by the police murder of Minneapolis father George Floyd.

The report describes the attempts of top intelligence officials to connect protesters to a fabricated anti-fascist terrorist plot in hopes of boosting Trump’s reelection odds, raising concerns about the ability of a sitting president to co-opt billions of dollars’ worth of domestic intelligence assets for their own political gain. DHS analysts recounted orders to create organizational charts that could be used to establish links between the arrested protesters; an effort that would seemingly legitimize President Trump’s erroneous tweets about “Antifa,” an organization DHS tried but failed to prove shared a central source of funding.

The DHS report offers a full accounting of the intelligence activities happening behind the scenes of officers’ protest containment; “twisted efforts,” Wyden said, of Trump administration officials promoting “baseless conspiracy theories” to manufacture of a domestic terrorist threat for the president’s “political gain.” The report describes the dossiers generated by DHS as having detailed the past whereabouts and the “friends and followers of the subjects, as well as their interests” — up to and including “First Amendment speech activity.” Intelligence analysts had internally raised concerns about the decision to accuse anyone caught in the streets by default of being an “anarchist extremist” specifically because “sufficient facts” were never found “to support such a characterization.”

11/04/2022

More than 36,500 academic workers from the University of California voted Wednesday night to authorize a strike after the university system failed to meet demands that include living wages and child care subsidies. They also say the UCs violated labor laws and failed to bargain in good faith.

The workers, who are represented by three different affiliates of the United Auto Workers, form the backbone of UC campus operations. There are about 48,000 unionized postdoctoral researchers, professional and student researchers, teaching assistants, tutors and readers across the 10 UC campuses.

UC Davis has about 6,200 academic workers, according to organizers.

About 76% of workers participated in the vote, with more than 97% voting to approve the strike.

Workers could walk off the job as early as Nov. 14. A strike would likely shut down the majority of undergraduate classes, as the universities rely heavily on TAs to teach discussion sections, grade papers and administer exams. Research would also grind to a halt if graduate student researchers, postdocs and academic researchers left their labs to join picket lines.

University officials said in a statement that plans are in place to continue classes.

The unions allege that the UCs violated labor law by bypassing the bargaining system, unilaterally changing working conditions for cherry-picked groups of workers, and refusing to provide relevant information to aid the bargaining process. They have filed 23 unfair labor practice charges with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board, and the board has issued complaints in three of those cases.

The unions want to see a minimum annual salary of $54,000 for graduate student workers and $70,000 for postdocs. They’re seeking a 14% pay raise for professional academic researchers, as well as annual cost-of-living and experience-based adjustments.

The university’s latest offer included salary raises between 6 to 7.5% with single-digit percentage increases in subsequent years of the contract.

10/16/2022

A 91-year-old civil rights pioneer from Boston is expected to survive after she was stabbed five times while walking through a park Wednesday evening, officials said.

Jean McGuire, the first Black social worker to work in the Boston Public Schools, was walking her dog Bailey through Playstead Park in Jamaica Plain at about 8:30 p.m. when an unidentified person approached her and stabbed her multiple times.

"The victim was transported to a local hospital where she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries," Boston Police stated in a press release. "Preliminary investigation reveals that the suspect may have been injured during this attack."

It is believed McGuire's dog fought to protect her and "the suspect may have been injured during this attack," police stated in the release.

Jeriline Brady-McGinnis told the Boston Globe that her friend fought for her life.

"[Jean] attacked this guy. She was kicking him in the nuts while Bailey was working him over. And he tried to run, and the dog chased him. And [the attacker] disappeared out of sight," Brady-Mcginnis told the newspaper. "Bailey stood up for her."

McGuire was the first black woman elected to the School Committee in 1981, station WGBH reports. She helped found METCO, Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity, a program in the 1960s as a way to help desegregate Boston schools.

Police still have not found the attacker.

10/15/2022

“They don’t keep us safe. We keep us safe. Riots work.”

A community member named Alex giving a speech yesterday in while receiving the “Saint Paul Police Chief’s Award For Valor”. Last year Alex was on his way to work and saved someone’s life while they were bleeding out from a gunshot wound. Alex says in the speech that police sped past the area instead of stopping to provide aid.

Video via on YouTube
Link: https://youtu.be/drCCy2vNuDc
Video Title on YouTube: “Saint Paul Police Chief’s Award for Valor Recipient

10/15/2022

The federal student loan relief application is live. It’s currently in a beta version and the application sometimes is closed for hours at a time, then open for hours at a time until they release the full version. If you apply now you will not have to apply again.

https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief/application

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