Liz and Brace of Truanon, joined by Young Chomsky, mock the absurdity of "Tribal Thumb" while diving into the 1973 Atlantic exposé by Jessica Mitford on California Medical Facility’s Vacaville—where CIA-funded MKUltra experiments targeted Black inmates like SLA’s Donald DeFries, held for two years. Left in the Bay’s Matts reveal how the 1960s psychiatric prison became a hub for drug trials, linking it to San Quentin and Lexington’s coercive "voluntary" commitments, exposing systemic exploitation beneath radical detention narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
The good thing is you just wave a gun and they empty the register.
You're gonna have a beauty parlour.
What's the matter with you?
All thinking like white people.
Don't need hundreds, need thousands.
We're going to a bakery.
Don't believe it.
That's so brilliant.
Yeah, we are also fucking chicken shit, bourgeois.
I wish I was black.
I mean, I just wish I was fucking black.
Hello, everyone.
I'm Liz.
My name is Brace.
We're, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called Truanon.
Hello.
Hello.
I like it when we say it at the same time.
Do you like this?
Jinx?
Oh, I didn't say it.
We didn't say what?
I didn't say jinx at the same time you said jinx.
That's not how jinx works.
I know, but I thought you were saying, like, do you like this?
And then we were going to say it at the same time.
No, I'm jinxing you.
Stop talking.
No.
You're jinxed.
I don't care.
I don't fucking follow your voice.
Yes, you can't do this.
I do what I want.
This is.
Okay.
All right.
This is a fucking problem.
Okay, everyone.
We have the second episode.
Tribal Thumb Experiments00:03:23
Part two.
Part two in our three-part series here about Tribal Thumb, a name that I hate saying.
It does seem like Tribal Thumb is.
It's like something you see at the Glastonbury Music Festival in 1995.
You know, like Fat Boy Slim and Tribal Thumb.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm surprised Tribal Thumb wasn't playing at the fucking Manic Street Preachers and Tribal Thumb.
Oh my God, what was it?
What was the festival's name called?
Nova?
Tribal Thumb at the Nova Festival.
That is actually, you know, that sounds right.
That's true.
That does sound right.
We have with us today Matt and Matt from Left in the Bay once again, and we are talking, well, we're talking about the SLA.
SLA.
And let's start this bad boy off.
Okay, so yeah, Jessica Mitford publishes this expose in The Atlantic in 73.
Talks about the California medical facility, says over the past 10 years, a brisk traffic in human subjects for drug company experimentation has grown up in this facility, a prison specifically designed for men deemed by the authorities to be in need of psychiatric treatment.
That's true at that time, but it quickly becomes in the mid-60s a place where a lot of radicals are sent and processed and transferred.
If you read like Huey Newton's Revolutionary Suicide, he talks about getting sent to Vacaville first.
It's like where a lot of these black radicals are sent.
Usually they're only there for like 60 to 90 days.
The really crazy thing to note about the figure at the heart of the SLA story that we'll talk about, Donald DeFries, is he's there for two years.
Yeah, almost two years.
Which is like longer than pretty much anyone ever spends there around that time.
But the facility is like a way station between going to San Quentin, sold Ed Folsom.
A lot of people just go through, like Huey Newton talks about it and says that he just gets like rigorously tested in all these kinds of ways.
And then they're sent off in like 20 days.
But there's all kinds of like weird experimentation going on there.
Some that are like legal within the framework of the prison system and many that are illegal.
And so like chaos program money from the CIA flows into Vacaville.
There's also like MKUltra experimentation going on there.
And what's the later one, like MK Search or something?
I think, yeah, I think it's MK Search.
There's all kinds of fucked up, crazy illegal experiments that are going on in many ways.
A lot of them involve sex in weird ways.
It really reminds one of the Lexington drug files.
Right.
We covered that in our Synodon series.
But like, same exact sort of thing.
I mean, it was a lot of black people that were there for.
That one was weird because it was also a prison, but also can be voluntary.