The Final Straw Radio

The last year has been a trying time for everyone. Hardest hit have been prisoners who have seen increasing infections of the covid-19 virus brought in by guards who live off site or other prisoners transferred in from other institutions, prisoners who don't have the luxury of free movement during the incessant lockdowns their wardens employed as a band-aid measure to limit transmission, prisoners...

This week on The Final Straw, we feature a conversation between our occasional host, Scott, and adrienne maree brown. For the hour, Scott and adrienne speak about " We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice ", her latest booklet available through AK Press , as well as sci-fi, abolition, harm, accountability and healing. adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the...

Building Working Class History [00:05:53] This week, I spoke with John from the Working Class History collective and host of their WCH podcast. We spoke about the new book, " Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance ", that WCH has published through PM Press, their archives, methodology, the project of popularizing working class, movement and human-sized history and a bunch more. More in...

The Security State, Far Right and Media Post-January 6 th This week on the show, you'll hear two segments: chat with Spencer Sunshine on the far right and the government's reaction following the riot on January 6 th in DC and some perspectives on political content removal and social media from anarchist media platforms ItsGoingDown and crimethInc . Spencer Sunshine Transcription PDF (unimposed) Zi...

ShineWhite on Turning Razor Wire Plantations Into Schools of Liberation The following is a conversation with ShineWhite. ShineWhite is the former spokesperson for the National White Panther Organization, a part of the United Panther Movement. There was quite recently a split in the UPM and ShineWhite is now affiliated with the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party. In this conversation,...

Organizing To End Prison Slavery with Bennu Hannibal Ra Sun [starts at 00:02:37] This week, Bursts spoke with Bennu Hannibal Ra Sun, co-founder of the Free Alabama Movement and the National Freedom Movement, which is helping coordinate prisoner-led organizing across the so-called US. Bennu just finished a 5 year period in segregated housing for his organizing efforts. For the hour, they talk about...

Prison Bars Won't Stifle These Hearts This week, we're presenting three segments, all related in some way to prison. We hear an essay by an anarchist prisoner in Chile about a prison massacre on it's 10 th anniversary, the voice of David Easley reporting from within a covid outbreak in an Ohio prison, and the voice of someone who's protest against nuclear weapons was leading her to incarceration....

Organizing in "No Chance Alamance" County This week on the show I'm speaking with three folks engaged in organizing in the rural Alamance County, North Carolina, and it's capital of Graham. All three work with the 501c4 political non-profit, DownhomeNC which in Alamance has been working on a range of engagements including running local candidates for office, doing get-out-the-vote work, sparking c...

This week, you'll hear Kiran and Marco of the Angry Workers , a collective of anti-authoritarian communists struggling to think through and build workers autonomy from the UK. For the hour, they talk about their organizing and the book they just published, " Class Power On Zero-Hours " (available from PM Press in the US & UK, currently at a 50% discount if purchased from the publisher using the di...

This week, you'll hear a full show, including a segment by Sean Swain [00:01:38 - 00:07:54] Defend DC, 12/11-12/12 [00:07:52 - 00:51:28] Our main content is a conversation with antifascist organizer Daryle Lamont Jenkins of the One People's Project and IdaVox to talk about his views of the state of the far right at this time in the US, their Stop The Steal rallies and the November 14 th Million fo...

This week, I spoke with Dónal O'Driscoll, an animal rights activist and anarchist from the UK talking about the work of the Undercover Research Group to investigate possible SpyCops in the UK, share resources by those harmed by the lies of long term undercovers in activist communities and the current Inquiry that activists are using to unearth the legacy of police infiltration since the 1960's. He...

Belarus is continuing to experience a revolt against the 26 year dictatorship of the post-Soviet dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. The situation came to a boil, fueled by yet another election rife with administration corruption, the creation of mutual aid infrastructure in the face of a government that abandoned public health measures in the face of the corona virus pandemic, decreased economic qual...

This week I got the chance to sit down with Olive and Yousef of the Durham NC based eviction defense group HEDS-Up! HEDS-Up! stands for Housing Eviction Defense Solidarity and is a group which formed in Durham North Carolina when COVID was first hitting the area and folks' housing was becoming more and more unstable. We get to talk about a lot of topics in this episode, among which are gentrificat...

This week on the The Final Straw you'll hear me speaking with Cora Borradaile, who sits on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and works around issues of tech security in movements and is an associate professor at OSU . We discuss the use of phone cloning by US Marshall's and other law enforcement while engaging protestors in Portland, OR. We talk about UpTurn's recent report...

Certain Days: Freedom For Political Prisoners Calendar 2021 For the release of the 2021 Certain Days: Freedom For Political Prisoners Calendars we caught up with Josh, Sara and Daniel, three outside collective members. There's no point in me explaining about the project when they do such a good job in the next 40 minutes! Calendars are now available via BurningBooks.com in the so-called US, LeftWi...

Resisting State Repression Panel The following is a conversation between folks involved in anti-repression work in 5 parts of the so-called US. The goal was to present a zoomed out vision of scope and patterns of repression since the Floyd Uprising of this summer, particularly as the US sits in a period of heightened tensions around the elections and continued killings by police. Please consider s...

This week on The Final Straw Radio, we spoke with Dylan and Enzo of Unity & Struggle. Unity & Struggle, or U&S, is an anti-state communist collective spread across the so-called US. Their members publish essays and engage in local organizing activities. Enzo recently authored a short essay entitled " How Do We Stop A Coup " which had editorial contribution by the wider U&S collective. For the hour...

This week, you'll hear Ruchell Magee speak about his struggle over 57 years to be heard in the California court system and appeals to US Federal courts. Ruchell is the lone, surviving prisoner-participant of the August 7 th , 1970 Marin County Courthouse Rebellion, lead by Jonathan Jackson and including prisoner rebels William Christmas and James McClain. Ruchell took the name of Cinque (aka Sengb...

This week on the podcast, we're sharing an interview that I did with Hannah Dobbz, author of " Nine-Tenths of the Law: Property and Resistance in the United States ", published by AK Press. This interview originally aired on March 31st, 2013. From the original post: "Hannah was also the creator of the documentary " Shelter: A Squatumentary ". We talk about squatting in the U.S., homesteading, mark...

This week, we're airing a presentation by Mark Cook from Burning Books bookstore in Buffalo, NY. This was recorded on February 18 th , 2016. From the announcement on Kersplebedeb.com for the event: "Mark Cook is a former Black Panther, member of the George Jackson Brigade, and political prisoner. Twenty four years in prison could not break his spirit or commitment to Black liberation and Mark Cook...

This week on The Final Straw, we present a conversation that I had with Lorax B. Horne , a non-binary writer and journalist from Canada, Ecuador and the United Kingdom who is currently the Editor-In-Chief of the data transparency collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets , or DDOSecrets. In June of this year, the collective released roughly 269 gigabytes of hacked information from 251 law enforcem...

This week we had the opportunity to connect with Delee Nikal, who is a Wet'su'weten community member, about updates from the Gidimt'en Camp that was created to block the TransCanada Coastal GasLink pipeline (or CGL) that Canada is trying to push through their un-ceded territory. In this interview Bursts and Delee speak about ways folks can get involved, both in so called BC and elsewhere, how the...

This week we are pleased to present a guest interview with author Kristian Williams about his new book Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde which was released in June 2020 from AK Press. I found this interview extremely illuminating, perhaps like many other people who might not have strong ties to either academia or popular education models of learning, I ha...

Prison By Any Other Name: Vikki Law on Toxic Reforms This week we speak with author and activist, Vikki Law about the book Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms , just out from The New Press and co-authored by Maya Schenwar. We speak about how reform and so-called 'more humane' 'alternatives' to incarceration such as electronic monitoring, drug courts and probation...

This week we are airing a conversation that Bursts had a few weeks ago with Aric McBay, who is an organizer, farmer, and author about his most recent book called Full Spectrum Resistance published by Seven Stories Press in May 2019.. This book is divided into 2 volumes, and from the books website [fullspectrumresistance.org]: " Volume 1: Building movements and fighting to win , explores how moveme...