The Final Straw Radio

Updates on FOSTA and Digital Harm Reduction with Norman Shamas This week, we continue our look at sex, work and the state with guest, Norman Shamas . Norman Shamas is an activist and educator whose work focuses on human-centered information and digital security and privacy. Now, Norman is not a lawyer but shares their insights about the legal situation around FOSTA, or Fighting Online Sex Traffick...

Sex Worker Outreach Project Behind Bars w/ Dr. Jill McCracken This week, William spoke with Jill McCracken , codirector of SWOP Behind Bars , or the Sex Worker Outreach Project, Behind Bars chapter. Jill is also a professor at University of South Florida at St. Petersburg teaching rhetoric and gender and sexuality studies, with a focus on sex work, prostitution, and trafficking in the sex industry...

Support Anarchist Prisoner Eric King This week Bursts spoke with the wife of vegan, antifascist and anarchist political prisoner, Eric King. Eric was was convicted of attempting the September 11, 2014 firebombing of the Kansas City office of a Missouri Democratic Congressman in solidarity with the Ferguson Uprising that kicked off after the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO. The office was att...

Front Line Organization Working To End Racism Firstly we're presenting a conversation that William had with an organizer with F.L.O.W.E.R ., which stands for Front Line Organization Working to End Racism, about opposition to a neo confederate rally scheduled to take place on February 2 nd at Stone Mountain Park about half an hour's drive outside of Atlanta, Georgia. We talk about the longstanding...

This week, we'd like to share a conversation had a little bit ago with Kali Kaneko, from LEAP.  Leap Encryption Access Project, like pEp featured in our prior Error451 interview, is an open-source project meant to ease... access to encryption (and it's a project).  At a point in the past, LEAP had an interest in shifting paradigm of email but is now focusing mainly on distribution, upkeep, and imp...

This week we feature two segments, the first on anti-pipeline resistance at the Gidimt'en Camp in Canada and second with JR from sub. Media about Mental Wellness and the recent Trouble episode on the subject. Wet'suwet'en Pipeline Resistance, so-called BC First up, we'll hear from Delee Nikal, a Wet'suwet'en community member from the Gidimt'en clan and the Cas Yikh House, a First Nation in so-call...

Support NoDAPL Prisoners This week, we're excited to share the voices of Jess and Olive, who both did legal support, and do prisoner solidarity with the folks facing Federal prison time from the struggle at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This episode was heavily edited for radio, so I suggest you find our audio at our website or in itunes or soundcloud or youtube or ideally our...

Hernani Marques on Pretty Easy Privacy On this episode I'm joined by Hernani Marques, a hacker and member of the pEp Foundation, talking about Pretty Easy Privacy, a concerted attempt to make adoption of end-to-end email encryption easier and more ubiquitous through automation of key-making and management through partnering with programs like Outlook and Thunderbird. To learn more about pEp, check...

Cindy Milstein, Part Two You're listening to the second half of my inteview with anarchist, activist and author Cindy Milstein as they toured with the book Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief , published last year by AK Press. In this portion of the conversation, Cindy will share about community support infrastructures in sickness and in health, the importance of play, the Montreal S...

Cindy Milstein, Part One Cindy Milstein is an anarchist, activist and author who was a touring few months back with Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief , published last year by AK Press. The book is compilation of essays by various authors about loss in it's myriad forms experienced under cis-hetero-patriarchy, in a capitalist settler colonialism, anti-Black and otherwise racist, abl...

This week William had the opportunity to speak with two people who are doing active support work for the folks involved in what's being called the "migrant caravan", a group of 7,000 or so people primarily from Honduras fleeting violence of many kinds. Firstly we'll hear from Chris, who is an organizer with Enclave Caracol, a social center which stands in solidarity with migrants in Tijuana. This...

Rural Organizing And Resiliency (ROAR) This week on The Final Straw Radio, we're sharing an interview with two members of Rural Organizing And Resilience, or ROAR, an anti-racist and mutual aid organization that's based in Madison County, North Carolina. Madison County is just north of Asheville and VERY Appalachian, with a small population that's sparsely populated in remote hollers and small tow...

Walidah Imarisha on Angels With Dirty Faces (rebroadcast) This week we are rebroadcasting an interview that William and Disembodied Voice conducted with Walidah Imarisha, who is an Oregon based writer, educator, public scholar and spoken word artist about her book Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption , her 2016 book out from AK Press and IAS, which highlights thr...

This week, we feature three segments. Locals Respond To Far-Right Doxxings First, we'll feature a statement about recent doxing of a number of anti-racists in the Asheville area by far-right keyboard warriors.  A Jailhouse Lawyer Speaks About #PrisonStrike 2018 After that, we feature an interview with Dee, an anonymous incarcerated organizer affiliated with Jailhouse Lawyers Speak. In this convers...

Sahar Francis of Addameer This week, I spoke with Sahar Francis, the Director of Addameer. Addameer is a non-governmental organization, or NGO, based in Ramallah in the West Bank in occupied Palestine that focuses on human rights advocacy, political prisoner support & public education efforts like Know Your Rights trainings. Addameer is one of the projects that is receiving a portion of the profit...

Taglit-Birthright Israel & Settler Colonialism This week, we spoke with Nani Ferreira-Mathews . Nani is the author of " Birthright?: Travelogue of an American Radical in Israel / Palestine ", published by On Our Own Authority (or OOOA) Books, out of Atlanta, earlier this year. Nani has indigenous Hawaiian and Jewish heritage and talks and in 2013 went on the Taglit-Birthright tour to Israel, which...

Disaster Relief Moving Forward This week we had the chance to talk to Sascha, who is a community organizer in the triangle area of North Carolina, about ongoing organizing to help rebuild and continue to aid folks after the multiple hurricanes recently hit this region.  This interview went in directions that we couldn't have predicted, and really went on a deep dive of how to conceptualize of disa...

This week on The Final Straw we'll be airing the second half of our interview with anarchist, author and cartoonist nonagenarian, Donald Rooum from Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Donald has written introductions to anarchism and has been a leading organizer in movements in the U.K. against nuclear war, the death penalty and the use of corporal punishment against children in schools. This summe...

Mutual Aid in the Wake of Hurricane Michael This week on The Final Straw Radio, we feature a conversation with Pearson, an anarchist resident of Tallahassee, Florida, and is involved in storm relief mutual aid work in the wake of Hurricane Michael. Pearson is also the co-host of the leftist podcast "Coffee With Comrades". For the hour we talk about Hurricane Michael, which just passed through the...

This week we had the opportunity to connect with Vanessa Bolin, who is an indigenous artist, community organizer, and activist who has been helping with flood rescue and rebuilding efforts after Hurricane Florence in Lumberton, NC, which is in Robeson County. In this interview we talk about what still needs to be done in this area, how to help out, some important parallels between post hurricane r...

This week we are very pleased to present an interview with Mango and Marin, who are mental healthcare workers based in New York City. We are going to get into a lot of topics, including anarchist critiques of psychiatry, the open dialogue method of treating mental health concerns, ways that anarchists can be comrades with people who have survived the psych industry, and the Earth First! MAD Camp,...

This week on The Final Straw radio we are sharing a chat that Bursts had with Zolo Agona Azania. Zolo is  from Gary, Indiana where he lives now, working a job and also doing re-entry work with the formerly incarcerated and community service to break cycles of trauma. After 7 and a half years in prison from ages 18-25 where Zolo engaged in political education with members of the Black Panther Party...

This week we are presenting audio from the Callisto Collective, which is a local collective "addressing conflict, abuse, assault and everything in between" by utilizing autonomous models of resolution, especially in closer knit communities of affinity. This workshop is called Conflict Resolution for folks who do Anti State Organizing. In this workshop, they talk about many things, including anarch...

This week, we air two segments. South Carolina Prisoner, "J" First, "J" is in segregation in a South Carolina prison. He does not give his full name or the prison he's inside for reasons of personal safety. You'll hear him share a bit about his experience of the prison strike from the inside, the repression of prisoners at his facilities, prisoner unity in the strike,the high costs of living in pr...

This week on The Final Straw , we're featuring two main events, both themed around the Prison Strike ongoing across Turtle Island until at least September 9 th . Kevin Rashid Johnson on the Prison Strike First, an interview we conducted with Kevin "Rashid" Johnson. Rashid is a co-founder of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party and is the Minister of Defense from within it's Prison Chapter. He is th...