Total Liberation

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with Native Hawaiian comrade, streamer, and indie game developer, Silver Spook, about a range of topics. We discuss Hawaiian civilization, past, present, and future, Land Back there and everywhere, Indigenous futurism, and Silver Spook’s cyberpunk adventure game, Neofeud, which contains a number of interesting anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and decolonial...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with Laura Schleifer and Anas Arafat, founders of Plant the Land Team Gaza. Plant the Land Team Gaza is a vegan food justice and community projects volunteer team based in Gaza, and they recently teamed up with Million Dollar Vegan to provide 3500 vegan meals to people in occupied Palestine. We discuss how their project came together, cover the history of Total...

Rundown We’re all together! Apologies for the audio quality as we kept moving and the mic picked up everything, but Mexie, Marine, and Nix from Pynk Spots got together in Portland to record this episode! We discuss the importance of being clear about what we mean when we say we’re fighting speciesism, as this has implications for how we proceed as a political movement. We also discuss...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie catches up with Jon Reynolds and Meagan Sullivan, two former No Evil Foods employees who were pivotal in the union drive effort at the company. Jon and Meagan joined Mexie on an episode last summer to discuss No Evil Foods’ union-busting tactics (that episode is listed below). Mexie also speaks with Jeremy, another former No Evil Foods employee who was laid off...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with former Lush Cosmetics employee, Hannah, about the company’s gross union-busting tactics and why she and others formed the Global Lush Union. As the mainstream vegan movement continues to focus itself on consumption under capitalism, it’s no wonder that vegan brands are replicating the same kind of colonizing and inequality-producing tendencies...

Rundown Marine is back, baby! She and Mexie have a wonderful discussion about her journey into facilitation work with high school students. We discuss how facilitation differs as an educational tool from conventional lecturing or teaching, how she began her own anti-oppression facilitation program, and everything she’s learned along the way. We cover a lot of ground and end by shouting out h...

Rundown Mexie sits down with the Wrong Boys and Brett from RevLeftRadio for the *most wholesome conversation ever had*. We centre the convo around how fantastic it feels to help others and the importance of looking for the helpers in our society. We branch out into discussing the science of empathy and mutual aid, and get into some deep thoughts about dismantling the ego and expanding our sense of...

Rundown Mexie’s fiancé, Jacob, who is a Jewish anti-Zionist activist in Toronto, is taking over VV for this episode! He interviews Sheryl Nestel, an academic and activist who is on the executive committee of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, about the latest round of Israeli violence sparked by the incidents in Sheikh Jarrah. They discuss the brutality of the occupation, the harmful myths ab...

Rundown Mexie sits down with community activist and YouTuber, Sadlord777, for a captivating conversation about our spiritual journeys, the import of spirituality in political and community organizing, navigating tradition as a white settler on Turtle Island, and ancestral accountability. Sources and Links * Sadlord777’s Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/JohannDrivesMyBus* Sadlord777&#821...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with author and professor, Tyler Shipley, about Canada’s dismaying place in the world. Tyler is the author of Canada in the World: Settler Capitalism and the Colonial Imagination, where he details how Canada’s genocidal relationship with Indigenous peoples has carried into imperialist aggression. Spoiler alert: we aren’t the good guys. Sources...

Rundown Mexie talks with Marxian economist, Dr. Richard Wolff, about COVID-19, the current economic recession, and the prospects for a post-capitalist future. Prof. Wolff argues that democratizing our workplaces from the ground up is critical to building that future. Sources and Links * Democracy at Work: https://www.democracyatwork.info/ * Democracy at Work on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/d...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with journalist, activist, and documentary film-maker, Abby Martin, about U.S. empire under Biden. We discuss his scary cabinet picks, his administration’s positioning with respect to various countries that have long been in the imperial crosshairs, and the importance of building a powerful anti-war and anti-imperialist movement. Sources and Links * Empir...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with Dalit anti-caste and anti-speciesist activist, Prateek Kumar, about life as a Dalit in India. We discuss how the caste system operates, how casteism and speciesism are interlinked and how this affects both lower caste people and animals, and how things have changed and worsened under Modi’s Hindu nationalist regime. We end by discussing the potential...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie sits down with Rachel Bromberg and Asante Haughton of the Reach Out Response Network in Toronto to talk about their work, which is revolutionizing crisis response in the city. Rachel and Asante are working to actualize a paradigm shift away from coercive, forceful, police-led intervention towards an anti-oppressive, trauma-informed model that will empower individuals...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with anti-oppressive, anti-speciesist activist and lecturer, Christopher Sebastian, about the intersections between race, class, and species. We discuss the links between speciesism and white supremacy, the ongoing bigotry and racism in vegan activism, and the connections between the Black Lives Matter uprisings and anti-speciesist activism. We end by touching...

Rundown Mexie sits down with anti-capitalist and decolonial scholar and activist, Dr. Nick Estes, to talk about the US election and what the Empire looks like under various administrations, about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court with respect to Indigenous law and sovereignty, and about how decolonial and anti-capitalist struggles are intimately linked. It was an enlightening discussion! Please...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie is joined by Nichole from Pynk Spots (formerly from Bitchy Shitshow and Vegan Warrior Princesses Attack!) to chat about the 2020 election results: our reactions to Biden winning, why the Supreme Court and the Electoral College need to go, what moves Trump is making to attempt a soft coup (possible but not likely), and how neoliberalism doesn’t beat fascism – in...

Rundown Happy Halloween (slash HBD, Mexie)! Mexie and Ash, from the podcast The Horror Vanguard, review the 1981 horror film, Wolfen. Comrade wolfen are eating rich imperialist real estate moguls, what fun! Sources and Links * Follow the Horror Vanguard on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-317910500 * Horror Vanguard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HorrorVanguard* Horror Vanguard on Patreon:...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with community organizer Noodle about information and operational security for political dissidents, protestors, and organizers. We talk about what protestors and organizers can do to keep themselves and their comrades secure, both in the streets as well as at home and on digital networks. Please check out the links below, and remember – we keep us safe....

Rundown In this episode, Mexie sits down with former employees of No Evil Foods, Jon, Meagan, and Cortne, to talk about how the company effectively quashed the workers’ union drive. No Evil has, until now, marketed themselves as a revolutionary brand, using socialist iconography and even appropriating the Zapatista movement to sell their products. We discuss the strategies No Evil used to pr...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with John Perkins, former Chief Economist for MAIN, about his time as an economic hitman, furthering U.S. empire through economic imperialism. We talk about the links between the World Bank, IMF, private firms like Haliburton and Bechtel, and intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA. John also discusses some insights from his new book about the shift in consc...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with plural justice activists Meneka Repka and Ehsan Otoufi about the challenges of political organizing within mainstream, ‘apolitical’ vegan spaces. We talk about why anti-speciesist activism needs to be anti-capitalist and pro-intersectional, take a look at some of the mainstream organizations that purport to be ‘apolitical’, and disc...

Rundown This episode begins with a short rundown of what’s going on with the BLM rebellions right now, and includes two PSAs from the Channel Zero Network about safety and security during street actions and how to provide jail support to your comrades. In the episode itself, Mexie and Marine talk about the problematic war rhetoric that leaders and media pundits are using to describe our resp...

Rundown In this bonus episode, Mexie appears on RevLeftRadio to discuss psychedelics, ego, consciousness, spirituality and leftism with Brett. This discussion dovetails well with our recent discussion on Mind and Nature, exploring themes of meditation and communing with nature in relation to leftist thought and activism. By popular request, we’ve gone in deeper on the psychedelic portion of...

Rundown In this episode, Mexie talks with Green, a comrade from the Indigenous Anarchist Federation, Ash from the Horror Vanguard podcast, and her partner, Jacob, about all things FF7 and how relevant the game’s narrative is for our current historical moment. We discuss the way the game handles themes of anti-capitalism, colonialism, environmentalism, racism, patriarchy, and last but not lea...