Movement Memos

“I think we can reframe and re-understand the immigrant rights movement, not just as one of many movements, but something that is fundamentally connected to how we remake the world,” says Harsha Walia. In this episode, Kelly and Border & Rule author Harsha Walia talk about the plight of Black students fleeing Ukraine, borders, the climate crisis, and taking action in these times. If you need a tra...

While officials spin false narratives blaming violent crime on bail reform, and police insist too many people are getting out of jail, conditions in U.S. jails and prisons remain nightmarish. In this episode, Kelly Hayes talks with organizer Brooke Terpstra about a hunger strike at the Santa Rita Jail in California, and about some of the complexities and political dynamics of organizing in jails a...

“What we cannot do is rally our compassion on the basis of whether or not we think the U.S. war machine can drop some bombs and make it better. Making things better is not what the war machine is for,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode, Kelly talks with organizer Yaira Matos from the youth anti-war group We Are Dissenters about militarism, international solidarity, and why the U.S. war machine can...

“What we have is a situation where our opponents are fixated on us and our allies are leaving us behind,” says trans attorney and activist Chase Strangio. Republicans have made attacks on trans youth a signature policy item at the state level. In this episode, Kelly and Chase talk about the avalanche of transphobic legislation Republicans have generated, the role of fascist politics in this onslau...

“This will be an era defined by who is deemed worthy of survival, and who isn’t, who gives a damn, and who doesn’t, and how we keep each other alive during and in between catastrophes,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode, Kelly talks with Shane Burley, the author of Why We Fight and Fascism Today, about right-wing power, the apocalypse, and organizing a counterculture of care. If you need a transcr...

“When you have a power that is designed to be unaccountable and has been unaccountable for so damn long, the reforms that stick to it just make it stronger and more efficient as they cover it in a veneer of legitimacy." In this episode, Kelly talks with abolitionist criminology professor and activist Brendan McQuade about how securitization has shaped popular ideas about what it means to be free,...

From the Amazon to Hubbard County, Minnesota, corporations are funding the repression of protesters. In this episode, Kelly talks with Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, about the history and future of corporate collaborations with the police. Kelly also talks with attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard about newly exposed documents that reveal the lead prosecutor in Hubbard County sought corpo...

“Capitalism is the unfolding catastrophe,” says activist Bree Newsome Bass. “It's this thing that has grabbed us all in its arms and it is just plummeting down.” In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly talks with activist and artist Bree about long COVID, voting rights and getting organized in these times. If you need a transcript, you can find that on our website. If you would like to support th...

“At the close of 2021, the right is poised to treat the pandemic as a political portal, and the left is not. That’s a disturbing reality, but it is not a fixed condition." In this year-end episode of Movement Memos, Kelly reflects on what we’re up against and what we need to build in the new year. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.

“The women who were already long-timers when I was just coming in, they were the light in my tunnel. We were all in the tunnel together just making light,” says formerly incarcerated organizer Monica Cosby. In this episode of Movement Memos, Cosby and Kelly Hayes talk about the emotional support networks imprisoned people create to survive institutions that punish symptoms of emotional distress, a...

“ShotSpotter manufactures the urgency of an active threat, offering situations where there is likely no risk, but where police can operate within a narrative of extreme risk.” In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly talks with Chicago organizers who are attempting to rid their city of an acoustic surveillance system that is both ineffective and dangerous. Kelly also digs into the question of why...

Right-wing myths about stolen elections and vaccine conspiracies will no doubt complicate many dinners today, as families gather to celebrate a holiday grounded in its own harmful mythology: Thanksgiving. Among liberals and leftists, there will be countless posts debunking the lies children are taught about the holiday in school. But on this day it is equally important to amplify the stories of Na...

“Apocalypse normal means we can go back to school, get on planes, and hit up restaurants and bars -- as long as we don’t think too hard about disabled people, unvaccinated children or long COVID. It means experiencing escalating heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, and scrolling past news about ‘code red’ climate reports, and the refugees that climate catastrophes create, without retali...

The Indian Child Welfare Act has been challenged more times in the past decade than the Affordable Care Act. In this episode of Movement Memos, Native journalists Kelly Hayes and Rebecca Nagle talk about the right-wing plot to bring down a child welfare law and why the fundamental rights of Native people, the fate of tribal lands, and “the very shape of what passes for democracy” in the U.S. are a...

In place of our usual content, this week, we are revisiting A COVID Memorial Mixtape. The mixtape, which was released in October of 2020 by Ric Wilson, in collaboration with a number of grassroots organizers, was created as part of a month-long effort to memorialize people lost to COVID-19. It was also played through a loudspeaker outside the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in downtown Chicago....

“We can't survive doing the work that we're asked to do, the way that we're being asked to do it, with the lack of support we're being asked to do it with,” says healthcare worker Nicole Brun-Cottan. Tens of thousands of nurses and other healthcare workers in the Kaiser Permanente health care system are poised to go on strike. In this Striketober episode, Kelly talks with three nurses who are read...

“This crisis embodies the violence of a murderous system that is re-legitimized through reforms, any time its true character becomes too visible, like a shapeshifting monster in a horror film. It never stops consuming life,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes digs into the crisis on Rikers Island, why people are dying, and why this isn’t a story about understaffing, b...

“In the coming years, we are going to have to practice our skills and our politics in ways that we probably can’t fully imagine right now, because we live in unprecedented times.” In this episode, Kelly and organizer Carlos Saavedra talk about burnout, building power and how our pandemic exhaustion could give way to an era of breakthroughs. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our we...

“Texas is playing by its own rules on immigration and deputizing police from as far away as Iowa to participate in Abbott’s state-level war on migrants. The implications here are just horrifying,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly examines recent events in Del Rio, Texas, where Black asylum-seekers were brutalized and faced mass deportations, and also highlights Operation...

We have witnessed the evolution of a social and moral binary in the United States: vaccinated and unvaccinated. Immersed in a culture of blame and condemnation, around the spread of COVID-19, we have also seen the rise of a brand of humor that Kelly characterizes as “recreational dehumanization.” So how should we be talking about vaccination and mass death, and how can we be constructive? In this...

“Fascist ideologies really rely on systems of bordering and ordering, of deciding who has the right to life and under what conditions,” says Harsha Walia. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes examines the state of right-wing power in the United States, and engages with commentary from authors Shane Burley and Sarah Kendzior, writer and organizer Harsha Walia, and President of the Texas ...

Ten years after Occupy Wall Street embodied the hopes and outrage of people across the country, Kelly and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe talk about what we can learn from a movement that launched a new and unruly era of protest. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.

“We're talking about a heavily armed populace that's radicalizing itself [and] self traumatizing through its own mythology.” In this episode, Kelly talks with author Shane Burley about the state of fascism in the Biden era, mutual aid, and building movements during apocalyptic times. For a transcript, audio and show notes, you can check out our website: https://truthout.org/series/movement-memos/

“People end up in prison for a reason, but it's not the reason that we're fed by all of these cop shows." In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes talks with journalist Victoria Law about prisons, why they don’t work, and what even well-meaning people tend to get wrong about incarceration. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website: https://truthout.org/series/movement-me...

"The goal of a supremacist state is to have a monopoly on the legitimacy of violence," says Palestinian writer and organizer Lea Kayali. In this episode, Kelly and Lea Kayali explore the history of Israeli violence against Palestinians – and the colonial dynamics that enable it – and discuss what you can do about it. For a transcript, audio and show notes, you can check our website: https://trutho...