The Final Straw Radio

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...

Its not uncommon to hear pundits and regular folks making comparisons between the crises we are now facing and other historical moments, such as the 1920s in Germany or the global rebellions of the 1960s. But is this an effective approach for gauging the potential of now? For the hour, anarchist author and activist Peter Gelderloos shares some of his thoughts on those comparisons, on the revolutio...

We Need To Spread This Freely: JN On HK Under National Security Law This week, I speak with JN, an anarchist who works with the decolonial, leftist HongKonger platform, Lausan , talks about where the uprising against Chinese integration in Hong Kong stands, the National Security Law, tankie and rightwing narratives and international anti-authoritarian solidarity and resistance. The interview about...

Omaha In The Uprising with Mel This week, we're going to hear two specials in two separate episodes, basically exploding radio edition into it's components. In this one you've clicked on, you'll hear Mel B from Omaha, Nebraska talk about the city, the protests there including the killing of James Scurlock on May 30 th , the mass arrest of 120 people on July 25 th and leftist and Black organizing t...

RVA In The Uprising with L and Buzz This week, we're going to hear two specials in two separate episodes, basically exploding radio edition into it's components. In this one you've clicked on, you'll hear L, who works with the Richmond Community Bail Fund , and Buzz talk about their experiences in the streets and doing anti-repression work in Richmond, Virginia, throughout the uprising against pol...

This week we got to sit down with two members of the Portland General Defense Committee , AC (they them) and Raoul (they he), about the ongoing Uprising in Portland OR in the months since the murder of George Floyd. We get to touch on a lot of topics in this interview; the neo-liberal whitewashing of the image of the city of Portland which masks a lot of ultra racist and colonial tendencies, perso...

Pipeline Updates from Yellow Finch Tree Sit 690 days. That is how long the tree sit on Yellow Finch lane has been standing to block the progress of the Mountain Valley Pipeline's proposed 301 mile corridor of pressurized, fracked liquified natural gas. This week, we speak with Dustie Pinesap and Woodchipper who are at the Yellow Finch Tree Sit in so-called Montgomery County, Virginia, who talk abo...

Anarchist Prisoners and Updates from the A-Radio Network This week, we're continuing our pandemic vacation. First up is some new words on surveillance and resistance by Sean Swain.[00:02:51-00:09:25] Then you'll hear audio from the most recent episode of our cousin project, Dissident Island Radio, where they spoke with a fan of London Anarchist Black Cross about the upcoming July 23-30th Week of S...

Rik Scarce is the author of the 1990 exploration of earth liberation and defense and the folks involved, entitled "Eco-Warriors: Understanding The Radical Environmental Movement", which is still considered required reading in understanding radical eco-defense. At one point, he served 159 days in the Spokane jail for refusing to testify about his sources in his research on the Animal Liberation mov...

On Blackness and Anarchy This week on the Final Straw, we are taking a break from consistently bringing fresh content over the last few months (frequently twice a week, instead of just the usual Sunday episodes) and re-airing this segment form a prior episode 2 years ago. Here we re-present a speech by William C. Anderson , keynote of the 2018 Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair in so-called Ashev...

Justice4Jerry2020, Confederate Monuments + Repression During The Movement for Black Lives photo by Ben Harper This episode has three portions following a segment by anarchist prisoner, Sean Swain, about confederate monuments. [00:02:31 - 00:09:32] This episode warrants a general content warning for the mentioning of the murder by shooting of a Black man at the hands of the police. Justice4Jerry 20...

Pan-African Social Ecology: A conversation with Dr Modibo Kadalie This week, we're happy to air a conversation I had with the author and activist, Modibo Kadalie, author of Pan-African Social Ecology as well as Internationalism, Pan-Africanism and the Struggle of Social Classes . A version of Dr. Kadalie's conversation with Andrew Zonneveld of OOA! Publishing, entitled Pan-Africanism, Social Ecolo...

In the past few weeks since the uprising in response to police killings of Black and Brown folks around Turtle Island, amazing chances have presented themselves and folks have seized opportunities. One great and unfolding circumstance is known as the CHAZ or CHOP, an autonomous zone and occupational protest surrounding a police precinct in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The area was opened t...

This week we are pleased to present an interview William conducted with Gabriel Kuhn and Maxida M ä rak on the 2019 PM Press release Liberating S á pmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe's Far North . This book, of which Kuhn is the author and editor and Märak is an contributor, details a political history of the Sámi people whose traditional lands extend along the north most regions of so called Sw...