The Final Straw Radio

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...

Ray Luc Levasseur, PT2 This week, we share some more perspectives on prison, stretching back decades. You're about to hear the second half of our conversation from earlier this year with Ray Luc Levasseur. Mr. Levasseur is a longtime activist, Vietnam War vet, revolutionary and former political prisoner in the U.S. Ray was a reputed founder of the Sam Melville / Jonathan Jackson Unit , later known...

William C. Anderson This week on The Final Straw, we are super pleased to present a talk given at the most recent Asheville Anarchist Bookfair by William C. Anderson, who co authored the book As Black As Resistance with Zoe Samudzi. The talk he is giving here is based heavily on the first chapter of the book called Black in Anarchy, and in addition to laying the groundwork of how he and Samudzi wr...

Steady Collective + SFBayView Newspaper This week on the show we feature two interviews. The first is with Mary Ratcliff, the editor of 27 years of the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper , with a print distribution of 20,000 copies around the U.S., including thousands behind bars. For the hour, Mary talks about the history of the paper, it's relationship with prisoners and prison stru...

This week we had the opportunity to interview Isabel and Christopher, who are active in differing ways in the No NEXUS Oberlin campaign, one in a long series of anti pipeline pushes in Oberlin Ohio. This campaign is based in part around the college which exists there, but is also in strong coalition with non college attending community members in the area who have been battling  the extraction ind...

Donald Rooum, pt1 This week, we invite you to listen in on the first part of a conversation we had with 90 year old anarchist, cartoonist and author, Donald Rooum . Donald was born 1928 in Bradford, UK. Donald is most known for his longtime illustration of the wiley, bomb-throwing, firebrand anarchist cartoon character, Wildcat. In this episode, Donald talks about his early political trajectory an...

This week we are talking a little break to work on other things, and so have taken the time to re-broadcast two interviews from two other radical and anarchist audio projects, both of which have been doing amazing work. From Embers The first we'll present is from an anarchist radio show in so-called Kingston, Ontario called From Embers . This interview was originally released by them in the middle...

"You may be nonviolent, but I'm not gonna let these white people kill you". A presentation with Charles Cobb on This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed . This week we are very pleased to present a presentation done some months ago at Firestorm Books with Charles E. Cobb, Jr.  Charles Cobb is a journalist, writer, and current senior analyst at allAfrica.com , which is "is a voice of, by and about A...

This week Bursts had two conversations, both focusing on the upcoming Prisoner Strike from August 21st to September 9 th , 2018, one with a member of IWOC and one with a Amani Sawari, a media liaison for some of the prisoners who called for the strike. The viewpoints expressed by the two guests are at time contradictory and at others redundant but it felt better to keep their voices mostly intact...

#OccupyICEPDX and J20 Updates This week, we're featuring two interviews.  The first was an an interview from the IGDcast with someone affiliated with #OccupyIcePDX blocking the immigration detention center in Portland, OR.  The second  was a chat we had with a supporter of the J20 arrestees, from among the 230 people rounded up during the Inauguration protests of January 20th, 2017, in Washington,...

This week on The Final Straw, we're airing three international segments covering anarchist perspectives from the Rojava Revolution in Northern Syria, voices from the pirate radio, Radio Klaxon on the ZAD, a land occupation in western France, and refugee solidarity and struggle in on the border of Croatia and Bosnia in the Balkans. First, we'll hear an interview with an anarchist recently returned...

This week on The Final Straw, we'll be airing two interviews. Shane Burley on Fascism Today In the first, Bursts spoke with author and activist Shane Burley about the state of street level fascism and anti-fascism in the U.S. Shane is the author of numerous articles on the subject as well as a the 2017 book from AK Press, "Fascism Today: What It Is And How To End It." The conversation ranges from...

This week we are airing a presentation that Margaret Killjoy gave at Firestorm Books on the release day of her new release The Barrow Will Send What it May . This is the second in her Danielle Cain series which highlights magic, anarchism, queerness, punk squatter subculture and a bunch more. The presentation consisted of a brief intro, a reading, and to end up a q&a session. As a warning to liste...

This week, Bursts spoke with Micah Lee .  Micah is, according to his bio at The Intercept : " a computer security engineer and an open source software developer. He writes about technical topics like digital and operational security, encryption tools, whistleblowing, and hacking using language that everyone can understand, but without dumbing it down. An avid user of Qubes and Linux, he develops s...