The Final Straw Radio

Imprisoned Anarchist Toby Shone This week, we're sharing audio from anarchist prisoner in the UK, Toby Shone. Toby was arrested in November of 2020 after a car chase and during 5 simultaneous raids on residences in the Forest of Dean outside of Bristol. Toby was accused of being responsible for the insurrectionary counter-info anarchist site 325.NoState. Net as well as participation in the Informa...

An interview with Joan Braune , author of Understanding and Countering Fascist Movements: From Void to Hope out this year from Routledge. In this chat we talk about understanding fascism and fascists, motivations and deterrents, the framework of "deradicalization", the role of former fascists in education around fascism and the importance of fostering antifascist movements. Transcript PDF (Unimpos...

First up, Ian chats with Tasha of Project Mayday , a harm reduction project operating in so-called West Virginia. They discuss harm reduction strategies and the political framework of their approach to mutual aid. The conversation also touches upon co-existing in the public health and non-profit space without compromising their radical values and some of the many ways that drug policy and pharmace...

We're sharing a recent chat with  Andrew Lee ( instagram / tiktok ), author of the book Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War , released by AK Press on February 6th 2024. Andrew and I talk about gentrification, speculation and financialization of houses, the destruction of communities by racial capitalism and the state, and some methods used to fight back and stay put. Andrew sh...

This week on the show, we're starting out with an interview with Lo and Meghan, two supporters of Jewish independent journalist, artist and antifascist leftist from Albany, NY, Alex Stokes Contompasis. Alex is serving a 20 year sentence for defending himself and 3 other community members attacked by Proud Boys and Oath Keepers at the New York state capital on January 6 th , 2021. For the hour, we...

This week, we're featuring a conversation with Mohammad Hureini ( twitter / instagram ), a young activist from Masafer Yatta, an area in the hills south of Hebron in the occupied West Bank in Palestine. Mohammad is a member of a non-violent group called Youth of Sumud that struggles to hold on to the sites and lives of Palestinian villages despite displacement by the Israeli military occupation as...

This week on the show, we're featuring three segments. First up, you'll hear an interview with  Shupavu wa Kirima , General Secretary of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party, comes on to talk to us about the ongoing hunger strike among prisoners at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia protesting the abuse of solitary confinement and the medical status of hunger striker Kevin " Rashid...

Sean Swain is an anarchist prisoner who's serving an indeterminate sentence in Ohio for a self-defense killing. Sean has authored 3 books (one co-authored with Travis Washington) and released an album of his music (with collaboration of a number of artists) while behind bars. Sean is also a dear friend and collaborator on The Final Straw for 10 years, now. We're sharing here a conversation Bursts...

This week on the show, you'll hear Kazi Toure. Kazi is a former political prisoner from the Ohio 7 case and founding member of the Boston chapter of  The National Jericho Movement . For the hour, Kazi and I talk about the history of Jericho Movement, supporting political prisoners and support for post-release and aging prisoners. You can find recent updates from the group at @OfficialJerichoBoston...

We're joined again by podcaster, writer and activist Elia J. Ayoub, who is a Lebanese Palestinian living in Europe, co-hosts a podcast called The Fire These Times which is soon to be a part of the From The Periphery podcast network. For the hour we speak about the Israeli war on Palestinians, US policies in the SWANA region and the possibilities of war expanding to neighboring states, conspiracy t...

This week on the show, you'll hear part of our conversation with Eric King and Josh Davidson. Josh has been on a few times to talk about collaborative inside-outside projects he works on such as the  Certain Days calendar, the greeting cards he helped make of Indigenous political prisoner Oso Blanco 's artwork to benefit Zapatista schools in Chiapas, and the Rattling The Cages book that he co-edit...

On this episode, Ian spoke with Adam Shapiro, Co-editor of We Are Many , a comics anthology released as part of the Cypher Zine project ( @cypher_comics on Instagram) and published by Radix Media. The book pairs artists and activists to create narratives around the defense of women and sex workers around the globe. Among other topics, the conversation touches on the process of matching local artis...

This week, we dig into the pre-trial hearings and jury selection for Ayla King, Stop Cop City movement's first and only co-defendant so far to be granted a speedy trial. We're joined by Silver, an on-the-ground correspondent among many in Atlanta focused on supporting the collective defense against the State of Georgia's RICO indictment. Stay tuned for future coverage of the trials as they unfold....

This week on the show, you'll hear an interview with Lala an anarchafeminist in the Azerbaijani group Feminist Peace Collective about the recent war against and expulsion of ethnic Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, about the Aliyev regime and patriotic elements in Azerbaijan's reaction against anti-militarist voices, conspiracy theories and real critiques of non-profit NGO's versus grassroots lgbtq...

This week, we checked back in with folks involved in the struggle to block the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303 mile so-called natural gas pipeline proposed to bring fracked gas from the Marcellus and Utica shale formations across parts of West Virginia and Virginia with an extension into North Carolina. Since a chat with activists we had in July, there have been nearly weekly actions to block the...

Sara and Josh On Certain Days Calendar This week on the show, Ian talks to Sara and Josh , organizers from the Certain Days Collective on the publication of this year's certain days calendar. The two discuss the creative and administrative processes involved in producing one of the most consistent projects in the abolition space. They also discuss the past, present, and future of the project and t...

Jewish Anti-Zionist in Palestine + Antifascists Repressed in Budapest This week's show features four segments: an announcement from IGD Podcast; an anti-Zionist Jewish voice from Palestine; an interview of two anti-repression activists on the harassment of two antifascist activists in Budapest, Hungary; Sean Swain's segment. Reflections of an Jewish Anti-Zionist from Palestine First up, we're feat...

Thomas Meyer-Falk is Free! We're sharing here a recent conversation that I had with Thomas Meyer-Falk, an anarchist who just finished a 27 year prison stint in Germany to speak about his life, his incarceration and his hopes now that he's out. Thomas was involved in a bank robbery in 1996 as a young RASH anarchist skinhead who hoped to fund above ground and underground leftist organizing and conti...

Mr. Block's Past and Legacy (with Sean Carleton and Iain McIntyre) This week, Ian talks to Sean Carleton of Graphic History Collective and Labor historian and activist Iain McIntyre about the recent release of Mr. Block: The Subversive Comics and Writings of Ernest Riebe by PM Press. After some background on their respective projects, they talk about the legacy of the IWW cartoonist, the origins a...

This week on The Final Straw, we're excited to share a panel discussion recorded at Firestorm Books entitled Against Genocide: A Palestinian Solidarity Panel , recorded on Sunday, October 22 nd 2023. Transcription PDF (Unimposed) Zine (Imposed PDF) From the event description: "With the "iron-clad" support of the United States and other Western powers, Israel has made explicit its plan for the syst...

This week on the show, we're featuring an interview I did recently with Sona, an anarcha-feminist from Yerevan, Armenia, about her experience of anarchism and some of the solidarity efforts related to supporting Armenians expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave within the borders of the neighboring country of Azerbaijan. Recent crimethInc articles: Anarchist Voices from Armenia and Aze...

This week on the show, we're featuring an interview with 3 activists involved in the Emergency Committee for Rojava about recent developments in Rojava, escalation of violence from the Turkish state and the KDP party-led Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq, experiences of recent visits to the region, updates on the US relationship to aggressive regimes in the region and other topics. If you are li...

December 8th Affair Trial in France is Under Way Hey listeners, this mid-week release features the words of anarchists involved in or doing support for the December 8 th Affair in France, in which 9 people were arrested at the end of 2020, following Movement for Black Lives protests took place around the world to challenge police impunity and racism. The French state is asserting, based on some pr...

This week we're sharing a recent interview with Elia J. Ayoub, host of The Fire These Times podcast to talk a bit about #solarpunk. Elia J. was on the show with Leila Al-Shami some years ago to speak about revolution and civil war in Syria, uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq. Transcript PDF (Unimposed) Zine (Imposed PDF) For the hour, we speak about the importance of radical imagination, the artistic g...

Ian speaks with journalist Shea Hennum about their article on #comicsbrokeme, in which workers in the comics industry shared their stories of tight deadlines, unreasonable workloads, and low pay following the death of cartoonist Ian McGinty. For the article, which appeared at  solrad.co , they applied an analysis that synthesized communist and anarchist traditions in order to identify a multitude...