This week we bring you two different segments. First, Cypress spoke with Jenny from Project Fang, a project that financially supports visits to earth and animal liberation prisoners. Since 2016, Project Fang has worked to combat the isolation of incarceration these prisoners feel by providing a fund for financial assistance for visits. The prisoners and their loved ones can apply to the fund to help pay for prison visits, which is one of the most important ways of supporting prisoners. Project Fang is currently in the middle of a fundraising push as they look to double their annual budget to continue their work.
Much has been said about the vital importance that visits from friends, family, and loved ones can have for folks forced to undergo incarceration at the hands of the state. Jenny goes into detail about the work she and the project do to help turn isolation around, and about how this work fits into a broader whole of creating sustainable communities of rebellion.
Folks can support their campaign through December 4th at fundrazr.com/project_fang. Head to the Project Fang Twitter or to the New York City Anarchist Black Cross website at nycabc.wordpress.com/fang/ to learn more.
All funds go directly to supporting visits for incarcerated animal and ecological defenders who have committed to not cooperating with the state.
Our second segment is a talk by Tyler on the techno politics of Crypto-Anarchy. This talk was recorded at the 2019 North American Anarchist Studies Network Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
This week I had the opportunity to sit down with Margaret Killjoy to talk about her new EP called Every Breath Our Last out this October from her one woman project Nomadic War Machine. Margaret is a writer, musician, and anarchist based in Western North Carolina. We got to talk about a lot of things in this episode, including her new EP, what went into making it, Nomadic War Machine as a project in general, and her new anarchist fiction podcast called We Will Remember Freedom.
This was a great conversation to have for me, and is a little bit of a different approach than what we usually do in that the conversation unfolded organically with little in the way of pre set prompts. I hope you will get a sense of sitting down at a kitchen table with two people who have known each other for some while, talking about stuff they would kind of normally talk about anyway, except it’s being recorded. I am also clearly not a music journalist, and that comes out, especially because I neglect to ask her about the political or social themes of her new EP. Give it a listen tho on any streaming platform!
Click on her Patreon to support Margaret in her endeavors and to read more of her fiction.
This episode of the Solecast includes her reading a short story called The Northern Host (“nazis don’t go to Valhallah”), and an interview on TFS where we talk about her then new book The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
Support Project FANG:
From their fundrazr page:
“The climate crisis, and ongoing destruction of landscapes and wildlife, are provoking a deepening sense of urgency in an increasing number of people. It can be a serious struggle to care for a world that is being plundered for profit, but there are more and more people turning their grief into resistance in defense of nature and other animals. From water protectors to pipeline protestors, and wildlife and caged animal defenders – good people who care for our world are standing up for all of us. Unfortunately taking such a stand can result in arrest, court, jail, and prison time.
Background:
In 2016, project FANG was established by the NYC ABC as a much-needed attempt to fill a gap in the ongoing support work for the growing number of eco and animal rights prisoners in the United States. The focus of project FANG funding is to help pay for prison visitation costs for friends and family of these prisoners.
Why are visits so important?
Visits from friends, family, and loved ones are repeatedly identified by prisoners as one of the most important life lines that exist for them. Without visits, the crushing isolation of life inside a prison becomes unbearable. However, visits can often be prohibitively expensive. Travel costs might include not only an expensive plane ticket, but also lodging, a rental car, and meals. These quickly add up to hundreds of dollars.
How you can help:
Currently, project FANG has committed funding of $5,000 per year, but due to the increase in eco and animal rights prisoners, and requests for visitation funding, we need to increase our available funds. With your support we are aiming to double the fund’s annual budget for 2019 and 2020 by raising $10,000. Can you help us reach our $10,000 goal?”
This week we are presenting a special guest interview, done by Scott who is an anarchist academic and regular listener, with Eli Meyerhoff about his book “Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World”. In this book, Meyerhoff “traces how key elements of education emerged from histories of struggles in opposition to alternative modes of study bound up with different modes of world-making. Taking inspiration from Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Indigenous resurgence projects, he charts a new course for movements within, against, and beyond the university as we know it.” and this quote is from the University of Minnesota webpage, who also published his book.
I found this interview really thought provoking and well crafted, it brought up a lot of issues I hadn’t really thought of in such terms, specifically about the historical and colonial construction of what we think of today as education. In this interview, Scott and Eli talk about his book, the vast terrain that the book covers, experiences in academia when one is operating as politically radical, and some alternatives to education that we can see and experience in the world around us.
If you are a listener and want to submit an interview for broadcast, just get in touch with us by emailing thefinalstrawradio@riseup.net and we can walk you thru the process!
This week, we’re sharing a conversation that I had with comrades from Radiozones Of Subversive Expression, an anti-authoritarian pirate radio station based in Athens, Greece. Mike, Sprout and Omar, three anarchists working with ROSE share their perspectives on the change in government in Greece, corruption in the New Democracy party that just came back into power, it’s attacks on immigrants and the anarchist stronghold neighborhood of Exarchia, the status of the social movements of the left and more. You can listen to their streaming radio station with ALL sorts of programming, from live reports from street actions, to comedy shows to music, all up at radio98fm.org. Check our past interview with folks from ROSE. ROSE is, notably, another member of the A-Radio Network to which we belong, which produces the monthly English-language anarchist news show, B(A)D News: Angry Voices From Around The World.
Other informative interviews conducted by fellow members of the Channel Zero Network on this topic include recent episodes by IGDcast and The Ex-Worker.
Announcement
Comrade Malik Phone Zap
But first, Comrade Malik Washington could use some help. He’s a politicized anarchist prisoner affiliated with the New Afrikan Black Panther Party who’s been serving time in Texas and been vocal about the mistreatment of himself and other prisoners. Despite his activism on the inside, Malik was recently paroled into Federal custody from Texas state control, and is being held currently at USP Beaumont. It was common knowledge among prisoners that he was in danger at Beaumont because of his activism, and Malik was attacked and is now in solitary. There is a phone zap ongoing to pressure administration to release him from solitary and move him to a federal prison in California, where he can be paroled after his brief stint in the DOJ’s gulags, and Comrade Malik can start working more actively with the SF Bay View National Black Newspaper where he has a spot upon his release. To learn more about his case and details on calling Warden Larry Schultz at USP Beaumont up at comrademalik.com.
