This week, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup looms across Turtle Island, we’re pre-sharing an interview with Jules Boykoff about one of his latest books about international sports spectacles, the upward money flow and authoritarian political power they facilitate but also a bit about the folks that are fighting back entitled Red Card: The 2026 World Cup, Sportswashing, and the FIFA Greed Machine (O/R Books, 2026).
This conversation falls into the same series as the recent interview with Kristian Williams and Sam Schmidt as regards evacuation of public spaces and attacks on community by the state and capital in the aid of police state capitalism.
This year has felt like there’ve been a series of large sports mega events and summits planned and taking place in cities across the USA. For instance, starting in June the FIFA World Cup will be hosted in cities across the country (as well as a few in Mexico and Canada). Also a few cities are hosting meetings and an eventual summit related to the G20, or group of 20 economies, a gathering between large capitalist industries, banks, para-governmental neoliberal international institutions, government ministries and heads of state that share policy decisions effecting immigration, wars, trade policy and the climate. In 2028 Los Angeles will host the Olympics.
This episode will feature two discussions about some of the security impacts of hosting large sports or political events and the ways that the state and capital work to change the landscape and norms of the locations they take place. First up, Kristian Williams speaks about National Special Security Events like the G20 or World Cup, how they change local police and surveillance landscapes and work to turbocharge gentrification and displace working and poor people, making our cities more hostile to anything but commerce and control. Then, you’ll hear from Sam Schmidt at Our Streets Collective to speak about homeless sweeps in Pittsburgh, PA in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2026 NFL Draft taking place in that city.
Prosfigyka coverage by Pyrias of Athens appears on this episode of B(A)D News podcast
Announcement
Marius Mason
Longtime listeners to The Final Straw Radio will be familiar with the yearly June 11th Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and other Longterm Anarchist Prisoners. Well, stay tuned for an announcement from the June 11 crew in coming weeks with a recording of this year’s call. We are happy to announce here that Marius Mason, a long standing ecological, animal rights and trans prisoner rights activist will is on his way out of prison, currently in a halfway house having served out his sentence,
Past interviews on Marius’ case, other prisoners supported on the day and June 11th yearly event
Here’s our recent chat with two members of The Peoples Want Network, an attempt to build an Internationalist movement from below and to the left. For this chat, Rindala and Doxie speak about sharing lessons from movements and uprisings of the recent past from around the world among participants and those hoping to create movements in their own lives, organizing in exile, the enriching practice of building solidarity and the recently published English booklet of The Peoples Want manifesto, Revolutions Of Our Times (Haymarket 2026). At the end of the chat, Rindala announces the upcoming, June 2026 project Mujawara for networking local movement sites with those around the world to further increase intercommunication and solidarity and support such spaces in conflict sites in the SWANA.
We’ve covered a number of the uprisings, migrant struggles, and internationalist organizing topics and movements discussed in the episode since we started in 2010, so feel free to pick through our website if you want to dig a little deeper and hear some views from the times.
This week, we’re sharing an interview with Andrew Krinks, author of White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization from NYU Press, 2024. For the chat, we speak about taking a theological lens to the question of what ties exclusive private property, white masculinity, police impunity and mass incarceration in the US. We discuss aspects of Christian thought, employ concepts borrowed from the Black Radical tradition and try to get closer to the root of the sickness in our culture that flourishes from others pain.
During the chat Vicky talks about intellectual property and how it overlaps between entertainment and other elements like technology and medicine, the shaping and limiting effects IP has on popular culture and imagination, the film industry and more.
To hear Vickys past appearances on our show check out:
