NPR: Moms for Liberty, Bombs for Liberty?

This week, we dive into Moms for Liberty, a national organization that astroturfs policy on the school board and county level under the guise of being “Concerned parents.” The Southern Policy Law Center designates them to be a hate group as their members have quoted hitler and pushed for the erasure and eradication of trans youth.

Recently, they’ve made forays into Davis, holding anti-trans events at the Mary L Stephens Public Library. We chat about the alarm that they’ve brought to the community, via bomb threats and general fashy hysteria, and how we might respond as abolitionists and targets of the group’s hate.

Also, we have an extended Bad Cop segment on a proposed project to expand the Sacramento County Jail.

As always, fire to the prisons; free them all.

NPR: campus, system, state, world

Today, we look at the question of how our abolitionist perspectives can scale down to a place like a specific university campus, and how they also can scale up to address policing at an international level.

Relatedly, we give an update on something relevant to our last show, which focused on labor action and its repression at UC San Diego

Then we explore in more depth the way that university administrators and other kinds of bosses function as cops and work with cops by looking at UCD as an example. Featuring a special guest!

Finally, we move our focus outward to look at what is happening with policing internationally and talk a bit about the relation of US policing to some struggles happening on the other side of the Atlantic.

NPR feat. UCSD community members

On May 5th, a group of UAW affiliates walked on stage at a UC San Diego awards ceremony and disrupted the scheduled events. Why you ask? They were bringing to light the failings of the university administration to uphold the union contract they brokered as a result of the UAW strike of 2022. As a result of this demonstration, 67 graduate students are now facing disciplinary action.

This week, we speak with two UCSD community members about their ongoing struggle. Alex is a graduate student researcher studying cancer genomics at UCSD and a member of the UAW local 2865 academic workers union. Wendy is faculty member at UCSD and part of executive board of San Diego Faculty Association that endorsed the faculty solidarity letter that now 299 signatures (over 100 from UCSD) calling for the withdrawal of the charges.

NPR feat. Davis Books to Prisoners

Featuring a conversation with Colin from Davis Books to Prisoners. Juniper and Mai discuss the carceral system’s emulation of slavery, banned books in prisons, and the B2P mission.

NPR: Kirks Off Campus debrief

TPUSA, known fascidork student org, brought their leader Charlie Kirk to UCD campus on 3/14/23. This week, 4 community members discuss the outcomes and their thoughts on the event as a whole.

NPR feat. Mark Bray

This week we speak with Mark Bray, a historian of human rights, political violence, and politics in Modern Europe at Rutgers University. He is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook (Melville House 2017), The Anarchist Inquisition: Assassins, Activists, and Martyrs in Spain and France (Cornell 2022), Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero 2013), and the co-editor of Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (PM Press 2018). His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Salon, Boston Review, and numerous edited volumes.

You can find out more about what Bray is up to here:

https://markmbray.wordpress.com/

Mark Bray on twitter

NPR feat. Arnoldo Garcia

This week we speak with Arnoldo Garcia from the Chiapas Support Committee.

Find Arnoldo’s art and writing here: https://artofthecommune.wordpress.com/

For ways to support/learn about the movement: https://chiapas-support.org/

NPR w/ Maddalena

We talk with Maddalena, a disabled, chronically ill, autistic, and ADHD PhD candidate at UC Davis who is also a rank and file UAW 2865 member and proud Wildcat striker. She’s a 1st generation college student and a police and prison abolitionist, whose work has included organizing and running expungement clinics in the Central Valley. She has also helped formerly incarcerated and system impacted community members work towards pursuing their formal educational goals, such as high school and college degrees.

NPR Episode 5 w/ Mia Dawson

On this episode of NPR we interview Mia Dawson, a community organizer and scholar based in Sacramento. She is a PhD Candidate in the Geography Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis, with a designated emphasis in African American studies. Her scholarly work focuses on urban human geography and Black social movements, specifically on the contemporary movement for abolition in Sacramento. Mia also works with the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program, collaborating on the development of community-based violence interruption programs and alternative first response systems. As a community organizer, she has led and participated in initiatives against police terror and incarceration in her city with groups including Black Lives Matter and Decarcerate Sacramento. She is a co-ordinating committee member and research partner with Decarcerate.

Note: Audio begins around the 43:30 minute mark. We record live in an old-school studio, apologies!

Introducing: NPR

Welcome to No Police Radio. You can hear us every other week discussing all things abolition, from tuition to the prison-industrial complex — everything that has to go to make way for a free university. We’ll feature conversations with guest organizers, abolitionist scholars, and people who have taken part in the university’s radical history, all with an eye toward how we get free.