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As this episode goes live, seven people are facing felony conspiracy and false imprisonment charges–and up to fifteen years in prison–for having been among the 26 Bay Area residents who, in the early morning of April 15, 2024 (tax day), took the extraordinary step of protesting the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza on the Golden Gate Bridge. Holding a banner stating, “Stop the World for Gaza,” these courageous protesters used their bodies to block the southbound lane and in so doing disrupted business as usual in the imperial metropole. Animating a long Bay Area legacy of queer direct action, they intervened against the lethal Zionism of U.S. foreign policy after having exhausted every option available to ordinary people to halt the genocide. In this episode, we speak with two of the Golden Gate 26 (GG26), Rosita, a healthcare worker, and Jordan, a law student, alongside Oakland civil rights attorney and lifelong activist Walter Riley. We discuss what it means to organize against imperialist genocide within the belly of the beast and why–no matter what the outcome of the trial–the GG26 have prevailed over those who would repress them by unapologetically materializing solidarity with the Palestinian people, demonstrating how U.S.-funded genocide boomerangs back here, and enacting radical care for each other and the world in which we live. As is clear from the conversation, the activist community that formed in the crucible of repression, far from bowed, is more durable, tenacious, and fierce than the state violence directed against them.

Links:

Golden Gate 26 Solidarity Committee (Instagram)

Golden Gate Defendants

Oakland People’s Arms Embargo

Stanford 11 Action Kit

Civil Rights and Structural Attacks: Conversations with Walter Riley (AK Books).

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In this episode, we are joined by Keith Miyake, a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Labor Studies at UC Riverside and a core member of the UC Ethnic Studies Council. Keith talks about how their moorings in STEM and ethnic studies inform and sharpen their research and organizing, including within the university, and how their work as an environmental engineer in Southern California helped inspire their new book, The Racial Environmental State: Contested Spaces of Resistance, published in June 2026 by the University of Washington Press. In this discussion, Keith addresses how activists and organizers have engaged with the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) process in ways that exceed the parameters of the racial environmental state, opening up the possibility of redistribution of resources, the elimination of borders and prisons, challenging settler colonialism, and the forging of unlikely solidarities. They explore the pros and cons of working with the state in pursuit of racial and environmental justice and wrestles with how abolitionists can craft new relationships rooted in radical notions of democracy.

Keith’s book can be purchased through the University of Washington for a 40% discount until July 11 with the code warm26.

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In the first episode of a new series, “The War Within,” featuring those fighting against war, imperialism, and repression from inside the UC system, we talk to BT Werner about their long history of organizing at UC San Diego (UCSD). Werner, a physicist who has been at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for 35 years, discusses how understanding complex systems can help us fight back against UC repression while providing examples from the Black Winter of 2010 to the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampments. Two years after the May 6 police raid that violently dismantled the UCSD encampment, Werner and one other UCSD professor are still facing disciplinary changes and suspension. We encourage listeners to sign a petition demanding that the UCSD administration drop the charges immediately.

Links:

Struggle for the Liberation of Palestine – UCSD Edition

Petition to Drop the Charges against UCSD Professor Lily Hoàng and Professor BT Werner

Drop the Charges Email Campaign

Legal and Support Funds for Survivors of The Palestine Exception at UCSD