“We need to arrive on our own authority.”

This whole thing is a farce, and it has to be uncovered. People have to pull the cover back off of this thing and it needs to be exposed. That's why I write. We're trying to expose certain things. We have to oppose the rulers above society no matter what their identity is.

Transcribed from the 29 April 2021 episode of This is Hell! Radio (Chicago) and printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the whole interview:

Ultimately, if some semblance of justice is to be done, ordinary people must take the reins of government; they must control their own political, social, judicial, and economic affairs. Elite professional politicians above society have failed ordinary people at every turn.

Chuck Mertz: Saint Louis county, which includes Saint Louis city, has been the site of violence by law enforcement for a very, very long time. That violence culminated in the Ferguson uprising that began in August 2014. Those uprisings—there were several—revealed to the outside world what the people of Saint Louis county have known for a very, very long time: law enforcement engages in systemic abuse of the people they are supposed to “serve and protect,” especially when the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting are people of color, and especially African-Americans.

It should come as no surprise that if the police on the streets are that abusive, the jailers in what is called the Saint Louis City Justice Center continue that abuse once citizens are incarcerated—jailed to wait for nothing but a court date, for who knows how long. With the jails and courts backed up, plus the impact on trials due to the pandemic, that wait is getting longer and longer.

Here to help us see behind the walls, to tell us what’s happening in the Saint Louis jail uprisings, criminal defense attorney Adofo Minka wrote the Black Agenda Report article “Spirit of Self-Emancipation Continues to Rise at the Saint Louis City Justice Center.”

Welcome to This is Hell!, Adofo.

Adofo Minka: Thanks, Chuck. Thanks for having me.

CM: Let’s start with something more general. Is there something about Saint Louis county when it comes to law enforcement? Or, from the police on the street to the jailers in the jails, is there something systemic throughout the whole system that creates this abuse? Whether it’s Ferguson, whether it’s what we’ve been seeing in Saint Louis with cops’ abuse of the citizenry, or whether it’s jail abuse—is there something unique about Saint Louis or is this just reflective of the United States in general?

AM: It’s the latter and not the former. It’s indicative of what we have in a capitalist society, when we have people being exploited and degraded in their workplaces, and the police are the lapdogs of capitalists and the state. They are there to keep people from rebelling and to quell any uprising or any rebellion from even trying to surface. That’s the role the police play in Saint Louis city, Saint Louis county, and every other place in the United States—and really throughout the world.

CM: The Saint Louis City Justice Center is in downtown Saint Louis. What effect, if any, does that location have on the Saint Louis jail as a site of protest—inside the jail and out? I couldn’t help but think about uprisings at jails or prisons that are in far more remote places, that are away from the eye of the public and what might be happening there.

Is there something unique about these uprisings because the Saint Louis Justice Center is in downtown Saint Louis?

AM: I don’t think so. People who are incarcerated are taking the lead in self-emancipation. They’re taking the lead in their own emancipation, throwing off the shackles of degradation and oppression. They’re setting a great example for oppressed people everywhere, in a certain sense. I don’t think what’s happening in Saint Louis is unique. I worked in Jackson, Mississippi, and there were uprisings in the jail there during my time working and living in Hinds county in Jackson, Mississippi. So, no. It is not anything special.

The jails and prisons throughout the United States are powder kegs waiting to explode at any time. Sometimes the social conditions and the fact that people are just tired and can’t take anymore of the conditions inside these places—they just strike the powder keg and things explode spontaneously.

CM: You said “spontaneously”—I want to ask you about that. These protests started back in December, and there was another wave of protests in early February, and now another wave of these protests in early April. Were there specific events that sparked each of these protests? Or is it not about a singular thing that happened?

AM: When I talked to my clients, they were telling me about the brutality of the guards on the inside: they were attacking people, they were spraying people in the face with pepper spray at point-blank range. They were denying people food, they were denying people phonecalls, they were denying people fresh bed linens, changes of underclothes. All of these things sparked this “enough is enough” spirit within the people in the Saint Louis City Justice Center.

Things had been rumbling in November and December, and the administration at that time had tried to shrug it up under the rug, and say it was some “unknown disturbances.” Shortly after the first rebellion, what I call the first major rebellion happened on February 6, when at the beginning of the year they had been trying to sweep things under the rug and say everything was under control.

CM: You point out that the cruelties and abuses against people in the Saint Louis city jail started before the pandemic did, and that they are protesting not just COVID-19 (which we’ll get to in a bit) but the ongoing abuses that had been happening since 2019 and before.

Is there any sense from your clients that the brutality has increased over the last year since the pandemic started? Has the brutality increased since the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed?

AM: I just have to point out that Saint Louis City Justice Center is only one jail in Saint Louis city. There’s another one, the Medium Security Institution, infamously called the “workhouse,” that officials have been promising to close for some time. Over the past year and a half or two years there has been a whole campaign of various activists talking about closing the workhouse, and it never happened. Now the new administration of Tishaura Jones (she was just elected on April 6) is coming with a number of promises to inmates.

But from my conversations with my clients, they have told me that there wasn’t any special intensification of these abuses. With the spirit to be free of oppression and to be free of degradation—eventually people say enough is enough, and that’s what happened.

CM: Are the acts of abuse that are happening within the Saint Louis city jail random acts of repression or is it systemic repression? Both are awful, cruel, and brutal, but they are awful, cruel, and brutal in their own ways. But is this repression random or is it something that as an inmate you can count on because it’s so systemic?

There is no such thing as a humane jail or prison. That’s absurd. We cannot reform a jail or prison. These are institutions of degradation and exploitation and barbarity. The folks who rule above society claim they are civilized. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be these kinds of institutions in existence anymore.

AM: It’s constant. It’s unrelenting. The nature of caging human beings is a violent thing. To keep people in a cage, to keep people running about, kicking them and pushing them about every day—that’s a violent business. This is something that people can no longer afford to overlook. People on the outside of the prisons have to realize that this is the violent business that folks are involved in, in their name.

Ultimately, if some semblance of justice is to be done, ordinary people must take the reins of government; they must control their own political, social, judicial, and economic affairs. It’s clear to me that elite professional politicians above society have failed ordinary people at every turn, and they are not fit to be some kind of torchlight or embodiment of culture and government.

CM: Let’s touch on those government leaders. The Saint Louis Dispatch had an editorial saying that it was “sad,” but the jail clearly needed an oversight board. I found this to be an odd sentence. Then, US representative for Missouri’s first congressional district (which includes Saint Louis city) Cori Bush told local news that she had asked city leaders to “publicly release COVID-19 testing and case rates, the use of segregation and solitary confinement, and the conditions of the jail—we are counting on the city to be more transparent.”

Of the acts that you say are well-documented repression—how much of a priority is COVID-19 to activists inside and outside the jail? Does addressing COVID-19 address the most serious problems facing inmates and detainees?

AM: COVID-19 is a case of life and death. I can’t sit here and tell you how the inmates or the detainees on the inside rank it. But COVID-19 was and is a serious matter of life and death. I understand that some detainees have begun receiving vaccinations. But having to sit for months on end waiting for court dates—they’re just being warehoused. The warehousing is not something new to the pretrial detention situation, but the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated it. It’s a time where tensions are high, angst and anxiety are high, people are wondering what’s going on with their family members; people are getting sick and they see no end in sight, sitting and languishing in hellish conditions.

CM: You described the Saint Louis Medium Security Institution as a “workhouse.” How is that facility different from the Saint Louis City Justice Center, from what we might think of as a typical jail?

AM: The workhouse is a much older facility. That is the argument that people are using; they are saying it’s a much older facility and shouldn’t be used to house people. It’s dirty, it’s decrepit. It has mice and rats and roaches running around. But you go into almost any jail or prison throughout the United States and you’ll see those same conditions. They perennially put jails under consent decrees by the federal government, and the same abuse and misuse continues unabated. Nothing ever happens.

I always thought that activists were off base by saying just the workhouse needs to be closed. Both jails need to be closed. Now the detainees at the Saint Louis City Justice Center have shown and proved that the MSI is no worse than the Saint Louis City Justice Center. I was speaking to a client the other day and he was telling me that recently the new mayoral administration of Tishaura Jones, along with the city circuit attorney Kim Gardner and Cori Bush, did a tour and spoke to inmates out at the jails—both the city justice center and the workhouse. They did a walk-through there and talked about closing the workhouse. But mere talks about closing the workhouse don’t go far enough. We need both of these facilities shut down. Both of them.

There is no such thing as a humane jail or prison. That’s absurd. We cannot reform a jail or prison. These are institutions of degradation and exploitation and barbarity. The folks who are above society, who rule above society—they claim they are civilized, they claim that they rule over civilization. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be these kinds of institutions in existence anymore.

CM: You also point out that the Saint Louis mayor prior to Tishaura Jones, Lyda Krewson, employed a taskforce to investigate conditions at the jail following the first major rebellion and they were refused access to investigate the fifth floor—this is where there is administrative segregation, which is also referred to as “the hole.” You add that this exposed how much of a farce this “body of misleaders tapped by the mayor” were and that their “task was to pacify, not ameliorate” with respect to conditions at the jail.

So wait a second—who refused the taskforce access? Can the mayor of Saint Louis get access to the area where you say inmates are being abused for participating in an uprising?

AM: The mayor should have been able to get it. But I want to be clear about something. I’m not on this bandwagon with the new mayoral administration. All she is doing right now is publicity. It’s a publicity stunt to ensure that more uprisings don’t happen. She’s making promises to detainees at these jails saying she’s going to get them home. She doesn’t have the authority to get anybody home. She’s in the executive branch. She doesn’t deal with who gets detained or who goes home. She’s giving people false hope in an effort to quell the self-emancipating spirit of the detainees that is present and on the surface in these jails.

She’s trying to avert further rebellion in the city of Saint Louis. These people use their social identity as Black people to legitimate their rule above society and say, “Because I’m a Black woman or because I come from a background where some of my family members have faced victimization, then I understand where you’re coming from and you should trust me.” But these people work at the behest of capital and the state. Tishaura Jones’s campaign raised overwhelming funds over her opponent. That was a nod from capital and the state that she was alright and that she would do a good job and keep things in order. That’s what is on the table today.

All throughout the United states we see these Black mayors of cities talking about how they’re the “people’s mayor” and they’re going to make their cities the most radical cities on the planet—we still have police murder. We still have brutality in jails. We have Black-led police states that are still conquering and killing ordinary Black and poor people.

The violence and degradation at the upper echelons of the city government where the top officials are begets the violence that we see in the jails and on the streets and everywhere else. There are people languishing under unemployment, under impoverishment conditions. This is violence. The violence from above society begets the violence that we see. But this is not the violence that these people ever want to talk about.

CM: You write, “Circuit attorney Gardner’s office has yet to find any criminality among the Black misleaders who orchestrate the abuse of inmates from their administrative posts.” How do administrators orchestrate abuse in the Saint Louis city jail?

MA: They preside over it. They know that the degradation is going on. There was a woman, a low-level corrections officer working as a jailer in the Saint Louis City Justice Center, indicted by circuit attorney Gardner’s office for facilitating abuse by detainees on another detainee which resulted in his jaw being broken. This woman was Demeria Thomas. But she is just low-hanging fruit. At the very top of this thing is violence and degradation. The violence and degradation at the upper echelons of the city government where the top officials are begets the violence that we see in the jails and on the streets and everywhere else. There are people languishing under unemployment, under impoverishment conditions. This is violence. When people don’t have food to eat, when people don’t have proper housing and things of that nature—this is violence.

The violence from above society begets the violence that we see. But this is not the violence that these people ever want to talk about.

CM: You write, “Circuit attorney Gardner’s ‘antiracism’ is counterfeit and is primarily based on her social identity as a Black woman, not her deeds.” What happens, in your opinion, to antiracism more generally when it is defined by some through identity and not deeds? What impact can that have on antiracism more generally?

AM: It’s antiracism that holds hands with the state as the ordinary people at the bottom of society are brutalized. It’s totalitarianism, that’s what it is. These people use their identity to tell ordinary people that “I am the embodiment of your freedom and dignity and justice” when that’s not the case. They preside over the police state. They preside over the carceral state. And because these people are Black, there are activists who align with these rulers in oppressing people and legitimating their rule above society.

That’s the issue. That is the mode of rule today that must be addressed. These people talk about a white racial state as more and more Black people are elected to public office above society, and perpetuate the same forms of degradation and exploitation. These people are not anticapitalist. They are not against the police. They’re talking about “reforming” the police. They’re talking about “defunding” the police. They’re not talking about abolishing the police.

They’re talking about redistributing. We don’t need rulers to distribute wealth. Ordinary people create the wealth. We create the housing. We grow the food. We don’t need any middleman. We don’t need these rulers to redistribute these things. We need to arrive on our own authority and establish our own self-government, and abolish the governments that claim to embody our freedom.

CM: For years and years, we’ve been told that more racial and ethnic and gender diversity would fix everything. If we just have more elected representatives with more racial and ethnic diversity and gender diversity, everything will be fixed. Have we simply yet to elect enough Black government leaders to achieve an end of the white racial state?

AM: The white racial state has been abolished. Sure, you can go somewhere like Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama, or some obscure counties even in some northern states, some rural places, where the white racial state is still in place. But the white racial state is not still in place in New Orleans. The white racial state is not in place in Jackson, Mississippi. The white racial state is not in place in Atlanta, Georgia. The white racial state is not in place in Buffalo, New York. The white racial state is not in place in Houston, Texas. All of these places have elected Black mayors, Black district attorneys, circuit attorneys, prosecuting attorneys, where they have predominately Black county boards. So what’s the talk about a white racial state?

People like Kim Gardner open up their mouth and talk about a “New Jim Crow.” It ain’t no new Jim Crow. These people want to say it’s a new Jim Crow—that implies that the mass incarceration is being done by white people, when it’s Black people in office who are mass-incarcerating. When you go to the Saint Louis City Justice Center, or MSI, you’ll see a vast majority of those people are Black, and you ask who put them there. It’s Kim Gardner’s office that put them there. It wasn’t somebody white who did that. So what are people talking about? That needs to be the discussion. These are the questions that have to be raised today.

CM: You write, “The self-emancipating activity of detainees has done more in two months to expose the bankruptcy of the municipal government than phony prison reform activists who speak of a ‘New Jim Crow’ have done in a decade.” Why do you believe these jail uprisings have done more for prison reform than talk of the new Jim Crow?

AM: Because before these people rose up, nobody was studying what was going on at the jail except those people whose loved ones are in jail or people like me who work closely with and are serious about what is happening to people in jails and prisons in the United States. Otherwise people weren’t paying attention.

Lyda Krewson, the previous mayor, wasn’t talking about the conditions in the jail—the conditions were the same, though. Nobody was talking about it. It is these detainees who put the discussion on the table. It is because of these detainees that Tishaura Jones, Cori Bush, and Kim Gardner are running out there trying to quell or suppress any more rebellion going on at the jail. Because they know that continued rebellion places their power in jeopardy. It calls their legitimacy into question. It calls the lie that because Black people rule above society, that equals progress for the most oppressed—that puts that in question.

Being a progressive doesn’t mean anything. A “progressive” is nothing but somebody who is trying to reconcile ordinary people with the permanent slaughter. They’re trying to convince ordinary people that this system can self-correct when we’ve seen, year after year, decade after decade, that the same thing continues to go on.

They cannot have that. So they are going to do what is necessary to suppress further rebellion, just like what we saw this past summer with the George Floyd rebellion. These people say all kinds of stuff trying to quell the various rebellions in various cities across the United States. They started talking about “Defund the Police,” which was something created out of the left bloc of capital, or the cultural apparatus of the Democratic Party. That was not something that came up organically. This is something that was grabbed and that was co-opted by the Democratic Party. Talk about redistribution—that’s not talking about bringing forth real and substantive change to the situation. These people are not going to do that, because they work at the behest of capital and the state.

But they will make projections as if they are going to do something. One example that I can point to is the Chauvin verdict. They had to convict that man. They knew that more cities would burn. They knew that more private property would burn. They knew that capital would be placed in jeopardy if that man walked away free. They always have to have a scapegoat at a certain point in time. But the permanent slaughter still continues. Even during the trial, Black people and white people and everybody else continued to be brutalized and killed by the police state. That didn’t stop.

Derek Chauvin going to prison is just one person. The whole system should be condemned. The whole system has to go. There can be no “advising” the state. The state as it currently stands—it’s got to go. It must go. Ordinary people have to arrive on their own authority and establish their own self-government and hold the reins of society if we are going to have a new society based on the principles of mutual aid and cooperation and not greed and exploitation.

CM: You write, “Well before the pandemic, detainees here have been warehoused for years at a time as they await trial.” Saint Louis Public Radio reported the day following the April 4 uprising that “a group of inmates at the justice center in downtown Saint Louis left their cells and sparked an uprising to draw attention to how long prisoners are there awaiting trial. Throughout the disturbance, inmates chanted ‘We need help’ and ‘We want court dates.’ No one was injured, a spokesperson for mayor Krewson said.”

So how much of that lack of court dates is due to the pandemic? And how much was this an issue prior to the pandemic? Did the pandemic just make it worse?

AM: Yes, the pandemic exacerbated the situation. But like I stated before, there were people waiting for years on end, especially on serious cases like murder and some higher level assaults and other so-called violent offenses. People had to wait in jail. Some of this is because of the incompetence and ineptness of the prosecutors. They’re not getting defendants the necessary evidence that they need before they can go to trial. So there are a number of factors that play into this, but to answer your question directly: yes, the pandemic exacerbated it. But the problem existed will before the pandemic.

CM: You say this is incompetence by prosecutors failing to give evidence to those who are going to be facing trial or court dates. Do you think that’s purposeful, intentional incompetence?

AM: Sometimes it is. We’ve seen cases that were undertaken by the Innocence Project and other initiatives come back twenty or thirty years after somebody has served these years in prison, been away from their family, and they find out that a prosecutor had hidden key evidence that would have exonerated them. Many times these people are never disbarred. They never go to jail. But you have someone who’s had their life snatched away. They’ve been away from their family, they’ve been away from their children. This is commonplace.

As much as these people want to talk about “progressive” prosecutors, that’s an oxymoron. We have to understand that “progressive” means absolutely nothing. Being a progressive doesn’t mean anything. A “progressive” is nothing but somebody who is trying to reconcile ordinary people with the permanent slaughter. They’re trying to convince ordinary people that this system can self-correct when we’ve seen, year after year, decade after decade, that the same thing continues to go on.

CM: How far could ending cash bail go toward ending the problem that is happening right now with detainees awaiting trial in the Saint Louis Justice Center?

AM: If we look around the country, ending cash bail doesn’t stop people from being held. These people have another safety valve to go to. They can just find that these people are a “danger to the community” or they are a “flight risk” and people can be held on that basis. So they can just be denied bond altogether. People are denied bond all the time on serious cases, even when it’s a case of clear self defense, even when it’s a case of when people cannot be identified as the perpetrator based on the evidence. Even when these people don’t have the evidence to sustain charges, people still continue to languish in jail because the officials don’t have the courage to dismiss a case and they just want to let it play out. They don’t want to step on the circuit attorney’s toes or whatever the case may be. And they claim that this is a system of justice.

CM: What explains why prosecutors are seemingly not concerned about criminal abuse being committed in jails and prisons? Why do prosecutors turn a blind eye to those committing criminal acts against inmates and detainees? Why is that crime relatively ignored?

If you’re a real anti-imperialist, if you’re really for freedom and justice for people—such people don’t get flown around. They don’t get paid millions of dollars to do that. People get buried. People get killed behind this kind of stuff if they’re serious about it.

AM: They know this is the cost of doing business. Just like people turning a blind eye to all these people being killed in the street by the police. They pay some money and then it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. We’ll pay the family off. We’ll pay them some kind of civil settlement. The same thing goes on in jail. People sue for abuses that happen in jail. It’s the cost of doing business. They know the business they’re in. They know that they can’t go too far; every once in a while they’ll prosecute this or that person, but it’s always a low-level person as we pointed out earlier with Demeria Thomas in the Saint Louis City Justice Center.

Like Malcolm said, these people are criminals—but he was talking about white people. I’m not talking about just white people. I’m talking about whoever rules above society and heaps degradation and exploitation on the heads of ordinary people, whether they be blue, black, red, or brown.

That’s another things about mass incarceration. These people open up their mouths and they always say black and brown people are being incarcerated. There are millions of white people in jail and prisons today throughout here, and these people won’t open their mouth. I guess they think that all poor white people are criminals too, because those are the ones who are in jails and prisons, the poor white people along with black and brown people who are poor and exploited and degraded.

This whole thing is a farce, and it has to be uncovered. People have to pull the cover back off of this thing and it needs to be exposed. That’s why I write. We’re trying to expose certain things. We have to oppose the rulers above society no matter what their identity is.

CM: Let’s talk about what that opposition might look like. You write, “Many organizations, institutions, and personalities claim to represent justice. Most are compensated to play charades that they are guardians of ordinary people as they contain our better instincts. When the prisoners move, under great adversity, under grave consequences that imperial mayors, prosecutors, and judges are not even permitted to ‘discover,’ we are reminded what is required as they lay more eggs: the further breaking up of the old world so we can arrive at a new beginning. That is what the Easter season truly promises.”

What would breaking up the old world look like to you when it comes to incarceration?

AM: The first thing that has to be pointed out is it goes beyond incarceration. We’re talking about a new society—period—where ordinary people will establish what public safety and security looks like, not some elite representatives who work at the behest of capital and the state apparatus.

But with respect—look, today it’s so widespread that almost everywhere you point out, there are people who are literally (I’m not just being hyperbolic here when I say this) activists-for-the-state who pretend that they are in some kind of freedom struggle. Like I said before about Jackson, Mississippi where I was, and in other places, they’re talking about a “radical city,” they’re talking about capitalism and all of these things, and they all have activists around them who claim to be for justice and freedom of ordinary people. But all of these people prop up the legitimacy of these various governments who preside over the exploitation and degradation of the masses of people.

That’s the first thing that has to be attacked. We have to have people who are really independent of the state address these issues. We can’t have people who operate inside the cultural apparatus of the Democratic Party, taking money from the Rockefellers, the MacArthur Foundation, and these other foundations like many of these activists are. The Black Lives Matter movement is a prime example. Now certain things are coming out about that. These people who were at the highest echelons of the Black Lives Matter movements are getting millions of dollars, getting all kinds of movie and art deals and book deals, they’re being flown around the country.

If you’re a real anti-imperialist, if you’re really for freedom and justice for people—such people don’t get flown around. They don’t get paid millions of dollars to do that. People get buried. People get killed behind this kind of stuff if they’re serious about it. I’m not saying people are always killed, that’s not the case either. But I’m making a point that these activists who operate inside and outside of the Democratic Party are playing around. They are not serious about these issues.

When I was in Mississippi, they had this prison reform outfit that talked about reforming the infamous Parchman penitentiary. But at the same time that uprisings and things were happening in Parchman, they were happening at other jails and prisons—and another thing is these people didn’t address these issues while a Black Mississippi department of corrections officer was in there. They waited until after she stepped aside. Scores of people had been killed under her watch, but these Black activists never addressed this woman. They never said anything about the degradation and outright brutality and murder that was happening under her watch. But then they go and talk about Parchman prison when the whole thing is rioting. They want to play musical jail cells: “Not this jail cell over here; this one is more humane.” It’s total nonsense.

Like I said, it’s a charade. It’s a farce. And it’s really disrespectful to people’s intelligence who can see and look and point out these things.

CM: You write, “The inmates’ continued desire to expose the barbarism masquerading as civilization that is the carceral state evinces that they have been resurrected—indeed, like Christ on the third day, they have risen.”

Barbarism masquerading as civilization—the quote that’s been cited the most on our show since we started back in 1996 when it comes to the carceral state is Dostoevsky’s famous adage “The degree of civilization of a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

What degree of civilization is there within the walls of US prisons and jails? And what degree of civilization is there outside prisons, past those walls? And what does it say about our civilization when it takes a pandemic to recognize carceral abuse?

AM: Chuck, this is the one thing that me and my comrades have been talking about. This whole distinction between inside and outside of prison is total nonsense, and it’s got to be abolished. People have got to stop playing around with this kind of thing. There are people inside the prisons who complain about not having access to clean water. In the cities I’ve lived in and been in, there are people on the outside talking about sewage in their front yards, talking about water problems, talking about lead in water and all these things. There are people being killed inside the jail, and then when you walk outside the jail there are police who beat, brutalize, conquer, and kill ordinary people at the drop of a hat.

When we look at the conditions inside the jail or we look at the conditions outside the jail, they mirror one another. The question is what is going to happen. What are people going to do? Are they going to arrive on their own authority? Or are they going to continue to give up their authority to rulers who claim to be the embodiment of their freedom in some kind of democracy? I think they should do the former and not the latter.

That’s the point that I continue to raise and continue to agitate and continue to put forward, and I will continue to do so.

CM: I cannot thank you enough for being on our show today, Adofo.

AM: Thank y’all, I appreciate it.

Featured image: “All love to the rebels, inside and out, from Brooklyn Center to Bristol, from St. Louis City Justice Center and McCormick to Saskatoon and Insein. Out struggles are one in the same and we all must keep fighting as we’re able! All fire to the prisons, borders, and precincts—may more come down every single day. Whether brick by brick or engulfed in flame. Keep adapting and keep attacking! Solidarity from Asheville.” Source: some anarchists, via Hellbender AVL (Twitter)

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top