Movement Memos

“Apocalypse normal means we can go back to school, get on planes, and hit up restaurants and bars -- as long as we don’t think too hard about disabled people, unvaccinated children or long COVID. It means experiencing escalating heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and wildfires, and scrolling past news about ‘code red’ climate reports, and the refugees that climate catastrophes create, without retaliating or rebelling against political leaders who have once again refused to chart a different course.” In this episode, Kelly tackles the idea of “getting back to normal.” 

The Indian Child Welfare Act has been challenged more times in the past decade than the Affordable Care Act. In this episode of Movement Memos, Native journalists Kelly Hayes and Rebecca Nagle talk about the right-wing plot to bring down a child welfare law and why the fundamental rights of Native people, the fate of tribal lands, and “the very shape of what passes for democracy” in the U.S. are at stake. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.

In place of our usual content, this week, we are revisiting A COVID Memorial Mixtape. The mixtape, which was released in October of 2020 by Ric Wilson, in collaboration with a number of grassroots organizers, was created as part of a month-long effort to memorialize people lost to COVID-19. It was also played through a loudspeaker outside the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in downtown Chicago. When the tape was created, we had lost over 200,000 people to COVID-19 in the United States. Now, we have lost over 750,000. Globally, more than 5 million people have died. So we're taking a pause this week, and revisiting some reflection, reverence and resistance around those losses. We’ll be back next week with a regular episode.  You can find a transcript on our website.

“We can't survive doing the work that we're asked to do, the way that we're being asked to do it, with the lack of support we're being asked to do it with,” says healthcare worker Nicole Brun-Cottan. Tens of thousands of nurses and other healthcare workers in the Kaiser Permanente health care system are poised to go on strike. In this Striketober episode, Kelly talks with three nurses who are ready to go on strike about what’s at stake in their struggle, and how the pandemic has affected frontline labor. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.

“This crisis embodies the violence of a murderous system that is re-legitimized through reforms, any time its true character becomes too visible, like a shapeshifting monster in a horror film. It never stops consuming life,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes digs into the crisis on Rikers Island, why people are dying, and why this isn’t a story about understaffing, but rather, a story about a system that cannot be redeemed. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website. Music by Son Monarcas and Charles Hubbert

“In the coming years, we are going to have to practice our skills and our politics in ways that we probably can’t fully imagine right now, because we live in unprecedented times.” In this episode, Kelly and organizer Carlos Saavedra talk about burnout, building power and how our pandemic exhaustion could give way to an era of breakthroughs. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.

“Texas is playing by its own rules on immigration and deputizing police from as far away as Iowa to participate in Abbott’s state-level war on migrants. The implications here are just horrifying,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly examines recent events in Del Rio, Texas, where Black asylum-seekers were brutalized and faced mass deportations, and also highlights Operation Lone Star, Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s unconstitutional, state-level war on migrants. Kelly also talks with Breanne Palmer, with the UndocuBlack Network, and Kevin Herrera, with Just Futures Law, about the fight to defend refugees and asylum seekers. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.

We have witnessed the evolution of a social and moral binary in the United States: vaccinated and unvaccinated. Immersed in a culture of blame and condemnation, around the spread of COVID-19, we have also seen the rise of a brand of humor that Kelly characterizes as “recreational dehumanization.” So how should we be talking about vaccination and mass death, and how can we be constructive? In this episode, Kelly talks with activist Johnny Dangers, about overcoming vaccine hesitancy, and Shana McDavis-Conway, with the Center for Story-Based Strategy, about how we can constructively frame the moment. For a transcript, audio and show notes, you can check out our website.

“Fascist ideologies really rely on systems of bordering and ordering, of deciding who has the right to life and under what conditions,” says Harsha Walia. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly Hayes examines the state of right-wing power in the United States, and engages with commentary from authors Shane Burley and Sarah Kendzior, writer and organizer Harsha Walia, and President of the Texas  Civil Rights Project, Mimi Marziani. For a transcript, audio and show notes, please check out our website.

Ten years after Occupy Wall Street embodied the hopes and outrage of people across the country, Kelly and labor journalist Sarah Jaffe talk about what we can learn from a movement that launched a new and unruly era of protest. You can find a transcript, audio and show notes on our website.