The Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle  for self-determination and basic human rights has appropriately drawn the attention and support of freedom lovers the world around. Invasion and occupation, ethnic cleansing and segregation as both policy and law are all part of the continuing and everyday catastrophe. Rick Ayers co-hosts this episode, and we’re both grateful to be joined from her home in the Galilee by an inspiring writer, Fida Jiryis, as she tells the story of Palestine through a beautiful and haunting memoir of her family's journey—Stranger in my own Land.

Stranger in My Own Land with Fida Jiryis

For millennia and all over the world fire was a powerful tool in the hands of Indigenous peoples. As they stewarded the land generation after generation, fire was understood to be a natural and necessary element for an abundant world—fire was regeneration and revitalization. But fire was taken away from Native people and handed over to agencies and bureaus who never grasped the positive power of fire. With typical arrogance and ignorance the powerful and the policy makers made fire an enemy to be destroyed—they developed the policy of 100% fire suppression which created the monster we live with today: a towering accumulation of fuels, and recurring catastrophic fires of earth-shaking proportions. In California, state and federal agencies are beginning to work with Tribes to shift how fires (and fuels) are managed, but public understanding of the fire paradox and pressure is needed to change long-standing failed policies. We’re joined today by Will Harling and Leif Carlson for a discussion of fire and freedom.

Fire and Freedom with Will Harling and Leif Carlson

We were at the Winter Garden of the Harold Washington Library  this month for the launch of  “Help This Garden Grow,” a new docuseries that tells the story of Hazel Johnson, a visionary of the Environmental Justice movement and a resident of the Altgeld Gardens community on the far South Side of Chicago. 

“Help This Garden Grow” is a project of Respair, a liberatory ecosystem hub brought to life by an entire community, and spearheaded by my mentors in media, the visionaries Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger. Respair Production and Media (RPM) creates and builds media projects in partnership with social justice movement-makers, visionaries, and creatives who are taking stock of the world as it is, and working relentlessly to create a world that could be or should be, but is not yet. Over the past few years AirGo has made its mark as a unique space of movement-building, opening critical conversations, deepening our understanding of fundamental questions, connecting people and linking issues. Respair represents a qualitative leap forward, spinning off new media projects in all directions. One example is the podcast “Guaranteed” with the incomparable Eve Ewing. Another is “Help This Garden Grow,” and I’m honored to have been asked to help launch this docuseries by broadcasting Episode One. Here it is.

Subscribe to listen to the entire docuseries by searching “Help This Garden Grow” wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find out much more about the project at respairmedia.com.

Help This Garden Grow with Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger of AirGo

We’re bombarded with relentless and punishing propaganda that places the US at the epicenter of the whole wide world. We are the exceptional nation, it says, the indispensable nation, the most remarkable people who ever lived, a shining beacon on a hill to the lesser nations. The propaganda is so unremitting that it can take on the color of common sense—and there’s nothing more dogmatic and insistent than common sense. Breaking with that dogma requires a conscious effort to open your eyes, to see the world large, and to reach out in solidarity. We’re joined by Destine Phillips, Beth Awano, and Eliza Gonring, three comrades from Chicago who journeyed to Palestine to study, learn, and join hands in our common struggle against settler colonialism.

From the River to the Sea- Journeys in Solidarity

These are terrible times—escalating wars, racialized police violence, environmental collapse on full display, democratic institutions on life support, bodily integrity under assault. On the other hand—26 million people poured into the streets in response to the police murder of George Floyd, women across a wide political spectrum have refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights, and broad forces are on the march world-wide to resist plunder and extraction, and to preserve life on earth. Charles Dickens would recognize the contradiction: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom. Life is never one thing in isolation of every other thing. Yes, there is oppression, but there is also resistance. And, yes, the predatory heart of capitalism is incorrigibly avaricious, aching to transform everything within reach into a profit-generating commodity: teaching and learning are turned into the education business, human health morphs into the healthcare industry, art is transfigured into the art market. But our imaginations, nourished and unleashed, have the capacity to “light the slow fuse of possibility.” And our resistance fuels our imaginations.

Voices of the Movement with Anthony Arnove & Haley Pessin

Chicagoland area is home to more Palestinians than anywhere else in the U.S., with over 18,000 living in Cook County alone. The Palestinian community has led powerful protests that have led to Chicago becoming the largest city in the country to endorse a ceasefire resolution. It is in the midst of this atmosphere that we gathered for an urgent exchange with Rashid Khalidi, the preeminent historian of the Palestinian national struggle, and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in conversation with activists Ricardo Gamboa of the Hoodoisie and Latinxs for Palestine, and Bill Ayers from Under the Tree. The event served to not only raise awareness but to also raise funds for Palestine Legal. The energy was fierce, the mood determined, the spirit razor-sharp. We left that gathering a little wiser, more resolute, and fixed on turning our anger into action and our dreams of a world at peace into reality.

Community as Resistance with Rashid Khalidi

You may already know that 15 US governors recently  rejected federal funds available for families who qualify for free school lunches that would provide $120 per child per month through the summer. If you forgot, I get it—your cruelty/stupidity quotient may have reached capacity, and your brain simply couldn’t accommodate one more item. We’re joined in conversation with Mark Nowak, an innovative and influential political poet, author of Social Poetics and Coal Mountain Elementary.  His latest book, Again, takes its title from the last word in MAGA, and works its way through the four seasons, naming this political moment and urgently asking us to consider what the known demands of us now.

Again, Winter with Mark Nowak

Precarious times, phenomenal times. As protests for peace and freedom explode across the country and around the world, we’re searching for and finding democracy in the streets and in the campus encampments, in prison study groups and collectives of artists and writers. We’re honored tonight to be meeting up at our beloved Pilsen Community Books with Zeke Caligiuri, co-editor with a unique collective of incarcerated writers, for a discussion of their dazzling collection, American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion. While the class of people whose lives lack stability and security, and are increasingly dominated by uncertainty about our jobs and our incomes, our housing and our safety—about our futures—grows steadily and exponentially, it’s particularly illuminating to explore this political moment with the unseen and the unheard, the excluded and the marginalized, those deemed by power the leastwise of the land.

American Precariat with Zeke Caligiuri

This centennial episode of Under the Tree features an enlightening conversation with Stanley Howard, the legendary jailhouse lawyer and founder of the Death Row 10, a group of African American men on Illinois' death row who organized a powerful campaign from their prison cells to save their lives and to spark a new abolitionist movement decades ago. The Death Row Ten and their mothers linked up with courageous activists, intrepid lawyers, relentless journalists, and a growing wave of social protest against police violence to demand justice in their cases, and an end to the barbaric practice of capital punishment. Stanley Howard is an organizer/activist, a fighter, and the author of Tortured by Blue: The Chicago Police Torture Story.

The Real Dragon with Stanley Howard

The centuries-old struggle for Black Freedom is filled with victories and defeats, tragedy and triumph, forward motion and backlash. Today we sit down with historian and engaged scholar Say Burgin to uncover some of the myths that pass as history, focusing particularly on the historic turn toward Black Power and the resulting strategy of “racially parallel organizing” with white comrades. Say Burgin’s illuminating book is urgent and relevant for anti-racist organizers and activists today.

Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power with Say Burgin

Years of coordinated effort by the reactionary Heritage Foundation has culminated in a frighteningly dystopian document describing the future society they hope to build: Project 2025. At 900-plus pages, it’s been described as a blueprint for a second Trump presidential term, but it's so much more than that. It is in fact a sweeping manifesto, and a massive mapping of the key issues facing society. Project 2025 will outlive Trump by decades, providing a vision, guidance, and energy for organizing campaigns based on authoritarian themes and Christian Dominionist theology well into the future. Significantly, this effort has organized 110 disparate right-wing organizations and thousands of individuals into a united front. Attention peace activists, freedom fighters, and justice  organizers: this is what we’re up against! Our comrade and dear friend Kevin Kumashiro, author of several books including a new edition of his classic Against Common Sense, joins Under the Tree for a record third time to help us unpack the significance of Project 2025.

Project 2025 with Kevin Kumashiro

Abolition can perhaps best be understood as a collection of creative and complex acts of world-building—what kind of world would we need to build in order to have no slavery? our forebears asked. And what kind of world could we begin to create today that would render prisons and police and militarism obsolete, predation and exploitation relics of a cruel past? Abolition is not simply a policy, it’s an entire politics—the politics of realizing our freedom dreams by building the world we want and need. All of us—workers, teachers, nurses, midwives, parents—can reimagine and rebuild our worlds. Everything can change. And abolition work—changing everything—is the practice of freedom. We’re joined Under the Tree by Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson, co-editors of We Grow Together: Parenting Toward Abolition, an anthology focussed on  connecting liberatory parenting and movements for freedom.

Parenting Toward Abolition with Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson

In America is in the Heart, Carlos Bulosan describes his good fortune at landing a job in a library where he could be close to books: “I was beginning to understand what was going on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting.” Ursula Le Guin writes of a library’s sacredness: “its accessibility, its publicness.” She calls the public library a public trust, and continues: “A great library is freedom,.” We’re honored to be joined in conversation with Emily Drabinski, past president of the American Library Association, and a brilliant and intrepid defender of the public square.

To Be Close to Books with Emily Drabinski

Human beings are suspended in webs-of-significance—we make sense and we make meaning—and culture is nothing more nor less than the webs. Those webs-of-significance are alive, forever trembling and vibrating, evolving and regenerating, changing and developing as messages and stories and ways-of-being vibrate across the surface. So culture can never stand still, never sit static or inert; rather it is always on the move, in the mix, and on the make—dynamic and churning and charging forward. The joy of the churn, and the burden of resistance, re-imagination, and reconstruction lives within the counter-culture. We’re joined by Alex Zamalin in a wide-ranging conversation about culture, counter-culture, and the quest for revolutionary freedom.

Culture/Counterculture with Alex Zamalin

Barbara Smith is a Movement legend— the kind of courageous activist, powerful thinker, persistent organizer and whole-hearted doer who keeps the Movement moving. She is co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of the acclaimed 1977 statement that has been one of the most influential Black feminist documents of the twentieth century—“Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community, which allows us to continue our struggle and work.” She’s been a freedom fighter for over half a century—a long time in the life of a person, but, as she knows, the blink of an eye in the life of a struggle, and so she is neither nostalgic for a ship that’s already left the shore nor interested in burnishing a legacy. Rather, she is leaning forward—on the move and in the mix—still fighting for peace and freedom and joy and justice, still asking the most insistent and burning questions: How do we name this political moment? Where do we go from here? What does the known demand of us now? Here is Barbara Smith in conversation with Bill Ayers on December 5, 2024 at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York.

How We Get Free with Barbara Smith

Solidarity takes on many forms but for over four decades one vivid example rose out of a design and print studio in Havana, Cuba. Born in 1966 out of the Tricontinental Conference the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina — OSPAAAL) strove to unite liberation movements across the three continents. The Tricontinental magazine and the colorful, multi-lingual posters inserted within became legendary and covered the walls of activists and revolutionaries around the world. 

Inspired by the intersection of graphic design and political solidarity, the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive hosted an retrospective exhibit of the work of OSPAAAL. Now, publishers Common Notions have released an astonishing and beautiful new book not only celebrating the legacy but inviting us all to explore how we can contribute to this vital work of moving towards social transformation. We’re joined in conversation by two of the editors of the book Armed by Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s OSPAAAL, Lani Hanna and Josh MacPhee.



Solidarity through Design with Lani Hanna and Josh MacPhee

If you were ever an enthusiastic reader of “Calvin and Hobbes,” “Peanuts,” “Blondie,” “Doonesbury,” or the “Boondocks,” you have a treat coming your way: “Mafalda,” a six-year-old comic book character created by the artist Quino in Argentina, is now available in English in a dazzling translation by Frank Wynne. Mafalda is a precocious kid—Frank describes her as “six going on sixty”—who observes the world around her with fresh eyes, and then asks the kind of queer questions that the grown-ups in her life can’t or won’t answer. Mafalda’s concerns focus on humanity and world peace, and her innocence shines a bright light on the conflict between what adults claim to value, and how they actually live. Think of her as a socialist “Nancy.”  We’re joined from London by Frank Wynne, a former Chair of the Judging Panel of the International Booker Prize and the award-winning author, translator, and editor of two major anthologies, Found in Translation: 100 of the finest stories every translated, and QUEER: LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday.


Lost and Found, in Translation with Frank Wynne

The severe challenges and unforeseen possibilities facing humanity today cry out for clarity. We need it all: poetry and politics, art and the people’s army, agitation and organization, theory and practice, deep study and sustained action, joy and justice, both the moments of quiet contemplation and the times of swift, sharp thrusts, dreams as well as deeds. We’re delighted to be joined from Santiago, Chile by Vijay Prashad, a preeminent Marxist theorist and activist intellectual. His work continues the initiative of the Tricontinental Conference in Cuba which brought together revolutionary movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Today Vijay is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, and an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Vijay is refreshingly dialectical in his thinking and writing—witness a dangerous mind in ongoing argument with itself.

Trapped in Reality, Walking Toward Freedom with Vijay Prashad

The speed at which a fascist government can disrupt, dismantle, and destroy on its way to building a full-blown fascist society is breathtaking. Resistance is scattered, and anyone looking to the Democratic Party to offer guidance or leadership should remember that we came to this point on bipartisan rails, that is, the ruling class and the political establishment has agreed for decades on every major issue: unqualified support for Israel’s murderous and illegal actions; the militarization of domestic police forces and policing as the ready-answer to every social problems; mass incarceration as a defining feature of society; the frantic privatization of public goods and services. And underlying it all, the tenacious and deadly legacy of the culture and structures of white supremacy. We’re joined in conversation with the activist, organizer, and writer Emile Suotonye DeWeaver, author most recently of Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future.



The Ghost of White Supremacy with Emile Suotonye DeWeaver

When Hurricane Katrina roared up the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Coast in August, 2005, the devastation was just beginning. The government was murderously unprepared—when the levees failed, 80% of New Orleans was underwater, 1500 people lost their lives, thousand more were injured, and property losses were estimated at $125 billion. The capitalist media consistently smacked its lips over suffering and offered an upside down world where victims became criminals, and mutual aid was portrayed as theft.  The afterlife—the trauma, waste. and wreckage—of the catastrophe is ongoing and includes displacement, corporate theft, privatization of public goods, educide, and cultural sacking.   We’re joined on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina by Kristen Buras, an anti-racist activist, teacher, and researcher who is the director of the New Orleans–based Urban South Grass-roots Research Collective, a coalition with African American community groups that combines research and grass-roots organizing for racial equity. She is the author, most recently, of What We Stand to Lose: Black Teachers, the Culture They Created, and the Closure of a New Orleans High School.

After Katrina: What We Stand to Lose with Kristen Buras

On Monday, September 29th the National Public Housing Museum in collaboration with the Goodman Theatre hosted a conversation between Lisa Lee, the founding director of the Museum, and the playwright Zayd Dohrn whose hip hop rock musical Revolution(s) opens the Goodman Theatre's centennial season in October. The gathering was part of an epic citywide and year-long event—100 Free Acts of Theater—which will activate all 50 wards in the city to celebrate the artistic fabric of Chicago, amplify existing arts programming, and collaborate on new efforts. (Learn more at GoodmanTheatre.org/100FreeActs). The conversation roamed widely and revolved around questions like: What does revolution mean? What is the future we deserve? What role do love and joy play in our visions of a better world? What is the role of the many arts at this moment on the clock of the universe?  Examining how art, activism, and imagination shape movements for change, Lisa and Zayd are joined by guest activists throughout the night.



Revolution & the Art of Creating the World with Zayd Dohrn & Lisa Lee

On September 27, 2025 we met up at Pilsen Community Books with Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla of About Face: Veterans Against the War, a dynamic and powerful group involved in building an irresistible movement for peace and against war and fascism. About Face builds on and highlights the legacy and revolutionary power of GI resistance against the backdrop of military mobilizations to violently suppress people’s movements. They walk a difficult and necessary path, organizing inside the military as they support GI resistance and the right to refuse, and outside as they create structures of care and support that prevent enlistment in the imperial death machine in the first place. Their work dances a difficult dialectic as it embraces a fundamental contradiction: confronting and resisting the real harm erupting from the war-makers, and providing paths for radical reorientation for people who (like all of us) can be both perpetrators of harm and victims of a racial capitalist system. They are the authors of a new zine, State Violence, Abolition, and GI Resistance.

The History of GI Resistance with Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla

These are tough times for teachers and students, for young people and their families, for immigrant communities, for people of color, for all of us. All times are tough, of course, but the consolidation of white supremacist power, the organized acts of everyday cruelty, the disdain for humanity, the consolidation of autocracy, the performance of savagery, the unchecked embrace of selfishness, selective humanization and the rendering of large sections of human beings as disposable—the vilest human qualities and the beating heart of capitalism—make our lives all the more precarious, and precious. We’re joined by Kathryn (Kat) Zamarron, a Chicago Public School teacher, in a wide-ranging conversation focussed on the complex  reality of supporting children and youth and their families in dark times. 

Teaching in Dark Times with Kathryn (Kat) Zamarron

We surely know by now that freedom is more journey than destination, more a summons to struggle than a port-of-call in which to lie down and take s rest. We understand freedom most acutely, paradoxically, when we name the obstacles to our full humanity as unacceptable, and link arms to storm the barricades in the name of liberation. There are moments in history when an apparition of freedom appears clearly, and its meaning is transformed and enlarged—General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” was just such a moment. Twenty thousand enslaved people liberated themselves, taking freedom into their own hands in the wake of the march—they sought freedom in movement, and created a keen, detailed reimagining of freedom, reframing the meaning of the Civil War ever after. We’re joined in conversation by my dear friend and co-host for this episode, Jeff Jones, and Bennett Parten, the author of the remarkable new history, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation.





Somewhere Toward Freedom with Bennett Parten  and special guest co-host Jeff Jones

Police agencies across the country have functioned from the start as a violent arm of the elite and a cat’s paw in resisting racial justice and economic fairness. Today’s ICE agents are in the long tradition of slave patrols, SWAT teams and Red Squads. During the high tide of the Civil Rights Movement the brutality of Southern sheriffs was on full display, but two critical phenomena are missed when the dominant narrative focuses exclusively on iconic photos from a few dramatic moments: first, state  repression—brutality, physical violence, infiltration and spying, reputational attacks, bogus prosecutions—against the Movement was not confined to a few redneck sheriffs, but was common practice in police departments at every level everywhere; and, second, Movement activists did not passively accept the abuse, but rather, fought back actively. In Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activist Who Fought Back Joshua Clark Davis documents a monstrous pattern of police activity to crush the Movement, and also the brilliance of Movement folks who confronted police power openly, consistently, and courageously. 

Fighting the Cops with Joshua Clark Davis

International solidarity is at the heart of our hopes for fundamental, humane change in the US. There can be no revolution in values or in fact if progressive Americans wrap themselves in the myth of “exceptionalism” and stand aside from the global struggles leading the fight against imperialism and for peace and justice. We need to become comrades, standing together—shoulder-to-shoulder against a common enemy and toward a common goal. We join, then, a voluntary association characterized by enthusiasm and joy at being part of something larger than ourselves. We’re not allies, functioning in service to, but rather comrades, acting in solidarity with. The biggest obstacle to authentic comradeship in US history—the third rail of American radical politics—is and always has been white supremacy, and tepid work toward International Solidarity and Black freedom. Comradeship in America emerges only from an unconditional embrace of Internationalism and Black Liberation. We are joined in conversation with Martha Biondi, the Lorraine H. Morton Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University, author of The Black Revolution on Campus;   To Stand and Fight: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City,  and most recently, We Are Internationalists: Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation

and Prexy Nesbitt, a Chicago organizer, engaged scholar, and activist who built (over several decades) international solidarity with African liberation movements fighting against colonialism and apartheid in Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa.

We Are Internationalists with Martha Biondi and Prexy Nesbitt

We each share a human culture, a human experience, and a human fate with everyone who exists, or ever did exist—we are born, we suffer, we die. And yet, within that vast shared experience there are enormous disparities and variations—all of which can test our capacity for empathy and human solidarity. Imagine facing bombardment and continuous war, invasion and occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the murders of your friends and your children and your family members, the loss of home and community, dislocation and exile—all the worst experiences human beings have suffered. Come close; don’t look away. Now, connect. We are joined in conversation by Tareq Baconi, a Palestinian writer and activist who has written a memoir—Fire in Every Direction—that is also an exquisite love letter to the people of Palestine—their land, their ancestors, a history that cannot be forgotten and a future that cannot be denied. Free Palestine!  

Fire in Every Direction with Tareq Baconi

Here we go again—another invasion, another occupation, another aggression. The US government is a warmongering behemoth that is in a constant, continuing state of war, and it ceaslessly gas-lights the pubic, asking us to repudiate “your own lying eyes,” and to instead embrace euphemisms designed to make murder, theft, and brazen lawlessness sound inevitable and benevolent. A humane future makes a simple demand on each and all of us: RESIST! We’re joined in conversation with Michelle Nickerson, professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author, most recently, of Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial, an illuminating account of the organized Catholic resistance to the US war against Vietnam, and an inspiration for the task ahead.

Spiritual Criminals with Michelle Nickerson

“Under the Tree” is a new podcast that focuses on freedom—a complex, layered, dynamic, and often contradictory idea—and takes you on a journey each week to fundamentally reimagine how we can bring freedom and liberation to life in relation to schools and schooling, equality and justice, and learning to live together in peace.

Our podcast opens a crawl-space, a fugitive field and firmament where we can both explore our wildest freedom dreams, and organize for a liberating insurgency. "Under the Tree" is a seminar, and it runs the gamut from current events to the arts, from history lessons to scientific inquiries, and from essential readings to frequent guest speakers. 

We’re in the midst of the largest social uprising in US history—and what better time to dive headfirst into the wreckage, figuring out as we go how to support the rebellion, name it, and work together to realize its most radical possibilities—and to reach its farthest horizons?

Under the Tree with Bill Ayers

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