Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode we have an extended

interview with Kevin Rashid Johnson, formerly of the new African Black Panther Party, now of the

Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party and we discuss how that change happened and the split

that precipitated it. Rashid is a hero. He's one of the most principled voices on the left. He's also

a victim of the white supremacist prison system and we go quite into depth of the depravity,

the human rights violations, the torture and the terrorism that prisoners undergo within the US

prison system and it really inflex the importance of abolition being a core pillar of these struggles

for Black liberation, for liberation more broadly, for the fight against colonialism and capitalism.

When you hear the stories that Rashid tells of shit he went through in prison, it would turn any

stomach, anybody with a pulse. You're gonna feel viscerally the disgusting nature of the prison

system and the overall system that it is an indictment of and a reflection of. Rashid is also an

auto-diedeck. He is self-learned. He taught himself all of what he knows and to hear his depth of

political philosophy and history and to hear of the shit he has to go through on a daily basis

from solitary confinement to having rotwilers stuck on him in a jail sale to being brutally beaten

routinely. It is just a lot to take. It's incredibly revealing and it says so much about the spirit

and the heart and the fortitude and the humanity of him and his fellow prisoners for having to go

through that stuff and refusing to be broken in the way that the system wants them to be broken.

So again, this is a privilege to be able to amplify Kevin Rashid Johnson and his struggle to learn

from him and to get the word out about his organization and a special shout out to Kamar at Garlic

who facilitated this discussion who hooked up the prison call to Rev. left and was able to

mediate that discussion and who is a member of the revolutionary intercommunal Black Panther

Party of course as well doing important essential work. So throughout this conversation because the

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