Essential Dissent

First Baptist Church, Community Room

309 N. Cayuga St, Ithaca

Speakers:

SEAN CHUNG, author of Due Process in Chains: A Self-Help Journal for Protecting Your Rights in the Criminal Justice System

Topic: Legal strategies to hold guards accountable for their abuses

JASON HOGE, former LAW-NY Reentry program director

Topic: Legal resistance to employment and housing discrimination; correcting and clearing records

CARL WILLIAMS, Cornell social movement lawyering clinic director

Topic: Strategies for decarceration and abolition

Event organized by Central New York Communities for Justice

info: [email protected]

Co-sponsors:

OAR of Tompkins County - TC Workers Center - Southside Community Center Greater Ithaca Activity Center - Civic Ensemble & ReEntry Theatre Program

Donate via Village at Ithaca, select "Central New York Communities for Justice"

A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age

Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia governed solely by the rules of the market and inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe.

Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half century is littered with the remains of such experiments in what Raymond Craib calls “libertarian exit.” Often dismissed as little more than the dreams of crazy, rich Caucasians, exit strategies have been tried out from the southwest Pacific to the Caribbean, from the North Sea to the high seas, often with dire consequences for local inhabitants.

Based on research in archives in the US, the UK, and Vanuatu, as well as in FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, Craib explores in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary cap­italism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands.

Adventure Capitalism is a global history that intersects with an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, Honolulu-based real estate speculators and British Special Branch spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, Orange County engineers and Tongan navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and a new breed of techno-utopians and an old guard of Honduran coup leaders.

This is not only a history of our time but, given the new iterations of privatized exit—seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization—it is also a history of our future.

This episode is “Flock Off! Ithaca - Organizing Against Mass Surveillance”, which is a panel from the 2026 Upstate Anarchist Book Fair, held May 2nd and 3rd in Binghamton, NY.

Flock Off! Ithaca is a group of Ithaca, NY residents who successfully pressured the Ithaca City Council to terminate its contract with Flock Safety.

According to the Ithaca Voice, in March of 2026, "the Ithaca Common Council passed a resolution that directed the city attorney and city manager to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety at the “earliest possible opportunity.” The resolution also states that all Flock Safety equipment, such as license plate reader cameras and gunshot detection devices, must be turned off and disconnected within 14 days of the contract being terminated. It adds that the company must remove all related technology “as soon as practicable” after the contract ends.”

When the cameras did not come down within that time frame, members of the group covered several of the cameras with opaque plastic bags to disable them.

https://ithacavoice.org/2026/06/activists-cover-flock-cameras-with-black-bags-call-for-faster-removal/

The annual Upstate Anarchist Book Fair is co-sponsored by PM Press and Riot Act Books.

PM Press is a radical independent publisher that amplifies bold political ideas and vital stories, operating a warehouse in Binghamton, NY. Riot Act Books is an anti-profit, volunteer-run bookstore in Binghamton that co-organizes community events.

https://pmpress.org

https://www.riotactbooks.com

https://pmpress.org/

A decade of American society coming apart.

Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles—Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Rebellion—alongside accounts of the rise of Trumpism, the alt-right, an apocalyptic shift in popular culture, to paint a dense and complex portrait of a decade of protracted social crisis.

Jarrod Shanahan reports from the ground. On the streets in 2014, from the depths of the Rikers Island penal complex, inside the alt-right underground and the carnival of Trump rallies, and in the line of fire in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, among other scenes that Shanahan accessed not as a credentialed observer but an active participant: prisoner, infiltrator, activist.

The resulting essays outline the pitfalls and opportunities facing those seeking to reverse the suicidal course of capitalist society and build a liberated world.

https://pmpress.org/

Jarrod Shanahan spoke at the 2026 Upstate Anarchist Book Fair, which was held at the PM Press warehouse in Binghamton, NY on May 2nd and 3rd.

He was interviewed by Sarah Kizuk.

This episode is a talk from the 2026 Upstate Anarchist Book Fair, held May 2nd and 3rd in Binghamton, NY.

It features C.S. Soong, who previously co-hosted the well known radio show Against the Grain, in conversation with Ellen David Friedman, author of “Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It’s Hard.”

The 2026 Upstate Anarchist Book Fair was sponsored and hosted by PM Press.

https://pmpress.org/

In this episode, titled “People Power in Pursuit of Peace”, Michael Wong, a leader of Veterans For Peace and co-founder of VFP's China Working Group, interviews award-winning author Dee Knight.

Dee Knight is the author of Befriending China, which was "Gold Winner" of the 2025 Nonfiction Book Award, and two other books: “A Realistic Path to Peace” and “My Whirlwind Lives: Navigating Decades of Storms”.

The interview took place on May 15, 2026.

Professor Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East, and the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Colombia University.

The event was recorded on March 29, 2026 at the First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn. and was co-sponsored by First Unitarian Brooklyn’s chapter of Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East, New York City DSA Anti-war Working Group, and Brooklyn for Peace.

The talk is a conversation between Professor Khalidi and Reverend Meagan Henry from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, followed by a Q&A session.

This episode is Professor Noura Erakat speaking at Princeton University on March 26, 2026, in a talk titled “Exit and Exception.”

It was the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, given in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic Edward W. Said, who was a Princeton grad and who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University from 1963 until 2003.

Noura Erakat is Professor of Africana Studies and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University Newark, and the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

Includes an intro by Professor Max Weiss.

The event was sponsored by the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture Fund, the Princeton Department of English, and the Princeton Committee on Palestine.

This episode is “Judy Bello on China”, in which I (Wilton Vought) interview Judy Bello about her 2025 trip to China, among other things.

A panel held at the Philadelphia Liberation Center on March 25th, 2026, featuring Gabriel Rockhill, Nazia Kazi, Adeem Suhail, and Adnan Husain.

https://www.phillyliberationcenter.org

https://pslweb.org

https://criticaltheoryworkshop.com