Davey D closed out 2025 with a sharp, no-nonsense roundtable that examined the year’s major political fault lines while looking ahead to what communities should prepare for in 2026. Joining him were four voices who remained consistent even as platforms shifted and institutions retreated. Melina Abdullah, professor, organizer with Black Lives Matter Grassroots, and host on KBLA Talk 1580 in Los Angeles. Nora Barrows Friedman, longtime journalist and editor with Electronic Intifada. Kamau Franklin, organizer and host with Black Liberation Media based in Atlanta. And Melinda, known to Hard Knock listeners as Brown Girl Pride, a Colorado based commentator and military veteran focused on decolonization, Indigenous rights, and abolition.
Brown Girl Pride opened the discussion by challenging one of the most repeated media narratives of the year, the idea of a single Latino voting bloc. She argued that the labels Latino and Hispanic operate as tools of erasure, collapsing Indigenous, African, Asian, and mixed identities into one category and then using that distortion to justify political abandonment. In her view, exit poll headlines were not simply inaccurate but strategic, designed to dull public concern for communities that would soon face intensified repression. She framed the deeper task as decolonizing political values, not just language, and warned that colonial power thrives on confusion about identity and history.
Melina Abdullah built on that analysis by naming what she described as an underreported reality of 2025. People never stopped fighting. From actions at detention centers and city halls to ongoing Palestine solidarity work and resistance to Cop City, she described a movement landscape where the battlefront is everywhere and there is no sheltered rear. She rejected the false choice between open fascism and softer liberalism, arguing that real freedom depends on solidarity across Black liberation, immigrant justice, Palestine, land back, and abolition.
Davey D connected those points to what he identified as a defining theme of the year, disinformation and manufactured division. He pointed to coordinated online narratives calling for ICE raids in places like Oakland and Chicago, and described how the chaos forced organizers and journalists to rely less on algorithms and more on direct relationships, picking up the phone to confirm what was actually happening.
Nora Barrows Friedman described that shift toward relationship based verification as a key development of 2025. She spoke about a growing internationalist consciousness, with people connecting the genocide in Palestine to ICE raids, border militarization, stolen Indigenous land, and the expansion of policing and surveillance. She also addressed the pressure campaign aimed at silencing Palestinian solidarity, arguing that smears and intimidation are designed to distract and exhaust. In her view, activists do not have the luxury of disengaging while Palestinians are fighting for their lives, and Zionist propaganda is losing ground as more people recognize it as a political project sustained by censorship and repression.
Kamau Franklin widened the lens further, describing 2025 as a moment when overt white nationalism returned to public life with little resistance from mainstream institutions. He pointed to the nationalization of policing through ICE, FBI raids alongside local law enforcement, and the deployment of federal force as potential rehearsals for election season repression in 2026. He argued that so-called rights evaporated quickly because the system was never designed to protect everyone equally, and tied domestic repression to international escalation, including U.S. actions across the Western Hemisphere. He also critiqued conditions inside Black political spaces, warning that years of counterattack and the elevation of a Black political elite weakened left infrastructure and created openings for reactionary narratives to gain traction.
That critique fed into one of the roundtable’s sharpest themes, capitulation. Davey D framed it as a kind of person of the year, not as weakness but exposure. Who is silent out of fear, and who is silent because they always agreed. Melina Abdullah said the word capitulate became unavoidable after January 2025, as liberal institutions and even Black leadership figures quickly folded to right wing pressure. She stressed that the answer is not despair but deeper organizing rooted in relationships. People checking on one another. People showing up when someone goes quiet. People building networks that cannot be erased by algorithmic suppression.
Nora sharpened that critique of liberal politics, arguing that major Democratic institutions often prefer opposition because it is profitable and comfortable, while offering candidates who concede ground to the right. She pointed to crackdowns on speech around Palestine and described universities, including UC Berkeley, as willing partners in repression rather than reluctant participants. Davey D underscored the contradiction of institutions branding themselves as champions of free speech while cooperating with political targeting and punishment of dissent.
As the show closed, the guests offered clear marching orders for 2026. Melina Abdullah urged listeners to organize, organize, organize, and invited people to join Black Lives Matter Grassroots or any serious local formation, emphasizing that movements grow when people move from spectatorship to participation. Brown Girl Pride encouraged listeners to start at the neighborhood level, meet their neighbors, build community, and connect with organizers and veterans to develop practical defensive strategies, noting that the crisis is already in motion. Nora Barrows Friedman echoed the call to organize while stressing the need to break isolation, get offline, build relationships, ask for help, and avoid burnout. Kamau Franklin defined organizing as collective struggle through real organizations, not individual heroics, and urged people to build alternative institutions and media so communities are not trapped inside corporate narratives.
The roundtable ended the way it began, grounded in camaraderie and accountability. A reminder that politics is not just analysis but relationships. In a year marked by suppression, distortion, and institutional surrender, the guests made clear that the path forward lies in disciplined solidarity, grounded organizing, and building a culture of resistance that does not depend on mainstream permission.
Hard Knock Radio is a drive-time Hip-Hop talk show on KPFA (94.1fm @ 4-5 pm Monday-Friday), a community radio station without corporate underwriting, hosted by Davey D and Anita Johnson.