Davey D opens by clocking a surge of disinformation that treats facts and political education as disposable—amplified by anonymous influencers and even AI personas attacking iconic figures like Assata Shakur and the Panthers. Akuno traces this back to well-funded, right-wing astroturfing that targeted Black and Latino audiences—citing ADOS/FBA as examples—and leveraged platform algorithms that trap users in “information cul-de-sacs.” He points to the rise of deepfakes and a broader program to control reality by shaping what people think. In that frame, Akuno name-checks Peter Thiel and the neoreactionary playbook around Curtis Yarvin, arguing that Palantir-style surveillance infrastructure now undergirds federal decision-making while figures like J.D. Vance are positioned as heirs to MAGA power.
Pivoting from media to material conditions, Akuno and Davey lay out Jackson, Mississippi as a case study: years of “starve the city, then blame the victims,” followed by a state-engineered mini-dictatorship—separate courts, Capitol Police expansion, and resource capture. Akuno recounts how these moves intensified after Jackson became majority-Black, and how control of the courts—slept on by Democrats—enabled the rollback. A recent Wall Street Journal narrative lauding the “Jackson Plan,” he says, whitewashes a strategy that denied infrastructure funding for decades but found limitless money for policing.
So what to do? Akuno is blunt: we don’t yet have a formula to beat platform gatekeeping. Quality content alone won’t travel if algorithms throttle it. His prescription is dual: build an autonomous social-digital commons (own servers, platforms, data) and reinvest in on-the-ground organizing—up to and including radio/shortwave grids to route around chokepoints. The conversation closes by tying the Jackson-Kush Plan, Cooperation Jackson, and the Build & Fight formula to the present: mutual aid, co-ops, unions, makerspaces already exist; the missing piece is disciplined coordination at scale. Project 2025, he argues, is the empire’s counter to the 2020 uprisings, executed with precision—but internal contradictions and looming austerity could open cracks by 2026. Davey underscores the lesson: real power is collective, not messianic. Akuno credits a wide network of comrades and elders, framing the work as shared, iterative, and urgent to protect any living democracy and to build something new beyond it.
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.