4:00 PM PACIFIC TIME: MONDAYS - FRIDAYS
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. Hosts Davey D and Anita Johnson give voice to issues ignored by the mainstream while planting seeds for social change.
Davey D sits down with journalists Tim Redmond of 48 Hills and Rasheed Shabazz of Oakland Voices for a local year in review that ties Bay Area stories to national power plays, housing fights, and media battles. Tim opens by arguing that the big political shift in San Francisco is from a fear driven crime narrative …
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 … Continued
Davey D sits down with award-winning tech journalist Karen Hao to unpack her book Empires of AI—a sweeping critique of how today’s AI boom concentrates power while eroding public agency. Hao traces OpenAI’s arc from a purportedly altruistic nonprofit to a profit-driven juggernaut shaped by the egos and ambitions of its founders. She argues that to evaluate tools … Continued
Hard Knock Radio Afrofuturism Round Table 2025 Reflections and 2026 Futures Davey D closed out the year with the show’s annual Afrofuturism round table, bringing together writers, educators, artists, and cultural critics to reflect on what defined Afrofuturism in 2025 and what may shape 2026. The conversation moved fluidly across film, literature, comics, animation, music, … Continued
In this Hard Knock Radio segment, you and AI expert X. Eyeé walk listeners through the real story of the past year in tech and AI, way beyond the hype about fancy tools and the United States versus China headlines. X explains that California has quietly become the world’s main regulator of AI by passing … Continued
This Hard Knock Radio conversation is a year-in-review on tech and AI, with host Davey D chopping it up with Quency Phillips of Lighthouse Innovation Center and social entrepreneur/author Darian Rodriguez Heyman. They start by framing 2025 as the year AI moved from “wow” to “woven in” – no longer just a flashy search trick … Continued
Davey D talks with writer and geographer Alex Werth about his new book On Loop: Black Sonic Politics in Oakland and how sound, race, and power collide in the town’s history. Werth explains that although he was trained by anthropologists, his grounding in geography helps him track how Oakland as a place has been made and remade through … Continued
Host Davey D brings on Minneapolis–St. Paul journalist and activist Georgia Fort to dig into ICE raids, attacks on Somali communities, and the growing repression of journalists and protesters in Minnesota and beyond. Georgia starts by describing a November 25 raid on St. Paul’s East Side where several hundred people showed up and three journalists … Continued
Davey D opens by grounding listeners in the fight over ethnic studies in California, focusing on AB715 and how claims of antisemitism are being used to roll back gains and potentially chill K–12 ethnic studies. Sameer frames this as part of a larger right-wing strategy coming out of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” a companion … Continued
Davey D opens Hard Knock Radio by framing housing and policing as intertwined crises, then centers the conversation on Rahim Kurwa’s book Indefensible Spaces: Policing and the Struggle for Housing. Kurwa begins with the story of Michelle Ross, a Section 8 voucher holder who moved from Los Angeles to Palmdale in 2008. Once there, she … Continued
On this episode of Hard Knock Radio, host Davey D sits down with Joshua Davis, a history professor at the University of Baltimore and author of Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back. The conversation digs into a part of civil rights history that is usually blurred … Continued
