The Spiral Times: Jakhi Isaiah | BB

This month’s guest is Jakhi Isaiah, a 23-year-old New Afrikan communist from Maplewood, New Jersey. At the end of this month, October 2026, Jakhi will be sentenced to a federal prison term of between 5 and 20 years for setting fire to 11 NYPD vehicles. He joins BB a year into his time on house arrest, recounting the intense experience of being on the run during a six-week manhunt involving the FBI, DHS, and at least seven other state agencies, the decision to turn himself in, and the mental preparation for entering prison.

As we stand at the dawn of NSPM-7 Era (National Security Presidential Memorandum-7) with an overt focus on so-called left wing extremism, what are the ongoing effects of the memory crater created by COINTELPRO? How can these severed connections and lost lessons be regrafted? As one place to begin, our conversation surveys the history of the New Afrikan movement, how Black liberation struggles in the US addressed the question of land, and how their demands are inherited and interpreted today including by a new gen of organisers like Jakhi. He also recounts his experience staying with and learning from a Oglala Lakota elder at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation about generations of connection forged between Indigenous radicals and Black revolutionaries.

Alongside sketching out the terrain and tenor of recent resistance activity in the US from campus encampments post October 7th to anti-ICE uprisings and state clampdowns, Jakhi and BB unpack the term ‘political prisoner' and discuss the cellblock as its own terrain of struggle, from Attica to Palestine. We are also joined by a member of Jakhi’s Support and Defence Committee, themselves a second generation participant in anti-imperialist prisoner support organising born and raised in Brooklyn, who explains the tradition and legacy of defence committee work, provides perspective of working alongside prisoners in solidarity, the potential for strategic interplay between legal teams and self-organised committees, and offers advice on how to ensure that support work for our incarcerated comrades stays rooted in their actual demands.

On the eve of this sentencing, Jakhi Isaiah offers us a humbling lesson about responsibility, sacrifice, and what it means to “earn your life.”

As ever, ft. special song selections from our guests.