By Firestorm Coop
April 28th, 2026
Chicago-based author and agitator Jarrod Shanahan is joined in conversation by public intellectual Eman Abdelhadi to explore his 2025 essay collection, “Ever Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms”. Together they discuss the trajectory of liberatory struggle from Occupy Wall Street to the present, the evolving character of the far Right, and the necessity of political organization with a strategic orientation.
ABOUT THE BOOK —- Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help collects a decade of reflections on recent US struggles -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.
