“Who are these people who are not seeing that our people are dying?”
Njeru municipality, located in Uganda's Buikwe district, is a scenic area where the River Nile flows out of Lake Victoria. While the locale attracts tourists, who go swimming, canoeing, and rafting in these waters, the region has also seen a drastic transformation in recent years, drawing large industries that provide employment opportunities for Uganda's young population. They often get work as machine operators or production workers, sorting and packaging at these factories. But while economically beneficial to some, these industries are also increasing pollution in the water, air, and environment—threatening the health of the region for tourists, youth workers, and long-time residents alike.
Since 2019, through the Uganda Investment Authority, the Ugandan government has allocated 956 acres of land for industries in Buikwe district as part of Vision 2040, an economic initiative that aims to transform Uganda into a modern and prosperous country within 30 years. But many locals suggest the government has fallen short in regulating these industries, leading to disastrous repercussions: It’s almost certain you’ll engage with some form of factory pollution in the region, via inhaling smog or coming into contact with the polluted water that flows into the Nile.
While Uganda’s 2019 National Environmental Act requires industries to treat their effluent before discharging it into water bodies, many businesses in the region do not comply. In Bujowali village, for example, the steel manufacturing company Pramukh Steel Limited releases wastewater into the Naava stream without proper treatment. Residents are concerned about the pollution, which affects their main water source, and consequently, their health.
On a warm day in March, the wet season fully underway, three women stand akimbo, atop a drainage channel being constructed across the marram road from Pramukh factory. In the channel, about a dozen men are hard at work lifting stones and mixing sand and cement while a supervisor hovers over them.
One of the women is Wazemba Annet Jackline, a resident of Bujowali village, and a local area councilor. “This is the only clean water stream we have in the village,” she says. “But now, we cannot take the water without boiling it first. It is no longer safe, it's contaminated.”
The steel company not only releases dust and sludge into the region’s water and air, but also mill scale, which pollutes the air with small particles that can be ingested by people and animals in close proximity to the factory. Residents have reported cases of illnesses such as diarrhea, cough, and flu. There are also some unconfirmed cases of cancer and allegations of animals dying due to the pollution. What’s more, the company’s factory also releases wastewater with a foul smell during the dry season, and even larger quantities mixed with fecal matter during the rainy season, which flows into the lower end of the stream.
In March this year, after a series of negotiations, Pramukh agreed to build the water drainage channel in response to complaints from Bujowali’s residents. Unfortunately, the construction materials they’ve used cannot withstand the water flow from the factory or the region’s heavy rains. Residents say this is the third time the channel is being constructed, with the same materials, after previous attempts have collapsed.
“They are reconstructing in the same place every day. The type of cement they are using will take time to set, yet this is a water-logged area,” says Jackline, who is a civil engineer by profession. “I’m asking them to reconsider the type of cement they are using. As much as they are looking at cutting costs, the cement type I’m suggesting only hydrates when it rains, and the mixture gets stronger instead of being washed away.”
Her pleas, however, fall on deaf ears as the workers continue with their work.
On the frontlines of the environmental fight in the region is Girls for Climate Action, an eco-feminist movement founded in Jinja district, advocating for climate justice and action in Buikwe. The organization has partnered with the community to address industrial pollution and promote sustainable practices under the campaign “Toa Uchafu,” a Swahili word meaning, “remove the garbage,” a call to end industrial water pollution in Buikwe.
The campaign highlights how the region’s industries are not complying with Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) standards, says Viola Kataike, the organization’s advocacy lead. “[They] pollute the different eco-systems that the community—especially women and girls—depend on for their livelihoods,” she adds.
The factories have also led to the displacement of some of the region’s long-time residents. Kataike cites an example of a woman she says is currently being forced to leave her land, where her late husband is buried. “She is crying out,” she says. “How is she going to move her husband’s remains because now the land supposedly belongs to the factory? It’s traumatic.”
Girls for Climate Action has also carried out a situational analysis of the pollution levels for existing industries in Buikwe, measuring contamination in the different natural water sources. According to Kataike, the results were revealing. “These industries have taken the opportunity to release their waste and effluents into River Nile, but of course channel it through the streams that the communities fetch water from.”
This pollution is also affecting the farming community throughout the Buikwe district. Farmers report crop damage, animal deaths, and health problems such as itchy eyes and skin, as well as inflamed skin that turns ashy after contact with the contaminated water.
At a community meeting held in March at the Mubeeya cultural site in Nyenga in Njeru municipality, farmers expressed distress at the pollution of the Mubeeya stream caused by the sugar, spirits, and plastics manufacturing company, GM Sugar. The farmers, most of whom are rice growers, raised a number of complaints.
“During the night, you can't sleep, the water stinks,” says 44-year-old Godfrey Walusimbi, a farmer who has spent his whole life in Buikwe. “You can't give your cattle the water, if they drink it, our cattle fall sick. I lost two goats.”
Some farmers also say their crops are being burnt up by the chemicals now contaminating the ground. “The acid in the soil has killed the soil fertility and crops are drying up in the garden,” Walusimbi says.
In the town of Njeru itself, which is centrally located in Buikwe, councilor Ibriata Clarke says that a factory located next to a secondary school has water trenches that run through the school’s playfield. She also says some representatives have tried to speak to factory management but are constantly being sent away. “We’ve been told not to complain about what the factories are doing to our people,” she says—but, she adds, “Who are these people who are not seeing that our people in Njeru municipality are dying?”
A Buikwe district officer who asked that they remain unnamed but whose role offers relevant insight, says they have carried out several tests, and there is proof that industrial chemicals have polluted the water, soil, and air in the locality. According to them, “While the recommended chemical oxygen demand in the water is 50, in Njeru, it is much higher, which is proof the water is polluted.” With residents reporting headaches, stomach pains, and skin reactions, the immediate solution, they say, is to stop using the water, concluding that it is corrosive.
However, they added that farmers who use agro chemicals and pesticides to kill weeds are also partially to blame. “During the rainy season, those chemicals sink into the sand and the water runs off into the streams,” they explain.
As environmental incidents continue to gain attention in the district, a court case between a local farmer, Allan John Ddamulira, and GM Sugar has come to underscore Buikwe’s industrial pollution problem.
Ddamulira claims that GM Sugar's discharge of toxic waste into the Kinywa water stream killed his fish and damaged his farm, which consisted of eight fishponds located on 10 acres. “Unknowingly to us, the water that was flowing through the stream that day had been polluted with molasses from the sugar factory,” he says. “So, we woke up to a fish kill. All the fish were floating, dead.”
In September 2022, Ddamulira registered a formal complaint with NEMA in Uganda’s capital city, Kampala.“Results comparing the stream water and the water from the ponds revealed there was an oxygen deficiency that resulted in the fish kill at the farm,” Ddamulira says.
Following their investigation, NEMA issued a stop order to GM Sugar to cease the company’s release of effluent into the stream, but Ddamulira says the order has never been respected. He has since taken GM Sugar to court, and has accused NEMA of withholding evidence that would be useful in his case.
In February 2024, through his lawyers, Ddadmulira wrote to NEMA requesting that the environmental authority share their findings with them, to be presented in court. But in a letter dated March 22, 2024, NEMA’s Executive Director, Barirega Akankwasah, stated that the matter was still under criminal investigation and consequently would not hand over copies of the technical expert report, stop order, or photographs taken at the site. He added that their refusal was protected by law. When contacted for comment, NEMA spokesperson Noame Karekaho responded, “Discussing the issue of GM Sugar and degradation of the environment are considered ‘subjudice.’”
GM Sugar’s Head of Legal has also denied Ddadmulira’s claims, saying the company has the latest technology from Germany handling its waste. “The company waste does not flow to the stream as the complainant claims. We usually take our waste to the Buikwe Industrial Park.” In court, Ddamulira produced a video of a GM Sugar vehicle pouring waste near the fish farm, disputing this was the case. However, GM Sugar argued that the “errant driver was asked by the villagers to release the waste into the road to allegedly reduce the dust which was about 15km from the fish pond.”
Still, Ddamulira fights on. “We need to pursue this case to get these people to understand that what they are doing is wrong and get justice for myself and many other farmers suffering because of this pollution,” he says. He claims he has lost 800m Uganda Shillings, or $218,000, as a result of the fish kill.
He also isn’t alone in this fight—and despite her frustrations, Kataike believes they are making an impact as community members increasingly voice their concerns. This is happening not just at meetings, but through peaceful protests and demands for action, including demands for more drainage channels. She adds, however, that not everyone has been supportive of their work: According to her, some community leaders are undermining their efforts by supporting the companies for selfish gains. “It’s a huge problem, especially with the small bribes that they give to a few leaders,” she says. “They also give false promises, offering positions to those who oppose them.”
Rather than slow their efforts, however, this has only further fueled them. Girls for Climate Action continues to raise awareness and empower the community to push the factories to adhere to the set environmental standards and to stop polluting, especially water sources. While Kataike expresses disappointment that the pollution persists, she promises their campaign against it will do the same. “If we don't act now, then when?” she asks. “Should we wait for the rest of the people to die, or should we support the community to create justice?”
[post_title] => One Ugandan Village's Fight Against Industrial Pollution
[post_excerpt] => “Who are these people who are not seeing that our people are dying?”
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Despite the threat of police violence and arrest, student-led protests against President Erdoğan and his ruling party continue across Turkey.
A wave of street demonstrations began rapidly taking over Turkey last month after a crowd of students at Istanbul University pushed back against, and ultimately overcame, a riot police barricade attempting to block their path. This feat was seen as a moment of encouragement and empowerment for a country that has long felt silenced by its current government, and has led to continued demonstrations across Turkey in the weeks since.
The students on March 19 were protesting the imprisonment of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul’s current mayor, and the biggest rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the next presidential election. They were also protesting a court decision made the day prior that nullified İmamoğlu’s diploma, a controversial ruling that meant the mayor, a member of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, the CHP, would not be directly eligible for candidacy.
The ruling was taken as a major blow to democracy and rule of law both by his supporters and by the opposition, with the party’s chairman calling it a “black mark.” But it was only a foreshadowing. The next morning, İmamoğlu, along with some 100 people, including aides, business people, and other mayors of the metropolitan’s districts, were detained in their homes. İmamoğlu had been accused of corruption and terror for allegedly establishing an electoral alliance with the Kurds in previous mayoral elections.
The case against him was widely taken as politically-motivated—the law being utilized once again as a weapon to extend Erdoğan’s reign, and discourage and limit his critics. Many were also quick to call out the hypocrisy of the charges: President Erdoğan, founder of the ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, has himself been in talks with Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party to release Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, designated as a terror entity by Turkey and the U.S. alike.
In a handwritten note posted on Twitter/X while he was detained, İmamoğlu wrote, “My people will respond to those who steal the people’s will.”
Massive demonstrations immediately erupted across the country, in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, and tens of provinces, including Konya in central Turkey, a very conservative AKP stronghold. All were met with brutal police violence. At many of the protests, the riot police used tear gas, rubber ball rifles, and water cannons against the young protestors, many of whom had their faces covered to hide their identities, out of fear of losing their livelihoods.
For many, it was their first street demonstration. Many held various sizes of the Turkish flag, and banners—some humorous—expressing their resilience and upset.
Bülent Kılıç
On March 22, at the legal end of the mayor’s detention period, İmamoğlu and the CHP Chairman Özgür Özel both called for a demonstration at Sarachane, the metropolitan municipality’s headquarters in Istanbul’s historic Fatih district.
“The walls of fear have been overcome,” İmamoğlu said in his call, posted on Twitter/X—referencing a culture of fear that has been especially prevalent since 2015, when a war re-erupted with the PKK, and since 2016, when a U.S.-based Turkish cleric was accused of orchestrating a coup. Both paved the way for a more authoritarian environment, in which civil dissent would often be marginalized.
Hoping to deter protestors from attending the demonstration in Sarachane, the Interior Ministry imposed various travel restrictions in key provinces, including shutting down metro and bus stations to limit travel. But their efforts were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands surrounded the municipality in support of İmamoğlu, while many other demonstrators of various ages stood outside the courthouse in Caglayan, where the mayor’s hearing would be held throughout the night.
Ultimately, demonstrators were protesting what they believed to be an attack on Turkey’s democracy and core values. Facing a riot police barricade encircling the massive building, hundreds chanted, “Turkey is secular; it will remain secular,” and the famous Bertolt Brecht line: “All of us, or none!”
The court ruling came at early dawn: İmamoğlu and tens of aides were arrested for corruption, pending trial, which has since been postponed to July 11.
The decision drew masses more to the streets, mainly young people, many of whom viewed the ruling as an extension of Erdoğan’s corruption. For millions across the country, it was a drop too much following years of polarizing rhetoric and the criminalization of dissent in a crumbling economy.
“We are not here to support any political party,” Beyza Ozdemir, a 30-year-old screenwriter said in Sarachane, a day after the mayor was arrested. “I came because I want to defend my rights, my country; to stand against injustice. I’m here for the ruling government to resign.”
Alongside her friend, 27, Ozdemir explained that, like much of the population, they were just “surviving.” Under near-80 percent inflation, it has become nearly impossible to travel, own property, or make plans for the future in Turkey, something they blamed on Erdoğan and the AKP.
Other demonstrators said they were protesting for freedom of expression, justice, and in support of earthquake-proofing cities, following the devastating damage caused by the 2023 earthquake. Others said they were there because of the alarming femicide numbers, the destruction of nature, and the killing of strays in shelters. A majority said they came to protect the secular democracy entrusted to the Turkish youth by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey.
President Erdoğan, who’s been in the official power seat since 2003, called the demonstrations “a movement of violence” and “street terror.” But Beyza’s friend said that he felt like “a phoenix” standing among the crowds, chanting in solidarity, after years of being silenced following the massive 2013 Gezi Park protests against the same government, protests that were criminalized to the point of terror charges and a life sentence for a Turkish philanthropist, who is accused of undertaking an alleged organizational role.
Bülent Kılıç
Twelve years later, in Sarachane, the authorities would take similar, disproportionate measures once again. Caught on camera by photojournalists and protestors on the night of March 23, hundreds of riot police sprayed tear gas and fired heavy barrages of rubber balls directly at demonstrators, many of whom were just walking back to the metro at the end of the night.
Dozens of shoes were left behind by those who could flee. The next morning, members of the media, including internationally-acclaimed photojournalists, were detained on morning raids along with hundreds of young demonstrators, many of them university students.
All were accused of violating the law on meetings, and were imprisoned pending trial. Immediately, a public campaign to release them began, underlining that they were simply using their constitutional rights to protest. The campaign gained momentum on various social media and opposition platforms, which seems to have helped most of them to be freed, but with tens still imprisoned.
The protests continued. Following the last day of the mass gathering in Sarachane, on March 25, the CHP announced a demonstration in Maltepe, across the Bosphorus, the weekend following. They claimed 2.2 million people attended the event in solidarity.
The next day was the beginning of a government-imposed nine-day religious holiday, Eid al-Fitr, putting a temporary end to the mass demonstrations. In response, the opposition called for a day of nationwide mass boycott to curb the AKP’s economic hinge, by stopping consumption fully, a goal that was supported by many shops and restaurants, which all closed for the day.
Some actors who supported the boycott were removed from their roles in state-owned streaming platform Tabii, while Cem Yiğit Üzümoğlu, who stars as Mehmed the Conqueror in Netflix’s Rise of Empires: Ottoman, was briefly detained.
While the heat of the mass street demonstrations has since slowed down because of the break, boycotts against pro-government brands and the student-led protests have continued. This month, videos of demonstrations held by high school students from various provinces have also started circulating. In one, tens of riot police are stationed outside Vefa High School in Istanbul, where one student holds a banner reading, “Rights, Law, Justice!”
Many universities across the country have also continued to hold sit-ins and forums, calling for more demonstrations on campuses and in the streets. They continue to demand the release of the remaining imprisoned students, and to defend their right to constitutional welfare and secular democracy under new leadership.
Bülent Kılıç
On April 8, a “resistance and solidarity concert” was held in Kadikoy, attended mostly by university students, with hundreds of riot police standing by. While letters from imprisoned students were read aloud on stage, slogans against Erdoğan and his government were chanted throughout.
“Turkey has major problems of injustice and corruption. These come together and threaten our future,” Ayse, a 25-year-old student, who did not want to provide her last name, said. She’s about the same age as the AKP’s political power.
“Our fight will not end upon the students’ and İmamoğlu’s release, but when Turkey becomes a just and equal country, providing a bright future for its youth,” she said. “Though, they should be released because they were only practicing their constitutional rights.”
Despite the growing authoritarianism, Ayse said she feels more empowered than ever before, thanks to the crowds surrounding her.
[post_title] => "A Drop Too Much"
[post_excerpt] => Despite the threat of police violence and arrest, student-led protests against President Erdoğan and his ruling party continue across Turkey.
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Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. But ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself.
In a moment when the experiment of the United States is teetering on the brink, the Trump administration is weaponizing deep-seated hatred of marginalized people to exacerbate ideological divides and deepen MAGA’s cult-like relationship with the president. A key component to this is their belief in and use of eugenics—the idea that it’s possible to create an ideal human by ≥eliminating “undesirable traits.” Meaningful resistance to Trump, then, requires a culture shift grounded in understanding the ideology’s history, the tech industry’s role in encouraging it, and the complicity of liberals and the left in conversations about whose life has value. It also means acknowledging just how deeply baked the ideology is into modern American culture.
Many people associate eugenics with the Nazis, comparing what’s happening in the United States today—the disappearing of immigrants without due process, the erasure of anything considered DEI, the destruction of archives—to the Nazi movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Nazi policy called for the extinction of unwanted communities via any means possible, including forced sterilization, social control, and, of course, “euthanasia” and mass murder. Yet in this pursuit of an improved “Aryan race,” the Nazis didn’t just want to populate the world with nondisabled blue-eyed blonds: They also viewed circumstantial, socially-mediated experiences such as criminality and poverty as genetic and therefore targets for elimination via breeding, an idea fundamental to the broader eugenics movement.
But the movement didn’t start there: The U.S.-based eugenics movement of the early 20th century was a tremendous influence on the Nazis, as was the work of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Julian Huxley. In the U.S., Charles Davenport, Henry Goddard, and many others aimed to “improve” humanity by fighting “dysgenic” influences, with prominent corporate foundations bankrolling their efforts. The normalization of American eugenics was also supported on a broader, sociocultural scale: Across the United States, laws encouraged marriage and children (for the right people), while simultaneously promoting the institutionalization and mass sterilization of disabled people, poor people, and Black, Indigenous people of color. “Better Babies” contests at county and state fairs promoted eugenic beliefs, alongside “fitter family” lectures and informational pamphlets.
The normalization of these policies across the U.S. has directly fed the rise of Trumpism, and the return of eugenics to the mainstream. The president’s support of this ideology is also explicit: Trump, throughout his campaigns and now in the White House (again), has made comments about “immigrant bloodlines,” implying Black and Brown immigrants are inherently animalistic, criminal, subhuman. This, despite the fact that Trump himself is the child of a Scottish immigrant, and the fact that he has been married to two immigrants himself—collectively, the mothers of four of his five children. The only difference, of course, is whiteness.
We’ve already seen Trump’s belief in race science—and eugenics more broadly—reflected in his administration’s actions so far. His Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, has proposed prioritizing funding for areas with higher marriage and birth rates, a directly eugenic project echoing the “marriage incentives” long promoted by the right. The administration is attempting to write trans people out of existence, both in the sense of stripping all references to the community from federal reporting, documents, and initiatives, and attacking transition care. And while abducting and trafficking people to high security foreign prisons without due process, Trump has simultaneously begun offering “golden visas” to more “desirable” (re: rich, white) immigrants to take their place, including offers of a “rapid pathway” to immigration for white South African farmers, whom he claims are subjects of “reverse racism.”
Enter the tech industry, whose belief that it’s superior to representative democracy isn’t anything new. Eugenics has always been a component of big tech ideology, and unsurprisingly, its cited goal of “human improvement” has only made this more explicit. The transhumanist movement in particular is rife with disablism, with disabled culture critic Anna Hamilton noting that under transhumanist frameworks “certain disabilities can, and should, be fixed for the good of humanity.” The biotech industry may be behind critical advancements, but these advancements have also come with complex implications: CRISPR, for example, makes it possible to edit the human genome, but has also allowed for tailoring embryos beyond targeting issues such as lethal fetal anomalies, and well into designer babies.
Silicon Valley is also obsessed with Great Replacement Theory—the idea that the “white race” is somehow under attack—a particular interest of the right. Musk is notably fixated on having as many (white) children as possible to do his part for the cause, seeding the world with what he describes as his superior genetics (often, allegedly, via IVF), with his daughter Vivian Wilson claiming that Musk and her mother Justine even engaged in prenatal sex selection. Fellow technocrat Mark Zuckerberg also longs for a “tribe” of children. The technofascism is on full display as a growing number of tech companies publicly move right, sometimes actively repudiating former progressive stances, while the billionaires who run them move to control the media and government.
Disabled people; Black, Indigenous people of color; low-income people; Jewish people; trans people; and others very familiar with navigating a hostile United States in undesirable bodies have been warning about this for a very long time. And while liberals and those on the left may think of eugenics as a rightwing ideology, it’s also baked into some of their attitudes, in part because eugenics is so core to U.S. culture. Recognizing that some lives are valued more than others, and the ways in which this interacts with liberal and left praxis, is challenging, especially with the external pressures of fascism and capitalism. But shying away from our own complicity in these systems only perpetuates them, and leaves some marginalized people feeling like perennially conditional members of these social movements and society at large.
This is on particular display for the disability community, which has repeatedly expressed concerns about being left out, and is tired of being told to wait its turn for liberation. This frustration is rooted in the community’s continued dehumanization, and a general sense that disabled lives are somehow more expendable than others, that disabled bodyminds do not have a role to play in the collective struggle. The long covid community, for example, as an active advocate for masking and other basic measures to prevent the spread of infectious disease, is increasingly shut out of theoretically left organizing spaces. Rhetoric in support of abortion raises the specter of a “disabled” fetus as grounds for ensuring continued access to reproductive health care. Conversations about medical aid in dying often revolve around the idea of being a “burden” on family members, or assumptions about quality of life that are rooted in solvable problems, for those with the money and the will to solve them. There is a sense that some disabled people are “unfit” for political struggle, and therefore “unfit” for existence—echoing the rejection of “the unfit” throughout the history of eugenics.
This isn’t just about disability, but about a larger lack of support for marginalized people in the midst of a project to eliminate them. This includes the sidelining of trans people at a time when they are under active assault; the prevalence of respectability politics for Black, Indigenous people of color; and the dehumanization of red states and their most marginalized residents—all of which highlight a willingness to leave some communities behind for factors entirely out of their control. The fundamental implication that life would be more convenient if these populations were to shut up, or simply not exist, is always bubbling below the surface.
Fighting eugenic influences requires challenging racism, disablism, and other discriminatory attitudes that are deeply woven into our society. It requires reckoning with the fact that class does not exist in a vacuum; and acknowledging that a person’s worth should not be dependent on their ability to “contribute to society” through capitalist exploitation. In many liberal and left spaces, this includes eliminating the anti-Blackness that pervades so many conversations, and learning the most basic foundations of disablism, starting with the continued treatment of disability as a medical issue rather than a social identity, and the assumption that disabled people want cures over full social inclusion. Antisemitism in liberal and left environments is also an enduring problem, as is resistance to conversations about how these spaces are falling short.
If it is possible to create some version of the United States that is not inherently morally bankrupt, fighting eugenics is essential, as is truly valuing marginalized people and making a robust case for their defense and inclusion at all costs. Change is possible. During the Occupy movement, for example, organizers fought—with varying degrees of success—for the application of gender and racial analysis to conversations about class. The Disability Working Group at the Democratic Socialists of America, and the increasing number of disability caucuses in other left and progressive organizations, shows that there is a growing understanding of disability’s role in the struggle. Solidarity is also on display in protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, itself a eugenic project, and one Trump very much supports.
Ultimately, eliminating eugenic beliefs from our shared society may require dismantling the United States itself. The first step in that project, however, must involve an engagement with the role of eugenics in political thought, and conscious efforts to acknowledge and make good on the harm done. In the midst of the current political climate, pulling at the threads of eugenics isn’t adjacent to fighting the political right: It’s essential. The nation was founded on a basis of white supremacy, which is now woven deeply through the nation’s legal and popular culture. Whether liberals and the left are willing to continue building momentum, let alone face up to the influence of eugenics on their political values, is an open question and one that needs to be decided quickly. Challenging eugenic influences on political ideology isn’t infighting or purity policing: It lies at the heart of an inclusive political movement that actually strives towards liberation for all.
[post_title] => The United States of Eugenics
[post_excerpt] => Under Trump, the ideology is on the rise. How do we finally dismantle it once and for all?
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The U.S. isn't the only country paying the price for his policy changes.
When Donald Trump returned to the presidency in 2025, one of his first actions was to reverse almost all of the climate commitments made by the Biden administration that preceded him. These actions included initiating a second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement—following his first withdrawal in 2017—and terminating multiple critical climate finance programs. The consequences of these decisions have already extended beyond U.S. borders, affecting vulnerable and developing nations while undermining international climate negotiations, scientific collaboration, and the urgently needed global transition to more sustainable economies.
Despite their minimal contributions to global emissions, developing countries disproportionately face the most severe climate impacts. They also depend on the countries that contribute most to emissions to pay their fair share when it comes to reducing them, of which the U.S. is one. Trump’s withdrawal of approximately $11 billion in annual U.S. climate finance, previously pledged by the Biden administration, has robbed these countries of vitally needed resources and is creating significant funding gaps for climate projects around the world, threatening regional and global climate objectives alike.
Unsurprisingly, this will affect developing nations the most, and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have become particularly vulnerable. Facing existential threats from sea level rise, intensifying hurricanes, and other climate-related disasters, these nations have been severely impacted by the Trump administration's withdrawal from the newly established Loss and Damage Fund, which Biden pledged $17.5 million to in 2022. Without adequate support for adaptation and recovery, island nations across the Caribbean and Pacific will be forced to confront heightened risks to critical infrastructure and economic stability; and ultimately, their very existence.
Another notable victim of Trump’s policy shift is the Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs)—multibillion-dollar agreements designed under the Biden administration to assist coal-dependent developing countries in transitioning to renewable energy. Trump's administration has abruptly canceled U.S. participation in JETPs with countries including Indonesia, South Africa, and Vietnam, creating uncertainty around the future of projects vital for reducing global carbon emissions and ensuring socially equitable transitions. Beyond their environmental importance, these partnerships were also structured to prioritize job creation and community support in regions historically dependent on fossil fuels.
Trump's policies have also significantly destabilized international climate negotiations at large. The second U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has diminished diplomatic trust in the country and emboldened other nations to reconsider their own commitments to climate policy. During COP29 in 2024, the absence of U.S. leadership allowed fossil fuel-dependent nations to gain greater influence yet again, further complicating efforts to meet and strengthen global emissions reduction targets. This retreat was particularly damaging to trust among developing nations, who view it as a profound injustice that wealthy countries would abandon their commitments, despite bearing disproportionate responsibility for causing climate change in the first place.
The disengagement from climate science under the Trump administration carries equally troubling implications. Notably, U.S. scientists were absent from recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) meetings, depriving global climate research of critical American expertise and undermining the strength and legitimacy of the meetings’ scientific assessments. The deliberate sidelining of science under Trump weakens global responses precisely when robust scientific consensus is urgently needed to drive ambitious climate action. When combined with Trump’s massive cuts to science funding and federal grants, things are likely to only get worse.
Domestically, Trump’s policies are clashing even with Republican-held states that benefited economically from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed by Biden. The IRA provided significant support for clean industries, driving growth in historically marginalized communities. As a result, states like Texas and Florida attracted billions in investment for renewable energy and green manufacturing, resulting in the creation of thousands of jobs. The reversal of these policies threatens not only climate progress but also denies the tangible economic and social benefits that the clean energy transition has delivered to these communities—and to the U.S.’s bottom line.
The administration, meanwhile, has doubled down on its aggressive expansion of oil and gas extraction on federal lands, yet another concerning development, particularly as Trump continues to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By fast-tracking drilling permits and relaxing environmental review processes, these policies prioritize short-term interests in fossil fuels over long-term climate stability. The increased extraction not only undermines global emissions reduction efforts but also exposes local communities—often lower-income and minority populations—to pollution risks and environmental degradation, further exacerbating climate injustice both domestically and abroad.
However, while the U.S. has faltered on its commitment to climate action, not every country has abandoned the fight—and the U.S.’s retreat has created space for alternative leadership to take its place in global climate governance. China, France, and the broader European Union have already moved to fill the vacuum, increasingly shaping international climate policy both at COP29 and beyond. This shift presents these nations with an opportunity to advance their strategic interests while growing their global influence, demonstrating the international community's continued commitment to climate action despite U.S. disengagement.
Still, as the global community races to limit global warming, the absence of American leadership and financial support is strongly felt. Trump's climate policy decisions transcend climate concerns, representing a serious regression in social and economic justice, particularly for the world's most vulnerable populations. Developing nations, especially the most climate-vulnerable ones, bear the disproportionate burden of these policy shifts as they struggle to adapt and transition in an unstable climate landscape.
These circumstances underscore a fundamental truth: Effective climate action requires not only environmental responsibility but also a commitment to global justice, equity, and shared prosperity. The current U.S. approach only undermines these principles at a time when solidarity and collective action are most urgently needed.
[post_title] => Who Trump's Climate Denialism is Really Hurting
[post_excerpt] => The U.S. isn't the only country paying the price for his policy changes.
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From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no."
I’ve been to at least 15 countries in the last two and a half years, some of them repeatedly, including frequent trips to Nigeria and the United Kingdom for personal and family commitments. But most of my travel has been while working on my forthcoming book, Foremothers, including visiting new countries for the first time, such as Brazil, or some, for the first time in a long time, like South Africa.
Foremothers, slated for release in the near future, has taken much more time and much more out of me than I thought it would when I first conceived of it over seven years ago. Surprisingly, this hasn’t just been because of the laborious effort of working on a cross-continental, multicultural, multigenerational, women-centered historical nonfiction book. It has also been due to the universal sentiment of doom and gloom I kept encountering while researching and writing it—raising my internal and intellectual alarm bells beyond the scope of the project. As such, in the wake of my travels, I’ve found myself repeatedly considering a new and troubling question: Is it just me, or is anyone, anywhere having a good time?
Of course, the very premise of this good time and its practice may not even be universally defined. What constitutes a good time in Dakar, Senegal may not be the same as in Lagos, Portugal. But even if the specifics of a good time and good times are relative, we can all agree—as difficult as it may be for us to do, given our abundant disagreements—that having a good time on a broader scale must consist of some fundamentals. For any country or society or group of people anywhere to claim it, for example, there must be established, uncontestable liberties that its people, irrespective of their differences, enjoy collectively. Healthy, nourishing, affordable food must be available to its inhabitants. Their most humble abodes, whatever they look like, ought to be functional and secure to the environment they live in. Basically, there should be basic human rights, and then some, for all.And even though, across communities and nations, these good time aims may not previously have been achieved, this did not change its pursuit for and by subsequent generations. It seems, however, this is no longer the case.
To the pessimists and realists, whose differences have become the same, these so-called “good times” have always been little more than a post-World War II mirage, chased by the utopic dreamers who don’t understand the real world and how it works. To others, the vision has long lost its luster because too many of us are unwilling to pay the price it would take to accomplish it, from living with less, to partaking in simultaneous revolutions more. This view, most embodied by the old-school retired optimists, has also found favor with the apolitical and the nihilistic, who mimic each other so closely they can hardly be told apart. But even for the optimists still-in-residence, and indeed those rare fools who dare to be counted and characterized as the hopeful, the dream of a good time appears increasingly illusive, increasingly difficult to hold onto. This, I think, has been the greatest throughline of my travels, and perhaps the most worrying, too—a collective loss of hope among everyone, but especially amongst the hopeful.
The reasons why appear obvious enough. COVID and its poor handling by political and public health institutions alike around the globe. The economic frustrations stemming from a widespread rise in cost of living and inflation, and the ebbs in job opportunity and security; everywhere, the rich have got richer, and the poor have got poorer, with fewer people able to make it to, and stay within, the in-between. Climate change is unequivocally upon us and we are living through its effects, wondering with each unprecedented event or catastrophic change to a people’s way of life, the longevity of our human existence on Earth. We have become witnesses to, if not reluctant consumers of, the daily accounts of the violence of apartheid, war, and the unjust global nation-state dynamics respective to Palestine-Israel, to Sudan, and elsewhere, mainly in the Global South—even as the most hopeful among us have protested and petitioned continuously in the face of ever-creeping sentiments of powerlessness.
All this has also come as trust in news media everywhere, but especially in the United States’ conglomerates, remains at record lows, and in the midst of a technological insurgency of misinformation and disinformation where even the media literate are as liable to conspiracies as they are to good-faith misinterpretations. Add to that a broken faith in political systems that no longer appear built for the world we live in today, tightly tethered to a system that continues to serve the most materially advantaged. But even more alarming still, is the broken trust permeating through the people we live near to and alongside, as a contagion of loneliness sweeps through the world, posing as much threat to our species’ health and well-being as future pandemics inevitably will—all of which is, in part, an outcome of a rise of individualism around the world.
This incomplete list of gloom and doom sounds bleak, because it is. Yet much of what has even been listed has always been true of our collective human experiences, in eras long past that in important ways were objectively worse than this one. What we are experiencing now, then, is just the latest iteration of the human condition, the sufferings and the sufferers altering every few hundred years or so. But this reality also stands in contrast with the objective progression of this time—in science, in medicine, in technology, in faith; in short, in all that we know makes for a good life, and a good time, for the many. In the context of our human history, perhaps these progressions frustrate us all the more because in spite of them, the human condition has not been permanently altered. But maybe the biggest difference between the eras of yesteryear and today, is that so many of the people I have encountered in my travels, whatever their politics and whatever our disagreements, do not believe that those who come after them will enjoy a better future.
From what I’ve observed during my travels, it’s not difficult to see why. In Nigeria, the country of my birth, years of unfettered greed and complacency by politicians and the rise of high-influence people who prop up ethnocentrism and religious bigotry, in tandem with a return to the old-school tricks of its former dictatorship era, including threats of violence and free speech suppression, have led to a national mood of despondency for an otherwise almost hazardously hopeful people—a people I ordinarily advise to be more skeptical. This has dashed the reveries of my elders, peers, and juniors, some of whom returned home at the turn of the late aughts, in the midst of a prodigious cultural boom, to partake in a contemporary attempt of nation-building when the country looked on the ascent economically. Today, Nigeria is experiencing what has been called its worst economic crisis in a generation, and the high cost of basic needs has resulted in over 30 million people facing food insecurity in 2025.
In South Africa, high unemployment and depletion in the quality of public services have resulted in the economic disempowerment of everyday citizens, who blame migrants with its cause, stoking the country’s African-centric xenophobia. All of this has been laid at the feet of its African National Congress (ANC) party, the former heroes of the apartheid struggle who lost their 20 years of political dominance in 2024. Following South Africa’s elections last May, the ANC was all but forced to form a political coalition with the Democratic Alliance (DA) party, the latter of which a journalist friend of mine referred to as “the residual party of white privilege.”
But even the more hopeful chances we might have anticipated at achieving a “good time” have struggled to achieve it. This includes Brazil, a place where the people seem to most demonstrate the desire for a good time—partly because that Brazilian label runs deep in the national fabric, and partly as a result of their 2022 election in which leftist candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva replaced the authoritarian-like Jair Bolsonaro. In the weeks after Lula was sworn in, I attended carnival in both Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, documenting the joyous tradition and its history, and was told by many of the relief they felt at Lula’s return, his third time at the helm of the nation. Yet Bolsonaro’s continued influence prevails to the point of his own possible comeback, even despite a recent police report of his attempt at a failed coup in those same 2022 elections.
Meanwhile, as in much of the West, right-wing extremists in Portugal gained support via parliamentary representation during its general elections in March last year, and the once open, migrant-friendly policies of the country that drove its digital nomad explosion are now set to be restricted. In the UK, the self-inflicted Brexit wound has come to fester in the last few years following its summer 2016 vote. Compounded with the COVID years, it has left the country’s economy smaller, and exacerbated its cost of living crisis; any night out in London will confirm a decimated scene, unveiling how the once Swinging City hardly deserves to be mentioned among its global equivalents anymore. In the United States, where I have lived for much of my adult life, the early days of a second Trump presidency have already brought about a sense of impending chaos and doom throughout structures and institutions, political, cultural, and economic, after his landslide victory in November. Much ink will continue to be spilled as to how and why he was reelected at all, but the fears of the authoritarianism that accompany Trump’s presence long preceded his first administration, and will supersede the current one. It’s unclear, too, if the coalitions that oppose his presidency even have the wherewithal to form and execute an integrated vision that will safeguard the communities they claim to defend, not only against Trump’s actions, but for the good of the people, regardless of who sits in The White House.
Of course, some ordinary people—and not those who actually benefit from these global state of affairs—have boasted of victory in all of these instances. Their overall political participation (and not just their electoral one), or lack thereof, stems from a plethora of grievances and discontent—many real, some imagined—leading to a need to believe that their side will at least see gains, or more honestly, not suffer quite as much as the “losers.” This of course is an effective political strategy set up by those who truly benefit—convincing their base that despite the lack of evidence that surrounds them, they have been victorious. But a cursory examination of the whole, along with the many candid if unsuspecting admissions people have shared with me during my travels—including from those claiming electoral victory—nonetheless reveals that none, regardless of which political side they may be on, believe that their life will marginally improve after an election. The winning side confesses deep-seated dejections as much as the imagined losing side, in sometimes unspoken but always communicated anxieties that the good times are no longer within one’s reach, nor within one’s children’s reach, if they ever even were.
The privilege of observing this phenomenon these last few years has been witnessing how its cultural ramifications have grown alongside its political ones. This is obvious in the rise of the rhetoric and content of trad wives and the manosphere, indicating a desire to suppress women’s rights and keep men in less empowered, less diverse visions of masculinity. Oppression begets repression to more than its victims, and because it does, a good time becomes impossible for all, oppressor and oppressed alike. Relatedly, another cultural consequence can be seen in the choice—when it is a choice—to delay or wholly repudiate parenthood, not only because of the real expenses associated with it, but because so many have decided they would rather deny themselves the experience than foist the offerings of this dystopia we are headed towards onto their potential offspring. But less obvious manifestations can also be seen in how so much of the latest sociotechnological innovations are not improving our material lives but instead inviting us to escape into virtual apathy and antipathy. It struck me continuously throughout my travels how much even when around others, people expressed a desire to abscond into their digital lives, most often to nurse parasocial relationships where they imagined their counterparts as more fulfilled than them, counterparts who they seem to have outsourced their hopes and dreams to. Witnessing all this and more, and as someone who ordinarily accepts that little is new under the sun—seasons of plenty and joy live alongside seasons of paucity and pain as a fact of life, and we are called to persist in all of them—I, who considers myself among the hopeful, began to wonder if hope here is even the answer. Moreover, what does hope even look like under such universal malaise?
The truth is I don’t have a unanimous solution, or at least, not yet. Certainly, building coalition across issues in ways that acknowledge our political and social differences has been advocated for by those more knowledgeable than I, as have mutual aid collectives in our communities by movement leaders at the frontlines of our despair. There are guides to survival that have been written in the form of literature, such as Octavia Butler’s Parables, or nonfiction directives we can follow to address the underlying litany of systemic problems we face, offered in books like David Graber’s The Utopia of Rules. But because of the work I do as a journalist and the work I have been doing as a forthcoming author, and because of who I am—a person whose imagination is wired to pursue history in order to realize the future—I have found myself meditating on not only the stories of significant women of the past that I’ve collected for Foremothers, but on those of my own foreparents, too.
In the past year especially, I have contemplated not infrequently the lives of my foreparents, including those I never met and those that in my own lifetime transitioned beyond the physical realm. I have thought about the conditions they endured—from illness to war to colonization to migrations, new and old. And I have thought about the fears they overcame, the joys they found, and the unwavering perseverance they had to continue on; at least in part, for the sake of descendants they would never meet. And they did this not always because they believed they could promise their descendants a good life, but because they believed that whatever progress they made—even the most minute—should never see its end when their own lives ended on this Earth, but instead, be built upon with each generation that followed. Their responsibility to those who they could not know would come after them, was, above all else, a refusal to succumb to whatever hopelessness their circumstances presented, and instead a choice to hold onto an imagination that made no promises of what was to come, but only of what is possible.
For what it’s worth, although I didn’t hear this same sentiment expressed in great quantities throughout my travels, the debt of continuing to carry as a testament to one’s forebearers was the singular throughline even the most faintly hopeful people managed to convey. From a source in Luanda, Angola who told me how our dues to our ancestors is what can propel us forward in times of difficulty, to colleagues I encountered in Nairobi, Kenya who proposed that in order to keep moving forward, we must look continually to all those who have survived before us.
All the same, I cannot promise myself a good time knowing what I have seen these last few years and even prior to them, much less can I promise a good time to anybody who will come after me. I also cannot promise relief will come anywhere, because for most of us, even those of us who might have the means and privilege of movement, there is nowhere to run to, to escape this intercontinental anguish. But alongside the pragmatism of collective coalitions in our communities, small and big, that we must adopt in order to persist, we owe it to the foreparents gone and the foreparents still to come to never let our imagination yield to believing that both good and better times are not possible. Our collective survival depends on it.
[post_title] => Is Anyone, Anywhere Having a Good Time?
[post_excerpt] => From my recent travels, the answer seems to be "no."
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To believe things can get better, we must first accept they can get worse.
I find Trump so repulsive that I wasn't willing to engage with the reality of his second term until he won and I had no choice. In the weeks following, I braced myself for Christo-fascism, knowing every day he wasn’t president was a day to cherish. I told anyone who would listen to prepare for the worst.
In the days since he was sworn in, I’ve been frustrated but not surprised that people still don't get it. “Is he really a fascist?" "Was that really a Nazi salute?" "Is this really going to be thatbad?" Girl, yes. In fact, it’s probably going to be worse than most can imagine, considering it was a massive failure of imagination that led us here in the first place: American optimism has done us no favors this time around, and now we're all paying the price.
Millions failed to imagine that fascism really was popular enough to get Trump reelected. They failed to imagine that the outlandishly evil Project 2025 could really be the GOP manifesto, and clung to the obvious lies and denials of its authors (who are now overwhelmingly employed by the White House). Immigrants who fled failed states and autocracies only to vote for Trump failed to imagine this country having the exact same problems as the ones they’d left. It was a collective failure of imagination that the Supreme Court would actively cover for a coup, let alone that they’d reward the man who incited it with immunity. Personally, I failed to imagine that losing reproductive rights would have so little impact on white women's presidential votes; and these same women who chose to split their tickets failed to imagine state abortion protections could be undone by a national ban.
Americans have an escalating autocracy problem, but underlying that is an emotional and psychological problem. At every turn, we get tripped up by reality, especially around humanity's capacity for evil at scale, not to mention imperial decline. Putting these criminals in charge has likely poisoned the United States for generations. Anyone who thinks it will be over in four years is deluding themselves. But few want to wrap their heads around the fact that most checks on executive power are already gone. No one wants to imagine themselves being targeted until it's too late. We don’t want to believe that things can, and will, get worse. But our failures of imagination won't stop the bad things from happening. They’ll just ensure we won’t be prepared to handle them—which is exactly how we’ve ended up here.
There's a Russian proverb, "Когда я думала, что достигла дна, снизу постучали." "Just when I thought I'd hit rock bottom, someone knocked from below."
These last few weeks, I've been thinking a lot about Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, and about people's readiness to accept lies at face value when the truth is too painful. It's the corollary of our failure to imagine atrocities before they happen. When Trump was elected the first time around, I wrote a piece on what the Nazis were thinking when they committed genocide—a warning on how dehumanization and propaganda create the conditions for mass murder. I compared the interviews a Jewish US Army psychiatrist did with the Nuremberg defendants to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, which argued that an autocratic cult of personality can lead mild-mannered people to abdicate their own moral compass and commit atrocities in the name of Dear Leader. Since then, the Eichmann tapes have surfaced—a 1957 recording of an interview Eichmann did in Buenos Aires, in which he admitted to a fellow Nazi that of course they knew they were murdering all those Jews, and he'd have been happy had they completed the job. Countless academics and practitioners, myself included, have spent decades debating the banality of evil and individual agency: whether people intentionally commit mass murder or are "just following orders." Fields have developed, careers have been made, and centers have been built around the question of whether perpetrators are cynics or true believers—when all this time Eichmann was just a fucking liar.
The day after Trump won last November, when Steve Bannon slithered out of some hole to rub Project 2025 in our faces, I thought: This is the Eichmann tapes all over again. The inauguration, and what has followed, has done little to change my mind. Take Elon's Nazi salute, which he performed (twice) at a fascist inauguration bought with his fascist money. The discourse and debate and scrambling that has followed has been nothing short of infuriating: Is the apartheid oligarch who runs a Nazi-friendly site, calls himself Kekius Maximus, promotes eugenics and the Great Replacement Theory, and bought the US presidency while campaigning for the German far-right a Nazi, or is it autism?
People are clinging to the fact that Musk is a troll, as if pushing boundaries then retreating isn't part of the fascist playbook. Trolling doesn't diminish his responsibility for his behavior, lessen the salute's impact, or alter the context in which he performed it. People similarly brushed off Trump's insistence that Haitians are eating pets as a joke, sharing cat memes that will haunt them when he ends Temporary Protected Status and deports their neighbors.
Orwell had words for the West's failure to imagine autocracy: "If you have grown up in that sort of [liberal] atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic regime is like….Such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism." Orwell was writing here about Western leftists' apologism for Stalin (also embarrassingly still a thing in some circles), but the reasoning still applies.
This inability to imagine an end to America as we know it was more understandable during Trump's first round, though that still required ignoring our long history of white supremacy and corruption. At this point, the failure to acknowledge that far-right extremists are in charge of all three branches of government feels willful. The cognitive dissonance when a rich white man does a bad thing is astounding, no matter how many flagrant crimes he's committed in the past, how many people he's violated. Suddenly everyone's parsing intent like they're guest judges on Law and Order.
Is evil really banal? Or are we simply unable to process the insidious truth that extreme abuses of power are so common? Frequency and severity are not the same thing. I've been writing for over eight years now about the delusions of exceptionalism, and how the failure to imagine America's decline ensures it. I’ve also written at length about how abuse distorts reality, and how state abuses mirror interpersonal abuse. As a survivor of childhood narcissistic abuse, I watched otherwise decent adults ignore or make excuses for monstrous behavior they personally witnessed, because taking a stand would cost them too much, or at least more than throwing me under the bus might keep them up at night. I don't have to imagine the depths people will reach to avoid what's right in front of their eyes, because I've lived it. Abuse thrives where reality is too painful to digest, when people get exhausted, look away, give up, blame the victims, apologize for power and patriarchy, follow charlatans, accommodate in advance. Abuse leads us to blame the people or institutions who failed to keep us safe, even when they aren't the ones hurting us. Expected violence is perversely easier to accept than failed promises. And all of us are tired of being let down.
Unsurprisingly, lost in all the questions about why the Democrats have lost the information war, or why mainstream media keeps sane-washing a decompensating narcissist, is the fact that it's safer to attack Democrats for the things they didn't do than to pick a fight with Trump over the things he's done and is doing. To be clear, Democrats have absolutely betrayed voters' trust by campaigning on Republicans wanting to end democracy, and then caving to collegiality. How is it that in the past few days only AOC seems appropriately angry, and brave enough to show it? Meanwhile legacy media is on the path to both-sides-ing themselves into extinction, and wondering why they’ve lost everyone's trust. But whether or not their actions are motivated by corruption or naivete is, again, besides the point. Focusing on unprovable intent—what's in people's hearts and minds, whether bones are racist—is safer than confronting what's observable: that the federal government and civil rights are being dismantled before our eyes. Principles come at a cost, and most Americans, including Democratic leadership, seemingly do not want to pay. Bargaining to avoid a fight while someone is already beating you is the ultimate failure of imagination.
Scared people say and do dumb things, and many of us are terrified. But fascism feeds on fear, and it’s only through brave, principled opposition that we can begin to overcome these seemingly impossible circumstances. I founded The Conversationalist to combat the nihilism and despair that oligarchs and autocrats depend on, in the hopes that we'd stop the cancer from metastasizing. Only now that it's spread through the entire body politic do we get dire warnings from President Biden on his way out the door about the dangers of oligarchy and disinformation. Now that autocracy is entrenched, and we're deep into the destruction of democracy and rule of law, there are finally articles in the mainstream arguing what I was called hysterical for saying in 2016. Better late than never, but hardly a model of courage.
To be fair, denial is deeply human. Most of us crave a stable life that allows us to follow our dreams and our loved ones to thrive. Puncturing those dreams with the ugly reality of autocracy is a hard sell to those privileged enough to avoid it. But as American institutions collapse around us, those dreams move further and further away. Americans are so accustomed to the costs of our colossally bad ballot box decisions being born by voiceless others elsewhere, that we’ve kneecapped ourselves and expected it not to hurt. But if there’s one message I wish everyone would hear, it’s that this round is not going to be like the last one, and may last way longer, too.
A lot of the election autopsies have chosen to pit economic concerns as separate from the transphobia, misogyny, and xenophobia that Republicans ran on, which is odd considering how fascism works. In less than a week, we’ve already seen this play out via a blitz of ChatGPT-authored executive orders stopping refugee entry, attempting to end birthright citizenship, denying trans people's existence, and firing any federal employee who was part of a DEI program (including a snitch hotline for people who want to denounce their colleagues of color). It was a banner week for far-right terrorists with pardons for January 6 insurrectionists and anti-abortion extremists. Trump has threatened to invade Canada, and wants to reinstitute tariffs. He's withdrawing from climate treaties, ending FEMA, and withholding aid for California wildfires unless they cave to Republicans.
Taking hostages is par for the course: The message Trump was selling wasn’t economic prosperity for all, but economic prosperity for his supporters, at the expense of the rest. Fascism is all about prosperity through persecution. Help us get rid of the bad, undeserving folks, and there will be more left for you. No, not every Trump voter is chomping at the bit to deport 20 million people. Some just wanted to stick it to the incumbent administration, and others weren't paying much attention either way. Their intentions are irrelevant, however, because they gave the electorate's power away, and effectively voted for Americans to not freely and fairly vote again.
When you replace your civil servants and judiciary with loyalist hacks, and corrupt the processes that keep them in check, institutions do not hold. And yet most narratives still talk about future elections as if they’ll be recognizable. The US has devolved into what political scientists call competitive authoritarianism or electoral autocracy, a hybrid system that maintains the veneer of elections with rigged outcomes for the ruling party. A friend described our current state as Schroedinger's democracy: both here and not. Trump's primary focus in office will be making sure he never leaves again.
Unfortunately, Trump's not starting from scratch here, and he's got a lot of help. Between his first term; the coup; the captured Supreme Court that rejected the plain language of the 14th amendment to let him run for office again, and gave him immunity while president; the transnational cabal of autocrats, oligarchs, white supremacists, and religious fundamentalists rooting for him while actively plotting our dystopian future; and the Democrats' failure to mount proper opposition at any point along the way—the frog has already boiled several times over. Already there are Republican proposals to amend the Constitution and give him a third term. In this election alone, the GOP (with foreign assistance) suppressed the vote with legislation, lawsuits, Russian bomb threats, and other acts of violence, while billionaire oligarchs amplified extremist propaganda from captured media outlets and platforms. Rather than pay the consequences for these actions, all of them got to celebrate at the White House this week.
Before we become too cynical, it's important to remember: Just because Trump is determined to gut the country and die in office doesn't mean he'll succeed—electoral autocracies are fragile and we don't have to make it easy for him. He lacks the resources and the competence to accomplish all his goals. But picking a fight with a bully like Trump could lead to being targeted by him. He's coming for the DOJ, the civil service, the military, private business, late night TV hosts—his goal is to make it illegal to oppose him and require everyone to beg for his favor.
Cronyism and kleptocracy aren't new to this country. Historical examples include the robber barons and the Jim Crow South. In our current day, we have no safety net, healthcare is a scam, and guns are everywhere. And still, we have a lot to lose. People think eggs were expensive before. Just wait until they're double the price, half as available, and ten times more likely to poison you with avian flu. We're going to miss career civil servants, food safety, consumer protections, postal service, air and water quality, public health, public education, libraries, a free press, a depoliticized military, rule of law, and free and fair elections when they're gone. We're going to miss support for climate science, contraceptives, and measles vaccines. We're going to miss the immigrants who are the backbone of our economy and our culture. We're especially going to miss being able to remove the politicians responsible for predatory policies. A lot of Trump voters depend on Medicare and Social Security. Congrats, you’ve played yourself. It's not that we didn't have serious problems before. It's that in a year from now, we're going to be nostalgic for them. We're going to miss the good government we took for granted once it's gone.
Which isn't to say we should give up—quite the opposite. If there was ever a time to fight for our future, our values, and our communities—this is it. All is not lost. A failure to imagine the problem implies a failure to imagine its solution, as well. In fact, we must imagine how bad things can get in order to plan and prepare to overcome them. It isn’t too late—is never too late—to turn things around. There are millions of people around the globe that have fought fascism and won. We can learn from them, and from our past. Our history isn't just atrocities. We have so many role models, as well; people who fought under even worse circumstances for this country to be a better version of itself. We don’t have to wait for the next horror to happen before we choose to believe it’s possible to do the same.
[post_title] => A (State) Failure of Imagination
[post_excerpt] => To believe things can get better, we must first accept they can get worse.
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Last year was considered one of the biggest election years in history. Here's a quick overview of some of its most influential results.
In 2024, it was estimated that half of the world’s population would have the chance to participate in what observers called “the biggest election year in history,” with over 60 countries holding national elections throughout the year. Now, in 2025, people around the world may begin to experience the consequences.
Despite the varied histories and contemporary politics across countries and regions, a number of noticeable themes were evident in last year’s elections. The biggest one being that, from Portugal to Indonesia, right-wing parties were successful at the polls. This comes as young populations have become more electorally influential: In Iran, 60% of the population is under 30 years old and over 60% of people in Botswana and South Africa are younger than 35. Meanwhile, across the various elections that took place, only five women were elected heads of government, and globally, a mere 27% of parliament members are women. Opposition parties also gained considerable success, most notably in Senegal, South Korea, and Ghana.
Over the next few years, the aftermath of these outcomes will reverberate throughout their respective nations and throughout all of us together, as a global community. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of some of 2024’s most consequential elections, and where to pay attention in 2025.
Senegal
In late March, opposition candidates Bassirou Diomaye Faye and Ousmane Sonko were elected president and vice president, respectively. Faye, who was relatively unknown before the election, was endorsed by Sonko, who had been arrested in 2023 in what some supporters and international observers alike determined was “political prosecution.” Both Sonko and Faye were in jail until just before the election. The election was originally slated to take place in February, but was postponed by then-president Macky Sall, leading to protests around the country. Faye’s victory was celebrated as a potential shift away from Western dependence; one proposal of his was to create a currency that is independent from the Euro, unlike the West African CFA Franc, which is what the country currently uses. At 44, Faye is also currently Africa’s youngest president.
Indonesia
Prabowo Subianto and Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of former Indonesian president Joko Widodo, announced victory in February. Subianto, 72, was the former Indonesian Defense Minister and there were concerns of Subianto’s human rights record from when he was in the military; activists allege that he was involved in various abuses, which led to him being banned from the United States and Australia until 2020. It was Subianto’s third time running for president in the “world’s third-largest democracy.”
Russia
Vladimir Putin, who has been president since 2012 but involved in Russian politics as either president or prime minister since 1999, was re-elected in March in what the European Parliament described as a “carefully staged legitimisation ritual.” Alex Navalny, one of Putin’s most prominent critics, also died in prison the month prior. Russia’s Central Election Commission claimed that Putin secured over 87% of the vote, but a watchdog group noted that “voter intimidation” occurred, which likely affected the integrity of the votes. Putin’s win means that he will be in power until at least 2030.
Iran
Elections were held in the Western Asian country around 6 weeks after the sudden death of then-president Ebrahim Raisi. Two rounds of elections were held and reformist Masoud Pezeshkian won. The race, in which less than half of the eligible population voted, was described as a “silent protest” of dissatisfaction with previous regimes. Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon, will have to balance reformist politics with Iranians’ frustration at conservative policies. Notably, in Iran, the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, actually holds the highest title in the nation and the president ultimately reports to him, which may limit what Pezeshkian can actually achieve.
Venezuela
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s incumbent president since 2013, once again won last July’s election. His main opponent, Maria Corina Machado, was banned by the country’s Supreme Court from running against Maduro due to alleged “financial irregularities that occurred when she was a national legislator,” which was considered a politically motivated move as Machado was a popular opposition candidate. Venezuela’s elections have been widely criticized by various countries, including the United States and Denmark, as “fraudulent.” According to the US, Edmundo González, another candidate who ran, should have been considered the winner. But González fled to Spain in September 2024, saying he was forced to recognize Maduro’s win before being allowed to leave. This is not the first time Maduro has claimed victory in a disputed election; he also did so in 2013 and 2018. Maduro remains a controversial figure, his government having led the country while it continues to experience severe inflation and inflicts human rights abuses, including the torture of political critics.
Ghana
In early December, citizens of Ghana cast their votes, and opposition candidate John Mahama won against incumbent vice president Mahamadu Bawumiua in “the biggest margin of victory in the country for 24 years.” Mahama, who had previously been Ghana’s president from 2012 to 2017, ran with Jane Naana Opoku Agyemang, who became the nation’s first female vice president. Parliamentary elections also took place, and all 276 seats were up for election. In addition to Maham’s prior term as president, he has also occupied a number of other roles, including “MP, deputy minister, minister” and “vice-president.” While running, Mahama pledged to transform the cocoa industry.
Last July’s general election marked a rare swing to the left last year, with the Labour party winning a majority for the first time in over a decade, and its leader, Keir Starmer, elected Prime Minister. The Labour party gained 211 seats for a total of 412 out of 650 total seats in Parliament, in contrast to the Conservative party’s 251-seat loss. This win has been aptly described as a “landslide victory.”
Namibia
In November, the southwest African nation elected its first female president. However, Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah’s victory has been called into question by one of her opponents, Panduleni Itula. Nandi-Ndaitwah has a long history of involvement in Namibian politics; she was also once in exile as a result of her work with South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), which was once a liberation movement and is currently a political party. SWAPO has been Namibia’s ruling political party since 1990, when it gained independence from South Africa, but the most recent election reflected its lowest levels of support so far.
El Salvador
Nayib Bukele declared victory in the El Salvadoran presidential election last February. The self-described “coolest dictator in the world” has been head of the Central American country since 2019 and was previously mayor of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. He has been responsible for jailing over 70,000 people in El Salvador in order to “fight organized crime,” which has made him “popular” across the country, but human rights groups have raised concerns over potential violations. Bukele’s New Ideas party won 54 out of 60 National Assembly seats. Of his win, Bukele said, “El Salvador has broken all the records of all democracies in the entire history of the world.”
Tunisia
Kais Saied was declared the winner of the North African country’s October presidential race, but the election has been described as “Tunisia’s first undemocratic presidential election in almost fourteen years.” Saied, who has been head of state since 2019, won more than 90% of votes. However, fewer than 30% of voters cast their ballots, representing a general lack of enthusiasm among Tunisians who were eligible to vote.
South Korea
The opposition party won 175 out of 300 parliamentary seats in South Korea’s April 2024 general elections. This was a reflection of South Koreans’ dislike of incumbent President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has been in office since 2022. In December, Yoon declared martial law, but it was reversed a few hours later after parliament opposed it. Then, a few days later, an impeachment attempt was blocked, but a later effort was successful. The government has been thrown into chaos since, and a few days ago, Yoon was arrested.
Botswana
October’s general election saw the end of the Botswana Democratic Party’s (BDP) rule after almost 60 years. The BDP, which had been in power since the country’s 1966 independence, lost to the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC). “Recent poor economic growth and high unemployment” were among some of the factors that affected the BDP’s loss of power. Duma Boko, the head of the UDC, replaced BDP’s Mokgweetsi Masisi as president. BDP is a center-left party, which may reflect Botswana’s youth leaning left, unlike elsewhere.
South Africa
South Africa’s late-May legislative elections marked a shift in the nation’s political history. The African National Congress (ANC) party, formed from a “liberation movement" for Black South Africans, and which had been in power since the country ended apartheid, lost its majority. The ANC, once led by Nelson Mandela, still has a plurality of seats, meaning it has more seats than the other parties, but it no longer has more than half the seats. The ANC and “centre-right party,” the Democratic Alliance (DA), formed a coalition in June, which gave incumbent Cyril Ramaphosa enough votes to remain president. The DA and ANC “have been rivals for decades,” and this coalition reflected a change in how the ANC had to operate in order to remain in power. The ANC’s loss of majority reflected many South Africans’ frustration with “the state of the country, and a desire for change.”
[post_title] => The Global Elections That Led Us to 2025
[post_excerpt] => A quick overview of some of the most influential elections of last year.
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There was a time when people would ask, "Do Israelis and Palestinians hate each other?" and I would say "no." Then, the walls came up. Now, that time is increasingly hard to imagine, even in memory.
As a Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank and would frequently return to visit, I vividly recall the first time I witnessed the walls rising in the early 2000s along a road to Ramallah, a city in the occupied West Bank near Jerusalem. I thought: Why did the Israelis do this? Why has it been erected with such disregard for the communities living behind it? I understood, even then, that this division would only tear neighbors apart, and more alarmingly, further separate "enemies" from one another.
In just a few years, the walls would stretch over 400 miles, dividing the occupied Palestinian territories from Israel. These walls and fences, which Israelis called the separation barrier, would not just be physical barriers, but the hardening and entrenchments of dueling positions in this conflict. They still stand today: In some stretches, the walls are made of concrete and 30 feet high.
What Palestinians call Al Jidar—Arabic for "the Wall," connoting "the Apartheid Wall"—was, according to Israelis, mainly erected to prevent suicide bombings and violent attacks, which were accelerating at a rate they alleged left them with very few options. In 2002, during its construction, Human Rights Watch reported that "more than 415 Israeli and other civilians have been killed, and more than two thousand injured, as a result of attacks by armed Palestinians between September 30, 2000 and August 31, 2002,” with most of the harm “caused by so-called suicide bombings.”
But while I could understand the horror and the pain and the fear these attacks had caused, I could never understand how the wall was the solution.
A child of the occupation
As a child, I discovered a fear that would forever shape my understanding of the military occupation.
I have seen soldiers for longer than I can remember, but through childhood eyes, they’d always seemed friendly. One night, however, that changed.
I was maybe 5 or 6 years old when I demanded that I be allowed to mop the store floor in my small town in the West Bank. It was a sign of growing up, and behaving as I saw the adults around me do—working, tidying, driving, living. While I was mopping, a group of soldiers came into the store to buy some things. I remember being unable to control the joy I felt, performing this adult chore, while trying to control the mop, which was three times my size. I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings, until I accidentally hit one of the soldiers with the mop’s handle.
When I looked up, I saw something I’d never seen before—the soldier's hand on the trigger of a very long weapon and, oddly, his bared teeth. I still remember these teeth without a face, and how they scared me as much as the trigger on his weapon. I knew I’d made a mistake—and that night, I learned how easily a mistake could cost me my life.
I’d finally met my "master," and understood the divide between "us" and "them."
The "solution" that created the "monsters"
After the wall, this divide grew bigger. For Palestinians, the wall separated us from life. It turned our cities and towns into cages, where the sky above us was the only place outside that felt within reach.
Solutions to this conflict were never going to be easy, if ever achieved. Yet the wall allowed both Israel and the international community to sidestep its complexity, disregarding the future of both Palestinians and Israelis alike. It decreased all human interaction with the “other side,” regardless of which side of the wall you stood. It was not a solution at all, but the deference or maybe even the ignorance of one. It was also a boiling pot: I say this because I saw it, and I felt it, and I lived it.
The wall disconnected me from both friends and "enemies," but in time, I was no longer interested in seeing either. It isolated all of us and confined us to our own causes and anger, not caring for how the "other" felt. After all, I could only feel my anger when standing at a checkpoint. I could only feel my hatred when looking at the wall in front of me. I could only feel my outrage that my freedom to move was restricted by a permit, which I was required to obtain whenever I wished to leave, and that it was something I needed to be deemed “acceptable” to acquire.
For some Palestinians, receiving this permit may have brought joy, because they felt like the "lucky" ones. But for me, I often felt better just going about my life, refusing to get one, because living inside the wall felt more dignified than seeking permission to leave it.
I did not always prioritize my dignity in this conflict. I looked for friendships and ways to enjoy life despite the violence and the vitriol that surrounded me. But eventually, all these constant humiliations chipped away at me. Chipped away at the hope and joys I sought—all the things available to most human beings, but not to me. It offered me no choice but to instead look at what I did not have: my freedom, my rights, even my will to love, something I cannot have when I am stripped every day of everything that is mine.
The wall did this. And I wondered as I wonder now, when people are unable to meet freely, is our only alternative more war and more killing?
Before the wall
There was a time when American-Palestinians from the West Bank could drive what we called a "yellow tag" car, which felt like the height of "privilege," because it meant you could drive freely in the West Bank and Israel. At the time, if you had one of these cars, it felt as if all you had to do was drive by the checkpoint and get waived through, most times without your ID even being checked. (Over the years—just like the ever-changing restrictions—civilian cars with a Palestinian tag couldn’t enter Israel and most parts of Jerusalem. Those rules continue to change even now, depending on the political climate.)
I drove a car like this once to go and meet with a friend for a swim in Tiberias, an Israeli town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Just writing this seems absurd in the year 2024. But it did happen often once, and not just for me, but for others, as well—although for Palestinians with limited "privilege" today who have an Israeli residence or hold an Israeli passport, it can still be a daily occurrence should they wish, because those people are considered "outside" the wall.
When driving back from my trip, I had to pass another checkpoint when leaving Tiberias. While I have an American passport, I also hold a West Bank ID, which placed restrictions on what car I could drive at the time. The restrictions had recently become stricter, and technically, I was not allowed to drive the "yellow tag" car I was driving.
I was nervous, but as I passed the checkpoint, the soldiers mistook me for Israeli. They asked me a question in Hebrew that I did not fully understand, and I said "yes." I thought they were asking if I was from Jerusalem, which would have allowed me to drive that car, and hoping they’d let me pass, I lied.
Seconds later, three soldiers entered my vehicle. Afraid of being caught violating the law, I just smiled and started driving. I soon realized that the soldiers wanted to hitch a ride to Jerusalem, something that might have allowed me to get away with my transgression, except I wasn’t going to Jerusalem, but home to a village in the West Bank. Not knowing what to say or do, I kept driving.
Amidst my panic driving along the winding road that night, one of the soldiers asked, "You came from America?" I said that I had. Then, he asked, "How come your parents didn’t teach you Hebrew?"
I knew this was the moment I should tell them I am Palestinian, so I replied, "Because my parents taught me Arabic."
After, it felt as if the world stopped turning and it was just me and the soldiers in the car. We were silent for a long time. My face turned hot, so hot I can still feel it all these years later. I could feel the soldiers were tense, too.
I’d made a mistake not confessing that I was not authorized to drive that vehicle and they’d made a mistake not vetting me at that checkpoint. In any other context, this might have been a moment of silent honor amongst harmless lawbreakers, but instead, it felt like a dangerous mess for us all.
For their safety, those soldiers should not have been in my car. For my safety, I should not have let them in.
"So, what are we going to do?" I asked after another long pause. "I cannot drive you to Jerusalem because I am almost out of gas and we must go through a checkpoint, and I cannot leave you on the side of the road just anywhere." We started strategizing when and where I could drop them off that was familiar to them, but was also somewhere I could go unnoticed. Eventually, we chose a place and parted ways, and never saw each other again.
This incident would not play out the same today—or maybe, more accurately, after the walls went up, it couldn’t: I’d see them differently now, and they’d see me differently, too.
You cannot contain hate
The wall did not just create a cage for "us." Israelis were also not free; instead, they were caged in fear.
You see, I am a person who is "occupied." I grew up understanding "they" rule me, and my rulers will kill "us" if we dare to rise and demand our freedom, the right of every human being on this earth. A right that is not to be granted or given. A right that we are born with and that belongs to us. Both of us also have a right to not live in fear. Yet it is their fear which is why we are made to stand, stripped of everything, in front of an enemy with an arsenal of weapons with which to annihilate us.
Killing, however, is not a right—not for "them" or for "us." As societies, we find different ways to justify it, support it, and, at times, speak proudly of it. Yet when we do so, we all lose, because there is no pride in killing. There is, I believe, no justification for taking a human life. And nothing can exonerate us from our complicity when we support it, even when it’s in service of pursuing our freedom.
When I was still a young aspiring documentary filmmaker, I remember once having to ride on an Israeli bus. As a Palestinian, I had no permit, and I remember being grateful I was still able to board, but was unprepared for how I felt throughout the ride.
I felt fear! What if there was a suicide bomber on this bus? One of my people, I remember thinking. Filled with anxiety, I surveyed every person who got on the bus at every stop, worried if "this person" could be the one. And in that moment, I understood there was no human difference between the fear Israelis must experience and my own.
But I also wondered if they would ever understand that, too. When I felt "their fear," I also wished they could know mine, and how we, the Palestinians, feared "them"—their cruelty, their disproportionate response to "our" attacks. Their collective punishment without mercy against the people inside the wall.
Witnessing horror in the making
As time passed, I grew accustomed to the wall's presence, and it became acceptable to see it everywhere without staring at or questioning it for too long. But the anger remained, an anger that is difficult to understand for those who have not lived on the "other" side of it.
Visitors saw the wall as an "ugly" thing, a sign of injustice, at most. But they were not witnesses to what has happened to the people for whom this wall represents the circumference of their existence. We were not living—just existing. Constantly adjusting to everything, from restrictions to violations, because we had no choice.
The years have gone by, and like many, I’ve seen less hope and more hate every year, with no way to correct it. My privilege as an American-Palestinian has allowed me to see the severity of these changes with each visit: the deteriorating living conditions, the increased restrictions, the endless violence, almost always without consequence.
But I have also observed something far sadder and more terrifying: a generation growing up without seeing their "enemy" as human.
You see, I am of a different generation. A generation that grew up under occupation and was constantly reminded that I had a "ruler." But before the wall, no matter how I felt about the occupation and my oppression, I could still see the people who "ruled" me; I could still see their humanity, because I could still see their faces.
Now, the wall has made the "enemy" soulless and faceless. And I wonder, on the other side of the wall, is there also a generation that fears their enemy and thinks of us as non-human, too? As people who not only do not belong to this world, but who also wish to cause them harm—to kill them?
I pictured a generation of people on either side, fighting an enemy they’ll never know, and I worried about what would happen when the walls come down, because walls always do. It’s because of this, when the time came, and people would ask me, "Do they hate each other?" My answer became, "Yes, they do."
The children of the wall
October 7, 2023 happened over two decades after the walls were built. To this day, I do not want to watch the videos that were plastered on every television screen. It is the nightmare I imagined, but even worse, because it was real. In the aftermath, many people—the media, acquaintances, colleagues—called the Palestinians who did it "monsters." Then, we saw the other "monsters" emerge, the Israelis.
On October 7, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel, including about 800 civilians, 346 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers, and 66 police officers, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thousands were also injured in the attack and about 250 men, women, and children were abducted.
Since then, Israel’s retaliatory war on Hamas has killed more than 44,000 Palestinians, with more than half of them women and children. Gaza has become “home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,” according to a UN official. Entire bloodlines have been erased. The videos that have emerged have been equally unbearable to watch as those from October 7: As ABC reported, "in many pictures and videos that have circulated since the conflict began… IDF soldiers are seen blowing up buildings in Gaza while in combat, waving women’s underwear like flags and rifling through the possessions of Gazans with gleeful expressions."
Many families of the Israeli hostages who were not released or rescued are still waiting on their loved ones to come home, dead or alive; while thousands of unidentified Palestinian children are either buried under the rubble in Gaza or have been left orphaned and injured and starving. Mass graves are only a sign of the times for the people in Gaza: Their "open-air prison" is now a graveyard.
Many may uphold that staying in Gaza is a heroic honor—and it absolutely is. But when there is no choice but to stay, we cannot call it a choice at all. Those still alive in Gaza continue to have nowhere to go, their right to move and live freely taken from them. The children, especially, deserve to grow up and decide their position on a war they did not choose to be a part of. But we have robbed them of that. We are spectators with a cause: We count the dead but look away from the living. The Israeli soldiers and the Palestinian fighters, even Hamas—all of them chose to fight in this war. The children did not.
Are we comfortable with Gaza’s children dying for "our" cause? I am not. But there are no winners in war: What good is winning when the land is drenched in blood?
So, who is the monster?
Neither of us were created to suffer. It is not our destiny, or theirs. While I’m not a peace activist, I did—and still do—believe that the only way through this conflict is to be seen, to be heard, and to share without hate and fear. But we can only do that by opening ourselves to the idea of peace, to opening the doors for peace. Not by walling them up.
Like the Israelis soldiers in Gaza killing Palestinians, many of those who killed Israelis on October 7 are from "behind the wall." The same wall that taught them that neither of them is human, that the people on the other side are objects to destroy, to seek revenge from, and to win against, no matter the cost. It’s a matter of perspective.
But I do not believe it is only the people who pulled the trigger who are to blame. To me, all who were silent when the walls came up, who witnessed human rights violations increase every year, who watched two generations living side by side while growing to hate and fear one another—they are to blame.
All of us, then, are to blame.
Every educator, every media personality, every politician, every international leader who did not speak loudly and demanded solutions. Every person who only chose to look after it was too late. All of us are complicit in the death of every child and civilian in Gaza, and Jerusalem, and the occupied West Bank, for the death of every person and child on October 7, and for the fear every hostage and citizen feels in Gaza today. This misery was created by us all. The deadly airstrikes, the starvation, the inhumane conditions that people are living under, the unknown fate of the hostages—all of it was made and maintained by us. Whether consciously or not, through our complicity, through losing sight of our shared humanity, we have all become the monsters we most purport to fear. Because the truth is, when we choose to build walls, we are the ones making a monster out of the people on the other side—and a monster out of ourselves in the process.
We must all ask ourselves, then, if the right conditions were set, the right circumstances—would we become a monster, too? I don’t know that I can say “no” for certain; my privilege, relative though it may be, does not allow me to give definitive answers. I was born a Palestinian by chance, just as we all are born into our circumstances by chance. But maybe in another life, I, too, could have turned into the "monster" behind the wall in this one.
On building something better than what we've been given.
I was a young writer relatively early in my career when Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Based out of California with most of the team in New York, I was also the only writer still online at the magazine where I worked when the election was called. In a fugue state, I wrote the story I’d been assigned: a neutral news piece laying out the facts. Then, I drank a Miller High Life and went to bed, knowing there wasn’t much else I could do until morning.
Two election cycles later, and again, I was the only one still online at my job when they announced the results of the race. But this time, my mother was sitting next to me. It was her fourth presidential election cycle as an American citizen, and watching the television screen, we both held our breath—not just in anticipation of the results, but for everything before and beyond them, and the chaos we knew would follow, regardless of who won.
When it was finally called, we both exhaled. Despite whatever other feelings we might have had as individuals, neither of us, I think, was surprised: Between us, there was a mutual understanding that anything is possible in America—for better but, more often, for worse.
~
It is impossible to convince someone who has bought into their own delusions that what they see in front of them is, in fact, a delusion. This fact is non-partisan, and applies as much to the Democratic Party as it does to the millions of Trump supporters who voted in favor of a candidate whose policies would cause them harm. If you are surprised by Trump’s victory this year, then you, too, have bought into a delusion—an idea of security either afforded to you by privilege or passivity or both. This is different from being disappointed, or scared, or even angry about it, although sometimes they can all feel the same.
“A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his new book, The Message, which grapples with the narratives we tell ourselves in order to maintain our sense of moral righteousness when confronted with an immoral reality. Coates cites the Trump years as proof of this: The illusion of America has been crumbling for years, but accepting this requires facing your complicity in the facade—something not everyone chooses to do, particularly those that benefit from it.
Our democracy has long been broken. The 2024 election just tore down the last vestiges of the veneer for those still unable to see it. Now, the US must reckon with what remains. We cannot call ourselves a democracy when we live in a country where nearly 38 million people live below the poverty line, where basic healthcare isn’t a human right, and where ordinary citizens have no say in what wars we participate in and who we send weapons to. Nor can we call ourselves a democracy when the salary for a sitting member of Congress is more than twice the average total household income, and when the judges that sit on the nation’s highest court are appointed for lifelong tenures, able to change the fate of an entire generation, and entirely dependent on the political party in power when a justice either steps down or dies. Perhaps most obviously, we also cannot call ourselves a democracy when we elect a president based on an electoral college rather than a popular vote—and the outcome of any election, including this one, should not change our stance that this is fundamentally undemocratic; as is the frequent redlining, gerrymandering, redistricting, and voter suppression that happens openly and without shame.
This is not the track record of a country with a functioning moral compass, although it begs the question if a country can even have one. Morality is a thing for people, not for nation-states. Change in this country, in perhaps all countries, has almost always been reactionary. So, too, will change be on the other side of this, whatever shape “this” takes; something I would have said even prior to the election, because no amount of voting has ever been enough to save us from ourselves, to guarantee the safety of the millions affected by our government’s actions, or to definitively “fix” things for good.
A “functioning” democracy is dependent on the buy-in of its people, but I’d argue also on an electorate's collective desire to do what’s best for the majority of its populace. This baseline isn’t automatic, but built through its foundations, which are fortified by the choices we make each day in showing up for one another, far beyond the ballot box. When we treat voting as our only tool against oppression, we’ve already lost. When we only engage, and demand, and pay attention every two or four years, we’ve already lost. This doesn’t mean that voting isn’t important, just that we cannot solely rely on something that was originally designed to exclude the vast majority of us to enact meaningful change for that same majority.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde said, something I see quoted time and time again. But people rarely seem to include the rest of the sentiment, and its context: “They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” The reality, should we choose to see it, is our toolbox is often much larger than we believe it to be, our sources of support much wider. It is, I believe, our moral obligation to utilize both.
To do so, however, requires us not to do the work of our oppressors for them. “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression,” Lorde said in the same speech. “But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
If a diverse people’s history of the country is our guide, when has the United States ever been a beacon of morality? When has what is ethically sound ever been achieved in this country without an uprising or without violence, or at least some degree of incivility? The modern Republican Party has always understood—and, arguably, romanticized—this in a way the Democratic Party has not, because the latter fundamentally believes the system works when it has continuously proven it doesn’t. (At least, never for all of us, or even for most.)
The real work, then, is in building the world we want to live in through organizing and action and care, not by solely relying on systems of bureaucracy and government that depend on our dysfunction and discord to keep us reliant on their mercurial benevolence in order to continue funding themselves. The work is in taking care of each other when the systems that purport to have our best interests at heart continuously fail to protect them. The work is in not only dreaming that something better is possible, but realizing it, every day, in our actions and in our communities, both close to us and far away. We achieve this by investing in our communities, not just financially, but through the creation of long-term, sustainable support systems and networks of care; by establishing community processes that encourage collaborative, collective decision-making and problem-solving; by sharing responsibility for our communities’ well-being and safety; and by making resources accessible to anyone who needs them, whether healthcare, food, or otherwise.
In spite of everything, we have done this. We are doing this. Even before the election, I saw the fruits of these efforts in my community every day: people rallying to find breastmilk for a baby who needed it, someone looking for help doing their dishes while struggling with their mental health, another person looking for housing leads after their current living situation proved unsafe. All three found the support they needed, not from the government, but from their neighbors.
So if you are seeking comfort right now, this is the one thing that has given some to me: We still have each other.
~
The day after the election, I text back and forth with a friend. He is disappointed, hungover, knee-deep in political analysis, doomscrolling.
“I left one country 15 years ago because I tried to be a part of something, and ultimately it led to me having to flee, and then everything got a lot worse than I even anticipated at that time,” he says. “Now I see the same thing happening here, but this time I don’t actually believe that anything will get better.”
What do you say to someone who’s already lived through worse? I tell him that I’m sorry and I love him and he deserves more.
~
In the lead-up to this year’s election, I am often very angry. Around me, a lot of people are, too. While some of this anger seems to circle around the election specifically, much of it does not—and it might be more accurate to say it is actually the election which is orbiting around the anger, and not the other way around. This is mostly because there’s been so much to be angry about: the way the United States continues to fund a genocide; the catastrophic reality of climate change; the endless threats to abortion and bodily autonomy; the rampant racism, transphobia, and xenophobia; how quickly the world has backslid into fascism, embracing right wing extremism in elections around the globe. All of it feels impossible to ignore, an endless cacophony of horrors; but still, some people manage, and this makes me angry, too.
None of this goes away after the election is over.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about anger since Trump was first elected in 2016; about its manifestations, its purpose. This curiosity began, in part, because of my own relationship to it: Historically, I’ve never been good at holding on to interpersonal anger, yet I’ve always felt it, deep and terrifying, in response to the world’s seemingly endless capacity for injustice, violence, and other forms of harm. I see it everywhere, notice the various shapes it takes. I learn that rage can be a guiding force when we really listen to it, or a parasite that hollows us out when we don’t. I ask my friends what pisses them off, discuss what our anger tells us about ourselves, and try to better understand what my anger might tell me about me.
What enrages us often reveals something that terrifies us, anger and fear just two sides of the same coin. People often vote (or don’t vote) because they’re angry about something. But fear, too, drives people to the polls: fear for how their lives might change if it goes one way or the other, fear for their livelihoods, their family, their friends, their safety, themselves, the world; and, inversely, fear of other people—although history suggests this isn’t anything new. “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Life of the Mind, her final unfinished work. But somehow, this has always felt scarier to me, more dangerous, more unpredictable than the alternative. When morality is an afterthought, evil is gradual, more insidious, a slow burn that starts small, until eventually we’re so deep into it, it feels impossible to close the gap between where we are and where we were and where we want to be.
How, then, do we push back? The most optimistic answer I can come up with is by making the “good” so obvious a choice that there are actual consequences to being “evil,” rather than a deepening of the status quo. Rather than moving the threshold for what we accept, for how we categorize and define “good” and “evil,” we make up our minds not to waver from what we know is right—critically, not just in our elections, but in how we move through the world every day. It is stoking the fire of our anger, and our terror, and actually using it for good.
Back in 2020, I read On Anger, a Boston Review forum led by philosopher Agnes Callard. The book was released just before COVID shut everything down, a few months before that year’s election. “Maybe anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world,” editors Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen write in the book’s introduction. Some of the writers agree; others less so. There is debate on whether it is possible to be both justifiably angry and morally sound; whether anger is “useful” from an evolutionary standpoint; whether anger is, in fact, what makes us human. All seem to agree that it’s a powerful emotion; Callard, perhaps, most of all.
“When people commit injustice against us, we feel it: our blood boils,” she writes in the book’s seminal essay. “At that point, we have to decide how much we want to fight to quell our anger, how much effort we are going to put into repressing and suppressing that upswell of rage.”
“The answer,” she concludes, “is rarely none.”
~
The night of the election, a friend calls me, afraid and alone in her grief, her husband already asleep. “I feel guilty for calling,” she says. I tell her not to, that I’m glad she did. The next day, another friend calls. He asks why I sound so calm. “Aren’t you worried about NATO?” he asks. “I’m worried about NATO.”
“Well,” I say. “Everything is shit.”
“Everything is shit,” he repeats.
Another friend and I text back and forth on Election Day. “I’m so deeply jaded by this country at this point,” she says. “I feel like politicians aren’t as scared of us as they should be.” My response is immediate. “Well, to be fair, I don’t think we’ve given them enough reason to be.”
~
Much like America itself, the American Dream has always been one of deluded and individualistic self-exceptionalism, selling itself as a meritocracy when in reality, it is a lottery stacked in favor of a very small minority, the buy-in rarely worth the pay-out.
While American exceptionalism is unlikely to be the death of us all, it’s already been the death of too many of us, the vast majority not even American, but people whose greatest sin was being born somewhere the US had a financial and/or political interest in, a Venn diagram that I’m pretty sure is just a circle. But to believe this type of unfettered power through violence could be limitless and without consequence is foolish: Global imperialism is a cancer, and like all cancers, it ultimately feeds on the host. “Nobody is exceptional, we are all just people worthy of life and dignity,” writer Fariha Róisín posted in a message on Instagram. “US Americans made domination a world order and what they didn’t realize was that fascistic glean would rear its ugly head and turn inward.” It should come as no surprise that fascism is now in full bloom on American soil: Its keepers have been watering it for years.
There is little we can do but try to plant something better that might outgrow it, by not abandoning our humanity when it may feel “easier” to give it up. I often revisit Muriel Rekeyser’s poem, “Elegy in Joy,” as a reminder it is always possible to grow something new: “Not all things are blest, but the / seeds of all things are blest. / The blessing is in the seed.” Each choice we make is a seed, each choice a new beginning. Not all will bear fruit, but that doesn’t mean the planting is fruitless.
I know we—the collective we—will survive this, in part because there isn’t much of a choice. What devastates me and enrages me is how many will suffer unnecessarily in the process, how many already have; and the people who won’t survive this at all, who already haven’t. “Where there is power, there is resistance,” writes Foucault. And it’s true: As long as people give a shit, there will be resistance. As long as there are people who haven’t given into their own complacency, there will be resistance. And for all my own disillusionment, I’m not so far gone that I can’t see it’s there: Right now, there is despair, but despair is just a reminder there’s still something human left in you yearning for better, that there’s still some sliver of hope, kicking and screaming and furious and terrified, buried underneath the muck.
“Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country,” Ursula K. Le Guin said during her commencement address at Mills College in 1983. “Why [do] we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there…Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
It is also in this darkness where we must grow a backbone, because the longest stretch of the fight is always still to come.
~
Late Thursday afternoon, two days after the election, my mom’s phone dings. Looking at it, she groans.
“Forget it, Nancy Pelosi,” she says. “Jesus. It’s over!”
~
In the early afternoon, long before any of the polls closed on Tuesday, I began donating. Not to any political campaign (despite the onslaught of texts, I never understood what possible use my $20 would do in changing an election on Election Day), but to Palestine, to Sudan, to mutual aid. I signed up to make lunches for my unhoused neighbors. I spoke with friends. I chose to respond to a situation that felt dependent on the cooperation of millions, many not interested in mutual liberation, with small choices that felt, comparatively, within my control—a practice I try to keep in my everyday life. These actions may have been insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but they felt more significant than any vote I’ve ever cast, more fortifying. Closer to a version of the world I want to live in, but don’t.
At the 2001 Connecticut Forum, Toni Morrison was asked, “How do you survive whole in a world where we’re all victims of something?” She took a moment to gather her thoughts. “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part,” she said. “But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about, you know, being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”
For the last few years, so much has felt impossible. So much has felt enraging, and heartbreaking, and terrifying, and worse. But I’ve seen enough jokes about the relentlessness of living in “unprecedented times,” and counter-jokes from historians that the times are not, in fact, unprecedented at all, to know that what feels impossible is less impossible than we might believe.
“The worst thing about being human is our ability to adapt,” a friend tells me. But maybe it’s one of the best things, too. Even if we are no longer whole, we are changed—and it's precisely because of this change that we can begin to build a new whole from our parts.
[post_title] => Fear and Rage and Grief and Joy
[post_excerpt] => On building something better than what we've been given.
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Why you should pay attention to Arizona's Proposition 314 this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.
Emily Sotelo Estrada knows firsthand the ramifications of letting local police departments enforce federal immigration laws.
She was seven years old when her father was supposed to pick her up from school one day but never arrived. Later, she discovered he’d been taken into custody by local law enforcement after a traffic stop. Her father spent almost five months separated from his family before they were eventually reunited.
“It’s a really hard thing to understand as a child that, because your parents don't have proper documentation, that they’re gone,” says Sotelo Estrada, who grew up in Prescott, Arizona, about an hour and a half north of Phoenix. “It’s something that’s really hard and traumatic for children and because of that, I grew up in fear of law enforcement.”
Sotelo Estrada’s parents are immigrants from Mexico, and her father had been arrested after the 2010 passage of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070—colloquially known as the “show me your papers” law—which allowed local and state law enforcement agencies to ask for proof of citizenship if they suspected someone was in the country without authorized documentation. It was one of the strictest anti-immigration laws in the country, and its passage led to both national and international outcry, including marches and boycotts.
Sotelo Estrada, 20, now attends Arizona State University, and is one of many activists throughout the state speaking out against a new measure—Proposition 314—that will ask voters to once again let the state enforce federal immigration laws. She is currently an Arizona’s Future Fellow with Aliento, a youth-led organization that advocates for undocumented immigrants, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and families with mixed immigration statuses within their household. Through this leadership development program, she’s been working to educate voters on the potential effects of the proposition, hosting voter registration drives, and conducting outreach campaigns within her community and on college campuses.
If passed, Proposition 314 would make it a state crime for migrants to enter the country at any location that’s not a port of entry, allow state and local police to arrest noncitizens who have entered the country illegally, and allow state judges to order deportations. The proposition would also criminalize migrants who knowingly submit false documentation when applying for federal, state, or local public benefits, as well as those who submit false information or documents to an employer to avoid detection of employment eligibility under the E-Verify program. (E-Verify is an online system that allows employers to confirm whether their employees can work in the United States.) If passed, the law would also enact certain penalties, such as an additional five years added to any prison sentence for anyone who knowingly sells fentanyl that was smuggled into the United States and causes the death of another person.
The Republican-controlled Arizona State Legislature passed a similar law in March during the legislative session, but Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed the measure. At the time, Hobbs said the bill would hurt businesses and communities around the state while overburdening law enforcement and potentially attracting lawsuits.
The state legislature referred the measure to the November ballot in June, and in August, the Arizona Supreme Court helped the proposition clear a final hurdle after it rejected a legal challenge from Latino advocacy groups who questioned the constitutionality of the law, allowing it to remain on the ballot.
In the leadup to the election, Proposition 314 has drawn the ire of activists, civic groups, religious leaders, and even some law enforcement personnel, who view the measure as an unfunded mandate that could pack the state’s prisons, overwhelm police and sheriff’s departments, promote racial profiling, and instill fear into immigrant communities throughout the state.
“It’s a huge overreach in regard to law enforcement overstepping boundaries, leading up to potential racial profiling,” says Alicia Contreras, executive director of Corazón Arizona, an interfaith grassroots organization that has spoken out against the proposition. “It really puts extreme risk and harm in our community, and when we talk about our communities, that’s our Black, brown, [and] indigenous people of color in [our] community.”
Corazón Arizona has worked with a coalition of other groups to conduct voter registration drives, host a press conference, engage the community through town halls and roundtable conversations, and work with faith leaders to help educate their congregations, Contreras says. She believes the work will continue beyond election day.
“Nov. 5 is not the end,” she said. “We’re going to continue to fight with our communities, organize with our communities, and stand up to unjust laws.”
Contreras referred to the proposition as “SB 1070 on steroids,” saying it could cause further division within communities across the state and harm Arizona’s most vulnerable populations.
“It is not going to support us, and, to be clear, it does nothing to improve our immigration system,” says Contreras, who organized and protested against SB 1070 14 years ago.
In Arizona, a poll released in September by Noble Predictive Insights showed that Arizona voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 314, with 63% saying they would support it and 16% saying they would vote in opposition to the measure. However, if passed by voters, Proposition 314 wouldn’t become law unless a similar measure in Texas, Senate Bill 4, is deemed constitutional. The Texas law, which was passed by its state legislature in 2023, has been blocked due to legal challenges.
The state’s Republicans have continually described the arrival of migrants as an “invasion,” with Republican State Sen. John Kavanagh saying during a televised debate last month that the proposition would attempt to address problems caused by the “tsunami of illegal immigrants.”
According to Kavanagh, Proposition 314 is supposed to target the “worst of the worst” such as drug smugglers, human smugglers, those on the terrorist watchlist, and others who wouldn’t qualify for asylum.
Kavanagh, who supported SB 1070 and defended the controversial law during the debate, said this measure is supposedly different because of its “laser beam” focus on stopping criminals and smugglers, instead of authorizing law enforcement to conduct roundups of migrants.
Democratic State Rep. Analise Ortiz called the proposition “unconstitutional” and a “waste of your tax dollars” during the debate with Kavanaugh. She also argued that it wouldn't “secure the border” and invoked its similarities to New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy, turning law enforcement and civil servants into immigration agents without the financial backing.
Sotelo Estrada, meanwhile, only remembers the trauma of not seeing her dad for months, and has expressed fear that children and their families could experience the same hardships if this proposition is approved by voters.
“No matter your immigration status, it’s going to impact so many different families within the state of Arizona,” she says. “Our biggest thing is we don’t want children to grow up in fear.”
[post_title] => When Local Police Enforce Federal Immigration
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Arizona's Proposition 314 this election.
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Why you should pay attention to Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund Amendment this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.
While wind energy production in the Gulf of Mexico is still a nascent industry, Louisiana voters will soon decide whether potential royalties from offshore renewables should be spent on protecting and restoring the state’s sinking coastline.
Louisiana has lost more than 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s, in large part because of the construction of levees along the Mississippi River meant to prevent flooding, which have blocked sand and mud carried by the river from replenishing the coast. Canals dredged through the marsh by oil and gas exploration companies and sea level rise have also contributed to the state’s land loss. As the coast has eroded, communities have retreated inland, landmarks have been wiped off the map, and the threat of hurricane storm surge has increased. Native American communities once driven to the coast by white settlers are now among the most vulnerable to storms and sea level rise. Indigenous fishing villages like Grand Bayou, Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-au-Chien have also been left outside of the federal levee system. Their populations have dwindled as frequent hurricanes have destroyed their homes and saltwater intrusion has made it difficult to grow crops.
“We’re talking about part of the country not being here anymore because of man made environmental change,” says Charles Sutcliffe, a resilience, climate, and coastal policy specialist for the National Wildlife Federation. And energy production in the Gulf of Mexico depends on the people and ports along Louisiana’s coast, he explains.
As one potential solution, a November 5 ballot measure asks voters, “Do you support an amendment to require that federal revenues received by the state generated from Outer Continental Shelf alternative or renewable energy production be deposited into the Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund?” The Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund at the center of the measure is a trust fund that the state’s constitution says must be spent on projects in line with Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, a roadmap of projects aimed at protecting residents from flooding and restoring the state’s wetlands. The plan includes a $2.9 billion project to unleash the Mississippi River into degrading wetlands downriver of New Orleans and a $1.9 billion project to elevate thousands of flood-prone homes. Currently, a portion of the royalties from offshore oil and gas production is already directed to the state’s $50 billion Coastal Master Plan. If passed, the measure would also direct royalties from alternative energy production towards the same efforts.
State Rep. Joseph Orgeron introduced the Constitutional amendment in the legislature this spring. He said he’s been asked whether the measure is putting the cart before the horse, since there isn’t a federal law yet that directs the Department of the Treasury to share offshore renewable royalties with states like there is for offshore oil and gas.
“Louisiana is moving from only oil and gas to any energy,” Orgeron says. “If there are federal revenues to be received from them we would like those to also be dedicated to the Coastal Restoration Fund.”
The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA) allocates a portion of the revenue from oil and gas pulled from federal waters of the Gulf to Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Before former Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) pushed to get GOMESA passed in 2006, Louisiana lawmakers created state legislation to dedicate revenue from offshore oil and gas to coastal protection and restoration, Orgeron noted.
“It would have been difficult for her to pass that legislation if it was not for her state legislature the year before making this legislation,” he says. “Mary Landrieu used that to go to Congress and say that we’re not going to use it on splash parks and butterfly museums.”
According to Oregron, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) is following Landriue’s footsteps with his efforts to get a slice of the royalties from offshore renewables sent to states. Sen. Cassidy introduced legislation last year that would send 37.5% of offshore wind revenue to states adjacent to offshore wind farms. The bill has bipartisan support and is expected to pass out of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee next month, says Molly Block, Senator Bill Cassidy’s Communications Director. As written, the bill would also lift a cap on the amount of revenue states receive through GOMESA.
So far, Louisiana has secured about $21 billion of the $50 billion needed to construct all of the projects in its Coastal Master Plan. Gulf states have received more than $2 billion from offshore oil and gas royalties under GOMESA since 2009. But the $8 billion Louisiana received in legal settlements and fines resulting from BP’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf has made up the lion’s share of funding for Louisiana’s flood protection and coastal restoration projects. Oil spill settlement payments to the state will end in 2031, leaving Louisiana’s delegation in search of more funds.
Royalties from offshore wind in the Gulf are unlikely to shore up the state’s funding shortfall for coastal projects. There are currently two offshore wind projects planned in Louisiana waters, and a third project further out in federal waters off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The offshore wind industry is expected to create thousands of jobs in Louisiana over the next decade. Proceeds from wind lease sales in federal waters go to the U.S. Treasury General Fund. Wind farm companies also pay the federal government annual rental fees during construction and operating fees once the projects start generating electricity, says John Filostrat, Director Of Public Affairs at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.
But those fees are smaller than the severance fees collected on oil and gas production in the Gulf, Orgeron notes. “There is no severance. It’s not like you’re extracting oil and gas and you’re taking something from the ground. Wind works differently because you're returning the molecules of air on the other side of the blade,” he says. “You’re not severing anything.”
Last year, two million barrels of oil per day were produced from the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, generating $6 billion in federal revenue. At most, wind energy in the Gulf could produce about a tenth of the royalties that Louisiana gets from oil and gas production, Orgeron says. Still, Sutcliffe says the state could use every penny it gets to put towards its coast, where nearly two million people call home. “I think it’s too early to know how much it’s going to produce, but right now it’s zero,” he says. “This amendment is just trying to say however that works out those dollars are dedicated to the coast.”
[post_title] => Paying the Bill for Lousiana's Crumbling Coast
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Fund Amendment this election.
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Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election.
This article is a part of Down-Ballot, a weeklong series highlighting state measures worth watching in the 2024 United States election.
As voters around the United States prepare for a tight presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, they will also have to make pivotal decisions on ballot referendums in their respective states. In Wisconsin, one of the questions this year revolves around noncitizen voting.
Noncitizen voting is illegal at the state and federal level in the U.S. On voter registration forms, people must sign under the penalty of perjury that they are a citizen, facing punishment of fines, imprisonment, or deportation if they are not. But on a local scale, noncitizen voting is allowed in some cities and towns in Vermont, California, and Maryland, allowing residents to cast a vote in school board and city council elections.
At this time, there are no elections in Wisconsin that allow for noncitizen voting. Wisconsin previously allowed noncitizen voting in 1848, but that was disallowed by 1912. In a ballot initiative on deck for Nov. 5, however, a coalition of Wisconsin Republicans are seeking to change language in the state’s constitution around citizen voting, making it as explicit as possible that noncitizens cannot vote in any election in Wisconsin.
Currently, the state’s constitution reads “every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district who may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.” The referendum, however, would change the language to “only a United States citizen age 18 or older who resides in an election district may vote in an election for national, state, or local office or at a statewide or local referendum.”
A yes vote for the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment would allow the language change and a no vote would prevent any changes to the constitution.
Behind the bill
There are 14 Wisconsin state senators and 41 state representatives behind the push to pass this referendum, an effort which began in September of 2023.
While several members of the Wisconsin Legislature did not reply to requests for interviews, Sen. Julian Bradley, a Republican among the coalition that introduced the ballot measure, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that their goal is to make it extremely difficult for noncitizens to ever have an opportunity to vote in Wisconsin. He also said he wants less room for interpretation around the law.
"If you want to vote in elections, then you have to declare your citizenship, and you have to go through the process," he told the Sentinel.
However, Debra Cronmiller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, says the initiative is unnecessary and could foster misinformation. The league was one of 30 organizations that has endorsed a no-vote on the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment and also released a toolkit with information about the ballot.
“It creates an opportunity to suggest, imply, whatever word you want to insert there, that this is a problem. This is not a problem. That's been documented time and time again,” she says. “It makes me wonder, is the real motivation here not to change the constitution to prohibit noncitizens from voting in municipal races, but is it to fuel a conversation that is more about us and them, who should have the rights and who shouldn't have the rights.”
Cronmiller compared the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment to a 2011 push by Republicans in Wisconsin to require voter IDs during elections. She said that on its surface, both sound good: ensuring that only citizens of Wisconsin are voting in elections. But she also pointed out the unintended consequences of these policies. In the case of voter IDs, not everyone has a driver's license or works for the state or is a member of a tribal community. And in 2017, the Associated Press reported that the law ultimately turned eligible voters away as a result.
“There's too many people who were unnecessarily disenfranchised because of what sounded like a good idea,” she says. “We suspect [the same] in this instance, where only a citizen should vote sounds good, but the constitution actually already guarantees that.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission, a six-member board created in 2015 to oversee election processes, reported 30 potential casesof fraud from July 1, 2023 through September 12, 2024. However, none of the cases were related to citizenship, and most were related to people voting twice or involved people with felonies.
In October of 2023, a woman in Wisconsin was charged with election fraud for voting in an April school board election, despite not being a citizen. But she admitted to the act, saying that it was a misunderstanding and that her daughter-in-law completed the paperwork due to an English language barrier, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She has since entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and the charges will be dismissed.
Anti-immigrant concerns
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin organization that works with the civil rights of immigrants, says the drive behind the ballot initiative is anti-immigration sentiment and disinformation.
“My greatest concern is that this is being used to create a narrative that is intended to motivate part of Trump’s MAGA base to turn out on election day and based on how people look, and if they’re not English dominant, they will try to intimidate and harass U.S. citizen voters to try to steal the elections,” she says.
Neumann-Ortiz is also concerned that the ballot initiative is part of a longer-term strategy of voter suppression.
“It’s been a very calculated agenda by the right wing,” she says. “There’s been a relentless attack on eroding voting rights.”
She pointed to a lawsuit, Cerny v Wisconsin Elections Commission, filed by a citizen in Wisconsin in August. In the case, Ardis Cerny, a resident of Pewaukee, sued the commission and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to challenge how the state verifies the citizenship status of voters with drivers licenses. Cerny alleges that the commission does not check the registration of applicants with the Department of Motor Vehicles list of driver’s licenses and identification cards to ensure they have citizenship. The lawsuit is still ongoing.
Neumann-Ortiz believes that the amendment would “disenfranchise so many people,” because when residents become naturalized U.S. citizens, they don’t have to go to the DMV to update immigration status, meaning the documentation isn’t always aligned. When they register to vote, however, they have to show evidence of citizenship, she says.
Immigrants who are working to gain citizenship are not interested in registering to vote illegally and jeopardizing their future, Neumann-Ortiz added.
“It’s more anti-immigration rhetoric, it’s more disinformation, and it’s voter suppression for all voters,” she says. “It’s an attack on democracy.”
The Wisconsin constitution has been amended 148 times, with the most recent change in April of 2023. In regards to voting, previous amendments have been made to expand rights based on race, gender, and age. It will also not be the only state where noncitizen voting is on the ballot in November: Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and South Carolina also have ballot measures regarding noncitizen voting this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislature, a coalition of members of state legislatures around the U.S.
“This question on the ballot sounds pretty good, but what you have to do as a conscientious voter is look behind the question. Why is it being asked? What could be the unintended consequences?” Cronmiller says. “Our elections are fair, they're safe, they're accountable, only the people who should be getting ballots are getting ballots. There's no problem to fix here and I think we're actually potentially creating a future problem by enacting this particular constitutional change.”
[post_title] => Is Noncitizen Voting Actually a Non-Issue?
[post_excerpt] => Why you should pay attention to the Wisconsin Citizenship Voting Requirement Amendment this election.
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