“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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Why the Abraham Accords could not bring peace to the Middle East.
In its November/December 2023 issue, the political magazine Foreign Affairs published a longform essay titled “The Sources of American Power,” which posited that the United States needs to “lay a new foundation of American strength” in the Middle East “that protects its interests and values and advances the common good.” Written shortly before the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 (but published after), the author argued that “although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades” thanks to the Biden administration’s responsible stewardship. This lapse of critical judgment might have been forgivable had its writer not been US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.1 But he was also not the only American official who had lulled himself into false security.
Since taking office, the Biden administration, with great fanfare, had chosen to double down on the Trump era’s diplomatic coup, the Abraham Accords, in hopes it would become the crown jewel of regional foreign policy: building a new Middle Eastern economic and security architecture between the Gulf and Israel that would successfully confront and contain their mutual regional antagonist, Iran.
The Abraham Accords’ sleight of hand was subverting the Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking paradigm in the process. Instead of normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Middle East in exchange for a Palestinian state, as was the guiding principle of negotiations since the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, the 2020 Abraham Accords dropped the question of establishing a Palestinian state altogether, making instead vague allusions to peace. Its supporters didn’t seem to mind. In Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals, they believed the time was ripe to put aside “tedious” questions of protecting Palestinians or their unrealized sovereignty, and to instead focus on the much more tangible and lucrative questions of trade, defense cooperation, and intelligence-sharing, as well as upgraded strategic relationships with the United States.
In this respect, it worked. Through the Abraham Accords, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan all signed up for normalization agreements with Israel, and a flurry of diplomatic, touristic, and commercial enterprises sprung up in their wake. Israelis partied in Dubai; Bahrainis headed to Tel Aviv. Defense and intelligence sharing accelerated. All the while, the Biden administration continued to pursue Trump’s ultimate goal of bringing Saudi Arabia into the normalized fold. Pundits in the US crowed about a new era of peace.
Today, conditions across the region could hardly be worse. Escalations and counter-escalations in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen threaten to deepen the abyss of violence and suffering for civilians. A year ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas’s attack killed over 1,300 Israelis. The attack was strategically timed, in part, to disrupt Israeli-Saudi normalization. In the months since, Israel has killed some 42,000 Palestinians. Thousands more lie dead under the rubble of what was Gaza. A hundred thousand Palestinians are wounded. Two million Gazans languish amid devastation under Israeli military occupation. The Israeli apartheid machine continues to destroy lives and cities apace in the West Bank. Palestinians confront ongoing Israeli settler violence under the full imprimatur of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Near 10,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned without pretense of due process. Some 2,000 civilians are already dead in Lebanon just in the last week, as Israel launched yet another invasion to fight Hezbollah. Ninety-seven Israeli hostages remain in Hamas’s custody in Gaza. The Red Sea has become a perilous commercial passage owing to Houthi attacks. And the prospect of a full-blown war between Israel and Iran grows ever more acute as Tehran executes another dramatic but fruitless missile barrage. No ceasefire is in sight on any front.
How did the Abraham Accords, heralded as a new paradigm for the Middle East, yield a total collapse of security and stability across the region? The answer lies in the deliberate effort of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foremost backer, the United States, to sustain Israel’s control over Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely. American officials—Republican or Democrat—may be loath to acknowledge this reality, but the central conceit (and consequently the failure) of the Abraham Accords lay in imagining a world where Palestinians did not exist. The status quo, which seemed quiet enough to Mr. Sullivan, was, in reality, deeply toxic. Though US policy formally sustains the fiction of a two-state solution, the Abraham Accords in effect tried to bury the question of when—or whether—Palestinians should ever be free and see an independent state come to fruition.
The desperate charm offensive led by Biden administration officials Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein to convince Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman to accede to the Abraham Accords, dangling offers of a defense pact among other political inducements, has failed. Even authoritarians need to keep their fingers on the pulse of public sentiment—and in Arab states, establishing diplomatic and commercial relations with Israel is deeply unpopular. Mohamed bin Salman has admitted the carnage in Gaza makes the prospect of normalization a political nonstarter in the Kingdom.
The Gulf states are now in an awkward position. On the one hand, states like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain had already been working steadily to stabilize relationships with Iran, despite overriding tensions for the past several years. At a strategic level, there’s a clear understanding that diplomatic exchanges can head off the worst types of violent confrontation. We see these ongoing efforts as Saudi Arabia and Iran attemptrapprochement: The Kingdom is unquestionably nervous about the threat on its southern border from a febrile and trigger-happy Houthi movement. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are equally pleased to see the destruction of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which they see as Islamist-Iranian proxies that pose a direct challenge to their visions of a consolidated Gulf hegemony in the Middle East.
Reports that American officials greenlighted the Israeli escalation against Hezbollah after the two sides had agreed to a 21-day ceasefire opens the prospect of a more dangerous phase to this transnational conflict, wherein the US and Israel take this moment as an opportunity to fundamentally reshape the security architecture of the Middle East. The risk is that Israel could continue pursuing “greater strategic objectives” in responding to Iran’s missile attack on October 1, and drawing in American support for what would be a cataclysmic war of regime change in Iran.
None of this is inevitable. It’s possible that the US will be able to convince Israel to deliver a calibrated military response to Iran’s latest attack, tamping down further escalation for a brief window of time. But it feels increasingly likely that the delicate balancing act between security actors in the region that has prevailed over the last decade is about to come crashing down in the face of Israel’s unabashed impunity in both Gaza and Lebanon. This is not just because Arab states are unwilling to undo their peace agreements with Israel (Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi underscored again last week that Arab nations stand ready to ensure Israel’s security), but because it is unlikely that Israel will ever permit the creation of a Palestinian state, and none will emerge short of an internationally-enforced partition of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The stark reality that Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi should grasp is that the fastest means to defanging the “Axis of Resistance” is the establishment of said Palestinian state. That state is not going to be the product of negotiations, if it ever comes. The occupation will end abruptly; there are no piecemeal negotiated solutions to apartheid. For the sake of his own political survival, Netanyahu will continue to foment chaos across the Middle East to retain power for as long as Washington allows him free rein. And in large part, the Abraham Accords are to blame. In saying the lives of Palestinians were less important than normalization, the brokers of the Abraham Accords helped embellish Israel’s fiction that it could sustain the status quo with Palestinians without friction or blowback. They were grievously wrong.
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[post_title] => Biblical Failure
[post_excerpt] => Why the Abraham Accords were never going to bring peace to the Middle East.
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If we want to restore and preserve abortion rights in the United States, we have to fight harder for the ERA.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s overdue decision to suspend his reelection campaign and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination has given the Democratic Party a decent shot at winning in November. It has also freed the Democrats to emphasize an issue they believe will drive voters to the polls: At its recent national convention, the party put reproductive rights and the “power of women” front and center, hoping to capitalize on voters’ very rational fear of a potential nationwide abortion ban if Trump is reelected.
But while the landscape for abortion rights will be less bleak if Democrats retain the White House next year, electing Harris alone will not be enough to restore these rights or prevent them from being ripped away again. Nor will it keep the far-right Supreme Court from laying the groundwork for the next Republican administration to implement the same reactionary social policies favored by the architects of Project 2025, the so-called blueprint for a second Trump term.
Aside from changing the composition of the Court, many advocates believe that passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is the best and possibly the only way to restore our abortion rights, and, more broadly, to protect the rights of millions of American women and LGBTQ+ people from current and future attacks. First proposed in 1923, the ERA would prohibit gender discrimination and ensure that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”—something our Constitution does not explicitly guarantee. Most crucially, it would also safeguard these rights no matter which political party is in power. Its passage has rarely felt so urgent; in the wake of Dobbs, Americans cannot afford to leave the ERA’s fate up to the leaders of either party. Congress has already repeatedly failed to pass federal legislation to protect abortion rights: With so much at stake, demanding that the Biden administration immediately publish this badly needed amendment, and, to a lesser extent, joining efforts to add gender equality provisions to state constitutions has become far more crucial to preserving our rights than voting alone.
According to the American Bar Association (ABA) and other experts, the ERA has already achieved the number of state ratifications required to add it to the Constitution. (Conservative activists argue that some states’ decisions to rescind their original ratifications means the ERA never met this threshold, but many legal scholars say those rescissions are legally invalid and can be ignored.) But while Biden has repeatedly affirmed his support for the ERA, he has, to the outrage of its proponents, resisted publishing it for years. Why he is so reluctant is anyone’s guess. Perhaps his administration is taking a conservative approach due to perceived legal issues and a general fear of rocking the boat, despite the ERA’s popularity and legal validity. Or maybe they think it’s in their best interest to preserve threats to equality that double as fundraising tools for the Democratic Party and its allies, which help them retain the support of voters who know today’s GOP will do nothing to publish the ERA or protect abortion rights, but still hold out hope that the Democrats might.
It could also be personal: Biden, who is technically pro-choice, is a notably poor advocate with an appalling record on the issue. By contrast, Harris speaks passionately about abortion and, in March, became the first sitting U.S. president or vice president to visit an abortion clinic in an official capacity. In her convention speech, she declared, “We trust women,” and vowed that when “Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom” she would “proudly sign it into law.” Yet she offered no explanation as to why this didn’t happen when Democrats controlled Congress, no strategy for ensuring that it happens in the next Congress, and no reason why the Democratic administration she is currently a part of hasn’t yet published the ERA. There is also no reason to assume that if Harris wins in November, she will honor her 2019 presidential campaign pledge to pass the ERA in her first 100 days in office, either. In fact, she did not mention the ERA in her speech at all, despite the party’s promise in its official 2024 platform that “Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land.” Notably, this year’s platform also promised that “Democrats will work to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act”—something then President Obama promised to do over a decade ago—and repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal programs like Medicaid from covering the cost of most abortions, and which Biden supported until June 2019. It did not explain how they plan to do so. (Neither the Biden administration nor the Harris campaign responded to my requests for comment by the time this was published.)
Nicole Vorrasi Bates, Executive Director of the pro-ERA organization Shattering Glass, did not mince words in a recent phone call. “Both parties are playing political football with the rights and lives of 187 million women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people,” she said. Regardless of who is in the White House, the Supreme Court will issue rulings in the next year that could further damage women’s legal standing for decades to come by subjecting claims of gender discrimination to a lower standard of judicial review—something that theoretically could not happen if we could point to language in the Constitution that explicitly guarantees sex equality, rather than relying on what many legal scholars consider an implicit guarantee under the 14th Amendment.
The quickest and most straightforward path to achieving that guarantee is to publish the ERA. As Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa explained in a 2020 Columbia Undergraduate Law Review article, “the Court has continually changed the test it uses to evaluate claims of sex-discrimination…Without [the ERA], the Court will continue to evaluate sex-discrimination cases without a steady metric, thereby leaving problems of inequality unsolved.” The fact that sex equality is not clearly guaranteed in the Constitution, Wadhwa wrote, gives the Court “a blank check to decide what test to use” and “how seriously to take challenges against statutes that discriminate on the basis of sex.”
Today, the vast majority of pro-ERA politicians are Democrats. But the ERA continues to enjoy broad bipartisan support among voters. A 2016 poll found that 90% of Republicans support it, which suggests that most non-elite Republicans favor basic equality—and GOP leaders are, on this issue, profoundly out of step with their base. A more recent 2022 poll shows that the vast majority of Americans still support the amendment—and gender equality—across party lines. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly derailed the ERA in the 1970s and left it for dead at the dawn of the Reagan era; decades later, fury at Trump resurrected it. Nevada ratified the ERA in 2017, Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, bringing the total number of state ratifications to the 38 required to make it part of the Constitution.
Twenty-nine states already explicitly guarantee sex or gender equality in their constitutions, which offers stronger and more durable protections for abortion rights than state laws banning discrimination. The ERA would guarantee these protections at the federal level. Such protections are necessary even in blue states with strong anti-discrimination laws for two main reasons: (1) laws are much easier to change and/or repeal than constitutional text and (2) gender discrimination claims are usually subject to intermediate scrutiny, which is a lower standard than the one applied in cases involving explicitly protected categories like race. This is because a minority of Americans with outsized power do not consider abortion a right and do not want U.S. courts to treat gender discrimination as seriously as other forms of prejudice. Once courts are required to apply the same standard to sex-discrimination cases, abortion restrictions, which apply almost exclusively to women, will be much harder to defend.
This is already clear at the state level. In Connecticut and New Mexico, the constitutions of which prohibit sex discrimination, courts have upheldpublic funding of abortion. The New Mexico Supreme Court is considering striking down abortion restrictions passed by conservative localities because they violate the state’s constitution. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that abortion providers can challenge Pennsylvania’s ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion as sex discrimination under the state’s Equal Rights Amendment and constitutional equal protection provisions. Even in blood-red Utah, the state Supreme Court recently upheld a suspension of the state’s abortion ban, keeping the procedure legal while the ban is being challenged in court. In suing to block the Utah ban, Utah Planned Parenthood argued that it violated several provisions in the state’s constitution, including the right to gender equality.
But as Wendy J. Murphy explained in a recent law review article, amending state constitutions is an imperfect strategy for reasons similar to those put forth by Wadhwa. According to Murphy, only thirteen states enforce their own constitutional gender equity provisions under the highest standard of judicial review. In Texas, for example, the state constitution’s sex equality provision failed to protect Texas women when the state Supreme Court concluded that abortion-related funding restrictions do not deny equality “‘because of’ sex, even though only women [can] become pregnant.” As Murphy argued, “without the ERA, States are free to apply their State constitutional equality guarantees unequally to women.”
This doesn’t mean that states’ efforts are futile. A year ago, abortion rights supporters had reason for cautious optimism: Ballot measures designed to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions passed, and those intended to restrict such rights failed in all seven of the states, including red states like Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, that voted on these measures in the aftermath of Dobbs. In November, New Yorkers will vote on whether their constitution should guarantee equality regardless of gender and reproductive status. (New York’s constitution currently prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, creed or religion,” but not “sex.”) Floridians, too, will have the opportunity to enshrine abortion rights in their constitution. Abortion-related state constitutional amendments are also on the ballot or under consideration in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota.
Yet some recent efforts to protect abortion and other rights via state constitutions have stalled. Despite having approved a resolution calling on Congress to ratify the federal ERA in 2023, Minnesota was unable to pass a state ERA in 2024. Minnesota’s proposed amendment did not include the word “abortion,” but it would have protected Minnesotans’ right to make “decisions about all matters relating to one’s own pregnancy or decision whether to become or remain pregnant.” An effort to enshrine abortion rights in Maine’s constitution similarly failed in April after lawmakers voted against putting the proposal on the November ballot. The Maine proposal, which would have asked whether Mainers wanted their state constitution “to declare that every person has a right to reproductive autonomy,” also omitted the word “abortion,” though supporters did not avoid the word in promoting it.
Even states that have managed to get reproductive rights on the ballot have had to fight to include the word “abortion.” In New York, pro-choice advocates and legislators attempted to revise the language of the upcoming ballot measure to make its primary purpose—protecting abortion rights—clear, after the state board of elections voted to exclude the word “abortion” from the initiative’s description. Democrats challenged that decision on the grounds that the state is obligated to provide easy-to-understand explanations of ballot proposals to voters. A judge recently upheld the vague language, and state Democrats are now squabbling over whether to keep fighting for the broadly popular initiative or retreat in hopes of neutralizing bad-faith GOP attacks on Democrats in swing districts. But allowing an abortion-rights initiative to fail in deep-blue New York would have serious implications for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights nationwide.
Gender equality as a concept is broadly popular in the United States, whether or not it always exists in fact. And as we’ve seen many times in the wake of Dobbs, abortion rights are popular and restricting them is not. That’s why the GOP is working so hard to keep abortion off of state ballots and overrule the will of the voters, and why New York Democrats belatedly tried to tie the word “abortion” to the state’s upcoming ballot proposal: Both parties know that opportunities to defend abortion rights drive voter turnout. But whatever happens in November, our rights would be better protected if Biden simply published the ERA today.
Despite her frustration with the two major parties, Bates remains hopeful that the tide is beginning to turn. “In light of recent events, and given all that’s at stake, the momentum for ERA publication is growing exponentially,” she recently said. Whoever our next president is, one thing is clear: Actions speak louder than words, and we will need to do more than vote to take back our rights.
[post_title] => Voting Isn't Going to Be Enough
[post_excerpt] => If we want to restore and preserve abortion rights in the United States, we have to fight harder for the ERA.
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A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.
At the broad, gray steps of the entrance to the European Parliament in Brussels, a group of women circle around one in particular. Most are dressed in traditional Yazidi attire—long, white dresses with short lilac or black vests, and white headscarves—but the woman they’ve assembled around is dressed inconspicuously, her long, dark hair tied in a loose knot. Everybody knows who she is: Feleknas Uca, a long-time advocate for the rights of her Yazidi community. Looking at the women around her, she calls out their names one by one, handing each a badge. With these badges, the women will be able to enter the colossal building before them, where their voices are desperately needed inside. Uca has organized this gathering, a one-day conference, to demand justice for the Yazidi genocide, ten years ago this August.
"Yazidis need to be able to protect themselves,” she says.
Those who remember the Yazidi genocide, which started on August 3, 2014, likely recall the haunting footage of Iraqi and US helicopters throwing water and food down to the bone-dry, scorching hot mountain below, where Yazidi refugees had gathered in a panic. Down the hill, ISIS, the fundamentalist jihadist group that had quickly occupied large swaths of Iraq and Syria, had begun an ethnic cleansing of their people.
Mount Sinjar (or Shingal, in Kurdish) is the center of the historic homeland of the Yazidis, and was, at the time, their last hope for salvation. As some of the helicopters touched ground, they prioritized pulling women, children, and the elderly to safety. Those left behind on the mountain either succumbed to the heat, thirst, or exhaustion; the rest were brought across the border after Kurdish militias opened a corridor to Kurdish-controlled land in Syria.
The fate of those who never made it to the mountain would become clearer in the weeks and months thereafter. Thousands of men were instantly massacred by ISIS, and thousands of women and children were abducted. Girls and women were forced into ISIS “marriages,” sold on markets, and used as domestic and sex slaves, while boys became “cubs of the caliphate,” fighters-in-training. All were forcibly converted to Islam.
Ethnically, Yazidis are considered Kurdish, and their mother tongue is the eponymous language; although some in the Yazidi community consider it an ethnic identity of its own. Others contend all Kurds used to be Yazidis, until the emergence of Islam, when many Kurds converted. ISIS considered the Yazidis to be devil worshippers, as most adhere to a centuries-old pre-Christian and pre-Islamic faith.
Uca was visiting Germany when the genocide started to unfold, receiving the news in real time on the day the tragedy began. ISIS had been approaching, but the Kurdish peshmerga forces present in the Shingal region had promised to protect the Yazidis from harm. They withdrew just as ISIS began their attack.
“A call came from a man I knew who was there,” she says. “His sister wanted to kill herself because she was about to fall into ISIS’ hands. She had a weapon. We tried to talk to her but then I heard a shot. I will never forget that moment.”
The daughter of a Yazidi family that migrated to Germany in the 1970s, Uca was born in the north-central town of Celle, which has a large Yazidi community. In 1999, at age 22, she became the youngest-ever member of European Parliament (MEP) as a German representative of the Party for Democratic Socialism, and later for Die Linke (The Left), where she remained an MEP until 2009, when she didn’t seek re-election. When the genocide began, she had just recently moved from Germany to Turkey, where her family was originally from: The Yazidis are indigenous to Kurdistan, which geographically includes regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. She’d chosen to live in Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Turkey’s southeast region, and had become a candidate in the parliamentary elections for the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or HDP. Founded in 2012, HDP is a leftist party rooted in the Kurdish political movement; their main objective is to democratize Turkey and give regions and communities the opportunity to govern themselves. In the June 2015 elections, Uca was elected MP and became the first Yazidi in Turkish parliament.
From the start of her time as an HDP MP, Uca was in a delicate position. While advocating for Kurds and for Yazidis specifically, the HDP claimed that the Turkish government had been aiding ISIS, and consequently held it co-responsible for the genocide—something the government vehemently denied. The HDP, including Uca, also supported the armed Kurdish groups that fought against ISIS, including those the Turkish government considered to be terrorists because of their adherence to the same leftist ideology as the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, which has been waging an armed struggle for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey since the 1980s. Because of this overlap, HDP MPs, like Uca, became victims of a government campaign that accused them of supporting terrorism.
Uca was undeterred by it. The author of this piece, herself based in Diyarbakır during those years, got to know Uca as a parliamentarian who was often found among her community, listening to their needs and trying to forge solutions for them in her capacity as MP. For example, many Yazidis who fled to Turkey to escape ISIS were left in refugee camps with tents that did not protect them during harsh winters and hot summers. They also lacked adequate medical care and were not receiving substantial education. As MP, Uca made attempts to increase the budget for the camps, and while she only had limited success, her presence and care endeared her to the community.
Feleknas Uca in 2008. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz)
Having witnessed the Yazidis’ struggles over the years while advocating for them at high levels of government, Uca has a profound understanding of her community’s needs, wants, and fears. Today, she believes what’s most important is ensuring they are able to return to their homeland. In the aftermath of the genocide, thousands of Yazidis left their home as refugees, resettling in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. While they may be physically safe in these places, Uca tells me, their displacement is still a continuation of the genocide.
“What ISIS wanted to do, is not only to kill and enslave the Yazidis, but also remove them from their ancestral lands. One of the problems we face now is that the community is still not able to return to Shingal because it remains too unsafe,” she says.
In Shingal, where the Iraqi army and Iran-backed militias are now stationed, the Yazidi self-defense force—the Shingal Resistance Units (YBŞ)—founded by the PKK in the weeks after August 3, 2014, is under pressure to be dismantled. Like the PKK, Turkey considers the YBŞ a terrorist group, and regularly bombs them, killing fighters; in addition to targeting local medical clinics, according to reports by Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group. Consequently, Yazidis can’t always return to their homeland, even if they wish to do so. Uca believes that Europe and the US have a responsibility to step in.
“Many Western countries have recognized the Yazidi genocide, but they don’t take any action to assist the community in building a future again in Shingal,” she says. “They don’t visit the region, they don’t help rebuilding it, they don’t hold Turkey responsible for assisting ISIS then, and letting it attack Shingal now.”
Among her many grievances are the centers that were opened in several European countries—mostly in Germany—where Yazidi women who were rescued from ISIS could process their trauma. These same services remain unavailable in Shingal.
“I have always said that if we really want to help these women, we will have to build trauma centers in Shingal, so they can process their trauma and rebuild their future and live their culture and religion in their homeland, where they were born and raised,” Uca says. “But the therapy has been transferred abroad, and with that, the future of the Yazidis. While the community can only really survive at home.”
The continued plight of the Yazidis could cause Uca great despair, but she is adamant that there are also victories, large and small. She has heard countless stories of Yazidi women, in particular, overcoming horrific circumstances and fighting back. She was able to get a visa for one of these women, Hêza Shengalî, so that she could speak at the one-day conference in Brussels. Shengalî was taken captive by ISIS in 2014 and remained in their custody for a year. After she escaped, she joined the Şengal Women’s Units, or YJŞ—the armed women’s wing of the YBŞ—and requested to be sent to Syria to join the forces fighting ISIS there.
“For me, and for other Yazidi women who have joined the YBŞ, fighting back against ISIS is a way to heal,” Shengalî says.
As a commander, she contributed to their eventual victory in the city of Raqqa, which ISIS had deemed their “capital.” When Raqqa was liberated, many Yazidi women and girls were liberated, too. After returning to Shingal, Hêza was even a part of a small delegation that handed over a newly liberated young Yazidi woman back to her family.
In large part because of the YBŞ, despite the Yazidi community’s past gender conservatism, things have started to change in the last decade, including its expectations of women.
“Hêza is normative for what Yazidi women can accomplish,” Uca says. “In 2014, and after that, even 70-year-old women have taken up a weapon to defend themselves. The community has transformed itself.”
Of course, there is still a long way to go. In early 2018, after ISIS lost the last territory they occupied, the women and their children were locked up in camps in northeast Syria and guarded by Kurdish forces. Amongst them were Yazidi women who were once held captive by ISIS. They were (and are) afraid to reveal themselves as such because ISIS ideology is still prevalent amongst the prisoners there. For others, it’s because they’ve had children with ISIS members and are afraid to lose them, as the Yazidi community does not accept these children as legitimate.
Periodically, Yazidi women and girls have been discovered within the camps and rescued by the Kurdish armed forces, but currently, some 2700 remain missing, and are believed to still be in the camps or abroad with ISIS members who managed to flee to neighboring countries, including Turkey. Others may be dead, and their remains are unlikely to ever be found.
Thousands of boys and men remain missing, as well. In cooperation with the United Nations, mass graves in different locations in the Shingal region have been opened since early 2019. Some remains have been identified by Iraqi authorities in cooperation with the UN and have gone on to be reburied with dignity. However, many mass graves remain untouched, leaving families in anguish over the exact fate of their loved ones and unable to give them a proper burial or grave. Other boys may have died in battle as “cubs of the caliphate,” although occasionally, some are found in Turkey, staying with families who belonged to ISIS, who may have distanced themselves from their ideology or who may quietly still support it. Some Yazidi boys have also been reunited with their families in exchange for a ransom.
Having visited Shingal multiple times since the genocide, Uca has been present to witness some of these reunions. She’s also spent a lot of time talking to the women, men, girls, and boys who have been liberated.
“I remember one boy whose first question was: ‘How is Shingal? Is it liberated?’ I saw hope in his eyes. ‘Yes, it has been liberated,’” she says. “And I see that hope in the eyes of the liberated women, too. They have gone through so much, but their resilience is impressive. This is what makes me feel hopeful.”
Uca knows she still has much work to do. In 2018, she was re-elected to the Turkish parliament and visited Shingal with an HDP delegation after Turkey targeted a clinic with a drone, killing eight. She gave a speech about it in parliament, demanding answers from her fellow MPs—answers she didn’t get.
In last year’s general elections, Uca wasn’t on the ballot, due to the party’s two-term limit for all parliamentarians. The end of her mandate also meant the end of her parliamentary immunity, compelling her to leave Turkey instantly because state prosecutors had opened investigations against her for “propaganda for a terrorist organization,” as it had done to dozens of Kurdish MPs, many of whom have been imprisoned. She returned to Germany, and from there, continued her political work in Europe, including organizing conferences, undertaking diplomacy work in the EU, and networking and cooperating with a wide range of Yazidi, Kurdish, and other women’s groups. She’s still keen to solve her legal problems in Turkey, however, and is also planning a new journey to Shingal; it’s been a year since she was last able to visit. And while there is still much to resolve and to heal in the aftermath of what the Yazidis have endured, for Uca, hope is alive and ahead.
“You know what comes to mind when I think of hope? I remember just walking in Shingal and suddenly seeing a lilac flower. Shingal, too, will bloom again and be the hope of humanity,” she says. “Of course, I can do a lot of work in Europe, but my heart is in Shingal. Only when I am there, working in my community, I know that I am Feleknas.”
[post_title] => The Story of the Yazidi Genocide Isn't Over
[post_excerpt] => A decade later, activist and politician Feleknas Uca is still seeking justice for her community.
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Now that the Democrats have chosen a nominee, it's time to focus on reversing the damage done by the Supreme Court.
Corrupted by years of dark money, political attacks, and propaganda, the United States' democratic institutions aren't holding, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the protracted lead-up to the 2024 election. In the last couple weeks alone, Donald Trump was shot at, Hillbilly Elegy’s JD Vance was announced as his running mate at the Republican National Convention, and President Joe Biden withdrew his bid for reelection after a geriatric debate performance led to weeks of bullying from media, donors, and party leadership, all demanding he drop out. What's worse, all of it happened under the backdrop of the extremist, unaccountable Supreme Court taking a sledgehammer to rule of law right before summer recess.
Despite a bleak election year thus far, there’s been a surge of new hope and enthusiasm amongst Democrats after Biden immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for the nomination, spurring a flurry of endorsements from party leaders and potential opponents, and a record-setting $81 million spike in small donations in the first 24 hours. By Monday night, Harris had garnered enough delegates to clinch the nomination—and thank fuck she did. Contested conventions are good for ratings, but historically, they’re also election losers, and it was far from obvious we’d avoid the chaos of a mini-primary, which was supported by heavy hitters like Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg, and the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards, plus a slate of pundits with inflatedegos and billionaires with their own personal preferences. (Obama has since given Harris his endorsement.)
Safely on the other side, the party will inevitably face questions about how this went down come November, but for now, time is precious, and the looming, ongoing threat to democracy remains. Biden's withdrawal was, for all the rifts it created, the right move, and seemingly, a calculated one. For a man alleged to be incompetent, he deftly outplayed Republicans and the media by timing his announcement after the RNC and Sunday morning talk shows, depriving them of a splashy platform to respond. In one afternoon, he orchestrated his succession, neutralized GOP and media attacks against him, and reinforced the most fundamental of democratic norms—the peaceful transition of power. Coup-loving Republicans are furious and scrambling, having wasted their convention trashing a candidate that's no longer running. They have also recommitted to a convicted felon who, with Biden out of the race, is now the oldest candidate in history, with zero plans for how to face an energetic, younger, Black and South Asian woman who intends to run on protecting abortion. Trump, hilariously, has asked for his money back.
It comes as a huge relief that the public infighting among Democrats is largely over, because it allows us to focus on the bigger story of the past few weeks, which is the far-right entrenching itself via the judiciary and gutting the state from within. What the extremist hacks on the Supreme Court have accomplished at the behest of their fascist mega-donors this summer has virtually remade our government overnight: The Federalist Society just delivered a judicial coup, and didn't even need the executive branch to do it.
Thankfully, there's fresh hope now that with a Harris candidacy, various factions on the left and center will align, as France just did, to rebuke the far-right. But even if the Democrats win in November, and Republicans don't start a civil war in response, it’ll be a long road to undo all the damage that’s been done in the last couple months alone. The decisions in Trump v. United States and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, in particular, are two of the worst opinions in Supreme Court history—which is wild considering the Roberts era already has so many doozies to choose from, like Dobbs, Shelby v. Holder, and Citizens United, along with more recent disgraces like Grants Pass v. Johnson or Snyder v. United States.
I've been raising the alarm about plutocrat-funded Christian nationalism for close to a decade, but there's no satisfaction in being right, only sorrow that we're here. Political instability is an eater of dreams and a threat to people's lives. The uncertainty of this moment is overwhelming, the losses too large to digest, and it's created a rush to prophesize and pronounce definitive outcomes. Deniers, doomers, and accelerationists have all entered the chat, and all of them risk self-fulfillment. Our only option is to form a unified front against them and get to work.
In Trump v. United States, a case most legal experts thought the Court would dismiss outright, the far-right majority delivered their delayed decision on Trump's coup, inventing presidential immunity from criminal liability for official acts, while retaining the right to decide what counts as "official." It's a self-destructive move that undermines the most basic tenet of rule of law, which is that everyone is subject to it. The majority's reasoning focused entirely on hypotheticals, deliberately ignoring the very real January 6th coup attempt that precipitated the charges, and greasing the way for more far-right political violence, particularly as trigger-happy Republicans warn in advance of the 2024 election that they won't accept a loss.
Years spent reading Soviet legal documents prepared me for the smug, dishonest, means-to-an-end mindfuck that is Trump v. US, though we don't have to look outside American legal tradition for our own authoritarianism. The United States is infamous for treating people as property and corporations as people: We're seeing the active legacies of the Fugitive Slave Act, Jim Crow, and the Comstock Act in the GOP's endless voter suppression efforts, attempts to ban abortion medication by mail, and tracking of people seeking abortions across state lines. And still, Trump v. US lowers the bar. The opinion is a grotesque power grab that fundamentally upends the Constitution by magically bestowing criminal immunity on a criminal president, effectively making it legal for a (Republican) president to stay in power by any means “officially” necessary. (Richard "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal" Nixon was ahead of his time.)
It's a curious feature of American exceptionalism that headlines on the decision jumped immediately to monarchy, not autocracy. It suggests a romanticism about domestic authoritarianism as something British we defeated in the 18th century—a period piece rather than a contemporary dystopia. In reality, we're poised to elect an autocrat for the second time, not crown a king or queen for the first.
As I've written about before, the US brand of white Christian fascism is both unique and on trend: Demonizing migrants, trapping women, and persecuting the LGBTQ community is the glue binding the global anti-rights movement. Republicans have been open about their desire to emulate far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban's success at purging Hungarian universities, media, and business sectors. The people who wrote Project 2025, the 900-page Heritage Foundation manual for dismantling the country, looked explicitly to other autocrats for strategic advice on how to better end democracy.
King George is certainly self-referential, but he's far less relevant to our situation than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing Congress to a standing ovation with Elon Musk as his guest, Orban visiting Mar a Lago earlier this month, or Jared Kushner promoting ethnic cleansing while drooling over Gaza's "waterfront property." President Vladimir Putin and Sergey Lavrov are openly celebrating Trump's pick of JD Vance for VP because Vance has loudly advocated for letting Russia devour Ukraine and, relatedly, letting husbands abuse their wives. Former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill recently posted on Threads about the formative influence of apartheid South Africa on the grievance-driven tech billionaires Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and, again, Elon Musk—all of whom have thrown in for Trump, not that Musk's support lasted long. Trump himself has been the least subtle of all, shouting out President Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un at rallies, and ominously referencing Nazi talking points about Weimar Germany's inflation in his acceptance speech at the RNC.
The influence of oligarchs like Harlon Crow and Peter Thiel—who personally nurtured Vance—is especially insidious within the judiciary. If the immunity case demonstrates the Supreme Court's open alliance with Trump, they similarly delivered for their billionaire backers with the end of Chevron deference last month and the corruption of our federal regulatory system. Loper Bright covers less sexy subject matter, but its impact on the functioning of our government is arguably as tremendous as the immunity case. Decided in 1984, Chevron created a separation of powers between the judiciary and federal agencies, who employ thousands of career civil servants to administer the vast majority of federal rules that affect our lives, whether related to food and drug safety, air quality, or any number of rules that prevent corporations from preying on people. Under Chevron, courts deferred to agency interpretations of statutes for policymaking purposes. Now, thanks to Loper Bright, the judiciary has the last word on even the most minute agency rules, and any schmuck with enough money can sue and ask a judge with limited staff and zero technical expertise to veto federal regulation. If you think the US is scammy now, just wait.
The challenges we face from Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo and Justice Sam Alito wouldn’t feel so daunting if corporate media weren't also on their side. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, the parent company to CNN, was recently quoted saying that what mattered most in this election is that the next president is friendly to business. "We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate," Zaslav told reporters in Sun Valley, Idaho. How embarrassingly short-sighted to throw away the rule of law, and to treat press freedom as a nice to have, not a necessity. Does he expect to survive autocracy intact?
The hypocrisy is not new. At the same time that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was sentenced to another 16 years in Russian prison for doing his job, the WSJ editorial board was copying Putin's playbook and accusing Democrats who pointed out Trump's dictatorial ambitions of being responsible for his getting shot by a fellow Republican. It's hard to trust that the same corporate media that has soft-pedaled fascism and developed tunnel vision a la Hillary's emails over Biden's debate performance won't also find new ways to tear down Harris, who will face horrifying levels of misogynoir and disinformation that, for obvious reasons, other candidates will not. Media coverage of Harris’ campaign launch has so far been positive, but already there are rumblings of people who "just don't like her for some reason," not to mention a birther campaign, reviving all the greatest hits from Clinton ‘16 and Obama ‘08 and ‘12, respectively. The conservative mediasphere is taking the cheapest shots, accusing her of being a DEI candidate, of sleeping her way to the top, and, horror of all horrors, of laughing too much.
It's generally bad news for democracy when the far-right captures essential institutions, staffs them with loyalists, and threatens political violence, all while aligning with big business and media for profit. Republicans are also itching to make legal trouble over any changes to the ballot, with Rep. Andy Ogles filing articles of impeachment against Harris, and Speaker Mike Johnson threatening to sue to keep Biden in the race. Considering the switch happened before the convention and before state deadlines have passed, this seems to be mostly posturing. That said, there's still real concern that any case arising from this election ends up before a corrupt SCOTUS, giving them another opportunity to hand down a breathtakingly bad decision. The last thing we need is another Bush v. Gore, but on steroids.
So what can be done? A lot, actually. The goal in drawing attention to rising fascism has always been to catalyze opposition, precisely because resignation is so tempting. Harris, who is already walking off to Beyonce's "FREEDOM" at her rallies, has provided a much needed contrast to the gerontocracy, and is generating the excitement American voters look for. Her campaign has moved quickly to calling out her opponents as creepy losers, delighting Democrats who've longed for the party to stop pulling their punches. And she’s gaining momentum. The Divine Nine Black frats and sororities are mobilizing for their AKA sister. Singer Charli XCX tweeted "Kamala IS brat." Zoom's Indian American COO, Aparna Bawa, made it possible for 44,000 Black women to join an organizing call the night Harris announced. Young people are signing up to vote for the first time, and the campaign has already seen an influx of over 100,000 volunteers. With Harris set to secure her party’s nomination at the DNC, the future feels less grim today, which is good because the fight is so far from over.
The Democrats’ sudden return to life brings to mind Miracle Max from The Princess Bride: "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead… Mostly dead is slightly alive." The boring truth is: Harris can win if people vote for her. She has a lot going for her as the incumbent VP, and as the prosecutor taking on an aging gangster, and as a woman running on reproductive rights against a rapist. Crucially, she and Biden both take court reform and expansion seriously—a necessity for us reversing the damage wrought by an extremist Supreme Court, and for preventing it from happening again in the future. She can also take credit for Biden's strong legislative record, low unemployment, rising wages, and record-low violent crime rates—conditions that get incumbent administrations re-elected.
Harris is, like any political candidate, an imperfect one; her prosecutorial record has earned her the leftist badge of "imperialist cop," and uncommitted voters who’d been boycotting Biden for Gaza have vocalized outrage with Harris following her meeting with Netanyahu this week. Others are concerned that she's been set up to fail via the so-called "glass cliff," where women are only given responsibility in a crisis after men have made a mess of things. Because we are still a democracy, voters can and should be able to vocalize these concerns without fear, and to hold our representatives to account. But as even some of her critics have pointed out, Harris has the chance to not just be a strong candidate, but a genuinely decent one, simply by addressing voters’ concerns directly, righting the wrongs she can, calling out the far-right’s bullshit, and delivering on her campaign’s promises in order to preserve our democracy. Our job is to support her in these efforts and get us through November. Then we can fall apart.
The far-right is taking a victory lap, but it’s premature. Republicans are overplaying their hand after their court victories, with the Heritage Foundation president announcing a second American revolution and threatening violence unless the left rolls over. How quickly the creators of Project 2025 forget how much they’ve relied on plausible deniability, credulous institutionalists, and media normalization to get this far. As Harris said of Project 2025 in Milwaukee last week, "Can you believe they put that in writing?"
Let them mistake arrogance for invincibility. Abortion bans have been destroying Republicans electorally, including in red states. Trump is now saddled with an unpopular, brutish, 900-page manifesto that is penetrating popular consciousness across generations—on TV, social media, in conversation—and a thirsty VP "with the integrity of a Boeing 737" whose primary contribution to his campaign is more white male resentment and unpopular views on ending no-fault divorce. Even Appalachia doesn't claim him. As Kentucky Governor and VP hopeful Andy Beshear said of Vance, "He ain't from here." And let's never forget that Trump needed a new VP because he tried to have the last one murdered. Even Kim Jong Un won't be his friend. Nobody especially cared that Trump almost got assassinated, either.
The bigger issue is not that Trump is poised to win, but that Republicans are unwilling to lose. They've already shown their support for coups and stochastic terror, and they've captured the court. If we're going to have any shot at undoing their grip and saving what's left, court reform and expansion have to be the highest priority. And to have any hope of that, we have to vote our people in while we still have the chance, because with democracy on the line, the right to vote itself is on the ballot, too. So is bodily autonomy, and LGBTQ+ rights, and concealed carry laws, and Obamacare, and countless other policies that people depend on to live. We already exist in a violently racist status quo: Sonya Massey's murder by police is a heavy reminder that Black people and other communities of color are especially vulnerable to state violence. A second Trump administration would further politicize the Justice Department to target prosecutors who investigate police abuse. Trump himself is personally promising to deport 20 million people who are "poisoning" the country via expulsions and camps.
When I saw Masha Gessen speak several months ago, they described people lining up for Alexei Navalny's funeral with power banks, water, and food, expecting to be arrested for expressing condolences. It was a bleak reminder that things can always be worse. We don't have to end up that way, but that requires us to not be fucking stupid about dictatorship. Look at French voters who turned against Marine Le Pen once the threat of a far-right government sunk in. Last year in Poland, voters ousted the Law and Justice party and began trying to heal the damage, including plans to restore independence to a stacked judiciary. It's harder to rebuild the rule of law once it's gone, so it's essential we prevent further backsliding. It’s doable for us to stave off fascism and reinforce our democracy, but only if we can keep the presidency, regain the House, and expand the Supreme Court. We have no choice but to aim big—and to demand that our representatives deliver on what they’ve promised.
So gather your courage, your rage, your despair, and channel it into something for your community. Don't be scared of good news, or to feel hopeful about the future. It's in imagining better that we grow and move forward. Get active locally when national politics feel like too much. Sign people up to vote, knock on doors, and tell your people about the dangers of Project 2025. We have momentum against the threat of autocracy. Let's get this done.
[post_title] => The United States v. The Rule of Law
[post_excerpt] => Now that the Democrats have chosen a nominee, it's time to focus on reversing the damage done by the Supreme Court.
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Two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, an honest assessment of how things could get worse.
Nine months before the 2016 presidential election, I declared in an op-ed that if a Republican were to win in November, Trump would be “the best-case scenario for American women, not the worst.” Having covered politics and abortion rights for years, I’d been wrong in my predictions before—but never quite as spectacularly as I was about that.
It’s not that I thought the plainly misogynistic Trump would be good for women, but rather that Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio—two of the highest-profile GOP alternatives to Trump at the time—would be worse. I wasn’t alone in thinking so: That February, a left-leaning columnist for Glamour had labeled Trump the “Best Republican Presidential Candidate on Women's Health Issues” because he was noncommittal on abortion and had taken less extreme positions overall than other Republicans in the race. Trump was and remains amoral and unprincipled, but, at the time, he was considered somewhat of a wild card, whereas Cruz and Rubio were running as ideologues with carefully cultivated right-wing brands. Both wanted to force women to carry their rapists’ babies to term, and Cruz vowed to prosecute Planned Parenthood if elected president. I was surprised that Trump—who was pro-choice for years and never cared about abortion, except as a means of shoring up support from the religious Right—turned out to be the most ruthlessly effective of the three at rolling back women’s rights nationwide.
Two election cycles later, I’m relieved that that op-ed was never published. But being so wrong about the former president taught me an important lesson: What Trump believes, says, or avoids saying has little bearing on what he does—and countless people will suffer as a result of his whims. He is a creature of impulse, guided by an outsized ego and often sharp political instincts. Barring some unforeseeable and extraordinary event, he will be his party’s nominee in November. But what matters far more than “who” leads the GOP ticket is how life would change for abortion seekers with a Republican in the White House next year.
We already know the consequences of anti-abortion laws and policies because we’ve been witnessing them for years, more commonly but not exclusively in red states. Thanks to our shockingly inadequate healthcare system, millions of pregnant people are already suffering—and not just those who need abortions. States with the cruelest abortion bans have the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country: Give birth in Alabama, for example, and you are more than four times as likely to die during or shortly afterward than you would be in California. In states like Idaho, Missouri, and Texas, abortion is a felony in nearly all circumstances; and with Roe overturned, healthcare providers across the country must now weigh their responsibilities to their patients against the risk of being sued, stripped of their medical licenses, or jailed—a choice with deadly consequences for patients. A 2022 survey of medical students found that a majority, around 58 percent, were unlikely or very unlikely to apply to residencies in states that restrict abortion, meaning we’re on the brink of a serious shortage of qualified OB/GYNs in the states where they’re needed the most. We’ve already seen the consequences of this play out: A January New Yorkerstory posed the question, “Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?”—and, as the author’s extensive reporting makes clear, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, the young woman in question, died while pregnant in 2022. After trying and failing to save Glick’s life, a doctor attempted to deliver her baby prematurely via C-section. The baby died, too.
Glick’s health problems, coupled with the poor care she received as a low-income, uninsured, undocumented Mexican woman in a small rural town in Texas, all contributed to her death. But according to the four outside experts The New Yorker asked to review her medical file, doctors likely could have saved her life by explaining how risky it was to continue her pregnancy and, if she wanted one, performing an abortion. Texas’ cruel abortion law made them afraid to do so.
If a Republican wins the presidency in November, the landscape will be even bleaker. While Congress is unlikely to pass federal legislation banning abortion nationwide, a Republican presidential administration wouldn’t need a law to accomplish that goal. As with the repeal of Roe, anti-abortion activists have been laying the groundwork for a backdoor ban for decades. And while Trump recently claimed that he would not support a federal abortion ban (a stance he’s likely to waffle on), anti-abortion activists don’t need him to. Below are the three main strategies they are pursuing—despite stiffening opposition from a passionate but fragmented pro-choice movement—to make a national ban a reality:
A Republican HHS Secretary could override the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs most often used to induce abortion. Mifepristone was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2000; but in 2022, anti-abortion activists, hoping to curb access to the drug, filed a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approach to regulating it. The Supreme Court’s June ruling in that case preserved access to mifepristone for now, but left the door open to further challenges down the road. And the next president’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary could still override the FDA’s approval of the drug, effectively ending what has become the most common method of abortion nationwide.
An anti-abortion administration could resurrect the Comstock Act. Comstock is a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law which prohibits using the mail to send or receive “obscene” items, potentially including anything that could be used to perform an abortion. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Comstock applies to the internet, as well, meaning that even discussing abortion online could lead to up to five years in prison, $250,000 in fines, or both. Medical abortions performed via telemedicine, wherein providers consult with patients online and send the necessary pills by mail, are just as safe and effective as those performed in person; but Comstock would prevent doctors from sending the pills at all, severing a lifeline connecting women in red states and remote, rural areas to needed care. (Between April 2022 and August 2022, around 4 percent of total recorded abortions in the U.S. were performed via telemedicine; as of May 2024, that figure had risen to 19 percent.) Because Comstock is a federal law, it would most likely invalidate state laws, which means a Republican Department of Justice could federally prosecute doctors and drug companies nationwide. It could also shut down all U.S. abortion clinics by barring them from receiving any abortion-related materials via mail.
An anti-abortion Republican president could reinstate the global gag rule. The rule bars foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from using any funds, including non-U.S. government funds, to provide abortion services, information, counseling, referrals, or advocacy, effectively forcing NGOs outside of the U.S. to choose between receiving U.S. global health assistance and providing comprehensive healthcare. It has largely been in place under Republican administrations since 1984, but the Trump administration expanded it to apply to an unprecedented range of agencies and public health programs, many of which serve poor women in rural areas. When women desperate to end a pregnancy are kept in the dark about their options, they have more abortions, not fewer—and many end up dead or seriously injured as a result. The International Women’s Health Coalition wrote in a 2019 report that the rule “contributes to arbitrary deaths by impeding the provision of life-saving care.” Marie Stopes International, one of the largest global family planning organizations, estimated in 2017 that Trump’s expanded gag rule would increase abortions in Nigeria by 660,000 over four years, and that 10,000 women would die as a result. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but it’s clear that women have, as predicted, died as a consequence of this cruel and pointless policy. (Healthcare providers also expect the repeal of Roe to continue harming women worldwide.)
Whether or not the above scenarios come to pass—and there is little doubt that, if a Republican wins the White House in November, the last one will—the harm already caused by state abortion bans shows that a national ban would be an unmitigated disaster. Nor would it stop people from getting abortions. Women end pregnancies for a myriad of reasons, some more common than others. They do so whether it is safe, legal, and accepted, or dangerous, criminal, and condemned. And they do it whether or not their parents, lovers, spouses, friends, neighbors, religious leaders, strangers, or elected officials approve. The only difference is how many will get the quality care they need, and how many will suffer and die.
Forcing a person to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth against their will is a brutal act under any circumstances. But in a country like the U.S., with its threadbare social safety net and policies that vary wildly by state and region, it often means forcing them into poverty, as well. As Bryce Covert explained in 2023, “The states that have banned abortion are the same ones that do the least to help pregnant people and new parents make ends meet.” Most states with abortion bans offer little help to pregnant workers; none guarantee any control over work schedules, paid family leave, or paid sick days. When Lationna Halbert of West Jackson, Mississippi, found herself unexpectedly pregnant in 2022, she toldIn These Times, she cried and cried. She was earning just $8.50 per hour and already had a four-year-old son. She and her partner were not ready for another baby, nor could they afford to raise one. When Roe was overturned, an abortion ban automatically went into effect in Mississippi, shutting down the state’s last remaining clinic. By the time Halbert realized she was pregnant, it was too late: She couldn’t afford to travel to another state to get an abortion, and it was impossible to get one safely and legally in Mississippi. She delivered her second baby in a hospital with no hot water.
As I have written for The Conversationalist before, the same officials who worked so tirelessly to overturn Roe have also fiercely resisted using public funds to help vulnerable women like Halbert. This is because the same politicians who romanticized her fetus have nothing but contempt for Halbert herself, and for all the other people—who are, not coincidentally, mostly women—being forced to have babies they do not want and cannot provide for. That contempt is matched only by their sociopathic indifference to the children who make it out of the womb—the kind who already exist, only to be routinely denied housing, healthcare, and basic nourishment by their state governments. (Nor do these politicians have any empathy for living, breathing children facingcrisis pregnancies of their own.)
If pregnant women are the primary and intended victims of U.S. abortion policy, which is rooted in a desire to control and punish them, their children, partners, and families are collateral damage. It is bad for babies to be unwanted; bad for already existing children to be deprived of needed resources; and bad for the couple experiencing an unexpected pregnancy to be forced to have a baby that one or neither wants. It is delusional and insulting to pretend otherwise. Anti-abortion zealots’ cozy fantasies of domestic fulfillment have nothing to do with the daily lives of women forced into motherhood.
Even under a Democratic administration, women are already being investigated, prosecuted, and punished for various pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages. In 2023, Brittany Watts, a 33-year-old Black woman in Ohio whose water broke prematurely, leading to a miscarriage, was charged with abuse of a corpse—a felony punishable by up to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine. Doctors told Watts her fetus was nonviable, and she spent a total of 19 hours in a local hospital over the course of two days, begging for supervised medical help. Concerned about the potential legal ramifications, the hospital repeatedly delayed her care. Watts ultimately gave up and miscarried alone in her bathroom. When she returned to the hospital for follow-up care, a nurse rubbed her back and told her everything would be okay—then called the police at the behest of the hospital's risk management team. As Watts was lying in the hospital recovering, police searched her home, seized her toilet, and broke it apart to retrieve the remains of her fetus as “evidence.” Watts’ charge was dismissed after a grand jury declined to indict her: Her prosecution was meant to shame and punish her, not protect her fetus. But prosecutors have always been more inclined to target women of color, immigrants, and/or poor women in these types of cases—because it’s easier to win against someone who can’t fight back. Watts’ experience also specifically demonstrates how little our healthcare system values the health and well-being of Black women, who are three times more likely than white women to die from a pregnancy-related cause.
One of the bitterest ironies of conservative reasoning on abortion is that, followed to its logical conclusion, it will impede tens of thousands of people who desperately want to become parents or expand their families from doing so. When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are children, three of the state’s IVF providers suspended their services, fearing legal repercussions. (Alabama voters in a longtime Republican stronghold were so alarmed that they elected a pro-abortion rights Democrat to Congress a few weeks later.) A number of prominent Republicans, including Trump, have since affirmed their support for IVF, but that hasn’t stopped many of them from co-sponsoring the Life at Conception Act, a piece of federal legislation that would ban nearly all abortions nationwide and does not include a carveout for IVF. Nor has it stopped those same Republicans from blocking a recent bill that would have protected the procedure. Leaders of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, Southern Baptists, have recently voted to condemn the use of IVF, as well.
While Republicans’ support of openly fascist and deeply unpopular abortion policies has become a political liability for the GOP, it’s simultaneously become a human nightmare for the rest of us. Trump’s failed attempt to contain the political fallout from Arizona’s recent revival of an 1864 ban is an object lesson in locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. If abortion is the same as infanticide, as most anti-abortion activists insist that it is, then no person seeking one would be exempt from prosecution, whether you’re 9 years old and a man rapes you, 11 years old and your grandfather rapes you, 12 years old and a man rapes you, 33 and desperate to end your pregnancy, 33 and suicidal, a married mother who doesn’t want another child, or unexpectedly pregnant at 45. Even white, married, heterosexual moms are not exempt. The state of Texas recently forced lifelong Texan Kate Cox to travel out of state for an abortion she needed to protect her life and fertility. Cox, a married mother of two who wants more kids, was told that her third pregnancy was nonviable: The fetus was unlikely to survive, and the best-case scenario was that she might give birth to a baby who would livein anguish for a week or less. Alternatively, she could experience a life-threatening uterine rupture and need a C-section and/or a hysterectomy, potentially losing the ability to have more children in the future. Forced sterilization, which is one outcome Texas’ barbaric denial of care could have imposed on Cox had she lacked the means to travel out of state, is internationally recognized as a human rights crime. No wonder she fled.
It’s a sad truth that things can always get worse, even for relatively privileged Americans. Until it did, many legal experts considered it highly unlikely that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe, upending nearly 50 years of precedent and stripping American women of a right guaranteed to us for half a century. But many U.S. residents, particularly in rural areas and throughout the South and Midwest, have been living under de facto abortion bans for at least the last decade. A right is only guaranteed when it can be freely and easily exercised by all; for many U.S. residents, the cost of abortion—the procedure itself, the travel, the lodging, the childcare costs, the ability to request and take time away from paid work—is too high. One in five U.S. women must travel more than 40 miles one way to access care; in some rural areas, that distance is 300 miles or more. Under a national abortion ban, the situation will only grow more dire. People have taken and will continue to take risks that range from reasonable but frightening (crossing the border to buy pills from a pharmacy in Mexico) to desperate and potentially fatal (shooting themselves in the stomach). Denying care to women who need it permanently alters their lives, most often not for the better.
There is no reason to believe that the proudly anti-democratic GOP will uphold democratic norms or respect the popular will, and little reason to trust the Democratic Party, which has, in recent years, canceled elections, failed to defend abortion rights, and repeatedly defied its own voters. But focusing on how abortion politics are hurting the GOP or improving Biden’s chances misses the point. Like miscarriage, abortion stops an embryo or a fetus from becoming a baby. Restricting it tortures women, children, and families and rips holes in communities. Policies that harm actual, living people must be stopped, and those who promote them held to account. Voting is one fragile, inadequate tool. With so many lives at stake, we’ll need more.
[post_title] => The Reality of a National Abortion Ban
[post_excerpt] => Two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, an honest assessment of how things could get worse.
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