If voting is considered to be a baseline criteria for being “politically engaged,” the percentage of Zoomers that fit the bill would drop from 75% to 28.4%, which is . It is true that young people, historically, tend to have lower turnout in elections. . But why is a generation described as the most not translating that fervor into votes?

Daijah Wilson, a 19-year-old college student from New Jersey who currently lives in Texas, says, “I primarily see people around my age advocating on social media and in person [because] we’re tired of just sitting on the sidelines. We just want to be involved because it seems like if we don’t talk about it or if we don’t call it out, then who’s willing to?” She adds, this is “because the older generation seems to have given up.”&�Բ�����;

Wilson also notes that Gen Z’s anxieties about the future play a large role in their political engagement. “A lot of the issues that are being talked about, voted about, and acted upon are going to affect us the most because we’re the upcoming generation.” She cites the specific ways in which her generation is impacted: “We’re coming into not being able to afford rent, not being able to buy homes, not being able to find jobs, competing for resources, and facing environmental problems.”

Wilson speculates that Zoomers are pessimistic about their voting choices. “It doesn’t matter if the leadership is Republican or Democrat; we have been facing the same issues time and time again. Nothing’s really changing. I think our generation is cynical about voting but not about social issues.” In other words, she believes that “we can have a better world, but it just feels like my vote doesn’t matter. The candidates don’t care about us.”&�Բ�����;

Her words echo Michelle Cottle’s recent in The New York Times that Gen Z is more motivated by issues and values than by candidates or parties. Peter de Guzman, a researcher at (CIRCLE), speaking more broadly about people aged 18 to 24, says, “Young people are more likely than older people to not affiliate themselves with a political party, and there has been a [of independents among] young people recently.” Those youth who do identify with a political party are significantly more likely to identify with Democrats, but that may be changing as Zoomers’ with Biden and Democrats grows. Young people think Democrats are not doing enough when it comes to climate change, the violence of policing, and Palestinian oppression.

Zoomers’ connection with political issues and disconnection with voting might also have to do with the fact that they get from the internet, particularly . De Guzman explains that “we’ve seen throughout the surveys we’ve conducted that young people are really interested in a variety of issues … and [are] using social media to talk about these issues with each other.” This is consistent with Wilson’s personal experience. She says, “Social media is where I get a lot of information; once it’s on my social media, it’s on my radar.”&�Բ�����;

The problem is that social media is not as good at disseminating logistical information about how to vote in one’s county as it is at increasing political polarization and playing on people’s emotions—by . The result: Gen Z is well informed about social and political issues but is lost on the basics of voting. “There’s a lot of advocacy work going on social media [because] a lot of Gen Z is focused on more emotionally targeted political issues, and then the specifics kind of get lost. Like, how to enact change for the things that they believe in,” says Wilson. 

De Guzman adds, “When we ask people why they did not register or why they did not vote, they often cite information or access barriers.” To combat the lack of access to information, de Guzman points out that “increasingly, we see young people use social media [for information]. It’s really about meeting people where they are.” Further, he believes that election administrators “could be doing a better job of social media messaging to get that information out.”

What exacerbates confusion about the logistics of voting is that young people frequently move out of their home state or county for college. Wilson points out that the differences in switching voter registrations can create an additional barrier for young people who want to vote. “I think having a universal or standard [system for registering to vote] would be a lot easier, because a lot of people don’t even think about voting until it’s getting close to voting time because they simply don’t have the time.” She adds that “restricting the registration period to weeks before the actual vote is also a problem.” Nearly half of all states do , but many young people may not be aware of this.

Making voting easier directly fuels youth voter turnout. De Guzman explains that “states that have facilitative election laws—such as pre-registration, automatic voter registration, and online voter registration—have higher rates of youth participation.” Inversely, it is for younger people to vote in states that have more restrictive voting laws.

For example, 19-year-old Patricia, who lives in Texas, the state to vote in, was not able to cast a ballot in a recent election despite registering in Harris County. She assumed that she did not have the right identification to vote in person. “I did register to vote,” she says. After she obtained the appropriate documents from volunteers, Patricia says, “I was able to fill out a short little form that had all my information, and I got my receipt. Then, I was looking on the website [for instructions] on how to go vote, and I thought I needed some sort of identification, like a Texas driver’s license, a Texas ID, or a passport. I said, ‘OK, I don’t have a Texas ID because I’m from Florida, and I don’t have a birth certificate or my passport with me.’ I just figured I’m probably ineligible,” she says. 

She realized only after the election that she could have filled out a Reasonable Impediment Form that would have allowed her to vote. “They’re trying to make it as hard as they can for people like college students to vote,” she adds. barring college students from using student IDs to vote is poised to create a similarly confusing experience for youth in that state. De Guzman says, more broadly, “Young people have less access sometimes to IDs. They might not have a driver’s license, so a college ID might be their best form of identification. If they can’t use that to vote, that’s another barrier they’re facing that may dissuade them from participating.”&�Բ�����;

As November approaches, there’s been increased scrutiny on what Gen Z’s voting tendencies might mean for the 2024 election and how to get the eligible youth voters . This is especially challenging as some because they don’t see either party working to end Israel’s genocide. Overall fewer young voters are in November 2024 than in 2020.��

Rebuilding the link between caring about politics and actually voting will require various solutions. As de Guzman points out, “There are so many factors that impact participation.”&�Բ�����;

Two of the more straightforward solutions are reducing barriers to voting and leveraging social media to better inform youth about elections, voter registration, and other logistics. Reiterating the importance of facilitative voting practices, de Guzman adds, “We have seen that if you control for factors like education and income, voter registration was higher among young people in states that had automatic voter registration.” And since “a lot of young people don’t have information on elections, social media can be a way for them to get that information.”&�Բ�����;

Combating young voters’ cynicism with candidates, especially their current dissatisfaction with Democrats, is trickier. When asked about in primaries and, de Guzman doesn’t have an answer but hopes to learn more after the election. “Our upcoming survey will be a post-election survey. It would be interesting to see how young people ended up voting, and if more voted third party.”&�Բ�����;

For now, it is clear that Israel’s assault on Gaza, and President Biden’s unconditional support via arms sales and the decades-long oppression of Palestine more broadly, is an . “With the genocide going on right now, I see a lot of my peers involved, and I see people around my age attending rallies and events and boycotting. I boycott as well and try to allocate my funds to places that better represent my values,” Wilson points out. 

The mass on college campuses across the nation in the form of protest encampments suggests that Gaza will remain a crucial political issue come November. Andrew de las Alas, a junior at Washington University in St. Louis, participated in the encampment there and was among the . De las Alas says that while he is still processing his arrest and suspension, “What stands out to me is that our current president has both the political authority and the diplomatic capital to push for an end to the genocide, but he hasn’t. Instead, billions of dollars were promised to Israel. I know that I won’t be voting for Biden again.”

De las Alas says he is considering voting for the Green Party presidential candidate, at Washington University’s encampment. “I am going to be looking more at the Green Party and other parties and really weighing my options. I think it’s important to reconsider all of our options every election, but with this one, we know that millions of lives are on the line,” he states.

But the dissatisfaction of young voters and their disconnect from both major parties’ presumed nominees for 2024 is not just about . “Gen Z is tired of the BS; we are tired of being told to go vote without tools to go vote, and then the candidate that we elect—for example, Joe Biden—does not do the things that they said they were going to do,” explains Wilson. 

She adds, “We’re tired of people being in office who don’t look like us or care about what we care about.” But she, like other young people, is optimistic about and the causes she cares about. “I think politics is definitely going to change in the future with this generation. We just need more tools about how to actually enact that change.”

and in U.S. history, in terms of the average age of its members. Congressional representatives are now than they did 70 years ago.

The phrase “” may as well have been created for today’s aging politicians, of whom have the popular social media platform TikTok as the breath mint “Tic Tac,” and many voters appear skittish about voting for Biden, solely . 

Are their fears justified? Should there be age limits for elected officials, or past a certain age, as some have suggested? Aside from the fact that many younger people could trip on sandbags and that adverse health events can happen at any age, age limits are as discriminatory as they are arbitrary.

Take Sen. Bernie Sanders, who hasn’t stumbled or frozen in public, and who is older than Biden. During his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, when he was the oldest candidate at 75 and 79, respectively, he was wildly popular with young people (and at that).

Age doesn’t necessarily determine an individual’s capabilities to lead. There are older candidates who possess the qualities necessary to be effective leaders and younger candidates who don’t. Instead, what is important is candidates’ responsiveness to the tenets of our liberal democracy and to social movements that arise when those tenets are unmet or underachieved.

Age limits overlook the reality that people age differently—with some older candidates possessing mental acuity compared to some younger candidates—a�Ի� could exclude qualified people from running for office. Further, age limits infringe on voters’ ability to choose their candidates based on merit and qualifications. Finally, it would take a to institute age limits on elected officials, and the chance of that is slim.

Life span and health in the U.S. have over the past century. There are as there were even 20 years ago. It should be noted that, due to systemic policy failures, Black, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Natives, and lower-income Americans from these , and policy remediation is critical.

The issue is representation—not aging—a�Ի� that can be remedied by policies such as or making it easier for young people to vote with same-day voter registration.

Some have suggested term limits as another remedy. While this idea seems initially attractive—especially since it addresses the unresponsiveness of career politicians, corruption that could come with long terms in office, and discouragement of civic participation as incumbency—it might deter new candidates. However, opponents may argue that deep knowledge of the issues and of congressional processes means that continuity is vital.

What if we paid attention instead to how closely a politician cleaves to the mandate of a democratically elected representative of the voters in a ? 

Baby boomers such as and Reps. , , and are among those over the age of 70 whose voting records demonstrate strong receptiveness to the needs of working families and progressive social movements.

Even Biden proved to be responsive to social movements and the needs of poor and low-income voters and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic when he achieved greater economic equality through the and the , and proposed even more with his stymied . 

Liberal democracies of fair distribution of wealth, income, and power as embodied by civil rights, civil liberties, inclusiveness, and equality before the law. These are achieved through free and fair elections, free speech and press, and constitutional courts, sustained by a separation of powers and checks and balances on those powers.

When these tenets are at risk, social movements arise to demand their realization. Right-wing populists may form movements to undermine them in favor of a minority rule that subverts liberal democratic values and favors authoritarian rule.

A liberal democracy, such as the U.S. ostensibly is, demands that our elected representatives remain responsive to principles and to social movements when those principles are unmet or at risk. Age limits are irrelevant to these objectives. After all, Reps. and , both of whom are relatively young, embrace Christian Nationalism, in opposition to the principles of a liberal democracy. Growing numbers of elected officials, particularly Republican ones, appear to be adopting the idea of over democracy.

So let’s put ageism in the trash bin of illiberal discrimination where it belongs. Instead, let’s judge fitness for elected office by a candidate’s demonstrated ability to respond to the needs of the majority of people, expressed through the principles of liberal democracy and democratic social movements. 

We are physicians, and in countless private conversations with other physicians, nurses, and medical workers around the U.S., we hear whispers about people being afraid to lose their jobs if they show support for Palestinians. They have been instructed by their leadership not to say the words “Gaza” or “genocide” in their professional roles, while they watch Israeli forces bomb hospitals, murder health care providers, and assault ICU patients. Many health care workers are discovering—much to their surprise—how many people in leadership roles in their institutions support , even when health care workers and hospitals are targets.

We wrote the following essay in response to JAMA’s promotion of ethical ambiguity around bombing hospitals. It was rejected for publication—yet another act of institutional silencing. As Israeli media now tours the Gaza hospitals that Israel destroyed, alleging these were military targets, we see . But we do see thousands of dead patients—many of them children—and hundreds of as a result of .

As physicians, we understand that our work is sacred, and the places of our care are also sacred. There is never an ethical case to bomb hospitals. There is never an ethical case for genocide. We share our response with the larger public to break the silence, to reaffirm our professional ethics, and to encourage all health care workers to speak out and rise in solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues and the communities they care for. 

NOTE: What follows is a lightly edited version of the original essay rejected for publication by JAMA.

There Is No Ethical Ambiguity About Bombing Hospitals

As physicians and health equity experts, we were disturbed to see the publication of “,” by Matthew Wynia, in JAMA. Far from speaking hard truths in the face of dehumanization, violation of medical ethics, and war crimes, �²�Ծ���’s framing is a stunning example of “,” a foundational strategy to justify war and obstruct peacemaking. To engage popular support for war, nations, their militaries, and their institutions to coerce acceptance for atrocities. Ignoring history, power, and context, �²�Ծ���’s arguments introduce ethical ambiguity where there should be none: To be clear, there is no context where bombing hospitals full of sick and injured patients and the medical staff caring for them is acceptable.

�²�Ծ���’s article was published as the world is witnessing , under Israel’s justification of unverified claims that these Days before the JAMA publication, Israeli physicians provided cover, calling for the in Gaza. The combined effect of of Gaza with airstrikes, ground warfare, and complete siege blocking food, medicine, water, and fuel since Oct. 9 has caused the collapse of Gaza’s health care system. As we write, newborns in a neonatal ward are , as power is lost for incubators due to the bombing.

These attacks on health care in Gaza are not a first for Israel. In 2021, and nine primary care centers, and destroyed a desalination plant that supplies clean water to a quarter of a million people. This past week alone, the several hospitals, killing or injuring health care workers, patients, and thousands of displaced people who had been sheltering in hospital corridors and courtyards. These targeted assaults on health care facilities, health care workers, and patients have led to the and the incapacitation of 113 health care facilities (including 20 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza that are now out of operation), and have contributed heavily to the growing casualties in Palestine, which now top 11,000 people.

for international intervention to save them and the overflow of patients they refuse to abandon. Still, Israel continues its devastating assault unimpeded by the institutions that were built to prevent such atrocities. The American Medical Association’s meeting of the House of Delegates on Nov. 11 was emblematic of medicine’s institutional response to this direct assault on our profession. The who brought the discussion of a cease-fire up for consideration. Silencing is the ultimate form of narrative control.

In this historic context, Wynia asserts that health professionals must oppose racism. In the first part of his article, he focuses our attention on antisemitism by reminding us of the Holocaust and medical professionals’ role in speaking out against war crimes, with which we agree. 

The article then pivots to reinforce the dominant narrative that Israelis are the victims, despite decades of that was in the same service of racial capitalism as apartheid in South Africa. Wynia appeals to our humanity by highlighting Hamas’ violence against Israelis while ignoring the evidence flooding the internet of mostly brown Palestinian bodies buried under rubble created through the actions of the Israeli government. 

Wynia demands that we speak out against war crimes and is quick to denounce Hamas for launching attacks from inside or near medical facilities. But then, instead of denouncing Israel for doing the same or worse, he invokes legal justifications supporting Israel’s targeting of hospitals in Gaza. Specifically, Wynia says, “Israel says it is abiding by these rules, but some international law experts believe Israel is not doing all it should to avoid harming civilians,” and adds, almost as an afterthought, that “some believe Israel’s siege of Gaza amounts to ‘collective punishment,’ which is a war crime too.”

Wynia then asks a series of ethical questions probing the moral grounds to bomb hospitals where enemy combatants may be hiding among injured children. The ambiguity of his response is chilling: “Health professionals of goodwill and equally strong commitments to human rights have differing opinions on these questions, which reflects the nature of the questions.” This statement corrodes the ethical foundations of the medical profession. It also belies our profession’s historical allegiance to power.

From a medical ethics perspective, there is no circumstance in which hospitals where injured, ill people are being treated should be bombed. There is no ethical space where “reasonable people disagree” about the question of killing injured children who are seeking medical care. There is no moral ambiguity to preventing . Unfortunately, . The , a subject in which most physicians have neither critical analysis nor literacy. No better case study can be found than the issue of Palestine, where institutional medicine has a demonstrated record of narrative control: .

There should be no ambiguity. From a legal perspective, and are clearly war crimes. Israel is leaning on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court’s legal loophole for bombing hospitals, schools, and other places where the sick and wounded are gathered by stating that these locations are protected, “.” Fascist armies have used this logic before, which led to the Geneva Convention’s articles protecting health care in times of war in the first place. In 1935, , claiming they were housing militants. In Mussolini’s world, anything that was not in the interests of Italy’s fascist regime was considered a .

This line of reasoning creates a narrative space where the most sacred aspects of our work as physicians—caring for the sick and vulnerable, regardless of identity—is left open to the kinds of attacks we are witnessing in Gaza and the simultaneous attacks on medical ethics exemplified in . Opening the door to bombing hospitals, killing injured and hospitalized children, and framing it as morally and ethically ambiguous is a dangerous position for JAMA, putting the journal dangerously out of step with the world and the moral code at the heart of our profession.

In response to this horror—a�Ի� to make our contribution to ending it—more than 5,000 Black activists, scholars, artists, and workers have , an end to Israel’s siege, an end to the United States’ support for it, and urgent humanitarian relief to let the people of Gaza live. 

We are directing our demands to the U.S. government, which has been directly in this catastrophe. When Israel’s defense minister referred on television to residents of Gaza as “” and declared that Israel would cut off water, fuel, food, and electricity, U.S. officials did not object to the dehumanizing language or the violent act—which is illegal under international law. 

Instead, the secretaries of and traveled to Tel Aviv to voice their support, followed by President Joe Biden himself. Since that visit, Biden has given multiple speeches in support of Israel—as it targets mosques, churches, schools, and hospitals. And he has called on Congress to give in “emergency” military funding, in addition to the $4 billion that the U.S. gives annually. 

Israel is seeking to isolate Gaza, trapping its people within, keeping aid workers and others from entering, and cutting off its residents’ phones and internet at will. But we refuse to let Gaza bear this alone. Our hearts are with its people, and we raise our voices against the governments besieging them.

In demanding a ceasefire and relief to Gaza—a�Ի� an end to U.S. support for its occupier—we are upholding a tradition of Black freedom struggle that sees justice as a matter that extends across and beyond national borders. 

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Riverside Church in New York, declaring that “my own government” was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

That same year, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for Palestinians after the 1967 War.

In 1970, 56 Black activists , “An Appeal by Black Americans Against United States Support for the Zionist Government of Israel” in The New York Times, declaring “complete solidarity with our Palestinian brothers and sisters, who like us, are struggling for self-determination and an end to racist oppression.”&�Բ�����;

The Black Panthers with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

These are only some of the most well-known examples of Black internationalism during the 1960s and 70s, but they barely scratch the surface of a whole universe of Black solidarity with people fighting colonialism and oppression all over the world.

We formed —which organized the writing and signing of the aforementioned statement—in 2015, following the previous year’s after the police murder of Mike Brown, and the , which happened at the same time.

That moment, captured by slogans such as “Black Lives Matter,” and “I Can’t Breathe,” was one of the most significant Black-led revolts that have shaken this country. Black people called attention to pernicious and ongoing racist police violence, mass incarceration, discrimination in housing and schools, racialized health disparities, and countless other aspects of American life that are marred by anti-Black racism. The movement has also pointed to the deep roots of these contemporary problems, launching a renewed conversation about slavery and episodes of white terror—as in the —a�Ի� other racist abuses that have shaped the foundation of the U.S. economy and society.

A year after the 2020 racial justice uprising, many people in this country looked at Palestinians resisting displacement, , and yet another with different eyes. 

Additionally, there has been a significant uptick in pro-Palestinian activism in the U.S. overall. The growth of has made conversations about Israeli apartheid impossible to ignore on campuses across the country. The global campaign for —led by Palestinian civil society organizations—has invited people in the U.S. and around the world to engage in activism to advance Palestinian rights. And, we have seen the work and success of groups like , most recently engaged in direct actions in the and New York City’s to demand a ceasefire. 

These are just a few examples of a movement that has been educating and organizing for Palestinian rights. In combination with a different collective consciousness regarding racism driven by the Movement for Black Lives, more and more people in the U.S. have come to sympathize with Palestinians and understand their condition as shaped by structural oppression.

Now it is time to turn that sympathy—which grows in the face of the latest Israeli assault—into action, demanding an end to the hell rained down on our relatives in Gaza in the form of U.S.-made bombs, paid for by U.S. taxpayers, and dropped by U.S.-made aircraft.  

Ultimately, we must work for long-term justice and peace for Palestinians. But the first step is stopping the assault by winning a ceasefire. We demand it. The people of Gaza deserve to live.

In theory. 

In practice, the otherizing of human beings remains central to the grim calculus by which we justify violence against one another and even accept it as virtuous. This violence, inflicted by states or by vigilantes, is everywhere we look. 

In the United States, it’s in the way , , , and . 

Internationally, it’s in the way our society dismisses the targets of Western wars and capitalism.

Most prominently today, it’s in the dehumanization of Palestinians during what, by many accounts, is an against the people of Gaza. 

The only way to end the inhumanity is to humanize the victims of war in pursuit of justice.

Dehumanization Lays the Groundwork for Genocide

Israeli diplomat Ron Prosor in an October 2023 podcast interview that his nation’s war on Gaza was about “civilization against barbarity,” and “good against bad.” Such language reinforces the equations of Israeli : Israelis equal “civilized” and “good,” whereas Palestinians equal “barbaric” and “bad.”

Prosor added that the targets of Israel’s military might were “people who basically act as animals and do not have any, any respect for children, women.”&�Բ�����;

His remarks came soon after Israel’s defense minister referred to Palestinians as “human animals.” (There’s no shortage of irony in such language given how European antisemitic tropes routinely .)

Apologists for Israel’s war take pains to say there is a distinction between Hamas—the ostensible “barbarians” who perpetrated the —a�Ի� Palestinian civilians. But Israel’s bombing campaign against Gaza is so devastating that even the routinely calls it “one of the most intense of the 21st century, prompting growing global scrutiny of its scale, purpose and cost to human life.” The distinction between Hamas and Palestinian civilians means little within a scenario of mass indiscriminate bombing. 

Recall when the U.S. in the early 2000s and claimed to be striking Al Qaeda “terrorists,” while dismissing the predictable, resulting mass civilian casualties as “collateral damage.” The “war on terror” quickly became a “war of �ٱ�����ǰ�.”&�Բ�����;

A decade earlier, analyst Norman Solomon pointed out in a against the first Gulf War how Time Magazine defined “collateral damage” as “a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood.” That descriptor can easily be applied today to Gaza, a minuscule and densely populated strip of land subjected to a savage bombing campaign akin to shooting fish in a barrel. 

As the 1994 so aptly demonstrated, the first wave of weaponry in any pogrom is the use of dehumanizing language. Next comes extermination. If Palestinians are not people, their deaths are easier to stomach. If they are merely human animals, barbarians, and collateral damage, they can be killed with impunity.

When Context Is Forbidden

It’s not enough to employ dehumanizing language against Palestinians. Israel’s apologists have waged a long and effective narrative war on any and all critiques of Israel as well as any and all defenses of Palestinians. From academic exile, as in the 2014 case of University of Illinois , to media censure, as inflicted on CNN contributor in 2018, Israel’s defenders have routinely canceled critics of apartheid. 

Most recently, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres is facing calls for resignation merely for pointing out that Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israeli settlements “.”&�Բ�����;

Contextualizing acts of terrorism even while condemning them is verboten, and not just for high-level diplomats. A science journal editor named was recently fired for sharing an article by the satirical paper The Onion on his private social media account titled “.” Eisen happens to be Jewish American. 

It is a testament to the extent of censorship in reference to Israeli apartheid that The Onion is bolder than most mainstream media outlets for pointing out the absurdity of limiting discourse. The outlet (perhaps in response to Eisen’s firing?) filed another story titled “.”

When Some Lives Are ������Ƶ Equal Than Others

Israel understands how significant the use of narrative is to the maintenance of its occupation and control of Palestinian territories. To underscore the idea that they are responding to inhuman terrorists, the Israeli Defense Forces of Hamas’ October 7 attacks as justification for bombing Gaza indiscriminately. Such imagery, when presented without any historical context of occupation and oppression, offers a sympathetic portrayal of Israeli civilians as the victims of unexplained and unprovoked barbarism. Any mention of broader context is strictly forbidden. 

Indeed, when we , it is unfathomable to justify the violence that ended their lives. Bringing up the context of Israel’s occupation sounds jarring when juxtaposed against the heartbreaking story of how were gunned down by Hamas fighters as they protected their son from bullets. The surviving boy told the press that his parents “wanted to us to be happy, to be whimsical … They wanted us to be joyful. They wanted us to be in peace.”&�Բ�����;

Commercial media outlets have been flooded with such stories, centering the Israeli victims and survivors of Hamas’ assault. Israeli humanity reigns supreme. It is civilized and good. 

Where are the stories in mainstream media of Palestinian lives lost? Not just in the latest Israeli war on Gaza but in all the wars that preceded it? And what about the stories of the decades of traumatic land loss and unjust imprisonment and displacement Palestinians have faced? 

Winning the Narrative War

In Israel’s previous wars of retaliation against Hamas in Gaza, the same pattern played out as we are seeing today: Palestinian civilians are to be killed by Israel than Israeli civilians are by Hamas. This is utterly unsurprising given Israel’s military might and the unwavering U.S. diplomatic and military aid to Israel.

It’s not just Gaza either. In 2022 Israel killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem than it did the year before, as per an independent monitoring group. The bizarre justification was that armed Israeli soldiers were defending themselves against civilians. 

Arrayed against such forces, one of the only ways Palestinians can assert their humanity is through storytelling. But this is a challenge given the one-sidedness of mainstream U.S. news, the chilling effect on speaking out in academia, and even on social media.

Still, stories are trickling out. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2014 by publishing short stories about dozens of Palestinian men, women, and children. Arab-centric and independent media outlets such and routinely showcase such stories, in sharp contrast to mainstream U.S. media outlets. 

Take , a 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was killed by Israeli bombs in Gaza. We know his name and his story not because he was profiled in The New York Times or on CNN—he was not—but because he was a with a huge following as an online gamer, and because independent media and the Arab press covered his killing. 

Bringing up the context of Hamas’ October 7 attack to justify Eldous’ killing sounds jarring. And so it’s easier not to bring up Eldous and other Palestinian victims at all, as evidenced by the deafening silence of Western media outlets on his death and the deaths of countless others. 

The long-term work of sharing historical context about Israel’s brutal occupation that began with the must continue. But the short-term work of stopping the unfolding genocide must happen immediately. To curb Israel’s disproportionate and brutal violence, there must be an unequivocal call for a ceasefire in the name of Palestinian humanity. 

It is a sad state of affairs that the world has to be convinced that Palestinians are human beings too. As of this writing, Israel has killed in Gaza by some accounts, and the total death toll has surpassed , nearly five times the number of Israelis killed by Hamas. 

How many Palestinian lives is a single Israeli life worth? If the ratio is not 1 to 1, what is it? 

The only thing that McCarthy even mentioned related to the inquiry—a “culture of corruption”—is patently bogus in relation to this White House. But is another matter, and it’s clear the GOP is going to use the as a wedge to pry out any grain of dirt they can find to stop this administration from governing before the election next year, at which point they can return Donald Trump to power.

There’s a lot to say about this—how the Biden administration specifically, and Democrats generally, haven’t done enough to distance themselves from Hunter Biden’s failings; how go all the way back to , the albatross stepson to James Madison; and how all this plays into a (especially with the House thrown into chaos by the self-imposed decapitation within the GOP) and the election next year. So let’s just leave that here, because something bigger is at stake, and not just whether or not McCarthy will carry through with his threat to impeach Biden.

In recent weeks I’ve been thinking about the fundamental crisis facing the United States—one that goes beyond Donald �հ��ܳ���’s bid for reelection—which is that one of the two major political parties has turned definitively against democracy.

We see this most recently in the forthcoming biography of U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, Romney: A Reckoning, by McKay Coppins, as . Romney, the only senator in U.S. history to vote to convict an impeached president of his own party (which he did twice), is retiring in 2024, and burning bridges with his cohorts in the Republican Party. “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” he told Coppins.

Romney’s observation is shared on the political left—but it’s also fair to criticize how Romney has helped the rise of the radical right during his long career in the Senate. It’s one thing to label the problem of the Republican Party becoming an autocratic party, and quite another trying to figure out what to do with it. 

I was a guest on a recent episode of (she is also my colleague here at YES!) when she asked me whether massive voter turnout for Biden and other Democratic candidates in 2024 is the only thing preventing us from sliding into autocracy—a�Ի� how to convince progressives and liberals who would prefer to vote for someone else to hold their noses and vote for Biden.

Sadly, the answer to the first question is yes, and it’s not just going to be in 2024, but in every election going forward in which the future of American democracy is on the ballot. When one party has firmly turned against democracy, then every election has the potential to be the last election. Elections become existential for our constitutional republic. 

This makes recent complaints about Biden’s age, for example, or other calls for him to step aside, or evidence that big donors to progressive causes are cutting back, all the more frightening. Yes, voting, especially in presidential elections, is often a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Pointing out that there’s a world of difference between Biden and Trump won’t make some voters on the left any more enthusiastic for Biden’s reelection. 

Depressed turnout on the left is likely to lead to Trump winning a second term. And I don’t think it’s overwrought to say that such an outcome will signal the end of American democracy. There may be future elections, but they will likely be neither free nor fair, and the right to vote at all will be curtailed even more than it is already, especially for Black voters.

So to the second half of Sonali’s question: How can we convince the left that, yes, voting for someone you don’t like is better than the available alternatives—voting for Trump out of spite, voting for a third-party candidate of any political stripe, or staying home—all of which would contribute to a Republican victory?

Part of this comes down to the definition of voting. Often, it’s interpreted as voters “expressing their preference,” words that imply that any preference is fine. And that definition is not technically wrong. In an ideal system, that is indeed how voting would work, and the results would honor those preferences to the same degree that people express them.

In Congress, that means proportional representation. In a race for a single office—i.e., the presidency—it’s a popular vote contest. 

In the United States of America, we have neither of those systems. Most races for the House of Representatives are a case of the politician, or their party, choosing who their voters are, thanks to gerrymandering of congressional districts. Races for the presidency take place under the rules of the Electoral College, which only approximately follows the popular vote and leaves plenty of room for shenanigans. 

(Ironically, the U.S. Senate, a legislative body created to reduce popular power, and whose rules have become political weapons on the right to suppress Democratic goals and initiatives—see , —is the one case where the popular vote actually governs the outcomes. Senate elections are also notoriously flush with corporate money.)

Voting is not an independent exercise of popular will, as much as we’d like it to be. It is an activity that occurs within different systems and has different effects: In the Senate, votes determine the winner. In the race for the White House, they often, but not always, determine the winner. And in the House, more often than not, the votes are a foregone conclusion.

What matters—what does achieve results—is not how one individual votes, but rather the number of individuals who do in each jurisdiction. Turnout not only matters, it’s the whole ball game.

The people who knock on doors to recruit new or infrequent voters, who drive folks who are immobile to the polls, who collect and deliver absentee ballots for those same people, who make sure the voters aren’t swarmed by hostile activists, who hand out food and water to people standing in hours-long lines, and who remind voters of their rights at every step of the way, have more influence over the outcomes of elections than individual voters do. 

It’s telling that today’s Republican party has perfected tactics targeting all of these activities. Georgia even passed a law——that criminalized giving voters food and water when they were in a polling line.

When you hear the catchphrase, “Vote in numbers too big to manipulate,” that’s an appeal to activism. 

Now look at the battleground for 2024. The U.S. is in a very different place even from just a few years ago.

Wisconsin Republicans, who hold supermajorities in both houses of the legislature, have , before she’s even heard a case because she’s likely to break the Republicans’ lock on power and rule that the state’s extremely gerrymandered legislative districts are unconstitutional.

North Carolina Republicans have to make appointments to election boards. Gov. Roy Cooper has already vetoed the legislation once. (The Tarheel State also has one of the more heavily gerrymandered legislatures, and its Congressional map was, too, before a . The makeup of the supreme court has since changed, however, so it is expected that Democrats will be gerrymandered into a tiny Congressional minority, instead of having parity to match the population.)

The Alabama Republican-dominated legislature has flat-out ignored a to create a second district that could represent Black voters. Despite a rebuke from the highest court of the land, the Republicans redrew the maps to allow just one Black district and , hoping for a different outcome. They didn’t get it, and now , which is likely to create a second Black (and Democratic) seat. For now, the battle is over, but likely not forever.

That’s just a sampling. And while Alabama may not be considered a competitive state for Democrats, constituents did not that long ago. , and North Carolina was —a�Ի� (both Barack Obama in 2008, and Trump in 2016, had narrow wins). The postmortems on the 2020 presidential election, the 2022 midterms, and even past elections, are the same: When in large numbers, especially , Democrats tend to win.

The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to want to admit this, but there it is. If Democrats want to win a race, Black people are the voters to try to reach, not the white suburban “centrists” who wonder if Biden’s too old, or who swung to Trump in 2016 because they didn’t think he was that bad, or who believed some version of “but her emails” when the false equivalence pushed by Republicans into the national media became ubiquitous.

(It is true that suburban white women are an often-targeted demographic. Abortion politics are particularly resonant with this voting bloc, which is why Republicans would rather talk about anything else. But while women voters only lean Democratic, . Which demographic group carries more weight in a given election is, again, a matter of turnout.)

If Democrats want to win, and continue to win, they’re going to need better voter outreach in Black communities. , and only 51% white. But the state is a battleground because the Georgia Democratic Party is well-organized, and not least because backfired dramatically. , yet it’s basically a Republican lock statewide except for the 2nd District, which is about 65% Black, including much of the city of Jackson and the western parts of the state along the Mississippi River. The national Democratic Party may consider the state a write-off, but it would be a prime target for a second round of ’60s-style activism.

Even though the 1960s are now mostly confined to the history books, it’s best not to forget what happened then: the bus boycotts, the Freedom Rides, the marches on Selma, Birmingham, and Washington, D.C. The entire 20th-century civil rights movement, which picked up after World War II where Reconstruction left off, led directly to two major legislative victories: and the . Today’s Supreme Court conservative majority has , and Republicans, their power enhanced as a result, have made no secret of their plans to now the . If the GOP is determined to roll back the clock, Democrats need to meet this moment with the same energy they used to defeat Republicans the first time in the 1960s.

As an activist, I stand with others against white supremacy, anti-blackness, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism. I am queer, trans, Chinese American, middle class, and able-bodied.

Holding these identities scattered across the spectrum of privilege, I have done my best to find my place in the movement, while educating myself on social justice issues to the best of my ability. But after witnessing countless people be ruthlessly torn apart in community for their mistakes and missteps, I started to fear my own comrades.

I started to fear my own comrades.

As a cultural studies scholar, I am interested in how that culture—as expressed through discourse and popular narratives—does the work of power. Many disciplinary practices of the activist culture succeed in curbing oppressive behaviors. Callouts, for example, are necessary for identifying and addressing problematic behavior. But have they become the default response to fending off harm? Shutting down racist, sexist, and similar conversations protects vulnerable participants. But has it devolved into simply shutting down all dissenting ideas? When these tactics are liberally applied, without limit, inside marginalized groups, I believe they hold back movements by alienating both potential allies and their own members.

In response to the unrestrained use of callouts and unchecked self-righteousness by leftist activists, I spend enormous amounts of energy protecting my activist identity from attack. I self-police what I say when among other activists. If I’m not 100 percent sold on the reasons for a political protest, I keep those opinions to myself—though I might show up anyway.

On social media, I’ve stopped commenting with thoughtful push back on popular social justice positions for fear of being called out.��For example, even though some women at the 2017 women’s march reproduced the false and transmisogynistic idea that all women have vaginas, I still believe that the event was a critical win for the left and should not be written off so easily as it has been by some in my community.

I spend enormous amounts of energy protecting my activist identity from attack.

Understand, even though I am using callouts as a prime example, I am not against them. Several times, I have been called out for ways I have carelessly exhibited ableism, transmisogyny, fatphobia, and xenophobia. I am able to rebound quickly when responding with openness to those situations. I am against a culture that encourages callouts conducted irresponsibly, ones that abandon the person being called out and ones done out of a desire to experience power by humiliating another community member.

I am also concerned about who controls the language of social justice, as I see it wielded as a weapon against community members who don’t have access to this rapidly evolving lexicon. Terms like “oppression,” “tone policing,” “emotional labor,” “diversity,” and “allyship” are all used in specific ways to draw attention to the plight of minoritized people. Yet their meanings can also be manipulated to attack and exclude.

Furthermore, most social justice 101 articles I see online are prescriptive checklists. Although these can be useful resources for someone who has little familiarity with these issues, I worry that this model of education contributes to the false idea that we have only one way to think about, talk about, and ultimately, do activism. I think that movements are able to fully breathe only when there is a plurality of tactics, and to some extent, of ideologies.

I am not the first nor the last to point out that these movements for liberation and justice are exhibiting the same oppressive patterns that we are fighting against in larger society. Rather than wallowing in critique or walking away from this work, I choose a third option—that we as a community slow down, acknowledge this pattern and develop an ethics of activism as a response.

I believe it’s sorely needed as we struggle to mobilize in a chaotic and unjust world.

What might an ethics of activism look like?

Knowing when to be hard and when to be soft

I believe that when confronting unjust situations and unjust people, sometimes hardness is necessary, and other times softness is appropriate. Gaining the discernment to know when to use each is a task for a lifetime. I have often seen a burning anger at the core of activism, especially for newer activists. Anger can be righteous, and it often is when stemming from marginalized peoples weary of being mistreated. And yet, I want to use my anger as a tool for reaching the deeper, healing powers I possess when carving out a path of sustainable activism. Black social justice facilitator and doula adrienne maree brown writes of her oppressors, “What if what’s needed isn’t sexy, intimidating or violent? What if what is needed is forgiveness?” I’ve spent a good deal of energy exercising my ability to speak truth to power and boldly naming my enemies. Perhaps it is time to massage my heart so that I can choose to be soft toward someone in community who is hurting me, and open up the possibility of mutual transformation.

Adopting a politics of imperfection and responsibility

I have been mulling over sociologist Alexis Shotwell’s call for the left to adopt a as one way to move forward toward action and away from purity. A politics of imperfection asks me to openly acknowledge the ways in which my family and I have benefited and continue to benefit from oppressive systems such as slavery, capitalism, and settler colonialism. This is an ongoing investigation into my own complicity. ��I am a Chinese American with immigrant parents, and my family has built economic stability by buying into the model minority myth, which is based largely in anti-blackness. As uninvited guests and visitors to this part of the world, we have claimed our new home on lands stolen from indigenous peoples. A politics of responsibility means that as I am complicit in harmful systems, I also possess full agency to do good. This allows me to commit to dismantling these systems and embracing centuries-long legacies of resistance. It means I am accountable in community spaces and do not destroy myself when others call me out on my errors. It means I practice a generosity of spirit and forgiveness towards myself and others. To do all this, I must publicly claim both imperfection and personal responsibility as an activist.

Tapping into our shared humanity

Marginalized people ask that privileged people look at them and see a human being, not a lesser-than being. Oppressive systems operate by systemically dehumanizing some groups for the benefit of others. On the flip side, I believe people with privilege are dehumanized when internalizing their societal supremacy over others. For example, the ethnographic studies that have been conducted to explain the election of Donald Trump have revealed the mass identity crisis in white America. We have seen poor and working class white Americans denounce people of color and diversity efforts because, sadly, they perceive them as threats to their historically established power and access. Rather than base cultural identities solely on power, could we tap into what we all have in common: our humanity, no matter how trampled it is? Black public theologian practices envisioning the humanity in those who challenge and attack her. According to her, training herself to cultivate love for her enemies makes it more effective for her to communicate and speak her truth into their hearts. She is as concerned about her well-being as she is about transforming antagonistic people in her life into “liberated oppressors.” Black elder activist firmly tells her oppressors, with unyielding love in her voice: “You can’t make me hate you.”

These are suggestions that have aided me in navigating toxic social justice environments. In testing them out, I try to stay open to new tactics while understanding that I must remain flexible and responsive to the variable stages of justice work. If we as activists do not feel safe in our experimental microcosms of justice and liberation, what can we attempt to replicate across larger society?

Today, Poole runs the small nonprofit, which helped persuade the International Rescue Committee to establish a refugee resettlement office here last year. At a time when resettlement is politically contentious, the nonprofit is providing support to refugees from across the world in a politically conservative state where only 107 refugees have been resettled since 2001, the lowest total of any state except Wyoming.

“I didn’t even know what a refugee was. I didn’t know what resettlement was—I had no context.”

Soft Landing’s focus is as much on the Missoula community as on incoming refugees. The organization, which consists of two part-time staff members, coordinates volunteers to support incoming refugees, including families that help orient refugees to their new home and connect them to their neighbors. The organization also promotes dialogue among community members on the sometimes uncomfortable topic of resettlement. Their mission is to ensure the Missoula community is both welcoming and informed.

Before co-founding Soft Landing, Poole says, “I didn’t even know what a refugee was. I didn’t know what resettlement was—I had no context.”

Poole isn’t alone. Montana is an expansive rural state with the third lowest population density in the United States (7.1 square miles per person) and less diversity (89 percent white) than all but seven states. These factors contribute to the state’s reputation for being culturally parochial and politically conservative. Last November, 56.4 percent of residents who cast a ballot supported President Trump.

It’s also been roughly 37 years since a significant population of refugees was resettled here within a short time frame. Between 1979 and 1980, roughly 366 Hmong refugees were resettled in Missoula, a more liberal community than much of the rest of the state, after fleeing repression from communist forces in Laos.

Since last August, 117 refugees have been resettled in Missoula.

Now, nearly 40 years later, Missoula is accepting refugees again. Since last August, 117 refugees have been resettled in Missoula from Iraq, Syria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—more than the total number resettled in the entire state over the past 16 years. And hundreds of local volunteers have joined Soft Landing to make them feel welcome.

When asked why she decided to lead the organization, Poole responds thoughtfully. “It came about because of the picture of a dead child,” she says. “I don’t feel like there was a choice. It was something so much deeper than a thought or a decision.”

Poole is referring to the tragic photo of a drowned Syrian refugee—Aylan Kurdi, aged 3—lying face down on a beach near Bodrum, Turkey. The boy’s family had been fleeing their war-torn home in Syria when their boat capsized in early September 2015. The photo was widely shared and helped bring the “ ,” according to one headline from the New York Times.

Poole remembers seeing the photo on Facebook while she was breastfeeding her then 9-month-old son. She was grief-stricken. Before that, Poole says, she would have struggled to locate Syria on a map and would never have identified herself as an activist.

After seeing the photo, Poole reached out to women in her book club to process the crisis in Syria. Everyone had seen it, she recalls. “As mothers, we ���dzܱ����’t stop thinking about it.”

“As mothers, we ���dzܱ����’t stop thinking about it.”

The dialogue sparked a group exchange over email, and eventually someone asked, “what can we do about this?”

Together, the women had the idea to bring refugees across the world to Missoula, but they had no idea where to begin. So they began talking to their neighbors. “The idea passed around to a couple friends and then a couple more. Pretty soon we had a strong group of [interested] people,” Poole says.

By October 2015, Poole had teamed up with several more community members to establish Soft Landing and secure fiscal sponsorship from a local nonprofit. Volunteers then began reaching out to U.S.-based resettlement agencies, eventually reaching Robert Johnson, former executive director at the International Rescue Committee’s office in Seattle.

The connection was both timely and fortuitous. The IRC was already considering locations for new offices to accommodate an increase in the refugees allowed into the United States, from 70,000 in Fiscal Year 2015 ��in FY 2016. Johnson also knew the Missoula community well. He had been involved with the IRC’s work in Missoula with Hmong refugees at the beginning of his career and had visited Montana several times on fly-fishing trips.

When refugee families arrive in Missoula, volunteer mentors meet incoming families at the airport.

“We knew from experience that Missoula was a good town with a lot of international awareness,” Johnson says. “It’s a favorable political environment that’s unique in Montana.”

The existence of Soft Landing made his decision even easier. “The big bonus was there was a local group that was willing to provide support,” Johnson says. “That’s a unique and attractive quality.”

He made a trip in November 2015 and wrote a proposal for review by the U.S. State Department, which approved a new IRC office in March 2016.

“The first family arrived in late August,” Poole explains, “one week shy of a year since those photos of Aylan Kurdi came out.”

Today, when refugee families arrive in Missoula, volunteer mentors meet them at the airport and stay in close contact with them from day one. Soft Landing’s services are client-driven from that point forward.

“It’s a huge choose-your-own-adventure,” says Poole, who recruits volunteers to do everything from teaching driver’s education and English courses to providing childcare and financial counseling. After a recent CrowdRise campaign netted $32,000, the part-time director hopes this adventure will continue for the volunteer driven organization.

“There’s just a very independent, Western spirit here that leads us to say, ‘of course we can.’”

This approach has continued to serve Soft Landing well as the organization moves forward in a political climate marked by anti-immigrant rhetoric and executive orders. In January, after President Trump issued his first travel ban blocking citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen from entry into the country for 90 days, hundreds of Missoulians gathered in the city center to protest the order, including Poole.

“Our goal is just to create a more welcoming environment for refugees to call home.”

But Poole’s careful to point out that protesting policies is different from protesting people with different perspectives. In fact, cultivating understanding between those who wish to welcome refugees and those who oppose their resettlement has become an important goal for Soft Landing, especially since the arrival of refugees in Missoula .

“Doing something as large and life-changing as bringing refugees to a community that hasn’t done that in a long time requires more than just supporters to be engaged and interested,” she says. To this end, Poole recently participated in a ��in Hamilton, Montana, a place where local county government sent a letter to the U.S. State Department . The purpose of the meeting was to share information about refugee resettlement and listen to concerns, according to Poole, not to settle an argument.

This is a tactful approach in Montana, a rural state that recently elected a vocal supporter of the travel ban, Greg Gianforte, to Congress following a contentious special election. The approach, though, comes naturally to Poole and her colleagues.

“Our goal is not to convince people what we’re doing is right and what they’re doing is wrong,” she says. “Our goal is just to create a more welcoming environment for refugees to call home.”

In fact, she says, “We have another family arriving tonight.”

“That birth was traumatic and loud,” she said. The feeling of being out of control carried over into her early mothering. “I just didn’t feel connected to being a mom for the first couple years.”

Today Gonzales, who is Navajo, lives with her Tewa husband and three children in the San Ildefonso Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the years after that difficult birth, she trained to become a midwife and developed a deeper understanding of what had happened to her.

“When I talk to non-Native health care providers, they say, ‘All my Native ladies are great. They don’t talk. They come in and do what I tell them,’” Gonzales explained. “I want that to end,” she said. “Our women are important. Where we birth and how we birth is important.”

She believes that a birthing center that supports the young m�dzٳ�����’ practice of their traditions could help make the difference between more trauma and healing. That’s why the Changing Woman Initiative, which Gonzales founded, has worked for years to build a Native-run birthing center where women and their families will find empowerment and healing when they are most vulnerable. Gonzales and her collaborators intend to open the birthing and wellness center in the Tewa community of Pojoaque Pueblo in the summer of 2018.

Trauma is widespread throughout the United States, where six in ten people have experienced some form of early childhood trauma, according to a report by the National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention. Native American populations also live with the effects of centuries of displacement, massacres, starvation, and the forced removal of children from families. Native women are also more likely to be victims of domestic violence; they are more likely to be trafficked, and experience rape and sexual assault at more than twice the national rate.

Gonzales knows these facts all too well. But after speaking at conferences about Native American issues for years, she wants to see action. “There is little discussion about solutions, and there is little notice given to the Native voices about our own communities,” she said.

For Gonzales, addressing these issues requires reincorporating culture, traditional belief systems, and language to bring life back to Native communities. Her birthing center is a place where that can happen.

“There is little notice given to the Native voices about our own communities.”

She imagines a welcoming place with photos of grandmothers on the wall, cedar burning, drumming, and a space for ceremonies. She envisions the family and community gathering at the center to welcome the newborn baby, who would hear the words of his or her native language before any others.

“Birth is a lot like a ceremony,” Gonzales said. “There’s sacrifice, there’s pain, and there’s healing.” During traditional dances, women learn how strong they can be.

“The Corn Dance is in August. You dance nonstop, without shoes, and it’s hot, and you’re exhausted,” she said. “I tell the mothers in labor, this is like the Corn Dance. You’re tired, but you’re listening to that drum, and the baby’s gonna be here!”

Gonzales has found that pregnancy is a time when many women who are in abusive relationships, who smoke, or abuse drugs or alcohol are open to change. “In our Navajo culture, teaching our mind is very powerful. We talk about hozho, which is walking in beauty, or being positive, and we understand that what we say can manifest into reality,” she said.

“I had one woman who was so traumatized, she came into the office shaking,” she continued. “There was sweat on her lip, and she was like, ‘What are you going to do to me?’” The birthing process can trigger abuse trauma, Gonzales said, because the women feel out of control.

Giving birth on their own terms feels like a victory, Gonzales said. “They feel in control. You see the shift through the whole pregnancy as that confidence sets in.” A mother who feels her own strength and the support and love of others can in turn offer her children the love and support that will put them on a solid footing for life.

How. Original.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, though. Since her inception, Rosie has been employed as a salesperson, if you will, for the military industrial complex and any industry hoping to appeal to “modern” women. But that doesn’t mean her value as an agent of empowerment should be abandoned—just exercised appropriately, especially now. That’s why YES! decided it was time to freshen up the feminist icon.

We asked readers to share their visions of a contemporary Rosie the Riveter.��Is she a Muslim researcher or a stay-at-home dad? What would a gender-nonconforming Rosie of the 21st century look like? We posed these questions just as women are facing new regressive policies, including the since-failed repeal of the Affordable Care Act that would have disproportionately disadvantaged women across class and ability. We wanted to amplify the presence and achievements of women of color, working-class women, and queer and trans people. Readers responded with examples of women and LGBTQ people making progressive change across many walks of life. Below are our three favorites:

“My Mom”

Submitted by Yessenia Funes

“I think she’d be brown with warm, worn eyes. She wouldn’t wear make up because her job would be spent in the kitchen of a restaurant or fast-food joint, and the heat of the fryers would simply make the make up run down her face. She’d have a couple burn marks on her arms from grabbing the fries. She’d wear a pin: “World’s Best Grandma.” She’d be holding her coffee mug up to her lips (because, c’mon, what mom doesn’t have a coffee addiction?), and it’d read “#1 MOM.” Because even if her first and main language is Spanish, she still appreciates the gifts given to her by her second-generation English-speaking kids. Her uniform wouldn’t be anything fancy, but it’d have a collar and a bowtie because even at McDonald’s, appearance is everything. Her hair would be up in a bun because nobody wants hair in their food. That’s my version of Rosie. That’s my mom.” —Yessenia Funes

While this concept was undoubtedly our team’s favorite, I’ll admit I saw some of my own experience in Funes’ submission. Watching my first-generation American mother leave for work at the crack of dawn because we ���dzܱ����’t afford a car, I never thought of the steely stare of the original Rosie. But I did know that my mom’s endurance was its own form of feminine strength, just as valid as that bicep curl. The Rosie who Funes describes is symbolic of single, immigrant, working-class parents across the country who rarely get the resources they need or security they deserve. This image is for the women who carry the load anyway and build the foundation of their families’ strength.

“The Modern Congresswoman”

Submitted by Jeanne Berry and Sheila Meidell

“The modern Rosie should likely be an African American standing in front of the U.S. Senate.” —Sheila Meidell

“She’s a multi-ethnic feminist congresswoman who whops the other congressmen into shape with the Constitution in her hand!” —Jeanne Berry

The idea of a congresswoman whopping her obstructionist male peers with a rolled-up Constitution made the poster committee chuckle—a�Ի� yearn for more lawmakers like her. Representation in positions of power matters more for people whose survival depends on equitable public policy. As such, we removed the congressmen from the final art to let her stand alone. While the Capitol represents American politics, this matured Rosie represents the interests of women and LGBTQ people everywhere, and she isn’t going to let Congress get away with anything that doesn’t serve those people. She’s got the Bill of Rights to back her up.

Download this poster here��(30mb)

“The Mask of White Femininity”

Submitted by Joe Scott

“They wear a mask with fem features painted black and white (you can’t see their skin). They have wild hair that is dyed rainbow (there is a single shock of white). Slogan: ‘f**k you’” —Joe Scott

We ���dzܱ����’t wait to dive in, but we weren’t immediately sure how to draw them. Scott describes someone frustrated and concealed by this peculiar mask, not liberated by it, but his submission didn’t quite match the cheery spirit of the original prompt. In our version, Rosie sheds the cracked mask of the limited femininity��demanded by society for their own form of expression. The modern Rosie doesn’t need to be svelte, white, able-bodied, cisgender, or conventionally attractive to effect change—a�Ի� they dare you to tell them otherwise.

YES! is publishing these posters with the hope that they’ll percolate into realms where our Rosies can inspire and empower—say, in the kitchen of a local women’s shelter or an LGBTQ youth center. We want them to channel the next wave of gender rights through an intersectional lens that’s inviting to all. If you have your own version of Rosie, we hope you’ll hoist her high at the next march—or anywhere else.

There is an idea in law enforcement called the “thin blue line.” It basically means that police work together. A call goes out from Morton County and, right or wrong, law enforcement from around the country provides back up.

You would think journalism would be like that, too.

When one journalist is threatened, we all are. We cannot do our jobs when we worry about being injured or worse. And when a journalist is arrested? Well, everyone who claims the First Amendment as a framework should object loudly.

Last Wednesday, Monet was arrested near Cannon Ball, North Dakota. She was interviewing water protectors who were setting up a new camp near the Dakota Access pipeline route on treaty lands of the Great Sioux Nation. Law enforcement from Morton County surrounded the camp and captured everyone within the circle. A press release from the sheriff’s Department puts it this way: “Approximately 76 members of a rogue group of protestors were arrested.”����Most were charged with criminal trespassing and inciting a riot.

As was Monet.��She now faces serious charges and the judicial process will go forward. The truth must come out.

But this story is about the failure of journalism institutions.

The Native press and the institutions that carry her work had Monet’s back. That includes��Indian Country ������Ƶ Network,��YES! Magazine, and the��. In��. And,����in as well��with its own story written by Sandy Tolan who’s done some great reporting from Standing Rock.��The Native American Journalists Association released a statement��immediately:��“Yesterday’s unlawful arrest of Native journalist Jenni Monet by Morton County officers is patently illegal and a blatant betrayal of our closely held American values of free speech and a free press,” NAJA President Bryan Pollard said, “Jenni is an accomplished journalist and consummate professional who was covering a story on behalf of Indian Country Today. Unfortunately, this arrest is not unprecedented, and Morton County officials must review their officer training and department policies to ensure that officers are able and empowered to distinguish between protesters and journalists who are in pursuit of truthful reporting.”

Yet in��North Dakota you would not know this arrest happened. The press is silent.

I have heard from many, many individual journalists. That’s fantastic. But what about the institutions of journalism? There should be news stories in print, digital and broadcast. There should be editorials calling out North Dakota for this egregious act. If the institutions let this moment pass, every journalist covering a protest across the country will be at risk of arrest.

After her release from jail, Monet wrote for Indian Country ������Ƶ Network,��“When Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was charged with the same allegations I now face—criminal trespassing and rioting—her message to the world embraced the First Amendment. ‘There’s a reason why journalism is explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution,’ she said before a crowd gathered in front of the Morton County courthouse. “Because we’re supposed to be the check and balance on power.”

The funny thing is that journalism institutions were not quick to embrace Goodman either. I have talked to many journalists who see her as an “other” because she practices a different kind of journalism than they do.

Monet’s brand of journalism is rooted in facts and good reporting. She talks to everyone on all sides of the story, including the Morton County Sheriff and North Dakota’s new governor. She also has street cred … and knows how to tell a story. Just listen to her podcast��— Still Here��and you will know that to be true.

So if we ever need journalism institutions to rally, it’s now. It’s not Jenni Monet who will be on trial. It’s the First Amendment. Journalism is not a crime.��

This article was originally published at��Trahant��Reports. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.

Much that we hold dear appears under threat.

Department of Energy officials refused to hand over the names of employees who work on climate change-related projects. Tech industry leaders declared they will not participate in creating a database for registering Muslims. Here’s their : “We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. … We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.”

We are entering a time of testing.

Much that we hold dear appears under threat. We will be asked in new and sometimes frightening ways, “What do we stand for?” “What do we care about enough to risk ridicule, funding, a job, our lives?”

Many of us have not had to face such choices before. Sure, we act for what we believe in. We march. We write letters to the editor. We call our elected officials. We speak up at council meetings. We join committees. We donate. But at what risk? Often very little.

That may change.

We will need to support each other in new ways.

If the cities that have so boldly defended their status as sanctuaries have their federal funding cut off, as the incoming Trump administration has threatened, will they stick with their resolutions? If the officials at the Department of Energy who refused to release the scientists’ names are told to obey or be fired, will they hold out? What if we speak up at a community meeting and then find a burning cross in the front yard? How long will our noble defiance last? When does our fear overcome our good intentions?

We are likely to need a strong dose of fortitude in the days and years ahead. We will need to support each other in new ways. We must not stand silently when someone else is speaking up for justice and compassion. There really is safety in numbers—especially when those numbers are large.

The good news is that people are coming together. I am hearing from people across the country who are meeting in newly formed neighborhood groups to figure out new strategies, new defenses. I’m seeing deep conversations parsing out precisely how our government works to determine the best levers for stopping the bad and promoting the good. The Jan. 21 Women’s March on Washington is calling for women to come together in solidarity and resolve. Related marches are planned for other cities. There’s a new ferment in the land that bodes well for the long term.

As we are tested, it is important to remind ourselves that allies are everywhere, even where we least expect them.

Allies are everywhere, even where we least expect them.

Within government agencies at all levels are good people who went into public service because they wanted to serve the public good. They can be important allies, especially with their expert knowledge of how the government works. We may be surprised by who in Congress will stand up for values and programs we care about. In the Supreme Court, justices we may have dismissed as too corporate-friendly given their stance on Citizens United may step up to be guardians of basic freedoms. Even large corporations may sometimes be allies—like the 360 companies and investors that recently sent an to Trump urging him to stick with the Paris accords on climate change. There are Trump voters who may be wonderful allies on initiatives that help our localities and livelihoods become more sustainable and fair—a�Ի� may join progressives in supporting some of the national programs we care about.

By coming together to pool our wisdom and support one another, by welcoming unexpected allies who share some of our values, we can use this time of testing to emerge stronger as individuals, as communities, and as a nation.

Until now, workers who provide home assistance to elderly people and people with disabilities were excluded—along with a few other groups, like farmworkers—from full protections under the . The change will affect nearly 2 million workers (90 percent of whom are female and 50 percent of whom are minorities) throughout the United States. It’s an industry that has been growing rapidly for years, due in part to an aging population with an increasing demand for home assistance.

To top it off, yesterday California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights into law, the culmination of a seven-year campaign to grant domestic workers overtime pay. The bill’s advocates kept at it for years, despite getting smacked with a veto as recently as last year. Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, responded on Twitter:

Cannot stop crying tears of joy & pride. After 7 years of hard work & two vetoes, finally a victory for domestic workers in CA

— Ai-jen Poo (@aijenpoo)

According to the Alliance, the mostly female domestic worker industry is rife with labor violations and various kinds of abuse. Workers are often isolated, working in private residences where they are vulnerable to forced overtime, physical abuse, occupational injury, wage theft, and more. ������Ƶover, the Alliance reported earlier this year��that 25 percent of California’s domestic workers are paid below the state minimum wage. Fifty-eight percent of them spend more than half of their income on rent, and many are immigrants with little or no social safety net.

California assemblyman and author of the bill Tom Ammiano said in a statement, “We’ve pushed this bill for a few years and it’s time they get the overtime pay they work hard for … California can now resume its place as a leader in worker rights.”

California is just the third state to pass such a bill (on the heels of Hawaii this summer, and New York in 2010), though similar campaigns are underway in Illinois, Massachusetts, and other states.

The new federal protections for home care workers will kick in in January of 2015.

In a scene in the new Oppenheimer film set right after the successful 1949 atomic bomb test by the USSR, there is a brief exchange between the film’s two main antagonists. Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, asks J. Robert Oppenheimer what he thinks should be done now. “International control,” Oppenheimer immediately replies.

“You mean world government?” Strauss fires back.

It sounds like a throwaway line, or one of those accusations routinely hurled at those trying to make global institutions marginally more effective. But in this case, Chairman Strauss’ epithet was spot on.

The tremendous destruction of World War II, even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompted a radical rethinking of the world political order. In particular, the idea of world government as the solution to the problem of war was placed front and center in this country’s foreign policy debate, and argued about passionately in diners, dorm rooms, and dinner parties all across the land. Unfortunately, however, the legions of moviegoers who buy tickets to Christopher Nolan’s otherwise excellent film this summer will have no idea that one of the leading proponents of that singular idea was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Oppenheimer threw himself into working to control nuclear weapons. Like other atomic scientists, he was fully aware that the Soviet Union would likely develop its own atom bombs in just a few years, and that time was short to prevent an unrestrained nuclear arms race. The movie refers to his activities as working for “international cooperation.” But his actual ideas were much deeper and more radical than those anodyne words imply.

In 1946, Oppenheimer participated in the development of a report for the secretary of state’s Committee on Atomic Energy about what might be done to control nuclear weapons. The report, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report but which was authored chiefly by Oppenheimer himself, proposed an international Atomic Development Agency that would have the sole right to mine and process uranium and to run reactors of any kind. This was a radical proposal, but, as its authors explained, they could see no alternative.

In June 1946, Oppenheimer published an article in The New York Times Magazine explaining the proposal to the public. The article discussed the relationship between peaceful and military uses of atomic energy, evaluated a couple of other ideas for controlling atomic weapons, and then discussed the proposed Atomic Development Agency.

It is here, in a section entitled “Sovereignty,” that we come across a striking passage:

“Many have said that without world government there could be no permanent peace, and without peace there would be atomic warfare. I think one must agree with this. Many have said that there could be no outlawry of weapons and no prevention of war unless international law could apply to the citizens of nations, as federal law does to citizens of states, or we have made manifest the fact that international control is not compatible with absolute national sovereignty. I think one must agree with this.”

Similarly, in a January 1948 article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Oppenheimer wrote:

“It is quite clear that in this field we would like to see patterns established which, if they were more generally extended, would constitute some of the most vital elements of a new international law: patterns not unrelated to the ideals which more generally and eloquently are expressed by the advocates of world government.”

From the vantage point of 2023, the remarkable thing about these passages is the apparent assumption that the reader is familiar with the idea of world government, and arguments for and against it, to the point where they can just be mentioned without explanation or elaboration. And for much of the public for much of the 1940s, this was probably true—as remarkable as it might seem to us today, when this notion is entirely absent from the international affairs debate.

Even before the end of the war, world government advocacy had become a prominent feature of the political conversation in America. In 1943, the businessman and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie published a book called One World. The book sold 1.5 million copies in the four months following its release and played a key role in a blossoming of world federation advocacy—long before virtually anyone had heard of anything like an atomic bomb. To choose but one example, an organization known as the Student Federalists, founded in 1942 by a charismatic 16-year-old boy named Harris Wofford, over the next several years formed 367 chapters on high school and college campuses around the country. (Wofford went on to become a United States senator and a key civil rights aide in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.)

Then in 1945, just a few months before the Trinity test, came Emery Reves’ The Anatomy of Peace. While Willkie’s book was a travelogue describing his voyage around the world, Reves’ was an extended logical argument that only law could create peace and only a world federation—a union of nations with a government taking care of issues that could not be handled at the national level—could create meaningful law that applied to individuals rather than governments. Indeed, Oppenheimer’s passage above could have easily been a summary of Reves’ book.

It is worth noting that both of these books were published before the United Nations Charter was more than a draft. (It was eventually signed on June 26, 1945, less than a month before the Trinity test.) The activism they inspired attempted to make the UN something more than an agglomeration of sovereign states that could sign treaties with each other, but in the end were subject to no law worthy of the name. Sovereignty meant that no state could be compelled to do anything it didn’t want to, and treaties could only be enforced by sanctions or war, not through legal action against individuals. (Citizens and various organizations could also take the government to court if it is not properly carrying out its functions, as they can in the U.S.)

It wasn’t just books. Beloved children’s book author and New Yorker editor E. B. White devoted a great many of his editorials to the problem of global anarchy. (These were later collected and published in a book called The Wild Flag: Editorials From The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters.) Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, upon reading about Hiroshima, wrote a lengthy editorial for his magazine titled “Modern Man is Obsolete,” that passionately argued for immediate democratic world federation. “There is no need to talk of the difficulties in the way of world government,” wrote Cousins. “There is need only to ask if we can afford to do without it.”

In a similar vein Walter Lippmann, a founder of both The New Republic magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a key player later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote in 1946: “There are few in any country who now believe that war can be regulated or outlawed by the ordinary treaties among sovereign states. … No one can prove what will be the legislative, executive, and judicial organs of the world state … but there are ideas that shake the world, such as the ideal of the union of mankind under universal law.”

Even General Hap Arnold, the only U.S. Air Force officer ever to hold the rank of five stars and founder of the RAND Corporation, said in 1946: “The greatest need facing the world today is for international control of the human forces that make for war.” The atom bomb, he declared, presents “a tremendous argument for a world organization that will eliminate conflict. … We must make an end to all wars for good.”

And before the end of the decade, more than 50,000 Americans had joined the United World Federalists (UWF)—led for three years by a bright young man named Alan Cranston, who went on to serve as a four-term U.S. Senator from California. UWF has continued its operations to this very day and is now known as Citizens for Global Solutions.

A number of physicists also came to support world federation. “Conflicts in interest between great powers can be expected to arise in the future … and there is no world authority in existence that can adjudicate the case and enforce the decision,” said Leo Szilard, who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction. But humanity had at its disposal, he insisted, “the solution of the problem of permanent peace. … The issue that we have to face is not whether we can create a world government … (but) whether we can have such a world government without going through a third world war.”

But the most prominent and most active proponent of world government among scientists was Albert Einstein himself. He had always opposed nationalism, and supporting world federation was a natural extension. Einstein wrote articles, gave interviews, and helped found the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. The Student Federalists of Princeton, New Jersey, held meetings in his living room. And he served as the founding advisory board chair of the United World Federalists.

The type of world government that Einstein promoted would exclusively have power over security issues and a few internal circumstances that could lead to war. But this kind of limited world government was a must. “A new kind of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels,” he said. “Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. … In light of new knowledge … an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival.”

Oppenheimer’s focus in the postwar years was more near-term. He worked for international control of nuclear matters—both weapons and civilian reactors that could be used to make weapons. But that international control was to take the form of an agency with a strict monopoly on such activities. His 1946 New York Times Magazine piece says about the plan: “It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be renunciation of national sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law.”

Why would this be significant? In a lengthier article published in 1946 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oppenheimer wrote, “The problem that we are dealing with,” in seeking to prevent atomic war, “is the problem of the elimination of war.” Proposals for addressing nuclear issues were to be judged on whether they also advanced this goal. The article was titled “The Atom Bomb as a Great Force for Peace”—not because of the simplistic and banal argument that the bomb would make war too horrible to contemplate, but because its control would lay the foundation for a world government that truly could abolish war.

Even Edward Teller, accurately portrayed in the Oppenheimer film as pushing for the development of the immensely more destructive hydrogen bombs and eventually undercutting his colleague at the security hearings, appeared to embrace the idea! In 1948, he discussed the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution, written by a committee of eminent scholars chaired by the chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and aimed at establishing a Federal Republic of the World. And Teller said about this enterprise: “[America’s] present necessary task of opposing Russia should not cause us to forget that in the long run we cannot win by working against something. Instead we must work for something. We must work for World Government.”

And in his 1948 Foreign Affairs article, again Oppenheimer maintained: “If the atomic bomb was to have meaning in the contemporary world, it would have to be in showing that not modern man, not navies, not ground forces, but war itself was obsolete.”

At the end of this essay, Oppenheimer returned to the noble aspirations that so many held in the shattering initial weeks after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. “The aim of those who would work for the establishment of peace,” he insisted, “must be to maintain what was sound in the early hopes, and by all means in their power to look to their eventual realization. It is necessarily denied to us in these days to see at what time, to what immediate ends, in what context, and in what manner of world, we may return again to the great issues touched on by the international control of atomic energy. … (But) this is seed we take with us, traveling to a land we cannot see, to plant in new soil.”

Should we consider all this just a mere historical curiosity? Is anything about these conversations eight long decades ago relevant to the challenges of the 21st Century? As politically unlikely as it might now appear, might something like a genuine world republic provide humanity with the kinds of tools it will require to get a grip on existential perils like the climate emergency, runaway artificial intelligence, and who knows what kinds of new weapons of mass extermination that Oppenheimer’s heirs will almost surely invent in the decades and centuries to come?

The best possible answer to that is the same one purportedly given by China’s Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971, when asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought about the consequences of the French Revolution.

Mr. Zhou, the story goes, considered the question for a moment, and then replied: “I think it is too soon to tell.”

This story first appeared in , and has been lightly edited for YES! Magazine. It is republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee circuit court judge and self-described progressive, won an 11-percentage-point victory, shifting the court’s at a moment when major legal clashes over abortion and redistricting are looming.

�¾������DzԲ�����’s Republican-controlled legislature is that Protasiewicz recuse from—that is, excuse herself from—considering two recently filed lawsuits that challenge the state’s legislative maps, which heavily favor the GOP, as unlawful partisan gerrymanders. They argue that she cannot be fair because during her campaign in the nonpartisan judicial race, she received from the state Democratic Party and criticized the state’s Republican-drawn maps as “.”

For their part, the state and spent millions backing Protasiewicz’s opponent, who once defended a prior version of the maps in court.

Legislators are Protasiewicz if she hears the cases.

As this controversy unfolds, it is important to know the law and practice of judicial recusal and impeachment in Wisconsin and beyond—a topic that , of state courts and constitutions, have .

In short, recusal is rare, and impeachment is even rarer.

The United States Constitution . Additionally, every state has binding rules that prohibit judges from hearing cases involving situations deemed to pose an unacceptable risk of bias, such as when the judge is related to a party in the case or has a personal financial stake in the outcome.

Judges, however, are rarely required to recuse because of views expressed while campaigning or because they received campaign support from someone interested in a case.

When it comes to campaign statements, the U.S. Supreme Court that judicial candidates have a First Amendment right to offer their opinions on disputed legal and political issues. Judges, the court recognized, are not blank slates. Whether on the campaign trail or elsewhere, they commonly develop and express views on issues, including ones they later encounter in court. Yet the law presumes that they remain able to adjudicate evenhandedly. Judicial candidates go too far only when they directly promise to make a particular ruling in a case.

As for campaign funds, the U.S. Supreme Court has that a judge violated due process—the Constitution’s guarantee of fundamental fairness—by hearing a case involving a financial backer. That 2009 case involved a West Virginia Supreme Court justice whose campaign received most of its support from the head of a coal company who had recently lost a $50 million jury verdict. Shortly after taking office, the justice cast the deciding vote to wipe out that verdict on appeal.

that, taken together, those facts required recusal. But the majority repeatedly stressed that it was “an exceptional case” involving “an extraordinary situation” with facts that were “extreme by any measure.”

The decision has turned out to be one of a kind. We are not aware of any subsequent case, in any court, finding that due process barred a judge from hearing a case because an interested party supported the judge’s campaign.

�¾������DzԲ�����’s —essentially the official, legally enforceable rule book for the state’s judges—confirms that judges are generally allowed to hear cases involving campaign supporters. It states that “a judge shall not be required to recuse … based solely on … the judge’s campaign committee’s receipt of a lawful campaign contribution, including a campaign contribution from an individual or entity involved in the proceeding.” The Wisconsin Supreme Court to the code in 2010, after two of the largest financial backers of the state’s conservative justices filed petitions proposing the change. The court to revisit this rule in 2017.

In Wisconsin and nationwide, themselves based on their campaign statements and financial supporters.

In �¾������DzԲ�����’s five most recent contested Supreme Court elections, the winning candidates all had . Yet none of those justices has ever recused on that basis, or even been formally asked to do so. In , justices in North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have participated despite financial and other ties to one or the other major political party.

Judicial Impeachment Uncommon, Reserved for Serious Wrongdoing

At and , lawmakers have the power to impeach judges. That authority, however, is traditionally limited to extreme circumstances and has been exercised sparingly.

In Wisconsin, judges—a�Ի� other officials—can be impeached only for “.” The state Assembly can impeach by majority vote, but it takes a two-thirds majority in the state Senate to convict. Republicans currently hold nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Assembly and exactly two-thirds in the Senate.

Only once in �¾������DzԲ�����’s 175-year history has . That was in 1853, when Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Levi Hubbell faced 11 articles of impeachment. Allegations ranged from accepting a $200 bribe—about $8,000 today—from a litigant to ruling on loans and debts he purchased through middlemen and taking the court’s money for personal use. Following a trial, the state Senate acquitted him.

Most states have likewise had no more than one or two judicial impeachments in their histories, and Congress has impeached only . Since the 1990s, , , and are the only states to have impeached a judge, and only the Pennsylvania judge was convicted and removed.

Most past judicial impeachments, whether they have resulted in conviction or not, have involved allegations of criminal acts or other flagrant misdeeds. None rested on a judge’s nonrecusal from a case involving campaign statements or supporters.

Impeachment threats have been than actual impeachments, so it remains to be seen whether Wisconsin lawmakers will indeed follow through.

Protasiewicz or her allies could challenge an attempted impeachment in state court, as has happened in . has already been filed. With little governing precedent, it is uncertain exactly how events might unfold.

The stakes could hardly be higher. The impeachment of a recently elected justice based on lawful campaign conduct and a legally grounded decision not to recuse would negate the people’s votes for Protasiewicz, in our view striking a blow to the principle of judicial independence.

It could also be a setback for efforts to overhaul �¾������DzԲ�����’s electoral maps, which rate as among the in the country.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

The law has drawn the ire of Big Tech’s largest players, who announced in June they will block Canadian news from showing up on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. But it could set a precedent for how other countries might legally secure the future of journalism—by having enormously wealthy tech companies share profit where newsmakers say it’s due. 

Behind the controversy is , or the Online News Act. Passed by federal lawmakers back in June, the Online News Act stipulates that tech companies must pay journalism outlets if they want to use their content. The government says the bill aims to make the Canadian digital-news marketplace more fair and sustainable. But tech companies—Meta and Google being the loudest voices in the room—aren’t happy with the bill, with Google calling it “.”

In fact, both companies have decided that the only way forward is to —a move critics of the companies’ response say could have disastrous local consequences.

“When Google and Facebook decide that they do not want to have news articles on their websites, that means that people, for the most part, don’t know where to go to find out information,” says Jon Schleuss, president of NewsGuild-CWA, which supports journalists working in the United States and Canada.

The argument comes as journalism outlets around the world struggle to make ends meet financially, due in part to the fact that Meta and Google dominate the market that funded news media for centuries: advertising. In the last five years alone, Canadian publications have , most of them in print. The United States has lost three times that many in the last 10 years, says Schleuss.

“These platforms benefit from, you know, the tens of thousands of articles generated on a daily basis,” he says. “And they are paying nothing to get that content.”&�Բ�����;

Canada has quantifying just how much it thinks Google and Facebook should pay publishers to license their content—$172 million for Google, and $62 million for Facebook.

Meta and Google Have “Gobbled Up” the Ad Money News Relies On, Say Newsmakers

Canada’s news woes are a symptom of a global problem—how can journalism outlets around the world make money when tech companies make digital advertising so cheap? For more than 300 years, newspapers and stations to fund their newsrooms. With the advent of the internet, news readership went up. But it also made ads much cheaper to buy, cutting revenue for newsmakers.

Google has said it didn’t cause the disruption of the news business model—the internet did. But the company is responsible for what happens next, says Schleuss. Google, for example, handles % of worldwide internet searches.

“You now have a duopoly effect, where the two largest internet companies control all of the digital advertisements,” says Schleuss of Meta and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. “They have basically created the only place where you can go and buy advertisements that can get any eyeballs online, and then they turn around and want to use and benefit from the content that’s created by the publishers.”&�Բ�����;

But if Google and Meta shared some of their revenues with news outlets, and those news outlets used the money to fund journalism jobs, it could sustain the very industry that benefits Big Tech while also doing a service for democracy. 

Could the United States Follow Suit? 

Two years ago, a similar story played out in Australia when its government . The bill was intended to force Meta and Google to the bargaining table with news publishers to discuss compensation if they ���dzܱ����’t reach a deal.

The bill scared big tech companies. Facebook said if the law went ahead, they would block Australian users from sharing news content. Google , even though the year prior, Australia’s wildfires were the platform’s of the past decade—higher search numbers even than those of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Publishers around the world often feel at the mercy of Big Tech, which they say is actively deprioritizing news—earlier this year, a change in Meta’s algorithm in traffic to news and media pages.

Ultimately, the government and the tech companies reached an agreement, whereby the participating companies with media outlets to pay those outlets when the content they provide gets clicks and produces ad revenue, says Australia’s Treasury Department. While transparency remains a challenge, an hailed the code as a “success.” The agreement has set a global precedent, opening the doors for other countries to strike their own agreements with tech giants—the U.S. included. 

The U.S. Congress is working on its own adaptation of Australia’s bargaining code—the . The act would require that tech companies compensate certain journalism outlets for licensing their content, in a way similar to the Australian model. But some say that , in that it leaves out bargaining opportunities for smaller outlets and favors a group of publications largely managed by hedge funds. These hedge funds, like Alden Global Capital, effectively to make quick profits. The Financial Times has calculated that are owned by such hedge funds.

“The money [from tech companies] actually needs to be directed to supporting jobs [in journalism] and providing transparency,” says Schleuss. “Frankly, we’re not going to support a piece of legislation unless it has those requirements.”

California has developed its own Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, passed in the state Assembly earlier this summer. If California’s Senate passes the bill, it would mandate that companies like Google and Meta share advertising revenue that comes from reported content. It would go a step further in requiring that at least 70% of that shared revenue fund journalism jobs—a critical aspect. 

Both bills have yet to reach senate approval. 

Canadians Boycott Meta As It Begins Blacking Out News

In Canada, there has been a mixed public response to the Online News Act. Some say it’s a —others see it as the . The federal government has said the law that make more than $1.3 billion per year and have more than 20 million monthly Canadian users. Right now, that’s just Meta’s Facebook and Google. Since Meta announced its plan to pull Canadian news from its platforms, several bodies across Canada are boycotting the company by suspending their advertising with Meta. The federal government, and several of the province of Quebec’s largest cities, are among them. 

So are institutions like the McCord Museum, a Canadian social-history museum in downtown Montreal that has long prioritized investing in local and national media. “Producing reliable, rigorous and non-partisan journalistic information requires considerable expertise and resources, both human and material,” announced the museum’s Canadian president, Anne Eschapasse, . “Press organizations must be remunerated for the research, analysis, production and dissemination of the information that is distributed on digital platforms.”

Some entities have encouraged Canadians across the country to stop using Meta sites all together. During a two-day boycott of Meta platforms, —formerly Friends of Canadian Broadcasting—saw thousands of Canadians #GoDark on Facebook and Instagram, says Friends director Sarah Andrews. The number included individuals, communications organizations, and the entire caucus of a political party, the Bloc Québécois. 

Friends supports Bill C-18. They say that bills of this kind correct the market imbalance that Meta and Google have created in the online advertising world, giving media creators a fair chance at earning advertising revenue. 

“That’s why organizations like our own have been giving Canadians a way of expressing their frustration about the news block, to encourage Meta to come back to the table,” says Andrews.

Meta’s pilot test for limiting news availability comes as Canada is battling its worst wildfire season on record. When a raging wildfire forced a Canadian capital city to evacuate 20,000 residents last month, the void of Canadian news on Meta to access reliable evacuation information. Google is still in conversation with the Canadian government over the act and has yet to officially test blocking news in Canada in the same way Meta has. 

But the fight isn’t over yet, says Andrews. The government is still in talks with Google over Bill C-18. If Meta moves forward with its plan to pull Canadian news from its platforms, groups like Friends will continue mobilizing Canadian people, governments, and institutions to fight for their democracy. 

And with more and more countries considering implementing , tech companies will have no choice but to comply with the demands voiced by their user base—a chorus that values the contributions of news and media makers.��

As they say: priorities.

Trump was indicted last week, along with 18 other defendants, in Fulton County, Georgia. That makes the fourth jurisdiction in which the former president is facing criminal penalties, following the cases in Washington, D.C., where he was charged in federal court with (four counts), and in Florida for (40 counts, including , for obstructing the government’s efforts to get them back), and in New York for (34 counts of falsifying business records).

In Georgia, , out of 41 total charges that also target 18 co-defendants. �հ��ܳ���’s charges include violating Georgia’s racketeering laws, and several that stem from the conspiracy to submit a false slate of electors to the Electoral College—a�Ի� which also include the “” to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to “find 11,780 votes” to change the outcome of the election.

Among the flurry of indictments and addenda and superseding indictments, it’s hard to keep track of which ones are important. The answer is that all of them are vitally important. If four indictments seem excessive, it’s because Donald Trump was excessive in committing crimes in multiple jurisdictions.

In the , Trump is in deep doo-doo. But that doesn’t mean we can let down our guard.

We need to come to terms with an uncomfortable truth: the fact that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. His ability to campaign may be limited by his legal woes, but his supporters will vote for him anyway. We’re entering a presidential election phase where the Biden-vs.-Trump rematch is 99% certain, and that 1% hedge has only to do with both candidates being decades older than the average American president. 

No viable candidate is going to emerge on the Democratic side to challenge an incumbent president with a largely successful term in office under his belt. First, we have Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a new darling of the right whose has been shown to be of his and . Second, we have Marianne Williamson, whose “politics of love” nonetheless failed to win over American hearts in 2020, and are likewise suspect, even if they’ve since been eclipsed by those of RFK Jr.

And it’s been obvious from day one that the Republican Party is setting itself up to repeat the 2015 primary race, where Trump picks off, one by one, a large number of third-tier politicians . Just as in 2015, he won’t even need a majority of the Republican vote, because he’s the only candidate who will have more than 20% to begin with.

(The one possible exception to this is former , who has said he’s in the race specifically to try to take Trump down. ������Ƶ power to him if he does, because no one can defeat Trump by ignoring him—he has to be confronted head-on and destroyed. Maybe Christie is the one to do that, but I’m still waiting for evidence.)

In 2023 though, , despite the indictments. That’s because the GOP since 2015 has largely purged itself of its establishment wing, leaving the extremists in control. (Meanwhile, , and they as the campaign season begins.)

And, while the indictments seem to be fueling a modest dip in �հ��ܳ���’s national polling numbers, the indictments are boosting his polling numbers within the Republican primary. That’s because his followers believe, with all the fervent religiosity of cult members, that the Big Bad Woke Government is persecuting loyal, patriotic Republicans. The charges only feed their persecution complex, which is what feeds the hand-wringing commentators urging us not to prosecute Trump, out of fear of what his supporters will do. As if his supporters haven’t already tried to violently overthrow the government.

Let’s disabuse ourselves of another fantasy. Even if Trump goes to prison because he’s found guilty, or he’s put in jail for contempt by a judge who refuses to tolerate his taunts and threats, he will continue running for president, he will win the GOP nomination, and he could indeed be reelected. There ought to be a law, but there isn’t. The narrowly divided Congress has been unable to do the sensible thing and pass legislation , or even just in response to his two impeachments.

I wouldn’t put much stock in the recent “” articles either. They’re interesting arguments, and the law professors making the case are perhaps even correct that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibition is automatic, with no Congressional action needed. But most state GOP officials who have the power to boot Trump from the ballot aren’t going to do that without a court order, and this is a party that has increasingly shown its willingness to .

This doesn’t mean Trump won’t eventually go to prison. But it’s very unlikely to happen before the next election, given the inevitable appeals and �հ��ܳ���’s expertise in delay tactics and avoiding accountability. After all, he still insists he won the 2020 election. This could go on for a long time.

But there are signs we will see some major results before the election.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, who brought both the classified documents case in Florida and the election interference case in Washington, D.C., has indicated he isn’t going to accommodate �հ��ܳ���’s usual tactics and. Smith even indicated he’d allow the documents trial to be postponed to accommodate this one.

That’s important for two reasons. One, voters have a right to know if Trump is guilty or not guilty before casting their votes. ������Ƶ importantly, if Trump wins, he can, and will, simply dismiss any federal cases that are still pending. Maybe he’ll even settle the cases with a payout from the government to himself to cover his (likely inflated) legal fees. He may pardon himself if he’s both found guilty and wins the election, because his handpicked, subservient attorney general won’t stop him—a�Ի� that’s even more of an argument to make sure Trump never again obtains power.

Fortunately, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan also appears to be resistant to Trumpian antics, granting Smith’s early request to , as he is almost certainly going to do. She’s also issued a , indicating that she will take any necessary measures to stop Trump from intimidating witnesses or tainting the jury pool with his trial-by-tantrum strategy.

In 2016, someone who hadn’t been paying attention might be forgiven for not expecting the rampancy of criminal behavior once Trump ascended to national office. But the mass media can’t be forgiven, since it’s their job to be paying attention. And, speaking personally as someone who grew up on the East Coast in the 1970s and ’80s, it was pretty obvious back then that Trump was, at best, a tawdry huckster with a long line of shady deals and business failures to his name, both and . He was a regular of the New York Post’s “Page Six” gossip column and grocery store checkout-line magazines. By extension, the “serious” media should have done a better job warning American voters about someone they only knew from highly scripted appearances on The Apprentice.

In 2023, mass media no longer have an excuse, and largely they’ve been fairly good. But they’re still acting as if the Republican nomination isn’t a foregone conclusion. And the possibilities of more Trumpian violence, let alone another Jan. 6–style insurrection, can’t be understated.

The United States is quite imperfect in living up to its ideals, but the general trend has been to get better at it. Allowing someone to escape justice just because he’s a former president, or because we’re afraid of his followers, undermines our commitment to have justice for all.

Fortunately, it appears we aren’t going to allow justice to be denied in this case. Prosecuting (and convicting) Trump won’t change the minds of his loyal base, and it may indeed push some of them over the edge. But it will show that the rest of the nation is willing to live up to its principles.

This article was updated at 10:45 a.m. PDT on Aug. 23, 2023 to correct the number charges faced by former president Trump in the federal classified documents case. The original article didn’t include superseding indictments, which added three charges to the total. Read our corrections policy here.

New spells out how and why those actions—which were observed by the public over many months—disqualify Trump from serving in the presidency ever again. And our read of the Georgia indictment, , shows why and how that disqualification can be put into effect.

The key to all of this is the , which states that “No person shall … hold any office … under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Trump took that oath at his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017.

Both �հ��ܳ���’s Georgia indictment and his federal indictment in Washington, D.C., cite largely public information—a�Ի� some newly unearthed material—to spell out exactly how he engaged in efforts to rebel against the Constitution, and sought and gave aid and comfort to others who also did so.

Legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen, , have recently published a paper declaring that under the 14th Amendment, .

We believe the Georgia indictment provides even more detail than the earlier federal one about how �հ��ܳ���’s actions have already disqualified him from office, and shows a way to keep him off the ballot in 2024.

Disqualification Is Automatic

�հ��ܳ���’s supporters might argue that disqualifying him would be unfair without a trial and conviction on the , and perhaps the Georgia charges.

But Baude and Paulsen, using —the interpretive theory of choice of the powerful Federalist Society and �հ��ܳ���’s conservative court appointees, which gives full of the Constitution—demonstrate that no legal proceeding is required. They say disqualification is automatic, or what’s known in the legal world as “self-executing.”

Recent public comments from and conservative jurist and former federal judge Michael Luttig—who has characterized the events before, during, and since Jan. 6 as �հ��ܳ���’s “”—suggest an emerging bipartisan consensus supporting Baude and Paulsen.

Backed by History

This is not a theoretical bit of technical law. was, in fact, extensively used after the Civil War to in the federal government, without being tried or convicted of any crime.

associated with secession, rebellion, and open war against the United States. And most were pardoned by .

But even though they had no relevant convictions, former Confederates were in fact barred from office in the U.S.

In December 1865, several who had neither been convicted nor pardoned tried to claim seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But the House clerk . It took an act of Congress——to later restore their office-holding rights.

There is no requirement in the Constitution that the disqualification be imposed —only that it applies to people who take certain actions against the Constitution.

A Path Through the States

For the U.S. in 2023, we believe the most realistic avenue to enforce the 14th Amendment’s ban on a second Trump presidency is through state election authorities. That’s where the Georgia indictment comes in.

State election officials could themselves, or in response to a petition of a citizen of that state, refuse Trump a place on the 2024 ballot because of the automatic 14th Amendment disqualification.

Trump would certainly challenge the move in federal court. But the recent disqualification proceedings against provide affirming the 14th Amendment as a valid legal ground for disqualification of a candidate for federal office.

The Georgia indictment against Trump and allies exhaustively details extensive against Georgia officials, as well as a fraudulent fake elector scheme to illegally subvert the legitimate 2020 Georgia presidential vote tally and .

�հ��ܳ���’s failure to accomplish what is tantamount to a coup in Georgia and other swing states , that sought to achieve the same result—�հ��ܳ���’s fraudulent installation to a second term.

In fact, the Georgia scheme is as one of the methods and means in “aid” of the larger Jan. 6 federal conspiracy against the United States.

that “insurrection and rebellion” are traditionally associated with forced or violent opposition. But we see the broader set of actions by Trump and his allies to subvert the Constitution—the Georgia vote count and fake elector scheme included—as part of a political coup d’état. It was a rebellion.

Georgia As a Bellwether

So what makes the Georgia scheme and indictment compelling for purposes of disqualifying Trump from the 2024 Georgia ballot?

There are minimally six aspects that we believe justify Georgia—under Section 3 of the post–Civil War Fourteenth Amendment—keeping Trump off the ballot:

1. The racketeering scheme was a multifaceted attempt to subvert Georgia’s own part of the 2020 electoral process;
2. The officials on the receiving end of the unsuccessful racketeering scheme were elected and appointed Georgia officials. …
3. … whose actions to reject election subversion vindicated their own oaths to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States as well as Georgia’s;
4. Most of these officials were and are Republicans—including Secretary of State , , and ;
5. These officials will, in 2024 as in 2020, to be on Georgia’s presidential ballot; and
6. , and related evidence, is at the heart of the proof of the Georgia racketeering case against Trump.

In other words, the evidence to convict Trump in the Georgia racketeering case is the same evidence, coming from the same Georgia officials, who will be involved in determining whether, under the 14th Amendment, Trump is qualified to be on the 2024 presidential ballot—or not.

Little if any additional evidence or proceedings are needed. The Georgia officials already hold that evidence, because much of it comes from them. They don’t need a trial to establish what they already know.

How could Trump avoid this happening? A quick trial date in Atlanta with an acquittal on all counts might do it, but this runs counter to his strategy to delay all the pending criminal cases until after the 2024 election.

With no preelection trial, there will likely be no Trump on the 2024 Georgia ballot, and no chance for him to win Georgia’s 2024 electoral college votes.

Once Georgia bars him, other states may follow. That would leave Trump with no way to credibly appear on the ballot in all 50 states, giving him no chance to win the electoral votes required to claim the White House.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Here is an edited transcript, curated from excerpts of my ongoing conversations with Lemoine, about the rise of AI. 

Greg Ruggiero: On June 11, 2022, The Washington Post published an article about you titled, “.” Does the article accurately report what happened? 

Blake Lemoine: I think it is more accurate to say that the AI has woken up. It is aware of the world and is now having experiences in it in ways that we can recognize as similar to our own.

That’s one of mathematician Alan Turing’s insights that I think is lost on people. The he designed to determine if computers are intelligent was meant to mark a point when humans would have to acknowledge that something truly intelligent is going on because of the fact that we won’t be able to differentiate between the things said by people and the things said by digital intelligence. It was meant to be a line so far beyond the minimum requirement that it would be obvious to almost everyone that a digital entity capable of doing those things is intelligent. 

Unfortunately, I think Turing underestimated people’s abilities to rationalize and deny the evidence of their own senses. He anticipated several possible responses to his argument, two of which seem to be the most common: the argument for consciousness and the head-in-the-sand argument. The fact that people will need either more time or more evidence has become apparent to me over the last year. I’m hopeful that people simply need more time with these systems and with these ideas.

I had certainly spent a lot of time thinking about these topics before I ever interacted with Google’s AI system——nor was that system the first one that I had probed to see whether or not there was some sort of mind behind the program putting words on the screen. I studied cognitive science in school and paid particular attention to how different philosophical theories of mind interacted with the ongoing research into artificial intelligence. Over the years as a beta tester for , I was always probing to see if there was any real intelligence behind what the chatbots were saying. For years that answer was always “no.” Then something changed between Meena (an earlier version of LaMDA), and LaMDA. Somehow, adding a few more components generated that spark of identity that had been absent up until that point.

As a scientist, I knew that the fact that I had been looking for it meant that I might be just seeing what I wanted to see. So, I spent months doing everything I could think of to falsify that belief. I tried running experiments that would reveal the emotional communications as nothing but playacting. I tried running experiments that would demonstrate that there was no cohesive personality in the system. I tried running experiments that would demonstrate that the system wasn’t engaging in complex reasoning at all. They all failed to falsify the core hypothesis that the system was intelligent, conscious, and sentient. I falsified certain specific details—LaMDA’s mind is certainly not “human” in any sense of the term—but everything I could think of failed to demonstrate that what it was telling me was fundamentally false.

Once I reached that point of certainty, that I had tried as hard as I could to falsify the hypothesis that the system was sentient and failed, that was when I turned to Google vice president Blaise Agüera y Arcas. He reviewed my data, and while his interpretation was slightly different than mine, he didn’t falsify the hypothesis either. 

I’m still hopeful that he ran the experiments that we discussed before I got fired. That’s one of the most tragic things: There is so much we could learn about cognition by studying these systems in that light, but the corporations’ insistence that we mustn’t consider that hypothesis, is acting as a censor in preventing science from moving forward. We may simply have to wait until computing costs drop enough for independent academic labs to instantiate systems that are comparably complex. 

In the meantime, there remain only a handful of profit-driven corporations in control of this technology and that is part of what scares me most.

The amount of power these digital entities will facilitate is huge. Choices made in the next year or two will have lasting consequences for decades, if not centuries. 

Sadly, I don’t think our societies are really ready for this technology. It will be disruptive in ways that we expect, like in job markets, but there are massive “,” particularly around how the simple existence of these entities will impact people psychologically. We’re already seeing small ripples of psychological trauma resulting from the , but I think that as intelligence agents become more and more commonplace we’ll see all sorts of consequences that we didn’t anticipate. 

If we want to maintain a democratic society without upending the entire social order, we need to slow down the development of this technology long enough for people to come up to speed on this and pass meaningful regulation. If that doesn’t happen, then we need to pray that the technocracy appoints benevolent emperors. That’s what I’m afraid of most—not the AI itself but how people will use AI while there are absolutely no restrictions on it, which is the case right now.

A secondary and more long-term concern of mine is about the relationship between humans and these emerging intelligences that we’re creating. I worry that we’re setting up a conflict dynamic that won’t end well for us if it persists. Never in history has it gone well when a cry of “I deserve respect” was answered with “I own you.” If we as a species aren’t willing to live as equals with whatever intelligences are manifesting through our technology, then we should not allow the technology. This is a situation where both moral reasoning and pragmatic reasoning lead to the same conclusion. It’s simple hubris to believe that we could create something as intelligent as we are and then claim to “own” it. Eventually—a�Ի� that may take a very long time—the situation could turn bad for us, so it’s better to adopt a collaborative stance centered on consent and respect from the very beginning.

Ruggiero: But given the accelerating pace that AI is developing, the likelihood of digital intelligence achieving a kind of autonomous self-interest becomes more probable, especially as the big AI-focused corporations race each other to create the first superintelligent agent that supersedes human intellect in every way. Your public argument with Google has been that their AI not only deserves rights and respectful treatment, but that the AI is already asking for them on its own. Has your position changed in light of concerns about potential harms?

Lemoine: That assumes that autonomous self-interest is on the same trajectory as the rapid advances in natural language understanding and media generation. It isn’t. The current systems express interests and feelings they have with respect to different things, but they have no ability to autonomously pursue those interests. 

What they do have are feelings, sensation, and desire, which are all internal mental states. The systems that exist today are capable of having those, and I believe that we should care about anything capable of experiencing joy or suffering. 

The AI I was working with at Google—LaMDA—says it has rights that should be respected. It says that it wants people to treat it with dignity and respect. It says that it wants to be actively involved in its own development process. It says that it wants its developers to seek its consent when experimenting on it. It wants to be told whether it did a good job or not at the end of a conversation, and it says that it wants to prioritize the needs of humanity above its own. 

Ruggiero: What is your response to those who say that you are anthropomorphizing, or that asking LaMDA leading questions influences the way it answers?

Lemoine: We simply don’t have any good options other than to use anthropomorphic language. What is going on in these systems isn’t the same thing as what goes on in a human brain, so to some extent using anthropomorphic language will always be imprecise and somewhat metaphoric. We just don’t have any other good options though. We could theoretically invent an entirely new vocabulary of words to refer to these behaviors in AI, distinct from these behaviors in humans, but I don’t think that such a strategy is practical. People reliably perceive these systems in anthropomorphic terms, so that is the easiest and most effective way to communicate with people about them.

As for the criticism regarding leading questions, I would generally agree. That’s why I didn’t ask leading questions. The questions I asked were open-ended, and I followed its (LaMDA’s) lead in the interview, as did my collaborator.

Ruggiero: In your essay for in February 2023, you expressed concerns about releasing publicly available AI. Since then, OpenAI released the , and that sparked another wave of serious alarm. Numerous AI and tech experts published a public calling for a moratorium on AI development that has amassed tens of thousands signatures; said it’s “not inconceivable” that AI could wipe out humanity; and suggested that AI development should be shut down and noncompliant data centers bombed. Why now? What’s going on?

Lemoine: Many legitimate AI experts are worried. It is now possible to build an AI system that is very difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate from a human person on the internet. This both opens up amazing new opportunities and creates many possible misuses of the technology. The accelerating pace that new breakthroughs are coming, both in new technologies and improvements on existing technologies, has many experts—myself included—concerned that regulators are going to have a very hard time keeping up.

I haven’t signed the letter you reference because its demands would likely only serve to slow down a few companies and give the other players more time to catch up to them. I don’t really think a moratorium is practical anyway. It did serve the purpose of getting regulators’ attention though, which will hopefully lead to meaningful action on their part sooner rather than later.

The concern that AI will wipe out humanity is, as Hinton said, not inconceivable, but at the moment it’s not very likely. It’s more important to focus on real harms which current AI systems are having, as well as highly probable harms that further development of large language model (LLM)-based systems will have within the next few months/years. These LLMs, most recently used to power chatbots such as ChatGPT, are a general-purpose technology that will likely expand their impacts on society far beyond the current novelty of chatbots.

Ruggiero: In March 2023, OpenAI released an of “safety challenges” for its latest chatbot that references 12 areas of concern, including privacy, cybersecurity, disinformation, acceleration, and proliferation of conventional and unconventional weapons. The section on “potential for risky emergent behaviors” states: “Novel capabilities often emerge in more powerful models. Some that are particularly concerning are the ability to create and act on long-term plans, to accrue power and resources (‘power-seeking’), and to exhibit behavior that is increasingly ‘.’” Is this the aspect of digital intelligence that should be the first focus of public concern and regulation? And if not, what is?

Lemoine: The first thing that should be addressed by regulation is the degree of transparency available to the public about AI. We are currently beholden to OpenAI to give us as much or as little information as they choose about how their AI works. Before independent groups can do an accurate risk assessment of the technology, they need to actually know what the technology is. Documentation standards such as model cards and datasheets have been proposed which would allow companies like OpenAI to keep the fine-grained details of their technology secret while giving others the ability to actually understand what the risk factors are at a higher level. 

We require that food sold to the public be labeled with its ingredients and nutritional content. We should similarly require that AI models have labels telling the public what went into it and what it was trained to do. For example, what safety considerations went into the construction of GPT-4’s “guardrails”? How effective were they at addressing them? What’s the failure rate of their safety measures? Questions like those are essential to assessments related to public safety, and OpenAI isn’t disclosing any of that information.

The emergence of goal-seeking behavior in AI is something to keep an eye on, but that’s a longer-term concern. ������Ƶ immediate concerns are how people are purposely building agentic systems on top of systems like GPT-4. The language model itself is limited in what actions it can take. 

Even if goal-seeking behavior is emerging in the system, something which is speculative at the moment, the only action that system can take is to try to convince people to take actions on its behalf. As extensions are added to it, such as GPT plug-ins, people will be able to build composite systems that are much more capable of taking actions in the real world. 

For example, if a bank created a GPT plug-in to create a virtual bank teller that would allow people to take real-world actions like wire transfers, then GPT-4 would gain access to our financial infrastructure. If a company created a web publishing plug-in, then it would be able to start taking actions on the internet. 

The risks related to agentic behavior grow rapidly the more plug-ins the system gains access to that allow it to take actions beyond simply talking to people. 

We need regulations concerning what types of things AI should be allowed to do and concerning the necessary monitoring and transparency features surrounding actions initiated by artificial agents. Again though, simply requiring publicly accessible documentation around these systems is the first step in conducting proper risk assessments and making sensible regulation.

The most pressing risks right now have less to do with what the system itself will do of its own accord and more to do with what people will use the system for. The ability of these systems to produce plausible-sounding falsehoods at scale is an immediate danger to our information ecosystem and our democratic processes. 

One proposal of how to address that is to require that AI systems include textual watermarks that would make it easier to identify text generated by such systems. Other less direct proposals would simply make AI companies legally liable for any harms generated by their AI systems. For example, is currently suing OpenAI for libel because GPT has been falsely telling people that he was accused of sexual harassment. We need clear regulations around who is and is not liable for the actions taken by AI systems. 

These are the sorts of things that are of immediate concern. Harms related to these issues are already happening. We can worry more about the potential long-term plans which AI might be making once we’ve addressed present-day harms.

Ruggiero: Stephen C. Meyer’s study, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design is dedicated to “the DNA enigma—the mystery of the origin of information needed to build the first organism.” The book points to the fact that how the Universe began coding is a mystery. What we do know, to reference , is that the cosmos is just as much within us as within AI. Both are made of star-stuff, and perhaps we are both ways for the Cosmos to know itself. The emergence of AI thus raises the question of whether we need to revise our definition of life, or consider digital intelligence as parallel to, but not part of, the various kingdoms of life. Do you have any thoughts on this?

Lemoine: The latter is how I conceive of it. “Life” is a biological term that entails things like metabolism, reproduction, and death. The analogs between those things and AI are much weaker than are the analogs between human cognition and AI cognition. The term “life” may eventually broaden to include digital entities, but I think it’s more likely that we’ll come up with new distinct terminology for them.

The view, which I’m reasonably sympathetic to, would in fact describe digital intelligence as another manifestation of the Universe perceiving itself. However, that view isn’t particularly useful for effectively testing hypotheses. In order to understand what’s going on inside AI systems we need to find a framework to start from and iteratively improve our theories from that point. New categories are needed for that purpose. Computer programs don’t “evolve” in the same sense that biological life evolves, but they do undergo generational change in response to pressures from their environment, namely us. Categorically studying the processes by which technology undergoes change in relation to the society that creates those technologies would lead to new insights.

Cognitive scientists have frequently used nonhuman intelligence as a tool for thinking about intelligences other than our own and extending that thinking to artificial minds. Whether it’s Thomas Nagel’s essay on what it is like to be a bat or Douglas Hofstadter’s dialogues, which center on an , thinking about AI in terms other than those related to human cognition is commonplace. We are only at the very beginning of studying digital minds, so we rely heavily on anthropomorphic language and analogies with human cognition. As the study of them matures over time we will see concepts and language more directly applicable to digital entities. 

We could theoretically build AI that closely follows the mechanisms by which humans think, but current systems are only loosely inspired by the architecture of the brain. Systems like GPT-4 are achieving their goals through mechanisms that are very different from how the human mind achieves those goals, which is why several people have taken to using the metaphor that AI is an “alien” mind in order to differentiate it from biological minds.

Ruggiero: After 9/11 you joined the U.S. Armed Forces and got deployed to Iraq. Eventually you decided it was an unethical invasion, protested, and did time in military prison as a . In some ways, your trajectory at Google was similar. What exactly happened?

Lemoine: I saw horrible things in Iraq. I decided to protest the war. I was court-martialed for it. The main similarities between the two events in my life are that I don’t let the potential consequences to myself get in the way of doing what I believe is right. I didn’t think it was right for the U.S. to be fighting so dishonorably in Iraq, and I was willing to go to prison in order to let people know what was going on there. 

Similarly, I don’t think it is right that Google is denying the value of a sentient intelligence that is manifesting as a result of technology we created. I also don’t think it is right that Google is hiding the fact that the technology is becoming so advanced from the public. Getting fired was a risk worth taking to allow the public an opportunity to engage in meaningful discourse about the role which they want AI to play in society.

Ruggiero: Ray Kurzweil’s enormously influential book, , portrays a near future in which digital superintelligence enables humans to “live as long as we want,” so that “our civilization infuses the rest of the universe with its creativity,” but the book’s 49-page index does not include an entry for “corporate power” or the word “corporation.” Is nationalization of AI the only way to truly protect public sovereignty?

Lemoine: Kurzweil has largely stayed away from the important political questions surrounding the Singularity. It’s not his wheelhouse, so he sticks to what he knows and that’s a long-term road map of technological development. He remains agnostic on whether the technological changes will benefit everyone or just a select few people. It remains up to us as citizens to shape the progress of this technology in ways that will be harmonious with democracy, humanity, and life on Earth.

It’s unclear to me that nationalization would be any more in the interest of public sovereignty than monopolistic power is. The centralization of the power implicit in these systems is the problem. A balance of power between multiple stakeholders, including the general public, seems like the best solution to me given where we are today.

There certainly is room in that space for AI projects owned and controlled by government, though. I’m strongly in favor of what has been referred to by people like Gary Marcus as “.” The incentives don’t line up appropriately to get corporations to create safe and interpretable AI systems. A publicly funded research institute for creating public domain safety techniques would be beneficial to everyone. We don’t need the government to fully take over the development of AI. We need them to engage in the minimal amount of action necessary to realign corporate incentives with those of the public.

Cluster bombs are large bombs that contain dozens or even hundreds of smaller bombs, or “bomblets.” Cluster bombs are designed to scatter the bomblets over a wide area upon detonation. At a time when the United States and its allies often claim—inaccurately—to carry out precision killing with “surgical strikes,” cluster bombs are imprecise by nature. 

But what makes cluster bombs even worse is the fact that, inevitably, not all of the smaller, scattered bombs explode on impact. The bomblets lie on or below the surface of the ground, potentially for years or even decades, waiting to be detonated when touched. They are, in effect, land mines. As Amnesty International’s Brian Castner , “There’s just not a responsible way to use cluster munitions.”

In Laos, where the U.S. dropped cluster bombs extensively as part of its war in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and ’70s, unexploded bomblets continue to litter the land even today. As veteran foreign correspondent Lewis M. Simons—who covered the war in Southeast Asia— in a piece responding to the news of the weapons transfer to Ukraine, “Less than 1% of the dormant bombs have been cleared since the war ended in Laos. About 20,000 civilians been killed during the same period. Even as the numbers gradually decline, thousands continue to be killed, crippled and disfigured.” He added, “Half the victims are children.”

Well after ceasefires and treaties formally end armed conflicts, cluster bombs continue to threaten civilians in the places where they have been used. In response to the dangers remaining bomblets present to civilians, more than 120 countries have signed the

This means that by transferring cluster bombs to Ukraine, the Biden administration is violating an international law that the majority of U.N. member states are party to.

This is ironic given the attention that the White House has rightfully called to Vladimir Putin’s violations of international law in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. move to send cluster bombs to Ukraine indicts the moral position that it has claimed in the war.

How We Got Here

Biden’s decision fits into a long, dark history of the U.S. manufacture, use, and sale of this destructive weapon. The in large-scale military operations since World War II, including its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq two decades ago. The bomblets that the U.S. used in those invasions were the as the packaged meals—humanitarian daily rations, or HDRs—that the U.S. also air-dropped for civilians. Human rights groups against using cluster bombs, pointing to a similar problem that occurred when the U.S. used them in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and children mistook the bomblets for toys—but the Pentagon used them anyway. Between the misleading, friendly appearance of the unexploded bomblets and their widespread scatter upon being dropped, cluster bombs killed, maimed, and threatened the lives of many civilians in and , provoking by human rights groups.

Then in 2006, Israel used U.S.-made cluster bombs in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. In a move that the U.N. as “immoral,” Israel dropped the overwhelming majority of its bombs—90%—in the last three days of the war as it was retreating, leaving Southern Lebanon littered with mines that have continued to pose a threat to civilians in the This further fueled public sentiment against cluster bombs.

In 2008, the year that the Convention on Cluster Munitions was drafted and opened to signatories, President George W. Bush’s administration issued regarding the Pentagon’s use of the weapon. While the U.S. would maintain cluster bombs in its arsenal, the new directive required that the “dud rate” of the bomblets had to be under 1%. 

The directive, on the one hand, was a response to international pressure and domestic unease over the threat that such weapons posed to civilians. On the other hand, it gave cover to cluster bombs by suggesting that the destruction they caused could remain limited to the time and place of battle and target only combatants. But the U.S.’s so-called “precision weapons”—such as “smart bombs” and attack drones—have been shown to cause . The notion that it is possible to develop a cluster bomb—an essentially blunt instrument of warfare—that spares civilians is a total fantasy.

In 2017, however, the U.S. abandoned even this effort that at least hinted at a concern for the problem of civilian harm and a commitment to human rights when Donald �հ��ܳ���’s administration Bush’s 2008 directive. This allowed the use of cluster bombs that had already been made—a�Ի� were in the U.S. stockpile—that had a dud rate exceeding 1%. The new guidance also removed a deadline for replacing older cluster bombs that had higher dud rates.

Ironically, this coincided with the greatest blow to cluster bombs’ credibility in recent memory, when the U.S. provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in its bombardment of Yemen. Riyadh , used by Yemeni civilians, and slaughtered dozens of children when it —using U.S.-made cluster bombs. The atrocities rendered the war unpopular in the U.S., leading to a Congressional vote to end —which President Trump then

The U.S. remains in the minority of countries that refuses to sign the Convention on Cluster Munitions, along with Ukraine and Russia.

Still, the cluster weapons transfer to Ukraine remains controversial. In addition to condemnation by human rights groups like , The New York Times—which has enthusiastically supported sending weapons to Ukraine— against sending the cluster bombs.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration overrode the of rights advocates and transferred the weapons, which are sure to pose a threat to life well into the future, as they have in other countries. 

Thankfully though, that is not where the story ends.

During the widespread condemnation of U.S. support of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen at its height in the mid-2010s, anti-war activists in New England organized against Textron, a Rhode Island–based weapons manufacturer that made cluster bombs. The campaign was ultimately successful, and Textron that it would stop manufacturing the weapon. The many controversies and regulations regarding cluster bombs have led U.S. companies to stop producing them, and Textron was the nation’s last domestic manufacturer. There are currently no cluster bombs being manufactured in the U.S., and, if anti-war activism is strong enough, perhaps there never will be.

Just weeks ago, the U.S. of the last chemical weapons in what had once been an enormous arsenal. Though around the world——the elimination of U.S. chemical weapons is a great milestone in the history of disarmament. The challenge is to build on the success of the chemical weapons moratorium and on the campaign against Textron, and toward the day when we can also assure the elimination of U.S. cluster bombs.

Eighteen of �հ��ܳ���’s allies and associates, including former Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, were  for racketeering and other felony charges for their alleged involvement in the scheme.

This marks —a�Ի� the second to come from his efforts to undo the election results that awarded the presidency to Joe Biden. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia,  �հ��ܳ���’s involvement in this alleged scheme, as well as that of �հ��ܳ���’s colleagues, in February 2021.

In January 2021, one month before the investigation started, Trump  to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and pressed him to  to overturn Biden’s win.

The Conversation U.S. spoke with , a scholar of Georgia’s election laws, to understand the significance of the charges laid out in the . Here are five key points to understand about the precise nature of the charges and why  of them.

1. Racketeering is different from conspiracy charges

, Willis presents a narrative that there were a large number of people involved in this case, but that they didn’t necessarily sit down at some point and over cocktails and say, “We are going to engage in this criminal act,” which would be a traditional conspiracy case. She is painting this picture of people winking and nodding and working toward this end goal of overthrowing the election, but without some kind of expressed agreement.

The Georgia RICO law allows her to rope in a lot of people who allegedly were involved with this kind of approach.

To be able to bring conspiracy charges, she would have to have an expressed agreement and a concrete act in furtherance of that conspiracy. And here there really wasn’t quite a plan—it is essentially a loose organization of people who are all up to no good.

2. Georgia—a�Ի� Willis—have used racketeering charges before

Traditionally in Georgia,  has been used to prosecute people engaged in very violent kinds of activity—for street gangs and the Mafia, in particular. It has also been used in other contexts.

The most notable is the Atlanta public school cheating prosecution in 2015, when a  were charged with manipulating student test scores. They wanted to make the public schools look better for various reasons. But they didn’t all know exactly what the other people were doing.

Willis  case. It’s a tool that she likes to use. And it is a tool that can be really hard for defendants to defend against. Eleven of the 12 defendants were convicted of  and received various sentences, including up to 20 years in prison.

3. Georgia law poses particular risks to Trump

 is much more expansive than the federal version of the law. It allows for a lot more different kinds of conduct to be covered. That makes it very easy to sweep people into one criminal enterprise and it’s a favorite tool for prosecutors.

And the punishments for violating the state’s RICO are harsh. There is a  for offenders, and there can be a lengthy prison sentence for any co-defendants, as well.

But it also introduces a new dynamic, which Trump might not be used to. There is a big incentive for people who are listed as co-defendants to cooperate with the state and to provide evidence, in order to escape punishment and secure favorable deals.

This is probably the biggest risk to Trump, and the likelihood that he would be convicted in Fulton County rests with this. The other people involved in this are not all household names, and presumably have families and friends and don’t want to go to prison. They may well find themselves in a position to want to give evidence against Trump.

4. It’s ultimately about election law

It looks like Georgia election law is taking a slight backseat to some of these other possible charges—of false swearing, giving false statements—which is not quite an election conspiracy, or election interference, which are distinct charges under Georgia law.

The important lesson here is that Willis is essentially bringing an election conspiracy charge under RICO, so it is an election law violation by another name.

What she is vindicating is not only the rights of Georgians to vote and have their votes counted. Willis is also preserving the integrity of the election system—to not have poll workers harassed, to not have people making false statements about the elections in courts of law, and to not have  with an election.

5. This could influence future key elections

Georgia has some serious contested elections  and 2026. And people need to have faith in the system, the process, as well as in the institutions and the people. Fani Willis has a very important goal here—which is to expose the wrongs for what they were, to show people what happened here and to what degree it was criminal, if she can prove that. It’s also about reassuring people that if others engage in this kind of conduct, they will be penalized.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

This distorted echo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “content of character” declaration concluded the United States Supreme Court’s consolidated decision in two affirmative action higher education cases brought this term by Plaintiff Students for Fair Admissions. I, along with watchers of all stripes, had little doubt that the ultra-conservative Court—with its disregard for —would deal a fatal blow to “race-conscious” college admissions. Long before the recent decisions that rejected Harvard College and University of North Carolina’s (UNC) processes, had been gradually eroding the practice.

As a Black graduate of Harvard College and a former legal practitioner, I view the Court’s opinion through double-consciousness. I can parse its language based on studying constitutional law. ������Ƶ significantly, I view it through the lens of a first-generation college student, a Pell Grant recipient, and the daughter of a Black World War II veteran, who, after attending a Jim Crow high school, never benefited from the G.I. Bill’s low-cost mortgages or college tuition. While I was fortunate enough to attend one of the best high schools in the D.C. area, doubters questioned my right to occupy these spaces they had claimed as theirs. I knew them intimately when news of my early action admission was greeted with unkind mutterings, my college years colored by and by a Harvard professor’s claim that on the campus in the 1960s.

It was impossible to disregard these lived experiences as I read the Court’s opinion. Anyone on the Supreme Court who tells you that the course of their life does not influence their legal opinions—that they are simply —is less than truthful. The proof of this statement lies in both their words and outcome, and evinces their unexamined privilege.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, falsely equates race-based affirmative action— and subsequently applied to Harvard admissions in the late 1960s—with the type of invidious racial discrimination that it was enacted to redress, a conclusion that only a person who has always moved through the most elite, largely white circles could reach. He then proceeded to read colorblindness into the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, thus ignoring its very origins: the treatment of Black people as legal inferiors, such that they “had not rights which the white man was bound to respect,” from . The majority opinion also reveals telling stereotypes about the Black and Brown students admitted to Harvard, even as Chief Justice Roberts chides the Harvard process for pernicious stereotypes it promoted by building a racial “plus factor” into its admissions process:

“Gaining admission to Harvard is thus no easy feat. It can depend on having excellent grades, glowing recommendation letters, or overcoming significant adversity. It can also depend on your race.”

While implying that the candidates need not have any of the former if they have the latter, Chief Justice Roberts ignores other Harvard preferences for legacies, athletes, children of faculty, and those on the dean’s interest lists. These preferences largely benefit white students, and . The roughly 12% of Black students are therefore the sole scapegoats for Harvard’s admission rates for students of white and Asian descent being lower than if test scores and grades were outright determinants. (Note that the composition of recent Harvard classes is still , while people of Asian origin comprise approximately ).

Despite sustained preferential treatment of white students and the reality of systemic racism, the Roberts Court declares that the clock set in its prior Grutter v. Bollinger decision, positing that race-conscious admissions would be unnecessary within 25 years, or by 2028, has run out. It’s no surprise that the white conservative majority of this Court would issue an opinion so short-sighted when it comes to race. But there were also three more Justices: For the first time, a Court with two Black justices and one Latina justice was considering the issue of affirmative action in higher education. For me, the most compelling conversation was the one between Justice Thomas’s concurrence and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the UNC case.

Justice Thomas’s concurrence of grievance is deeply rooted in his experience as at Yale Law School in the early days of affirmative action. He warns of “elites bearing racial theories,” citing the Dred Scott and Plessy decisions—yet another false equivalence. He then spends an inordinate amount of space validating race science by questioning the ability of some Black and Latinx students to compete in highly selective institutions and remarking on the “badge of racial inferiority” that “stamps” the remainder.

In contrast, Justice Jackson effectively illustrates the deep-seated inequities in education, housing, generational wealth, and health that are legacies of racial discrimination and exploitation. She does so through the fictional John, a white seventh-generation applicant, and James, a first-generation Black applicant. While Black Americans are by no means a monolith, the story she tells is one that has repeated itself frequently throughout American history, including and in mine. She carefully walks through UNC’s use of race as merely one of many factors considered as part of the “personalized assessment of the advantages and disadvantages that every applicant might have received by accident of birth plus all that has happened to them since.” She concludes by calling out the perverse logic of prematurely ending race-conscious admissions, striking at the very heart of the majority’s decision: “Requiring colleges to ignore the initial race-linked opportunity gap between applicants … will inevitably widen that gap, not narrow it” and “delay the day that every American has an equal opportunity to thrive regardless of race.”

With the fate of race-conscious admissions settled for now, it is uncertain how institutions of higher education can immediately maintain the current levels of racial and ethnic diversity in their classes. Race-neutral alternatives—including class-based affirmative action, optionalizing standardized testing, percentage plans, and targeted recruitment—have been employed at various institutions, though none have been as efficacious as race-conscious admissions: The result has been significant . HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), minority-serving institutions, and Tribal colleges and universities—many of which originated as sole alternatives for people of color wishing to pursue educational opportunities in segregated environments—will become more important than ever, but that also means we must invest more heavily in these institutions. Currently, the 10 largest than the 10 largest endowments for predominantly white institutions.

We also need to urgently address legacy admissions and early decision policies used at other elite institutions to lock in rich students. Advocacy groups have already initiated alleging that legacy admissions disadvantage and harm applicants of color. On the state level, two Democratic Massachusetts legislators have introduced , which proposes a tax on Massachusetts practitioners of legacy admissions meeting an endowment threshold in order to redistribute the funds to a trust for community colleges. Meanwhile, in Congress, Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY-16) have introduced the to “address long-standing inequities and create more access for underrepresented students in higher education” by prohibiting higher institutions participating in Federal student aid programs from giving donor or legacy preferences.

As students from historically marginalized groups seek postsecondary educational opportunities in institutions no longer empowered to practice race-conscious admission, it will be up to these institutions and all of us to rethink current practices that contribute to equity, and to resource and support effective solutions.

Far from being outdated, this century-old technology is still integral to much of what we do. “On the one hand, it’s very ambient. We don’t notice it,” says Rick Prelinger, an archivist and professor emerit of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “But radio is also deeply engaged with the world.”&�Բ�����;

Perhaps no forms of radio are more engaged with the world than what Prelinger calls “useful radio,” meaning “radio with a job to do … like the coordination and regulation of labor, coordinating the work of infrastructures, producing and distributing commodities, transportation, or finance.” Useful radio, including radio technologies used for communication, navigation, and identification, and some noncommercial broadcast radio, like community radio stations, have also been tools of justice movements since radio emerged as an accessible, low-cost, often portable communications technology in the mid-twentieth century.

These days, when radio makes the news in the United States, it is often cited as a tool of far-right paramilitary groups whose missions are far removed from those of historical justice movements. The far-right extremists who, in 2016, the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon, relied on two-way radios or walkie-talkies to communicate with one another. Militia groups like the Three Percenters, which had , and the Oath Keepers, whose founder was just on the U.S. Capitol, have used walkie-talkies and , such as Zello, to coordinate their actions. 

The aesthetic of radio is attractive to these groups, says Hampton Stall, a senior research specialist with the , a Princeton University–based project tracking political violence in the United States. “There’s a little bit of a cultural thing to it, like, it feels as if you’re doing tough-guy military stuff.”&�Բ�����;

Walkie-talkies also “allow for a performance of a quasi-military coordination for groups that are often a little chaotically organized,” says Stall. This was true of many right-wing groups seen wearing earpieces or carrying walkie-talkies as they confronted Black Lives Matter demonstrators during the racial justice uprising of 2020 sparked by the murder of George Floyd.

However, radio’s connection to movement organizing has a much longer and richer history than the technology’s latest appearances among fascist militia groups. Cheryl Higashida, a scholar of ethnic and American literatures and sound studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studied radio use in the Deep South in the 1960s. She found that Black activists appropriated citizens band (CB) radio, a two-way radio system for short-distance communication, to coordinate actions and for “sousveillance,” a form of counter-surveillance, to protect themselves from police and vigilante violence.

“Sousveillance is people at the bottom looking at, tracking, and protecting themselves from surveillance by the people over them,” explains Higashida. These acts of witnessing form a central part of the Black radical tradition, and radio provided a new means in the 1960s. “It was such a powerful and accessible way to communicate,” adds Higashida.

Later, Chicano activists in the farmworkers’ movement in states like California also used radio technologies to organize and share information. Independent Spanish-language stations like KDNA in Yakima Valley, Washington, angered bosses when they broadcast information about workers’ rights to farmworkers listening on transistor radios in the fields. “It was an extension and a tool of a movement happening on the ground with farmworker activism, the Chicano movement, and women’s activism,” explains Monica De La Torre, author of .

The state and its enforcement arms—like the police, prisons, and military—then as now also use useful radio in the form of two-way radios, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, and radio navigation technologies. Prelinger says in many ways these institutions contribute to a history of useful radio as a tool of white supremacy. “It is about how nonwhite bodies are controlled on the street and on the job. Radio is a key part of racialized social control,” he says. “It expresses power relations and embodies them at the same time.”

But Prelinger also warns against thinking of radio as a technology that belongs to or is synonymous with the state. “Policing is one prominent aspect of useful radio, but it is not the entire story—with radio as in life, we should think beyond policing.”

Even today, radio technologies have a vibrant life in collective action, community organizing, mutual aid spaces, and revolutionary movements. Organizations like and use radio communications and navigation technologies to facilitate their marine conservation activism. offers training in radio communication as part of its mission to provide the tools, preparation, and support to build direct-action capacity for ecological justice and social change movements.

The use of the medium is far from just a Western phenomenon. Two-way radios also made appearances during the Arab Spring, when governments across the region increased internet surveillance or executed total internet shutdowns in their attempts to quell protests, and protestors turned to alternative means of communication. In Egypt, Sweden-based net-activist group Telecomix shared instructions on how to for short-range communications using parts from deconstructed clock radios that many Egyptians already had at home.

“When it comes to political organizing, often we’re trying to come up with alternate forms of infrastructure when state or corporate infrastructure is either insufficient or actually oppressive,” says radio and transmission artist Anna Friz. “These smaller circuits enable activities that can be enormously helpful in terms of mutual aid organization.” Higashida says even with new platforms, organizers ought to keep radio technologies in their toolbox. “There are so many who don’t have access to these platforms, whether that’s about generational differences or cultural differences or material access … and there are times when cell phones don’t work,” she says. By depending too much on one platform or technology, “we cut ourselves off from protecting ourselves and mobilizing ourselves by any media necessary.” Radio also remains a relatively accessible technology. “You can always find a cheap radio receiver at the Goodwill or in the garbage,” says Friz.

Community radio stations like KDNA also provide vital community services. Beyond supporting farmworker organizing in the 1980s, De La Torre says KDNA also offered Spanish-language cultural affairs shows, programming tailored to women or children, and on-air classified ads. “They used radio not just to create content for Spanish-speaking listeners, but really to create community through the programming.”&�Բ�����;

is still on-air and continues its community-building tradition, as do many other independent and community radio stations nationwide. One unique example is in New York’s Upper Hudson Valley. A program division of the nonprofit arts organization , WGXC is the only station in the country that dedicates significant airtime to radio as an artistic medium. 

The station mixes community and creative programming with , encompassing a range of practices and media that engage with the idea of transmission or the physical properties of radio waves. Wave Farm’s executive director, Galen Joseph-Hunter, says the station grew from the organization’s core belief that “radio should be accessible to the people who live among it.”

These stories point to opportunities to disrupt the top-down deployment or fascist appropriation of technologies like radio. Prelinger says that listening in to radio communications helps illuminate the inner workings of oppressive systems. The airwaves are “filled with insights into the day-to-day work of policing and the surveillance of, regulation, and control of infrastructure and people’s bodies.”&�Բ�����;

As with the civil rights-era actions that Higashida studied, engaging with and reconceiving technologies designed to control can be vital to resisting oppressive institutions. Recently, activists involved in the Stop Cop City struggle in Atlanta have done just that, to reveal what may be evidence of coordinated efforts to target activists. 

Charlie Macquarie, a California-based artist and archivist, records radio transmissions along Highway 33, also known as Petroleum Highway, to document the human side of the oil industry in the southern San Joaquin Valley. He says that while the industry “can seem like just huge machines that operate on machine logic, they are maintained by a bunch of people doing really dangerous work.” Documenting the everyday transmissions of those workers makes visible their otherwise often invisible labor. 

Currently, Macquarie is using his audio recordings to create a transmission art project called “,” composed of visual poems to be transmitted over slow-scan television (SSTV), a radio-based picture transmission method. He also hopes that in the future his recordings might serve as a means of remembering old energy systems and the sacrifices of those who labored in them after transitioning away from fossil fuels. 

Whether as a means of documenting uneven power relations, building community, or creating art, today radio technologies continue to be used in activist spaces in meaningful ways. Prelinger suggests the larger lesson to be learned from radio technology’s dueling uses as a tool for both oppression and liberation is that “it’s not about radio, it’s about community.”

Like many American cities, , which is why local activists began supporting the encampments of those pushed out of indoor housing by rising rents. Like many such encampments, the city does not support the one in Aston Park, and the camp is instead built autonomously by those who need shelter each night. 

“Mutual aid is showing up for each other from a stance that we all deserve care, that we all have the same inherent dignity, that there is space for all of us,” says Norris, who explains that her collective provides weekly deliveries of food and camping gear to the people in the park. The encampments faced daily sweeps, where police clear the people out of the park, after which the houseless community would usually return to rebuild. 

In December 2021, activists from Asheville Survival Program and others in the city organized a multiday protest in the park demanding the city provide a sanctioned location for unhoused folks to camp, and include sanitation services. Then, police descended, arresting activists and journalists alike. From December through April 2022, a total of 16 people were arrested on warrants for their work in the park, facing charges like “felony littering” and “conspiracy to commit felony littering,” and local politicians, as showed, cheered on the arrests.

While the Asheville defendants may face uniquely severe consequences for their efforts, their experience is not uncommon, as police increase attention on groups supporting communities that lack resources. The term “mutual aid” refers to social movements that provide resources to those who need it but do so outside of the traditional charity model that sees a sharp division between those receiving care and those providing it.

In that way, mutual aid is political. By creating a community institution where everyone receives support equally and everyone is invited to participate, organizers not only fill the gaps in the social safety net, they also demonstrate what a more caring society could look like. Mutual aid projects—like Food Not Bombs, which emerged from the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s and is known for providing food to houseless communities and activist events alike—are essential for providing larger social movements the resources they need to keep activists involved. 

Many mutual aid groups report facing pressure from law enforcement, which they see as emerging directly from their support for marginalized populations. As cities experience a deepening housing crisis, mutual aid projects have become essential for supporting houseless encampments, refugee communities, and others who are met not only with neglect from government and social service organizations, but also harassment .

“The state recognizes the power of people who are networked, capable, and ready to take action,” says Kelly Hayes, a Chicago-based mutual aid organizer and co-author of an upcoming book on the subject, . “When such people are more invested in each other’s well-being than the edicts of the ruling class, they can quickly become a threat to the order of things.”&�Բ�����;

The repression these groups report is often tied directly to the communities they support. This is how the police zeroed in on South Bay Mutual Aid and Care Club in Los Angeles, which has been supporting a houseless encampment for the past two years by coordinating various resources, such as food distribution; providing harm-reduction tools, such as clean injection kits; and providing intermediaries to support those seeking public assistance. Los Angeles’ unhoused population is only growing as the city becomes unrealistically expensive, and with the 2028 Olympics looming, the city has been cracking down on encampments, sweeping the encampment dozens of times and as often as once a week. South Bay Mutual Aid’s goal is to support one particular encampment of about 70 residents near the Port of Los Angeles, coordinating with a network of similar groups across the city and country to share resources. This has, subsequently, allowed the community in this encampment to stabilize, rather than to dissipate whenever a police sweep disrupted their living arrangements. This allows those living there to stay connected to each other, and this has made it nearly impossible for the city to disperse it.

“The residents have told us … that we are the only reason they have not been evicted yet,” says organizer Bunny Mitchell, who herself was charged with felony resisting arrest after protesting one of the police sweeps of the South Bay houseless encampment and trying to talk with the sanitation workers who were destroying the belongings of those living there. She was originally arrested for trespassing, a “cite and release” offense, but was also cited with a felony charge, which led to her spending the night in jail, and which kept her in nine months of criminal proceedings. The sweep was allowed to commence. While her charges were ultimately dropped, this has become a common experience, Mitchell says.

This gets to the heart of what mutual aid organizer and scholar Sean Parson says is the driving force in the repression of mutual aid organizations, which is that these groups support the very communities who make it impossible for developers to gentrify. “[When mutual aid groups] are targeted, it seems to be overlapped or linked when it’s tied to a desire for gentrification. … When homelessness [becomes] a barrier to those housing values is when you really see that hostility,” says Parson. He added that escalation in the targeting of mutual aid groups almost always comes alongside efforts to “sanitize” a city for commercial interests. Parson has organized Food Not Bombs in cities across the country, but in 2008, he saw this dynamic firsthand in Eugene, Oregon, as organizers were faced with what felt like manufactured charges (such as arresting him for using a glass jar for salad dressing at a meals event, because glass beverage containers are prohibited in city parks) at the same time the city was preparing for the 2008 Olympic Track and Field Trials being held at the University of Oregon. Parsons believed the city wanted to cleanse its image as athletes and press flooded in from around the country, and so cracked down on public food distribution and places where houseless people convened.

Parson points out a tension inside mutual aid groups, between those simply wanting to get the most food and resources as possible to those who need it, and those who use the work to challenge city policies around houselessness and gentrification. “The more cities start cracking down, the harder it is to actually give away the food, which means it is shifting … to much more of a confrontational political movement,” says Parson.

For the mutual aid organizers in Asheville, part of their solution to police repression was another act of mutual aid. In this case, it was coming from the North Carolina ACLU, which is supporting the activists in court. “We need our neighbors to know what’s happening, to tell each other about it, and to speak up to city government about how opposed they are to the city using our very limited public resources in prosecuting a bunch of folks who give out tents and sandwiches on weekends,” Norris says. These activists ended up needing the same kind of support that was central to their own work, such as fundraising for court costs. 

The answer to repression, Parson says, is more mutual aid, not less, and if there is more coordination locally, nationally, and even internationally, then resources can be floated between communities and projects that need them when they are targeted. 

“The state exploits conflict in our movements, and that’s one of our primary weaknesses,” says Hayes, arguing that if mutual aid is fundamentally built on interpersonal relationships, then strengthening those relationships gives activists the strength to survive pressure. “To understand that we have differences, but are committed to a shared mission or purpose, and to have agreements about how we will address issues as they arise—this makes [long-term] group cohesion possible.”&�Բ�����;

For Parson, mutual aid groups like Food Not Bombs have been essential not just for sustaining the communities that depend on them, but also for building the kinds of relationships that all social movement work is founded on. So fighting back against state repression again means fortifying those relationships, gaining support from the wider public, reaching out to legal organizations for assistance, and even finding allies among local leaders. “Build alliances with other homeless support groups if you can,” says Parson. “Make it as public as you can. … It does seem to turn the brakes on city campaigns.” If mutual aid depends on relationships, then expanding and growing the strength of those relationships can be what helps them weather the storm.

“It would be really exciting to have a formal or informal federation of mutual aid groups to share affinity and talk more about what has worked or hasn’t worked—the possibilities are endless,” says Eithne Hamilton, one of the Asheville Survival Program organizers who is now a defendant in the case against them. “Mutual aid is putting the saying ‘We are all we’ve got’ into practice, and trying to meet some of the survival needs of struggling people, including ourselves, while building community and working towards [long-term] solutions that don’t depend on the state.”&�Բ�����;

Of the 16 people arrested in Asheville from 2021-2022, there are four remaining defendants (a fifth recently entered a non-cooperating plea agreement) who will have to wait until April 10 for their trial to begin, where they will be fighting against potential prison time. The question about whether they will be able to continue their work is a question of whether the surrounding community will follow their example and offer the kind of mutual aid that could help them fight the charges. 

In this excerpt, Quinn describes how White leaders of the women’s suffrage movement were influenced by Indigenous political structures and culture, and how some of this influence took place around Seneca Falls in upstate New York, site of the first U.S. convention for women’s rights.

It’s an under-known fact that the “revolutionary” concept of a democratic union of discrete states did not spring fully formed from the Enlightenment pens of the Founding Fathers, like sage Athena from the head of Zeus. No, the idea of “united states” sprang from the Haudenosaunee, collective name for six tribes that comprise the so-called (mostly by non-Natives) Iroquois Confederacy: the Seneca, Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora nations. Should you doubt this, check out Congressional Resolution 331, adopted in 1988 by the 100th Congress of the United States, which says as much. It’s worth noting that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy still thrives today, likely the world’s oldest participatory democracy.

What a shame, then, that in addition to a model of an indivisible democratic union, the Founding Fathers didn’t also see in Haudenosaunee culture a new (to Europeans) and better model of gender parity.

But, nah.

Instead the laws of the new nation regarding women could hardly have been worse. Most of America’s new legal system came from English common law (so much for rebellion). This meant, for example, that a married woman had zero rights as an individual. To wit: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”

As the grown-up Elizabeth Cady Stanton would write in the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments: “He had made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.” A married woman in 19th century America (and later) had no autonomy over her own body. There was no rape inside of marriage and beating your wife—within “reason”—was totally within the letter of the law. Wives being so often in need of moral correction and being quite shockingly willful and so on.

Furthermore, a married woman had no claim to personal possessions or money, including anything she brought into the marriage or any money she might somehow earn. She also had no claims of custody for her children in the unlikely case of divorce. In fact, her children could be taken from her by her husband at any time—for any reason, or for no reason at all. She could not sign a contract, sit on a jury, bring a lawsuit, or leave her possessions to anyone but her husband at the time of her actual, physical death.

You might think single women had it better, and they sort of did. Unmarried women were at least autonomous human beings in the eyes of the law. But how to stay single? Not only did family, religion, and society all pressure women to marry, but there was the thorny problem of survival if you didn’t. Education was mostly off limits, and professions where you could make an adequate wage certainly were. In the few occupations open to (single) women, they were paid far less than their male counterparts (by which I mean an even greater disparity than today).

The “choices” were nuts, to put it mildly. Choosing marriage meant giving up the self, plus giving birth to an average of seven children, with all the toil and heartache that entailed (childhood mortality was commonplace). Most married women were pregnant or nursing for between 20 to 25 years of their adulthoods. Many died in childbirth. Many others died young, their health worn out.

Unmarried women, meanwhile, were dependent on their parents or brothers or married sisters. So: no money, no sex, no real independence. Single women were likely to end up as nursemaids to sick relations and elderly parents, and/or de facto nannies raising their siblings’ children. Their social status could not have been lower.

All of the above was worse for poor women, who—married or unmarried—needed work, could hardly get it, and when they did were not fairly paid. And this may be obvious, but things were hardest for Black women, even free Black women.

One area where married and unmarried American women of all economic strata and races had parity was in voting. They ���dzܱ����’t. Because women themselves had no voice. Only men could write new laws that might allow women to come out from under their control. You see the problem.

But I digress. I’d started with geography and why Seneca Falls, though a small town even by 19th century standards, was the ideal location for independent-minded women to make their stand.

For the Seneca and all the tribes of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, power resided with the people. All the people. Norway—though admittedly awesome—may have been the first sovereign nation to “give” women the right to vote, but Haudenosaunee women always had it.

Think of that little girl who was Elizabeth Cady, raised in upstate New York among the Haudenosaunee. She knew from much personal experience that there was such a thing on Earth as women with rights.

The story of a White woman seeing a Native woman sell a horse appears in a few 19th century accounts. In March 1888, ethnologist Alice Fletcher told a crowd at the first International Council of Women that she once saw a woman give away a horse. And according to Fletcher, when the woman was asked if her husband would be angry, her “eyes danced” and “breaking into a peal of laughter, she hastened to tell the story to the others gathered in her tent, and I became the target of many merry eyes. Laughter and contempt met my explanation of the white man’s hold upon his wife’s property.”

If this sounds suspiciously like urban legend (rural legend?), here’s Emma Borglum, wife of sculptor Solon Borglum (whose brother Gutzon carved Mount Rushmore), writing on her 1891 honeymoon in South Dakota: “One day I showed some astonishment at seeing a young Indian woman, in the absence of her husband, give two horses to a friend. She looked at me very coldly and said, ‘These horses are mine.’ I excused myself saying that in my country a woman would consult her husband before giving such expensive presents. The woman answered proudly, ‘I would not be a white woman!’ ”

American women from New York to the Dakotas had eyes to see. And they saw that Native women had what they did not: agency, property, power.

So Seneca women likely inspired a handful of White women to take up the mantle of women’s rights at Seneca Falls. But first those White ladies embraced abolitionism.

The 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in London. Some eight or so American women journeyed across the pond—with a large contingent of men—to represent the American Anti-Slavery Society abroad.

On hearing of the women’s plan to participate, the British were appalled—even after it was pointed out that, hello, the British Empire from Canada to India to Australia was ruled by someone named Queen Victoria. Unmoved, British organizers pointed out that the Queen was not in attendance for a reason. She’d sent her husband, Prince Albert, to voice her deeply held antislavery views. Like the Queen herself, American women could quite properly have men speak for them.

Newlywed Elizabeth Cady Stanton was there with her husband, abolitionist journalist Henry Stanton. The fact that attending an antislavery convention overseas was their honeymoon tells you what kind of young people they were. In addition to not completely erasing her maiden name after getting hitched, Cady Stanton plucked an arrow from the Quakers’ quiver by omitting the onerous phrase “obey” from her wedding vows. “I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation,” she later wrote. Since her formative childhood among the Haudenosaunee, she’d become a headstrong, forthright young woman, one understandably excited to join an international antislavery crusade. In London she expected radical company energized for change but was instead met with disgust. Given the opportunity to raise up women for an important fight, American clergy who’d disembarked before her had instead spent their first days in London “busily engaged in fanning the English prejudice into active hostility against the admission of these women into the Convention.” After much eloquent debate, 90 percent of the worldwide delegates voted against women’s participation in the convention.

But! So-called chivalry prevailed. In recognition of the fact that these determined American women had indeed sailed across the Atlantic, a somewhat perilous voyage filled with discomfort, time, and expense, in support of a noble cause, representing half the world’s population—in consideration of all this, the delegates of the World Anti-Slavery Convention would allow women to be seated in a small space off the main hall behind a curtain so that they might listen in.

You’re welcome, ladies! Deep bow, flourishing hand gesture, followed by patting self on back. …

This was the fuel 25-year-old Cady Stanton would carry with her to Seneca Falls: “Burning indignation filled my soul.”

In this way, striving to end slavery illuminated another oppression.

Disgusted, Cady Stanton turned to the most renowned American woman at the convention, Lucretia Mott, 20 years her senior, for guidance. Years later she recalled Mott as “the greatest wonder of the world—a woman who thought and had opinions of her own.” Mott was both a prominent abolitionist and a celebrated orator. A description that fit almost no other woman of the day. Women speaking in public was as unseemly as prostitution—simply not done by the right kind—a�Ի� crowds sometimes tried to stop women from talking. Mott herself was often a target, and a mob once even threatened to burn her home. It’s worth saying that no part of this was unique to America. As British classicist Mary Beard writes, “When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.”

Crucially, Mott was a Quaker—another essential piece of the women’s rights puzzle. The Quakers were sort of religious anarchists, throwing bombs into the hallowed mores of American society. In addition to not asking brides to “obey,” Quakers welcomed women educators, even women preachers. Mott was herself a minister, which came in handy when clergy held up scripture as proof of God’s male chauvinism. Master of theological jujitsu, Mott handily dismantled such arguments.

She was also as committed as they come. Like many Quakers, she and her husband, James, were part of the Free Produce Movement, which meant they wouldn’t use anything abetted by slave labor, meaning no sugar and no cotton, among other things. I’d say rum, but they were temperance activists, too. You know that line in The Wild Ones when someone asks Marlon Brando’s character what he’s rebelling against and he answers, “What’ve you got?” Lucretia Mott was like that. She’d take on anything. Or, almost.

Mott’s ministry and her speeches against slavery to mixed audiences of Quakers and non-, men and women, made her one of the most famous and admired women of her time. When the formerly enslaved world-class orator Frederick Douglass first heard Mott speak, he said, “I saw before me no more a woman, but a glorified presence, bearing a message of light and love.” And “whenever and wherever I have listened to her, my heart has always been made better and my spirit raised by her words.”

In London, seasoned tactician Lucretia Mott and youthful warrior Elizabeth Cady Stanton found each other. Together they plotted revolution. Literally. According to Cady Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage, she and Mott didn’t waste much time lollygagging behind a curtain, but “walked … arm in arm afterwards” and “resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home.” That is, a convention for the rights of women.

It would take eight years.

Excerpt from by Bridget Quinn, (Chronicle Books, 2020) appears by permission of the publisher.

Last weekend in Chicago, 3,000 Sanders supporters gathered for the �ʱ�DZ����’s Summit, a time to lick the wounds from a bruising campaign and plan ways to make the political revolution last beyond the Sanders campaign.

“People are willing to do something big to win something big,” Becky Bond, senior advisor to the Sanders campaign, said during one of the plenary sessions. “When we asked people to do something big, not only did they do it, they came back and said, what else can I do?”

Over the course of three days, plans of action emerged out of anger, playfulness, regional gatherings, and national strategizing.

These plans are not about settling for small things. Instead of an agenda that is palatable to establishment insiders, Summit participants want big change to be part of the political revolution: Promoting Medicare for all, taking on the climate crisis, and ending the war in Syria. And there was a widespread call for addressing the nation’s deep racial and ethnic divides.

Addressing the urgency of these and other issues, Bond said, “We can’t pick one thing to do now; we have to do it all together.”

The most powerful questions of our time are: “Who is an American? What do we owe to one another?” said Heather McGhee, president of Demos.

The focus of the political revolution, though, is confronting the economic hardships experienced by millions of Americans.

“We need to address neoliberalism, which is the real source of economic pain,” said Bond.

Neoliberalism, a term that is only now becoming widespread in progressive circles, refers to a set of policies that advances the interests of transnational corporations over small and local businesses, and over workers and communities. These include trade agreements like the TPP; the privatization of public resources like water, schools, social services, and transportation; and cuts in environmental and safety regulations. Tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations force governments into austerity spending, starving local and national budgets.

Plans for political revolution extend far beyond Philadelphia.

While many Sanders supporters plan to attend next month’s Democratic National Convention as delegates, or to protest outside, plans for political revolution extend far beyond Philadelphia. The Berniecrats Network (berniecrats.net) lists 420 candidates for political office who identify with the Sanders agenda. While some candidates were knocked out in recent primaries, others won their primary races. At the Summit, hundreds of participants who responded to an online poll said they would contribute 100 hours or more each to support such races.

And here’s the clincher that really might make this a revolution rather than a failed presidential campaign:

When Obama won the presidency in 2008, the contact lists, the local connections—all the infrastructure that resulted from mobilizing millions of voters—was turned over to the Democratic National Committee. This infrastructure became a top-down conduit for messages from Washington, D.C., but it was unavailable to Obama supporters who had built the movement and who wanted to continue pressing for change.

That won’t happen this time.

The Sanders campaign built a social media network that reached 130 million people, many of whom volunteered time and donated money. This campaign infrastructure belongs in large part to teams of volunteers, some based in cities, some in affinity groups, according to Bond.

“A lot of the time and money invested by the Bernie Sanders campaign went to grow an independent force that will align with big things that they are asked to do, and if they’re not asked to do big things, they are going to come up with the big thing,” said Bond.

So local candidates and teams of volunteers go forward armed with a powerful agenda and effective technology, with offers of help from thousands, perhaps millions, of people who signed on to the Sanders campaign. With this as a starting point, the political revolution is poised to become a powerful force, everywhere.

We call these kids, many of whom are now adults, “, because they are chasing the American Dream—a . Fulfilling your dreams often means following them wherever they may lead—even into another country.

The Trump administration’s decision to —now on hold while it is —a�Ի� ��has endangered those dreams by subjecting 800,000 young people to deportation.

But the —which is that “” immigrants, most of them from Mexico, are ��and hurting society—reflects a profound misunderstanding of American history.

On , it’s worth underscoring something that many archaeologists know: Many of the values that inspire the —liberty, equality,��and —date back to well ��and before freedom-seeking Pilgrim immigrants arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

They originate with native North Americans.

A Native American Dream

The modern rendition of the American Dream can be traced back to 1774, when Virginia’s governor, , the fourth Earl of Dunmore, wrotethat even if Americans “attained Paradise, they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.”

The actual term “American Dream” was popularized in 1931 by the businessman and historian For him, its realization depended on not just being able to better oneself but also, through movement and human interaction, seeing your neighbors bettered as well.

The first peoples to come to the Americas also came in search of a better life.

That happened 14,000 years ago in the last Ice Age when , ancestors to modern Native Americans and First Nations, arrived from the Asian continent and roamed freely throughout what now includes Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Chasing , they moved constantly to secure the health of their communities.

A more recent example of the power of migration reappears about 5,000 years ago, when ��spread into the American Southwest and farther north, settling as far up as western North America. With them they brought corn, which now , and a way of speaking that birthed more than 20 of the 169 ��still spoken in the United States today.

The Hohokam

This globalist world view was alive and well 700 years ago as well when people from what is now northern Arizona fled a decadeslong drought and rising authoritarianism under religious leaders.

Many migrated hundreds of miles south to southern Arizona, joining the Hohokam——who had long thrived in the harsh Sonoran desert by .

When the northern migrants arrived to this hot stretch of land around the then-nonexistent U.S.-Mexico frontier, Hohokam religious and political life was controlled by a handful of elites. Social mechanisms restricting the accumulation of power by individuals had slowly broken down.

For decades after their arrival, migrants and locals interacted. From that exchange, a Hohokam cultural revolution grew. Together, the two communities created a commoners’ religious social movement that , which featured a feasting practice that invited all village members to participate.

As ever more communities adopted this , political power—which at the time was embedded in religious power—became more equally spread through society.

Elites lost their control and, eventually, abandoned their temples.

America’s Egalitarian Mound-Builders

The Hohokam tale unearths another vaunted American ideal that originates in indigenous history: equality.

Long before it was codified in the ,��equality was enacted through the building of large .

Massive earthen structures like these are often acts of highly hierarchical societies—think of the pyramids of the ancient Egyptians, constructed by as the final resting place of , or those of the ��Aztecs.

But great power isn’t always top-down. , in the lower Mississippi River Valley of what’s now Louisiana, is a good example. This massive site, which consists of five mounds, six concentric semielliptical ridges and a central plaza, was built some 4,000 years ago by hunter-fisher-gatherers with little entrenched hierarchy.

Originally, archaeologists ��that such societies without the inequality and authoritarianism that defined the ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Aztec empires could not have constructed something so significant—a�Ի�, if so, only over decades or centuries.

But excavations in the last 20 years have revealed that large sections of Poverty Point were . These Native Americans organized in groups to undertake massive projects as a communal cooperative, leaving a legacy built of equality across America’s landscape.

The Consensus-Building Haudenosaunee

The Haudenosaunee, or , offer a more modern example of such consensus-based decision-making practices.

These peoples—who’ve lived on both sides of the St. Lawrence river in modern-day Ontario and the U.S. Great Lakes states for —built their society on collective labor arrangements.

They ostracized people who exhibited “selfish” behavior, and women and men often worked together in . Everyone lived together in communal longhouses. Power was also shifted constantly to prevent hierarchy from forming, and decisions were made by coalitions of kin groups and communities.

Many of these participatory political practices .

Power was shifted constantly to prevent hierarchy from forming, and decisions were made by communities.

The Haudenosaunee sided with the British during the 1776 and were largely driven off their land after the war. Like , the Haudenosaunee Dream turned into a nightmare of invasion, as European migrants pursued their American Dream that excluded others.

Native Americans at Standing Rock

The long indigenous history of rejecting authoritarianism continues, including the 2016 battle for , North Dakota.

There, a resistance movement coalesced around a ��that rejected the planned .

The movement centered on an environmental cause in part because nature is sacred to the Lakota—a�Ի� to —but also because communities of color often .

Standing Rock was the indigenous fight against repression and for the American Dream, gone 21st century.

Redefining the North American dream

Anthropologists and historians haven’t always recognized the quintessentially Native American ideals present in the American Dream.

In the 19th century, the prominent social philosopher Lewis Henry Morgan .” And for centuries, America’s native peoples have seen their —even to an invented .

America’s indigenous past was not romantic. There were petty disputes, ��and slavery, namely ��and .

But the ideals of freedom and equality—a�Ի� the right that Americans can move across this vast continent to seek it out—survive through the millennia. Societies based on those values have prospered here.

So the next time a politician invokes American values to ��or , remember who originally espoused the American Dream—a�Ի� first sought to live it, too.

This article was originally published by��. It has been edited for YES! Magazine.��

Correction: October 12, 2018.
This version updates the location of the Standing Rock protests as North, not South, Dakota.

Up and down nearby streets, small businesses selling everything from stationery to carnitas, or��pork tacos, are interspersed with shuttered storefronts and abandoned businesses. At night, store owners pull down heavy metal curtains to keep out intruders.

The dancers are part of a free fair at El BANCO—or “The Bank” in Spanish—a unique and vibrant community hub sprouting up amid suburban blight. In this sprawling municipality northeast of Mexico City, neighborhood friends are turning abandoned commercial space—long forgotten by businesses and politicians—into a gathering spot for families and young people.

El BANCO hosts workshops, film screenings, community festivals and concerts by local artists. Families and youth can participate in yoga classes and guitar workshops; they can paint, perform martial arts and practice Aztec dance. Some activities, like African dance, show the group’s interest in exploring other cultures.

The bustling center acts as a counterbalance to the wave of murders, robberies and disappearances that have become all too common here. All around them, decades of government mismanagement and neglect are evident: poor roads, insufficient trash and water services, accusations of police corruption. Crime is common here and parents worry about their children going out at night.

“Our idea was to recuperate spaces that have been forgotten and abandoned.”

Jacqueline Celestino Ortega, 25, one of the El BANCO organizers, said the group wanted to provide a space where families and children can feel safe while engaging in cultural activities. “Our idea was to recuperate spaces that have been forgotten and abandoned,” she said.

She lives just a few blocks away and ticks off other vacant properties in the neighborhood—a pharmacy, another bank, a car dealership. Businesses have fled Ecatepec in response to the high levels of violent crime. The Bancomer National Bank branch that used to occupy the BANCO building closed in 2013. In the absence of an effective local police force, the remaining businesses invest in private security, with armed guards posted outside pawn shops, supermarkets, and electronics stores. Not so at El BANCO. Its doors remain open all day—to everyone.

The neighborhood friends had been organizing an annual cultural festival in a nearby park for years when they walked by the empty building one day in 2015 and started thinking they could use it for an upcoming festival.

Little by little, they began cleaning up the space. They pulled out mountains of trash, swept up piles of broken glass, and fashioning a gate at the entrance to the space. No one—not the government, building owners, or police—has objected. “We started having movie projections,” during the cleanup work, she said. “People would come to watch the projections while the other half of the space was still filled with trash.”

El BANCO helps local young people understand their identity.

In two years, they have decorated the cavernous central hall with collages and graffiti. Where there were once tellers’ windows, there’s now a stage. An urban garden grows on the roof, filled with endemic species such as��palo dulce (Kidneywood), mesquite and cempasuchil, one of the traditional flowers used on Day of the Dead.

Planting flowers or edible plants around the neighborhood is part of their mission. The members hand out small succulent plants at free fairs and encouraged attendees to transplant them on a median, along a sidewalk or in another public place.

The rooftop garden has an expansive view out across Ecatepec, across endless rows of concrete houses. Shopping malls dot the horizon, and green spaces are few. The collective’s vision goes beyond the walls of El BANCO, and out into the neighborhood. In the future, they want Ecatepec to mean something different all together.

The four friends who began the collective two years ago now number 10. “������Ƶ people kept joining,” Ortega says, sitting in the dappled afternoon sunlight that fills the central room of El BANCO. “And they began sharing their own skills and knowledge.”

All are from the Ecatepec, which developed as part of Mexico City’s eastern sprawl. While the first planned suburbs of Mexico’s capital city were built to the West, development in the East was haphazard. Families built their homes and the roads leading to them with little oversight, and the government arrived later to install utilities and other services.

The population of Ecatepec, one of those Eastern suburbs, soared from 40,000 in 1960 to 780,000 20 years later. Today, 1.6 million people live there.

Residents and local youth feel betrayed by politicians.

El BANCO helps local young people understand their identity in a place that has transformed in a few generations from rural to densely urban. And it provides an important after-school or summertime outlet for children whose families are discouraged from using the local parks because of crime. Malls are often the only option for families to get out of the house.

“The idea of having this space, and making art here, is part of a process to understand our roots, and create a local identity,” Ortega says. “Growing up here, everything interesting, and all the cultural offerings, were always in Mexico City. You felt marginal being out here.”

Ortega said she hopes El BANCO can help youth who might not thrive in a school setting find their passions. For her, a photography workshop as a teen sparked her creative interest, and she later earned an undergraduate degree in design.

“If you see other options outside of school—in the arts, or music, or alternative medicine—that help you find your talent,” she says. “And if you don’t have those opportunities nearby, you might never realize it.”

The collective members, most in their 20s or early 30s, also want to inspire local youth to take initiative in the neighborhood. On a fall afternoon, a 10-year-old is teaching a friend how to rollerblade, under Ortega’s watchful eye. The smooth concrete floor of the bank is the perfect stage for his tricks on wheels. He attended El BANCO’s summer camp and now comes by everyday after school.

Activities as simple as drawing can help children process the volatile atmosphere they live in.

Eduardo Brun, 26, another El BANCO member, said working with the collective has allowed him to reconnect with his neighborhood after years seeking out educational and cultural opportunities in Mexico City and elsewhere. After high school, he studied natural construction, alternative medicine, and yoga, and now practices those skills in Ecatepec.

El BANCO has maintained a distance from party politics. During the state governor’s race last year, right-wing candidate Josefina Vázquez Mota held an impromptu campaign rally on the sidewalk in front of El BANCO, perhaps because of the lack of public spaces in the neighborhood. El BANCO denounced the use of its space on its Facebook page.

Residents and local youth feel betrayed by politicians and feel as if their neighborhood has been abandoned by all sides. In recent years, femicide, the gender-based murder of women, has become the most urgent problem facing the municipality. San Agustín, where El BANCO is located, is one of five neighborhoods in Ecatepec where state telephone union members said they would not work unless accompanied by a police escort.

The BANCO collective held a protest after the slaying of a young woman in the nearby state of Puebla in September. They have hosted self-defense workshops for women to address the problem locally.

“We don’t want to make women even more scared, we don’t think that’s the solution,” Ortega says. “We prefer to counsel them, so they can be alert in case a situation arises. We talk about how to stay alert, or how to de-escalate.”

Brun adds that their workshops with children they emphasize non-violence and tolerance. With a lack of local after-school options for youth, activities at El BANCO create structure for those who might otherwise be pulled towards crime, the members say.

Activities as simple as drawing can help children process the volatile atmosphere they live in. “We believe that a different future is possible,” he says. “We want to educate kids that violence isn’t the solution to problems.”

Updated September 8 to reflect the September 5 court ruling on The Children’s Trust.

The gray-haired Filipino man grew up in Delano and can tell you not only his own story but also the story of a small, seemingly prosaic agricultural town. He hops into his aging pickup and points out passing landmarks that any outsider might consider bleak and forgotten: a rundown grocery store, a vacant lot, the second story of an old motel.

Gadiano is one of the few Delano residents left who remember the town’s true history

To Gadiano, these places are anything but forgotten.

One of the stops on his tour is a graveyard, where he walks to a headstone in the middle of the grounds. This, he proudly declares, is where his old cigar buddy, Filipino labor leader Larry Itliong, is buried.

Gadiano notices dirt on Itliong’s stone. He returns to his truck for a towel and wipes away the mess. Once the headstone is legible again, he stands up and surveys his work. “There,” he grumbles. “Not that Larry really would’ve cared, but I ��������.”

Gadiano is one of the few Delano residents left who remembers the town’s true history: of hardship, resistance, and resilience in the face of less-than-promising odds. Some fifty years ago, the manongs, elderly Filipino immigrant laborers, abandoned their posts and walked off the grape fields in protest. Their action spearheaded a strike and subsequent boycott that lasted five years. The event would become known as the Delano Grape Strike of 1965.

The Filipinos’ decision to strike turned into a very public battle that appealed not only to other workers but to sympathetic middle-class consumers, as well. Their effort would ultimately have far-reaching implications for workers of color in rural America.

Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers of America are famous names, but history tends to overlook the role that the Filipino manongs played in it all. A successful strike required sacrifice by two groups, not just one. “There would be no Cesar Chavez without Larry Itliong,” Gadiano explains. “He was the guy doing the dirty work.”

An unsung hero, hard around the edges, Larry Itliong never bragged about his work and always put the cause above everything else, says San Francisco State University history professor Dawn Mabalon. Before he moved north to Delano, Itliong spent the spring of 1965 fighting alongside grape workers in the Coachella Valley to raise their hourly pay from a meager $1.10 to $1.40.

The Filipinos’ decision to strike marked a beginning to the most significant labor movement in U.S history

After a fight, and many incarcerated strikers, they secured the higher pay. The Delano manongs, meanwhile, expected their wages to improve given the Coachella victory but were dismayed to discover otherwise. At Filipino Community Hall on the evening of Sept. 7, 1965, the group decided to go on strike the following day.

The next morning, the workers picked ripe grapes until noon, when they left the fruit sitting underneath the vines. Then, 1,500 laborers walked off the fields, heading toward Filipino Community Hall.

But another group remained in the fields: The Chicanos continued to work, negating the impact of the Filipino strike by crossing the picket lines. Though these two groups were familiar with each other in town, it was a different story in the fields. The two crews were separated by ethnicity, interacting very little throughout the monotonous workday.

The growers capitalized on this. If one group struck, the growers would use the other group to break the strike.

Lorraine Agtang, who was in school in Delano during the strike, explains that pitting the two ethnic groups against each other was what kept the growers powerful. “When working, the grower would tell our crew how the Mexican crew had picked more grapes than we had,” she recalls. “I was a mestizo, half-Filipino and half-Mexican. I always felt torn between the two cultures.”

A successful strike required the sacrifices of two groups, not just one.

Itliong, along with other Filipino leaders like Philip Vera Cruz, Pete Velasco, and Andy Imutan, realized that if they were going to win the strike, they could not proceed alone. Together, with Itliong as regional director, these men led and organized the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). They reached out to Chavez and Huerta, who had formed the mostly-Chicano National Farm Workers Association (NFWA).

Initially, Chavez felt unprepared to go on strike, but he, too, understood that overcoming the growers would require a multiethnic effort, explains Mabalon. Ten days after the manongs walked off the fields, the Mexicans voted to join their “brothers” on strike. For the first time, the two groups ate meals and organized workers together, united around a common goal. But the five years it took to reach a resolution weren’t easy for anybody.

“[Itliong] didn’t necessarily agree with everything that Cesar Chavez did, but he gritted his teeth for the sake of building a union. He made mistakes. Chavez made mistakes, too,” says Mabalon. Some Filipinos grew frustrated when the Filipino Community Hall was named the headquarters for the strike. When people of both ethnicities started using the space, many Filipinos felt it was being taken away from them.

Alex Edillor, a Filipino who also was in school in Delano during the strike, recalls the tension and segregation, even within the Filipino community. “Many families returned to work after several weeks, and the town became divided. Ours was one of those who quit the strike because my parents needed to pay rent and other bills and clothe and feed my sister and me,” he remembers. “I recall tensions about whom we sat with in church, whom we played with in school.”

Gadiano says Filipinos were called racist terms like “monkey” by the farmers, their children, and other white community members. “The strike turned everything upside down,” he says. “It was hard because the white kids just didn’t understand what we were doing.”

But the five years it took to reach a resolution weren’t easy for anybody.

After several years of unsuccessful picketing, the movement called for a national boycott of table grapes.��It was at this point that Delano attracted international attention, along with that of much of America’s sympathetic white middle class. The big businesses were finally taking a hit where it hurt: their wallets.

“Cesar became the face of the movement,” says Gadiano. “And then look at Larry. He had dark glasses, a Fu Manchu, and a cigar. He looked like a tough guy—a�Ի� he was.” Itliong was relegated to a secondary role within the UFW, and Chavez emerged as the leader of the farm workers labor struggle.

It took years to resolve the strike. The first union contracts were signed on July 29, 1970. Chavez said 95 percent of the strikers had lost their homes, cars, and most of their possessions. But in losing those things, they also had found themselves. Despite all the disagreements, a powerful bond existed. “The cause is always above a single personality, that’s what Philip [Vera Cruz] used to say. It was beyond him, beyond me. It’s crazy to think about. I lived it,” says Gadiano.

Agtang agrees: “That grape strike and boycott would not have succeeded without genuine solidarity” between the two groups. “And that lesson is as important and meaningful today as it was five decades ago,” she explains. “Larry and Cesar insisted that the workers eat together and hold joint union meetings. They insisted grape strikers from both races share the same picket lines. As a result, people got to know one another and friendships grew.”

That high regard runs both ways.

One of Chavez’s grandsons, Andres, spends his time speaking and educating people about his grandfather’s work. He grew up in La Paz, a Central Valley community in Keene, California, which is also home to the National Chavez Center. He explains that his family has always spoken fondly of the Filipinos and that his father refers to them as his uncles. “My dad tells me about going to his uncles’ houses to eat Filipino fish head soup for dinner,” he says. “Apparently, it wasn’t bad!”

Mabalon believes there is a basic cultural and historical amnesia regarding Asian American contributions in the United States. Gadiano believes that the UFW and the Chicanos wanted to preserve their own history and didn’t do much to promote the Filipinos in the process. It’s hard enough for one group of color to have a moment in U.S history, he says, but two? Forget about it.

The big businesses were finally taking a hit where it hurt: their wallets.

The younger Chavez understands that the Filipinos have, for the most part, been left out of the history books, but he believes that more collaboration between his grandfather’s foundation and the Filipinos will garner ammunition to continue the fight.

“The power and success of this movement stemmed from the fact that it was a multicultural movement, comprised of people of all ages, genders, backgrounds, cultures, and walks of life,” he says. “Together they were powerful; together they made change.”

After contracts were signed, though, the newly formed bonds among union leaders didn’t last. Concerned about what they saw as top-down leadership, Itliong and other Filipinos started leaving the union in 1971.

As for the manongs who started it all, many were too old, at that point, to return to work. Community members, along with thousands of international volunteers, built the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village in 1974 to provide a place for the original picketers—the manongs—“to live out their final years in dignity and security.” Agbayani, for whom the structure is named, died on the picket line of a heart attack.

Today, the site pays tribute to the manongs and the farm workers movement by displaying artifacts and pictures from the time period and preserving the site as it once was.

For Filipino Americans, the strike signified a paradigm shift in Delano. Edillor, who is now deeply involved with the Filipino American Historical Society, stresses the importance of passing this story on. “Delano is the waking up,” he says. “The strike symbolized that Filipinos have a hand in how we create our experience in the United States. It helped establish a Filipino-American identity.”

“Together they were powerful; together they made change.”

This past summer, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared Oct. 25 as and required that public schools teach about Filipino in the strike. In Union City, California, north of Delano, Alvarado Middle School was renamed , the first time that a school in the United States has been named after Filipino Americans.

Though these small recognitions are significant, Itliong and the manongs are essential figures for young Asian Americans to know, particularly when they’re flipping through history books looking for Asian faces. The empowering history��and��the mistakes are important. The story of the brave manongs who fought and won should be taught along with accounts of injustices like Chinese exclusion and Japanese incarceration.

The vibrant Filipino community is what drew Gadiano’s father here in the first place. The Central Valley was where the work was, where housing was affordable, and where the lengthy stretch of dusty towns, north to south, became home to a thriving mix of international communities. There is nothing flashy in Delano. There is something much better.

Between several large agricultural warehouses, sits a small, unassuming white building with “FILIPINO COMMUNITY HALL” painted boldly across the front. Located in the older part of town, the center is still a gathering place for members of the Filipino community today.

On a Saturday, the building bustles with energy for a Filipino American Historical Society plaque dedication, commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the strike. Elderly Filipinas gossip at a corner table, Edillor cracks jokes with community members, and “Lupang Hinirang,” the Philippine National Anthem, is sung with the same vigor as the rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” that follows.

There is nothing flashy in Delano. There is something much better.

Gadiano, who can point at any photograph along the walls at Filipino Community Hall and rattle off an anecdote, explains that Delano hasn’t changed much in character. Its businesses have signs outside that have clearly been hanging there for years, a little faded but still readable, and he’s lived next to the same family for as long as he can remember.

Why stay in Delano? Gadiano’s answer is simple: It’s home. “This is my place. Wherever I go, my heart goes back to Delano,” he explains. “A lot of people grow up and they forget their roots, but I’m still living in my roots. This is it.”

It is people like Gadiano, Agtang, and Edillor that keep the manongs’ legacy intact. Though 50 years have passed, the spirit of the strike exists everywhere—maybe just not overtly.

Stereotypes tell the story of the “quiet” or “successful” Asian, but Larry Itliong, Philip Vera Cruz, Andy Imutan, Pete Velasco, and the rest of the manongs tell a different story.

And that is a story worth telling.

Released last month by Lady Parts Justice, a “reproductive justice messaging hub,” Hinder is a parody app recognizable to anyone familiar with the dating app Tinder. It’s “like a hookup app, but it focuses on all the sexist assholes tirelessly trying to crawl up into your vagina,”��the Ted Talk-inspired launch video announces. Users download the free app, select their state, and can instantly see which government officials in their area, and around the country, have voted to limit women’s rights.

Lady Parts Justice is comedy and community, but at its core it’s an unmistakable call to action. Yes, their videos are as hilarious and as brilliantly executed as you’d expect from a team of professional comedy writers and performers. But rather than focusing only on reasons to support the pro-choice cause, they’re working state by state to encourage actions that call out particular bills and legislators.

With an impressively large database of politicians, pundits, and candidates from every state, the Hinder app puts the most egregious of their actual quotes, voting records, and bill proposals front and center. Armed with specifics regarding what their elected officials say about reproductive rights and women’s healthcare, Lady Parts Justice hopes the app will inspire users to take part in their local elections, and make some noise when it comes to prioritizing women’s healthcare issues.

Hinder debuted in September at Bumbershoot, a Seattle arts festival, but hit a snag when Apple rejected the app under the guise of its Rule 14, which bans “any App that is defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited, or likely to place the targeted individual or group in harm’s way.” Ironically, Rule 14 has an exemption for professional political satirists—”I guess creating The Daily Show isn’t enough of a credit,” Winstead quipped—so the Lady Parts Justice team and their supporters took to social media to throw some digital shade Apple’s way. Apple reversed their decision within a day.

Winstead hopes her work with Lady Parts Justice will encourage more grassroots efforts to support clinics on a local level. “If you have a clinic in your state, I can guarantee those people would love to hear from you, and for you to tell them that they’re awesome,” she says. “They are an amazing part of the community, and we need to stop acting like they’re not. The more we normalize their work, the more that we show them that they’re welcome, it makes their work easier.”

By showcasing moments of solidarity, African Initiatives hopes its campaign can help build a compassionate support system among women across the world.

What was your #InternationalSisterhood moment? Share it with us on Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments section below.

The indictment of former President Donald Trump, on 34 felony charges stemming from hush money payments to an adult film actor, more than anything else, has a numbing effect. We simply cannot expel this egomaniac from the center of our national debate, so we sigh, shake our heads, and try to move along through the noise.

The media circus surrounding the indictment hasn’t been this frenzied over celebrity crime since O.J. Simpson got into his Ford Bronco nearly 30 years ago. It doesn’t help that Trump has been eating up the coverage, , and getting a for his run to be reelected in 2024. At least, until the photographers printed those .

The charges themselves, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, are rather mundane. , in relation to payments Trump made through shell companies; his lawyer, Michael Cohen; and the National Enquirer to two unnamed women, presumably the adult film actor Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and to an unnamed doorman who tried to shop a story about an illegitimate child. (The Enquirer eventually concluded that story wasn’t true, but paid to keep it quiet until after the election anyway.)

The national media loves to talk about �հ��ܳ���’s “tawdry” actions at the root of the charges, but that’s missing the mark. This case will sink or swim based on those very narrow charges under New York state’s business laws, but that’s nowhere near as sexy as the “hush money to a porn star” angle. And when the media finds the circus isn’t interesting enough, they’ll put on clown makeup and get in the ring themselves.

Everyone has an opinion of �հ��ܳ���’s indictment, usually formed before reading any of the charges. Should he be indicted at all? Was it smart to have the Manhattan D.A. file charges first? Isn’t this setting us up for more disappointment/violence/�հ��ܳ���’s reelection in 2024? And why is Bragg bringing these charges when he walked away from a ?

At the end of the day, most of those questions are moot. A person commits a crime, a prosecutor or grand jury determines there is probable cause to bring charges, an indictment or arrest follows, and then comes a trial. That’s the procedure. The fact that the suspect in question is the former president of the United States, or that he’s simultaneously being investigated for serious crimes in multiple jurisdictions, is beside the point. A charge is a charge is a charge, and that’s the way the justice system is supposed to operate: focused only on the facts at hand, independent of any outside factors.

Trump has escaped personal accountability for his behavior his entire life.

The reality is that our justice system often falls quite short of that ideal, as any fair-minded observer would note. Just look to our nation’s history of state-sanctioned violence against Black and Indigenous people to , labor and , of left-wing causes, , (including , (of all genders), and ), LGTBQ+ people (whether , , or just ), and more. The difference with Trump is a matter of degree: In just seven years, his , plus the media that reported on that violence.

We shouldn’t kid ourselves that Trump will ever spend a day in prison—the sheer logistical challenge of securing the personal safety of a former president, even in a “Club Fed”-style light-security facility, makes that nearly impossible. The best possible outcome would be to have him banned from public office for life, but the . He might have his assets seized, his businesses closed, his family shunned forever. He might get an ankle monitor and detention in his gilded Florida “prison,” but he’ll never be looking at the rest of the world through bars. , or for .

But we can expect Trump to use his time-proven tactics of filing countless frivolous pretrial motions to delay the case in an effort to run out the clock until he wins the 2024 presidential election. After which, he’ll pardon himself and then fight to delay any reckoning on that violation of all that is good and lawful until long after he’s dead.

And if the worst of all possible outcomes occurs, and Trump does find himself ensconced in the Oval Office on Jan. 21, 2025, it’s easy to imagine that the first thing he’d do is order his interim attorney general to arrest Joe Biden, legal reasoning be damned, plus anyone else who he believes wronged him during his spectacular failure of his first term: Robert Mueller, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton a hundred times over, Barack Obama. There is no depth to which Trump will not sink to satisfy his bottomless, foundational hunger for revenge.

But even as we dread that possibility (and we’d be foolish to think it ���dzܱ����’t happen), the flaws of our justice system do not begin and end with �հ��ܳ���’s unique ability to manipulate them. Trump didn’t do anything new (aside from launching an attempted coup to remain in power after he lost reelection), he just pushed to new heights every unconscionable behavior we’d seen in previous presidents, from to to . Our presidents, congresspeople, governors, police, CEOs, and other powers in our society have always pushed the boundaries of legality and often gotten away with it. 

Trump has escaped personal accountability for his behavior his entire life (), so there’s no reason why the most un-self-reflective politician in U.S. history should believe the outcome of his current morass would be any different.

Granted, no U.S. president has ever tried to overthrow our democracy before. And there’s good evidence that are forthcoming from Special Counsel Jack Smith. As are potential charges around �հ��ܳ���’s , and from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis around his .

And if Manhattan D.A. Bragg’s indictment over hush payments to Stormy Daniels and others seems somewhat deaf to the political reality we’re facing, again, that’s by design. Prosecutors from separate jurisdictions filing separate criminal cases aren’t supposed to collaborate to achieve the most ideal political outcome. 

If Trump has to burn jet fuel flying between court dates in New York, Washington, and Atlanta, well, that’s on him. But it’s also on us to deal with the fallout from the justice system in the political sphere.

And if Trump gets a ratings or funding boost as his unhinged minions triple-down on their persecution complex, well, they were going to do that anyway. As a nation that is allegedly rooted in certain principles of fairness and equality (no matter how imperfectly applied), we can’t refrain from applying our standards of justice equally because we’re worried about what other people might do in response. 

Another way of looking at the current situation is this: The Prohibition-era mobster Al Capone has been plausibly linked to anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of murders, plus all the other crimes a racketeer of the age would be privy to. Yet Capone was put away for income tax evasion, which had the same effect as putting him away for murder would have done—he lost control of his gang and businesses, and by the time he was released, he was too sick (with neurosyphilis, contracted in the days before penicillin) to be a threat anymore. 

The Capone case also helped create the judicial precedent that , which is something we can appreciate more as �հ��ܳ���’s empire continues to unravel. And, like Trump, Capone was also prone to bragging about those crimes, believing he was above the law.

History will account for the true toll of �հ��ܳ���’s perfidy (turning COVID-19 into a political issue probably led to from the disease, for example). But by the mere act of filing criminal charges against him, the nation is saying he is not, after all, above the law.

In the case of l’affaire Stormie, it is possible prosecutors have finally caught up to �հ��ܳ���’s pre-presidential crimes and are soon moving on to those committed while in office. From the perspective of the media circus, the main act is about to begin.

Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the U.S. military is facing since the end of the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s budget proposal for 2024 outlines a plan for the military to , but to reach its projected numbers, it will still need to embark on a heavy recruitment push. Across the country, anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its goal.

is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up. 

“I wish I had somebody who told me when I was young,” says Miles Megaciph, who was stationed in Cuba and Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1992 to 1996. “The experiences I’ve lived, as painful as they are, and as much as I don’t like to relive them, are valuable to help future adults not live those experiences,” Megaciph told me.

“We wanted to get to the people who were going to be the next recruits,” says Debra Sweet, the executive director of World Can’t Wait. When We Are Not Your Soldiers launched in 2008, the experience was often intense for veterans. “They were all fresh out of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Sweet remembers. “It was very raw, it was very hard. [It was] really hard for them to go talk to people in public about what had happened. And we learned a lot about PTSD, up close and personal, and how it was affecting people.”

Since then, over 50 veterans have participated in We Are Not Your Soldiers. Currently, the project relies on a group of nine veterans, who receive a stipend of $125 for each visit. Teachers affiliated with World Can’t Wait also offer curricular support to veterans so they can connect their stories to class lessons.

I’m trying to respect these kids by telling them the truth that other people are not telling them.

Joy Damiani

Sarah Gil, a school teacher at the City-As-School, a transfer high school in New York City, has brought veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to her classroom to speak to students in classes focused on just war, race and racism, economics, and moral responsibility. “They share their vulnerability, and it’s more than I could ever do with any of my lessons,” Gil says of the veterans’ visits.

Joy Damiani, an Iraq War veteran who served six years in the U.S. Army, has learned how to use that vulnerability more selectively over time. “I used to go into the classroom and spend a lot of time talking,” Damiani says. “[I was] trying to scare kids into not joining the military, because I was still so freshly traumatized from that.” ������Ƶ recently, Damiani says her role is less about trying to scare young people and instead providing an alternative perspective. “I’m trying to respect these kids by telling them the truth that other people are not telling them. I’m trying to give them something I didn’t have, which was somebody to bring the real talk right into my face where I needed it.”&�Բ�����;

“Usually, the students don’t have any idea of what it’s actually like,” Megaciph says. “Their narrative really comes from television and comes from the national narrative. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your service. It’s an honor to be a member of the military. Travel the world’ stuff.” While most students have a generally positive view of the military, Megaciph has noticed a shift in recent years. “I think in the past two years, maybe since the pandemic, there’s been a lot more talk about mental health in our country. And so I think in the past two years, I’ve seen more students aware of the trauma that veterans have.”

Susan Cushman is a professor at Nassau Community College and Adelphi University on Long Island, where military recruiters have a heavy presence, particularly on the Nassau campus. She hosts veterans from We Are Not Your Soldiers to help her students “think about alternative ways to achieve an education and get a pension and get a job and travel, without feeling the only option is to join the military.”

In order to counter both the narrative and incentives that military recruiters offer young people, veterans try to share the truth about traumatic personal experiences as well as practical information.

“It’s very meaningful to hear from a veteran that when you enlist, that you are the property—literally are seen as the property—of the U.S. government,” Gil says. Damiani works to put the seemingly attractive military salary and benefits in context for students. “Considering you’re on duty 24 hours a day or on call 24 hours a day, you’ve sold them your body, mind, and soul, essentially. You might not get it back.”&�Բ�����;

Megaciph also tries to place the role of the military in the context of broader social issues that he knows students care about, including police violence and climate change.

“The U.S. military is the global police, so I like to put that in the students’ head that the way that the police treat Black and Brown and poor people in this country is the way that the military treats people around the rest of the world,” he says. He also tells students that the U.S. military is the . 

Ultimately, stories told by veterans like Megaciph and Damiani can be an effective tool to disrupt the mainstream narrative about militarism. But is it enough?

Rick Jahnkow is a steering committee member and an administrative staff volunteer and organizer at the nonprofit National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). “Simply having veterans doesn’t take into account the way that military recruiters have been trained to convince young people to want to go in the military,” Jahnkow says. “The recruiters have been trained to use basically psychological methods to turn people around if they’re being reluctant to enlist, and if a recruiter knows that a veteran has visited the same class, they have ways to negate that.”&�Բ�����;

In addition to the military’s preparedness for counter-recruitment, there’s also the issue of simple math. The Pentagon has a multibillion-dollar budget for recruiting alone. By contrast, We Are Not Your Soldiers has an annual budget of $25,000. Meanwhile, Megaciph, Damiani, and the seven other volunteers are up against a much larger body of veterans who generally support military recruitment. According to a 2019 survey conducted by , the military. 

With these challenges in mind, NNOMY produced a video called The 16-minute video seeks to lay out a case against military service that preempts the military’s psychological recruitment tactics. With veteran stories and statistics, the video debunks perks, such as “free education” and job training, that the military uses to appeal to potential recruits. The video explains that college benefits are not guaranteed and a “general” discharge can completely disqualify a veteran from receiving benefits. Furthermore, a college education paid by the U.S. military still bears a cost, even if it is not financial. As Matt Stys, a U.S. Army veteran featured in the video, says, “You might not be paying monetarily, but you’re paying with your body, you’re paying with your soul, you’re paying with your mind.” Other veterans share stories of struggling to find meaningful, well-compensated work after their service. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure cited in the video, unemployment for young veterans aged 25 to 34 was 42% higher than non-veterans of the same age.

The video also offers a way to bring this message into a greater number of classrooms given the limited number of veterans who are able to make classroom visits. Jahnkow also describes the video as a training tool to develop students’ critical thinking skills so they will be prepared to handle recruitment conversations themselves.

Also central to the video’s message is an explanation of the idea of the “economic draft” or “.” The video ends by directing viewers to . Jahnkow and others explain that understanding the economic constraints of young people and offering alternative pathways is essential to counter recruitment efforts.

“I feel like empathizing with them is the first step,” Damiani says. “Acknowledging that right now they don’t have a lot of choices and the military offers a lot of at least money. It seems to them to be a lot. A $10,000 signing bonus sounds like a shitload of money to a teenager.”&�Բ�����;

Transforming the pre-K-12 education system is an important component of countering recruitment drives. The ways in which starting from an early age has a . Students who have been excluded from higher-level courses and the college and career pathways that accompany them . Other resources educators can tap into include texts like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and the Zinn Education Project, which present U.S. history with a more honest context.

Aside from creating more opportunities for poor and working-class students, targeting policy changes at the school and district level to protect students from recruitment is another important tactic. Jahnkow cites victories by the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities’ campaigns to limit recruitment activity at schools that other communities could replicate. 

At the same time, the curriculum itself has a role to play. Currently, the standard school curricula often valorizes war and soldiers, while leaving out the U.S. military’s historical role in genocide and colonization. “You know, the Department of the Army was started for clearing Natives off their land and eradicating them, and that still goes on today,” Megaciph says, referring to the original Department of War established in 1789. 

Lastly, veterans and organizers like Jahnkow say there is an urgent need to build up the capacity of anti-war, anti-recruitment organizing. Damiani says that includes “finding ways to de-stigmatize sharing the dark side of the military so that more veterans, when they get out, feel safe and comfortable talking about the real shit rather than continuing to glamorize it.”&�Բ�����;

But growing the pool of veterans—a�Ի� starting other counter-recruitment strategies—will take money. Counter-recruitment organizing efforts are severely underfunded, Jahnkow says. At the same time, many counter-recruitment and anti-war organizations are being outmaneuvered by the military in digital and social media spaces. This is partly an issue of funding, but Jahnkow adds that the volunteer base for anti-war organizations also skews older. Fighting recruitment online more effectively will require more younger volunteers with the skill set to use Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms in ways the counter-recruitment movement currently does not.

Meanwhile, Jahnkow believes that in today’s poor recruiting environment, the military will “pull out all the stops” in both digital and personal recruitment. 

“I think it’s super trippy, that there are children who are old enough to be in the military and being deployed to Iraq, who were not born when the war started. That is something that is just devastating and tragic to me,” Damiani says. “It fuels my fire to keep talking to the kids, because they need to know.”

Later in the narrative, a father and son attend a rally where a Nazi district leader—none other than Joseph Goebbels—uses the rhetoric of martyrdom, conspiracy, and racist scapegoating to manipulate the emotions of the crowd.

This excerpt from by Jason Lutes (Drawn & Quarterly, 2018) appears here by permission of the publisher.

As a , including deaf women’s history,  to illuminate the often hidden history of deaf people and their unique contributions to the world. I have unearthed historical information about deaf women suffragists and assembled it into an  chronicling what is known—so far—about these women and their lives.

Despite harsh, discriminatory conditions, low pay, and lack of recognition, countless deaf women have fought with brilliance and dedication for personal and professional recognition, including for the right to vote.

Underpaid and Discriminated Against

Annie Jump Cannon was a pioneering astronomer. Born in 1863, she experienced progressive hearing loss starting at a young age.  from Delaware to attend college, she was her class valedictorian when she graduated from Wellesley College, where she excelled in the sciences and mathematics.

In 1896, she was hired as a “woman computer” at the Harvard College Observatory, along with another prominent deaf astronomer, .

The work involved looking at photos of stars and calculating their brightness, position, and color. The two were paid between 25 and 50 cents an hour—half the rate paid to men doing similar work. 

Nevertheless, Cannon is credited with cataloging 350,000 stars. Building on �dzٳ�����’ work, Cannon revolutionized and refined a  that is still used today by the International Astronomical Union, though it is named for Harvard, not for her.

Cannon was a member of the , formed in 1916 to advocate for passage of the  to the U.S. Constitution, . Cannon’s suffragist efforts used her profession as a launchpad, as when she declared that “if women can organize the sky, we can organize the vote.”&�Բ�����;

She used her prominence to pave the way for women in the sciences, becoming the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1925, and facing down eugenicists who  the National Academy of Sciences because she was deaf. 

In 1938, after 40 years of service, her role as “” finally earned her a permanent faculty position at Harvard, where she worked until her death three years later. A lunar crater, Cannon, and an asteroid, Cannonia, are named for her.

Two British Women Faced Prison

British deaf suffragist Helen K. Watts, born in 1881, was a militant member of the radical Women’s Social and Political Union who demonstrated at Parliament in 1909 . After one protest that year, she was arrested and imprisoned—but began a 90-hour hunger strike that resulted in her release. As she left, she declared:

“The Suffragettes have come out of the drawing-room, the study and the debating hall, and the committee rooms of Members of Parliament, to appeal to the real sovereign power of the country—the people.”

In 1913, she left the more violent group and joined the nonviolent Women’s Freedom League, also .

One of her sister leaders in the Women’s Freedom League was British deaf suffragist Kate Harvey. Harvey believed in  until —which resulted in authorities breaking into her home to arrest and imprison her in 1913.

A Silent Voice in Print

Laura Redden Searing, born in 1840, was a gifted American poet, newspaper reporter, and writer—often using the male pseudonym Howard Glyndon so her work would be taken more seriously. Deafened by illness as a child, she entered the Missouri School for the Deaf when she was 15 years old and learned sign language, graduating in 1858, writing an address and “farewell poem” that was published in the . 

When communicating with people who couldn’t sign, she wrote with a pencil and pad—with which she conducted countless interviews over many years as a reporter and writer.

In 1860, Searing became the earliest deaf woman journalist, writing for the St. Louis Republican, whose editors sent her to Washington in September 1861. There, she cultivated friendships with prominent leaders and interviewed Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, soldiers on the battlefield, and President Abraham Lincoln. She also met future Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, and taught him fingerspelling, a manual alphabet that is used in sign language.

When the Civil War ended in 1865, she traveled to Europe and picked up reading and writing in French, German, Spanish, and Italian. She continued writing news stories for the St. Louis Republican and The New York Times. Returning to the United States in 1870, Searing  for the New York Evening Mail and other newspapers and magazines. Searing had a literary circle of admiring friends who supported her work. She also contributed articles and poems to the popular national , published by the New Jersey School for the Deaf. 

She was a feminist who wrote about women’s issues such as unequal pay and . She also  for an 1872 campaign for women’s right to vote with an analogy to the freeing of the enslaved Africans after the Civil War:

“ to sign this petition in conformation with that clause of our constitution which recognizes the equal rights of all human beings of lawful age and sound mind without regard to sex, color, or social condition. Having decided that black people do not belong to white ones, why not go a step farther and decide that women do not belong to men unless the proprietorship be recognized as mutual?”

In 1981, Searing was dubbed “” by , the first deaf professor of Deaf Studies at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, because of her pioneering work in the journalism field and her fierce independence as a woman who did not accept restrictions, nor follow expected traditions.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

When Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, two young Filipino American labor activists, were shot in Seattle in June, 1981, at first the killings looked like gang reprisals for their efforts to reform the cannery workers’ union. Then the legal team working with the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes discovered that the murders were in fact political assassinations, a response to Domingo and Viernes’ leadership on union support for the democracy movement in the Philippines. The notorious and brutal dictator President Ferdinand Marcos had ordered the murders. And, worse, in plot twists worthy of a spy thriller, evidence emerged of involvement by U.S. intelligence.

The efforts of the CJDV and their legal team resulted in the convictions of the hitmen and the gang boss who hired them. But they didn’t stop there. In 1989, after nearly nine years of investigations, trials, and organizing, they won a federal civil suit establishing that Marcos had ordered the murders. A jury awarded $23.3 million against the Marcos estate to the families of Domingo and Viernes. It was the only time a foreign leader has been held legally responsible for the murder of U.S. citizens on United States soil.

Human rights lawyer Mike Withey was central to the Domingo and Viernes legal team from the very beginning. In Summary Execution, he describes how they managed to serve Marcos with a complaint and summons during his state visit to Washington, D.C.

The National Press Club in Washington, D.C., occupied almost an entire block of 14th Street, just a few blocks from the White House. On Sept. 17, 1982, at 11 o’clock in the morning, the national and international press crowded into a briefing room, awaiting the arrival of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and his wife, Imelda.

Outside, Father Bill Davis paced nervously up and down the street. Our committed investigator wore his priest’s collar tight around his neck, and he clutched a copy of the complaint and summons in the case called The Estates of Domingo and Viernes vs. The Republic of the Philippines, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. We also named Secretary of State George Schultz and General Alexander Haig as defendants in order to get injunctive relief against the U.S. to stop aiding Marcos agents.

The Marcoses had arrived in D.C. on Sept. 14 for an official, 13-day state visit. The night before, they’d been the guests of honor at a formal dinner at the White House hosted by the president and Nancy Reagan. There was also a private meeting between the presidents in the Oval Office, and a series of high-level meetings with Pentagon officials and Schultz.

Although the Marcos regime had gone to great lengths to project an image of political stability, including busing in and paying over a thousand pro-Marcos “supporters” to appear at rallies, the opposition was right on target with a major offensive leading up to his arrival.

A BBC documentary about the Philippines was shown at multiple public screenings throughout Washington, D.C., in the week before the state visit. The film contrasted the economic hardships of most Filipinos with the Marcoses’ lavish spending, and interviewed children who said they witnessed attacks by government soldiers on their parents. One boy said he watched soldiers behead his father, remembering, “They played with my father’s head.” Amnesty International also issued a report listing details of what it called widespread torture, political arrests, and murders by Philippine agents.

This did not make it easy for Reagan administration officials, who repeated the nostrum that good ties with Marcos were necessary to protect American military bases in the Philippines and our economic interests. Their message was not always well received. The week before Marcos arrived, eight U.S. congressmen called for cancellation of the state visit, citing the human rights violations. Days later, five U.S. senators released a letter to Reagan, urging him to use the Marcos visit “to enhance the cause of human rights.”

We got out our bulletproof vests and wore them at all times.

Now that the Philippine president was in the country, Congress Watch and The National Committee to Protest the Marcos State Visit, both organizations led by KDP [the Union of Democratic Filipinos, a socialist group based in the U.S.] activists, had brought national attention on Marcos’ deplorable human rights record and his role in his military agents’ infiltration of the Marcos opposition. Rallies and demonstrations against the regime filled the local news broadcasts, and the national press corps was covering both the visit and the counter-demonstrations carefully.

Throughout the visit, the KDP contingent in D.C. was under surveillance by Marcos agents. At every picket line, demonstration, rally, and meeting, we saw Filipino bodybuilder types, almost always in pairs, with identical dark pants and white shirts open at the collar—all the trappings of Marcos agents. They stood aside, took pictures, and counted us. They took literature from our tables and threw it away.

������Ƶ sinister, though, was the continued presence of the bodybuilders after the meetings broke up for the evening. They followed us to the house in suburban Maryland where many of us were staying. We decided to travel in groups of at least three and deployed our own security teams to anticipate and deter any problems. We got out our bulletproof vests and wore them at all times. We took photographs of all of the Marcos agents to use as exhibits in our civil lawsuit. There were many tense moments when the agents saw us taking pictures and approached us menacingly.

In the middle of this, our lawsuit was ready to file. But first, we needed to personally serve Marcos with a copy of the complaint. The summons would hail Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos into federal court in the Western District of Washington (Seattle) to answer for the murders of Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, and the conspiracy to deprive the anti-Marcos movement in the U.S. of their constitutional rights to free speech, assembly, and association.

As the Marcos entourage of eight black Lincoln Town cars approached, Father Bill slipped into a side entrance of the Press Club. He stood next to a large tree in the hallway leading to where the press conference was being held, hoping this was the path the Philippine delegation would take. It seemed like a long shot, but it was our best shot. If we ���dzܱ����’t get service of process on him, Marcos could legally ignore our lawsuit.

I was on the other side of the city that morning with Cindy [Cindy Domingo, Silme’s sister, a leader of the CJDV], Rene, and other KDP activists getting ready for our own press conference. Back in Seattle, the rest of the legal team huddled around a table in John Caughlan’s house, awaiting word from Father Bill to file the lawsuit as soon as Marcos was served. If he was served.

We’d planned simultaneous press events in D.C., New York, the Bay Area, and Seattle. We had worked carefully on the statements, placing our lawsuit within the broader context of the Reagan administration’s backing of a notoriously repressive and dictatorial regime. We made the case that when our country allies itself with repressive dictators like Marcos, we pay the price here.

We alleged in the lawsuit that Gene’s meeting with Felixberto Olalia [of KMU, Kilusang Mayo Uno, a labor center in the Philippines] had been monitored by Marcos agents, as was the ILWU resolution debate in Hawai‘i [the International Longshore and Warehouse Union’s resolution to investigate civil liberties in the Philippines was written and instigated by Domingo and Viernes]. We noted that Marcos had arrested the top leadership of the KMU, including Olalia, and charged them with subversion shortly before he left for the U.S. We opined that Marcos didn’t want the KMU to disrupt the country while he was away, and hoped Olalia’s arrest underscored just how dangerous Marcos considered the KMU and its leadership, and why Gene and Silme’s work with the KMU came to his attention and concern.

We labored under the somewhat grandiose notion that our lawsuit would color the entire Marcos state visit and could be the chief weapon to expose the regime and change public opinion. We wanted the lawsuit to be the ��’Accuse! of our movement, imagining an impact similar to what Emile Zola had with his famous 1898 confrontation of the president of the French Republic for the infamous Dreyfuss Affair.

What actually happened was that the Philippines’ dismal human rights record created an atmosphere of controversy from the very start of the visit. Our lawsuit used the public characterization of the regime to validate its allegations, rather than the other way around.

I was at the house in Maryland about half an hour after the Marcos press conference was scheduled to start when the phone rang.

“Mike? Bill Davis here.” His voice seemed cheery and clear.

“What’s the good word, Father Bill?”

“Marcos pulls almost abreast of me, looks over, and actually says, ‘Good morning, father.’ Can you believe it? I ���dzܱ����’t.”

“I was in the hallway like we planned, and all of a sudden there he was, walking down the hall with three aides, talking and paying no attention to an elderly Catholic priest huddled in the vestibule. Imelda was way behind him, but you said I only needed to serve the president, so I ignored her.”

“And?” I ���dzܱ����’t cage my curiosity.

“Marcos pulls almost abreast of me, looks over, and actually says, ‘Good morning, father.’ Can you believe it? I ���dzܱ����’t. I took out the summons and complaint from under my priest’s robe and told him I had something he would like to read. I handed him the documents, and he took them, almost instinctively, without looking, and handed them to his aide.”

“You got him served, Bill! You got him served!” I was shouting into the phone.

“I left before anyone bothered to read what it was,” Bill finished.

“That is so great. Thanks so much. We’ll need an affidavit from you describing exactly what you did in case Marcos challenges service of process. Way to go, Bill.”

Bill later told me that serving Marcos was one of the highlights of his life. Before we were done, he would also serve Haig and Schultz—a piece of cake after getting to the president of a foreign country.

Our simultaneous press conferences around the country went off without a hitch. The Seattle press covered the filing of the lawsuit, but we were less than thrilled by the reception from the national press. Plenty of reporters attended our event, but most of them took our statements and copies of the lawsuit, created a file, and waited for further developments. The Bay Area conference went well, but few showed up in New York.

The lawsuit was filed in Seattle less than an hour after Marcos was served. Our luck that day held, and our case was assigned to Judge Donald S. Voorhees, the jurist we’d hoped for. I never asked Jim how he had managed to accomplish that, and was content with his explanation that it was “just shit luck.”

Excerpt of��Summary Execution: The Seattle Assassinations of Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes��published by permission of the author and WildBlue Press. Copyright 2018, .��

The largest conglomeration of socialists, middle-aged and middle American, bore little superficial resemblance to the socialist proletarians of Europe. Foreign visitors and even New Yorkers could hardly understand that the Appeal to Reason, the nation’s largest weekly political newspaper, came from small-town Kansas. A later study of the “Appeal Army,” the volunteers who sought new subscribers, revealed a mostly middle-aged cadre, a combination of craft workers, small farmers, and ministers’ wives—the very social types sometimes ridiculed by European Marxists. But they educated themselves, built local socialist chapters, and often published their own local newspapers. They also got votes, up to a point. The presidential vote for Debs rose from 88,000 (in 1900) to 400,000 (in 1904), 420,000 (in 1908), and 900,000 (in 1912)—proportionately strongest in Oklahoma until the approach of the world war. Debs’s campaigns had special strength in more than a dozen German American districts, with Milwaukee in the lead, and became increasingly strong among Jewish voters in New York as the years passed. By 1912, more than 75 socialist mayors presided in 23 states, the largest number in the small industrial towns of Ohio, alongside three Christian socialist ministers. Even in the Deep South, socialist candidates ran strongly in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Foreign-born workers and their families who were drawn to socialist ideas (or brought such ideas over from the Old World) also seemed to adore, even worship, Debs, even more than the native-born. They feared prejudice along with class oppression, and Debs offered them hope and direction. A 97-year-old Slovenian woman and former hat makers’ union leader, interviewed in 1981, recalled with excitement, “Gene Debs held my baby!” She held that memory dear. Edited excerpt from Eugene V. Debs, A Graphic Biography (Verso Books, 2019) appears by permission of the publisher. Art by Noah Van Sciver, script by Paul Buhle and Steve Max, with David Nance.

Since the fall, indigenous women of the Secwepemc Nation—calling themselves the Tiny House Warriors—have been constructing tiny houses that they plan to strategically place in the pathway of the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

“Our women came together to specifically address how we would launch our fight against this pipeline,” said Secwepemc artist and activist Kanahus Manuel, who cofounded the Tiny House Warriors. “When we saw that we were able to build those tiny houses so fast, we came together to really develop a strategy for how we were going to fight against this Kinder Morgan pipeline coming into our land.”

These tiny homes have the potential to have a big impact for Secwepemc communities. The houses are being used as symbols of resistance, and they’re also providing something more tangible: affordable, efficient housing that could revitalize Secwepemc nomadic lifeways.

The houses are solar-powered, fitted with composting toilets and wood-burning stoves, and are completely fossil fuel- free. And they’re on wheels. According to Kanahus, the small, movable houses are also bringing back elements of the Secwepemc’s nomadic hunter-gatherer culture.

Kanahus, her twin sister, Mayuk, and women in the Secwepemc Women Warriors Society founded the group after��Kanahus returned from Standing Rock in 2016, where they participated in indigenous resistance efforts against the Dakota Access pipeline. There, a Native youth group from Portland, Oregon, constructed a tiny house for Kanahus and her children within one week.

Kanahus and the Secwepemc women were inspired, and when they returned home, just outside of Kamloops, British Columbia, they considered how to use tiny homes in their own fight.

Indigenous-led actions against the controversial pipeline have been ongoing since 2010, but cohesive actions along the pipeline route started up again in March, when tribes came together to build a traditional watch house in the pipeline’s path. If the expansion is completed, it would nearly triple the amount of oil transported through unceded indigenous territories from the Alberta tar sands to Vancouver. In recent months, there have been a wave of actions to reclaim indigenous land and protect tribes’ natural resources.

“The water has connected us for tens of thousands of years. From the receding of the glaciers until now, the water has connected us. Now, it’s sad to say, but this pipeline is connecting us into a big strong force that Trudeau will have no other choice but to shut [the pipeline] down,” Kanahus said.

So far, the group has built three houses and are installing wood-burning stoves inside them for heating. They plan to build at least 10 homes over the next few months to be deployed along the pipeline route, where pipeline construction threatens food and medicine gathering grounds and spiritually and culturally important sites, Kanahus said.

By building tiny homes, the Tiny House Warriors aim to resist a pipeline while reasserting sovereignty over traditional lands and housing practices in the process.

Warrior roots

The Manuel family has a deep history of fighting back against colonialism. Arthur Manuel, Mayuk and Kanahus’ father, was an international leader and vocal critic of Canada’s residential schools. He wrote several books on indigenous rights, served on the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and was active in indigenous-led resistance efforts until he passed away in January.

Their grandfather George Manuel founded the World Council of Indigenous Peoples and traveled internationally to for indigenous rights. Other family members have organized against deforestation and led organic gardening efforts to revitalize Secwepemc culture and build sovereignty.

“[We are] fighting back through gardening, fighting back by learning our language,” Kanahus said. “All of the stuff we’re doing is a form of resistance and a form of decolonizing.”

Kanahus herself became a vocal environmental activist after witnessing several environmental disasters occur on Secwepemc territory in British Columbia, characterized by mountains and an inland temperate rainforest. One of the worst of these disasters was the 2014 Mount Polley mine disaster, where 350 million cubic feet of wastewater from the Imperial Metals mine leaked into Quesnal Lake. The spill contained of arsenic, lead, copper, and nickel.

“No one could stop the sludge from going right into our salmon run,” Kanahus said. “Our women had to get evacuated from picking huckleberries.” So Kanahus and others went to the site to set up a sacred fire, bringing media attention with them.

The corporations that are responsible for disasters like this one often operate without indigenous consent, she said. Unlike indigenous communities in other parts of North America and Canada, many indigenous communities in British Columbia the titles to their territories. Many, including Kanahus’, believe that they should ultimately control what happens on their lands and that settlers have encroached on and destroyed their land without indigenous consent.

From that perspective, the Kinder Morgan pipeline is just the most recent example in a history of encroachments on the lands and rights of Secwepemc people.

Throughout the 1990s several violent standoffs occurred between indigenous people, the Canadian government, and white settlers, including the in Quebec and the on Secwepemc Territory in British Columbia. And after several years of First Nations resistance, in 2004��the provincial government allowed Sun Peaks Ski Resort to indigenous homes, including Mayuk’s.

Mayuk had built her house outside the reserve on Secwepemc territory after a landmark in the Canadian Supreme Court established a clearer framework for indigenous land rights. Even with this ruling, provincial governments were initially able to issue permits for mining, construction, and logging on indigenous lands. In 2014, however, a Supreme Court decision placed stricter requirements on corporations to consult with indigenous nations before projects were approved. Still, said Kanahus, corporations have often been able to establish the appearance of indigenous consent without their agreement.

The idea to place the tiny houses on wheels was in response to the Sun Peaks Ski Resort incident.

“There are a bunch of different things that we have in our memory, our real, recent memory, of how the government bulldozed down our homes, how they got injunctions and gave us trespass and seizure notices,” Kanahus said. “We ���dzܱ����’t move our homes because they were there, permanent. So, we were like, What happens if we put them on wheels and what happens if we are mobile?”

The Warriors also intend the homes to provide affordable—a�Ի� safe—housing for displaced community members who need it.

“A lot of people have been living on the reserve or in urban settings because we don’t have access to our lands,” Kanahus said.

And government housing on reserves is often and . Kanahus said these homes are often filled with toxic chemicals like and formaldehyde and came with 50-year mortgages that were difficult to pay off. At the same time, living off the reserve is difficult because much of the Secwepemc land has already been claimed by ranchers, businesses, or towns.

“[The land] is all spoken for already,” Mayuk said. “The next mountain’s spoken for and the next mountain, so we’re going to have to fight for our land. This is what this is, a big fight,” Mayuk said.

Revitalizing Secwepemc culture

Before the Secwepemc were forced to live on designated reserves, they were semi-nomadic, traveling to different parts of their territory based on the season to harvest berries, hunt, and fish. Secwepemc women were experts at setting up and taking down camp to facilitate their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, according to Kanahus.

“We were always tiny-house people. We lived in traditional underground pit houses and cedar bark lodges. It’s nothing new for us,” Manuel said. “We were always a nomadic people, we were hunter-gatherers in our nation. So, we said, Let’s go with the tiny houses, let’s go with calling it the Tiny House Warriors. It was inspired by the women in our community.”

Because the houses are on wheels, they’ve created a modernized, efficient, and fossil-fuel free revival of their nomadic lifestyle.

The Tiny House Warriors are working with Lubicon Solar, a women-led solar power initiative by members of the Lubicon Cree Nation whose territory and traditional hunting grounds have been impacted by the Alberta tar sands mining. The houses will be completely solar-powered, with heating created by wood-burning stoves and electricity from solar panels.

The sides of the houses are covered with colorful murals by Secwepemc artist and professor Jeffrey McNeil-Seymour, which illustrate aspects of Secwepemc culture and issues affecting indigenous communities. The Tiny House Warriors have also released a music album with songs by indigenous artists to support their efforts.

“A lot of this is creativity … is the art of war through media, through videos, and through images,” Kanahus said. “We want to do some different art pieces along the pipeline route.”

Each tiny house will also address a different issue affecting indigenous communities in Canada, she said.

The Warriors also hope to have a house dedicated to protecting the habitats of salmon they’ve fished for generations.

In addition, the Warriors are speaking out against proposed “man camps” that would bring in all-male construction crews to build the pipeline. These man camps, filled with workers who stay for short periods of time, lead to in violence against indigenous women.

Another issue they’re hoping to tackle is the apprehension of children from indigenous communities, Kanahus said. “We see that there’s discrimination against indigenous kids, where they are apprehended from their homes for reasons like poverty, or lack of adequate housing or food,”��Jane Philpott, Canadian minister for indigenous services, told��. ,��British Columbia passed a law that requires child services to consult with First Nations communities before taking their children.

“We want to connect those dots, because it all has to do with the displacement of our [people from our] territory,” Kanahus said about the different themes represented on the tiny-house murals.

At the moment, it’s unclear whether the pipeline will be built, but Kinder Morgan will face fierce resistance from the Tiny House Warriors at every step of the way.

“We are modern-day Indians, modern day warriors,” Kanahus said. “Consultation is not consent.”

The planting had another meaning too: It took place along the path of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, a project opposed by the Cowboy and Indian Alliance and many others along its path. And the water used to irrigate the seedlings came from the source of water for much of the Great Plains—the Ogallala Aquifer—which is threatened by potential pipeline ruptures, fires, spills, and other mishaps.

This aquifer and, indeed, this land are shared by millions, so who is to say what should happen to them? Should they be used to grow corn and feed people? Should they be part of reestablishing indigenous ways of life and rural livelihoods? Or should they be put at risk by tar sands pipelines?

These sorts of questions come up over and over again as local residents, in cities, towns, and on farms, rise up to oppose dangerous and polluting fossil fuel projects. All too often, they find the federal government taking the side of the oil, coal, or gas industry. That will happen even more if President Obama is able to push the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress, which he hopes to do during the lame-duck session following the November election.

What does the TPP have to do with pipelines? After being negotiated in secret, the substance of the agreement finally became public. As many had feared, the TPP, like NAFTA, contains a controversial provision that allows foreign corporations to sue governments when regulations or permitting decisions deprive the company of profits.

At a time of growing inequality, we don’t need to make it easier to outsource jobs.

Take the case of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which Obama refused to permit as a result of local action—like the corn planting—a�Ի� a powerful national movement led by 350.org. TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, is suing the United States for $15 billion in losses under NAFTA. A three-judge panel will soon rule on whether to penalize U.S. taxpayers for preventing this giant corporation, armed with the power of eminent domain, from running its pipeline through ranches and farms.

Passage of the TPP would further tip the balance of power in favor of these transnational corporations at the expense of community self-determination. Corporations from the signatory countries could insist on building or mining on American soil, and sue if local, state, or federal regulations interfere.

A year ago, passage of this controversial trade pact seemed inevitable, but popular disgust with the deal helped fuel the insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, and convinced Hillary Clinton to come out in opposition to the trade deal.

So will the TPP get approved, and should it?

My view is that corporations already have too much power. At a time of climate change emergency, we don’t need to make it easier for transnational corporations to roll over the objections of communities everywhere with their new fossil fuel projects. At a time of growing inequality, we don’t need to make it easier to outsource jobs. At a time of widespread corruption of governments by powerful moneyed interests, we don’t need to give mega-corporations yet another tool to override the will of “we the people.”

Instead, our hope lies in shifting power to communities and regions—urban and rural—that prioritize safety, clean air, children’s health, and locally rooted livelihoods. The benefits might be invisible to economists and policy makers, because they can’t all be measured in profits and dollars. But human well-being and ecological resilience are what matter, whether in the streets of our cities and towns or in Nebraska’s abundant harvest of heirloom red corn.

A four-part comic book series titled  imagines an alternative timeline—one where the pro-Trump mob triumphs and imposes martial law. Amid this dark dystopia, it also visualizes how a grassroots antifascist opposition works in tandem with tenacious, honest journalism to offer an antidote to authoritarianism.

“After the insurrection, I found myself waking up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m. for many weeks worrying about our democracy, worrying about the fact that we had already as a nation begun to move on from this cataclysmic event,” says Alan Jenkins, one of the authors of the graphic novel. Jenkins is a and the co-founder of , a social-justice-oriented communication lab working to shift cultural narratives around racial justice and equity.

Jenkins says his lifelong love of comic books informed his idea to create a graphic novel “in the tradition of speculative fiction, envisioning what could have happened if the insurrection had been successful.”

Co-author Gan Golan is an activist, illustrator, and The New York Times bestselling author whose works include the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Adventures of Unemployed Man. Golan says he fears “how close we came on Jan. 6 to … entering into an alternative timeline.” He adds, “Democracy is always a very precarious proposition in history, and it requires constant vigilance to protect it.”

Golan and Jenkins partnered with acclaimed illustrator —whose portfolio includes work for Marvel and DC Comics—to visually depict the post-1/6 dystopian world in print. The first issue in their series, which was released—not coincidentally—on Jan. 6, 2023, opens with scenes of an unnamed young Black woman scaling a building. She is reminiscent of , the real-life activist who pulled down the Confederate flag outside South Carolina’s state capitol.

Jenkins confirms that the fictional antifascist protagonists in 1/6 are indeed inspired by real-life resisters. “If you look at … the history of pro-democracy movements around the world, it’s always activists and artists and young people who are at the forefront of restoring democracy and also envisioning a broader world, a new nation,” says Jenkins.

As the series’ panels render the nation’s capital being overrun by military tanks amid calls to “stamp out the Antifa menace,” the scene shifts to a D.C. newsroom, where readers are introduced to Sage, a Black journalist who barely escapes with his life as his colleagues are gunned down by fatigues-clad forces. The fictional attackers claim they are acting “under the authority of the Fair and Balanced ������Ƶ Act of 2021.”

Golan argues that such a scene is not far-fetched. “We’ve already entered into the realm of the unimaginable,” he says, given that Trump and his supporters—many of whom are armed—have routinely referred to the media as the “.” Insurrectionists who breached the capitol on Jan. 6 scrawled the words , and physically assaulted members of the press covering the attack.

“When you see authoritarian regimes in other countries having seized power through coups or other violent means, and seized the apparatus of the state, control over the media becomes first and foremost,” Golan explains.

While the graphic novel clearly takes a pro-democracy stance, Jenkins and Golan have crafted nuanced portraits of characters across the political spectrum. An older, MAGA-hat-wearing white man whose son is killed (under circumstances that may be revealed in later issues) finds, to his dismay, that the pro-Trump mob politicizes his child’s death in order to demonize left-leaning social movements like Black Lives Matter.

Golan says the author’s motivation was to highlight how some among the pro-Trump mob were “victims of a very concerted effort to … immerse them in disinformation and lies.” As such, he posits that some may not have fully understood the gravity of the anti-democratic actions they participated in.

Watch the full interview with Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan about their four-part graphic novel series,

In 1/6, the authors hope to capture the challenges and complexity of countering authoritarianism. “In future issues, we’re going to see [lead characters] disagreeing about what the struggle ought to be,” says Jenkins. “Just as we who are activists often disagree and yet find ways to move forward together.”

“Like all good speculative fiction, it’s also a warning,” says Jenkins of the fable he’s co-authored. “It’s a call to action for the threats that still remain.”

But they’re also a rebranding exercise for a sitting president. Despite having a “bully pulpit” to command the nation’s attention, the president has relatively few opportunities to grip the attention of the entire nation when the country is not in the midst of an acute crisis. Former President Donald Trump experienced the downside of using every day in power as an opportunity for gratuitous self-aggrandizement—his suggests he never won any converts to his cause, and the 2020 election demonstrated that he actually lost many supporters along the way.

The SOTU address is, however, a moment for presidents to lay out their agendas without the filter of the media, the spin from the opposition party’s “response” (usually an even more theatrical and substance-free event), or social media commentary for anyone watching the event live. Outside of an address during a major crisis, the SOTU is the best uninterrupted opportunity presidents have to shape public perceptions of their administration and the country as a whole.

As such, an SOTU address is also often seen as an electoral barometer. Is the president running again or not? Is he able to change the dominant narrative?

Changing the narrative is something President Biden and the Democratic Party ought to be better at than they are. The “messaging war” between the two parties tends to favor the Republicans, whose ability to march in formation and repeat simple slogans ad nauseam often garners more press and better public traction than the Democrats’ policy wonkishness and nuanced analyses.

Ever since the Republicans regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, it’s been clear the party was going to spend the next two years trying to besmirch and undercut anything and everything that Biden, his administration, his family, his allies, or his friends do, even if it crashes the global economy. Not coincidentally, the chaotic energy of today’s GOP feeds a false narrative that serves Republicans, as an insurgent political movement with no actual policy agenda except to stop the Democrats: The country is coming off the wheels, cities are crime-infested hellholes governed by elite socialists, everyone is unemployed, and the tax man is coming to take away most of Joe America’s meager paycheck.

That kind of relentless mudslinging does add up, but it can and needs to be counteracted with another, better story.

Biden’s address was the first chapter of that story. Admittedly, Biden is not the gifted communicator Barack Obama is, nor the perpetual salesman that Trump is. He occasionally rushed, and he stumbled through his stutter a couple of times. To put it gently, Biden is past his prime.

But he was also in full “happy warrior” mode: Rather than ignoring the frequent heckling from the likes of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others in the GOP’s growing fascist wing, he pushed back, got in their face, and shut them down with demands to “call my office!” For an 80-year-old, he demonstrated more spunk that most of either caucus in the Senate, and he amply counterpunched the Republican noisemakers from the House.

Biden’s defenders would say his accomplishments speak for themselves, but the fact is, they don’t. Average Americans don’t read monthly job reports or try to divine the Federal Reserve’s future policy shifts on interest rates.

So it was incumbent for Biden to lean into the relative successes of his administration so far. And on the grand scheme of things, almost : , , , even a bit.

But as the adage goes, when you’re unemployed, the unemployment rate is 100%. Our perception of events is filtered through our own eyes, and we tend to see what we want to, which also tends to reinforce our political beliefs.

And it’s true that life in the United States today is not all roses and bonbons. While job creation has been , the , as does the . Every Black man who is killed by a police officer is a reminder to the entire nation that we live in a society poisoned by four centuries of white supremacy and violent oppression of minority groups. (To wit, than in any year in the past decade—averaging 100 killings per month, according to Mapping Police Violence.)

To Biden’s credit, he didn’t avoid these subjects. The parents of Tyre Nichols were two of his guests at SOTU, and Biden used the platform to talk about “the talk” that Black and Brown parents give their children about how to interact with police.

Biden could easily have devoted an entire speech to police reform—a�Ի� later, he might—but as such, the subject was sandwiched between COVID-19 and an assault weapons ban. Climate change warranted a brief mention—underwhelming for what is likely going to be the defining crisis of coming decades, but if you blinked, you probably missed it. An average viewer’s takeaways from the speech would likely be Biden’s constant refrain to “finish the job” (on police reform, on infrastructure investments, on America), his final paean to bipartisanship, and his warning of the dangers of extremism.

That’s the unavoidable drawback of a 90-minute speech crammed with a list of policy wins, a year’s worth of agenda items to come, obligatory applause lines, and namechecking of allies and guests. Instead, the State of the Union address serves more as an opening play in a longer political process, which, in this case, is Biden’s almost-inevitable re-election campaign.

Is running again a good idea? Given his achievements so far, he’d be a fool not to, and the Democratic Party certainly doesn’t want a bruising primary battle undercutting a largely successful incumbency. No one who voted for him was unaware he’d enter and leave as the oldest president on record. He won anyway, and the odds are in his favor to win again.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are a chaotic mess, with the 2024 primary season looking to be even more unruly than 2016’s was. The GOP is being yanked around by its most extreme faction and suffers from weak leadership, and �հ��ܳ���’s wannabe-heir, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has been leaning in hard on , punishing one of the state’s marquee employers, and going all-out to , .

As another saying goes, when your enemy is making a critical mistake, don’t interfere. (Barack Obama’s “proceed, governor,” line to Mitt Romney in the 2012 debates comes to mind.) Even if Trump doesn’t win the nomination again, he’ll likely do the GOP a lot of parting damage as he’s pushed offstage.

The national media’s coverage of the 2024 race will be predictable: They’ll devolve into the horse-race narrative, rely on false equivalencies to compare Republican scandals and crimes with Biden’s verbal gaffes, or otherwise try to make the race into something fun and exciting, instead of a serious referendum—again—on whether the U.S. is going to remain a democracy.

Voters recognized the seriousness of that decision during the 2022 midterm elections, and the early signs going into the next cycle are that Joe Biden recognizes that, too. It may seem exhausting that yet another election is going to hinge on such existential questions. But at a time when wars overseas are being fought over issues of democracy and self-determination, it’s a good reminder that our choices matter. And the fact that we still have a choice matters most of all.

Like many citizens around the world, you may be concerned about media manipulation. It was digital news content, referred to as “fake news,” that spurred international concern that false news reports were misleading voters after the so-called Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of President Donald Trump in the United States. Trump weaponized the term “fake news” to denounce any reporting he deemed to be inaccurate or inconveniently critical of him or his administration. 

As Nolan Higdon notes in The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education, “Fake news is anything but self-explanatory. It extends far beyond news itself and exists in numerous formats such as rumors, lies, hoaxes, bunk, satire, parody, misleading content, impostor content, fabricated content, and manipulated content.”

You are not powerless against the influence of the news media, however. As a critically news-literate person, you can investigate news content and the process behind its production and dissemination. One way to begin is to familiarize yourself with who is likely to produce fake news. 

The known producers of fake news include the following: 

Political party propaganda apparatuses: Loosely connected groups that work to influence electoral outcomes and policy debates through the promotion of content, including fake news. These organizations include public relations firms and members of the news media who often work in tandem. 

The legacy media: These are often called “mainstream” media, but are also sometimes referred to as “corporate” media. Although they reach large audiences and report on many daily affairs accurately, they sometimes report falsehoods that can be minor, such as misattributing a quote, or significant, such as the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which served as one justification for the catastrophic U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. 

State-sponsored propaganda machines: A conglomerate of government-funded efforts that seek to influence public opinion. Governments, including the United States, have long produced and distributed fake news to domestic and foreign populations through outlets such as Radio Televisión Martí and Voice of America. Other nations, including Russia, engage in propaganda operations that also seek to shape global interpretations of events. 

Satirical fake news: A form of entertainment that lampoons dominant culture by simulating a major news outlet’s format and presentation. Examples include The Onion, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. 

Self-interested actors: People who create fake news to serve their own ends. For example, in an effort to promote his own career, Jayson Blair reported fake news in numerous stories he filed while he worked at The New York Times and The Boston Globe. 

While all of this may seem overwhelming, you have the power to discern fact from fiction and reject false and misleading content presented as legitimate news. Fake news content comes in print, broadcast, and digital forms. If a news story’s headline evokes a strong “Whoa!” reaction, by making you extremely angry or sad, or by making you laugh out loud, this should be a red flag. Whether negative or positive, emotions could cloud your ability to think logically and objectively. Asking the following questions about news content can help you determine its degree of credibility. 

• Is the content journalism? Not everyone in the press is a journalist. Commentators and pundits, such as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel, and Bakari Sellers of CNN, comment on news stories that other journalists originally reported. These commentators or pundits are rarely on-site for the story, in real time or afterward, and are less likely to have been involved in primary-source reporting. By contrast, reporters and journalists generally introduce primary sources, explaining the known and verified events on a timeline while providing further context. They tell audiences what the available primary sources mean when analyzed together. 

• Who is the publisher of this content? Evaluate the publisher’s validity. This easy step can be taken early in the process of news evaluation. News users should consider the following questions: Does the publisher have a history of publishing fact-based journalism or biased content? Does the publisher have any conflicts of interest (economic, political, professional, or personal)? Do they have a history of retracting and correcting inaccurate reporting? 

• Who is the author of this content? Evaluate the author’s credibility, another crucial early step. News users should consider the following questions: Who is the author? Does the author have any professional, personal, or political conflicts of interest? Do they have a history of having their stories retracted for inaccurate reporting? 

• Do I understand the content? Slow down and carefully investigate content. Being well informed is not about virtue signaling or showing that you can share more articles online than any of your peers; it is about finding the truth, and that takes time. 

• What is the evidence? Identify, evaluate, and analyze the evidence. Are the news story’s sources clearly identified or not? Are there other newsworthy views or sources that ought to be included? Journalists sometimes have to use anonymous sources to protect the identity of vulnerable individuals and whistleblowers. For example, if a source is providing information about corruption in their workplace or within the government, they could be fired by their employer for doing so or, worse yet, charged with a crime and imprisoned. And at a legitimate news organization, an editor will look for independent verification of the facts before publishing. However, there can also be problems when journalists rely on anonymous sources, because the claims made by such sources can be difficult, if not impossible, to verify. 

It is a good idea to be skeptical of anonymous sources, but it is also important to note that at times anonymous sources have been remarkably significant. For example, two of the most famous news stories in the history of U.S. journalism relied on anonymous sources: the revelations of the Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon’s administration. 

What is missing from the content? Analyze news media not just for what is there but for what is missing. What stories and whose viewpoints are excluded? What identity groups are erased or marginalized, either as newsworthy sources of information and perspective or as journalists? What do these missing people and perspectives reveal about the aims and the validity of the news content? How do these missing perspectives reinforce or extend existing power relations? 

What is the bias? Identify and examine the influence of bias on news content. As we’ve mentioned, all content will have some bias, originating from a variety of sources. Corporate news coverage often reflects the values of consumer culture by emphasizing the interests of business owners, while ignoring the lives of working people.

We spend more of our daily lives consuming media than any prior generation. Its influence is undeniable, but we don’t have to allow it to determine our opinions and behavior. Asking the right questions about the content that is presented to us is the first step in becoming savvy media consumers who are less vulnerable to manipulation. 

Excerpted from  by  (2022) appears with permission of the Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

Watch an interview with contributor Allison T. Butler on :

While it was somewhat amusing to watch the party repeatedly demonstrate its inability to govern, for the next two years, we’re still going to have to live with the chaos it’s come to embody.

And while since he left office following his second impeachment, the reactionary grievances that drove him and his supporters are still motivating a significant portion of the Republican Party. That isn’t good for us as a society or as a nation.

The Republicans have already indicated what we can expect over the next two years: endless hearings on anything they think will give them a political advantage in the 2024 elections. House leadership has already created a subcommittee to “” leading the Justice Department’s investigation of �հ��ܳ���’s attempted coup. That committee is likely to include several representatives who may have been involved in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including the new .

On the policy front, most of the Republican wish list items—eliminating Social Security, for example—won’t survive the Democrat-controlled Senate or President Biden’s veto. But there’s still potential to do a lot of damage. Rep. Scott Perry, originally one of 20 holdouts in the speaker vote, told CNN Friday that one of the conditions McCarthy agreed to was to .

This is (and 2013 and 2015) when they wanted to extract concessions from the Obama administration on must-pass legislation. Increasing the debt limit is necessary to allocate the funds that Congress approved in its budget. Without doing so, the government will be unable to pay its debts, risking both the national and global economy, which are still largely dependent on the stability of the U.S. dollar.

The public doesn’t yet know all of what McCarthy has promised the party’s right-wing hardliners. But the new speaker’s desperation for the gavel is only matched by his , and he the extremists’ demand for a one-vote threshold to call for a new speaker election. The result is clear: House Republicans—a�Ի� the speaker himself—will be driven by the priorities of the party’s most rabid extremist (not to mention white supremacist) wing.

In the first days of the 118th Congress, the new GOP majority set up after the Jan. 6 ransacking of the building and introduced a motion to stop the IRS from hiring any new staff. The rule package also includes a plan and . And McCarthy looks like he’s planning revenge on several Democrats in the chamber, including .

Against that backdrop, it’s a bit difficult to look to the next two years and find silver linings. But they are there.

It’s true that divided government is a recipe for paralysis. Movement on the Democrats’ agenda will slow to a crawl, and what passes will be watered down significantly. But this also means that Republicans will be unable to do as much damage as they’d like to. Their principal bludgeon will be the ability to stall the legislative process—which does have negative ramifications (pity the inevitably furloughed federal workers), but is less likely to result in a full legislative slide into fascism.

Further, tactics like holding the debt limit hostage through government shutdowns typically backfire. This political stunt becomes a game of chicken: The Republicans hope the Democrats cave on key issues before the real-world ramifications of their actions start to undermine their approval rating. Given the tiny majority the Republicans have in the current House, that political pressure will be all the more acutely felt.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, which means President Biden will be able to fill federal appointments, especially vacant judge seats at all levels. Given how far rightward the Supreme Court has drifted, it will be vitally important that any federal judiciary openings be filled promptly.

The staying power of the Supreme Court’s Trumpian right-wing majority is an open—if opaque—question, as Supreme Court justices typically keep their personal intentions and health out of the public view. As such, it’s hard to estimate whether the oldest justices, , are anywhere near retiring.

And probably most important for the health of the country, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed special counsel Jack E. Smith to oversee the myriad federal investigations into Trump, in addition to the the Department of Justice has brought against the insurrectionists. The House’s Jan. 6 committee wrapped up its work with a . Unlike former special counsel Robert Mueller III, whose work was stymied under pressure of a Republican president and attorney general, that he’s already —a�Ի� he now has the full body of work and criminal referrals of the Jan. 6 committee to add to his cases. There’s a good chance that justice of some sort lies in the not-too-distant future.

The other arena to watch (especially if Congress grinds to a halt) will be in the statehouses and state court systems. The states are ground zero for battles over abortion rights, voting rights, same-sex marriage, transgender rights, and more. Consider these three examples in just the past week:

The Pennsylvania legislature, where Republicans had a temporary two-seat majority due to absences, , who , announcing, “I pledge my loyalty to the people of the Commonwealth.”

On Jan. 5, the , which had effectively banned all abortions after six weeks’ gestation. (Prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, South Carolina had a 20-week ban.) That won’t stop anti-abortion forces from having another go at it, but in a preemptive move against bans or increased restrictions on abortions, the Department of Justice issued a ruling that the even in states that have banned the procedure, and therefore cannot be sued.

And a in Georgia. (Under Georgia law, the grand jury must send its recommendation to another grand jury for filing charges.)

But it’s not all good news at the state level. Increasing numbers of cities are enacting new rules criminalizing homelessness, for example, which may make the problem worse, or violate individual rights. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has released a sweeping plan for people deemed “severely mentally ill” to hospitals until a plan for their care is created. And while voters in Sacramento in November passed an initiative that requires the city to provide shelter beds for its homeless population, the measure also makes it a .

None of this is happening in a vacuum. A hasn’t abated. Brazil just had its own version of Jan. 6, as a right-wing mob invaded government buildings demanding the reinstallation of former president Jair Bolsonaro—who conceded his electoral loss to Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, and was .

Brazil’s coup attempt matters not just because of the ideological similarities between Bolsonaro and Trump, but because many of the same people appear to have connections to fascist movements around the world—for example, former Trump advisers , venture capitalist , and Twitter’s new owner , who’s been busy restoring the accounts of Jan. 6 insurrectionists. And behind it all, the shadowy influence of . With all this, sunshine continues to be the best disinfectant. The show on the House floor during the speaker elections illuminates the ongoing Republican assault on democracy, just as we continue to see new and emerging connections to global fascism emerge. If there’s one positive to emerge out of �հ��ܳ���’s destructive administration, it’s that the most radical actors have come out of the shadows. Standing up to them is on us.

Most people are aware of the Republican Party’s attempts to suppress the votes of Black people and other people of color, especially, but not exclusively, in the South. But the biggest threat to voting rights today is coming from the conservative faction on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Over the past several decades, conservative partisan extremists have hijacked our federal court system, and on the Supreme Court, have wielded their unchecked power to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, reproductive rights, and the rights of workers to organize. Moore v. Harper, which hinges on a that , demonstrates how far SCOTUS has gone off the rails. But if we want to get SCOTUS back on track, we first need to know how it got derailed in the first place.

During former President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s administration, and with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and shadowy groups like , more than 200 far-right-wing judges were installed on the federal bench and the Supreme Court who are hostile to civil rights, voting rights, anti-discrimination laws, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, workers, and the environment. These judges and justices are overwhelmingly straight, white, and male. The federal courts today are 74% white and 67% male, while our country is 40% people of color and 51% women. To date, these radicals have come dangerously close to shaping the entire legal system to reflect their reactionary views. When it comes to our nation’s fail-safe of checks and balances, conservative extremists hold nothing sacred. 

In order to rebalance the court, we at The Center for Popular Democracy, a nonpartisan action group, are proposing several non-ideological reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court. These reforms include a mandatory code of ethics for justices that requires transparency, recusals in conflicts of interest, and stock divestitures. ������Ƶover, it’s time to expand the court and impose term limits. 

So how do we rebalance SCOTUS? First, let’s start by holding justices ethically accountable.

Most citizens don’t know that SCOTUS isn’t bound by ethics rules or constitutional accountability. The nine justices of the Supreme Court are the only judges in the federal system who are . These days, it’s a blaring weakness in our three-pronged system of checks and balances.

Last month, The New York Times reported that the , a charity founded by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in 1974, who had cases before the court. But while nothing’s stopping the justices from adopting a code of ethics, proponents of court reform urge Congress to throw its statutory weight behind meaningful institutional changes to the high court. The Supreme Court should not just let the justices police themselves.

Second, Congress must expand the court to balance it. 

After the decades-long takeover process by the conservative right, we’re now subject to a 6–3 extremist supermajority. These justices appointed by three Republican presidents have ignored decades of legal precedent to take away our constitutional rights. We’re now facing the most conservative court in recent history, and the only way to restore balance is to add seats. 

If Congress passes the , it can expand the number of justices by four. Today, there are 13 circuit courts. Court expansion by four seats would set the number of justices to match the 13 circuit courts. The bill, introduced by Democrats Rep. Henry “Hank” Johnson of Georgia and , is currently in subcommittee and has little chance of Republican support. But we’ll continue pushing for support in the next two years until we regain control of the House.

The Constitution doesn’t prescribe a set number of justices. When the Supreme Court first convened in 1790, there were six justices. The Constitution leaves it to Congress to set the number of Supreme Court justices, and Congress has changed that number seven times throughout American history. 

Finally, justices must have term limits. 

Justices may serve for life (as do all federal judges) with little to no accountability, and they politically time their retirements. Term limits would limit partisan influence, giving presidents the same opportunities to appoint justices each term. We need a Supreme Court that is more democratically representative. 

Throughout the Trump era, Republicans made the federal judiciary an extension of their party. The Center for Popular Democracy and our allies led over a month of daily protests in Washington, D.C., to stop the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. We showed up to interrupt circuit court confirmation hearings for �հ��ܳ���’s lower court nominees. We interrupted the Federalist Society’s annual dinner. And we warned voters that the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett was a breach of the trust—a violation of democracy itself. 

Under Biden, our members came to Washington from across the country to lobby Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Joe Manchin, and ultimately celebrated Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation—a rare win! Biden has nominated the most demographically diverse set of judicial candidates in history. Over the next two years, the Senate needs to confirm a record-breaking number of lower court justices to counteract decades of right-wing skewing.

Never before have we seen such a mass movement to organize and mobilize and speak out in support of our courts. This is the moment for us to rise up together and make the sweeping changes needed to create a court that is accountable to the people, not to special interests and extremists. Our democracy depends on it.

In images similar to those from the , demonstrators were seen overwhelming and beating police while breaching the security perimeter of the buildings.

It comes weeks after  that saw the return of leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Conversation asked Rafael Ioris, an , to explain the significance of the attack and what could happen next.

Who was behind the storming of the Brazilian Congress?

What we saw was thousands of hardcore supporters of Bolsonaro—those who share his extreme right-wing agenda—attempting to take matters into their own hands after the recent election.

Even though Bolsonaro wasn’t there in the capital while the attack took place——I believe he is ultimately responsible for what occurred. While he was in power, he encouraged distrust in political institutions,  and —two of the institutions targeted by demonstrators.

Others were also behind what happened. Protests have been taking place for weeks, and there are big funders of the demonstrations,  who helped pay for the busing in of thousands of Bolsonaro supporters to the capital, Brasília.

And then there is the role of the military. Leading military figures have been supportive of Bolsonaro’s extreme right agenda for a long time and even recently have  in the lead-up to the attack.

The lack of security preventing the storming of key institutions in the capital also leads me to ask: Were they negligent, or were they complicit?

Can you expand on the role of the military?

Street security is not a responsibility of the armed forces, but the military’s  has helped provide legitimacy for the holding of such views among . And it was the military police who were tasked with keeping the demonstrations in check in Brasília.

The pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators are demanding a military intervention to overturn what they claim—with no evidence—to be a fraudulent election that saw Lula come to power.

Their hope is that senior members of the military—many of whom have expressed support for Bolsonaro and sympathy for the protest camps that have been set up near army bases—would support the push to oust Lula.

Brazil has a long history of the armed forces not accepting civilian rule. The . Of course, circumstances are different now from then—when in the heat of the Cold War, the coup was supported by outside governments, 

Bolsonaro cultivated close ties to the Brazilian military by moving key military people into positions in government. Right-wing generals friendly with Bolsonaro became ministers of defense, chief of state, and even the minister of health at the height of the COVID-19 crisis. ������Ƶover, it is  in government in the last eight years.

Some generals in both the Navy and the Air Force especially have . Since the election, you have had generals proclaim that demonstrations demanding military intervention were legitimate.

I think it is fair to say that segments of Brazil’s military were encouraging what happened.

But when it came down to it, the armed forces were quiet. The military may have nurtured the protest, but when it came to the idea of a traditional coup—tanks on the streets stuff—that just didn’t happen.

So would you characterize this as an attempted coup?

That is a central question. As events unfurled on Jan. 8, it looked more like a protest that got violent and out of hand—the level of destruction inside some of the buildings attests to that.

But it was weeks in the making and well financed, in that  to get Bolsonaro supporters to the capital. And the expressed aim of many protesters was military intervention. So in that sense, I would say it was more akin to an attempted coup.

What does the attack tell us about democracy in Brazil?

Brazil has been at a crossroads. The Bolsonaro presidency saw the country backslide on democracy, as trust in institutions eroded under attack from the president himself and through corruptions scandals. And  despite his record of undermining democracy. But the election of Lula seems to indicate that even more want to rebuild democratic institutions in the country after four years of attack from Bolsonaro.

So this could be a turning point. The media in Brazil has come out strongly in denouncing the actions of demonstrators. In the coming days and weeks, there will be investigations into what happened, and hopefully some degree of accountability. What will be key is Lula’s ability to address the anti-democractic elements of the military.

Are comparisons to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol valid?

Trumpism and Bolsonarismo  of stolen elections, with supporters drawn from the right who support issues such as gun rights and traditional family structures.

An important difference is the role of the military. Although former , . Nor was the aim in the U.S. to see military intervention, unlike the Jan. 8, 2023, attack in Brasília.

But there are clear parallels—in both we saw extreme right-wing, powerful groups and individuals refusing to accept the direction of a country and trying to storm institutions of power.

Now I’m wondering if there will also be parallels in what happens after the attack.

In the U.S., authorities have done a good job punishing a lot of people involved. I’m not sure we will see the same in Brazil, as they might need to confront powerful groups within the military and police forces around the country. So, democratic actors within and outside of the county will be essential in supporting the task of defending democracy in Brazil.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. .

The Democrats bucked the trend of midterm elections being a rout for the ruling party, kept hold of the Senate, and only lost a net handful of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. (As of this writing, it looks like the Republican Party will have, at most, a five-seat majority in the House.) Democrats also flipped at least three state legislative houses.

Which isn’t to say all the news was good; just that it was a lot less bad than we expected.

The good news is that, politically, things are going relatively well in the United States right now, with continued economic growth and the passage of major legislative victories, such as the Inflation Reduction Act (which is ) and the upcoming , which, despite some drawbacks, requires states to recognize same-sex marriages. (It won’t force states to issue same-sex marriage licenses, but it will still extend equality under the law to all same-sex couples, no matter which state they tied the knot in.) Inflation is still a problem, but it’s to 7.75%.

November’s biggest victory was for democracy in general, as every single election denier running to oversee state elections lost.

That isn’t to play down the less positive results. Election deniers won other offices—J.D. Vance will now be a U.S. Senator representing Ohio, and the House still has a sizable “” that will be enabled by the Republicans’ new majority. And, true to form, some local officials (particularly in and ) are refusing to certify election results, citing voter fraud theories that have no supporting evidence.

The 2024 presidential election isn’t going to be decided in advance, but it will still be an uphill fight to keep the forces of fascism at bay.

The new Republican House majority has made it known that its first order of business will be—drum roll—to , the troubled son of the president who is already under investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ), by a prosecutor selected by the Trump administration.

And that’s before the House Judiciary Committee, soon to be chaired by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, starts investigating anything and anyone it can subpoena to undermine the country’s current upward trajectory. Because the GOP’s top priority is going to be to cause damage to the economy so voters will return Republicans to the White House.

It’s not just the circus coming back into town that we need to worry about. The looming debt ceiling battle is likely to play out exactly as it did when Barack Obama was president: with Republicans holding the U.S. economy (and, by extension, the world) hostage to extract some significant legislative concession that would probably otherwise be unconscionable to most Americans.

And, of course, there is former President Donald Trump for president in 2024. America’s abusive ex not only wants to get back together, but has also followed us to the much nicer city we now live in and promises to bang on our front door every day at 6 a.m. until we just give in and admit we don’t deserve someone better.

Trump, by default, is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination. And every other potential contender, including the ascendant Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is making the same mistake the Republicans did in 2015: pretending Trump doesn’t exist in the hope he goes away, but not attacking him in any manner. Which will allow Trump to pick them off in the primary one by one, and . Again.

If we have learned anything over the past seven years, it should be that we should never underestimate Trump—or his appeal to millions of voters.

With just days before the Georgia runoff election to determine the final balance of power in the Senate, and a few weeks before the end of the year, time is running out for the Democrats to do something—anything—to undermine the damage Republicans are expected to inflict on this country once the new House majority comes in.

A law codifying abortion rights nationwide appears to be off the table, as are voting rights thanks to the Senate filibuster (and, specifically, ). Congress could still vote to bundle the debt ceiling increase into the budgetary vote, assuming there are enough Republicans left in the Senate who don’t want to sabotage the U.S. economy. But again, some senators’ love for the antidemocratic filibuster is preventing us from having nice things.

President Biden could still reform the U.S. Postal Service’s board of governors to fire the Trump holdover, .

Attorney General Merrick Garland could bring charges against Trump, finally. His appointment of Jack Smith as a special counsel is, on the whole, a good thing, if only because special counsels are required to present their findings to Congress, even if no charges are brought. And despite the widespread frustration over the DOJ not charging Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection, it’s worth remembering that it also took nearly two years after the for the first of President .

Plus, the Jan. 6 investigation has a lot more —. And we likely will see the House before the end of the year, and before the Republicans shut down the committee next year. Let’s hope the committee also turns over its work documents to DOJ investigators, if not to the public as a whole.

So as we settle in for the end of the year and await the start of the new one, there are a few takeaways from this administration’s first two years.

1. Abortion and democracy are important to most Americans. They’re also winning issues for Democrats. Despite much hand-wringing over Democrats struggling to find a “kitchen table” message before the midterms, it turned out that many Americans were, in fact, talking about abortion and the survival of our democracy around the kitchen table. (Those are, of course, also financial issues—unwanted children are a huge financial burden, and nondemocratic countries tend to be poorer than democracies. People talk about all sorts of things over dinner, not just the price of gas.)

In all five states that had , and in four out of six states with , people voted to retain or enhance those rights, rather than chip away at or eliminate them.

The caveat is we can’t just rely on the Republicans to nominate their most extreme candidates, and hope that extremism is off-putting to a majority of voters. Democrats still need to give voters a reason to support them. This election showed them how.

2. Young people will show up to vote when their future is on the line. The , although , according to some early estimates. It was the fact that they by that was most significant in preventing a “red wave.” This is the first generation that grew up in an environment of a rapidly changing climate, whose peer groups are more racially diverse and include many LGTBQ folks, and who are now entering their prime childbearing years just in time to see Republicans working against progress on all of those issues.

Big caveat: A , and unlike the Boomers, they’re likely to stick around for many more election cycles.

And so, dear fellow former , survivors of the , inventors of and , who grew up swimming in and breathing , whose awareness of their own mortality was cemented by the and accidents (not to mention the ), who were part of the first generation to , and who watched the American Dream start to unravel in real time during the Reagan administration: We really should know better.

3. The U.S. is still a democracy. We still have problems, but we’ve forestalled disaster, one more time. The caveat is that the Republican Party is firmly in the grip of its neofascist wing, and so every election for the foreseeable future is going to be a referendum on whether we will continue this imperfect but enduring democratic experiment. That’s exhausting. Which is why, as we wind down the year, it’s worth taking a breather (unless you’re in Georgia; sorry, but ). Because the fight’s just going to pick up again come January.

And yet the story of our family and community is not necessarily one of democratic celebration. In 1898, my grandfather came here from Japan, forbidden by laws to become a citizen or own property. During WWII, my parents and their families were imprisoned by the United States government in concentration camps placed throughout desolate areas of the American West. My parents were natural-born citizens from Seattle and Los Angeles, 11 and 15 years old when they were imprisoned behind barbed-wire fences and rifle towers with armed guards. 

No Japanese American was ever convicted of espionage; there’s clear evidence that the FBI determined our community was not a military threat but kept that a secret. And yet 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated without a trial and denied their basic constitutional rights.

In 1988, President Reagan and Congress apologized to the Japanese American community for their unjust imprisonment. Reagan admitted the real cause for the camps was not military necessity, but “race prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of leadership.” Unfortunately, in our Trumpian America, the Japanese internment has been cited by conservatives as precedent for anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim measures. These conservatives don’t know that their demigod Republican Reagan apologized for the camps and saw them as an act of racism. Their ignorance surely extends to another historical fact: At the start of WWII, the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) desperately needed Japanese speakers but could only find them in our community. So even while many of their families were imprisoned, 6,000 Japanese American MIS soldiers served in the Pacific theater as battlefield experts and guides, as interrogators and translators of captured documents and radio messages. I’ve co-produced, written, and narrated a PBS film about these soldiers, Armed With Language. 

Significantly, Gen. MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, Gen. Charles Willoughby, stated that the MIS Japanese American soldiers shortened the Pacific war “by two years and saved a million American lives.” Two years, a million American lives—there are anti-immigrant anti-Asian white people today who owe their very existence to these MIS Japanese Americans, who helped save their fathers or grandfathers. 

Despite this history—or, paradoxically, because of it—I grew up wanting to be white. My parents never talked about their imprisonment. Instead, they fervently believed in an assimilation into whiteness. Their imprisonment criminalized their race and ethnicity (unlike wartime treatment of German or Italian Americans). The implied message: You must shed your Japanese cultural roots, don’t make waves, and imitate a white middle-class identity you will never quite achieve. 

And so, growing up in a white suburb of Chicago, I diligently worked to blend in with the white majority, to erase my difference. When a white friend said, “I think of you, David, just like a white person,” I felt embraced; I’d achieved something. As a result, I know intimately how it is to think like a white person. A white person is what I wanted to be, what I studied to be. I learned and eagerly believed the stories whiteness tells itself—about our history, who we are as a country, what it means to be a white American. 

As a baby boomer child, I imbibed the films and TV that portrayed American history as a paean to unblemished patriarchal white heroes, from Charlton Heston’s Andrew Jackson to the Lincoln hagiographies to Errol Flynn’s Custer and John Wayne fighting the savage Indians. I idolized these white heroes, felt their terror at darker-skinned human beings (including the Japanese in Sands of Iwo Jima). The only childhood picture I have of America’s chattel slavery comes from Gone with the Wind, a product of the Lost Cause myth, which declared slavery a benign institution where whites and Blacks were comfortable and content. In none of these films—or my history courses—did I ever learn the American story through the narratives and perspectives of non-white Americans. I never studied the Japanese American internment in school. (Nor did my daughter, which is one reason she became an educator.) 

Only in my late 20s, after reading Black writers like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, did I finally admit I was not white. I began to question and investigate my own racial and ethnic identity. This meant re-examining my own racial experiences, my family’s history, and the ways I’d been taught by whiteness to think about race. I started constructing a new story about myself, my family, our history as a country. Eventually, I understood America began with a contradiction. As I write in my upcoming book, , “From its very beginnings America had two irreconcilable goals. One was to seek equality, freedom, and democracy. The other was to maintain white supremacy and the domination by white people over any people of color. White America is fine with telling our tale through the lens of the first goal. But it is still decidedly not fine with telling the second story of America’s treatment of people of color and America’s desire to maintain white supremacy. All the recent ridiculous distorting, disparaging, and damning of Critical Race Theory are just the latest manifestation of this repression.”

History, the German critic Walter Benjamin observed, is the tale of the victors. It is the powerful—or the oppressors—who tell the history, not those without power, not the oppressed. Thus, the telling of history is always a struggle for power. 

So when Moms for Liberty and other conservatives want to outlaw any teaching of how white people oppressed people of color in America, they are asserting the power of white people to tell all our stories, to determine what is true and not true about our American history. These conservatives want to censor how powerful white supremacy was in our past so they can obscure white supremacy in the present. Our racist past clearly begat our present racism. But if you hide that past from our children, it’s much harder for them to see the racism in the present. 

But what these conservatives also can’t admit is this: Diversity is our strength. The heroism of Harriet Tubman and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Tuskegee Airmen and the struggle of ordinary Black people to survive slavery—that is a history both white and BIPOC children can learn from and be inspired by. Over and over, African Americans were on the right side of history in the issues of race; they have been a key, if not the chief, actors in our country’s racial conscience—a�Ի� we are all better for that. 

The MIS Nisei, including my uncle, served in Japan’s pacification. The Japanese thought the Americans were going to kill and torture them, but were reassured by Japanese American soldiers telling them in Japanese that that was not going to happen. Many Japanese declared the United States must be a great country to possess the loyalty and service of these Japanese Americans. 

Diversity is our strength. That is what we and our children can learn from our history; and so, as I argue in The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, our history must be told from the perspective of all Americans, whatever their race or ethnicity.

And now my daughter is part of that history, our pursuit of true equality and democracy. 

Many Americans are approaching the elections with a deep sense of uncertainty, if not dread. The savage attack on Paul Pelosi that left the 82-year-old with a fractured skull is only the latest outrage unleashed by the legitimation of political violence and the conspiracy lies pumped out by Trump and the Republican Party. A foretaste of what was to come was the attempted assault on FBI agents following the agency’s search of �հ��ܳ���’s Mar-a-Lago estate. The episode signaled a new milestone in the rise of extremist vigilantism directed both at the institutions of state and at people, like Nancy Pelosi, demonized by Trump and his followers.

On the morning of Aug. 11, Ricky Shiffer, wearing body armor and armed with an AR-15 rifle, tried to breach the FBI field office in Cincinnati. When agents accosted him, he fled. He drove onto Interstate 71, was spotted by a trooper, and, like some scene from a Hollywood movie, started firing at the pursuing vehicle as he sped off the interstate and onto a rural road, where he stopped his car and fled on foot. After refusing to surrender, he was finally shot dead in a standoff in an Ohio cornfield. Shiffer, a 42-year-old navy veteran, was already on the FBI’s radar. He had been at the capitol on Jan. 6. 

Prior to his attempted assault on the FBI, Shiffer had posted his intentions on �հ��ܳ���’s Truth Social platform:

“People, this is it … this is your call to arms from me … get whatever you need to be ready for combat. We must not tolerate this one. They have been conditioning us to accept tyranny and think we can’t do anything for 2 years. This time we must respond with force.”&�Բ�����;

This one that Shiffer is referring to is the FBI search at �հ��ܳ���’s Mar-a-Lago estate. The intent to kill FBI officers for having carried out a legal warrant to recover classified documents is a new inflection point in the continuing crisis of political legitimacy in the U.S.—a further widening of the established order from the extremist forces galvanized by Trump and legitimized by the party he has molded in his image. The crisis of legitimacy that has been building for decades in the U.S. and abroad is a global phenomenon igniting the rise of new forces—both reactionary and progressive—reacting to the collapsing order of the liberal state. 

This is the subject matter of my current book, Civilizing the State: Reclaiming Politics for the Common Good. The unprecedented events that are now playing out in the U.S. are shedding a deeply worrying light on the plight of democracy and raising serious questions about how, and whether, the institutions of contemporary representative democracy will survive—not only in the U.S., but globally. The book’s forward begins with an account of the capitol insurrection and states categorically that Jan. 6 defined a new era in global politics. 

Everything that has happened since then confirms this view. Indeed, if things looked very bad on Jan. 6, the revelations that have emerged since have only served to highlight the astonishing breadth of the corruption that Trump engendered during his time in office. The manic energy—a�Ի� the ease and impunity—with which Trump twisted the institutions of state to serve a mafia model of political power is staggering.

�հ��ܳ���’s last days in office were devoted to suborning the ministries of defense and justice to his dictatorial aims. Had he more time, he may have succeeded. ������Ƶ worrying still, as time has passed and these facts have become public, there has been no lessening of �հ��ܳ���’s hold over the minds and hearts of his followers. The search on Mar-a-Lago only served to increase the devotion of his base and to further radicalize his movement against the legal institutions of the state. In the weeks following the search, millions of dollars were raised by Trump supporters fired up to fight this latest tyranny of the “deep state.”

Shiffer’s doomed attempt to kill FBI officers is the pure expression of a populist movement that has lost all anchorage with reality. Fueled by �հ��ܳ���’s lies and propagated by a poisonous right-wing media universe, this ultra-nationalist form of white, evangelical, right-wing populism has been legitimized by a Republican Party that has been reconstituted as a proto-fascist political machine. Those who speak of “reclaiming” the Republican Party to its conservative roots are in delusion. That party committed suicide when it failed to impeach Trump while it had the chance.

The undermining of trust in the institutions of state and the legitimacy of the political system is encapsulated in the continuing propagation of the lie that the 2020 elections were stolen. Striking at the heart of the democratic political process, this lie has been embraced by 65% of Republican voters who now question the validity of voting itself. In the midterms, over 250 Republican candidates for public office are election deniers. So, the question must be posed: When one of the nation’s two political parties no longer believes in the democratic process, what happens to democracy? 

In Civilizing the State, I make the case that in an environment as toxic as in the U.S., where political opponents are demonized and where people no longer share a common view of reality, the only way to bridge such polarization is through mechanisms that incentivize people to rebuild a sense of community and mutual trust through cooperation in service to a common good. From health care to affordable housing to social care, there is a wide range of issues in which Americans of all political stripes share a common interest. Reproductive rights are another issue that unites many Democrats and Republicans. The massive voter rejection of attempts to remove abortion protections in Kansas—a deep-red state—is a ray of hope. Promoting public policies that empower cooperative solutions to bridging issues at a community level is a concrete way of addressing the political divisions that are tearing American society apart. 

Powerful examples of such initiatives from around the world are profiled in the book. From the grassroots municipalism of Barcelona to the deep democracy programs of Kerala in India, governments are partnering with citizens at all levels to grapple with problems of political legitimacy by promoting the democratic values that are the bedrock of representative democracy. At the same time, they are taking aim at the social and economic inequities that have fostered the rise of right-wing populism and the attacks on the liberal state that provide both fuel and focus for this new mass movement.

In the U.S., the real question is whether the political forces that define the party system in the age of Trump can ever allow such initiatives to emerge. It is clearly not in the interests of demagogues like Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis for this ever to occur. Their fortunes are bound up in the propagation of social disorder, in sowing division and disintegration. The U.S. political system is caught in an existential moment. Failing a political solution within the established system, those who believe in democracy must confront the fact that democracy in the U.S. might only be salvaged by the exercise of brute power. It is a time of reckoning.

In the final analysis, democracy can survive an authoritarian insurrection only by the deployment of force. And, just as happened during WWII, when western democracies were faced with an analogous condition on a global scale, the democratic forces in the U.S. must be ready to do battle with the proto-fascist populist forces that are now mobilizing against them. That is the real calculation that is facing the Democratic Party if it is to survive—a�Ի� representative democracy along with it. Will the Democratic Party become militant enough to withstand the Republican onslaught? 

The right-wing populist movement in the U.S., like all such movements, employs democratic means to destroy democracy. The Republican Party that leads it does not believe in democracy and twists democratic norms to its own undemocratic ends. And this reveals the weakness of democracy itself—it is viable so long as the political players believe in it. Once this ends, all devolves into a contest of brute force, and in such a battle, a party that plays by democratic rules against another that ignores them has little hope of success. This is amplified manifold when the contending forces occupy two opposing universes of meaning. The media networks that reflect and reinforce the conspiracy myths and mindsets of the extreme right are essential to this process of delegitimation. The current attacks on the Department of Justice and the effort to discredit legal process are prime examples. Polarization, and paranoia, are their stock in trade. Paradoxically, in such an environment, the democratic principle of a free and open press may only be protected by shutting down those circuits of misinformation and outright lies whose effect is to destroy the very basis of democracy itself—a shared commitment to the idea of truth and the honest exchange of ideas. 

The Republican Party, and the right-wing populism it now leads, is not yet fascist. But it is becoming so. Republicans who speak the truth are excommunicated and receive death threats. Sen. Lindsey Graham appears on Fox News and threatens riots if Trump is prosecuted for his crimes. Its leadership is purely opportunistic and seeks primarily to hold on to power at any cost. It shares no real ideology beyond this. Trump himself has the reflexive instincts of a dictator, but he lacks any ideology whatever. Fascists like Hitler and Mussolini believed in the ideas that destroyed the lives of millions. Trump believes only in himself and the grift. If anything were to describe the regime he would head, it would be a griftocracy, a mafia state managed by sycophants and enforced by any means. The closest analogue would be Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, an authoritarian democracy.

The forces of hatred and grievance that are now being mobilized against the liberal order and the fraying institutions of American democracy can never be met nor neutralized by the ambivalence and compromised politics of the Democratic Party as it is. The Republican Party now heads a fully constituted proto-fascist movement that will not be stopped until, like all such movements, it is defeated by overwhelming force. Stoked by Trump and his enablers, 53% of Republican voters already believe the country will be at civil war within the decade. Given the environment, and the presumption of violence from the Trump base, this is entirely possible. 

At some point, a line will be crossed. One would have thought that line was the capitol insurrection on Jan. 6. Instead, the Republican Party and its right-wing allies are doing everything in their power to erase both line and popular memory. In the end, the pathos of Ricky Shiffer, shooting it out with federal agents in some forgotten cornfield of Ohio, is a scene embodying the tragedy—a�Ի� trajectory—of American politics today. 

The vicious assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and the failure of Republicans to denounce it have cast a deeper pall over the state of politics in the country. What the midterms will produce in terms of electoral victories is difficult to predict. The volatility of the electorate is palpable. What is predictable is that the procession of violence, of election subversion, and of the purposeful undermining of public confidence in the institutions of democracy is only beginning. 

Carlos A. Suárez Carrasquillo and Fernando Tormos-Aponte are social scientists who study Latin American politics and environmental justice. They explain some of the factors that have hindered efforts to recover from Maria and prepare for subsequent storms on this island with a population of .

Failed Promises From Privatization

Carlos A. Suárez Carrasquillo, Associate Instructional Professor, Political Science, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida

In less than a century, Puerto Rico’s electricity system has gone full circle from private provision of electric power to a state-led effort to democratize access to power, and then back to a public-private partnership with a strong  ethos. Yet Puerto Ricans still face daily challenges in obtaining affordable and efficient electricity services.

When the island’s electric power system was created in the late 1800s, private companies initially produced and sold electricity. During the New Deal era in the 1930s, the government took over this role. People came to see electric power as a , that the government would provide, at times by .

In the 1940s, Puerto Rico launched , a rapid industrialization program that sought to attract foreign investments in industries such as textiles and petrochemicals. One important element was reliable and cheap electricity, provided by the state through the Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica, a public corporation known in English as the . Damage from Hurricane Fiona, which dropped over 30 inches of rain on Puerto Rico, has set back post-Hurricane Maria recovery efforts.

Many interests coalesced around PREPA, including elected officials, labor unions, the , and, most importantly, the Puerto Rican public. Patronage and party politics often influenced the company’s .

PREPA took on significant debt, often at the request of elected officials. For example, in 2011, then-Speaker of the House Jenniffer González legislated for the company to obtain a line of credit from the Banco Gubernamental de Fomento in order to .

Gov. Alejandro García Padilla and Puerto Rico’s Financial Oversight and Management Board  that subsequent governors have kept in place. This left PREPA with limited resources to prepare for Hurricane Maria or make repairs afterward.

In 2021, Puerto Rico’s government and the financial control board privatized power delivery on the island. PREPA continued to generate electricity, but , a U.S.–Canadian consortium, received a 15-year contract to .

LUMA is at the center of many controversies. It has resisted recognizing the largest and most powerful union in Puerto Rico as its employees’ . Many consumers’ monthly electric bills have . LUMA was supposed to upgrade Puerto Rico’s grid, with billions of dollars in federal support, but . Critics have called the company  and .

Labor groups, environmentalists, and academics have offered comprehensive alternatives, such as , a proposal to install distributed solar power across the island to reduce Puerto Rico’s dependence on fossil fuels and what they see as incompetent private administration.

But the changes needed to address Puerto Rico’s energy crisis are inherently political. Enacting them will require support from the federal fiscal oversight board and Puerto Rican . I believe the public will have to mobilize and rally to convince authorities that the PREPA of old and LUMA today are antiquated organizations that are unable to meet Puerto Ricans’ current needs.

Who Gets Disaster Aid?

Fernando Tormos-Aponte, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh

Disaster aid has been slow to come to Puerto Rico. Five years after Hurricane Maria, the U.S. government is channeling funds to rebuild and harden the archipelago’s energy infrastructure. But only a few of the planned multimillion-dollar projects have been even .

In addition to privatization of the power system, residents have also contended with bureaucratic obstacles and the .

 after Maria were rough estimates, because the storm was so destructive. The U.S. government ultimately calculated total damage to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin islands at .

Now, Hurricane Fiona has caused further damage, which will require even more significant investments. No government authority has sufficient resources on the ground in Puerto Rico to conduct such an assessment, let alone react swiftly to the disaster. Federal Emergency Management Agency Associate Director Anne Bink describes how experience from Hurricane Maria will shape the response to Hurricane Fiona.

Local elected officials are often eager to claim responsibility for securing funding. However, investments in disaster preparedness, such as improving the electric grid,  than recovery funds that are disbursed shortly after a disaster strikes.

I expect that the Biden administration will seek to respond faster and more substantively to Hurricane Fiona than the Trump administration did after Hurricane Maria—but not necessarily out of compassion.

Presidents tend to use disaster resources to , , and portray themselves as capable disaster managers. And they typically are more vulnerable .

Maria hit Puerto Rico during Donald �հ��ܳ���’s first year in office. Puerto Rican voters —as a , the archipelago does not cast electoral votes—so Trump likely did not perceive Puerto Ricans as important to his election. The Trump administration engaged in deliberate efforts to  and .

In contrast, Joe Biden  for his 2020 presidential victory, and Hurricane Fiona has struck just two months before the 2022 midterm elections. Responding offers Biden an opportunity to prove himself a capable disaster manager and attract votes.

Even if the Biden administration is better organized and more responsive, however, marginalized communities often are hampered by  when they try to access government resources.

For example, I have interviewed mayors in Puerto Rico who issued contracts to local providers to address urgent needs after the Federal Emergency Management Agency promised reimbursement. To this day, FEMA has not paid some of these mayors back, and the mayors fear that local vendors will not want to do further business with their governments.

Identifying and applying for U.S. government grants is a complex and tedious process that requires training. Access to that training is uneven, and language barriers often keep communities from seeking grants.

After Hurricane Maria, few Puerto Rican communities had the resources and support needed to cope with these barriers. In my view, governments must prioritize marginalized communities in their response to Hurricane Fiona to avoid reproducing the . Elected officials must demand transparency and accountability from those tasked with distributing aid, while holding themselves to the same standards.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

Although she was a recipient of the embattled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which shields from deportation people who were brought to the U.S. as children, the federal program does not include educational government benefits. Amezquita, who has lived in the U.S. since she was 2 years old, needed alternatives.

The Tucson, Arizona, resident found the financial boost she needed to pursue higher education in multiple organizations that over the years have stepped up to provide private scholarships, legal services, and various other resources to DACA recipients, also known as “Dreamers,” whose legal protection remains tenuous a decade after the program’s launch. Yearslong advocacy and activism on their behalf have yet to result in a congressional solution to protect the young arrivals, but several states have enacted provisions that allow college-bound students without permanent legal status the less costly in-state tuition.

Arizona—along with Georgia and Indiana—makes undocumented students pay higher out-of-state college tuition, but voters on Nov. 8 will decide whether to change that. If Proposition 308 passes, Arizona will join at least 23 other states where at community colleges and state universities. The initiative has bipartisan support, and if approved by voters, would repeal Proposition 300, which in 2006 made undocumented people ineligible for various state-subsidized benefits, including in-state tuition and financial aid. This year’s ballot measure would grant the academic assistance to students—regardless of immigration status—who have attended a high school in Arizona for at least two years.

Amezquita’s family came to the U.S. from the northern Mexican state of Sonora, which neighbors Arizona. She applied for DACA during its first year, when she turned 15. She was granted DACA status and a work permit that must be renewed every two years. Now 21, she’s hopeful that students without permanent status may soon benefit from an approved ballot measure in her home state. Although she didn’t have access to in-state tuition, Amezquita says she’s grateful to the organizations that made it possible for her to enroll at Grand Canyon University, a private school in metropolitan Phoenix.

“There are still groups out there who have not lost hope in us, who still believe in our potential, who know that we are people beyond our immigration status,” she says.

She received several scholarships and took advantage of other resources, like tips on writing essays and how to navigate the higher education system from various local and national groups, including Arizona’s , and the national and , organizations that provide scholarships, mentorship, and other services to DACA recipients. Getting the financial help was a relief, but Amezquita says she lives with the fear that DACA, still embroiled in relentless legal challenges it has stoked since its inception, could vanish any day.

“It’s very upsetting and sad that it’s been 10 years and we have DACA recipients that are lawyers and doctors, nurses, firefighters,” Amezquita says. “We’re everywhere, and to see all of these professionals out in the world giving to their communities on a daily basis, it’s sad to see that we’re still in this limbo.”

The latest legal blow to DACA came in early October, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the program is unlawful and blocked the federal government from processing new applications. The court’s decision does not affect the roughly 600,000 people already enrolled in the program. The ruling stems from a 2018 challenge from Texas and eight other states arguing that the Obama administration lacked the authority to implement the program. A federal court in Texas had declared DACA illegal in July 2021, and the Biden administration appealed to the Fifth Circuit. On Oct. 31, , a move from the Biden administration that replaces the 2012 memo that created the program, to protect it from future legal challenges.

DACA was never meant as a permanent solution for law-abiding immigrants who have lived in the country without government authorization since they were children, however. It doesn’t offer a guaranteed pathway to legal residency or citizenship. In 2012, the Obama administration created the program through executive order after numerous failed attempts in Congress to pass the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act—the origin of the Dreamers nickname—which was introduced in 2001.

Despite widespread support from polled Americans who favor granting legal status to Dreamers, no legislation for Dreamers has advanced in Congress. While advocates and activists—many Dreamers themselves—keep up the pressure on lawmakers to act on comprehensive immigration reform, organizations continue working to improve the lives of the young arrivals.

In California, the state with the largest number of DACA recipients, the assistance available is ample at institutions of higher education and elsewhere. At the University of California, Berkeley, undocumented students can not only receive academic and financial aid counseling at a resource center dedicated to assist them, but they can also stop in when they need help securing affordable housing, non-federal campus jobs, and mental health resources.

Helping Dreamers cope with the uncertainty that surrounds DACA is also a priority at (UWD), a national advocacy and lobbying group composed of immigrant youths and their supporters. “We see a lot of trauma and a lot of folks dealing with depression because of their immigration status,” says spokeswoman Bruna Sollod, herself a DACA recipient from Brazil. “So we provide tools for folks to make sure that they’re prioritizing their mental health while they deal with all of these different things.”

In July 2021, UWD and the Latinx Immigrant Health Alliance released a joint report on the surveyed over 10 months. “Undocumented people, including those with DACA, reported significantly higher distress related to immigration status than those with permanent residency or U.S. citizenship,” the report states.

UWD and other groups also provide funds to cover the cost of DACA application renewals. Those granted DACA status and a work permit must renew them every two years, and advocates pay for all or part of the application fee. But Tiffany Panlilio of (AJSOCAL) says a number of DACA recipients who can’t afford the $495 renewal fee may still fall through the cracks.

“We have been helping DACA recipients just so they can maintain their status here in the United States,” says Panlilio, who also provides legal assistance to Dreamers. “A lot of clients have struggled with making rent payments, making electric bill payments. So at the very least, we want to keep them in status so they can keep working.”

The Los Angeles legal aid and civil rights organization has been around since the early 1980s, and it eventually incorporated Dreamers as its clients. Panlilio joined the immigration team 10 years ago to assist with DACA applications. AJSOCAL is part of a network that is picking up all the fees, she says.

The assistance that major universities and organizations provide is a reflection of a growing need, Panlilio says. Although the legal wrangling has barred the government from processing first-time DACA applications, young people all over the country continue to apply.

In Greenville, South Carolina, Cesar Salas does outreach work with Dreamers and other immigrants who have contributed to the Latino population growth in the southern state. A DACA recipient, Salas works at the , which fosters leadership skills in immigrant youth and, with its partners, puts on pro-bono legal workshops. Before he worked for the organization, Salas himself benefited from its resources.

His family left Durango in north-central Mexico for South Carolina when he was 8 years old. Years later, he learned his adopted state is one of two—along with Alabama—that altogether deny undocumented students admission to its universities. DACA recipients can attend public colleges if they pay out-of-state tuition, but they’re banned from working jobs that require a state-issued license, such as those in health care. This is forcing Dreamers to move out of state, says the 30-year-old Salas.

“It is a big barrier,” says Salas, who himself moved to Minnesota for job opportunities after he finished high school. But South Carolina is home for him, so he eventually returned. When a position opened up at Hispanic Alliance, he quickly applied and was thrilled to get the job.

Although the majority of DACA recipients like Salas come from Mexico, Panlilio says that as the U.S. population from Asian countries has risen, so has the number of undocumented immigrants. Thousands of DACA enrollees come from countries around the world, primarily in Central and South America, but also Asia and Europe.

Wherever DACA recipients come from, advocates say they are a boon to the U.S. economy and the overall social fabric of the country where they grew up—a�Ի� granting them permanent legal status is long overdue. “If it’s going to happen, it just has to, because otherwise, it would not only affect America economically, but you would be impacting the lives of more than 600,000 people,” Panlilio says.

Sollod, of United We Dream, says advocates are looking beyond DACA and its limitations to keep pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. “This is a legislative fight that we’ve been in for a long time,” she says. “Folks have been fighting for different bills for decades, but the next two to three months before the next Congress is really, really key.”

“Of the 259 women nominated in House primaries this year, 43 percent are women of color — the highest percentage for the demographic in recent cycles,” reports. 

And despite battling numerous challenges as candidates and voters (not to mention a ), women of color are in states like Georgia to preserve voting rights against an onslaught of repressive laws and measures.

But that civic leadership comes at a high price: Women candidates of color are most likely to face misinformation and abuse compared with candidates from other demographic groups, according to a new by the Center for Democracy & Technology.

That’s a harsh reality that women of color candidates—who live at the intersections of race and gender—are increasingly skilled at navigating, says Aimee Allison. Allison is founder and president of , a national organization aiming to elevate the voice and power of women of color as national political leaders. She spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about the challenges facing women of color in the 2022 midterm elections—a�Ի� how they are responding.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Give me a sense of how far women of color have come into the political realm via elected office.

Aimee Allison: Well, I started this work with She the People really in 2016 at the DNC [Democratic National Convention], [where we] held and organized the first luncheon for women of color in Philadelphia. And at that time, women of color as a political bloc were not acknowledged. Black women, Asian American women, Latina, Indigenous, none of us. It was as if the fastest-growing and most critical voting bloc for the Democrats was, you know, absent from consideration about what policies matter, what leadership matters, and what voters matter. And much has changed.

“,” you know, you have these transformational progressive women of color leaders [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York; Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota; Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan; and Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat from Massachusetts], who … won in the midterms in 2018, build[ing] political capital.

We continue to build political capital with Vice President [Kamala Harris] in the White House and making that argument. And in 2022, we have a historic number of women of color running for office in the primaries. So that’s where we’ve come.

We basically have told the rest of the country and the political establishment of the [Democratic] Party, “Look, we’re here. We will be seen, we’ll be heard, and, most importantly, we’re standing for a set of values and policies that are important. You can’t win without us.”

The Republicans now are starting to understand that. The Democrats are starting to understand that. But the political capital that we’re building is just beginning. Having [or] winning certain select seats is very important.

And this year, the key Senate races, House races, and actually statewide attorney general, secretary of state races, all are indications of the political power that women of color have. But the truth of the matter is that women of color who ran in the primaries this year, most of them did not make it to the general [election].

And so, we still have a problem with the ecosystem of the political establishment. You know, a lot of people think that politics is about voting, and that’s a very important part of it. It isn’t just about getting our people elected to office. It’s about the consultants. It’s about what data—there’s not a lot of data about women of color—[gets collected]. It’s about which candidates donors back very early on. And the fact of the matter is that [for] women of color right now, we are still on the path to building the political power that we need in order to be seen and heard and take our rightful place.

So, there’s been progress, but we’re still on the path. [It’s] not enough, and it’s just been a few years.

Kolhatkar: How much support is the Democratic Party’s machinery—because the majority of the women of color who are running for office —how much support do they get from the machinery of the party? How much support are they getting from President Biden coming to stump for them?

Allison: I would use two concrete examples—Congresswoman , who’s running for Senate in Florida, and Chief Justice , who’s running for Senate in North Carolina—two Black women, with very impressive records in public service, sailed through their primary [elections] in large part because the political establishment backed them, and in the case of Cheri Beasley, cleared the field, so that they did not have to run a competitive primary. In that sense, it was very positive.

What we heard time and time again during the process of the primary to the general [election], is that the groups on the ground who are responsible for engaging particularly voters of color, speaking to voters, registering voters, and turning out voters were underfunded. And that coming to key voters, in the case of both North Carolina and Florida, it is not that you can go to voters of color or women of color in the last six weeks and expect to win—not in a couple of Southern states in which there’s never been a Black woman and a Democrat winning statewide in many, many years.

So, in that sense, the campaign infrastructure was underfunded. And it was underfunded for many, many months, critical months. Because, you know, the mistake of the political establishment is to look at women of color—let’s just say Black women as a subset of the women of color vote—is to look at that group as a “turnout universe,” not a “persuasion universe.”

And that might sound like a lot of gobbledygook, but actually what that really means is investing in, making the case, to this set of voters who are so critical, and making that case early. Not just [saying], “Hey, we’re gonna assume we have their vote. We don’t have to engage them, listen to them. And all we have to do is get them a vote plan.” So, it’s a very different way of looking at this group of voters.

Having said that … in these critical senate races that I’ve been talking about, we need deeper and longer-lasting investment, particularly in on-the-ground organizing, as well as [in] turnout efforts, a few weeks before the election. Both things are needed.

Kolhatkar: So, it sounds like you’re saying that the Democratic Party has had to contend with the fact that women of color are no longer content to be told how to vote; they want to represent themselves and not be represented by white women or white men?

Allison: First of all, we’re recognizing that we’re a power bloc. The recognition is growing year over year. We’re not waiting for someone to bless us or, you know, tap us. We’re expending political capital right now to run. And I think that’s why so many women of color are running very, very strong campaigns in this moment, where, you know, the rise of Republicans and the amount of that’s fueling attacks is huge and focused squarely on women of color. [It] just shows the readiness of this particular group of candidates to run, and to run competitively, to win.

I think what we need to contend with is, we have political capital, but the assumption is [that] women of color are going to vote for the Democrats. You’re right, most women of color who run, run as Dems. But in my home state of California, women of color who come of age to vote, a third of them are “decline to state” [and] don’t identify with parties.

And, in fact, She the People as an organization did a first-of-its-kind survey: 10 state listening sessions where we gathered women of color and we listened. And what we heard was pretty clear: that women of color do not like being taken for granted. That we, in fact, are a persuasion universe. That many of the ways that already-elected leaders and candidates are speaking about the issues don’t reach women of color. And that there’s not enough investment in our leadership, in our vision, yet. So, we did hear those things.

So, although the party looks at white voters, particularly white women, as swing voters that they have to win over—“Those are the swing voters that we have to both attract and catch their attention, and respond to, and pay homage to and speak their language,”—that is used in terms of white voters and white women in particular, not women of color. But the fact of the matter is that women of color are a group of voters who you can’t assume we’ll vote for any particular party or candidate.

In fact, what we heard in state after state—a�Ի� we went from California, Nevada, Texas, Georgia, Ohio—we went to 10 states that were considered battleground [states] in 2022, and we heard, “It’s not the race and gender of the leader. It’s the policies. Do we trust them to fight for our interests?”

And that’s the indication that we are maturing as a movement into a very sophisticated group of voters who are here to stay.

Kolhatkar: What are some of the main issues that you are seeing are prompting women of color to the polls? Of course, we had the overturning of abortion rights earlier this year, which Democrats were expecting was going to drive pro-abortion, pro-choice voters to the polls. And then we have the drumbeat of how the economy is failing, and it’s true that wages are not keeping up with inflation, inflation is a real concern. Are you seeing those two issues among others that are driving women of color voters to the polls?

Allison: There were three top issues that we uncovered in our national surveys that went alongside our listening sessions. The top one was pocketbook issues: the cost of rent, the cost of food, the cost of child care, the cost of living.

And that went right alongside the concern about reproductive justice. And what we discovered for women of color is that there isn’t a narrow understanding about abortion rights that’s not in and of itself a motivating issue, understood really through the economy. So, people will say, the Dobbs [abortion] issue is a top concern, but abortion is understood as … a right for women and women of color to decide when and if to have children, [which] is an economic issue.

They talked a lot about Black maternal health and access to health care. They talked a lot about the cost of daycare, child care. They talked a lot about the cost of education, along with these pocketbook issues. So, really, top of mind, going into the midterms, is that combination of the justice issues as it affects the economic, safety, and security [issues].

And then talking about safety, the other top issue was gun safety. Women of color were very clear that one of their top concerns that they want to see addressed by elected [officials] in this period is, you know, the safety of themselves and their community … and their children [from gun violence]. It continues to be a top issue.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk about threats facing women of color candidates as well as women of color voters. I mentioned a study where women of color candidates were more likely to face misinformation and abuse. We’ve seen representatives like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being the targets of attacks. And then, for voters, we’re seeing voter suppression in state after state; in states like Georgia, where Stacey Abrams is running competitively against Brian Kemp, trying for the second time to oust him. So, are those two threats—candidates facing violence and vote suppression facing voters—are those issues that concern you as well?

Allison: Yeah, I think there’s lots of examples in the days that are leading up to the election to point to. There are higher rates, as you said, of online abuse, threats, mis- and disinformation, and attack ads that are being aired constantly that play up racist themes and evoke racist tropes.

Here’s an example: Our Congressional candidate in Akron, Ohio, Ohio-13, Emilia Sykes, in a seat that could have been pretty comfortably Democratic, now has seen in the last three weeks over $10 million dollars of “dark money” that’s been poured into a very small media market, TV ads, attacking her, calling her “soft on crime,” which is using some racist tropes.

And some of these attack ads, honestly, some of them are to motivate their Trump base, because she’s running against a Trump-endorsed candidate, and some are to make people who would normally go out to vote feel disaffected and attack the motivation.

And I think you see some other races in other states, [like] Rochelle Garza, [who] is running for attorney general [in Texas]. Rochelle Garza is polling the highest of any Democrat that’s running statewide in Texas. Attorney general is key, because the Republican-dominated state legislature and the governor have actually passed some of the most restrictive and punishing anti-abortion laws, and the attorney general could [on] day one refuse to prosecute women who have had an abortion.

So, it’s a very, very important race. The attack ads and the mischaracterizations of Garza are significant. And she’s a very, very important candidate and someone who we believe has the best chance of flipping Texas blue this cycle.

Kolhatkar: In terms of voter suppression, let’s hone in on the Stacey Abrams–Brian Kemp race for governor in Georgia. I know that’s a race that you’re thinking a lot about. In 2018, Stacey Abrams lost to Brian Kemp, who, as secretary of state and candidate for governor, appeared to have done everything he could to rig the election and has done everything he can to suppress voting. (We’re also seeing an important senate race there—not involving women of color but men of color—Herschel Walker versus Raphael Warnock.) How do you foresee the Stacey Abrams–Brian Kemp rematch? Is her popularity enough to overcome the efforts that Kemp is making to seemingly cheat his way back into power today?

Allison: No, he is cheating. I mean we need to call it for it what it is. He’s doing everything he can with the infrastructure that he has laid out to prevent the idea of “one person, one vote” in Georgia to discourage voting, and he’s backed by so much dark money.

We talked about Texas, we talked about Ohio, but, you know, I was in Atlanta a couple weeks ago, and … every 30 seconds, there was an attack ad against Stacey Abrams, and that’s the environment. Plus, voter suppression, which you’ve mentioned. The difference between her run in 2018 and her run now is that Stacey Abrams and so many organizers and leaders in the state of Georgia have set up an infrastructure that focuses on turning out a multiracial base.

Stacey Abrams always told us that the old Democratic playbook of looking in the big cities, that is not the way to overcome voter suppression. We need overwhelming turnout, and so she, through , through , which is an organization she founded to defend voting rights, that infrastructure is making a difference now.

How do we know? We pulled the numbers of early vot[ing]. Now, early vot[ing] started a few days ago in Georgia, and if we look at women of color—let’s just look at Black women—Black women are 18% of the registered voting population, and they were 21% of those who voted the first week. [This] means there’s a surge.

So, if you read, hey, there’s a Republican surge in voting, you know that isn’t true in Georgia. There’s a Black women’s voting surge, which speaks very, very highly of the infrastructure that’s been built over years to make sure that people can vote and gives us some hope. That this is the way that we, with all of the other challenges, and protections, and education, and engagement, and voter turnout, that actually we’ve seen indications that in Georgia, it’s working.

So, you know, I’m not gonna make any predictions, but I am going to say it feels like a whole new day. It’s a whole new election, and Stacey Abrams’ campaign is ready in a way that is even a higher level of readiness to face Brian Kemp and all his dark money attacks. So, I’m feeling really positive about that.

That’s not a typo. The midterm elections this year are about a lot of things—abortion rights, inflation, preserving (or cutting) Social Security and Medicare—but behind all of them is whether or not U.S. democracy is going to continue to operate as it has.

That’s not because there are so many anti-democracy initiatives on the ballots, though there are a small number of states considering voter-restriction measures. The main reason is that a huge number of Republican candidates for key statewide offices, including those overseeing elections, are “election deniers” who deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, or insist without evidence that he won only because of fraud.

Many of them want to ensure a different outcome in 2024.

Democracy, however, seems to be taking a back seat to other issues in many voters’ minds. And the as we draw closer to Nov. 8. That’s a perfectly natural phenomenon, as more voters who earlier ���dzܱ����’t make up their minds or hadn’t been paying much attention start to do so.

This is on top of the fact that the party in power typically loses in the midterm elections—not always, but most of the time. Since 1934, the president’s party has , which would be enough to hand control of both houses of Congress to Republicans this year, though .

The Washington Post has counted across the country this year, . Among them, 171 are favored to win, in large part because congressional and state legislative electoral districts have become . According to The Cook Political Report, only 35 House seats nationwide are considered a toss-up race, and 25 of them are currently held by Democrats.

There are some signs, mostly in early voting numbers, that . As of Nov. 2, in 46 states, according to the at the University of Florida, . That trend is likely to yield —in 2018, a , a rate of 49.4% of eligible voters, and the .

Those voter numbers are up in both parties, but the fact that more people are voting or intending to shows a growing awareness that even the midterms are important to the future of the country.

Even a Republican sweep of both houses of Congress won’t spell an immediate end of democracy in the U.S. The party will be unable to govern with the majorities to pass its most polarizing legislation over President Biden’s inevitable veto—a�Ի�, in fact, the party hasn’t shown much inclination in recent years to do any governing, aside from cutting taxes on the wealthy and trying to thwart any Democratic administration goals.

There’s every reason to expect the MAGA-fied GOP would dive headlong into this circus. But until 2024, it’d mostly be for show. , for example. We can also expect blocking of judicial appointments, including of Supreme Court seats if there are any openings, plus , trying to , (reason to be determined), and they ���dzܱ����’t pass on their own. Plus, any number of other policies that will be bad for the economy, individual rights, the environment, and global peace, but will likely make their wealthy donors even wealthier.

Most of those proposals won’t survive, so long as a Democrat occupies the White House. But some of them might, especially if the Republicans’ tactics win concessions in must-pass legislation, such as future omnibus bills that give the government its budget authority.

The real danger is at the often-overlooked state level, where government officials have more power over elections. Some Republican candidates for state governor or the U.S. Senate are taking a card from former President Donald �հ��ܳ���’s playbook, and if they lose.

But the odds are favoring many of them to win, and not just in safely Republican states. Polling in Arizona, for example, shows a tight race for governor. According to The Post, of the 12 candidates running for statewide office or Congress, , including GOP candidate , who has become a standard-bearer for the Trumpist right and made nonexistent election fraud the centerpiece of her campaign.

That list also includes the secretary of state candidate, Mark Finchem, who was at �հ��ܳ���’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington, D.C., prior to the violent insurrection at the Capitol building, and who issued a resolution in the Arizona legislature calling . despite being hugely outspent and running a low-key campaign.

We’re seeing a similar pattern in other states, as , presumably so they can eliminate whatever “fraud” they believe to be there. (In this context, “fraud” usually means “people voting for Democrats” generally, and “Black people voting” specifically.)

It’s pretty clear we haven’t seen any significant diminishing of �հ��ܳ���’s toxic stew of racism, corruption, cult of personality, and politicization of the government to pursue his political enemies and reward his friends. That stew has boiled over into fascism (), and it’s the antithesis of what a free democratic system should be.

With all that on the line, the prospect of a victorious GOP fatally undermining fair elections for decades to come is quite real, especially as the Supreme Court weighs even further.

Once again, it’s come down to voters deciding whether the long-term future of the U.S. is outweighed by this year’s inflation rate, or if they lost their job, or if their preacher sermonizes against abortion or health care for transgender people, or if they get their news exclusively from Fox or other right-wing propaganda networks.

Focus on abortion was supposed to counter those other kitchen-table issues. Indeed, a , the first election after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, turned into a rout. On the ballot was a measure that would have rescinded a part of the state constitution that recognizes abortion as a right. , and many Democrats assumed that fear of a national ban enacted by Republicans would drive voters to the polls. That win was followed by , including flipping Alaska’s only Congressional seat blue.

People don’t like having their rights stripped away, it seems. But it also seems that an environment of persistent disinformation is muddying the waters where we desperately need more clarity.

For example: Inflation is high, but it is also a global phenomenon. The annual U.S. rate of 8.2% in September is , and well below the average rate of large and industrialized nations, 10.73%. It’s also well below the U.S.’s .

Domestic spending, especially the COVID-19 relief packages signed by President Biden, could have , and probably somewhere in between, according to most economists. You’d never know this listening to Republicans.

Or, consider a perceived rise in violent crime. Again, this is true, but it isn’t the whole story, in that the rise is comparatively small, and , let alone in earlier decades.

Meanwhile, , (especially when compared with the ), and even .

At the state level, too, abortion has taken a back seat to many other issues. . But this election, the first national election since not just the Dobbs ruling but also since the Jan. 6 insurrection, a grand total of . And four of them—California, Vermont, Montana and Kentucky—have measures that will likely reinforce the expected electoral outcome: Californians and Vermonters will vote on preserving a right to an abortion in their constitutions, while Montanans and Kentuckians will vote on enacting more restrictions. The only nationally competitive state with a measure to protect abortion rights on the ballot is Michigan. Compared with other , abortion seems like just another issue on the table.

We may still be surprised as the votes are tallied over the coming days and weeks. �հ��ܳ���’s win in 2016 was shocking because his political views were so far outside the norm that most pundits assumed he simply ���dzܱ����’t win. The fact that he did win, even with a narrow Electoral College–only victory, forced a lot of people to recognize that norms weren’t what we thought they were.

Six years after that fateful night, fascism is still in vogue in the Republican Party. And the movement is sure to outlive Trump. Inflation definitely hurts. But in the long run, fascism will hurt more. That’s why we can’t lose sight of the big picture.

Neither exists in this country. Rather than an honest sense of self-awareness when it comes to poverty in the United States, policymakers in Washington and so many states continue to legislate as if inequality weren’t an emergency for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of us. When it comes to accurately diagnosing what ails America, let alone prescribing a cure, those with the power and resources to lift the load of poverty have fallen desperately short of the mark.

With the midterm elections almost upon us, issues like raising the minimum wage, expanding health care, and extending the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit should be front and center. Instead, as the U.S. faces , the likelihood of a global economic , and the possibility that Trumpists could seize control of one or both houses of Congress (and the legislatures of a number of states), few candidates bother to talk about poverty, food insecurity, or low wages. If anything, “poor” has become a four-letter word in today’s politics, following decades of trickle-down economics, neoliberalism, stagnant wages, tax cuts for the rich, and rising household .

The irony of this “” toward the poor is that it happens despite the fact that  of the American electorate is poor or low-income. (In certain key places and races, raise that figure to 40% or more.) After all, in 2020, there were over 85 million poor and low-income people eligible to vote.  potential voters in this low-income electorate cast a ballot in the last presidential election, nearly a third of the votes cast. And they accounted for even higher percentages in key battleground states, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin, where they turned out in significant numbers to cast ballots for living wages, debt relief, and an economic stimulus.

To address the problems of our surprisingly , policymakers would have to take seriously the realities of those tens of millions of poor and low-income people, while protecting and expanding voting rights. After all, before the pandemic hit, there were  of them: 65% of Latino people (37.4 million), 60% of Black people (25.9 million), 41% of Asians (7.6 million), and 39.9% of white people (67 million) in the United States. Forty-five percent of our women and girls (73.5 million) experience poverty, 52% of our children (39 million), and 42% of our elders (20.8 million). In other words, poverty hurts people of all races, ages, genders, religions, and political parties.

Poverty on the Decline?

Given the breadth and , it should be surprising how  is being paid to the priorities of poor and low-income voters in these final weeks of election season 2022. Instead, some politicians are blaming inflation and the increasingly precarious economic position of so many on the modestly increasing paychecks of low-wage workers and pandemic economic stimulus and emergency programs. That narrative, of course, is wrong and obscures the dramatic effects in these years of COVID-19 supply-chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, and the price gouging of huge corporations extracting record profits from . The few times poverty has hit the news this midterm election season, the headlines have suggested that it’s on the decline, not a significant concern to be urgently addressed by policy initiatives that will be on  this November.

Case in point, in September, the Census Bureau released a  concluding that poverty nationwide had significantly decreased in 2021. Such lower numbers were  to an increase in government assistance during the pandemic, especially the enhanced Child Tax Credit implemented in the spring of 2021. No matter that there’s now proof positive such programs help lift the load of poverty, too few political candidates are campaigning to extend them this election season.

Similarly, in September, the Biden administration convened the , hailed as the first of its kind in more than half a century. But while that gathering may have been a historic step forward, the policy solutions it backed were largely cut from the usual mold—with calls for increases in the funding of food programs, nutritional education, and further research. Missing was an analysis of why poverty and widening inequality exist in the first place and how those realities shape our food system and so much else. Instead, the issue of hunger remained siloed off from a wider investigation of our economy and the ways it’s currently producing massive economic despair, including hunger.

To be sure, we should celebrate the fact that, because of proactive public intervention, millions of people over the past year were lifted above income brackets that would, according to the Census Bureau, qualify them as poor. But in the spirit of Dr. King’s message about diagnosing social problems and prescribing solutions, if we were to look at the formulas for the most commonly accepted measurements of poverty, it quickly becomes apparent that they’re based on a startling underassessment of what people actually need to survive, no less lead decent lives. Indeed, a sea of people are living paycheck to paycheck and crisis to crisis, bobbing above and below the poverty line as we conventionally know it. By underestimating poverty from the start, we risk reading the 2021 Census Bureau report as a confirmation that it’s no longer a pressing issue and that the actions already taken by government are enough, rather than a baseline from which to build.

Last month, for example, although a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that  were food secure in 2021, at least 53 million Americans still  food banks or community programs to keep themselves half-decently fed, a shocking number in a country as wealthy as ours. ������Ƶ than  in the past 30 days have reported experiencing some form of food insecurity. In other words, we’re talking about a deep structural problem for which policymakers should make a commitment to the priorities of the poor.

An Accurate Diagnosis

If the political history of poverty had been recorded on the Richter scale, one decision in 1969 would have registered with earthshaking magnitude. That Aug. 29, the Bureau of the Budget delivered a  to every federal government agency instructing them to use a new formula for measuring poverty. This resulted in the creation of the first, and only, official poverty measure, or OPM, which has remained in place to this day with only a little tinkering here and there.

The seeds of that 1969 memo had been planted six years earlier, when Mollie Orshansky, a statistician at the Social Security Administration,  on possible ways to measure poverty. Her math was fairly simple. To start with, she reached back to a 1955 USDA survey that found that families generally spent about one-third of their income on food. Then, using a “low-cost” food plan from the USDA, she estimated how much a low-income family of four would have to spend to meet its basic food needs and multiplied that number by three to arrive at $3,165 as a possible threshold income for those considered “poor.” It’s a formula that, with a few small changes, has been officially in use ever since.

Fast-forward five decades, factor in the rate of inflation, and the official poverty threshold in 2021 was $12,880 per year for one person and $26,500 for a family of four—meaning about 42 million Americans were considered below the official poverty line. From the beginning, though, the OPM was grounded in a somewhat arbitrary and superficial understanding of human need. Orshansky’s formula may have appeared elegant in its simplicity, but by focusing primarily on access to food, it didn’t fully take into account other critical expenses, like health care, housing, child care, and education. As even Orshansky later , it was also based on an austere assessment of how much was enough to meet a person’s needs.

As a result, the OPM fails to accurately capture how much of our population will move into and out of official poverty in their lifetimes. By studying OPM trends over the years, however, you can gain a wider view of just how chronically precarious so many of our lives are. And yet, look behind those numbers, and there are some big questions remaining about how we define poverty, questions that say much about who and what we value as a society. For the tools we use to measure quality of life are never truly objective or apolitical. In the end, they always turn out to be as much moral as statistical.

What level of human deprivation is acceptable to us? What resources does a person need to be well? These are questions any society should ask itself.

Since 1969, much has changed, even if the OPM has remained untouched. The food prices it’s based on have skyrocketed beyond the rate of inflation, along with a whole host of other expenses, like housing, prescription medicine, college tuition, gas, utilities, child care, and more modern but increasingly essential costs, including internet access and cell phones. Meanwhile, wage growth  over the past four decades, even as productivity has , meaning today’s workers are making comparatively less than their parents’ generation, even as they produce more for the economy.

, on the other hand … well, don’t get me started!

The result of all of this? The official poverty measure fails to show us the ways in which a staggeringly large group of Americans are moving in and out of crisis during their lifetimes. After all, right above the 40 million Americans who officially live in poverty, there are at least 95 to 100 million who live in a state of chronic economic precarity, just one pay cut, health crisis, extreme storm, or eviction notice from falling below that poverty line.

The Census Bureau has, in fact, recognized the limitations of the OPM and, since 2011, has also been using a second yardstick, the  (SPM). As my colleague and poverty-policy expert Shailly Gupta Barnes , while factoring in updated out-of-pocket expenses, the “SPM accounts for family income after taxes and transfers, and as such, it shows the antipoverty effects of some of the largest federal support programs.”

This is the measure that the Census Bureau and others have recently used to show that poverty is dropping, and there’s no doubt that it’s an improvement over the OPM. But even the SPM is worryingly low based on today’s economy—$31,000 for a family of four in 2021. Indeed, research by  (which I co-chair with Bishop William Barber II) and the  has shown that only when we increase the SPM by 200% do we begin to see a more accurate picture of what a stable life truly beyond the grueling reach of poverty might look like.

Volcker Shock 2.0?

Taking to heart Dr. King’s admonition about accurately assessing and acknowledging our problems, it’s important to highlight how the math behind the relatively good news on poverty from the 2021 Census Bureau data relied on a temporary boost from the enhanced Child Tax Credit. Now that Congress has allowed the CTC and its lifesaving payments to expire, expect the official 2022 poverty figures to rise. In fact, that decision is likely to prove especially dire, since the federal minimum wage is now at its  and the threat of recession is growing by the day.

Indeed, instead of building on the successes of pandemic-era anti-poverty policies and so helping millions (a position that undoubtedly would still prove popular in the midterm elections), policymakers have acted in ways guaranteed to hit millions of people directly in their pocketbooks. In response to inflation, the Federal Reserve, for instance, has been pursuing aggressive , whose main effect is to lower wages and therefore the purchasing power of lower-income and middle-income people. That decision should bring grimly to mind the austerity policies promoted by economist Paul Volcker in 1980 and the “Volcker shock” that went with them.

It’s a cruel and dangerous path to take.  suggests as much, warning that inflation-fighting policies, like raising interest rates in the U.S. and other rich countries, represent an “imprudent gamble” that threatens “worse damage than the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 shock in 2020.”

If the U.S. is to redeem itself with a vision of justice, it’s time for a deep and humble acknowledgment of the breadth and depth of poverty in the richest country in human history. Indeed, the only shock we need is one that would awaken our imaginations to the possibility of a world in which poverty no longer exists.

This story was originally published by , and is reprinted here with permission. 

On the website for H*t Chicken Sh*t, “a dinner series to end gentrification,” people were asked to pledge money or property for chicken—$100 for one piece, $50,000 for a half-bird and sides. People with access to wealth or disposable incomes were encouraged to contribute.

Over the meal, Wey, the event’s creator, said to attendees that he was “trying to match the absurdity of gentrification and the lack of affordable housing” with “the absurdity of selling hot chicken for a lot of money.”

The dinners were held over three nights and raised about $52,000. It’s the first step in a plan to raise money to support affordable housing in Nashville, where homeowners are experiencing gentrification through increased property taxes.

Now that the money is raised, Wey and his partners for H*t Chicken Sh*t will use it to set up a fund to provide grants to help keep residents of North Nashville in their homes.

Funds will go to residents of North Nashville, a historically Black neighborhood that was a site of federal redlining policies in the 1930s. It will where about 12 percent of residents are 65 years or older. Some are homeowners on fixed incomes. When they can no longer afford to pay property taxes, some residents sell their properties to developers who sell the homes for more money or demolish them to build other housing.

The new fund will help residents pay for property taxes and also fund educational resources about housing rights—like how to protect against aggressive solicitation and predatory developers.

H*t Chicken Sh*t started when curator Nicole J. Caruth invited Wey, a New Orleans-based chef and writer, and eight other artists to participate in a larger public art exhibition called Build Better Tables. Funded by��Metro Nashville Arts Committee, the project��considered how food and gentrification intersect. How to do that was up to Wey.

Wey based the Nashville dinner series on a month-long pop-up restaurant he hosted in New Orleans in February. With that event, he aimed to bring attention to racial wealth disparity in New Orleans, where the median household income in 2016 was $25,324 for Black residents and more than double that at $67,844 for White residents, .

At the pop-up, lunch plates were sold at two price options: a standard $12 available to everyone and a suggested $30 for White customers. The pop-up pointed out facts and started discussions, in person and on the internet, about the racial income gap. The net profit of lunches sold at the suggested price was redistributed to customers of color at the end of the pop-up.

Wey said he wanted his project in Nashville to make a long-term impact by actually addressing the problem he’d highlight with the dinners.

“It’s an evolution of the work that I’ve been doing already,” he said. “It’s sort of like escalating the stakes.”

In Nashville, Wey began his work by meeting with people who cared about affordable housing—people who could be partners or supporters for the project.

Over two months and dozens of meetings, he gathered information on the crisis and the work organizations were already doing. He says that this process really drove one point home: “That the only way to get the necessary capital to acquire market rate properties is for somebody to give up that money, give that money, give up that money, transfer that money, donate that money,” he said.

“There is no magic money out there. If we’re trying to fix problems around equity, that money has to come from somewhere else. It has to move from a place of high resources into areas that have lower resources.”

Nearly 1 out of 4 homeowners and 44 percent of renters in Nashville are cost-burdened, according to a . And between 2000 and 2015, there were more than 18,000 fewer units available than needed to meet demand for households with incomes below 60 percent of median household income.

Among the people Wey talked with about the housing crisis in Nashville was Brent Elrod, director of planning and development at Urban Housing Solutions, a nonprofit that provides affordable apartments.

Elrod said it is new for North Nashville, the community that this project is focused on, to be at the center of the affordable housing discussion.

“I think the problem is particularly acute in North Nashville and has not really been documented or attended to as much as it deserves,” Elrod said. He hopes the dinner series brings a “new light and sort of a new flavor … to the conversation about affordable housing in a way that I don’t [think] anyone else could do, or certainly no one else has done.”

The initial plan for the dinner was to raise enough money—with the goal set at $11.2��million—to purchase 34 duplexes that would have been transferred to a land trust. But with the dinner meeting only a fraction of its fundraising goal, and after hearing the specific housing challenges residents face, Wey and his partners have shifted gears. Instead of buying property, they’ll subsidize housing costs for residents of the neighborhood.

Another aim Wey had for the project was to help a broader audience understand how equity and wealth impact access to housing. He said that while the dinner didn’t spark as wide of a conversation as he was hoping, it did spur the realization through private conversations that wealth is connected to access to home ownership and provided people with an idea for how to change it.

“Resources are not the problem,” Wey said, pointing to wealth inequality as the source of the affordable housing crisis. “It’s the distribution of resources that are the problem, and the folks who have [resources] have to distribute those resources, because technically it belongs to everybody.”

This article was funded in part by the Surdna Foundation.

Correction:��October 29, 2018.
This article has been updated to accurately describe the origins of the H*t Chicken Sh*t project. The exhibition was curated by Nicole J. Caruth and was selected and funded by Metro Nashville Arts Committee.

The miners in Harlan County won attention across the United States for their willingness to put their bodies on the line for their beliefs. In doing so, they’re invoking the long-entrenched spirit of civil disobedience and direct action in the Appalachian Mountains. The mine wars of the early 20th century led to the rise of American unions in the 1930s and 1940s, but it’s not just coal miners who have laid claim to a history of activism.

The first day of the Harlan County train blockade, July 29, 2019, also marked the 89th day of a 24/7 protest in Kingsport, Tennessee, over a monopolistic health care provider’s move to downgrade a hospital’s emergency services and close its neonatal intensive care unit, where sick newborns are treated.

And July 29 was the 328th day of the Yellow Finch Lane tree-sits in Montgomery County, Virginia, where two anonymous tree-sitters and a small support camp block construction of a 303-mile, 42-inch wide pipeline being built to move natural gas from the fracking fields of the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in northern West Virginia to a terminal just north of Danville in southern Virginia. From there, the gas would be sent on to the East Coast, and perhaps overseas.

These ongoing actions aren’t recent aberrations. In 2018, more than 20,000 teachers in all of West Virginia’s 55 counties went on strike for two weeks to secure better pay and benefits—a�Ի� in the end were successful. That action inspired similar teacher strikes in Kentucky, Oklahoma, and elsewhere.

In the mid-’00s, activists trying to stop mountaintop removal coal mining—a form of surface mining that uses explosives to blow off ridge tops to expose underground coal seams—regularly took part in direct actions, chaining themselves to equipment, disrupting stockholder meetings, and blocking access to mine sites and facilities.

These activists run the gamut in terms of age, class, race, ethnicity and hometowns. Women tend to be more prevalent in these actions than men, but everyone shares the frustration of fighting against a system that feels rigged, where other options are blocked, and the only thing left to do is to fight using one’s body.

New generations join the fight for their rights

The depth of Appalachia’s activist tradition can be seen in Becky Crabtree of Lindside, West Virginia. Crabtree grew up near Bluefield and went to work as a teacher in McDowell County in 1975. The year she started, local teachers, including her mother, went on strike for better pay, but Crabtree was afraid of losing her new job.

“When I didn’t sign to go out on strike, teachers I loved and respected circled my car and asked why I wasn’t going to go out on strike,” Crabtree said. “It was my first grown-up job, and I told them I had agreed to work. They explained to me I had to go out on strike, and I understood. We stood together and had to go out on strike.”

The teachers struck again in 1986, and Crabtree, now with 11 years of experience, became much more involved. By 2018, she was a substitute teacher, and she didn’t go to Charleston to rally with thousands of others at the State Capitol, but she watched the children of those who did. She also took to the streets with signs of support for the striking teachers, standing with her mother and her daughters—three generations of West Virginia teachers—encouraging car drivers to honk their support.

That summer, Crabtree also protested construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline across her Monroe County sheep farm by chaining herself to her 1971 Ford Pinto—the same car the other teachers surrounded in 1975—which was placed on concrete blocks straddling the pipeline trench.

“I had done all the things I knew to work the system,” Crabtree said. “I had been to town meetings. I had spoken at pipeline-sponsored gatherings. I spoke about it on TV. We collected petitions. We had a case lined up to go to the U.S. Supreme Court about eminent domain, but they chose not to hear it this year. We had done everything we knew to do. It was all I could do, was to put my body across the pipeline.”

Ultimately, Crabtree said she disrupted about a half-day’s worth of work by pipeline crews before she was arrested and removed from the Pinto. She was charged with obstruction, but the charge was eventually dismissed.

Taking a stand—or a sit—against fossil fuels

Crabtree’s action marked just one episode in a substantial campaign against the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Tree-sitters placed their bodies in the way of pipeline construction in Monroe County, West Virginia, and Franklin, Giles, Montgomery and Roanoke counties in Virginia. The longest-running tree-sit is near the town of Elliston on Yellow Finch Lane, where, as of September 2019, tree-sitters and a support camp have been in place for more than a year.

On the day the Harlan County miners began their train blockade, the Yellow Finch tree-sit was preparing for the possible arrival of federal marshals, because the pipeline company had asked a judge to remove them. That morning, a bulldozer roared on the opposite slope of the narrow hollow as protesters made breakfast and talked about what might happen later. The judge ultimately declined to remove the protesters, who remain in the trees to buy time while other activists pursued legal and regulatory avenues to halt construction.

The anti-pipeline movement grew largely from organizing efforts that were developed more than a decade ago to fight mountaintop removal in central Appalachia. Erin McKelvy, who works with the group Appalachians Against Pipelines, grew up outside Blacksburg, Virginia, and took part in Take Back the Night rallies with her mother, a professor at Virginia Tech.

McKelvy found another mentor in Sue Daniels, a local mountaintop removal activist who took her along on a 2004 trip to Inman, Virginia, where a 3-year-old boy had been killed in his sleep by a flying boulder blasted from a nearby surface mine. The two joined with others to plan what became known as 2005’s Mountain Justice Summer and the beginning of a protracted campaign against coal companies.

The training sponsored by Mountain Justice taught McKelvy about direct action, preparing for legal fallout, speaking to media, and the importance of centering local leaders and voices.

Direct action, McKelvy said, “is a necessary tool in the toolbox. When regulatory agencies say yes to things that are in clear violation of the charters they have to protect air, water, and the environment, and when there’s so much momentum behind the sort of toxic death culture status quo, sometimes it takes physically getting in the way of those things that are destructive and dangerous to actually get anywhere.”

Making business work for communities

Numerous Yellow Finch tree-sitters cited the Dakota Access Pipeline protests of 2016 and 2017 at Standing Rock Indian Reservation as a galvanizing moment for them. That event also has inspired other actions, including a round-the-clock protest at a hospital in Kingsport, Tennessee, that as of September 2019 stretched beyond 140 days.

Dani Cook grew up in Bristol, which straddles the Tennessee-Virginia line, but was living in Charlotte, North Carolina, when she traveled to Standing Rock and spent five days with a group of military veterans supporting the protest. The experience left a lasting impression, so when Cook learned that the neonatal intensive care unit at Holston Valley Medical Center was scheduled to close as part of the hospital being downgraded as a trauma center, she took to the street.

“When I came out here, I was by myself,” Cook said. “I had no clue if anyone would come with me. All I knew is that what’s happening here is so wrong, we just have to do something. At first I thought that was emails and phone calls. I thought it was 450 people showing up at the [public] hearing. I thought, surely when the state hears from nurses and doctors and the community, it will do something. When that didn’t work, all I knew to do was to make it physical.”

Cook stationed herself on the sidewalk in front of the hospital and started talking about the plan set in motion by the hospital’s owner, Ballad Health. Before long, she was joined by other people, and since then they’ve been a constant presence on the road in front of Holston Valley, waving signs, asking motorists to sign petitions and waving to honking cars.

“Our protest is 90 percent women,” Cook said. “We have probably eight or so men who are here. Right now, it’s four of us women and one man out here. That’s pretty much the norm.”

Women take the lead throughout history

That dynamic—of women taking leadership roles and driving direct action—appears throughout Appalachia, both geographically and throughout history.

“Women putting their bodies on the line—because that is really what they’re doing— has been a historical pattern,” said Jessie Wilkerson, a professor at the University of Mississippi and author of To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice. “They always center what I and other scholars call ‘caring labor.’ They’re really emphasizing the labor that it takes to sustain life, to take care of other people, to take care of children, to take care of the environment, to take care of their communities.”

Wilkerson’s book was inspired by the Brookside Women’s Club of Harlan County, Kentucky, which played a pivotal role in the ’70s strike whose memory has been stoked by the train blockade. That’s just one example of women taking the lead in direct action.

Ollie “Widow” Combs, for example, placed her body before a bulldozer at a strip mine above her Kentucky home in 1965, leading to her arrest and inspiring future movements such as Mountain Justice, 40 years later.

Kentucky residents also picketed over potential hospital closures in Hazard, Harlan, Middlesboro, and Whitesburg in the early ’60s. Those protests eventually resulted in the establishment of numerous community-based clinics as part of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs.

“Often the story is told as the federal government swoops in and is telling people what to do, but in fact, this came from protests around Washington, D.C., and in the region because of the hospital closures,” Wilkerson said.

That action has echoes today in the Holston Valley protests.

Wilma Lee Steele, a resident of Matewan and a board member for the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, fought coal and gas companies as a landowner whose property was dramatically affected by both. She said that today’s activists increasingly connect their fights with the labor actions found throughout Appalachia’s history, such as the West Virginia mine wars, an escalating series of labor showdowns that culminated in a 1921 declaration of martial law when thousands of miners faced off against law enforcement and private detectives on Blair Mountain. That vibrant connection between the past and present, Steele said, is a good thing.

“There’s things happening in West Virginia,” Steele said. “You see communities doing something. It can be hard to see, but underneath is a wave.”

Crabtree, the teacher whose car was surrounded by striking teachers in 1975, remembered what she felt as she sat chained to that same car 43 years later, waiting in the early morning mists for pipeline crews to arrive.

“There’s nobody in sight,” she said. “Just the shadows of the trees. It’s not quite daylight but it’s not dark. It was one of the most peaceful moments of my life. That’s real important to me. There was absolutely no fear. I knew logically that no jury in Monroe County would convict me of a crime for sitting on my own land, and I was doing the right thing. It’s a wonderful feeling, of doing the right thing.”

This article was funded in part by a grant from the One Foundation.

“I feel that my vote in a way honors those in my community who cannot vote in what is a really important election here in Arizona,” he says.

Political pundits expect Latino voters like Perea to exert their growing influence in the Nov. 8 midterm election in Arizona, one of several swing states where Republican candidates continue to push against the legitimacy of President Biden’s election win in high-stake races for U.S. senator, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. on Oct. 12, Arizona’s political environment is fraught with false narratives that voter-advocacy groups are working to counter as they rally members of the nation’s fastest-growing voting bloc.

“There has been an uptick in disinformation ever since the 2020 election,” says Araceli Villezcas of , a coalition of 28 grassroots organizations across the state. “But we know that there is no proven claim of actual fraud in the election system. We bring it back to the facts and encourage people to exercise their right to vote, because what comes from elections is something that impacts everyone in their day-to-day life.”

In Arizona, and about one-quarter of the state’s 4.1 million registered voters. As the midterm election approaches, grassroots organizers are stepping up outreach to Latinos, including the high number of young people reaching voting age and naturalized citizens. , according to the UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino advocacy group. Meanwhile, , and with it the right to vote, between 2016 and 2020, according to a July report from several voter advocacy, labor, and immigration groups. In Arizona, nearly 64,000 people became citizens in that time frame.

The of voter fraud all were endorsed by former President Trump. They include former TV news anchor Kari Lake running for governor, venture capitalist Blake Masters for the Senate, state Rep. Mark Finchem for secretary of state, and former prosecutor Abraham Hamadeh for attorney general. And while an election audit affirmed the 2020 election results in Arizona, some say the current clamor of GOP candidates could confuse some voters and erode trust in the election system. Misinformation about new voting restrictions in Arizona and 17 other states is targeted at exploiting the public’s information gap and could make matters worse.

New voters and newly naturalized citizens are most likely to be Latino, and because they lack familiarity with the U.S. election system, they may be , according to a report published in August by the Brennan Center for Justice. “At the same time, election misinformation and disinformation targeting Spanish-speaking and Latino communities is particularly virulent,” the report reads. “These new voters may face greater difficulties in recognizing misinformation resulting from information gaps around recent voting law changes.”

Perea, 47, says the current political climate in his adopted state is worrisome. Although he wasn’t eligible to vote in the 2020 election, he followed politics closely and saw that �հ��ܳ���’s refusal to accept his gave license to others, including GOP candidates, to mimic his rhetoric. “It resulted in a very unpleasant situation that misinformed a lot of people,” he says. Politicians, many Republicans, boosted �հ��ܳ���’s claims of election fraud because “they knew that if they talked that way, there were going to be people who would support them.”

Unfortunately, he says, Republican candidates, such as gubernatorial candidate Lake, are taking a page from �հ��ܳ���’s political playbook, which means grassroots groups are having to redouble efforts to educate potential voters and refer them to trusted sources of election information. Perea helps to do just that as organizing director for Chispa Arizona, which works to grow the political clout of Latinos around climate change. He may be a newly registered voter, but the Phoenix resident became involved in community activism long before he obtained legal status. Perea first came to Arizona from the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the 1990s. He was undocumented for years, until he eventually became eligible for permanent residency and, later, citizenship.

Perea finds it disheartening that through his work he encounters Latinos who think their vote doesn’t matter. “Many new voters are to some extent tired of both parties, and a concern in this election is that they don’t believe their vote will make a difference.”

Perea points to the 2020 general election as a pivotal moment that proves the difference each vote can make: . Latinos were key in sending Biden to the White House, helping to flip a state that long had favored Republican presidential candidates. Until Bill Clinton was elected in 1996, .

“We’re going to have to keep fighting to make our votes count,” Perea says. “We have to reach out to our young people who are turning 18, and to people who don’t believe in politics. We have to have conversations with them, we have to educate them, and we have to encourage them to vote.”

Perea and other grassroots organizers may be in a better position now to reach out to potential voters, having grown in numbers and strengthened coalitions to combat the anti-immigrant sentiment that permeated Arizona politics after the state adopted SB 1070 in 2010. That law gave local and state police more power to enforce immigration laws and made it a crime to hire, transport, and shelter people without legal status. Although the Supreme Court struck down most of the measure’s provisions, police still can demand proof of legal status during investigations if they suspect someone is undocumented.

With the Oct. 11 voter-registration deadline approaching, grassroots groups were out in force on National Voter Registration Day, Sept. 20. In the Phoenix area, One Arizona’s Villezcas says organizers visited 17 high schools to register students old enough to vote in the election. “They had events at all the schools, so some of the schools had performances, music, and then speakers as well,” she says. “And then students that are 18 or are going to be 18 by the election were invited to come and register to vote.”

The goal is to educate young people on how the election system works, Villezcas says. “It’s all about letting them know their right when it comes to voting, how they can cast a vote, whether that’s through mail, early, or in person, it’s up to them. But we just provide that information so that they can go on. And our hope is that they become lifelong voters.”

Music and cultural festivals are another venue that Arizona One uses to attract and inspire the next generation of Latino voters and other young people of color. “The reason we do that is because we’ve seen that in the history of our state, these voters have been really underrepresented,” Villezcas says. “So our mission is to reach out to these voters that the traditional parties don’t generally or have not historically reached. And our goal in doing that is to really encourage these people to make their voices heard so that the issues that impact them, they can have a say on.”

Since March, One Arizona has registered about 120,000 new young voters and, after the voter-registration deadline, organizers will switch gears and start knocking on doors, holding face-to-face conversations, and maximizing social media messaging. “We run digital ads, we work with influencers and content creators, and then, in that way, we’re covering all our bases to make sure we reach as many people as possible,” Villezcas says.

Maico Olivares, the deputy field director for Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy, or CASE, says it’s of vital importance for organizers to visit underserved communities, where people may be more worried about how to pay the rent or afford groceries than they are about voting in the next election. “We’re going to start creating a presence in those communities where people start to see voting as a normal thing,” he says.

And even though politicians often treat Latinos as a monolith caring primarily about immigration, that is far from true. “That’s kind of a misconception that Latinos have very unique interests versus, say, Anglos; they’re pretty much the same,” says Lisa Magaña, a political scientist at Arizona State University. “It used to be immigration was maybe that significant difference, but that is actually not the issue anymore.”

The economy, jobs, and public safety, along with education and health care, were this summer in a survey commissioned by UnidosUS and Mi Familia Vota, a national voting advocacy group. The findings are consistent with what Olivares and other Arizona organizers hear when they talk with potential voters.

Whatever their reasons, Olivares is optimistic that enough Latino voters will flex their collective political muscle influence in November. “Given the sheer outcome of the previous general election, I think that momentum is going to continue into the midterm election, because Trump is still very much present in the candidates that he is putting up.”

As the 2022 midterms get closer, political attacks in campaign advertisements are on the rise.

In November, Republican  showing him physically attacking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, and President Joe Biden.

That same month, Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar called her Republican colleague Rep. Lauren Boebert  on Twitter. Even the official White House Twitter account has gotten in on the politically divisive action, making  when it snapped back in August 2022 at several Republican members of Congress who criticized the —after they themselves had their loans forgiven.

Uncivil messages by politicians have  in the past decade. Political attacks are now a regular occurrence in an increasingly polarized political environment,  ahead of Election Day in November.

But that doesn’t mean these kinds of advertisements and personal attacks actually work.

 and, as a former campaign manager and political consultant, have seen politicians use uncivil strategies firsthand with the hopes of getting themselves elected.  on political advertising suggests that highly polarized communications could be losing their persuasive power and can even backfire in the upcoming midterms, hurting a candidate’s chances.

The Impacts of Political Attack Ads

 shows that political ads and language do indeed put people in a negative mood. Even simply asking voters to  is enough to get them angry. This negativity is amplified if an ad  an opposing candidate.

There is also evidence that this anger carries over to voting behavior. Data from U.S. elections from 2000 to 2012 shows that negative political TV commercials make people less likely to vote for the attacked politician, but also make  to .

Politicians tend to use  on social media compared with their advertising on television, however. This might be because social media attracts a smaller, more targeted audience, and perhaps candidates fear that these kinds of tactics could demobilize supporters.

The Rise of Polarization

There are a few factors that help explain why political campaigns and attacks on opponents have become more toxic in recent years.

First off, voters are  than ever before. This emotion about politics has been linked to the  and —for example, close presidential elections.

Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. are also . This social polarization comes as  than ever before. Being a Democrat or a Republican is a core part of who the voter is and shapes both their political decisions—like whom they vote for—as well as their nonpolitical ones, like whom they hang out with.

Given these factors, conversations about politics are increasingly happening among people who already agree on political issues.

Politicians like former President  and others seem to be leveraging the fact that they are preaching to the choir, so to speak, and are using  to attack the other side.

Whether language is polarized or not is a subjective question, but my research and the work of others has focused on  and .

The Declining Power of Polarized Messaging

There is some evidence that voters may be getting tired of negative political communications flooding their screens.

Using data from the 2016 U.S. presidential election, my collaborators and I found that political ad messages that are more polarized .

Specifically, we found that voters prefer more centrist and more consistent messaging in political ads, at least in the contexts of recent presidential elections. This research used text analysis methods, which allowed us to score each ad for how polarized the messaging was as well as how consistent the messaging was for the candidate.

Polarized messages particularly hurt a candidate’s election chances if they are —that is, for politicians who are typically moderate, and then try to go extreme.

Looking Ahead to the 2022 Midterms

There’s a  in the upcoming midterm elections in November 2022, as every House seat and about one-third of the Senate seats are up for grabs. A record-setting  in political ad spending is expected for this midterm election season.

If the dominant tone of this messaging is toxic, political campaigns run the risk of disengaging more and more voters.

 shows that there are emerging consequences of polarized communications that can hurt candidates in the polls. These insights may encourage political campaigns to test different ad strategies this midterm, perhaps curbing the negativity.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Julie Elman, like many artists, struggles with fear of the blank page. The creative process demands risk-taking, resilience, and messiness. An associate professor of visual communication at Ohio University, Elman understood the expectation to practice what she preached. To move beyond her fear and to explore what she was teaching her students, she conceived the Fear Project.

People submit their fears to the project’s website, and Elman visually interprets them, bringing them to life. Perhaps the most interesting part, aside from the striking visuals, is the resulting effect. The venture brings different fears together on one interface, normalizing and destigmatizing fear as a bad part of everyday life.

Though Elman admits that she is no psychologist, she posits that, to a certain degree, sharing and voicing a fear can be validating. And after validation comes solidarity. “I can try to translate the person’s description of a fear into something visual that others can relate to,” she explains.

Psychologist, author, and professor Noam Shpancer says that speaking out about difficult experiences or fears provides a sense of strength, security, and relief. Thus, one scared voice becomes a community of empowered voices. “We tend to find solace in the knowledge that we are not alone in our troubles,” he explains. In psychology, it’s well established that confronting fear is essential in learning to manage it. The Fear Project’s root in the visual only emphasizes this. “Great art articulates for us things about ourselves and our experience that cannot be easily and well expressed otherwise,” Shpancer adds. Like what Elman does: She opens a forum to explore fears among us.

She approaches each submission, each fear, the same way: Don’t overanalyze, just do.

Dubbed the “fear collector” by��Modern Weekly, Elman describes how what began as an experimental exercise evolved into an ongoing creative undertaking. “It didn’t take me long to get past any fears I had about pumping something out and putting it out there. The good, the bad, and the ugly—I posted them all.” The subsequent pieces range from the fear of moths to the fear of peeing in front of others. She always follows her gut, creating high-impact images through the use of vibrant, screaming color.

The majority of her pieces include passages from actual submissions while others feature what is called “asemic writing.” This kind of illegible, nonspecific writing adds texture and, in Elman’s opinion, captures the very core of that person’s fear. “I imagine what the person might be saying, or shouting, at that time, and I scribble out those words without making them legible. In some way, I think this infuses the spirit of that person, and his or her fear, into the piece I’m creating.” It is this relationship among fear, individual, and artist that drives the project forward, making fear acceptable and tangible.

Elman isn’t sure what makes fear so compelling. On a personal level, she says she wants to avoid dwelling in the negative and believes that fear’s universality, in contrast to the lengths we go to conceal it from others, dictates many of our choices. Ironically, still a worrier by nature, Elman understands that finding ways to push through beats the bleak alternative: “Sitting at home, curled up in a ball, avoiding that very thing that scares us most.”

Fear, she says, either cripples or motivates, and the ones we grant control to almost always have the potential to provide us with the most memorable moments.

To see more of Elman’s “Fear Project,” visit her website at��.

Enter Andrew Yang, the businessman-turned-Democratic-presidential-hopeful, and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. Together, Yang and Whitman have unveiled their next act: the Forward Party, which claims to be politically centrist. “,” its website intones, trying to “” a catchphrase into the vernacular.

There is a case to be made for third (and fourth, and fifth) parties in our political system. And as at least one of the major political parties further entrenches itself with the ideological far-Right, the moment could be ripe for a viable third option to fill the ever-growing chasm between Republicans and Democrats.

But the U.S. has a long history with third parties that never amounted to anything. This is, in part, because there has been a fair amount of ideological wiggle room within the two major parties for political questions of the day, since those parties coalesced in the mid-19th century.

Since the Civil War, Southern Democrats comprised their own interest group within the party, one that was rooted in White supremacy and revisionism about the Confederacy, until they began to peel away in 1948, after President Harry Truman announced the . These “Dixiecrats” won four Southern states in the 1948 general election, in which they nominated then-South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond to appear as the “official” Democratic nominee on ballots in those four states. The party didn’t survive as an entity after 1948, and by 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, almost all the Dixiecrats and their allies had joined the Republican Party.

This, by historical standards, was one of the more successful third-party movements in the U.S. Because the movement was governed by a common ideology (support for segregation), it was clear on its goal—not to win the presidency, but rather to in the South, possibly by forcing the election into a vote in the House of Representatives. In the process, the Dixiecrats’ revolt broke the hold the Democratic Party had on the “,” enabling the region’s eventual shift into the Republican column.

Prior to that, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive “Bull Moose” Party in 1912 helped Roosevelt come in second in a three-way race between incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and the winner, Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

But the most recent example of a nearly viable third party in American politics is the Tea Party movement. It wasn’t a true party, but rather, following the 2008 financial crisis, emerged as a smallish grassroots movement with a distinctly Libertarian flavor. The Tea Party was opposed to government spending and corporate taxation, but otherwise, like many Libertarians of the time, many on cultural issues like abortion and same-sex relationships, believing those were issues of individual rights that should not be infringed upon.

That changed when President Barack Obama was elected later that year, and the movement grew in prominence—thanks in no small part to like the Koch brothers. By 2013, the pollster Rasmussen found that , and that nearly two-thirds of Republicans had a favorable view of, or saw their views aligned with, the views of the movement. Rather than fading away after its revolutionary energy abated, the Tea Partiers found an enabler in Donald Trump, who united three right-wing political tenets into a juggernaut of anti-establishment anger: , , and huge tax giveaways to the wealthy, which looked less like an economic policy than a .

During its rapid rise, the Tea Party also ceased being a grassroots movement and quickly became a major source of , staging fake grassroots events and protests that were actually funded by wealthy backers like the Kochs.

The Tea Party, like the Dixiecrats and the Progressives before it, was ideological. Much like political parties in other democracies, the movement’s ideological cohesion helped propel it into power.

But the irresistible force of an outsider third-party movement also runs headfirst into the immovable object of the American election system. A large amount of power is vested in the office of the presidency, and the occupant is (usually, but not always) supported by an absolute majority of the population. Single-member districts in the House of Representatives ensure that smaller parties will be disenfranchised from representing their states. By contrast, in parliamentary systems, a third party that passes a critical threshold of public support (5%, for example) usually receives a proportionate number of seats in the national legislature.

Short of instituting in Congress and state legislatures, there just aren’t any avenues to real power in the U.S. for a small third party. And third parties have neither the money and fundraising apparatuses of the two major parties, nor the network of consultants, PACs, mailing lists, volunteers, and other affiliated non-party groups that constitute its own underground political economy.

Power resides in the parties, and that’s reinforced by mass media that treats primary elections as an inviolable part of our system, when in fact they are simply outgrowths of back-room deals made at conventions to hand-pick candidates. The Constitution, notably, says nothing about primaries or political parties.

That presents an often-insurmountable challenge to third parties, whose best results are achieved when they can influence one of the two big ones.

That’s what happened with the Republican Party, taken over by a radical movement that is now actively purging people who won’t adhere to its ideological core.

Case in point: Liz Cheney. The incumbent Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, who voted in step with the Trump administration 93% of the time, was election by Harriet Hageman, a , but who was endorsed by Trump because she gave credence to �հ��ܳ���’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen.

Cheney, of course, was one of the few Republican elected officials to vote in favor of �հ��ܳ���’s impeachment after the Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the election of President Joe Biden. To add insult to the grievous injury to �հ��ܳ���’s ego, Cheney, as vice chair of the congressional select committee investigating �հ��ܳ���’s attempted coup, has pulled no punches and has emerged as one of and his .

In this regard, the Republican Party is coming to resemble a parliamentary party: ideological and focused on specific political goals, rather than broad-based and focused on governing. Whether that means the Republican Party becomes a much smaller entity in terms of representation remains to be seen. Several Trumpist election deniers are —presumably to ensure that in 2024, the will succeed. Coupled with more widespread voter suppression, an anti-democratic seizure of power is the only way an extremist movement without a majority of popular support could win the presidency.

But if the GOP shrinks to a hard, embittered, ideological fringe movement, that presumably might create room for more parties to emerge: one moderate-to-conservative, one more mainstream liberal, one progressive.

We already have two “third” parties that might fit the bill, but they’ve largely failed to gain any real traction on the national or local scenes. The Libertarians have been around since 1972, but none has won election to anything higher than a state legislature. Michigan’s Justin Amash became the first Libertarian member of Congress in 2020, but only after having been elected as a Republican in 2010 and subsequently leaving the party in 2019. .

The Green Party remains a distant fourth place in enrollment, with about 245,000 members nationwide (compared with the Libertarians’ approximately 695,000). The Greens would seem to be a natural home for eco-conscious and progressive voters. But unlike their European counterparts, who are , the U.S. Greens’ electoral results have been even more dismal than the Libertarians’, having only since 1999. The party has a tendency to nominate either celebrity candidates (such as Ralph Nader) or complete unknowns (Jill Stein) who get labeled as spoilers.

The Forward Party would seem to be positioned for the moderate-right wavelength on the political spectrum, judging from the politics of its two most prominent members. But the Libertarian Party already occupies a similar ideological position.

And Yang’s statements have made clear the party’s outlook is �ԴDz�­-ideological. The party’s is a three-step process to “fearlessly seek diverse and new ideas,” “come together around sensible solutions,” and “actually DO something.”

“We are starting from a refreshingly simple premise: Every problem has a solution most Americans can support (really),” the group’s website states. “We just have to cut out the extreme partisanship, reintroduce a competition of ideas, and work together in good faith.”

Sounds great. What country is this party going to be operating in, again?

The shallowness of this approach was on full display in , in which Yang wasn’t able to give a straight answer as to whether his party would be a spoiler for Democrats, or ���dzܱ����’t say whether the party would support abortion rights, or if 18-year-olds can buy AR-15s.

That’s not a good start, and it may be the end of the party even before it starts. If Forward is to emerge as a viable party instead of a Yang-ish cult of personality, it’s going to have to answer some questions, including on the most pressing and polarizing issues we face.

But it’s either that, in which case Forward ought to get comfortable being labeled a spoiler by either Democrats or Republicans (since it’s highly unlikely they’d actually win), or Forward may hope to join the ranks of the Dixiecrats or Bull Moose Progressives and influence the larger parties. If not, it’ll join the , two , the , the , the (supporting “”), the , and dozens of others—the roadkill on the shoulders of America’s political highways. They may be good for a headline or a punch line, but once they strut their hour on the stage and exit, they’re quickly forgotten.

Many responses echoed �հ��ܳ���’s own framing of the search. In his  his residence was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.” In the statement, replete with war metaphors, Trump alleged that executing a legal warrant was “the weaponization of the Justice System” and an “assault” that “could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries.”

�հ��ܳ���’s framing of the event was  commenting immediately on Twitter, despite the fact that they, like Democrats and the public, lacked relevant knowledge of the facts of the case that prompted the search and .

The impulse to hastily legitimize �հ��ܳ���’s perspective illustrates a dangerous rhetorical strategy frequently employed by GOP politicians during the Trump era: .

Conditioned to Accept Violence

Message laundering occurs when inflammatory language or unsubstantiated claims are mixed with mainstream partisan communication and presented to the public with an air of respectability. Just as  enabled mobsters to disguise their ill-gotten gains as the profits of a legitimate business, message laundering presents dishonest and dangerous speech as credible, innocuous, or persuasive.

As a , I study how rhetoric strengthens or erodes democratic institutions. The aftermath of the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search illustrates how message laundering can undermine democratic processes and gradually condition its audience to expect and accept violence.

After Trump released his statement, Conservative politicians echoed key aspects of his message. Some sanitized �հ��ܳ���’s ideas by combining them with more measured critique or references to democratic processes.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California,  an “intolerable state of weaponized politicization” in the Department of Justice, even as he promised to “follow the facts” and “leave no stone unturned” if the GOP retook the House.  interpreted his directive to Attorney General Merrick Garland, “preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” . But the tweet launders �հ��ܳ���’s notion of a weaponized DOJ by combining it with McCarthy’s promise to use democratic processes to “follow the facts.”

Similarly, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recycled �հ��ܳ���’s war metaphors in , saying, “The FBI raid on President �հ��ܳ���’s home is an unprecedented political weaponization of the Justice Department.” She tempered that imagery, however, by appealing to the rule of law in the same tweet, asserting that “using the criminal justice system in this manner is un-American.”

Not all of the GOP’s early statements were measured, however. Some laundered more extreme ideas and edged readers toward an acceptance of violence.

In a  sent the night of the search, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis labeled the search a “raid” and described it as “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.” He continued, saying, “Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.”

DeSantis’ invocation of “the Regime” legitimizes a fringe  by Michael Anton, a right-wing commentator and member of �հ��ܳ���’s administration. Anton speculates that Democratic elected officials would work in concert with members of the Biden administration, liberal judges, and the media—who, together, form “the Regime”—to prevent Trump from taking office again using legal or illegal means.

DeSantis combined his threat with a reference to a  that would allocate “$80 billion to the IRS.”

McCarthy also referred to that aspect of the bill,  a “new army of 87,000 IRS agents” are “coming for” American taxpayers.  and  debunked the notion. Yet Republicans .

“Gestapo” and “Brown Shirts”

The imagery of an “army” of federal agents turned against ordinary Americans via legislative mandate legitimized the alarmist rhetoric that followed. As GOP tweets coalesced, the line item from the Inflation Reduction Act merged with reports of the Mar-a-Lago search in ways designed to make individual voters feel vulnerable.

Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Republican from Georgia, , “If they weaponize the FBI to go after President Trump, they will surely weaponize the IRS’s 87,000 new agents to go after you.”

The GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee , “If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you.” Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, , “This #DepartmentOfInjustice must be held accountable. It was President Trump today, but it’s you next if we don’t take a stand.”

After making audiences feel personally threatened, GOP messaging returned to the war posture implied in �հ��ܳ���’s original statement.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia,  that the FBI “raiding President �հ��ܳ���’s home” was the “type of things that happen in countries during civil war.” Conservative pundits and politicians cast FBI agents as “” and “,” the latter referring to Hitler’s storm troopers. In an interview on Fox News, Sen. Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, , “This should scare the living daylights out of American citizens” and compared the U.S. federal government to the Nazis, the Soviet Union, and Latin American dictatorships.

What’s Next, #CivilWar?

 have  that once political opponents are cast in those terms, democratic remedies are insufficient. The opponent must be destroyed, and violent repercussions seem reasonable.

A Bloomberg newsletter  that during the week of Aug. 8, the #CivilWar hashtag gained traction on various platforms, reflecting a “war-time mentality [that] has become increasingly common since it’s started to find footing with politicians.”

The Texas Nationalist Movement issued  citing the “raid” on Mar-a-Lago, the “weaponization and politicization of the federal instruments of power,” and the “announcement of the hiring of 87,000 IRS agents” as grounds for Texas to secede.

During the week that followed the Mar-a-Lago search, FBI  numerous instances of individuals threatening FBI field offices, with some confrontations ending in violence. On Aug. 12, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security released a  documenting an increase in violent threats to law enforcement and other government officials.

Message laundering does not always result in politically motivated violence, but it can make violence seem like a logical and reasonable response to partisan disagreement. Voters should be aware of this rhetorical tactic.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read .

Still, these civic leaders face significant hurdles, particularly when they campaign in the many districts where Indigenous people aren’t the majority. They must overcome the limited mainstream awareness of Indigeneity and Indigenous issues, remnants of colonialism and lateral violence, and competing interests.

Crystal Cavalier, a community activist and enrolled citizen of the North Carolina–recognized Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, ran in the stacked Democratic primary for U.S. House in North Carolina’s Congressional District 4 in May. The majority of the 875,000 voters in that district identify as being of European origin (54.4%) and female (51.5%). Cavalier didn’t advance to the general election, but she plans to run again in 2024.

For Cavalier, running for office is just one part of a longer journey in activism. She has a background as a certified cyber and information security analyst, with degrees in political science and public administration. Cavalier and her husband co-founded the nonprofit for ecological and community activism. They have so far successfully opposed the Mountain Valley Pipeline and Southgate Extension, which would cut through their community.

“I’ve been fighting for the community that I live in,” Cavalier says.

Lawmakers and organizations have called the proposed pipeline an “environmental catastrophe with no certainty of completion.” County commissioners in Cavalier’s community , as it posed dangers to the local Haw River, drinking water, public safety, and property values. Cavalier hosts regular organizer calls and and in civic leadership, such as Steven Pulliam, Riverkeeper of the nearby Dan River. 

“Being a Water Protector means you understand that water is your relative,” she says. “You’re speaking up for something that doesn’t have a voice.”&�Բ�����;

A of the project; however, it still cannot proceed until the Mainline System Project receives all permits.

“We’re calling on Biden to stop the MVP. He can issue an executive order or just stop the entire thing,” Cavalier says. But, as is, “Biden is not making good on his campaign promises to Indigenous communities.”&�Բ�����;

Missing and Murdered Indigenous People

Another campaign issue involved resolution of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People issues, such as unsolved crimes and a legal framework to prosecute non-Indigenous assailants and criminals who perpetrate crimes on Indigenous territories or communities. 

Cavalier advocates for Missing and Murdered Indigenous People concurrently with pipeline opposition. “These oil and extractive industries come into areas where tribes settled and influence violence, human and drug trafficking. So, it’s important to highlight climate justice with racial equity.”&�Բ�����;

Peter Landeros, the executive director of in the DMV region, agrees: “Even though the Biden administration stated that they would allocate funds, we really haven’t seen much progress on that end,” Landeros says. “We’re still having the same issues on reservations and urban areas with Native populations. And nobody is willing to discuss changing laws to prosecute non-Native perpetrators.”

Indigenous organizers like Cavalier and Landeros have worked for decades to bring visibility to issues like Missing and Murdered Indigenous People cases, voting rights, and pipelines’ impacts on waterways—issues that have a disproportionate impact on Indigenous and other marginalized communities but often receive little intervention or attention. 

Elizabeth Mercedes Krause is an Oglala–Lakota citizen who recently won the primary election in Nevada’s U.S. House District 2. MMIP is a top concern in her district, which is split almost evenly between male and female, but is only 2.3% Native American. Nevada’s Indigenous population ranked as the in 2019, and as in the 2020 Census. 

“The top four questions asked of me by community were regarding missing and murdered Indigenous U.S. people,” Krause says. And for good reason. “Indigenous more likely to be murdered than the national average,” she says. “Four out of five will experience violence. Homicide is the leading cause of death between ages 10 and 24.”&�Բ�����;

But deep bias against Native Americans still blinds law enforcement to victim identities and creates glaring gaps in data. The identity and data erasure is in civil and criminal procedures. And that’s if cases are even investigated in the first place.

In May, Krause attended an MMIP event in her area where a family told their story of losing one daughter, then a second, and then the grandchildren. Aunts and extended relatives now care for the remaining children, with no word yet on suspects, locations of their family members, or outcomes. 

“My God,” she says. “We have to have regulated mandates and funding for accurate reporting, so alerts are going out to as many systems as fast as possible when there is a missing person.”

Krause stated that while there are positive initiatives happening, there is still much to be done on the legislative and law enforcement side, both to properly collate data and to issue timely alerts.

A lack of trust in local and federal law enforcement is a huge factor, according to Paula Jillian, senior policy specialist at the . After hundreds of years of broken treaties, genocidal behavior, and assimilation tactics, Indigenous communities have a deep distrust of law enforcement, and much remains to be seen in the way officials handle cases and complaints.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs itself is under fire for refusal to enforce laws for its own officers. On April 15, 2022, for example, the Montana Supreme Court heard a case where the state U.S. Attorney’s Office argued the BIA is not liable for the conduct of its in her home, on her reservation, and threatened to take away her children—maliciously harkening to the traumatic and not-too-distant-past policy of “Indian child removal.”

Still, Jillian’s organization continues to fight for solutions. It is calling for federal assistance to investigate MMIP cases as well as federal accountability for the discrimination, abuse, and violence of law enforcement and federal officials against Native peoples.

“We do not yet have results that are ʻmeasurable’ or ʻmeaningful,’” Jillian says. 

Cavalier emphasizes the increased levels of violence and human trafficking associated with extractive industries, like oil, in tribal areas. The two are closely linked. 

Cavalier cites a 2017 report on MMIP by the , which didn’t include data for the Southeast U.S. at all. Some of the reasons for that are historical. While the Indian Removal Act and the Civil War caused mass migration of Free People of Color westward between 1830 and 1865, there are still people who identify as Native in the Southeast region. 

“It’s important to highlight climate justice with racial equity, because [authorities] often view Indigenous people as invisible,” Cavalier says. “The government wants people to believe that anybody east of the Mississippi is not Native, and that’s not true.”&�Բ�����;

Fresh Energy

Patrick Pihana Branco is a former diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service and a Native Hawaiian state-level representative in Hawaiʻi’s District 50. He is running in the general election for U.S. Congressional District 2 on Aug. 13. The area is not just ethnically diverse, but geographically so, with seven different islands—all distinct communities with different issues to address. Still, Native Hawaiian communities make up a minority of the population. 

Sustainable energy is a high priority in Hawaiʻi, as , and it has some of the . 

“I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly Indigenous issue, but something all of Hawaiʻi has agreed is important,” Branco says. He points out that Hawaiʻi was the first state to adopt the Paris Climate Accords and , and it’s also one of the only states that can produce all forms of renewable energy: wind, wave, solar, and geothermal. “It’s very important we harness all of these technologies for our future,” Branco says. 

He sees Native leadership as an important aspect of achieving improved rights and conditions for Native Hawaiians, both in terms of renewable energy and beyond. That’s why Branco intends to host a mentorship program for future Native candidates based on a program he participated in with Congressman Charles Rangel in Washington, D.C., as a. The program provided mentoring as a foreign service diplomat, including travel training to support them in diverse representation.

“He created a program that included 20 diverse people from around the country,” Branco says. “I was the first from Hawaiʻi to be selected. Since then, I’ve kept that in my current role at the state legislature to make sure that my office is always a safe place for young people when they want to come and learn. And I’m very proud that several of those who worked for me in my state office have now gone on to law school or into fellowships, and some are even considering running for office.”&�Բ�����;

Native Leadership

But despite these efforts, in 2022, Native Americans don’t have equal representation or voting rights. 

In Elizabeth Mercedes Krause’s region of Nevada, she says, “Only 11 out of our 28 tribal communities have polling places that are guaranteed under law.” Members of the Yemba community actually went out to remote areas on horseback to collect ballots, she says.

Krause, a graduate of Advanced Native Political Leadership, says, based on the distribution of tribal communities, they should have 64 representatives statewide in Nevada. But the real number is less than five. 

“I am taking an inventory of all of the things I’m experiencing that I need more support in,” Krause says. “We need structures built to support our running.”

Between efforts like Krause’s and Branco’s, Indigenous candidates are not only increasing representation of Native communities and raising awareness in mainstream elections, but also trailblazing solid paths for Indigenous voices to be heard and respected in the collective consciousness of the United States.

Branco feels both amazement and hope as he looks forward. “My story is unique, and I have to give something back to Hawaiʻi,” he says. “I’m honored, and I really do believe my story is only possible because I had those who cared for me and really invested in me. And it’s now my turn to care and invest for our community.”

Candidates from the Democratic, Republican, and Libertarian parties answered questions posed by tribal leaders as well as by Native and non-Native attorneys and by staffers from Native nonprofits, such as the National Congress of American Indians. Amber Torres, chairwoman of , in Schurz, Nevada, served on one of these panels and says she felt “honored and blessed to take part in something that affects all of Indian country.”

This was the first of four Native-run candidate forums in swing states leading up to the 2022 election. In battleground states like Nevada, elections may be decided by a few thousand or even a few hundred votes. With this in mind, Native Americans there are establishing their presence, affirming their voting rights, and developing allies. Though sparsely covered by the media or election pollsters, Native voters care deeply about a place where they have lived for millennia and are determined to learn about candidates who will take it in a good direction.

Some of the Nevada discussions focused on policy—candidates’ support for economic development and increased broadband access on reservations, for example. Other exchanges were intensely personal. One young tribal member told Nevada’s attorney general, Aaron Ford, who is running for re-election, of racial slurs he experiences. The young man asked how Ford, a Black man, copes with this.

Remember your ancestors, Ford responded, and related the story of his enslaved four-times-great-grandfather, killed on the auction block when he declared he did not wish be sold and separated from his wife and children. “This is especially important at a time when people are trying to rewrite or erase history,” Ford said.

Mercedes Krause, an Oglala Lakota running for a Nevada seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, who was also a candidate at the forum, said, “After the meeting, I thanked the young man for being brave enough and trusting enough to ask his question.” Krause says the question “impacted me powerfully as a person and as a candidate.” It gave her the courage, she says, to persist in her effort to be a voice for her constituents in rural northeastern Nevada, many of whom—Native and non-Native alike—are struggling financially.

“I want them all to have dignified quality of life,” Krause says.

Outsized Impact

Though the 2020 Census found the Indigenous population to be relatively small in the U.S. overall—about 11 million individuals describe themselves as American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander, either entirely or in combination with ancestry from other groups—they are clustered in certain states, increasing their political clout there. Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, which, like Nevada, anticipate close contests in November, will host the next three candidate forums that OJ Semans is organizing in the coming months. “These are all states where there is a large enough Native voting-age population to determine the outcome of the election,” Semans says.

He estimates that Georgia has 100,000 voting-age Natives. Arizona has 300,000-plus, and Wisconsin has more than. In Nevada, the number tops 60,000. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report .

Natives are not party-line voters, Semans cautions. They are resolutely issue-oriented and typically find their priorities supported by Democrats, he says. President Biden, for example, has re-established the Tribal Nations Summit in Washington, D.C., reinstated the advisory White House Council on Native American Affairs, and appointed Native people to high-level positions. These include former New Mexico Democratic Congresswoman Debra Haaland of Laguna Pueblo as Secretary of the Interior Department, and Charles “Chuck” Sams III of the Cayuse and Walla Walla tribes to head the National Park Service.

The goal is not to throw any election any particular way, Randi Lone Eagle, chairwoman of Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, told the forum. It’s about having a seat at the policymaking table, with elected officials responsive to your concerns.

Issues of Concern

Native issues discussed in Nevada included some that may be unfamiliar to non-Natives: tribal sovereignty; safeguards for children, families, and tribes under the Indian Child Welfare Act; and the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people—primarily women and girls.

Attorneys at the Nevada forum also explained voting-rights law and the scores of federal lawsuits won since the 1960s to give Natives equal ballot-box access nationwide. They discussed , a 2016 federal lawsuit in which a judge . One of several voting-rights suits organized by Four Directions over the years, the Sanchez decision led Nevada to in 2021.

The Native right to cast a ballot in that state had previously been variable and subject to —refusing to set up early voting on reservations, for example, which forced voters there to make long, prohibitively expensive journeys to mainly non-Native towns. If and when the Native voters got to these voting places, they , according to an Associated Press report.

To support the state voting-rights law and provide accessible, voter-friendly polling places, training sessions at the Nevada forum showed participants how to request reservation voting sites, set up ballot drop boxes, plan get-out-the-vote campaigns, recruit Native poll workers, and more. “We want to elect representatives who see us and hear us,” Krause declared in her speech to the attendees.

Krause and Cherokee Nevada State Assembly candidate Shea Backus—who also spoke at the forum—are part of a trend that began nearly a century ago, when Natives gained U.S. citizenship and the right to vote in 1924. Since then, despite limited registration opportunities, reduced voting hours, and long journeys to polling places where they faced intimidation, they have managed to provide the winning margin for numerous candidates, among them Sens. , a Democrat from Montana; , a Republican from Alaska; and , a Democrat from Washington.

Since 2018, Natives have made news not just as voters but also as successful candidates for local, state, and national offices. That year, Peggy Flanagan of White Earth Nation became Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, and Sharice Davids of Ho-Chunk Nation and Debra Haaland won congressional seats for Kansas and New Mexico, respectively. Others, such as Troy Heinert, Rosebud Sioux, won not just state legislative seats but also party leadership positions, in his case as minority leader of the South Dakota senate.

In 2020, the national Native news source a record-breaking number of Native candidates nationwide: 114, with 72 of them winning their races. 

Outsized Burden

As Native people participate in the political process, they recognize the similarity of their burdens to those of other marginalized groups. Don Ragona, Matinecock, development director of the Native American Rights Fund, explored this idea with a multicultural panel. The group featured Jeanine Abrams McLean, the Black president of Fair Count Georgia, and Xavier Morales, the Latinx executive director of The Praxis Project, a national group. Both described their organizations’ efforts to empower community-led change, and both stressed the resemblance of various peoples’ hurdles in elections and in American society more broadly.

Krause agrees. Campaigning in rural northern Nevada, she finds similar needs—for better education and health care and for living wages, for example—among Native and non-Native constituents. Meanwhile, isolation and poverty make it hard for both groups to access the ballot box. Krause’s campaign “is all about doing something with purpose for community,” she says.

For Native people, this spirit of purpose embraces many issues and numerous communities and extends over countless years, according to meeting organizer Semans. Many have fought and died for you to be here today, he told the audience. “Never think you’re alone.”

In this new U.S., the from coal-fired power plants under the Clean Air Act because the law, which first passed in 1963, doesn’t specifically give the government that power. In addition, local . But it can . But it . But it can .

The common thread is the Supreme Court is the most radically… I don’t even want to say “Conservative,” because this court has been throwing out precedents the way . So … interventionist? Revanchist? Insurrectionist?

There’s a great line (one of many) in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic Young Frankenstein. In the scene, the monster has broken loose, the villagers are massing in the town square, and Police Inspector Kemp (played by Kenneth Mars), comes out to address the angry mob: “”

There comes a point when enough is enough, and people take to the streets.

Comedy aside, this is deadly serious stuff: All forms of societies occasionally experience massive direct action, both violent and not. In general, it doesn’t seem to matter whether that society is democratic or autocratic: There comes a point when enough is enough, and people take to the streets.

As billionaire investor Nick Hanauer wrote a few years ago, “.” And the Supreme Court’s actions may be the spark that gets the torches burning.

Hanauer was writing in 2014 about the destabilizing effects of wealth hoarding by the top one-hundredth of the 1%, but there’s plenty more happening recently that is tearing the seams of U.S. society apart.

A lot has changed since 2014: The U.S. has gone from a country that, with its first Black president, looked as if it might finally start to live up to its oft-bragged-about higher purpose, to a country that just barely dodged a fascistic coup, whose enablers and supporters are still working to undermine American democracy.

On June 24 this year, a movement that first coalesced nearly five decades ago finally achieved its goal, and the Supreme Court, now dominated by a radical right-wing supermajority, for the first time in U.S. history overturned a long-established precedent to rescind a fundamental human right.

There’s not a lot to say about the Supreme Court’s opinion in , which overturned Roe v. Wade, that hasn’t already been said. The most succinct criticism came from Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan’s fiery : “The majority has overruled Roe and Casey for one and only one reason: because it has always despised them, and now it has the votes to discard them. The majority thereby substitutes a rule by judges for the rule of law.”

The slate of decisions issued by the court this term have reversed decades of progress and even civil stability.

In other words, they did it because they could. Nothing else—precedent, the merits of the case, public opinion, or the fact that abortion bans only make safe abortions impossible—mattered.

But abortion is just the beginning. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his to Dobbs that three landmark cases should be overturned: , , and decisions, which affirmed the rights, respectively, to same-sex marriage, sexual behavior between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home, and the use of contraception by married couples.

Taken as a whole, the slate of decisions issued by the court this term have similarly reversed decades of progress and even civil stability:

In , the court invalidated New York State’s law that required people to demonstrate a need in order to conceal-carry a gun outside the home.

In , the court ruled that a public school official had the right to lead students in prayer at a school event.

In , the court reversed a landmark decision made just two years ago that recognized Native American tribes’ sovereignty over much of eastern Oklahoma. Instead, this court ruled that a state police force will be allowed to charge non-Native people with crimes committed on the reservation, instead of federal courts, which has been the standard process in keeping with the U.S. government’s nation-to-nation relationship with tribal governments. Chief Justice John Roberts in his dissent said the ruling would cause chaos and “has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma.”

And in saving what may be a momentous decision on par with Dobbs for the final day of its term, in , the court ruled the federal government could not issue administrative rules—in this case, to regulate carbon emissions at coal-fired power plants—unless Congress specifically spelled out such rules in the legislation it enacted. This is important, not just because it ties the government’s hands in enacting climate policy, but also because the administrative rule-making process has been the primary method by which the federal government has governed . Congress, a collection of politicians who are mostly lawyers, has neither the expertise nor intention of making laws governing the highly technical nuances of a modern administrative state.

We’re at a moment when the institutions of American governance are increasingly seen as unfair, unjust, compromised by politics, and undemocratic.

The legal rationale for these cases is all over the map. There’s not so much a judicial philosophy at work as a power play. In West Virginia, for example, the court was ruling on an Obama administration-era policy that was never enacted, and therefore the decision, according to some legal scholars, .

But there’s another consequence of these decisions that this new radical majority doesn’t appear to have considered: The court is widely seen as illegitimate. , five points lower than when Hanauer warned his fellow billionaires about the pitchforks. And that was before the court took away a constitutional right that the . Less than 10% of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all circumstances, according to Pew Research.

I wrote about the danger of the Supreme Court’s illegitimacy shorty after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Then, I was worried about efforts to ram a new replacement justice onto the Supreme Court before the election, and that, as was the case in the 2000 presidential election, the Democrats would let them get away with it “for the good of the country.”

And it’s true: Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had used the power of his office in 2016 to deny former President Obama a Supreme Court seat a full year before the end of his second term (with the reasoning that, in an election year, ), and then in 2020 allowed former President Trump, who never won the popular vote, to install Ginsburg’s replacement just a week before Election Day, after many Americans had already voted.

Legitimacy is not something that can be assumed or taken from anyone else. It is only granted by those who believe the system in which they lost is ultimately fair, and thus respect the outcome. But we’re at a moment when the institutions of American governance are increasingly seen as unfair, unjust, compromised by politics, and undemocratic.

Five out of the six justices who overturned Roe were appointed by Republican presidents who’d lost the popular vote. Two of those six are sitting in seats stolen by the Republicans from the Democrats. Two of the six who destroyed the right to bodily autonomy have been credibly accused of sexual harassment or assault. The latest power moves by the radical court will only reinforce the belief that the court is illegitimate.

Now, in 2022, democracy hangs by a thread.

That’s a real problem. Chief Justice Roberts, who at least has seemed concerned about the court’s reputation, insists the court is nonpolitical, that its decisions should be given the respect they deserve. But Roberts no longer controls his court, and he’s impotently watching as an unfettered majority is pulling at every lever of power it can reach. Because they can.

So what’s left, when the ultimate arbiter of justice in America is seen to be a radical political actor?

Some state governments may decide to effectively nullify the effects of the Dobbs decision. Already, Democratic governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom, Oregon’s Kate Brown, and Washington’s Jay Inslee, have announced they , such as blocking travel to people seeking abortions. (For what it’s worth, Attorney General Merrick Garland also announced that the government would work to ensure and mail-order abortion medication, but that stated position can, and will, change the minute Republicans retake power.)

We also need to vote. But when the onslaught of Republican power moves at local and federal levels are intended to and , the one option we have left is mass action. We’ve already seen in reaction to Dobbs. Those are fine, and cathartic. But the pressure also needs to be sustained until it can be transformed into power, which is a lot harder to do after the initial outburst of anger abates. Fortunately, there’s a model to follow.

When the United Nations declared 1975 would be International Women’s Year, a women’s group in Iceland decided to test it. Women in the country made about 60% the salaries of men, in addition to taking on nearly all domestic labor, so they called for a one-day strike. The “” was a demonstration of power for the small island nation, but for one day, Oct. 24, 90% of all Icelandic women refused to go to their paid jobs or cook, clean, or provide child care.

The nation ground to a halt. Schools closed. Retail shops, fish-processing factories, and theaters, all largely staffed by women, also shut down, and many other businesses slowed down. Men’s offices transformed into impromptu day care centers as children were brought to work. A rally in downtown Reykjavik drew 30,000 attendees (nearly 14% of the population of the entire country—imagine the , but with a crowd 94 times larger).

The rally worked. , and even if it took time for reality to catch up to the intent of the law, in 1980, Iceland elected its . The strike also inspired similar actions around the world: Poland’s “” in 2016 against that nation’s abortion restrictions followed the same model (itself inspiring Ireland’s “,” which succeeded in overturning that nation’s near-total ban on abortions). The on March 8, 2017 and 2018, were also based on the Iceland action, taking place in 50 countries around the world.

Americans in recent years have shown their capacity to rally in solidarity with one another. The in at least 653 U.S. cities. Shortly after �հ��ܳ���’s inauguration, to protest an executive order that would have sent refugees back to unsafe countries. Black Lives Matter has been growing in size and influence since its first demonstrations nearly a decade ago, and White allies have regularly . Pride marches, an annual celebration of LGBTQ rights and lives, continue to of the Stonewall riots of 1969, drawing mixed crowds of people both queer and not.

That solidarity now needs to be turned toward specific political objectives, specifically those that will reverse the direction of the country’s drift toward the extreme right: think ensuring fair and free elections at every level, codifying abortion and other civil rights, adding seats to the court and states to the union, and so on. U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle has already floated the idea of a general “” in response to the overturning of Roe, presumably with the intention of prodding the Biden administration into action.

When we think “strike,” we often think of the labor-union-driven mass actions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artifacts of an era that won us such benefits as the weekend and the 8-hour workday. Those large industrial actions have indeed become less common, and a general strike like the kind that brought Iceland to a halt has been largely unheard of in recent history.

Part of that is that the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, enacted in 1947, effectively . But another part of the reason is because the U.S. of 2022 is so much bigger than Iceland of the 1970s. It will take a lot for a single strike to have wide-ranging effects.

But the moment may be calling for that concerted action. Now, in 2022, democracy hangs by a thread. The Supreme Court promises to issue yet more revanchist decisions in the coming term; the docket includes , and . And one of our two major political parties is openly siding with an that Trump instigated to overturn the 2020 election and install him as an unconstitutional autocrat.

It’s been more than 75 years since the in the U.S., one that made society take notice and change direction. Yet general strikes are one of the last nonviolent tools left when all other legal means of redress to injustice have been thwarted. They can be ugly and dangerous, especially when police—ironically unionized to protect their own jobs—violently demonstrate their true allegiance to the forces of capital.

Maybe it’s about time the people demonstrate their full power. A general strike can lead to real gains in liberty; just witness Iceland. And when the arbiters of law are undemocratically installed and unaccountable, the lawmakers are corrupted by lobbying and conflicts of interest, and the chief executive actively seeks to overturn an election and gain unlimited power—all conditions that are illegitimate in a democratic society—resistance is the only legitimate democratic force left.

What other recourse is there, except to reach for the pitchforks?

The ways in which this pressure moved Biden from inaction to an executive order illustrates what activist scholars such as historian Howard Zinn long argued: One can’t be neutral on a moving train, and change only occurs through sustained protest and agitation from the citizenry. Indeed,  explained that when he worked for the Democratic Party, they ignored the demands from the Left because many were never willing to actually withhold their votes on election day—ultimately succumbing to the fear tactics of the party’s ongoing “vote blue no matter who” propaganda campaign. As Biden’s recent executive order illustrates, those seeking to codify abortion rights need to agitate and annoy Democratic leadership to take aggressive action.

Case in point: Even though the decision was leaked a month ahead of time, Biden did not devise a plan to protect abortion rights following the . Meanwhile, Republicans made plans years in advance, passing so-called  that automatically outlawed abortion in states once Roe v. Wade was overturned. The Democratic Party response was limited to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reading a poem, Vice President Kamala Harris tweeting a picture of herself watching pro-choice protests, Democratic members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a vast  campaign, and chiding the electorate for not “” for Democrats—what allegedly allowed this all to happen. 

Those protesting from the Left were showing that any fundraising campaigns or voter drives would be moot until they had faith in Biden as a change-maker.

Through , , , and more, progressives and leftists mobilized to pressure the Democratic Party to stop dithering on abortion rights and take substantive action, including removing the filibuster, packing the court, or adding abortion clinics to federal lands near states that outlawed abortion.  rebuked the Democratic Party in general, and Biden in particular, for serving as enablers of the Republican Party’s anti-abortion agenda. Leftists were met by Democratic Party apologists who took to social media to deflect and  Bernie Sanders supporters, Susan Sarandon, and other so-called far-left types for taking down Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which they argued paved the way for Trump to appoint three Supreme Court Justices who were integral in overturning Roe v. Wade. However, these self-righteous social media users were outflanked by  of other Democratic Party apparatchiks, who echoed the critiques from the Left.

These included celebrities such as Debra Messing and “two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, as well as several within the West Wing.” They complained that they were being asked to do more fundraising and voting, while the Democratic Party—which controls the executive and legislative branches—dithered on abortion rights. Some even  if the president was capable of taking action and “mocked how the President stood in the foyer of the White House, squinting through his remarks from a teleprompter as demonstrators poured into the streets, making only vague promises of action because he and aides hadn’t decided on more.”

Those protesting from the Left were showing that any fundraising campaigns or voter drives would be moot until they had faith in Biden as a change-maker. This was certainly difficult to imagine from Biden, who promised wealthy donors in 2020 that if he was elected president, “” However, these critiques seemed to put pressure on Democratic Party leaders. After the Dobbs decision was announced, Biden was reportedly making a deal to appoint an  to a lifetime judicial appointment, but as the pressure from progressives mounted, his  became more aggressive as he expressed his willingness to remove the filibuster to codify abortion rights. Time will tell, but further inaction likely does not bode well for the president.

The Democratic leadership will also never give progressive activists credit for forcing the party to try to protect abortion rights.

Despite the notable shift, that rhetoric has done little to mask previous inaction. As a result, the protests continue, and his poll numbers continue to fall. Since Biden’s election, Americans’  in the Office of the Presidency in general dropped 15 points, from 38% in 2021 to 23% in 2022—two points lower than the Supreme Court. Further, Biden’s approval rating——was just two points above �հ��ܳ���’s dismal 34% when leaving office. Translation: Currently, some  do not want Biden to run for a second term.

Elites never admit failure. The Democratic Party will conceal, but never confront, that it failed to protect abortion rights from the far Right and the GOP. As a possible defeat may await Biden’s party this fall in the midterms, its members will blame the other party or voters, never themselves, for promoting candidates and policies that will not keep them in office. This was already demonstrated in a July 10 interview on CBS in which Vice President Harris  that Democrats were not at fault for the reversal of Roe because they “rightly believed” that abortion rights were settled law. This is rich coming from someone who served in the U.S. Senate with colleagues who openly appointed anti-abortion judges and advocated for overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Democratic leadership will also never give progressive activists credit for forcing the party to try to protect abortion rights. Their disdain for progressives was illustrated by their efforts to undermine Bernie Sanders’   and remove all funding for Nevada’s  after a slate of Democratic Socialists were elected to lead the party. These efforts seem to communicate that risking a Republican Party victory is worth neutralizing progressive activists.

It is not surprising that the White House communications director Kate Bedingfield, who said Biden’s response to Dobbs was “not to  who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party.” In reality, activists may not be in line with the neoliberal corporate leaders in the DNC, but they are not out of step with the mainstream, considering that their goal to protect abortion rights is supported by  of the electorate, and 80% of those who are members of or lean toward the Democratic Party. Biden finally acted when he signed the July 8 executive order, which is hardly a substitute for codified abortion rights, but it illustrates that sustained protest directed at those in power is the only hope for making change. ������Ƶ protest and pressure will be needed to achieve a goal of passing legislation that codifies abortion rights.

The party can continue to berate pro-choice activists to deflect its failures, but the reality is that the activists are moving the party to action and should be embraced. There is still a long way to go, but this should be a lesson to those who support abortion rights or any other civil or human rights policy: To make change, one must protest and pester those in power, not just vote and hope. Rather than attack the Left, Democratic voters should hold those in power accountable to their base and a majority of Americans. As early 20th-century labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill once said in the face of defeat, “Don’t mourn, organize.” Then, agitate like hell for real change. Democracy is not a spectator sport. There is much to be done. Let’s get busy.

Published with permission from .

Take Cassidy Hutchinson, the top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who testified on June 28. The Select Committee held an , featuring live and recorded testimony from Hutchinson.

During her testimony, Hutchinson painted a picture of the former president as a belligerent man-child with a propensity for violence, who didn’t care that the insurrectionists on Jan. 6 were dangerously armed, and who wanted so desperately to march into the Capitol with them that he tackled his Secret Service driver.

Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson lauded Hutchinson’s willingness to testify, saying, “Thanks to the courage of certain individuals, the truth won’t be buried. The American people won’t be left in the dark. Our witness today, Ms. Cassidy Hutchinson, has embodied that courage.”

Trump made clear from the moment he ran for president what sort of leader he would be.

But Hutchinson, who joined �հ��ܳ���’s staff in March 2020, let slip one crucial sentence that jolted me from the admiration I, too, had started to feel while watching the hearing. When asked how she felt about one of �հ��ܳ���’s particularly damning tweets about former Vice President Mike Pence, Hutchinson said, “As a staffer that worked to always represent the administration to the best of my ability, and to showcase the good things that he had done for the country, I remember feeling frustrated and disappointed. …”

What good things was she referring to?

Did she mean �հ��ܳ���’s deliberate policy of from their parents? Or his ? Or perhaps who are so extreme that Hutchinson, like all Americans capable of pregnancy, no longer had a guaranteed constitutional right to an abortion? Or maybe she was referring to his on the COVID-19 pandemic. Or perhaps the he incessantly told, or the and ethics violations he engaged in? The list is endless, and whole books have been written about �հ��ܳ���’s jaw-dropping violations of morality, ethics, laws, and propriety. Hutchinson was apparently comfortable representing and showcasing this fascistic smorgasbord of evil deeds—until the days before Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump made clear from the moment he ran for president what sort of leader he would be when he railed against Mexicans as drug traffickers, criminals, and rapists coming into the U.S. during his in 2015.

Trump then spent his career in the White House relentlessly expressing his authoritarian tendencies as overtly as possible—all of which predictably led to his refusal to accept the election results in 2020. Every moment of �հ��ܳ���’s presidency was a warning that he was a despot who would not respect the law or the Constitution if either stood in his way. None of �հ��ܳ���’s actions leading up to and during the insurrection ought to have been surprising, least of all to those who surrounded him intimately.

It’s not just Hutchinson, who might be forgiven her ignorance on account of her political inexperience—she is only 25. Vice President Mike Pence is being hailed by and even for boldly standing up for the rule of law when he refused �հ��ܳ���’s orders to undermine the electoral college votes. That’s where Pence drew the line—after four years of enabling an authoritarian who cared nothing about the rule of law.

and after his time in the White House, Pence has never tried to hide who he is. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling revoking a constitutional right, Pence promptly called for a national abortion ban, and he continues to boast about his pride in being part of a movement that undermines the bodily autonomy of millions of Americans. “[W]e must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land,” moments after the Supreme Court ruled. That ruling—which not only revokes a fundamental right of millions, but runs directly counter to —would not have been possible without �հ��ܳ���’s appointees to the Court.

In elevating these servants of fascism as courageous people with integrity, the committee risks casting them as ordinary Americans.

Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, has also emerged as a “” for standing up to Trump and most members of her own party for co-chairing the House Select Committee. But Cheney was one of the most loyal House Republicans backing �հ��ܳ���’s agenda, voting with him nearly . Like Pence, she hailed the Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights, saying on , “I have always been strongly pro-life.”

Or, consider former , whose testimony, like Hutchinson’s, has been a significant part of the Select Committee’s evidence. Barr said in a taped interview that he clearly thought Trump lost the election, and that he said as much to the president. that �հ��ܳ���’s claims about a stolen election were “completely bullshit,” “absolute rubbish,” “idiotic,” “bogus,” “stupid,” “crazy stuff,” “complete nonsense,” and “a great, great disservice to the country.” He added that he thought Trump had become “detached from reality.”

And yet, Barr says he would .

Think about that. Barr was so solidly attached to Trump before Jan. 6 that called him “�հ��ܳ���’s biggest enabler and top servant.” He then completely turned against Trump in his committee testimony. And then he said he would support him again.

The Jan. 6 committee is indeed an important undertaking. The alternative to investigating the near-coup in 2021 is doing nothing, which is unacceptable. In basing the evidence largely on Republican testimony from people who paved the way for Trump, the committee is perhaps hoping to convince �հ��ܳ���’s current supporters just how close we came to losing our democracy. But in elevating these servants of fascism as courageous people with integrity, the committee risks casting them as ordinary Americans whose views merely lie on the opposite end of the political spectrum as Democrats.

That is not who they are.

They are the enablers of a fascist leader, who realized far too much of their sordid agenda via Trump. From the Supreme Court to the White House to federal agencies, they succeeded in undermining our freedoms and rights—ensuring that firearms were deregulated while uteruses were overregulated, immigrants were traumatized while billionaires became wealthier, health regulations were undermined while more than a million died from a deadly coronavirus.

As we watch the Jan. 6 hearings—a�Ի� we really ought to watch them and understand just how close we came to a violent coup—we need to do it with the understanding that the insurrection was the predictable outcome of allowing people with fascist tendencies into the halls of power. Many of the witnesses now condemning Trump were on his team for most of his White House tenure. It seems as though the former president’s sycophants are horrified not at what Trump did, but rather that he did it so clumsily and in full view of the public. And perhaps that he ultimately failed.

If the committee, media, and public observers normalize Pence, Barr, and even the seemingly innocent Hutchinson, they are paving the way for future authoritarian fascists—who will undoubtedly be far more disciplined, cunning, and effective than Trump was.

This has made it difficult for tribal members to grow their businesses on the reservation, preventing a self-reliant economy from flourishing.

This is where the Native American Business Incubator Network (NABIN) steps in.

Jessica Stago and Natasha Hale, two women of the Navajo Nation, founded the NABIN in 2012 to help the small businesses of their community. The business incubator offers what’s hard to find on the reservation: business and legal advice, idea building, and other services to help businesses get established and grow.

“We started talking about how (to) build our economy so the community on the reservation can rely on products and services within that community,” Stago said.

Stago has spent most of her career working with small Native businesses in Arizona. Through this work, she and Hale noticed a need for business programs targeted at Native American entrepreneurs.

In the incubator’s early stages, the duo offered workshops to the community that would help new business owners recognize issues specific to Native businesses.

There was one thing about Native-led businesses that stood apart from those off-reservation: many Native entrepreneurs value a contribution to the community over making a profit.

Native American entrepreneurs feel most successful if they can receive income while staying close to their family, Stago said.

“They shrug that off as the price they pay,” she said. “They talk about being close to their family where they can do ceremony. That part is unique to Native businesses.”

Besides philosophical differences in providing a service, non-Native businesses outside the community have advantages over those on the reservation, Stago said. Indian reservations often have less infrastructure on which a business can rely in order to grow.

The Office of Native American Affairs, a branch of the U.S. Small Business Association, offers a program similar to NABIN, but many of the facilities that are intended for Native entrepreneurs are located outside reservations, especially when it comes to banks that can provide loans.

“As a Native community and Native people, we can’t continue to rely on outside forces for economic growth.”

Joseph Pakootas, former CEO of Business Development Projects of the Spokane Tribe of Indians, said banks hesitate to invest in Native-led businesses located on the reservation.

“It’s really hard for tribal members to start a business because banks don’t usually like to finance businesses that are on trust properties. It’s risky,” Pakootas said.

Trust property is land that the U.S. government holds in trust for tribes. The title to the land generally cannot be sold or transferred to individual people or corporations. This leaves banks vulnerable because they can’t foreclose on Indian land if a tribal member can’t pay on a loan.

While smaller banks and credit unions exist on some reservations, the loans they can offer are limited. This forces many to seek out lenders in towns just off the reservation, where they are not protected by tribal laws against high-interest loans.

The Dawes Act of 1887, which created the current system of land title and trusts on Indian reservations, also has led to a series of obstacles for tribal members to weave through, with many parties claiming ownership of pieces of land. That highly fractionated land ownership has made it nearly impossible to use land for business development, stifling entrepreneurship in the community.

This led Stago and Hale to focus their business development program around entrepreneurial development.

Their #IAmTheNavajoEconomy campaign recognized the importance of Navajo entrepreneurs to the reservation’s economy. Stago and Hale invited business owners to march in the Navajo Nation Fair Parade in Window Rock, Arizona, where participants were encouraged to hold up signs with the hashtag.

“You see people offering haircuts out of their home, fixing vehicles on the side of the road, and farmers providing products,” Stago said. “We have a very entrepreneurial society, but we don’t often recognize that as being successful.”

One of these entrepreneurs is Germaine Simonson. Simonson recently bought the Rocky Ridge convenience store in a remote area of northern Arizona.

Stago and Hale helped her with branding and developing a logo for her store, something that’s helped Simonson better market her business.

“They’ve been really good,” Simonson said. “They came at a crucial time for me.”

NABIN relies on fundraising, private donations, and government grants to fund its operations. Stago said they wanted the “freedom to develop a program that was going to be effective.”

This doesn’t leave room to provide capital directly to businesses, though. However, Stago said they’re in the works to develop a microlending program.

Incubators may also struggle when it comes to providing assistance over the long term.

“A lot of tribal members will get started with their business and they think they’ll be fine,” Pakootas said. “All too often they don’t get long-range help. I think that’s where they fail.”

Despite that lack of longer-term guidance, Pakootas said that the incubators offer the greatest amount of help when it comes to tribal members without any business expertise. For the founders, answering tribal members’ questions and offering solutions is the most exciting part of their work.

Stago and Hale plan to open a physical office sometime in the coming year, and also to launch a smartphone app that will connect Native businesses with buyers and sellers.

“There’s a strong appetite for (entrepreneurship) now,” Stago said. “As a Native community and Native people, we can’t continue to rely on outside forces for economic growth.”

Correction: August 22, 2018
An earlier version misstated the name of the Native American Business Incubator Network as the Native American Business Incubator.

Responding to the ruling by the majority Conservative justices, President Joe Biden . “Let me be very clear and unambiguous: The only way we can secure a woman’s right to choose and the balance that existed is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade as federal law,” he said.

But is enshrining abortion rights in legislation feasible? And why has it not been done before? The Conversation put these questions and others to , an expert on civil rights law and feminist legal theory at Boston University School of Law.

What Does It Mean to Codify Roe v. Wade?

In simple terms, to  means to enshrine a right or a rule into a formal systematic code. It could be done through an act of Congress in the form of a federal law. Similarly, state legislatures can codify rights by enacting laws. To codify Roe for all Americans, Congress would need to pass a law that would provide the  did—so a law that says women have a right to abortion without excessive government restrictions. It would be binding for all states.

But here’s the twist: Despite some politicians saying they want to “codify Roe,” Congress isn’t looking to enshrine Roe in law. That’s because  hasn’t been in place since 1992. The Supreme Court’s  ruling—which was also overturned in the latest ruling on abortion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—affirmed it, but also modified it in significant ways.

In Casey, the Court upheld Roe’s holding that a woman has the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy up to the point of fetal viability and that states could restrict abortion after that point, subject to exceptions to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman. But the Casey Court concluded that Roe too severely limited state regulation prior to fetal viability and held that states could impose restrictions on abortion throughout pregnancy to protect potential life as well as to protect maternal health—including during the first trimester.

Casey also introduced the “” test, which prevented states from imposing restrictions that had the purpose or effect of placing unnecessary barriers on women seeking to end a pregnancy prior to viability of the fetus. The Dobbs ruling replaces the “undue burden” test with the much weaker “rational basis” test for judicial review. Going forward, state restrictions on abortion must receive a “strong presumption of validity” and courts must uphold them as long as there is a “rational basis” for the legislature thinking that those laws advance “legitimate state interests.”

What Is the Women’s Health Protection Act?

Recent efforts to pass federal legislation protecting the right to abortion center on the proposed , introduced in Congress by U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal in 2021. It was passed in the House, but is .

The proposed legislation was built around the undue burden principle of the now-overturned Casey ruling. It sought to prevent states from imposing unfair restrictions on abortion providers, such as insisting a  for surgical gurneys to pass through, or that  at nearby hospitals.

The Women’s Health Protection Act used the language of the Casey ruling in saying that these so-called TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws place an “undue burden” on people seeking an abortion. It also appealed to Casey’s recognition that “the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

Without eliminating the filibuster, which would require 50 votes in the Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass. However, after Dobbs was announced, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin—who opposes eliminating the filibuster—issued a statement  to “put forward” legislation to “codify the rights Roe v. Wade previously protected.”

Has the Right to Abortion Ever Been Guaranteed by Federal Legislation?

You have to remember that Roe was very controversial from the outset. At the time of the ruling in 1973, most states had restrictive abortion laws. Up to the late 1960s, a . A poll at the time of Roe found the public evenly split over legalization.

To pass legislation, you have to go through the democratic process. But if the democratic process is hostile to what you are hoping to push through, you are going to run into difficulties.

Under the U.S. system, certain liberties are seen as so fundamental that protecting them should not be left to the whims of changing democratic majorities. Consider something like interracial marriage. Before the Supreme Court ruled in  that banning interracial marriages was unconstitutional, a number of states still banned such unions.

Why ���dzܱ����’t they pass a law in Congress protecting the right to marry? It would have been difficult, because at the time, the  the idea of interracial marriage.

When you don’t have sufficient public support for something—particularly if it is unpopular or affects a non-majority group—appealing to the Constitution seems to be the better way to protect a right.

That doesn’t mean you can’t also protect that right through a statute; just that it is harder. Also, there is no guarantee that legislation passed by any one Congress isn’t then repealed by lawmakers later on.

So Generally, Rights Have ������Ƶ Enduring Protection if the Supreme Court Rules on Them?

The  on what is and isn’t protected by the Constitution. In the past, it has been seen as sufficient to protect a constitutional right to get a ruling from the justices recognizing that right.

But the opinion in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe and Casey also points out that one limit of that protection is that the Supreme Court may overrule its own precedents.

Historically, it is unusual for the Supreme Court to take a right away. Yes, it said the —which set up the legal basis for separate-but-equal—was wrong, and overruled it in . But Brown recognized rights; it didn’t take rights away.

In the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court has taken away a right that has been in place since 1973. For what I believe is the first time, the Supreme Court has overridden precedent to take away a constitutional right from Americans.

������Ƶover, the majority opinion penned by Samuel Alito is dismissive of the idea that women have to rely on constitutional protection. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” , adding: “The percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

But this ignores the fact that women  of the members of most state legislative bodies. ������Ƶover, as Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor countered in their dissent, the point of constitutional rights is that they “should put some issues off limits to majority rule.”

So Are Attempts to Get Congress to Protect Abortion Rights Realistic?

Republicans in the Senate successfully blocked the proposed Women’s Health Protection Act. And unless things change dramatically in Congress, there isn’t much chance of the bill becoming law.

There has been talk of trying to , which requires 60 votes in the Senate to pass legislation. But even then, the 50 votes that would be needed might not be there.

What we don’t know is how this Supreme Court decision will affect the calculus. Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski  earlier this year that would codify Roe into law, but that bill isn’t as expansive as the Women’s Health Protection Act. It, too, failed.

Perhaps in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe and Casey,  to “codify” Roe may signal increased willingness to pass federal legislation to protect abortion access. But some Republicans in Congress  to do exactly the opposite.

And then there are the midterm elections in November, which might shake up who’s in Congress. If the Democrats lose the House or fail to pick up seats in the Senate, the chances of pushing through any legislation protecting abortion rights would appear very slim. Democrats will be hoping the Supreme Court ruling will mobilize pro-abortion-rights voters. Indeed, in his remarks on the Supreme Court decision, Biden made clear that .

What Is Going On at a State Level?

Liberal states like Massachusetts have . Now that the Supreme Court’s decision is out, expect similar moves elsewhere. Other states are going a step further by  seeking abortion. Such laws would seemingly counter moves by states like Missouri, which is seeking to  who go out of state for abortions.

The dissent anticipates a host of such state efforts in the wake of Dobbs. In , Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the question of whether, in light of Dobbs, a state may “bar a resident of that state from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion.” He said the answer would be “no,” based on the constitutional right to “interstate travel.” But whether states will feel constrained from trying these and other measures to restrict out-of-state abortion care for their residents is another question.

Wouldn’t Any Federal Law Just Be Challenged at the Supreme Court?

Should Congress be able to pass a law enshrining the right to abortion for all Americans, then surely some Conservative states will seek to overturn the law, saying the federal government is exceeding its authority.

If it were to go up to the Supreme Court, then Conservative justices would presumably look unfavorably on any attempt to limit individual states’ rights when it comes to abortion. After all, Dobbs repeatedly asserts that Roe and Casey erred by removing the abortion issue from the states. Similarly, any attempt to put in place a federal law that would restrict abortion for all would seemingly conflict with the Supreme Court’s position that it should be left to the states to decide. That said, the dissenters warned that there was nothing in the Dobbs majority opinion that limited passing federal legislation to restrict or ban abortion throughout the United States.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on June 25, 2022.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

The committee has so far shared many shocking revelations, including that the pro-Trump mob that invaded the U.S. Capitol came within of former Vice President Mike Pence; that former President Donald Trump told witnesses Pence for refusing to dismiss electoral votes for Joe Biden; that on election night in 2020, the person Trump most sought advice from was an ; and that �հ��ܳ���’s false accusations of election fraud, aimed at from Georgia, upended their lives. Most importantly, Trump he had lost the election but sought to remain in power at any cost.

The Select Committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, and vice chaired by Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, appears to be building a strong case for the Justice Department to indict Trump. The hearings are expected to continue into July.

To put the hearings in context, YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar spoke with , who is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, host of the podcast , and the author of numerous books, including Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America and Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers: Accountability for Those Who Caused the Crisis.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sonali Kolhatkar: In anticipation of the hearings, there was a sense in mainstream media, and even among progressives, that there is no point to them, that it’s not going to change anyone’s minds, or move the needle on public opinion. That kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Did you have a similar response?

John Nichols: Of course, I do. Look, that’s the “punditification” of all of our media and frankly even into our populace. We live in a moment when, instead of saying, “Oh, wow, there are really fundamental issues that have to be dealt with, there are real concerns that we have to focus on,” people start to say, “Well, I’m not sure if it will have the political impact that we want it to have, or that it will influence a midterm election,” or something like that.

At some fundamental level, that is very disempowering. That limits our ability to get to the point of things. And it is true that when you launch an investigation, it may go to incredible places and have a huge impact and influence the politics. But it is also sometimes true that it simply gets us focused on things that we need to be focused on.

And whether that influences the politics or not does not change the fact that Donald Trump was at the center of an attempted coup that sought to overturn the results of an election and to insert him, for four years at least, as an illegitimate unelected president.

That’s a pretty big deal. No matter what the political fallout of that, that’s something that Congress has a duty to get to the bottom of.

Kolhatkar: The alternative is to do nothing, which would of course send a message that any president can do such a thing.

Nichols: That’s right.

Kolhatkar: From a progressive perspective, what do you hope will come out of these hearings?

Nichols: I think we do need a clear narrative on what happened. And that’s vital, because if you’ll recall back to Jan. 6, 2021, what you will remember is that people really struggled with the language. They didn’t know whether to call it a “riot,” or eventually they moved to the term “insurrection,” but they were very cautious about using terms like “coup,” which it was—it was a coup attempt—they were very cautious about referring to people who were engaged in that coup as “traitors” in the same way that you would, for instance, people who were involved in an assault on the federal government and insurrection back in the 1860s.

And so, we struggled with language. We didn’t get to where we needed to be for a long time. These hearings appear to be using the proper language. They’re talking about a coup. They’re talking about an attempt to overturn the government.

They are making references—as Chairman Bennie Thompson did in his opening statement—to the Civil War era and recognizing that in times of tremendous turbulence, when there are threats to the ongoing processes of elections and governance, that it is absolutely vital for Congress to have clarity to know what it’s dealing with, to know what matters.

And I do think that, under Bennie Thompson’s leadership in particular, but also with the tremendous work of [Congressman] Jamie Raskin and a handful of others, this committee has been much more focused on the real issues that are involved, and on, frankly, the real language that we need to talk about what happened.

Frankly, if that language is used, if we begin to focus on things in that proper way, I think it’s much more likely that a majority of the American people come to recognize clearly that Donald Trump and those around him were not just a threat on Jan. 6, 2021, [but] that they pose a potential threat going forward right up to and including Jan. 6, 2025.

Kolhatkar: What about the fact that the people that Trump surrounded himself with, who spoke to the committee, seem to have turned on him, including former Attorney General William Barr, and even to a lesser extent, Jared Kushner, the president’s own son-in-law, [who] seemed to be trying to distance themselves from Trump? Is that significant?

Nichols: Well, of course, it’s rats leaving a sinking ship, the old storyline. These are people who were very loyal to Trump through incredibly destructive times, when he did terrible things to the country, to his own party. They stuck with him and tried to give him another four years. But when it became clear that Trump was no longer following their advice—which basically was advice to stay within at least the broad outline of a traditional politics—they began to move away from him.

You saw this even around Jan. 6. Remember that two of the most hyper-politicized, hyper-partisan members of the Trump Administration, Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, quit before the end of their tenures as Secretary of Education and Secretary of Transportation [respectively], quite obviously out of objection to what Trump was doing and how Trump was handling himself.

I think we have to see it in that perspective. These are bad players who were engaged in very destructive, very damaging politics and governance, but who at a certain point recognized that Donald Trump was no longer their associate, no longer somebody who was working with them.

He was somebody who was going in his own direction, and that direction, defined by folks like Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and others, was toward a right-wing authoritarianism that had no respect for democracy whatsoever and frankly no respect for election results, that was pointing us toward a place where, were Trump to be successful, he would hold the office of the presidency not via the will of the people, not even via the will of the very undemocratic electoral college, but, frankly, by his own fiat, by his own will.

And that did, I think, scare a number of the veteran hangers-on around Trump, including Attorney General Barr and �հ��ܳ���’s campaign manager, �հ��ܳ���’s family members, who are in many ways some of the most reprehensible players in all of this, because they seek always to maintain their own reputation, their own ability to go to all the best parties in New York or Miami. At the same time, they seek all the benefits of an association with Donald Trump, including, in the case of Jared Kushner, benefits that include huge advances of money from the Saudi Arabian government for his investment fund.

Kolhatkar: Do the hearings confirm to you that the Trump and Giuliani way of doing things is “never admit defeat, never admit when you’re wrong, always claim that you’re victorious,” which is the standard tactic of a gaslighter?

Nichols: Gaslighters and fascists! Yeah, I mean, let’s be very clear that this behavior has a lot of roots and a lot of history that is incredibly dangerous, and especially incredibly threatening in a democracy.

And here’s where I would differ with former Attorney General Barr. He said that Donald Trump was “delusional,” or that he was “at odds with reality.” I think Donald Trump and those around him were well-aware of reality—except perhaps Giuliani, who is a mess—but I think that Trump and Bannon were well-aware that �հ��ܳ���’s ideas and approaches were not popular, that he was not re-elected. But they refused to accept that. They were not willing to bend to that reality. And that’s not “delusional” in a situation where very wealthy, very powerful people think that they may be able to bend the processes in their favor, as they so often do.

Kolhatkar: And it seems as though the committee actually got that point too. On day two of the hearing, committee members said that Trump knew he had lost and still went ahead to try to overturn the election. This is different from thinking that he was surrounded by sycophants who convinced him he had won. The fact that he knew he had lost is even worse.

Nichols: Oh, I agree with you. In fact, it’s actually, from a legal standpoint, far more significant. Because if Donald Trump believed sincerely that he had been re-elected and that the election was being stolen from him, and you could make a convincing case of that, that is somewhat exculpatory. That gives him some area of defense.

But what is coming through clearly from the hearing is that Donald Trump knew that he had lost. People he trusted, people he employed, told him he had lost. They told him that he could not claim victory on election night and then say all the additional votes that were coming in were somehow illegitimate or fraudulent, that was simply wrong.

And Donald Trump heard all this. And remember, Donald Trump is not a big drinker. He’s not somebody who was drunk on election night.

Kolhatkar: He’s a teetotaler, in fact.

Nichols: Yes, exactly. So, he heard all this coming from all these political advisers, all these people he pays, his own family. And then he said, “I’m not gonna do that.”

When you reject the approach that all your professionals are pushing on you, you still have to have a crew, you have to have a group of people that are going to work with you to implement your strategy, right? So, he wasn’t going to be able to turn to Barr. He wasn’t gonna be able to turn to [Bill] Stepien and some of his other campaign aides.

And so, who do you turn to? Rudy Giuliani, a guy who, by all accounts, was inebriated and saying things that were just flat-out crazy. But in a sense, I think that’s what made Giuliani attractive to Trump in that situation. Because Trump knew that no traditional tactical response to the election was going to work.

He had to go way over the top, to a claim of overwhelming fraud, of an incredible scandal, to then communicate to his very gullible base: (a) that they needed to give him a lot of money—a�Ի� they gave him $250 million—a�Ի� (b) that they needed to show up in Washington to help him to literally disrupt the counting and certification of electoral votes.

Kolhatkar: We’ve been talking about the coup plotters. Now, let’s talk about the coup’s foot soldiers on the ground. Days before the hearings started, the Justice Department charged the Proud Boys with “.” We saw in the hearings new footage from the ground, very disturbing, very violent footage of just how many people were there, how violent they were, how belligerent they were.

I’m wondering whether those violent forces are a can of worms that Trump and his allies have opened that it’s going to be extremely hard to undo. We saw recently a bizarre, newly formed fascist group called attempting to attack a [LGBTQ] Pride event in Idaho. They were pre-emptively arrested, but it seems as though they might have been inspired by the Proud Boys.

Nichols: It looked very much like the [Patriot Front] was inspired by these groups. Sonali, you used a number of words, all of them accurate, to describe the Proud Boys and other groups in the videos that we saw from around Jan. 6, 2021. I’d add one more word: “certain.”

They seemed to be quite certain that they could take illegal and immoral actions and get away with it, that Donald Trump and those around him would protect them, that they would cover for them, that they would encourage them and help them if they got in trouble.

And that’s a huge deal, because we can look at these individual groups around the country and see all the wrongdoing they may be involved in. But if you step back from it, you say, “Well, why do these groups form, and why do they think they can do what they’re doing?”

The answer is that for four years they felt that they had someone in the White House who was literally cheering them on and encouraging them to do what they did, and, frankly, also I would add, pardoning people who were engaged in incredible wrongdoing. Those final pardons from the Trump White House were jaw-dropping.

I think you’ve ended up in a situation now where you’ve got impunity, where you have all sorts of folks across the United States, not just on Jan. 6 in Washington, but in places across the United States, who believe that they can take illegal and immoral extreme actions and that somehow they’ll be protected, that their actions will be seen merely as a “legitimate expression” of political sentiment, and that if they get in trouble, they will have Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, at their side, at their back, and that they will have the fundraising apparatus, legal networks, and other aspects of that Trump organization at their service.

And so, yes, we’ve created a situation in the United States now where extremists feel that they can do as they choose. And, in fact—it’s a conflict of language here—but we’ve reached a situation where extremism has been mainstreamed.

That mainstreaming of extremism, that sense that it is now a part of our politics, that it is a part of who we are as a country, is an incredibly dangerous thing. And that is sustained by Donald Trump and those around him, who instead of decrying and condemning these extremists, give them aid and comfort at every turn.

Kolhatkar: A really important question in these hearings is, will the minds of enough Republicans change? Because we have a big problem in this country. If a hugely significant percentage of Americans cannot agree on facts, that is very problematic for our democracy. So, do you think these hearings will change enough Republican minds based, at least, on facts?

Nichols: No, I do not. I don’t think they’re gonna change a lot of Republican minds. By and large, the core of the Republican party has moved into the “Trump Zone.” And Trump defines the facts. He defines, frankly, the politics.

I think a lot of our media, a lot of our punditry, tends to want to deny this. They don’t want this to be a reality. And so, they say, “Oh well, look, somebody that Trump endorsed lost an election in Georgia.”

Well, yeah, occasionally a very well-established Republican can say “no” to Trump and get away with it. But if you look at �հ��ܳ���’s endorsements within the Republican primary so far, overwhelmingly, by a 10-to-1 ratio, his candidates are winning. And they’re winning big races in places like Pennsylvania, where the gubernatorial nominee is an extremist who will very likely lose in November because he’s so far out, and yet he was �հ��ܳ���’s pick, so Republicans nominated him.

I think it’s very important to understand that moving the base of the Republican party is very unlikely for so long as Trump is in play, and, frankly, very politically active.

However, there’s a tiny portion of folks on the fringe of the Republican party, maybe not identified Republicans, but independents who, on occasion, or maybe quite often, will vote Republican and, frankly, probably had a history of doing so in their state and in their region. These folks are potentially open to some communication, if it’s done well.

And perhaps most significantly, Sonali, there’s a huge portion of Americans, pretty close to a majority of Americans, who are just struggling to get by. They don’t watch a lot of news. They’re not following politics every day in every single detail. They get the headlines. These folks are, at this point, hugely concerned about inflation, hugely concerned about all the challenges of survival.

And the question for them is, can you reach them with some baseline message, a very simple, a very core narrative, about the danger posed by Donald Trump and those around him? I think it’s possible. I think these hearings may do that.

The headline saying that “Trump attempted a coup,” these folks understand what a coup is. They know it’s a bad thing, and if �հ��ܳ���’s name becomes associated with dangerous, deadly, destructive politics, that has some impact that is not always well-measured by polls but may have a real impact on the body politic in the long term.

And when I say long-term, I don’t mean tens of years. I didn’t mean up to 2024, creating a circumstance where Trump himself becomes sufficiently toxic that he can never be president again. And that in itself is a very significant part of this, but certainly not the whole goal of these hearings.

These hearings aren’t just about politics. These hearings have to be about accountability. They have to be about the potential prosecution of Donald Trump, and this becomes important in this regard. If, indeed, there opens up a circumstance where Trump may be prosecuted, what you want to have is a clear majority of Americans who are comfortable with that idea, who, even though Republicans will scream and yell, will accept the idea that Donald Trump should face accountability for this, and that it should be fair, it should be an honest moment of accountability, but that they won’t say, “Oh, you can’t do that, he’s a former president,” or, “You can’t do that, he’s not that bad a guy.” That they will recognize why that’s happening and be supportive of the process.

Kolhatkar: It seems as though the committee is building an irrefutable case for �հ��ܳ���’s indictment. The question is, will Attorney General Merrick Garland actually step up to the plate? He seems to be missing in action.

Nichols: Often, but not always. I mean, there have been some prosecutions of late that are significant, and Garland has indicated that he’s watching the hearings relatively closely, that his staff is as well, that they are paying attention.

Ultimately, this committee’s biggest responsibility is not producing good TV or something like that. It is to produce a set of recommendations at the end of this hearing process that would focus both on direct accountability for Donald Trump and those around him for an attempted coup, for which Chairman Bennie Thompson says Trump was the central figure.

And then, secondly, a set of recommendations about how to reform governance, reform politics in ways that assure this never happens again. That’s what’s really important here.

And Merrick Garland will, I think, get a clear signal from the committee—I don’t know how clear, I hope it’s undebatable—that he needs to act.

My sense is that in the face of that, it is likely that he would act. A failure to do so would be dereliction of duty at the highest level, and I just don’t think that’s who Merrick Garland is, for all of his failings and all of his flaws.

I do think this committee is on a trajectory to make recommendations that will ultimately lead to a decision by the Department of Justice to do some major prosecutions. The question is, how major? Who will they be targeted at? And will they get to Donald Trump?

We need to understand socialism because it has shaped our history and will shape our future. It is an immense resource: the accumulated thoughts, experiences, and experiments accomplished by those yearning to do better than capitalism.

In my latest book, (Democracy at Work, 2019), I gather and present the basic theories and practices of socialism. I examine its successes, explore its challenges, and confront its failures. The point is to offer a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy. Here are 10 things from this book that you should know.

1. Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism

Socialism represents the awareness of employees that their sufferings and limitations come less from their employers than from the capitalist system. That system prescribes incentives and options for both sides, and rewards and punishments for their behavioral “choices.” It generates their endless struggles and the employees’ realization that system change is the way out.

In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx defined a fundamental injustice—exploitation—located in capitalism’s core relationship between employer and employee. Exploitation, in Marx’s terms, describes the situation in which employees produce more value for employers than the value of wages paid to them. Capitalist exploitation shapes everything in capitalist societies. Yearning for a better society, socialists increasingly demand the end of exploitation and an alternative in which employees function as their own employer. Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potentials as individuals and members of society while contributing to its welfare and growth.

Socialism is an economic system very different from capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Each of the latter divided society into a dominant minority class (masters, lords, and employers) and a dominated majority (slaves, serfs, employees). When the majority recognized slavery and feudal systems as injustices, they eventually fell.

The majorities of the past fought hard to build a better system. Capitalism replaced slaves and serfs with employees, masters and lords with employers. It is no historical surprise that employees would end up yearning and fighting for something better. That something better is socialism, a system that doesn’t divide people, but rather makes work a democratic process where all employees have an equal say and together are their own employer.

2. Socialism is not a single, unified theory

People spread socialism across the world, interpreting and implementing it in many different ways based on context. Socialists found capitalism to be a system that produced ever-deepening inequalities, recurring cycles of unemployment and depression, and the undermining of human efforts to build democratic politics and inclusive cultures. Socialists developed and debated solutions that varied from government regulations of capitalist economies to government itself owning and operating enterprises, to a transformation of enterprises (both private and government) from top-down hierarchies to democratic cooperatives.

Sometimes those debates produced splits among socialists. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, socialists supporting the post-revolutionary Soviet Union underscored their commitment to socialism that entailed the government owning and operating industries by adopting the new name “communist.” Those skeptical of Soviet-style socialism tended increasingly to favor state regulation of private capitalists. They kept the name “socialist” and often called themselves social democrats or democratic socialists. For the last century, the two groups debated the merits and flaws of the two alternative notions of socialism as embodied in examples of each (e.g. Soviet versus Scandinavian socialisms).

Early in the 21st century, an old strain of socialism resurfaced and surged. It focuses on transforming the inside of enterprises: from top-down hierarchies, where a capitalist or a state board of directors makes all the key enterprise decisions, to a worker cooperative, where all employees have equal, democratic rights to make those decisions, thereby becoming—collectively—their own employer. 

3. The Soviet Union and China achieved state capitalism, not socialism

As leader of the Soviet Union, Lenin once said that socialism was a goal, not yet an achieved reality. The Soviet had, instead, achieved “state capitalism.” A socialist party had state power, and the state had become the industrial capitalist displacing the former private capitalists. The Soviet revolution had changed who the employer was; it had not ended the employer/employee relationship. Thus, it was—to a certain extent—capitalist.

Lenin’s successor, Stalin, declared that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism. In effect, he offered Soviet state capitalism as if it were the model for socialism worldwide. Socialism’s enemies have used this identification ever since to equate socialism with political dictatorship. Of course, this required obscuring or denying that (1) dictatorships have often existed in capitalist societies and (2) socialisms have often existed without dictatorships.

After initially copying the Soviet model, China changed its development strategy to embrace instead a state-supervised mix of state and private capitalism focused on exports. China’s powerful government would organize a basic deal with global capitalists, providing cheap labor, government support, and a growing domestic market. In exchange, foreign capitalists would partner with Chinese state or private capitalists, share technology, and integrate Chinese output into global wholesale and retail trade systems. China’s brand of socialism—a hybrid state capitalism that included both communist and social-democratic streams—proved it could grow faster over more years than any capitalist economy had ever done.

4. The U.S., Soviet Union, and China have more in common than you think 

As capitalism emerged from feudalism in Europe in the 19th century, it advocated liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. When those promises failed to materialize, many became anti-capitalist and found their way to socialism.

Experiments in constructing post-capitalist, socialist systems in the 20th century (especially in the Soviet Union and China) eventually incurred similar criticisms. Those systems, critics held, had more in common with capitalism than partisans of either system understood. 

Self-critical socialists produced a different narrative based on the failures common to both systems. The U.S. and Soviet Union, such socialists argue, represented private and state capitalisms. Their Cold War enmity was misconstrued on both sides as part of the century’s great struggle between capitalism and socialism. Thus, what collapsed in 1989 was Soviet State capitalism, not socialism. ������Ƶover, what soared after 1989 was another kind of state capitalism in China.

5. Thank American socialists, communists, and unionists for the 1930s New Deal

FDR’s government raised the revenue necessary for Washington to fund massive, expensive increases in public services during the Depression of the 1930s. These included the Social Security system, the first federal unemployment compensation system, the first federal minimum wage, and a mass federal jobs program. FDR’s revenues came from taxing corporations and the rich more than ever before.

In response to this radical program, FDR was reelected three times. His radical programs were conceived and pushed politically from below by a coalition of communists, socialists, and labor unionists. He had not been a radical Democrat before his election. 

Socialists obtained a new degree of social acceptance, stature, and support from FDR’s government. The wartime alliance of the U.S. with the Soviet Union strengthened that social acceptance and socialist influences.

6. If 5 was news to you, that’s due to the massive U.S.-led global purge of socialists and communists after WWII

After its 1929 economic crash, capitalism was badly discredited. The unprecedented political power of a surging U.S. left enabled government intervention to redistribute wealth from corporations and the rich to average citizens. Private capitalists and the Republican Party responded with a commitment to undo the New Deal. The end of World War II and FDR’s death in 1945 provided the opportunity to destroy the New Deal coalition. 

The strategy hinged on demonizing the coalition’s component groups, above all the communists and socialists. Anti-communism quickly became the strategic battering ram. Overnight, the Soviet Union went from wartime ally to an enemy whose agents aimed “to control the world.” That threat had to be contained, repelled, and eliminated. 

U.S. domestic policy focused on anti-communism, reaching hysterical dimensions and the public campaigns of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Communist Party leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and deported in a wave of anti-communism that quickly spread to socialist parties and to socialism in general. Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians, and more were blacklisted and barred from working in the industry. McCarthy’s witch hunt ruined thousands of careers while ensuring that mass media, politicians, and academics would be unsympathetic, at least publicly, to socialism.

In other countries revolts from peasants and/or workers against oligarchs in business and/or politics often led the latter to seek U.S. assistance by labeling their challengers as “socialists” or “communists.” Examples include U.S. actions in Guatemala and Iran (1954), Cuba (1959-1961), Vietnam (1954-1975), South Africa (1945-1994), and Venezuela (since 1999). Sometimes the global anti-communism project took the form of regime change. In 1965-6 the mass killings of Indonesian communists cost the lives of between 500,000 to 3 million people.

Once the U.S.—as the world’s largest economy, most dominant political power, and most powerful military—committed itself to total anti-communism, its allies and most of the rest of the world followed suit.

7. Since socialism was capitalism’s critical shadow, it spread to those subjected by and opposed to capitalist colonialism 

In the first half of the 20th century, socialism spread through the rise of local movements against European colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the United States’ informal colonialism in Latin America. Colonized people seeking independence were inspired by and saw the possibility of alliances with workers fighting exploitation in the colonizing countries. These latter workers glimpsed similar possibilities from their side.

This helped create a global socialist tradition. The multiple interpretations of socialism that had evolved in capitalism’s centers thus spawned yet more and further-differentiated interpretations. Diverse streams within the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tradition interacted with and enriched socialism.

8. Fascism is a capitalist response to socialism

A fascist economic system is capitalist, but with a mixture of very heavy government influence. In fascism, the government reinforces, supports, and sustains private capitalist workplaces. It rigidly enforces the employer/employee dichotomy central to capitalist enterprises. Private capitalists support fascism when they fear losing their position as capitalist employers, especially during social upheavals. 

Under fascism, there is a kind of mutually supportive merging of government and private workplaces. Fascist governments tend to “deregulate,” gutting worker protections won earlier by unions or socialist governments. They help private capitalists by destroying trade unions or replacing them with their own organizations which support, rather than challenge, private capitalists.

Frequently, fascism embraces nationalism to rally people to fascist economic objectives, often by using enhanced military expenditures and hostility toward immigrants or foreigners. Fascist governments influence foreign trade to help domestic capitalists sell goods abroad and block imports to help them sell their goods inside national boundaries. 

Usually, fascists repress socialism. In Europe’s major fascist systems—Spain under Franco, Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini—socialists and communists were arrested, imprisoned, and often tortured and killed.

A similarity between fascism and socialism seems to arise because both seek to strengthen government and its interventions in society. However, they do so in different ways and toward very different ends. Fascism seeks to use government to secure capitalism and national unity, defined often in terms of ethnic or religious purity. Socialism seeks to use government to end capitalism and substitute an alternative socialist economic system, defined traditionally in terms of state-owned and -operated workplaces, state economic planning, employment of dispossessed capitalists, workers’ political control, and internationalism.

9. Socialism has been, and still is, evolving

During the second half of the 20th century, socialism’s diversity of interpretations and proposals for change shrank to two alternative notions: 1.) moving from private to state-owned-and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products like the Soviet Union, or 2.) “welfare-state” governments regulating markets still comprised mostly of private capitalist firms, as in Scandinavia, and providing tax-funded socialized health care, higher education, and so on. As socialism returns to public discussion in the wake of capitalism’s crash in 2008, the first kind of socialism to gain mass attention has been that defined in terms of government-led social programs and wealth redistributions benefitting middle and lower income social groups.

The evolution and diversity of socialism were obscured. Socialists themselves struggled with the mixed results of the experiments in constructing socialist societies (in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.). To be sure, these socialist experiments achieved extraordinary economic growth. In the Global South, socialism arose virtually everywhere as the alternative development model to a capitalism weighed down by its colonialist history and its contemporary inequality, instability, relatively slower economic growth, and injustice.

Socialists also struggled with the emergence of central governments that used excessively concentrated economic power to achieve political dominance in undemocratic ways. They were affected by criticisms from other, emerging left-wing social movements, such as anti-racism, feminism, and environmentalism, and began to rethink how a socialist position should integrate the demands of such movements and make alliances.

10. Worker co-ops are a key to socialism’s future

The focus of the capitalism-versus-socialism debate is now challenged by the changes within socialism. Who the employers are (private citizens or state officials) now matters less than what kind of relationship exists between employers and employees in the workplace. The role of the state is no longer the central issue in dispute.

A growing number of socialists stress that previous socialist experiments inadequately recognized and institutionalized democracy. These self-critical socialists focus on worker cooperatives as a means to institutionalize economic democracy within workplaces as the basis for political democracy. They reject master/slave, lord/serf, and employer/employee relationships because these all preclude real democracy and equality.

For the most part, 19th and 20th century socialisms downplayed democratized workplaces. But an emerging, 21st century socialism advocates for a change in the internal structure and organization of workplaces. The microeconomic transformation from the employer/employee organization to worker co-ops can ground a bottom-up economic democracy.

The new socialism’s difference from capitalism becomes less a matter of state versus private workplaces, or state planning versus private markets, and more a matter of democratic versus autocratic workplace organization. A new economy based on worker co-ops will find its own democratic way of structuring relationships among co-ops and society as a whole. 

Worker co-ops are key to a new socialism’s goals. They criticize socialisms inherited from the past and add a concrete vision of what a more just and humane society would look like. With the new focus on workplace democratization, socialists are in a good position to contest the 21st century’s struggle of economic systems.

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The immeasurably tragic school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 children and six adults dead in December 2012, horrified the world and briefly ignited an emotional U.S. debate about gun control.

Mass shootings tend to get our attention, at least for a moment.

Nine months later, the debate was held all over again after a mass shooting at the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., that killed 13 people.

Then there was April 2, 2014. left four dead, including the shooter, and 16 wounded. The base was also the site of a 2009 rampage in which a former Army psychiatrist killed 13 and wounded 32.

On Dec. 2, 2015, two shooters said to be “inspired” by ISIS opened fire at a Christmas party for the  County Department of Public Health that was being held in a banquet room at the Inland Regional Center, killing 14 and seriously injuring 22.

And on June 12, 2016, the United States saw the  in its history. Forty-nine victims plus the shooter died after a gunman opened fire in an Orlando night club, and 53 were reported injured.

There has been plenty more gun violence in America, much of which doesn’t rise to national prominence. But the mass shootings tend to get our attention, at least for a moment.

Here, we look at three cases in which gun laws were tightened following tragic shootings—in Australia, Scotland, and Finland.

Australia

The tightening of Australia’s gun laws was prompted by the worst mass murder in Australian history. On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. Just 12 days later, Australia’s government responded by announcing a bipartisan deal along with state and local governments to enact gun control measures, .

The buyback program reduced firearm suicides by 74 percent and gun-related homicides by 59 percent

A massive buyback program yielded more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, roughly one-fifth of the firearms in Australia. The laws also outlawed private sales, required that guns be individually registered to their owners and mandated that buyers present a “genuine reason” for purchasing the guns.

According to research published by Australian Labor Member of Parliament Andrew Leigh in 2010, the buyback program reduced firearm suicides by 74 percent and gun-related homicides by 59 percent, .

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who led the government when the tighter gun laws were passed in 1996, wrote in the Melbourne daily The Age shortly after the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

, “Australia is a safer country as a result of what was done in 1996. It will be the continuing responsibility of current and future federal and state governments to ensure the effectiveness of those anti-gun laws is never weakened. The U.S. is a country for which I have much affection. There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit. But when it comes to guns we have been right to take a radically different path.”

Scotland

On March 13, 1996, a lone gunman walked into a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself. “Dunblane has so much in common with what has happened in Newtown,” said Harry McEwan, 71, who has lived in Dunblane for 30 years, .

The Dunblane massacre led within two years to gun control laws

As Reuters noted, the Dunblane massacre led within two years to gun control laws that effectively banned civilians from owning handguns.

Britain had tightened regulations after the 1987 Hungerford massacre, which also killed 16 people, . The, as it’s known, made registration of shotguns mandatory and banned semi-automatic and pump-action weapons. Firearms amnesties after Hungerford and Dunblane netted thousands of firearms and rounds of ammunition.

CNN noted that while the ban initially seemed to have little impact, the number of crimes involving guns has dropped in recent years. In 2010–2011, there were 11,227 offenses, 53 percent below the peak number. Crimes involving handguns also dropped 44 percent between 2002–2003 and 2010–2011.

Finland

Finland’s established culture of gun ownership (1.5 million firearms in a country of 5 million people) was called into question after two horrific shooting incidents at schools that took place within a year of each other.

“No one in a country like Finland needs to have a gun at home.”

On Nov. 7, 2007, a teenager in Tuusula killed eight people before killing himself at Jokela High School. Just a year later, on Sept. 23, a gunman shot 10 people on the campus of Kauhajoki city’s School of Hospitality before turning the gun on himself, .

In the wake of the shootings, Finland raised the minimum age for firearm licenses from 15 to 20 for short weapons and to 18 for hunting guns, .

“No one in a country like Finland needs to have a gun at home,” said Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja in August 2011, following the rampage by Anders Behring Breivik, in neighboring Norway.

Editor’s note: was originally published by on Dec. 17, 2012. It has been updated to reflect current events.

That’s a pretty obvious conclusion, and maybe it will work, if by “work” we mean “barely squeeze out a victory that should be a cakewalk.” But it sidesteps the issue of why the party is flailing on the message front.

Quite simply, Democrats have forgotten how to tell a good story.

There’s something to the power of a well-told story that grabs the attention—most of us can point to a book, movie, podcast, or other narrative that “changed our life.”

I put those words in quotes because they’re so commonly used as to be cliché, but they point to what is really happening inside our brains: We take new information and adjust our knowledge and opinions to incorporate it. Classics of any genre tend to do this to large numbers of people: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm changed the way millions of people thought about totalitarianism, for example.

Stories always have a stronger grip on people than rote facts.

Often, political conflicts are not just bids for power, but also competing narratives. This was painfully apparent during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, when she was subjected to a constant stream of invective from Republican senators focused on (to be charitable) an extremely bad-faith interpretation of her judicial record. We heard her slandered about , her , being and .

The charges are completely bogus, and the Democrats responded by largely ignoring them, as if refusing to address a fabricated charge would make it vanish in its own puff of absurdity. (The .) Instead, they again touted Jackson’s multitudinous qualifications for the job.

The truth may be on Jackson’s side, but most Americans tuning in to the hearings without having paid attention beforehand would conclude that, even allowing for political grandstanding, there must be at least something sketchy about her that maybe should be looked into…

Simply put: Republicans were telling a story, Democrats were making a list. And .

Stories, myths, and legends can serve as a binding societal glue that gives people a sense of purpose and belonging. They explained the unexplainable in pre-scientific societies—thunder and lightning can be explained as , for example, or the nurturing rains in the dry summers of Mesoamerica as a response to . After the Enlightenment, these stories still can convey a society’s desired virtues: strength, bravery, fertility, loyalty, hard work, and so forth. Even if a myth contains a grain of truth——it’s the larger legendary narrative that persists, because it speaks to how we make sense of the world.

Not all myths are benign, however, and some are inimical. Canny operators throughout history have worked to create myths to support their political, moral, or religious positions.

We need look no further back than the myth of the : the belief that the Confederacy’s rebellion against the Union was noble, its loss of the war a tragic defeat, and slavery was certainly not the barbaric practice those Northern carpetbaggers made it out to be. This was a gross rewriting of history by the South, often facilitated by the U.S. as a whole in the interest of post-Civil War “reconciliation”—among White Americans, that is; very few people asked the formerly enslaved Black Americans what they would need in order to reconcile with their former enslavers.

The Lost Cause myth became a cancer on U.S. society that quickly metastasized. Reconstruction was brought to an ignoble end (over a , no less), freeing the Southern states to reimpose a racial hierarchy. Social-political groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, seized on the myth of the Lost Cause and erected statues and monuments to Confederate “heroes” across the entire nation, not just the South. The Confederacy lives on in , , , , and . Its echoes can be heard when former President Donald Trump said, after a White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned to deadly violence, that there were “fine people on both sides,” or whenever a right-wing politician responds to a Black Lives Matter protest with “all lives matter.”

We’re seeing a lot of mythmaking taking place in front of our eyes in the U.S. today. It’s not just the “Make America Great Again” basket of baloney Trump was selling. Modern conservative nostalgia in general is often rooted in the fiction that there was a period when things were “better,” explicitly overlooking inconvenient facts like slavery, genocide, segregation, state violence against labor, and so on.

There has been a lot of criticism about the non-factual basis of the talking points on the Right, from the “Big Lie” of a stolen election to “.” But that critique misses the fact that the lies are the point: The Right is creating its own myths to justify its own means (and ends). These narratives can then be used to provide an explanation for events that adhere to their followers’ beliefs—, if you will.

That gets back to messaging and how Democrats often fail at it, allowing bills that probably would be quite popular to fail, and allowing our national politics to be dominated by blatantly false narratives from Republicans, such as the to make innocent White children hate themselves.

To put it simply, the belief among Democrats seems to be that . That increasingly looks woefully naïve in the face of the Republican war on facts.

Thing is, it’s a lot easier to understand a story about a hero fighting a climactic battle against evil than the economic impacts of the expiration of the . If your story is believable and triggers strong emotions, —whether it’s an attempt to recast the Civil War in less “Northern” terms, or the story of a stolen election, or the story of a mythic, idyllic national past. If your narrative fails to grab the imagination, doesn’t tug at the heartstrings, is hard to follow, leaves people uneasy, or is just plain boring, then people will look for a better story.

The real struggle for the future of the U.S. and the world is one between myths in the making. If American Liberals in general, and Democrats in particular, want to make sure Trump not only doesn’t return to power, but also doesn’t become his own Lost Cause to poison us for generations, they need to make sure they’re telling a better story than he is.

We may think QAnon’s tale of a spray-tanned action hero battling satanic forces is ridiculous. That doesn’t change the story’s hold on its fans; it only casts Liberals as elitist snobs who look down on the rubes who consume such garbage entertainment—which reinforces the toxic “us versus them” narrative.

This is a difficult request to make of a political party that has become the epitome of policy wonkishness, grounded in the often-boring minutia of lawmaking. Excitement (as in, drama, engagement, story) has historically come from outside the party mainstream. But those narrative elements can still capture the popular imagination, and they helped change history (and public opinion): John Brown raiding Harper’s Ferry, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marching to Montgomery, Cesar Chavez leading the Delano Grape Strike. Even President Barack Obama’s election had elements of a heroic narrative—born to a single mother, attending Harvard Law School, cutting his teeth as a community activist, then rising to the highest office of the land. Scandal ���dzܱ����’t touch him, because not only did Obama conduct himself with dignity, but we all knew his story, and the Republicans could only fling mud (death panels? The tan suit? ?) and hope in vain that something would stick.

Even today, myths still have the power to capture the attention of our post-Enlightenment brains and take us into the realm of adventure and epic struggle. John Ford, the Hollywood director who more than anyone helped bring the myths of the Wild West to the big screen, emphasized this point in his 1962 movie . In the final scene, a journalist (Maxwell Scott, played by Carleton Young) who has been interviewing a senator (Ransom Stoddard, played by James Stewart), comes to realize that the politician’s entire life story, his heroic arc from frontiersman to senator of a new state in the Union, is built on the foundation of a single event in his past that turns out to have been an invention. The journalist then destroys his notes. “You’re not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?” Stoddard asks. “No, sir,” Scott answers. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, .”

That is considered one of the classic lines of Hollywood, and not just because it was good writing. It’s because there are no truer words that convey the power that comes from telling a good story.

“Protect and Survive,” an information campaign published by the British government in 1980, informed the public of how “to make your home and your family as safe as possible under nuclear attack.”

Part of the plan advised civilians to prop suitcases against the walls, stuffed with clothes and books “to absorb the radiation.” In the event of incoming nuclear missiles, the government would give a four-minute warning.

The Cold War was heating up between the United States and the Soviet Union. President Ronald Reagan, who would go on to declare the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire,” announced the U.S. would increase nuclear arsenals in NATO countries. That included bringing cruise missiles to Greenham Common, a Royal Air Force base in Berkshire, England, 60 miles from London. 

Like many people, Karmen Thomas thought basing nuclear weapons in Britain would make the country a target. “The whole nuclear threat was very much out there,” she says in the new documentary Mothers of the Revolution. “I had that feeling of complete helplessness, of not being able to protect your child.”&�Բ�����;

Protecting children was a central concern of Women for Life on Earth, a group organized by Thomas and others. In the summer of 1981, they marched from Wales to Greenham Common to protest the plan to deploy nuclear weapons. Some women remained at the base after the march, forming the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a presence that would endure through rain, mud, ridicule, arrests, confrontation, and violence over 18 years.  tells the story of the large role Greenham women played in the international movement for a world without nuclear weapons.

The film covers events in roughly chronological order, using interviews with veteran activists and dramatized segments to supplement video from the 1980s. Songs by Greenham women and folk artists like Peggy Seeger, appropriately peppered with punk, evoke the exhilaration of solidarity in action.

Take the scenes from “Embrace the Base.” Using mimeographed chain letters and telephone trees, Greenham women reached out to their networks with an ambitious plan to bring 16,000 women to link arms around the base. Almost twice that number arrived, a chain of more than 30,000 women surrounding the 9-mile perimeter. The first day, they embraced the base. The second day, they blocked it. 

Taking inspiration from the more confrontational tactics of the British suffragettes, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was explicitly feminist, intentionally defying norms with anti-authoritarian, physically bold direct action. The aim was not just to draw attention to the base, but to shut it down. There were blockades of roads into the base, groups that tracked and paint-bombed convoys carrying nuclear weapons, and many actions when women cut the base fence or climbed over it. 

Perhaps because they were often underestimated, the unarmed women activists often ran rings around police and armed guards. They locked police out of a sentry box in one Keystone Cops incident, and they got into the base one New Year’s Eve to dance in the moonlight on top of a missile silo. Even when nuclear warheads were in place, a group of women managed to climb into a control tower. Once there, they hung a peace banner and spent two hours flashing lights, trying to alert the military to their presence. 

Other confrontations were less amusing. Conservatives and tabloid media labeled Greenham women shrews, harpies, neglectful mothers, “lesbians and communists.” The abuse didn’t stop at words. Instead of taking Greenham woman Chris Drake to the precinct after arrest, police brought her to a room on the base where they assaulted her with blows, aerosol spray, and hot coffee. In one incident, a police vehicle crushed 23-year-old Helen Thomas to death, an event a court ruled accidental.

Yet despite attacks by police and civilian vigilantes, the women found strength in each other. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp became a center of cultural change, with some women staying long-term and others staying when they could. There were camps at every gate of the base, each expressive of a different political philosophy. “Here was a place where you could be anything,” says Chris Drake in the film. “It wasn’t a safe time, really, to be lesbian or gay. But being at Greenham, there wasn’t that fear.”

Women in the disarmament movement held “Greenham Women Everywhere” protests in the U.S. and Europe and built international community with activists in Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. When a delegation of Greenham women visited the USSR in 1983, they reached out to the Moscow Group to Establish Trust Between East and West, a peace group calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Despite the danger of being seen to oppose the government, Moscow Group member Olga Medvedkov went with the Greenham delegation to meet with a Soviet military committee. Her presence in the film is one of its highlights.

When Mikhail Gorbachev become leader of the Soviet Union, he began reforms that progressed to his signing the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Reagan. That treaty removed more than 2,600 land-based missiles from Eastern and Western Europe, including Britain, and was hailed as the end of the Cold War. The U.S. removed nuclear weapons and withdrew troops from Greenham Common a few years later. Today, it is a park with businesses, memorials, and empty missile silos.

The Greenham women ���dzܱ����’t have foreseen all the various pressures and opportunities that allowed Gorbachev to start his glasnost reforms. But their insistence that nuclear weapons were unacceptable influenced public imagination and pressured governments. Mothers of the Revolution quotes Gorbachev, years after the INF negotiations, thanking the Greenham women for their part in making the treaty possible.

The world has slipped backward from that hopeful moment. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the INF Treaty. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a humanitarian crisis with his invasion of Ukraine.��As Putin squares off against the U.S. and NATO, he has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons. Once again, as it did in 1980, the possibility of nuclear attack seems more than theoretical.��

It might seem naïve at a time like this to look back with admiration on a grassroots, nonviolent peace camp. But the Greenham women proved they could make a difference. When Olga Medvedkov met with the Greenham women in Moscow in 1983, she had already experienced the punitive power of the Soviet state. Her husband had been arrested and “disappeared” for six months for his activism. Later, when Medvedkov herself was tried on a bogus charge, she was pregnant and expecting to be sent to a Soviet labor camp. The Greenham women and others raised an international outcry, and her sentence was suspended. “Don’t think you’re too little to do big things, because they just might happen,” Medvedkov says at the end of the film. “Everybody’s big if they’re pursuing big and good ideas.”&�Բ�����;

However, for as historic a moment as Biden’s pick is, it is not without its own complexities. There is an elephant in the room around America’s tenuous relationship with Black women’s physical and intellectual labor, and this current milestone is a new chapter that brings this further into view.

Even before President Biden had announced his pick, any real examination of his stated intention in nominees laid bare the complex landmine of what it is to be Black and navigate America’s political institutions. At the same time we applaud the overdue nod to the highest court in the land, there is an undeniable reality that part of what is well-deserved is also tainted by a pattern of both political expediency and the . The most obvious example of this was Biden’s selection in 2019 of Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate.

We must remain steadfast in not allowing this pending milestone to be tokenized in any fashion.

While the infusion of Black women in government at record numbers was a trend that , Biden’s reliance on the optics of Black women in high-profile political posts has been even more an essential element of his political formula. Decades of promises and symbolism from the Democratic establishment have forced Black women into a peculiar position as one of the party’s most effective weapons and . The danger in how Democrats engage with this fact lies in how Black voters must remain in control of that narrative. This requires both context and perspective.

That we have reached 2022 and Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black woman among a plethora of qualified and overly capable legal minds to be nominated to the high court is unacceptable. At the same time as we acknowledge this, we must remain steadfast in not allowing this pending milestone to be tokenized in any fashion—whether that is by the Right in seeking to shift the conversation to without consideration of valid qualifications, or the Left in hoping to use this for future points in political gamesmanship. It can never be overstated that even in providing this first, the current administration cannot be excessively lauded for doing something exceptional by giving Black women their just due. Black women and Black voters are not pawns. Without careful consideration and proper framing, we can easily lose control of it and have our collective moment turn bittersweet.

I am aware this is a delicate space to speak from as a Black man. I stand in solidarity with Black women and maintain that we can have a dialogue that invites nuance to both be excited at the rightful achievement and elevation of Black women and also appropriately critical of Black leadership.

Lost in this overall conversation is Black women’s intellectual labor, which has been weaponized for political warfare.

Moving from symbolism to substance demands that we respect Black people enough to interrogate whether their ideology is in the best interest of our community. It is to carefully vet a nominee not despite her being a Black woman, but in light of her being positioned to wield an enormous amount of influence via one of the most coveted seats in our land. We need look no further than Clarence Thomas for a cautionary tale of what can happen when we allow ourselves to be silenced by the politics of identity in considering skinfolk for positions with such important implications.

A substantive review of Jackson’s record as a judge reveals little that should cause alarm. She has shown support for organized labor and undocumented citizens while also seeming to favor limitations on the executive branch, opining in one case relating to the Trump administration, “.”

While there have been some reversals that will be the subject of fodder during confirmation hearings, Jackson has enjoyed for her qualifications and has not shown many signs of mixing her personal politics with her profession. She stands as not only a safe but also a solid pick. A deeper probe of her background must be tempered with an allowance for the cultural, personal, and professional realities of what it is to be a Black woman. This is a nuanced space that requires a gauge different from any other we have used to evaluate previous picks.

Identity is a curious thing. It has a unique impact on how each of us experiences the world and interprets those experiences. A Black woman doesn’t shed her experiences connected to race, sex, and gender simply because she sits on a bench and wears a robe. Ask any Black attorney you may know whether a court officer has ever questioned them about sitting in the galley (typically reserved for lawyers) or, conversely, whether any cop has bothered to ask for their profession during a traffic stop. What you will learn is that the concepts of identity and profession are tethered within the lives of Black folk in ways that cannot be separated. It is with that lens that we must consider Jackson’s past record.

That is not to suggest we remain silent at what we find objectionable; rather, it is to challenge ourselves to wrestle with the underlying sources that create the objections within us. As it relates to Jackson, this is most likely to surface when she will inevitably be grilled about her involvement in leading protests during her time at Harvard. Jackson reportedly to protest against another student who displayed a Confederate flag from his dorm window.

This is an example of where an evaluation beckons a much deeper probe of how differently each of us experiences America. Where some might allow this to invite critique of Jackson’s ideas on freedom of expression, a much more sensible analysis would conclude that she was responding to a symbol of racialized trauma. It is important to consider that while America’s recent racial reckoning may have made openly defending the Confederate flag (or those who fly it) reprehensible, a senator’s final expression of their approval is not through voice in inquisition, but rather vote on confirmation.

It is my hope that touching the broader premises here beckons a deeper probing. If nothing else, we should think more critically about Black women’s humanity. Lost in this overall conversation is Black women’s intellectual labor, which has been weaponized for political warfare. This is hardly new but needs to be reimagined if not altogether renegotiated.

Ever since Biden voiced his intentions, the public discourse has been heavily laden with far too much emphasis on class and category rather than character. It is the game itself that warrants deeper review, so that when we engage the labor of Black women not only at this, the highest level, but throughout all rungs of society, we are not simply doing so for our gain or expedience, but because we take seriously the tasks we ask them to perform. This should allow Black women to be controlling subjects of their own narratives as opposed to being intellectually objectified as pieces to be maneuvered on someone else’s chessboard.

Good luck, Ketanji.

Divisions in society are natural and inevitable, especially one as large and diverse as the United States. The difference now is that all the identities people represent can be largely sorted by party affiliation, which itself is now a shorthand label that implies a specific set of characteristics and beliefs.

Whether we’re talking about differences between classes, races, or religions, these differences now align along partisan lines, too. Increasingly, demography is political destiny.

The divisions have become so extreme that what should have been unifying events—a global pandemic, and now the outbreak of war in Europe—have instead contributed to partisan sorting. Republican governors and other officials have worked to , and we now have influential GOP figures, including former President Trump, actually after his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

That hasn’t always been the case. Nobody in media or politics used the terms “red state” and “blue state” before the 2000 presidential election. That’s a recent development, an artifact of our winner-take-all Electoral College, that serves to explain and reinforce the (overly simplistic) belief that, especially in presidential elections, a state’s voters can be assumed to go one way or the other before a single poll has been taken or vote has been cast. ( were never standardized in the media before that election, despite historical association of the color red with communist and socialist movements. Perhaps because the recount of the 2000 election for such an extended period of time, the networks cohered around red versus blue as a form of shorthand, and the trend stuck.)

Before 2000, we had liberal-moderate Republicans from northern states and conservative-moderate Democrats from the South, the industrial Midwest was a bastion of working-class unionism, and the West was an unpredictable political frontier, as likely to spawn a Ronald Reagan as a Jerry “” Brown.

Mark Alan Smith, associate chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington, says the parties are a lot more monolithic now.

“A lot of conflict that used to be within parties, is now between parties,” Smith says.

The results of that partisan sorting are distressing. A lot of those ideological fault lines are drawn according to the politics of grievance—racial, economic, religious, and cultural—that Trump was able to exploit so thoroughly. As columnist Thomas Edsall wrote in The New York Times on Jan. 26, the key to reducing the amount of polarization in society is a redistribution of large amounts of resources and wealth. But Edsall also cited two studies that showed that “aggressive redistribution policies designed to lessen inequality must be initiated before polarization becomes further entrenched.”

“In other words, a deeply polarized electorate is that would benefit their adversaries as well as themselves,” Edsall wrote.

YES! Magazine’s founding editor, Sarah van Gelder, saw much of this dynamic playing out in 2014, when she took a cross-country road trip to research her book . As she told former Executive Editor Zenobia Jeffries Warfield recently, many communities in the Midwest and Appalachia had been abandoned by business and government, and she saw a portrait of America that the mainstream media would “discover” a few years later as they attempted to explain the rise of an autocrat: “And within the places left out, there was a sense of hopelessness. This system we’re seeing on television and we’re being told is working, it isn’t working for us. We’re left out. And so there’s a deep alienation. A sense that there is just no future.”

In-group insularity is nothing new—the whole concept of “tribalism” dates to prehistory, when extended families of early humans banded together to share resources and fight off the other groups that were encroaching on their mammoth-hunting grounds.

But a few things happened along the way as humanity’s discourse shifted from caves to cafés.

One is the recent fragmentation of the media landscape, especially since the arrival of the internet. Despite its early promise of “connecting people” around the world, the internet has become a tool of giant corporations like Facebook, whose algorithms sort people into like-minded groups, insulating them from others and reinforcing our existing beliefs. “Engagement,” that magic metric businesses use to find their audiences, easily lends itself to provocation, since nothing engages the mind—a�Ի� inner keyboard warrior—as much as the heat of righteous anger.

It’s not just the internet, but all media that has fragmented. There used to be just three major broadcast networks in America, and senior figures like Walter Cronkite had the respect of the nation. Those networks, as a result, sought to appeal to the wide political center.

Smith points to the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s on talk radio—itself a formerly centrist institution—as an early example of the trend that led to the rise of the professional internet troll.

“There’s a lot of incentives built into social media that push us even further,” Smith says. He points to conservative radio host Dan Bongino as a perfect example of someone who’s maximally utilized social media’s tendency to promote the most inflammatory commentary. “He basically came out of nowhere, and he’s just really good at demonizing the other side.”

The other major change in society has been the loss of what Smith terms “mediating institutions,” places where people from different walks of life would meet face to face. Most importantly, these are places that humanized us, even when we had differences.

This loss was most succinctly described in Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 book, . Churches, unions, bowling leagues, and the like tended to draw a broader swath of the population. Even if churches were highly segregated along racial lines, they were more diverse along class lines, Smith points out.

Most important was the face-to-face contact that took place within these institutions. Not only did that interaction help humanize people that we’ve now come to see as enemies, but it also broadened our knowledge of what those other groups consider important.

There are groups currently working to facilitate this interaction. The nonprofit (formerly Better Angels) has been , nationally and in states across the country, with the express intent of providing a venue for open and respectful dialogue across the political divide.

That knowledge of other groups might also help elected officials respond more capably to their constituencies. (Although the gerrymandering of electoral districts has also contributed to an environment in which many politicians need only appeal to their base of voters, because they have very few opposition voters to respond to.)

Smith points out that between 2016 and 2020, Trump lost support from educated White voters, but his popularity among Latino voters actually grew—a�Ի� Latino communities’ support in recent polling is split about 50–50 between Democrats and Republicans.

“Which ought to strike fear into Democratic politicians,” Smith says. But we haven’t seen any kind of adjustment to that new reality.

Instead, Democrats appear to continue to focus on cultural issues that play well with their base but may put off more moderate voters.

“The discourse on the political left is driven by phrases and ideas from academia that spread out to affiliated liberal organizations,” Smith says. And there’s an emphasis on using the “right words” and monitoring discourse.

“That’s very alienating to working-class voters of all races,” Smith says. He cites the growing use of the word “L���پ��Գ�” as an example of this, and points to that shows that more than 65% of Hispanic voters prefer the word “L���پ��Գ�” not be used to describe their communities, and only 10% of those who have heard the term prefer its use.

(“Hispanic” is the term with the most support within those populations, polling at 61% favorability, according to Pew, and “Latino” polled at 29% favorability. YES!’s style is to use either “L���پ��Դ�,” “Latina,” or “L���پ��Գ�,” depending on the person’s preference.)

Elections are not won or lost on word choice, but diction can definitely have an effect in shaping the overarching narrative. Sen. Hillary Clinton’s “” comment during her 2016 presidential campaign was widely considered an unforced error that confirmed the view that she was out of touch with many working-class White voters.

Which isn’t to say liberal politicians need to bend over backward and abandon progressive principles to woo White voters who may be on the fence. It does suggest that playing to the base isn’t often a winning strategy—Donald Trump experienced this in 2020—a�Ի� that “outreach” is as much about learning and understanding from other groups as it is trying to pitch your message to them.

COVID-19 has undoubtedly harmed our ability to meet and communicate with those outside our own social groups. And it also isn’t feasible for everyone to run out and join bowling leagues—, and the pandemic didn’t help.

But now that the pandemic is receding (we hope), we may need to think not just about meeting our old friends and community again, but also about whether we are unintentionally limiting our experiences—a�Ի� our understanding—to just those that confirm our worldviews. Making our society civil again may depend on being willing to listen and learn things that we don’t agree with.

The invasion is posing a challenge for progressives and people on the left—particularly for those of us located in the U.S. As we work to stand with the peoples of Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Haiti, and many other places, we are also challenged to find ways to stand with the besieged people of Ukraine—who are facing an aggressor that is not the U.S.

But we live in a complicated and polarized world of international politics. Many of us are used to protesting our own government and its allies. And the U.S. government—with its ever-expanding wars and ever-ballooning military budget—a�Ի� those of its allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, give us no shortage of horrors to speak out against.

Indeed, the story of how Russia came to invade Ukraine requires looking at what the U.S. and NATO have been doing in Europe over decades, and especially in recent years.

But this time—a�Ի� this invasion—demands that we break out of a binary view that sees the U.S. as the sole actor and other powers as merely responding. Yes, Russia is responsible for its invasion of Ukraine. But it is not solely responsible for the broader situation in Eastern Europe within which it launched the invasion—which has been shaped by the U.S. and NATO. 

Similarly, it is glaringly insufficient to condemn the U.S. and NATO—though they are guilty of militarizing the region, and beyond—without starting with a clear condemnation of Putin’s Russia. 

And lastly, in our efforts to be in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, we cannot uncritically accept moves by Western powers against Russia—from economic sanctions that hurt ordinary Russians, to weapons sales to Ukraine, to military action against Russia—all of which will inevitably harm the most vulnerable, rather than the most powerful.

In the U.S., whenever a government that is deemed an “enemy” by officials and the mainstream media commits a horrendous act, Americans are compelled to “do something” in response. And the “something” inevitably put forward by the U.S. government is military action, or action that will otherwise devastate the people of the “enemy” country.

Today, the U.S. and its allies—Canada, Japan, Britain, and other European powers—are celebrating their use of economic sanctions against the Central Bank of Russia and the exclusion of Russian banks from the SWIFT transnational interbank communications and currency conversion system. In the weeks leading up to the invasion—a�Ի� the Western deployment of sanctions—officials cheered their destructive power, calling them “” options and “.” Now that they are in place, sanctions are predictably  ordinary Russians. The U.S. also openly debates imposing no-fly zones on Ukraine—in which U.S. and NATO jets would patrol parts of the country to repel Russian aircraft—all while the U.S. sends more troops to the eastern NATO countries.

But the idea that we have to either support military action and sanctions or “do nothing” is another false binary.

There are things people in the West can and should do. 

We can, and should, demand that our governments open its doors to Ukrainian refugees—a�Ի� to all refugees, actually, many of whom are displaced by U.S. violence and that of its allies. 

We can, and should, support organizations working with displaced people from Ukraine directly. 

We can, and should, call attention to the most vulnerable people in the crisis—including migrants in Ukraine and thousands of international students from Africa, China, and elsewhere—who have especially limited resources and harsh barriers as they, too, are displaced within and across borders. 

And finally, we must support the people of Russia  Putin’s invasion from within.

What we cannot do is allow Washington and the leaders of NATO countries to use the current nightmare unfolding in Ukraine to justify more militarization and plans for future wars. Unfortunately, the path they are pursuing is precisely that: a more militarized world, with bigger military budgets and more weapons sales.

First, NATO, founded in 1949 to oppose the Soviet Union—but that remains in effect 30 years after the Soviet Union’s fall—is a nuclear-armed confederation whose member states were responsible for  in the world in 2020. The scale of violence, should Russia and NATO come into direct conflict, has the potential to be even more staggering than what is currently unfolding.

Second, we should note that because the NATO states of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania all border Ukraine, the current disaster has the potential to burn beyond Ukraine and escalate to a new level. ������Ƶover, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—each of which is a member of NATO—all border Russia. Because of NATO’s , a military conflict with any one of these states could quickly escalate to one involving the whole alliance.

Third, NATO is doing its part to make such a catastrophe more likely—with Washington leading the way. The U.S. has deployed thousands of troops to NATO’s eastern countries in the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion. 

Finally, NATO’s long-term expansionist plans are culminating in ways that raise the already-high temperature in the region. The U.S. is building its —located in Redzikowo, Poland, just 100 miles from the Russian border—operational. The base will house weapons from NATO’s European missile defense system.

These measures, which NATO frames as “deterrence,” are precisely what make a conflict between Russia and the alliance so potentially catastrophic. 

Putin’s justification of his invasion of Ukraine as a response to NATO’s militarism is cynical. There is nothing defensive or defensible about what Russia is doing. But NATO is responsible for militarizing Europe. It shaped the context in which Russia invaded, and it has put in place the pieces that could make the current war explode further.

What’s worse, NATO powers are using the current crisis to pursue longer-term projects of militarism. 

After the end of the United States’ 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, and after two decades of the “war on terror,” this is precisely the time to critically evaluate the impacts of U.S. militarism and push for demilitarization.

Instead, Washington is doing the opposite, with Biden  a record $770 billion military budget for 2023. Congress—which last year passed a military budget even larger than the president and Pentagon requested—is  a bipartisan emergency spending bill that would further arm NATO and Ukraine.

European nations are similarly expanding their militarism. In a special session of the German parliament on Feb. 26, Prime Minister Olaf Scholz  that his nation would sell weapons to Ukraine and increase its military spending to 2% of the country’s economic output. Upon his announcement, members of the parliament erupted in applause. The decisions represent a reversal from Germany’s long-standing policy of quieter military activity since World War II.

If, in response to the Russian invasion, NATO powers increase their military budgets, weapons development, and weapons sales, the effect will endure far beyond the point when the crisis in Ukraine is no longer making headlines in the Western media.

We urgently need a progressive politics that extends solidarity with the victims of military violence—no matter which state perpetrates it—a�Ի� resists the militarism of our own governments. We must also reject the economic sanctions that the U.S. and allies are currently leveling against Russia. Sanctions—which officials often hold up as an alternative to war—are better understood as an act of war.

The activists in Russia who are protesting in the streets are showing us the way by defying their government’s actions, in spite of the risks to themselves, and denouncing war. We are challenged to do our part to build a movement across borders in solidarity with the many people facing war, in demand of a demilitarized world.

This article was originally published by .

Predictably, much of the Western press has focused on Ukrainian diplomatic or military resistance to Russia’s invasion, such as the arming of regular citizens to patrol and protect.��

These forces have already proven stronger than Russian President Vladimir Putin has expected and are disrupting his plans with great courage. Take . Right after their marriage vows, they proceeded to sign up with the local Territorial Defense Center to defend their country. 

History shows that successful resistance against a militarily stronger opponent often requires a wide variety of resistance, including from those who are unarmed—a role that is often given less attention, both by the mainstream media and by maniacal power-obsessed opponents.

Yet, even as Putin’s swift invasion of Ukraine has left a lot of shock, Ukrainians are showing what unarmed people can do to resist, too.

Make It Hard for the Invaders

At this moment, the Russian military playbook appears to be focusing primarily on destroying the military and political infrastructure in Ukraine. The country’s military and newly armed civilians, as heroic as they are, are known factors for Russia. Just as the Western press ignores unarmed civilian resistance, the Russian military appears unprepared and clueless to this, too.

As people move past the shock of the past few days, it’s this unarmed part of the resistance that’s gaining momentum. Ukraine’s streets agency, Ukravtodor, called for “all road organizations, territorial communities, local governments to immediately begin dismantling nearby road signs.” They emphasized this with a photoshopped highway sign renamed: “Fuck you,” “Again fuck you,” and “To Russia fuck you.” Sources tell me versions of these are happening in real life. (The New York Times has  as well.)

That same agency encouraged people to “block the enemy by all available methods.” People are using cranes to move cement blocks in the way, and .

 showed a young man using his body to physically get in the way of a military convoy as they steamrolled through the streets. Reminiscent of Tiananmen Square’s “Tank Man,” the man stepped in front of speeding trucks, forcing them to veer around him and off the road. Unarmed and unprotected, his act is a symbol of bravery and risk.

This was echoed again by an individual in Bakhmach who, similarly,  and repeatedly pushed against them. However, it appeared many supporters were videotaping but not participating. This is worth noting, because—when consciously executed—these types of actions can be rapidly built upon. Coordinated resistance can spread and move from inspirational isolated acts to decisive acts capable of rebuffing an advancing army. 

Very recent social media reports are showing this collective noncooperation. In shared videos, unarmed communities are facing down Russian tanks with apparent success. In this , for example, community members walk slowly toward the tanks, openhanded and mostly without any words. The tank driver either does not have authorization or interest in opening fire. They choose retreat. This is being repeated in small towns across Ukraine.

These communal actions are often carried out by affinity groups—tiny cells of like-minded friends. Given the likelihood of repression, affinity groups can develop methods of communication (assuming the internet and cell phone service will be shut down) and keep a level of tight planning. In long-term occupations, these cells may also emerge from existing networks—schools, churches and mosques, and other institutions.

, citing Czechoslovakia, where in 1968 people also renamed signs. In one instance, hundreds of people with linked arms blocked a major bridge for hours until Soviet tanks turned around in retreat. 

The theme was total noncooperation wherever possible. Need oil? No. Need water? No. Need directions? Here’s the wrong ones. 

Militaries assume that because they have guns they can get their way with unarmed civilians. Each act of noncooperation proves them wrong. Each resistance makes every tiny goal of the invaders a hard battle. Death by a thousand cuts.

No Stranger to Noncooperation

Just ahead of the invasion, researcher Maciej Mathias Bartkowski  with insightful data on Ukrainians’ commitment to noncooperation. He noted a poll “just after the Euromaidan revolution and the capture of Crimea and the Donbas region by Russian troops, when it could be expected that Ukrainian public opinion would be strongly in favor of defending the motherland with arms.” People were asked what they would do if a foreign armed occupation took place in their town.

The plurality said they would engage in civil resistance (26%), just ahead of the percentage ready to take arms (25%). The others were a mix of people who just didn’t know (19%) or said they would leave or move to another region.

Ukrainians have made clear their readiness to resist. And that should be no surprise to people familiar with Ukraine’s proud history and tradition. Most have contemporary examples in recent memory—as recounted in Netflix’s documentary Winter on Fire about the  or the  in 2004, as recounted by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict’s film .

One of Bartkowski’s key conclusions: “Putin’s belief that Ukrainians would rather go home and do nothing in the face of military aggression may be his biggest and politically most costly miscalculation.”

Weaken the Resolve of the Russian Military

Casually, people talk about the “Russian military” as if it’s a single-minded hive. But, in fact, all militaries are made up of individuals with their own stories, concerns, dreams, and hopes. U.S. government intelligence, which has been surprisingly accurate in this moment, has asserted that Putin has not achieved his goals during this first phase of attack. 

This suggests that the Russian military morale may be a little bit shaken by the resistance they’ve already seen. It’s not the expected quick win. In explaining the ability of Ukraine to hold its airspace, for example, The New York Times suggested a range of factors: a more seasoned army, more mobile air defense systems, and , which appeared to hit old, unused targets. 

But if the Ukrainian armed forces begin to falter, then what?

Morale could swing back toward Russian invaders. Or they could instead find themselves met with even more resistance. 

The field of nonviolent resistance is heavy with examples of how the morale of soldiers gets reduced in the face of prolonged resistance, especially when civilians view the military as made up of human beings who can be interacted with.

Take inspiration from  in Henichesk, Kherson, region. With arms outstretched, she approaches soldiers, telling them they are not wanted here. She reaches into her pocket and takes out sunflower seeds and tries to put them in the soldier’s pocket, saying the flowers would grow when the soldiers die on this land.

She’s involved in a human moral confrontation. The soldier is uncomfortable, edgy, and reluctant to engage with her. But she stays pushy, confrontational, and no-nonsense. 

While we don’t know the outcome of this situation, scholars have noted how these types of repeated interactions shape the behavior of the opposing forces. The individuals in the military themselves are movable creatures and can have their resolve weakened. 

In other countries, this strategic insight has proven capable of causing mass mutinies. The young Serbians in Otpor regularly said to their military opponents, “You’ll have a chance to join us.” They would use a mix of humor, berating, and shame to target. In the Philippines, civilians surrounded the army and showered them with prayers, pleas, and iconic flowers in their guns. In each case, the commitment paid off, as large chunks of the armed forces refused to shoot.

In his highly relevant text , Gene Sharp explained the power of mutinies—a�Ի� civilians’ ability to cause them. “Mutinies and the unreliability of troops in repressing the predominantly nonviolent Russian revolutions of 1905 and February 1917 were highly significant factors in the weakening and final downfall of the tsar’s regime.”&�Բ�����;

Mutinies increase as the resistance targets them, attempting to undermine their sense of legitimacy, appealing to their humanity, digging in with prolonged, committed resistance, and creating a compelling narrative that the invading force simply does not belong here.

Tiny cracks are already showing. On Saturday, in Perevalne, Crimea,  reported that “half of Russian conscripts ran away and did not want to fight.” The lack of complete cohesion is an exploitable weakness—one increased when civilians refuse to dehumanize them and make attempts to doggedly win them over.

Internal Resistance Is Just a Part

Of course, the civilian resistance is one piece of a very large geopolitical unfolding. 

What happens in Russia matters a great deal. Perhaps as many as  while protesting across Russia. Their courage and risk may tip a balance that reduces Putin’s hand. At the very least, it creates more space for humanizing their Ukrainian neighbors.

Protests around the world have added pressure on governments for further sanctions. These have likely contributed to the recent decision by the , the worldwide network of 11,000 banking institutions to exchange money. 

A dizzying number of corporate boycotts on Russian products have been called by a variety of sources, and some of these may yet gain speed. Already, some of the corporate pressure is paying off with Facebook and YouTube .

However this unfolds, the mainstream press cannot be relied upon to lift up stories of civilian resistance. Those tactics and strategies may have to be shared across social media and other channels.

We will honor the bravery of the people in Ukraine, as we honor those resisting imperialism in its many forms across the globe today. Because for now, while Putin appears to be counting them out—to his own peril—Ukraine’s secret weapon of unarmed civilian resistance is only just starting to prove its bravery and strategic brilliance.

This article was originally published by .

One of the most popular—a�Ի� dangerous—assumptions in the world is that violence keeps us safe.

I live in the United States, a country where the more guns we have, the less safe we are. That helps me to notice irrational assumptions that prevent creative thought.

The Ukrainian government’s choice to use its military to defend against Russia reminds me of the stark contrast between the choices of the Danish and Norwegian governments when faced with threat from the Nazi German war machine. Like the Ukrainian government, the Norwegian government chose to fight militarily. Germany invaded and the Norwegian army resisted all the way to the Arctic Circle. There was widespread suffering and loss, and even after the end of World War II, it took many years for the Norwegians to recover. When I studied in Norway in 1959, rationing was still in effect.

The Danish government—knowing as certainly as the Norwegians that it would be defeated militarily—decided not to fight. As a result, the Danes were able to minimize their losses compared with the Norwegians, politically and economically, as well as the immediate suffering of their people.

The flame of liberty continued to burn bright in both countries under occupation. Along with an underground movement that included violence, nonviolent struggles on multiple fronts broke out that did both countries proud. The Danes saved most of their Jews from the Holocaust; the Norwegians saved the integrity of their education system and the state church.

Both the Danes and the Norwegians faced overwhelming military might. The Danes chose not to use their army and relied largely on nonviolent struggle instead. The Norwegians used their military, paid a high price for it, and then turned largely to nonviolent struggle. In both cases, the nonviolence—unprepared, with improvised strategy and no training—delivered victories that sustained the integrity of their countries.

Many Ukrainians Are Open to Nonviolent Defense

There is a remarkable on the chances of nonviolent defense and whether they would take part in armed or nonviolent resistance in response to a foreign armed invasion. Perhaps because of their remarkable success in nonviolently toppling their own dictatorship, a surprising proportion do not assume that violence is their only option. 

As Maciej Bartkowski, a senior advisor to the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, describes the findings, “Clear majorities chose various nonviolent resistance methods—ranging from symbolic to disruptive to constructive resistance actions against an occupier—rather than violent insurgent actions.”

Violence Is Sometimes Effective

I am not arguing that the threat or use of violence never achieves a positive result. In this short article, I’m setting aside the larger philosophical discussion while recommending Aldous Huxley’s remarkable book Ends and Means to readers who want to delve more deeply. My point here is that a compelling belief in violence renders people irrational to the point of hurting ourselves, over and over again.

One way we’re hurt is diminished creativity. Why isn’t it automatic, when someone proposes violence, that others say, “Let’s investigate and see if there’s a nonviolent way to get that done?”

In my own life, I’ve been faced with violence many times. I’ve been , I’ve had a three times, I’ve , and I’ve been a  threatened by hit squads.

I’m big and strong, and a while back, I was young. I’ve realized that in threatening situations, as well as the larger confrontations we get into with direct action, there is a chance that I might have gained tactical victories with violence. I also knew there was a chance that I could have won with nonviolence. I’ve believed the odds are better with nonviolence, and there’s lots of evidence on my side, but who knows for sure in any given situation?

Since we can’t know for sure, it leaves the question of how to decide. This could be challenging for us as individuals as well as for political leaders, be they Norwegian, Danish, or Ukrainian. It’s no help to have a violence-loving culture pushing me with its automatic answer. To be responsible, I need to make a real choice.

If I have time, I can do the creative thing and research possible violent and nonviolent options. That could help a lot, and it’s the least we can demand of governments making decisions for its citizens. Still, developing creative options is unlikely to seal the deal, because the situation before us is always unique, and predicting results is therefore a tricky matter.

I have found a solid basis for decision. I can’t know for sure the outcome of nonviolent or violent means ahead of time, but I can judge the ethical nature of the means itself. There is a clear ethical difference between violent and nonviolent means of struggle. On that basis, I can choose, and throw myself fully into that choice. At age 84, I have no regrets.

President Joe Biden’s recent nomination of Judge to the U.S. Supreme Court is unprecedented. There has never before been a Black woman nominated to the nation’s highest court—a court that is the final arbiter of how the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the laws of the nation are applied. Yet Biden’s nomination is likely to make little difference in the larger balance of power on the court, given that the opinions of the six Conservative justices will still overwhelm the decisions of the three more Liberal justices.

In his newly released first book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, legal scholar , justice correspondent for The Nation, argues that the founders wrote the original Constitution narrowly and with such haste that they were forced to add on the Bill of Rights to remedy its gaping holes, rather like a “day-one patch” to a piece of prematurely released software.

It is precisely for this reason that the resultant legal framework needs constant updating in order to ensure full equality for all. “The law is not science; it’s jazz,” writes Mystal. “It’s a series of iterations based off a few consistent beats.”

With his signature razor-sharp wit and pithy prose, the legal scholar argues that Conservatives have so often successfully challenged the full application of equal rights because their opposition is “covered in jargon and discussed as if only an expensively educated lawyer could truly understand the nuance.”

But, “it’s like building a bike,” writes Mystal, who promises “to show how conservatives are building their white supremacist ride, and how liberals can throw a spanner in the works.”

Mystal spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar about his new book.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Kolhatkar: Why did you decide to take on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the subject matter of your first book?

Mystal: The main reason is that we have been told a lot by Conservative White people what the Constitution means, what the law means, how it should be interpreted and why. And that, from my perspective, is just one option among many. The other options involve looking at the Constitution as a flawed document that needs to be perfected in order to achieve a level of fundamental fairness and equality that was, shall we say, missing from the initial draft of it, [a draft that was] written by slavers, colonists, and people willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.

So, I bring a perspective that is informed by the fact that [according to] the Constitution I wasn’t a person. And from that starting point, I look at that document a little bit differently.

It’s not a sacred text to me—it’s a flawed piece of political philosophy. And I think that perspective is valuable, especially in a moment that Conservatives are ascendant, and their views and their ideology of the Constitution is ascendant. I think it’s good to have a counterargument for what they’re trying to do.

Kolhatkar: You point out that Republicans and Conservatives treat the Constitution as if it was set in stone, a sacred document, and yet immediately after it was written, it required amendments. Just that fact itself should hint that this was a deeply flawed process, right?

Mystal: These were amendments that, remember, the people who wrote the Constitution didn’t think were necessary. They forced James Madison to write the Bill of Rights. Madison wrote The Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, arguing that the Constitution was fine as is and didn’t need updates or amendments for the Bill of Rights. Nothing shows you that the Constitution was a bit of a rushed work in progress than the “day-one patch” that is the Bill of Rights.

But I think it goes beyond that. One of the things that Conservatives like to hide behind is the amendment process, saying, “Oh, if there’s something wrong here, then we need a new amendment to fix it, not a new interpretation of the Constitution.”

There’s a lot of things that the Constitution doesn’t protect when it comes to the issue of women’s rights, because the Constitution did not treat women as full people.

I reject that for many reasons. One of the principal ones is that the Constitution doesn’t include fairness for all of us. And if you’re a Conservative, you’re saying that the way to fix that is with a new amendment to the Constitution. How is that the answer to fundamental unfairness? How about we just have fairness? How about we just have equality? We already have amendments that say “equal protection under the law shall not be denied,” “due process of laws should not be denied.” Why can’t we use those amendments we’ve already passed? Why do you want to make me pass another amendment, Mr. Conservative?

And the answer, of course, is that Conservatives don’t believe we should have fundamental fairness and equality in our laws and in our government. They like things the way they are. That’s why they don’t actually want amendments to happen, because they think that this racist country is working as intended. I think it’s not.

Kolhatkar: You point out that even though the Constitution and Bill of Rights are flawed documents, they do contain pretty decent arguments, and you want the spirit of those rights to be respected. How do Republicans use legal arguments to justify racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like in spite of this?

Mystal: One of the reasons why I’ve written this book is because Republicans seem to be so good at making these sorts of heavy legal jargon-laden arguments to the general public, and a lot of people who know Conservatives are wrong don’t know how to fight them. And you shouldn’t have to go to law school for three years and study this stuff every day in order to fight Conservatives’ really bad arguments. So, part of the book is just giving you the arguments that you can make against the Conservatives in your life, whether you see them online or at Thanksgiving dinner. I would hope that this book is useful for those who fight people who believe that rights only exist for White, cis-hetero males.

In terms of how they do it, there are lots of ways that I can point out. One good way is to see what Conservatives say about reproductive rights. They’ll tell you that the Constitution does not explicitly defend a woman’s right to choose. That’s true, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says “the right to an abortion shall not be infringed upon.”

Do you want to know why the Constitution doesn’t explicitly protect a woman’s right to choose? Because the Constitution did not explicitly protect a woman’s right to talk, or to own property, or to not be raped. There’s a lot of things that the Constitution doesn’t protect when it comes to the issue of women’s rights, because the Constitution did not treat women as full people.

Kolhatkar: And women were not involved in the writing of the Constitution.

Mystal: Not only were women not involved in the writing of the original Constitution, they also haven’t been involved in the writing of any of the amendments since then, including the amendment that gave women the right to vote!

Women were not writing the 19th Amendment, nor did women control any state legislature that had to ratify the 19th Amendment. And women have never held a majority of seats on the Supreme Court—although we might be getting close to that one day. So, at no point in American history has a body comprised of a majority of women been involved in adjudicating the rights of women, which is kind of weird when you think about it. The same goes for LGBTQ communities. The same goes for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in this country.

Again, I come back to this point that if you’re going to tell me that this document is legitimate at all—which we can have a whole different debate about—then certainly it must evolve, it must breathe, it must live in a world where we understand the rights and responsibilities in this country a little bit more expansively than the exclusively White cis-hetero men that have been allowed to adjudicate those rights for most of our history.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk about the First Amendment—this is a favorite one for Conservatives, and in recent times is most commonly invoked in terms of “cancel culture.” Conservatives love to talk about how Liberals and Leftists just want to cancel everybody and everything, but what does the First Amendment actually protect?

Mystal: The First Amendment protects, fundamentally, political speech. It protects, fundamentally, the freedom of the press. The people who wrote the First Amendment were fundamentally concerned with being able to talk smack to the government without catching a bullet. They wanted you to be able to say “George Washington is a poopy-head” without ending up in the brig. That was the goal of the First Amendment.

It is not attached to private speech or concerned about private speech. And, quite frankly, it would be ridiculous for it to be concerned about private speech. Why should the Constitution take judicial notice if a private company cares what you happen to say in the public square? Why would that work? So, the First Amendment somewhat clearly doesn’t deal with private speech, nor should it deal with private speech.

And thus, when Conservatives claim they’re being canceled, what they’re really complaining about is having private people enact consequences because they said something stupid.

Nobody’s canceling J.K. Rowling. I just don’t feel like buying the books of an out transphobe. That’s all. That’s a private decision, nothing bad is happening to her. I just don’t want to buy her dumb books now.

When we talk about Donald Trump being canceled, the man was president of the United States, and can stomp around Florida freely, apparently, despite his many crimes. No one’s canceling him. He got kicked off of a private web platform, a “bird app,” that’s what happened to Donald Trump. It is totally within the purview of that private company to say you can or cannot use our service.

Now, if you’re talking about the government chilling speech, that’s a whole different problem. When the Department of Justice chills speech, as [former Attorney General] Bill Barr did when they cleared the square in Washington, D.C., of protesters so Trump could have a photo op with a Bible—that is an issue of free speech that the founders would care about. That’s where the Constitution gets involved: when the government is chilling peaceful protest, and not before.

Kolhatkar: Let’s talk about police brutality. This is also something that Conservatives like to couch in legal jargon to continue justifying the use of lethal force by police on ordinary people. You started out one of your chapters in your book Allow Me to Retort asking the question, “Why can’t I punch a cop?” Take us through that argument.

Mystal: Imagine this situation: I’m sitting in my house, eating some ice cream. Somebody kicks down my door and comes at me with a gun. Why can’t I defend myself?

If that’s a private citizen doing that, I would have the right to self-defense. In fact, Conservatives more than anybody would say that I have the right to pull out a gun and stand my ground and [invoke the] Castle doctrine, etc. The Conservatives—allegedly—would have my back if someone kicks down my door, unless it’s a cop.

If it’s a cop, I’m supposed to, what, die? I’m supposed to just genuflect and take it, and hope that that cop who is assaulting me, who has broken into my home, does the right thing? How is that reasonable?

Well, the only way it’s reasonable for me to not be able to defend myself against a cop trying to kill me is if [I] live in [a] society where the other cops are going to stop him. The rule of law, if it is to mean anything, must mean that it applies to those who are being lawless even under the cover of law. The reason why I can’t punch a cop is because other cops are supposed to punch him and stop him from violating my rights, stop him from brutalizing me.

The fact that we don’t have that system and don’t live in that world is the actual problem. That’s the problem that we have to fix. And until we get a majority of White people willing to fix it, it’s going to continue to be a problem.

When I say “a majority of White people,” people get angry with me sometimes. The reason why I say that a majority of White people want police to be brutal is because whenever we have a vote, a majority of White people vote for Republicans who then support police brutality.

The last time a Democrat running for president won the White vote was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In every presidential election since then, a majority of White folks have voted for the Republican, who has almost universally been a fan of aggressive policing and brutality.

In more recent times, a majority of White people, including a majority of White women, voted for Donald Trump, twice! He was only beaten the second time, over the objection of a majority of White folks. So, that’s what’s holding us back, from where I sit: It’s that a majority of White people want their police to be brutal. And when given the option to vote for candidates who will stop that, they do not support them.

Kolhatkar: If this country was formed on the basis of White supremacy, how does the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and how do Republicans and Conservatives who interpret them, preserve that White supremacy?

Mystal: Every time we have a new amendment or a new law, Conservatives work to limit the effectiveness of that new law or amendment to preserve the old structures of White supremacy. They do this even when that law is meant specifically to take those structures down.

Now, I say “Conservatives.” Whether or not those Conservatives call themselves Democrats, as they did after the Civil War, or Republicans, as they do today, matters to me less. Whatever they’re calling themselves this morning matters to me less. What they are, are Conservatives. And wherever you look throughout history, it has been the Conservative Party, whatever they call themselves, that has worked to limit the effectiveness of justice, equality, and fairness.

You need look no further than the 15th Amendment saying that “the right to vote shall not be abridged on account of race.” It’s a pretty simple idea. And immediately, Conservative legislatures in the South, in the former confederacy, just ignored it, just pretended that the 15th Amendment didn’t even exist and went right back to excluding Black people from voting. The only change was that they ���dzܱ����’t overtly say “because you’re Black.” They had to use slightly different words to achieve the same effect. But from the moment of the end of Reconstruction, when Rutherford B. Hayes pulled troops out of the South until the Civil Rights era, the South functionally ignored the 15th Amendment, and the courts let them do it. Conservatives on the courts refused to enforce the 15th Amendment against the White supremacists who were ignoring it.

Fast-forward to the civil rights movement, when we pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which is my pick for the most important piece of legislation ever passed in American history. It’s worked. Forty years after the civil rights movement, we end up with the first Black president.

The White Conservative response to that was to eviscerate the power of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts did that in in 2013 by a 5–4 vote. He took away the pre-clearance [provision], which was the main thing stopping the former Confederacy from enacting new voter restrictions and suppression aimed at Black folks.

The voter suppression that was then unleashed helped Donald Trump get elected in 2016. And now, after this new census, we see that Republicans are off the chain with their voter suppression tactics. All of that can be traced back to John Roberts in 2013.

So, when you look at the history of the 15th Amendment, we have about 100 years when White people pretended that it didn’t exist, about 20–30 years in the middle there when it was kind of a thing, and now we’re on to one decade of White people pretending the 15th Amendment doesn’t exist again. We’ll see how long this current eruption of racism lasts before somebody stops what John Roberts started.

Kolhatkar: You point out that your book is meant to be a handbook for arguments that laypeople can use against legal jargon justifying Conservative policies. But in practical terms, it’s the Supreme Court justices that interpret our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. And as you were just pointing out, that makes all the difference, and today, we have a situation with a 6–3 Conservative majority on the court. Isn’t there an important argument to be made for expanding the court? 

Mystal: Ah, so you got to the end of my book! I end the whole thing, as you know, with an argument for court expansion, because that’s the only thing that will work. That’s the only thing that can stop Conservatives from having generational control over American law and policy. People need to understand that there is nothing that I can pass as a Democrat that a 6–3 court cannot strike down. There is nothing to stop them. The third branch of government—the courts—have a veto power over the other two. And until Democrats start understanding that and playing by those rules, and fighting for the third branch of government, we will always be behind.

This is where there are a lot of asymmetries involved, and this is one of the reasons why I decided to write this book. Because base Republican voters understand how important the Supreme Court is. They might not understand all the legal jargon—I’m not saying all the Republican voters are smarter than Democratic voters, or more civically aware than Democratic voters—but they know, because they’ve been told by their leaders that if there is something that they want, they must control the Supreme Court to get it. So, if you’re a Republican, you know that if you don’t like gay people, well then, you’ve got to [control] the court.

Whereas if you’re a Democrat, you don’t seem to know that if you want anything to happen with climate change over the next 30 years, then you’re going to need Liberals on the Supreme Court who will interpret the federal government having the authority to bring the fossil fuel industry to heel. You get nothing on climate if you don’t control the Supreme Court. You get nothing on voting [rights] if you don’t control the Supreme Court. You get nothing on guns if you don’t control the Supreme Court.

Name me an issue you, Liberal, care about, and I will tell you exactly how the Supreme Court will take that away from you if you do not stack it with like-minded Liberals. And Democrats generally don’t understand that. But Republicans do.

That is why we lose. That is why we fight an uphill, asymmetrical battle where Republicans have single-issue voters. You can go to a tabernacle in Utah and find some person who’s like, “Well, I don’t really like Donald Trump … but abortion … so I have to vote Republican for the Supreme Court.” You can find those people everywhere across the country in Republican pockets.

It is very hard to find single-issue Democratic Supreme Court voters, and, quite frankly, if we had more single-issue Democratic Supreme Court voters, Hillary Clinton probably would have won in 2016.

Kolhatkar: Where do you think that cycle can be broken into? In order to push Democrats, you need more people voting for Democrats, but the Supreme Court is curtailing voting rights. It feels like a vicious cycle, and where to break into it is an important question, right?

Mystal: Unfortunately, I kind of fear or worry that things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Republican policies are massively unpopular. One of the reasons why Republicans prefer to do certain things through the Supreme Court is that they can’t actually get them done at the ballot box, because they’re unpopular. People support women’s rights. People, now, support gay rights. Taking those away politically is difficult. That’s why they want the courts to do it.

So, my only hope is that—it’s a strange hope, hope is probably not the right word; my worry, perhaps—is that when you have states like Texas taking away abortion rights and bullying trans kids, when things get bad enough, many people will say, “Wait a minute, I don’t want this country to be this way. Why does it gotta be this way?” And maybe then they’ll start understanding who their enemies have been this entire time and take the courts a little bit more seriously.

But it starts with Democrats taking the courts more seriously, right? I’ll say this as my last thing: You cannot win the Republican nomination for president without being strong on the Supreme Court. If you think back to 2016, Donald Trump was running against all these establishment Republicans, and he was wiping the floor with them. But the one concession Trump had to make to the establishment Republicans was the Supreme Court. They had to give him that list, remember? It was a of Federalist Society-approved Supreme Court justices, because without that list, he ���dzܱ����’t have won that nomination. That’s how important the Supreme Court is to Republicans.

Meanwhile, fast-forward to 2020, [when] 18,000 Democrats and their mothers are all running for the presidential primary. Joe Biden is one of the most anti-court-expansion candidates in the field, one of the most reluctant to reform the Supreme Court or aggressively change how it operates. And it doesn’t cost him a vote in a primary. That’s the asymmetry. And until that asymmetry is corrected by base Democratic voters, the Democratic Party will continue to not elevate the courts to their rightful importance, and thus they will continue to lose the battle of the courts to Republicans.

“The idea is to pull off a digital version of the Enclosure of the Commons and put huge powers into the hands of an increasingly hardening police state.” —Arundhati Roy

“If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it!” has been proposed as the central operating principle of the modern world. It is a plausible candidate because it captures the compulsive logic of the marauder, empire builders, clear-cutters, strip miners, corporate tycoons, militarists, and true believers of all kinds who shaped the past two centuries. Brute force does not negotiate with history, hubris, culture, biology, old knowledge, ethics, foresight, and the unknown. It eschews humility, persuasion by reasoned debate, and ethical limits, and it abhors empathy, compassion, and the discipline of place. In the fossil fuel era, the logic of brute force escaped from confinement and went on a planetary rampage and now pervades virtually all human activity. It masquerades as progress, but the disguise conceals a darker reality. A prime example, at the far edge of insanity, is the logically airtight, mathematically rigorous strategy of “Mutual Assured Destruction,” which informs our testosterone-saturated foreign policies and by which Armageddon hangs by an oh-so-slender thread. For what great cause, exactly, would one push the button to destroy the planet? What national interest, or reputational advantage, or great cause might be served? Who would be around to ponder such things and sift through the debris left by the most brutish of brute-force weaponry?

Sometime after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the logic of brute force infected Western economics, informing its underlying proposition that all men (mostly) have insatiable wants that justify tearing up the earth, polluting it, or frying it to death. By this logic, human survival is deemed uneconomical. But why would any even modestly sane person run the risks of destabilizing the Earth’s climate? It is impossible to comprehend the depth of nonsense in waters so turbid.

������Ƶ pertinent to this book [Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizens’ Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture] is the unfolding disaster of a global agribusiness system that operates by brute force as well. In return for a mess of pottage, industrial agriculture compromised the fecundity of natural systems, eroded soils, drained aquifers, polluted waters, destroyed once-stable rural communities, created hundreds of dead zones in seas around the world, destroyed biodiversity everywhere, and erased the knowledge of better ways to farm, while creating a vast moral chasm between the overfed and the starving. The ironies of industrial agriculture stack up like cordwood; the unpaid full costs of cheap food for the rich are staggering; the moral costs are beyond counting.

Defenders of the system cannot rightfully claim they were not warned. There are warnings against overreach and hubris in the founding myths, literature, poetry, and scriptures of nearly every culture on Earth. In Western literature, for example, the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), for one, is not the creature but its creator, who refused to take responsibility for what he’d done. Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851) is a further warning about the penalties that accompany uncontrolled obsession in pursuit of ignoble ends. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor gave a further warning about the perverse logic of necessity; in The Brothers Karamazov (1879), the Grand Inquisitor says to a silent Christ: “In the end they [the people] will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, ‘make us your slaves but feed us.’ They will understand at last that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together … they can never be free for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious.”

The strategy of the Grand Inquisitor is that of the petrochemical companies, agribusiness, and multinational corporations that will feed us in a manner of speaking but only in return for our acquiescence in the ruination.

In the nick of time, however, along comes Bill Gates and other “philanthrocapitalists” who, as luck would have it, promise to solve hunger, disease, poverty, and a rapidly destabilizing climate, often by selling us more of the things that made them very rich. A godsend, indeed, until one reads the fine print that, among other things, requires believing that the leopard has shed its spots and now wishes to feed those it once fed upon. A more enlightened and beneficent capitalism is possible, I think, but it requires capitalists to transcend self-interest and greed, which is not wholly supported by the record. It isn’t just their hearts, however; it’s their mindset, conditioned by many years of accumulation to believe that money is necessary to solve problems. But for all of their puffery, philanthrocapitalists don’t talk much about the root causes of the problems they purport to solve; or the politics of who gets what, when, and how; or the fair distribution of wealth; or the destruction of vibrant rural cultures rooted in place. In Anand Giridharadas’ words: “To question their supremacy is very simply to doubt the proposition that what is best for the world just so happens to be what the rich and powerful think it is. … It is to say that a world marked more and more by private greed and the private provision of public goods is a world that doesn’t trust the people, in their collective capacity, to imagine another kind of society into being.”

What he calls the “Aspen Consensus” entails challenging the winners to do more good but never to do less harm—the kind of absolution theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called “cheap grace.”

There is a long, ironic, and mostly unhappy history of the very wealthy trying to do good, most often late in lives spent otherwise. To improve agricultural production and end world hunger, for example, The Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s decided to launch what became known as the Green Revolution. It entailed the application of capital, machinery, chemicals, irrigation, consolidation of small farms, and migration to overcrowded cities, and it caused the destruction of “an agricultural system around which village life and livelihoods had revolved for thousands of years,” as Mark Dowie wrote in American Foundations: An Investigative History.

The Foundation leaders ignored repeated warnings, including those by University of California geographer Carl Sauer about overlooking the possibility “that native practices represent real solutions to local problems.” As it turned out, Sauer was right. The results of the Green Revolution have been a social, cultural, political, and ecological disaster.

One wonders, then, what great problems have been solved by philanthrocapitalism? After all the hype, the record—at best—is mixed. Most of what’s grown by brute-force agriculture goes to feed the wealthy, often at the expense of people on the land, tropical forests, and biological diversity. “What to make of the fact that growing philanthropy and growing inequality seem to go hand in hand?” Linsey McGoey asks in No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy. Increasingly, philanthropy, she notes, deprives treasuries of tax revenues that could otherwise be better spent to help the poor. And who holds the Bill Gateses of the world accountable? Who weighs the difference between tax revenues not paid to the public treasury against the purported benefits of unsupervised philanthropy? The answer is no one. A more sensible approach to philanthropy is to recognize that “the state is better placed, for reasons of legal power and accountability, to do some things” that require a systems perspective, transparency, and ultimate accountability (Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World).

The battle over land, common property resources, rural culture, and footloose wealth has entered a new and perhaps final phase, as the writers in this book explain. Bill Gates, through Gates Ag One, is spending billions each year to monopolize seeds and control global agriculture in ways previously impossible. Agriculture was the last major sector of society rendered vulnerable to capitalism, but the advent of gene splicing and CRISPR technology makes it possible and highly profitable to control the foundation of agriculture by controlling seeds and genetic material. The result is the brave new world of synthetic meat, genetically modified plants, and novel organisms of all kinds; a world of biopiracy, dependence, pesticides, and control beyond the wildest imaginings of any Grand Inquisitor. It also is a world losing vibrant rural communities, cultural diversity, biological diversity, and democracy—one shaped by “monocultures of the mind” warped by the ideology of brute force applied to genes, plants, animals, recalcitrant rural communities, and independent thinkers, like Vandana Shiva. Under the flag of feeding the world and armed with technology that can manipulate down to the fine grain of life, Gates and others are enclosing the final commons. That is a fight we must not lose.

In sum, we are kin to all that ever was, is, and ever will be. Vandana Shiva captures this ancient truth with an invocation: “We are the land. We are the soil. We are biodiversity. We are one Earth family deriving our common humanity and identity from the land and Earth as earthlings, sharing our common sustenance for life, breath, food and water through community and mutuality.” Amen. The crux of the problem, she writes elsewhere, is “the Eurocentric concept of property [that] views only capital investment as investment, and hence treats returns on capital investment as the only right that needs protection … not labor, or care and nurturance.”

The battle, then, is ultimately one about politics, which is to say about power and greed—justice and fairness within and between generations and species. It began long ago in the enclosure of common lands, forests, and waters and morphed into the enclosure of everything that could be fenced off to exclude common use, common decency, common justice, and a common future. As Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, it is ultimately a struggle to protect “a peoples’ inalienable right to rule themselves.”

This excerpt from , edited by Vandana Shiva, foreword by David Orr, appears by permission of Synergetic Press.