When I asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who regularly faces off in debate with some of the most powerful politicians in Washington, to sing “” with my choir early last year, she demurred. “Oh, I can’t sing,” she said.

For many self-identified non-singers, for the many who were told by their middle school choir directors that they didn’t have the voice for it, singing has been relegated to the shower, the car, or the karaoke room—places that lack that same terror of exposure. Given the feeling of privacy, we allow ourselves an opening to become singers.

Karaoke can be fun, of course. (I lean toward “Psycho Killer” after a couple of whiskey sours.) But if it’s the only singing you do, you’re missing out. Karaoke gives only a dulled version of the power of song. It gets nowhere near the exhilaration a person feels when they take their voice into the streets.

The power of song to literally transform the brain and move people to action has given it a place of privilege in mass political actions. Almost every revolutionary movement in modern history—the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement, and so many more—has had an accompanying singing culture.

That’s because singing at protests isn’t just for pleasure. It works.

Singers United

Choral singing is a physical demonstration of unity. It is a simple means of communication that gives participants the opportunity to voice their purpose collectively. In in the 1980s, protesters demonstrating against apartheid used a dance called the toyi-toyi, a militant bouncing from foot to foot, along with chanting and singing (in four-part harmony). Through song and dance, they were able to communicate their demands, create crowd unity, and present a formidable and frightening show for the armed soldiers they were confronting.

“You’re in a protest and it’s loud, and the streets are loud, and the cops are loud, and the sound of the city is loud,” says Savitri D, director of the New York City-based radical protest choir . “How can you be heard? Well, you share a song together. A choir is a bullhorn.”

The songs of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome,” “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and “This Little Light of Mine,” drew from the entire repertoire of the Black American song tradition. These simple, popular songs communicated a strong message during demonstrations, lowered tensions in situations with the threat of police violence, and kept morale high when demonstrators were sent to jail en masse. In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memoir Why We Can’t Wait, he called these songs the “soul of the movement.”

Song as Counterprotest

Choral singing can also be an effective form of counterprotest. In the early 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union, had its labor demonstrations interrupted by the Salvation Army band. The band was sent in by factory owners to drown out the speeches of labor organizers. As a defense tactic, members of the IWW made up parodies of Salvation Army hymns. When the brass band started up, union members were ready to sing along to the music with radical lyrics, thus preventing the noise of the band from breaking up the solidarity of their demonstration.

It is in this context that the song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was transformed into the anthem of the American labor movement, “Solidarity Forever.” The verse “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” became “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run / There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun.”

Radical caroling, as my choir practices it, comes from this tradition of counterprotest. There are no auditions, and singers of all abilities are welcome. My choir, as well as the handful of choirs like it, goes caroling every year, singing left-wing parodies of popular Christmas carols in the streets around the holidays. We sing songs like “” (sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree,”) or make up our own parodies.

As with Salvation Army hymns, caroling songs, for some, come with connotations of sweet, family-friendly good times. The idea is to draw a crowd with the warm and inviting sound of your voices but to change the message from one of holiday cheer to one of revolutionary solidarity.

As in a karaoke room, caroling brings a private event (a Christmas party) into a public space: It creates an opening. Radical choirs use that opening to stage political happenings.

Sing in Solidarity goes caroling in support of candidates running for local elected office in New York City. We draw public attention to our candidates and their platforms by throwing holiday parties in the streets and singing the block down for hours.

Emotional Sustenance

Radical choirs have an objective value in progressive political movements. They can demonstrate unity and convey a message loud and clear. Studies have shown that singing in chorus that allow people to withstand pain for longer periods. A long, cold demonstration or a night in jail are literally less painful when you are singing with others.

We know that protest singing is effective. For the individual members of a choir, it can also be incredibly emotionally sustaining.

“It’s really hard to be an activist. It’s hard work every day,” says Savitri D of The Church of Stop Shopping. “When you’re with a group of people united around your values and you sing together, somehow it just makes it all possible.”

Elise Bryant, the founding director of the DC Labor Chorus, goes even further: “We sing because something inside needs to be expressed, something beyond words,” she says. “It has a power that no other human activity has, in that it stimulates both hemispheres of the brain, and it also alters our mood and allows us to go deeper in some ways that just talking won’t do.”

Music can take that small opening between public and private spaces and tear down the wall between them. It helps create mass civilizational events, such as the protests in Santiago, Chile, in 2019, when millions took to the streets to protest inequality. Thousands gathered in public squares to sing revolutionary songs. Protesters sang music that has become synonymous with Latin American resistance, songs like “,” (“The People United Will Never Be Defeated”) and “”(“The Right to Live in Peace”).

The fear of public singing evaporates when you sing not just for yourself but also as a demonstration of solidarity and as evidence of the power of the collective voice. Song is an incredibly powerful organizing tool that I believe is too little utilized in activist spaces.

If you are wondering if a political movement is effective, sometimes you need to follow the music.

Election 2024 brought the lowest of lows—Donald Trump’s wildest, most fascist fantasies manifesting in a parade of hate—a�Ի� the highest highs—the late-breaking entry of a multiracial woman of color who snagged the Democratic Party’s nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a record-breaking billion-dollar campaign amid a tidal wave of young women progressives spurred by attacks on their bodily autonomy. 

Over and over, we were told this was the most important election of our lifetimes. We, the people, were asked to choose between an apologist for genocide, the specter of fascist insurrection, or a third-party option that had no serious prospects for victory.

Along the way to winning the election, Trump and his allies reduced so many of us to objects, to evildoers, to garbage, to the enemy. If we made it through these past months, it was with a sense of nervous hope that the insults and attacks had an expiration date. If we could just make it to Nov. 6, we could deal with the trauma, heal, and look forward to holding the centrist establishment accountable. 

Along the way to losing the election, Harris and her backers flirted with A-list celebrities and , repeatedly shunned Palestinians fighting for their rights, pushed back against demands to hold Israel accountable for genocide, and wrapped it all up with an appearance on Saturday Night Live.��

With both candidates’ approaches top of mind, I began monitoring election results on Nov. 5, feeling—to quote one woman I overheard say to another that morning—“nauseously optimistic.” As I anxiously monitored the New York Times’ , coaxing it toward the blue-tinged left, I found myself reliving the , when that same needle veered suddenly to the red-hued right.��

So, here we are again, waking up to a new chapter of the same nightmare we experienced from 2016 to 2020. Now, as we are still reeling from many months of abuse, we face the prospect of four more years of it. 

We need to understand what has happened and how to move from here. But we also need to take a moment to mourn—for ourselves; for our fellow Americans and especially immigrants; for our Black, Brown and queer sisters, brothers, and kinfolk; for our children’s imperiled future; and for our country’s fate. 

In the coming months, we’re going to read reams of analyses about why Harris lost the  election: the insurmountable polarization our country is experiencing, third-party candidates’ “spoiler” effects, the blind spots and failures of the Harris campaign, political amnesia, whether the nation is ready to elect a woman, and how Trump’s voters will regret supporting a demagogue. 

But maybe it’s not even that complicated. 

“In so many ways our leaders have failed us, and a lot of people are really struggling,” immigrant rights organizer and author Silky Shah said on a recent episode of my show, . “And the easy thing that happens is blaming immigrant communities when, in fact, obviously we should be blaming those who have put in these policies that aren’t helping communities on the whole.”

Most Americans agree on their basic needs: good jobs and , , and so on. They also . Indeed, some of those who picked Trump might have done so because , while others might be hopelessly invested in racist, misogynist, queerphobic, anti-immigrant hate—or both. Together they number , or 51% of the electorate, with of Latino men, younger voters, and first-time voters.��

The rest of us—about 67 million—who picked Harris, either did so holding our nose to keep Trump away from the levers of power, or genuinely believed she was a force for good. (It is this latter group that is probably most shocked and perplexed by the election results). 

Instead of a shift toward policies that prioritize collective care—which could unite Americans—what we got from the two major-party political candidates were false narratives that largely fell into two camps: Trump painted the nation as a dystopian quagmire that only a strongman like him could fix, while Harris’ campaign was based on the idea that we must preserve the booming economy she and incumbent President Joe Biden ushered in. 

But in truth, both parties have moved dramatically rightward. According to investigative journalist and YES! contributor Arun Gupta, “One is a hard-right Republican party known as the Democrats, and the other is a fascist party, a MAGA party known as the Republicans.”��

Shah concurred, saying she found it “actually really surreal to see how far to the right things have moved and how much Democrats aren’t even really advocating for immigrants in the way that they were before.”

Gupta attended Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City that made headlines for its speakers’ . He saw a different reality than the one being reported in corporate media outlets. “You had lots of anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant bombast. But that is only half the equation,” he said, a week before the election. “What’s really going on at these rallies … is love and �󲹳ٱ�.”

He concluded that Trump supporters are “there as much out of hate as they are out of love. And they go there because these rallies make them feel good about themselves. They make them feel good about the country, that they’re part of a movement.”

What if we all seek a love-based movement that prioritizes us over the interests of elites? What if Trump’s election is a horrific manifestation of a nation cutting off its nose to spite its face? There are no easy answers to these questions, but since we have failed to stave off extremist hate from occupying the highest rungs of power, we know the most vulnerable among us will likely pay a heavy price in the coming years. The rest of us can’t give up. 

“Our power and our potential actually goes beyond the ballot box,” says Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. “We need to keep on pushing on all of those levers [of power], regardless of who wins, no matter what day—Election Day, the day after, Inauguration Day, the day after.”

We will—we must—get through this time by reminding ourselves that most of us want the same things: safety, security, stability, and—dare I say it?—love. But how we get there as a nation is a conundrum we must continue grappling with.

Not surprisingly, . A Pew Research Center survey of people in 24 nations in 2023 revealed that 70% of people support direct democracy, with the percentage rising to 77% support for representative democracy. However, since democracy is designed to equalize power among people, it tends to be a work in progress. Even in functioning democracies, and use it to their ends, while those who have less power struggle for their fair share. 

The United States——was once regarded as a shining example of that form of government. But now, people around the world are disappointed in the nation’s approach to democracy. A of people in 34 nations concluded that only about 21% of those surveyed believe the U.S. offers a good model of democracy for the world, while 40% believe the U.S. used to be a source of inspiration but is no longer. The view from within is hardly better: Most people in the U.S. tend to distrust the government, with only about at any given time since 2007. 

Their suspicions are justified, as , a researcher at , explains: “The data suggests that the U.S. is less democratic now than it was a decade ago, even though it remains much more democratic than it was for most of its history.”&�Բ�����;

Because of the incredible promise it holds, democracy is fraught with contradictions and often triggers deep dissatisfaction when it doesn’t live up to its ideals. Indeed, . Herre found that the number of people living in democracies fell from 3.9 billion in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2023, and that more people are living in countries that are autocratizing.��

To understand why democracies are in decline, it’s worth examining how systems are enacted. The devil is often in the details. In the space between our decision-making and the enactment of those decisions, nefarious and power-hungry actors can hijack processes and sow the seeds of autocracy. 

There are many ways to strengthen democracy amid a rise in authoritarianism. It begins with voters making wise choices: “People can work toward making [the U.S.] more democratic by voting for pro-democracy candidates,” Herre notes. Indeed, we tend to equate democracy with voting—the most tangible way representative democracy is enacted and a critical step in choosing the public servants who make decisions on our behalf. Beyond that, Herre suggests that to make democracy more inclusive, what’s needed is “supporting pro-democracy organizations, and expressing their support for democracy in protests and conversations.”&�Բ�����;

Unfortunately, contemporary systems of representative democracy have become popularity contests in which participants are called upon every couple of years to pick between exceedingly narrow choices. In the U.S. especially, the question of —a�Ի� therefore participate in democracy—has been debated and legislated for centuries. 

Further, there are structural obstacles to voting baked into the U.S. Constitution, which is the definitive document laying out the rules of democracy and within which are embedded those devilish details that determine the responsiveness of the system. Even after adding various amendments to right historical wrongs, rather than individual voters when it comes to electing a president, and allows for the undemocratic, racist, and complicated Electoral College system. The Constitution also specifies the undemocratic makeup of the , a powerful body that allows smaller, whiter states to have the same power as larger, more racially diverse ones.��

In other words, as Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation and author of , told YES! in 2022, the U.S. Constitution is “a flawed document that needs to be perfected in order to achieve a level of fundamental fairness and equality that was … missing from the initial draft of it.”&�Բ�����;

He points out that none of the original authors of the Constitution or its amendments were women.“[T]he same goes for LGBTQ communities. The same goes for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities in this country.”&�Բ�����;

If U.S. democracy is exclusionary by design, is it even a democracy at all? 

Democracy for Some

The U.S. Constitution was inspired not only by , but also by formations that had greater physical and temporal proximity to the nation’s modern founders. A acknowledged how the “original framers of the Constitution … are known to have greatly admired the concepts, principles and government practices of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy,” which today is referred to as the . 

“Our ‘Founding Fathers’ based the U.S. Constitution on the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace,” says Fern Naomi Renville, an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota and Omaha nations, and a Seneca-Cayuga storyteller from Minnesota. Renville adds that acknowledges this debt to the Indigenous peoples of the land. 

“At the time when all of the ‘Founding Fathers’ were having conversations, there were Native people at the table who were consulting … [and] giving input to the colonists, who weren’t all getting along, and they were being advised to come together in the way that the Haudenosaunee Tribes had,” Renville says. 

Through their experience, Indigenous advisers showed the power in forming a union of disparate groups and modeled how settler colonialists could do the same to counter the power of the British Crown. However, Renville says some of the differences between the U.S. Constitution and the Haudenosaunee Law of Peace were deliberately designed to preserve power for those who already had it: wealthy white men. 

“When people learn about the actual inspiration for the U.S. Constitution, it changes how we think about inclusion in those rights,” says Renville. “It changes how we might think about the Bill of Rights, which enshrines what are basically Haudenosaunee principles for good governance. … Just learning that might prompt people to do some growing around how we include everyone … men and women, rich and poor.”&�Բ�����;

Tribes centered women in their democratic structures, and did not operate as capitalists or enslavers. In contrast, the Constitution’s framers imported European ideas of women’s disenfranchisement, human enslavement, and even landownership and property rights. 

When in 1920, they were strongly influenced by Indigenous women who enjoyed political power and decision-making authority over land and food. In 2016, women’s studies historian Sally Roesch Wagner told that early white suffragists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton “believed women’s liberation was possible because they knew liberated women, women who possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination: Haudenosaunee women.”&�Բ�����;

“The Haudenosaunee Law of Peace that the Constitution is based on relies on the power of the clan mothers as the ultimate authority,” says Renville. “That is the one piece that got left out in the application of these ideas on the U.S. Constitution and so that might be a part of why these ideas haven’t been as successfully applied in our country that we have now.”&�Բ�����;

For example, the U.S. Constitution does not enshrine reproductive justice or the right to an abortion because, according to Mystal, “the Constitution did not treat women as full people.”&�Բ�����;

People of color and especially Black people were also excluded from the writing and passage of the , , and Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which ended enslavement, granted citizenship to African Americans, and legalized voting rights for Black men, respectively. And yet, white supremacist forces continued to curb the democratic rights of people of color until the civil rights movement forced passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

Calling it “the most important piece of legislation ever passed in American history,” Mystal attributes Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential win to the Voting Rights Act. “Forty years after the civil rights movement, we end up with the first Black president,” he says. 

U.S. democracy has suffered from constant push-and-pull factors, with excluded communities fighting for and winning rights, and reactionary forces working to undo those gains. Mystal laments how, after Obama’s election, the U.S. Supreme Court “eviscerated” the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and spawned a slew of and dilute the impact of their votes. 

The exclusionary nature of U.S. democracy remains one of its central problems. Today, is seen as a continuation of slavery, with millions of people who are forced to and . 

History offers many lessons in strengthening democracy: After the U.S. incorporated the , a pay-to-play patchwork system that required people to pay taxes in order to vote, women, people of color, and low-income people overcame the corruptive power of money. Eventually, , a retired domestic worker, successfully challenged the poll tax through the 1966 Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections Supreme Court ruling. 

And yet, the overrepresentation of wealth in politics remains one of the greatest challenges to U.S. democracy. A found that 83% of Republicans and Republican-leaning people in the U.S. and 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning people in the U.S. feel that big-money donors and special interest lobbyists “have too much influence on decisions made by members of Congress.”&�Բ�����;

What Renville considers “most terrifying” today is “the rulings that recognize corporations as equal to people, so that economic structures have more legal weight than a human being.”&�Բ�����;

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded.”

Gerald Horne, who holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, agrees money has too much influence in politics. He offers a salient piece of advice to those seeking to strengthen democracy: “You would have to democratize the economy to begin with,” he says. “When you don’t democratize the economy, the malefactors of great wealth—as [Theodore] Roosevelt used to say—are able to use their economic strength to put a thumb on the scale with regard to politics.” A weighing scale is an apt metaphor for who has influence in U.S. democracy: The political power of historically marginalized people has been outweighed by the nefarious power of wealth and capital. 

Labor unions are microcosms of democracy and offer useful examples of how direct democracy via inclusive decision-making can counter the power of money. Horne says in the early part of the 20th century, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) tended to organize skilled workers but not low-wage workers such as secretaries in their quest for labor rights and better wages and benefits. 

In contrast, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) “was organizing across the board, from top to bottom” in auto plants, Horne adds. “Obviously the CIO model was more democratic than the AFL model.” Ultimately, McCarthyism eroded the CIO, which was then absorbed by the AFL. “We have not learned that much from unions,” says Horne. 

Furthermore, unions are relatively small formations in which direct democracy is a more viable prospect than in nation states. Most of the world’s democracies are representative, which means that people choose leaders to make decisions on their behalf rather than making every decision themselves. In contrast, direct democracies allow people to directly choose policies that govern them. 

Direct Democracies Lead the Way

When it comes to large nations in particular, representative democracy seems more efficient than, say, how a small nation such as —one of the world’s only direct democracies—is run. A nation of fewer than 9 million, the Swiss elect seven councilors every four years to carry out the day-to-day functioning of the government and participate in popular votes up to four times a year on specific measures. It is the closest to a direct democracy the world has today. 

At more than 333 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous nation on the planet, behind India and China. It is also the third-largest in size, behind Russia and Canada. By virtue of its sheer population and geographic size, U.S. democracy is complicated. A republic of 50 states and various territories, the federal government shares sovereign power with state governments. It makes little sense for residents of, say, Maryland, to vote on an issue that disproportionately impacts Oregonians. 

About have some form of Switzerland-like direct democracy, allowing residents to regularly cast votes on ballot measures—a sound approach, at least on paper, to ensuring state-level governments remain responsive to their voters. But there is no direct democracy at the federal level, even for something as simple as choosing the president. 

The Electoral College, where citizens vote for state-level delegates, is arguably one of the biggest tools used to dilute the power of democratic federal representation. Those delegates in turn cast ballots for the president. This is one step removed from representative democracy and could even be considered . 

The complexity of the Electoral College system becomes most apparent every four years, when adults attempt to explain to the children around them that the path to the White House winds its way through a handful of so-called “swing states.” Watch the face of a young person contort in confusion over the fact that a Michigan ballot is far more consequential than one from California, and try to explain why such a system is allowed to define itself as democratic. 

The fact that the Electoral College makes it possible for a presidential nominee to win office even if they lose the popular vote—which has happened , including twice in the past 25 years—has prompted many to call for its abolition. After all, minority rule is a hallmark of autocracy. About favor ending the Electoral College and want direct democracy—at least when it comes to choosing the president. 

“We don’t have to get into these complicated arguments about economic democracy and the power of billionaires,” says Horne. “You can just start with the Electoral College. It’s obvious that the Electoral College reflects a belief on the part of the framers of the Constitution that those small percentages of a potential electorate that could vote were not trustworthy and so therefore you needed this intervening force … to ‘correct’ any ‘mistakes’ that voters had made.”&�Բ�����;

There are efforts underway to end the Electoral College system, the most promising of which is the, a state-by-state effort to end the winner-take-all electors system practiced by 48 out of 50 states. Although the Constitution specifies the use of electors, it doesn’t require states to award all electoral votes to the winner of the statewide popular vote. Each state can therefore pass a law switching to proportional apportionment of electors and, as of , 17 states and the District of Columbia—representing 209 Electoral College votes—have done so. When states representing the majority of electoral votes—270—pass such laws, the Electoral College will effectively become a popular vote. 

Democratizing the Supreme Court

Another obstacle to people’s ability to rule themselves is the increasingly unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court, where only nine people with lifetime terms make decisions affecting hundreds of millions—a dynamic veering uncomfortably close to autocratic rule. 

The Court is prone to financial corruption, with justices having been found to from wealthy friends and then . It is also severely exclusionary in terms of race and gender—out of 116 justices since the nation’s founding, . ������Ƶover, justices are instead of interpreting laws—in effect becoming proxy legislators. 

“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,” says Mystal, who sees the Supreme Court as one of the biggest counterbalances to U.S. democracy. “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.”&�Բ�����;

There are numerous ideas around reforming the Supreme Court, including —a popular idea—a�Ի� creating a binding code of conduct. President Joe Biden has backed both these ideas, but so far, none of these efforts appear likely to come to fruition. 

Indigenous Democratic Principles

“I believe that how we treat land is how we treat people,” says Renville. The sentiment captures another major difference between the U.S. form of democracy and the Indigenous democratic principles on which the U.S. Constitution was loosely based: Landownership, which is the root of individual financial accumulation and capitalism, had no place in the Haudenosaunee Great Law of Peace. 

Per Renville, “the recognition of the ‘rights of nature’” is a critical piece of inclusion in the U.S. political system that can strengthen democracy. Humans exist within the context of their environment and consequently thrive when their environment is respected. Modern-day democratic systems tend not to consider the rights of nature. Yet, as Renville asserts, we need to begin incorporating “the right of a river or a forest or a mountain or so forth to exist and to be preserved and protected for the future” into our democratic system, as the Haudenosaunee did. 

There is precedent for such an idea. In 2008, in the world to vote on a new Constitution that centered the rights of nature and of natural systems to “exist, flourish, and evolve.” Remarkably, the idea originated in the U.S. and was pushed by a grassroots organization from San Francisco called the , and drafted with the help of the , which is based in Pennsylvania. Today, the is leading a worldwide effort to incorporate similar clauses in the constitutions of all democracies. 

Indigenous principles centering women and nature offer a pathway toward stronger democracy in the U.S. Renville cites the leadership of , the chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe in the Northwest U.S. Charles was “a huge part of the force that brought down that Elwha Dam successfully and restored their ancestral beach, and restored the salmon run” so that people could sustain themselves, according to Renville. “That kind of female leadership, I see it as being very connected to the ability to advocate for land and water, and to take care of our lands and people.” After all, care for people and the land is the ultimate measure of success in any democracy. 

Democracy is healthiest when there is greatest participation and power sharing, especially among those who have been historically excluded. Or, as Herre concluded in a , “People turned previous autocratic tides by advocating relentlessly for governing themselves democratically. We have done it before, and can do it again.”&�Բ�����;

“Gerrymandering has always happened in the U.S., and both parties have always done it and will always do it,” says Aneteneh, 25, a redistricting coordinator with . “In the South, generally gerrymandering has hurt and continues to hurt communities of color.”

Gerrymandering also tends to make many races uncompetitive. As a result of the last round of gerrymandering in Georgia in 2011, five of the state’s 14 ran unopposed in November 2016.

Fair Count, a Georgia voting rights organization started by Stacey Abrams, has been organizing community mapping efforts in which marginalized people draw their own district maps to present to lawmakers. The citizen-drawn districts often are fairer than those drawn by politicians, and if lawmakers ignore those maps and instead gerrymander districts for political advantage, the community-created maps can become evidence in future anti-discrimination lawsuits.

Maps can be drawn to either aid communities of color to have a voice, or designed to drown them out.

This surge of voting rights outreach follows the release of the , which states are using to draw the maps that will allocate political power and representation for the next decade at every level of government, from Congress to local governments. This year, Fair Count and other advocates face a redistricting landscape that offers new challenges but also some reason for guarded optimism.

One of the challenges is an accelerated timetable because the pandemic delayed the collection and release of census data. Another challenge is prior Supreme Court rulings that have removed safeguards against potential racial discrimination. At the same time, voting rights advocates are encouraged by seeing how the diverse voters who turned out in historic numbers in the 2020 presidential election are now mobilizing again to assure that their votes will still count after redistricting.

“You can do all of the voting, but if people have manipulated the line so that your vote effectively doesn’t matter, then how do you get better schools, better roads, better health care, criminal justice reform?” says Leah Aden, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “Maps can be drawn to either aid communities of color to have a voice, or designed to drown them out.”

Map drawing ramped up with the release in August of the 2020 data, followed by the release of a in September. Those numbers show that the United States is becoming and metropolitan. The proportion of people of color rose from 34% of the national population in 2010 to 43%, and most population growth occurred in urban areas.

Every state saw growth in its Asian American population, notes Terry Ao Minnis, senior director of the census and voting programs of . Her organization is publishing redistricting guides and tip sheets in 13 Asian languages and is working with Pacific Islander communities to add more translations.

“We have to speak up and be a part of this process because it should not be a partisan issue, it should be about communities,” says Minnis, recalling how Chicago’s Chinatown had once been split into four legislative districts, an example of gerrymandering that later was corrected. “What is at stake for Asian Americans is to be able to make sure that our communities are visible.”

There’s nobody more expert at talking about your own community than you.

“The stakes are very high,” agrees Matthew Campbell, staff attorney for the , which this year launched the first-ever project with state-specific toolkits for Alaska, Arizona, Montana, North and South Dakota, and New Mexico. “You go through Indian Country, and in many places, you see schools are dilapidated, roads are in poor condition, health care is subpar. A lot of that can be tied to lack of proper representation in government.”

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s Aden says historically marginalized communities need “to be in the room when those decisions are made, to call ‘code red’ when people are proposing maps that will diminish their voice.”

Code red practices, Aden says, include packing (putting all the Black voters in one district so their sole majority district is outvoted by all the others), cracking (spreading the Black voters among all the districts so they never have a majority in any of them), and stacking (putting Black voters into one district that is still populated by enough White people to ensure Blacks can’t form a majority.)

She singles out prison gerrymandering as another egregious practice in which incarcerated individuals are counted as “residents” of the districts where their prisons are located instead of their home communities. Aden says this form of gerrymandering can give rural areas more representation than warranted, while lowering the potential population count in the places where those incarcerated persons used to live, which are usually more urban. At least and have started to count incarcerated people where they come from or were last registered.

Another particularly grievous example of gerrymandering was drafted by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011, in which they . The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the plan was unconstitutional in 2017, but for the six years that the case was traveling through the court system, North Carolina Republicans were able to create a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature, which they used to enact more voter suppression laws.

Gerrymandering and voter suppression are responses to an emerging political reality in the United States.

When the Republicans re-drew the districts in 2016, they claimed to be aiming for purely partisan districts. But they also drew a line through the middle of , dividing the nation’s largest historically Black university between two congressional districts, which stood until a court later rejected the map in 2019—again, after another election cycle in which one of the Republican representatives retained his seat.

The 2021 redistricting cycle is the first since the Supreme Court in its 2013 ruling invalidated a provision of the Voting Rights Act requiring jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to get pre-clearance of their redistricting plans before they can be implemented. Then in a 2019 ruling, , the U.S. Supreme Court upheld gerrymandering for political partisan purposes.

The current round of map making, says Yurij Rudensky, redistricting counsel at the Democracy Program, “is all happening as the legal landscape has shifted significantly. The Supreme Court is no friend of the Voting Rights Act. This is going to be a tough cycle for those interested in fair representation and race equity.”

“On the flip side,” he adds, “I think it’s also a cycle that has seen unprecedented attention and engagement by the public with a strong chorus of grassroots organizations calling for transparency and accountability. There’s been a real civic awakening.”

Fair Count sees that reflected in the more than 500 Georgians who have participated in its sessions to draft maps showing how to give equitable representation to communities of color. Along with some 125 other advocacy groups, Fair Count uses , one of a number of new software tools making community mapping easier this redistricting cycle.

“I like to tell everybody there’s nobody more expert at talking about your own community than you,” says Kathay Feng, national redistricting director at Common Cause.

“There is no question that there is the highest level of awareness of the importance of redistricting that I’ve ever seen,” says Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He points out that Latinos accounted for more than half the nation’s population growth this past decade.

Some states are already releasing proposed maps. Colorado, which uses an independent commission to draw maps for both legislative and congressional districts, released its maps in early September. In response to input from advocates, the proposed map makes the state’s 8th Congressional District Colorado’s maps still must be finalized and approved by the state Supreme Court.

, and this year, 19 states have enacted laws that make it harder to vote, including the most recent example of Texas’ SB 1, which almost immediately became the subject of from voting and civil rights organizations.

“We’re starting to see the beginning of what’s going to probably be a very heavily litigated cycle, unfortunately, despite the efforts of all the people on the ground trying to ensure that there are fair maps,” says Sophia Lakin of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.

But gerrymandering and voter suppression are responses to an emerging political reality in the United States. Looking at the new census data showing the growth of non-White populations in the United States, Aden says, “It’s hard to deny it’s soon to be a majority people of color nation. You can’t wipe us out. We are here. We’re not going anywhere. And that gives me hope.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2:00 p.m. on Sept. 30, 2021, to clarify that Leah Aden works for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, not the NAACP, which is a separate organization. Read our corrections policy here.

A November 2024 for Rosas and thousands of other Santa Ana residents. If voters pass , noncitizen residents will have the right to vote in Santa Ana’s local elections beginning in 2028. It would be the third jurisdiction in California to offer limited voting rights to noncitizens. Meanwhile, nationwide, the number of jurisdictions that have granted some is nearing two dozen, with just last September by a vote of the local Board of Aldermen.

The measure to expand voting rights in Santa Ana is the only one like it on any ballot nationwide in November 2024. It comes as voters are being asked to decide on constitutional amendments that will to preemptively block any noncitizen voting measures from moving forward. Those amendments have been spurred by and former president about immigrants violating voting laws.

Pro-democracy and voter education groups, such as the and , have condemned the proposed amendments for giving credence to conspiracy theories about voter fraud and Democrat-led ballot harvesting. 

“We don’t know what the outcome of the presidential election is going to be in November, but we do know that immigrants have lost regardless because of the rhetoric that has been spewed by both candidates,” says Carlos Perea, executive director at the , which has helped drive the movement for Measure DD in Santa Ana. Not unlike Republican nominee Trump, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has also adopted a callous tone toward migrants during her campaign, including bragging about backing a bipartisan anti-immigrant bill that her campaign ads call “.”&�Բ�����;

“In an election year where immigrants have become the preferred boogeyman for both presidential candidates, we want to send a message that we are not going to stand for our communities being demonized,” says Perea. “We are defining our lives at the local level, and we want self-determination through political representation.” Perea, a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient who has lived in Santa Ana since he was 14, is also among the residents who could vote in local elections for the first time if Measure DD passes.

If the call to expand limited voting rights to noncitizens sounds far fetched or new, the suburban town of Takoma Park, Maryland, has news for you. “We just celebrated 30 years of noncitizen voting,” says Jessie Carpenter, Takoma Park’s city clerk responsible for election administration. Voters in Takoma Park voted to allow noncitizen residents to cast ballots in local elections in 1992. The change was implemented the following year and has worked smoothly for decades.

The movement is younger in California, where San Francisco became the first city in the state to grant noncitizens some voting rights in 2016 with a ballot measure called . The change went into effect two years later. San Francisco’s measure, which is more limited in scope than Takoma Park’s, enables noncitizen parents of school children to vote only in school board races. In contrast, all noncitizen residents of Takoma Park can vote in all municipal elections. similar to San Francisco’s in 2022.

Annette Wong, managing director of programs at in San Francisco, says the initiative to enfranchise parents in school board elections was important to the city’s Chinese American community and other immigrant communities because they wanted to be more involved in the politics of their children’s education. “It came from this desire by the parents that we had been organizing with for them to have a bigger say and a voice in their child’s education,” she says.

A similar sentiment has driven the movement in Santa Ana, where parents like Rosas want to vote in local contests based on what they believe is best for their children. The campaign for Measure DD also highlights how much the noncitizen community contributes to the local economy. Each year, noncitizen residents of Santa Ana pay an estimated , according to analysis from the Harbor Institute.

That number is based on U.S. Census Bureau data and information from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “Regardless of immigration status, regardless of where we come from, today we live in this city … our children go to school, we contribute our labor, and we pay taxes,” Rosas says. “Simply, we [should] be allowed to participate just like any other person in this city participates in local decisions.”

The expansion of limited voting rights to noncitizen residents in parts of California has faced challenges from opponents who argue it burdens cities with additional costs and complexities in election administration and could contradict the state’s constitution. After Proposition N passed and was implemented in San Francisco, a conservative activist named , who does not live in San Francisco, brought a lawsuit in a local court, alleging the program was unconstitutional.

A San Francisco Superior Court judge initially sided with Lacy in July 2022. However, the city appealed that decision to the California Court of Appeal, which reversed the lower court decision and upheld the legality of San Francisco’s noncitizen voting program in what city attorney David Chiu called “.”

that California’s constitution, which states that “a United States citizen 18 years of age and resident in this State may vote,” only established a “floor,” meaning a lower limit on enfranchisement, rather than a “ceiling” or upper limit. Therefore, it does not preclude expanding voting rights to groups beyond what is named in the state’s constitution. (The ruling also paved the way for the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year olds in some California cities.)

Julia Gomez, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, says the California Court of Appeal’s holding “highlights that it’s state specific,” and whether other jurisdictions can pursue similar noncitizen resident voting programs will depend on their state constitution. 

In New York City, where the city council passed legislation allowing noncitizen residents to vote in local elections in 2021, Republican officials the rule at the appellate court level. Unlike in the California case, a judge in New York ruled that the state’s constitution establishes a ceiling beyond which voting rights cannot be expanded. In March 2024, the city council filed a in support of the law. 

In spite of repeated conservative claims that widespread and illegal noncitizen voting threatens U.S. democracy, researchers conclude that there is essentially . Carpenter, who administers elections in Takoma Park, says the noncitizen voter program in her jurisdiction does not threaten the integrity of state or federal elections, in which noncitizens remain barred from voting. The city clerk’s office maintains its own supplemental list of noncitizen voters and does not feed any information into county or state systems, meaning there is no chance that noncitizen voters from Takoma Park could accidentally end up on the Maryland voter rolls. 

Other jurisdictions that pursue limited enfranchisement for noncitizen voters have put similar safeguards in place. For example, in San Francisco, the ballots for noncitizen parents are a different color and only feature the applicable school board races, so no one could accidentally vote in another contest. 

“The stories that noncitizens are voting [in federal elections] or we’re registering people so they can vote for Democrats—none of that is the case,” says Carpenter. “What it does mean is that people could feel like they’re really a part of the community and that they have a say in how the local government works.”

Plus, noncitizen voters themselves have no desire to commit voter fraud and risk disrupting their immigration status. “Folks in the noncitizen community, the immigrant community, they’re not trying to jeopardize things for themselves,” says Wong, whose organization also anchors the . That group provides outreach and education services to newly enfranchised immigrant parents to ensure they are familiar with the bounds of their hard-won rights and feel empowered to get involved in their children’s education, whether or not they decide to cast a vote in school board elections. Gomez says that if Measure DD passes in Santa Ana, the coalition there will launch a similar effort before the new rule goes into effect. 

As Republican-led legislation to preclude the enfranchisement of noncitizens gains steam amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment nationwide, proponents of noncitizen voting programs remain focused on the heart of the issue: “We see this movement as an acknowledgment that we are all a part of this shared society,” says Wong. “No matter where you are in the society, you have a stake and you should have a voice.”

When I turned 18, one of my proudest moments was completing my voter registration application. I grew up in a politically aware household. My grandma, who was raised with Jim Crow laws, discussed the importance of voting and being politically informed with me from a young age. She grew up in a time where voting was not a right extended to Black people, especially those living in the South, as she was. She instilled that history in me.

My elders wanted me to be an informed voter and to know more than just the names on the ballot. I also knew which issues I cared about and where candidates stood on those issues. As I developed my own understanding of the world and the societal and political issues that mattered to me, being informed was imperative so I knew which candidates aligned or misaligned with the world I hoped to see and be a part of. 

I voted in my first presidential election in 2004. During that time, the U.S. was embroiled in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so I would attend campus events to better understand the concurrent conflicts and how we came to be at war to begin with. As I learned more about Islamophobia and colonialism, I began questioning our country’s role around the world.

Those events, coupled with the classes I was taking in African American Studies, broadened my worldview, allowing me to better understand how the U.S. interacts with other countries, especially those in the Middle East and Africa, and how political propaganda skews our collective perspective. I was already liberal about the “controversial” issues of that time, including supporting LGBTQ rights, but now my rose-colored glasses were off. I was no longer buying into the propaganda that the United States is the “greatest nation on Earth,” so I knew I would be more prepared when the next election rolled around.

In January 2008, I learned about a Black man who was running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew he was gaining attention among the other students on campus. When he planned a visit to my alma mater, I knew I had to attend. 

I had no idea I would be wowed by then Senator Barack Obama. I was mesmerized by his charisma, his intelligence, and his ability to work the crowd as he explained how his background led him to run for president. By the time the event concluded, I knew if he secured the Democratic nomination, I would be voting for him. I wasn’t the only person excited by Obama’s potential; my elders, all of whom were widows, never thought they’d see the day a Black man could be elected as president.

I haven’t been enamored by a candidate since Obama’s first presidential election. He imbued me with a sense of hope after living through George W. Bush’s disheartening presidency. We were electrified. And yet, the political veil I’d begun removing during Bush’s presidency came completely off during Obama’s tenure.

I began organizing in 2013 around policies that impacted the lives of disabled people and, more specifically, disabled people of color, including police violence, which . Through that organizing, I learned that the “trainings” police departments were using to better understand disability weren’t stopping them from harming and killing us, though these trainings were being heralded as “groundbreaking.”&�Բ�����;

I came to better understand that laws that should protect disabled people are in desperate need of an overhaul in order to be truly significant in the times we lived in. All of these truths hit me and kept me from being omplacent with the mere presence of a Black president; I want a president that fully supports the people who do and don’t look like me.

“When you know better, you do better” has been a guiding light in my politics, but now, I know when we know better, we demand better. As I entered my 30s, my political understanding was not just shaped by my worldview but also by those I was now in community with. Finding and learning about candidates throughout the country who not just cared about the issues that mattered to me but had a strong track record of supporting them became pronounced. This view was the reason I dived deeper in supporting candidates whose values and politics aligned with mine.  

In 2020, I had the opportunity to be a consultant on the disability policy plan for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run. Being a part of the movement to ensure every Democratic candidate that election cycle had a disability policy plan reignited my commitment to connecting with candidates who don’t overlook disabled people and figuring out what accountability looks like for me as a voter.

Now, as we face another presidential election, the awakening of Gen Z, many of whom are voting in their first election, has given me an extra boost of energy. Gen Z’s excitement is infectious. Even as they are watching a Black and Indian woman running for the most coveted position, they’re not losing sight of the issues that matter most to them—a reminder to me and others that we can and should demand better from our elected officials.

Nothing is perfect, and it never will be. But this election is pivotal for people in the United States and abroad. Every position on the ballot matters—school boards, city councils, state representatives—a�Ի� it’s on us to use our votes to push for the causes we’re passionate about. As voters, we must remember that whoever is in office works for us; if we don’t like what they’re doing, then we can vote them out when their term is up. Gen Z is learning this reality and voting for the future they deserve to have, including one without genocide and without gun violence.

I hope Gen Z knows their presence at the polls matters and their work doesn’t end after they’ve dropped off their ballots. We the people have the ultimate power, and it is critical to remember that the government is much bigger than the White House. Know who the treasurer, sheriff, and coroner of your city is—it’s just as critical as knowing who the president is. Learn what policies are being enacted and blocked that will either improve or hinder the quality of life for yourself and those more marginalized than you. You are the adults now, in charge of ensuring Gen Alpha and the generation after them will live in a world where their rights are protected.  

And, most of all, keep that hopeful energy. Don’t dive deeper into the belly of despair. Hope and joy are our birthrights as humans to hold onto and find when we need them, and they are essential elements when organizing for the world we desire to live in. Use history as a guide. Even amid the most unimaginable circumstances, people still found ways to push forward, build community, and fight for a more just world.

If we don’t believe things can and should be better, then what will motivate us to not back down when beaten down (literally or metaphorically)? Every movement has had people who believe, are hopeful, and find joy among each other—a�Ի� we need that in this moment, no matter who is elected president. Having hope is not a sign of disillusionment; it’s a reminder that every storm eventually runs out of rain. While we are in a storm right now with so much at stake, let us all do our part to demand more so that when this storm breaks, we will not be more broken. We’ll be as strong as we can be. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seem to be recognizing that a campaign whose gendered messaging has consisted almost entirely of overt misogyny is not doing them any favors with women voters. The last few weeks have seen the Republican ticket making a host of promises to women: to “” them, to give them “” that will help them “,” and to ensure a world where they will “.”��

This women-specific messaging from Trump and Vance reflects an important shift in our political culture. Feminism has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity. In a time when , it has become difficult to reach women without making some kind of claim about understanding their plight.

Yet Trump and Vance—who oppose abortion rights, have no plans to raise the federal minimum wage, and who seem to —cannot present themselves as advocates for women without undermining their own policy positions. Yet they are now addressing what have traditionally been thought of as feminist issues, such as sexual assault, Title IX, and the struggles of moms. Their gloss on the issues is, unsurprisingly, racist, transphobic, and indifferent to economic inequality. But they seem to be banking on the idea that elite women will mistake the candidates’ investments in oppressive systems with investments in the fate of women.

There is a preexisting reservoir of arguments available to help Republicans accomplish this confusion, and it comes from a surprising place: from within feminism. As I argue in my new book, (Beacon Press, October 2024), feminism has always had many strands within it, and some of these have sought to advance the interests of privileged women at the expense of less privileged ones.

Trump has, in recent weeks, repeated the message that he will be women’s protector. This position has been roundly criticized for being condescending to women, and for coming from an alleged rapist. But less has been said about which women Trump and his surrogates claim to be protecting, and whom he claims to be protecting them from. 

Trump’s original protector comments were embedded within a set of dog whistles about men of color. His specific promise was to and on “city streets.”

This is part of in which Trump has repeatedly attempted to associate rape with Latinx and undocumented people, in spite of the fact that the prevalence of sexual assault is high among all racial and ethnic groups, and in spite of the fact that many rapes of migrant women are . 

This strategy of associating Black and Brown men with rape also has a longer history within white feminism. actively argued that “other” men’s treatment of women was a reason that countries in the Global South need to be colonized. The dominant feminist response to rape in the U.S. until quite recently was what is known as “,” an approach that proposes widening the reach of a racist criminal justice system as the solution to gender-based violence.

Trump’s and Vance’s borrowings from white feminism extend to another domain in which they are using the language of “protection”: women’s sports. Vance recently claimed that in sports would prevent his daughter from being “brutalized,” repeating a false image of the trans woman as a violator of women’s “safe spaces.” This concept has recently resurged since its initial popularity in feminist separatist circles in the 1970s. Feminists of color were vocally critical of , because it assumed that there was one way to be a woman—usually, implicitly, the white way.  

Vance’s recent rhetoric around family and childcare draws on another, “softer” side of white feminism. The sarcastic tone of his “childless cat ladies” comments and his participation in banter about the “” seems to have vanished, replaced with a man who wants to , and instead give them “.”

The idea that feminists are enemies of stay-at-home moms has its roots in . Conservatives of the time managed to block feminist efforts to secure free childcare by portraying the feminist as a judgmental career woman who looked down her nose at motherhood. 

The legacy of this period endures in the popular feminist claim that the aim of feminism is to respect individual women’s choices—that women should be able to make decisions about their lives without fear of judgment. Yet a feminism focused on non-judgment continues to serve only the most privileged women, since the “choice” not to work outside the home has only ever been available to the well-off. Across a range of issues—childcare, abortion, and sexual harassment—what women actually need is not the false guise of options, but also material support.

Whether these strategies of appealing to privileged women will win Trump and Vance the election remains to be seen. But the lessons from these appropriations of seemingly feminist arguments extend far beyond what happens this November. Unless we achieve greater moral clarity about the goals of feminism, it will remain easy for privileged women to confuse their interests with the interests of women and gender-expansive people as a group.

Fortunately for feminists, arriving at this clarity does not have to mean starting from scratch. White feminism, and its sister ideologies such as neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have never been the only games in town. These ideologies, I argue in the book, are united by an understanding of feminism as a movement to increase women’s individual freedom. 

But feminism should really be understood in the way famously described it in 1984—as a movement against oppression. Oppression is not the same thing as restrictions on what individual women can do; it is a set of social structures that brings down women as a group. It is only by reclaiming this heart of feminism that we can fight against the proliferation of faux feminisms that serve the interests of the powerful.

Ashley Tchanyoum, a high school junior in Oakland, says she has been encouraging her classmates to register in the lead-up to the election and looks forward to exercising her right to vote for the first time. “It empowers students to have a voice in shaping the policies that affect them every day,” she says. 

The Oakland initiative is part of a growing movement in the United States to lower the voting age to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds. Proponents of the change argue that young people are already shaping the nation’s politics through influential organizing movements, including and . Those student-led organizations respond to issues that disproportionately affect young people, including gun violence and climate change. With so much on the line, lowering the voting age would give young people a more direct means of intervening in the political process to shape policy on issues that affect them and their futures.

A dozen municipalities have already enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds in either school board elections, such as in Oakland, or all municipal elections, meaning young people can also vote on local ballot measures and for municipal representatives. The majority of these municipalities are in . There are also ongoing campaigns to lower the voting age in Washington, D.C., and . This November, voters in Albany, California, will decide on . Meanwhile, statewide campaigns to lower voting age in , , and are growing and have garnered support from both Republicans and Democrats.��

At the national level, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Representative Grace Meng of New York have introduced legislation to lower the voting age in federal, state, and local elections. When Pressley proposed it as an amendment to the House Democrats’ voting rights bill in 2019, —a significant number, even though the amendment failed. ������Ƶ recently, Meng an amendment to the Constitution that would lower the national voting age to 16 years old. 

“Over the past few years, we have seen the influence [that] young people in our nation have on trends, political movements, and elections,” said Meng in announcing the legislation. “It is time to give them a voice in our democracy.” She first introduced similar legislation in 2018 and then reintroduced it in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Each time, it has failed to move out of committee.

While a federal move to lower the voting age might sound far fetched, Lukas Brekke-Miesner, executive director of (OKF), likes to remind naysayers that it has happened before. Less than six decades ago, in 1971, the 26th Amendment to the Constitution lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. “[The Oakland campaign] felt like a bit of an uphill battle,” admits Brekke-Miesner. “But understanding that there is a legacy and precedent of this having happened was a point of hope.”&�Բ�����;

Today, the push to lower the voting age enjoys less popular support than half a century ago. Back then, both liberal and conservative politicians backed it, arguing that if young people could be conscripted and go to war at 18 years old, they ought to be able to vote then, too. show that most Americans supported the change as early as the 1950s, following a change in eligibility for the military draft, which allowed Americans as young as 18 to be conscripted into World War II.

Today, those poll numbers are much different. One found that 75% of registered voters opposed letting 17-year-olds vote, and 84% opposed voting rights for 16-year-olds. Opponents express doubts about whether people in these age groups are mature enough to vote and question whether their votes would differ from those of their parents. Some Republicans, who tend to oppose lowering the voting age in greater numbers than Democrats do, are just ploys to get more votes for their rivals.��

Studies on adolescent brain development suggest that fears of 16-year-olds not having the decision-making power to cast a vote are unfounded. Instead, that what psychologists call “cold cognition”—meaning a person’s judgment in situations that allow for unhurried decision-making and consultation with others—is likely to be just as developed in 16-year-olds as in adults. While a person’s “hot cognition,” meaning their judgment in high-pressure or emotional situations, tends not to mature until later, the skills needed to make informed decisions at the ballot box are already developed at age 16.

“This idea that young people don’t have the maturity, don’t have the smarts, don’t have the intellect to vote, I think is not only problematic, but it does a disservice to young people,” says LaJuan Allen, director of , a national organization that supports youth-led campaigns to extend voting rights to 16 and 17 year olds at the state and local levels.

Research also suggests that if 16- and 17-year-olds were enfranchised, they would not necessarily vote the same way that their parents do. While there is little data on this phenomenon in the U.S., conducted before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum showed that more than 40% of 16- and 17-year-olds planned to vote differently than their parents. According to Jan Eichhorn, the researcher who led that study, when young people did intend to vote the same way as their parents, they nonetheless came to that conclusion on their own. “They really make up their mind in quite a complex way themselves, and that is really encouraging to see,” .

In Oakland, the campaign to lower the voting age was a student-led one. Students were driven to organize around lowering the voting age because of issues they experienced and that adults seemed to overlook. First, in 2019, the Oakland School Board cut vital support programs for its students. Student organizers spoke out against the cuts, but the board pursued them anyway. “We could definitely see a disconnect between what students think is important and what school board members do,” shares Tchanyoum. ������Ƶ recently, Tchanyoum says students at her high school have been concerned about the lack of accessible bathrooms on campus and disparities in the amenities and extracurricular programs offered on different campuses in the district. Students would also like to implement programs to improve student–staff relationships and are concerned that their rights to speak about Palestine-related issues are being restricted.

To help get youth voting rights on the ballot in Oakland, Tchanyoum joined the movement as an organizer with Oakland Unified School District’s and the , both of which are part of the . That coalition was formed in 2019 with the goal of lobbying the Oakland City Council for a ballot measure to lower the voting age in school board elections. They succeeded, and in November 2020, voters were asked to decide on . 

Leading up to the vote, student organizers mobilized voters through phone banking, media interviews, social media, and other advertising. Measure QQ passed, with 67% of Oakland voters voting in its favor. The new rule is being rolled out for the first time this year after organizers worked with election officials, school board officials, and consultants to ensure its smooth implementation. Sixteen and 17-year-olds in neighboring Berkeley will also be for the first time, following a ballot measure that passed there in 2016 but was slow to be implemented.

For those who argue that enfranchising more young people would be a power grab for Democrats, Allen of Vote16USA says that’s simply not the point: “Lowering the voting age is about enfranchising young people, prioritizing youth voting rights, and strengthening our democracy.”&�Բ�����;

Plus, some research suggests that voters between the ages of 18 and 24 than voters between the ages of 25 and 29. When girls between the ages of 7 and 12 were surveyed about the 2024 election, the proportion who said they with either the Republican or Democratic party was larger than those who did identify with one. 

While it is unclear how future 16- and 17-year-olds would vote if enfranchised, evidence suggests that either way, enfranchising this group would have benefits for the nation’s democracy, including boosting low voter turnout. Data from Takoma Park and Hyattsville, Maryland, a pair of towns that allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote on all municipal matters, show that enfranchised teens tend to than the general population.

Plus, engaging young people in the voting process earlier could encourage long-term civic engagement. Reaching young, would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18 can be challenging because they tend to be going through significant life transitions, like moving from high school to college. However, according to Ava Mateao, president of the voter turnout organization , “If you reach a young person and engage them in the voting process [in] whatever capacity you can when they’re 16 or 17, they’re more likely to be a lifelong voter.” The group also supports lowering the voting age to 16 to boost turnout. 

Brekke-Miesner says these big-picture benefits are the ultimate goal: “Our young folks didn’t enter the chat to say, ‘Hey, voting is the end-all, be-all,’ but really because they wanted to have power within their communities,” he says. “That’s the ultimate drive—to get folks re-engaged, organizing in their communities, and engaging in local governance.”

Wearing a dark blue suit and a broad smile, he walked out of his naturalization ceremony holding a small U.S. flag and his citizenship certificate. The timing was no coincidence; he aimed to become eligible to vote before the Nov. 5 presidential election. 

“I am very excited that I will be able to vote,” says Garcia, 57. “We can express our voice and, more than anything, we can make ourselves count.”

In swing states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and large states such as California, the influence of Latino voters like Garcia could be key to choosing the next president in the race between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Newly naturalized citizens and an influx of young Latinos reaching the voting age of 18 boosted to 36.2 million in 2024, up from 32.3 million in 2020.

A by Phoenix-based advocacy group (LUCHA) and Data for Social Good shows that a majority of 1,028 registered Arizona voters surveyed between April and May are highly motivated to cast a ballot. While immigration remains important for many Latinos, the poll found they are also deeply concerned about the economy, health care access, and affordable housing. The findings track with examining the issues Latino voters are thinking about less than a month before the election.

The shifting demographics of Latino voters reflect the nuanced distinctions within an evolving population often characterized as a monolithic voting bloc. “We’re a diverse community with a wide range of political views, experience, and priorities,” says Alejandra Gomez, executive director of LUCHA.

Canvassers have been knocking on doors all over the state since March to encourage voters—Latinos in particular—to cast a ballot and hopes are high that they will turn out en masse, says Stephanie Maldonado, managing director at LUCHA. “I definitely do see our community showing up and showing up big this November 5th,” she adds.

Garcia says he’s looking forward to making his vote count. For years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, he worked in construction. In the 1990s, he started his own landscaping business, which he still operates. These days he worries about inflation because his earnings don’t go as far as they used to when buying necessities. “Prices have gone way up, for food and gasoline and other items,” he says.

Garcia is hopeful the next president will take on issues related to the economy, but he also would like the future commander-in-chief to push for immigration reforms. What’s needed, he says, is an orderly, speedier process that gives eligible people already in the country or waiting to apply for U.S. asylum south of the border an opportunity to live here legally. “People come here to improve their lives and to achieve the American dream, as I did,” he says. 

Dustin Corella, who was born in Tucson, is among a generation of young Latinos coming of age in 2024. Soon after turning 18 in June, he registered to vote and is eager to cast a ballot. “It feels like a big responsibility,” he says.

The issues motivating Corella to vote include his desire to elect politicians who ensure appropriate funding for public education as well as after-school programs and other resources aimed at youth in the community. And he says there’s a need for elected officials who can better address the impact of climate change, adding, “Those are the things that I care about, and I’m looking for leaders who can tackle them and create opportunities for the next generation.”

Corella is one of 1.3 million eligible Latino voters in Arizona. The state, along with California, Texas, Florida, and New York, is home to about two-thirds, or 65%, of all Latino eligible voters in the country, according to the .

For Latinos and immigrant communities across the country, the stakes are high this election, says Nicole Melaku, executive director of the . The coalition of immigrant and refugee rights organizations is working to encourage the nation’s naturalized citizens to vote, especially in the face of anti-immigrant attacks. For example, a slew of focuses negatively on immigrants.

“With the likes of Project 2025 looming about in the background, of family separation and of attacks to our democracy, I think it was important for us to make sure that our communities, and naturalized voters especially, are aware of the power that their vote and their voice has to shape the outcome of the election,” Melaku says.

Project 2025 is a policy agenda of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that aims to radically restructure the federal government in a conservative administration. Experts caution that and promotes with far-reaching implications.

from the project, but he has made immigration a key part of the race. In one campaign stop after another, Trump’s against immigrants punctuates his speeches. Should he win, he promises to quickly launch living in the country without legal status—a�Ի� even some with legal status.

Instead of countering him with pro-immigrant rhetoric, Harris has responded by taking a tougher stance on the issue, including a proposal to implemented by the Biden administration. She has also endorsed . for a record number of migrants—many of them asylum seekers—entering the U.S. from Mexico, even as amid policy changes on both sides of the border.��

In the border state of Arizona, the immigration debate is ever present. On Nov. 5, voters will reject or approve Proposition 314, which would give the state authority to enforce federal immigration policies. The initiative, Maldonado says, “specifically targets immigrant communities and continues to push racial profiling, which we know is a top concern among the Latino community. And I think that this election for us is pushing back against policies that continue to criminalize our families and communities.”

Immigration hits close to home for Maldonado, who comes from a mixed-status family. She and her two siblings are U.S.-born citizens and her father is a legal resident. However, her mother is undocumented, says Maldonado, and returned to Mexico some time ago. Her mother’s departure was the catalyst for Maldonado to become more involved in electoral and civic matters. “We need a permanent solution on immigration, not just for my family, but millions of families across the country and many diverse families that are living in these complexities of being separated,” she explains.��

The Latino vote in the upcoming election could mean a shift in the usual narrative about the nation’s second-largest group of voters, Maldonado says. “If we didn’t have this much power, there wouldn’t be so many attempts at trying to strip away our rights.” She adds, “We just need to come together and make it happen even greater this year.”&�Բ�����;

“I understand why young people are really angry and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States. … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”

Fonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative����and conducted by The Guardian, CBS News, and Rolling Stone magazine.

Making major social change requires massive, nonviolent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of��, from her anti–Vietnam War and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights, and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”

During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it” or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s����and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”

Scientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions��, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling and fracking and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: Do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”

Fonda launched the����three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state, and local. “The PAC focuses down ballot—on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”

Forty-two of the 60 candidates the PAC endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the PAC is providing money, voter outreach, and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state,” she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California.”

Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency.” She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our PAC candidates” as well.

Her PAC has a strict rule: It endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said.Polls show that��, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “We’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry. … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”

Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the����and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris–Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well.” But she “was very disturbed that the No. 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour and a half to come up and was not really addressed,” she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”

Given her years of anti-nuclear activism—including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the����in 1979—it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.

“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these����are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: No nuclear reactor of any kind—the traditional or��, none of them—has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “��takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”

The reason that solar—a�Ի� wind and geothermal—energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it.” Noting that air pollution from��, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it!��[in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying. … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet—but they run the world.”

The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds����for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris–Walz ticket.

“I think she’s awesome, amazing, and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”

“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience. … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central Valley and Kern County and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”

Climate activism is also “so much fun,” she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.

“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘Everything’s gonna be fine,’ but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is ‘I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.’”

This article by is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Alongside get-out-the-vote efforts that happen right before elections, long-term policy-oriented campaigns are underway nationwide to boost voter turnout in the U.S., including making Election Day a national holiday to give voters time off to cast their ballots, rolling out automatic and pre-registration options, and expanding vote-at-home options. “Generating higher voter turnout is critical toward building a healthy democracy that works for everyone,” says Andrea Hailey, CEO at .

Several factors influence voter turnout in every nation, including voter enthusiasm; candidates and issues; and whether the election is a presidential, midterm, or local election. The U.S. is unique in its complex and patchwork state-led voting system, which creates stumbling blocks for would-be voters at every turn. “One of the largest contributors to low voter turnout in the U.S. [are] the laws that govern voting,” says Gayle Alberda, a professor of politics and public administration at Fairfield University.

Depending on where a voter lives, they must navigate a series of hurdles, including registering to vote, requesting an absentee ballot or locating a polling place, and ensuring they have the documents required to cast a ballot before they even get to the ballot box. These burdens are multiplied for some groups, including individuals with limited English proficiency, students attending college away from home, those in rural or low-income areas, and disabled people to whom registration processes or polling locations may be inaccessible. “This process places the burden of voting on the individual,” says Alberda, making it less likely people will turn out to vote.

Organizations focused on voter education and mobilization, including community groups and national giants such as and , backed by tens of thousands of volunteers, help eligible voters navigate these complexities each election cycle. Their efforts are vital, but the groups are fighting an uphill battle. The nation also needs policy interventions to streamline the burdensome election system and ensure more Americans can access the democratic process. 

Making Election Day a national holiday is one such intervention that has gained steam and even Congressional backers in recent years. “Work-related barriers hold back as many as 35% of non-voters from going to the polls,” says Hailey, citing data from a Pew Research Center survey conducted after the . Currently, “time off to vote” laws vary widely across the country, and require employers to provide paid time off for employees to vote.

Representative Anna G. Eshoo introduced the in 2024 to standardize state rules by making Election Day a federal holiday. Hailey says her organization hopes the bill is passed “so every voter has the flexibility they need to vote.” In the absence of a federal mandate, in August 2024, Vote.org challenging businesses to guarantee paid time off for their employees to vote on or before Election Day. 

While making Election Day a national holiday is a simple way to signal the importance of civic participation, researchers and voting rights advocates say the intervention should be coupled with changes to how people register to vote and cast their ballots. Research from the at Tufts University suggests that automatic and pre-registration options significantly positively impact turnout, . 

With (AVR), eligible voters are automatically registered when they utilize the services of a state agency, such as when they apply for a driver’s license or identification card at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Those who do not want to register to vote can opt out. “Studies show that automatic voter registration does increase voter registration and slightly increases voter turnout as it does eliminate a key barrier to voting, the registration process,” says Alberda. 

Oregon was the first state to implement AVR in 2016, and showed that AVR added more than a quarter of a million voters to the state’s rolls. Of that group, 36% were first-time registrants, and the group was younger and more ethnically diverse than the population of voters who had registered before automatic registration went into effect. A total of nationwide have enacted AVR policies so far. From Oregon’s introduction of AVR in 2016 to the 2018 voter registration deadline, Oregon and seven other states with new AVR programs added a combined .

Another innovation in voter registration is pre-registration, which allows young people to register to vote before reaching voting age. Many states allow 17-year-olds to register to vote as long as they will turn 18 before the next federal election. and allow those as young as 16 to pre-register. This approach eliminates the challenge of reaching would-be voters for the first time when they turn 18, an age at which many are transitioning into college life or new jobs away from home.

Pre-registration also allows young people to become familiar with the election process while still in school and rooted in a community. These factors encourage an enduring sense of civic responsibility and can turn teenagers into lifelong voters, according to Ava Mateo, president of voter organization . “Pre-registering to vote not only provides pathways for younger people to be involved in the civic process earlier, but it also, through our experience, has shown to have a positive impact on youth voter turnout,” she says.

Expanding vote-by-mail is another way to boost voter turnout. With this method, which resembles absentee balloting, the government mails ballots to eligible voters, and the voter marks their ballot at home and returns it before a deadline. Currently, , mail paper ballots to every registered voter before every election. Many voters also got a taste of this system when in-person polling locations had to be closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and . 

Alberda says that shift helped drive “record-high turnout” in the November 2020 election. Most states only offer in limited cases, and moving toward universal mail balloting could give turnout another boost. Similar to making Election Day a national holiday to ensure paid time off for voting, allowing people to vote from home eliminates work-related barriers that prevent so many Americans from getting to the polls. Recent research from the , a research and advocacy nonprofit, suggests that implementing vote-by-mail could boost turnout by as much as in some jurisdictions.

For Barbara Smith Warner, executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, expanding vote-by-mail is not only a matter of engaging more voters but also of showing respect for voting as a fundamental right. “If you think voting is a right, it should be as convenient and voter-centric as possible, and nothing is easier than sending everybody their damn ballot.”

Some innovations to expand voter access have faced criticism from conservatives, who claim they . However, there is no evidence to back assertions that leads to illegal voting. Errors with automatic voter registration programs are also rare and mitigable. In Oregon, where it has recently come to light that some voters were mistakenly registered through the automatic system without showing requisite proof of citizenship, . The Oregon Secretary of State’s office emphasized that the records show evidence of clerical errors, meaning that clerks had mistakenly identified people as U.S. citizens when they obtained a driver’s license, even though they had not provided proof of citizenship. Previously, in cases such as this, many of the registrants were, in fact, citizens and only needed to provide a missing document to update their registration.

While pro-democracy organizers fight to protect the right to vote and boost the nation’s relatively low voter turnout on multiple fronts, they are also forced to confront harmful conservative narratives that paint expanding voter access as potentially leading to fraud. They are also up against regressive legislation from Republican lawmakers to restrict rather than expand access to the polls. The nonpartisan research group has tracked a surge in restrictive voter identification laws, restrictions on mail voting, and other policies undermining voting rights . 

Advocates argue that the struggle to expand access and boost turnout is nonpartisan, and legislation to restrict voting is a threat to all. “Voter suppression threatens the constitutional rights of every American,” says Hailey. “The best way to safeguard the foundations of our democracy is to empower the electorate and ensure every voter has the opportunity to make their voice heard.”

That the United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world is, by now, a truism.

But that’s not the only way in which the country is an outlier. The vast majority of people locked up in prisons throughout America cannot vote. In many democratic nations, including Canada and most of the European Union, . Imprisonment itself is seen as sufficient punishment. 

The exclusion does not stop at the prison walls. There are over 2 million other Americans who have served their time but remain barred from voting because of a felony conviction. 

In total, 4.6 million people are locked out of the democratic process in the United States. Nearly . That’s a fundamental flaw in this experiment called democracy. 

Restoring our right to vote would make society safer. It would give incarcerated people a means of pushing back against a system that controls our lives. And it would help America realize a truer, more inclusive version of itself. 

People in this country have a long history of fearing the other. I wonder what people might fear about currently and formerly incarcerated people voting? Is it that we might vote against the interests of fellow Americans? 

Maybe some of us would vote in humane policymakers who mandate , or who challenge  like picking cotton, the major cash crop of U.S. slavery. Others might mark their ballots for lawmakers committed to creating more green spaces and reducing food deserts in under-resourced communities.

Or maybe that wouldn’t happen. We are not a . In fact, inside I have noticed that it’s the working class, across all demographics, who overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. Those with more formal education tend to support Kamala Harris.  

We probably care a lot about what you care about. We want our kids to grow up healthy and safe. We want fair politicians reelected and corrupt ones voted out. We want to fund and strengthen our communities, but not waste money.

For me? I would throw my support behind school board members who would allow my daughter to read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of Texas’ most frequently banned books. I would advocate for safe and clean drinking water in rural towns, where prisons are often located. And I would rally behind leaders who protect a broad range of reproductive rights because I don’t believe my daughters should have fewer reproductive rights than their grandmother.��

Meanwhile, by letting us have a say in politics, you are helping us become reinvested in our communities, where . The Sentencing Project released  last year that argued restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions can improve public safety. The right to vote and the act of voting are linked to  for Americans who have been involved with the criminal legal system, according to the report. 

Instead of getting involved in our communities, we’re forced to sit on the sidelines and let the state do with us what it pleases.

A few years ago, Texas began . Before then, I was able to hold letters from my loved ones. I remember tracing the pink crayon-heart indentations of my daughter’s script, and taking in the signature scent of my mother’s perfume, which she sprayed on the page. Now, that simple but profound moment of physical connection is gone, and I can’t do anything about it.

Larger, attacks on our rights and dignity are also occurring while we cry out into the abyss, hoping someone will hear us. Failed forms of  continue to extend sentences for convictions, no matter how old. Marijuana possession is still criminalized in many states, including Texas, a fact responsible for countless ruined lives. And , who in some cases can’t even recall their convictions, are routinely denied compassionate release. Shouldn’t those of us most impacted by these policies have an opportunity to influence them?

Some people think “no.” Supporters of felony disenfranchisement laws tend to argue that incarcerated people gave up their privilege to vote when they chose to break the law. But this view ignores the fact that our legal system treats the poor differently than the rich. 

Consider the financial crisis of 2008. None of its bank CEO architects, who ruined millions of lives and cost the country an estimated $23 trillion, went to jail or prison. Same for members of the infamous Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma created Oxycontin and marketed the fatally addictive drug under false pretenses, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths nationwide. Neither the bank CEOs nor the Sacklers lost their privilege to vote, despite breaking the law. 

Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump, who was found guilty on 34 felony counts earlier this year, continues his run for re-election to the highest office in the land.

But my neighbors incarcerated for bouncing grocery checks at Walmart are left without the right to have a voice in our government? 

������Ƶ than anything, restoring our right to vote would honor the spirit of our democracy. It would signal to everyone inside and out that all voices matter, no matter what.

That would be a novel but no less essential development in the history of America. Since the end of the Civil War, the United States has found ways to disenfranchise Black voters. It started with literacy tests and poll taxes and threats of racist violence. Now, it’s through  and mass incarceration. 

“We the People” includes we the incarcerated. It’s long past time to allow all voting-age Americans the freedom to vote.

Thus an editor of the Detroit Free Press professes sympathy for the protesters’ aims but their “awful slogan” is “alienating” to the public, including to “White people who feel more reassured than threatened” by the police. Other pundits that “activists who are demanding radical change” are paving the way for Trump’s reelection: “Defund the Police” is “music to Trump’s ears” because it baits the Democrats into endorsing this presumably unpopular demand.

These critics share an assumption about : Movements must win over the majority of the public; once they do so, that sentiment soon finds its way into policy changes.

This argument has several problems. One is that government so frequently disobeys the will of the majority. Statistical analyses that compare public preferences and policy that the opinions of non-wealthy people “have little or no independent influence on policy.” Having the support of the majority is no guarantee of change, to say the least.

Also problematic is the assumption that radical demands or actions scare away the public. The empirical evidence is mixed, but the 54% support for the recent burning of the Minneapolis police precinct should make us skeptical of conventional wisdom.

But the biggest problem with the We-Must-Persuade-the-Majority argument is that most progressive victories in U.S. history did not enjoy majority support when they were won. In case after case, a radical minority disrupted the functioning of businesses and state institutions, which sought to restore stability by granting concessions and ordering politicians to do the same.

Their Own Emancipation Proclamations

Before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had criticized slavery but opposed immediate abolition. In 1837 he “slavery is founded on injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends to increase rather than abate its evils.” Even 16 months into the war, Lincoln still stressed that “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” and that “if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” By all indications, most Northern Whites shared Lincoln’s position.

In contrast, the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass criticized “those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation,” saying that they “want crops without plowing up the ground,” and “the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” Douglass celebrated John Brown’s 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, which forced slavery into the center of debate: “Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy, and uncertain.”

Enslaved workers themselves played a decisive role. By fleeing the plantations, burning property, fighting for the Union, and numerous other acts of resistance, they weakened the Confederacy and impelled Union leaders to embrace the pragmatic logic of emancipation as a way of undermining their enemies. This “general strike” of enslaved people was a key theme in W.E.B. Du Bois’ classic 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, and that thesis has been confirmed and expanded by recent . In Vincent Harding’s words, it was “courageous Black men and women and children” who “created and signed their own emancipation proclamations, and seized the time.”

Thus it was a militant minority—enslaved Black people in the South, aided by abolitionists such as Douglass and Brown in the North—who transformed the war to “save the Union” into an antislavery revolution.

The Moderates Get Alienated

The Black freedom struggles a century later were likewise the work of a minority. Most of the public either favored segregation outright or criticized segregation and the disruptive tactics of civil rights activists. Even many established Black leaders criticized the disruptive approach, favoring a purely legal strategy instead.

In a 1961 Gallup , 61% of respondents disapproved of the Freedom Riders who rode integrated buses into the South. A similar percentage condemned the sit-ins at lunch counters. Three years later, 74% said, in an echo of Lincoln, that “mass demonstrations by Negroes are more likely to hurt the Negro’s cause for racial equality.”

Such attitudes inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which brilliantly skewered “the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” King later dismissed warnings about alienating “white middle-class support” by , “I don’t think that a person who is truly committed is ever alienated completely by tactics.” Ultimately, “I don’t think in a social revolution you can always retain support of the moderates.”

Like the enslaved people who sabotaged the Confederate war effort, Black activists of the 1960s faced opposition or ambivalence from the majority. They succeeded because they imposed on the Southern elite, through boycotts, sit-ins, and other means. Thus it was the White business owners in places such as Birmingham who capitulated first, and who directed the rest of the White power structure—police, mayors, legislators, and so on—to allow desegregation.

The Wise Men Get Shaken

Another major progressive victory of that era, the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, came about for similar reasons. Public opinion and Congress were peripheral to the war’s end. Far more important was the unabating Vietnamese resistance, most notably the January 1968 Tet Offensive against the U.S. occupation and client regime in South Vietnam.

Tet catalyzed two decisive shifts. One was among U.S. business leaders, who concluded that the war was a drag on their profits. Lyndon Johnson’s March 1968 decision to de-escalate the war came five days after he met with his “Wise Men,” a group of top business leaders and former government officials. Insider accounts report that Johnson was “deeply shaken” by the meeting and left with “no doubt that a large majority” of the Wise Men “felt the present policy was at a dead end.”

Tet also accelerated the rebellion among U.S. soldiers. The people needed to fight the war increasingly disobeyed, deserted, declined to enlist or reenlist, and even killed the commanding officers who sent them on death missions. By 1971 military leaders warned of “a personnel crisis that borders on disaster,” and actually demanded that Nixon speed up the withdrawal. My co-authors and I tell this story in more detail in a new book, .

Public opinion often shifts toward the radicals after the fact. In 1966, 59% the Vietnam War was “morally justified.” A decade later, 70% the war was “fundamentally wrong and immoral.” In the years in between, radicals such as MLK had U.S. intervention in Vietnam as “one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.” As usual, the radicals endured a barrage of vitriol from respected , and King and many others paid for their radicalism with their lives.

The lesson of these past victories is that successful change depends not on majority opinion, but on the ability of the key participants in a system to disrupt that system: enslaved Black people in the Confederacy, Black consumers in Birmingham, the Vietnamese people and U.S. soldiers in Vietnam (or workers in a workplace, tenants in a building, and so on).

This is a major advantage of non-electoral forms of activism. Electoral campaigns require a majority of voters. Non-electoral strategies do not. 

It’s not that the opinions of the majority are irrelevant. Certainly it’s good to have more people sympathizing with you. Most of the radicals in the above movements realized that. They understood the importance of organizing, building relationships, and doing educational work among the public. They thought carefully about tactics.

But they also recognized, as King did, that “you can’t always retain support of the moderates.”

Interested in Kevin Young’s new book, Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It? Read an excerpt here.

As the debate floated among leftists on social media, the argument shifted from whether this well-known neo-Nazi slogan is acceptable to use to whether it is an accurate reflection of our current reality. “[It] would appear we have a Zionist Operated Government,” a with more than 40,000 followers suggested. “Has anyone ever noticed that?”

White nationalists fashioned the term “ZOG” to refer to an antisemitic conspiracy theory in which “Zionist” is used to reference a shadowy global cabal of Jews who have infiltrated the United States. According to this conspiracy theory, this ethnic other has now taken the reins of power to undermine national sovereignty, racial integrity, and refashion the U.S. to act in the interests of a demonic power. 

Though this idea is overwhelmingly found on the right, this term’s brief revival also lends credence to concerns over antisemitism on the left and reveals a key misunderstanding of Israel’s role in global empire. Israel is not controlling U.S. policy. Instead, it is global Western empire itself determining the future of Palestine.

A Western Colony

The claim that Zionists control the U.S. can sometimes emerge from the “Israel lobby” thesis, an unfounded allegation that a network of pro-Israel lobbying groups are primarily responsible for manufacturing America’s Zionist consensus. This theory is often highlighted to critique real pro-Israel lobby groups such as AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who .

But this framework is also often used in more dubious ways, suggesting a small, elite cadre (usually of Jews) are pulling the strings of geopolitics. However, that framing misunderstands the way both historical Zionists and Western political leaders view Israel as an outpost for Western interests in the Middle East.

While the earliest Jewish Zionists were motivated by what they saw as perennial antisemitism, they always acknowledged their success required imperial sponsorship. Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, always wanted Israel to be a client state of Western empires, even reaching out to South African colonialist to aid this quest.

As , William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History at Harvard University, notes in an interview with , Herzl “was not wedded to the notion of a Jewish state.” Instead, he “wrote about many different forms of political organization” ranging from “an autonomous province in the Ottoman Empire” to “a crown colony,” and even “a protectorate under European control.” Ultimately, Herzl and the overall Zionist movement desired “a Jewish national home … secured by international law.” Similarly, Zionist theorist Leon Pinsker never envisioned Israel as an independent country but as simply one component of a European imperial arrangement.

While Zionism often used the language of national liberation movements, which were popular at the time, this was again part of the re-nativism common to colonial movements: to imagine yourself as the land’s new indigenous people. In reality, Ashkenazi immigration was intentionally allowed by the British during their mandate between 1917 and 1948, who also positively affirmed the creation of a Jewish state as a way of maintaining a stronghold in the formerly Ottoman-controlled region. This was not out of an abundance of care for Jewish immigrants escaping pogroms and the Holocaust, but as a way of maintaining British interests in perpetuity.

In 1920, Winston Churchill, who was soon to be prime minister, noted in the that supporting Zionism was a way of subverting communism. He thought he could use Zionism to refashion Jewish identity and challenge the Bolshevik revolution in Russia by offering Jews Israel instead. Since Herzl wanted to create a European-style country in the Middle East, this could become a trade hub to move Western economic interests and control the increasingly important oil trade.

The logic harkened back to European political ideas, with figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte urging Jews to “return” to Zion during his Palestine Campaign as a way of undermining British trade pathways to India. Laurence Oliphant, a Christian Zionist who encouraged survivors of the 1881 Kiev pogrom to head to Palestine, argued in 1879 that if Ashekanzim created settlements in historic Palestine (which he originally called the Plan for Gilead) then he could secure “the political and economic penetration of Palestine by Britain.”

This process became clearer after World War I when the political and economic importance of the region came into focus for Western powers, and especially so after World War II, as the U.S. became an economic hegemon. The U.S. began looking to Israel as its own outpost, acknowledging in 1966 that it could no longer remain a global watchdog and would need friends in the region. As Arab countries experienced decolonization that often challenged U.S. corporate interests, the U.S. knew it would need a regional ally they could flood with defense spending.

This became a form of “military Keynesianism” through which the could fortify domestic consent, and then push back on the growth of Arab nationalism and insurgent movements across the Global South. “Israel proved its ability to militarily overpower its neighbors,” writes Jason Farber in a 2021 article. “If made an ally, American power brokers realized, the United States could use Israel to exert control indirectly.”

U.S. support for Israel only escalated after the Six-Day War, when Israel became an even more important part of the U.S. strategy in the region, pushing countries like Egypt into economically subservient partnerships. By 1973 the U.S. had offered more than . In 1974, Pres. Richard Nixon increased that sum to a staggering $2.6 billion. Since then, aid to Israel has steadily increased, with $3.8 billion being offered in 2023 and an additional $14.3 billion offered in April 2024. The War on Terror only further motivated a direct U.S. investment in Israel, and the U.S. has sent a slew of military leaders to Israel to train them on the methods of counterinsurgency that were then used to squash uprisings in Palestine.

As the dollar amount increased, Israel became a lynchpin of Western domination in the region. As Egyptian-born scholar pointed out in 1969, when the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights were newly captured, the majority of Israeli companies that invested in Africa were “owned by Western monopolies,” such as those in the U.S., Britain, France, and West Germany. “Israel as an outpost of Western capital and neo-colonialist ideologies fulfills the prophecies and aspirations of the imperialists,” El-Messiri wrote.

One Empire, Many States

If pro-Israel forces were occupying the U.S. government, that would imply there are two different interests at play, but this misunderstands the relationship between Israel and the U.S. Rather than the U.S. and Israel operating as two independent states brokering a self-serving relationship, the U.S. and Israel operate as a single hegemonic system that mobilizes the Zionist project to stabilize profits and Western interests.

All the while, —birthed by a colonial situation and modeled on Germanic romantic nationalism—is being allowed to decimate indigenous Palestinian communities because political leaders have decided that having a compliant Israel is better than having a rebellious Palestinian republic. The U.S. therefore ensures a state of perpetual conflict, one that has further empowered the defense sector to escalate its investments and profits.

Since 1990, Lockheed Martin, one of the largest weapons manufacturers in the U.S. and a key supplier of arms to Israel, has spent more than $330 million in lobbying efforts. In contrast, AIPAC, the Israel lobby of record, has been a minor player in lobbying, only spending $60 million during that same time period. Lockheed’s stock price skyrocketed over the past year, with one of the biggest jumps happening between Oct. 5, 2023, and Oct. 10, 2023, a trend seen among several other weapons manufacturers.

Even AIPAC has evolved, becoming less a single-issue lobbying group and more of a vessel for corporate and conservative interests, of which Israel is a piece. In the end, a pro-Israel political vision is one that fits nicely in the world of hegemonic transnational corporations that would rather provide their friends with overwhelming control over the future of the Global South than enforce universal human rights.

The strength of the “Israel lobby” actually comes from a decidedly non-Jewish source. Evangelical Christians are the largest pro-Israel constituency in the United States. In fact, Christians United for Israel is the largest pro-Israel lobbying organization in the U.S., though these Christian Zionists support Israel based on an eschatological belief that Jews must return to Israel so they can face genocide or forced conversion when Jesus returns.

As support for Israel’s genocidal mission in Gaza declines among U.S. voters, there may come a time when the U.S. will need to seek a new ally in the region. If that were to happen, it would force massive shifts in the war through the loss of unquestioned loyalty and military aid, thus opening a window to a new future in the region.

But even that positive change says nothing about the overarching political reality that the U.S. and other powerhouse countries would simply look for other potential allies that will enact their interests across the Global South. In order to get to the heart of this crisis we have to look at the ongoing systems of colonialism and capitalism themselves, which are baked into the country we live in and drive its foreign policy. We have not been captured by an alien power; this is who America has been all along.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:00 a.m. PT on September 27, 2024, to acknowledge the existence and influence of Israel-focused lobbies.��Read our corrections policy here.��

Since the 1960s and the election of President John F. Kennedy, younger voters have supported Democratic candidates, while older voters leaned Republican. But , and now, in 2024, large numbers in both groups are bucking traditional assumptions about their political affiliation.

This shift challenges the age-old political adage that youthful idealism gives way to conservative pragmatism with age. As pollsters and pundits scramble to explain the phenomenon, one intriguing theory emerges: It may .

The Unhappy Vote for Change

I am an  and the co-founder and co-director of the . Our lab investigates and analyzes public opinion and political trends nationwide. With the upcoming election, I’ve been specifically examining the potential influence of happiness on voting patterns.

Research worldwide indicates that happy people prefer keeping things the same, and they . Voters who aren’t as happy are more open to anti-establishment candidates, seeing the government as a source of their discontent.

These findings may help to explain the Democratic Party’s waning support among young people.

This group is still reliably blue. Vice President Kamala Harris , with 50% favoring her over former President Donald Trump’s 34%. U.S. voters ages 18 to 35 mainly prefer Democratic views on  and . Yet they are more likely to vote Republican than they have been in the past, especially young men.

Youth Are No Longer Carefree

Declining life satisfaction and happiness levels among young Americans may help to explain their changing political preferences.

Our  found that 55% of respondents ages 18 to 34 reported dissatisfaction with their lives, compared with 65% of the general population.

These findings, , challenge the common belief that young adulthood is one of life’s happiest periods.

 suggests that older voters, long a Republican base, are trending blue in 2024. As of September 2024, Harris leads among older voters, with somewhere between 51% to 55% favoring her over Trump.

These happy seniors appear to be concerned about sweeping changes that could occur under another Trump administration, like . The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 erased what was seen as a major milestone and accomplishment for that generation.

Older Americans are also focused on retaining , a Democratic priority that Trump has wavered on, and maintaining lower prescription drug costs. Both of these programs help keep older Americans happy and healthy. They barely register for young people.

Polls are notoriously slippery, and they’ll keep changing. But, increasingly, age is no longer a very good indicator of party affiliation.

Happiness Matters at the Ballot Box

I am not suggesting that happiness drives all voting behavior or explains changing political preferences in the United States. But I am saying that it should not be ignored.

My research indicates that to understand why people vote the way they do, it’s essential to examine happiness alongside other key factors like the economy and personal experiences. By studying how happiness connects with age, life experiences, and engagement with social media, researchers can gain clearer insights into the changing voting behavior of both young and old voters.

The 2024 presidential candidates seem to have intuited this. The Harris campaign is all about “joy” and . The Trump campaign adopts an angrier tone and a grievance-filled approach.

Ultimately, happiness is more than just a mood. Just as much as ideology, the literal pursuit of happiness may be shaping decisions at the ballot box.

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

But even as she galvanizes this new wave of political energy, . The ongoing U.S.-backed Israeli genocide remains a focal point for young liberals, presenting a challenge that Harris will have to navigate, both on the campaign trail and, if elected, in the Oval Office. Furthermore, many are looking for her policy specifics, beyond TikTok memes.

From the start, Harris’ campaign ignited a wave of political engagement, particularly among young voters. The launch of her campaign led to a notable surge in voter registrations in Maine, a state where  according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement’s . In July alone, signed up to vote—the largest number since November 2023. Nationwide, the impact was even more stark; to vote in the two days after Biden dropped out, representing a staggering 700% spike. ������Ƶ than 80% of these new registrations were among people between the ages of 18 and 34.

Lauren Barton, a 19-year-old from Tennessee, shares, “One of my friends is especially excited. She was going to register to vote, and I feel like this finally pushed her into doing it.” Daijah Wilson, also 19 and from New Jersey, spent this summer registering voters. “A lot of my family members were not going to vote because they felt like it was the same thing again—lesser of two evils,” she said. “Now that Kamala is running, I know a couple of my cousins who have registered to vote, and they said they keep encouraging their friends to vote. … People who were on the fence are now jumping off the fence.”

Suraj Singreddy, a 20-year-old from Georgia, another state that YESI identified as a key battleground where young voters could significantly influence the 2024 presidential race, expressed that a common frustration had been the redundancy of Trump against a moderate white Democrat. “I think in 2016 and 2020 people were tired of being told, ‘Oh, wait for the next election cycle; there’ll be better [candidates] available,’ and then that constantly not being the case.”&�Բ�����;

The fact that Kamala represents something new—at least, on the surface—is exciting. Claire Sorge, a student at the Hawai‘i Conservatory of Acting, shares, “I’m glad it’s a woman of color. I’m glad it’s not an old white man.”&�Բ�����;

But Barton brings up that “there’s obviously the huge elephant in the room—her stance on the genocide in Palestine … [but] the idea of our first female president is exciting.”

For young Americans of color, the fact that Harris is multiracial is Wilson, who is Black, planned to vote third party when Biden was on the ticket because of his ceaseless support of Israel, but now plans to vote for Harris. She explains, “I don’t think representation is our savior, but it is a move towards progress to see a woman, a Black woman, a multiracial woman, lead this country and be the face of America for the next four years.”

Another break from the democratic electoral monotony of the past several years is simply that Harris is fun in a way Biden and Hillary never were. Whether she’s soliloquizing on or proclaiming , .” Singreddy believes Harris is finally a candidate with a magnetism that can rival Trump’s. “Trump is entertaining, but in a way that makes you go, ‘Uh… .’ Harris has just been so unintentionally funny … it makes her seem genuine.”

“People are going to vote for the president that they’d want to sit down in a bar with and share a drink with,” he adds. 

and the creative team behind Harris’ hugely popular TikTok account, , which constantly churns out clever content, have captured Gen Z’s spirit of “brat summer.”

Barton explains, “She’s very relevant right now in all of the [TikTok] audios and the memes.” While Barton characterizes young voters’ enjoyment of such s as partially a humor-based coping mechanism for the fact that Harris’ policies are not ideal, she acknowledges it is genuinely appealing. 

Wilson adds, “Trump has a hold on Twitter/X. I feel like Kamala or her team has tried to strategize by taking over the app that actually has a lot more [young voters].” Referring to how Harris’ TikTok videos humanize her, she points out, “We want to see that; it’s about looking past the facade of the politician.”

On the other hand, Harris risks infantilizing and alienating her young voter base if she doesn’t offer them something more substantive to hold on to. Some already feel that relying too much on internet trends and memes could “I feel like it could very quickly turn and become too much, in the same way that ‘’ did in 2016,” Singreddy says. 

Singreddy also feels that because Harris and her campaign have focused on pushing mostly vibes in their messaging to young voters, it is unclear what Harris’ actual policies are. “Right now, I’m in a place where my interest is piqued, but I still don’t understand exactly who I’m voting for or what her policies are. … I just wonder how she’s going to get that out to people because it’s not as easy as viral trends and memes,” he adds.

Unfortunately for Harris, the issue that young voters seem most aware of is the situation in Palestine and Israel. Wilson, Sorge, Barton, and Singreddy all cite her role in the current administration and its involvement in the ongoing as a significant deterrent in voting for her. 

Additionally, when Singreddy thinks about the policies he would like to see, he says, “First and foremost, it is trying to negotiate a cease-fire in Gaza. After that, it’s the status quo Democrat [policies]: protecting the right to abortion, health care, and general stuff.” Wilson adds that even while she plans on voting for Harris, she will continue attending protests and rallies to push for a cease-fire. 

Harris can’t take her , and there is a concern that she “Kamala has a chance [at winning the election], but only if younger people vote for her,” Sorge says.

Maali’s family comes from the occupied West Bank. She says, “My father is older than Palestine,” when it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1948. Wearing a long keffiyeh-patterned dress that skimmed the grass, Maali was joined by several friends waving Palestinian flags and holding up posters denouncing President Joe Biden as “Genocide Joe.” They were among 3,000 demonstrators that drew heavily from Chicago’s “,” the largest Palestinian community in the country.

When asked how the movement for Gaza could pressure Democrats and presidential nominee Kamala Harris to end the Israeli genocide, Maali says, “Hold out our votes.” She asks, “What else do we have besides our votes? That is our only power.”&�Բ�����;

Nearby was Satnaam Singh Mago, who wore a T-shirt with a T. rex grasping a Palestinian flag. Like Maali, Mago has voted for Democrats faithfully all his life. Now, however, he rejects the idea of “the lesser of two evils” and “voting based on fear.” But he is also hopeful. “We have the power to change an election. … What we are trying to tell Kamala Harris is you have to earn our vote.”&�Բ�����;

I interviewed a couple dozen people the week of the DNC and asked protesters about pressing issues like abortion rights, Project 2025, and the dangers of a second Trump presidency. Almost all protesters told me things like, “Genocide isn’t a single issue, it’s the only issue,” “I can’t vote for genocide,” and “Trump is worse on some things, but there is nothing worse than genocide.”

The protesters reflected my own thoughts. We have real power. The more voters declare, “No arms embargo, no vote,” the more pressure it puts on Harris to capitulate to our demands ahead of the election on November 5. 

Let’s not kid ourselves. Harris supports the genocide of Palestinians. On four high-profile occasions she has declared, “Israel has a right to defend itself”: after with Benjamin Netanyahu in July, during , during , and , when she also reiterated the widely debunked claim that mass rape was committed by Hamas during its attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. American politicians have long  In the context of Israel wiping out Gaza in the name of “defending” itself from Hamas, that phrase is a dog whistle for genocide.

It’s hard to accept that we are complicit in genocide. It’s easier to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to blame, that we are not responsible, that Biden cannot end arms transfers with a phone call, that Harris will end them after she is elected.  It’s also easier to treat genocide as a transactional issue: Gaza is bad, but the threat to abortion rights and democracy and Project 2025 are bigger risks. Or, Trump will enact a worse genocide in Gaza.

We need to hear other perspectives. Outside the DNC I talked to one woman, who didn’t want to give her name, who told me she had lost more than a hundred relatives in Gaza to Israel’s attacks. She said, “Every morning I wake up in anguish. I don’t know who survived last night. Many days I can’t get in touch with anyone. I have cousins whose families have been wiped out. One aunt is in a wheelchair with a heart condition. A cousin has diabetes and can’t get medicine. They’re dying.” She burst out crying while speaking to me.

Can we honestly tell her to vote for the party slaughtering her family? Why is it that we won’t save her from a violent America, but we expect her to save us from a different face of that same violence? If this was happening to you, would you be telling people to vote for the party wiping out everyone who knew and loved?

In Chicago, protesters showed us what solidarity looks like. It means seeing the world through the eyes of the people you are supporting, and to work to achieve their goals. Palestinians are being crushed by the American empire. We benefit from the empire in terms of wealth, power, jobs, and lower-cost goods and resources. Solidarity means putting the needs of oppressed peoples before our own.

The defeat of the American empire by the Vietnamese inspired international solidarity movements of all types. A mass movement of Americans in solidarity with the people of Central America  Reagan from invading Nicaragua. The anti-apartheid movement helped bring down the brutal Afrikaner regime in South Africa. 

Now we need to be in solidarity with Palestine and say, “End the genocide immediately.”&�Բ�����;

Genocide is the worst political act possible: the extermination of an entire people. “Never again” does not mean “never again except for Palestinians.” If we think we can’t stop this, then we are nihilists. We are saying politics is useless.

It starts with hope. Student protesters for Gaza last spring had a rock-solid conviction they could force universities to divest from Israel. While have divested so far (it is always a trickle before it is a flood), the protests worked. They triggered an of and , , and that have made Israel an . With students returning for the fall, pro-Palestine protests are despite universities new methods to free speech and assembly. 

By continuously emphasizing ironclad support for Israel, Harris is revealing that support is actually fragile. This gives us an opening to force her to earn our vote by making it contingent on an arms embargo and an end to the genocide. This is hardball politics. It’s what billionaires do. They cut million-dollar checks to candidates and demand much more in return. Harris recently to from billionaires to drop a proposed tax on the ultrawealthy.

We have something more precious than dollars. There are horrified by the genocide and who want it to end immediately. But many of us are scared to use our power. Right before the DNC, of nearly in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. It found that 34% or more of voters in those states would be likelier to support Harris if there was a permanent cease-fire or an arms embargo on Israel.

In Chicago, a protester named Chris, a member of the Starbucks Workers United union, says, “It’s a genocide happening in real time, and people don’t want to call it that.” Still, he plans to vote for Harris, saying, “I will make sure to hold her accountable the whole time she’s in office.” When asked how he can hold Harris accountable after the election, Chris says, “I don’t know. It’s tough.”&�Բ�����;

This is the problem. Instead of using our power over the Democrats before the election, when it is most potent, we surrender to them. It’s because they have perfected a formula to terrorize us. Every four years they hold a gun to our heads and say, “The world will end if you don’t elect us.” The name on the gun changes—Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 1 and 2, McCain, Romney, and Trump—but the threat remains the same.

The Democrats have trapped us. We vote them in. But then not only do we get nothing in return, they do the dirty work of Republicans. And we ignore it.

This strategy was honed during the 1964 campaign with the infamous “.” The commercial shows a little blonde girl plucking petals off a flower as she counts. She freezes as a loudspeaker at a test site starts counting down. A thermonuclear blast fills the screen, and President Lyndon Johnson intones, “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live. Or to go into the dark. We must either love each other. Or we must die.”&�Բ�����;

Subtle, it wasn’t. Johnson was saying a vote for Barry Goldwater was a vote for annihilation, and that he, in contrast, was the candidate of love. Except exactly one month before the ad aired, Congress handed Johnson a for a U.S. war that eventually killed 5 million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. 

They have been using this trick for 60 years. Democrats have us so terrified of the right that we will sign off on any atrocity as long as Team Blue does it. Bill Clinton , Obama supersized the war on terror, and Biden is to blame for the Gaza genocide, not Trump. 

Democrats have sat in the White House for 20 of the past 32 years. They Wall Street, after it blew up the economy, and criminal bankers from prosecution. Democrats climate change accords and a historic and boom that has baked in climate catastrophe. They , passed , the far right to the courts, mass incarceration, the “most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world,” and a massive immigration prison system.

Harris promises more of the same: more border cruelty, more global warming, more genocide. ������Ƶ of the same threats we hear every election: “This election … is the most important of our lives.”&�Բ�����;

Instead we should beware that Gaza is a threat of genocides to come.

I have reported from border cities such as Tijuana and Matamoros that have become killing fields as a result of our policies that have spawned brutal wars, criminal cartels, and climate chaos. By 2050 climate refugees could number 1.2 billion, according to . Harris’ vow to be “” than Trump on the border means more violence, deaths, and racism. Ratcheting up anti-immigrant policies as their numbers increase could bring genocide to our borders.

We cannot throw 90% of humanity under the bus. If we don’t end the razing of Gaza, we will throw open the gates of hell. Genocide is like COVID-19 and climate change: Borders won’t stop it. 

We can succumb to defeatism and believe Harris will never agree to an arms embargo and permanent cease-fire. 

Or we can remember that every movement that has made the world better—labor, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights—had an absolute belief they would win. They refused compromises, half measures, and surrendering. 

There can be no compromise in the fight for Palestine. If not now, when?

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit��.

Harris walked directly up to Trump, extended her hand, and leaned in, even after it was clear that he had no intention of greeting her. In introducing herself, Harris pronounced her name, “COMMA-LA,” clearly and correctly, leaving him no excuses to ever mispronounce it again.��

Harris was confident, in control, and in command of the night.��

Gender dynamics were on display for much of the high-stakes debate, which Trump spent showing and telling his brand of masculinity to voters. He was divisive, demeaning, and distracting, much of his behavior a reminder of his four years in office and his continued words and actions on the campaign trail. During most of the 90-minute exchange, he ignored the two Black women on stage—avoiding eye contact with Harris and rarely addressing moderator Linsey Davis—intentionally choosing to largely engage the only other white man present, moderator David Muir.��

When Harris addressed Trump, she referred to him respectfully as “the former president.” But at no point did he address Harris by her first or last name, nor by her title. Instead, Trump made frequent references to “her boss” when mentioning President Joe Biden in an effort to diminish Harris’ leadership and agency. 

The candidates’ microphones were muted while their opponents spoke, a rule set when Biden was the candidate and one that Harris unsuccessfully fought to reverse. But her facial expressions, ranging from exhausted to incredulous to amused, did the talking as an often scowling Trump made various false statements on , , and his repeated claim that he won the 2020 election.��

He tried to control the stage—a�Ի� at times attempted to dominate Harris. “I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please. Does that sound familiar?” Trump said sarcastically at one point when Harris attempted to interject, referencing Harris saying “I’m speaking” to Vice President Mike Pence in a 2020 debate after he tried to interrupt her. Toward the end of the debate, Trump essentially tried to shush her again, simply saying, “Quiet, please,” during an answer on how he would handle the war on Russia. 

There was also no live audience at the debate, but the audience Harris was speaking to was clear. She had two goals on Tuesday: to speak directly to voters who may just be learning about her candidacy, which is still barely 50 days old, and to expose Trump to viewers, reminding them of his temperament and tone.

She did both with a smile and a laugh, which he has also ridiculed, while using Trump’s own tactics to draw him out. When asked a question about immigration—a thorny issue for her as vice president—Harris’ response quickly shifted the subject from one that inflames voters to one that inflamed Trump: his rallies, and in particular, the implication that his crowds are starting to dwindle. 

“He’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised,” Harris said before proceeding to change the topic herself.

“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”

Instead of responding to Harris’ claims that Trump intentionally sabotaged federal legislation to reform immigration or attacking her record on the issue, before repeating a bizarre, racist, and false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in small-town communities across the country. Contrast shown. 

Heading into Tuesday night, Trump had referred to his opponent as “crazy,” “dumb,” “crooked,” a liar, “grossly incompetent,” “low IQ,” and “weak.” While it was initially unclear whether he would show his contempt for Harris on stage, he was ultimately unable to resist.��

By the end of the night, Harris shut down every stereotype he has tried to pin on her. When he doubled down on questioning her Blackness, Harris pointed to the response as part of a stale playbook rooted in racism and sexism that should be a relic of our politics. 

Ahead of the debate, Trump insisted on Truth Social that “no boxes or artificial lifts” be allowed during the debate for the shorter Harris, implying that to do so would be a form of cheating. In the end, it was the former president, almost a foot taller than Harris, who came across as smaller.

This story was originally published by and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. This column first appeared in The Amendment, a by Errin Haines, The 19th’s editor-at-large.

Almost no one has asked what men need to do in order to remedy the problem that the job has been off-limits to more than 50% of the talent pool since … forever.

At the 2024 Democratic National Convention, that changed. Democratic men made choices that were entirely new, or exceedingly rare, in support of a woman presidential candidate and in service to the nation. It was unprecedented.

As a , I’ve argued that the biggest impediment to electing a woman as president is not a dearth of qualified woman candidates but a . The fault is not in the candidates but in American culture.

As it turns out, men in politics were also to blame.

When faced with competitive women as presidential candidates, many men historically have leveraged their power and privilege in ways that undercut women’s candidacies. But the Democratic convention was different.

For the first time in history, men in a major political party offered unified support for a woman candidate. They refrained from strategically deploying the stereotype that strong women are not likable, as .

They accepted the party’s overwhelming support for a woman candidate, instead of insisting on being , as Bernie Sanders did in 2016.

And they put their career on hold to support their spouse’s candidacy instead of undercutting it by offering support to primary campaign challengers, as Bob Dole did when .

“Relinquishing Male Power”

Rhetorical choices reveal the underlying motivations of individuals and groups. The messaging of Democratic men at the 2024 convention signaled that their party was finally ready to do something that no major party has ever done. They were not only nominating a woman candidate but relinquishing male power and privilege.

Biden surprised everyone when he pulled out of the race from flagging poll results, skeptical donors and party leaders, and nervous down-ballot candidates. Any resentment he may have felt, however, did not turn into pique or pettiness at the convention.

When the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Joe,” he instructed, “,” and promised to be “the best volunteer the Harris and Walz camp have ever seen.” He didn’t just give up his candidacy. He ceded his authority—to the people and the party, but also to Harris, specifically.

Although Secretary of Transportation and may still harbor his own presidential aspirations, he did not use his convention speaking slot to audition for the 2028 campaign. Instead, he performed the role that historically has been reserved for women at political conventions: pitching the party’s message via the perspective of a parent whose primary concern is “, .

The convention speech given by the presidential nominee’s spouse has historically been an opportunity for prospective first ladies to portray their husbands as patriarchs of an ideal American family. In his speech, second gentleman Doug Emhoff of a “complicated” and “blended family” with no patriarch but two active partners, equally capable of professional success and deep commitment to family.

When Harris selected Tim Walz as her running mate, and the who deemed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro the best strategic choice. Walz’s by one news outlet as the message of a “Midwest ‘man’s man’” and the “antidote to toxic MAGA masculinity.” Even Ms. magazine touted it as a “.”

But Walz did something Americans are not used to seeing “man’s men” do. He made it clear that he could work not just with, but for, a woman. And that everyone should.

After that the election was in the metaphorical “fourth quarter,” the team was “down a field goal,” and the offense was “driving down the field,” Coach Walz made it clear that, as in his high school coaching days, . Their leader was Kamala Harris, and “Kamala Harris is tough. Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready.”

Contented Second Fiddles

To be clear, Harris’ early success as a presidential candidate should be attributed, first and foremost, to her to a series of unprecedented events and to the of the Black women who have long sustained the Democratic Party.

But the men of the convention made a collective choice to embrace “,” as an Axios reporter described it, and treat Harris like a commander in chief. That should be unremarkable. Women have been doing it for presidential candidates since … forever. But to see so many white men stepping back so enthusiastically for a woman of color was almost unbelievable.

Stepping back is not the same thing as stepping away. That’s important, because the broader message of the convention was about how to create an inclusive, democratic community. When you need to make a circle wider, and let more people in, you step back. That doesn’t leave you out of the circle. It makes your circle bigger.

The convention offered an expansive circle that includes , , and serve as , and .

It also includes a presidential candidate who looks like no other president in U.S. history. That’s a big step forward for the country.

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

The constitution is one of many in a new database created by Beth Redbird (Oglala Lakota and Oklahoma Choctaw), a sociologist at Northwestern University, as part of the. The effort aims to find, preserve, and catalog the documents written by various tribal governments from 1820 on. The database contains constitutions from more than 350 of the now 574 federally recognized tribes, documents that serve as written records of the many ways tribal governments have asserted independence within a colonial system. They also detail how the tribes address problems inherent in governing bodies, like who has rights, what rights might exist for people who are displaced, and the potential rights of natural places.

One of things missing in our history, Redbird says, “is access to this whole story of what these are, how they came to be, and how they work to structure modern tribes today.” Whether it’s engaging in national policymaking or constitution-making, or asserting tribal rights in courts, Redbird says, “These constitutions can and do matter.”

Redbird started the project four years ago when she asked a researcher to search for tribal constitutions so they could analyze the documents. How many were there, and how many survived? had a limited database, and the Library of Congress had a fraction of those passed by federally recognized tribes.

To find more, the team Googled, called up tribal offices, and phoned regional Bureau of Indian Affairs offices. They searched law libraries. They discovered constitutions in appropriations bills from the 1940s and others attached to court cases.  

Redbird employed the expertise of Erin Delaney, a law professor at Northwestern University, to help analyze the documents. The pair got a National Science Foundation grant to code the documents—a process that allows someone reading documents to search the text—a�Ի� they continued looking. Eventually, the team compiled more than 1,000 constitutions into a database that now includes both originals and updated versions.

The database shows how tribes have reacted to U.S. federal policy over time. It tells a different tribal history than the one told by lawmakers of their time or explained in textbooks. It could also give tribal governments more information about how different tribes have governed themselves; how that resulted in different social outcomes, like access to education or housing; and what that might mean for tribal governance in the future.

“It’s the first time that this has been done comprehensively,” says Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band Ojibwe), a law professor at New York University and partner of the project through the NYU-Yale Sovereignty Project. 

The tribes in what is now the U.S. wrote constitutions under a variety of circumstances and histories. Some tribes have treaties, some have reservations, and some exist in a state where laws have been applied to them, making each document unique and different.

The bulk of the tribal constitutions in the Tribal Constitutions Project database were passed in response to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, often called the Indian New Deal. The purpose of the law is contested; according to some accounts, it was an attempt to decrease federal control of Native peoples and increase self-governance. Others saw the Indian Reorganization Act as a continuation of a typical government policy toward Indigenous people.

The Act’s passage marks the first time in decades of federal policy that a tribe could have a legal government in the open. That’s not to say that tribes didn’t have governments between then and the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, says Redbird. It just means that Native people didn’t share them with U.S. government entities for fear of arrest.

Individual tribes voted on whether to adopt the Indian Reorganization Act. If they did, the Secretary of the Interior approved or denied those constitutions and any subsequent amendments.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs created a template for tribes, which should have opened the door to millions of dollars in loans from the federal government. But the government spent $38 million in the 1920s on Native people, and that number had not budged two decades later. At first, it only took a couple of months for the federal government to approve a constitution, but by the end of the decade, it took an average of two years.

“If you’re a tribe, and you’re hoping to do the kinds of things that the government does, like offer assistance to people who are in need, and manage your own land and your own affairs, then two years is a long time to wait,” Redbird says.

The rate of approved constitutions slowed over time, and the ones that were approved were simpler and more standardized. These documents may not have represented the values and interests of tribes wary of the federal government.

Still, the Indian Reorganization Act, according to Blackhawk, “is the legal framework that continues to structure the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Native nations today.” In short, she says, “It was a very different way of doing colonialism that empowered Native people to form governments and establish a formal relationship with the United States beyond the treaty process.”

Many of the constitutions followed the guidance to include a branch of government called a business council, showing how the Indian Reorganization Act may have been an effort to mold tribes into businesses that cost the federal government less money to administer than tribal states.

There’s some evidence to suggest that the federal government wanted to turn��tribes into private corporations that could make a profit and go away, Redbird says. She sums up the government stance like this: “If we can teach them to work, they’ll become white, because the secret to being white is to engage in capitalism. …Like, the biggest problem of Indians is they haven’t learned to be selfish yet,” she says.

In 1953, the federal government passed a resolution approving a measure that allowed states to make tribes illegal, essentially terminating them. At that point tribal constitutional amendments dropped off as tribes kept their policies close to their chests, Redbird says. 

Many tribes have since revised their constitutions and continue to do so, particularly those that address current issues like climate change and the rights of non-human relatives, like rivers. This is where the database could prove particularly useful today: providing references, inspiration, and solidarity among tribes to set the course of their own futures. 

“There’s lots of pragmatic and hopefully beneficial knowledge to help tribes in their constitutional processes achieve their goals, whatever those goals may be,” Delaney says.

Redbird and her collaborators plan to eventually make the database public and include introductions from the tribes. That way, she says, they could narrate the history of their documents. Though there is inherent risk, considering the tribal and federal government relationship, there is also value, Redbird says.

“Transparency does a lot for you, even if there’s not a direct, immediate, obvious benefit to it,” she says. “The ability to have civil society depends on the ability of people to see the actions of a government, and that means a government both at the tribal level and a state and national level.”

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.”

As news of the shooting flooded the media, at NDN Collective our first reaction was empathy for the loss of life and for the rally attendees who now hold the trauma of gunshots and people dying in front of them. Simultaneously, we were filled with great concern for the safety of systemically oppressed communities, knowing that right-wing extremism disproportionately impacts us, and that state actors under real, perceived, or falsified threat invariably respond with increased policing of social justice movements and Black and Brown communities. Because of this, we issued a reminding people that more than anything, the shooting was “yet another consequence of building and maintaining a nation based in violence, control and bloodshed.”&�Բ�����;

When shootings capture mainstream media attention, we see the same players dominate our news feeds: a tired spectrum ranging from empty “thoughts and prayers,” to shallow messages of unity, to vague demands for more gun control. This form of gun control hyper-focuses on individual acts of violence, but disproportionately impacts the ability of to access guns and exercise our Second Amendment rights—despite the . 

The real-world implications of race-based exceptionalism around weapons looks like white youth —who killed two people with an illegal gun—being arrested without a scratch, acquitted of all charges, and turned into a conservative hero. In fact, Rittenhouse was invited to . Meanwhile, 12-year-old was murdered by the police just for holding a toy pellet gun. He was shot by officers within two seconds—they didn’t even stop long enough to exit their vehicles before deciding this Black child, alone in a park, posed enough of a threat to be executed.

It’s unsurprising that mainstream narratives in response to the shooting at Trump’s rally have been centered on condemnation of “political violence,” when they only mean violence against politicians. Intentionally excluded from this discourse are the most egregious forms of political violence being carried out by both parties, through the apparatus of American imperialism. While Trump nurses a cut on his ear and the Republican party rallies around the call to “make America safe again,” Gaza has experienced the since the start of the latest genocide of Palestinian peoples. And two days ago, less than a mile from the perimeter of the RNC, the community of Milwaukee was rocked by the killing of beloved unhoused Black relative by Ohio police who were brought in to provide extra security for the RNC. 

WATCH: What Is (And Is Not) Political Violence

The real political violence is our being increasingly funneled toward to kill people for their land and resources; and . The real political violence is both the state-sanctioned murders carried out in the name of profit—a�Ի� that these wars are being fought with our resources, but without our consent. Refusing to acknowledge the link between the systemic oppression of Black and Brown communities by militarized police forces within our country and the slaughter of entire populations by United States militaries and weapons developed by the U.S. is hypocritical, and aids the country’s rapid descent into fascism.

As a dedicated to supporting the self-determination of Indigenous Peoples, we acknowledge the two-party system represents two sides of the same coin. They both uphold a culture of violence whose primary goal is to protect and maintain control of the power and wealth built from the theft of Indigenous lands and resources, and the exploitation of Black, Brown, and poor, working-class labor. These are the conditions of a country built on political violence and based in principles of white supremacy, religious extremism, heteropatriarchy, and colonialism, in which racism, classism, ableism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia are ideological tools of suppression meant to divide and systemically oppress mass intersectional mobilizations.   

We are not facing a new “crisis” of democracy. Indigenous people have never been represented by this system, or protected by it. Real power has never been won at a ballot box alone, but is the result of sustained, principled resistance demanding structural change. That’s why NDN Collective also plans to attend the Democratic National Convention in August—because we understand election outcomes have a huge impact on the organizing conditions within which we must operate. 

The legislated gaslighting around what is and what is not political violence can no longer be accepted. We need and deserve elected officials who understand safety and peace are not abstract ideas—they are policy choices—a�Ի� we all deserve leaders wise and courageous enough to center the well-being of all sacred life and Mother Earth.

Indigenous Peoples hold a wealth of talents, skills, and knowledge needed for our shared liberation. We are not helpless victims of the state, but expert survivors with resources that can be pooled together to counter death and destruction. There are so many ways we can build sustainable power. One way is to support Indigenous-led movements—especially if you are feeling particularly disenfranchised and pessimistic about the direction of this country.  

Indigenous Peoples have faced apocalypses before, but we are still here: running healing justice circles, maintaining localized systems of mutual aid, carrying out direct actions in protection of water and sacred life, and revitalizing our lifeways and traditional knowledge systems to build sustainable food systems and models for regenerative economies. 

No matter the direction of this country, we are not going anywhere.

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.”

To many, this isn’t exactly news. The lack of women in film—in front of and behind the camera—has been at the center of Hollywood criticism in recent years, with scholars and writers detailing the ways women tend to be underrepresented or cast in stereotypical roles.

Women are assuming central roles—not as victims, but as monsters and heroes.

University of Southern California communications professor , who researches depictions of gender and race in film and TV, found that of the 5,839 characters in the 129 top-grossing films released between 2006 and 2011, fewer than 30 percent were girls or women. Meanwhile, only 50 percent of films fulfill the criteria of , which asks whether a film features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Despite the uphill climb for women in film, it isn’t all doom and gloom. Horror is one genre where women are taking on increasingly prominent parts. Yes, screaming is still a staple of a scary flick. But women are assuming central roles—not as victims, but as monsters and heroes.

Bucking the trend

Each year, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and ������Ƶ publishes research that shows how gender imbalance in film affects women and girls.

For example,  that positive and prominent roles for women in movies “motivate women to be more ambitious” professionally and personally. But when there is a dearth of women being depicted in positive ways, .

A recent  and the Geena Davis Institute studied this phenomenon across genres. They developed something called “the GD-IQ” (Geena Davis Inclusion Quotient), which is facilitated by machine-learning technology. The goal was to  in gender, screen time and speaking time that the casual movie viewer might overlook. The results of this study told a familiar story: In film, men are seen and heard twice as often as women.

But there was one exception: horror films.

A horror renaissance

In a way, this makes sense. A recent Guardian article describes how women . Many beloved horror films have strong female leads: Carrie, The Descent, and The Witch, to name a few.

Horror, of course, has always been interested in women; traditionally, women and girls are victims of crazed killers or of monsters. They scream a lot.

Yet the terms have changed along with the times, and a horror renaissance seems to have been taking place over the past decade.

The genre has moved from taking pleasure in victimizing women to focusing on women as survivors and protagonists. It has veered away from slashers and torture porn to more substantive, nuanced films that comment on social issues and possess an aesthetic vision.

Even old and seemingly worn-out franchises are being rebooted with female leads.

Earlier this year, Jordan Peele’s Get Out became a major box-office smash; as it skewered racial politics, it also made a beautiful, young white woman the evil antagonist. In 2015, Robert Egger’s historical horror film The Witch was a surprise hit. With a  rating on Rotten Tomatoes, The Witch captured audiences by being a historically accurate tale that included a feminist twist. Set in Puritan America, a teenage protagonist, Thomasin, battles her parents and siblings, who assume she’s become a witch, faulting her for all the misfortunes that befall the family. Of course she’s simply a teenage girl—a dangerous creature, the film seems to be saying, in a culture controlled by men.

Get Out and The Witch join a host of other horror films with women as central characters: Stoker, Under the Skin, Rec, The Conjuring, Ginger Snaps, American Mary, Jennifer’s Body, and You’re Next.

Changing the narrative

For decades, sexually active women in horror movies tend to die first as punishment for sexual transgression. We see this in Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

It Follows (2015) upends this narrative. Maika Monroe stars as Jay, a young woman who battles an unseen and unknown predator after having sex with a date. But It Follows isn’t interested in punishing Jay—or any other female character—for having sex. One critic makes an intriguing case that It Follows actually  by highlighting the trauma of how rape survivors are often treated by culture, friends and family. This creepy and critically acclaimed horror film allows Jay to be the girl we all wish we could be: She investigates, fights back against the predator and ultimately prevails.

Even old and seemingly worn-out franchises are being rebooted with female leads. The original Amityville Horror (1979) capitalized on the true story of a house in Amityville, New York. The tale of a disintegrating nuclear family terrorized by a haunted house spawned 12 .

But this summer, audiences  yet another addition to the Amityville oeuvre; Amityville: The Awakening stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bella Thorne as a single mother and her daughter who must endure life in the infamous house.  for the movie features an image of Bella Thorne superimposed over the house, suggesting that she is more important and more powerful than the terrifying home.

As the role of women in other realms of our society continues to grow, it’s only fitting that they do the same in horror movies. With the massive box-office success of , the hope is that other genres will soon enough take horror’s lead and embrace women as protagonists, heroes, and maybe even the occasional witch, too.

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

“That made me very uncomfortable, because it’s a vulnerable position to be in—there is no way for me to verify that the individual marks my ballot as I specified, and unfortunately, that was my only choice if I wanted my vote to be counted,” explains Flores. She is now a Voting Access and Election Protection Fellow at (DDP), an organization committed to building the political power of the disability community.

As the general election nears, disability-led organizations like DDP are scaling up their efforts to combat common barriers to the ballot box for disabled voters. While has a disability, there remain significant gaps in voting access for this demographic. Disabled organizers bring unique expertise rooted in lived experiences to the work of improving voting access and forging a more inclusive democracy. The landscape they are working in is a difficult one given the nation’s patchwork, state-led voting system that demands a unique strategy for countering voter suppression in each state.��

Research has shown that the nationwide are not fully accessible, meaning they each have potential impediments for people with disabilities to cast votes. Many states also , such as those that , , or make it more difficult to . These rules are most burdensome to disabled voters and also voters of color. Over 11% of disabled voters voting in the last general election, despite the expansion of mail-in voting as a pandemic precaution.

“The disability community is often forgotten, even by progressive organizations or those that are working to contact voters,” says Lila Zucker, organizing director at (NDS), a disability rights and justice nonprofit organization working across 14 states in the U.S. South. Over in the South is disabled—the highest rate in the nation.��

The region is also rife with disenfranchisement as Republican-led states concoct new election-related crimes and toughen punitive measures. Last year, , an organization that tracks election-related legislation nationwide, identified a “” in North Carolina. Neighboring Georgia in the run-up to the 2022 midterm election for a bill that criminalized passing out food or water within 25 feet of voters waiting in line at a polling location (a federal judge on First Amendment grounds last year, but it was upheld during the midterms).��

Recently, lawmakers in Alabama passed Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), with filling out or delivering their absentee ballot applications.�� A last year. While DDP’s Flores wanted to mark her ballot without support when voting absentee in college (and she should have had the option of an accessible ballot to do so), disabled voters in other states may depend on support that could result in criminal charges under these laws. These differences point to the fact that disabled voters are not a monolith and have different needs.

Fighting legal battles and passing new legislation could make a significant difference in reducing voting barriers for disabled Americans. The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging many discriminatory voting laws in court, including Alabama’s SB 1. One of the ACLU’s coalition partners in that lawsuit is the (ADAP). “For many voters with disabilities, absentee voting may be the only practical option to be heard and have their voices counted, [and] SB 1 poses additional barriers to this critical right,” said William Van Der Pol Jr., senior trial counsel for ADAP in .

While lawyers are fighting to roll back restrictive legislation, some policymakers are also working to improve voting access through new federal legislation. Past legislative gains, like the , furthered access for disabled voters by requiring that every polling place nationwide have equipment for disabled people to vote independently and privately, including an accessible voting terminal.��

The Accessible Voting Act, reintroduced in the U.S. Congress earlier this year, could be an even greater leap forward. If passed, it would within the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, create a national resource center on accessible voting, expand options for disabled people to cast their ballots in federal elections, and improve the accessibility of voting information and resources. Another bill, , was reintroduced in the same package. It would protect disabled people who want to run for office from being disqualified for receiving disability benefits or .��

Sarah Blahovec, co-founder, co-director, and president of , which , says both bills are “part of an ecosystem of ensuring that disabled people have access to the ballot box.” While Blahovec’s organization focuses on training, networking, and leadership development for disabled progressive candidates, she wonders, “How can we get more disabled people to run for office if they can’t actually get to the polls?”��

Dessa Cosma, executive director of DDP, emphasizes that these legal struggles are not just for disability rights. “When we expand voting rights for disabled people, it helps everyone,” she says. “When we restrict voting access, it hurts everyone, but it disproportionately hurts disabled voters.”

While legal battles may offer longer-term solutions to the barriers facing disabled voters, other organizing efforts are focused on working within the imperfect system we have now to ensure as many disabled people as possible can access the vote. 

At DDP, Flores and Cosma are focusing on making polling locations more accessible. The organization has been conducting poll-access audits since 2018, collecting data on common issues that could prevent disabled people from casting a ballot at their local polling location. In 2022, DDP ran , auditing 261 polling locations across 15 jurisdictions in Metro Detroit, serving about 1 million Michigan voters. The audit consists of a 23-question survey that evaluates polling locations across four categories, including having an accessible parking area, an accessible entrance, an accessible voting system, and accessible voting booths. Sites are labeled inaccessible if they fail in at least one of the four categories.��

In 2022, 84% of the polling locations that DDP visited failed the audit. This number tracks with a nationwide government study conducted in 2017 with a smaller sample size, which found that . While the results are grim, Cosma says, “Many of these are no-cost, low-cost fixable problems.”��

Of the 218 polling locations that failed DDP’s 2022 audit, 67 fell short in only one of the four categories. Many of them could have passed the audit if they had added signage to help voters find the accessible entrance, reoriented accessible voting booths to give voters privacy, or just remembered to plug in the accessible voting machine. If those polling locations remedied that one failed category, the percentage of polling places that were accessible would jump from 16% to 42%.

To help polling locations address their access barriers, DDP shares its audit data and builds relationships with election officials. Flores says the data “allows the clerks to have a better understanding of what access barriers look like.” Following its record-breaking poll-access audit, DDP so other organizations can replicate its methods in districts outside Detroit without starting from scratch.��

Meanwhile, in the U.S. South, NDS is partnering with voter registration, education, and turnout efforts to make their strategies, promotional materials, and volunteer and staff opportunities more inclusive of disabled people. Zucker says one of their suggested interventions is that organizations visit congregate settings, such as sheltered workshops and nursing homes. “One of the biggest things is meeting disabled voters where they’re at,” she explains.

Efforts such as these can ensure more disabled voters have their voices heard on critical issues during this November’s election. “Many disabled folks depend on systems that are guided and regulated by people that we elect to office, like home- and community-based services or the condition of roads, sidewalks, and public transportation,” explains Zucker. “Disabled people also exist at the margins of lots of different intersecting identities, so a lot of the issues that matter to everyone in this country matter to disabled voters.” Issues that are on the minds of all voters, like poverty, policing, and climate change, are acutely felt within the disability community. Disabled people experience poverty at and are more vulnerable to police violence and the effects of climate change.

To build political power on these issues, Cosma says, disabled people “have to have access to our democracy.”

When Aiwuyor tells others that infuriating online debates could be with bots or trolls, those incendiary exchanges begin to come into focus, and lose some of their power. “They are happy to hear they haven’t lost their minds,” said Aiwuyor, a communications specialist based near Washington, D.C.

Indeed, her friend may have been a victim of a broad disinformation campaign aimed at the Black community in the U.S. by Russian-backed Internet Research Agency or other bad actors.

Groups are countering disinformation aimed at the Black community by spreading accurate information, becoming reliable resources in communities, and tapping local influencers to be trusted messengers.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, “no single group of Americans was targeted by IRA information operatives more than African-Americans,” according to a released in October 2019.

Ahead of the general election, U.S. intelligence agencies such as the FBI have been sounding the alarm about to “manipulate public opinion, discredit the electoral process, and undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions.”  

Aiwuyor was alarmed about the ongoing problem, and this October launched the National Black Cultural Information Trust to challenge disinformation.

Disinformation—falsehoods and rumors, purposefully meant to cause harm—is “a perpetual ,” said the NAACP in October.

Along with the National Black Cultural Information Trust, the NAACP and other groups are countering disinformation aimed at the Black community by spreading accurate information, becoming reliable resources in communities, and tapping local influencers to be trusted messengers.

Researchers found that posing as Black activists “received more engagement than other types of inauthentic accounts,” said Deen Freelon of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lead author of a study published this year in Social Science Computer Review.

Ahead of 2016 elections, Blacktivist, a Russian-created campaign with social media accounts, spewed and racked up 11.2 million engagements on Facebook alone, such as likes and shares.

Black people are particularly vulnerable to false health information because they are more likely to have existing and untreated health conditions.

This year, an unprecedented pandemic, race-related protests, and polemical U.S. elections, provide ample fodder for disinformation campaigns. Bad information can discourage people from voting, exacerbate COVID-19 health risks, and sow distrust in government and institutions.

Twitter in October suspended after , including some based in Iran that inflamed conversations about Black Lives Matter and other racially charged issues. .

Recent disinformation has spread falsehoods about voting station locations, or that voting by mail doesn’t work. In Michigan, people are receiving robocalls claiming that voting will put people on government watchlists, said Rai Lanier, a director at nonprofit Michigan Liberation.

Other falsehoods claimed that Black people couldn’t contract COVID-19 or that the virus is caused by 5G cellphone technology. Getting reliable information “is a life or death situation. It’s not intellectual conversations,” said Nse Ufot, executive director of New Georgia Project, a civic engagement nonprofit.

Black people are particularly vulnerable to false health information because they are more likely to have existing and untreated health conditions. Distrust exists in Black communities “due to a , neglect, and the limited diversity of the medical profession,” according to a report from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School.

Voter suppression, intimidation, and propaganda are not new, but the internet makes it easier to spread.

But various organizations are combating disinformation in innovative ways. New Georgia Project, based in Atlanta, forges connections with young people, especially Black and other people of color, through hackathons and video game launches to get them interested in elections. In November 2019, some 150 coders, designers and esports players attended a “game jam” to come up with apps and games to demystify elections.

Those connections with communities help defuse falsehoods and rumors. “The more they see us as a trusted messenger, the better we get at combating disinformation,” Ufot said.

New Georgia Project also sends out shareable messages with accurate information through social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

It even made a cheeky . “There’s nowhere we won’t go to meet our folks,” Ufot said. She estimated the New Georgia Project has reached 3 million Georgians of color via social media in 2020.

There are signs that outreach has resonated with people. In 2014, New Georgia Project registered roughly 69,000 new voters. It has registered 455,000 Georgians in total since its founding.

The National Black Cultural Information Trust released a that warns about “digital Black face,” in which fake social media accounts and bots masquerade as Black people to discourage voting and create conflict within Black communities.

The guide advises checking social media accounts for suspicious signs by asking whether they were just recently created, or had very few or zero followers. “Beware of abnormal social media handles, accounts with no profile photos, or strange images and vernacular,” the group advises.

In 2019, Andre Banks, CEO of communications firm A/B Partners, started Win Black/Pa’lante, a digital strategy coalition to counter disinformation targeting Blacks and Latinos, who are also prime targets.

During the 2016 election, disinformation was “actually targeted to make sure Black voters were not fully able to express our political power,”  he said.

Banks was aware of academics and analysts gathering data on disinformation campaigns. He started Win Black/Pa’lante to “listen and learn from that research quickly and create content that groups across the country could use.”

Voter suppression, intimidation, and propaganda are not new, but the internet makes it easier to spread. “These are old-school tactics but weaponized with digital media,” observed Ashley Bryant, co-lead of Win Black/Pa’lante. 

Win Black analyzes disinformation trends on social media and then arms about 100 progressive organizations and advocacy partners in 21 states with accurate, catchy on social media. It has reached millions of people through posts and videos.

However, organizations sometimes need training and tools to accurately spread awareness. “Without education, a lot of groups are inadvertently amplifying these narratives,” said Bryant.  

Education may need to be tailored to reach the grassroots level. Nonprofit First Draft administers a two-week course by SMS text messages in English and Spanish. It sends daily lessons via text because people might lack robust internet connections, especially during the pandemic lockdown. The SMS lessons have reached dozens of community organizations like youth groups and women’s clubs and hundreds of individuals.

Messages in mainstream media and newspaper op-eds also may not reach people on the ground or resonate with marginalized groups, so trusted messengers within communities are key.

Influential conversations are happening in “nail salons, barbershops, on the stoop in front of houses, in parks, churches,” said Amalia Deloney, co-executive director of ������Ƶ Democracy Fund.

The National Black Cultural Information Trust also raises awareness through events such as a on reparations with Black academics and other experts. An upcoming webinar will feature The Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the influential African Methodist Episcopal Church.

“You’re more likely to trust people you can see and engage with,” said founder Jessica Aiwuyor.

In addition to church leaders, NBCIT reaches out to other important Black influencers, including Black media like podcasts, radio stations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, and newspapers such as The Afro, and public television outlets and cable, such as Black News Channel.

Aiwuyor also spreads the word through Black Bloggers Connect, an online community and newsletter with 10,000 members that she started as a graduate student in 2009.

Disinformation is in the spotlight because of elections, but it also widens fissures within the Black community that can have long-lasting impact. Bad actors “are using our cultural conversations to sway the way we think about each other and ourselves,” Aiwuyor said.

Disinformation can, for example, stoke “animus for a Jamaican or an African immigrant and blame them for our social woes or vice versa. Then that sways how we think about immigration,” she explained.

“It’s kind of attacking us from within. It’s using our cultural conversations against us,” said Aiwuyor. “It harms our ability to unite around issues. What we need to do is band together.”

“Heading into the 2020 election, voters in half the states face more obstacles to the ballot box and will find it harder to vote than they did a decade ago,” says Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the .

These new obstacles have energized a counter-campaign to restore and expand voting rights. Often the newer restrictions focus on bureaucratic details, but their intent and impact target the same populations that historically faced violence and harassment when seeking to exercise the right to vote.

The proliferating challenges to the right to vote include requiring people to show specific government identification; mandating an exact match between the name on voting registration records and on approved forms of ID; reducing early voting and absentee voting; preventing voter registration drives by third-party organizations; and aggressive purges of voters who may have moved or who failed to vote in previous elections.

• Voter ID requirements: According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, . .

• Exact match standards: Georgia enacted a strict match requirement in 2017, and 80 percent of voters whose registrations were blocked by the new law were people of color. A lawsuit forced Georgia to largely end the policy.

• Early/absentee voting restrictions: in states such as Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio has the effect of longer lines at the polls and fewer overall voters.

• Restrictions on voting registration drives by third-party organizations, such as those enacted in Tennessee that that submit incomplete or inaccurate registration forms. The measure was enacted after the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered 90,000 new voters for the 2018 midterm election.

• Roll Purges: States like Georgia and Wisconsin are , often on flimsy pretexts. A federal judge recently .

According to the Brennan Center For Justice, .

“What we are seeing is systematic voter suppression around the country,” says Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, the Georgia organization building on former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ work mobilizing and protecting the rights of voters.

Abrams ran against then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who refused to step down from his job of overseeing elections while campaigning for governor. The gave him the race by a margin of just 55,000, after as many as 1 million voters were removed from the rolls. She has called Kemp an “architect of voter suppression,” and Abrams used her now-famous of Nov. 16, 2018 to launch Fair Fight Action with Groh-Wargo.

“We’re going to have a fair fight in 2020 because my mission is to make certain that no one has to go through in 2020 what we went through in 2018,” Abrams said in a to a union in Las Vegas last summer when she announced an additional initiative aimed at in 20 battleground states.

In Georgia, Fair Fight sued in federal court over voter suppression issues raised by the gubernatorial election and the state’s move to purge 300,000 voters under a “use it or lose it” rule. The court so far has refused to take emergency action to stop the mass Georgia purge, but Groh-Wargo says the suit led to nearly 30,000 voters getting restored after the state admitted to a technical glitch and after advocates’ outreach prompted some voters to update their own registrations. “The court didn’t give us the ruling we had hoped for which was to completely restore these use-it-or-lose-it people, but we ended up viewing it as a win,” says Groh-Wargo.

“What we are seeing is systematic voter suppression around the country.”

That rule also is at the heart of an that allowed purging of voters who failed to vote for six years and did not confirm their residency. An from the rolls in 2015, but in 2018 the . Other states besides Ohio and Georgia with some version of use-it-or-lose-it include Pennsylvania, Oregon, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Montana.

In , which like Georgia is expected to be a battleground state in 2020, a purge of 200,000 registered voters based on a computer algorithm showing they had changed their residence has led to suits in federal court and has divided the state Elections Commission along party lines on how to proceed. On Jan. 14, an appellate court put a hold on the purge, but pending litigation challenges the hold.

At a private event in Wisconsin last fall, , an adviser to President Trump’s reelection campaign, was recorded confirming that “traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes.” Clark was quoted at a later event telling a crowd of Republican lawyers that voter suppression is “going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program.”

Wisconsin also is in the voting rights crosshairs over identification restrictions that opponents say make it more difficult for students to vote. A 2011 law establishing a photo ID requirement was signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, and survived initial court challenges. A filed by Common Cause is still pending.

That suit says that among 28 states with voter ID laws that allow use of student IDs, Wisconsin is the only one that requires students also to show proof of enrollment and that the student ID can only be valid for up to two years.

Carolyn DeWitt, president and executive director of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan organization that works to get more young voters to the polls, says ID laws generally can be problematic for young people who move frequently and may not have a driver’s license or other requisite identification.

“In Texas, student IDs from public universities are not accepted for voting, but gun licenses are,” says DeWitt.

also opposes like the one New Hampshire lawmakers adopted last year, which changes the definition of residency to require that voters be permanent residents of New Hampshire. That makes it more difficult for out-of-state college students to be eligible to vote where they go to school.

“We are definitely seeing a backlash against the wave of youth voting that we’ve seen over the last couple of years,” DeWitt says.

In addition to monitoring voter suppression initiatives from Republican-controlled state legislatures, voting rights advocates worry about identifying and curbing stealth tactics by local election officials. Administrative moves that can depress voting include shutting down or moving polling places, changes in polling place hours, using new ways of voting that may confuse voters, and not adequately training polling place workers, all of which also may contribute to long waits to cast ballots.

“These types of things are hard for us to alert people of and address everywhere,” says Sophia Lakin, an attorney with the project.

“So many of these restrictions fall disproportionately on these communities that have been growing in strength over the last decade or so—voters of color, young voters, voters with disabilities,” adds Lakin. “What’s at stake for many of the state actors who are perpetrating these restrictive measures, and certainly what’s motivating it, is an attempt to keep control.

“As the country’s electorate has changed over time becoming more diverse, that has motivated I would say a lot of efforts to make voting more difficult. Look at what we are seeing with racial gerrymandering,” she continued. “You’re putting in place a situation where politicians are choosing their voters, and voters are not choosing their politicians.”

Advocates cite two key triggers that helped propel voting restrictions: the 2008 election of Barack Obama and a 2013 Supreme Court ruling gutting part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Lakin says the huge increase in voters of color and young voters in 2008 “resulted in the election of the first African American president, and almost immediately in that aftermath we start to hear the beginnings of a suppression period that follows about 45 years of expansion of voting rights.”

Then in Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court in 2013 removed a requirement for states and local governments with a history of discrimination to get approval from the federal government before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices. Lakin says the ruling gave the jurisdictions formerly subject to preclearance “free rein in terms of putting into place restrictions,” and since the 2013 ruling those states have had a higher rate of purges.

“People need to understand our whole country’s history is a fight for voting rights and in many ways.”

The Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the House in 2019 but is unlikely to get through the Republican-held Senate, would restore the preclearance process voided by Shelby and update the Voting Rights Act to provide protections against newer forms of voter discrimination.

The counter-campaign to increase voting access advocates measures that make it easier to vote, such as same-day registration, automatic voter registration, automatic registration updates and voting by mail.

At this point, 16 states and the District of Columbia have approved automatic voter registration, but Weiser says only 12 states will have it in place in time for the 2020 elections. She says that 24 states will have same-day registration in place for the November general election.

According to the , 21 states now allow some elections to be conducted by mail, and four use mailed ballots for all elections: Oregon (2000), Washington (2011), Colorado (2013) and Hawaii (2019).

Groh-Wargo urges candidates and campaigns to start early building voter protection infrastructure and to follow the of reaching out to all voters, including those in underrepresented communities and those considered unlikely to vote.

“We can’t win every court battle, we can’t overcome Russian interference in our elections, we can’t do Congress’ job for them,” says Groh-Wargo. “We’re not going to sit around and wait. We’re going to be fighting day in and day out. So much of the right to vote is an exercise in organizing as much as it is an exercise in the battle in the courtroom.”

“People need to understand our whole country’s history is a fight for voting rights and in many ways, this is about a new fight, and it is a fight worth having and we can be victorious,” she says.

What Can You Do?

Advocates urge individual voters to help counter voter suppression by:

• early and often to make sure it’s up to date. Make sure family and friends also check. Many states have easy online access to your view registration records, and from all 50 states.

• Helping counter misinformation and disinformation by knowing the credible sources for voting information and sharing it with others. Double-check the information you hear and report disinformation immediately.

• Volunteering to be poll workers.

“Are you thinking of voting?” she asks.

He looks at her warily. “I might. I might be out of town—you know, I’m retired.”

He’s Black and so is Cogwell, and she shifts to a more familiar tone. “You know, turnout was a little low last time,” she says.

He gives her a long look, then acquiesces. “OK, I’ll do it. I’ll vote.”

Cogwell is working for Down Home North Carolina, a group based in five rural North Carolina counties that’s aiming to build support among poor and working-class communities to grow a multiracial, progressive coalition. This nonpartisan get-out-the-vote effort before the Nov. 2 municipal election is just one tool in its arsenal, but it matters.

Two days later, election results revealed that while not all of the candidates favored by Down Home prevailed, a couple of Black candidates they’d supported were elected to the councils of small municipalities in the county. Perhaps more important, , rising from 12% in 2019, another off-year election, to 18% on Nov. 2. It’s still a low turnout rate, but it’s a positive sign.

Other election results around the United States were far more dispiriting. In Virginia, Republicans swept state and local elections, with particularly strong turnout in rural areas. The outcome portends poorly for Democrats in 2022, and kicked off a new of about the party’s lack of popularity in rural regions. That’s due to many factors, but it’s partially the result of Democratic Party representatives’ diminished presence there, aside from the occasional visit during a campaign. The party’s ground operations have been receding from rural America for a decade, at least, while Republicans have courted residents consistently and year-round. 

Down Home offers a potential model for how progressives might proceed in North Carolina. The organization was established in 2017 specifically as an antidote to the Democratic withdrawal problem. “We understood that huge swaths of the state haven’t had a complete democratic ecosystem for long periods. The progressive movement and [progressive] Democrats were not even competing for voters,” says Todd Zimmer, one of Down Home’s founders. “And we were also seeing that poor and working people were being very poorly served.”

Indeed, starting in 2012, Republicans have captured a in each electoral cycle. And while the state leaned Democratic in local elections in the past, Democratic officials tended to be fairly conservative and were often more aligned politically with Republicans than with the national Democratic Party.

What’s also the case is that in many locales, especially rural counties, the Democratic Party doesn’t even field candidates for local offices, and Republicans run unopposed.

In response, Down Home began knocking on doors and talking to people in the parking lots of Walmarts and food banks and social services agencies across several counties. That type of one-on-one communication, often with people who haven’t been engaged in the political process before, is still a hallmark of its strategy. Down Home’s goal is to address tangible needs that residents themselves identify, as a way of bypassing some of the rhetoric and culture-war talking points. The objective, ultimately, is to elect more progressive candidates who will fight for poor and working people’s needs—though the organization emphasizes that it’s technically nonpartisan and therefore doesn’t affiliate with the Democratic Party.

The group tends to focus on bread-and-butter issues that affect lower-income people of all political persuasions. That includes big national initiatives, such as health care and a living wage, as well as explicitly local issues, such as the need for more substance abuse treatment centers rather than jails, or landfill fees that are too high.

Down Home isn’t just focused on White residents, even though the term “rural working class” tends to evoke images of just that. Like many other states, particularly in the South, rural areas are full of Black and Latino voters—a�Ի� more than a few in the last presidential election. Down Home is betting that, despite a deep racial divide, it can bring Blacks and Whites into coalition together. “We think this is the only way to move the South and to build working-class power and have a real populist movement,” says Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home’s director of communications.

But it’s slow, incremental work, especially in a place like North Carolina, where 80 of the state’s 100 counties are rural and almost all of them supported Donald Trump last year. But in Alamance County, a former textile-producing region that’s lost thousands of jobs over the past two decades and has seen the rise of far-right movements, Down Home’s directors point to the election of the state’s first Latino legislator as one of the group’s successes.

������Ƶ nebulous are the social and political changes. “When I joined Down Home in 2017, no one attended county commission meetings, no one paid attention to what was going on,” says Dreama Caldwell, one of Down Home’s co-directors and an Alamance County resident. These days, she says, far more citizens are politically active, and county commission meetings are often crowded. Plus, the group has helped to unite the area’s disparate political organizations. “It moved from being a competitive thing to a collaborative environment.”

But the lack of attention from the Democratic Party has allowed conservative positions to become deeply entrenched. Some observers say there’s no way a group like Down Home, working on a shoestring, can really change minds.

“You can talk to White rural voters who watch Fox, [but] you’re not going to convert them,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist and sociologist who recently released a while others don’t. “There’s a lot of romanticism on the Left that if you talk to people about things, you’ll change them. You’re not going to overcome the racial divide very easily.”

Indeed, Anthony Flaccavento, a resident of rural Virginia who established the Rural Progressive Platform and ran for Congress in 2018, chalks up his loss to the deep partisan divide. “I think people thought, ‘I can’t take a chance on a Democrat,’” he explains. “The polarization is so extreme.” But Flaccavento himself doesn’t believe rural America is a lost cause for progressive ideas. He’s created a new organization, the , that trains liberal organizations in communicating with rural residents.

Down Home’s organizers are true believers too. And they’ve got a couple of tools in their box that might give them an advantage.

Getting Deep Into Outreach and Canvassing

It’s a few days after the election, and a Down Home employee, working from home in Winston-Salem, is cold-calling rural residents around the state to ask how they’re doing and what kind of concerns they currently have.

“Hi, this is Jillian with Down Home,” the caller says. “We’re just calling neighbors to see how you and folks you care about were impacted by the pandemic.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic broke out, Down Home took pride in its face-to-face door-knocking campaigns. These days, it often connects with people over the phone. But the upshot is the same: conversations with rural residents that aim to connect on an emotional level, as a way to find common ground. It’s called , and it’s a technique Down Home has been employing since the organization’s 2017 launch. Sometimes, deep canvassing campaigns—like this one, conducted by Jillian and her colleagues—are largely about listening. Often, though, the goal is to change minds.

Does it actually work? “All the time,” says Bonnie Dobson, one of Down Home’s deep-canvassing trainers.

“The whole thing about deep canvassing is that people are conflicted about certain things. It’s cognitive dissonance,” she says. For example, someone on the phone might say, “We don’t need government—people should be taking care of themselves.” Dobson might sympathetically respond with her own story, and then add that she’s been grateful for the school buses that delivered meals to kids in her town during the pandemic.

And that might nudge the other person to begin thinking—a�Ի� talking—about a time when they got help that didn’t look like the stereotypical “government assistance” they’d had in mind. The level of listening and respect used by Down Home’s callers, who are themselves working-class rural residents, helps keep people from becoming defensive and digging into their positions.

During the 2020 presidential race, People’s Action—a national network of progressive groups, including Down Home, with roots in community organizing— in 280,000 conversations around the country. Researchers found that the model decreased Trump’s vote margin with women by 4.9%, and with all voters by 3.1%. Use of the technique was estimated to be over 100 times more effective per person than the average electoral persuasion strategy in presidential races. And the shift in support persisted for at least four months following the canvassing.

Still, Down Home’s leaders admit that the racial divide that Skocpol referenced is formidable. “We know that conservative politicians have long used racial dog whistles to attract White working-class voters, and we know that dog-whistle politics work,” says Dan Bayer, a longtime deep canvasser with the organization. “So, you run into people who’d probably support a program, except for these stereotypes they had of ‘lazy minorities’ taking advantage of it.”

Down Home tries to dispel those fears by using another technique, the “race-class narrative.” Developed by University of California, Berkeley, law professor Ian Haney López, the race-class narrative uses a script that references racial division up front.

“The main message,” says Bayer, “is, whether we’re White, Brown, or Black, we all want safe communities and a shot at a decent life. But those in power use racism to distract us while they pass huge tax cuts for themselves or large subsidies for their businesses. Don’t you think we should work together?”

López and his research partners have found that . After all, if racism is the main reason low-income Black and White residents haven’t come together in solidarity—what López has called “the holy grail of progressive organizing”—then it’s critical to call it out for what it is, rather than hoping it’ll go away, as Democrats tend to do, says López. “Nobody wins in sports or politics by leaving the other side’s best player unguarded,” he quips.

George Goehl, director of People’s Action and a longtime community organizer, has come to strongly support deep canvassing, especially used in tandem with the race-class narrative. “If you want to advance a progressive agenda on economics, race, gender—I don’t think it’s possible unless we dramatically expand how many people we’re in conversation with that don’t agree with us on some things,” he says.

Down Home has big plans for the coming year. The organization hopes to scale up and expand across the state. That’ll begin with another major listening canvass so the group’s leaders can grasp citizens’ concerns and develop a statewide issue mandate. One item will most certainly be Medicaid expansion, but the rest will be determined by citizens’ needs.

Shifting the balance of power in the state won’t be easy. North Carolina’s electoral districts are deeply gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, and polarization means only 15% of the state’s 2,700 precincts are competitive. Down Home’s chance of influencing legislative and Congressional elections is slim. But Trump won the state in 2020 by only 1.4 percentage points, the smallest margin of any state. If Down Home works quickly, the group could have a real opportunity to impact the 2024 presidential election.

But winning elections wouldn’t be the only important accomplishment. For a group introducing progressive ideas to rural areas after years of inattention, success might just look like losing by a little less.

So here are the numbers: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is currently tracking in the 2024 legislative session alone. In 2023, more than—making it the worst year on record for anti-LGBTQ legislation. The tangle of discriminatory laws included bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth, policies that require the misgendering of trans students, and the legal censorship of books and educational curriculum. Many of these laws target and their access to basic needs like health care, as well as common childhood activities like school and athletics. The surge in anti-LGBTQ legislation was so significant that, for the first time in its history, the Human Rights Campaign for LGBTQ Americans in 2023.��

“The rise in anti-LGBTQ legislation can be tracked back to 2016 with the introduction of ,’” says Mariah Moore, co-director of policy and programs for the . House Bill 2—which prevented trans people from using bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity in public buildings—quickly thrust trans people, and their rights, to the and inspired a .”

But the spread of this legislation is not coincidental—it’s coordinated.

Trans journalist Imara Jones has reported widely on what she calls the —a shadowy, well-funded, and well-organized network of , , and . Jones’ comprehensive reporting documents how this machine works to , limit bodily autonomy, and infuse political discourse with anti-trans rhetoric. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Moore says “These pieces of legislation are often fueled by far-right Christian extremist politicians who spread mis- [and] disinformation.”

Now in 2024—a�Ի� rapidly approaching the 10-year anniversary of that first North Carolina “bathroom bill”—the LGBTQ community and our allies must not only navigate the hundreds of harmful bills at the local and state level, but also a national moral and cultural panic around our very existence.

Begin in Your Backyard

Since the vast majority of anti-queer and trans bills are , effective intervention often requires engaging directly with local and state government—sometimes with surprising success. 

Samira Burnside, a 17-year-old community organizing fellow for , said she and her team just came out of one of the most successful legislative sessions they’ve had in terms of LGBTQ rights. “Last year, as you know, we had a lot of anti-trans bills,” says Burnside. “This year, out of the 22 proposed anti-LGBTQ bills, we defeated 21. We even that allows over-the-counter access for pre-exposure prophylaxis [PrEP] which helps prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.”

Burnside says Equality Florida is focused on finding common ground with their opposition—either to “pin them down” into doing better, expose the hypocrisy of their stance, or find the overlap between their different positions. 

“And in doing so,” Burnside continues, “we actually saw this year a couple of Republicans vote with us on things like abortion and the [PrEP] bill.”&�Բ�����;

While cynics may dismiss this bipartisan approach, there’s no denying its effectiveness. The GOP-dominated Kansas State Legislature, for example, failed to ban gender-affirming care when a . She said her conversations with hospital staff, therapists, medical providers, and the parents of transgender kids changed her mind.

Bigotry’s Testing Ground 

Despite its prevalence, this type of legislation fails to pass more often than not. , out of the nearly 2,000 pieces of anti-LGBTQ legislation introduced between 2015 and 2023, only 194 were passed by state legislators. In other words, 90% of bills introduced were defeated. Some of these defeats are undoubtedly the efforts of grassroots activists and organizations like Equality Florida, but many bills also lack the internal support needed to pass within a legislative session. 

But the experimental nature of this legislation, and the sheer volume, is part of its efficacy. “Extremist politicians use the South as a testing ground for some of the worst legislation,” says Ivy Hill, the director of gender justice for . “They test things [in the South], like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, then replicate it across the country from there.”

So even when defeated, every piece of anti-LGBTQ legislation retains its teeth. Through their mere existence, these bills arm extremists with the information they need to become more effective, all while normalizing the —to say nothing of the harm caused by legislation that does pass.

But quashing the anti-LGBTQ movement isn’t just about playing defense, or managing a frantic whack-a-mole game against hundreds of bills. 

Out in Office

Moving beyond defense requires LGBTQ people and our allies in office to introduce and pass proactive, protective laws—a�Ի� that requires more seats at the table for LGBTQ politicians and candidates.

Annise Parker, president and CEO of the nonpartisan action committee , believes one of the most direct avenues for change is to put LGBTQ leaders into office, both elected and appointed. Parker herself was the first openly gay mayor of a major city, having served three terms from 2010 to 2016 as the mayor of Houston. “Democracy only functions when everyone is present and our community has long been underrepresented,” Parker says. 

In practice, this often looks like training LGBTQ candidates on the nuts and bolts of campaigning and teaching them to weave their identities into their platform. A strong LGBTQ candidate, Parker explains, is able to link their life experiences to the experiences of their constituents. This can be especially important for trans candidates, who must transform themselves from “other” to “advocate” in the eyes of voters—many of whom may not actually know an out trans person in real life.

Once elected, LGBTQ politicians can not only kill harmful bills in committee through voting, building allies, and caucuses—they can also defeat them through what Parker calls “quiet conversations in hallways.”&�Բ�����;

It doesn’t take a huge number of officials to make an impact, either. With only a small (but ) number of out representatives in the Texas State Legislature, Parker says a queer cohort was able to stop all but three of the . And every so often, the combined efforts of grassroots organizers, advocacy groups, politicians, and judges are able to usher in big wins for the LGBTQ community, like state prison reforms for trans inmates in Colorado, a , and .��

Yet even with these successes, the truth is that getting into office doesn’t guarantee equal power, nor safety, for marginalized communities or their representatives. Across the country, Republican-held state legislatures, for example, are —often for the simple act of acknowledging their own existence and the impact of the harmful bills their colleagues are promoting. 

But it’s also worth noting that the vast majority of voters simply aren’t that interested in the anti-LGBTQ culture wars. , the vast majority of LGBTQ voters, registered voters, and swing voters agree that “Republicans should stop focusing on restricting women’s rights and banning medical care for transgender youth” and instead focus on economic issues. Even the stronghold in Florida—ground zero for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ self-proclaimed culture war against “woke” ideology— as anti-queer bills languish. “Don’t Say Gay” was , and DeSantis himself . 

Clearly, representation in government makes a difference. But the American political process is slow. Not only do bills and laws live long lives and enjoy slow deaths, but it would take generations to elect enough officials who truly represent the beliefs and diversity of the American people—even before accounting for how powerfully voter-suppression tactics impact Black and Brown communities, incarcerated people, immigrant, and working-class communities. 

Queer and trans people can’t wait decades until an election finally swings our way; our people are suffering now. After all, the Stonewall riots of 1969, an urgent, spontaneous response against police raids, were led not by politicians but by a group of Black and Brown trans women, sex workers, butch lesbians, and drag queens who refused to accept brutality against their community. In other words, the modern gay rights movement was started by an uprising, not a “get out the vote” mixer.

We Keep Us Safe

Community care—ranging from grassroots initiatives and organized spaces for resource-sharing to informal networks of love and resiliency—is often what truly protects people and helps them cultivate the strength to keep fighting.

In 2019, Jasmine McKenzie, a Black trans woman living openly with HIV, saw a need in her own Miami community. “South Florida has historically lacked brave spaces for Black people of trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary (TGNCNB+) experience, especially those that are run by our own community,” McKenzie says. In response, she founded —the only Black, trans-led organization in Miami-Dade County—to create affirming spaces for the community to heal, build self-determination, and develop solutions around structural racism and transphobia.

The project’s services range from providing drop-in resources like a food pantry, clothing, laundry, and needle exchanges, to direct services like case management, access to hormone replacement therapy, HIV testing, and mental health support. Together, these services work to address the immediate needs of Miami’s queer and trans community. At the same time, the McKenzie Project challenges Florida’s legislative environment with youth-focused programs like The Black Unicorn Party, which not only creates spaces for support and collaboration for Black trans youth, but also develops their advocacy skills with public speaking, organizing, and lobbying training. 

Taken together, McKenzie says the organization has been able to not only mitigate the challenges posed by the legislative environment, but also to build a stronger, more resilient community.

“To counter anti-LGBT legislation and policies, it is imperative to engage with a diverse range of queer and trans individuals working at the local, state, and national levels,” McKenzie explains. 

The McKenzie Project may be unique in Miami-Dade County, but similar efforts pepper the country. These programs, gathering spaces, education and political trainings, and mutual aid efforts all work together to provide more opportunities for LGBTQ people to not just weather the storm—but to experience enough safety and dignity to finally enjoy our place in the sun.

This moment calls for an equally bold response that centers human and planetary needs—a�Ի� uplifts the solutions that make them possible. 

For nearly 30 years, YES! has been reporting on these exact solutions. That’s why we’ve launched , intended to be a hub for the big ideas—a�Ի� grassroots methods—that offers a hopeful, collective vision that counters toxic individualism and authoritarianism. 

Project 2025 is a crafted by the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-conservative think tank, that offers a future conservative presidential administration a transition plan to severely limit how federal government agencies serve the public. The authors of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” mock progressive and intersectional ideals, claiming that “unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening,” and specifically target federal funding for human needs.��

Progressives are sounding the alarm over Project 2025 and its proudly regressive agenda to decimate reproductive and LGBTQ rights, undermine racial justice, privatize government services, accelerate climate change, and more. Similarly, many have lamented the lack of a comprehensive progressive counter-agenda designed to improve conditions for and safeguard the rights of all people.  

WATCH: Understanding Project 2025’s Threat to Democracy

But the truth is that communities across the country have already been laying the groundwork for a collective, compassionate future. YES! has decades of archival stories reporting on solutions that can make this progressive vision a reality.

Beginning on August 20, YES! will publish new, original stories every week that expand the framework of what is possible under a Progress 2025 vision. Together, we will respond to the apt and timely : “How do we build something that is able to sustain what’s already happening now, and able to help us thrive into the future? We have to make the world that we need to live in politically possible.”&�Բ�����; 

Read on to learn more about our Progress 2025 vision:

Project 2025 targets both undocumented immigrants and legal methods of immigration. In the words of its authors, the next administration ought to be “[p]rioritizing border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation.” The project places enormous emphasis on immigration as the main source of domestic problems, playing up fears of crime and job theft by immigrants and calling for mandatory detention of undocumented people.��

The broad vision of Project 2025 is that immigrants don’t belong in the United States, and therefore the next administration would have a mandate to dramatically increase the budget of the Customs and Border Patrol agency, completely seal the border with Mexico, eliminate several categories of visas and legal statuses, and federally divest from “sanctuary” cities.��

In contrast, Progress 2025’s vision of immigration upholds the tenet that “no human being is illegal.” It adopts the intersectional and multiracial organizing led by immigrants’ rights groups that prioritizes the collective rights and dignity of immigrants. Progress 2025 envisions an end to detention and family separation, the decriminalization of asylum and immigration violations, an expansion of sanctuary cities, and comprehensive immigration reform that includes permanent status for “Dreamers” and their families. The end goal is to imagine a world without borders.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on immigration.

Project 2025 aims to cut the size and scope of federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, claiming they have infiltrated the federal government and are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It calls for the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change so the U.S. wouldn’t need to track, report, or reduce emissions. 

Project 2025 also calls for a rollback of environmental protections—including the repeal of the climate-forward Inflation Reduction Act—as well as an expansion of fossil fuel drilling. determined that if all of the document’s climate-related recommendations were implemented, the U.S. would spew an additional 2.7 billion tons of climate-heating emissions into the atmosphere by 2030, comparable to what India emits in a year.��

Progress 2025 instead highlights the communities taking back the power to stop burning fossil fuels today. Groups are holding polluters accountable, passing life-sustaining legislation, enshrining the legal rights of nature, and decolonizing their relationship with the land. Advocates emphasize the need to invest in alternative energies that protect the planet without sacrificing frontline communities in the process. As Progress 2025 makes plain, climate solutions need to be many and varied, tailored to individual communities and the people who call them home.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on climate and environment.

In keeping with its authoritarian, Christian nationalist, and white supremacist objectives, Project 2025 aims to criminalize the existence of LGBTQ people—through regressive legislation that targets freedom of expression, health care policies that deny access to medically necessary care (especially for transgender people), and a culture of repression, intolerance, and hatred for those deemed “different.” The Heritage Foundation has a long history and deep financial ties to the Christian right, which has spent decades whipping up anti-gay and trans panic, fighting tooth and nail to reject—a�Ի� then overturn—marriage equality, and falsely equating gay (and now trans) people with sexual predators, despite the fact that trans people, in particular, are much more likely to be the victim of sexual violence than the perpetrator. 

Progress 2025 instead embraces a progressive vision for queer equality that centers LGBTQ joy, safety, and security. Constitutional protections for same-sex marriage, explicit LGBTQ inclusion in state and federal laws that prohibit sex-based discrimination in education, employment, and are codified nationwide. The epidemic of deadly violence against trans women of color—which continues to rise every year—is a thing of the past, and all LGBTQ people enjoy protections in and equal access to public accommodations, employment, housing, culturally competent health care, and all social services.��

This vision imagines a society where no one is vilified or faces violence or discrimination because of who they are, whom they love, or how they choose to find joy and meaning in their lives. And many of those LGBTQ people who point to historic movement leaders like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—both trans women of color and sex workers who were pivotal in the historic Stonewall Riots—contend that queer liberation cannot be realized without abolition of the carceral and police state, and an end to U.S. imperialism, which continues to fund death and devastation for millions of people worldwide—many of whom are also LGBTQ.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on LGBTQ rights.

Project 2025 promotes independent-contractor-based employment—i.e., gig work—over secure union jobs that pay a living wage. It considers federal employee unions to be “incompatible with democracy” and critiques overtime pay, claiming it punishes businesses. Shockingly, it targets child labor laws and encourages minors’ access to hazardous jobs in order to mitigate “worker shortages.”��

In their quest to “secure free and open markets,” the authors of Project 2025 demand “lower taxes and deregulation.” They define “fiscal responsibility” as balancing the federal budget via cuts to food stamps and family assistance “while maintaining a strong national defense and not raising taxes.”

In sharp contrast, Progress 2025 embraces policies backed by unions and their advocates that make it easier for workers to unionize and would strengthen child labor laws. It envisions the expansion of worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives, and builds on the momentum of organized labor’s recent successes from domestic worker organizing to Starbucks baristas’ massive unionizing spree. The Progress 2025 vision includes increased taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals (adopting the ethos that “billionaires should not exist”), while increasing federal spending on social programs and defunding the military.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on labor and capital.

Project 2025 and students of color, LGBTQ students, and low-income students. This includes eliminating the Department of Education so “families and students [can] be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments that best fit their needs” and rolling back federal protections and funding for students with disabilities, transgender and nonbinary students, and low-income students.

Project 2025 would eliminate federally funded programs for low-income children such as Head Start. It promotes privatized education and “universal school choice” at the expense of underserved students, while stripping educators of the right to teach accurate history. It would allow discrimination to run rampant in schools, rolling back federal policies requiring schools receiving funding to protect trans and nonbinary children. 

Progress 2025 envisions fully funded public schools regardless of zip code, where parents can choose the best schools for their children without vouchers. Every child is fed in school for free, and federally funded programs ensure their families are fed on weekends and breaks. Teachers are paid living wages, given union protection, and have autonomy to teach the full history of the country. LGBTQ students, especially those who are trans and nonbinary, can self-define without objection, be referred to by their accurate pronouns, and have access to gender-neutral facilities.

All student loan debt is forgiven, public colleges offer reduced or free tuition, and race-conscious admissions policies are reinstated and expanded at all schools.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on education.

Project 2025 would further entrench the sinister agenda of the Trump administration—alongside a number of co-conspirators who have since been indicted—who targeted election workers in multiple states, cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, and amplified disinformation in the 2020 election. Project 2025 would also continue the decades-long quest to undo the civil rights movement’s voting gains.

Project 2025 would gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tasked with fortifying election integrity. Additionally, Project 2025 proposes eliminating the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, which has been at the forefront of bringing lawsuits against counties and states that violate voting rights statutes, and would encourage the DOJ’s Criminal Division to investigate the widespread myths of “voter registration fraud and unlawful ballot correction.”

Progress 2025 doesn’t just want to combat an authoritarian takeover of the ballot box. In this vision, all people over the age of 16 in the U.S. would have unimpeded access to the ballot box. Election Day would be a national holiday, and the U.S. would have the infrastructure to ensure every voter can cast a ballot through their cell phone or other electronic device. Mail-in ballots would also be embraced as an essential element of ensuring voting is accessible to people with disabilities.

Running for office wouldn’t be reserved for a select few who get into power and remain there. Instead, campaign donation reform, the undoing of gerrymandering, and term limits would ensure that any person, no matter their net worth, could run for office and have a fair chance to win.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on voting rights.

One of Project 2025’s most ambitious—a�Ի� far-reaching—objectives is to not only end abortion access in the U.S. but to radically restrict and redefine reproductive health care. The project envisions a nationwide abortion ban—including ending access to emergency abortion care and contraception—a�Ի� restricted access to assisted reproduction technologies like IVF, in addition to “fetal personhood” policies that criminalize the termination of a pregnancy and prioritize the “life” of a not-yet-viable fetus over the life and rights of the pregnant person. 

Project 2025 proposes from every “federal rule, agency regulation, contract, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists,” and instead would fund the proliferation of misleading, religiously based “crisis pregnancy centers” that peddle dangerous misinformation and anti-abortion dogma to pregnant people. 

By contrast, Progress 2025 embraces reproductive health care as a non-negotiable element of health care. It envisions not only the reinstatement of constitutional protections for abortion, but a future where abortion is safe, free, and destigmatized. This reproductive health care is also explicitly inclusive of—a�Ի� knowledgeable about the unique health care needs of—LGBTQ people, people of color (reversing the Black maternal mortality rate, for instance), and aging people.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on reproductive justice.

Project 2025 takes aim at Medicare, the largest nationalized health program in the U.S. Linking the costs of government-funded health care to the federal government deficit, its authors claim that “our deficit problem is a Medicare and Medicaid problem.” They denounce the programs that millions rely on as “runaway entitlements that stifle medical innovation, encourage fraud, and impede cost containment.”

The authors hope to chip away at the program by making the privatized program, Medicare Advantage, the when seniors enroll. They also take aim at Medicaid—on which millions of low-income children and adults rely—with work requirements and means testing, hoping to turn Medicaid coverage into a voucher program. Project 2025 also aims to Medicare Part D prescription drug prices. Currently only specific groups of people are eligible for government-funded health care: seniors, veterans, and low-income people.

In contrast, Progress 2025 recognizes what , , and have been saying for years: Health care is a human right. As such, the Progress 2025 vision seeks to reject the insurance industry’s intense and expand Medicare to everyone in the U.S. Not only would “Medicare for All” be , but, according to , such a system “would provide health care based on patient need, not profit.”

Read more Progress 2025 stories on health care.

Project 2025 justifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, in spite of the fact that violent crime has . Project 2025 denounces criminal justice reform efforts, and, rather than promoting federal oversight of police departments with abusive officers, it wants federal oversight of jurisdictions where police divestment efforts have had some success.

In contrast, Progress 2025 supports the visions of abolitionist organizers who are responding to the from police violence by reinvesting tax dollars from law enforcement into proven programs of public safety such as basic income, mental health support, and non-police crisis responders.

Progress 2025 envisions the removal of discriminatory barriers in employment, education, and housing, and embraces the teaching of accurate history to help students understand the roots of racial injustices. The nationwide movement for reparations for Black people builds on its growing momentum and secures reparations at the federal, state, and local levels to compensate families devastated by enslavement, segregation, and ongoing systemic racial discrimination.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on race and policing.

Project 2025 argues that too much public land is not being used to its full potential and should be sold to private interests for development and fossil fuel extraction. The authors want to strengthen the U.S. military and its colonial mandate that “democracy” be embraced around the world. The plan calls for increasing the army’s budget in order to “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” Project 2025’s goal is to hold onto its authors’ vision of preeminent power and project that impression of power around the world. To ensure this, they call for investment in weapons development and expanding our nuclear arsenal.

Progress 2025 acknowledges the agency of Indigenous peoples, territories, and their rights to self-determination without the interference of the U.S. government or military, whether domestically or abroad. The organizations we cover are honest about the U.S.’s ongoing role in colonialism in its territories and around the world. Progress 2025 recognizes that true sovereignty comes when populations make decisions for themselves—controlling access to (and conservation of) resources like land and water as well as establishing their own economic agendas. Advocates emphasize that solidarity between Indigenous peoples and other historically marginalized populations can move their movements for sovereignty forward.

Read more Progress 2025 stories on colonialism and sovereignty.

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.”

Beyond the federal dollars funding the ongoing attack on Gaza, there are also investments made to support Israel’s violence against Palestinians. “The ethnic cleansing and horrors that we’re witnessing being carried out by the Israeli government are deeply entangled in material support from the United States, and that happens on multiple levels,” says Jay Saper, an organizer with in New York City.

As demands for Palestinian liberation in defiance of Israel’s continuing assaults on the occupied nation and its people, organizers with JVP and other groups critical of U.S. funding for Israel have ramped up efforts targeting this support in their own backyards. These efforts include the in New York state, which aims to end subsidies for New York–registered charitable organizations that fundraise to support the Israeli military and violent settler groups, and the , a JVP-led initiative that seeds and supports local efforts to demand divestment from nationwide.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, Mohammed Faraj works with the on a local effort connected to JVP’s Break the Bonds campaign. He says the coalition’s “No New Bonds” campaign has grown stronger and more organized since Israel launched its latest assault on Gaza, and coalition partners have made a concerted effort to reach local lawmakers. “After October, there was just a feeling of wanting to talk to, really, anybody who would listen,” explains Faraj. “We realized how inaccessible our federal legislators are and have been, [but] our local political leaders are here, and they’re accessible.”

Not only are state and local lawmakers more accessible to constituents than federal lawmakers, but local investment portfolios also hold billions of dollars in funding to Israel sourced from the everyday taxes of community members. State and local governments across the U.S. in all investments in their investment portfolios. At least is held between state governments, municipal governments, and public pension funds nationwide. Those investment dollars come from every individual, household, and business within the municipal or state borders that pay property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes, making them some of the most representative pools of dollars invested on behalf of the public. Saper says that campaigns targeting the investment of these local dollars “invite people to reckon with how implicated we are here at home with the atrocities we are witnessing abroad.”

The Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community is targeting Cuyahoga County’s . The Development Corporation for Israel sells these bonds to raise foreign funds for the Israeli treasury. The sale of Israel Bonds provides critical financial support to the Israeli government and its military, and bondholders maintain no oversight of how their funds are spent once invested. “The Break the Bonds call for institutional divestment really came out of an absolute horror on the part of folks who are taxpayers at the county, city level, state level […] to learn that many institutions in the United States actually directly loan money to the Israeli government and military unrestricted in the form of Israel Bonds,” explains Dani Noble, senior campaigns organizer at JVP and member leader of JVP-Philadelphia.

Across the U.S., dozens of states and municipalities purchase Israel Bonds. Palm Beach County, Florida, recently made headlines for being the world’s largest investor in Israel Bonds with . In Ohio, besides Cuyahoga County’s $16 million in holdings, also hold Israel Bonds, while the Ohio Treasury has more than .

At a meeting on June 4, 2024, Cuyahoga County Council Members Cheryl Stephens and Patrick Kelly introduced a Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community–supported resolution that would, according to its text, “urg[e] the Investment Advisory Committee to amend the County’s Investment Policy to .” Dozens of Cuyahoga County residents addressed the council regarding the resolution, including Palestinian Americans whose family members in Palestine have been subject to Israeli violence. One resident, Shereen Naser, later told News 5 Cleveland that one of her cousins, a college student in Palestine, had recently been detained by the Israeli military. “I’m wondering if the cuffs around her wrists are ,” she said.

After it was introduced, Cuyahoga County’s Resolution No. R2024-0208 was referred to the Committee of the Whole. However, the resolution following pressure from groups that categorized it as antisemitic or in violation of Ohio’s anti-Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) law. The Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community drafted responses refuting these claims and shared them with the Cuyahoga County Council. The coalition continues to pressure local lawmakers for action on the issue. “We want this $16 million to be reinvested here at home,” says Faraj.

A Break the Bonds campaign based in Providence, Rhode Island, has also gathered steam since last year. As recently as 2022, Providence held about . Those bonds matured, and the city no longer has direct investments in Israel. “We want to keep it that way,” says Joel Reinstein, an organizer with JVP in Rhode Island. 

At a , councilors introduced , which would prohibit future investments in the bonds of governments maintaining a military occupation or accused of committing war crimes or human rights violations. The proposed ordinance was referred to the council’s finance committee, which will decide whether to send it back to the council for a vote. If the committee sends the ordinance back to the full council, it will need to receive two affirmative majority votes to pass—a�Ի� may require a third majority vote in the event that Mayor Brett Smiley vetoes it, . Leading up to a vote, organizers from JVP and coalition partners, including the Providence Youth Student Movement and Rhode Island Democratic Socialists of America, are and to show support for the legislation.

Meanwhile, in New York state, organizers are targeting a different financial instrument being used to support Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. The Not on Our Dime! campaign and an eponymous act sponsored by Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport in the and the , respectively, launched in May 2023. If the Not on Our Dime! Act passes, New York nonprofit organizations that provide financial support to Israel’s military or Israeli settler groups could be sued for at least $1 million and lose their tax-exempt status. Currently, New York charities send more than $60 million in tax-exempt dollars per year to Israel to fund “the violation of international law,” according to Mamdani in a .

Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian New Yorker and director of strategy at the , a coalition partner working on the campaign, says that the Not on Our Dime! campaign is powerful and unique because “it offers a tool, a pathway to divert funds from apartheid, to divert funds from genocide, and instead to invest them in life and in public goods.”

This year, the Not on Our Dime! Act was expanded, and the campaign was relaunched with new supporters, including and New York Congressional Representative , who spoke at a relaunch event on May 20 in Albany, New York. The bill’s language has been updated to explicitly name the Israeli government’s attacks in Gaza and ensure that New York–based nonprofit organizations providing funding for those attacks would be subject to the legislation.

“For this bill to continue to hold a mirror to the world around us one year later, we needed to expand its scope,” says Mamdani. He points out that the campaign’s messaging and updated bill language now reflect “the facts of genocide in Gaza, a proliferation of New York charities’ fundraising in support of units in the Israeli Army perpetrating that genocide, and the renewed calls for the Israeli settler movement to expand into Gaza.”

Gabriel Acevero, member of the Maryland House of Delegates, introduced similar legislation . It was referred to the Maryland House Judiciary Committee for review and has yet to move forward.

For Jewish organizers, these efforts are not only a matter of divesting public dollars but also of extricating their religious traditions from the violence of Israel’s occupation and its genocide in Gaza. Noble explains that the Development Corporation for Israel has historically linked the sale of Israel Bonds to Jewish rituals, including “imposing a tradition of gifting” the bonds at bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings and passing them down as part of a family’s legacy when sitting shiva. “We absolutely are dedicated not just to ending that material support but also to reclaiming our traditions from violence and from war,” Noble says.

The Not on Our Dime! campaign’s title also echoes , who say “not in our name” to demand that their religious identity and a not be weaponized to obscure Israel’s atrocities.

Diverse and cross-movement coalitions have been vital to the progress of these campaigns to halt the transfer of U.S. taxpayer dollars from Ohio, Rhode Island, and New York to Israel. Regular mass demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians nationwide have also spurred the efforts. “The horizon of possibilities is opened up by the historic uprisings that we’re seeing in the streets, and across campuses, and really across the globe,” says Saper.

For organizers looking to ride this wave, JVP and the to get involved or .

Reinstein of JVP–Rhode Island says the local and state-level campaigns that are being forged now are the building blocks needed to force meaningful change on the federal level. “The more on the municipal level that we can actually stop the flow of cash to Israel’s violence, the more that can build up to a national movement that could finally create some accountability.”

It’s past time that a woman—a�Ի� especially a woman of color—occupied the Oval Office. In a nation as multiracial as the United States, it makes sense to have racial and gender diversity in the halls of power. On that point alone, Harris’ candidacy is exciting. But politics is about much more than demographic representation.   

It is a strange, new phenomenon for women of color like me to see a brown-skinned woman come this close to the highest office in the country. Many of us hate the idea of elections as popularity contests and are genuinely turned off by the emotional attachments that some voters form toward candidates, lifting them up as saviors. But we live in a nation where Harris’ racial and gender identity are deeply politicized. Republicans have already rushed to dismiss her as the (based on the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion), a telling opening salvo in an election that will inevitably be framed as a referendum on whether women of color are full human beings, rather than which issues and policies best meet the country’s needs. 

As people of color in the U.S., we live with the ugly racial politics of respectability: the idea that if someone who looks like us fails to meet dominant white culture’s standards for “propriety”—if a person of color is deeply flawed or if they commit a crime, for instance—all people of color are to blame. Harris’ inevitable missteps and human imperfections will be weaponized and used as justification to further deny women of color political power and agency. Of course, as the prior two presidential administrations have demonstrated, the shortcomings of white male leaders are rarely seen as negative reflections on all white men. 

In other words, for women of color, Harris is us, and we are Harris, whether we like it or not. And I, for one, don’t like it one bit. I want demographic and political representation. After all, wealthy white men have had both for generations. 

The attacks on Harris were ugly enough in 2020 when Biden picked her to be his running mate. Every right-wing internet meme, every racist and sexist insult emerging from Trump’s mouth, felt as though it was aimed at women of color as a whole—a sector of U.S. society that still has the in federal government. And while we work to withstand this escalation of hateful, often violent rhetoric, we must simultaneously find ways to focus on—a�Ի� assess for ourselves—the policies she actually espouses.

What I want to know is whether Harris will disavow herself from the Biden administration’s enthusiastic financing and arming of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Will she from the ?

I’d love to know whether her domestic economic policies are going to be as progressive as Biden’s—or more so. How much will she

Indeed, what will Harris do on climate change, prisons and policing (a particularly salient question given her history as a prosecutor and California attorney general), the Supreme Court, LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, gun laws, immigration reform, or education? 

These are the issues that matter. 

Meanwhile, celebrating the fact that Harris will face off against Donald Trump as a is not helpful. The deadly toll of policing and prisons in the U.S. has been felt most seriously in Black and Brown communities. Think about the fact that those attending the Republican National Convention (RNC) held up pro-police and anti-immigrant signs saying “” and “.”&�Բ�����;

Although Harris ought to be viewed as “blue” in such a context—not because she’s a Democrat but because she is California’s former “”—the RNC’s attendees likely understood that policing and immigration enforcement are white supremacist institutions, regardless of whether their enforcers sometimes have non-white faces. 

Ultimately, the right will make Harris out to be far more aggressive than she is likely to be as president. The left will expect she’ll do nothing right, while those in the center might project their wildest dreams on to her as the savior of the nation. Most likely, if she becomes president, she’ll be a complicated version of all three. 

Savvy voters understand that elections—especially in a system designed to dilute our vote through the electoral college—are about making strategic choices that get us closer to realizing the world we want to live in. Seasoned activists, keen political observers, and most people who have paid attention to modern history, know that the real work of accountability happens between elections. And the 2024 election is about all that—and dealing a death blow to fascism and white supremacy. 

Thinking dispassionately about the election in such a manner is going to be harder than ever for people who look like Kamala Harris: South Asian women like me, Black women, and those who are the beautiful products of both South Asian and Black ancestry. 

Many of us want Harris to be held to the same high standards that we held Biden, Obama, Clinton, and other politicians to. It’s likely that she will be no better or no worse on issues than her Democratic predecessors, except that the expectations on her will be higher by virtue of her demographics. By the same token, the pressure on her to prove she won’t be biased toward people of color will be high too. Already, media pundits are advising her to . 

In the end, a president is going to allow themselves to be pushed on some issues and not on others. For example, a centrist such as Joe Biden moved to the left on domestic issues, largely because he felt grassroots pressure to do so. Yet on arming Israel in its genocide in Gaza, he refused to budge, no matter how high the political cost. Harris will likely be similar, except she’ll face the added pressures of embodying the sort of person the hard right fears and loathes.

If Harris becomes president, women of color will lead movements to hold her accountable. At the same time, we will become proxies for her, and the racist and sexist assaults she faces will impact us as well. 

So here’s the main memo: Your brown-skinned sisters are not going to be OK between now and November. We neither want you to fawn over Harris and uncritically throw your support behind her, nor do we want to allow Trump to retake office. Rather, vote as though your life depends on it—because ours does. And then work to hold accountable whoever occupies the White House next January.

A small sampling of activity since the start of 2023: Animal rights advocates have disrupted the U.K.’s Grand National  and Victoria Beckham’s ; abortion rights protesters have been sentenced for impeding the proceedings of the ; striking  “upended operations at two of Canada’s three busiest ports”; and climate protesters have , chained themselves to aircraft gangways to  private jet sales, and spoken out forcefully at corporate .

Given the urgency of the challenges in our world, this wave of disobedient and determined action should generally be regarded as a positive development. Because it breaks the rhythms of orderly business in society, forcing both the public and those in positions of power to pay attention to issues of great importance that might otherwise be downplayed or ignored, disruption is a vital tool of civil resistance.

However, not all disruptive protests are created equal—a�Ի� not all are equally beneficial in advancing a cause. Some actions can win popular support and lead to a snowball of escalating energy within a movement. Others can drive away potential participants, repel sympathizers, and invite state repression. Put another way, some actions lead to victory while others trap activists into a cycle of self-isolation and alienation from the wider public.

To be clear, in the face of injustice, action is preferable to silence. At the same time, studying the dynamics of polarization can help movement participants maximize their impact and prevent occasions when protests backfire.

But before they can work on the skills needed to harness the power of polarizing action, organizers must engage with more basic questions: Why is polarization around specific issues even necessary? And how can movements know when they are using it effectively?

Understanding How Protests Polarize

The idea of an issue being polarized is most commonly talked about in negative terms. But to the extent that polarization around an issue is not present at a given time, it is not because difficult underlying tensions do not exist, but rather because politicians sweep them under the rug. They avoid them for fear of generating controversy that could fracture the political coalitions that keep them in power. In an interview discussing his 2020 book, Why We’re Polarized, author and New York Times columnist Ezra Klein , “The alternative to polarization in political systems often isn’t agreement or compromise or civility—it’s suppression. It’s suppression of the things the political system doesn’t want to face.”

Protest actions are polarizing. This means that they force people to take sides on an issue. And, contrary to what some may think, that is not a bad thing when used for progressive ends.

To take just one example, the civil rights movement was certainly polarizing. But were we really better off living with widespread and often bipartisan acceptance of Jim Crow segregation and the racist terror used to enforce it? Likewise, defying prevalent homophobia and affording equal marriage rights for LGBTQ couples involved considerable controversy and required politicians to take stands that most had long preferred to avoid—until social movements forced them to change course.

Polarizing protest takes a suppressed and simmering issue and brings it to a boil, moving it to the fore of public discussion and, at least temporarily, placing its consideration above other disputes and ordinary deliberations. As famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass , earnest struggle for progress is “exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, [puts] all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing.”

The polarization of an issue, in this respect, is both an inevitable and necessary part of the process of social change. In the  of sociologist Frances Fox Piven, a preeminent theorist of disruptive power, “[A]ll of our past experience argues that the mobilization of collective defiance and the disruption it causes have always been essential to the preservation of democracy.”

The dynamics of polarization remain complex for a variety of reasons. For one, polarization works differently in the context of a short-term electoral contest than in longer-term activist campaigns, the contours of which we are focusing on here. Second, the good and bad effects of controversial protest do not come as an either/or proposition. Instead, positive and negative polarization occur at the same time. Highly visible protests that draw in new sympathizers will simultaneously drive away other people who are turned off by activist tactics and demands. Thus, the White Citizens’ Councils grew in the South when the civil rights movement launched its most high-profile campaigns, such as the Montgomery bus boycott.

Because organizers cannot avoid polarization, both good and bad, their goal must be to ensure that the positive results outweigh the negative. They must use good judgment as they engage in a cost-benefit analysis of any potential action.

One concept related to the positive and negative sides of polarization is what social movement theorists call the “.” The idea here is that sometimes the presence of a more militant faction within a movement—made of activists who deploy more controversial, outsider tactics—can make the demands of mainstream reformers appear more reasonable. Such radicals can advance the ability of insiders to extract concessions from people in power, who grow willing to negotiate with the “respectable” face of dissent when confronted with the threat of a more impolite and uncompromising alternative.

These outcomes are examples of  flank effects. However, those who  radical flanks  that the behavior of a militant fringe is a double-edged sword.  flank effects occur when extreme actions undertaken by a group on a movement’s margins—particularly actions that the public perceives as violent—end up inviting overwhelming backlash, discrediting the cause as a whole, and providing justification for the harsh repression of even modest dissent. Like with polarization more generally, the goal therefore must be to maximize positive flank effects while minimizing negative ones. And once again, this requires rejecting an “anything goes” mentality and instead exercising both judgment and discipline.

Another reason that polarization is complicated is that protests prompt members of the public to polarize around several different things at the same time. Distinct responses can be measured with regard to how observers feel about the issue at hand, what they think about the methods used by those carrying out the action, and how they view the target of a protest. For example, it is possible that people will say that they dislike a protest, but that the action will nevertheless be successful in making them view the target of the actions less favorably.

Another very common result is that, when asked about a demonstration that makes news headlines, respondents will report sympathy for the protesters’ demands, but they will express distaste for the tactics deployed. They will see the activists themselves as too noisy, impatient, and discourteous. This is an age-old dynamic, and one addressed eloquently by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his renowned 1963 “.” This letter was written not as a response to racist opponents of the movement, but rather to people who professed support for the cause while criticizing demonstrations as “untimely” and deriding direct action methods. “Frankly I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation,” King quipped. But confronting these criticisms, he made the case for why the movement’s campaigns were both necessary and effective.

For social movements, it is acceptable if mainstream observers dislike the disruption and tension caused by protest, so long as support for the underlying issue grows. When it comes to nonviolent resistance, this is the case more often than not, which is why the taking of collective action should be widely encouraged. That said, there are times when a movement’s chosen tactics are so controversial and despised that they overshadow any discussion of the cause itself. Therefore, with all actions, organizers must weigh the relative benefits of the polarization created against potential downsides. Organizers must use any and all means at their disposal to measure this response—whether formal polling data and focus groups, or simple conversations that pay attention to the responses from different groups of people, especially those outside their most immediate circles.

The Spectrum of Support

Overall, the goal of the movement is to shift the “spectrum of support” in its favor.

Many different organizing traditions have recognized that victory does not come from total conversion of all constituencies, but rather through making more qualified progress. In the labor movement it is common to place workers in a given shop on a one-to-five scale, based on their level of commitment to the union. “Ones” are strong leaders who will convince other coworkers to vote yes for the union. On the other side of the scale, “fives” are employees who are resolutely anti-union and actively side with the boss. Everyone else in the shop falls somewhere on the continuum between these extremes.

An organizer would not expect to win over everyone. But their job is to at least partially move those who can be persuaded and to minimize the zeal and influence of those who cannot be swayed. The union must work diligently to make indifferent “threes” into more supportive “twos.” It must motivate existing “twos” to step up and become more active leaders. And, finally, it must aim to dampen the negative attitudes circulating among “fours,” convincing members of this group to abstain from actively supporting the opposition if they cannot be moved to defect entirely.

Coming from a different tradition, the spectrum of support—sometimes  the “spectrum of allies” and credited to Quaker organizer and activist trainer —provides a visual representation of the same principle. The  training community presents it this way:

For movements to win, they do not need to convince their worst enemies to change. Instead, they win by turning neutrals into passive supporters and turning passive sympathizers into active allies and movement participants. Meanwhile, they should aim to whittle away at ranks of the opposition—making them less resolute, active, and committed, even if these people never move beyond being neutral at best.

As 350.org , the good news is that “in most social-change campaigns it is not necessary to win over the opponent to your point of view. It is only necessary to move the central pie wedges one step in your direction…. That means our goal is not to convince the fossil fuel industry to end themselves. Instead, it is moving the rest of the society to shut them down.”

In the diagram above, the arrow shows the direction in which organizers want people to move. In practice, however, they must accept that there will be some motion each way. In the wake of polarizing actions, it is not unusual for both the movement and the opposition to grow: Opponents may be able to rally die-hards to their side who feel threatened by the issue at hand, as did the White Citizens’ Councils. Yet if, on the whole, organizers are moving greater numbers toward their side, they can count themselves as making headway.

In short, polarization is a multifaceted equation—a�Ի� only by working hard to do the math can those who seek to use it get continually better at improving their results.

Against Protest Shaming

In recent years, there has been considerable research published that attempts to measure radical flank effects and  the polarizing effects of movements. While there are limits to how much protest impacts can be precisely quantified, the cumulative result of such research, in the words of one , is to point to “strong evidence that protests or protest movements can be effective in achieving their desired outcomes,” and that they can produce “positive effects on public opinion, public discourse and voting behavior.” Both the historical experience of organizers and recent studies also  for the idea that support for a movement’s issue can grow, even when a majority of people do not particularly like the tactics being used.

Nevertheless, with each new wave of protest, there is inevitably a rash of mainstream commentary about how protesters are naive and likely to harm their cause. Certainly this is the case with this spring’s pro-Palestinian student encampments, which elicited a raft of “protest shaming” articles  that the occupations were . Often, those making such admonitions invoke an earlier age—such as the 1960s civil rights movement—when protest was ostensibly more dignified and effective. These overlook  that  how wide swaths of the public saw lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides to desegregate buses, and even the March on Washington as being harmful to the winning of civil rights. Of course, all of these actions are now considered hallowed landmarks in the struggle for progress in the United States.

Because they appeal to , which remains very widespread, about the ability of protests to make a difference at all, protest-shaming pundits can find fertile ground for their arguments. However, their perspective is rarely based on a hard evaluation of contemporary research or deep engagement with the history of social movements. Most often, it results in bad advice: Activists are told to work within establishment channels to pursue change, to avoid controversy, and to be more patient with the system—the same counsel King wrote of having received from erstwhile allies many decades ago.

Instead of conforming to critics’ preferences and seeking to avoid polarization altogether, movements do better to carefully study how they can use it to their advantage. Understanding that both positive and negative polarization occur at the same time means that protesters can win, even when there is backlash. Understanding that a movement’s cause may benefit, even when there is negative perception of the tactics deployed, offers a critical distinction in measuring success. And understanding the spectrum of support allows protesters to gauge when, on balance, they are advancing and when they need to reevaluate their actions.

Protest movements take a gamble when they unsettle the status quo. But it is a risk worth taking. For it is only when movements appreciate how polarization can be used as a tool that they are poised to make their greatest gains.

This story originally appeared in and is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license.

The past few years have felt like a sequence of disappointments as political leaders, celebrities, large corporate brands, news outlets, and political parties have leaned further away from truth-telling and the bravery of accountability and instead toward profit margins and easy ways out. If the Band-Aid brand had an era, it would be the period between 2020 and today. This has only become clearer as race and equity efforts secured in the wake of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have been rolled back at prominent universities like the and the . Even newsrooms have been affected. has disbanded its race and equality team but claimed through a spokesperson that “the investment is still 100 percent there.”

Because of these recent experiences, I have been reflecting on the importance of courage. I like to rely on the wisdom of that courage is about being afraid but doing the scary thing anyway. Courage has never been about being fearless, without feelings, or avoiding our emotions. Instead, courage is about doing the good thing, the right thing, even and especially when doing it is challenging. But, as I have watched silent colleagues quietly retreating to their inner selves and home lives as the world burns, landfills spill over, waterways remain polluted, and the future of our country (and perhaps our planet) remains uncertain, I have, once again, been reminded of the hard lesson that I live amongst cowards and this nation is certainly not “the home of the brave.”&�Բ�����;

I find it troubling that in this political moment, saying “genocide is wrong” requires courage. I like to believe that there have been times in history when that fact was a given, not a “radical” stance. But deep down I know that we have always been a nation conceived of and established by cowards. White men who were convinced of their superiority felt self-assured and legitimized, even ordained, when colonizing, raping, and pillaging land already occupied by thousands of tribes of Indigenous people. These same men were the ancestors of more men who thought it economically justified to steal Africans from their homelands and force them into labor—in service of white colonial capital—in the Caribbean and North American South. They are the kinfolk of warring nations, men old and young who, because of their whiteness and gender power, have used their land, wealth, and “ingenuity” to conquer rather than to commune. They are the men who sired our presidential candidates, our corporate leaders, our college provosts, and our neighborhood vigilantes. These are the cowards who, rather than build a nation, stole it all to begin with.

In every crisis, these cowards retreat to their safest places. They return to the old ways, never straying too far from their forefathers. When times are most challenging, these men turn toward whiteness, toward maleness, and toward power. That’s the mark of a coward. They always choose the easiest thing. 

Living amongst these cowards means that the rest of us are always called upon to be courageous. I talk about this in my book Black Women Taught Us, when I note that it is always Black women who are expected to save white Americans from problems of their own creation. We are the ones expected to stand up and be counted. We see this now in another election season where Vice President Kamala Harris has been asked to be “” to an entire nation. To clarify: Drew Barrymore essentially asked the Vice President of the United States to be a mammy to the country. It seems like such an odd request from a white woman who could simply use her own power and privilege to create the change she wants to see. 

So it is unsurprising—but also notable—that young people of color have been with the struggle of the Palestinian people, according to a . Solidarities between the Palestinian people and Black Americans have long existed and have only strengthened in recent years as the militarization of U.S. cities and the repression of protestors have become increasingly aggressive. Many Latine Americans are still being affected by the Trump administration’s “” immigration policies, which separated hundreds of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border and placed them in cages. were instrumental in ending this policy, though Biden has reinstated some of Trump’s border policy. These past few years have shown that, while cowards may have power, the rest of us do too.

The Matrix remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Of the three-part series, it is the film that, I believe, seeks to tell the most truthful story about life in the United States. In high school, I learned to pair the film with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the book, Freire examines the ways that oppressed people can overcome their subordinated positions in an effort to find liberation. The connections between Freire’s theories and The Matrix are most clear when Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) tells Neo (Keanu Reeves), “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”&�Բ�����;

Many of us learned to walk the path before we knew what our path was. That’s the gift and curse of living in relation to powerful, cowardly people. In many ways, we find and systematize new futures, new possibilities, and new ways of being simply by surviving this white, heteropatriarchal, capitalist world. And, while cowards surround us, we manifest and facilitate new futures completely independent of them.

This past weekend, President Joe Biden stepped down from the Democratic ticket and endorsed Vice President Harris as she embarks on her own journey to the White House. While some will see this as a courageous act, it is important to remember that these white men often only do the courageous thing once their backs are up against the wall. And, though this decision is the right one, it doesn’t change that we are being forced to choose between imperialists who have yet to speak against genocide. Harris—as vice president or as the potential future president—has yet to show us if she will have the courage that so many of us have already amplified these past 10 months.

This is yet another moment where we are called to be courageous. I’m not worried that we won’t rise to the challenge. I’m just tired of us having to do the work for cowards who intentionally put us all in harm’s way. But I’m an abolitionist and Afro-futurist, so I know we will win. On the way, we just have to remember who our people are. And, more importantly, who our people are not.

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 couldn’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.

Young people have an image problem. Even if they turn out in the midterms, they likely still will be berated for not participating, from both left and right.

Of course, many young people are engaged in politics. Look at the leaders of grassroots movements such as Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, or March for Our Lives. And young people are running for and winning public office in impressive fashion.

But over and over again, the question keeps resurfacing: Why aren’t more young people involved in politics?

If we are seriously interested in increasing participation in politics among the generations coming of age in the 21st century, we need to alter our approach.

Taking Hopelessness Seriously

It’s time to stop castigating young people and instead try to understand and empathize with why disengaging is often their default position.

For those under 30, the earliest political memory is likely Sept. 11 and the rise of a surveillance state, one that instilled in them the idea that we are never safe and should always prepare for the worst.

Young adulthood was marked by two unsuccessful, never-ending wars and the entire financial system collapsing.

All the while, American politics became dysfunctional. The ��brought brinksmanship and obstructionism to Washington, denigrating government and public service and leading to poorly designed public policy. Why would anyone coming of age aspire to work in this “swamp”?

And even if one wants to make a difference, student debt destroys career flexibility. Nearly ��ages 18 to 29 have outstanding student loans. The total student debt that Americans owe has more than doubled in just the past decade and is now over $1.5 trillion—a sum greater than .

On top of all of this, many young people since childhood have experienced the existential weight of whether the Earth will remain inhabitable by the time they retire. The bleak forecast about climate change alone would justify some nihilism.

������Ƶ so than apathy, nihilism, or disengagement,�� hopelessness plagues young people. And overcoming that hopelessness requires showing empathy and making clear that our crises are being shouldered by allies of all ages. Also, we need to finally stop gaslighting young people with tales of previous generations’ tribulations and how they overcame them.

Everyone Deserves a Mentor

We also have to teach young people how to fight back.

“There’s a strange myth that has developed about the 1960s, that students turned into progressive activists spontaneously,” explains Joan Mandle, executive director of Democracy Matters, a nonpartisan organization that teaches students to organize for democracy reform. “But we all had mentors. We were taught how to organize by those who came before. Many of us even went to organizing school!”

Mandle would know. She joined the civil rights movement as an undergraduate and was an active participant in Students for a Democratic Society and later in the emerging women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s.

Participating in politics is difficult and often scary. Most of us don’t wake up and become political organizers. In fact, even after becoming politically aware, it’s not immediately clear how to actually engage in our complex political system.

Many people don’t know how to vote or research the issues and are ashamed to ask for help.

We need people in older generations to be mentors, to guide political newcomers through the process of becoming involved.

Mandle was my mentor. When I first started organizing at Vassar College, we would talk once a week to go over successes and failures and to discuss strategy. She gave me the space to be creative but also kept me focused. Her mentorship gave me the confidence to tackle the previously unknown world of political action.

Many people don’t know how to vote or research the issues and are ashamed to ask for help. And that’s understandable because it is taboo to admit as much, and civic education is hardly robust anymore.

Today, one of the most common forms of political engagement on college campuses is through College Democrats or College Republicans organizations. Yet, more often than not, these undergraduate clubs only serve as networking opportunities for like-minded individuals. Little political action is involved.

������Ƶover, as Mandle explains, community volunteer work has been favored over political engagement by high schools, colleges, educational and religious institutions. “There are many avenues and organizations for young people to ‘help others.’ But involvement in political issues or elections is, if not actively discouraged, not promoted by these same institutions. As a result, in building their resumes and looking for what are seen as ‘legitimate’ volunteer activities, many young people shy away from politics.”

Instead of shaming young folks for , why not help them learn?

It’s time to ask: Why aren’t more adults willing to be mentors?

Shifting attitudes are no substitute, of course, for laws that make political participation easier—such as strong civic education,����and��, and��. But mentoring is a big step everyone can take immediately to help end critical barriers to youth participation once and for all.

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.

Despite the record increase of women in Congress and elsewhere, including and , the nation is far from achieving gender parity. In 2024, on the eve of what’s being called the most consequential election of the past eight years, the spikes that began six years ago have plateaued. While the surge of women running qualifies as an important trend, the trend is far from the norm. The problem, say experts like and , is that the obstacles to women candidates that have always existed—money, lack of institutional support, and a male-dominated culture—are still in place, and are more daunting for women of color and other marginalized constituencies than for whites. This, despite the fact that women have outvoted for the past 40 years. 

“Racism and sexism have converged to ensure there are few women in office, even fewer women of color,” says Cohen, founder and president of . “There are more resources for women now. There is momentum to have a more diverse elected class that looks more like America. But our system has so many barriers to that happening.” And those barriers aren’t new. One is economic: A from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University notes that salaries for elected office in many states are frequently too low to meet working women’s needs, which often include childcare. It’s another way women are underpaid, a long-standing problem that’s part of a larger context of structural problems, through which Cohen says we should always view the state of women in electoral politics. As she says, “History matters.”&�Բ�����;

Still, the recent rise in the number of women in elected office is significant. The CAWP reports that after the 2022 election, the number of women serving in Congress rose to a new high of 149, or nearly 30% of all seats—that’s 106 Democrats, 42 Republicans, and one Independent. With 91 Democrats and 33 Republican women serving in the House of Representatives, women marked a new House record. The 25 women serving in the U.S. Senate—15 Democrats and nine Republicans—fell one short of the record. Four more women serve as nonvoting delegates (i.e., those who represent the District of Columbia and U.S. territories) to the U.S. House. What’s more, the 118th Congress swore in one of the most ethnically diverse groups of women officeholders in the U.S. House to date, boasting new highs in representation for Black and Latina women.

At the same time, in 2022 due to retirement, running for another office, or primary or general election defeat—the highest number in U.S. history. Attrition is normal, but for women, who are still trying as a demographic to get a foothold in electoral politics, the 2022 departures could be a red flag. 

Dittmar, associate professor of political science at Rutgers and CAWP’s director of research, says that attrition could be due to burnout. “For a while there was a greater sense of urgency” for women to run for office, she says. “But have we moved from urgency to exhaustion?” Dittmar says that in 2024, unlike other years, there’s no catalyzing event to make women want to throw their hats into the ring—such as the racial reckoning sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, the revelations of the #MeToo movement, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. While all these events continue to impact politics—the loss of abortion rights in particular will be in the 2024 election—the shock of invigorating events that compelled women to run for office has faded.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. Dittmar’s 2023 CAWP study, “,” takes a closer look across five states at the ways in which women build power, including but not limited to winning elected office. “Motivation to run can be different for women,” she says. “It’s not always a career move. There are different calculations.”&�Բ�����;

Dittmar says that women effect political change in ways that are not reflected in the numbers elected to office. For example, women of color work to shore up voting rights and are part of a rich history of local activism. The “Rethinking” research shows that they exert as much influence on elected officials’ decision-making as high-level staffers do—influence that’s low-profile by nature but ultimately helps shape policy. 

The study also found there are existing support infrastructures for women in politics, such as networking and advocacy groups, that are helpful but insufficient. (“Support infrastructure” is broadly defined and includes aid in education, preparation, recruitment, mentorship, camaraderie, coping, and achieving professional success for women seeking and/or holding political power.) Where support infrastructures do exist, they do not equally serve all women. Such infrastructures are overly reliant on volunteers, short on support for current officeholders and related positions like consultants and lobbyists, and rarely designed to serve women at intersections of race and gender. In many cases, Dittmar says, women’s political organizations are led and/or resourced by white women. 

While these impediments are sobering, they don’t seem to discourage women from seeking office. She Should Run, a nonprofit group promoting women as candidates, found in a 2023 “” survey conducted with YWCA and UN Women that 22% of women surveyed were fired up to run for office. 

Being encouraged to run by friends, family, colleagues, and mentors is a big factor, especially with Black women, who have to be repeatedly encouraged to run before they actually do, and who have a history of working for change in their communities. Asian women were least likely to run for office, while Native American women were most likely to view politics in a positive light and to see themselves as leaders. 

The report’s key finding is that the majority of women surveyed were motivated to address problems closest to them, which go beyond gender equity. In other words, women were most likely to take action on issues related to children, health, education, and poverty, but their broader concerns include the economy, climate change, reproductive health, racism, and gun violence. This is especially true of women who are Gen X and younger.

Dittmar says it is also important to examine what elected women are doing to address the growing number of issues they care about. Access is important, but it’s only a means to an end. “Power is not just about getting there, it’s about being in the room,” she says. “Does a Black woman in the room have the power to disrupt the room, to change the conversation, change the policy debates? That’s the question.”&�Բ�����;

The “Rethinking” report found via interviews of political figures in Georgia, Nevada, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania that women officials still struggle to establish that kind of power. Compounding this struggle is the fact that women remain underrepresented in influential non-elected positions such as donors, staff, political appointees, consultants, campaign strategists, and managers. This amounts to underrepresentation in elected offices at all levels. 

, still a distinct minority, but also a record high number. Dittmar says gubernatorial races can actually be tougher to access and win than federal races. “The question that faces women is, are you capable of being a sole executive?” she says. Governorships are also highly competitive, i.e., more sought-after by men. According to recent CAWP data, women are not much better represented at the municipal level—despite popular belief to the contrary—including on school boards, which are often seen as attracting grassroots candidates and aligning with issues traditionally associated with women, such as education and kids.

But even if the numbers were better, it would not necessarily be good for women. For example, the Republican Party, long seen by many as unfriendly to women’s rights and feminism, includes many prominent conservative women such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elise Stefanik, and Lauren Boebert (dubbed in a recent article by The Washington Post as the “”).&�Բ�����;

Boosting their political agenda are right-wing women-led groups like Moms for Liberty leading the fight against LGBTQ rights, Black history education, and other favored targets of Trump’s MAGA movement. Underpinning these groups is an overwhelmingly white Christian evangelical movement. 

In fact, Trump won the majority of white female votes in 2016 and 2020, according to exit polls. “We know why white women supported Donald Trump—because they’ve been aligning with white male power forever,” says Dittmar. “They benefit from white supremacy.”&�Բ�����;

The fact that the GOP’s agenda is increasingly antithetical to women’s rights complicates efforts to increase the party’s female representation. In a 2019 New York Times piece, Cohen wrote that because of this agenda, female Republican elected officials were becoming an endangered species and women were leaving the party in droves. It was up to a handful of moderates like Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to pull the GOP back from the brink by serving as models for other Republican women. That didn’t happen, even though Trump lost the election in 2020, and Murkowski, one of the few GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment for his role in inciting an insurrection, is still in office.

On the Democratic side, Cohen says the liberal party is responding to voter pressure to counteract Trumpism but is not dealing with underlying biases within the party. 

Women’s political participation is also hampered by the threat of violence, mostly from the extreme right, whose views are fueled by religious fervor. For women in office or those thinking of running, “the cost of service is too high,” Cohen says. She adds that it’s no accident that “this is all spiraling after [the] Obama years,” when the GOP’s overt antipathy toward a Black president opened the door to antipathy toward other groups. “Gender hostility and racial hostility go hand in hand.”��

So what can be done to increase access and sustain interest? Many solutions were put forth in a 2021 report by the Center for American Progress assessing women’s status in politics and leadership. Despite the alarmingly antidemocratic nature of the Jan. 6 insurrection, the election itself was seen as a hopeful moment, with Kamala Harris becoming the first female, first Black, and first Indian American woman to become vice president. Record numbers of women of color and LGBTQ candidates ran for offices across the country in 2020—a�Ի� won.��

Still, the report acknowledged progress was slow and recommended recruiting more women of color and candidates outside of existing networks; increasing funding for women candidates, especially in open-seat elections that offer the best opportunities for women of color, LGBTQ candidates, and marginalized women; combating the influence of big donors by getting cities and states to adopt small-donor public financing of elections; increasing legislative pay; and requiring legislatures to adopt family-friendly workplace policies. 

Perhaps the most obvious, but most important, recommendation is the report’s last one: fostering an atmosphere of equity and respect on the campaign trail by rooting out sexual harassment, racism, homophobia, and other abuses. Changing the culture is the surest and best way to open access and ensure equitable outcomes not just for women, but for everyone. 

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 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 terror.”&�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 Trump’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 couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

“As mothers, we couldn’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 couldn’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 couldn’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 couldn’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. Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’s actions have already disqualified him from office, and shows a way to keep him off the ballot in 2024.

Disqualification Is Automatic

Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 .

Trump’s failure to accomplish what is tantamount to a coup in Georgia and other swing states , that sought to achieve the same result—Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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,  Trump’s involvement in this alleged scheme, as well as that of Trump’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.

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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 couldn’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 People’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 Trump’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 Trump’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/Trump’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 couldn’t happen), the flaws of our justice system do not begin and end with Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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.

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 couldn’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 couldn’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 couldn’t cage my curiosity.

“Marcos pulls almost abreast of me, looks over, and actually says, ‘Good morning, father.’ Can you believe it? I couldn’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 couldn’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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 Trump’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.