An Abolitionist Response to Project 2025
Project 2025, created by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, fortifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, despite the fact that violent crime has . Its authors denounce criminal-justice reform efforts and promote federal oversight of jurisdictions where police divestment efforts have had some success.Â
The “tough on crime†approach has champions both among and , in spite of the fact that in 2020, many elites claiming to support racial justice vowed changes to violent policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.Â
What would a progressive vision of racial justice and policing look like? There has been for decades an active movement to divest from policing with an eye toward abolishing police and prisons altogether. , professor of law at the University of Washington has been active in that movement, working with various groups and campaigns in Seattle including , , and . She spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about what an abolitionist vision of racial justice looks like.
Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent ÎÞÂëÊÓƵ Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host†in her 2014  of the same name.
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