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Georgia’s Teens Take the Fight to Atlanta

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

[Twitter/georgiayouthco]

In the very near future, voters in two Democratic strongholds in Georgia could wake up to find themselves represented by QAnon-promoting Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene.

If this happens, it will represent a victory for Republican legislators who have redrawn the state district maps to maximize their party’s impact. It will also be a major loss for the voters who don’t share those beliefs – including a disproportionate number of people of color.

Redistricting is one of the many issues on the agenda for the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, a youth-led association that organizes young people around political issues like public education, the climate crisis, abortion and voting rights, and teaches them about state legislative processes so that they can get directly involved. I spoke with GYJC organizer and recent high school graduate Yana Batra about how the coalition is bringing more people into politics, and what this might mean for Georgia.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about the GYJC and what your aims are.

We are a group of 40 or 50 organizers, all between the ages of 14 and 23. We're all students, and we're all Georgians, from counties all across the state. Many of us are students of color. Many of us are first-generation American or low-income. We work at what we call the intersection of public education and democracy – on issues like redistricting, making sure that our high schools don't have lead pipes and ensuring that our representatives actually reflect the communities that they come from.

How did redistricting become an issue that rose to the fore for you?

The thing is, redistricting happens every 10 years, and it affects literally every issue that a young person might care about. We call it a bottleneck issue.

For example, I am about to go to school at Georgia Tech, which is divided between two state Senate districts, 36 and 39. Georgia Tech is the third-largest college in the state. But because its representation is divided, parts of the campus vote in different locations, and so members of the community aren't able to effectively lobby their legislators to meet the needs of their community, for instance, around transit or housing. The same is true for all kinds of minority communities. Without contiguous representation, these communities are denied the ability to advocate for their interests.

What has it been like trying to organize young people around redistricting?

Redistricting is difficult to mobilize people around since it’s such an abstract concept and it comes up so infrequently. So, in galvanizing young people we had two questions: One, how do we bring media attention to the issue so that we can pressure representatives to actually draw fair maps? And two, how can we organize young people who are not very aware of or educated on what redistricting is and how it happens?

Our main tactic was to get young people to testify at the state legislators’ redistricting town hall. Because we wanted folks from all across the state – and especially from at-risk and diverse communities – to feel prepared and comfortable fighting for fair representation, our challenge was partly to educate folks, but also to teach them the skills required to take up space at a town hall. This is very hard for young people to do, because we're often told that we aren’t old enough or experienced enough, or that we don't know enough. That's one of the biggest challenges in all forms of organizing, actually: showing young people that they have the skills and the right to make change for themselves.

Are there any recent success stories that the coalition is particularly proud of?

Yeah, we're proud of a lot of the work that we did over the legislative session. We were able to kill quite a few bills that would have defunded, limited or placed restrictions on schools in which teachers can discuss race and racism in the classroom. We also managed to kill a couple of transgender athlete bans, although unfortunately, the Georgia High School Association [which governs high school sports in the state] just voted nearly unanimously to ban transgender athletes from participating on teams that align with their gender identity.

We’re also celebrating the fact that for the first time in 19 years, public education in Georgia is fully funded, according to the Quality Basic Education formula. The QBE dictates the basic level of funding that Georgia schools need in order to meet the minimum level of quality for students. The entire time I’ve been alive, my schools haven’t received full state funding. But this year, thanks to a lot of surplus money from last year's budgets, from COVID relief funds and just the fact that Georgia is pretty flush with money right now, the QBE was finally fully funded. So that is a really gratifying win.

That's great. And what are the coalition's ambitions in the future?

This summer, we are working on building momentum ahead of the next legislative session. Students are much more available in the summer, so we can really grind.

We’re creating a network of Black student unions; Georgia is an amazing powerhouse of student organizing, our historically Black colleges and universities are amazing powerhouses of student organizing, and we want to make sure that our high schools are too.

We also want to work against the political violence that many young people are experiencing. I have friends in Forsyth County who went to a school board meeting to speak about their right to learn real, unabridged, unfalsified history in their classrooms, and they received online threats of physical violence from adults and parents in their community. Democracy cannot exist when adults are literally threatening to beat up students.

Finally, we recognize that bringing people into GYJC looks like making space and training people to feel comfortable and feel like they have the skills to effectively organize. We've done training programs in which we trained folks to be comfortable with the legislative processes in Georgia so that they could go work as legislative staffers or on campaigns, and be equipped to not only support candidates and legislators, but also to advocate for themselves.

What Does Disability Justice During a Pandemic Look Like?

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

A portrait of Imani Barbarin. [Photo by Maude Ballinger via Imani Barbarin, illustration by Samantha Grasso]

By Samantha Grasso

This interview is the last of a three-part series about the pandemic’s impact on disabled and chronically ill people. Read our first interview with Tinu Abayomi-Paul and our second interview with Britt Lynnae here.

Ever find yourself aimlessly scrolling through TikTok? Then you’ve likely come across the work of Imani Barbarin, a disability advocate and inclusion activist in Philadelphia whose videos have amassed nearly 25 million likes.

On TikTok and Twitter, Barbarin educates viewers about disability and incisively criticizes ableist rhetoric, like a comment by CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who said she was “encouraged” that most vaccinated people who had died from COVID “had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”

Over Zoom, Barbarin talked about how the pandemic has impacted her life and work. “Before the pandemic, disability was seen as, ‘That's their issue. This will never affect me,’” Barbarin told me. “Anybody is capable of having a disability or being impacted by disability. Just now it's right in front of their faces.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What were your concerns at the beginning of the pandemic?

My concerns began with the medical rationing guidelines: who would and would not get care if hospitals were at capacity. Disabled people were at the end of that list.

Looking at how COVID spread in Italy, people were like, “This mostly impacts disabled and elderly people.” But I knew that Americans do not care about disabled people. Once you’ve told them that only disabled and elderly people die, you’ve shot yourself in the foot. On top of that, they released data saying it was primarily Black people and people of color who were being impacted. That's when the tide turned. Americans were like, “I don't wanna wear a mask anymore.”

I panicked about going anywhere, and not just because of medical rationing guidelines, but I'm a Black woman, and I didn't think I would get equitable care in a crisis.

Because of the stress of the pandemic, I was up every night for like the first couple months. I was physically ill all the time. I have a very deep brain fog. My muscles have seized and are tight.

How did the pandemic affect your work on social media?

I had been talking about this stuff for years. In early 2020 I started posting about the pandemic. I was relentlessly telling people, “This is a mass-disabling event.” All of a sudden my social media blew up.

What impact has this success had on your work and message?

It felt really difficult to juggle talking to disabled people and educating nondisabled people on disability. I want to go back to just making inside jokes and having fun with disabled people. But I knew that I had to talk to nondisabled people because if they weren't taking it seriously, disabled people were the ones that were going to pay.

Do you see people’s failure or unwillingness to mask up the fault of the individual, or the fault of governments for not taking COVID more seriously?

I think it's all our responsibility. I think of it along the lines of drunk driving: Yeah, you have the choice to drink. You also have the choice not to drive. When you drive down the highway with other people in your car, you're responsible for them too.

We rely on both government and interpersonal intervention when it comes to drunk driving. But people seem not to understand that while wearing a mask is your personal choice, you are also responsible for not infecting the people you come across.

How have your Twitter hashtag campaigns helped further your advocacy?

Growing up as a disabled kid, for the longest time I was like, “What is the point of all these people coming up to tell me I'm inspiring and then not caring about what I say or do, and just playing in front of me?” Disability advocacy was the first thing I did where I felt like there was a purpose. It was the first thing that made me feel as if my life made sense.

I got my master's degree with the hope of telling disability stories to people around the world. I started doing hashtags because it made it easy for disabled people to find each other, and it made disabled people feel less alone.

It also forced nondisabled people to wake up and take notice, and that was a good side effect. It wasn't the purpose of us doing what we were doing, but it is always welcome.

Tell me about your hashtag campaign in response to Walensky’s comments about the “encouraging news” that people who were vaccinated against COVID and dying from the virus were “unwell to begin with?”

I was very pissed.

I started #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthy because throughout the entire pandemic we had been told, “We'll save whoever we're going to save, and then the rest of you, good luck. You don't do anything anyway, so how long are we going to pause the economy to make sure that this disabled person who's going to die anyway has a fair shot?”

So I was like, f*ck you. I'm sick and tired of people telling disabled people that our lives don't matter, that we have nothing to offer to society, and that there's no inherent dignity to being alive as a disabled person. In fact, that's your fault. We built a society that is for nondisabled people. We punish disabled people for existing and then say, “If you don't overcome the barriers I put there, then you don't deserve to be here.”

Is there anything else people know about disability justice or advocacy during the pandemic that we haven't talked about yet?

You need to look around. Everything that surrounds you is your retirement plan, your disability plan. If you live long enough, you'll experience disability in your life or somebody else's close to you, and what is left for you is exactly what you left for yourself. So if you want a world of ease and accessibility and kindness, build it now.

Who are other disability advocates that you recommend people follow online?

Alice Wong (@SFdirewolf)

Tinu (@Tinu)

Teona (@teonawrites)

Tee Franklin (@MizTeeFranklin)

Mia Ives-Rublee (@SeeMiaRoll)

Tim Boy (@blackautisticking)

Meet the Indigenous Activists Taking Quebec to Court

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. [Lydia Yakonowsky/National Trust for Canada]

By Theo Malhotra

In recent years, more North American colleges have begun to perform land acknowledgements, which recognize the Indigenous people on whose unceded land their campuses were built centuries ago. But recent events show that talk is cheap.

A group of Mohawk women from the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation outside Montreal has taken legal action to prevent the expansion of two McGill University buildings on historically Mohawk land. This is also the site where the CIA’s MK-Ultra psychological experiments took place, in which unwilling test subjects were used in dystopian brainwashing and mind control experiments. The Mohawk group claims that the unmarked graves of children – victims of these experiments – lie beneath both the Royal Victoria Hospital and Allan Memorial Institute.

The Kanien’kehá:ka kahnistensera, or Mohawk Mothers, presented their case to the Quebec Superior Court on May 30. They’re demanding a thorough investigation of the sites to collect evidence of unmarked graves. We spoke with Mother, activist and Mohawk Nation News founder kahentinetha about McGill’s refusal to return stolen Iroquois funds and why Canada’s “whole system will fall” when the Mothers’ case is heard in court.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Who are the Mohawk Mothers?

We are the progenitors of the land, and all decisions that are made about it have to go through the women. We work together with the men, but the women are the ones that select those at the higher levels of power, for example, the chiefs.

Where do allegations of unmarked graves around McGill originate?

We have had many children taken from us, murdered and buried. This was based on the 1924 Indian Lands Act, which turned our resources over to the provinces and put us on reservations, which were actually death camps. They took our children and set up residential schools. Now we're finding these children, and they're everywhere in Canada, in unmarked graves. [Ed. Note: 1,800 confirmed or suspected unmarked graves have been identified to date, while a Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report estimates that 3,200 exist.]

We've done a lot of research. We went to the McGill library archive, and now we've seen with our own eyes the proof of what was done, and it's boxes and boxes. There's so much.

After World War II, McGill got a lot of money from the military, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Canadian government to do mind control and all kinds of gross experiments on our children.

But the main scientist working with the CIA and the Canadian military on MK-Ultra was Dr. Ewen Cameron, who led the Allan Memorial Institute [a psychiatric hospital and research institute that led the CIA’s MK-Ultra experiments from 1957 to 1964]. We also have some people who lived through it and are willing to come and testify at our trial about the Native children that were brought in there and were buried. They saw shovels and everything. I personally know of somebody who was taken there because he was “unruly.” They did a lobotomy on him and sent him back. And for 40 years, his family took care of him.

My two uncles and my aunt were sent to one of the residential schools near the Six Nations reserve, and they came back and told us about it. They said to my father, whatever you do, don't ever go to that place. So that's how I heard about it. We knew about it. Our grandparents knew about this. It was just that nobody ever believed us. But people talked about it, and now it's coming out.

What is the Mohawk Band Council, and how would you describe its role in this situation? [Ed. Note: In Canada, band councils are composed of and elected by Indigenous tribal members, and are responsible for administering education, community housing and other services. However, council election turnout is very low, and the band councils are accountable to the federal government.]

Well, they don't get much support from the people because they work so much against us. We call them “paid killers” because they were right there from the beginning in 1924, when Canada set the reservations up.

The band council ran the reservations and helped the government to carry out the genocide. They helped select the children that were sent to these schools and were never seen again. The genocide’s purpose was to rid Canada of the Indigenous people, because all the land is Indigenous land, and there is no way to sell or transfer it because it belongs to the unborn children. So the only way they could get it would be to kill off all the children and sterilize the mothers, which they did.

I was young at the time, so I experienced quite a bit of it. The band council would point out who was considered to be unruly. They would suggest that they get tested, and then who knows what would happen to them after that. That's how people disappeared. We didn't see them again, and we couldn't find out what happened to them.

What did your petition to McGill University ask for?

I started in 2015 by writing a letter to McGill in which I took a seizure of the university, reminding them that we continue to have jurisdiction over all Mohawk land. I informed them that it was built without my knowledge or consent, and that this land belongs to us.

McGill University was built in 1821 with money from the Iroquois trust fund, which had been seized by the Canadian government, because they had decided that we were “wards of the state.” They took the money and loaned it to James McGill, a slave owner, to create a military college. Then they borrowed more money from the same fund when they turned it into a university, which has never been returned. And we've asked for it back in this court case, because there's more than enough evidence.

One of the things I asked McGill for was proof that any of this land was ever transferred from the Native people. On McGill’s own website, it says very clearly there that this is Kahnawake land since time immemorial and it has never been ceded. Everybody has to say that now, before they start any meeting.

I also asked McGill to discontinue its war labs, which fund military research. I said this violates the Haudenosaunee Great Peace. This is our university, it's on our land and we will not allow that.

How have the McGill administration and the Canadian government responded to these claims?

I waited for a response and I didn't get one. So I wrote back to them and I said, the time has come. When you don't answer, that means you're in default, you have admitted every allegation that I have made.

We went to the Federal Court of Canada and they were swamping us with protocols. We decided to drop out because they were going to do that to us for years to come. So we took it to the Superior Court of Quebec. They knew they were going to lose the case because their constitution says pretty plainly that all of the laws that have come here do not supersede Indigenous law. Anything that conflicts with that is of no force or effect. Canada has never allowed anybody to challenge it in court because that would prove it, and their whole system would fall.

We're just doing what we know from our own way, by ourselves. We have no lawyers. The other party, well, they have their law. We have many, many lawyers working against us. They're going to use hundreds of thousands of laws foreign to Turtle Island. Go ahead, use your law. See if any of it supersedes our way. None of it does. Their own constitution says that Indigenous law is still the law of the land. Read sections 25 and 35 yourself. But nobody's challenged it up until now.

What resources can people access to learn more about this?

The McGill library would be a good beginning, but the files are also hidden in the Department of Indian Affairs and hospitals like Brandon Sanatorium in Manitoba.

What we want to do is we want to get all that information, all of the proof that we have, and put it on the court records and have it there for people to look at. We want the truth out there and we want it posted in their own system.

— Theo Malhotra (@theo_malhotra)

Rural Racism and Reclaiming Space in the UK

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

Black Girls Hike founder Rhiane Fatinikun leading a nature hike. [Black Girls Hike press page]

By Harry Stopes

For centuries, people of color around the world have been denied access to public lands, and been estranged from their own through colonialism and violence.

Even now, simply going for a walk in the woods can be prohibitively expensive or involve overcoming obstacles like rural racism and bad infrastructure.

In Britain, despite making up 13% of the population, POC make up only 1% of visitors to national parks. Sam Siva is a grower, writer and organizer with Land in Our Names, a collective that aims to reconnect Black and POC communities in Britain with the land. They also work with the Right To Roam campaign, which demands greater rights of access to rural land so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of being in nature. Siva, who uses they/them pronouns, spoke to AJ+ about how their work reimagines the relationship between people of color and nature.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about Land in Our Names and the work you’re doing.

Land in Our Names is a very small collective of Black people and people of color (BPOC), working at the intersections of climate justice, land justice and racial justice, as a means to liberate all people.

We're trying to heal our relationship with the land and achieve self-determination through telling our stories and sharing experiences. We’ve worked on podcasts and zines, done research on the experiences of BPOC farmers in Britain, and hosted lots of events – mostly discussions and skill-sharing sessions – both in London, where we are based, and in rural natural spaces.

In the long run, we want to create a space and environment where people can learn skills like farming or agroforestry, and that can also serve as a place for rest, healing and community. This would be based on seeing land ownership as collective, rather than as rooted in the private, patriarchal family farm, which still dominates even the organic and agroecological growing movements.

Your website mentions land as a form of reparation. Can you expand on this?

Across the world, a very small percentage of the population owns land, so reparations in terms of resources is essential. But reparations also mean repair. Most BPOC in Britain grow up in urban spaces, so our connection to the land might be quite distant, especially since we’re not seen as, you know, typical campers or hikers. Last December, when a group called “Muslim Hikers” went for a walk in the Peak District National Park, their Facebook page was flooded with racist abuse. So we want to repair that, because we all belong to nature, and everyone has the right to it.

I've learned and changed so much since I started actively learning about the natural world. There are a lot of scientific studies showing how green and blue spaces are good for your mental health. Without dismissing the reasons that a person might be struggling, being in spaces where you're not surrounded by buildings or people can help give you room to navigate whatever you're struggling with as well.

Another side of repair means repairing the stories that we were told, the historical amnesia that is so deeply ingrained in colonizer countries. The history of empire is so embedded in the land in Britain, in all those country estates that are now seen as quaint tourist attractions, but in many cases were built with colonial wealth.

What’s the relationship between climate justice, food justice and what we might call racial justice in Britain and around the world?

Historically, a certain form of colonial capitalism has been based on an exploitative, extractive relationship with nature. Sugar plantations in Jamaica, for example, were the earliest examples of intensive agroindustry, and they massively degraded the soil. The agriculture and food industries are responsible for around a third of greenhouse gas emissions.

This system doesn’t produce good food or healthy diets. Food poverty is a big problem in Britain, and so many people are reliant on food banks. BPOC are most vulnerable to these issues, but they aren’t in positions to control the production or the decisions made about food. Food sovereignty means changing our relationship with food production, and that includes changing our relationship with the land.

You’re also involved with the Right To Roam campaign, could you explain what that is trying to accomplish?

Right To Roam is demanding the right to walk freely – and to do other things, like camp, swim, canoe – over a much greater portion of the land in England. Currently, only 8% of land is accessible to the public. We have been organizing what we call mass trespasses involving hundreds of people on private land as a form of political demonstration, to say, “We have the right to enjoy nature, we have the right to enjoy this beautiful space too.” Earlier this month, there was one in a forest belonging to the Duke of Somerset, for example.

My role specifically is to help build an inclusive movement, because there are a lot of barriers to accessing the countryside. Hiking, for instance, involves a lot of niche knowledge and can be expensive — good hiking boots cost over $125, and that’s if you know which kind to get. There’s the cost of travel too; train and bus services in rural areas are bad and overpriced.

What was the Kinder in Colour event last month?

Kinder Scout is a well-known mountain in the Peak District that was inaccessible to the public until the Peak District National Park, which was the first national park in the country, was founded in 1951. On April 24, 1932, several hundred hikers deliberately trespassed there as a form of protest. Five went to prison for several months, and four of those arrestees were Jewish. As is the case with BPOC today, right-wing notions of Englishness excluded Jewish people and their right to be in rural spaces.

We decided to mark the 90th anniversary of that event last month by highlighting the invisible barriers that still limit access to the countryside, even if the legal barriers no longer exist. So we held a BPOC-centered event where we met in a nearby field for speeches and rituals, then walked up the mountain together. People came in buses from London, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle.

Something like that makes you aware of how often you just get used to not being around other people of color in certain spaces. The few times I've been in the countryside with other people of color around me, it's always felt energizing and healing, and kind of magical.

A Brief History of Homophobic Slander in the U.S.

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

Renowned homophobe Anita Bryant has a banana cream pie thrown in her face by gay rights activist Tom Higgins in Den Moines, Iowa on October 14, 1977. [AP Photo]

By Samantha Grasso

Last year, conservatives created a nationwide panic over “critical race theory,” leading many Republican-governed states to ban honest conversations about American history from public schools. This year, many of those same conservatives have moved on to something equally disturbing.

In schools across the country, according to these moral crusaders, teachers are “grooming” students for sexual abuse by introducing discussions of gender and sexuality into the classroom. These discussions of sex education have been falsely equated to “personal disclosure[s] of adult sexual activity and preferences.” It’s worth noting that conservative activists began lobbing these “grooming” accusations just as the GOP was trying to rescind medical care for transgender children and to prevent them from playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity.

Though right-wing pundits, like conservative activist Christopher Rufo and numerous Fox News hosts, have been careful not to explicitly point fingers at gay, queer and trans teachers, the attacks on education related to gender and sexuality are not some brash new invention, but a longstanding right-wing tactic. The right has used moral panics to force queer people out of public life, restrict social programs like childcare, and much, much more.

Here’s a timeline, and reading list, of such homophobic eruptions.

1940s-1960s: Gay federal workers are fired in the ‘Lavender Scare’

Throughout the middle of the century, thousands of gay people (and those suspected of being gay) were fired or forced to resign from the federal government for being a “security risk.” According to the perverse logic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) the mere fact of being gay made an employee “vulnerable to blackmail.” In two cases involving “known communists,” McCarthy directly linked homosexuality to leftist political beliefs, saying that gay men were especially susceptible to recruitment because of their “peculiar mental twists.”

1964: Florida sets its sights on gay sex with the ‘Purple Pamphlet’

In the 1950s, Florida created a state legislative committee to target civil rights activists for allegedly having communist ties. It soon took on the task of stalking and outing queer people. Known as the “Johns Committee,” the group published a 50-page pamphlet titled “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” which accused gay men of being worse than “normal” child molesters and stated that the goal of gay men was to “recruit” “normal” children.

1977: Anita Bryant exhorts the right to ‘Save Our Children’

In response to a Dade County, Florida, ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, singer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant founded the “Save Our Children” campaign, which promoted the idea that “homosexuals cannot reproduce, so they must recruit … the youth of America.” The ordinance was repealed, and states including Oklahoma and Arkansas followed suit by banning gay and lesbian people from teaching in public schools. (Activists responded to Bryant with pies to the face.)

1978: California defeats proposal to ban gay teachers

Following Bryant’s lead, California legislator John Briggs led a ballot proposition to to ban gay and lesbian people from working in public schools. The proposition, called the Briggs Initiative, failed, but still won 41.6% of the vote.

1977-78: The FBI’s “Sex Deviates” program goes up in flames

Between 1951 and 1977, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI collected more than 350,000 pages of personal information about gay and lesbian Americans under the so-called “Sex Deviates Program. Hoover justified this enormous invasion of privacy – and the harassment suffered by its subjects – by claiming that gay men were a threat to children and the FBI had a responsibility to warn Americans about them. Many of these files were destroyed in 1977-8. Though Hoover was rumored to be gay, Hoover’s War on Gays author Douglas Charles has said that there’s a “lack of evidence” to support this theory.

1980s: America's forgotten day care panic

How does a totally baseless fear of widespread child abuse explode into a full-blown moral panic? This is the question Richard Beck poses in his book We Believe the Children, which tells the story of the child abuse panics of the 1980s, focusing primarily on the McMartin preschool trial in California. In that case, prosecutors alleged that the school’s founders had committed hundreds of acts of sexual abuse on the children in their care. Despite lasting for seven years, and being one of the most expensive trials in U.S. history, the trial did not lead to any convictions. Beck blamed the moral panic in part on right-wing conservatives worried about the death of the patriarchal nuclear family. At the time, more women were taking jobs outside of the home, and relying more heavily on child care.

2000s: Bryant’s influence continues in the Defense of Marriage Act and the rise of QAnon

Will Anita Bryant ever fade away as an anti-LGBT icon? In the 2000s, Bryant’s refrain to “save the children” was revived in an effort to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which ensured the right to marriage for same-sex couples. (According to homophobic critics, marriage equality would lead to more adoptions by gay couples.) Bryant’s tagline was also an early inspiration for QAnon, an online conspiracy movement that maintains (without evidence) that Democrats and Hollywood liberals are trafficking and abusing children.

2016-2020: A viral QAnon-led lie about sex trafficking hurts real kids

First there was Pizzagate, then there was “Save the Children,” and then the Wayfair conspiracy, which maintained that children were secretly being trafficked through a furniture website. They weren’t, but that didn’t mean that nobody got hurt – the incredible speed with which this disinformation spread across the internet ended up ruining people’s lives. As right-wing conspiracies continue to run rampant online, QAnon devotees have doubled down on baseless theories about child sex trafficking as a way of promoting a homophobic agenda.

Starving for Justice

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

New York City taxi drivers and their supporters during a hunger strike for debt relief outside City Hall in Lower Manhattan on October 31, 2021. [Spencer Platt/Getty Images via AFP]

By Samantha Grasso

Would you starve yourself for justice?

This was the question I asked myself last year when New York City taxi drivers undertook a hunger strike to fight for relief from overwhelming debt. In doing this, they were joining a long political tradition: Late Irish Republican Army leader Bobby Sands and Palestinian prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash are among the political activists and prisoners worldwide who have used hunger strikes to advocate for better conditions for themselves and those with whom they stand in solidarity.

To better understand this tactic, I interviewed Nayan Shah, professor of American studies and ethnicity and history at the University of Southern California and author of Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes.

What can be achieved, he asks, through “projecting the possibility of one's life and death?”

Here are five takeaways from our conversation.

The body can communicate

“At the very core, the refusal to eat while in prison is to use your body’s deprivation to fight the conditions which are put [upon it] and marry it to a political cause,” Shah said. He emphasizes that strikers “[marshal] the human body to communicate over prison barricades to the public.” Strikers then rely on lawyers, advocates and family to transmit their experiences.

Strikes require preparation

Shah was struck by the strategies that hunger strikers use to calm their minds and impulses, and to mitigate their hunger and physical transformation. Some practice deprivation, go on extended fasts, or even undertake short-term hunger strikes in order to build endurance before embarking on the long one.

Strikers “prepare for the gnaw and pain of hunger, for the weakness, dizziness and listlessness, for the experience of constipation, for the threats and entreaties from wardens, guards, doctors and family members to resume eating,” he said, noting that some will also “try to forestall dehydration by drinking water (with salt).”

Strikers also have to learn how to support each other and maintain solidarity, especially while being physically isolated. “The hunger strike can break because people disagree, and might actively undercut each other because of their own sense of despair,” Shah said.

Strikers turn state violence on its head

“Food – its preparation, its delivery schedule, its withdrawal – is central to the structuring of prison operations. So the hunger strike actually creates an upheaval in the prison itself and the way it's organized,” Shah said.

Hunger strikes are different from other forms of protest because they “don’t cause material harm to an adversary,” Shah said. Instead, they create an “alarming exposure of the striker to suffering … It's a jiujitsu move in a way because it begins to foist responsibility for the strikers’ self-destruction onto the state's authority.”

Doctors and nurses’ ethics are rooted in solidarity

Prison hunger strikers are often subjected to forcible feeding, an ugly process that can bring attention to the violent means that prisons use to control their wards.

In the U.S., Shah said, medical associations have not historically considered forcible feeding comparable to assisting people who can’t eat. To underscore this point, he singled out a letter written by the American Medical Association to former defense secretary Chuck Hagel, and another by the International Council of Nurses to the U.S. Navy, both criticizing the practice of force-feeding Guantanamo Bay prisoners in 2013 and 2014.

“People have said that life preservation at all costs is really the idea here. And that this person could be considered suicidal and depressed, and that's why they're [being force-fed] … This is a confrontation ethically for physicians and nurses who increasingly do not want to be engaged in forceful feeding,” Shah said. Though strikers who have been moved to hospitals might be persuaded to eat and rehydrate, the ethical question is whether they feel as if they’ve given their consent.

It’s not about death, but about the fight to live

“We often focus on the hunger strikers who may have perished … but most hunger strikers are survivors,” Shah said. “What many hunger strikers see is not just that they have endured a period of hunger strike, but that they're actually people who have and want to embrace a life beyond [the strike], whether that continues in prison or in detention.”

“[Hunger strikers] want to see a different world than the one that exists and they’re willing to court their death to do that,” Shah said. “They are courting the idea of dying as a way of talking about the conditions of their living.”

“Strikers have to have some degree of astonishing hopefulness [about whether] it's possible to breach the barriers outside,” Shah said. To feel as if “they can reach people outside and people will care, they have to believe in the powers of communication [through] their body, and that ... their actions will be something that's going to influence other people to respond.”

The Fertility Doctor Who Played God

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:58 +0300

Keith Boyle as Donald Cline in Our Father. [Netflix]

By Jessica Loudis

The popularization of at-home genetic testing has, in many ways, been a boon. Millions of people have learned about their ancestries to a degree previously thought unimaginable. Long-lost relatives have been found. Decades’-old cold cases have been solved. New relationships have been forged.

And then there are the discoveries nobody ever wants to make.

In 2014, Jacoba Ballard signed up for an account on the genetic testing site 23andMe, and was surprised to receive a notification saying that she had seven half siblings near her in the Indianapolis area. After doing further research, she realized that this wasn’t a mistake — her biological father was not the man who had raised her, but Dr. Donald Cline, a fertility specialist who secretly inseminated dozens of clients over more than four decades, including her mother.

Over the next several years, as ancestry sites grew in popularity, the number of Ballard’s siblings continued to grow — from seven, to two dozen, to four dozen, to an eventual 94. And that’s just for now. So far, the youngest sibling who has been discovered was born in 1988 — 11 years before Cline stopped practicing medicine. “Every time we get a new match I give them this news,” Ballard told The Guardian, “and it’s like I’m ruining their life.”

This horrifying story of one deranged doctor’s private medical experiment is the subject of Our Father, a new Netflix documentary directed by Lucie Jourdan and produced by Blumhouse, the production company behind Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Picking up on that film’s attention to the horrors lurking beneath white suburbia, Our Father details a world in which every (blonde) person could potentially be related, and coming-of-age means being mindful of who you date. After all, as Ballard discovered, almost all of the siblings live within a 25-mile radius of each other.

Do Cline’s actions count as rape? Lots of his victims think so. After all, none of the women who visited his clinic between 1972 and 2009 knew he might use his own “sample.” Many went with their husbands, and had no idea that the good doctor was in the next room, swapping their specimens with his.

When Ballard figured out what had happened, she wrote to state and national attorneys general, who informed her that Cline had not broken any laws since he didn’t use force, and anyway, Indiana juries wouldn’t be likely to prosecute him. She then blanketed the press, receiving no responses. It wasn’t until a local Fox News reporter picked up the case and began pressuring Cline to take responsibility for his actions that things started to change.

When Cline finally did see the inside of a courtroom, it was because he had lied to his attorney about using his own sperm. Cline was ultimately stripped of his medical license and given a $500 fine. And that was that. He has stoutly refused to speak to journalists, or to almost all of his 94 children, or to anybody else lacking the force of law. (In Our Father, he is portrayed by a series of actors.) Cline is an elder in his church and is surrounded by a protective community.

It’s important to note that for the siblings, these consequences aren’t only psychological, they’re also physical — a number of his kids have autoimmune diseases and other mysterious illness they’ve been unable to diagnose. As one of the siblings noted, in light of Cline’s own medical history, he never would have been accepted as a donor.

Given Cline’s refusal to speak, there’s no way of knowing exactly why he did what he did, but in her research, Ballard came across a telling clue — his association with a member of the Quiverfull movement, a conservative Christian theology that holds that members should have as many children as possible in order to fill the world with their babies. As The Daily Beast succinctly put it, “The underlying motivation here is often racist: White Christians must repopulate the planet with their own chosen kind, lest it be taken over by darker-skinned heathens.”

While Cline has not identified himself as a member of the movement, he was known to be assertive about his conservative religious beliefs, decorating his office with Christian memorabilia and frequently citing Jeremiah 1:5, a line of scripture that is popular in the Quiverfull movement. It reads, “Before I formed you in your mother’s womb, I knew you.”

Jourdan began working on Our Father in 2017. Netflix’s release of the documentary in the wake of the Supreme Court draft leak was surely a matter of luck, but still, it seems apt. Until 2019, when Indiana became the first state in the country to make it a crime for doctors to unknowingly inseminate women with their own sperm (just stop and consider that sentence for a moment), it was perfectly legal. Meanwhile, of course, women are about to be deprived of the ability to make choices about their own lives and bodies.

It’s no secret that the GOP is in bed with Christian white nationalists, and that the war on women is now in the open. For years, argues Laura Briggs, author of How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics, “it used to be that if you wanted to rally the right-wing troops, your misogyny had to be racially coded to mostly exclude white women,” focusing on “single Black mothers as ‘welfare queens’ and immigrant women with children as unfairly taking public benefits.” Now, all women are now under threat, and men like Cline remain free.

An Abolitionist’s Message to Activists

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:57 +0300

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. [Verso Books]

By Andreas Petrossiants

In June 2020, millions of people across the world took to the streets to protest the ongoing murder of people of color at the hands of police.

The movement, led by Black youth and supported by a diversity of demonstrators, emanated from a rebellion in Minneapolis after police murdered George Floyd. This uprising brought the word “abolition” into mainstream discourse, and made it possible for more people to consider a world without police, prisons and state violence. There was a palpable sense that people were questioning what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” – in other words, racism.

For over three decades, Gilmore’s work has been crucial to the study of policing and prison abolition; her classic work, Golden Gulag, charts how the number of people imprisoned in the U.S. increased by more than 450% between 1980 and 2007. Her newest anthology, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, includes Gilmore’s essays on policing, capitalism and organizing and are more critical than ever two years after the largest street mobilization in decades. Expertly assembled by scholars Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, the anthology reproduces Gilmore’s essays chronologically from 1991 to 2018.

In the first section, Gilmore looks at how intellectuals and scholars relate to abolitionist movements, revisiting Audre Lorde’s famous question: If “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” then who will? In her answer, she pushes academics and other knowledge workers to not only talk the talk, but to take action. In the following section, “Race and Globalization,” she explores how “through prison expansion and prison export, both U.S. and non-U.S. racist practices can become determining forces in places nominally ‘free’ of white supremacy.” To do this, she looks at how the advent of NGOs and international treaties that spread U.S.-style policing and prisons has buttressed the expansion of mass incarceration.

Gilmore then addresses the racialized state as well as the “anti-state state,” a term that describes the outsourcing of traditional state functions, like health care and housing, to private interests. Promoted by leaders like Reagan and Thatcher, and both liberals and conservatives since, the goal of the “anti-state state” is to feign “small government” while actually beefing up the capacity to carry out violence, from wars abroad to incarceration at home. Here, Gilmore maps the terrain of prisons and jails and charts how racism, colonialism and neoliberal capitalism have conspired to put millions of people behind bars, whether for private profit, racialized capitalist discipline, or as a “prison fix” for land or labor problems.

Finally, she underlines the work of abolitionists and anti-carceral organizations like Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, which since 1992 has supported people of color arrested on false or exaggerated charges. Looking at their organizing, she concludes that activists must broaden their thinking, and “move beyond place-based identities toward identification across space, from not-in-my-backyard to not-in-anyone’s-backyard.” If “abolition is a movement to end systemic violence, including the interpersonal vulnerabilities and displacements that keep the system going,” Gilmore writes, then “the goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people before profits, welfare before warfare, and life over death.”

As politicians use summer 2020 to reinforce a law-and-order agenda, as activist groups in Atlanta fight the construction of a 300-acre police training facility, and as President Biden argues, again, that police reform requires giving departments even more federal funding, Gilmore’s call to change is especially crucial. The only way to escape the cycles of police violence, protest and retrenchment will be to collectively build popular, abolitionist frameworks for relating to each other. Gilmore’s work helps us move toward that goal.

Cleaning Out the Closet? Keep It Sustainable

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:57 +0300

A "clothing spill" art installation brings attention to textile waste at Seattle's Alki Beach on April 22, 2016. [Elaine Thompson/AP Photo]

By Samantha Grasso

The sun is out, my depression fog has cleared and I’m ready to start paring down the abundance of stuff that has taken over my apartment! But with all the news about textile waste and trashed donations, I know that hauling paper bags of used belongings to Goodwill will no longer cut it.

Inspired to find a more environmental way of spring cleaning, I turned to sustainability advocates Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism; Kristy Drutman, founder of Brown Girl Green; and Amy Nguyen, founder and editor of Sustainable & Social. Here are some takeaways from our conversation.

One man’s trash isn’t anyone’s treasure

In the UK, only 10% to 30% of donations to charity stores are sold over the counter, Nguyen said. The other donations are sent abroad to places like the Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, where they cause economic and ecological problems.

“Why do we from the West or the Global North feel that we can pat ourselves on the back and send all this stuff away for it to then become someone else's problem?” Nguyen said.

Barber said that when she takes clothing to charity shops, they must be new or in close-to-new condition. “People are donating that stuff, but nobody wants it. … It's gonna end up being shipped to Ghana. And then somebody there is gonna buy a pallet [with] clothing that they can't sell, and that's just not fair,” she said.

Be intentional

“When we do the types of not-so-thoughtful purges where we just clean house [without] consideration, I think all that does is make space for us to make the same mistakes over and over again,” Barber said. Instead, she suggests slowing down your cleaning process and rehoming as many things as possible by reselling or giving them away.

Go online

Barber also recommends using Facebook Marketplace or “buy nothing” Facebook groups to find new homes for belongings, and I’ve found Craigslist and Nextdoor to be similarly reliable. You can also sell clothing on Depop or Vestiaire Collective, and if you want to get crafty, use Instagram Stories or make a new IG account to advertise your wares.

Find a cause

For items like furniture, Barber recommends finding a group that actually needs the items you’re offering. Instead of just leaving them with a charity shop, consider giving them to organizations that resettle refugees or rehome people released from prison.

Keep it simple

If you want to maximize your use of the clothes you do have, Drutman suggests setting up a “capsule wardrobe”: a limited set of clothes (typically basics) that can be layered and interchanged frequently. That way, you can make use of your closet without over-purging.

Drutman also recommends holding an item swap with friends and bringing items you’d like to exchange. And if you have clothes that need a little upkeep, consider adding patches or other upcycled flair to old pieces.

When in doubt, toss it out

Unfortunately the Global North doesn’t have the infrastructure for textile recycling, so if you can’t reuse tattered or stained clothing, don’t donate it. “If you can’t [find a repurposing project], I'd rather [put something] in a landfill in the Global North [than] in someone's backyard in the Global South,” Barber said.

Sustain your sustainability

“Just because you're sending all of this stuff to Goodwill … doesn't give you license to then buy just as much stuff so you can donate the same quantity next year,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen challenges people to not just see themselves as “consumers,” but as citizens first. When you’re shopping in the future, ask yourself: Why am I buying this item? Question the sustainability of what you’re shopping for, especially when it comes to fast fashion: Is this a timeless piece? Am I going to wear this at least 30 times?

“It's about having that thoughtfulness stay with you the next time you think about buying something,” Barber said. “Now, when I think about buying something, I ask myself, ‘If there's ever a day where I don't want this item, will anybody else want it?’”

Meet the First Nations Women Fighting for Their Land

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:14:57 +0300

Kanahus Manuel stands at the Tiny House Warriors encampment in Blue River, British Columbia. [Tupac Saavedra/AJ+]

By Sharmila Venkatasubban

For the past four years, a small group of Indigenous land defenders, who call themselves the Tiny House Warriors, have been fighting a massive pipeline expansion in Canada. And they’ve faced violence to do it.

The Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs from Alberta to just outside of Vancouver, will triple Canada’s ability to carry crude oil across the country by building a new line alongside the existing one. However, half the current pipeline runs through territory belonging to the Secwepemc Nation – land that Canada’s Supreme Court admits the nation never ceded through treaties.

Twin sisters Kanahus and Mayuk Manuel, who are Secwepemc, co-founded the group, and they see asserting their right to the land as both a struggle and a way of life.

Since 2017, they’ve traveled up and down the pipeline’s construction route, from Edmonton to Vancouver. The group makes the journey in tiny wooden mobile homes they call “battle tanks,” because they provide shelter and protection for the activists.

In their attempt to challenge the construction, the Tiny House Warriors have clashed with pipeline workers and police, and faced violence, arrests, criminal charges and convictions. During one clash last year, a pipeline worker knocked Mayuk to the ground and pinned her there, and Kanahus says police broke her wrist in another incident in 2019.

Throughout, though, the Tiny House village, a camp located in Blue River, British Columbia, has served as a safe space and cultural refuge – a place where they can teach their traditions to younger generations.

After AJ+ senior producer Tupac Saavedra interviewed the sisters for a recent documentary, I followed up with them to learn more about their efforts to assert Aboriginal rights to the land. Here are the main takeaways from our conversation.

Fighting forced assimilation, land theft and abuse

First Nations communities have faced a long history of oppression and colonial violence in Canada, which government officials have said amounted to genocide.

For over 100 years, the Canadian government ran residential boarding schools, where at least 150,000 Native children were forced to assimilate and subjected to systemic abuse. And just last year, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported that over 1,000 Indigenous women and girls were murdered between 1980 and 2021 – a rate 4.5 times higher than that of all other women in Canada.

“Our blood grandmother, my mother's mother, was murdered … so we’ve dealt with this [history] of murdered and missing Indigenous women. It was a part of our family,” Kanahus said, adding that their mother suffered from clinical mental health issues as a result.

But it was this intergenerational trauma and the desire to heal it that led the family to organize, they said.

“In the ‘80s, our aunt began educating counselors and therapists about the effects of the Indian residential school on our family system,” Mayuk said. Kanahus, Mayuk and their siblings are the first generation in their family to not attend these schools.

The sisters’ father, Arthur Manuel, also helped lead the movement to assert and secure Aboriginal rights to the land and develop economic strategies that would support Indigenous cultural life outside of the policies of the Canadian government.

It’s also the reason why they’re resisting resource extraction projects like the pipeline. They’re not opposed to economic development, Mayuk says, but they want “good economic development that honors Indigenous people.”

A resource for their nation

Volunteers designed and built the half-dozen tiny houses in their encampment, Kanahus said, and most of their funding, which varies from year to year, comes from a nonprofit that supports development projects for Indigenous communities.

Community members clean and maintain the camp of seven full-time residents, provide emotional support for one another, and teach cultural practices and history to younger people. Over the years, the camp has housed up to 30 people, including children.

“We [are a resource] for our nation when it comes to traditional food harvesting, medicinal practices, birth practices,” Kanahus told me. “At different stages of our lives [we were able to provide] 90% of traditional food harvest and organically grown foods. We got enough salmon to feed our children in the winter months until the next salmon run. And then we can freeze and smoke the salmon. But because the [current land defense work] really requires us to be on the ground doing 24-hour security, it doesn’t allow us to go pick huckleberries for two weeks straight.”

But it's their goal to become fully self-sustaining so that their movement can thrive. "You can't ask for independence, you can't have an army with your hand out at the same time,” Kanahus said. “We go into their stores not because we want to but because we have to until we can live independently on our land."

The land, bodies and trauma

“We believe in the land being our mother,” Mayuk said. “It's not a simile or a metaphor. It’s … a reciprocal relationship, where we gave to the land, not just took, and our mother sustained us for thousands of years. Our land has generated more wealth for Great Britain and Canada than any other. Our land is one of the most wealthy lands in all of the world.”

And for the Tiny House Warriors, the body, as much as the land, is at the center of this centuries-old conflict over the territory and the right to self-determination, Kanahus said. The body is where they hold multigenerational trauma as well as the power to move past it.

To this end, their activism also focuses on healing practices, which include a ritual of dipping themselves in the coldest creeks along the mountain range, inking ancestral tattoos across their faces and arms, and braiding their children’s hair. These practices ensure that they don’t pass the pain they’ve experienced on to future generations. “We don’t want to hurt our family members with the trauma Canada gave to us,” Mayuk said.

Resistance tactics designed to heal, not provoke

Kanahus clarified that the sisters and the rest of the group don’t consider themselves protesters. “The majority of our work is to get our inherent right to self-determination recognized on the ground,” she says. “This is really important because what we’re doing, when we’re out there, is a healing strategy.”

“The worst form of trauma you can experience,” Mayuk added, “is the paralyzing fear of not doing anything.”

To learn more, watch AJ+’s full documentary, “Canada’s Other Rebellion Is Being Fought By These Women,” on YouTube.

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