In 2024 alone, authorities imposed 304 internet shutdowns across 54 countries - the highest number ever recorded. This reflects a growing trend of governments treating connectivity as a weapon.
This is really about trying to put power in the hands of people. There's 70% of workers who want a union, and 10% have them. If it were a company, they would figure out how to get the product into the hands of the 70% who wanted it.
Developers promise "community investments," downtown revitalization, and a new "AI Center." What they don't say is that this development comes tethered to a massive resource-intensive data center that will cost billions, create pollution, and concentrate profits for the corporations and CEOs at the top-not the surrounding communities. This is not innovation, it's exploitation.
By the mid-1980s, the AIDS epidemic had completely gripped the nation. Its victims, primarily queer men, were dying by the thousands. Fear and misinformation reigned supreme, and our government refused to respond to the crisis. Reverend Charles Angel, a community leader and activist who was living with HIV himself, recognized that queer men of color faced additional disparities due to cultural norms and societal inequities.
The labor of this kind of organizing was invisible and deeply exhausting. In a precarious workplace, where a so-called 'performance review' could amount to job loss, organizing meant building a bridge while standing on it.
U.S. president Donald Trump shared a racist video on his Truth Social account in which former American president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama were depicted as apes. I was unsurprised, yet nonetheless disgusted. U.S. senator Jon Ossoff also found the video unacceptable. He said during a rally in Atlanta that Donald Trump was "posting about the Obamas like a Klansman."
According to Fast Company, businesses across the country - including in Portland, Maine; Denver, Rochester, New York; Omaha, Nebraska; Las Vegas; and Los Angeles - have said they will be closed today in support of the strike. Local NBC affiliate 9News reports that multiple school districts in Colorado are canceling classes due to teacher and student participation in the strike. And while it remains to be seen how widespread the national shutdown will be, this is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
"Are you okay?" These were Alex Pretti's last words, said to a woman after ICE agents had tackled and pepper-sprayed her. Videos from bystanders show Pretti holding up a phone, attempting to document what was happening before he himself was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground, and killed by those officers. He lost his life not for committing violence, but for documenting it, and stepping in to protect someone facing it.
If Dr King were alive today, he'd be admonishing us across the nation to stand up and march for Renee Good. If we miss this moment, our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be paying the price in a dying planet, in an authoritarian, tyrannical America where women don't have biological autonomy, and Black and Brown people are in chains, and white women are getting gunned down in the streets. That is not Dr. King's America.
