A Progress 2025 Vision of Self-Determination
Project 2025, created by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, takes a colonialist position on U.S. influence at home and abroad. Its authors argue 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.
They also want to strengthen the U.S. military and call for increasing the army’s budget in order to “defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.” They also want to increase investment in weapons development and expand nuclear arsenals.
What would a progressive vision of anti-colonialism and sovereignty look like? As climate catastrophes such as the U.S.’s Hurricane Helene and Europe’s historic flooding damage communities, and as Israel carries out a genocide in Gaza and expands its war into Lebanon and Yemen (with the help of the U.S. military), how are Indigenous communities expressing what’s most needed to ensure sovereignty and justice? Nick Tilsen, citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and president and CEO of the NDN Collective, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali to help answer that question.
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 Media 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 TEDx talk of the same name.
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