Hello, howdy, and hey there Meteor readers. Welcome back to your favorite part of Wednesday. It’s been an inexplicably long week and I have yet to manifest all of the intentions I set forth during my Spring Equinox full moon ritual. Is the moon ignoring my calls?

In today’s newsletter, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd contemplates the absolute clown show that has been the confirmation hearings of The Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson. These hearings are historic, not just because of the woman in the hot seat but because it may very well be the first time a grown man asked someone if a baby was racist. I wish I was joking.

Also today, a reminder that the water crisis of your youth is still ongoing and, as with so many other things, getting worse. But first, the news!

—Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Small forest fires have broken out in the area surrounding Chernobyl, which is currently under the control of the Russian military. Ukraine’s parliament reported spotting at least seven fires in the area via satellite. The report also claims that Ukrainian firefighters have not been able to manage the outbreaks because of the presence of the Russian military. The situation is “particularly dangerous” and still developing.

• The Taliban has walked back their promise to re-open girls’ high schools in Afghanistan, claiming that officials are trying to “draw up a plan for them to reopen in accordance with Islamic law.” Schools were initially supposed to reopen to all students on Wednesday for the Spring semester—and several girls’ schools did open in the morning but were immediately closed once the announcement was made. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education attributed this move to a lack of proper uniforms for girls above grade six and a lack of female teachers. All of this has less to do with Islamic law and more to do with sex-based segregation, which begins after girls and boys pass puberty which (ostensibly) happens around the time they enter high school. In some parts of the country, girls under Grade 6 have reportedly returned to school.

• Officials and wealthy elites in Syria are creating a “maze of shell companies” to skirt international sanctions and continue funneling money into Bashar al-Assad’s government. Why should you care? Without new economic sanctions, the Syrian regime will have all the assets necessary to continue carrying out human rights violations against its citizens, which have gone largely unchecked in recent years.

• The US has reportedly run out of money to buy the next round of (vaccine) shots for everyone. That defense budget looking real plump, though, isn’t it Joseph Robinette.

AND: 

• Madeleine Albright, the first woman Secretary of State, has died at 84.

• The U.S. has officially classified the acts carried out over the last five years against the Rohingya population by Myanmar as genocide.

• TERF and author JK Rowling spent her Monday spreading misinformation about detransitioning, hormone replacement therapy, and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)—all topics she appears to know nothing about. On principle, I won’t link to anything she wrote because it’s utter codswallop. So instead, here’s some informative writing on PCOS in the LGTBQ+ community.  

• The Jamaican government has started the parliamentary process of becoming a republic, which means they’ll eventually be removing Queen Elizabeth II as head of state.

• The National College Players Association filed a civil rights complaint against 350 Division I schools, claiming Black students’ rights have been violated by a “collusive athlete compensation prohibition.” Bet you didn’t have that in your March Madness bracket.

• No survivors have been found in the wreckage of a plane that crashed into a mountain in China on Monday. There were 132 people on board.

• The number of trans youth on the brink of losing gender-affirming care is staggering.

• Ashley Barty is now Ashley Retiree at the tender age of 25.

—SM

SCOTUS WATCH 

6 Takeaways from the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Hearings

What surprised me (and didn’t) over the last 48 hours

BY JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON ILLUSTRATES HOW MUCH PATIENCE SHE HAS LEFT FOR TED CRUZ. (PHOTO BY CHEN MENGTONG/CHINA NEWS SERVICE VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

In the last 48 hours, I have watched approximately 324 hours of confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Please don’t challenge my math—I’ve seen Mr. Robot and claim my right to employ the same logic as Sen. John Cornyn, who told Judge Jackson that he is “not an attorney—I watch Law and Order from time to time.”)

Some of the proceedings have gone just as I’d anticipated. I expected the racist and sexist aggression that white Republicans are volleying at Judge Jackson, and I expected her response to be professional and controlled—skills she certainly was expected to triply perfect as a Black woman working in law. I expected the condescension, the gotcha questions, the abuse, and I expected her to meet them with thoughtful measure. But what actually hit me was how absurd the Republican line of questioning was, and how beautifully Judge Jackson has responded. In honor of Her Honor, my takeaways so far.

1. The racist nonsense before she even publicly spoke with Congress.

Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley introduced the lie that Judge Jackson has been soft on sentencing for child pornographers, a dog-whistle meant for the ears of the “government pedophilia conspiracy” QAnon cult. (This will continue tomorrow when Republicans introduce testimony from a lawyer for the extreme fringe group Operation Underground Railroad.) During the hearings, Hawley doubled down on these accusations despite major outlets like the Washington Post disproving them as “scurrilous”—and the reasoning was repeated in questioning from many of his worst Republican peers, including Sens. Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Marsha Blackburn. The latter also spent a considerable amount of time trying to paint Judge Jackson as having been mean to anti-abortion protesters, as well as goading her to define the word “woman” in a long transphobic tirade.

2. But she’s so much smarter than these jokers.

In response to these allegations, Judge Jackson explained the circumstances in the pornography cases she ruled on, pointing out that judges are constrained by Congress’s laws and effectively showing that she knows the inner workings of Congress better than some of the people working there. All this while Senators’ questions forced her repeatedly to relive the clearly painful experience of having to see, in her capacity as a judge, the “heinous” evidence in child pornography cases.

Cruz, who was one of Jackson’s peers at Harvard Law and is definitely still seething that he’s a lesser mind, also invoked the bogeyman of Critical Race Theory, an academic school of thought that most people don’t encounter until law school (if even then), and which Cruz seems to think is being taught to babies. After his barrage, Jackson paused and let out a deep sigh. It was a moment indicative of the circumstances: that a woman of her great intellect and patient temperament had to spend hour upon hour answering disingenuous and deeply uneducated questions.

WHAT SOLID PROOF DO WE HAVE THAT TED CRUZ KNOWS HOW TO READ? (PHOTO BY WIN MCNAMEE VIA GETTY IMAGES)

3. Despite all this, the hearings have been a breath of fresh air. 

Judge Jackson met even the most ridiculous questions with a level of gravity her questioners didn’t earn. She did not, like Brett Kavanaugh, whine or cry or yell at Senators—something she knows that she, as a Black woman, would end her nomination in a way it didn’t end Kavanaugh’s.

Her race and gender were a clear factor in the way a litany of white Republican Senators addressed her (note to Sen. Kennedy: Do not call a Black woman “articulate”) and even still she responded with patience. Her display of fairness and skill was exhilarating, a refreshing palate cleanser for those of us still reeling from the Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett proceedings. (For a really nice example of this, watch her exchange with Sen. Mazie Hirono, who skillfully dunked on the spurious accusations of her Republican colleagues.)

4. Judge Jackson will be an addition to the court who “thinks like America.”

Yesterday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal addressed why he thinks the Judge’s position on SCOTUS is significant. “You will make the court look and feel more like America, but also think more like America,” he said. He also asked her to address the importance of her experience as a public defender, a job he too once had. “Zealous defense council… ensures the government is protecting these rights and that people are getting due process in the criminal justice system,” she said. “That’s to all of our benefits. That helps everyone in America when we ensure that liberty cannot be denied due process.”

As Republicans repeatedly tried to paint Judge Jackson as soft on crime, this is an important point to remember. After all, as the lawyer and podcaster Josie Duffy Rice told Brittany Packnett Cunningham on a recent episode of UNDISTRACTED: “[Public defender]… is a job that should really resonate with conservatives in this country that are worried about Big Government. These are the same people that should be cheering her. Here’s someone who repeatedly stood up and tried to protect regular people from the tyranny of government.”

5. She understands the difficulties of working motherhood.

In a conversation with Senator Cory Booker, KBJ addressed her position as a working mom with visible emotion. “It’s a lot of early mornings and late nights, and what that means is there will be hearings during your daughters’ recitals. There’ll be emergencies on birthdays that you have to handle,” she said. “And I know so many young women in this country, especially who have small kids who have these momentous events, and have to make a choice. I didn’t always get the balance right.” (Her kids, though, seem to think she did all right, as evidenced by a beautiful sign on her daughter Leila’s seat: “You Got This!”)

6. Finally, nobody is tamping down the joy of this moment (dammit). 

Nothing the Republicans attempt to do can take away from this historic nomination, and I have been moved by how meaningful the moment has been—and for the sight of unadulterated hope in government at a time when there’s not a lot to feel great about. “Judge Jackson’s explanations are so clear, she is talking to the Senators but also is teaching,” tweeted National Women’s Law Center President Fatima Goss Graves. Maya Wiley noted that it is “a joyous day unto the world.” And in a profile of some of the Black women rallying in D.C. in support of KBJ, Washington Post reporter Anne Branigin writes:

“We need a little joy in this moment,” said Glynda Carr, a political strategist and co-founder of Higher Heights, a group that helps elect and support Black women in politics.

“If that little joy comes in the fact that this woman looks like us — looks like me, from my hair to my glasses to the hue of my skin — it gives you the possibilities that exist, in that we can always reach higher..”

CLIMATE CHANGE

The Water Crisis Is Getting Worse

BY SHANNON MELERO

BANGLADESHI PEOPLE TRAVELING TO GATHER WATER AMIDST AN EXTREME WATER CRISIS IN RANGAMATI. (PHOTO BY MOHAMMAD SHAJAHAN/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

Yesterday, March 22, was World Water Day, a day of observance started by the United Nations in 1993 to highlight the importance of access to fresh water sources in the global community. Unfortunately, about 2 billion people are living without access to clean water, and in 2019, 1.2 million people died from drinking unsafe water.

In fact, “in the last year, more people died from lack of access to water than from war-related violence,” Mustafa Mabruk tells me. Mabruk and his business partner Murad Noful are the cofounders of Wear the Peace, a slow fashion brand working to educate people and raise money for some of the world’s largest ongoing crises; their latest initiative is in partnership with Charity: Water, to build long term sustainable water safety in the areas most affected by the crisis. Like many of us, Mabruk and Noful are searching for the answer to what feels like an existential question: what can I, a regular person, do to solve an enormous global problem?

The first step is understanding that the problem is ours to fix. For as long as I’ve been alive, there’s been a water crisis, and for years it’s been framed as a problem other people have and not the concern of Europe or the United States. And yet, in 2014, in supposedly the most powerful nation in the world, Flint, Michigan, did not have a drop of clean water. (A crisis that is still ongoing.) The water crisis is everyday life for millions of people who will spend nearly half of their lives just walking to gather clean water. Countries that do not have entire populations actively gathering water are beginning to grapple with a lack of sustainable water sources and a future where water privatization may be the new normal.

“If there’s a time to start pushing toward a solution, it’s yesterday.”

“Climate change is the biggest cause of the current water shortage, but there’s also increased human consumption in general and overuse of water,” Nofal explains. Solving the water crisis is no longer just about building wells and providing tankards of water; now it’s intertwined with more frequent weather events, climate-based immigration, and thousands of people migrating to flee war violence. . So the big picture answers are sustainability in water gathering, better management of water resources—and understanding that war and climate change are interconnected issues. “At the end of the day, allowing a crisis to continue—allowing hundreds of years of violence and war—it’s all a choice. [Solving this crisis] comes down to political choices. All of it is doable, especially now,” Nofal says. He’s skeptically hopeful.

And while we need huge sweeping policy changes to really tackle this problem, there are steps that those of us who aren’t scientists, researchers, politicians, or Water Protectors can take to make sure this World Water Day isn’t just a blip on the calendar: Manage your water use at home, safe, clean water is finite and needs to be treated as such. Divest from fast fashion. Understand where your water comes from and how it’s treated. Donate to organizations like Charity: Water. Vote for officials in local elections who back “green” legislation at the city and state levels.“If there’s a time to start pushing toward a solution,” Nofal emphasizes, “it’s yesterday.”

What’s way less stressful than watching a confirmation hearing? Sharing this newsletter with your friends. Give it a try!

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