The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has promised a dystopian vision for LGBTQ rights. Its ideas are consistent with authoritarian, Christian nationalist, and white supremacist objectives. It aims to criminalize the existence of LGBTQ people through regressive legislation that targets freedom of expression, health care policies that deny access to medically necessary care (especially for transgender people), and a culture of repression, intolerance, and hatred for those deemed “different.”
But what would a progressive vision for LGBTQ people look like? As part of YES! Media’s Progress 2025 initiative, Jenn M. Jackson, Ph.D., answers that question in a conversation with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. Jackson is a YES! contributor, an assistant professor at Syracuse University’s Department of Political Science, and author of Black Women Taught Us (Penguin Random House, 2024) and the forthcoming Policing Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
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.
