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Ashoka Mukpo

@shokes.bsky.social

1.6K followers 370 following 440 posts

Features Writer, @mongabay.bsky.social ☀️

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · Apr 11

The last of three pieces I wrote about Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park is up now for @mongabay.bsky.social.

Protected areas across Africa have long colonial legacies that shape their relationship with people. This is my deep-dive into one of them:

news.mongabay.com/2025/04/the-...

The colonial ghosts of Uganda’s ‘Queen Elizabeth’ park

In 1889, the British journalist Henry Morton Stanley stumbled out of the forests of Central Africa into the town of Katwe, a settlement on the shore of a sulfurous volcanic lake. The lake’s vast depos...

news.mongabay.com

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 11h

We are going to start seeing disappearances of activists and probably journalists in the next few years.

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 11h

The Antifa stuff is the next logical step from brutalization of immigrants. They’re moving from stripping noncitizens of rights to their political opposition. The current Democratic leadership is clearly not meeting the challenge of this moment.

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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 2d

I can’t help but think today about how many young people were savaged on social media, branded as anti-semites and abandoned by their schools for daring to call for a ceasefire. I remember saying that it was the first time I can remember that calling for ceasefire was regarded as a hostile demand.

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 2d

This narrative is sloppy but also somehow everywhere right now. Why? Because journalists are addicted to X and the algorithm there is warping their sense of reality.

What clearly *is* happening is the center is unpopular and that's creating openings for both left and right among the young.

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 2d

She also cites a Yale poll here that shows a tiny slice of the youth vote (18-21) at the start of the year were R+12 in the USA, but it also showed that under-30s oppose deportation of undocumented people by a large margin.

youthpoll.yale.edu/spring-2025-...

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 2d

"Both sides of the Atlantic young people are aligning themselves with the right."

Really? Die Linke - outright communists - beat AfD by 5 points among youth this year and Melenchon's bloc crushed Le Pen's with that demographic last year.

www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/...

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 2d

i like this writer's work a lot of the time but this piece is a good case study in what's wrong with this narrative - nothing she cites here actually holds up

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 2d

this bit of emergent media gospel on how young voters are all shifting towards the hard right suffers from a slight problem : there's essentially no data supporting it, and in fact a lot that points the opposite way www.ft.com/content/61d4...

The fashion for the young: turn to the radical right

The intellectual energy of new rightwing movements is drawing in young people

www.ft.com

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UAINE @mahtowin1.bsky.social · 3d

Chile’s Indigenous Rapa Nui Want Their Stolen Moai Back.
www.fairobserver.com/culture/chil...

Chile’s Indigenous Rapa Nui Wants Its Stolen Moai Back

Rapa Nui natives are demanding the return of Hoa Hakananai'a, a venerated statue taken by the British from their island in 1868.

www.fairobserver.com

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 2d

Good essay here by one of my favorite people in the media world, Meher Ahmad (who wisely appears to have left social media) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/o...

Opinion | Zohran Mamdani and How to Be a ‘Good’ Muslim in America

www.nytimes.com

Reposted by Ashoka Mukpo

Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 6d

Why is this front-page news? The Washington Post doesn't say. It's a turning point in US history but our pathetic journalist class hides the relevance behind suggestion and implication, afraid to say things that everyone knows. Useless

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James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social · 6d

“I’ll declare war on you if you don’t give me the peace prize” is an incredible bit

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 9d

I don't think this is necessarily all that smart. They're trying to stir up a Ferguson/Baltimore response, but I don't see that happening and most of the imagery is just going to be DHS violating people's rights. This could seriously backfire on them, especially if the economy starts cracking.

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 9d

It does seem like the strategy here is to provoke some kind of major protest response in Chicago/Portland/NYC in order to justify repressive measures, potentially up to and including suspension of the 2026 midterms.

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KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘 @kojamf.bsky.social · 10d

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

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Mr. Chau @srirachachau.bsky.social · 13d

Jane Goodall was actually the only one keeping the apes in control. Now there's a power vacuum

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Mongabay @mongabay.com · 13d

Ghana has issued its first batch of sustainable timber licenses under the European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) system, which aims to block illegal logging and strengthen forest governance.

Ghana begins sustainable wood exports to EU under new license

Ghana has issued its first batch of sustainable timber licenses under the European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) system, which aims to block illegal logging and…

news.mongabay.com

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 13d

Jane Goodall was a great friend to Mongabay. Here's our obit for her, by founder @rhettayersbutler.bsky.social news.mongabay.com/2025/10/jane...

Jane Goodall (1934–2025): primatologist, conservationist, and messenger of hope

Jane Goodall, who revealed the intimate lives of chimpanzees and gave the modern world a language of hope, has died at the age of 91. Over the course of six decades, she moved from an unlikely young r...

news.mongabay.com

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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 14d

Jane Goodall, ethologist and conservationist, has died. She was 91

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Aaron Bady @zunguzungu.bsky.social · 15d

"What that tells the FBI to do now is to employ the exact same tools that they fine-tuned against the Muslim community and wage them against leftists, liberals" www.forever-wars.com/an-fbi-count...

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Siddhartha Mitter @siddharthamitter.bsky.social · 15d

Mathieu Aikins on his 4-part series in the NYT today (totalling 25,000 words of investigative reporting) on crime and impunity in the US Special Forces and its domestic blowback now.

He provides gift links for all four articles.

mattaikins.substack.com/p/how-a-lawl...

How a lawless war overseas came home to the US

Crime and Impunity in the Special Forces

mattaikins.substack.com

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 16d

Where my lunatics, haters and punk trash at stand up

Reposted by Ashoka Mukpo

Boo!-per Lund @cooperlund.online · 20d

I’m telling you, political violence is the new school shooting - angry and nihilistic young men doing violence for attention. Our years of lead aren’t ideological, they’re byproducts of the attention economy.

Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 20d

It feels like this is becoming a more common mass shooter profile: Someone who's interested in politics but not as a vehicle to express clear values or a coherent viewpoint. He just wants to mock anyone who takes it seriously.

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Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 24d

The problem with this is it presents X as a permanent town square and the heart of political culture in America. That’s both not true if you look at recent events and doesn’t have to be an inevitability even if it were.

Shadi Hamid @shadihamid.bsky.social · 27d

One of the biggest mistakes left-of-center pundits and influencers made was decamping to Bluesky. They made themselves irrelevant, shrunk their audiences, and dramatically lessened the positive impact they could have on our public debate at the precise time we needed it most.

Ashoka Mukpo @shokes.bsky.social · 25d

Nothing bothers them more than doing the thing they say they want you to do