University of Denver Sturm College of Law is facing increased scrutiny in Colorado and California following written inquiries and regulatory referrals concerning donor-fund governance and undisclosed baseline assumptions underlying the law school’s public-facing claims of impact, public benefit, protection, and well-being.
The matter arose after a complaint submitted in early 2026 through www.FalseClaimsChecker.org led to written inquiries concerning donor-fund governance and the omission of baseline assumptions in public-facing “impact,” “public benefit,” “protection,” and “well-being” claims connected to the Animal Law Program and Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.
According to The Fair Start Movement, written responses from University of Denver Sturm College of Law did not resolve those concerns and instead expanded questions about donor intent, fund use, and whether public-facing institutional representations were supported by sufficiently disclosed standards. The Fair Start Movement states that it is now formally investigating the matter and has asked the Federal Trade Commission, as well as government bodies in Colorado and California to investigate as well.
The donor-fund issue became concrete when A. F. Rothschild, PhD, Director of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, sought accounting from University of Denver Sturm College of Law regarding the use of funds connected to the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies for two years without an on-point response.
Watch this video to learn more.
Then only after University of Denver Sturm College of Law Dean Bruce P. Smith was contacted by The Fair Start Movement, Smith wrote to Rothschild in February 2026 that over $90k in “charges to the Fund were made during 2023-24 to support the salary, benefits, and travel” related to the engagements regarding proposed equine-related initiatives. Smith further wrote: “Ultimately, SCOL and CCES could not reach alignment regarding programmatic priorities. Thus, additional equine-related work conducted pursuant to the commitment has been paused. No charges have been made to the Fund since August 2024, and a balance of $158,403.24 remains.”
According to donor materials provided by University of Denver Sturm College of Law and other documentation, the total award amount from The Center for Contemporary Equine Studies was $250,000. The obvious question is why has the “paused” $150k not been returned or otherwise formally resolved for two years?
Those disclosures transformed the matter from a general concern into a concrete donor-intent and fund-governance dispute involving a named donor, a designated equine fund and unresolved questions about whether University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s public-facing institutional representations matched the actual status and direction of the funded work.
Since the matter began, University of Denver Sturm College of Law has received at least two direct written inquiries: one concerning donor-fund use and donor intent in connection with equine-designated funding raised by A. F. Rothschild, PhD, Director of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, and another from The Fair Start Movement seeking baseline clarity for public-facing benefit claims connected to the Animal Law Program and Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.
Both inquiries have received written responses from University of Denver Sturm College of Law, but the issues expanded rather than narrowed, and the matter has since reached the Colorado Attorney General, the Colorado Secretary of State, and the California Attorney General.
On February 25, 2026, University of Denver Sturm College of Law Dean Bruce P. Smith wrote that “the Animal Law Program supports a robust slate of activities, including, without limitation, scholarly research, affiliated faculty, a public event series, a certificate program, courses and externships, and the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project.”
The Fair Start Movement argues that this response did not address the narrower question it had raised: what evaluative baseline governs University of Denver Sturm College of Law’s public-facing benefit claims.
That question matters because the Program’s own Annual Report uses language such as “enhance animal protection in the United States” and “around the world for generations to come,” describes itself as “well-known in Colorado as a hub for education, advocacy, and compassion,” refers to “elevating the voices of all beyond human animals,” and claims it will “expand our impact throughout Colorado and across the nation.”
The Fair Start Movement says the underlying issue is not whether a program undertakes activity, but whether public-facing claims of impact or benefit disclose the evaluative baseline needed to interpret them. In its view, that includes what counts as benefit, what harms or costs are excluded, what populations are counted, the time horizon used for evaluation, and how uncertainty and tradeoffs are treated.
“This inquiry process has now become a formal case for Fair Start Movement and False Claims Checker,” said Suriya Khan of Fair Start Movement. “We asked a narrow question. The University replied. But the reply did not identify the baseline used for public-benefit language or the disclosure limits attached to those claims. In general, it matters when institutions seek trust, donations, and public reliance.”
Zahara Nabakooza, lead at TruthAlliance.global, decried the charade and misdirection of funding from a macro-level benefit to infants and animals together: “This is not a request for awareness campaigns or symbolic gestures. It is a demand for accountability. Governments, institutions, and global leaders must confront inequality honestly, commit resources where harm has been greatest, and measure progress transparently. Good intentions are not enough. Outcomes matter.” That would entail the school using a zero-baseline to assess value and report impact, something like the inseparable link between future human and nonhuman outcomes.
The Fair Start Movement reports that University of Denver Sturm College of Law is no longer merely in an advocacy dispute and that this matter now presents a policy-level and institutional investigative issue under familiar omission, donor-reliance, and misleading-net-impression theories reflected in Federal Trade Commission deception standards and California unfair-competition law.
The theory is grounded in established federal and California law. The FTC states that a deceptive practice can involve a material representation, omission, or practice that is likely to mislead a reasonable person in the circumstances, and the agency’s deception policy expressly focuses on the net impression created by what is said and what is left out.
California’s Unfair Competition Law defines unfair competition to include unlawful, unfair, or fraudulent business acts or practices as well as deceptive, untrue, or misleading advertising, and Business and Professions Code section 17200/17500 separately prohibits untrue or misleading statements made to induce the public to enter into obligations.
California courts have long recognized that advertising can mislead through implication and omission, including in Committee on Children’s Television, Inc. v. General Foods Corp., 35 Cal.3d 197, and that materially misleading representations tied to reliance and economic loss are actionable under California’s UCL and false-advertising framework, including in Kwikset Corp. v. Superior Court, 51 Cal.4th 310.
The Fair Start Movement says those principles are directly relevant here. In its view, University of Denver Sturm College of Law cannot seek trust, money, credibility, or public reliance through claims of “impact,” “public benefit,” “well-being,” “compassion,” or “protection” while leaving unstated the evaluative assumptions that determine what those terms mean.
“The issue in Denver is just the first of many,” said Suriya Khan, “and The Fair Start Movement is asking regulators across the country to consider baseline-disclosure guidance clarifying that public-facing net-benefit claims should disclose the baseline assumptions that determine what the claim means. The proposed disclosure structure would require statements describing what is counted as benefit, what harms or costs are excluded, the time horizon and uncertainty treatment, how outputs are expected to translate into outcomes, and what verification procedures and correction triggers apply.”
The dispute also has relevance beyond one school or one donor. The Fair Start Movement says the issues raised here may have implications for how universities, nonprofits, and advocacy programs describe public impact, outcomes, and benefit claims.
To help identify similar patterns, Fair Start is directing journalists, donors, advocates, and institutions to www.FalseClaimsChecker.org.
The tool is intended to screen public-impact claims, force baseline clarity before such claims induce reliance, and catalyze identification of similar false or omission-based claims across sectors and across the world.
About Fair Start Movement
Fair Start Movement is a public-interest initiative focused on compliance, disclosure, and governance issues in public-benefit claims. Through research, complaints, and policy advocacy, it examines whether institutions adequately disclose the assumptions and standards underlying claims of impact, benefit, protection, and related outcome-oriented representations. FalseClaimsChecker.org is one of its public-facing projects.
Media Contact Suriya Khan Fair Start Movement suriya@fairstartmovement.org 516-725-3157
Those claiming to prevent such threats – especially lawyers – used a deceptive system of moving goalposts to constantly assess progress and raise funding. But relative to the fixed standard – child/political equity – that was necessary to actually prevent the threats, the progress was being undone daily by inequitable growth – growth that benefited those lawyers and the funders backing them. In the case of those tasked with and claiming to protect animals, their work is the most easily falsifiable – dealing with the most vulnerable class of entities and the legitimacy of the system they use.
A close examination shows a cadre of lawyers creating the illusion of legitimacy for their own benefit at deadly cost to the animals they claimed to benefit, and many vulnerable humans as well.
Are you getting scammed by people claiming to do public interest work?
As an animal protection attorney I was paid for decades by wealthy foundations to create a fantasy world of progress for animals and the environment that was being easily undone, every day, by inequitable growth. That growth did more to more harm to animals than we did good, and because it was inequitable, it enriched mostly white children at deadly cost to children of color.
Attorneys like Carney Anne Nasser intentionally omitted information, for well over a decade, about the actual impacts of her work – especially in her role defining what “animal law” means as a Fellow at Harvard.
People like Nasser got paid to play the hero. But it was an illusion. On balance, Nasser did more to privilege her children, at cost to others, than help animals. Even as the climate crisis exacerbated conditions for animals and the most vulnerable, and growth killed off vastly more wildlife than humans could save, Nasser fronted as constantly protecting animals – moving the goalposts each time away from a standard that would have actually protected them in order to falsely claim victory.
Nasser, instead of dealing with animal rights in the context of the subject-level relations of reproductive rights, chose to silo the issue away from birth equity in order to triple-dip: 1) benefit from her arbitrary but very privileged national/racial/class birth positionality, 2) benefit from growth-based wealth unimpeded by the rights of future children, and 3) pretend to be an animal savior while ensuring a comfortable life for her and her children at cost to animals.
Why is that so bad? If we are to be free we have to be measurably self-determining, rather than determining of others – through things like wealth-based ecocide killing infants in the Sahel. And that first gets determined in reproductive rights policies that determine who we should be.
One can easily see this by assessing her quotes on impact in the context of growth, growth that is based on the anthropocentric and “separate but equal” reproductive rights system / baseline that creates commercialized and disenfranchising relations, rather than the legitimate fundamental baseline of “no child is worth more than another / one person, one equal and influential vote” that underlies legitimacy. Even simple AI systems can detect this, and it manifests as manufactured numbers in her claims, where the on-balance benefit to animals is easily undone by assumptions and policies – like high permissible levels of climate emissions and a commercialized and disenfranchising conception of human freedom – that undo the benefit claimed.
More specifically, Nasser helped cement the nonsensical concept of anthropocentric animal law: Animal law as the current legal system’s reference to animals, with no need to fundamentally change how we form human/animal relations to actually / on balance protect animals. But you cannot help animals on balance without accounting for their relations with humans. Helping them requires the same fundamental change children of color need – reforming fundamental illegitimacy – but that’s the last thing those who made their wealth on illegitimacy want to deal with.
Why? Inverting preemptive power from documents like constitutions to collective family planning discourses – to account for the actual creation of power relations and the lives animals will experience – nullifies all of the assumed and unlegitimated authorities and entitlements Nasser relies on to live well while others suffer.
Her work was a charade hiding wealth made at cost to the things she claimed to value. It did more to hide climate harm and other liabilities than benefit animals.
Even after multiple conversations with Fair Start activists Nasser insisted on excluding birth inequity impacts from her work – even though they are the largest driver of animal suffering. But it went beyond that – Nasser intentionally ignored obvious evidence legal system she was using was itself becoming increasing illegitimate as the average person was disenfranchised – and she chose to ignore it, currying favor with funders whose wealth was built on that illegitimacy.
Honest lawyers will derive legal systems back to and condition them on the empowerment of those subject to them – not assume entitlements to the wealth that funds them.
That deriving is the macro, upstream form of animal rights that makes micro, downstream interventions actually – or on balance – effective.
The Tell the Truth campaign allows us to admit that choosing inequitable growth policies that treat children of color as deserving less, and that disenfranchise them, did more harm to our proclaimed values than we did good.
The injunction is based on unfair competition law. Legitimate entities willing to tell the truth about their impacts – to put them in context – and to factor in the costs to ensuring all children are empowered could never compete against funders and advocates who shift their costs to infants and animals – those they claim to protect.
If it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to maintain a business model that enriches white children at deadly cost to children of color. It’s a no-brainer. Whether governments back the injunction raises a key question: Is political authority and the wealth it entitles – it national legitimacy – conditioned on the measurable empowerment of those subject to those things?
Who knew that benefits in a political system should be geared to paying the costs of others being empowered to participate in that system!? This is nutty stuff for those like Nasser.
This shows a horrible thing: In the middle of the polycrisis, wealth could buy and further false ideologies at top schools – like the idea that freedom is about “free markets” that harm animals rather than measurable political empowerment for humans which helps animals, or the idea that performative public interest work – in which the performer quietly chooses policies that undo the work on balance, and benefit them – are acceptable.
Take action: Urge Nasser, at cnasser@law.harvard.edu, to Tell the Truth and admit using an illegal baseline to asses and report her impacts on animals, and to back a legal injunction that would prohibit it.
Also contact leadership at Dillard University – kvazdeville@dillard.edu. where Nasser is employed, to urge the same.
Background:
What is Fair Start? Legitimate Public Interest Work Can’t Compete Against Illegitimate Charade–Level Work. And It Does Not Have To.
Unless a person or company claiming to add value to the world can show they were evaluating and reporting by accounting for the preemptive costs of having to measurably empower all children equitably as they enter the world—and at a standard where those children could protect themselves from the climate crisis—the person or company making the claims was using an illegal Ponzi/equity-fraud standard and benefiting at deadly cost to others, mostly children of color.
Those willing to account for those costs, to legitimate political systems and engage in the most just and effective reforms possible, cannot compete with those who do not – but they don’t have to. Those benefiting from particular values must pay the costs, and limit their fundamental entitlements, if we are to ensure governance by the people.
In the middle of the Twentieth Century world leaders used the prevailing “separate but equal” standard to treat the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy, rather than political equity for all. Governments, in the wake of WW2, were supposed to use objective standards to protect the vulnerable. They did the opposite. This blocked the measurable empowerment of each child – the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of being free – and ensured a privatized, commercialized version of freedom, and unsustainable and inequitable growth that created extreme concentrations of wealth, disenfranchised citizens, and irreparable harm to the environment. It allowed those with authority, wealth and other entitlements to assume them, rather than legitimate them though protective limits on the birth-creation of power relations.
Today women “liberated” by this reproductive rights regime, as well as their children, are dying in growth-based heat waves, with no way to use their political influence to save themselves or their children. Worse yet, wealthy funders benefiting from that inequitable growth masked it for decades with the downstream charade interventions discussed above, and moving goalposts / low standards for defining terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable” designed to enrich their own children at deadly cost to others.
Law and justice were meant to eliminate arbitrary measures and outcomes – and yet with equity fraud, these systems start with a random “parental bodily autonomy” birth lottery ensuring inequitable and unsustainable growth that overshot ecological, political, and social thresholds.
Those using the Ponzi/equity-fraud standard are subject to legal and other action to block the use of the standard because all political authority derives from government having to empower those subject to its authority. Documents like constitutions don’t constitute free nations – communications that form empowering relations, including all birth and development, do. Our value assessments and impact reporting constitute such communications and situate us into a system of protective obligation, or they do not.
Illegal baselining assumes children deserve what they are born with, even as growth degrades their prospects, rather than what rights and political legitimacy require. There’s a false assumption behind most public interest work: That our political obligations are constituted by documents like constitutions instead of being constituted, or not, as children come into the world. Public interest work is performative if it is based on this assumption.
And if it’s illegal not to hire persons of color, it’s illegal to systematically enrich white children at deadly and disenfranchising costs to children of color. The largest driver of suffering in the world is the discounting of future life, enabled by a lack of a protective threshold/relations beneath which no child should be born, achieved through “legitimations” – funded collective family planning, entitlements to ensure equal opportunity, and parenting delay and assured readiness.
Will courts go along? Given that their authority derives from the empowerment obligation, they should.
There is a huge class of professionals – lawyers, academics, fundraisers, politicians, reporters/editors, etc. – funded by the wealth created through birth inequity. That wealth, more than the objective values that underlie public interest work, determine outcomes.
They benefit from this high-stakes birth-lottery system, free-ride triple-dipping on birth positionality and omitting the impacts of inequitable growth from the fantasy world of value and impact they create.
The triple-dipping involves the:
– privileges of birth (nationality, race, generational, etc.),
– growth income unimpeded for decades by equity and empowerment-based reproductive rights, and
– charade public-interest heroism that omits countervailing impacts of growth.
Out them with one question: Your value and impact is relative to what? The answer will not be relative to illegitimacy: one person, one equal and influential vote:
Those maintaining and benefitting from the illegitimacy – the lack of a protective check on the birth-creation of power relations. Their lives are worth no more than the infants dying in climate-crisis heat waves caused by the wealth bubble they helped create. They accept a growth arc based on entitlements that contradict their own values, assuming as permissible high levels of harm in a list of variables (this claimant takes credit for “saving animals” for decades), rather than zeroing out the harm – an assumption that quintuple or more discounts the harm caused by birth inequity.
In the context of animal liberation, the macro framework is disfavored by funders because while food law and even criminal law reforms can ensure good media that support existing entitlements and investments, the family law and other reforms that the macro entails pose potential preemptive liability for value assessments and impact reporting around micro, downstream-level interventions undone by macro, upstream-level forces that illegally enriched some at deadly cost to others.
Under our lead counsel, Esther Afolaranmi, the TruthAlliance.org and Fair Start Movement will run a Tell the Truth and Commit (TTTC) campaign backed by legal, grassroots and corporate certification efforts that divides binarily between those who admit use of the standard and commit to changing it, and scammers who do not and instead engage in hypocritical babble and value-signaling devoid of legitimating obligations—many of whom have used the standard for decades. The focus is not on the claims, but the numbers behind the claims.
We admit: We were part of a system of unsustainable birth inequity that did more harm to our own values than we did to further them, and we owe the victims compensation. We admit we omitted key facts, and back universally applicable injunctions against doing so as a matter of political legitimacy
The TTTC campaign leverages the costs of tens of millions of deaths from equity fraud to enjoin the use of the standard as unfair competition inside key public and private institutions in the U.S. and Europe. These institutions are using it to assume entitlements rather than legitimate them, and to pursue growth that slowly dilutes and commercializes the average level of political influence. Some of the institutions actually participated in the creation of the standard and constantly framed their public interest work as charity or investment, rather than the obligation of deriving entitlements from the measurable empowerment of others.
The injunction would limit entitlements and other benefits by the true or objective costs to others, based on things we all value—like safe temperatures, equality of opportunity, and limits on who has control over what we experience. TTTC is a truth and reconciliation process involving universal admission of our having benefited deadly costs to others based on equity fraud.
Fair Start is Working to End the Corrupt Public Interest Charade That Created Trump With a Yes-or-No Campaign on How We Measure Impact.
Micro, Downstream Interventions Are Being Undone by Macro, Upstream Growth and Birth-Based Political Inequity, Illegally Discounting Future Lives and Creating Liability for the Deaths of Millions.
Fair Start Movement and TruthAlliance.global offer the most just and effective social justice reforms possible today—but only if we ask the right question to understand why. When someone makes a value assessment or impact claim, we must ask: relative to what? What is the baseline?
If someone claims a beneficial public impact, they should be able to account for how they factor in the variable of children entering the world, relative to what children’s rights and equity require. If they cannot, their value assessments and impact reporting may do more harm than good.
Fair Start was established by advocates who recognized a fraudulent Ponzi standard embedded in prior public-interest work.
Animal law provides a key starting point. It is both aspirational and a stark example of winner-take-all philanthropy. In the 1970s, Peter Singer advanced an illegal and fraudulent standard at the Animal Legal Defense Fund that narrowly defined animal liberation. Over five decades, that standard facilitated wealth concentration that now underwrites his Effective Altruism movement.
This standard stems from a twentieth-century power grab by wealthy families who privatized family planning to safeguard entitlements and maintain power within a coercive political system that never empowered its subjects.
These families, along with political leaders, were legally bound to adhere to a child-rights and equity standard asserting that no child is worth more than another, as outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The fundamental measure of value is infant health, wellness, and self-determination—ensuring equal political influence for each individual.
Instead, they relied on a prevailing “separate but equal” standard to disenfranchise others, excluding birth equity from valuation and reporting systems.
This twentieth-century power grab treated the act of having children as a matter of parental bodily autonomy rather than political equity. In doing so, it blocked the empowerment of each child—the measurable political equity that is a necessary condition of freedom—and ensured unsustainable, inequitable growth. The result has been extreme concentration of wealth, mass disenfranchisement, and irreparable environmental harm.
Growth is not neutral.
Growth produces political inequity and ultimately illegitimacy. World leaders pushed public interest and social justice into the object position of the sentence, enabling triple extraction—through birth positionality, growth-based profits, and charade-level philanthropy—from a system built on birth inequity.
This has forced us into a position where we benefit at deadly cost to others through increasingly diluted and commercialized versions of our values, making those values inaccessible to future generations. There is no way to prevent this harm other than preventing children from being brought into the world without sufficient resources and political equity. The system ensures children arrive without what they need, and in numbers and power relations that degrade the very conditions required for their survival and freedom.
Today, women “liberated” by this reproductive-rights regime—and their children—are dying in growth-driven heat waves, with no meaningful political influence to protect themselves. Meanwhile, wealthy funders who benefit from inequitable growth masked these harms for decades through downstream, performative interventions and weak standards for terms like “green,” “humane,” and “equitable,” enriching their own children at deadly cost to others.
This is about equity as empowerment—one’s influential share in one’s democracy. It is the political analogue of equity in a firm. What we have instead is a diluted, growth-and-inequity-commercialized version of freedom: a vote in a shopping mall rather than a town hall. The principle of one person, one equal and influential vote is the basis of national legitimacy. Today, legitimacy would require enough empowerment for future generations to block the climate and political harms we now face—and to reverse their root causes.
The most fundamental obligation is to position future generations, and ourselves with them, in this way. The only means is a constitutional discourse that accounts for these obligations and brings every child into the world above a measurable threshold of empowerment—within conditions and relations that make that empowerment real. Our words situate us in constitutional discourse. There is no such thing as a “private” equity entitlement outside it.
A broad professional class sustains the white-wealth bubble: lawyers who refuse to derive authority from empowerment because they benefit from not doing so; academics who ignore birth positionality and thereby forfeit neutrality; reporters and editors incentivized to produce ad-friendly sensationalism that omits birth-equity facts; campaigners and fundraisers who profit from downstream work rather than structural solutions. Together, they manufacture a fantasy of legitimacy and progress built on micro-level interventions that are easily undone by upstream growth and disenfranchisement.
They profit by blocking the threshold that would protect infants and animals, while pretending their downstream additions are meaningful. In doing so, they convert freedom into wealth through child abuse, disenfranchisement, ecocide, and deadly inequity. They take objective values meant for all and hoard them for themselves.
Fair Start activists watched these groups take extreme measures to hide liability, including reframing the issue as “population” in order to evade equity-based overrides.
The remedy is to confront those using this fraud—beginning with the Tell the Truth campaign—and to pursue state attorneys general complaints to prohibit the hidden, illegal, and highly harmful practices treated as permissible despite violating objective human-rights and democratic limits on power. Legal instruments alone do not constitute obligations. Bringing children into the world in a way that genuinely empowers them does.
There is also a preemptive cause of action for fraud, because governments can redefine what it means to omit information necessary for legitimate political obligation.
The Fair Start Tell the Truth (TTT) campaign is one way to do this.
Long-time animal-liberation advocate Zane McNeill recently highlighted the urgency of resisting current administration efforts to coerce higher birth rates—moves that would undo the benefits of nearly all contemporary social-justice efforts:
While opposing pronatalism is essential, it does not by itself address the power imbalance that enables such coercion. Fair Start reforms—including the Tell the Truth campaign, which prioritizes measurable #birthequity as a basis for national legitimacy—are the most just and effective path forward. This includes actions such as suing Coke/Fairlife to enjoin equity fraud.
To understand why, we must ask one question of anyone making public-interest impact claims: How are you accounting for children entering the world? What level of democratic empowerment do you require? Are children and animals being discounted and exploited at birth?
The campaign demands a simple admission: we all relied on a system with an embedded baseline error—one that dilutes votes, commercializes democratic relations, and overshoots political, social, and ecological thresholds, rather than enforcing a resourcing threshold beneath which no child should be born. Freedom and self-determination—and national legitimacy—are physically impossible without a shared language that creates measurable empowerment through equitable power relations.
The illegal standard relies on manufactured numbers, often via an XYZ analysis: out-of-context impact claims (X) are assessed against the variable of children entering the world (Y) in ways that degrade birthright conditions, producing outcomes (Z) that contradict the claims. This standard rewards micro-level “progress” that benefits the claimant while concealing macro-level losses driven by growth. Interventions conducted under such a system often did more to subjugate people of color than to advance their stated missions.
Our work uses the Tell the Truth campaign to preemptively establish legitimate obligations and to examine why some actors refuse to participate.
Leaders such as Suriya Khan, Gabby Mora, and Breeze Harper are telling the truth. Others, including Paul Shapiro, are not.
This all begins by challenging value and impact claims rooted in an illegal UN-developed standard (1948–1968) that caused the deaths of tens of millions through a colonial system of privatized reproductive rights designed to protect entitlements rather than measurably empower women and children.
This was political-equity fraud. It triggered multi-threshold overshoot and self-reinforcing feedback loops.
Our thesis is that admitting use of this system—and changing course through language itself—reorients obligation from governance toward future generations. The TTT campaign is supported by legal, certification, and grassroots efforts within Fair Start and Truth Alliance. Legitimacy is about obligation, and all our work reflects that value.
TTT is a constitutive discourse, not a document. It rests on individual choices about which models to use within institutions, recognizing that we all benefit at others’ expense. The campaign identifies non-constitutive language and impact reporting that ignores harm to infants and animals, demonstrating the need for systemic change.
To tell the truth is to admit participation in a system of unsustainable growth and inequitable birth positionality—one that has harmed our professed values more than it has advanced them.
There is no conception of freedom that does not require measurable political equity—enough influence to protect oneself from the climate crisis. At this stage of overshoot, liability outweighs charity or investment.
The TTT “legitimacy lever,” as our lead Suriya Khan describes it, redirects responsibility for the global death debt created by the “separate but equal” standard toward concrete demands—beginning in Africa and India—and leverages them through failed UN mechanisms into coordinated legal, corporate, and grassroots action in the U.S. and Europe. The goal is not merely to remove Trump by 2028, but to remove the conditions that produced him: a disembedded, isolated conception of freedom.
Omitting information required for zero-baseline legitimacy in public-impact reporting constitutes illegal unfair competition. Using illegitimate entitlements to oppress infants and animals—backed by state violence—is morally equivalent to violence itself.
Peter Singer and the Obligation to Tell the Truth
Animal law provides a key starting point. It is both aspirational and a stark example of winner-take-all philanthropy. In the 1970s, Peter Singer advanced an illegal and fraudulent standard at the Animal Legal Defense Fund that narrowly defined animal liberation. Over five decades, that standard facilitated wealth concentration that now underwrites Effective Altruism.
Singer continues today with a charade version of animal liberation, working with groups like Direct Action Everywhere while obscuring the political-equity and impact fraud that produced the current polycrisis. Claimed impacts collapse when assessed against an objective, preemptive standard.
True animal protection—subject-level reform—requires accounting for the human-animal relations formed at birth. Instead, animal advocacy focused for decades on downstream spectacle after macro-level property relations were already entrenched. Ending exploitation requires ending those relations, but doing so demands confronting racist birth inequity—the same power imbalance imposed on animals at birth.
Behavior is driven by fear of ostracism and coercion. The wealthy rely on diluted representation and state power to preserve growth economies. Leaders act as if votes are equal when they are not. In that context, preemptive self-defense—and defense of others—is justified.
Fair Start represents a permanent form of resistance to fundamental oppression, using language to define obligation, legitimacy, and protection. The first laws are those that account for our creation relative to one another and the environment. No one is above the law.
All Fair Start is, is the research conclusion that all facts are relative to values, and value and impact claims either constitute or deconstitute legitimate political systems relative to a legally required ideal of measurable empowerment. It is physically impossible to be free without a preemptive, obligatory, collective discourse of family planning ensuring all children are born above a threshold of empowerment. The Tell the Truth campaign is the closest thing to that discourse. Deconstituting legitimacy through inaccurate statements is equity fraud and subject to preemptive equity injunctions, because authority derives from constituting—from telling the truth.
What really drives behavior? Fear of ostracism and coercion. The wealthy use state violence and the threat of prosecution to control people, but few know the state operates on diluted representation necessary for growth economies that benefit the top. Leaders act as if votes are equal. We have a right to preemptive self-defense, and defense of others, in that context.
Fair Start represents a permanent, ubiquitous, and indefatigable form of resistance to fundamental oppression, using language to identify perpetrators and obligations. It clarifies who belongs in the legitimate linguistic community of obligation,entitlements-to-ensure actual or on-balance values, and protection, and who does not. All laws should be fair.The first laws are laws that account for our creation relative to others and our environment. And no one is above the law
We cannot keep calling something “progress” when it leaves children unsafe, families struggling, and the land exhausted. Freedom and legitimacy should never be given to wealthy individuals or organizations that operate under fake equity standards—standards that ignore how children are born into the world, how families survive day to day, and how the environment that sustains life is treated. Equity is not just about how much money is made. It starts much earlier with safe births, strong families, clean water, healthy land, education, and the protection of children’s lives. When these basics are ignored, the wealth that follows is not neutral. It is built by taking more than is given back.
Today, many powerful actors hide behind numbers that look impressive but tell only part of the story. These numbers leave out family reform, birth equity, and climate impact. This is not accidental. It is a choice. And that choice has consequences especially for children and communities living on the frontlines of environmental and economic harm.
Two Lives, One Broken System
Dickson’s frustration comes from what he sees every day. Children dropping out of school. Families stretched thin. Communities facing drought, pollution, and land pressure. Mothers giving birth in conditions that no one should accept. His concern is not theoretical, it is personal, urgent, and deeply human.
At the same time, Paul Shapiro’s Company is thriving within this same system.
As communities struggle, Shapiro Paul’s meat company has grown. He is now a millionaire. But this success has come at a real cost to families and children in places like Amboseli, where environmental damage, land stress, and the absence of family-centered reforms are rarely counted in profit reports. When wealth grows while children suffer and land is depleted, something is wrong. That is not development. That is equity fraud.
Fake standards make harm invisible. They allow wealth to grow while erasing:
The conditions children are born into.
The damage to land, water, and climate that families depend on.
The absence of family and birth reforms.
The long-term impact on education, health, and community survival.
When environmental destruction and family breakdown are excluded from “impact,” success becomes a performance. Injustice becomes normal.
Climate justice and family reform cannot be separated. When land is polluted or overused, families lose food, health, and stability. When families are unsupported, children become vulnerable to illness, exploitation, and early death. Ignoring this connection is not neutrality—it is participation in harm.
A Silence That Speaks Loudly
Years ago, we sent a concept note to Paul Shapiro. It focused on seeds for the future, family reform, community equity, environmental responsibility, and protecting children. There was no response. No engagement. No support. Years later, his company is flourishing. Meanwhile, Truth Alliance continues to struggle to raise funds, not because the work lacks value, but because it refuses to lie, inflate numbers, or separate profit from responsibility. Truth is harder to fund than comfort.
A Simple, Necessary Demand
Truth Alliance is not asking for charity. It is boldly asking for honesty and accountability.
We are calling on those who have benefited from broken systems to:
Acknowledge harm to families, children, and the environment
Stop hiding behind incomplete or fake standards
Measure success through climate responsibility, family reform, and child well-being
Take responsibility for wealth built on silence and extraction
Freedom without accountability is not freedom.
It is exploitation. If equity does not protect children at birth, support families, and care for the land they depend on, then it is not equity at all. And we can no longer pretend otherwise.
Our advocates have worked with several professional fundraisers over the years who systematically use a fraudulent equity and impact standard – claiming beneficial impacts for micro-level public interest work while omitting how the benefits are undone, upstream by macro-level and deeply inequitable growth. Often this is because the omission benefits those funding the work and the fundraisers they pay – e.g., alt-protein investors funding animal rights organizations that ignore the negative impact of growth on animals for example.
This fundamental form of fraud explains why the children of so many philanthropists are wealthy and thriving, and the children meant to be protected by the charities they funded are much worse off.
We are writing to begin a dialogue about the urgent need for AFP to initiate policy reforms to prevent equity and impact fraud, so that fundraising is premised on including in value assessments and reporting the largest an increasingly deleterious driver of outcomes across all philanthropic sectors: Growth.
Fair Start reforms
Fair Start reforms offer the most just and effective way to address many of today’s overlapping crises—but only if public-interest claims are evaluated using the right standard. Anyone claiming positive impact should be asked a basic question: How did your cost-benefit model account for children entering the world, and did it meet what those children’s legal rights, political equity, and national legitimacy require? In most cases, the answer is that it did not. There were no functional protections at birth, no value-based limitations of the creation of power relations to favor the vulnerable over the powerful.
Our modeling has been subject to near ten positive peer reviews.
Under current modeling, children are typically treated as economic inputs driving growth, while the ecological, political, and human costs of that growth are ignored or illegally discounted. This constitutes the use of fraudulent equity and impact standards, one that produces “free” wealth that depends on worsening conditions – especially for children of color – and contradicts the values advocates claim to hold, such as safety, equality, and sustainability. The result is continued overshoot of ecological and social thresholds that both humans and nonhumans need to survive. The wealth created by that standard, a massive concentration of mostly white wealth, today funds decoy micro-level public interest interventions that mask upstream undoing by macro growth.
Use of the standard – which derives from the maintenance of the racist “separate but equal” standard of the Twentieth Century, tucked away in reproductive rights regimes as a form of autonomy designed to gut political equity, is preempted by a variety of laws, and can be targeted as unfair competition under state law. How? Because vulnerable entities and those who represent them, like TruthAlliance.Global – can’t compete with those who use the equity fraud model. Use of that standard constitutes the ongoing subversion of racial justice and other decolonial movements, and the hiding of collective liability for the deaths of millions as the democratic disenfranchisement and climate crisis.
Anyone can spot the standard of private benefit and public costs and its manufactured numbers using an AI-based XYZ analysis where claim X is assessed for how the cost/benefit modeling accounted for what children were owed as they entered the world (high levels of permissible harm v. self-determination, or zero), the largest factor altering the X claim to in fact be Z).
When confronted with these truths by TruthAlliance.global, many have just continued, hiding collective liability for the deaths of millions, and intentionally omitting the impacts of the largest driver.
Many others are admitting they benefited from a system of illegal birth inequity, and of systematic omission in assessments and impact reporting hiding that system, that did more harm to our values than we did good. Whistleblowers are coming out around the United States to lock arms with Africans, target the fundamental driver of the climate crisis and Trump himself, using the legal system in the United States to challenge “equity and impact fraud,” or assessments and claims of public impact that ignore birth equity as the key factor, and do so to illegally enrich some children at deadly cost to others.
They target decades of misleading public interest work that assumed that some children were worth much more than others, work that was always being undone by the political inequity of growth.
For our supporters we urge specific avenues – Take action: 1) Become a whistleblower and grassroots organizer with Truth Alliance, 2) demand truth and reconciliation with our Tell the Truth campaign, 3) urge your attorney general or other law enforcement to seek a “legitimacy injunction” blocking use of the standard, and 4) back legitimacy certification for those who come forward and are willing to change accelerates.
Thanks for considering this invitation to open dialogue,
Inequitable growth and unsustainable demand have put more animals in factory farms and done more harm to vulnerable communities than ever before, as detailed here.
Child equity impacts cannot be separated from animal welfare impacts.
I now urge anyone who wants to help animals to ask one simple question of anyone claiming to do good for them: How are you accounting for children coming into the world, including ensuring their rights and equal opportunities in life? How are you ensuring a basic system of justice that does not enrich some children at deadly cost to others and undo the claimed impacts through growth?
We don’t talk about how growth and inequitable birth positionality undo the work we do because it benefits the lawyers involved – like me, and those who fund us.
A new coalition –truthalliance.global – is bringing legal actions to ensure public interest interventions account for inequitable growth in their cost/benefit assessments and impact reporting. Those who truly represent the vulnerable cannot compete against the wealth of those who omit inequitable growth as a key factor in public interest outcomes.
Rather than use an illegitimate system that starts by exploiting infants and animals, the coalition urges all to tell the truth – to state impacts in context – and legitimate systems by deriving legal authority and entitlements to wealth from the empowerment of those subject to them.
The coalition has already moved to set a standard for such disclosures at the United Nations, African Union, and with the California Attorney General, and will soon challenge decades of claims by foundations and academic institutions that hid the fact that micro-level interventions were and are being undone by macro and upstream factors benefiting some at deadly and illegal cost to others.
Want to understand the most just and effective solution to many of the world’s crises, like climate change, today?
Ask anyone proposing an intervention to tell you how they have been accounting for children as a key factor in their work. Factcheck it with AI. You will be surprised.
Inequitable growth has put more animals and children in conditions of abuse, neglect and suffering than any organization has been able to save, and that’s before we factor in compounding factors like the climate crisis, and the decline of democracy.
Measurable political equity is a necessary condition of being free, but the privatization of reproductive rights in the Twentieth Century made assuring that equity impossible. The fix is to require it as preemptive standard today, implemented through fundable birth equity standards.
No child is worth more than another.
Take Action: Engage those, like Bob Sternfels, who benefitted from a system that has killed millions to tell the truth and change course and move towards Fair Start Certification.
The core discourse to engage in the solution: “_______’s claimed value add does not account for political inequity, which is caused by our all treating children of color as deserving of less than white children, something that has for decades slowly disenfranchised at risk communities. That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes that are undoing our claimed value add to the world, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent. Use of any standard that ignores political equity means actively harming others, while slowly disenfranchising persons of color. Choose the Equity/Fair Start standard instead. Freedom is universal democratic empowerment, not exploiting arbitrary but massive differences in birth positionality and empowerment.” One is either part of a system of mutual obligation, or not, and asking these questions helps determine where others stand.
The exponential growth enabled by birth and political inequity, the absence of any protective floor for children in reproductive rights regimes, did more to harm animals than any animal protection group has done to help them.
Many animals charities assess the value they add to the world, and report beneficial impact, but relative to what standard?
Most are using the same fraudulent standard of quietly disenchanting persons of color – and undoing value, on balance – that caused the climate and inequity crises today killing millions. This is the 20th century child-inequity standard that caused the climate crisis, and subverted racial justice movements. The standard removes political equity from reproductive rights and replaces it with manufactured numbers, like high pollution thresholds and diluted representative ratios that undermine democracy. This assessment and reporting standard is fundamentally designed to illegally enrich some children at disenfranchising and deadly cost to others – mostly children of color, in violation of a long list of human and animal rights.
This is not theory. Fair Start and Truth Alliance activists have experienced organizations intentionally omitting information that would show their impacts being undone in order to avoid liability – exacerbating the risk to millions.
Under this cost/benefit standard, some get the benefits of a coercive legal system without having to pay the costs of actually empowering those subject to it. Use of this #equifraud standard hides the fact that value and impact claims and micro-level interventions taken of context, were being undone everyday by the more macro forces that have destroyed our ecologies, democracies, and freedoms. Use of that standard shifted the true costs of wealth onto infants and animals did exponentially more harm – resulting in the deaths of millions as the climate crisis accelerates, measured by values we all share – than any of us did good. There is no set of values that doesn’t begin with infant health/equity, and no legal system could actually protects animals without first accounting for the creation of their disparate power relations with humans.
Free people will always need to legitimize the power – ecological, social, and economic – others have over them, power that starts as children enter the world, and avoid a fraudulent and illegal standard that exploits children as they enter the world by removing any minimum threshold of empowerment and protection rather than paying legitimations that offset the costs of wealth.
Take Action: Before you give to any charity claiming to help animals, ask how they account for child inequity and the growth in enables.
Take Action: Join and back charities that are part of the Truth Alliance, and entity designed to block equity and impact fraud.
Take Action: Organize Truth Alliance work in your state, and urge state officials to do their job and recognize measurable political equity as the correct standard for legitimacy, and to derive and condition their authority on empowering their constituents.
“Great wealth does not shield you,” French Gates says. “I have an absurd amount of wealth and I’m doing my very best to give it away. … But what I want people to know is that I’m a human being and they may put a label on me, but that label doesn’t really define who I am. … By being my authentic self, I hope they can see, OK, she’s gone through struggles and hardship too, but come out the other side and so maybe I can as well.”
Fair Start, by contacting her foundations this week, is urging her to Tell the Truth.
All of our not accounting, in our value and impact assessments and claims, for how for children enter the world relative to what their rights require has done more harm to our values and goals than we have done to further them. This is especially so because ignoring their birthrights both violated and degraded the ecological, social, and olitical thresholds necessary for justice and national legitimacy, and treated children of color as worth exponentially fewer resources and more risk than white children, discounting their lives to enrich others through growth. This single largest driver of the crisies we see today – not paying costs of functional legal rights for the future majority, which ensures growth and demand that undoes social justice imact, an undoing which we hide through omission.
Admitting this failure as part of the process of deriving and conditioning our obligation to follow the law on understanding our self-determination in the context of others – the intergenerational freedom and justice that makes representative and consensual governance possible – is the first step towards righting this wrong and not free-riding on our birth positionality. We admit we were not accounting for children entering the world in conditions consistent with their rights and political equity, the first measures necessary for national legitimacy and the assignment of entitlements to things like wealth. This did more to hide liability than further our missions. It entailed using the same flawed value assessment and reporting model, the most basic criteria for evaluation, that caused the political and ecological crises we see today to conceal liability for them.
This step is part of preempting conflicting standards that interfere with justice, which we cannot get to without starting with intergenerational justice as we constitute future relations. A world with rich infants and dying, impoverished infants, reflects illegal exclusion and a failure to constitute legitimately. Tital liberation starts with elevating the most vulnerable, infants and the animals with whom they will share the world.
We are asking Melinda:
When you make claims of adding value and beneficial impact, how were you accounting for children entering the world relative to what their rights require and reparations for the violations of those rights?
Equitywashing comes before green or humane washing, ensuring incusive criteria to accuratey asses the latter and in ways that avoid things like a climate crisis enriching some and killing others.
There is more suffering than ever in the world today because of that standard, which evades children’s brithrights – and the need to legitimate authority and entitlements via legitimacy thresholds – to instead ensure cheap labor and consumer demand. The rich were playing both sides, funding the industry and those who jumped in to say they were opposed.
This is not population. This is not something different – a different object – from you or anyone else, at all. It’s the orientation of the collective subject-pronoun, the obligated “we,” in our language.
This omissive standard risks millions of lives, will cost businesses trillions of dollars, and its use constitutes the fraudulent withholding of equity reparations. Using this standard makes it impossible to meet our commitments, which imply context, and the protecting of key social, ecological and political thresholds.
Much of the wealth in the world today was made at cost to, and in violation of, children’s birth and development rights, including to political equity (or equal offets relative to zero). This illegal shifting of costs and degrading of the threshold of self-determination continued well after it was clear we’ve been in overshoot of the ecological, social and political metrics/thresholds that frame those rights.
Those who hold wealth did not create value. They benefited from the violation of children’s birthrights to move costs, converting democracy into something more commercial, rather than legitimating their wealth and the state authority protecting it.
Who created Trump and Musk? Use of the illegal standard described here shows liberals caring more about the free money coming from their growth-based investmemnts than values, values ike moderate temperatures, access to water and nature, participatory democracy, equal opportunity etc.
Our first hurdle is to overcome the idea that having kids is just about the freedom of the parents. It’s also about the freedom of the child and the community they form. And that second freedom is unique because all authority to govern and to own wealth first derives from the inclusion of those subject to the governance or wealth as free and equal persons, with one person/one vote or equal self-determination.
But by 1968, governments had used the standard – which omits how children entering the world change our claimed impacts – to take equity out of reproductive rights systems so that inclusion never occurred. Instead, the illegal discounting of infants’ and animals’ rights, economic growth became the standard in a shell/ponzi scheme that took one’s freedom taken out of one’s birth positional context.
They assumed rather than legitimated their authority and entitlements, and by treating reproductive rights as based on parental whim rather than children’s rightr, power relations became subjective/commercial. The fundamental criteria use to evaluate – our rules – failed to evade the climate crisis because people were effectively excluded, bu growth and inequity, from making those rules.
Justice was taken out of where the power differentials, especially in the long run, were being made the greatest. This was equity fraud, avoiding protections inherent in the overriding right to democratic equity by only applying protections after children entered the world, in band-aid fashion, rather than before.
This was a power grab, where governments just assumed authority and entitlements without actually legitimating them through rights.
This meant zero functional protections for infants as they entered the world, and the animals they would impact. That “population” is the closest common concept to this shows how deep the subversion runs. There were two standards: An illegitimate one designed to enrich wealthy white children that assumed governmental authority and entitlements to wealth and the legitimate standard of actually including children of color that was passed over.
This gutted what Dr. Breeze Harper called the primacy of Black birth equity, which benefited some children at deadly cost to others through unsustainable and inequitable growth. Operating outside of those rights, those parameters, harms others. The standard, using manufactured numbers, treats children of color as deserving exponentially fewer resources and more risk, including the violence inherent in unrepresentative government.
We would and should ostracize anyone who refused to hire black people. Why not identify, reform or if they cannot be reformed, ostracize anyone backing largely old white make billionaires whose wealth is being made at deadly cost to millions of black children, wealth that could be moved to still save lives? There is a bright line test for this sort of racist, based on whether one supports universal birth equity or not, now pending before the United Nations.
The standard allowed public interest organizations to maintain demand for products and cheaper labor, simultaneously undoing upstream the impacts they claimed to be making downstream through decoy, symbolic or charade-like interventions that used wealth made at cost to rights and objective values, to force attention on the symptoms and not the cause. By creating a fantasy world of change being undone daily by birth inequity, philanthropists were laid the groundwork for the threats our democracies now face.
The omission of daily undoing, through inequitable growth, is the subversion.
There is no such thing as an anthrocentric animal rights activist, and macro animal liberation requires equity reparations for future families that restore nature. Without macro animal personood, at a subject level of our thinking and commuciations, micro acts of animal protection becomes a charade.
It’s not about intent, but rather than consequences of our actions, and the language – using words like “humane” for a system increasingly causing suffering – under which we acted.
The wealth derived from that subversion today via foundations and otherwise funds media, nonprofits, academics (who were never neutral because they never accounted, as a default requirement for benefitting from the system, for their birth positionality), etc. who free ride on the birth lottery and continue to make false claims to protect the wealth. But we can’t use the same fundamentally illegal standard that caused the climate crisis and allowed generations of illegal wealth to compound in order to evade liability for it — that’s fraud. And the constitutional language that resolves it will be accessible to all, not owned by some. Would we have to go to court to get a decision as to the overriding nature of birth equity? The court’s authority derives from it.
The subversion took the idea of freedom, or autonomy, outside of one’s equity in one’s democracy and ability to influence political outcomes. But there is a first right to representative or consensual governance through inclusion and empowerment. Government can’t make up their own authority, including to define fraud in the basic allocation of costs and benefits, and entitle wealth to whom they choose. This is not about capitalism or socialism. This is about legitimacy and illegitimacy and the obligation to derive national sovereignty from individual sovereignty.
One way to tell the story involves abortion policy
The illegal standard, even by the most liberal assessments, treats terminating a pregnancy as autonomy for the woman, even if she dies months later in a climate crisis heat wave because she could not afford air conditioning. could not influence her political system to save herself, and did not have levels of trust to access her neighbor’s air conditioning, and was positioned that way because under fake “efficiency” standards she was treated as an economic input, etc.
The victim would have been taught and likely assumed that she had just been unlucky in her being born without wealth, when in fact she would have had the right to derive her obligation to the political system and condition her compliance with the law, on the state reversing that state of affairs, which derived from a very specific policy decision dating back to the 1960s. She was never free because she was never empowered, and in that situation, there is little reason to follow the rules. That is what commercialized/privatized/diluted freedom, and consumerism as social justice, and degraded democracy look like. Fundamental causation is existential, and her birth exclusion was the unjust cause of all she experienced. Any lesser account makes assumptions that hides things.
The subversion and standard enabled entities through their positionality to define and use terms like “sustainable,” green,” and “humane” around the needs of wealthy white children and their trusts, creating a fantasy world of good being undone daily by deadly inequitable growth at deadly cost to countless children of color.
But it is physically impossible to be free, as in objectively self-determining as opposed to other-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to first ensure that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that equally offset their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position like nature/the nonhuman world. Legitimacy is a physical state of capacity to have consensual representative government derived from how we relate to one another.
Representative governance, and things like entitlement to wealth, derive from a legitimate legal system in which people are first obligated to one another, which is what it means in a constitution to say “we the people.” Our first obligations are to each other, in the creation at birth of the power relations between us. Ensuring our obligations to children are how we fist become politically obligated to one another, unless one gives up the idea of government by the people and consensual governance. We don’t get to maximize welfare through economic growth and massive inequality, at cost of self-determination, because that latter value is what is necessary to legitimate the former and subject it to consensual governance.
The subversion hid this fact.
If we do not agree to invest enough in children’s birth and development conditions, enough to offset their capacity to influence others relative to a neutral or zero position, then constituents are not being empowered equally, and representatives and officials do not represent us at all. Our values are operating at the object-level of our communication, where they can be undone, rather than at a subject level that reflects the creation of power relations. Animal personhood and liberation, in a macrosense, works at the subject level. That can be reversed, as discussed below, by collective family planning systems. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to plan for one.
This ensures a preemptive standard to avoid governments hiding their own liability for actual harms associated with the climate crisis, governments whose work is preempted by the need to first legitimize ther authority. A fair start in life for all children is the first law, and no one is above the law.
There’s a counterfactual world, a legal world in which the subversion didn’t happen, in which wealth was not made illegally at cost to children’s and others’ rights. That is measure of reparative justice owed. Things like racial justice and animal liberation align once we abandon the standard that allows us to violate – in creation – the rights of others, exploiting children and animals by bringing the latter in beneath the threshold of things we owe them.
Things like AI governance reforms around better base code that ensures no obligation to follow the law without being empowered to change it, and using crowdsourcing for the enforcement of life-saving and self-defensive equity reparations to empower can change this. For example, those negotiating the Paris Agreement on climate assumed authority and entitlements rather than actually legitimating them – a move that will kill countless innocent victims. Telling the Truth resolves this.
We can’t get to justice from injustice or obligations from others by first violating our obligations to them. Change starts with the most vulnerable, infants and animals, and their rights to be measurably free.
Telling the truth is a constitutive discourse, the only means to a just and legitimate future.
We ask these questions of anyone claiming to add value to the world:
How were you accounting for your work being undone each day by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back and condition it on ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems decades ago to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?
The illegal standard is designed to hide deadly costs and liability.
And the preemptive standard, as both a means of interpreting law and actually creating obligation to future children, requires the disclosure of that information through a truth and reconciliation process meant to ensure the full payment of damages by creating a situation where children are capable of forming self-determining communities.
Changing away from the subversion and its standard, reorienting by Telling the Truth in response to the questions above, could save millions of lives and trillions of dollars while constituting a just future through a discourse that includes all in the ongoing formation of a protective social contract. Children entering the world relative to standard of self-determination or sovereignty is the only source from which governmental sovereignty and authority can derive, including authority to assign property rights to wealth. The Children’s Rights Convention, replaces national sovereignty as the basis for international law because the latter derives from the former. Otherwise, you are using a false premise where one go from adult reproductive rights to protect autonomy, to adult human rights to protect autonomy, with children’s rights thrown in – as abandaid after the fact – rather than as a check on the creation of power relations.
If we want to be in a legitimate political system, we need to first account for our existence, our birth-based positionality, and privilege, or we cannot be truly self-determining, deriving governmental authority, entitlements to wealth, and obligation to follow the law on measurable and equitable empowerment for all as children enter the world. If we can’t fully account for our birth-based position in the social contract, we fall outside its scope of obligation – why would we be collectively obligated to those who cannot account? Tell the Truth devides the free from the unfree.
Elevating infants and animals enables authority, the rule of law, and justice. Anything else is too late.
Take Action
Fair Start, by contacting her foundations this week, is urging her to Tell the Truth.
