Kelli Klymenko

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Artist · Photographer · Writer (he/him) — We Have Friends Everywhere ✊🏼
Sedona, Arizona
Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦🇺🇸
Substack → wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com
kelliklymenko.com • sedonaincense.com • sedonamagic.printify.me Kelli Klymenko is an artist, storyteller, photographer, teacher, yogi, husband, father, science aficionado and free thinker - experiencing life in one of the most inspiring and pict

uresque places on earth with his fabulous wife and children.

“Remember: grow; learn; conserve; preserve; create; question; educate; change; and free your mind.” – KelliKlymenko.com

09/03/2026

When One Lever Fails, Pull Another

This week, House Republican leadership brought Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs’s constitutional amendment to the floor. It would have permanently fixed the Supreme Court at nine justices.

It failed.

But look at what they were trying to do.

The Constitution doesn’t require nine Supreme Court justices. Congress has changed the size of the Court repeatedly throughout our history, reaching ten justices in 1863 before settling on nine in 1869. Biggs’s amendment would have taken that authority away from future Congresses and put the number nine into the Constitution.

And Republicans tried to do that while benefiting from the 6–3 conservative majority they helped create through one of the most shameless political reversals of our lifetime.

When Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland in 2016, Election Day was nearly eight months away. Mitch McConnell refused to give him a confirmation vote because voters supposedly deserved a voice in who filled the vacancy.

Four years later, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed eight days before Election Day.

There is no principled way to reconcile those two decisions. Republicans used whichever rule gave them the seat.

And now look at what else is happening. Republicans are pushing the SAVE Act and new proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting. The Trump administration is trying to change how mail ballots are handled through the Postal Service and appealing when courts keep stopping it. Trump has repeatedly tried to expand presidential control over elections that the Constitution largely entrusts to the states.

This is why I don’t find individual failures particularly reassuring anymore. Especially when some of these efforts are useful even when they fail. A losing vote can still become an election ad, a fundraising pitch or another manufactured grievance.

The pattern isn’t that Republicans always get what they want. They don’t. The pattern is that when one route closes, they quickly look for another.

The same instinct keeps appearing: find the lever that works.

Biggs’s amendment was another lever. This one didn’t work.

The question is what they pull next.

09/02/2026

Desperate People Do Desperate Things

I have distrusted Republican politics for most of my life.

I was a teenager during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. I watched trickle-down economics sold as prosperity while deficits exploded. I watched Republican administrations sell tax cuts and fiscal responsibility while adding enormously to the debt, followed again and again by Democrats inheriting the consequences and trying to repair them.

But I never thought I would watch one of America’s two major political parties become willing to sacrifice democracy itself rather than risk losing power.

Maybe I was naive.

Or maybe I knew it was possible, but knowing something is possible is different from watching it happen.

Look at the behavior now: the SAVE Act. Attacks on voting and elections. Attacks on the press. Efforts to expand presidential power and weaken the institutions capable of restraining it. And now a Republican proposal to amend the Constitution to permanently fix the Supreme Court at nine justices while Republicans hold a 6–3 conservative majority.

The pattern is simple: keeping the power.

If persuasion isn’t enough, change the rules. If the rules aren’t enough, change who can vote. If an institution might someday be changed by someone else, lock it down while you control it.

On July 26, 2024, Donald Trump told Christian voters, “Get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore.” He told them they would have it “fixed” so they wouldn’t have to vote again.

Democracy is not something you “fix” so people no longer need to vote.

Sometimes you lose.

You lose an election. You lose a majority. You lose a court case. You lose an argument. Then you make a better argument. You persuade more people. You organize. You run again.

Political power in a democracy is supposed to be temporary because ultimately it doesn’t belong to the people holding office.

It belongs to us.

Desperate people do desperate things.

And desperate people with the power of the United States government at their disposal can do enormously dangerous things.

We should be paying very close attention to what they’re trying to lock into place while they still can.

09/01/2026

I write every day.

About democracy. Nature. Humanity. The future. And whatever else seems worth understanding.

Some days that means disappearing into court decisions, history, government documents, and the machinery of power. Other days it means looking up at the Milky Way, wandering through the desert, or paying attention to what’s blooming, flying, crawling, or growing outside.

Because all of it matters. The world we’re trying to understand. The democracy we’re trying to protect. The lives we’re trying to live. The future we’re trying to build.

Nearly everything I publish on my Substack, We Have Friends Everywhere, is free to read and share. No outrage machine. Just independent writing, research, photography, curiosity, and a belief that understanding the world is still worth the effort.

If you haven’t subscribed, please subscribe. And if you’re able to become a paid supporter, you help keep this work independent and free for everyone else.

We really do have friends everywhere. ✊🏼

Link in bio.

09/01/2026

The president is not the editor in chief.

Donald Trump has spent years calling journalists liars. Report something he doesn’t like: fake news. Ask a question he doesn’t like: dishonest reporter. Publish something inconvenient: enemy of the people.

We all know the routine.

But something more dangerous happens when the president invokes federal power against journalists whose reporting he dislikes.

On Sunday, Trump said NBC’s Kristen Welker should be reported to the FCC for “rebuke or punishment” after she described his political endorsements as mixed.

Not a correction. Not a rebuttal. Punishment. Never mind the fact that she wasn’t wrong.

The FCC is not the president’s editorial department. The First Amendment doesn’t contain an exception for reporting that makes the president angry.

And the instinct isn’t new. Trump has long tried to control information he didn’t want made public through lawsuits, nondisclosure agreements, payments for silence and “catch and kill” arrangements.

The tactic changed depending on what power was available to him.

Now he has the federal government.

And it’s impossible to separate this from the way Trump has treated women for decades. An Axios analysis found his attacks on female reporters were often more personal than those on men, frequently targeting their intelligence or appearance.

The details change. The entitlement doesn’t.

When women challenge Trump, he has repeatedly attacked their intelligence, appearance, competence or character. With female journalists, the woman asking the question becomes the target.

And now one of those women should, according to the president, be reported to a federal agency for punishment.

That isn’t just misogyny. It’s misogyny backed by power.

Trump can complain—and he does—constantly. What he can’t do is transform disagreement with journalism into grounds for government retaliation.

The president is not the assignment editor. The FCC is not his corrections desk. The federal government is not his personal enforcement arm.

Facts don’t require presidential approval. Journalism doesn’t require presidential permission.

08/31/2026

On January 31, people gathered at a Minneapolis public library to discuss peaceful protest, de-escalation, safety marshals and sit-ins.

Undercover federal agents were in the room.

Then one of those agents approached a participant and offered something else. He said he worked in construction. He could build things that might help groups interested in more “direct action.” Going to jail didn’t bother him.

The people organizing the meeting were discussing how to protest peacefully.

The person behaving like an agitator was working for the United States government.

This wasn’t an isolated encounter. DHS agents infiltrated meetings in churches, schools, libraries, parks and union spaces. They entered private Signal chats, secretly recorded conversations, photographed participants, collected license-plate information and mapped relationships among political groups.

The operation had a name: Operation Puppet Master.

This is how the machinery works.

First, create the enemy.

Call political opposition dangerous. Call activists agitators. Call dissent extremism. Tell the public you’re going after terrorists. Then expand the definition of who belongs inside that category.

Once people have been taught that their neighbors are dangerous enough, extraordinary treatment begins to look ordinary.

We’ve seen this before. The Soviet security state infiltrated dissidents. The FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltrated political organizations, civil-rights groups and antiwar movements.

Apparently we need the lesson again.

A government doesn’t have to outlaw assembly if it can make people afraid to assemble.

The First Amendment can remain beautifully intact on paper while people become afraid to exercise it.

Investigate actual crimes. Prosecute actual violence.

But peaceful political organizing is not terrorism. Opposition to government policy is not terrorism.

Dissent is not terrorism.

The enemy has to come before the repression.

That’s why the lie matters. That’s why the infiltration matters. And that’s why recognizing the machinery is not enough.

We need to dismantle it.

08/30/2026

These Are Our Forests.

I photographed these ponderosa pines in Coconino National Forest, just outside Flagstaff, Arizona.

At first glance, a forest can look like a collection of individuals.

It isn’t.

Beneath the soil, fungi form intimate partnerships with tree roots, helping plants obtain water and nutrients while receiving carbon produced through photosynthesis. Above ground, the relationships multiply. Trees change temperature and moisture beneath their canopies. Fallen wood becomes habitat and eventually soil. Insects feed birds. Animals move seeds. Fire can recycle nutrients and create conditions for new life.

A forest isn’t simply trees standing beside one another.

It is relationship.

And somehow, confronted with all of this complexity, we keep finding men capable of seeing only what can be extracted from it.

Reduce a forest to a spreadsheet and the living system disappears. Trees become timber. Land becomes acreage. Protection becomes an obstacle to profit.

The question becomes: What can we get out of it?

That’s not stewardship. It’s extraction.

And now even Yosemite is being treated as something to exploit.

The Trump regime is considering a land exchange that would transfer a narrow strip of Yosemite National Park to private ownership, providing road access to private property beside the park.

Land preserved for the American people is being treated as though the person temporarily occupying the White House is managing his own real-estate portfolio.

But we are not tenants in Donald Trump’s America.

He is the temporary tenant.

There is never enough in a worldview built around extraction because extraction has no natural stopping point.

A finite planet does.

These are our forests.

Not ours because we have the right to consume them.

Ours because, for this brief moment in an enormously longer story, they have been entrusted to us.

We owe the future more than whatever we can extract from the present.

08/29/2026

Our greatest strength may be something we’ve been taught to underestimate.

The men attempting to dominate everyone want us to believe that we’re broken.

But we’re not the broken ones.

What’s broken is an ideology that still believes domination is strength: toxic masculinity, contempt for empathy, worship of wealth, obsession with hierarchy and the need to decide who belongs above and who belongs beneath.

But power over someone isn’t the only kind of power.

There is power with each other.

Nature has been teaching us this forever. Nothing exists alone. Soil, fungi, roots, insects, water, sunlight, decay, birth, migration, adaptation—the living world is relationship upon relationship upon relationship.

A forest isn’t diminished because its organisms depend upon one another. An ecosystem doesn’t survive because one organism conquers everything else. Life survives through extraordinary webs of competition and cooperation, reciprocity and interdependence.

Science doesn’t diminish that wonder for me, either. Science deepens it. Critical thinking doesn’t make the universe less beautiful. Understanding it makes the wonder larger.

And compassion doesn’t make us weak.

It may be one of the most powerful things our species ever learned to practice.

The people selling domination as strength want us exhausted, isolated, suspicious and afraid. Isolation reinforces the illusion that we are alone, that nobody understands us and nobody will stand beside us. They want us fighting horizontally while power accumulates vertically.

You can see it in the toxic communication that has become performative among some men: the belittling, mocking and tearing down of others, as though contempt itself were evidence of strength.

I reject all of it.

I believe in evidence, curiosity, this planet and dignity. I believe our differences make the world more interesting, not more dangerous.

They haven’t broken us.

We’re still capable of caring. Learning. Wonder. Building power together instead of demanding power over one another.

We’re stronger than that.

Not over each other.

With each other.

08/28/2026

We shouldn’t have to live like this.

This was a difficult week to write. Not because I couldn’t find the words. I found plenty of them. The problem was what I kept finding underneath them.

Power without restraint. Entitlement without consent. Expertise pushed aside for loyalty. Institutions treated like possessions. Victims expected to accept unanswered questions. Women and girls treated as though access to their photographs somehow grants access to their bodies.

By yesterday afternoon, after hours spent reading about men using artificial intelligence to manufacture sexual images of women who never consented to any of it, I was fu***ng angry.

I still am.

But the more I sat with that anger, the more I realized that anger isn’t really the main issue.

We shouldn’t have to be this angry. We shouldn’t have to live like this.

We shouldn’t have to wake up every morning wondering what fresh cruelty, threat, humiliation, constitutional violation or abuse of power happened overnight. We shouldn’t have to devote this much of our finite lives to one man’s grievances, appetites and relentless need for admiration.

We know who Donald Trump is. He told us long before he returned to the White House and long before he rode down that ridiculous escalator. We all heard the recording in which he described fame as permission to take sexual liberties with women. We know about the 34 felony convictions. We know about the E. Jean Carroll verdicts. We know about his documented relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and the unanswered questions that remain in an investigation that still has survivors demanding accountability and investigators demanding records.

None of this was ever hidden from us.

And yet here we are.

Trump is surrounded by people willing to enable him, flatter him and hand him more and more power. Too many are spectacularly unqualified for the authority they’ve been given.

Competence matters. Expertise matters. Experience matters.

And somehow loyalty has become the only true qualification.

And that should make every one of us angry.

The full Weekly Reflection is at We Have Friends Everywhere.

08/27/2026

Progress Without Consent. We gave old forms of abuse extraordinary new power.

One of the first things people figured out how to do with AI was digitally sexualize women without their consent.

Not imaginary women. Real women.

On New Year’s Eve, Brazilian musician Julie Yukari posted an ordinary selfie. Strangers took it and used Grok, Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot, to manufacture sexualized versions of her that never existed.

All she did was post a photograph. Strangers asked the machine to violate her. It complied.

The technology is new. The violation isn’t.

Women have been sexualized, objectified and humiliated as a means of exercising power over them for centuries. Technology didn’t invent patriarchy. Men did.

AI simply gave that abuse extraordinary new reach.

Researchers found almost 35,000 publicly downloadable AI models designed to create deepfakes, downloaded nearly 15 million times since late 2022. Ninety-six percent targeted women.

When Grok’s image-editing tools became widely available, Reuters watched just ten minutes of public activity and counted 102 attempts to sexualize photographs. Most targeted young women. Some involved possible minors.

Then came the outrage. The investigations. And eventually the safeguards.

Guardrails were always possible. They simply weren’t there to begin with.

Minnesota finally drew a line. Its first-in-the-nation law targeting commercial AI “nudification” tools passed 197–1.

xAI sued.

In steps the United States Department of Justice.

DOJ supported xAI’s challenge, raising concerns about federal AI policy and economic competitiveness.

Think about that.

A person is sexually violated without consent, and somehow the urgent question becomes whether protecting her interferes too much with an AI company or America’s race to dominate the industry.

Whose freedom are we protecting?

The image may be fake. The violation is real.

Technological capability doesn’t create moral permission.

Artificial intelligence didn’t create misogyny. Men did.

And we don’t consent to its automation.

08/26/2026

The Epstein story was never supposed to end with one dead predator and one convicted accomplice.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison.

And apparently we’re supposed to accept that as the end of the story.

We don’t.

Maxwell was convicted because a jury found that she helped Epstein recruit and sexually abuse underage girls. Epstein’s death didn’t erase what happened.

There were victims. There was a trafficking and abuse operation. At least one accomplice was convicted.

So where are the rest of the investigations?

Evidence matters. Which is exactly why someone should be following it.

Earlier this year, Todd Blanche said DOJ had reviewed the Epstein files and found “nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody.” He later said DOJ was investigating leads provided by Epstein’s victims.

Then investigate them.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has reopened an investigation involving Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. His state is now suing DOJ for unredacted federal records it says are necessary to investigate possible crimes.

New Mexico also created a bipartisan Survivors’ Truth Commission with subpoena power.

Attorney and journalist Katie Phang is still fighting DOJ in federal court over compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. A federal judge has ordered DOJ to address withheld and redacted records and provide unredacted material for court review.

Yet we’re supposed to be satisfied that the files have been fully reviewed.

That doesn’t add up.

This is about people who were sexually exploited and abused.

The survivors are asking for accountability. New Mexico is asking for evidence. A federal judge is reviewing DOJ’s redactions.

And still, the message from Washington is to move on.

No.

Follow the evidence. Show us the investigative work. Protect the survivors. Protect legitimate privacy.

But don’t expect the public to become exhausted enough to stop asking.

That’s not going to happen.

We will not forget.

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http://kelliklymenko.com/, http://wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com/

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