Special Reports – The Rest of the World Report

The Rest of the World Report | The Export

Before there was a Jesus or a Mohammed on the African continent, there were gods. The Hijra of India collected taxes in Mughal courts. The Mexica god Xochipilli presided over sexuality alongside flowers and music. The British came and wrote the laws. The laws stayed when the colonizers left.
Ghana’s Parliament just passed a bill criminalizing same-sex identity. Uganda’s carries the death penalty. Senegal doubled its prison sentence. Burkina Faso. Mali. A wave is moving across Africa.
The laws being defended as African tradition were written by British colonial administrators. The theology underwriting them was brought by missionaries. And the Americans now helping defend them — Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, Family Watch International, MassResistance, World Congress of Families — built their movement on a religion that was itself imposed on Africa by force.
A Massachusetts Christian nationalist organization coordinated strategy with a Senegalese Islamic network to pass legislation in a Muslim-majority country. They are now running anti-LGBTQ youth clubs in Ghanaian secondary schools using American-produced materials.
“The transnational pro-family movement has reached new heights in terms of their level of influence now that Trump is in office.” — Haley McEwen, author of “The US Christian Right and Pro-Family Politics in 21st Century Africa,” Reuters, March 2026.
This is not a story about Africa. It is a story about what America exports when it loses at home.

The (faux) Indignation of People Who Know What They Said

Outrage is a resource. It is deployed selectively, against targets chosen for maximum political effect, by people who have demonstrated repeatedly that they are not bound by the standard they are invoking.

The Rest of the World Report | Special Report

The US spends more on healthcare than any peer nation. It ranks last on outcomes. 26 million people have no coverage at all. And millions more are enrolled in programs they don’t recognize by name — and have voted to cut.

The Rest of the World Report | Saturday, May 10, 2026

The maps. The voter roll purges. The ICE uncertainty. The enforcement vacuum. The certification layer. The enthusiasm data. The turnout arithmetic. The geography of suppression. The international frame. And the plaintiff who brought the case that ended sixty years of voting rights protection — a man who has called American elections rigged.
The answer to the question “what does it take for November 2026 to reflect what Americans actually want?” is in this report. It is specific. It is uncomfortable. It does not tell you what to do. The facts do that work on their own.

The Rest of the World Report | Saturday, May 2, 2026

The Supreme Court didn’t strike down the Voting Rights Act on April 29. It did something more durable: it left the law on the books and emptied it. The Special Report is live at restoftheworldreport.org — and the inaugural episode of the Rest of the World Podcast drops tomorrow.

The Rest of the World Report | Special Report

April 25, 2026 THE CEASEFIRE CLAUSE Self-Defense Carve-Outs, Ceasefire Violations, and Who Gets to Decide On the morning of November 27, 2024, a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect at 4 a.m. local time. Hours later, Israeli forces fired on civilians returning to their homes in the southern Lebanese town of Khiam. The […]

The Rest of the World Report | Special Report

Space Travel Benefits Us All Published Day 44 | Monday, April 13, 2026 When I posted about Artemi II returning I was surprised by some of the pushback I received. So I decided to illustrate the ways in which we have all come to benefit from the science of space travel. This Special Report is […]

The Rest of the World Report | The Children

Hind Rajab was six years old. She spent her last three and a half hours alone in a car surrounded by the bodies of her family, on the phone with a dispatcher, waiting for an ambulance that was deliberately destroyed before it reached her.
Ritaj Rihan was nine years old. She was shot at her desk in a tent classroom two days ago, during a ceasefire, in front of forty-four other children.
Between them: more than 18,000 children killed in Gaza. A thirty-year documented record spanning booby-trapped toys in Lebanese villages, 1.2 million cluster submunitions fired after a UN ceasefire resolution passed, AI targeting systems that authorized civilian deaths as a statistical acceptable loss, and strikes on schools where no military target was ever found.
This is not a summary of allegations. Every claim in this edition is sourced to independent investigations, UN bodies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and wire services. The record exists. It has never produced accountability.

Rest of the World Special Reports