iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kelli Klymenko

@kelliklymenko.com

3.3K followers 2.8K following 535 posts

Artist • Photographer • Writer 💍 @greentera.bsky.social We Have Friends Everywhere ✊🏼 Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Sedona, Arizona Substack ↓ wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com kelliklymenko.com sedonaincense.com sedonaartscenter.org

Posts Replies Media

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 11h

Three Red Flag Alerts have now been issued concerning anti-trans policies in the United States. Genocide prevention means recognizing an accumulation while there’s still time to interrupt it. The warning comes before the worst happens. Listen while there’s still time to act.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

What Is a Warning For?

Raphael Lemkin gave us a language for recognizing atrocity. The harder question is whether we’re willing to listen before it’s too late.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 29/09/2026

We do not have to wait for someone else to tell us when the emergency has begun. History is ordinary people living through today and not yet knowing what future generations will call it. We still have the chance to decide what we do next.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Exhaustion is not powerlessness. We still have our voices, our votes, and each other.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 28/09/2026

Turning Point USA spent years accusing educators of indoctrinating children. Now its $115M+ political machine says it has 3,570 high-school chapters and 58,000+ student activists. You don’t get to define indoctrination as everyone else’s ideas and education as your own.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

They’re Coming for the Children

Turning Point USA spent years accusing educators of indoctrinating students. Now its multimillion-dollar political machine is moving into high schools—including here in the Verde Valley.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 27/09/2026

War. Health care. Federal spending. Voting rights. They can look like separate stories. They aren’t. Behind all of them is a question we should ask much more often: Who does this serve? Public power should serve the public. That shouldn’t be a radical idea.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Who Does This Serve?

The news can feel like a hundred different stories. Look closer, and many of them are asking the same question.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 26/09/2026

The Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers select chiefs—and can remove their authority when they stop serving the people. These days, I find that idea enormously appealing. Human beings have organized power differently before. The world we inherited was never the only one we could have built.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

What Else Have We Been?

We don’t have to imagine every alternative. Human beings have already lived some of them.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 25/09/2026

How much of the world we live in was actually inevitable? We treat dominance, hierarchy and accumulation as human nature. But cooperation is human nature too. What if we didn’t eliminate ambition — but changed what earned our admiration? Today’s Weekly Reflection: What Else Could We Become?

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

What Else Could We Become?

Weekly Reflection: We inherited this civilization. We are still choosing what comes next.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 24/09/2026

Eli Crane has a record. Residence. Access. Judicial independence. Voting rights. Medicaid. War powers. Russia and Ukraine. Campaign language can change. The public record can’t. Public office leaves evidence behind. And I think records matter.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Eli Crane Has a Record

Representation is more than a title. It’s what someone chooses to do with the power we give them.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 23/09/2026

Russia’s election. Ukraine at the UN. NATO preparing for what may come next. Trump (State) TV and journalists fighting for access. Different stories. Same underlying question: What happens when institutions created to restrain power are tested by people who don’t want to be restrained?

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Story of Power

At the United Nations, war, elections, information and democracy converged around the same question: who has power, and what restrains it?

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 22/09/2026

The wheel turns again. 🍂 There’s magic in the changing light, even when we understand the science. Maybe especially then. Notice the season changing. Gather what you’re grateful for. Set down what you no longer need to carry. Blessed Equinox.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Wheel Turns Again

On the Autumnal Equinox and the old wisdom of simply paying attention

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 22/09/2026

LGBTQIA+ people are being turned into political arguments while actual human beings are trying to live their lives. You don’t have to understand someone else’s life to recognize that it belongs to them. When we say everyone has rights, everyone has to mean everyone.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Everyone Means Everyone

While our attention is elsewhere, LGBTQIA+ rights are being stripped away piece by piece.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 21/09/2026

There’s a lot happening at once. Press freedom. Ukraine and NATO. Epstein. AI. Measles. These are some of the stories I’m watching this week—not just for the headlines, but for what they reveal about power, accountability, expertise and the institutions we depend upon.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

What I’m Watching This Week

The stories I’m keeping an eye on as another busy week begins

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 20/09/2026

For more than a decade, people have explained, translated and cleaned up what Trump says until it sounds more coherent and presidential than what we actually heard. Strip away the translators, the excuses and the bullshit. What remains is the actual president.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Fake President

For years, America has been given an edited version of Donald Trump. Now the distance between the version we were sold and the president we actually have is becoming impossible to ignore.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 19/09/2026

Three news organizations. Three sets of journalists turned away from the White House. This cannot become someone else’s problem while everyone waits to see who gets banned next. The First Amendment protects their right to report. And it protects our right to know.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

This Is the Moment to Stand Together

A free press cannot survive by waiting to see who gets banned next

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 19/09/2026

Nearly 300 million years ago, reptiles walked across wet sand near what is now Sedona. Their footprints remain. The mountains didn’t exist as we know them. Before We Were Here — a little journey through deep time beneath a morning mist.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Before We Were Here

Nearly 300 million years beneath a morning mist.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 18/09/2026

Time is one of the few things we can’t make more of. And power seems especially good at wasting other people’s time. Today’s Weekly Reflection: The Time We Keep Losing.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Weekly Reflection: The Time We Keep Losing

What happens while power keeps the rest of us waiting.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 17/09/2026

The people who built and accelerated the AI race are now warning that development may be moving too fast to safely control. That doesn’t make them neutral observers. It makes the warning harder to ignore.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The People Who Built The Problem

AI is beginning to help build better AI. Now some of the people behind it are warning that humans may not be able to keep pace.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 16/09/2026

One dead predator. One jailed predator. Millions of pages. Congress ordered the Epstein files released. DOJ declared compliance. A federal judge granted preliminary relief in a challenge to that compliance. DOJ appealed. So what are we still protecting?

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

One Dead Predator. One Jailed Predator.

Congress ordered the Epstein files released. The Justice Department is still fighting over what we’re allowed to see.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 15/09/2026

Trump said Russia and Ukraine had agreed to stop attacking energy infrastructure. Zelenskyy wanted guarantees Russia would actually stop. Overnight, Russia attacked again. If Russia won’t stop, why is Trump asking Ukraine to?

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Ukraine Has the Right to Defend Itself

Russia invaded Ukraine. Donald Trump just told Ukraine to ease up.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 14/09/2026

So much of government happens beyond the handful of offices that dominate the news. Fifty days is enough time to learn who’s on the ballot, what those offices actually do, and why they matter.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Fifty days until the midterms. There is still time to do more than watch.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 13/09/2026

Political violence cannot become something we condemn only when it happens to our side. The harder test of leadership comes when the ugliness is coming from your own room. Silence doesn’t have to mean agreement. But silence is still a choice.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Silent Permission

What happens when condemning violence depends on who the target is.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 12/09/2026

Someone carried every one of these stones. Centuries later, we can study what remains. But archaeology can’t tell us who made them laugh, what they worried about, or whom they loved.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Stones Once Carried

On the traces of lives lived here centuries before ours.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 11/09/2026

Twenty-five years later, I keep wondering what exactly we meant by “never forget.” Remembering what happened to us isn’t enough. We also have to remember what fear made us willing to do to one another. Today’s Weekly Reflection: What We Choose to Remember

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Weekly Reflection: What We Choose to Remember

Twenty-five years after September 11, remembering what happened to us isn’t enough.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 10/09/2026

There will be chaos. Some states are already mailing ballots. The federal government is still fighting in court to change the rules for how those ballots move through the mail. The election clock doesn’t stop while the courts decide.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

There Will Be Chaos

The fight over mail voting is still in court. The election is already beginning.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 09/09/2026

Putin temporarily stopped bombing Kyiv while American envoys were there. They thanked him. Then they left, and the missiles returned. Peace can’t be a performance staged for the people who get to leave. It has to mean something for the people who stay.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Performance of Peace

While Putin is treated like a partner in peace, Ukraine is left to endure his war

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 08/09/2026

If you value my work at We Have Friends Everywhere, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. All of my full essays remain free. Paid support helps keep the publication independent and the essays free for everyone. wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com⁠

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 08/09/2026

Familiarity is not the same thing as acceptability. We should know the difference. We’ve had some version of this conversation so many times that even the question has become familiar: What happened to our standards? But “that’s Trump” is not an answer.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

So Much For Standards

On the presidency, public power, and what we have learned to accept.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 07/09/2026

Our lives feel enormous while we are living them. And yet our time here is astonishingly brief. I find that strangely liberating.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Time We Have

Our time is finite. What we choose to do with it is ours.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 06/09/2026

Interdependence. We need each other. Connection shapes our health, our communities, and the ways our lives reach into other lives—often farther than we’ll ever know. We are here together. We have friends everywhere.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Interdependence

We aren’t meant to move through this world alone.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 05/09/2026

I took a photograph of the Milky Way years ago and found myself thinking about what that light really was. One galactic year is about 230 million Earth years. The Sun has completed only around twenty. “The night sky is an archive.”

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

One Galactic Year

Join me for a trip around the Milky Way, where one year lasts around 230 million Earth years.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 04/09/2026

There is something profoundly exhausting about having to take unserious people seriously. This week’s Weekly Reflection is about power, accountability, and what happens when people entrusted with enormous responsibility refuse to accept limits.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Weekly Reflection: Unserious People, Serious Power

There is something profoundly exhausting about having to take unserious people seriously.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 03/09/2026

When one lever fails, pull another. Biggs’s Supreme Court amendment failed. Good. But the pattern matters: when one route closes, Republicans keep looking for another way to lock power into place.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

When One Lever Fails, Pull Another

Andy Biggs’s Supreme Court amendment failed. It is the larger effort to lock power into place that should concern us.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 02/09/2026

Sometimes you lose. You lose an election. You lose a majority. You lose an argument. Then you persuade more people, organize and run again. A political movement that believes in democracy has to be willing to lose an election.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Desperate People Do Desperate Things

I don’t know what will happen in November. Neither do they. But increasingly, Republicans are behaving like people who understand that power may not remain theirs forever.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 01/09/2026

Trump spent years calling unfavorable reporting “fake news.” Now he wants journalists reported to the FCC for “rebuke or punishment.” That’s the escalation. The president is not the assignment editor. Facts don’t require presidential approval.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The President Is Not the Editor in Chief

Donald Trump doesn’t just want to attack the press anymore. He wants the government to punish journalists who refuse to tell his version of the story.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 31/08/2026

Undercover federal agents entered peaceful political meetings, private chats and organizing spaces in Minnesota. This is bigger than one operation. It’s the machinery of repression: create the enemy, justify surveillance, make dissent feel dangerous.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Machinery of Repression

First comes the label. Then surveillance. Then the state starts treating political opposition as a threat.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 30/08/2026

A forest isn’t simply trees standing beside one another. It is relationship. These are our forests. Not ours because we have the right to consume them, but because they have been entrusted to us. We owe the future more than whatever we can extract from the present.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

These Are Our Forests

They are living systems, public inheritance, and worth more than whatever can be extracted from them.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 29/08/2026

Compassion doesn’t make us weak. Empathy may be one of the most powerful things our species ever learned to practice. We’re still capable of caring, learning, wonder and building strength together. Not over each other. With each other.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Our Greatest Strength

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

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 28/08/2026

Power without restraint. Entitlement without consent. Expertise pushed aside for loyalty. Institutions treated like possessions. By the end of this week, I was fucking angry. I still am. We shouldn’t have to be this angry. We shouldn’t have to live like this.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Weekly Reflection: We Shouldn’t Have to Live Like This

Our anger is not the problem. The relentless assault on our lives, our institutions and our democracy is.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 27/08/2026

The image may be fake. The violation is real. AI didn’t create misogyny. But it has given old forms of abuse extraordinary new power. Technological capability doesn’t create moral permission. Consent is the boundary.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Progress Without Consent

We gave old forms of abuse extraordinary new power. Now we have to demand an answer: whose freedom is technology being built to serve?

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 26/08/2026

The Epstein story was never supposed to end with one dead predator and one convicted accomplice. Survivors are asking for accountability. Investigators are asking for evidence. Judges are examining what DOJ has withheld. Follow the evidence. We will not forget.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

We Will Not Forget

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

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 25/08/2026

The person seeking political power should not control the machinery Americans use to grant—or take away—that power. States administer elections. Congress has its constitutional role. Courts resolve disputes. The president? He has to live with what the voters decide.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The President Does Not Run Our Elections

The Constitution deliberately keeps election power out of the president’s hands.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 23/08/2026

We are brilliantly insignificant. Almost nothing against the scale of the cosmos. But everything to one another. The hierarchies dividing us aren’t laws of nature. Humans made them. We can make something else. And the only way we build something better is together.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Our Brilliant Insignificance

We invented the hierarchies that divide us. We can build something better.

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 22/08/2026

Certainty sounds powerful. Qualification can sound weak. But often, qualification is evidence of knowledge. That’s the paradox of expertise. The people who know the most understand uncertainty. The people who know the least can sound absolutely certain. We shouldn’t mistake one for the other.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Paradox of Expertise

Why authoritarian power needs expertise to become the enemy

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 21/08/2026

They spent decades building power. That’s frightening. But there’s another lesson in that history: Power can be built. And it doesn’t belong exclusively to them. Look around. Find each other. We are not standing alone. This week’s Weekly Reflection:

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Weekly Reflection: We Know Each Other Now

They spent decades building power. We are learning to recognize ours.

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 20/08/2026

421,451 signatures were submitted to put Arizona’s Prop. 212 before voters. I signed one of them. Now we won’t get to vote on it. Power doesn’t only operate at the ballot box. It operates in deciding what reaches the ballot box.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The People’s Voice Has to Reach the Ballot

What happens when citizens organize, collect signatures, and ask for a vote — but the public never gets the chance to cast one?

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 19/08/2026

Sometimes we need to step away from the immediate moment and remember the much larger story happening around us. Devil’s Bridge is a reminder that landscapes are constantly changing, life adapts, and we are only here for a brief moment in a story much older than ourselves.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Before Us, After Us

Devil’s Bridge and the ancient story we are lucky enough to be a part of

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 18/08/2026

Three hundred essays later, many of the warnings are no longer warnings. History matters because authoritarian systems develop through accumulation — and recognizing the pattern only matters if we do it before the end. We are not finished.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

This Is Where We Are

Three hundred essays later, what history has taught us — and why we can’t stop speaking

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 17/08/2026

Tomorrow will be my 300th essay here. Which makes this one 299. People ask how I find the time to write so much. The truth is, finding the time isn’t the hard part. Convincing my brain to stop writing in the background is.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Finding the Words

The notes, the noise, and a brain that rarely stops writing

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 16/08/2026

Water is not something we can invent our way around. It’s one of the conditions that makes life possible in the first place. We live within physical limits whether corporations acknowledge them or not. Water is life.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Most Precious Thing

Water, power, and what we choose to protect

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 15/08/2026

A seven-day surveillance record is still a surveillance record. The answer isn’t a nicer surveillance state or a better-regulated one. No surveillance state. The cameras were never just cameras. They are infrastructure for control.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

The Cameras Were Never Just Cameras

What Flock’s growing surveillance network reveals about privacy, power, and trust

000

Kelli Klymenko @kelliklymenko.com · 14/08/2026

Sometimes, in our determination to protect what matters, we forget that we are also part of what we are trying to protect. Rest is not surrender. We don’t have to carry everything alone. Sometimes we find our strength in each other. We have friends everywhere.

wehavefriendseverywhere.substack.com

Weekly Reflection: We Have Friends Everywhere

Rest, resilience, and remembering what we are fighting for

000