Ruwa Romman, who is a Palestinian American and the first Muslim woman to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives, had hoped to give a speech on Palestine at the Democratic National Convention.
“I was incredibly honored to be considered,” she told Rolling Stone on Thursday.
But on Wednesday night, the Uncommitted Movement learned that the DNC would not be offering them a chance to speak on the main stage. The Uncommitted Movement represents more than 700,000 voters who voted “uncommitted” during the Democratic presidential primary campaign in support of Palestine, demanding a cease-fire and an end to U.S. arms shipments to Israel. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war on Hamas, in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel.
The movement’s voters could be especially crucial in Michigan, where more than 100,000 Democratic primary voters checked “uncommitted.” The DNC has provided several untelevised forums to the Uncommitted Movement this week, but refused to allow the group to put a speaker on stage — not even Romman, a Democratic state lawmaker in Georgia, a key battleground state.
“The reality of the situation is that we genuinely are asking for the bare minimum,” Romman said. “This was a symbolic gesture. This was supposed to be something that we could take back and say, ‘Look, the party is listening.’”
Before the Uncommitted Movement learned that they would not have the chance to speak, its leaders were “heartened because we saw that families of Israeli hostages were invited onto the stage,” Romman said. “So we thought, okay, this is it.”
On Thursday, Mother Jones published a draft of the speech that Romman had hoped to deliver. In it, she talks about the devastation of being “moral witnesses to the massacres in Gaza.”
“But in this pain,” she writes, “I’ve also witnessed something profound — a beautiful, multifaith, multiracial, and multigenerational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party.”
She continues: “For 320 days, we’ve stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a cease-fire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety. That’s why we are here — members of this Democratic Party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world.”
Part of Romman’s frustration was that former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan spoke on Wednesday. Duncan, a Republican, has opposed abortion.
“He’s a Republican, an anti-choice Republican, and in this big tent that we were building throughout the week, there was no room for me in it,” she said.
Romman intended to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in her speech. “Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur,” she says in the draft.
Referencing President Barack Obama’s most famous slogan, she hoped to say: “To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can — yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us — Black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.”
President Donald Trump discussing Venezuela at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago.
Why Venezuela Could Be a Turning Point in Gen Z’s Support for Trump
When Donald Trump called himself “the peace president” during his 2024 campaign, it was not just a slogan that my fellow Gen Z men and I took seriously, but also a promise we took personally. For a generation raised in the shadow of endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it felt reassuring. It told us there was a new Republican Party that had learned from its failures and wouldn’t ask our generation to fight another war for regime change. That belief stood strong until the U.S. overthrew Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Growing up in the long wake of the wars in Iraq in Afghanistan shaped how my generation learned to see Republicans. For us, “traditional” Republican foreign policy became synonymous with unnecessary conflicts that caused young people to bear the consequences. We heard how Iraq was sold to the public as a necessary war to destroy weapons of mass destruction, only to become a long conflict that defined the early adulthood of many millennials. Many of us grew up watching older siblings come home from deployments changed, and hearing teachers and coaches talk about friends who never fully came back. By the time we were old enough to pay attention, distrust of Bush-era Republicans wasn’t ideological, it was inherited from what we had heard.
As the 2024 election was rolling around, that dynamic had flipped. After watching wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines while Joe Biden was president, the Democrats were now the warmongers. My friends constantly told me how a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote to go to war. On the other hand, Donald Trump and the Republicans were the ones my friends thought could keep us safe. “I’m not voting for Trump because I love him,” one friend told me. “I’m voting for him because he cares about us and I don’t want to go fight in a stupid war.” For many of my friends, much of their vote came down to one question: Who was less likely to send us to fight? The answer to them was pretty clear.
Fast forward to now, and Venezuela has begun to complicate that belief. Even without talk of a draft or a formal declaration of war, the renewed focus on U.S. involvement and troops on the ground has brought back the same language of escalation my generation was taught to distrust. Young men online have been voicing the same worries, concerned that the ousting of Maduro mirrors the early stages of wars they were raised to fear. When I asked a friend what he thought about Venezuela, he shared that same sentiment. “This is how all these wars always start,” he told me. “They might try to make it sound like it’s not actually a war, but people our age always end up being the ones that pay the price for it.” For young men who supported Trump because they believed he represented a break from interventionist politics, Venezuela blurs the line between the “new” Republican Party they thought they were backing and the old one they were raised to reject.
For many young men, Venezuela has become a major part of a broader shift of how they view Trump. A recent poll from Speaking with American Men (SAM) found that Trump’s approval rating has fallen 10 percent among young men, with only 27 percent agreeing with the statement that Trump is “delivering for you”.
Gen Z men’s support of Trump was never about ideology or party loyalty, it was about the idea that he had their back and would fight for them. But that’s no longer the case. Recently, Trump proposed adding $500 billion to the military budget. Ideas like that will only hurt the president with young men. My friends don’t want more military spending that could get us entangled in foreign wars; they want a president who keeps them home and fights for their economic and social needs. As Trump pushes for a bigger military and more intervention abroad, the promise that once made him feel like a protector of young men now feels out of reach.
For my generation, Venezuela isn’t just another foreign policy dispute, it’s a conflict many young men worry they could be the ones sent to fight. Gen Z men didn’t support Trump because he was a Republican, but because they believed he was different from the old Republicans. He would be a president who would have their back, fight for their interests and keep them from fighting unnecessary wars. Now, that promise feels fragile, and the fear of being the ones asked to face the consequences has returned. For a generation raised on the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of another war isn’t abstract, it’s personal.