If you are an adult with living parents, odds are you’re in a constant state of explaining things to them. Popular questions include: How to turn the TV on, why you haven’t procreated yet, or what the hell happened to make the world such a hellscape. According to her latest term paper, Violet Affleck, the Marxist eldest child of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, is no stranger to that very important work.
On Wednesday, Page Six reported that Affleck, who just finished her freshman year at Yale University, had one of her academic research papers published by the university’s Global Health Review. Entitled A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles, the paper sees the 19-year-old candidly reflecting on her experience of living through the Los Angeles wildfires that ravaged the Pacific Palisades in January. How candid? Well, it begins: “I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel room.” Let’s read on, shall we?
Per Affleck, the arguments with her mother stemmed from frustration over her lack of understanding of what contributed to the fires’ cause and the climate crisis writ large. In short: millionaires and billionaires’ misuse of the planet. Garner, Affleck wrote, was “shell-shocked” and “astonished at the scale of destruction in the neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings.” Meanwhile, Affleck was “surprised at her surprise.”
“As a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z, my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when,” Affleck explained, noting that it wasn’t just Garner who seemed to be vexed by the fires and her daughter’s argument. Insert shock here. This is Los Angeles, after all.
“As I chatted with adults in the hotel where we’d gone to escape the smoke, though, I found my position to be an uncommon one: people spoke of how long rebuilding would take, how much it would cost, and how tragically odd the whole situation had been,” Affleck said.
Again, insert shock here. A reported 29 people died and thousands of homes—including those belonging to decidedly not wealthy actors—were decimated by the fires, but if there’s one thing a rich person will do in an emergency, it’s jawbone about how much it all cost…
“It’s anthropogenic,” Affleck wrote of the cause. “Driven by unsustainable consumption patterns concentrated among the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest countries, all of which have already subjected most of this country and the world to deadly temperatures, fire-flood cycles, rising seas, and dying crops.” Comparing the disaster to the pandemic, Affleck concluded her paper by calling on climate scientists to recognize the “methods and the political commitments” that COVID-conscious and disabled people have made. Period!
This isn’t the first time Affleck has been a loud, proud lefty. In July 2024, she delivered a heartfelt speech in opposition to mask bans at a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting.
“We must expand the availability of high-quality free tests and treatment and, most importantly, the county must oppose mask bans for any reason,” Affleck said at the meeting. “They do not keep us safer, they make vulnerable members of our community less safe and make everyone less able to participate in Los Angeles together.”
Of course, I also haven’t forgotten that time she was spotted reading The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality And Disease Collide, and her father publicly proclaiming her a Marxist in 2022.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but the image of Affleck radicalizing her rich and famous parents is doing a lot for me mentally right now. Steady on, sister.
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