After No Kings: A Conflicted Response (Part 2)

For Part 1, see my previous post.

The program ended soon after Guante finished, or at least it felt like it. People had already started leaving in droves while the speeches were going, but considering the ongoing manhunt, I couldn’t blame them. Past protests had often been followed up by radicals splitting off to light fireworks and sparklers, lead more aggressive chants, or organize future civil disobedience. I dragged my feet on the way to the bus stop, hoping to encounter a group like this, but found mostly clumps of families taking group photos with their signs, or phone cameras being indiscriminately waved to capture the crowd, which I had to duck to keep my face out of. About a block from the Capitol, I ran into a friend distributing literature for Socialist Alternative. I asked if they were aware of any other actions happening that day, but they hadn’t heard of any. It was humid,  we had marched through lunchtime, my phone was nearly dead, and I had an hour-long bus ride to look forward to. My new friends had left early, and I was beginning to think that the protest had accomplished nothing but getting me very sweaty.

I gained a new perspective, however, as I caught up with social media on my ride home. Images flowed in from city after city of seas of people who had shown up. 200,000 in LA. 50,000 in NYC. 10,000 in Dallas. Even towns embedded in deeply red states brought small but proud contingents to an estimated 5 million total protesters. This, compared to Trump’s reported 250,000 spectators– a number which, being supplied by the egotist himself, is likely inflated. A relative posted that, “for the first time in a long time,” she felt a sense of hope about the country. I felt a glimmer of it, too.

There is an efficacy to peaceful protests. Their uses are different from, and cannot be a replacement for, the uses of direct action. On Tuesday, my neighbors had actively prevented ICE from doing their job of disappearing vulnerable people without due process. On Saturday, we had created a visual representation of just where the will of the people lay, and that is vital to morale. If an undocumented person hiding in their home saw these enormous crowds on TV and felt less alone in their fear, felt reassured that there really are people on their side, dayenu. If the child of conservatives saw these protests and was emboldened for the first time to speak against how they were raised, dayenu. If a political apathetic wondered what all the fuss was about and finally began to ask questions, dayenu. Hope, joy, consolation and inspiration are as essential to life as food and water, and they are certainly scarce these days. This is the “feeling good” that I will always be in support of. Anger, fear, and grief can propel us for a time, but they are not a sustaining, renewing force. It is the right kind of “feeling good” that allows us to keep living through and fighting against the horrors.

A second use of peaceful protest is that it serves as an entry point into further action. Peaceful protests are where activists link up, form connection and community through shared experience, and get plugged in. The presence of DSA, FRSO, and Socialist Alternative at the march gave me hope that this goal had been achieved. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from leftist micropolitics, it’s that there is certainly drama and discourse surrounding some or all of the organizations I’ve named, and I am not well-informed enough to weigh in on it here. What’s relevant to me is how many Americans, particularly of the older crowd, are terrified of the word “socialism”. It’s possible that this rally was their first encounter with socialists outside of propaganda. For people invested in the mythology of America and capitalism, seeing radical politics represented alongside causes they already support could be an important inroad.

In this way, the political hodgepodge that I recognized at the march was a double-edged sword, and it reflects a larger tension currently facing the left. I have been wrestling for the past several months with June Jordan’s statement in On Call: Political Essays, that “only evil will collaborate with evil,” and how it coexists with the necessity of coalition building. On the one hand, the presence of Gadsden flags, anarchist flags, and American flags side by side betrayed the fact that the march stood for very little besides a shared opposition to Trump. And because there was no unifying political vision, no demands could be made, no goals could be set, and no strong statements could be made. It fell very much in line with the Democratic Party’s strategy of trying to play both sides. A major criticism of Kamala Harris’ campaign was its insistent attempts to court centrists and Never-Trump Conservatives, going as far as to partner with Liz Cheney and sing the praises of the U.S. military. This alienated leftists, who felt insulted that the Democratic Party was, to put it crassly, serving them shit and expecting them to eat it out of desperation. Leftists predicted that wealthy liberals and centrists left to their ignorant bliss would get Harris elected and then disappear to brunch for the next four years, leaving any systemic change completely unaddressed.

On the other hand, numbers matter. A conservative at an anti-Trump rally is one less conservative hanging on the dictator’s words. I don’t generally believe in expending much energy trying to move federal-level conservatives/centrists/liberals left, but that kind of political shift happens on the level of ordinary citizens every day. I should know, having grown up conservative. And it would happen a whole lot more if leftists didn’t belittle people for not being theory experts, lash out at good-faith questions, or excommunicate individuals and entire organizations for not meeting a standard of perfection.

As novelist Sarah Thankam Mathews writes in the thot pudding article “every day is all there is,” the way political spaces make people feel matters a whole lot in determining whether people will join them. Conservatives continue to be a vast and united force because their spaces make people feel smart and virtuous and important. Leftists, meanwhile, struggle to recruit because not only is our rhetoric inaccessible to anyone who hasn’t taken a college-level course on Marxist theory, but— like the droves of leftists who sat out the presidential election entirely, and like so many organizations absent from the No Kings rally— many will simply refuse to show up and be associated with the politically “impure”. The same woman who warned against collaborating with evil also preached against creating narrow definitions of who is “evil” and who is not.

In an Instagram reel responding to Saturday’s protests, trauma educator Jemarc Axinto asked a simple and pointed question to leftists who painted the No Kings rallies as pointless: where were you? What were you doing to confront the rolling of Trump’s tanks? I asked the same thing as I lingered at the rally, waiting for leftists to offer me something, anything. If the liberal impulse is towards ineffectual performance art, then a common radical leftist impulse is towards doing nothing out of fear of imperfection— and then complaining that nobody is doing anything. But this doesn’t always have to be the case. The organizers of Minneapolis People’s Pride and the Taking Back Pride march don’t just post critiques of the corporatization of Pride; they organize workable alternatives that make people want to keep being in community with them. But in instances when leftists complain from the stands while refusing to offer a practical alternative, what right do they have to shame the people who actually stepped into the arena?

—

Another sign that the protests mattered is, bitterly, the violence that conservatives met them with. The assassinations/attempted assassinations in my city are the most obvious examples. At Nashville’s rally, Elijah Millar, a young man reportedly fascinated with Nazis, was arrested for brandishing a gun at protesters. In Northern Virginia, an SUV intentionally drove into the crowd. I have seen at least one Minneapolis activist theorize that Boelter’s killings were a false flag operation coordinated by the police, and while that certainly aligns cover-ups the police have perpetrated in the past, there is as of now no actual evidence to substantiate it. I find it irresponsible to disseminate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, because, while theories like this exist because of well-founded distrust of police, they also exist because people don’t want certain events to have actually happened. Accepting false flag narratives apropos of nothing but vibes creates a situation in which anything that fits the speaker’s preferred narrative is real, and anything the speaker doesn’t want to acknowledge the implications of is a hoax. To me, the implications of this violence are clear. Trump supporters did not dismiss a mass demonstration of opposition to their leader. They met it with armed force, and that indicates that they felt threatened.

Of course, it would be remiss of me to mention violence in connection to the No Kings protests, or false media narratives, and not bring up the killing of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo in Salt Lake City. He is the exact sort of person that warrants a “Say His Name” chant. The story I read on my ride home, distributed by several news outlets, had been that Arturo Gamboa had been seen aiming his rifle into the crowd, and that a “peacekeeper” had fired at him in an attempt to prevent a mass shooting, accidentally striking Ah Loo in the process. But reports from the ground, as valiantly collected by Marisa Kabas and Bryan Schott of The Handbasket, tell a radically different story:

[Video] clearly shows Arturo in full black dress casually walking towards the protest with his rifle pointed down towards the ground and one hand on the barrel,” a friend of Gamboa, whose name isn’t being shared to ensure his safety, said after watching the video many times over. “The security team approach him from the side and rear, almost across the street, with weapons out.”

He continued: “You can hear in the audio that they fire on Arturo, at which point he leans forward, which causes the rifle and his hand to come up, but not in a ready position, in a fleeing position. The security team continues to fire twice more, and Arturo runs away as the video ends.”

It was this sudden repositioning in response to the volunteer shooting his gun that may have made it appear as though Gamboa was aiming his weapon at the crowd. But no video shared so far bears out that version.

The referenced footage has since been picked up by mainstream sources such as NBC. Gamboa, the son of Venezuelan immigrants, is described in the Handbasket article as a punk musician and a regular attender of left-wing protests, a man quoted describing America as “a steam train that’s always been fueled by Black and brown bodies and by the emotional, physical, and spiritual pain of poor people.” He was at the protest in support of its aims, not as a violent infiltrator, and his rifle– on display in an open-carry state, I should add– was part of that support. The safety volunteer, a military veteran who Utah 50501 stated they enlisted because of his military experience, took the presence of a militant Latino protester as a threat, retaliated without asking questions, and in the process killed an unarmed Samoan man. Now Gamboa is taking the fall for a tragedy created by 50501’s insistence that violence be the sole prerogative of the authorities.

There is much to be said about the shooting, which deserves an essay of its own and which I cannot attempt to do justice here. My primary conclusions are twofold: first, this situation is a perfect illustration of one of many reasons why so many activists are adamant to never collaborate with the police or military. When organizers cooperate with these institutions, they automatically render their spaces unsafe for Black and brown attendants. It’s no wonder, then, that in a place as diverse as the Twin Cities, the turnout for No Kings was overwhelmingly white: 50501 had already made it clear that people of color would not be prioritized and therefore were not fully welcome.

Second, 50501’s complete mishandling of the situation and refusal to take any responsibility for their role in Ah Loo’s death validates the accusations that these organizers are not for the people. When push came to horrifying shove, they protected the image of military “peacekeepers” and laid blame on a protester who kept his gun to the ground and never fired a shot. Framing Gamboa as to blame for their own volunteer’s misreading of the situation creates a narrative that militancy is suspect and pacifism is the only valid mode of resistance.

So I want to make it clear that any optimism and positivity I’ve expressed towards the No Kings rally is not because of, but in spite of, its organizers. I don’t trust these organizers as far as I can throw any of them. And their investment in framing police-sanctioned gatherings as the only acceptable channel for opposition flies in the face of my hope for this rally: that it would be many people’s first step towards more. I’m not saying that everybody needs to chain themselves to trees or light cars on fire in order to make a difference— I certainly have not lived up to that standard myself. But we need more than brunch, and 50501 seem entirely opposed to that.

What I am left with is a hope that a protest can be more than its organizers (like the LA No Kings protest, where, despite 50501’s best efforts, rocks and bottles were reportedly launched at cops.) That it is not the people at the highest levels of politics that make the earth move, but the people on the ground. That no matter how much those in power try to control us, people remain autonomous. This includes people whose ideology I abhor, but who still often find themselves stumbling into mutual aid and direct action. My hope is in the seeds sown by people like Guante, and his message that a march is a first step, not a destination.

My hope, my disappointment, my conflict, is that this march was not enough, but it was also not nothing. Whatever good feeling— hope, joy, consolation, inspiration— we created that day, it is now everybody’s task, whether they were on the ground that day or not, to ensure that those feelings are not in vain.

May the memory of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo be for a blessing.

After No Kings: A Conflicted Response (Part 1)

On Saturday, June 14th, I attended St Paul’s No Kings rally– but not without serious misgivings. I had learned via activists on social media that 50501, the organizers of the rally, have somewhat suspicious origins, having emerged seemingly out of nowhere with no clear activist lineage or connection to other movements. This, combined with 50501’s cooperation with police, funding by a Walmart heiress, and aspects of their messaging, made me apprehensive as I headed out that bright morning. Yet, I went. I’ve become somewhat skeptical of Instagram activists over the past few months, unable to tell when their admonishments are necessary and when they are simply symptomatic of political puritanism, and I figured the best way to gauge would be to attend and see for myself. Besides, I had the day off, and it was better than doomscrolling through images of Trump’s ego parade.

—

Throughout my hour-long bus ride, my mind wandered to the violent civil unrest going on throughout the country, both in my home turf of LA and in my adopted city, where just that Tuesday protesters had driven away ICE agents by throwing furniture and trash cans. I’m a believer in the necessity of this kind of direct action, and watching it had given me some hope that even as the tide of fascism is rising, the people too are rising to meet it. I wondered what the relationship was between that unrest and the carefully-organized peaceful demonstration I was headed to.

My bus quickly began to fill with other rally attendees, many of them toting American flags. It confused me how any progressives, having studied the genocidal origins of the United States, could still believe in that flag. I had a feeling this was not the place for me. That impression was confirmed when I finally reached the rally and found myself surrounded by older white people with more flags, white street vendors selling mass-manufactured protest merch, and even a few pink pussy hats, a garment that has become synonymous with milquetoast liberal feminism. Where many of the protests I’d attended in the past set the mood by blasting political rap, the speakers at No Kings played what I can best describe as Divorced Mother Pop: “inspirational” songs by Kelly Clarkson, Selena Gomez,  and the like.

I was almost considering turning back when I spotted a pair of masked protesters in black bloc, one of them carrying a trans flag. Other punks. I joined up with them, and we quickly began gathering other visibly trans and visibly radical attendees into our pod.

—

The start of the march was delayed as the organizers frantically adjusted for events unfolding in nearby Brooklyn Park. By that time, the news had broken of Representative Melissa Hortman’s assassination— in fact, some attendees had had time to make signs in tribute to her and her husband. The assassination, and the knowledge that police had found a “No Kings” flyer in killer Vance Boelter’s car, injected tension into the air. We were all worried that gathering in such a huge group had made us sitting ducks.

The program for the day was truncated as a result. One friend who I recognized at the march had mentioned a skit she was participating in onstage— a skit that never happened. I learned later that Governor Tim Walz had been planned to speak once we reached the Capitol, but having found his name on Vance Boelter’s hit list, he was lying low. When the speeches started, an organizer dedicated our march to the Hortmans. She then led us in a “Say Her Name” chant for Melissa Hortman. The “Say Her/His/Their Name” chant was created to honor civilians (originally Black women) murdered by police, who are treated as disposable by the state and whose murders and memories are often obscured by cover-ups. I have no desire to disrespect Hortman or any ill will towards her family, but she simply was not the right person to apply this chant to. As a public figure in a position of relative power, she is not at real risk of having her name forgotten. I would have welcomed a more appropriate way of honoring her, but I felt uncomfortable with this one.

A speaker instructed the crowd to raise their American flags high and wave them proudly. I waved my keffiyeh. She told us that criticizing our government was the most sincere form of patriotism, that we were representative of true democracy, that we were taking back what America stands for. I looked around to see banners bearing “We the People” and quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. There were protesters dressed as colonial soldiers and even a giant papier-mâché Benjamin Franklin head. Perhaps I should have expected this Revolutionary War imagery, given the name of the event. But I was struck by the cognitive dissonance of it all: using Jefferson and Franklin, who owned slaves, and Hamilton, who assisted in the sale of slaves, as representatives of freedom; reiterating throughout the day that this movement was committed to non-violence and peace, while leveraging the symbols of a war.

Later, after processing, I came to understand the purpose of this symbolism, and in fact the purpose of the entire rally. Trump’s re-election had shaken liberals’ belief in America as a land of freedom and equality, and the main goal of No Kings was to salvage that myth. When leftists had described the march as “existing to make people feel good”, this had not seemed like a particularly strong critique to me. When leftists scoff at “feeling good”, they often scoff at hope, joy, and other emotions that are just as necessary to resistance as anger and grief. But in this case, what they had meant by “feeling good” was preserving blissful ignorance, and they were right to say so. “No Kings” and its patriotism kept the narrative of American specialness comfortably intact.

I want to take a moment, while I’m here, to digress (although it really isn’t a digression) about the visuals of the protest, because even those not entrenched in Americana imagery supported this narrative of comfort. The signs, costumes, and papier-mâché puppets were all quite elaborate and meme-worthy. This is not in and of itself an issue; I love protest art, and there’s nothing wrong with a little humor and levity. But this felt like I had walked into a costume contest. It felt like pageantry.

Much has been written about the intellectual snobbery of the left, whether the bourgeois smugness of liberals or the theory pedantry of radicals (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Daniel Denvir have a particularly good breakdown of this in Hammer and Hope.)  This elitism alienates working-class and rural Americans from leftist politics and reinforces the idea that conservatism is “for the people” (despite all the evidence that it props up billionaires.) Witnessing the pageantry of retirees with time and money to do arts-and-crafts reminded me of this issue. Creating a fake taco cart to evoke “TACO trade theory”, dressing up as  a clown to call Trump a clown, puns like “No faux king way!” all struck me as wit for the sake of looking witty, rather than effective political messaging. But maybe that was my own leftist elitism shining through.

What troubled me more was how insubstantial the politics of these slogans were. Very few people, it seemed, wanted to represent any ideals or agenda beyond “Trump Bad.” A lot of signs mocked Trump for being orange and having small hands— jokes that got old sometime in early 2017 and have gotten less funny with each passing year. Others, bafflingly, called for his impeachment, which has already happened multiple times and was not effective in stopping him. But one sign that made my blood boil, a sign that I stood behind for most of the speeches at the Capitol, read in pink sparkly letters, “If Kamala Had Won, We Would All Be At Brunch.” Speak for yourself, I thought. If I wondered where these people had been the past five years to have politics that seemed cryogenically frozen in the 2010s, that sign was my answer.

Based on the messaging at this rally, all the ills of American politics could be reduced to one man and a handful of his cronies like Elon Musk. Saving a virtuous, mythic America was as simple as getting that one man out of office again, and hopefully getting another person of color in. There were no systems to dismantle, no founding myths to unlearn, no self-reflection to be done.

—

We finally started our walk to the Capitol building, and we did so in bewildering silence. In almost all of the protests I have been to, we spend the march chanting at the top of our lungs. These chants are embedded with our demands— “Disclose, divest/ We will not stop, we will not rest.” “Hey hey/ Ho ho/ These racist cops have got to go.” But the marshals of this rally were hesitant to start any chants. Those they did start were vague and demand-less, to the point that I cannot fully remember them. The one that caught on most consistently was “No kings!” but this also fizzled out quickly. My pod and I took it upon ourselves to supply our own chants, some of which were enthusiastically answered by the crowd, and some of which quickly died out. I could hear other small scatterings of chants throughout the long, winding crowd, and I wished we could have gotten organized enough to keep something going. The energy of an estimated 30,000 people chanting together would have been electric.

Reaching the Capitol, I found myself behind that goddamn Kamala sign, and a member of the pod pointed out a Gadsden flag to our left. Its bright yellow presence simultaneously felt like an incursion and made perfect sense. To our right, I spotted an anarchist flag, and, to my surprise, tables where Democratic Socialists and Freedom Road Socialist Organization were distributing literature. I was quite literally in the middle of all of this, surrounded by this incongruous march and its precarious, perhaps nonexistent, group identity.

There was a lot of chatter around me, so it’s difficult to give an accurate account of what this second batch of speeches were like. I know that much of the previously-planned material was scrapped in order to pay tribute to Representative Hortman, with one speaker comparing her assassination to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s been widely reported on social media that one of the speakers thanked the police for “keeping us safe.” I didn’t catch this, but I also don't dispute it. Yet, this same block of speakers contained the most genuine and refreshing message of the entire event. When poet-activist Guante (Kyle Tran Myhre) mounted the podium in a lavender “Protect Trans Kids” shirt to recite his poem “No kings, all bricks,” he spoke words I had been dying to hear all day, truth I had been aching to hear breathed into this space:

The ancestor on my shoulder doesn’t tell me to put the brick down, or that the weight isn’t worth it. I’m sure many of you are familiar with that… heaviness, whether guilt, or grief, or just the daily shipwreck of the news, all this information we already know: 

How things are bad. How they’ve always been bad for some of us, and how shining a light on the bad thing doesn’t change it… but can be a first step. How a big march like this can be a first step, but is never a destination. How going “back to normal” is going backwards. And how desperately the cowards in power want you going backwards, want you to put that brick down, want you to focus on your job, make money—focus on your family.

But I don’t have a family without immigrants and refugees. The word family means nothing to me when it doesn’t include trans people. The word community means nothing when it doesn’t include people with disabilities. Words like justice, peace—they are empty when they don’t include Palestinians. There are no billionaires on my block, no kings welcome in my grandmother’s kitchen. Her voice, a beacon: don’t you dare put that brick down. Not yet.

There it was, finally. Recognition that the issues are systemic and bigger than one man, recognition of interlinked struggles against oppression (including that of Palestine, which often goes unaddressed in liberal spaces), specific calls to action, and even, later in the poem, a shoutout to the civil unrest that had protected our neighbors from ICE earlier that week. When I listened to Guante, I felt for the first time like I was actually at a protest. Did anyone around me feel it too?

What a Six-Month Social Media Break Taught Me About Activism (Spoiler: It wasn’t just Cell Phone Bad)

I haven’t been on Instagram since January 20th. I didn’t want to receive real-time updates on the inauguration or read every vile thing that was said during it. And, crucially, I didn’t want to be inundated with the online leftist response to it: the overlapping barrages of doomerism, finger-pointing, futile-feeling action items, and platitudes about togetherness. I was spiraling towards a breakdown, and so I logged off for the day. And then, I didn’t feel much desire to log back on.

Usually, when I jump ship on a social media platform, a new addictive app fills its place. But this time was different; I stayed away from Bluesky and whatever other new hot online places there are. I didn’t want a different window to look at the burning world from. I just wanted to not be on fire myself. Only now am I starting to emerge from my digital exile. I spent much of those months— and trust me, I know how pretentious this sounds— reading, journaling, doing crossword puzzles, digging into my spirituality, and overall cultivating more intentionality in my life.

Those of us who have grown up in the internet age have also grown up with periodic reminders that Cell Phone Bad. We all know at this point that social media algorithms reward outrage and disincentivize nuanced discussion. We’ve read about its psychological and social effects, how we are trapped in an illusion of connection while more isolated than ever. I’m not going to belabor any of those points. Instead, I want to reflect on what these last few months have taught me specifically about being in queer/activist/leftist spaces, because I think there are valuable takeaways for anyone, regardless of how you use or don’t use social media.

1.We need pleasure activism fucking yesterday

adrienne maree brown’s anthology Pleasure Activism saved my life several times these past months. Much of online activist culture operates on guilt, shame, and fear: Why aren’t you doing enough? How can you rest/eat/have fun at a time like this? Don’t you know we’re all going to die? We conceptualize activists as ascetic martyrs slogging away at their work. brown’s thesis is simple but revolutionary: that for marginalized people to experience rest, joy, and pleasure is not selfish or frivolous, but is itself resistance to a social order built on our suffering.

To me, pleasure activism means a few different, equally important things. First, that activism can and should be pleasurable, that we should seek out the projects that fill our cup even as we fill others’— growing a pollinator garden, cooking meals for unhoused neighbors, teaching sewing at a skill share, participating in a clothing swap. Second, that the difficult and tedious necessities of activism can and should be made pleasurable through the small kindnesses and supports we give each other. And third, that the pleasure we experience completely outside of activism is important and essential. Play your video games, dance at the club, and explore weird and wonderful thrift shops free of the fear that you are a Bad Activist for taking a break.

2. We can’t fight fascism with a fascist work ethic

As poet/theorist/lesbian icon Audre Lorde famously wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And the rat-infested basement of the House of White Supremacist Capitalism we find ourselves trapped in is one built of scarcity, urgency, quantity-over-quality, and speed-over-precision. Whether it’s same-day shipping or leaving a hate comment online, this monster is made of instant gratification.

Far too often, we apply these same frameworks to activism. We turn activism to a commodity of which we must produce as much as we can, as fast as we can, at the expense of human needs and dignity. And when these slipshod efforts produce disappointing results, we discard our project and move on to the next cause. Is it any wonder, then, that we’re all so burnt out?

Yes, there is real danger and urgency in the threats we face, and yes, many of us are facing real scarcities. But what I have learned from studying the long-haulers that have done this for decades is that sustainable activism requires us to behave as though we do have the time. Sustainable activism is doing the hard, long work of relationship-building and coalition-building. It’s planting seeds we might not eat the fruit of. It’s facing defeats and partial victories and continuing on. It’s the intentional cultivation of hope.

Part of what enables long-term activists to do this work is focus— that is, limiting the projects they take on, so that they can give those few projects the depth of energy and care required to get them right. Saying no to things, even worthy causes and campaigns, provides us the space to give what brown refers to as our “orgasmic yes.” Capitalist reasoning is wrong: it’s better, and ultimately more useful to the collective, to craft one thing well than to make a thousand breakable little trinkets.

3. You don’t have to perform expertise

Another capitalist value too many of us have internalized is the idea that every individual must be exceptional in order to be valuable. Sometimes it seems like every leftist is a leader or a theorist or a life coach, all clamoring to give their expert advice whether they actually have it or not. It’s not that I don't think young people, uncredentialed people, or people new to movement spaces have valuable insights and experiences to pitch in; I, after all, am all of those things. But I think many of us have rushed into the position of expert, of teacher, without taking seriously what that means. The demand to perform expertise, I believe, does a lot to explain the cutthroat culture of many online leftist spaces: if everyone is assumed to already be an expert, and that expert messes up, it’s a much higher-stakes blunder than if a self-declared student does.

As I dove into my spiritual practice, I learned this story about Rabbi Akiva, one of the most revered of the ancient Jewish scholars: While his colleagues began studying religion almost from birth, Akiva did not begin studying until he was forty years old. He spent forty years as a student before becoming a teacher at the age of eighty, and then taught for another forty years until his death. That this legend gives Akiva a 120-year lifespan is beside the point. The lesson it imparts is more important than its historicity: learning is just as important as teaching, and there should not be shame in being a student, because every great teacher started out knowing nothing. We all deserve the opportunity to ask questions, make mistakes, disagree, and change our minds over time. And the best of us, like Rabbi Akiva, keep doing so even when we become teachers.

4. Nobody online is owed your time, energy, or attention

This is controversial in leftist spaces, but bear with me. When I logged off, I did so with a real sense of failure. Like a lot of people, I got most of my news from social media. By cutting myself off from the news, I worried, wasn’t I looking away from people who needed me? Wasn’t I sticking my head in the sand and becoming complacent? I felt obligated to constantly pay attention, and that obligation of attention kept me trapped in a cycle of doomscrolling. It also sucked away time and mental energy, creating the illusion that I was doing important activist work when I was really isolated in my room feeling anxious.

To make things worse, I also felt obligated to give time, energy, and attention to every piece of discourse that crossed my feed. Inflammatory statements would activate my fight-or-flight response, and the fight instinct would tell me that the post I’d encountered was an imminently dangerous threat that must be eliminated. The angry venting of a total stranger with no real power over my life became, in my mind, a matter of importance affecting the fate of the entire queer community.

So much of what is said on social media is borne out of pain and trauma, which then activates the viewer with their own pain and trauma. The sense of urgency induced by a fight-or-flight response, and the sense of obligation to “stay engaged”, means that we often don’t take the time to breathe deep and ask whether the energy we’re expending on online discourse is worth it. Our intentions are often good: we want to inform and be informed, to hear and be heard, to participate in meaningful discussion. And there is a place for all that. But when we aren’t intentional with how we spend our precious time, energy, and attention– when we believe that we don’t have a choice to log off— it becomes a whole lot of smoke for very little flame, a drain on resources that could be used to do much more meaningful things.

As it turns out, staying informed and engaged is not an all-or-nothing choice, in which we must either constantly consume information or be totally ignorant. I subscribe to local newsletters to keep up with what is literally affecting my friends and neighbors. I have a designated time each morning to engage with national and international news, and I do so in print or through radio/podcasts so that I consume more than just the headline. This keeps me regularly informed without inundating me with information at all hours, and helps me engage more analytically. I read theory, I mull it over in my head and in my journal, I read reviews and responses to the text, and I discuss with friends whose opinions I trust and value. Taking this slower, less-is-more approach has not only improved my mental health, but helped me to develop better-informed, more nuanced opinions that aren’t controlled by social media peer pressure.

5. Real-time community is revolutionary

I had feared that by leaving social media, I would lose connection with my friends. I’m a socially-awkward person with a long history of being the unwanted hanger-on in friend groups, and so the thought of reaching out to people directly often brings up fears that I’ll annoy them. Following people on social media provided a way to keep up on my friends’ lives without the risk of bothering them. But when I logged off, I challenged myself to stay in touch by texting at least two people every day.

To my surprise, instead of being met with cold shoulders and irritation, those texts often led to the in-person connections I had struggled to find before. I was having rich conversations, going to new places and trying new things. I also found myself enriched in other ways. Over the course of our meetups, my friends and I exchanged job leads and connections, information on upcoming events, business recommendations, meals, recipes, and art. My in-person bonds provided much of what I’d relied on the internet for.

As it turns out, building relationships requires us to be just a little pushy. Under capitalism, we are taught to operate in self-contained bubbles and to avoid inconveniencing each other as much as possible– including by not seeking out connection. This works well for capitalism because, after all, you’re less likely to pay a rideshare company if you have friends to carpool with, and you’re less likely to buy a tool that a friend is willing to loan you. But human beings aren’t meant to operate independently; for most of our history we worked, cleaned, ate, worshiped, and accessed entertainment in groups. We are meant to annoy each other a little, and taking the step to be annoying facilitates the development of anticapitalist interdependence.

When we meet new people through mutual friends or the spaces we frequent, those friendships grow into networks of interdependence. The people you have fun with often become the people you march with, and the people that are there for each other in emergencies. If that sounds like the relationship-building work that constitutes much of long-term activism, that’s because it is. An activist community that only comes together when times are tough is difficult to keep strong and vibrant; we need fun times with each other, too. And if we take seriously that joy and pleasure are resistance to our marginalization, then claiming our space by being out in the world and enjoying ourselves matters.

Building both individual bonds and networks of interdependence takes practice. I highly encourage everyone to find a group of people to meet up with regularly in real life (or at least outside of text-based media) and do something soul-nourishing with. For me, that’s weekly attendance at synagogue; for others it’s playing a team sport or taking a cooking class. This can be harder for disabled and/or poor folks, but even corralling a group of friends together for a bi-weekly potluck at your house, or dropping into a book club over Zoom, can make a huge difference.

6. We have to love us more than we hate them

Possibly the biggest reason that I left social media post-inauguration was because I could no longer stomach the endless choruses of Community, community, community– We’re in this together– All we have is each other. After an election season that leftists had spent tearing each other apart, taking each other in bad faith, calling anyone who disagreed on tactics a fascist or a liberal or an op, I couldn’t help thinking,“If all we have is each other, we’re fucked.” For all the talk of community, nobody seemed to actually enjoy being in community.

Hate is easy. Cynicism, doomerism, perfectionism, the witty-but-merciless clapback, are rewarded and glorified on and offline. As leftists, it’s easy for us to identify ourselves by what we are against, what is wrong, what needs to change. It’s much harder to take the time to imagine and articulate what we’re for. But that work of identifying the good is crucial. If our goal is to burn down the old world, but we have no plan for what to build in its stead, then all we are left with is a pile of ash. If our only goal is destruction, we will never be able to create the conditions that give and sustain life. The entire point of activism is to make life better; if we spend our time as activists making ourselves and others miserable, how is the world we’ve created any better than the one we started with?

This is why pleasure and self-care are essential tools in the activist arsenal. If we are not rested, fed, affirmed, and comforted, we get stuck in despair and emotional overwhelm. When we’re in those high-alert states, we’re unable to treat others well and unable to make wise, long-term decisions. The workaholic, ascetic activist culture we’ve created is directly responsible for our inability to get along with each other, and this infighting drives people out of activism and splinters our movements. We are being eaten alive because we have forgotten to love ourselves, and so have forgotten to love each other.

We need to practice living in the world we want to create, and that means practicing leading with love. We must identify and uplift the people and organizations doing things right, not just condemn the ones doing things wrong. We must give credit to those who show up, not just despair about those who stayed home. We must celebrate the partial victories, the imperfect allies, the steps along the long, long path to freedom. We must practice being grateful and satisfiable in a culture that has wired us to be insatiable. We must value each other, honor each other, protect each other. We must assume the best of each other, and give each other room to grow when expectations are not met. We must meet conflict and disagreement with a desire to understand each other. We must imagine better ways of living, and we must believe that they are possible.