We have been here before. We will survive again.

If you are searching for a place to go, look here.

Nov 10, 2024

A photo of Harriman State Park, overlooking a small valley where green grass grows and many tall, thin trees are standing. The trees are not covered with many leaves, so that it is possible to see the upper branches of each. — A photo I took at Harriman State Park, where a group of friends and I went foraging for the first time in mid-summer of 2024.

I usually resist writing these post-crisis, “now what?” types of essays, because I think it creates a false sense of urgency, a falsehood that these crises have spontaneously formed themselves out of thin air and exist only now that we perceive them as such, and because I think that what we must do under fascism is also what we must do during peacetime. But I’ve talked to several young people today1 who have never experienced this before, and who are expressing a sense of loss and despair, so if there’s any meaningful thing I should do as a “queer elder,” it’s to pass on what little I know (for I, too, am constantly working on my ideals, politics, and praxis).

In November of 2016, I had just turned twenty-four. I had come of age during the Obama years, and I was proud of being a liberal; I had not yet encountered leftist politics or the many terrifying, radicalizing events of the next eight years. For a naive, closed-off, liberal mind, Trump’s election victory was unthinkable. It fit nowhere in the liberal paradigm, and it is for this reason that liberalism is ill-equipped to deal with fascist threat. I would even say, as many others have pointed out, that liberalism is ill-equipped precisely because it is premised on maintaining the status quo — a status quo that is further premised on exchanging the lives of outside Others for the comforts of the inside few. It becomes inevitable that such a premise primes a nation-state for fascism2.

I think, at this moment, there are a lot of people facing the idea that we might be sharing a country with half a population of “inherently evil people.” And I think that, while tempting, this is the wrong direction to go in. Let’s remember that marginalized people of all kinds live in so-called “red states,” and that they are hampered by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a general lack of material resources and support. And final polling numbers coming in seem to suggest that, while Trump has gained some voters since 2020 and 2016, a better explanation for his win is that Harris lost a greater percentage of the Democratic vote that simply did not show up. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, for example, won their districts by a comfortable margin, the same districts that Harris lost. When Harris clinched the candidacy, the Democratic campaign experienced an ecstatic re-energizing. Since July, Harris has fumbled an easy race by clinging to establishment party tactics that may have worked in the 90s and early 2000s, but not in this changing world, and especially not for a party that has all but publicly greenlighted genocide. This has happened year after year; I am old enough to remember how the Democrats have failed us each time, and people older than me have longer memories. If there’s anything to blame for Trump, it’s the Democratic Party’s self-inflicted mistakes.

As we reflect on these mistakes at the dawn of a demagogue, I would be remiss to not point out how Harris’s own campaign promised a considerable rightward shift. She ran on a promise to “secure our border” in much the same way Trump has touted, to add Republicans to her Cabinet, to create a “strong” military, and when asked if she thought trans Americans should have a right to access gender-affirming healthcare, she replied, “I believe we should follow the law” — meaning, of course, that she would not make federal protection of trans healthcare a reality. I’ve been reminded by Twitter that universal healthcare and student debt forgiveness were not ever addressed during Harris’s campaign, and she offered no concrete plan to address climate change, either. These election-losing choices signaled an old liberal fear — that any policy with a whiff of “socialism” might invite right-wing backlash and certain electoral defeat — when we have seen time and time again, from district and local races, that the opposite proves itself true.

That the ordinary, working-class American would find socialist policies anathema is, of course, a liberal invention. After the 2016 election, liberals scrambled to find a reason for such a devastating loss from the Democratic Party, and they flocked nearly unanimously to JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. From his words, they divined that the white working class felt left behind and defeated by those dependent on welfare and “unwilling” to work. This, of course, is classist garbage, but as you can imagine, it comforted liberals in that they would never have to change their negative perceptions of poor people, nor would they ever have to introspect or decide that they would have to change themselves. That the ordinary American would be afraid of the word “socialism” is, in and of itself, a fault of liberalism, which, by design, cannot suggest anything to supplant itself. By insisting on its stagnation, it sets the stage for its own failure. It is perhaps no coincidence, or is at least a damning poetic justice, that liberals were themselves the ones who shot Vance to fame, and why we are now saddled with him as our vice president.

We have evidence that the promise of socialist-lite policies work to win even presidential elections. Speaking recently, Biden’s 2020 campaign was sold to me as one of the most “progressive” campaigns the Democrats have ever run. But, as we have experienced, he rarely followed through on his promises, and neither made strong protections for dwindling rights. COVID-19 was not eradicated through good public health policy but was instead memory-holed; wages continued to stagnate against skyrocketing rent and food prices. Billionaires exploited record profits from the pandemic while the rest of us were left to fend for ourselves, and whatever remaining goodwill Biden had was killed off by his refusal to end an American-funded genocide. The Democrats had eight years to fix things, to show the American populace that they are capable agents of material change. For whatever reasons you may throw at me, from bureaucracy to backdoor dealings, we can at least agree that the Democrats were slow to act, and slow to react, especially when it came to addressing Americans’ growing financial stability. That is their ultimate undoing. We have abundant historical evidence and precedent that fascist sentiment rises during times of economic turbulence. It is much easier to blame one’s paucity on being thefted by some typecast Other, and far more difficult to comprehend paucity’s origin in the vast complexity of an abstract system. In other words — a person (or peoples) is a concrete thing to point fingers at. Recognizing that your world is built entirely on lies, and thereby destabilizing everything you understand about your world — that is, unfortunately, not a choice many would make. The issues here are material: we must make sure a people are taken care of, because by the very process of doing so, we deradicalize and unmake fascism.

All of this is not to say that I don’t think there is a deep moral rot in our citizenry — I absolutely do, but I think it is rather that liberalism has allowed patriarchy, imperialism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, classism, ableism, queerphobia, and other such systemic ills to proliferate unabated, refusing to root out these poisonous structures and instead placing the fault on once-in-a-lifetime “dangerous individuals” like Trump. I do not believe that anyone who voted for him is inherently evil (which, to me, is a discrete claim from someone being a fascist), nor do I believe in an inherent goodness of the so-called left. There are thousands of years of philosophizing about the nature of human morality, so I might as well do myself a favor and throw my hat into the ring: neither goodness nor evil are inherent in us. I believe that goodness is a conscious choice you must make every day of your life, and what we perceive as “evil” is a series of justifications that people make in order to live with themselves. After all, no one ever, at least not seriously, not without jest, considers themself the villain.

If you won’t take my word for it, I invoke a man of much greater respect. There is a popular clip from the short film “Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris” that always periodically circulates on social media, in which he is oft-quoted to say, “Love has never been a popular movement… The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people.” That’s nice. I think this gets quoted a lot because we all like to imagine ourselves to belong among the special “very few people” who love. The reality is that it is easy to think of ourselves as lovers when, of course, there are so many in our lives whom we love. What is less often included are his next words: “Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

On days like today, I remind myself how difficult and biologically unnatural it is for a human to cause harm to another living being. The genocidal foot soldiers of empire always return home with PTSD. It has become somewhat of a cultural joke in American media to depict Vietnam War vets experiencing sudden flashbacks, until you learn that the veterans had contracted their “trauma” by committing unspeakable atrocities against the Vietnamese people. More recently, it has been reported that IOF soldiers are returning from Gaza plagued by horrific nightmares, one soldier even killing himself days before redeployment. It is despicable that these fascist mass murderers are considered with any degree of sympathy, but on the other hand, I feel extremely vindicated in something that I have always felt certain of: humans are not wired to commit atrocities. Drone operators experience nightmares for killing remotely, and even lab researchers describe the overwhelming guilt they feel for subjecting mice to horrific experiments. I will repeat this because it is important: we are not wired to commit atrocities. We are wired to love, to feel pleasure, and to be in community with one another. Social connection is like breathing to us. It’s what helped us survive.

I am not saying that none of us will see violence in the coming days or years. I am not saying genocide will end without our concerted interference. I am merely saying that as much has been evidenced over human history that we will maim and kill, there is equal evidence that we have always wanted to save each other, at the cost of our own comfort, sometimes even at the cost of our own lives. I am asking you to tap into what you may have forgotten, but somewhere inside you has laid nesting in your heart all along.

We will have had to do this, anyway. Under Harris or anyone else. Increased police budgets have allowed for the further militarization of police and for the establishment of “cop cities,” which happened under Biden’s watch, already placing the country on a fascist trajectory. Climate collapse is here, and no one in power wants to confront it. Last year, the Earth absorbed nearly no net carbon, a frightening acceleration towards irreversible warming, and we have all witnessed the freak hurricanes and irregular weather occurring over the past several years. I have had the unfortunate opportunity to witness climate scientists on Twitter expressing despair that we are all but racing towards 3.1 degrees of planetary warming. Now is the time for radical change — and I really mean this — with you, not the President, as the agent of change.

There is a saying in anarchist circles that I love: “The secret is to really begin.” It is a provocation for action, to not seek permission from a higher “authority” and instead to start, today, with what you have, and who you are. Some younger folks have been asking me today, “What now?” and what follows is an non-exhaustive list in response. So let’s begin.

1. Wear a mask and create accessible spaces.

My petty reasoning for this is, if you’d like to piss off Trump and his MAGAheads, then I suggest you start masking again. My strategic reasoning is that you can’t fight fascism if you’re sick. Increasing evidence has come out since 2021 that even mild COVID causes brain damage, resulting in memory issues, brain fog, and emotional regulation. Getting COVID increases your chances of getting a heart attack or stroke, which is why there has been a recent epidemic of young people suddenly dying from heart disease. Getting COVID once does not protect you from contracting a milder version of the disease next time around, and furthermore, reinfection increases your likelihood of getting long COVID, which covers a constellation of symptoms, including prolonged dizziness and shortness of breath, tachycardia, and energy levels that are so low that it often prevents people from walking a short distance or even getting out of bed. Getting COVID once also weakens your immune system, and reinfection has a cumulative effect. Vaccinations are not enough — they do not prevent you full-stop from contracting COVID, and they do not prevent you from spreading COVID either. This is why everyone has been “getting so sick” lately, and so often. This is not 2019.

I link all of this not to scare you, but to show you that these scientific studies are out there, and have existed in the world for as long as three years. The reason why you might not have known any of this is because the Democrats were frantic to earn back public trust without expending any actual money or effort to protect the populace, and because they wanted to put us back to work to labor for the billionaire class, so that we would not have the time nor luxury to grow a political conscience and protest like we did in 2020 against anti-Black police violence. The Democrats have traded your life for profit, and you should feel angry about it. This is, to quote Aaron Bushnell, what the ruling class has decided will be normal.

I find it interesting that when the COVID-19 pandemic began, many were invoking the HBO miniseries Chernobyl as a metaphor for Trump’s mismanagement of public health. But when Biden came into office and continued to mismanage the pandemic, one-time critics were soothed by only his arrival, and they quickly dropped efforts to mitigate disease. For many, they believed in masking only as anti-Trump (and pro-Democrat) rhetoric, which is a foul way to live your life. Though no one wants to believe we live in Chernobyl anymore, I still find these words from the last episode are evergreen: “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is still ongoing. I know this to be true without having to be told because people around me and around the world are still getting sick with COVID-19, and they are getting sicker. The “debt” we are paying is with our bodies — with poorer health, with compromised immune systems, leaving us unable, or unwilling, to fight off the next pandemic.

And, of course, my political reasoning for masking is that it’s simply the right thing to do. As a (currently) able-bodied person, I am intentional about including disability justice as an important part of my politics. Disability justice is a framework not solely about securing rights for disabled people. It is an anti-capitalist politic that refuses to frame the human body as a productive worker, but instead considers it a body that gets ill, that requires rest, that deserves accommodations and support for its unique needs, and isn’t forced to perform labor in order to live. When leftists leave out disability justice as a part of their politics — and therefore don’t include disabled people in their spaces and organizing — they take part in refusing disabled people’s ability to live and survive.

Speaking of vulnerable populations, I should also mention that Black and brown people are disproportionately affected by COVID, as are trans people, as is anyone who works an in-person customer service job — every single population that faces economic instability in this country is at higher risk for contracting acute COVID and developing long COVID. If you have children, which are one of our most oppressed classes of people, I urge you to mask them for their protection as well. Already we are starting to see concerning percentages of children suffering from long COVID, brain damage, and heart issues. I perhaps feel most angry for them. Children do not have the information nor the power to make their own choices about COVID prevention, and we have failed them. We did not protect them.

The continued mismanagement of COVID is also what led us here directly to fascism. I am not well-read on the history myself, but many disability activists have been sharing (since 2020) that the mismanagement of the 1918 flu epidemic is what invited fascism in the following decades. Normalized eugenics allows us to feel comfortable with “acceptable” losses — in this case, disabled and immunocompromised people — which in turn primes us to accept other losses. This election cycle, I have seen Palestinians’ lives framed by liberals as “acceptable” losses as well. It wouldn’t surprise you, I suppose, to learn that eugenics and genocide are closely woven, or even one and the same. Disease is a weapon of empire. At the end of 2020, Israel instated a vaccine apartheid, allowing Israelis to access the new COVID-19 vaccine but barring Palestinians. The Global South overall has less access to vaccines and masks due to resource-hoarding by wealthier countries, which hurts us all — it allows COVID-19 to spread and mutate into more immunity-evasive variants. As someone living in the heart of empire, who has the privilege to access many disease-prevention tools, I consider it my duty to stop the spread and mutation of COVID-19 beginning with myself, to remove myself as a node and origin point of infection. Masking is one of the easiest and most consistent anti-genocidal actions that I partake in.

We have the tools and protocols already to protect ourselves and others. Building community and organizing starts with sacrificing a bit of your own comfort to create a safer space for others. We know that N95 respirators are incredibly effective at blocking COVID, and you cannot start masking only when you or others around you are sick. 40-60% of COVID infections happen through asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic spread, and COVID can linger in the air for hours. Moreover, with each fast-mutating variant, at-home rapid tests have become less and less effective at detecting positives, especially for asymptomatic cases. In other words — you never know when you or others are contagious with COVID. So you must, even when you feel perfectly healthy, mask in crowded outdoor areas and anywhere indoors, especially in places like grocery stores, hospitals, doctor’s offices, and public transit — places that must be accessible to everyone. Do not bar disabled and immunocompromised people from public life or from services that are necessary to access. Do not exclude disabled people or disability justice from your organizing. This is how we have already invited eugenics and fascism into leftist spaces. Do not become a willing participant of fascism, and for god’s sake, mask up.

If you’ve had trouble finding a good K/N95 mask, I suggest starting with Project N95, which provides links for authentic and vetted masks, as well as multiple guides on how to find the right mask for you. Everyone’s face shape is a bit different, so don’t get frustrated with trying out different brands or shapes, as what works for a loved one may not work for you. The general advice for ensuring a good seal is to position your hands a short distance away from either side of your face, and if you exhale vigorously and feel no air leaking out from the edges of your mask, then you have pretty adequate protection. If you’d like to be more certain and don’t mind a bit of extra work, you can do an at-home fit test, which will ensure that your mask has a tight seal that will prevent COVID viruses from entering or exiting your mask.

Being able to buy masks, or any other mitigation tool, is of course a financial privilege. If you or a loved one cannot afford masks, there are many mask blocs around the country who will be able to provide you with free masks. If you have the time, money, and energy, and your local area does not yet have a mask bloc, I encourage you to start one. Organize your friends and start small. The time to do so has never been so necessary.

Another COVID-prevention practice we must perform immediately is to clean the air. As I mentioned earlier, because COVID is spread via aerosols and not droplets, it can linger in the air hours after the infected person has already left the room. Increased air circulation can clear and dissipate viral particles — which is why COVID is less transmissible (though not totally unavoidable) outdoors. An easy way to increase air circulation indoors is to simply open the windows, if you have no other recourse. A better way is to run a HEPA filter air purifier. Many clean air organizations are popping up around the country, providing indoor events with air purifiers, and some also run lending libraries, where you can borrow air purifiers for your own use. I suggest following these organizations on social media, as they also share up-to-date COVID information and resources.

Despite multiple other tools, masking continues to be our best and primary line of defense against respiratory disease. If you must do one mitigation only, then let it be masking. I agree that masking isn’t the most comfortable thing ever — I have particularly high sensory sensitivity when it comes to my skin, and fighting the physical discomfort of wearing a mask, to be frank, saps a good portion of my energy day-to-day. But I reiterate: we must. H5N1 is a real imminent threat, and if human-to-human transmission continues at its current rapid pace, it will have a mortality rate many times more fatal than COVID-19 (25-50% by some reports). I want you to be alive and well. I want you to be breathing strong alongside all of us. I don’t want you, or anyone else, dead.

I know people are afraid of Twitter right now, and for good reason, but it is also one of the best places to get some amount of information about COVID, H5N1, and other infectious diseases swirling around. People are reading new research, deciphering scientific papers, sharing resources, and testing what works to alleviate long COVID over there. It is sometimes imperfect information gathering, but after being abandoned wholesale by the government and the public health sector, it’s the best we’ve got right now. And a lot of it really is good, accurate work.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you that my ultimate point is community. Share your resources with others, as resource-hoarding is partially how we got to this point to begin with. Have spare masks on hand to give to others when they need it. Test before you meet people unmasked, and be honest and upfront when you’ve tested positive. Talk to your loved ones, patiently, in multiple conversations over time, about the dangers of COVID and the benefits of masking. The destruction of public health is a terrible loss for all of us, and we must do everything in our power to build it back, brick by brick.

2. Work on a local, grassroots level.

When we use the word “community,” usually we are using it to mean one of various things: our loved ones; people we like and want to be friends with; people who share our identities and backgrounds; people with whom we share our vision of the future. All of these are amenable in the umbrella of definition, and I think we should specify what exactly we mean when we say to “find community,” because while some of these people may overlap in your life, others may not. I also propose that we also include more often one that tends to get left out: people who live next to and around you. It’s smaller-scale than you might think — people who live in your building or on your block. People you might see everyday.

We advocate for getting involved in local communities for a few reasons, and here are a couple of mine: first, because in an emergency, the people you call on and aid first are the people in your immediate vicinity. Second, because you know the issues affecting your neighborhood better than anywhere else, so you’ll be able to better advocate for them. So a good place to start, even if you have no prior organizing experience, is to check in on your neighbors — especially your unhoused neighbors — and build a support network with them. And I think we must do this even amidst the rising fear and distrust we may feel right now — with reasonable precaution, of course, for our own physical safety. Much has been said about how we as a society, and particularly the “younger” generation, have lost connection with our neighbors and neighborhood, and how it has caused an increase in loneliness. I believe that, despite the risks and discomfort, we owe it to ourselves to reverse this.

The fortunate part of living in the age of social media is, if you are looking for local grassroots organizations to join, it is extraordinarily easy to find them online. Many have accounts on Instagram and/or Twitter, and if you live in Los Angeles or New York City, I have some vetted suggestions for you. As others may warn, do your research before joining a leftist organization. Humans will be humans despite what type of politics they preach, and some organizations can attract or harbor abusers, grifters, and counterinsurgents. Find suggestions from people you trust, or bar nothing else, you can leave when you feel unsafe. I also cannot stress enough against joining national organizations like DSA and PSL. Ask any longtime organizer, and they will probably have horrific stories. But mostly, I find them ineffectual. I have watched larger organizations, time and time again, fall into the same bureaucratic traps and languor of speed that we often critique governments or non-profits for. An organization only focused on its own growth and spread, as opposed to the work that will materially change people’s lives, will never truly be an organization for the people.

I make one exception to this, and that is organizing and communicating with incarcerated people, who rely on more broadly networked organizations to stay in touch with the outside world. It’s an especially crucial time to be in contact with our most vulnerable populations, namely the incarcerated and the unhoused, as laws criminalizing homelessness continue to get passed in the country, and as governments continue to expand the slavery of incarcerated people. The dehumanization of these populations is cruelly normalized, and we must, more than ever, vociferously reject this dehumanization. A good place to start with this might be signing up to become a penpal to an incarcerated person, and to learn what material resources they are lacking and are barred from.

Of course, if you are frustrated in the search for an organization that matches your values, or if the area you live in simply does not have a group doing the work you’re interested in, you can start something with your friends, people whom you already know and trust and are most likely to share your values. Start small, keep things manageable and moving efficiently. It’s important to learn from experienced organizers, but at the same time, there is no better way to learn than by doing. It’s okay to make mistakes as long as we correct and learn from them; we are all human. The secret, after all, is to really begin.

3. Pick your role, and learn your skills.

As my therapist likes to remind me, you cannot do everything by yourself, and since building community is our focus, it would be counterproductive, anyhow. I think many might be asking themselves at the moment, “How can I be useful? What can I do?” What follows are some suggestions on how to figure that out.

Conduct an audit of your skills, knowledge base, and materials. Are you enamored with spreadsheets and with keeping track of detailed data? Are you a Wikipedia-deep-diver, and would enjoy researching crucial information for a strategic action or movement? Are you good with people? Are you someone who prefers mediation and liaising compromise, or someone who excels at approaching strangers and speaking loudly for a cause? Can your existing expertise or interests lead you towards learning a new, adjacent skill? Do you have a car, and therefore would be able to assist in transporting food, machines, materials, etc.? Do you have extra savings every month that you can give to individuals in need?

A resource that may help further elucidate the path forward for you is Social Change Map (pages 5 and 6 of this PDF). We can be multiple roles at once, but again, we cannot do everything ourselves, and it’s worth figuring out what our individual strengths, weaknesses, and skill sets are, so that we can call on others who have what we lack, or to offer our abilities, when these opportunities arise.

4. Spread non-institutional knowledge, in non-institutional ways.

When I say “non-institutional knowledge,” I mean things like street medic first aid, local floral and fauna, foraging and food preservation, traditional clothes mending, labor organizing, political books written by people who exist outside of (or despite) the Western legal system, and so much more. And when I say “non-institutional ways,” I mean without the usual extractive, colonial methods of knowledge-seeking. I suppose I aim this mostly at white people, but it is also at all of us who grew up in educational systems founded in colonialism — knowledge is so often treated as possession, as a trophy one can wield over others in shows of domination or as a deed to stake claims in someone else’s territory. And what we call “knowledge” is so often considered with a static, unchanging quality that exists in the bounds of exactitude. If we want to truly learn, and to build strong collective foundations of knowledge, then knowledge must also exist alongside or even within change and uncertainty. We must always question what we have been taught before, and how the way we think might actually be benefiting others who wish to disempower us.

You can find or host reading groups and workshops on topics you’re interested in, but learning can be found in less formal ways than even those. As I will say several times in this essay: start small, and start close to home. Collect a group of friends who are interested in reading and discussing the same text as you, or who want to begin learning the same skill as you, and embark together. I think our modern educational systems have rendered the experience of encountering challenging material into an onerous chore, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can choose joy and playfulness in our revolutionary methods; after all, what use is the vision of a new world that does not permit joy?

I also suggest delving into the topic of pedagogy itself, and how the way knowledge is taught affects the way we perceive the world around us. In particular, I am thinking of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire, in which he critiques the “banking model of education,” based on rote memorization and the passive acquisition of knowledge, and advocates for a more discussion-based, equalizing method that, in doing so, may also help us learn how to consolidate our power against oppressive forces.

5. Work on creating archives.

I need you to know that this one was not my idea, I saw it on Twitter, but now I’m unable to find the original Tweet. I’m going to blame the impossibility of the search, while I still can, on Elon — and maybe this is exactly a demonstration of why we need archives to begin with. Contrary to what you might have been told, the internet is not forever. Large language models, or LLMs, are “hallucinating” false information, to disastrous real world effects. Generative AI is already polluting image searches with fake images, making it easier to trick viewers into believing a version of reality that does not exist. With all of this junk being generated in massive quantities and being spread across the internet, AI slop will soon drown out decades of research and reporting. It may even supersede the number of real people on the internet.

What’s more is there is an active war on information and the ability to access it. Recently, the Internet Archive was hacked and downed for multiple days, illuminating the fragility of what we previously considered a “permanent” receptacle of internet history. With so much disinformation infecting our world at such dizzying speed, power in the coming years will be determined by who owns or destroys what data, and who can confabulate most convincingly.

Though this is, of course, already the case. Fascism requires one’s buy-in that there was a glorious powerful past, and that out-groups today have stolen that past. Much of our collective complacency about COVID, climate change, and Palestine hinges on our never-ending participation in capitalism. We are too busy to care, and our careers are too at stake.

Instead, as Vicky Osterweil posits, we should consider remembering as an act of resistance, especially as our memories hold onto truths too inconvenient for the ruling class. We must resist forgetting, and whoever enables the forgetting. We can, in small part, practice resistance by building our own personal archives — not just of ourselves, but of things that we are passionate about or consider of great importance. Obscure and revolutionary histories; degenerate art; people and cultures and languages on the brink of erasure; to name a few examples. Download articles, essays, stories, images, photographs, art, videos — anything that could disappear from the internet easily — onto your hard drive. Create backups, and then backups of those backups. Create physical copies when you can.

Remember — nothing is permanent. Who knows how much knowledge has been lost across human history, either by accident or by design. But some things always survive. Let what you love leave a record so that those in future time will remember what was loved.

6. Do not comply.

Unfortunately, I really do think that the word “resist” has lost all power (and possibly meaning) since 2016. A better adage against authoritarianism might be, “Do not comply.” If it is a law or edict that encroaches on your or another human’s physical safety, do not comply. Do not give this system any more power than it’s already taken from you. If you have ever said, “Fuck 12,” or “Be gay, do crimes,” this is the time for praxis.

I also support direct action and material disruption (actions beyond protests and demonstrations, in other words). What I will advocate for here is not getting caught. Do not get arrested. I have read stories of activists getting harassed by police for years after their jail stint and having their arrest record used against them. And, of course, horrific abuse happens out of the public eye. “Be like water” is another anarchist saying. Don’t talk about your plans in public (including social media and unsecured messaging platforms), organize secretly and securely, get out safely, and live to fight another day.

I will have to, again, bring up the issue of masking. When mask mandates were lifted, or when Biden declared a false end to the COVID-19 pandemic, many stopped masking because of it. While I appreciate that many simply did not know about the dangers of COVID, nor that the government has lied to us about its perilousness, if you have gotten this far in my long-winded essay, then surely you know now. I and many other COVID-cautious folks believe that the reluctance to mask again is rooted in the adherence to social compliance, or peer pressure. Put simply, with so few people masking nowadays, if you mask, you stand out. Humans fear being singled out, mocked, ridiculed, and ostracized. I understand how difficult it is to override this natural reaction. But you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to make the effort. Think of it as an act of care — that you care about your own health and well-being, as well as that of those around you. I find that is worth the standing out.

7. Curb your consumerism.

It’s simple: the earth’s survival and ours is incompatible with our insatiable thirst for materials and energy. The touting of “green energy” only serves to enable our habits of overconsumption, and what’s more, it is incredibly environmentally destructive. How is it “green” to raze an entire old-growth forest in order to build a solar farm? Greenwashing is overabundant in our market. Every start-up has invented some more “environmentally friendly” version of a product, many without seriously backing up their claims, and many for products that we frankly do not need to begin with.

What we need to embark on instead, and expeditiously, is degrowth. Much of degrowth requires difficult structural changes, but we can start on a smaller scale. If we are serious, serious, about surviving climate collapse, then we must make the changes that we can to our own individual lives, which is what we each have control over. A while back, a statistic stating that 100 companies produce 70% of all emissions was spread around social media, though this was misquoted; in actuality, it’s 71% of fossil fuel and cement emissions that are attributed to 100 companies, whereas 88% of true global emissions is caused by the consumption of products. In other words: we can make a material and noticeable impact if we cut down on our consumption. And we must choose, enthusiastically, to refuse our participation in a system that is over-extractive and rapidly destroying our planet.

I understand that we are not always able to follow this rule, but even so, I do it imperfectly: if you must buy something, then do not buy newly-manufactured, buy used and secondhand. Especially electronics, as the mining of coltan and cobalt is tied to the genocide of millions of people in Congo. The more local you can find something, the better. The great joy of my last several years has been learning to navigate eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and local thrift stores for new clothes, furniture, and appliances.

I must also beseech you to stop using generative AI, fullstop, not even for the meme, as it eats up massive amounts of energy and water to cool its machines, creates $10 billion in emissions, and is being used to further fossil fuel production, contrary to tech CEOs’ claims that AI will be used to solve climate change (which, as evidenced by this sentence, is a malevolent obfuscation). Stop using ChatGPT, OpenAI, and other such tools that require the large-batch processing (and theft) of data. Google Search has begun to automatically load an “AI overview” for all of its searches, which uses 30 times the energy of a regular search, so if you haven’t already, I recommend switching from Google to another search engine (I use ecosia.org), or adding “-ai” to the end of your Google searches to remove the AI overview.

In general, we must change our lifestyles and consume less. Much less. Instead of deriving joy from the acquisition of material things and from hyper-convenience (both of which are more often than not predicated on the exploitation of people in the Global South, and on the over-extraction of natural resources of those regions), we must seek fulfillment in slowness, difficulty, and even failure. This is a tough ask when the world has been intentionally designed to make us consume and at speed, but I think this will also soothe our current existential emptiness. Pleasure need not be synonymous with consumption. We can instead spend time with each other, provide for each other’s needs, and rest. There were millennia where we existed without the unmoderated drive to consume everything in our path. We don’t need it. And the earth can’t sustain our greed.

8. Practice community skills and conflict resolution.

I think there is a lot of clamor to “build community,” when we don’t exactly understand what that means. Capitalism disincentivizes us from community-building, and we have been out of practice for a long time. As a leftist, I have witnessed (and been part of) leftist organizations that have fallen apart due to petty squabbling, and this is no recent phenomenon — this has been going on for as long as there have been leftists. What can I say — leftists love to squabble, and some of it always involves intellectual posturing and moral superiority. I am at once imploring not to let this dissuade or demoralize you, as this is an unavoidable and time-honored tradition, and for all of us to do better. To better organize alongside people whom you may not always agree with or may not even like, it requires you to look at yourself, really look at yourself, and ask yourself how you react to critique, dissent, and conflict. What triggers you? In activating situations, what traumas or experiences in your past are being recalled in your body? You may want to work with a therapist to answer some of these questions, but of course, not every therapist is a good therapist, and there is a strong argument that our modern system of medicalized therapy is yet another outcropping of empire, designed to mollify us into inaction. There are also alternative knowledge-holders, such as spiritual healers and body workers, who work outside of the therapy system. Either way, do your research, and find someone trusted. Rely on your friends more and have those deep, embarrassing, “trauma dump” conversations with them. Risk your heart. We do not heal in isolation of one another.

I have not yet read Conflict is Not Abuse, but even so, sometimes I like to repeat the title to myself, to remind myself that just because someone disagrees with me, or (I perceive that) someone is unhappy with me, it doesn’t mean that I am being abused. Conflict can feel triggering for me, and sometimes being triggered means we feel attacked, and we respond desperately in kind, digging ourselves into a well of never-ending self-justification. Managing our reactions to triggers is also a skill we must learn. I try to remind myself that, even if my body thinks otherwise, I am safe now, I am not a powerless child anymore and I am capable of protecting myself, and that even if I feel hurt, I don’t have to hold onto the hurt forever, I can hold myself through the emotion and then let it go, when it’s ready. That’s important — let yourself feel the bad feeling, even if it’s disgusting to you, even if it’s inconvenient. Ignoring it tends to make things worse.

For white people, I advocate for investigating your whiteness. Whiteness not as a skin color or racial group, but as a specific structure of power that subjugates and affects everything around it. I have had the unfortunate experience of encountering white people who specialize in Black studies or even Black radical politics and who are the most racist people I’ve ever met. I sometimes don’t think that studying the liberation movements of marginalized peoples is the most helpful thing ever for you, or if it’s helped you, then there’s a limit. I think it’s worth thinking deeply, investigating deeply, on how whiteness has impacted the way you see the world, how you move through the world, and more importantly, what whiteness has taken away from you. I have two examples for you: a while back, I read a Twitter thread3 about how whiteness has totally obliterated unique European cultures, destroying forms of folk customs and practices in order to better inculcate Europeans into the colonial project of whiteness. The Twitter user expressed anger about this. Here were a multitude of rich cultural histories, full of knowledge and meaning, traded away in favor of something cruel and hollow. “Whiteness” is fascism; it promises a yesteryear of grandeur and superiority that has never existed, and it is greedy in indoctrinating all it can under its malevolent wing. Much has been written about how Italian and Irish Americans, once oppressed groups, were absorbed into whiteness on the condition that they break solidarity with other racialized groups (namely the Black community), and now we are seeing the same thing being done to the Latine and East Asian American communities.

When you buy into structures of power and oppression, even unwittingly, it takes something from your soul. It steals your humanity. I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s lecture “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” in which she describes (via Moby Dick) an insistent adherence to whiteness as “personal dismemberment” on a societal and spiritual level. “The trauma of racism,” she writes, “is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self.” I am doubly reminded of how trans activists have painstakingly researched the radicalization of TERFs, and how each “gender critical activist” who starts out “asking questions” ends up becoming consumed by their own fanatical hatred, unwilling or unable to speak about anything else. Their entire identity begins to revolve around denigrating trans women. Perhaps many of us buy into oppression without such extremes, but the extremes show us, magnified, what the costs of buying are. I think it is worth it, especially for those who live in Western countries, to consider what power we hold over others, and where we can disengage. To recognize our own complicity, and to refuse it wherever we can, is the work of reinhabiting our humanity.

9. Practice earnestness.

No more of this cynical, detached, ironic shit. That’s the type of attitude fascists love, because if you think showing passion is cringe, then you’ll never show passion for anything important, and certainly not when the time is right. Be a degenerate freak and never apologize for it. Show your bleeding heart in the face of ridicule. And more importantly, never let them shame you for caring about what happens to other people.

Part of the American moral rot is that we have been fooled into thinking we are allowed to sacrifice a little bit of other people in order to secure our own stability and standing. I see this still prevalent in Western leftism, especially among white leftists, who have not done the work (as I advocated above) of dismantling their worldviews that have been shaped by the social order they were raised in. Part of the leftist petty squabbling is the desire to be, at all times, correct, and therefore to be the individual holder of all the special and correct knowledge in the world. I find this to also be a symptom of colonial thinking. To be wrong, to take accountability, to be earnest — all these require humility in the face of community, and to give oneself over to the unstable unknown.

I will leave you, dear reader, with the future, and one of my favorite Malcolm X quotes: “I want to be remembered as someone who was sincere. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity. If I was wrong, I was wrong in sincerity.”

RABBLEROUSE

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