How to Fight Fascism in a Captured State

In this week's episode of “Movement Memos,” I talk with author and organizer Shane Burley about the realities of organizing under a federal government that’s been captured by the far right. As I told Shane, “We need to think deeply about cultivating that mindset of collective survival, of needing to understand each other and work together, even if we don’t like each other, and would never actually choose each other, because this is the ‘us’ we’ve got in an us versus them situation.”

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Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout and is shared here with permission.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about fascism, including techno-fascism, mutual aid, and the kind of organizing and solidarity we need to survive these times. We’ll be hearing from my friend Shane Burley, who is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It, Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse, and the co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. Shane has helped me think through a lot of crises over the years, and I think his insights on this moment are downright essential.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Shane Burley, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Shane Burley: Thanks for having me back again.

KH: How are you doing, friend?

SB: I’m doing okay. It’s been a rough few weeks. It’s been a rough few weeks for everyone, so at least we’re all doing it together.

KH: Absolutely. So it’s been a while, but you’ve been on the show, I think probably more than any other guest, but for listeners who may not have heard from you before, can you say a bit about your work and what you do?

SB: Sure, yeah. I’m out here in Portland, Oregon. I have written for a long time about fascism, far right and anti-fascist organizing and about social movements in general, mutual aid. And I’ve worked in organizing and housing and labor, mutual aid organizing, ecological defense and other things over the years. And we’ve gotten together to talk about the state of the world and fighting back many, many, many times over, I don’t know how many years at this point.

KH: Well, really glad to have you back. I Really value your insights and your analysis, and I think I think the two of us make a good team.

So to open up this conversation, I just want to ask, as someone who has studied fascism, fascist movements, and anti-fascist organizing for many years, how do you view the present moment? What are you noticing? And what do you think needs to be named?

SB: I think this is a totally unwritten, unpredicted situation where the rules are entirely different and we should treat them as entirely differently. Right now, if you think about what we call anti-fascism, what people kind of have the image of, it’s mainly post-war anti-fascism, so after World War II. So what that generally means is that those movements aren’t fighting fascist governments, so that’s just typically not what’s happening in most of that, what we kind of envision as typical anti-fascist organizing. Maybe they’re fighting neo-Nazis, maybe they’re even fighting really, really large movements, but not necessarily in the state.

But the question is what does it look like when there’s state capture? And then what does it look like when there’s state capture by the far right in a very advanced post-industrial government? If you think about Germany or Italy or Spain or even later sort of government entities where a fascist or far right party takes power, those are somewhat primitive states in comparison to the massive sort of overarching American government, which is a totally different beast, which controls global economies, which has huge hands on workers’ lives, on people’s civil rights, health care access, all kinds of stuff, and is very technologically sophisticated and kind of coordinated.

So we are in a situation now where essentially the far right has taken over basically every element of the federal government, which is enacting policies that attack the left very specifically and are doing mass deportations, attacking trans health care. They’re staging a coup on people’s lives. It’s like dropping an atom bomb on the daily lives of human beings, at a scale that has never happened before. We should say that again. It’s never happened before, not like this. There’s real precedent for it.

So because of that, it doesn’t mean we don’t have many, many, many examples from history from which to learn, but we do need to kind of weave those together differently than we have in the past and certainly different than we did in 2017 when preparing for Trump’s first term or in the interim. So we should be thinking about this as how do we deal with this differently, when there is such a perfect alignment on the one hand of the world’s richest person and the scion of the far right who’s now the president, and a dramatic rightward shift of the entire GOP to aligning with politics that used to be found in the fringes of fascist message boards? What do we do in that situation?

KH: When you say this hasn’t happened before, you mean here in the United States?

SB: Right, yeah. No, to be real specific, I mean here. There’s not a precedent in the United States for this. There is precedent globally, which is why our sort of need to press internationally and to have those international relationships and that two-way sort of learning, that’s really important.

But here, specifically in the U.S., it hasn’t happened. And that’s why I think people were so unprepared for just the scale of these executive orders and the attacks that happened because there was a sort of underlying belief, particularly amongst kind of affluent liberal communities that are often in urban areas, that simply this scale of attack just wouldn’t take place. That it’d be much more muted or specific or it would slot itself into the sort of struggles that you normally have, that you’d be able to stop it in the courts or there would be protests that would get people to back down, that kind of thing.

But that’s not taking place now. Something different is happening, something that looks a lot more like political coups that have happened in other countries over the last 20 years, but not like the right-wing history of American government.

KH: So how does what we are experiencing in the U.S. relate to what’s happening with fascism globally right now and to some of those more recent histories you were just referring to?

SB: Well, there’s been a shift in electoral politics all across the world, but most specifically you can see it across Europe, in Russia, India, Israel, where a lot of mainstream parties either have taken on the character that you’d normally see in a far right national populist, white nationalist party.

So an example is Israel, the Likud party, which is often thought of as, I don’t know, sort of like the Republican Party, except their politics are much more in line with what you’d find in a far right nationalist party, National Front or something like that. In Europe, those have taken on that character and at the same time, coalition governments are now bringing in far right parties, so they’re actually working in collaboration in these places, which moves the entire apparatus very, very far to the right. So what you’re seeing now is not just an insurrectionary fascist movement, not like people in the streets, those exist too, but it’s a little bit different, but they’re actually in there making public policy. And the left hasn’t obviously had that same kind of success. The DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] hasn’t taken over huge parts of the Democratic Party or something like that.

So what you’re seeing is that they’re mobilizing and they’re using either, on the one hand, real financial instability or the trenchant threat of financial instability or the loss of status in a lot of largely white middle income communities, to then push these far right politics, specifically to demonize immigrants. In Europe, this is really, really built around the Islamophobic core of the far right. And here it’s, to a degree, of the same, but it’s also built around attacking immigrants south of the border and specifically in demonizing trans folks.

All of that has allowed them to take this long game of taking over state power, whether it’s in courts or in just normal electoral positions, and moving things really far to the right. And now what they’ve done, particularly in the U.S., that follows suit of what’s happened particularly in Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, which is to basically set up a situation that breaks down the safeguards, breaks down the balance of power so that when someone gets in there with enough force, they’re able to start just kind of knocking out various changes.

And that’s [what] Trump [is] doing today. The closest allegory is probably Viktor Orbán in Hungary and how there was a right-wing shift that allowed him to basically just start making really, really serious changes to fundamental core institutions. And there was not much, at least in terms of structures of government, that could stop that.

KH: Yeah, I think the Orbán comparison is really important, because there are a lot of parallels there. I also think it’s worth noting that Netanyahu, who can’t safely travel to many countries without worrying about his ICC [International Criminal Court] arrest warrant, was recently welcomed by Orbán in Hungary. And while Netanyahu was visiting, Orbán announced that Hungary was actually withdrawing from the International Criminal Court. Netanyahu and Orbán have long taken the position that western liberalism and multiculturalism are done, and that nationalist politics are going to define the future. With the second election of Donald Trump, which has led to the destabilization of long-held alliances and international norms, I think they see an opening for the normalization and proliferation of their agendas.

From Orbán’s capture of Hungarian media, to the control he’s exerted over the Hungarian judicial system — which is something Netanyahu has also aspired to — we can see, in Hungary, what it looks like when some Trump’s aspirations are brought to fruition. What should those of us who want to resist Trump take away from Orbán’s ascent in Hungary?

SB: Well, I think there’s a good comparison right now to the way that Orbán went after universities, public universities, not even just public universities, but universities in general as a sort of way of dispatching two things. One was to dispatch the actual political organs of the left, given the role that universities and colleges often play in grassroots politics. And then also to stage sort of like a cultural war intervention. We’re not going to reproduce the ideas that build the left. We are going to attack, I don’t know, gender studies or other sorts of ideas that run counter to the Hungarian national narrative. So that’s a way of intervening and changing things generationally. We haven’t even seen the long-term effects of what that looks like.

And then centralizing power, centralizing core powers. A similar way actually might be to what happened in Israel prior to October 7th with the attack on the judiciary, trying to make it… Sort of to undo the checks and balances that would’ve been used to pull back the more extreme policies that the right-wing coalition government was going to push through. These are just very smart ways of dismantling resistance, at least the kind of resistance that’s sort of legible through the state electoral system. And that’s exactly the things that are happening right now.

So you see these executive orders that go after those sort of what sometimes almost seem mundane elements. So for example, attacking collective bargaining rights for federal employees. This is attacking an institution that often challenges capital — labor unions — and going after that. Similarly, going after campus activists, making it too volatile for them to exist, going after universities and pulling their funding if they don’t do something about these collegiate activist organizations. Saying, “Okay, your university will no longer get medical research funding if you allow people to wear keffiyehs as masks,” things like that. What this does is it dismantles, one at a time, these elements of resistance. So that’s exactly what the Trump model would be.

I was with Dan Berger, well-known good buddy, organizer, scholar who was saying that one of the mistakes that Trump made in the first term was just simply entering in with racist rhetoric first. And that what he’ll likely do this time, and that has proven true, is to attack the elements of defense and resistance first. And then as that’s happening, to start ramping up racist policies and transphobic policies. Because what happened before was people had their defenses right away and people were able, there was mass flooding in the streets and you saw really big actions and the growth of organizing, but what they would try and do instead is attack that resistance right from the get-go, right? Have a real panic about it. Give a sort of moral panic about what the left was capable of and what the left had been doing. And therefore, they could dismantle any kind of resistance right away and then the policies would come in with less pushback, at least that’s what his hope would be.

KH: On that subject, I want to talk for a moment about the capitulation that we’re seeing from some institutions. I’m thinking about Columbia University and how some people seem to think they can cooperate their way out of this mess. If anything, I think submission actually excites the fascist ego, and will probably lead Trump to inflict more pain, and create a spectacle in doing so.

SB: Absolutely. Liberal politics is based on the idea that moderation and internal collaboration, by which they mean capitulation to their opponents is how you get to a sort of reasonable balance of society. And there was, there emerged a sort of class of liberals, over the last like 10 years or so, that really, whose goal is there to punch to the left, to sort of undermine the leftward shift that had happened in politics around Trump to say, “Actually, we’re trying to return ourselves to this sort of balancing act of American Democratic politics.”

The problem is that the right has no interest in that capitulation, right? They are a radical force, now they’re not a negotiating sort of center-right politic. That doesn’t exist in the Republican Party anymore, but is still the center of the Democratic Party and this whole apparatus that surrounds it. And to be on the radical left, which is the alternative to that, is to not have the same financial backing, which is to have no connections to corporate America, is to have all those things that make something larger and more vocal and to dominate the conversation more.

So what you’re seeing is a sort of class of affluent liberals basically just sort of bending to Trump’s demands. That’s exactly what’s happening in Columbia, right? You have essentially liberal-leaning academics of a techno-managerial class who are sort of giving in because they need money, they want to keep their university functioning. Except what’s happening when they do that? Trump’s not backing down. So they’re giving in all these things but they’re not getting anything in return.

And that is exactly the exchange that’s happening all across the country, as sort of center-left but liberal politicians sort of make these concessions, whether it’s on the budget or on other things, under the idea that hey, we need bipartisanship. That’s smart governance. But the reality is that they are at war with the rest of the people. So if you’re not coming in with that same sort of war mindset, you’re not actually going to be fighting back to get anything. When you actually get concessions, if concessions is what you want, is by actually fighting and having a real sense of position and a really sense of what you want to win. And that’s just simply not what’s happening.

And again, it’s not necessarily in those people’s interests to fight. For so long, our image of liberal Democratic politics has been governed by very, very affluent people in corporate or nonprofit or academic sectors. Those people are not the ones that are primarily harmed by these changes. It’s working-class people, it’s marginalized people. So again, when you’re going to leave it up to them to be the ones that are sort of the vocal, I don’t know, voice of the resistance, what you’re going to get is capitulation every time.

KH: So you’re saying appeasement doesn’t work.

[Laughter]

SB: Never has and never fucking will. There’s no situation in which that has ever worked. It can work in ensuring that you have a good donor base for your reelection, but it’s not going to work to actually fight back against these really serious attacks.

When Trump is attacking, for example, the labor movement and trying to erode the base of the entire worker’s struggle, there’s no negotiation that’s going to help you to maintain the standards of living for the people those unions negotiate for. That’s simply not how it works. You’re going to have to fight and dismantle those attacks. But if you’re not prepared to fight, then there’s really nothing that you can expect to receive on the other end of it other than to maybe slow the process of destruction.

KH: So what kind of posture do you think makes sense right now for people whose communities and organizations are under attack?

SB: I think the first thing is they have to know that they’re in a war. I think people need to know that they are under assault right now. There has been, again, the same kind of liberal apparatus that has focused for so long and making sure that people don’t feel like that Trump is apocalyptic and kind of making people feel sort of silly or vulnerable for having those kinds of reactions. But the reality is that if you are a union worker, if you are a federal worker, if you are a trans person or trying to get health care, if you’re a person of any level of immigration at this point, whether it’s a green card holder or someone on a more temporary basis, you are under attack, right? They are really literally rounding people up on camera and doing these sorts of things.

So we need to acknowledge what the threat actually is and then also acknowledge that all these sort of, quote-unquote, legally protected safeguards, whether it’s nonprofit status or these allegedly court-defended rights are vulnerable. Instead, we need to think what are the actual tools we have? And that is each other, it’s organizing together collectively to take action. The legal structures, while they can be helpful sometimes, are not what the actual core of it is. We cannot depend on those things.

We cannot depend on, for example, courts to maintain what we think is the true incarnation of our civil rights. The only thing that defends those is us defending them. So instead, looking at what resources we have within, the primary resource being people, other human beings that we have real personal relationships with and building strategies to take action in that way, that needs to be the big shift. If there is a positive shift that could happen right now, it’s shifting away from the idea that, for example, the nonprofit-industrial complex is the place in which change happens, and instead bringing it back to the personal level.

And that doesn’t mean that… People could still be involved in nonprofit organization stuff they want, but that’s understanding that that status, those protections, those legal sort of structures are not going to be the foundation of any successful social movement or defensive effort. Since people know that, acknowledging that, I think that pivoting to saying, “Okay, where’s our actual power coming from?” That’s where the basis of this is going to be.

KH: So, what does that kind of organizing look like?

SB: Well, I think it requires looking at each particular sort of node of a social movement as being distinct but collaborative. So we’re seeing an attack, for example, on housing access. This didn’t start with Trump, this is not a uniquely Trump issue. But it is, when we’re looking at the absolute dire sort of consequences of the economic collapse that we’re going through right now, housing’s going to be a really big piece of that. So we need housing organizations, independent from the state, not just lobbying for rent control or something, but independent tenant organizations or low-income homeowner groups, people to defend housing access and to expand that access. Those things have to work together with labor unions that defend people’s rights in the workplace, that are unionizing new places, that are basically organizing workers of different stripes to basically raise their wages and take action, defend themselves in the workplace. And those folks have to work really, really directly with people who are defending health care access more broadly and specifically, as the frontline, trans health care access.

These things have an entire sort of universe of strategies and tactics and relationships together individually. But when we come together and figure out how those are going to work together, that’s how you really build this web of solidarity and mutual aid. So that is more than anything what we need now, and that doesn’t mean actually inventing anything new. We actually know how to do those things, we’ve been doing them for years. But there’s ways of pivoting. You pivot into the tactics that you know are going to work now. You pivot away from relying, for example, on simply filing lawsuits for a court that might be unfriendly or trying to pass legislation that may not have an effect on it. And instead focusing on what is going to build us the long-term independent strength? Whether or not that’s building up the tenant union or building up the labor union and having some way of collaborating.

And then also know how those organizations can work together. How can a labor union help fight for health care access? Well, they do it for their members all the time in getting health care in union contracts and things. But maybe they can go a step further and maybe they can focus on trans members and trans community members. Maybe it’s health care workers that can speak out from those labor unions for health care recipients.

There’s all these ways in which you kind of do that, understanding that one issue is directly connected to the other. This is really easy when we’re talking about economic stuff, right? Housing and worker justice are really built together, but it’s all of these pieces that sort of make up a person’s social life. So having those networks together, building them and having those relationships, that’s what’s important.

And in a lot of ways that’s how you scale up anti-fascism. Like we’ve had anti-fascism as a defensive movement against attacks from neo-Nazis, but what happens when that far right is now attacking Medicaid? Is literally attacking the legal status of unions or people’s immigration status, you’re going to need something bigger than that. You can’t just have the black bloc blocking them. That’s not where it’s happening, that’s not what the site of struggle is anymore.

So instead, it’s expanding that out and making sure that you have these coalitions with these different pieces, those pieces meaning authentic to themselves, maintaining the strategy and their sense of themselves, but working together and figuring that out. And there are examples of this, right? Spokes councils exist for a reason, coalitions, long-term coalitions exist for a reason. They have done these things before. But with the level of threat we’re having now, it’s time for all those to have the most permanent relationships they can build.

KH: I feel like what you’re saying really connects with what Ejeris Dixon was saying on the show recently about how we’re safer when we’re bigger. This is really a time to build coalitions, deepen relationships, grow our organizations, and really break through some of the isolation that might be holding us back.

I am also thinking about what you said about how a lot of our infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable right now. Non-profits can be stripped of their status, and we know that’s part of the right’s vision for this administration, to really gut the infrastructure of progressive organizing. The National Labor Relations Board can be destroyed, or simply made defunct or irrelevant. We are going to have to be nimble, in terms of how we structure what we’re doing, and we have to accept that some work is going to happen differently over time. We are going to have to adapt to a changing terrain.

One example of this that I’m already seeing is this sort of common wisdom around protests — a lot of people won’t attend a protest unless it’s organized by a group they know and trust. Now, that’s really reasonable. It’s a sensible standard. But on a changing terrain, things aren’t always going to work that way. I’ve seen some people, in recent weeks, discouraging people from going to protests because some events and calls to action have not been organized by familiar groups or formations. But the reality is that this is a very daunting time for protest organizers, and there could be any number of reasons that the organizations people are used to showing up for aren’t going to issue the call or host the event.

For one thing, there was a Supreme Court decision last year that stated that organizers can be held liable for violence and property destruction, even if they had nothing to do with instigating those actions. I’m sure some people are thinking about how that might be weaponized, in the current climate. Some organizations are undoubtedly worried about losing their non-profit status. Some are probably worried about getting hit with a multi-million dollar judgment. In a recent lawsuit, Energy Transfer basically pegged the entire Standing Rock movement on Greenpeace, and won a judgment for $660 million — which is preposterous, but it happened. And that case has chilling implications, not only for protest organizers, but for groups doing support work or direct workshops.

The threats people are grappling with are intense, and the stakes are only going to get higher, so we have to accept that protests are probably going to emerge and happen differently in these times. I personally believe that protest is going to become riskier in general. It was already more dangerous for some people than others, but it’s going to get riskier for everyone. And we know that when things get worse for anyone, they get much worse for the marginalized. Some people may not protest under these conditions, while others will. Some people might take a really conditional approach, like only protesting if they have a really thorough safety plan, or an awareness that there are people in the streets who have their backs. Absent those things, they may opt out. Everyone has to do their own risk assessment and sort out what makes sense for them.

We need to think really expansively about the fact that things are changing rapidly. We need to be adaptable and we have to be willing to innovate and engage differently amid changing conditions, whatever that means for us.

SB: I think one dynamic of this reality, and like you’re saying, that the sort of schematic of who is vulnerable is growing really dramatically, is it does remind people, particularly people who consider themselves organizers or radicals or political in some way, is that you’re not actually helping those people over there. It’s actually you, right? You are there living this life under threat, being terrified, who could have things stripped from them. And I think having that reminder is actually what solidarity is built on. And I think when you have a common, shared experience, a negative experience, it does actually push you into that mindset. And I think a lot of people are thinking, “Okay, how do we do this all together? Because I personally need this.”

But what we need to think about too is then what is the actual core of that mutual aid solidarity relationship? When I did Fight for $15 organizing — this was many years ago, at least 10 years ago now, maybe longer than that — there was a training I went to and they always said, “You can say, when you’re having a conversation with a worker, talk to them, listen to them, do what you do in a conversation, but one thing everyone needs to say, that everyone needs to say one thing that’s common. And it’s a union exists whenever two people or a group of people work together to solve a problem they couldn’t alone.” And the point was/is to maintain this idea that a union isn’t a thing that the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board approves, right? It’s not something that has a legal sanction. A union exists when people come together to act collectively. That is what a union is.

And I think that’s what we need to start thinking about. Legal structures are super helpful. I think that they can be helpful when they work. But that is not what the actual core of the organizing is. The organizing is the relationships we build and our ability to take collective action. So we need to think about what does it look like if all of those legal protections were stripped? At that point, it’s just people coming together to solve a problem they couldn’t solve alone. So we should really use this as an opportunity to rethink those sorts of things.

And at the same time, as you’re watching the erosion not just of legal protections but of social safety net, of real stable access to almost any resource, what does it look like to share resources? Because that has a whole number of implications when you do that. When you create a mutual aid network, whether it’s sharing anything from food to medication to access to health care, whatever it ends up being, that is sort of a snapshot moment of a different kind of society. And if we’re talking about struggle as being a stepping stone to radical change, that actually happens when you actually build up those pieces of that different kind of world, not just as a sort of reminder of what could be, but something that exists right now. This is actually a piece of that other world. We can grow it, we can expand it, but it’s existing right in the here and now.

So both of those pieces, I think are at the core of what happens when the legal structure that’s supposed to validate forms of resistance like civil rights and nonprofit status, union status, things like that, when that evaporates, all you have at that point is solidarity and mutual aid. And that was what it always was to begin with.

KH: I feel like the work of collective survival also has the potential to help us get past some of the differences that keep us fractured and divided, and that make us less effective. I always think about my dad in AA, and how his politics evolved because he was committed to this project of collective survival, where his sobriety was bound up in this collective project of not drinking. Taking that seriously, and helping other people do what they needed to do to stay sober meant understanding people in ways he hadn’t before, and taking seriously what they were up against. Through that process, his politics evolved in ways I couldn’t have predicted and that I couldn’t have inspired, just by telling him that he should look at something differently. I’ve also seen a lot of things that seemed important to people melt away when a community is under immediate threat and the waters are rising or people are being taken by the state. And I want us to think deeply about cultivating that mindset of collective survival, of needing to understand each other and work together, even if we don’t like each other, and would never actually choose each other, because this is the “us” we’ve got in an us versus them situation. We need each other, plain and simple.

And I think getting people into motion is crucial, because we are not going to find the kind of understanding, connection and solidarity we need by venting on social media. We’re not going to bring anything worthwhile into being by standing in perpetual judgment of other people’s efforts because they aren’t doing what we would do. We are going to grow what needs to be grown by doing what we think people should do, and doing it in concert with other people.

SB: Yeah, the stress of reality also inspires the doing. You have no choice. We are actually doing the work of survival right now because we have no choice. We’re under assault. Then what we’re doing to basically maintain ourselves through that is what that work actually is. And the question is how is that work going to build into a different kind of future? Can it?

So by making choices of solidarity, basically I’m seeing these problems come and I’m going to make choices to build community and to work collectively as an answer to that, those are the kind of answers I would like to make. That is, in a lot of ways, how you build it up. And those things can actually grow really dramatically. I’m not the only person to be disappointed by the last few months of organized resistance to the second coming of Trump. It hasn’t been at the scale that we thought it was, it wasn’t the scale that it was in 2016, 2017 or in 2020. But that can change very, very rapidly as people sort of not just have to respond to these threats but have to survive them, because actually engaging in resistance is that form of survival.

KH: You said you’ve had some disappointment. Are there efforts or projects that you find particularly encouraging right now?

SB: I think we’re recording this just after a really big national mass action that involves some more moderate voices and things like that too. But the point was that it did get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand people out into the streets. This is a good thing. There’s been targeting of Tesla dealerships for protests, things like that. Those are positive. I think that interestingly, seeing federal worker unions really come out in force and they’re not known to be the most militant unions in the labor movement, I actually think that’s a really big positive. I think there’s been a number of high points in that way.

I think people are also scrambling to figure out what the next move is, and that’s okay. Scrambling is what we do. People should have empathy for the fact that it’s not always obvious what the right choice is.

I also think that coming out of the sort of solidarity movement for Palestinian liberation, that has been a huge high point and seeing certain coalitions continue that work. There’s Jewish coalitions, places like New York that sort of cemented up a lot of relationships in doing that work after October 7th that are then formalizing them now, so they’re able to respond very quickly. So we had these big 1,000-person rallies come out with very short notice, for example, in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil after the initial arrest and then the attacks on Columbia University. Those things happened really fast because the relationships existed and they were able to respond and they’re growing now.

So those high points are there, and I think they’re most successful when they sort of build out relationships and strategies that existed prior, right? They’re not just reinventing the wheel, but they’re trying to figure out how to apply those lessons learned and those relationships built to the new conditions.

KH: I think some of the conditions I mentioned before are also generating a certain amount of hesitancy. I think there are a lot of factors. I know I was at a protest recently where a man who was holding a todler was being menaced by the police, because he was sort of standing in the path of the doorway of a building. The police were threatening to arrest this man, and telling him to hand off the baby, and rather than trying to deescalate the police, a couple of protesters were talking to the man the police were threatening in ways that were really unhelpful. One man said, “The police are our friends here,” and the man who’s being pushed while holding a baby says, “they are nobody’s friends,” really emphatically. I turned my attention to the cops and was like, “Hey, you’ve pushed him enough that he’s not really blocking the door anymore, so this really seems like it’s been handled,” and the cop settled for that, and sort of took the win and backed off. But I could see that man’s anger, that rather than being on his side, some of the protesters were sort of advocating for the position of the police, and I understood that hurt. And this was a white man with a baby. There are people who have much more intense vulnerabilities, some of whom have trauma around being brutalized, or around seeing their Black or Indigenous kin brutalized by police. I think we are living in a politically fractured environment right now, and that there isn’t a lot of trust. People are afraid that if they show up for a cause, they could be harmed and undefended, so I want to name those concerns and that they don’t come from nothing. The solution can’t just be that people need to get over those fears.

But I also want to say that I have been excited about some of the less public work that’s going on, and some of the work that’s not playing out in the streets, but that definitely has a major impact on our communities and our movements. Interrupting Criminalization’s Beyond Do No Harm Network is a great example of folks cultivating resistance in essential, practical ways. The Chicago Teachers Union has done amazing work around creating a template for what defending our schools against ICE raids can look like, in addition to Bargaining for the Common Good. So, when we’re thinking about the ways people are in motion, in spite of the fractures and schisms that are holding us back, I hope folks will keep that work in mind as well.

SB: Yeah, I think we’re going through a process by which there’s also a separation of the left from a lot of nonprofits that weren’t… Maybe not the core, these are not core radical nonprofits, they’re not core labor unions or anything like that, around issues about the ceasefire, around Israel-Palestine, which was a big breaking point with the DNC’s inability to carry through really any of the demands of the actual left. So people are finding their way a little bit separate from some of what people outside of the core active spaces would’ve recognized as leaders in these spaces. So we should expect that things are going to be different, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have the same sort of mass constituencies they’ve had before.

[musical interlude]

KH: This regime is powered by multiple competing but cooperative forces, and one of those forces is techno-fascism. The old school Republican Party has really yielded itself to the MAGA movement, and the leader of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump, has handed off a whole lot of power to Elon Musk and DOGE.

In Elon Musk, we have this billionaire, the richest man in the world, who has referred to federal workers as “the parasite class.” We have DOGE gutting government agencies, and burrowing its way into the Social Security system, DHS, and pushing to centralize government data in ways that could create a kind of panopticon for people in the U.S., surveillance-wise. As someone who has been paying attention to the cults of Silicon Valley for quite a while now, I’m not exactly shocked by these developments, because their rate of economic and institutional capture has been incredible. But the severity of the situation is rather stunning. Do you have any thoughts on the role these techno-fascists are playing in the current moment and how they ought to be fought?

SB: Yeah, this is the tail end of a long far right social movement that really settled into Silicon Valley really starting in the ’90s, but closer to the larger financial collapse. We’ve started to sort of see what we think would be fairly called a big grand realignment of tech leaders who had been, to a large degree, sort of like neoliberal supporters of the Democratic Party, particularly as the Democratic Party facilitated wealth transfer to tech companies through public-private partnerships or subsidies, things like that. They had played for a long time thinking that, for example, these socially liberal policies, as long as they supported money coming in in relationship to venture capital or into things like Tesla, that that was in their favor.

And they really started to shift that when they started to see political issues around particularly identity-based struggles as being sort of something that could erode their power sector or was maybe connected to labor unions in some way. But basically, they started to see that as a form of resistance to their power and began to shift to Trump.

And one of the realities about Trumpism and his economic protectionism is that they largely believe that there’ll be carve-outs for particular tech leaders, and there probably will be. And having a protected economy with carve-outs is much more sort of safe as a channel of wealth than just having kind of an anarchic system of free markets, which can accumulate wealth, but also has competition. So what you’re seeing now is this tariff system which has just basically dropped an atom bomb on the economy, likely under the belief that there will be some ways of tech… Some fashion in which these tech leaders will continue to receive their wealth transfer from the working class up to their bank accounts.

But we’ve seen this coming from Silicon Valley from a very particular ideological legacy. So a person that’s been brought up a lot recently is Curtis Yarvin, who is a blogger and a tech developer who had helped build what’s called the neo-reactionary movement, sometimes called Dark Enlightenment. Well, it’s the idea that democracy is a failure, human beings are not equal, whether individually or racially or nationally or by gender, and that we need a strong monarchical leader in the form of a CEO to basically take control of society and run it like a business.

And this is a lot of the sort of internal mythology that runs venture capital in Silicon Valley. And it became more and more increasingly popular, particularly around people like Peter Thiel as he got really involved in funding the Trump campaign, other kind of right wing campaigns. And this has been really important, for example, Vice President [JD] Vance has been influenced by this. It used to be sort of an embarrassment to be associated with Yarvin because he comes in with incredibly racist ideas, these are open fascist movements. Except now he’s being interviewed in The New York Times because political leaders and major tech funders of campaigns are citing him openly, right?

This anti-democratic trend that’s often associated sometimes with what’s called post-capitalism, but a kind of new vibrant libertarianism or free-marketism mixed with authoritarian politics at home, this has become a kind of publicly stated part of the tech identity now, so we’ve had this really big shift over. So now what you have is the world’s richest man essentially entering into the American government and just laying off millions of workers in the same way that he would move fast and break things in a company of his own like he did in Twitter, now X.

So this is sort of the logic of the Silicon Valley far right, which had its own kind of internal culture and politics and lingo, now heading not just into the government, into all areas of politics and social life and now our discourse. And this is not new. It made me, when watching Elon Musk talk about the parasite class, for example, it reminded me of Sam Francis, who was a very important kind of white nationalist figure, before that he had been at the GOP amongst what were called paleoconservatives, so a kind of far right-wing element in the Republican Party, that had this belief that technocrats had taken over different parts of the government and the economy and that they were a class of their own. And we had to strip those out and give control back to what he called Middle American Radicals.

This is not altogether different than the way the MAGA movement talks about the deep state, right? Taking power away from the peoples. And I think at one point the idea that there was professional people in the government, Musk said that that means that we’re not in a democracy, we’re in a bureaucracy. This is the kind of logic you’ve heard on the far right for decades and decades and decades.

So all of this is about restating these far right politics and now putting them in positions of power. So if we talk about the idea of state capture, we’re not just talking about the fact that the Republican Party moved further to the right and now they have all sort of wings of federal government, and therefore they’re able to push through legislation. We’re talking about, on some cases, explicitly white nationalists or fascist politics have become the motivating ideology of major transitions in government and the government status quo.

So for example, they’re attacking this entire sector in the same way that paleoconservatives and others had been talking about for decades, and which were considered really fringe ideas. These were really out there ideas. You would find them often in white nationalist publications, but they are now public policy. You have to really ask yourself, what is the government today, if not a fully captured institution by the far right?

KH: Absolutely, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge the extent of that capture, because I don’t think words like “constitutional crisis” really do the situation justice.

And in acknowledging the reality of what the far right has accomplished here, I also want to take a moment to examine some of the myths and conspiracy theories that prop up their politics. You touch on some of this in your latest book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, which you co-authored with Ben Lorber. Can you talk about the role antisemitism plays in white supremacist cultures, conspiracies and myth-making, and why it’s important to understand those dynamics right now?

SB: Yeah. So antisemitism remains the functional ideological core of white nationalism. It’s sort of the linchpin that pulls it all together. That’s what Talia Lavin, the term that she would use. What this means is that as white nationalists tell a story about white people, about race, about governments, about human history, they need a sort of conspiratorial element to piece it all together. It should go as without saying that the white nationalist understanding of race is factually incorrect, right? It’s not actually based in scientific reality.

Their narrative, for example, about Black people is that they’re incapable, they have low IQs. But then they can’t explain why there has been Black uplift or Black social movements or Black development over the years. Well, they need an answer to that question. And the answer is, Jews, right? That Black people are being controlled by Ashkenazi Jews, that Jews control the government, they control finance. They’re the ones who invented both capitalism and communism. Basically, Jews are sort of the cornerstone of the modern world that makes white non-Jews so unfree, right? That attacks our sense of self, that distorts gender roles, that distorts natural hierarchies.

So it has continued to be, over the decades and the centuries, the real cornerstone ideological construct that white nationalist depends on. And this is not just in amongst sort of neo-Nazi fringe, antisemitic conspiracy theories have been, in a lot of ways, coded and secularized in ways that have made them really, really frequently popular just amongst the mainstream right and particularly a right that tries to explain economic disenfranchisement and to develop a populist politics.

So if you’re talking about a white working class that’s had falling real wages for decades, that has been disconnected from the community, that doesn’t have strong relationships anymore, but you don’t actually want to offer them economic uplift, you’re not going to support unions, you’re not going to support social programs, well, you have to give them a story that acknowledges their suffering, but channels them away from actual solutions and into reifying the same right-wing vision you’re offering. And the way you do that is with a conspiracy theory, right?

It’s not capitalism itself, it’s those capitalists, with names like Rothschild or Soros. That’s a way of basically sort of making it a more specific image of an enemy without looking at any of the structural factors involved. So as received, particularly in the modern right, conspiracy theories are the way that they channel and then neutralize the class anger of the dominant audiences they’re looking for, usually white men or male-bodied people in the U.S.

So the question ends up being too, how do we talk about this antisemitic reality? The reality that the right is sort of, in a lot of ways, foundationally built on these antisemitic conspiracy theories at a time when the right is constantly talking about antisemitism? Antisemitism has, for them, been one of the primary rallying cries they use to attack the left, particularly the Palestine solidarity movement, right? Claims of antisemitism are really a big part of how they’ve created this reactionary fervor in their movement. And it’s allegedly in defense of Jews who are being victimized by this antisemitism, that they’re attacking immigrant groups, the way they’re attacking social movements, attacking nonprofits, things like that. That’s all allegedly to defend Jews against antisemitism.

So we’re in a real serious bind at the moment where antisemitism, actual rates of antisemitic attacks are peaking at levels we haven’t seen in a long time. Actual white nationalism has grown severely. Antisemitic conspiracy theories are incredibly common across the GOP, whether it’s through the great replacement theory, the idea that Jews or a, quote-unquote, elite class are trying to bring in non-white immigrants to replace native-born whites. All of these things are really, really frequent on the one hand. And at the other time, the right never stops talking about antisemitism, except it’s pointing directly at the left every single time and using really spurious and weaponized claims to do so.

So one of the things that we talk about in the book is it’s important for us to really understand how this stuff works. One is to fight antisemitism, defend Jews from attacks, all those things are important. But two, to also see how antisemitism is used to split the working class, to give them false promises about how to solve their problems, and how these things are all related. And one thing that’s really important to understand is that when white nationalists create this story about Black communities, it dovetails with antisemitism in almost every conversation.

If we look at the attack on trans health care, if you look at the language people are using, they often have a pretty clear idea of who is, for example, attacking the community with youth gender medicine or something, right? They blame Rothschilds, they blame globalists or elite classes. They essentially use antisemitic conspiracy theories to explain why they think trans health care development is happening.

So these things end up being related. So one of the things we tried to pull out in the book is how can we look at different forms of oppression, both structural and interpersonal, and combine them together and say, “Look, these things are related and we have to struggle with them in a similar way.” And that’s how we think of antisemitism. Antisemitism is not disconnected from any other form of struggle. And that is exactly how the right would want it to be understood. They would want it to be understood as a zero-sum game. Defending Jews means undermining the rights of other people and we have a counter narrative to that.

And it’s not new. This is something that has come from anti-fascists and from the Jewish left for years, and I think it’s going to be much, much… It’s becoming even more important as the rhetoric about antisemitism as a sort of vector of attack on the left is increasing so severely, and we are needing to find our footing as fascist movements change and develop and grow.

KH: I think this nuanced analysis is so important right now. I also think people should understand that the right’s investment in Israel is not an investment in Jewish people or Jewish identity, and that when they talk about antisemitism, it’s generally about condemning any criticism or rejection of Israel’s violence. Trump’s administration is bound to Netanyahu’s in some really important ways. These are both fascistic leaders, and the structural supremacy of Jewish Israelis, the apartheid policies, the disregard for international law, the genocidal violence, the attempts to suppress the judiciary — this is all aspirational for Donald Trump. So, it’s important for us to keep that international view of who is part of Trump’s network of oligarchs, who he wants to be like — like who are his role models and how is he emulating them — and how false allegations of antisemitism serve his relationship with Netanyahu.

And while we’re on the subject of false allegations of antisemitism, I want to mention that the conflation of antisemitism with any advocacy for Palestinian life and liberation has led some leftists to be dismissive of antisemitism as a real world concern. So, I want to emphasize, when you refer to rising rates of antisemitic violence and attacks, you’re not just referring to statistics offered by the ADL, which I think many of us know is not a reliable or trustworthy organization. You’ve actually been involved in doing some research and fact-checking the ADL’s statistics, and evaluating what remains when you strip away things like Palestine solidarity protests, that have been wrongly characterized as instances of antisemitism. And on the basis of this sort of fact-checked research, you have found that, yes, this kind of violence is increasing?

SB: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s actually incredibly black and white. I think when we talk about antisemitism increasing, and when we look at the ADL research, they focus very, very, very heavily on campuses and on stuff related to anti-Zionism. And they’ll use really common anti-Zionist phrases or protest tactics and suggest those are antisemitism. Then people assume that that’s what they mean by the core of the increasing.

But actually, if you strip that stuff away, and we did this with last year’s ADL data, I’ve looked at it piece by piece, what you’re actually seeing is huge numbers of attacks on synagogues, attacks on visibly Jewish people, particularly Orthodox Jews. And that happens at a rate that just far exceeds what people understand. It’s actually happening really, really severely, street attacks against Orthodox people, that’s people who are visibly Jewish, and particularly in places like the South or in New York. All of that’s increasing really severely.

White nationalist gatherings that are specifically about Jews, whether they’re flyering about Jews or they’re creating programs or protest action that are meant to specifically target Jews, have increased really steeply as well. And actually, when you look at the actual incidents themselves, even when they mention Israel-Palestine, they’re not coming from left-wing anti-Zionist social movements. They’re oftentimes coming from the far right who also talk about Zionism for a whole different reason. They mean something very different. Or they’re coming from sort of impromptu street confrontations with people who are engaging in antisemitism. They may say something like Palestine, they may say that they’re supporting Palestine, but they’re not actually engaged in any kind of actual political work or thoughtful process. Instead, they’re just engaging in antisemitism and painting Palestine rhetoric on top of it.

So if we look at that, I think that’s really important to note that those numbers have increased very severely. There is no sort of testing metric that we’ve found that doesn’t show a dramatic increase. And at the same time, we’re also seeing that one of the largest increases in really open neo-Nazi style, it’s kind of very severe white nationalist organizing, that has also dramatically increased in the last two or three years. Basically, since October 7th, it has sort of skyrocketed, but it was already trending up in that way.

The other thing I think it would be worthwhile to people to understand about this is that there is a structural element to this. There’s something built into the common kind of Western understanding of politics that constantly reproduces these conspiracy theories and leans people back to these sort of antisemitic ideas. So they reproduce over years, and that’s really built into a lot of the ways that we misunderstand inequalities and the way that alienation is built in the economy.

And also, keep in mind there are places like, for example, prisons where antisemitism looks like it did 100 years ago, where interpersonal attacks are very, very severe. There’s places like the Bible Belt in the South where Jews have trouble finding houses sometimes or have trouble adopting or have trouble taking their kids to school.

So when I think people are able to dismiss some antisemitism or say, “Hey, it’s not that severe,” they’re not thinking about when I have been confronted by a Proud Boy with a gun who calls me a Jew? That’s not the image of the antisemitism that they’re thinking of. They’re thinking of an off-color phrase at a protest. So I think it’s important to pull that back and say, “No, let’s actually look at what’s happening, what kind of street attacks are happening. How does this actually play out in people’s lives? And what is possible in terms of antisemitism, like what kind of violence is possible there?”

KH: I really appreciate that clarity.

I want to circle back to something you said earlier about us not seeing the kind of mass participation in protest we saw in 2020. I think another difference between 2025 and 2020 is that, in the early pandemic, a lot more people were determined to figure out how they could help. There was an explosion of mutual aid. Everyone I talked to wanted to contribute to a cause, in whatever way they could. I am seeing less of that energy from people right now. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of bitterness, a lot of isolation. A lot of people are in motion, and scrambling to figure out how they can help each other and what they can do, but I don’t think nearly enough of us are in that mode. Instead, a lot of people are posting through it, or just keeping their heads down, hoping that they, personally, can avoid the worst outcomes.

So, in this environment, how do we cultivate the solidarity we are going to need to get through this?

SB: Yeah, I think that there has been some social movements that were easier to bridge difference in, and COVID mutual aid was one of those. I think anti-fascism has been one of those where lots of people felt, had just those kind of crossover feelings. So though they might have some political differences, they were able to meet on this sort of reality. People were able to sort of meet on the fact that what happened in Charlottesville was bad, that the people needed help during COVID. That was a low bar for a lot of people.

But other social movements have shown that there actually is a big reactionary core that wasn’t willing to move on certain things. Palestine was one of those. I think that there’s also a sort of liberal unwillingness to sort of stand up on trans issues in the way that we need folks to. And I think it’s about how are we able to build with the communities we have and then start to reach up beyond that?

And I think that the situation is actually shifting to a more dire one that will make that common cause more obvious to people. And I think at that point, we’ll see how resistance people are with some of these entrenched bad political ideas that we’ve seen split those coalitions before. I was really shocked to see how many of those coalitions broke down when Palestine became the issue. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, maybe that’s naive. But conditions, the reality of shared conditions and the need for each other, that oftentimes is what will bridge that gap and give people the moment in which they can actually move on those bigger issues, when they’re actually able to engage in shared organizing and relationship. Then they can start to be confronted on issues like Palestine, that they might have had decades of conditioning, to have a different sort of understanding of.

So I think the problem is I don’t like that it’s collapsed when those relationships get formed. And then also can make it that if that collapse is sort of mitigated, then those relationships could break down. But I do think what we’re going through right now, economically and socially, is not altogether different than what happened in 2020. I think that we’re in a bad spot and I think people are going to need each other, and so we’re going to have to bridge that as much as possible.

And I think people are, I think we’re actually seeing the early return of a sort of mass mutual aid politic. And I think part of it is that it’s unclear where those resources, other than supporting obviously trans communities and immigrant folks, where some of the new pain is going to be hit right away. So people should start working on the infrastructure and stuff now.

And the other thing to keep in mind is that whether people know it or not, there is a mutual aid group in their area that does exist already. You could be a part of it. Or you could federate, for example, you could take some of their ideas and build something in your neighborhood or regionally and then connect with them and work together. There are things, you are not starting from zero, and you can do that at basically any point.

I think so often for folks who have not been involved in organizing, maybe even folks who have been involved in organizing, getting involved on some really kind of critical point feels daunting. But knowing that there are people actually doing this already and that can stepping-stone your way into understanding how it works, that’s a useful way of approaching it. So just seeing what’s there first I think is always the kind of step number one.

KH: You’ve mentioned trans issues, immigration, and Palestine — areas where the Democrats are not just falling short, but failing miserably. Rather than addressing their own failures, the Democratic Party is taking the position that they just haven’t thrown enough people under the bus, and that they need to completely abandon trans folks and get even tougher on immigration. Unfortunately, we are seeing some resistance-coded liberals repeating those ideas — that to overtake Trump, the Dems are just going to have to abandon trans folks.

This fundamental misunderstanding about what it takes to defeat a fascist enemy is not only dangerous to trans people, and to everyone’s bodily autonomy, but it really has the potential to sink us. Because this is actually how fascists win, when targeted groups are sacrificed, one at a time, and their violence is normalized, while so-called good people do nothing. And on some level, I know people know this, but when it’s happening directly in front of their faces, some people apparently can’t see it. So, I am wondering if you can talk about the need to push back against these politics of sacrifice.

SB: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a politics of sacrifice. This is even the rhetoric that’s being used. You can see in a lot of these debate shows and public platforms of being like, “Well, trans athletes and youth gender medicine, those are losing issues. We need to drop them if we’re going to rebuild this progressive coalition,” or something like that. First off, there is no, quote-unquote, progressive coalition that leaves folks behind. That just doesn’t exist.

But the reality is that is not what breaks up those coalitions. What breaks up those coalitions is when you have a sort of affluent class speaking about issues that don’t matter to most people. The reality is that the issues of trans health care… they affect actually every single person because they are also the issues of everybody’s health care. They’re the issues of maybe your family, friends, and kids even, right? These are actually issues that affect people in material ways, and we need to bring that back to people’s reality.

These issues of attacking immigrant communities, that is a labor issue, that’s a health care issue, that is a communal safety issue, that’s a police justice issue. All of those things actually affect people in really material ways, but that is not the way that the Democratic Party talks about them or the way affluent progressives talk about them. They talk about them in a very sort of… They kind of present it almost in moralistic terms, not material terms. What’s happened is for years now, these issues have been talked in a way that only appeals to small segments of the community and not actually showing the stake to people about what’s going on.

So the change that we have to make is to actually be like, “Why do these issues matter? Let’s talk about them. Let’s show you really materially what’s going on here,” and get buy-in from folks. Because what’s often being understood here is that, and this is again where Democrats and centrist liberals sort of capitulate to far right wing sort of framings, is that we’re not talking about bread and butter issues because we’re talking about pronouns or something like that, as if pronouns are what’s not giving you the raise at work or is making your mortgage unaffordable or making college unaffordable. Instead of saying, “Actually these issues are interrelated. How do we combine those struggles? How do we have that shared reality?” Because these are all working-class issues when it comes down to it. These are all about having access to the things we need to be happy, to be safe, to have healthy lives that move forward.

So I think part of the problem here is that the wrong people have spoken about these issues for a very long time because they’re the ones who have access to speech modules. They’re the ones who get invited on the TV shows, they’re the ones that can pay for political ads, things like that. Instead, this needs to be actual working people talking about the issues that matter and why they should matter to everyone. That’s how you build solidarity.

When someone sees these issues of trans health care and says, “Actually, that matters to me. That impacts lives, that’s actually connected to the things I’m doing in my life, the things that affect me in my life,” that’s when you win. That’s when you actually build a revolutionary movement. And that is just not the way those issues have been talked about because it is not us talking about them. So I think we need to bring it back to the actual communities that are most affected and the folks that are trying to build bonds to have militant resistance because that is where the struggle is happening.

So for too long, we are sort of having, even on the radical left, we’re having to deal with the mistakes that liberal politicians, the liberal political class have made. And I think part of what’s happening over the last year, and partially this is because of the splits around Israel-Palestine and the failure of the Democratic Party to do anything to stop a genocide, I think is that we’re actually breaking away from them. And that gives us the opportunity to speak for ourselves and to actually talk about the issues that matter and to talk to communities about why these issues matter. That’s what’s going to be really important.

Because like you said, this idea of disposability, there is no political victory on any issue that’s possible if you dispose of people most affected by those issues. They’re just simply not possible. So the idea that that’s how you build a political coalition is, right at its foundation, one that’s not coming from our vision of solidarity. So we need to reify what does it mean to build solidarity with other people? It means to share those struggles because they are already shared whether we acknowledge them or not.

KH: Thank you for that. Is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience right now?

SB: I think people are really tired and working really hard. And I feel like people, it needs to be acknowledged, the way that there’s a certain sort of discourse that there’s laziness or apathy taking place that I don’t think is actually true. I think people are really struggling just to get through day by day. So I want people to engage in organizing as a way of knowing themselves and their community in ways that feel healing and generative.

So my only suggestion is to find ways that do feel sort of empowering and that give you energy and that don’t overtax it, and that makes making small commitments to organizing projects or community projects that you feel like you have the capacity to do and not overdoing it. That is, I think the biggest mistake people make is that they’re already tapped on energy and then they sort of collapse themselves into something that’s unsustainable. But instead, finding something small, starting there, figuring out what you feel like you have capacity for and what feels sort of energizing to you, that’s going to be the most important thing because that’s how you get longevity.

KH: Well, thank you so much for that, and thank you so much for joining me, Shane. It’s always so great to talk with you.

SB: Thanks for having me back, I love coming on.

KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Don’t forget to check out Shane’s new book with Ben Lorber, Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism.
• You can also find some useful guidance for the present moment in Kelly’s book with Mariame Kaba, Let This Radicalize You.