Wading Into 2025: How to Begin

A new, intimidating year is upon us. Catastrophes abound and the threat of autocracy looms large. As we prepare ourselves for the struggles ahead, many people are feeling discouraged or confused about how to move forward. As I have made my own preparations for the new year, I have talked with some of my brilliant friends–people like Mariame Kaba, Shane Burley, Dean Spade, and Eman Abdelhadi–about the strengths and weaknesses of our movements, and how we should be showing up for each other in these times. I found their wisdom enlightening and encouraging.

Beyond the Performance of Disapproval

In my conversations with discouraged activists and organizers, many people have described feelings of disorientation and dread. This is understandable. Many people’s daily experience of political ideas, news and updates about movements begins with social media, which means that they are navigating an endless flurry of fakery, misinformation, and fetishized conflict. While some platforms are better than others (X has largely been reduced to a right-wing firehose of bullshit, for example), all social media platforms foster dynamics of performance, proselytization and condemnation. These apps often serve as ideological runways, where politics are worn and expressed, rather than enacted in the world. Many leftists have become highly skilled at takedowns, when it comes to potential allies, but remain wholly nonthreatening to billionaires, corporations and genocidaires. 

In such climates, disorganizing forces abound. Disorganizing forces and individuals often seek to unravel solidarity, organizing efforts and organizations through disruption and an obsessive focus on critique and punishment. Disruption, feedback and critique can be important, but our good intentions and political rigor can be weaponized by forces that are seeking to destabilize our movements, or by individuals whose desire for centrality, attention or moral superiority are no less destructive than a system-sponsored effort to dismantle an organization. 

“There are many disorganizing individuals and forces,” Mariame Kaba told me. Mariame cautions organizers not to assume that what’s shared on social media or reported in the mainstream press is accurate. Organizers, Mariame explained, must be discerning. “The current information infrastructure isn’t healthy. Bad actors are consistently weaponizing existing platforms. Billionaires have taken over ‘mainstream news organizations’ and are dictating how they operate.” Mariame stressed the importance of trusted, independent media outlets. “We should all be engaged in information hygiene,” she said. “Be selective about what you consume and go on media fasts as needed to guard your wellness. We all also need to become disseminators of good information in our particular communities.”

Given that people cannot possibly read the full barrage of upsetting articles algorithmically loosed upon them each day, a person’s actual intake of news and analysis can wind up slipshod and skewed. How do people decide when to click through and when to scroll on? How often will they accept the interpretation of someone who didn’t actually read an article, or who accepted bad reporting at face value? It’s easy to get spun around in these environments. This is why I sign up for direct updates from media outlets I trust, like Truthout (where I also work), Prism, 404 Media and Bolts. It’s also why I create a weekly roundup for my newsletter subscribers of the 10 most important articles I’ve read each week. We need direct lines to trusted information in these times, and we sometimes need help sorting through the issues and articles we may or may not have time to engage with.

Bad information, of course, is only one part of the disorganizing picture. Another problem is what poet Kai Cheng Thom has called “the church of social justice.” 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò wrote an article for Teen Vogue recently that emphasized the distinction between activists who will recruit you to be something, versus those who will recruit you to do something. While I value disruptive voices, some people’s political lives more or less consist of condemnation and disruption. Rather than trying to create powerful movements, such people often seem fixed on a kind of almost-fundamentalist embodiment of ideology. In some cases, leftists who have distanced themselves from religion seem intent on recreating the norms of religiosity–treating belief itself as redemptive, and ideological piety as more important than any earthly or material concerns. As Thom put it:

the radical queers said there was room for everybody in the movement, that no one was disposable. they also said that if someone was problematic and didn’t repent, they could be publicly shamed and punished indefinitely, which is kind of a mixed message if you ask me.

Matters of ideological importance are often cherry-picked and skewed. There are no widely read sacred texts that actually inform this culture of critique, because most of its participants do not read books. They make cudgels of text-bytes that reinforce their positions–thoughts extracted like precious gems from larger bodies of work that would often contradict, or at least complicate their unyielding positions. The performance of disapproval is about sanctimony and condemnation. When people fall short of the standards performers have conjured, they are condemned. This performance of disapproval is sometimes a collective act, in which onlookers are encouraged to participate. This not only fosters a conflict fetish, and an ever-present thirst for takedowns, but also reinforces the idea that the performance of disapproval is politically meaningful, rather than a toxic, time-wasting hobby.

Conversations about “cancel culture” have failed to address these dynamics because they have often involved false equivalencies between the experiences of celebrities (including millionaires), everyday people, and activists who have been ripped apart by their peers. The “cancel culture” framework also fails to capture the larger problem, which is not the experience of targeted individuals (though those experiences matter), but the political disorientation of masses of people who believe they are living meaningful political lives, when in reality, they are squandering energy and relationships on ideological theatrics. 

As my friend Eman Abdelhadi stresses, “We need to have room for disagreement, for trial and error.” Rejecting a know-it-all culture of condemnation means being honest about the fact that no one has all of the answers. Eman emphasized that “no one knows quite what to do next, because this moment is unprecedented.” 

It’s difficult to acknowledge that, while our knowledge, experience and indignation have value, we do not know what it will actually take to win, and that many of our best efforts have failed. It’s scary to admit that what we have been doing is not working, and that we may not know what to do next. Rather than grappling honestly with their feelings of powerlessness, many people simply double down, insisting that if everyone adopted their strategy, and assumed their perspective, without questions, doubts or deviations, we would all get free. Banding behind such people, and crusading against the politically imperfect (or politically different) will not help us–even if it feels satisfying to punch a target who actually finds our putdowns upsetting.

As Eman told me, “We need to distinguish our enemies from our friends, even when those friends make mistakes.”

What the Moment Demands

Dean Spade is also concerned about how getting caught up in online posturing might detract from meaningful work. “Many of us get caught up in expressing opinions online, or want to be seen doing good work by others, but are less prepared to do underground work, work that is illegal or rule-breaking, and work that needs to happen covertly,” Dean said. “We need to increase our courage to take those risks together and build our collective capacity for underground work protecting immigrants and criminalized people from the government, making and distributing our own medicines, taking over public space, preventing evictions, dismantling the infrastructure of extraction and war, and moving resources to people who need them.”

It is crucial that we ground ourselves in relationships outside of the social posturing and ideological warfare of social media. Whether that means joining an existing organization or gathering with neighbors or friends to discuss the good you can do together. After the election, a young person, who is a loved one of Mariame’s, expressed concerns about abortion access under the incoming Trump administration. The young woman was upset and uncertain about what to do. Mariame made her a list of concrete steps that she and her friends could take in support of reproductive justice. After consulting the list, the young woman and her friends were ready to form their own reproductive justice student group. Mariame also made a more general list of concrete actions people can take, outside of protest and electoral politics.

It’s important to note that for some people, in-person gatherings may not be accessible, due to COVID concerns or other constraints. However, even in these cases, there are ways to build community in virtual spaces that are not wholly reliant on social media infrastructure. When we create our own Signal chats, virtual book meet-ups, Zoom social hours and discussion groups, we are maintaining necessary relationships and opportunities for collaboration and co-learning outside the crosshairs of thousands of strangers who may or may not share our values, or who may have no tolerance for the realities of the political learning process–work that requires many stumbles and mistakes. Creating spaces where people can be vulnerable together, explore ideas and create new experiments is crucial in these times.

Social media platforms are places we can frequent, while being mindful of their dangers and limitations. Neither X nor Bluesky should be anyone’s political home. If we are not intentional about participating in purposeful political environments, we risk having our political energy absorbed by the culture of performing disapproval.

When we are engaging with apps like Bluesky–which is where I spend my scrolling and posting time these days–we can be intentional about what we are expressing and amplifying. There are meaningful efforts to engage with in these spaces, such as Mariame’s end-of-the-year fundraiser supporting abortion funds. To me, efforts like this one, which have material impacts on people’s lives, are the best reason to continue to engage with these platforms.

Collective actions that have material impacts can also remind people that we can affect the heartbreaking conditions that discourage us. Feelings of powerlessness and overwhelm are responsible for many of the harmful dynamics that hinder our work as activists and organizers. 

Dean Spade noted that this is a time “to be rigorous and generous.” We need to be aware that our co-strugglers and potential allies are “immensely stressed and will be increasingly operating under pressure.” Dean emphasized that we need “to be aware of how our stressed states might be causing us to act toward others and apologize and make repairs when we can.” Dean encourages activists to “be forgiving” and extend grace, while also offering people feedback about the impacts of their behavior, when necessary. “It is not a time to gossip or stigmatize others, but instead to try to sort out what is happening and stick together if possible,” Dean said. 

Shane Burley stresses the importance of listening when organizing radical work. “I think we need to show up in the way we are explicitly being asked to,” Shane said. “So often we allow our own assessments to dictate what we offer, which disconnects us from people's direct needs,” he explained. “We should develop relationships that allow us to really receive feedback that can help us make decisions.” Activists sometimes get what they believe are “great ideas” about how to tackle the threats communities face, and attempt to build solutions without consulting with the people who are most affected by the issues at hand. “I don't think we should develop a militant community defense project if people in our community do not actually want such a thing,” Shane said. “But you can offer to support existing projects to be more secure if that is where your skills, interests and capacity lead you.”

The Good News

While it may feel easier to enumerate our failings and the threats we face right now, activists and organizers do have strengths to draw on in this moment. Dean Spade noted that since COVID and the uprisings against police repression in 2020, “Many people have participated in mutual aid projects and informal work-sharing."

“This is a time to draw upon what we've learned in those efforts–about engaging with new people, and taking spontaneous autonomous action in our communities rather than waiting for someone else to organize us or provide what we need,” Dean said. 

As surveillance and repression are ramped up in our communities, defensive skills should be deconsolidated. “Many people have learned new skills about digital security in recent years,” Dean said. “This is the moment to share those in every way we can with the new people who are getting involved. It's also a time to harvest lessons from the recent campus encampments and the recent mutual aid efforts to support survivors of floods, fires and storms.”

As climate catastrophes, genocidal violence and the global rise of fascism continue to cause immense suffering, we must marshall and share our skills. “It's all intensifying, and we can prepare by studying and sharing pragmatic knowledge and skills that have been developed in the recent crises and rebellions,” Dean said. 

Mariame also stressed that abolitionist organizers, who have struggled against the violence of carceral systems, have valuable experiences and insights to share in the context of anti-authoritarian organizing, as Rachel Herzing recently discussed in her essay, “The Terrain of Struggle.” Mariame notes that Herzing “correctly suggests that the criminal punishment system is ‘the enforcing arm of fascist forces.’”

While people often imagine that fascistic violence under Trump will be a spectacle reminiscent of the 1940s, it’s important to recognize that systems that sort people into categories of disposability and manufacture premature death are fully functional in the modern day United States, and that most people have already been successfully conditioned to ignore the violence of those systems. The violence of police and prisons, like the violence of war, is background noise to most people in the US. If we want people to have anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian politics that truly challenge the destructive capacity of the regime, we must bring that background noise into focus, and rally people against carceral violence, militarism and the disposal of human beings.

“I would say that criminalization is the indispensable fuel of fascism,” Mariame said. “It is central to the fascist project; not a peripheral issue. Those who have already been part of the struggle against the PIC [Prison Industrial Complex] have valuable information and lessons about successful organizing campaigns. This is definitely a strength to draw on.” 

Mariame also notes the importance of supporting “already organized people across the world.” Sometimes, we have to build things that we believe must exist. Sometimes, that work is well underway, and our hands and hearts are needed to propel it forward. “As Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us, there are many benefits to supporting and contributing to the work of already organized people,” Mariame said.

“There are many mutual aid efforts already in motion,” Mariame reminds us. “Plug in to those and support them. If such efforts don’t exist where you are, start your own. We need more togetherness right now and mutual aid is a good vehicle for developing it.”

Shane Burley believes we are well positioned to cultivate the kind of togetherness that Mariame describes. “We are better organizers, collectively, than we were 15 years ago,” he said. “The left has had a resurgence, but of the type that more reflects an encompassing, liberatory vision.” Shane argues that the left has made huge strides in areas “the left has previously been weak on,” such as disability justice, trans rights, sex worker support, antisemitism and body liberation. “All of that makes us stronger,” he said. “We have also normalized an anti-colonial framework, which gives us more avenues to organize.”

Shane also believes the explosion of mutual aid projects and the uprisings in 2020 demonstrate that “the public is more ready and capable of mobilization, often quite quickly, than they were before.” He is also encouraged by the political awareness of young people. “Millennials and Gen Z are more politically active and informed than their parents and have attuned to a model of mass participation. Now, we just need to figure out how to use organizations to stabilize that very large periphery.”

How We Show Up for Each Other

The work before us will take many shapes. I have heard some people express dismay that some tactics, such as street protests, are not being pursued heavily in this moment. While a drop off in that kind of visible protest can be a bad sign, it can also indicate that people simply recognize that a tactic that was consuming a great deal of time and energy is not garnering the result they are seeking. The health of our movements should not be measured by our willingness to doggedly recreate the same patterns of action. If people are evaluating what’s working and what isn’t, and committing themselves to pursuits they believe will best address this moment, and make the most of their capacities, that’s a good thing. I see that kind of evaluation and reconfiguration happening in some of the communities I am a part of, and I am heartened by it. Not everyone is doing what I would do, or what I believe is most urgent, and that’s okay.

“We don’t all have to be doing the same things,” Mariame said. “We should embrace a diversity of tactics and actions. At Just Practice Collaborative, we often say that judgement and curiosity don’t coexist well. So when you feel judgement creeping in, it’s always a good idea to get curious and ask why. Stay curious and ditch judgement.”

Or, as Eman put it, “We need to show up with care, grace and kindness.”

Mariame expressed frustration with perfectionist attitudes among some activists and organizers. “I’d love it if there was less emphasis on ‘being right’ and more on trying things and making lots of mistakes,” she said. “Taking risks is essential in our organizing. I hope that more people find soft places to land and that folks focus on being soft places to land for others.”

In the coming weeks, we will likely encounter a barrage of injustices. I fully expect a “shock-and-awe” approach from the incoming administration, which will be destabilizing, by design, for many people. It’s important to remember that we cannot do everything, and that if we make it our mission to respond to every misdeed or offensive utterance, we will likely do little else. We must not be consumed by the spectacle or become reactive in our politics.

As we endeavor to show up for each other, in overwhelming times, we are at risk of losing ourselves and squandering our potential in the realm of digital discourse. If enough political energy is wasted in the public performance of disapproval–or public angsting, as Daniel Hunter calls it–would-be activists and organizers will become mere political hobbyists, and hobbyists have no transformative potential. 

Many people are also at risk of withdrawing from political matters entirely, and retreating into private concerns, out of fear, frustration, or despair. Some may feel entitled to enjoy life on whatever terms they can, and ignore the fallout of a Trump regime, due to political disappointments. They may believe their would-be allies are incompetent, ignorant, or otherwise unworthy of solidarity. However, “opting out,” at this tragic stage of political and environmental catastrophe is a deadly form of submission. A hands-off approach to politics is a slow-motion surrender, in which our fellow human beings are sacrificed–one migrant, one prisoner, one forced pregnancy, one community and one ecosystem at a time. Historically, this approach has proved catastrophic for people living under oppressive regimes, and the stakes have never been higher than they are in this political moment.

Escapism and hobbyism share a critical similarity: they permit the status quo to persist unchallenged. Managing our political engagement with sustainability in mind and directing our energy toward meaningful resistance is therefore essential for collective survival.

If you are overwhelmed, and don’t know what to do, remember to focus on doing your part.

“We can focus on a few things that we feel we can influence based on our capacity, skills and interests,” Mariame reminds us. “Because I believe as Paul Hawken says that ‘everything is connected…no one thing can change by itself,’ I trust that where I devote my focus will affect areas where others are focusing too. This can mitigate a sense of overwhelm. Overwhelmed people are less effective and are susceptible to burning out.”

While hope is a controversial topic, and some people reliably get angry when Mariame and I discuss it, I continue to believe that hope is a necessary component of struggle for most people. If you are someone for whom action is not predicated upon hope, I support whatever approach propels your work (though I do think it’s important to distinguish simply having a perspective from actually organizing, as many arguments about perspective are wholly divorced from the work of building anything), but I urge you to consider that you might be relatively unique in this respect. In my experience as an organizer, people have limited capacities, and if they are going to be inspired to sacrifice their time and pool their capacities and labor toward some collective end, they need to have some confidence that those efforts will be worthwhile. That doesn’t mean promising people that things will turn out for the best, but it does mean cultivating hope and making our own light in the dark, when necessary. 

“Despite all evidence to the contrary, I remain convinced that things can improve and that we humans must cooperate to make it so,” Mariame told me. “If the status quo is unacceptable to us, then we need to act with others to lessen suffering and to improve our conditions. We show up for each other by taking consistent action. Small acts done with care are cumulative when added to others’ acts. Jump in how and where you can.”

Eman agrees that our communities have the capacity to do the work before us. “We have built incredible communities of organizers and activists, and these connections are our strength,” Eman said. “We need to mobilize these networks for mutual aid and resistance, as well as protect these connections with one another. In moments of despair or defeat, it is easy to turn on one another over minute differences. If we get into petty feuds and sectarianism, we would be depleting our most important resource: each other.”

Eman also stressed that Donald Trump’s missteps and failures will create opportunities for organizers to exploit. “We are about to have a president who is strongest when he's in opposition–when he's seen as an outsider. We need to remind working-class people of all colors that this administration does not actually represent a break from the ruling class and will not improve their material conditions.”

To take advantage of those opportunities, and leverage frustrations that could potentially unite the working class, the left will have to offer more than judgment and ideology. We will have to put forward a politics that addresses people’s material conditions, that grapples with the problems they face, and marries their hopes for change to larger transformations that would mean safety and freedom for everyone. To do this, we have to ignore the discourse snipers, forgive mistakes, practice discernment and meet each other with care and concern, despite our discomfort. That’s a tall order, but I believe the world is worth it. We live in chaotic, disastrous times, but amid that madness, we can still find each other and fight for each other. And I believe we will.

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