“I’m not interested in supporting Democratic Party genocide purveyors of any race or gender.” This, from a Patreon subscriber’s comment left on their exit survey as they canceled their monthly patronage of my work.
Over the last 300+ days since the start of the genocide upon the Palestinian people, I have had a number of people cancel their monthly support of my work, because they feel that my stance and performance of support for the people of Gaza is not strong enough. That is most certainly their prerogative, and one of the hardest things about writing using the patron method is knowing that at any time, people can pull their support for any or no reason. It is what it is, and I have come to accept it.
However, the above comment that was left a few days ago really hit a nerve because, increasingly, I find myself wondering if people care more about performance over substance—and over actual care and change.
As we gear up for what will be a truly intense presidential campaign season here in the states, battle lines have been drawn and while many are vocal in their various opinions, I find myself wondering if people are as committed to creating a new vision of the world as they say they are.
For a number of voters, the most pressing issue is the ongoing harm being committed upon the Palestinian people and for that segment of the population, they refuse to support any candidate who is not centering the well-being of Gaza above all else. The problem with that stance is that any candidate who places Gaza above all else has virtually no chance of winning in the current system under which we operate.
The odds of Jill Stein or Cornel West becoming president are slimmer than my odds of a winning lottery ticket. I suspect a large portion of the voting populace outside of liberal, progressive, or leftist spaces doesn’t even know who these candidates are—and that’s with less than 100 days before election day, or 70 days before early voting starts in many locations. The odds of either these campaigns or any other third-party candidate creating the campaign infrastructure to secure anything even near the 270 electoral votes to win the presidency is even slimmer than my 50-something-year-old perimenopausal self, dropping these extra 25+ pounds before the end of the year.
That said, many people who feel this deeply and passionately on the issue of the Palestinian people know this fact; they know the third-party candidates would be hard-pressed to score even a single electoral vote. But they are driven deeply by their convictions and often they see no difference between the two major parties and are ready to see the entire system collapse.
Once upon a time, when I was a much younger and idealistic voter, I shared similar visions of feeling that the best way to create a better system was to let the old one collapse. In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader. If you are old enough to remember that election, well, we know what happened.
I will just say that I still believe third-party candidates can become viable in a significant way. I also believe that we need a critical mass of third-party politicians in our local and state offices demonstrating what can be done and allowing them to get visibility so that when presidential elections roll around, these people might have enough of a track record and visibility to actually create the attention and buzz that might actually lead to one of them winning the presidency—instead of serving as spoilers and allowing the most unscrupulous of candidates to win.
For a third party to win, they need a long-term game plan along with planning and organizing among many different constituencies, not just select bubbles.
In the meantime, regardless of how one feels, the two options on this year’s menu as far as candidates who can actually win are Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. One of them is going to become our next president and, having experienced a Trump presidency, personally I would like to avoid a second go-round with him.
Even without Project 2025 and Agenda 47 on the table now, he would be an awful president just as he was before, and probably even more destructive and divisive. Muslim bans, anyone? Think about the number of white supremacists who were emboldened to come out publicly; the surge in hate crimes; the governing by social media; his inability to accept his loss and the attempted coup he orchestrated on January 6, 2020; his willingness to let his own vice president, Mike Pence, be harmed because he refused to follow Trump’s illegal orders. The fact that he installed justices on the Supreme Court who tilted the courts not just conservatively but to the far right, leading to the reversal of Roe v Wade. The fact that thanks to the justices he installed, more than half of American women now live in states that sharply restrict their rights to bodily autonomy. I have one daughter and two granddaughters, and that alone haunts me. Knowing they live in a world with less choices than their mother and grandmother had.
Our current system is not well. We are creeping toward fascism in a world where the average American can’t even read well enough to understand the implications of this creeping fascism and authoritarianism. But the reality is, we are not there—yet.
Just the fact that I can write this and publish it without imminently fearing for my life or having jack-booted thugs at my door to take me away as a dissident is a real reminder that despite how some may feel, we still have rights. Rights that can be used to advocate for people at home and around the globe. I am not willing to play with what diminishing rights we have left to take a stand and risk a world where advocacy and organizing may become illegal. Nor do I think most people advocating for the collapse of the United States understand what systemic failure in a country looks like. Countries that collapse into authoritarianism are not safe places for anyone. They are places where daily survival becomes the only goal. They are not places where we get to post our thoughts online and fret while ordering Door Dash for dinner.
The United States is a country founded on the ideal of rugged individualism and the thing with organizing for change—change of any sort—is that it requires working in partnership and community with others. Working with others who don’t always share the all same views as you but who ultimately share the same big-picture view.
My lane is anti-racism work and the liberation of Black and brown people globally, I also want collective liberation from capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism, and colonialism for all of us. That includes our Palestinian brothers and sisters. It’s just that my journey to the same end goal may look different because as a Black woman in America, I don’t have the privilege of wanting to burn it all up and trust that we will all come together. In fact, I would say that every message I get from what is almost certainly a white patron canceling their support because I am not vocal enough for their tastes is a reminder of how white supremacy operates on an interpersonal level. Of how too often, white people can’t sit with discomfort or differing opinions and navigate those differences with love and care for others.
It’s no different than white anti-racists who walk away from the most difficult of white people. Yet in a collapse, would we even have that privilege? What if the only person near you with a food source that could feed you holds objectionable views?
The funny thing about patrons cancelling their support based off what I do share publicly is not knowing that many organizers work behind the scenes and rarely share the full scope of their work. This spring, my staff wanted to support local organizing efforts on college campuses—which meant delaying our intended programming—and I signed off on it. Because while it set us back, it was the right thing to do. I took on more direct program work so my staff could support the work of younger activists on the ground who were risking their futures to advocate for Gaza. I shifted programming to bring in a session on Gaza and Israel from a colleague with family in Israel but who is pro-Palestine. I don’t generally feel the need to share this, because it is simply part of my anti-racism lens. But in a world led by the emotionality and imagery of social media, in-depth building and organizing is sacrificed for hot takes and likes.
I have never been a voter who blindly sides with any party. In this election season, I am supporting Kamala Harris because I don’t think the country or world can tolerate another Trump go-round and if that makes me a “Democratic Party genocide purveyor,” so be it. As for the patron who canceled their $20-a-month pledge, it sucks—but what sucks more is knowing they supported my work and didn’t grow from reading it. That they didn’t learn that they could have reached out to me to have a conversation. That they didn’t grow beyond their own scope of the world. That at the end of the day, their refusal to see only the humanity of one group of marginalized people without seeing the humanity of other groups is just business as usual and not at all within the framework of anti-racism work.
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Thank you, Shay. It continues to astonish me how blind and tone-deaf the would-be sabateurs on the left remain. Even after Nader gave us Bush, Elliot gave us LePage, and displaced vitriol against Hillary Clinton gave us Trump. And now they’re doing it again.
You are so right about system collapse; it won’t be.pretty and it won’t be brief. The revolution is here, people, and it’s far right wing. It’s not defeatist thinking to see this; it’s rational seeing of reality. If Lisa Savage and others on the far left want to make that collapse complete, effectively destroying many more lives than the ones they misguidedly think they are trying to save, they need some deep de-programming. Because Trump and his sycophants in office (forever, as he has promised there will be no more elections after) means I will lose my right to be married, probably my Medicare + Mainecare healthcare, and probably my monthly income of social security. Never mind my right to speak out against these things as well as genocide, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, you name it. And I am white. Black and Brown people — men, women, and children — will have it that much worse.
I empathise with BGIM though. How these so-called progressives can hear these things, learn these things, or know these things and persist in their regressive destructiveness is beyond reason. But then the far right is off the charts with unreality as well. Maybe there’s something in the water …
In the police state that VP Harris is eminently qualified to preside over implementing I’m sure I’ll be among the first to be locked up. Even though I’m white — unlike the multitudes Harris imprisoned during her tenure as a DA and then Attorney General in California. She is not the lesser evil in this election.
I would like to take public credit for my comment that generated this piece. If you see no growth in me from reading and supporting you via patreon these many years, that is your opinion. To ignore that the Democratic Party and its candidate are the purveyors of genocide right before our eyes because orange man bad syndrome has you in its grip is foolish. The defeatist analysis about 3rd party candidates just explains why you’re not supporting them. It does not explain why you’re supporting VP Kamala Harris, or the corporate-owned and operated two party system. Have BIPOC lives improved under the current Democratic administration? I would argue they have not in terms of wealth, safety, health, or pretty much any metric you care to name.
Would you have supported Condoleezza Rice for president? To me, Harris is parallel (albeit apparently less intelligent and articulate than Rice). Black Alliance for Peace, which I continue to support on a monthly basis, publishes Ajamu Baraka’s analysis where he calls such people the Black mis-leadership class. Needless to say, Barack Obama (who had endorsed Harris) is included.
I accept everyone’s right to have a different opinion than mine, but I’m not willing to support pro-Harris advocacy financially. Democrats right or wrong is a philosophy that is leading us right into the maw of WWIII as our Congress responds like trained seals to Netanyahu. He obviously got the green light for assassinations in other countries (Lebanon and Iran) from the Biden administration. Probably from VP Harris herself. That’s not ok with me.