as much as I hate hasan piker personally, from the bottom of my heart, there's a reason he is working with politicians right now.

social movements that actually MOVE things, tend to run over bystanders the faster they are moving. anti-intellectualism is rampent in our culture, and so any form of changing the zeitgeist on the relevant scale would pretty inevitably have to involve a degree of idiotic bullshit from a lot of people coming into play from the same side you're on. that is pretty much just the cost of mainstreaming activism. and it sucks every time, and it is harmful every time. but I do think hyperfixating on it can run the cost of ignoring the bigger picture.

kidology is another youtuber who's basically a college-educated liberal who accidentally ended up algorithmed to breadtube despite having an aggressive distain towards leftists for how fucking annoying they can get. I would personally recommend at least checking her out to every diehard natalie fan, she's even holding sexual personae on her profile pic. two years ago, she put out a video that was originally titled (something like) "how the pro-palestine movement has lost the plot", which was basically 47 minutes of her groaning in frustration at some of the performative slacktivism that was going on there from people who wanted to be On The Right Side Of History more than they wanted to actually do anything to help anyone. some time after that, she changed the title to "performative activists are the new epidemic". and as much as I understand her frustration. and as immensely cathartic as I found it to be at the time, being an israeli leftist on an internet that genuinely felt like it was trying to kill me. and as much as I appreciate her changing the title to be more specific. I still think putting that message out as a statement piece on a public platform, was getting in the way.

people are trying to organize to support the victims of a genocide, and to stop the US's enablement of the country that's been committing it. and as much as I hate the insane wave of antisemetism that this collective push enabled in our culture (only made worse by the fact that antisemetism is built on appealing to the kind of person who wants fighting power to be easy and simple), and as much as I feel for anyone who wishes they could stay out of it only for their community to not allow them to and ruin their life in the process (hi there), we kinda just have to face the reality that these things getting ugly is kind of impossible to avoid, once you get enough people onboard.

I am all for natalie stepping out of the political arena if this is what she wants to do, god knows it hasn't been good on her brain for some years now. I love natalie, and I genuinely hope she is able to take better care of herself offline and that people stop harrassing her over this shit. and I get being traumatized by the way leftist communities try to coerce you into politics when your identity forces you to rely on them for support, because I've experienced it too. and I think we need to know how to hold space for the people who's expressions about this get ugly, because this is part of what trauma DOES.

but I am BEGGING the rest of us to stop turning it into this contrarian moral high ground, from which you'd get to act like you're more enlightened than a lot of people who are ACTUALLY DOING PRAXIS. if your most important leftist statement piece is how activists are being unreasonable and morally fanatic and crazy, as much as I agree that that is the case some of the time, it means that you are not adding value to the conversation. what you SHOULD be doing is either learn how to help where you can, or get out of the fucking way where you can't. and this isn't directed at her, becuase she seemed to have chosen option 2 quite definitively, and we frankly should just leave her alone about this. but this IS directed at the rest of us, because that is still something that WE need to remember.