On a recent weekend afternoon, I walked to a local café. It’s a basic big-city coffee shop, with tall windows, west elm furniture, and potted pothos on the shelves. There were about forty people scattered about. Thirty-eight of them were on their laptops, scrolling through job boards, editing lines of code, and talking about the wonders of AI. It was pretty much my definition of Hell.
Across from me a pair of women were sitting together. The one turned to the other and said, ‘Isn’t it crazy what’s happening?’ ‘It’s disgusting,’ the other replied. They were discussing one of our region’s darling tech companies: Microsoft. For years, Israel has used Microsoft’s software, specifically Azure, to monitor phone calls from Gaza and the occupied West Bank, as well as guide Israeli air strikes within the Gaza Strip. This has led to strong internal employee resistance over the last two years. In April, two workers were fired for interrupting Bill Gates at the company’s 50th anniversary celebration. In May, a worker was fired for interrupting a speech by the CEO Satya Nadella1. Dissent among the employees has grown so intense that Microsoft even requested help from the FBI to crack down on employee protestors.
In late August a group of workers staged a sit-in at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, 16 miles east of the café. The protesters, part of a group called ‘No Azure for Apartheid’, occupied the office of the company’s President Brad Smith. While on a livestream they were pulled from the office and arrested. Four workers were immediately fired.
The women across from me were upset about the history of harsh responses from the company. They believed, like many people do, that it was wrong that thousands of children had been massacred in a genocide. They believed they had the right, as citizens of a ‘free’ country, to speak out and do something. But the two friends couldn’t agree on what to do. Instead, they just sat there, looking around, as if they were waiting for someone to finish their conversation for them.
I was about to say something to them, but then they pivoted from the topic of genocide. They turned back to their computers and to their essential task, which was finding a better job. The one woman wanted a higher salary, more vacation days, better office ‘culture’. She pointed at the computer and asked her friend to help edit a cover letter. ‘Which position is this for,’ the friend asked. ‘Oh, you know the one,’ the other replied with a hollow and embarrassed laugh. Ha-ha-ha. What was so funny? Oh, yes: after all she had said about the genocide in Gaza, and her disagreements with the terrible company helping with the killing, she would still be applying for a job on the Azure team at Microsoft.
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Last week I was walloped with a very annoying strain of the common cold. This is unimportant, except that it allowed me to lay on the couch, play videogames, and watch hours of YouTube. Apparently I have watched so many baseball clips and documentaries of American Civil War battles that the algorithm has clocked me as an angry white-American man (correct, but not in the way they think!). Unfortunately, this led to a rotation of repeating pro-Trump and anti-immigrant ads on my YouTube. In one of these ads the DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, proudly stands in frame and says “Thank you, President Donald Trump, for protecting our borders and deporting illegal immigrants,” while dozens of pictures of prisoners flash on screen. On another, Noem’s voice booms over a scene of people being handcuffed and says, ominously, “If you come to our country and you break our laws, we will hunt you down.” These ads are cartoonishly evil, psychopathic, and ridiculous. They have the vibe of a cartoon villain twirling their mustache and reciting long monologues about their plans to eat babies and shoot puppies.
Eventually, however, I started receiving a slew of ads for ICE. One of their local ads shows a panorama of my beautiful city, with its lakes and mountains and ocean coastline, while a voiceover tells the viewer, “You took an OATH. In Sanctuary Cities, you’re ordered to STAND DOWN. DANGEROUS ILLEGALS WALK FREE.” Supposedly they thought that I was a cop as well (depressing)! But their competitive salaries though! Signing bonuses of $50,000! This got me thinking; what on Earth would it take for me to join ICE, an organization that famously separates mothers from their children and disappears brown people into modern concentration camps? It would probably require Kristi Noem herself pointing a gun at my head. Unfortunately for me she has a lot of experience with point-blank executions, especially since she famously dragged her family’s 14-month-old dog into a gravel hole, shot it with a gun, and then bragged about the killing in her political memoir.2
My point is that a person almost always has an option to resist something they believe to be evil. There is always a different path to be taken. The option can be refusing to enlist in the American Gestapo, or it can be more productive, like; hypothetically3, building neighborhood networks to monitor and alert people to local ICE raids, or providing mutual aid to those that are in danger. But whatever it is, somewhere there’s a positive choice to be made.
The same goes for opposing the genocide in Gaza. When I heard the two people speaking about Gaza at the cafe, I could sympathize with their logic. The genocide in Gaza is an especially dire and frustrating crisis, and it’s difficult to imagine how protests will change Trump’s willingness to stand alongside Israel in its ethnic cleansing of Palestine. For two years the full apparatus of American civil society has united against any criticism of Israeli policy. Both Biden and Trump reacted viciously against the anti-war movement. College students were harassed and beaten for merely camping in their college quads. Many students were expelled, some deported. Even now, foreign travelers to the United States are having their social profiles searched for any criticism of the genocide before entry. All of this repression can lead to an immense feeling of powerlessness, which is where I think the two women at the cafe landed: a resigned, bitter, nihilistic powerlessness. They couldn’t see how their actions would accomplish anything, so they took the next logical step of believing that their actions do not matter at all, which very conveniently fit into their goals of getting rich in America.
Well, they’re wrong! While writing this piece, I learned that a few days ago Microsoft announced that it is ending some of its partnership with the Israeli government, specifically Azure cloud services for an Israeli military unit called Unit 8200. Now, is this enough? Of course not. But it’s clearly a decision that Microsoft was forced to make due to immense political pressure from activists and employees. It is not easy to get any company to admit to wrongdoing, especially a colossal tech company in Trump’s America. Each victory means something.
Victories like this matter because of the practical implications, obviously. But I think many people, myself included, need to be reminded that successful organized resistance is possible.
This has been a maddening year in the United States, and it’s been easy to slip into an obsessive doomerism about how the future is lost and all hope is dead. This government and its culture is so overwhelmingly cruel, violent, and all-encompassing in its stupidity that it’s difficult to easily imagine how to counter it. You can’t takedown the Trump worldview with fact-checking and epic-takedowns (they do not care). You also can’t magically change national foreign policy by showing our leaders pictures of dead mothers and starving children (they do not care, unless those kids are white). Logic doesn’t work, and empathy is non-existent (this is an administration dismantling vaccine science and posting AI-slop memes of crying families being deported). If nothing can seemingly get through to the administration, then a kind of logic concludes that Trump is simply all powerful and invincible. Perhaps, then, a person should keep their head down, kiss the boot, and lay low for the next few years?
This mindset of course will never work. It’s a sad way to live, but it’s also bad strategy. If rolling over and giving your opponent everything they want was an effective political strategy, then the Democratic Party would still be in the White House. Unfortunately for us the center-left party is completely missing from the largest American political crisis since the Civil War. People will have to figure out how to push-back against fascism on their own. But fortunately that means that people can listen to more people like Zohran Mamdani, and less of Hakeem Jeffries or Ezra Klein4.
But an important thing to note; Trump is not invincible. I think he’s quite a lot weaker than the media portray him as. His approval numbers are now near historical lows. The economy is almost certainly headed to a major recession. Polls are showing that Americans are increasingly pro-immigration and anti-ICE. There are significant signs of conservative discontent with Trump, both because of his censorship of free speech and his caginess around the Jeffrey Epstein files. And on Gaza, some polls are showing that half of voters believe that Israel is committing a genocide, while others are showing broad support for American recognition of a Palestinian state. Something is happening. I think the wall is beginning to crack.
But it’s not enough to wait for the far-right to break. You have to fight and break them. That requires willpower, vision, and strength, which are something that need to be cultivated and then activated. Back in February, at the height of the DOGE madness, I wrote about the dizzying speed and chaos of the early Trump days;
“I feel caught in the storm now, just spinning and spinning, and I have been spinning since November, and I am sick of spinning. Just about everyone I know is losing their minds. Certainly people are being brave in choosing to smile and not constantly yell and scream, or to quietly focus on their art or their work. But maybe screaming is good… I am tired of the sad, yearning, droopy mentality that pervades so much of the language of ‘discourse’. I want reasonable people to reclaim the concepts of will, and power, and take them permanently away from the far-right and the fascists. I would like if we immediately cultivated a culture of friction, tension, strong disagreements, and struggle. Because Christ almighty, will we need it. We have to be messy. We have to break the fascists, and then rebuild the world.”
I still agree. Being sad about the world, yet doing nothing about it? That’s over. Endlessly pinpointing the bad things happening yet never offering alternatives or next steps? That’s done too. Doomscrolling for hours and falling down algorithmic blackholes? That’s politically useless, but also spiritually and intellectually deflating. People need to be resilient and interconnected, not weak and atomized. There is nothing beautiful, noble, or transgressive about rotting one’s brain, especially at a moment when liberal democracy is crumbling.
Lastly, I think that everyone should start asking themselves one of the best questions ever put forward in politics; ‘What is to be done?’5 If you’re lonely, then how do you discover connection? If you’re angry, how do you channel that rage into productive action? If you’re feeling weak and disempowered, then what must you do to gain strength and empowerment? These can be personal questions with answers differing for each person. But I also don’t think that people should have to discover ‘what is to be done’ alone. If you want answers, watch the people who are already doing beautiful and powerful things. I can think of no better example of this than the global movement against the genocide in Palestine.
As I’m writing this the ‘Global Sumud Flotilla’, which is a fleet of 45 boats and ships from across the world, are sailing across the Mediterranean Sea with food and humanitarian supplies for Gazans trapped by the Israeli siege. It is a completely nonviolent movement, headed by doctors, teachers, religious figures, organizers, and people from all walks of life. In Italy, dockworkers are threatening a general strike if the flotilla is harmed. 16 countries have signed on in defense of the flotilla, and even Spain and Italy have provided their own boats in support. The ships have been constantly surveilled and attacked by Israeli drones. A ragtag group of small ships and fishing boats has scared a country so much that they are pummeling vessels full of food and medicine. But even despite the clear risk of arrest, injury, or even death, the activists are continuing on. They will not give up, unless they must. They are full of willpower and strength. The rest of the world is watching. It would be wise for us to watch them closely, too. They are carving a pathway for us through the storm.
Why are these CEOs such fragile little snowflakes?
I just feel a real need, in certain moments, to remind people that the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security once bragged in her memoir about dragging the family dog into a gravel pit and then shooting it.
Sounds interesting, but I have never seen such a network, nor will I ever!
If there’s any interest in a piece about Klein, let me know. I don’t want to do this, but for enough money I’d read the Abundance book…
We’re getting closer and closer to Three Chairs Inc. talking about political theory… scary prospect.