Greetings Good People,

I have continued to crisscross the country for speaking engagements and gatherings in donor and movement spaces, including many focused on electoral work. The people and organizations I have met along the way have filled me hope, which I am sharing today.

In this edition: Steinem, Nixon, Macklemore, and Other Hopeful Signs that America is Perimenopausal / Philanthropy Corner: A Word of Encouragement for White Donors, and how Individual Donors Are Holding Strong / Resources.

People are fed up with nonsense, which, as any organizer worth their salt will tell you, is the absolute best state of mind for people to be in when it’s time to push for change.

I think in pictures these days, which is useful in the current climate of information overload. It’s the gift of menopause and metaphors, so let's mix some. When someone puts a drop of ink into a cup of clean water, you can clear it by pouring enough fresh water into that same cup to push the ink out. When someone drops something toxic into the waters of a community — an organization, a social justice movement, or the public square at large — we clear it by pouring in enough truth to push that toxicity out. If we fail to pour, for whatever reason, because we are too afraid, resigned, or complacent, the toxic waters we fail to clear are what we all have to swim in. We’ve been swimming in a lot of toxicity in recent years, while too many people sat stagnant in their fear, but there are more and more signs that people are finally ready to pour.

Florida’s Representative Angie Nixon was outspent 17 to 1 in her race to be the Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat. Young, unapologetic, and facing a misdemeanor charge for standing her ground with a bullhorn in the state Capitol building to protest gerrymandering in her state, Nixon won decisively, by a 12 percent margin, in an upset that would have been hard to imagine even two years ago. Across the country, we are seeing that establishment candidates may have the majority of the money, but the majority of the people are fed up with milquetoast politicians and are ready to pour their time and treasure into candidates who are ready to fight like hell for the working class. In many key races, they are beginning to clear up the electoral waters just in time for the midterms.

We are all making a million calculations….Do we move towards someone who dared to stand up for what was right and was attacked? Or do we distance ourselves and treat them like they are radioactive?

When Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour, almost immediately Sheeran’s back-up band and several other acts pulled out of the show in protest, and the interwebs rallied in support of Macklemore and his message. It’s a response that would have been unthinkable even a year ago, when the public reaction to the firing and blacklisting of many people who dared to speak out about the genocide in Gaza was a depressingly timid public response. The Macklemore/Sheeran debacle plays out, in the public spotlight, the type of choices that, in this time of monsters, so many people are facing in our daily lives — between doing the right thing that is brave and difficult and the wrong thing that is cowardly but profitable, between solidarity that stands with the most vulnerable and individualism that stands only with ourselves and the most privileged.

We are all making a million calculations, at family dinners, in meetings with co-workers, in what we say or disclose to the people or places that we count on for our income. Do we move towards someone who dared to stand up for what was right and was attacked? Or do we distance ourselves and treat them like they are radioactive? Do we allow the Krafts of the world to bring us to heel, or do we use our power to push back? Do we sit in our fear or do we pour in courage until the waters clear?

In its baselessness, the accusation that Gloria Steinem was a life-long CIA conspirator was not dissimilar from countless other unsubstantiated call-outs of movement leaders since cancel culture surged to epic levels in 2020. Where the attack on Steinem departed from the rest was that it was not followed by the tense silence that far too many liberals and progressives have kept in moments like these, out of fear of being cancelled themselves. This time, people, a lot of people, spoke up in her defense. Among the strongest clap backs were, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s nuanced analysis, and Angela Davis’ NPR interview remembering Gloria Steinem’s allyship. When people on the left swarm in an ill-informed take down of a good person, integrity looks like speaking up to intervene. There have been a whole lot of takedowns of decent people and very little intervention in recent years. That is shifting. People are pouring in truth and clearing the waters of movement.

More movement activists are now saying some version of: when there’s an accusation, before piling on, we must get curious, read the full story, take in all the facts, and move from an informed place.

Fascism relies on enough people being so mired in fear that they abandon critical thinking, retreat into resignation, and buy into the lie that the only way to keep themselves safe is by being silent bystanders to the persecution of their neighbors. When this is normalized by the majority of people in any nation that faces a fascist takeover, that country is, to put it in gen Z speak, cooked. When social justice movements themselves become places where people practice being bystanders as good people are taken out, where people rehearse being sheep and cowards when faced with far less formidable forces, then their ranks become ill-prepared to find their lucid minds and their spines when it’s time to fight the real opponents that are threatening our very lives. If we do not examine facts instead of running with rumors, put things in context, allow room for people to grow and evolve; if we continue to swarm and destroy people and their legacies based on soundbites and spotty information, how are we any different from those who follow MAGA or QAnon? We’re not, and we’re sitting ducks for manipulation and control.

Unchecked meanness within movements themselves has impeded their ability to scale. What ordinary person wants to join up or stay engaged with movements where people behave as badly as those who dragged Steinem and go unchallenged? The answer is glaringly obvious in the numbers — or lack thereof. More movement activists are now saying some version of: when there’s an accusation, before piling on, we must get curious, read the full story, take in all the facts, and move from an informed place. And when the facts show that an accusation is baseless, we need to speak up with the truth.   

I recently attended an excellent workshop by the Freedom Trainers on non-compliance in the face of authoritarianism. Their slide deck contained a page from an old 1944 CIA pamphlet called, “The Simple Sabotage Field Manual”, initially distributed by the Allies in WWII to guide sympathetic citizens as to how best to infiltrate and damage an organization’s productivity.

I challenge anyone to read this list and not notice how many of these behaviors pervade today’s movement. Most of the people behaving this way are not on CIA payroll, they are on the payroll of movement organizations. Most of these folks have lost the plot of why we are here (the liberation of oppressed people) and how damn serious it is outside. They have lost it either because they joined movement for the wrong reasons (ego, status, self-righteousness), or because they are so profoundly dysregulated in their own nervous systems that they cannot stop themselves from acting out in destructive ways, or both. This kind of behavior can be met with empathy when it stems from dysregulation (and with encouragement to use existing resources, such as health benefits, to access healing), but it must also be met with healthy boundaries.

I hope that the recognition that so much of what movement orgs are dealing with is a carbon copy of what the CIA thought would destroy organizations might inspire more people to put down the Kool-Aid of appeasement, re-orient their center of gravity to the liberation of the people, and assert some clear and healthy boundaries.

The main reason that the people behaving in these ways are destroying so many movement organizations is because they are being allowed to — the boundaries are missing. People are afraid to set limits. I hope that the shift in the zeitgeist from fear to courage, and the knowledge that so much of what we are enabling is a carbon copy of what the CIA thought would destroy organizations, will move more people to put down the Kool-Aid of appeasement, re-orient their center of gravity to the liberation of the people, and assert some clear and healthy boundaries. Healthy boundaries are not a misuse of power, they are an act of love and accountability.

The people of the U.S. are fed up with the ink of injustice poisoning the waters that we are all swimming in. We are increasingly aware that the clear waters of truth and courage are ours to use. Just in time for election season, we are ready to pour.

There is no role more important for white donors to play in this moment than that of the organizer who reaches out to their network to recruit other donors to resource frontline movements; who helps replicate themselves by developing other donors into organizers as well.