Maybe two weeks ago(?) I got a message from Vanessa, another creator (her TikTok is Vanessa | LifeIsArt) expressing an interest in chatting about the state of things and the path forward before the big ban. I said sure! and then blew her off. Not for any reason; I get hundreds of DMs every week and my attention span wasn’t that great before social media fried it even more, so I spaced it completely.
She messaged me again yesterday and said we’re almost out of time! I spent a while perusing her social media, which has a pretty big following, to get a feel for who she is: she’s an opera singer, a creative, an artist, a gifted writer, a medium, a witch, a leftist, and a seasoned organizer. Her Substack bio reads, “Art like a grown-up.” Jeez, okay—I was already intimidated—but lets do it. We jumped on a Zoom call.
I don’t know what I expected from our chat. I’m an authentically godless, monochrome communist—possibly the least spiritually fluent or creative person who’s ever lived—so I wasn’t sure what we’d even talk about. Were we gonna discuss community organizing? Building ratlines for immigrants and abortions? Opera singing and musical theater? Was she a cop, baiting me into sharing something incriminating? Or, the absolute worst case: was it going to be cringe?
The first thing that struck me, seconds into the call, was that she’s one of the most attractive people I’ve ever seen in my life. You know how you look at some folks and just go, “who the fuck made you?” This is that level of aesthetic beauty that your brain needs a few moments to process because it doesn’t make any worldly sense. Don’t @ me because we’re all gonna die soon and I’m saying what the fuck I think anymore.
I rallied onward. We summarized our respective backgrounds: Vanessa shared her experience organizing with a leftist vanguard movement in the Bay Area, working with Angela Davis, being a liaison to Spain, getting hit in the ribs with police batons. I shared a bit about militant leftist organizing in the South, and the process of marrying ‘00s red state white boy rage with radically inclusive leftist politics to ultimately become whatever I am now.
Early on in the discussion, in so many words, she asked me what my overall messaging strategy is and I said “mostly just bashing white liberals.” Her laughter, applause and pure venom in her voice let me know immediately I was in safe company and put me at ease. If you think leftists’ forward-facing remarks about libs are too disparaging, you’d hate to hear what we say behind closed Zoom links.
Vanessa and I are opposites in many ways. She’s an educated black woman; I’m a white blue collar guy with a GED. She was cutting her teeth on the front lines of radical activism while I was getting drunk on construction sites. She’s an opera singer, a spiritually literate medium, an artist; I like to kickbox, shoot guns, lift heavy thing until make brain quiet. But we have plenty in common too: our politics, our values, our message, our idea of a fight. In this regard, what we communicate to our respective audiences is largely the same: to fight fascism you need to toughen up, and working for your community can’t be done until you do the work on yourself. We both emphasize the importance of confronting your fears, accountability, identifying where cowardice is disguised as morality, the praxis of being both a soldier and a servant, physical fitness, and so on.
Vanessa fights fascism with a weapon I don’t carry: creativity. We both understand the necessity and power of violence in the fight against fascism, and creativity is violence. It’s an expression that challenges power and can’t be controlled by it; a knife to be wielded and plunged into the neck of fascism’s ideologically sterile and repressive conditions by those who refuse its imprisonment; and one of the first things to be policed and suppressed by fascist regimes.
I am particularly struck by the analysis of this as outlined in her Villain Challenge:
Real artistic maturity isn't about finding yourself – it's about encountering the force that will ruthlessly confront the fears you've mistaken for virtues. Your villain is the one who will wage war with your antiquated moralities, who will expose where your "wisdom" is just well-dressed fear.
I could listen to that shit all day. It’s what I spend all my time here yelling about. It isn’t unique to liberals castrating their own political activism with smug moralizing; it affects all of us, you, me, everyone indoctrinated by this cruel society that squashes our expression and identity until we’re suitably impotent to control. Vanessa outlines the creative consequence of that indoctrination beautifully:
Most of you are loyal to fear disguised as virtue. Your hardworking parents taught you modesty, and now you can't take yourself seriously as an artist […] They preached kindness over anger, and now your art lacks the raw fire that makes people listen – you're watering down your truth, smoothing every edge, creating sanitized versions of your vision that offend no one and move no one.
It doesn’t matter why you’re doing nothing. Whether it’s fear, morality, intellectualizing, some other bullshit reason; it’s still nothing. That’s by design. The powers that be, whether it’s a monolithic state media apparatus or your parents at home, fear honest expression of truth and have instilled that fear in us. Fascism can only exercise its rule over a nation of cowards.
We abandoned conventional analysis of the world and got into all the witchy shit. Contact with the cosmos and its role in redirecting humanity’s course; humanity represented as a matrix within the earth’s crust, and the process of people either ascending through cold to light & freedom, or blindly following the comfort of warmth to hellfire & certain death; how poisonous soil must become to keep an entire forest of trees from growing (we are the trees btw); ubiquitous shared dreams of our plane of existence shifting, and the sensation of either hanging on or sliding off into oblivion.
Vanessa is a Jedi who does Jedi shit. She uses the force and can see things that I can’t see. It’s hard to describe. And that subject of honesty took us into the weeds for two hours. When do you feel most like yourself? Who are you? You know immediately when someone you know well walks into a room behind you just by the feeling, but how would someone know it was you behind them? If you could describe yourself as a feeling, what would it be? Vanessa asked me these questions while my brain’s ignition sputtered and choked, trying to turn over a spiritual engine I’ve pretty much never used.
She saw through me with an ease that’d be funny were it not so frightening. I’ve been losing my mind trying to hold white leftists’ hands through the process of both losing their fear of violence and becoming capable of it. I feel weighed down, driven insane, as I earnestly try to nurse the profound emotional fragility of left-leaning white people while communicating the urgency of the situation. Vanessa broke it down in seconds:
The heaviness and darkness I feel is my own dishonesty. I’m telling people to stop this nonsense of trying to fight the system with the tools the system gives them, while doing the exact same thing. I’m being untrue to myself and dishonest with the people I’m talking to. It’s functionally identical to the white liberal who cowers at home in fear while dressing it up as nonviolent morality: I’m scared to turn people off by being too blunt, to confront fascism without people beside me, and I disguise it as a strategy to “ease people into it” or whatever the fuck. Basically I’m preaching a path that I’m not walking myself, and the spiritual rot of hypocrisy is driving me insane.
Baked into this topic was our respective feeling that we’ve been given a higher calling. She feels this way, I feel this way. It’s hard to explain, it feels crazy to say out loud, and my conversation with Vanessa was the first time I’ve ever shared it. A guiding hand that I can’t see or feel forces my own. I’ve been given a message that I feel duty-bound to scream from the rooftops and tens of thousands have heard it, but that message is not supposed to be watered down the way I’m wont to do out of selfish fear; and if I really have been given some higher calling, I’m not only failing to rise to it, I’m incurring divine punishment. Of course I’m going fucking crazy.
I don’t care if this sounds nuts or evokes the image of some cult leader ordained by an ill-intentioned god. That’s what I think every time this feeling confronts me. But the moment I finally gave it voice, I felt lighter.
She shared her own moments of realization and confrontations with dishonesty. She told me about how her spiritual mentor cuts through these things just as Vanessa so effortlessly did for me. We discussed the divine calling that she answers to, her own growing pains as she tried to soften the edges of her own path, and how she was punished for it. Vanessa communicates with something far greater than herself, or me, or any of us. She taught me how to communicate with it too—not just to passively ask for guidance, but to actively seek it—and what it means to owe a debt to that power when its assignments aren’t honored.
My evening with Vanessa was transformative. I was in the presence of power I’d never encountered before, and I spent a lot of today still reeling from it. Tiktok got banned while we were talking, and then unbanned today, and I literally could not care less. Since we wrapped up the call, I feel like I’ve unlocked a new avenue of perception, opened a new eye…what’s the name for that again?
The last thing we did together was an honesty checklist. I promised that I wouldn’t baby-talk people anymore and she asked what that would sound like, so I’ll say to you all what I said to her:
If you don’t sack up and start fighting back for once in your fucking life, we’re all gonna die, and as you fade into oblivion I want you to know it was your own fault.
And it’ll be my fault too! Like the smug impotence of liberal nonviolence, or the softening of artistic expression til it offends no one and moves no one, the material result of fear, no matter its disguise, is nothing. If we don’t quit the bullshit marches and actually get into action—boycotts, divestment, public executions, whatever the fuck direct action means to you—we will all die. Those at the margins will be first, because they always are; then me and you. And going forward, I will not risk further divine punishment by watering that message down.
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It feels like both a curse and a gift to be awake and alive at this inflection point in not just US history, but human and ecological history. I flounder between hopeless paralysis and passionate excitement. It’s hard to move steadily forward, a tightrope in high winds. I took a strong mushroom trip last summer after struggling through a very difficult time dealing with the grief of bearing witness to the state of humanity and our world, and the message I received filled me with relief, hope, and strength: you are the earth defending itself. We are the earth defending itself, we are part of a wave that is breaching. The time of insecure, fearful men ruling with violence and shame is coming to an end, these are the last gasps.
I carry that with me.
Sometimes I fearfully worry that it is naively delusional or hopeful, but I can feel it in my bones. It feels very real and logically inevitable.
I am absolutely fucking thrilled to hear about this. Exciting, beautiful, real, raw, relevant, scary, conversation full of LOVE - please keep sharing. Your life is synthesizing as we speak. Thank you Vanessa!