Why I left the Left

and what I think of the state of Leftist discourse, catching bits and pieces of it from a deeply not-online place.

So, I left the Left and it’s finally time to talk about it. Some of you may have followed me here off of TikTok, where I spent the last five years building up a small but fairly dedicated following of fellow Leftists, WOC, burnt out besties, etc. But I need to take the mask off. It’s wrong to keep lying to you about who I am and where I stand politically. The Left isn’t for me, and in this article, I’m going to tell you why.

Okay, sorry for the rage bait title — I actually only left the online Leftist space. My politics are probably actually better rounded than ever because of this strategic (desperately needed) move. And I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, what it all means. How I, as a “Leftist” relate to my politics, learn from my community, and become an all-around better person and community member if I am not deeply attached to the light up rectangle in my pocket.

Since January of this year, I have not posted publicly to my TikTok account. The reason is that after I graduated from my MPA, I was so severely mentally ill and physically unwell that all I could do was to post online. I got into many fights with online trolls, I critiqued the Democrats to no end, and I made response video after response video to racist white liberal women. I was so drained all the time, and while I was actively blaming the institutional white supremacy of my MPA school for that (correctly), I realized towards the end of 2025 that I was not really doing anything to actually support my nervous system to actually heal. As it turns out, as trite as it might sound…doom scrolling actually really is bad for you! And I think it says something that the only sense of venting I could get was through a platform where I was undoubtedly “influencing” people. In my following, there were people who always agreed with me, clearly simply for the chance that I, someone they respected or thought was cool, would validate their own opinions.

Once I really understood that I wasn’t a person, but rather a sounding board for validating other people’s opinions, it felt awful and it felt wrong, a responsibility I wasn’t willing to take on. Not only because I’m just a person figuring things out, but because I felt like I was selling my audience a pipe dream. Recently, with the uptick of visibility for movement politics online, there has been a shift of discourse away from the “white-supremacy” led cynicism, apathy, and ignorance of the current political moment. In an effort to push against that very incorrect way of thinking, Black and brown activists and influencers began to shame people, pushing folks towards a “hope and joy” framework of politics, and insisting that hope and joy were the only ways to connect with activism, making no room and space for the very real despair and depression we are all experiencing under such a destabilizing system. In so doing, we (as in BIPOC, activists, allies) are actually just reinforcing the same binary that white supremacy culture does — to dismiss any parts of the self means to dismiss the whole self, especially when it comes to politics. And now, the “Hope and Joy” guys on TikTok aren’t wrong. But they are lying a little bit about how often they feel those things, I think!

But my thesis goes further than the individual. As much as I think the world in general has been destabilized by oppressive forces for a very long time, this particular moment feels different in a way that I’m not sure anyone has truly theorized on how we get of it. But first, how is the online Left harming the Left?

In a podcast, one of my favorite creators, and someone I’d like to think of as a friend, Sanjana of Baskinsuns fame, said something like, Americans love to moralize media, which does the interaction between person and media a deep disservice. It pauses the analysis and obscures the reason for the “problematic” thing to play out in its pages, and people put the piece of media in either a “right” or “wrong” in their brains to simplify whether or not they should engage with it. This sparked a thought in me. Now, with content creators as primary sources of media consumed by regular people, we have taken that type of interaction, our incessant need to moralize media, to its logical conclusion: we moralize the people making the content. If. you are a Good Leftist Creator, you are expected to debate The Bad Ones. You are asked for your thoughts on so and so and what they said about this and that. And I’m not saying that followers are wrong for asking for clarification or seeing what side you’re on, but rather that the debate bro industrial complex has seeded itself into the smallest of small time creators. I don’t think any of my peers would disagree with me on this — if you are a creator that has had in the past any level of following, you were being asked for your opinion on something that literally just happened. And if you don’t have a fully formed thought, you are either “contributing to the problem,” or you just don’t care enough. The need for instantaneous dialogue and discourse is what drives this machine, and we as creators feed its hungry beast of a mouth, gobbling up all of the attention and dopamine hits from each time a like lands on our page. And look, I love attention as much as the next chick on TikTok, and it’s not a bad thing at all, but when the political strategy for organizing youth is through the pretty self-obsessed Leftist content creators? Brother, we are cooked.

TikTok and Instagram as political discourse spaces do not allow for thoughtful dialogue, at all. The obvious must be said — whereas in the past we may have watched Foucault and Chomksy debate big ideas on a stage, we are now watching people who — in their defense — might be well read, but are certainly no Foucault or Chomksy. I’m sorry, I know I’ll get called elitist. But sue me, y’all just aren’t you know, literal political theory scholars. And I say that fully indicting myself! I only have a masters degree and I wield that thing like a sword. And while it means something, it doesn’t make me right 100% of the time (mostly because I actually deeply disagree with 90% of my education). But, if you mix speedy discourse with poorly constructed arguments built on someone’s 201 intro to European Political Theory class, you get absolute garbage piles of content that gets thousands of views, and sometimes, the power and ability to endorse political candidates. It is usually not a centered experience rooted in shared definitional understandings and thoughtful dialogue.

Even those of us who do take the time to make thoughtful response videos are bombarded with questions about what our thoughts are and where our responses are. Do you know the amount of peace I’ve achieved without that constant yammering in my comments and DMs? Brother, I can finally hear my own thoughts! But if you don’t speak, you’re also tossed out with the day-old garbage. There’s nothing worse than missing the discourse cycle because you were doing your research, and then your video bombs or people comment on other videos saying you don’t care about something you actually did make a video about.

And by no means it is a a new thing for Leftists, especially young ones and especially those in vulnerable situations to adhere to and worship Leftist thought leaders, of course, and then to dump them when they have scandal about them (or merely choose not to respond to some drama or scandal). We have relegated politicians, journalists, professors, experts, scholars, etc. untrustworthy for decades based on what comes out about them. If anything, we are so over-scandalized by public media creators that we have come to expect scandal, to be primed and ready to say “I knew it! I knew they weren’t trustworthy!” But in the past, those on stages and in media might have been more prepared to deal with such public lashings, might have been able to expect it in some ways, and might have been able to bounce back to their jobs doing whatever public service or education work they were doing prior to the scandal being outed by the enemy camp. Now, people are not any less trusting, but the people they are thrusting into the limelight do not have publicists. They do not have the ability to shoulder accountability for their own mistakes that deeply wound the people that loved and supported them. They handle it poorly, at best, and at worst, they have an entirely different option: to disappear, and to never show their face again. In so doing, sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of people lose their central educational touch point. No longer are we losing an on-air journalist to be replaced by another, but a distinct, charismatic leader of their own TikTok page who vaguely resonated with the previous guy. But you can’t replace them entirely. I should know. In the time since leaving TikTok, I have gotten multiple message requests, wondering where I am.

Some of this is typical parasocialiality, which may or may not be a word, but has been written about ad nauseam here and elsewhere. I have nothing more intelligent to add about that, except to say that I am terrified for what it means for the Left. It’s not like the Left hasn’t been full of these types of leaders since forever. Many people don’t seem to know this, but guy who made people drink the poisoned Kool-aid in Jamestown, Jim Jones? Yeah man, that guy was considered a “Leftist!” The Left hates to admit this, but we are just as likely to form fringe groups that irradiate with toxic ideologies and cult-like vibes as much as the Right. We have always needed good, smart, thoughtful engagement with our politics, and the insanely important ability to discern what is and isn’t true. But, now more than ever, Leftists are caught in information cycles that knock the wind out of them. We consistently ask Leftists to know and hold information about everything, everywhere, and then yell at individuals when they aren’t local enough. And the worst part is, unlike the Right Wing, the Democrats cannot seem to take hold of that energy and turn it into systemic power. So what is the point?

Which is why it is not only imperative to touch grass, but I’m wondering if we even stand a chance with how much over-usage of social media that online Leftists use. The reliance on the internet as the strategy to deliver organizing is a flawed one, at best. Yes, we can say that those Jubilee debate videos are doing some amorphous “awareness raising,” but in the end, regardless of who “wins” the debate or what debate bro is “humiliated,” can we say any of the profits from that video go to, say, a homeless shelter? Or a campaign? Or even to voter education materials? And now, when you watch a Hasan Piker streamer, unless it’s for charity, what praxis are we getting out of it? And even me — have any of you joined a MaskBloc because I talked about it? I don’t know.

I even fell victim to this. A few years ago, I was approached by someone who wanted to use their internet savvy for Indigenous rights and awareness raising. Me, being the Indigenous rights supporter than I am, and having the anti-colonialist mindset that I have, fell for her scheme of showing up as an anti-Hindutva content creator. She strung me along, planting pro-Indigenous talking points in my ear. When I realized that she was a Zionist and pro-Hindutva, pretending to be something she wasn’t so she could build up an audience to trick them, I had already done damage by sharing her work, which did not nuance anything, like she tried to say it did. All it did was muddy the ground of a genocide that is already unpopular to try to stop. So, when the lines started to get clearer, I pulled myself out of that friendship. But like I said, the damage had been done. And that’s me. I am incredibly picky about who I allow in my life politically. If I can be persuaded through someone manipulating my logic to support Indigenous return to land (an objectively Leftist stance), when I have extensively studied and worked in progressive spaces, who’s to say they aren’t convincing much less read people through rhetorical manipulation and internet propaganda?

Are our “Leftist influencers” up to the task of defending the Left against that? From what I see, we have the same seven conversations over and over again. I don’t even have to be online to know y’all are talking about how calling Indian food gross is racist, again. Or Olivia Rodrigo’s clothing is pedo-baiting, somehow. A friend of mine complained to me once that the internet isn’t a place to hold any real work, because the curriculum is expected from creators is “always 101.” How can we ever expect any real progress, when we are expected to teach the same class over and over again? This is not to say there are not creators whose main goal is to induct people into the Left. But surely, after we learn the basics of Marxism from an internet personality who is about to graduate from Berkeley after his parents funded his education into absolute joblessness, there must be some path set out for us? Some place to go? Why is raising class consciousness the goal, in and of itself, without some sort of political apparatus to find ourselves in? More than anything, most debate bros just want to get into media and entertainment — that is their goal. The political theater is simply the easiest way to get there. That, and hating women, which never seems to be the dealbreaker for who y’all follow, by the way.

The intelligent ones do find the political groups. We join the DSA or PSL or some other three letter acronym that loosely stands for “we are mostly socialist but also we really love hoarding power.” Others, smarter even still, join and serve in mutual aid groups, fiercely protecting their communities and serving their neighbors until the Discord group falls apart, because someone dated someone else, or something! I don’t mean to be trite here — these groups and spaces are incredibly important. They also almost always leave people scarred. Part of the reason for that is because the entry points for people that we have now — namely, internet personalities — don’t name the obvious thing: that the groups they align with are deeply flawed. Their content thrives based on getting you to believe their way of thinking is the absolute way, even if they don’t believe it, themselves. Even if they go so far as to say that they are not perfect, their followers make them out to be. “You never miss” should be written on my gravestone, after I’ve been doxxed and killed by someone who thought I missed, at least once.

But I’m not getting to some right-wing talking point about echo chambers or cancel culture. I’m trying to get to the point that the Left is not disunited, or even disjointed given its much more diverse identity and ideology range than the right wing. The right wing is not out organizing or even, at points, out funding us. The right wing is, however, intent on causing damage to nervous systems of internet users all over America, and then harnessing their fear, anger, and confusion and mobilizing that into votes. The Left does the exact same, but it has trouble harnessing that energy. It’s not that the internet game isn’t good strategy on the Left. It’s that they cannot harvest fear the same way the right wing does, because ultimately, the values they espouse do not correlate with the foundation of fear that mobilizes voters. Hope and fear are not direct opposites, but one does directly challenge the other. When you are so unregulated that you cannot make space for both, then one wins and the other loses, which is why the RW mobilizing on that makes sense. The Democrats cannot harvest fear when they say they mobilize on hope, when their constituents are so devoid of regulation that they may truly not feel either, or when their version of “hope” is diffused from its real truth, one that wrestles with fear on the ground, in the grass, getting all dirty. You can’t really do that on the internet.

I worry for the youth. It has always remained true that the revolution will be young. Youth lead, elders mentor, and the rest of us who fall in the middle fall behind as foot soldiers. Youth have always led revolutions all over the world. Young girls are our leaders, young girls of color our imaginative and creative engines. We also have to engage young men, and men of color, who have historically been incredible leaders as well, but also because it’s our responsibility to get to them before the right wing does. I know this is an unpopular opinion, especially among the Internet Feminists, and perhaps most Second Wavers, too. But you can’t have a people’s revolution without half of the people. This, too, is no real revelation that hasn’t been discussed to death on internet forums and in Socialism conferences. But it leads to me to a point that I don’t find discussed more often: I think the online Left is doing a number on young people being able to identify for what they’re actually longing, and replacing the need for connection and community with…watching streamers rant and rave.

I do think people are disconnected from community. And I think the Left — the real Left — can offer a sense of real connection, of that innate thing for which we all search and deeply desire. To be seen and understood, and to feel like your existence on this planet means something, anything. The Leftists of Yore (organized bunches between the 40s-70s) capitalized on this tightly, efficiently. The SDS led youth to massive breakthroughs on theories that shaped the world, both through intellect and praxis. The Black Panthers saw the world with clear eyes, and bright hope for building something different and new. The women’s groups of the sexual revolution dynamically changed how women viewed themselves and each other. Queer and trans activists — some of whom didn’t mean to become activists themselves, but had to in order to save their own lives — changed the game forever. But more than anything, these tightly organized groups offered something that changed people’s lives. More than social acceptance or policy change, they made space for people to connect. To be themselves. To find places they could find love, friendship, community. More than the theories they came up with, crit-self-crit circles, or even praxis, that is what changed anything at all.

And when those groups fell apart, as they do, it was from both external pressures and internal schematics. Young people fall together and fall apart, and you can’t stay on top forever. We keep thinking we want to be just like them, like our political forefathers. We keep wondering what we are doing wrong. We are more connected than ever, but we cannot seem to move people from online to offline, from theory to praxis. We blame each other, we blame the scholars, we blame the internet, but it takes two to tangle here, and neither party is moving one step forward. The Right Wing sees the dysregulation and capitalizes on it. The Left wing refuses to acknowledge it or to address it, but they sure as shit can’t capitalize on it. It doesn’t work for our end of things, unfortunately, for our youth to be so scramble minded that they reach for anything at all. We cannot just place ourselves in front of empty eyes and say “look! We’re the party of hope and joy!” without actually offering connection.

The Left is not regulated. The Left is crying out to be heard. But the Leftist organizers today are not as equipped or as resourced as the Leftist organizers of Yore. Which sounds crazy to say, right? We have undeniably more money flowing into social causes today than we ever did back then. That’s precisely the problem. Yep, this is about the NPIC LOL. The Nonprofit Industrial Complex, my old friend. The high level history is that, in order to cull the social movement work happening, the grants and philanthropy industry really blossomed (mostly specifically in the anti-Domestic Violence movement). The Reagan Era saw the massive destabilizing and rolling back of government programs, introducing more and complex government grants and contracts for nonprofits to take on that work, instead. This brought more and more progressive and social cause organizations into the sphere of grants cycles and funding and philanthropy. As we progressed socially, more organizations became a part of this cycle, and today, the situation is so dire that I saw a radical movement group advertising a grant writing seminar for organizers. If this doesn’t sound dire to you, I don’t know what could be. It’s not that I don’t want myself or my peers to do paid work. I want that very badly, very much, actually. But there is an undeniable vibe shift when you have to spend time on funding the organization’s work with grants instead of, you know, Doing The Work. And while there are radical donors and progressive philanthropies, the general consensus in the fundraising world right now is that philanthropies are shutting their doors and tightening their coffers, and the Federal Government’s rules on government grants is a death knell for smaller progressive organizations. And still, we have more wealth than ever flowing into movement organizations, but they are still sitting at a juncture of barely passing by, leaving fundraisers and grant writers in severe anxiety and further dysregulating activists who just want to do their work and also be able to pay rent.

So, we have more money than ever, but our organizing is still weak and not resulting in mass victories. Why? Some of it is biding our time. Massive changes do not happen overnight. And the burnt out activists, fundraisers, and grant writers are all doing the work. People are not quitting (even when they should, honestly). But we cannot count on the 22-35 year olds who are getting Lupus because they can’t stop themselves from working into the night to save the world. Movements mean people. Like more than just the paid organizers. So, back to my question. Is the internet the main vehicle we have for this? Because if so, we are cooked.

Because, as I said earlier, our Leftist theory/debate bros online are not just charismatic leaders. They are content themselves. They are mere images of who they actually are, and while that is very similar to the old timey cult preachers, I’d argue that because of reach, it’s worse. When people replace community with online identity, politics with whatever Hasan Piker is preaching, and making these folks rich instead of feeding their neighbors, I have to wonder if we are making any real progress at all. On the other hand, where are the Democrats knocking on my door? I live in a particularly class diverse part of the city. Why isn’t anyone trying to organize me? Even in a blue city in a blue state — or perhaps especially here — my vote is taken for granted. One cannot wait to be organized, but neither can one quell the desire to be organized.

So, I left the online Left. I don’t know that I will ever return, because my own dysregulation was feeding into other peoples’, and I do deeply apologize for that. I know now, in the core of my being, able to stand firm and strong that I do believe in radical politics and people and compromise and never, ever discarding people, that I am regulated. Or more regulated than before. And I don’t think we can do politics without at least 50% of us feeling this way. And a lot of that needs systemic changes, but a lot of it is also incumbent on us, the Internet Leftists, the Content Creators, being honest about what this is. If it isn’t a job that pays your bills, then a part of it is for your own validation. And that’s okay. But I don’t think we can act anymore like it’s an educational program that is getting people inducted into the Left. Because there is no 201 course on internet Leftism. There is no real call to action. There is only engagement and content and engagement and content and engagement and content, and nothing else. You are being sold a pipe dream through Hasan Piker’s mic that he will never make true — at least, not through you watching him rave about whatever catches his fancy and pays his bills.

For now, I will sit here politely and wait for the Democrats to organize me. I will do my part in the ways I know that I am doing. I will lead where I want to, and lean back where I must. But in the quest of calming myself, I have to leave behind something I loved. But if the thing you loved tries to kill you to make you feel beloved, is it worth it? Is it good for you? And more importantly: Is Internet TikTok Leftist Discourse going to save us?

Nah.

More sometime soon. Maybe.

Yours,

me