How to Deal with Trolling

Trolling, and cancellation campaigning, is a horrible practice, and the sooner we non-trolls can all figure that out, and get on the same page as far as how to deal with it, the better.

I am one of the most censored and canceled artists that I know of. For offending Zionists and others, I have had my YouTube channel "permanently deleted" for a month, I've had all my music pulled from YouTube Music for several months, and I've been banned from Facebook for months on end and had major features of the platform disabled for years. In an average month, I block and delete thousands of horrible comments from trolls, mostly on Facebook. Organizations and people associated with them from UK Lawyers for Israel to the Antideutsche to Rose City Antifa have long considered me persona non grata, and from both the right and the alleged left, people try to ruin my life and get all my gigs canceled, mostly using various trolling techniques on social media platforms.

As a result of these sorts of experiences over the past 24 years or so, especially the past 6, I've become a bit of an expert on trolling, and cancellation campaigning.

I've written a lot of essays in response to the trolls and their ideological leaders from both Zionist organizations and alleged antifascist ones, setting the record straight and exposing their deceptive, manipulative methods, and their lies. Doing these sorts of clarifications of reality have been important and helpful, although they only go a little way in dealing with the bigger problems that the trolling phenomenon brings us.

All the focus on clarifying reality and exposing troll lies in my particular case has meant that I haven't taken a whole lot of time to talk about the phenomenon generally, in ways that might be helpful for other people who are being tragically impacted by it. That's my aim today.

I've recently been inspired to write about the trolling phenomenon more broadly after witnessing a trolling effort cause an independent political campaign to be seriously impacted. Seeing this happening in real time reminded me of something I already know too well: that most people who have not been targeted by a trolling campaign are usually not really aware of what is happening to those of us who are targeted, they don't know how to react to trolling when it happens to them, or even how to identify it when it is happening.

I asked Grok what are the major forms of trolling when it comes to public figures and political campaigns, and what are the best ways to respond to it to minimize its impact. Grok's summary of the major forms of trolling was very good, and seems to have largely been taken from a Rand Corporation study I read years ago, but it's still all accurate, from my very extensive personal experience.

• Provocative / flame trolling: Direct insults, inflammatory statements, or emotionally charged attacks meant to start arguments or elicit hostility. Classic “baiting.”
• Concern trolling: Feigning sympathy or shared goals while undermining the target. Examples include “I’m on your side, but I’m worried this candidate is unelectable / too extreme / using the wrong tactics” or tone-policing framed as helpful advice. It positions the troll as an ally while shifting the burden or sowing doubt.
• Sea-lioning (sealioning): Relentless, polite-seeming demands for evidence, clarifications, or detailed justifications that exhaust the target and make them appear unreasonable or defensive when they disengage. Originating in a comic about intrusive demands for proof.
• Brigading: Coordinated mass action by a group (often from another community, Discord, or subreddit) to flood comments, mass downvote/upvote, spam a narrative, or harass a target. This includes vote brigading, comment flooding, and harassment campaigns.
• Humorous / memetic / shitposting trolling: Use of irony, absurdity, memes, or exaggerated mockery that may be playful or weaponized to derail or ridicule. Can range from light-hearted to pointed ideological attacks.
• Partisan / ideological / astroturfing / firehose trolling: Coordinated or sponsored efforts (including state-linked or partisan networks using sockpuppets and bots) to push narratives, amplify division, suppress opposing views, or attack specific figures/campaigns. Related to “firehose of falsehood” high-volume, low-consistency messaging. This overlaps with disinformation campaigns.
• Griefing / sustained harassment-oriented trolling: More personal or persistent attacks aimed at distress, sometimes escalating toward doxxing or threats (though pure doxxing is often categorized separately as severe harassment). In gaming or community contexts, this includes sabotage; online, it can mean relentless personal targeting.

I can vouch for all of these different techniques as being common, and I can say with absolute certainty that all of them work brilliantly, and cause tremendous amounts of distress and damage to people, campaigns, and social movements.

As with most things, understanding what's happening goes a long way to being able to deal with it better. Why is it so effective and what can be done to make it less effective?

I would say there are three profoundly important and ever-present problems that continually sabotage so many people, organizations, and movements, and they can be put into three categories: the nature of the internet, the nature of social media platforms as they are now structured, and our captured culture.

The Nature of the Internet

Even without social media and its algorithms, the interconnectedness of the world that the internet brings has its pros and cons. One of the profound disadvantages is the ability of one nefarious actor, one FBI agent, one jilted ex with a desire for revenge, or anyone else with access to the internet to ruin the lives of multiple people with very little effort.

The kind of effort that would have been required to do what can now be done by setting a Google Alert is fairly mind-boggling. For those unfamiliar with Google Alerts, if you set one for any semi-public figure, every time they are mentioned on a public website or in a public social media post, you will be notified within 24 hours or less.

So if you're trying, say, to get a musician's gigs canceled, your Google Alerts will tell you when they put out a listing for a show that's coming up, at which point you know where and when it's happening and you can contact the venue and tell them the guy is a fill-in-the-blank and their gig should therefore be canceled.

Algorithmic Social Media

The work of the trolls, whether they're employed by the FBI, the local police, or freelance, already made easy by the internet, is amplified by social media in altogether new ways. Whereas a comment on a blog post might have some kind of impact, it's absolutely minimal in comparison with a comment on a Facebook post or a post on most other social media platforms.

People who are of a certain age may not have really noticed that their news feed is no longer a history of your friends most recent posts, in the order they were posted, as it once was. It's now all about algorithms. So when you're trying to promote an event and someone comments about how someone involved with the event is a fill-in-the-blank, and then those allegations inspire more comments from other people who agree or disagree with them, the engagement represented by this activity will cause the post to be seen by far more people. That is, conflict is one of those things that is always promoted by the algorithms.  Reasonable discourse never is.

Our Captured Culture

Somewhere along the line society generally and what we may loosely call the left end of it in particular lost the plot in many ways. We collectively forgot that Cointelpro ever happened, forgot about all the basic methods employed by the FBI to systematically undermine, sabotage, and neutralize the American left since the formation of this secret police bureau.

In our state of collective amnesia, it seems we devised a whole philosophy of life that was made to be used to the advantage of those who want to destroy us. From somewhere in the bowels of academia came the notion that anytime anyone claims to be a victim, they should be believed. The notion that there are various sorts of nefarious actors ready and willing to take full advantage of this kind of orientation never seems to occur to most of our compromised culture.

Instead, we're terrified of being accused of siding with oppression and oppressors if we dare question the narrative of someone claiming to be a victim. We automatically assume there must be validity in someone's claims, and that their claims should be taken with the utmost seriousness. We're prepared to change or cancel events in order to make those claiming to be victims "feel safe." We have been trained to believe that it is an imposition for us to seek to find out the actual details of the allegations.

All of this makes it incredibly easy for a mentally ill person or a nefarious actor to throw a bomb into any proceedings, simply by chiming in on a social media post and claiming they are victims of someone involved with an event or a campaign, and that they won't feel safe attending the event unless that person is not involved, or unless that person apologizes for something, or goes through some kind of hypothetical accountability process.

How Do We Change this Equation?

There are all kinds of people with all kinds of issues they need to work on, no doubt. But there are also lots of different ways folks who have an issue with someone else can use to address a situation. If people choose to make public, slanderous statements about someone on a social media post, this is an indication they are up to no good. This is not a way to resolve a problem or seek accountability, it is an effort to sabotage a person, an event, campaign, etc.

We need to collectively understand that there is nothing legitimate or acceptable about public comments slandering other people. That's trolling, and trolling is bad, not helpful, nothing redeeming about it. The automatic response to such comments should be to delete them and block the troll making the posts.

It doesn't matter if the troll in question is an obvious fake anonymous troll account with hardly any followers or a real person with a name. The act of trolling is what is a bad faith behavior, regardless of who is doing it for what supposed reasons. The thing any organizer of an event or promoter of a campaign who controls a social media platform that is being trolled with such comments needs to do is block and delete, aggressively.

In many cases the blocking and deleting is something you'll only need to do with a handful of accounts, especially if the trolling is coming from a real person, rather than a paid troll farm, in which case you, like me, may be facing the task of deleting and blocking thousands of comments and accounts each month.

If someone has serious concerns about you or one of your associates involved with an event, campaign, etc., they can write you privately and tell you in great detail about what the situation is. But if they just say something happened and now they feel unsafe, especially if they do that in a public comment, they are not acting in good faith, they are just throwing bombs. This needs to be understood, or we'll remain crippled by our belief that bad-faith actors need to be given our scarce time and attention.

If we have a real concern about the truth behind allegations made about a public figure, but we don't have the time or don't want to spend the time trying to find out what happened or if there's any veracity to the allegations, if we even understand what they are supposed to be in the first place, consulting a chatbot can be very illuminating. At least in my case, you can ask a chatbot what are the allegations against David Rovics, and is there any truth to them, and the chatbot will explain what I'm allegedly guilty of, and why each of the charges is ridiculous.

In so many other cases, the chatbot will explain that a handful of social media accounts have been raising issues about someone for the past couple months, ever since they became especially prominent because of their success in some organizing effort.

One of the biggest problems with all of the trolling, if we take it seriously and engage with it as if it should be taken seriously, is it will sap us of all our time and energy, which is often by design. We must, of necessity and perhaps also on principle, assume people are innocent until they are proven to be guilty. We can't be vetting everybody to the extent that they must demonstrate that people trying to take them down by making negative comments about them in public social media forums are not telling the truth, and until then we can't publicly associate with the person in question. This is exactly the orientation, along with social media algorithms and trolling itself, that has brought us to this point where the left in the US is more ineffective and fractured than ever before.

If we engage with the trolls, there is simply no time to do anything else. If we believe the trolls, then we will end up destroying the potential of every one of those targeted by them.

I have literally seen most of the best organizers in the US get systematically canceled by trolling, and by those who take the trolls seriously and thus facilitate and participate in their actions. Many of the best artists have suffered this fate as well.

It requires a lot of certainty and discipline to respond to trolling effectively. An average of 20% of comments across social media are estimated to be trolling. With political figures this percentage tends to double.

The time spent by people arguing with or trying to placate trolls is absolutely staggering, from my extensive personal observation. The only thing more staggering than the time spent with these activities is the emotional toll it takes on those involved with it.

When people take the trolling seriously and engage with it, they help maintain the cloud of suspicion that surrounds all of the canceled organizers and artists and others.

Whether people engage with the trolls or try to pacify them, they will find pacification is impossible, and the more they engage, the worse everything gets for them and for anyone associated with the organizing effort they're involved with, which is under attack.

Regardless of how well they ignore the trolls, the trolling may continue, especially if a paid troll farm is involved, and it may become a constant headache. Whether it's a real person or a troll farm, they may persist in trying to sabotage events and campaigns for years into the future, and there's not necessarily any way to avoid this. But their impact will at least be minimized if you follow certain steps.

Don't believe them or pay attention to what they say. Assume it's not true, and if there are any truths about whoever it is that you need to find out about, you'll find out about them in the real world, without the aid of trolls making public comments that are obviously intended to undermine and foment division. Delete their comments and block their accounts, so you don't need to keep deleting their comments (at least until they create another sock puppet account to troll you with). Depending on the platform, change your settings so that only friends or followers can comment on posts, that can help a little.

While there are plenty of exceptions, the overwhelming majority of the time, by my personal observation, online trolling does not translate into real world harassment. Most of the time this is because the paid troll farm is located in another country, or the one person who hates your guts has very few friends who want to join them in confronting you at a public event. It's easy enough to pretend to be seventeen different people and swarm you on Instagram with sock puppet accounts, and relish the state of fear and distress this puts you in. It's another thing to show up at an event and troll someone in the real world.

Of course trolling people in the real off-line world is a tradition much older than the internet, and one that the FBI, police Red Squads, and sectarian wackos have engaged in for over a century.  (This is well-documented, and I have a lot of experience with this as well.)  But the vast majority of it is online, and we can dramatically minimize its impact simply by ignoring it, rather than fueling the fires the trolls are seeking to set.

For all of those reading this who are thinking, but if I don't take the allegations seriously, then I'll be accused of being an enabler of a fill-in-the-blank, and I'll be targeted for cancellation like that person, this can be true.  More often, you'll be targeted if you engage, but sometimes you'll be targeted for not engaging.  If you want to avoid that fate while still being politically active, you're dreaming of Camelot.  Stop trying to protect yourself from what is happening to so many of us all the time by distancing yourself from us out of some impossible desire for self-protection, this is not the way forward, and it also won't work with any degree of reliability.  

The way forward is for all of us, together, to ignore the trolls on the platforms where they're trying to get attention and sabotage people and events, whether they're coming after you, me, or somebody else.  The way forward is solidarity, the presumption of innocence, and kneejerk inclusivity.

For the Love of Minab

Reflections on having so many new friends in Iran.

I first heard from some of the Iranian students who publish Zaytoon magazine during a period of a few days when I was receiving thousands of beautiful messages in one form or another from people from all over Iran.  At the risk of self-indulgence I'll share a bit more about the experience of having so much correspondence with so many Iranians over the course of the past two weeks or so -- especially because there's a much bigger story to be told from this smaller one.

I'm a musician, singing in English, putting up videos of me singing songs on Instagram and other platforms.  It's not too hard to figure out that I'm not only singing in English, but I'm from the United States.

My fellow Americans might be surprised to learn that despite being from the country that has been bombing Iran and killing thousands of Iranians over the past seven months, the country which has been trying in so many different ways to overthrow the Iranian government since 1979, when people in Iran heard me singing a song about the aerial massacre of the children of Minab, they all responded with such deep appreciation.

I put up a lot of videos of me singing songs I write, and songs I write with what I call my AI band, Ai Tsuno.  Especially the songs opposing the war on Iran and the war on Palestine are more likely to get into the algorithms, for whatever reasons.  A giveaway that algorithms are involved, it seems, is usually when a song is performing well on Instagram, it will also be performing well on Facebook.

My rendition of "Minab," however, went almost nowhere on Facebook, but to date it has gotten over 300,000 views on Instagram.  The many thousands of comments make clear in various ways that the overwhelming majority of the viewers have been Iranian.  This song didn't spread because of algorithms.  It spread organically, because of Iranians sharing and forwarding the song, mostly to each other.

Once again at the risk of excessive self-indulgence I want to share some of the things people said, which in so many ways flies in the face of many popular themes with regards to Iranians in certain influential circles in the US and elsewhere in the west.

Thank you very much for being the voice of our innocent killed baby girls.🙏 Thank God still humanity is alive.

That brought tears to my eyes, deeply touched and felt so grateful that someone too far away could feel our pain and loss.

Great work, sir!  As an Iranian and as a human being, thank you so much.

There is still hope left in the world when souls like yours exist.  Thank you, good sir.

God bless you free man. 🙏

Thank you for this beautiful song and for the touching lyrics, which beautifully convey the pain of losing these children and the deep sorrow their families and the whole city have experienced after Minab School was bombed. 🤍

As an Iranian, I appreciate you.

Thank you, this means a lot, this means humanity still exists regardless of nationality, race, or colour of skin.

Again, there were thousands of comments just like these, from accounts that appeared to be authentically Iranians, mostly living in Iran.

There is a widespread notion in certain circles in the west that oppressed peoples should be encouraged to speak out against their own oppression, rather than having other people do that on their behalf.  The idea is that the oppressed then feel like they have more agency, and the non-oppressed people deigning to speak for the oppressed people can feel more humble by shutting up.

If that last paragraph made any sense to you, you're probably an American progressive.  For most of the rest of the world, it all seems bizarre, from what I've noticed as a touring performer who travels internationally a lot.  The basic idea of solidarity, and of empathy as well, is broadly popular throughout the world, except among certain confused circles in the US.  Most people in most of the world deeply appreciate solidarity and empathy, as the comments on the song illustrate.

I've been in touch with various fellow musicians from Iran as well as journalists, tour guides, students, professors, and festival organizers, among so many others.

It was particularly eye-opening to hear from the festival organizers, because through them I discovered the website of the festival they're organizing.

In places like the US and the UK sometimes protest organizers will call their protest a "festival of resistance," to try to make it seem more interesting and attract more participants.  This is a fine thing to do, but the Khesht-e Sevom Festival's intentions are to be a festival of resistance far beyond anything I've ever experienced.  A bit like the World Social Forum, but more militant.

The festival's aim is to be "inspiring resistance movements worldwide through culture and art."  Submissions of every conceivable form of traditional and very modern media may focus on one of many themes, including the Persian Gulf, the Minab School, Assassination and Steadfastness, and Martyrs and Defenders of the Homeland, to name a few.

I'm fairly confident that there is no festival remotely like this one anywhere in North America, anyway.  When I leave North America and go anywhere in Latin America, however, everybody knows as readily as they know the sun rises in the east that art, music and culture is the beating heart of the resistance.  For most people involved with social movements in most of the world, this is a statement of the obvious, as I discover again and again.

In the US, however, and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries particularly impacted by trends in the US, like Canada, the UK, and Australia, this statement of the obvious is not obvious at all.  In the US in particular, any elements of society connected with resistance movements, from those opposed to imperialism and genocide to those fighting for the rights of workers or tenants, has been successfully alienated from culture -- their own or anybody else's.

In the US, for the past fifteen years especially, you will find almost no art, theater, music, or other basic expressions of culture at the vast majority of protests, particularly with regards to whatever is happening on the stage with the sound system.  Whereas protests, social movements, and resistance movements in the past in the US have had more in common with movements around the world that understand culture to be central to maintaining and building anything involving humans, in modern times in the US this understanding appears to have been almost completely lost.

Millions around the world have become big fans of the brilliantly anti-imperialist Lego animation videos being produced by artists in Iran.  Whether or not those people around the world know it, these videos are only the tip of the iceberg, in terms of resistance culture coming out of Iran.  

Many of those who appreciate the Lego videos may or may not also be aware that these kinds of powerful, artistic forms of communication can be both encouraged and suppressed.  What a festival/cultural institution like Khesht-e Sevom is very intentionally doing is encouraging the further development and flourishing of resistance culture.

If we survey the history of the past century in the world we can find many other examples of resistance movements, as well as governments with the same kind of orientation, that very consciously use their resources to serve the cause of building a culture of resistance.  Examples include the Cuban government's support for the Nueva Trova/Nueva Cancion movement that gave rise to artists like Silvio Rodriguez becoming tremendously popular from the 1960's to the present, or the great work of the PLO Film Unit in the 1970's, or the Political Song festival that used to be a major event in East Germany, or the work Pete Seeger and friends were doing with the People's Songs project in the 1940's in the US.

On the other hand, culture can be systematically suppressed through all kinds of different means.

The main purpose of the US secret police force, the FBI, since it was formed over a century ago, has been to suppress popular social movements in the US.  The popular movements they focused on eliminating were always profoundly artistic, from the labor movement of the very early twentieth century to the communist movement of the 1930's to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements of the 1960's, the Global Justice movement of the 1990's, and beyond.

The efforts on the part of the powers-that-be to suppress social movements in the US have, for decades on end, included a backdrop of constant vilification and mockery of any connection between resistance and culture.  The corporate media in the US came up with the term "protest singer" in the 1960's in order to degrade the powerful efforts of the antiwar movement to use music to win the hearts and minds of the American people to oppose the war on Vietnam.  They focused on the most hedonistic aspects of any social movement, doing their best to make it all seem ridiculous.

Later, the successes of the secret police to infiltrate academia resulted in an atmosphere where anyone in the US oriented towards the liberation of humanity needs to stay in their lane, write only about personal experiences, and leave it entirely to the oppressed to communicate about their oppression, lest some of us engage in politically incorrect behavior like "cultural appropriation."

With the rise of (anti-) "social media" platforms in the past two decades, and their powerful algorithmic tools that allow for an even more systematic and much more insidious form of suppression of resistance culture and promotion of vapid escapism, we have arrived at the present day, where the waning social movements that still exist in the US have become completely divorced from culture.

Now, in the present day, where social movements around the world involve a seamless merging of political organizing and cultural expression, as they always have, in the US, by contrast, there is virtually nothing of the sort happening.

Instead of being events that educate, lift up, and inspire people to action, protests in the US do the opposite -- people leave them before they're over, feeling dejected and despondent, after being shouted at by "activists" who have no idea how to communicate effectively, who seem to have no capacity to understand what they're doing wrong, over and over again, causing movements to shrink and die before they have a chance to grow.

I dream of the day when international solidarity, and festivals of resistance like Khesht-e Sevom, succeed in becoming as popular as the organizers of that one intend them to be.  I dream of the day when resistance culture is not only popular in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but in "the western world" as well.

In the meantime, it's great to be in touch with so many Iranians who understand where I'm coming from, especially at a time when far too few of my fellow Americans do.

Canceled to Death

Among the many terrible potential impacts of cancelation on a person, one of them is death.

I'm leaving soon to head towards Arcata, California, for David Cobb's memorial.  That's just one of the reasons I'm thinking about him lately even more than I was immediately after he died, on September 7th.

Everything I wrote that day in my remembrance of David that I sent out to my email list the next day was true, except for the part about how he died.  Very soon after that post went out, I found out the truth -- or found out that when I had heard David had died of a broken heart, that didn't mean he had had a heart attack.  That was my inaccurate interpretation of the phrase.

David died by suicide.

Apologies to anyone that would rather not focus on the way he died.  I don't by any means want to take away from all he did in life, or all he meant in life to so many of us, by doing so.

But I think it's important, particularly because, as I've learned from David's friends and comrades since his death, David was contending in his life not only with the rise of fascism in the USA and horror at watching everything going to hell in that sense, but with being a canceled person.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm saying two plus two equals four here.  I'm certain there are many factors that drive such actions in most cases.

But when I learned about these circumstances I knew I had to say more, because of the complex nature of the phenomenon of cancelation, of being a canceled person, and because of my very intimate familiarity with the whole thing.

I speak, unfortunately, as a fellow canceled person, which is, no doubt, something that gives me particular insight into what was happening with David in the months prior to his death.

When people tell me how David couldn't attempt to do any kind of public-facing organizing in Humboldt County anymore without having to try to work through the clouds of suspicion about every aspect of who he was, effectively rendering him inert, at least locally in certain circles, I understand what they're talking about, because I know other people in the same situation, and I am one of them.

One of the most maddening aspects of being a canceled person is constantly having to contend with the reality that most people don't know what that means, or if they do, they don't believe it's real.  The wild thing about being canceled is you can be canceled without anyone else noticing, unless they happen to be trying to promote a public event or other project that involves you.  Most other people can pretty much go on for years without ever being confronted by this reality.

People who are regular readers of my essays or listeners to my songs or podcasts are already very familiar with the phenomenon of cancelation, cancelation campaigning, and the extreme forms of identity politics that feed into it.  They have heard the episode of the Fucking Canceled podcast which featured me -- a podcast, by the way, which I highly recommend as a resource for understanding various aspects of the kind of mentality that gives rise to the cancelation mindset.  (Also check out Bebe Montoya on Instagram for lots more wisdom on the subject.)

David Cobb was in a position that has become all too familiar to me and to so many other wonderful people in this world -- but particularly in this country, with a particular emphasis in parts of the west coast.  As with so many others among the best organizers I've known, David was facing all kinds of forms of vilification coming from people on what we would consider the political left, broadly speaking.

I don't know the details, and haven't sought them out, because they're always the same.

David was one of the most eloquent and educated supporters of women, people of color, and the queer community you'll ever meet, as well as being a warrior for the working class generally.  But we can be certain the cloud of suspicion that surrounded him in certain circles was related to some aspect of gender, sexuality or race, because it always is.  These are the divides that are weaponized most often, along with accusations of Jew-hatred, for others like me.

What happens so often are things like a group somewhere discovers you as a potential good speaker or performer and wants to organize an event with you, but then when they start promoting the idea publicly, they discover the cloud of suspicion that surrounds you, since certain people -- or in my case, often paid trolls -- will see your name come up, and they'll chime in to raise that cloud, making some reference to something you supposedly said or did that was bad, which means you're someone who should not be affiliated with in any way.  Then the invitation will be rescinded, or the gig canceled.

I was going to be on a podcast with a prominent podcaster in Portland recently, but then the host discovered the cloud, and rescinded the invitation.  I was going to play at a protest in a Portland suburb in a few weeks, but then the invitation was mysteriously rescinded.  I've lost count of how many times this has happened in recent years -- and it's something that pretty much never used to happen.  Now it's commonplace, for me, and for so many others.  I can name many names, dates, and places, but I won't bother getting that deep in the weeds here now.

What happens more often than invitations getting rescinded or events canceled, is invitations not being made in the first place.  I'm sure David would have been familiar with all of these sorts of things, because he was a canceled person, and this is what it's like to be canceled.

The canceled people in my life have responded in many different ways to their circumstances.

In the case of the hosts of Fucking Canceled or people like Bebe Montoya, they made it one of their main missions in life to expose this destructive mentality for what it is, and to promote notions like solidarity, inclusivity, and understanding instead.

Others have responded by leaving the country, or moving from particularly cancelation-prone environments like Portland, Oregon to other cities or towns less compromised by what the hosts of Fucking Canceled call the Nexus.

Others have left the professions that they were in when they experienced their cancellations, whether they had been college professors, touring musicians, or organizers.  Generally, this move meant bowing out of the fray, as far as the left goes, and doing more solitary sorts of things with their lives.  It always meant experiencing real trauma, alienation, and depression to one degree or another.

Do a little research online and you'll easily find dozens of examples of other documented cases of people who had been victims of cancelation campaigns, which ended in the suicides of the canceled.

Cancelation campaigning is not a new phenomenon.  The phenomenon of being exiled or purged or rejected from a group or social circle has long been known to be one of the most traumatic experiences a member of a group or a society can have.  There's been a lot written about this over the centuries.

What is new is social media, and the hegemonic control of our communications by a handful of predatory mega-corporations that systematically reinforce the worst of these sorts of behaviors, and systematically profit off of them.  They like the conflict -- it's good for business in all kinds of ways.

The FBI, of course, loves the conflict, it should be noted.  It has been the main purpose of the FBI, since the bureau's inception, according to their own propaganda, to neutralize the left in the US.  The social media algorithms seem to have succeeded in doing their job for them.  Add to that whatever they're actually doing outside of social media, and you've got a real hot mess.

When I look at David Cobb's effort in recent years to become a host of a YouTube program/podcast, it makes me wonder if part of his motivation for doing an online project like that was a response to being so hampered in his organizing efforts locally in the real world.  And when I see how most of the episodes got fewer than a thousand views each, I wonder if he felt deflated by that.  I know I would have.

So many of the canceled American organizers I know, like most people from the US, have never spent much time outside of the country.  I don't know how much international travel David did.  But especially for people who don't travel much internationally, the phenomenon of being canceled can be that much more intense, because it can feel like you're just completely canceled everywhere, when really, unlike within the Nexus, most people in most of the world don't believe what they read on social media -- if they even have an account on one of those American platforms at all.

I find leaving the US and going pretty much anywhere else can be so liberating, because I can feel viscerally how the cloud of suspicion that surrounds me has been somehow lifted by crossing that border or that ocean, and going to places where this kind of paranoid, self-absorbed, identitarian mindset is much less prevalent.

I wonder if David ever was able to have that experience in recent years -- to find out that maybe all he needed to do was leave the country, rather than leaving the planet.  Or maybe he did know that, but such a move was too much for him to contemplate.  It's too late now to ask him.  But I hope it's not too late for some other canceled person who might be reading this, who may be feeling so hopeless that they are thinking about following David's example.

We all need to follow David's example when it comes to his belief in solidarity, inclusivity, and mutual understanding.  We need to create a society -- and a social movement -- that completely embraces these concepts, and rejects cancelation campaigning, trolling, and exclusion that masquerades as safety or accountability or whatever other nonsense it's pretending to be.

Let's create that movement for David, and hope that no other brilliant organizers among us feel the need to end their lives so prematurely.