Late Stage Activism

How do we save ourselves from the Western activist class, and save it from itself?

The purple haired poverty tour of Cuba.

Scrappy grassroots activism is dead.

Give peace a chance. No nukes. Save the whales. Free Tibet.

These were the t-shirt slogans of my childhood, an era before attending protests was a national family outing. We were environmentalists of the sort that my dad used to give me the pre-printed address labels and wildlife calendars we received in the mail thanks to his regular donations to World Wildlife Fund and Sierra Club. The latter, America’s oldest environmental non-profit, recently made headlines for “imploding” over internal DEI policies that have gone on to undercut and overrun the foundational mission of the group and splinter its membership.

This is a pattern, both across human history and within the increasingly necrotic activism of our era. The key feature of purity spirals is the competitive moral outbidding of the type that eventually unravels groups and rots movements from within.

Not pure enough, not dedicated enough, not radical enough — collapse.

Last week we learned that the once-esteemed labor activist Cesar Chavez was a rapist and pedophile, a shock to everyone who ever fell for the logical fallacy that the correct politics, ethnicity, or class can immunize any human from their shadow.

This week, we’ve watched footage pouring in of a pro-Communism poverty safari in Cuba led by groups Code Pink and The People’s Forum, now famously joined by a Hasan Piker bespectacled in a pair of designer glasses that would feed a Cuban family for a year. The group, promising to deliver aid and offer solidarity on a state-sanctioned propaganda tour by a communist Cuban government which tightly represses journalism, limits the internet, and targets political dissidents, stayed in a five-star hotel and enjoyed uninterrupted electricity while the surrounding residents experienced the black outs which plague the country’s 10 million citizens.

For nearly two and a half years, we’ve witnessed the global Western activist class embrace the Hamas aesthetic and contort their politics into a Neo-Jihadist movement that refuses to acknowledge that life under jihadist rule includes death sentences for homosexuals, gender apartheid, and religious radicalization that espouses even child martyrdom.

Social media social justice warriors with “ACAB” and “defund the police” in their bios will pretend that Hamas’s well-documented practice of public torture and execution of dissidents and petty thieves in Gaza is “hasbara” or worse, call it warranted wartime justice for traitors against the resistance.

If I hadn’t had these exchanges myself, I would not believe my own words.

In the UK, Palestine Action group led a 2024 direct action in which one of the members wielded a sledgehammer upon the responding police officers, breaking the back of one. By 2025, a consortium of media, academia, and politicians wrung their hands and cried censorship when the group was then proscribed as a terrorist organization in accordance with the law.

People who posted photos of themselves proudly holding homemade signs at a No Kings march have turned around to wave mass-printed “Hands off Iran” posters and images of Ali Khameini, the recently-eliminated supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran for nearly four decades, whose Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps led the slaughter of more than 30,000 Iranian anti-regime protestors in January 2026.

How are we to rectify that anyone attending a No Kings rally can then take to the streets the following week to support despotic Islamist and communist regimes around the world that use brutal force against their own citizens and have suppressed free speech for decades to keep themselves in power?

The hypocrisies are too prolific to comprehensively list. Orwell’s concept of doublethink has never been confirmed on more prominent display. Objective reality has been erased by manipulated truths. Everyone who calls it out is a thought criminal.

Today we are witnessing modern, globalized activism play out on our phones every day in a never-ending series of absurd and indulgent contradictions. Extreme ideology, politicization of everything, assuming a monopoly on morality while forcing a constant and unnecessary radicalization of discourse, and a semantic warfare incessantly writing and rewriting a weaponized script.

It is somehow both inane and dangerous, and it’s driving the world mad in real time.

Our greatest problems can’t be solved if we don’t name them, so let’s name it.

This is late stage activism.

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Something dark has been spreading within political activism. Slowly, and then all at once.

In the America 20th century, activism was a tool of just and sustained movements seeking to work within our system to create meaningful change on workers rights, civil rights, equal rights, and environmental protection. It was a civic lever of the people, not looking to upend but to improve our world and ultimately work with leaders to pass legislation.

Even when groups like Greenpeace emerged to lead disruptive, unorthodox direct action tactics, chaining themselves to ships and trees in the name of saving the Earth, it wasn’t with malice — it was with an intelligible and admirable mission. Wherever you sat, you could sympathize with anyone throwing a fist in the air in solidarity.

For decades, more radical and Marxism-charged movements existed along the periphery of Western activism, when activism itself was on the periphery of our lives. But in the 21st century, political activism has become a core identity feature for many, a shift that has been supercharged by digital-led mobilization and exploding in an era of profound political polarization. The pattern is a pincer, with prominent radical voices advancing the entryism of fringe political theory into mainstream discourse while painting moderates as filthy centrists choosing neutrality and injustice. “Everything is political” is the proposition that we must now pin every decision onto an omnipresent political spectrum. That this is gradually bending the terminal ends onto themselves into a horseshoe is visible to everyone still residing outside the expanding fringe.

Shout we blame Donald Trump? COVID? BLM? Gaza? On social media profiles, the path of cause hopping in recent years is visible, and with each new movement there’s been an observable pattern of radicalization. Pink pussy hats became pride flags became N-95 masks became black squares became calls to globalize the intifada.

A driver we cannot ignore is the surge of foreign money financing the American non-profit sector and influencing politics. One name currently mentioned in many of these conversations is billionaire Neville Roy Singham, a former tech industry executive who lives in Shanghai and has ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Singham finances a network of non-profits including The People’s Forum and is now under federal investigation for working to co-opt and coordinate domestic activism to push anti-American and pro-CCP talking points following the October 7, 2023 attack. Under Singham and others, Western activism has been industrialized and radicalized to upend American politics and serve shadowy foreign interests.

If it all feels incessant, that’s by design. Much of this is ripped directly from the Marxist Leon Trotsky’s strategy of permanent revolution, in which the revolutionary class maintains a ceaseless series of sustained militant political demands and tactics until the socialist transformation of society is achieved. By it’s nature, permanent revolution is punishing by design, rejects compromise, and aims to bring society to its knees through perpetual revolt.

And it is truly revolting to everyone who sees it, particularly those who are painfully acquainted with the outcomes of revolutions.

Iranians, Venezuelans, Cubans, Nigerians, Israelis, and others both in those countries and in their diasporas who are speaking out on the heavy toll of Islamism and communism on their lives have found themselves in the crosshairs of activists who delegitimize those voices while claiming to champion “lived experience.” The priority isn’t humans, it’s ideology. When activists talk over those whose experience doesn’t match their Western leftist political narrative and myopic worldview, they aren’t speaking truth to power. They’re screaming lies at victims.

Among those victims, we see a coherent coalition forming against an activism with a trajectory that can best be described as terminal. With the fall of Maduro in Venezuela and Khameini in Iran, the synchronicity of converging world events seems to be begging the globe to heed the ghosts of victims of revolutions past and their living inheritors, before we reincarnate their mistakes in today’s West. We are up against an audible ticking clock, in a race to free those whose voices have been suppressed for too long and are best equipped to cry out against the ideological seduction promoting a destructive radicalization operating on a zero sum strategy.

This is precisely why some work so hard to silence and delegitimize this growing coalition.

Late stage activism must on principle be uncompromising, reject dialogue, and dismiss valid critique. Once you believe you have a monopoly on morality, it’s easy to then believe you have a mandate to mobilize and seize the means of political production. As zealous activists seem convinced of their own infallibility, they only prove Friedrich Nietzsche’s assertion —"Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty."

So now what? We cannot assume that any of this will collapse under the weight of its own rancid tribalism and incoherence, or that the global engine of late stage activism will run out of fuel. There is a determination we cannot underestimate, and so much history unheeded. The worldwide playbook of today’s activism has been ripped from that of the red-green alliance, which called for a communist revolution and instead got nearly half a century of Islamic revolution.

For everyone nostalgic for the productive, righteous, worthy activism of old, perhaps there’s still some hope that we can not only save ourselves from this era of activism, but save activism from itself. But how do we tell the galvanized Western college youth on the frontlines of Singham-backed demonstrations of the consequences of movements that their esteemed faculty won’t teach them about?

We keep running the race, to free the voices of trapped compatriots and be the coalition on the outside they so badly need.