The resource list gave us the vision for a liberatory economy; worker control, collective ownership, economies built on solidarity. But visions need infrastructure, and unions have long been one of the most contested, most powerful pieces of that infrastructure. So this month, we’re going deeper into a single question: what happens when we stop treating unions as narrowly economic institutions and start recognizing them as racial and gender justice organizations?

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Capitalism didn't just commodify our labor it commodified our relationships, everything has become transactional. It taught us that survival is a solo sport (hello culture of hyper individualism), that hoarding is safety, that the neighbor is a competitor rather than a community member. This has not, of course, always been the case. Before extraction became our social default, collectivity and community were the status quo. Communities fed each other, built together, held land and resources in common without viewing it as charity but as it's inherent structure.

This month, we're tracing that structure back. August's theme is Labor, Economic Justice & Collective Ownership and we look at one big question: what does liberation look like when workers, not owners, hold control?

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Tired meant I was needed.

Tired meant the calendar was full, the work was moving, people were calling, opportunities were coming, and presumably I was doing something right.

I have always been someone who can carry a ridiculous amount. I am ambitious. I care deeply about the things I build. I am very good at what I do, and I work hard at being good at it. I am also, as it turns out, extraordinarily capable of turning all of those beautiful things about myself into weapons against myself.

On purpose? No!

But….

Somewhere along the way, I, like everyone else, learned that there is something morally admirable about how much we can endure.

How much can you accomplish?

How little sleep can you survive on?

How many responsibilities can you hold without dropping anything?

How quickly can you answer the email?

How many people can depend on you?

How long can you keep going before your body finally forces you to stop?

And then we call the person who can withstand the most disciplined.

Driven. A beast. A machine.

The problem, for me at least, is that I don’t want to be a machine and I don’t want to live in a world that requires anyone to be one.

I would actually like to be a person.

A person who does excellent work, yes, absolutely.

A person with ambition. A person who builds things and contributes things and occasionally works very hard because something matters deeply to me.

But still a person.

When rest becomes another productivity strategy

Years ago, I realized that I had fallen deep into the spiraling vortex that is hustle culture; rooted in the union of rugged individuality and capitalistic exploitation that we are sold as the recipe for success and happiness.

Spoiler alert, IT’S A LIE!

Once I looked up and realized that I wasn’t actually practicing liberation in my relationship to productivity, I decided I had to start doing something differently.

I had to create an actual structure I could follow to save me from myself until I had fully embodied a more liberatory relationship with productivity.

I started with something called a seventh-week sabbatical, a concept credited to Sean McCabe.

I took the idea and swagged it out “According to Weeze.”

The premise was simple: work for six weeks, then deliberately create a week with significantly less work.

No meetings if I could help it. No clients. No expectation that my team stay plugged in. Fewer demands on my attention.

Sometimes I rested. Sometimes I cleaned my house. Sometimes I thought. Sometimes I walked my dog in the middle of the afternoon because it was beautiful outside and I would rather be there than staring at my laptop.

The point was never supposed to be to optimize myself so that I could become even more productive during the next six weeks.

Although, if I’m being honest, I have absolutely fallen into that trap too.

Rest so you can work harder.

Take a vacation so you can come back refreshed and produce more.

Meditate so you can manage your stress and maintain your output.

I had gotten incredibly good at turning even my attempts to escape productivity culture into productivity strategies.

At some point, I had to start asking myself a different question:

What if the rest is not there to make the work better? What if the rest is part of life?

That sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Apparently, at least for moi, it was not.

Despite years of teaching this, practicing this and intentionally building structures around myself to prevent burnout, I have (and will) still backslid.

There have been seasons when demand increased and I convinced myself that this particular moment was an exception.

Just for now.

Just until this launch.

Just until this project is finished.

Just until things calm down.

You probably know how that story goes. Things do not calm down.

You become the person who is good at carrying more, so more things arrive for you to carry.

At one point, I was so busy that people around me were asking whether I had even eaten that day. Whether I had had water.

I also have ADHD and remembering to eat is already a whole thing. If you know, you know.

Friends were bringing me food because I had become so preoccupied with work that the most basic needs of having a human body were somehow becoming optional.

There is nothing aspirational about that story. I am not telling you that so you think I am hardworking. I am telling you because I knew better.

And I did it anyway.

That matters to me, because if knowing better were enough, most of us would have rested by now.

We have read the books. Bought the planners. Learned about boundaries (I literally teach them, hello “Protect Your Peace”). Taken the PTO. Put the phone on Do Not Disturb. Drunk the water. Taken the magnesium (glycinate of course).

And somehow an extraordinary number of people remain profoundly tired.

Which makes me wonder whether we are asking the wrong question.

Maybe exhaustion is information

Maybe burnout isn’t always a sign that we haven’t figured out how to take care of ourselves.

Maybe sometimes exhaustion is information.

Maybe our bodies are telling us something about the environments we are asking them to survive.

Because there is a very convenient story we tell about burnout. You are overwhelmed because you need better boundaries. Exhausted because you need better time management. Unhappy because you have not found your purpose. You need a better morning routine. A better calendar. A better attitude.

And certainly, sometimes those things help.

I believe deeply in boundaries. I believe in creating spaciousness wherever we can. I believe in turning off your damn email when you leave work. I believe that if someone sends you a message at 9:37 p.m., their decision to work at 9:37 p.m. does not automatically become your emergency.

I believe in saying no when you are tired.

I believe in saying yes to the afternoon walk even when there is work you could technically be doing because sometimes you definitely need to just go touch grass.

I believe in building structures that protect our humanity.

But, and, also I think there is something profoundly dishonest about discussing burnout exclusively as a personal wellness problem.

A breathing exercise cannot compensate for intentional understaffing designed to keep labor costs low and profits high. A boundary cannot make rent cheaper. A gratitude practice cannot produce affordable childcare. A Sunday reset cannot transform a workplace that quietly demands sixty hours of labor while paying you for forty—or a culture that tells you to be grateful you have a job at all.

And no morning routine, however aesthetically pleasing, changes the fact that many people simply do not have enough money, enough time, enough support or enough power to create the kind of spaciousness wellness culture keeps prescribing.

We have individualized a structural problem.

Capitalism is nothing if not entrepreneurial, we created an entire industry to sell us solutions to the exhaustion produced by the system itself.

There is something almost impressive about it.

First make people exhausted. Then sell them things to recover from the exhaustion. Then convince them the recovery is necessary so they can return to producing.

Rinse. Repeat.

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When productivity becomes proof that we are good

Somewhere underneath all of this is a much deeper belief: Productivity is not simply something we do. We have turned productivity into evidence of character.

Busy people are important. Overwhelmed people must be in demand. People who work constantly are committed. People who stop are lazy.

Even pleasure becomes suspicious when it has not been sufficiently earned.

This is why people will announce that they have not taken a vacation in five years with the same tone someone else might use to describe receiving an award. It is why we casually compete over who slept less. Why being “slammed” can become a kind of social status. Why people apologize before telling you they took a nap.

We have created prestige around being unavailable to our own lives.

Aaaaand perhaps the strangest version of this happens when we, like I, love our work, because then exploitation becomes even easier to disguise.

You love what you do. You care about the mission. People need you. The work matters. So what is one more hour? One more client? One more favor? One more unpaid responsibility? One more thing squeezed into a day that was already full?

“Doing what you love” was supposed to make work more meaningful. Instead, it often becomes the reason we believe work should be allowed to consume us.

But loving something does not mean it is entitled to all of you.

I love my work. I also love my friends and my family. I love laughing until my stomach hurts. I love walking my dog, lifting, and drinking really good coffee slowly in the sun. I love sitting somewhere beautiful with absolutely nowhere I need to be. I love doing ridiculous things that will never become content, revenue, impact, a deliverable or a line on my résumé.

Those things are not distractions from my life.

They are my life.

What if work isn’t the point?

Once we understand this, I think the conversation about work begins to change. We stop asking only:

How do I survive my workload?

How do I become more efficient?

How do I fit more into the day?

How do I prevent burnout so I can keep doing this?

And we begin asking questions that are far more inconvenient.

Why is this much work necessary in the first place?

Who benefits from my exhaustion?

Why does increased productivity so rarely translate into increased spaciousness for the people doing the producing?

Why, despite technological advancements that allow us to accomplish more in less time, have we not collectively decided to simply, oh, I don’t know, work less?

What is work actually for?

That last question interests me most. I do not think the answer can simply be more work. Surely the purpose of all this innovation, efficiency, production and wealth cannot be to create a world in which everyone is too tired to enjoy being alive.

Surely abundance should produce spaciousness.

Surely progress should mean that more people get to experience security, leisure, creativity, health, curiosity, community and rest.

Not just the people who can afford to purchase their way out of exhaustion.

All of us.

There is a difference between building a society around individual optimization and building one around collective abundance.

Individual optimization asks: How can you become resilient enough to endure this?

Collective abundance asks: Why are we requiring people to endure this at all?

I still believe in building the boundaries. Pausing when you can. Turning off the phone. Saying no. Going outside. Coming home to yourself in whatever ways are actually accessible to you.

Those things matter.

Sometimes they are how we survive long enough to imagine something different, but I no longer want our imagination to stop at becoming better-rested participants in the same exhausted world.

I want us to become curious about the world underneath it.

A world where rest does not need to be earned. Where care is not a luxury. Where being human is not something we squeeze into the margins after the work is finished. Where excellence does not require self-abandonment. Where ambition and spaciousness are allowed to coexist.

Where our worth is not measured by how much of ourselves we can convert into labor.

Maybe we were never supposed to be this tired. And maybe, just maybe, the exhaustion so many of us are carrying is not proof that we are failing at life but rather an invitation to reconsider what we have decided life is for.

Which leads me to a new question:

What would we build, as a collective, if human flourishing, instead of productivity, were the thing we organized our lives around?

While I don’t know exactly what that looks like, I know that is the world I want to live in, the one I am trying to build!

W/ curiosity & care,
Weeze

With this month’s resource list, I asked you to sit with a question: what are we willing to build together....right now? I hope you have been mulling that over in the last few weeks so that you have a bit of a sense of what you think. Before you can fully answer that question however, we have to be incredibly honest about what we are working against as we dare to be architects of possibility. And I mean really honest like heeeelllaaa honest. Not “the system is broken” honest. Not “there are some bad actors” honest. I mean: the system and thus the society we live in is functioning exactly as designed, and there is a paper trail to prove it level honest (you know I love my receipts).

That is what this month’s deep dive is.

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I’m sure my thoughts will continue to evolve on this as I do as a human and educator, but for now, I think this initial exploration is an incredibly necessary one!

I want to start with where we’re at. Not where we wish we were, not the aspirational version, the actual truth of the thing.

Consent, as it currently exists in our collective imagination, is about the body. And honestly? We don’t even do that well. We haven’t normalized letting kids opt out of hugging a relative at a family gathering. And let’s be real, we’re definitely not even touching on the deeper, more harmful versions of consent yet. We’re stuck at the most basic entry point, and we’re failing.

We are a society that has not built consent into the fabric of how we talk to or engage with each other. Is this okay? Does this feel good? Would it be alright if…? Can I share something with you? Do you have capacity to…? etc etc

These aren’t questions we’ve been taught to ask as a baseline. They’re not the norm. And that’s not an accident, it’s the natural output of a society rooted in hierarchy, in social dominance, in the belief that proximity to power entitles you to something from whoever is positioned beneath you. Folks with privileged identities are socialized to believe they are entitled to the bodies, labor, effort, minds etc of folks whose identities do not hold the same level of power and privilege. That’s the water we’re swimming in. It is not universal, and it is not static, we’re watching people parent differently, watching cis men start to interrogate patriarchy and apply that reckoning across other social identities but that shift hasn’t been normalized yet. And normalizing it is the whole point.

I think about this as a snowball. If I change how I show up, how I communicate, what I model, in my little corner of the world, the people in that corner carry it into theirs. Their workplaces. Their families. It compounds. I know it feels like a lot to be the only one doing it but I also know that I, we, have to try anyway.

So when we talk about consent inside a liberatory framework, what we’re actually talking about is normalizing curiosity. Normalizing the practice of checking our own entitlement and our own presumptions because we presume constantly. We project. We build assumptions on top of our lived experience, our social identities, the intersection of all of it, and we rarely check any of that at the door before we walk into exchanges with another person.

A liberatory society is one where every person gets to show up to the party fully as themselves, with room to name what brings them joy, peace, pleasure, safety, humanity and what doesn’t. It gives people permission to change their mind as to what that means at any given moment, in any context or dynamic. Aaaannndd it means the people around them get to receive that naming and say, okay, cool, that’s what you need. With no push back, nothing more than the curiosity of how can I meet that need. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

I know how simple that sounds and how not-easy it is to actually do. There are failsafes built into systems of dominance specifically to keep this from happening. Unpacking those failsafes, how they live in us, how they show up in our nervous systems and our relationships, that’s work for a guided container, not a substack. But I want to name the reality clearly before we go further: simple to say that I recognize that this is not simple to do.

The other half of the coin: co-creation

Consent beyond the body means building a space where curiosity gets to flourish, where we ask what’s comfortable for you, what feels like safety and where the person answering gets room to change that answer as they change, as the room changes, as the day changes. Minute to minute, if that’s what’s true.

But consent isn’t a one-way street. I don’t just get to ask you what you need and receive it as instruction. You’re a fully sovereign human being, and your answer is valid and your answer might not be something I have capacity for. It might not land in my nervous system as okay. It might not account for who I am and what I’ve lived. That tension is where co-creation lives.

Without it, we tend to land in one of two places: either there’s no consent seeking at all or someone goes through the motions of asking and then shuts down the second the answer requires something of them. That shutdown is where people-pleasing and perfectionism show up. And I believe every one of us performs some version of both, shaped by whatever we’ve absorbed about what it means to be the perfect partner, parent, sibling, coworker, woman, child or whatever identity we’re holding in a given moment.

This is why I use the word co-creation instead of compromise. Compromise, as we practice it, means both people give something up to land in a flattened middle. I think that’s a complete lie of a framework. It’s the same as the “50/50 relationship” myth. I don’t want 50/50. I want 100/100, where you build something new out of what’s actually true for both people, instead of subtracting from each person until you land on the same diminished thing.

Co-creation means both people get to name what they need, lead with curiosity toward each other’s answer, and actually build from there. Sometimes that’s easy — oh yeah, bet, I can do that. Sometimes it’s not, and that’s where the real conversation starts. That’s where we have to remember: sovereignty is paramount, safety runs right alongside it, and both people are entitled to both, at all times.

What this actually looks like

Picture the fight where someone is talking to you sideways, energy all wrong, tone disrespectful and in your head you’re just thinking, who are you talking to right now? What you’re feeling is a violation of respect. Maybe they’re choosing to talk to you that way. Maybe their nervous system is fully activated and this is a fight response and there’s no “intentional choice” happening at all. Both are possible.

In a liberatory, reciprocal relationship, where consent and co-creation and boundaries are all moving together, what that moment actually requires is naming it in real time: the way you’re talking to me feels disrespectful, and I can’t hear anything else right now. And then the other person gets a real choice. Maybe they don’t have the toolkit yet and keep going so you choose to step away. Maybe they recognize they’re too activated to communicate and step away. Maybe they land on, oh shit, I didn’t even clock that — thank you for naming it, and they come back to themselves.

It’s a choose-your-own-adventure, every time. A back-and-forth where you get to be sovereign and whole and safe, and they get to be sovereign and whole and safe, and the entire point of the moment is naming what each of us needs to be the best version of ourselves inside the tension, not winning the exchange.

Same shape, softer stakes: you tell your partner you need a hug after a long day, and they tell you they don’t have physical touch in them right now. That’s not a rejection of you. That opens a door, is there something else I can offer that would make you feel held? Maybe there’s nothing, and they still get to say no, and maybe they come back in an hour with the hug they didn’t have in them before. Maybe you land on a cup of coffee and being listened to instead. The point is the dialogue stays open, stays curious, doesn’t collapse into either person disappearing.

Consent and co-creation were never a promise that everyone gets exactly what they want in every moment. That’s not the goal. The goal is building and continuously rebuilding the space where an empowered yes and an empowered no can both exist and be heard.

And sometimes that includes yourself. Sometimes it includes someone who cannot hear your yes and cannot hear your no. In that moment, whether or not they’ve said it outright, what they’re telling you is I am not capable of giving you what you need to feel safe. And once someone shows you that, as Maya Angelou said (more or less), believe them. It becomes your responsibility to adjust. To step back. To stop pouring energy where it isn’t being received. That person might not take your adjustment well. That’s between them and their own liberation journey. It was never your job to manage that for them. This is the unglamorous part of doing liberatory work inside a society built specifically to resist it. It matters anyway.

Where are you in this right now?

None of us are fully living outside of the systems we’re trying to unlearn, myself included. So instead of asking whether you’re “doing it right,” I want to offer some questions to just sit with. No grade attached. Just information for yourself!

1. Where in your life are you still operating from a presumption of entitlement, assuming you already know what someone needs, wants, or is okay with, without asking?

2. Where are you the one shutting down the second someone’s answer requires something of you? What does your version of people-pleasing or perfectionism look like, and whose approval is it actually protecting?

3. Where have you been calling something a compromise when it was really just you disappearing a little to keep the peace?

4. Is there a relationship in your life, with a partner, a parent, a friend, your kid, yourself, where you already know someone has shown you they can’t meet a need of yours, and you haven’t adjusted accordingly yet?

5. And underneath all of it: do you know what your own empowered yes feels like in your body? Do you know what your empowered no feels like? Because you can’t ask for consent or build co-creation with anyone else if you haven’t first mapped that terrain in yourself.

If you’re looking for one place to actually begin not the whole overhaul, just a start

Try this: pick one low-stakes moment this week and ask the question out loud instead of assuming the answer. Is this okay? Does this still feel good? What do you need right now? Ask it of your partner, your kid, a coworker, or even yourself before you default into autopilot. Then actually sit with the answer, even if it’s inconvenient, even if it’s not what you hoped to hear. That single repetition, asking, and then letting the answer change what happens next, is the whole practice in miniature. Everything else builds from there.

W/ Tenderness, Weeze

If this stirred something in you and you are curious about how to unpack, unlearn and simply go deeper then sign up for Protect Your Peace 2.0, a 7 module self paced course to work through all of these things, including the biggies perfectionism, boundaries, people-pleasing and empowered yes/no. Whether you’ve taken it before or you’re brand new, you’ll get closer to a more liberated version of you.

Use code substackpyp for 50% off

Hi Friends!

Let’s get one thing straight about abolition before we go any further, shall we? The misrepresentation of this word (I would go so far as to say the entire movement) has been so thorough and so deliberate that we need to clear the air before we can actually have the conversation. Abolition is not the belief that we simply have to choose not to harm each other. It is also not creating chaos. It is not creating a world with no process for accountability, repair or restoration. It is also not something only people who have never been at the receiving end of oppressive systems get to want. That is the caricature, and it was designed to shut the conversation down before it starts, water down the movement, and erase socially marginalized abolitionists.

So if that’s what it isn’t, what is it?

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I did not cover any of it up. I did not simply tolerate.

I marveled.

Physical reminders of growth, of how much I’ve been pushed and pulled and stretched past what I thought was my edge, what I thought I was capable of enduring, and still came back together. Still whole. Still here.

A reminder of my past, of who I used to be before I knew better, before I unlearned the lie that my body was a problem to be solved.

Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? A lie. Sold to us early, sold to us often, that smooth, perfect, youthful skin in a “just right” able body was a worthy body. That a body which shows evidence of living life is a body that’s failed somehow.

I don’t believe that anymore. But, and, also that took me time, healing, a journey of unlearning and a commitment to my own liberation to arrive at this place.

A place where I see these marks as evolving beauty. I see my humanity, written in gold, across skin that has held every version of me. And embrace the honor, the absolute honor, of living in a body that tells so many stories, holds so many memories and continues to grow, evolve and be present to experience more!

Today I told my body I loved her, and thanked her.

Out loud. Not as a performance. Not for anyone watching. Because no matter the pressure, no matter the change, she always knows how to hold me, even in the seasons when I thought I would break.

She doesn’t resist the stretching. She adapts. She becomes something new. Not better than she was. Not worse than she was. Renewed.

And I think that’s the part we skip past too fast: renewal isn’t a return to some “before.” It’s not bouncing back. It’s not snapping into an old shape like nothing happened. It’s becoming, again and again, a body that has evidence of every place it’s been, of everything it has seen, of every moment it has endured or relished in.

A body with legs that have walked out of rooms and relationships that did not honor me. Hands that have held community when they needed me most. A heart that feels deeply and connects genuinely. Skin that tracks the privilege of aging.

So today I sat in the sun and marveled, in gratitude, at my body.

I wonder, when was the last time you sat and marveled in your body, thanked your body and rejected all of the lies you were taught to believe?

Try it won’t you? You might be surprised just how glorious you feel!

W/ Tenderness

Weeze

Last week I told y’all that this path I am walking will lead me to new offers and y’all really showed out in my DMs, and I can’t tell y’all how much that meant to me. So in an effort to make sure the ones who want to be in the know do not a miss a thing while simultaneously protecting the pace that feels right for me, I created a little sign up ☺️

Be the first to know!

Hi friends!

At the end of this month’s resource list, I asked if we are being honest when we say we are fighting for everyone? When I ask that, I don’t just mean generally, do we believe that all people deserve liberation; I mean, are we actually thinking of everyone, and are we being intersectional in that thinking? This month’s deep dive forces us to take a look at the ways in which intersecting marginalized identities and experiences require us to be both intentional and expansive in our liberatory efforts!

The history of queer exclusion from U.S. immigration is not a side story to the broader criminalization of queer and trans life; it is one of its most revealing chapters. For most of the twentieth century, queerness was literally written into American immigration law as grounds for exclusion and deportation. “Sexual deviants,” “psychopathic personalities,” people deemed threats to the “moral fabric of the nation” (did you laugh at the absurdity of the idea of this nation even having moral fabric? I did, because, what lol!!!?!?) was the very real legal language of the state, and was used to bar, detain, and remove people whose only crime was existing outside the hetero-normative binary that colonial power decided was the only acceptable form of being human.

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From those exchanges came a question that I have gotten a few times, but this time I think my answer has changed ... because I am not the same person as I was the last time I answered it. Buckle up babes, today I made time 🤗.

Question:

How do you overcome fear to become your authentic self? I second-guess myself, but I want to live authentically too. How did you get to be so unapologetic in who you are?

Before I share my answer to this let’s start with a little disclaimer PSA of sorts shall we dears?

We are all so beautifully different and diverse. No two people are the same. We share similarities, we see ourselves and our experiences in others and we connect through a communal human experience. So yes, it is absolutely helpful and useful to bear witness and be witnessed.

But, and, also….my journey is my own.

What worked for me may not work for you. There is no universal formula. It is my perspective, my lived experience, a blueprint and guide you can borrow from while figuring out what authenticity looks like in your own life. Hearing me speak about my own experience can light your path, but the path you walk, and need to walk will be entirely your own!

The first time I chose my full self

So, let’s get into it! The truth is, my path to “authentic living”, which I just call being fully liberated, was neither linear nor particularly graceful.

I can remember, however, the first time I made the decision to say “the thing” and do “the thing”; the first time I decided to be the version of myself that I knew flew in the face of “respectable society” (if you are knew here my general reference to respectable society is an all encompassing term I like to use for the ways in which we have been socialized, based on our identities, to behave in order to maintain the existing supremacist society and hierarchy that we live in).

It wasn’t intentional and, lemme keep it a buck, I was terrified.

I was fifteen years old, it was shortly after September 11th, 2001. The high school I attended in Oakland was a small, private, predominantly white institution. Like many wealthy PWIs, it was shaped by money, elitism, and a whole lot of whiteness. So you can imagine that, in the early 2000s, it was not exactly fertile ground for nuanced conversations about race, religion, power, or equity (it still isn’t fyi).

The school periodically hosted speakers during a program called Forum. Shortly after 9/11, they invited a man who was presented to us as an accomplished political advisor to the White House and expert on foreign relations, particularly in relation to Arab and Muslim communities. As he began “educating us” on the topic, he proceeded to espouse Islamophobia in front of the entire school. Some of what he said was not simply offensive. It was factually incorrect.

I remember the moment he described the Prophet Muhammad (saw) as the Muslim equivalent of Jesus and claimed that Muslims regarded Muhammad (saw) as God. That is not a minor doctrinal disagreement. It is the opposite of a central tenet of Islam. No one corrected him. Not the administrators who invited him. Not the adults responsible for vetting him. No one.

The following Tuesday, during school announcements, when students were given an opportunity to speak in front of the school, I walked onto that stage and called the school out. Please note: I had no plan, no script, I just knew I had to say something.

I challenged them for failing to properly vet someone they had invited to educate us. I named the Islamophobia. I corrected the factual inaccuracies. I questioned the relationship between the school’s existing sociopolitical culture and its willingness to give this man a platform. I asked whether they were truly educating us well if they believed what had happened was appropriate.

Then I got off the stage. Neeeeeeeeedless to say, it did not go over well. 😬

But that is the first moment I can remember fully committing to myself.

At the time, I didn’t think of it as authenticity or living unapologetically. I didn’t think of myself as brave or bold. I was scared of the consequences (I was a scholarship kid), especially because I already had a reputation for being disruptive, outspoken, and willing to challenge authority.

It was not easy to do. But it was an easy choice to make.

The choice was between staying silent while people were miseducated in ways that could perpetuate real harm, or saying something despite the consequences I might face.

To me, even then, the answer was clear. When you have the opportunity to do the right thing, doing the right thing is the only real choice available to you.

That moment was the moment that liberation moved from being something in my awareness to an ethos, a practice.

I did not become fearless. I became convicted.

Here is the part people often misunderstand. I did not speak because I felt strong. I spoke because I was clear. There is a difference.

Strength is often treated as the absence of fear. Much of what people perceive as strength in me is actually conviction, a clear understanding of what I believe to be just, equitable, honorable, and true.

That conviction does not make the trembles or that pit in my stomach any less real, and it certainly does not make the very real life consequences disappear.

My decision in September of 2001 affected the way certain teachers treated me. It shaped my experience at that school for years. I wanted to transfer almost every day. I hated being there.

Fun example - during my junior year, a group of lacrosse players (yes, yes they were) physically put me into a trash can. The school did nothing to protect me or reprimand them, instead they tried to place blame on me and some of the melanated senior boys who came to my aid. My senior year after a math teacher (yes, yes he was) made a wildly racist remark to me, about me, in front of the whole class. We all told the administration. That same administration attempted to kick me out of school because of how I “reacted”, because GOD FORBID someone reacts poorly to their math teacher being racist to them, especially at 17 (they weren’t successful). And yes, this math teacher continued to teach there for years.

I could tell you a story like this for almost every week I was in high school for the three years after I got up on that stage that Tuesday in September.

Showing up had consequences and I would still make the same choice.

At 15 I had made a decision, despite what may come,I had to remain in integrity with my own spirit, my notions of humanity and my understanding of collective liberation. People did not like me. People talked about me. Adults with power made my life more difficult. None of that changed what I knew to be right.

That is important because authenticity is often sold as a personal-branding exercise: wear what you like, embody your quirk, just stop caring what people think, and voilà, you are free.

But real authenticity, being unapologetic, pushing back against social norms and expectations, that is not an aesthetic. It is a practice of remaining in relationship with yourself and humanity, yours and others, especially when doing so costs you something.

Authenticity still requires discernment

I want to place a very large asterisk here. Not every situation is safe.

There have been and will continue to be moments when I have chosen not to “be authentic”: to speak publicly, challenge someone directly, set a boundary or say everything I wanted to say because it is not emotionally, physically, professionally, or materially safe to do so.

That is not cowardice. That is discernment.

I was more reckless when I was young because I, like many young people, believed that I was safer than I actually was aaaannndd let’s be honest, I had far less to lose than I do now at 40. As I’ve gotten older, I have become much more skilled at assessing risk.

Where am I safe? Where am I not safe? What protection do my social identities offer me in this space Where do my identities make me more vulnerable? What line can I push? What consequences am I willing and resourced enough to absorb?

Authenticity does not require us to abandon ourselves in the name of proving that we are brave.

Sometimes the most authentic choice is to speak. Sometimes the most authentic choice is to leave. Sometimes it is to wait until you have more support. Sometimes it is to tell the truth only to the people who have earned access to it.

Visibility and advocacy without discernment is not liberation.

The path to living out loud

When I think about how I became capable of showing up as fully as I do now, I see three interconnected parts of the journey.

1. Find your true north

I don’t mean finding the perfect career or identifying one grand purpose that explains the rest of your life I mean finding the thing that orients you. What are your values? What do you believe? What is true for you beneath everything you were taught you were supposed to be? What principles do you want your decisions to reflect?

When you know your true north, other people’s reactions stop functioning as your compass.

That does not mean you stop caring about impact or accountability. It means popularity is no longer the standard by which you decide whether you are living well.

For me, justice and collective liberation are part of that orientation. When I am rooted in those values, decisions that might otherwise feel complicated become clearer. Will everyone like what I say? Definitely not! Could it cost me an opportunity? It has, from high school to just this past year.

Am I willing to abandon my values to preserve the comfort of people who benefit from my silence? No.

Purpose does not eliminate fear. It simply gives fear less authority.

2. Unlearn the person you were socialized to become

You cannot find your authentic self without confronting the forces that taught you to abandon that self.

All of us have been socialized. For example, for me as a melanated girl I absorbed messages from society and family about what it meant to be “good,” ladylike, attractive, feminine, desirable, successful and worthy of love. I learned what kind of girl boys were supposed to want. I learned how much confidence was considered acceptable before it became arrogance. I learned how direct I could be before it became aggression or I was a bitch. I learned how visible I could be before someone decided I needed to be humbled. I was not exempt from any of that. I had to unlearn it.

When I was younger, I sometimes chose authenticity while quietly but constantly worrying that people might not like me, I might upset someone, or I may no longer be included in something. Now I understand that I am all of the right things for all of the right people, places, communities and opportunities.

I stopped caring if a friend, family member or community member found fault with me especially if it was over my values or my boundaries. I no longer made choices from a place of concern that a prospective client may not hire me or a random person online dislikes how I speak, what I believe, or how I explain something.

The people with whom I am truly aligned will be drawn to the person I actually am, not the person I could exhaust myself performing.

That shift required deep decolonial work. There is a colonial voice inside all of us: the internalized voice of the systems we were raised within. It tells us to conform, compete, dominate, disappear, perform, produce, and seek legitimacy through proximity to power.

Then there is the voice of our authentic self. Most of us have been trained to mute the second voice while amplifying the first. The work is not necessarily to destroy the socialized voice. Sometimes it contains information that can help us assess risk and survive. But it should not be the voice making decisions.

We have to learn to turn its volume down long enough to hear ourselves again.

3. Learn how to create safety for yourself

Authenticity aka your liberated self, becomes much more accessible when you know how to take care of yourself.

When I feel activated, I ask myself:

Am I actually unsafe? Am I triggered or emotionally activated because this situation resembles something from my past? Am I moving toward an emotionally reactive or trauma-based response? What do I need in order to feel grounded? Do I need support? Do I need more information? Do I need to speak now, speak later, or not speak at all? Learning to regulate your nervous system does not mean learning to tolerate mistreatment with a smile. It means developing enough internal steadiness to recognize what is happening and choose your response rather than being consumed by it.

Safety is also collective.

Part of discernment is recognizing when your identities give you protection that someone else does not have. In those moments, I ask myself: If I do not say something, who will?

If we are not orienting our choices toward justice and collective liberation, then we are often simply navigating the world through complacency.

I know what it feels like to need someone whose identities offer them more protection to step in, speak up, or stand beside me. It doesn’t always have to be on the “big” social things either, it can be as simple as having a parent stand beside you in the aftermath of confront an elder family member or a homeboy subtly alerting a creeper man that you are in fact with men who do not play about you when out in public.

So I have made a commitment to do that for others when I can with intentionality.

4. You have to fall in love with your whole self

The fourth major part of my journey was learning to love myself deeply. I mean loving myself enough to embrace my imperfections and pieces I am less confident about alongside the parts of me that are “impressive” and easy to celebrate.

I had to learn to accept and make room for the fact that embracing my humanity is not just the way we fight for and protect it but acknowledging that the beauty of it is in its multiplicity and messiness. It is complicated. Imperfect. Sometimes contradictory. Sometimes wrong. Sometimes radiant. Sometimes still healing. Regardless of what it may or may not be, it and I am deeply lovable.

I had to come home to myself and learn to enjoy living there. Once you know yourself and love the person you find, random opinions lose much of their power.

Does someone not like how I speak? Okay. Someone does not like my face? Cool. Do they think I am too tall, too loud, too direct, too political, not political enough, too soft, too much, or not enough?

As long as I know that I am not hurting anyone, causing or perpetuating harm AND if I am alerted to the fact that I might have, I am accountable and course correct….well then I am standing ten toes down on who I am, what I said and how I said it because I meant it!

Someone somewhere will always have something to say. That is between them and whatever unresolved thing inside of them is reacting to me.

It does not belong to me and I did the work to ensure that I did not take ownership or internalize it!

Authenticity is not a destination

None of this means I never second-guess myself. I still experience imposter syndrome. I still have moments of “should I….”? And if I’m being perfectly frank, sharing the softness or vulnerability is actually so much harder than being bold and loud for liberation.

A client and community member recently told me how meaningful it has been to watch me become more publicly open and tender. I told them that this softness is not new. I have always been this person. What has changed is my capacity to resource myself, to provide myself with enough safety that I can do the “scary” thing. That is another layer of authenticity.

The work is not finished because you finally told one truth, set one boundary, left one relationship, posted one vulnerable thing, or challenged one person in power.

Healing and liberation are not linear.

I would love to tell you that you reach a certain level and suddenly graduate from insecurity forever. You do not. Old narratives still get loud. Old fears return. Old socializations reappear. Trauma finds new doors.

The difference is that I now have the tools and practices to care for myself when they do. When imposter syndrome appears, I know how to remind myself that I really do this!!!!! I am that girl!

When I begin comparing myself to someone else, I am soft and tender with myself and tell myself the same simple truth I began this post with: nobody else is me and that is precisely the point.

When an old wound gets activated, I know how to slow down, ground myself, seek support, and discern what I actually need.

The strength people see is not the absence of struggle. It is the result of years of learning how to hold myself through it.

I had to come apart many times. I had to fall apart many times.

I had mentors, therapists, guides, books, podcasts, examples of modeled behavior, loving community, and a deep commitment to being uncomfortable without abandoning myself. (We were never meant to liberate ourselves alone.) I did not get here alone. And I do not recommend that you try to do this alone either.

So, how do you become your authentic self?

You begin by learning who you are beneath your conditioning. You identify the values that will orient your life. You examine which beliefs are truly yours and which were handed to you by systems that benefited from your silence and contortion into a mold it created to benefit itself.

You learn how safety feels in your body. You build the capacity to care for yourself when fear arises. You surround yourself with people who can love you without requiring you to perform. You fall in love with your whole self, not just the polished parts.

And then you practice.

You tell one truth. You make one aligned choice. You let one person see you more clearly and vulnerably.

You survive being misunderstood. You repair when you cause harm. You begin again when you backslide.

Eventually, authenticity stops feeling like a performance of bravery and starts feeling like coming home.

Not because the world has become completely safe. Not because no one will judge you. Not because you are never afraid. But because you have learned that you can trust yourself to remain by your own side; and that, more than strength, is what allows you to live out loud.

W/ tenderness,

Weeze

Last week I told y’all that this path I am walking will lead me to new offers and y’all really showed out in my DMs, and I can’t tell y’all how much that meant to me. So in an effort to make sure the ones who want to be in the know do not a miss a thing while simultaneously protecting the pace that feels right for me, I created a little sign up ☺️

Be the first to know!!

I was catching up with an old client the other day, and they told me how much they missed hearing my voice and seeing my face.

They missed the IG posts, the podcast episodes, the Substack reflections that were thoughtfully crafted teaching tools dressed up as essay. They missed the random car sound-offs in my IG stories. And of course, the puppy posts (we all know y’all are really here for puppy content).

The way they said it landed somewhere tender.

It didn’t feel extractive. It didn’t feel like someone wanting access to me or my life just to consume it. They were naming a point of connection they genuinely missed.

And because I am who I am, I immediately made a joke.

“Damn! You’ve come such a long way. What could you possibly learn from me anymore?”

Now, for context, I’ve worked with this person on and off for years. I’ve walked alongside them through personal and professional transitions, family changes, career shifts, parenting challenges, partnership evolutions, and the building of their first liberatory business, one that ultimately changed their life in profound ways. I’ve guided and supported as they wrestled with questions about their identity, humanity, and their place in the world.

I’ve taught, challenged, encouraged, and held them with love.

Sometimes soft love.

Sometimes tough love.

Sometimes the kind of love that asks you to stop lying to yourself because you and the collective deserve better than that.

So when I made that joke, part of me meant it.

What could they possibly learn from me? Do they even need me anymore?

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But beneath the joke was something else.

Somewhere along the way, a loud part of my internal monologue convinced me that there wasn’t much left for me to say to the world that would help people “get it.”

That people weren’t really listening anyway.

That because the way I teach and practice liberation isn’t flashy, easily packaged, or optimized for quick consumption, people weren’t checking for it.

Not real liberation, anyway.

Not the kind that takes time. The kind that requires commitment. Not the kind that asks us to be uncomfortable, accountable, honest and human all at the same time.

Back to the point of this post, though.

After my lil jokie joke (which clearly wasn’t much of a joke once I got honest with myself), my former client said something that did two things.

First, it felt like a full-on heart hug. It reminded me that the work I’ve done with people, and within the collective, actually matters. That its impact is often immeasurable, even when I can’t see it.

Second, it sent me on an introspective journey that lasted for weeks.

They looked me dead in the face and said, more or less:

“Every time you open your mouth, I learn something or I get a permission slip. I’m reminded that doing the hard thing, or the socially unconventional thing, when it serves my humanity or the collective is usually the right thing. Every time you open your mouth, I remember that I’m not alone in this world, even when you don’t know I’m watching one of your videos or listening to an episode.”

Ooooffff!!

Now, when I say I spent weeks being introspective, that’s the polished version.

Baaaayyybbbeee... I spiraled.

I went on a whole journey trying to understand how and why I had given up my own voice.

I wrestled with the balance between creating space for my own humanity and continuing to create for the collective. I examined how burnt out I actually was versus how burnt out I thought I was. I questioned where I was still being held together by dominant society’s fabricated glue.

And yes, I asked myself whether I was hiding.

And why.

(I know y’all didn’t think I only push you to dig deep, tell the truth, and sit with the journaling prompts that make you just a litttttllleee uncomfortable. As the old commercial says: “I’m not only the president, I’m also a client.” 😉)

The answers to those questions, and many others, are staying with me…for now.

But here’s what I am willing to share.

I’m making a commitment to myself to create at least once a week.

That will probably happen here on Substack. Sometimes it’ll happen on IG. For now, I’m intentionally keeping the commitment simple enough that it can stay joyful.

Otherwise it could very easily become something that feel punishing, another place where I turn my own humanity into a productivity metric, and I reeeeefffuuusseee!

My hope is that it reconnects me to the kind of creating that feels easeful and nourishing. The kind that feels like coming home to myself.

I don’t know where it will lead.

What I do know is that when creating feels joyful, easeful, and nourishing again, the next step will likely be inviting people back into an offering of some kind.

What offering?

No clue.

And honestly, that excites me.

I don’t want to force it. I don’t want to package something just because the internet rewards urgency and overproduction. I don’t want to build anything from depletion and then put a brand colored bow on it and call it purpose.

The only thing I can promise is that whatever comes next will be completely honest and authentic. No gimmicky nonsense, liberation cosplay or performance of depth because y’all already know how I feel about all that. Gag me with an entire drawer of silverware!

All I can promise you is Weeze.

So here I am, opening my mouth again.

Not just so y’all can hold me accountable to using my voice.

But so that maybe one more person remembers they’re not alone.

And if you’ve been waiting for a sign to use your own voice again, maybe this is it.

Also, if you don’t want to miss what comes next, subscribe here and come hang out with me on IG. Apparently, some of y’all have been paying attention even when I thought nobody was listening.)

Hi Friends!

Pride was born as a riot. Not a parade. Not a corporate sponsorship opportunity. Not a month of rainbow logos on products made in sweatshops. A riot. Led by trans women of color, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and so many others whose names history has tried to swallow, against police violence, against criminalization, against a state that had decided queer and trans existence was something to be punished. That origin is not a fun fact or a sidenote; it is the entire frame.

We are living inside a deliberate erasure of that history. The same systems that have always treated queer and trans bodies as threats to social order are doing what they have always done: legislating who is allowed to exist, in what form, in what spaces, under what conditions. The criminalization of queer and trans life is not new, and it is not accidental. It is the continuation of a colonial project that has always used gender and sexuality as tools of control, deciding which bodies are legible, which relationships are valid, which identities are permitted, and which must be surveilled, punished, or erased.

Read more

If the first resource list asked who belongs, this Deep Dive asks something more pointed: who has been deliberately excluded, and how has that exclusion been made to look normal?

These two resources pull back the curtain on the mechanics of ableism, how it operates not just through overt cruelty but through the quiet normalization of systems designed to limit disabled people’s autonomy, economic power, and humanity. Together they challenge us to look more critically at the stories we’ve been told about disability, who gets to tell them, who benefits from them, and what becomes possible when disabled people are centered as the experts on their own lives.

Read more

Hi Friends!

Disability justice is often glossed over or treated as an afterthought in the larger scope of justice work, but as with all forms of oppression, it is an integral strand in dismantling the web that is supremacy culture. Ableism is not a series of individual failures or oversights; no, it is a part of the system of oppression. The same system that decides who is worthy, who is human; it is part of the larger system that decides whose bodies are valuable, whose minds are legible, whose lives are worth sustaining, and whose needs are considered “too expensive” to meet.

Supremacy culture and ideology have built our socio-political system with intention, and every form of oppression was designed using the same logic. The logic that justified (and still justifies) colonization, enslavement, and the ruthless extraction of human beings for profit is the very same one used to deny humanity to our disabled community members.

Read more

The resources in this month’s collection asked what decolonizing environmentalism means. This month’s Deep Dive by Malcom Ferdinand asks where it must begin, and his answer is clear: 1492. Malcom’s work suggests that it was not the industrial revolution, not the IPCC report, not even the Paris Agreement that caused our current environmental crisis. The colonial encounter was not a prelude to modernity’s environmental crisis. It was the crisis, and everything since has been its continuation.

Ferdinand, a philosopher and political theorist from Martinique, draws a crucial distinction that much of mainstream environmental discourse refuses to make: capitalism and colonialism are not the same thing. Capitalism is a system of economic extraction. Colonialism is a system of oppression, erasure, and destruction that uses various tools to accomplish its goal, and uses racial hierarchy as its main justification and driving force. These two frameworks, though deeply entangled, are not interchangeable.

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The environmental crisis we are currently facing is not a failure of awareness, we know, the people in power know...I mean there are whole summits about it! This crisis is a predictable outcome of colonialism, imperialism and capitalism, of systems designed to ruthlessly extract. The Big 3 (that’s what I like to call colonialism, imperialism and capitalism) did not only displace peoples; they displaced and destroyed entire relationships with the land, replacing reciprocity with ownership, stewardship with commodity, and living systems with inputs and outputs. That foundational violence is the root system beneath every environmental crisis we face today.

Capitalism accelerated what colonialism and imperialism began. The same logic that justified the theft of Indigenous lands (and people), that the Earth exists to be used, measured, and monetized, now drives the carbon economy, the fast fashion supply chain, and the industrial agriculture complex.

Read more

What happens when “feminist” solidarity becomes a matter of life and death?

This month’s resource list asks us to think differently about gender and empire, this deep dive asks us to reckon with the stakes of getting it wrong!

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We are living inside a contradiction. Women’s and gender-expansive people’s bodies have always been legislated, surveilled, and criminalized; there is no denying that. Now more than ever, however, we are seeing a reversal of rights and protections that are a matter of life and death. From abortion rights dismantled, immigration enforcement weaponized against reproductive autonomy, obstacles or complete eradication of gender affirming care (life-saving care), we are seeing the very concept of bodily sovereignty treated as a political bargaining chip.

At the same time, the language of “women’s rights” (a term we focus on and use, which very intentionally erases our trans and non-binary community members) is being strategically deployed and brazenly weaponized by governments, specifically the United States, to justify military aggression, most visibly in this moment in the narratives around our attack on Iran, even as those same governments ( again, it’s us, the call is coming from inside the house), strip rights from women and gender expansive people at home.

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Understanding why liberation matters is one thing. Beginning to develop an ethos and lens is certainly the beginning. Knowing how to move however, how to actually build and sustain revolutionary practice in your own life and community is another. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t difficult, to become an architect of possibility in a world that continues to show us that it is hell bent on oppression, imperialism and destruction. While it is not easy, it is not impossible!!

That gap between inspiration and action is where many of us get stuck. This interview with D. Musa Springer on the life and work of Walter Rodney , I find, to be an incredibly useful place to start closing it. Rodney was a Guyanese historian, organizer, and political economist whose entire life was a model of what it looks like to refuse that gap, to insist that theory and practice are inseparable, that knowledge not rooted in the conditions and struggles of real people is not knowledge worth having.

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Hi Friends!

Liberation is a word, concept but most importantly ethos and praxis that has gained popularity in the last few years and has been bastardized by social media, as so many others before it. Now more than ever, we need to bring people back to the root meaning of Liberation and the birth of the praxis. While there have been liberatory struggles globally, the way we talk about Liberation within the United States and much of the Western world is specifically born out of the Black Liberation movement.

Black liberation is not a niche concern; it is one of the most fully developed traditions of freedom thought in the modern world. Born out of centuries of resistance, Black liberation movements have produced some of the most rigorous, creative, and spiritually grounded analyses of power, dignity, and what it means to be fully human. The pursuit of Black liberation has developed intellectual and political traditions for understanding how oppression works and how to dismantle it. Things like abolition, Pan-Africanism, Black feminism etc, these are sophisticated, battle-tested frameworks, not just ideas but ever-evolving bodies of theory and practice. To engage with it seriously is to encounter a living tradition, one that has never had the luxury of treating freedom as abstract.

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There has been A LOT of conversation about Charlie Kirk since his assassination yesterday. There are the “thoughts and prayers” from his fan base. The “good riddance” from his opposition. And then there are the people who claim to fight for liberation, to stand vehemently against everything he stood for, who are lamenting his death.

I have never lied to y’all or hidden my stance on anything before, so I’m not going to start now. I will not be shedding a tear for Charlie Kirk. I do not feel bad for him. I do not send him prayers or well wishes. YES, me, someone who believes in the beauty and sanctity of humanity, ALSO believes that there is no empathy to be given to a man who said “I can't stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.” I have no sympathy either, sympathy is a “feeling of pity or sorrow for someone else’s misfortune”. This is not misfortune, his assassination is the direct result of the hurt and harm he advocated for and put into the world. It is not misfortune, it is the consequence of his very active and intentional decisions.

Let us be clear, my complete unbotheredness by his assassination does not then mean that I am celebrating his death. As people, we HAVE to get a grip on ourselves and check the way we have been taught to move from one edge of the binary to the other in all things. Are there those who rejoice in his death? Yes. Does that mean that everyone who does not grieve, have empathy etc, is inherently rejoicing? NO! Does his being assassinated inherently mean that we should mourn him? Also, NO!

We have got to expand our ability to sit with more complex and nuance feelings and realities. We need to actually name and recognize harm, not only when someone meets their end as a result BUT in this case, the harmful wheels they set in motion, harmful actions that resulted in very specific consequences.

Charlie Kirk was deeeeeeeeply harmful. He used his social identities and Turning Point USA as a platform not just to advocate conservative ideas, but to define culture war boundaries: who’s a person, who isn’t, who is valuable, who isn’t who deserves human and civil rights, who doesn’t and who we get to cast aside, throw away and accept as a legitimate “cost” for preserving the ideals he worked so hard to spread.

That harm does not simply get erased because he is now dead. As someone who believes in liberation, yes, I believe in humanity, empathy, sympathy but I reserve that for those who are not actively working to hurt others through policy and influence.

Mourning a life lost is valid, generally, but we cannot absolve someone of their harm and sins against humanity simply because they were killed. Simultaneously, recognizing flawed or dangerous beliefs doesn’t mean denying human vulnerability or mortality. It does, however, acknowledge that there are real-life and death consequences for our actions and our words.

One last point here. The system that has allowed Kirk to rise to influence and cause ripple effects of harm to others has been able to do so because it has made harm and violence essential. Violence is the very bedrock of our social fabric: political, physical, psychological, and emotional. Kirk’s miscalculation that he could be on the controlling end of that violence and never the recipient of it is another conversation for another substack, but you live by the gun, you die by the gun. If you are an active player in systems of violence or seek to solidify them, then that makes you a monster. I do not cry for monsters.

(Clip from Brooklyn Nine-Nine)

I’ve shared my personal beliefs, for those who do not know who Charlie Kirk is or the harm and hate he stood for - here’s a brief overview as well as a few “dot connecting” points at the end.

• Charlie Kirk Co-Founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at 18. TPUSA is a conservative nonprofit whose mission is to promote principles of limited government and free markets on high school and college campuses. It serves as a grassroots activist network, organizing students to advocate for conservative viewpoints through debates, conferences, and voter registration efforts. The organization also runs programs like Professor Watchlist, which identifies and criticizes professors it deems to be advancing liberal agendas in the classroom.

• Worked actively to turn youth towards conservative ideas through campus speaking, social media, debates, his show, and political allegiances.

• His values included support for the Second Amendment (gun rights), and what he called traditional Christian conservative social values (anti-LBGTQ) rights expansion, opposition to abortion, etc.), skepticism and outright opposition to many “progressive” cultural policies (DEI, gender-affirming care, etc.).

His beliefs from his own mouth

On guns: “I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

On Transgender identity: Kirk has been quoted as saying “there are only two genders.” He said that gender fluidity and transgender identity are “lies that hurt people and abuse kids,” and went further to say that “we must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country.”

On same sex marriage: He opposed same-sex marriage. When discussing his opposition for what he referred to as the “LGBTQ agenda” he referenced Bible verse Leviticus 20:13 (TLDR: Queer identity is punishable by death) as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters”.

On race: Kirk believed that Black women and “people of color” don’t have the “brain-processing power” to succeed without equity policies and specifically affirmative action. He believed DEI programs are “anti-White”. He said many things about MLK, but the shortest quote to sum it all up is that “MLK was awful... He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe".

Why his views and rhetoric are so deeply harmful

• Legitimizing prejudice and stigma
  Words have weight; they are not harmless. When someone with influence repeatedly calls queer/trans people “lies,” or says programs meant to help historically marginalized people are unfair or bad, or says “people of color” don’t have the “brain processing power” necessary, it contributes to an environment where discrimination, harassment, and violence become more acceptable.

• Undermining trust and safety
  For our already disenfranchised and politically vulnerable populations, whose identities increase the political and social, Kirk’s rhetoric contributes to the mission to erode psychological safety. This increases the risk of harm (from bullying to hate crimes), and discourages marginalized people from seeking help. It also gives political cover to those seeking to pass laws and policies that reduce or eradicate civil protections.

• Shaping policy & culture in ways that entrench inequality
  By opposing things like gender-affirming care or DEI, by framing civil rights laws as mistakes, by pushing back against systemic understandings of racism (e.g. critical race theory or history education), he helped legitimize backlash against civil rights, which leads to policy rollbacks, suppressing or undermining the rights and safety of marginalized people.

• Polarization
  TPUSA and Kirk's style often magnified the cultural divide and social tensions. Instead of opening space for dialogue, many statements were framed as zero-sum: if you do this, believe this, are this then you are bad, immoral or betraying your identity. That inevitably makes compromise or mutual understanding harder, which in turn increases societal fragmentation. That matters: polarization weakens democracy, makes collective action on big problems harder. It makes way for fascism (reminder that TPUSA was founded in 2012).

Alright, I’ve hit my limit on talking about this man. I hope that proved to be helpful and/or informative. As always, be kind to yourselves and be gracious with those who earn it!

Tata for now,

Weeze

Buy me a coffee 🤗