We Need To Have Imperfect Allies
Hasan Piker, Pattie Gonia, Mark Ruffalo, "Hot Chef"...
The internet has produced a strange and exhausting fantasy in many people: that somewhere out there exists perfectly coherent human comrades. People whose politics align flawlessly with ours. Whose every collaboration passes the purity tests. Who has never platformed the wrong person, donated to the wrong campaign, laughed at the wrong joke in 2014, failed to read the room correctly in 2018, or possessed any contradiction that could be described as problematic. We have created a moral mythology of spotless people and then act offended every time a human being reveals themself instead.
My timelines this week have essentially become one long symposium on disappointment. Pattie Gonia is being sued by Patagonia over trademark infringement. The conversation immediately calcified into camps: either defend the corporation because intellectual property matters or defend the individual because billion-dollar companies should not be crushing artists and activists under the weight of legal machinery. My own feeling is uncomplicated. Did Pattie probably push too close to the brand identity? Sure. Probably. I can admit that without caring one iota. I am not about to shill or defend a corporation no matter how environmental their branding is. It’s still slave wages and microplastics. Come on.
And this week, it keeps happening.
Mark Ruffalo backed billionaire Tom Steyer in the California governor race and people acted as though this revealed some final unforgivable truth about him. I understand the frustration. I do. I feel it too. The billionaire class has spent decades strip-mining the planet and collecting congress members like baseball cards. So when someone who speaks passionately about justice turns around and campaigns for a billionaire, it feels like ideological whiplash. I feel the disappointment. But what exactly am I supposed to do with that information? Pretend Ruffalo’s advocacy for Gaza suddenly becomes meaningless? Ignore years of committed public support to many issues I care about because one endorsement offended my sense of consistency? He is a celebrity. If you put your faith in him as The Last Great White Male Hope, then that’s on you.
Often, online political discourse can resemble diet culture. One contaminated ingredient and suddenly the entire meal becomes morally poisonous. One flawed action and suddenly every good thing a person has ever done gets thrown into a flaming pit like cursed jewelry in a fantasy game. We no longer evaluate people as accumulations of choices, pressures, blind spots, growth, fear, courage, ego, generosity, and contradiction. We evaluate them like they are saints or pollutants.
And then there is Hasan Piker, who already pisses of liberals for not being “blue no matter who”, who brought Ashley St. Clair onto his stream this week. St. Clair once wrote an anti-trans children’s book and moved effortlessly within right-wing reactionary media ecosystems before publicly breaking with both Elon Musk and some of her prior positions. I personally think having her on was a bad decision. I think there are legitimate criticisms to make about platforming. I think trans people have every right to feel exhausted by the endless cycle wherein public figures spend years helping create hostile conditions and then show up seeking redemption only after those positions become socially inconvenient or personally costly.
But even saying all of that, I am not interested in constructing some giant tribunal where Hasan is now exiled from every anti-capitalist movement or labor conversation forever. Because if that is the standard, there will eventually be nobody left to organize with except twelve people screaming at one another in a Discord server about whether or not composting is ableist.
The deeper problem here is that many people do not actually understand what coalition-building looks like because they have never had to build one in real life. Their political experience is primarily aesthetic. It happens through Threads posting. Through captions. Through re-quotes sharpened into little prison shivs. Real organizing is much uglier and much harder. It involves awkward interactions and partial agreements and deeply irritating personalities and people whose analysis on one subject may be brilliant while their takes on another sound like they were assembled from tired TED Talks, lead paint, mold and asbestos.
The labor movement was full of people who hated each other. Civil rights organizations fought internally all the time. Environmental groups disagree constantly on tactics, compromise, energy policy, reform versus abolition, electoral politics versus direct action. Feminist movements have spent generations in brutal conflict over race, sexuality, class, disability, and trans inclusion.
Human beings do not arrive at a justice that is fully assembled. Like IKEA furniture, it needs to be constructed. And you are just hoping all the right parts are there. Political consciousness is uneven and it develops asymmetrically. Someone may understand empire and still carry misogyny. Someone may fight racism while remaining deeply classist. Someone may arrive at queer liberation before understanding Palestine or arrive at anti-capitalism before understanding disability justice.
This does not excuse harm. It never does. But it the undeniable reality.
And I think many online spaces have lost the ability to distinguish between “this person has harmful blind spots” and “this person is fundamentally unusable for any collective purpose.” Those are wildly different conclusions. One allows room for growth and strategic cooperation. The other produces permanent exile.
The Threads discourse this week about KW Bogen and the so-called “Hot Chef” saga is another example of this bizarre cultural metabolism where people become furious over matters that, in the scale of global suffering, barely qualify as disturbances. She dated a chef in Paris. The relationship ended. She is now writing about it behind a paywall. Everyone is apparently enraged. Why? Vanity, greed, self-mythologizing, oversharing, parasocial manipulation — pick whichever accusation currently has the most engagement-friendly flavor.
Meanwhile I look at someone who has been publicly outspoken as an anti-Zionist, Jewish voice supporting Palestine during a moment when that position takes real social and professional collateral. And that matters to me more than whether strangers online think she enjoys attention too much. Even if she were vain or even if you do find it annoying or inauthentic or even if she monetized her heartbreak in ways you found distasteful, none of that automatically disqualifies her from solidarity on issues that materially matter.
Collaboration is not canonization.
There is solid historical precedent for this, by the way…
