How To Be an Online Leftist

Your Decolonized Guide to Moral Clarity and the Right Side of History

Do you want to be part of a glorious revolution? Do you want to punch up and speak truth to power? Do you want to destroy imperfect people without your conscience bugging you, or indulge in every vindictive and sadistic impulse while maintaining a sense of moral superiority? Then folx, do we have the article for you! This simple guide will walk you through everything you need to know in order to start doing the work, without having to do any actual work!

Getting Your Priorities Straight

You may be asking yourself, should I organize strikes or protest marches, maybe work with unions to improve workers’ rights? Should I donate to disadvantaged people in the developing world, or volunteer or make lifestyle changes to help animals or the environment? Well you could, but that’s, like, work. The trick is to support oppressed peoples through a technique known as “revolutionary retweeting.” Nothing makes a difference for the downtrodden like tweeting about making capitalists face the wall, or how liberals are actually fascists, or how every cop is a literal Klansman. Always remember, the goal is to be liked and accepted, not to achieve any actual progress. What is progress, anyway? Your Twitter account growing is definitely progress of a kind.

Becoming a Good Person™

Your first step is to become a good person. Understand that everything anyone could ever do is only just a baseline. Putting your pronouns in your bio, adopting the lingo, joining the right causes — these things are just the bare minimum. If you don’t do them (or don’t say that you do), you’ll be regarded as so much shit on people’s shoes. But having done them buys you nothing — just a provisional reprieve from a social guillotining. You could donate a kidney to an indigenous, black non-binary stranger. You could literally take a bullet for the leftist cause. The slightest misstep invalidates it all — even seemingly minor stuff from your past. You see, we believe in the survival of the purest. Basically, you’re never more than a few inches from full cannibalization. Even your leftist friends are just waiting for the thinnest excuse to throw you under the bus. What a wonderful group of people! Trust me, you won’t regret trading loyalty to principles or friends for loyalty to an online mob. Best decision you’ll ever make, right up there with extended warranties.

Cultivating a Persona

The next step is to play up your victim points. Do you sometimes feel nervous? Congratulations, you suffer from anxiety disorder. Do you feel blue now and then? You now suffer from clinical depression — tell everyone you meet. Don’t worry about obtaining medical diagnoses for the conditions you claim to have, science is just a colonialist tool of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. They can’t tell you who or what you are! Out of work? Nope, you’re disabled and can’t work, or you were denied employment from discrimination. Ever had a date you later regretted? Sounds to me like someone is a stunningly brave survivor.

And fear not cis and straight folx, anyone can call themselves non-binary or queer, and all of these new sexual orientations like sapiosexual and demisexual basically mean whatever you want them to — which is usually “I’m super special, please like me more!” Now, some might suggest you should work on your issues, take personal responsibility for your situation and try to improve yourself. That's ableist bigotry. You’re perfect just the way you are (but you still need to do better and constantly embellish your struggles).

Education is also key. Make sure to read obscure theory — Marxist theory, critical theory, queer theory, whatever. Now, I hear you — reading is hard, and takes a lot of effort. When I say “read”, I mean “skim”, and when I say “theory” I mean “condescend.” The more theory you’ve casually leafed through, the more room you have to dismiss any arguments that run contrary to your narrative. Somebody asks you to clarify? They clearly haven’t read enough theory and should shut up. You’re free to scoff at them for their ignorance, and need not engage with anything they have to say. It’s not your job to educate people or explain yourself, even if the claims you’re making fly in the face of basic science or known facts. Nobody is owed your emotional labor. Some suggest this makes your perspective unapproachable and gatekeeps people from your movement, but you don’t want those people in the movement anyhow. You might actually affect change, or, Che forbid, win an election. How exhausting.

Knowing the Good People From the Bad

As an online leftist, learning how to identify and differentiate the good people from the bad is of paramount importance. The problem is no one is really ever good. Nothing you do, say, or believe can ever be good enough. So the trick is to identify the bad people instead, and luckily, almost everyone is irredeemably and egregiously despicable.

Here’s the hierarchy of evil, going from just plain old everyday evil to the worst evil imaginable: apolitical people, moderates, conservatives and the far-right (they’re all the same), and finally, at the uttermost zenith of wickedness are other leftists whose views intolerably deviate from yours about two percent of the time. Your most bitter enemies, and the objects of your most blistering scorn will be people so similar to you that no outsider would be able to tell you apart. You join for the community and well-reasoned views, but you stay for the incessant infighting, circular firing squads, back-stabbings, and narcissism of small differences. Honestly, who would even want to live in a world where you’re not constantly looking over your shoulder and sleeping with one eye open? Colonizers, that’s who!

Indeed, many of your friends are fit for little else but the noose, and you would do well to sniff out their transgressions. You should purity-test (and re-test) everyone you associate with to at least the third degree of separation. Sleuth through their past and troll through their Twitter and Instagram likes — hell, hack them if you can. If you find anything amiss — anything at all — sever ties in the most obnoxious, publicly denunciatory way possible. A motto to live by: always be snitching. A.B.S.

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Elections?

Never seriously engage with elections unless it involves Saint Bernard Sanders, Our Light and Hope Who Was Cruelly Robbed Of His Chance To Bring About Paradise By the Neoliberal Establishment. Real political activism would require time and investment and — trigger warning — compromise. Just the presence of such an impure word could taint your revolutionary spirit. Instead, scoff at any attempts to win elections. The game is rigged anyway, which means that your position is morally superior — you get to call both sides contemptible, with your own beloved movement as the shining beacon of justice as opposed to the fascist or fascist-lite conservatives and liberals. Reforms? That’s just another word for neoliberal compromises that only nibble at the edges. Unless you can have full socialism, now, there’s absolutely no point to any other kind of change.

Violence?

We love political violence in support of our cause, but the problem is, violence is only really morally justifiable in self-defense. But there’s a nifty way to get around pesky ethics: reframe everything you don’t like as a form of violence! Once stuff you don’t like is considered “literal” violence, you are fully within your moral right to defend yourself. You’re welcome!

Discoursing in the People’s Republic of Wokelandia

As an online leftist, you’ll want to be intensely intolerant of any difference of opinion, however slight. To understand why we’re so contemptuously dismissive of other views, imagine asking an ordinary person whether [insert minority group] are really human. They would be offended that such a deranged and grotesque question would even be asked. The very idea of debate or discourse on the subject, let alone difference of opinion, is obscene. That level of moral certitude is how we approach every single political, philosophical, and moral issue on every subject.

This close-mindedness won’t sit well with everyone, and some people will start bringing up far-right bullshit like tolerance and viewpoint diversity. Here’s how you deal with that: Every time someone mentions “diversity of thought”, strawman them as advocating for Nazis to be accepted into polite society. While diversity is of course very important, and we pride ourselves on the number of non-white, non-cis, non-straight people in our movement, diversity of thought is basically the same as Nazism.

If a white, straight, or cis-gendered person says something you disagree with, attack them over their identity. Colonizers are wrong because they exist. But no amount of melanin or intersectionality-points matter if your views are centrist or conservative, in which case call them a sell-out, Uncle Tom, or native informant.

Never miss an opportunity to join in on a leftist dogpile. Don’t think too closely about whether it’s deserved, or disproportionate. When someone runs afoul of the mob, nothing that could be done to them is too much, because they’re being “held to account.” Actions have consequences, and as our justice system is irredeemably racist (plus the annoying fact that most of the things we online leftists hate aren’t actual crimes), we must take justice into our own hands.

Those are the rules for bad people, but we have a whole different set of rules for ourselves. When one of us faces backlash for our antics, that’s “harassment” and “abuse.” It’s also a nice touch to fabricate having received rape or death threats. If comrades aren’t flooding your comments to say “I’m so sorry this is happening to you”, do better. To recap: you could try to ruin someone’s life, and it’s well-deserved justice, but when you face any criticism it’s a human rights violation. Pretty neat, huh? Same deal with false equivalencies: use ‘em all you want, but never miss an opportunity to accuse others of doing it.

Now it’s time to use what you have learned to spread social justice to the masses and purge the world of bootlicking grifters. Moral clarity and the right side of history await! You have nothing to lose but your independence of thought! Onward, warriors of justice — to revolution, utopia, and those sweet sweet Twitter likes!

See also: “How To Be an Anti-Racist White Knight”

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