I was born in 1987 to Objectivist parents. Objectivism is the philosophy of Ayn Rand as spelled out in her fiction and nonfiction books. My mother is white. My father was a first-generation Syrian immigrant. He died when I was six. My mother remarried when I was ten. My adopted father is also an Objectivist. We were working class until my mother remarried, then solidly middle-class.
I grew up steeped in Objectivist thought. Some of that was good, or at least useful from a functional perspective. Objectivism teaches that work is of primary importance, that it should be a passion and give life meaning. I learned that one should question everything—even if most Objectivists do not do this in practice. It taught me heterodoxy; I had to learn to be comfortable holding views that were very different from the evangelical Christians that populate my home city of Colorado Springs
Other things I took away from Objectivism: weakness is failure, climate change isn’t real, a world without regulation will naturally be a meritocracy, affirmative action is evil, anyone can succeed if they work hard enough, material and career success is a sign of moral goodness and that failure is a sign of moral rot. That needing anyone else is a sin.
I once moved an entire apartment’s worth of furniture, with the exception of my bed, up a three-floor walkup by myself. Easy chairs, desks, bookcases. I was recovering from food poisoning at the time. I hadn’t eaten in two days. This was stupid and dangerous. I knew it was stupid and dangerous at the time. “I should call someone,” I thought, but I didn’t.
My brain will always be a little bit like that.
My family was not racist—or at least, not in a white supremacist sense. There was a rejection of the idea that systemic racism exists. Talking about systemic racism smacked of “collectivism”—the ultimate sin. I learned that the disparity of outcome between Black people and white people were due to “cultural problems” (which my mother has begun to rethink in the wake of George Floyd’s murder). I was taught that Western culture was superior. We listened to Rush Limbaugh in the car. That seeped in also.
I was discouraged from learning about my Syrian heritage and told not to talk about it. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a book about a woman whose Afghan husband took her back to Afghanistan and essentially kept her captive there. My mother once told me, in reference to Obama, that she could not believe the country was about to vote for someone with a middle name like “Hussein.” My middle name is also Arabic.
I was 13 when 9/11 happened. I passionately supported the War on Terror, including the Iraq war, and protested in favor of it. I wanted to go to West Point and have a career bringing peace and democracy to nations longing to be free, to win hearts and minds, to kill the bad guys–or at least, that’s how I saw it at the time.
I did not get into West Point—my physical fitness test disqualified me. I’d been accepted to the University of Chicago, but for various reasons ended up enlisting in the Army instead for five years. The idea was that I would reapply for West Point after getting in better shape, but by the time that was an option I knew I wanted out of the military.
Questioning
It’s a good thing I enlisted instead of going to the University of Chicago. For the first time, I met people who had grown up dirt poor. People who hadn’t been able to afford dental work, people who regularly had electricity shut off. They hadn’t joined for high-minded ideals like me, but because they wanted to escape a bad situation. Go to college someday. Not everyone, of course, but enough to begin to open my eyes to just how serious inequality is in the United States.
I also, for the first time, met large numbers of people who weren’t white. Although I had never thought of myself as racist, I’d absorbed a lot of casually racist ideas and had some serious subconscious bias. Thanks to patient friends, I came to realize this while still in the military. I have been working on this ever since, and will continue to work on it until I die.
I went to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. I did not see combat. Instead, I saw the god-awful decisions that put soldiers’ lives in danger, which sure made me think twice about the inherent goodness of humankind and how they’d act in pure capitalism. One of my jobs was to go through the cell phones of captured individuals: most of what I found involved Bollywood movies and pictures of family members. Sometimes I would find propaganda—pictures of Russian atrocities from the 1980s spliced in with footage of American soldiers. I realized it was all the same to them. Then I realized it was all the same, period. Heavily-armed foreigners invading their country, telling them how to live. I began to realize how little we really knew about this country, how little we cared about their tribal structures or beliefs or desires, what they wanted their country to look like. I saw that we were going to lose and understood that this was justice.
When I left the Army, I still considered myself a libertarian. I’d become anti-war and realized that racism is real (at least, on an individual level), but I still believed in bootstraps. After all, hadn’t the people in the military bootstrapped their way up? If you were strong enough and good enough, I thought, you could surely do anything.
I have written about this before, but the idea of bootstraps is very appealing to people who are doing well. If you believe that prosperity is a sign of moral righteousness, it stops being a source of unease and starts being a signifier of inherent worthiness.
God forbid, however, you believe in bootstraps and catastrophically fail. You are not merely in crisis due to your life falling apart, but also morally deficient, weak, disgusting. I failed catastrophically in 2011. I’m not particularly inclined to share the details, but it destroyed my confidence in my own goodness.
Someone who believes in bootstraps and finds themself brought low has a few options. They can kill themself, which I almost did. They can cast about for someone else to blame, which is what the far right does. Or they can reevaluate their entire worldview, which is what I ended up doing.
Over the next few years, I very slowly drifted leftwards.
In 2012, I supported libertarian candidate Gary Johnson for president and in the course of my activism on his behalf met enough libertarians to turn me off of libertarianism for the rest of my life. Why are these people all so awful, I wondered, and began to question whether basic Libertarian assumptions might have something to do with it.
Things I’d learned and seen up to that point began to coalesce and I began to shift my opinion. Maybe the Democrats had a point after all. I could not pinpoint the exact moment when I became a liberal, but it happened between 2014 and 2016.
(There were some events in there that facilitated the change but I’m not comfortable talking about those at this time)
By 2016 I was solidly liberal–a few centrist tendencies, a few progressive beliefs, but squarely in line with the Democrats. I voted for Hillary Clinton, though I thought she was a terrible candidate and would have preferred Bernie.
Trump always terrified me. I read a lot about Nazis growing up—spent a lot of time wishing I’d been born in World War II so I could have fought them—and I recognized protofascism in his words. I am proud of my mother and father for also opposing him. We don’t agree on much of anything, but we at least agree on that.
Reedies Against Racism
I began attending Reed College in 2016. My shift from liberalism to leftism occurred while I was there as a result of reading and learning more about the world. By the time I graduated in 2019, I was solidly leftist. I believed—and believe—that capitalism is a system that causes only misery for everyone involved, and that we must find a better way to live. I didn’t know—and still don’t—what that way might be. It’s something I think about a lot.
A few things happened while I was at Reed College. The first had to do with a required class for all freshmen. Traditionally this course covered Greek and Roman literature: the so-calleed “western canon” that nearly every philosopher in the last 2000 years have read. I believe that it’s very important to understand these classics—their strengths and their weaknesses and their profound problems—in order to understand the course of history and political thought. You don’t have to like their outsized influence, but it’s hard to argue that the books didn’t impact all subsequent European thought, or that European culture hasn’t touched every other culture on the planet in variously catastrophic ways. An understanding of these books sure helps us understand how the hell we got here.
A group that called themselves “Reedies against Racism” felt that teaching these books—critically or not—constituted racism, and that the program should be completely overhauled and focus on authors of color. I did not agree with that at the time and still don’t, for all the reasons outlined in the above paragraph. I was vocal in my opposition, and joined a group dedicated to pushing back against the change.
I am not ashamed at all of my opposition to what ended up being a disastrous policy change that led to professors teaching a disjointed survey of disconnected literature without any deeper knowledge of the texts or the cultures from whence they came.
I do regret the way in which I opposed the curriculum change. I embraced a “freedom of speech” angle, in which I argued that Reedies Against Racism were silencing opposition. The idea was to attract the largest possible opposition to the change. We didn’t have to agree on why Reedies Against Racism were wrong, just that they were wrong. It’s a scummy kind of tactic, one we see the far right use often. It was something from my toolkit growing up.
The “free speech is under attack” tactic was the wrong answer. One thing it did do, however, was help me understand how the tactic functions in ways that are not immediately apparent to everyone. This knowledge has helped me better understand the far right. A silver lining, perhaps.
The story of a plucky group of free speech activists fighting back against a group who wanted to cancel the classics was of course perfect fodder for the so-called “intellectual dark web” just beginning to come into its own. Our group was interviewed for several such pieces. It’s easy to become a pawn in the culture wars. One of the journalists who wrote about us suggested I look into the movement, maybe try to write for Quillette. The more I looked, the less I liked what I saw. I declined, and turned my attention to other things.
Patriot Prayer
In 2017, I decided to write my senior thesis on Patriot Prayer. This happened somewhat organically. After Jeremy Christian stabbed two people to death and left a third in critical condition, I joined the counter-protest against the Patriot Prayer rally a few days later. I was curious about what these monsters were saying and decided to enter their rally. What I found there was Joey Gibson preaching about free speech, talking up Martin Luther King, saying they had nothing to do with the stabbing, and doing his very best appeal-to-the-centrist act.
(there were also out-and-out Nazis and white supremacists at that rally, but I didn’t know what to look for yet. I saw what centrists and Republicans and gullible liberals see when they go to these rallies: a perspective I’m glad I can remember)
Clearly, I was misunderstanding something. Were these Nazis, or free speech activists? Were their rights under assault, or were they a danger to the community?
For the next two years, I endeavored to find out. I attended their rallies as a participant observer in order to conduct an ethnography of Patriot Prayer and their affiliated groups. This is a well-established method of research within anthropology. My project had to get approval through Reed’s Internal Review Board (IRB). Their conditions were stringent: anonymization of sources and no surreptitious video or audio recording. Permission always, every time. Before I officially started my thesis I took occasional video so I could remember what happened. After I began, I adhered to their requirement.
I was also required by the IRB to give my real name to interviewees. This scared me, but I wanted to do the research so I accepted it. I created a Facebook account with my real name to interact with people online. My actual Facebook had a fake name at the time.
I participated in the rallies in the sense that I showed up, stood around, marched, and talked to attendees. I presented myself as more sympathetic to the cause than I actually was, which is grey-area ethically but a choice I made in order to gain access.
I was somewhat successful, though not as successful as I would have liked. I was able to conduct nine long-form interviews with people of various involvement in the movement and observe many different kinds of rallies and protests.
By the end of my research, I had seen enough to understand the trick of the far right—the way they draw in people with centrist tendencies with rhetoric of free speech and love, then expose them to more virulent ideas and act in ways that contradict those words. People were paying a lot of attention to the alt-right at the time, but not to “alt-lite” groups like Patriot Prayer who were able to recruit people with fairly mainstream ideas and use those people to advance a cause that was abhorrent to me.
My experience with Patriot Prayer radicalized me. I had already moved well past my far-right beliefs, but seeing the mechanisms of recruitment and the constructed worldview of this group helped me deeply understand some of the sicknesses I still held.
I was able to observe the difference between the experience of attending rallies and the way videos presented those rallies. My thesis explored the recruitment cycle of Patriot Prayer—the way videos convinced people to attend or donate, the way the sense of community and shared struggle kept people coming back, and so on. The result won Reed’s 2019 Class of ’21 award. If you feel like slogging through 200 pages of very dense academic writing you can do so here.
Portland Protests
After I graduated in Spring 2019, I was unsure what to do with the connections I had established. I was nervous about whether antifascist organizations would ever want my help—after all, they’d seen me on the other side for years and I wasn’t sure they’d believe me about why. But I was no longer limited by the terms of the Internal Review Board, and was able to surreptitiously capture footage. On August 17th, 2019 I obtained the kind of footage I’d been hoping for. I am the anonymous informant in this article. The footage I took that day, which included members of the American Guard laughing about attacking protesters with hammers, would have been used in Alexander Dial’s defense had that case gone to trial.
I continued to attend rallies through the end of 2019’s protest season, but began pivoting towards writing about my experiences well before that. I wrote about my thesis findings for Reed Magazine and Portland Monthly Mag, then started making YouTube videos about what I’d learned. I hoped that my insights into the way the far right uses counterprotesters to create propaganda could help craft effective resistance to reactionary movements.
On May 25th, Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. I joined Portland’s Black Lives Matter protests as an activist. When journalists started getting brutalized by the police in July, I decided to try and use my words to describe what was happening. I stopped participating in protests and began to document them with the goal of communicating the truth about police brutality, the cause, and the people fighting for justice. You can read some of my live threads here.
In August of 2020, the far right once again began to protest in Portland and I decided to use my old skill set to get a look at what was going on from the inside. Adventures from this period include breaking news of a drive-by shooting, the December 2020 storming of Oregon’s Capitol building, and an extremely unpleasant altercation at the Million MAGA March just after Trump’s election loss.
Before the protests hit I agonized over what I ought to do with my life. By 2021, I knew beyond a doubt I’d found my calling. Writing, politics, and adrenaline: analysis of our current historical moment not from some aloof pseudo-objective perch but down in the mud where the history happens. I wanted to be a political journalist: a real one, not just on Twitter. I began writing for Truthout and thought hard about how to break into the mainstream.
As 2020 drew to a close, I applied to New York University’s Literary Reportage program: an MFA that focuses on creative nonfiction and longform journalism. They said yes. In August of 2021 I packed my life into a UHaul, drove across the country, and took up residence in the most beautiful place on earth: New York City.
A Journalist With Opinions
My career exploded almost the second the UHaul wheels stopped turning. A Medium article written in the heat of our final withdrawal from Afghanistan went massively viral and shone a sudden bright light on my work. With the help of a friend I was able to parlay that windfall into my first Rolling Stone article, then parlay that byline into others. I have written for New York Magazine and often write for The New Republic. I still can’t believe I’m lucky enough to get paid for doing the thing I love most in the world.
My goal as a journalist is to present people as they really are without whitewashing their beliefs or the consequences of their actions. I don’t do caricatures. I don’t do hit pieces. I don’t pull punches either. Thus far, I have never had the subject of an article complain about the way I portrayed them — in fact, several have reached out to say that they approve. If the people I write about recognize themselves in my work, I have done my job correctly.
Despite occasional attempts to achieve escape velocity, I always seem to return to writing about American conservatism. Something is happening in this country. I think we need to understand it. And I can never entirely forget the person I used to be or the place I came from. In some ways, every article I write is a letter to a version of myself who never changed her mind: an effort to reach someone on the other side of the aisle and get them to start asking questions.
If you have questions, you can ask them here.
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