Last we left off, I was volunteering at the No Kings rally. I’d stuck around to see if I could help the Indivisible Team with anything. The stage was strategically placed in front of Independence Hall — a view our team was hoping to use as a backdrop. Counter-protestors had another idea however. They set up behind the stage — not by accident, but in the camera’s line of sight — with a massive flag and banners ready.
It’s important to note these weren’t the usual passersby with signs or quiet solidarity chants for Gaza. This was a coordinated counter-demonstration. Their goal wasn’t solidarity, but to disrupt.
They’d arrived with a massive Freedom for Palestine flag and banners. Black and white keffiyehs, draped around their necks like armor. The flag-bearer covered his face and had a red “Make Palestine Free Again” hat. I didn’t think anything of them at first, until I heard one of the organizers talking to another about what to do about them.
It was then that I realized not only was the flag huge, but they were waving it and walking in front of volunteers and protestors who were holding their own US flags. It wasn’t subtle — they were trying to dominate the visual, to turn the camera angle.
At one point, the protestors drowned out a speaker with Free Free Palestine chant. What struck me wasn’t the message itself but the method. The optics. The insistence on centering their cause, even if it meant obscuring everyone else’s. There was no attempt at coalition, no conversation — just competition for moral ground. I heard multiple organizers in the official tent talk about how they were trying to work with the group, but that they were unrelenting.
“They’re being jerks.” One person said.
After a few more tense but silent standoffs — during which I’d secretly run around the venue gathering more American flag-bearers to stand behind the stage — I’d had enough. I suggested that the next time they chanted, we start our own round of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” (Look, man — I’m new to this and not yet disciplined enough to know when to shut up.) We ultimately decided it was better to ignore them since no one could hear them past the stage. Even now, I’m not sure what their goal was besides being disruptive.
I’ll hand it to them — they’re organized — but I’ve been more than pissed off by them in recent weeks. I know it showed, because the flag bearer made sure to drape his flag over my face for a good minute. He paced back and forth in front of our American flags, letting his own banner spill carelessly over other people as well. I couldn’t tell if he was spoiling for a fight or just oblivious. Either way, the effect was the same — a silent, irritating power play that didn’t need words to convey his distaste.
It’s sad really. Because what they have to say is important — and it’s right. No one should live under occupation, or under constant fear. Genocide is a very serious matter.
Moral alignment alone isn’t strategy. It’s not enough to be righteously furious if you can’t build relationships— if your tactics alienate the very people who might otherwise stand beside you.
I mean, these organizers brought seven million Americans together nationally. You’d think you’d want the help.
Our team all agreed: the cause is important — of course it is — but don’t try to make your flag more important than the U.S. flag. Not here. Not at a rally in America about saving our democracy.
It wasn’t about silencing anyone. It was about focus. About holding space for a message already fighting to be heard in the noise of disinformation and apathy. You can’t build solidarity by steamrolling the people who might have stood beside you.
And that’s what purity politics so often misses — the difference between being right and being effective. Between moral conviction and collective power.
We’ve seen it over and over lately. Suggestions that the Never Kamala voters had cost us the election— as if the point were punishment, not prevention. Ignoring the fact that Donald Trump would be far worse for the people of Gaza. He’s already said the quiet part out loud: calling to bulldoze Gaza and build condos. Completely bypassing the fact that the Vice President’s job is distilled to a tie-breaker vote and a contingency plan. Purity doesn’t care about complexity and civics. It cares about blame — demanding accountability for a miscast villain in their story.
That’s the thing about Purity Politics. It really needs a target more than a plan. You see it on both sides. The Pro-Life movement has long protested at Planned Parenthood locations claiming a moral high ground while simultaneously supporting cuts to reproductive access that prevent the need for abortion in the first place.
My mom was eighteen when she got pregnant with me. Our great-aunts and grandmother came from a deeply religious generation, and they were ashamed of a pregnancy out of wedlock— especially because she was the first girl in the family it happened to. That added an intense layer of gendered shame that should never have been hers to carry. She never even got a baby shower. Her relationships with the matriarchal women in our family have never quite healed.
Planned Parenthood was the only place that met her without judgment. They gave her counseling, helped her prepare for the reality of her decision, and supported her through the pregnancy when no one else would— certainly not the Pro-Life crowd of today.
That’s the real cost of purity politics. It fractures what makes families — and any forward movement — whole.
The same self-defeating logic plays out across movements that mistake moral theater for progress. Purity loves performance because it feels like power. It turns moral conviction into a holier-than-thou competition, where any forward momentum is buried under impossible demands. In the end, its short-sighted morality punishes the very people it claims to protect.
When everyone’s busy guarding their own righteousness, no one’s left building the bridges we actually need to cross.
I posted about it recently on Threads after campaign alumni had been graciously offered a virtual viewing of Kamala’s Book tour — saving me $300. She was interrupted multiple times and heckled by Free Palestine protesters. I’d proposed that they were hurting their own cause by harassing the wrong person, when the person actually in power was in the same city.
That didn’t go over well. After a few arguments that clearly went nowhere and a migraine brewing in the back of my head, I muted notifications. Clearly I’d hit a nerve. No one wanted to discuss the point of my post— that this strategy is killing any solidarity with the movement.
In hindsight, I could’ve worded it better. I don’t disagree with the cause; I just think the strategy is flawed. It reduces a decades-long, deeply complex geopolitical crisis to a kind of moral righteousness that nobody can live up to — and somehow, Democrats are the ones expected to save it.
Some of the most Democratic supporters of the movement — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamandi— have been turned on simply for acknowledging the horror of October 7th. These aren’t moderates; they’re the far-left flank, the ones who have been pushing for justice, peace, and equality for years. If even they’ve stopped being good enough, what hope does anyone else have?
The moral absolutism is exhausting to watch because it keeps shrinking the circle of who’s “good enough” to vote for. More Americans stayed home than voted for either candidate in the 2024 Election. (I’m still pissed about it.)
The demand for perfection has become the enemy of progress. You can’t build coalitions in a world where empathy itself is treated as betrayal.
I’ve always liked the metaphor that voting is like public transit — if the bus doesn’t take you directly to your destination, you take the one that gets you closest to where you need to go.
I don’t pretend to understand all the nuance here. I don’t think it should be controversial to say both Israel and Palestine should exist. No one should be killed or starved simply for their religion.
At Independence hall, before I knew this group wasn’t there out of solidarity, I saw an Israel flag next to a Free Palestine flag. At first I thought, Aww that’s great! Both sides are here. Then I thought Shit is there going to be trouble?
That flicker of hope followed by dread kind of sums up where we are right now. The idea of coexistence feels both obvious and impossible. Even symbols that should stand for peace have become battlegrounds. Somehow, instead of finding common ground, we keep digging trenches.
What I find funniest lately is that the work I’ve been doing in my Public Narrative class directly proves my viewpoint. There are 141 students from 60 countries. I know of at least one person who is Israeli and one that is Palestinian. Both are working to end the war, yet neither of them have devolved into hating the other.
They talk about loss, about grief, about the unbearable weight of what’s happening and the urgency of ending it as soon as they can. Always through the lens of humanity and freedom, not vengeance. They model the thing so many movements forget: that preserving empathy is discipline. It’s what allows people to stay in the room long enough to imagine something better together.
I keep thinking about those charged moments at Independence Hall. What I could have done better, how maybe I should have talked to them as my bubbly self — see if I could Elle Woods the situation. I remember my fury at their audacity and then the sting of humility as a Congresswoman handled it with practiced grace. She’d had a heckler in the front row repeating the same question over and over. What are you doing to end the Genocide? She eventually acknowledged him and spoke about freedom of speech and how he was right — the genocide in Gaza needs to end.
Yet for all her efforts, the tension didn’t ease. She agreed with him and amplified the cause, and it wasn’t enough. The jeers of “Free, Free Palestine” kept coming, and the flag-bearer draped the banner over my face as I stood near our tent and the press area. Our team looked at each other in quiet frustration. That’s when I realized what people mean when they say there’s no pleasing everybody.
Maybe that’s why those minutes at Independence Hall — and my failed attempt at nuance on Threads — still replay in my head. My fury, my naïve hope, the conversations that went nowhere. A reminder that righteousness without strategy is just noise. Moral clarity means nothing if it never becomes actionable.
I keep hoping to find a way to get past the noise and fury. I thought about trying to talk to the group about a way we could set up a visible space for them next time. See if there was some way we could work together and put tension behind us. I want to believe there’s still a path forward, that we can learn from the mistakes of the past instead of repeating them.
Freedom isn’t just an American promise — it’s a human one.
And like democracy itself, it only works when we build it together. We can’t fix anything abroad if people lose freedoms here at home. The causes that ignite our souls are important, but that doesn’t mean we can forget how to work together toward common goals.
Wonderful piece -- written with passion and eloquence and insight. As a progressive, an American Jew, a supporter of a free Palestine, and a lifelong Democrat, I share so many of the frustrations you express here. I, too, like the mass transit analogy for voting. In the Age of T%#mp especially, we just cannot afford to allow the quest for perfection to get in the way of pragmatic political choices.