Op-Ed: You Don’t Get To Burn It Down If You’ve Never Built A Damn Thing

I hear you. All your tweets. All your slogans.

All your online trolling that treats human lives like strategy—disposable, rhetorical, and forgotten. All your fantasy revolutions with no aftermath plan, no mourning, no math.

I hear you. And I’m saying it plain:

Sit down.

You don’t get to wear the language of liberation while you cheerlead for slaughter. You don’t get to name-drop movements you’ve never built, grief you’ve never held, or strategy you’ve never risked a damn thing for.

Because real organizing—real liberation—looks nothing like this.

When did you become the world’s funeral clowns?

You are out here treating struggle like a spoken word night gone off the rails. Quoting Audre Lorde to justify war crimes. Invoking King while denying Jewish and Palestinian suffering. Using “decolonization” like a bludgeon with no vision for life after death.

Let’s be clear: the legacies of radical thought are not yours to cosplay.

We’ve buried mentors and friends who gave everything to this work. They held coalitions together across race, religion, class, and creed. They did not sacrifice for hashtags. They did not sacrifice so you could embrace nihilism.

This is not speaking truth to power. This is performance art for your echo chamber.

And it’s killing people.

Not every oppressed person becomes free by killing their neighbor.

Some of you are lost in a lie:

“They harmed us. Now anything we do is righteous.”

That’s not justice. That’s trauma reenactment. You can’t resurrect your dead by creating more orphans. You can’t grieve your people through rape and kidnapping. You don’t free Palestine by turning the words allyship and solidarity into a warzone.

Source: Op-Ed: You Don’t Get To Burn It Down If You’ve Never Built A Damn Thing