I wasn’t there purely to enjoy the good vibes. We are deep in election season in LA and I was there to table for my friend Faizah, who is running for the city council seat in our district. It was a blast talking to strangers who live in the neighborhood and are excited to support her; there was an undeniable shared feeling of possibility and hope as we all converged on a breezy afternoon. I bumped into a multitude of friends I’ve met over my years of organizing in West LA. There’s something truly irreplicable about spontaneously running into someone you haven’t seen for months in the middle of a massive crowd. The only true antidote to the technofascist dystopia being constantly beamed into our phones is walking around in the sunshine and talking to flesh-and-blood human beings.

One of the most surreal aspects was seeing all the closed gas stations with no customers, their prices all firmly above $6 a gallon. Even on such a pleasant day, there was no escaping reminders of this disastrous, brutal war on Iran. I’ve been haunted this week by reports that the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz will cause mass food insecurity, particularly because the price of liquified, natural gas-based fertilizer that much of the world is dependent on will skyrocket. People will starve because of this. In conjunction, a former USAID worker has been making the rounds spelling out how intentionally Elon Musk and his DOGE ghouls put the agency “into the wood chipper.” The immediate result was that 700,000 people died in one year, the vast majority of whom were children. The sheer, staggering amount of death that this administration is already responsible for makes your entire nervous system freeze up.

How are we meant to show up for work and shop for groceries in such a time? Barbarians with unhinged jaws are attempting to swallow the world whole. How can we expect to just live isolated lives where our taxes and pensions fund machines of imperialism and immiseration? Pretending things are ordinary when a major government contractor like Palantir releases a deranged, incoherent, and self-contradictory technofascist manifesto is enough to make you feel totally unmoored from reality.

It was announced this week that the Onion has finally been approved to buy InfoWars out from underneath Alex Jones. (Their announcement of the purchase is very funny.) If you want to talk about being unmoored from reality, it’s difficult to think of a clearer example than Jones. Here is a man who simultaneously seems to sincerely believe he is anointed by God to be in an interdimensional spiritual war with the devil, and also cravenly lies about tragedies like the Sandy Hook massacre to sell methylene blue and dick pills. Somehow he has simultaneously been claiming the mantle of seeing past the left-right paradigm while also slovenly worshipping at the feet of Trump for a decade. He has been distorting reality for a generation; he is the human embodiment of a cherry-picked, John Birch Society-style conspiracist politics that has become normalized on social media. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have largely aped the style that Jones has perfected for decades.

On Saturday night someone tried to kill the president. It feels routine at this point. The White House Correspondents Dinner got disrupted and Trump blustered about wanting to go back on stage and that the show must go on. He gave a “defiant” press conference at the White House. His pathetic little acolytes on X insisted that this incident proves that this is why he needs his own private ballroom at the White House. The suspected shooter seems like a normie tutor and game developer who donated a whopping $25 to Kamala Harris. Naturally, the consensus that’s formed online is that this was a false flag operation. The more likely truth is this entirely unexceptional man was so horrified by what this administration has wrought that he felt personally responsible to stop it. Alex Jones should be very pleased that his influence has grown so much that the average person immediately reverts to conspiracism.

A lot of people don’t want to sit with the messy truth of why Alex Jones has managed to have such an enduring legacy. He is, unfortunately, a master orator, capable of tapping into a lizard-brained anger about the disconnection from humanity that permeates so much of modern civilization. It really doesn’t matter if what he says is factually true when the sheer force of how he communicates touches your amygdala. His monologue in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life is effective because it feels like it’s shaking you from a horrific dream no one else is willing to pull you from. No matter how much you logically know he’s a craven opportunist, there’s something that resonates about hearing him bellow on behalf of humanity. There are so few people in our public life who are capable of tapping into that instinctual part of ourselves that recognizes the way this society is currently arranged is intolerable; a voice like Jones’ can resonate. Jones comes from a family of anti-communist white supremacists, but when you live under a government that does legitimately incarcerate more people than any other country on the planet, spreading terror and despotism around the globe, his paranoid charlatan act screaming about government tyranny eventually starts to make sense.

All of these dark thoughts were clanging around my head when I got up on Sunday. They didn’t get entirely obliterated by going and being in public with my neighbors, but they did lessen. We live in a time of high strangeness and institutional collapse. Yet it’s harder to hate anyone the more time you spend making direct eye contact with strangers and making yourself vulnerable enough to believe that you can come into consensus with them about what a better world might look like. The Trumps and Alex Joneses of this world want to force us to believe that there is only fear and despair at the bottom of everything, but when you find the courage to be amongst your fellow man, it’s impossible to deny that love and solidarity permeate all human interactions.

If we have the power within us to transform streets to make them better suit our needs, there’s no reason to not have faith that we can similarly transform all social relations to better serve humanity. It’s so easy in these times to feel subsumed with doubts and fears, but truly reality is something we’re reshaping at all times: The more intentionally we engage in that shaping, the better off we all are.