When Aureliano’s father José Arcadio Buendía dies in One Hundred Years of Solitude, tiny yellow flowers fall on Macondo all night. So many of them, that by morning they cover the roofs, and pile up against the doors, and the townspeople have to go out with shovels and rakes to clear the street so the funeral can get through. And that’s it. The novel doesn’t stop to marvel at any of this. Nobody in Macondo asks where the flowers came from, it just keeps going, the way you’d keep going after mentioning that it was hot out.

That flat, unsuprised voice is, I think, the whole art of magical realism. And it inspires my spiritual practice every day.

According to the internet, the term “magical realism” started with painting. In 1925 the German art critic Franz Roh used Magischer Realismus to describe a new generation of painters who were rendering ordinary objects (a clock, a pot of tulips) with so much stillness and precision that the objects started to feel uncanny, as if they might look back at you. The magic was inside the real. Roh was talking about the strangeness of looking closely, which is, not for nothing, also a pretty decent description of zazen.

Writers in Latin America took the idea and went a lot further with it. The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, in his 1949 prologue to The Kingdom of This World, argued for lo real maravilloso, the marvelous real. His claim was that the European surrealists had to manufacture the marvelous in their studios, and in the Americas it was just there, in the history and the land and the faith of the people, no manufacturing required.

Gabriel García Márquez said some version of this for the rest of his life. He told The Paris Review that he found the tone for his work in his grandmother, who would report the most outlandish events with a completely straight face. In his 1982 Nobel lecture he insisted that it was the outsized reality of Latin America, the dictators and the disappeared, that had given writers more to work with than imagination ever could.

And he sets the terms right there in his first sentence. A man about to be shot remembers the afternoon he first touched ice. Ice! In Macondo, ice is the miracle, the thing that makes a child’s hand burn with wonder, and raining flowers are weather. In this way the genre swaps the categories we were raised with and asks us to notice how arbitrary those categories were to begin with.

Nothing Happened Here

This literary genre was born in places where the “real” could be dominating and cruel. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, soldiers gun down striking banana workers in the plaza, which García Márquez drew from the 1928 Banana Massacre at Ciénaga, Colombia. The one survivor wakes up on a train full of corpses being hauled to the sea to be dumped, and when he makes it back to town, everyone tells him nothing happened. Nothing. The official story has already replaced the dead. And then it rains for nearly five years.

The flowers and the massacre get told in the same voice, and both are facts, and the book refuses to rank them. It won’t let the miracle cancel out the atrocity and it won’t let the atrocity erase the miracle.

We live under our own official stories. We are told the detained are not really people. We are told the bombed are not really children, and that we are not really responsible for the bombs we are paying for and sending to be dropped on them. This is gaslighting at the scale of a state. What magical realism points us to, I believe, is a kind of stubborn witness, where you keep reporting what you saw with a straight face even when it is beyond belief.

In The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende centers Clara, a clairvoyant girl modeled on Allende’s own grandmother (who held séances and took telepathy very seriously). Clara moves the salt shaker across the table with her mind and foresees earthquakes and deaths, and the family more or less treats all of it as household weather.

Clara also writes everything down. For decades she fills notebooks with the life of the house, and years after her death, when her granddaughter Alba is arrested and tortured by a military regime drawn from Pinochet’s, Clara’s spirit comes to her in the cell and tells her to write in her head to stay alive. Alba survives. Afterward she rebuilds the family’s story out of her grandmother’s notebooks. So the clairvoyant is the archivist. Same woman. Same practice, which I’d argue was always just this: paying attention, and refusing to let the official, disenchanted story win.

Everything is a Miracle

Most of us live in a split world, where the sacred is in one room and the ordinary is in another. I light a candle to Hestia every morning at my household alter before I sit zazen, and then afterwards I snuff it out with a verse, and go back to “real life.”

Magical realist characters don’t do that. When Tita cooks in Like Water for Chocolate, her grief goes into the wedding cake, and every guest who eats it is overcome with longing for a lost love, and Laura Esquivel writes it as plainly as a recipe. Anyone who practices kitchen witchcraft already knows this. What we pour into the pot goes into the people we feed. The Old Ways never separated the spell from the recipe.

If you look closely at these novels, everything in them is alive. When José Arcadio (the son) is shot in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a thread of his blood leaves the room, slips under the door, crosses the street, turns corners and climbs curbs and travels the length of Macondo until it finds his mother, Úrsula, in her kitchen.

Anthropologists call this animism. The religious studies scholar Graham Harvey describes it as living in a world full of persons, most of whom happen not to be human, and Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about how her Potawatomi language grants aliveness to far more of the world than English does, so a hill can be grammatically alive, and so can a bay, or a day. English mostly gives us “it.” And I think that small pronoun does a lot of unnoticed work, training us to see a warehouse of objects where our ancestors saw kin.

The farm people of Småland, where my own matrilineal ancestors hail from, set out porridge for the beings who lived under the house. In the Peloponnese, on my father’s side, every spring had its nymph. Magical realism only reads as fantasy to a culture that forgot this grammar, and witchcraft is one of the ways I am remembering it. The Old Ways were always a practice of relationship with the more-than-human world, and a spell is a call to a cosmos who can respond.

Other People Are Not Me

In his Mountains and Waters Sutra, Dōgen writes that the blue mountains are always walking, and that if we doubt their walking we don’t yet understand our own. Elsewhere he takes up an old teaching that insentient beings preach the Dharma, so fences, walls, tiles and pebbles are all giving the teaching, all the time, and we are the ones who’ve stopped listening.

An old koan says ordinary mind is the Way. And teachings on suchness point at things exactly as they are, before we sort them into mundane and sacred. A crow on the fence is a messenger. It is also a crow. Both are true in the same breath.

Then there are the dishes.

In 1237 Dōgen wrote Instructions for the Cook (Tenzo Kyōkun), a whole text on how a monastery kitchen should be run, and in it he asks the cook to handle the rice and the greens and the pots with the same care he'd give his own eyes.

In contemporary times, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that we can wash the dishes to get them clean, or we can wash the dishes as if they are baby buddha.

And this, I think, is where Zen and magical realism meet. In the kitchen. Úrsula receives her son’s blood there. Tita pours her grief into the cake there. Dōgen realizes the whole Dharma in a soup pot.

In no way is this meant to be a case for believing every sign is a sign, or for handing our discernment over to the nearest crow. But I do believe the sink is an altar, and the bowl is Buddha Nature.

So the practice, as I understand it, is mostly a matter of tone. We stop narrating the mystery with a wink. We let the dream about our dead grandmother be a visit, and we let the hawk that circles on the anniversary carry meaning. But we say it plainly, the way these grandmothers did, and then we go put the kettle on.

The world is so enchanted. It is also so wounded. I’d really like to know what’s been talking to you lately, whether it’s a hawk or a grandmother in a dream or something you haven’t told anyone about yet. Tell me in the comments. Or don’t, and just go do your dishes, and listen.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿 Constant Craving ✨

Every once in a while a parenting social media post goes around after a collective trauma. Six pastel slides on how to talk to your kids about this or that, with a stock photo of a parent and child on a couch, both looking earnest, and a list of conversation starters that sound like they were written by a school district’s legal department.

This time, in response to the Cornell 7, the topic is “how to talk to your kids about bystander intervention.” I get why people are talking about this online. It also makes me want to throw my phone in the Hudson river.

If there is one thing I have learned in my 2+ years as a mom and 20+ years as a child caregiver, it is that kids learn by example. At my son’s young age, it’s literal mimicry: if I say something, he tries to say it back. If I do something, he gets up and wants to do it with me. While developmentally different, this is the case at every age. They copy how we hold a fork and how we talk about the neighbors, which friends we quietly stop calling after they make a mistake, and how we go silent when the same uncle starts yelling at his kids (again) at Thanksgiving dinner, while everyone looks at their plate.

They are watching all the time, and they’re catching a lot more than we give them credit for, including the discrepancy between what we say and what we do.

If you sit your kid down and lecture them about standing up for the kid getting picked on, but they have watched you laugh along at a mean joke, look away when someone gets belligerent in front of you, sign the petition and never show up, or keep your head down at work when your coworker got screwed, the only lesson that lands is that you are a hypocrite. They will learn that one very well. Possibly forever.

Courage Costs Something

Standing up to injustice takes courage because it costs us something. Your peers may mock you. They may pressure you to stand down, and they’ll call it chill or loyalty, or minding your own business. The bullies will threaten you and coerce you, and sometimes they’ll follow through.

Your body shakes. Your voice trembles. You have to be willing to take a real risk, with your friendships and your standing and sometimes your physical safety, and you have to do it without knowing whether anyone will back you.

This is something I have been consistent about throughout my life. I’m not suggesting that I’m never a coward, nor am I tooting my own horn. It's just a matter of record, and it has caused me quite a bit of grief over the years. Ask anyone who's ever known me. I can't keep my trap shut when someone with power or authority is misusing said power or authority and causing harm.

When I was a kid, I sat in the principal’s office all banged up after my third or fourth playground fight with bullies who were picking on me or someone else, and she said, “sooner or later they’ll learn to stop messing with you.” I didn’t get into trouble because I never started it, but I also had to deal with it myself.

In high school, I rallied the girls in the locker room before cross-country practice to stop hanging out with boys who were mean to us, but apparently male attention that comes with getting your head shoved underwater at the beach is better than no male attention at all.

At my corporate media job, I rallied the troops to go to HR about our creep boss. HR didn't do shit except move me to another department, and honestly, I'm surprised I didn't get fired. He was finally let go after another round of women went to HR because this time it was after the Me Too movement of 2017 and there were stakes.

At my former Zen center, I repeatedly pushed back on teachers misusing their spiritual authority, and my doe-eyed peers looked shocked that I would talk to our so-called "sensei" like that.

These days, I’m a suburban mom who makes my neighbors uncomfortable when I call out the Democratic nominee in our district’s congressional race for her unacceptable take on Palestine—she supports unconditional aid to Israel, declaring on television that it is a war not a genocide. Gross.

I have always spoken up. It's something I've had a lot of practice at. And it has cost me every time, although not nearly as much as the cost of the primary harm. So here I am, sitting down with you for a heart-to-heart.

Nobody has ever learned courage from just a talk. Your children will learn it the way the rest of us did, by doing it while visibly terrified, and by watching you do it first.

“Shop Still Open?”

Jane Doe says seven members of the Cornell Chi Phi Fraternity drugged and sexually assaulted her at the frat house in October 2024 and invited other members to join through a group chat. Around 1:42 a.m., one member sent a crude message to the chat saying a woman upstairs was available for sex. She says more men then came into the room and the assaults went on until 5:45 a.m. Later, someone asked if the shop was still open. Someone answered yes.

A whole chat full of young men read that. Not one of them, as far as anyone has reported, went upstairs to stop it. Nobody typed “what the fuck is wrong with you.” Nobody called the police (although the police are a bunch of abusers, too. I said what I said).

Reading that message and doing nothing is a choice. So how did a room full of young men from good schools and, presumably, a lot of top-notch parenting social media content, arrive at a night like that with their courage already gone.

They learned it. Years of repetition taught them that boys who are sensitive, boys who care, boys who say “dude, stop,” get punished for it, in the locker room, on the school bus, in the lunch line and, often enough, at the dinner table. They get mocked, isolated, roughed up, called whatever word was going around that year. When it happened, no adult came. No coach, no dad, no teacher. Nobody backed them.

A kid who goes through that a few times does the math. Sticking your neck out means getting your head cut off, and you’ll be all alone when it happens. By nineteen the math is reflex. The phone buzzes at 1:42 a.m. and the body already knows what to do, which is nothing.

The adults who didn’t come were us. We were scared or we didn’t want to make it weird with the other parents. That is the lesson the boys learned.

What’s Our Excuse?

It would be convenient if this were a story just about toxic frat culture, because then the rest of us could shake our heads at Ithaca and go back to our lives. But we are three years into a genocide in Gaza, paid for with our tax dollars and our weapons contracts. The bombs are ours. The killing did not stop when the word “ceasefire” started showing up in headlines; Israeli strikes are still killing people nearly every day, children included, and most people are complicit bystanders just like those young men.

Here at home, ICE is pulling our neighbors out of courthouses and off job sites and putting them somewhere their loved ones can’t find them, with our tax dollars funding that too. And the best most people can rally is the occasional permitted protest. Permits! From the same machine devouring our neighbors!

Crunch, crunch crunch.

Most people I know have put zero skin in the game to stop any of it. Zero. Maybe they posted a watermelon in 2023, maybe they went to a march and took a picture, maybe they “liked” my post and then went quiet when I called out our congressional nominee, because, after all, we have to win the house back so I guess the machine can have Palestinian babies and our immigrant neighbors.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

This is the grown-up version. This is our group chat. The message comes in, a video of a father carrying what’s left of his sweet baby in a plastic bag, a neighbor’s cousin gone after a check-in appointment, and we read it, and we scroll.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

We have our reasons, and the reasons sound a lot like the frat house. We don’t want to lose the job or the donors or the invitation or our standing. We watched students get suspended and arrested, people get fired and doxxed and called antisemitic for saying what the UN’s own investigators said, and we did the same math those boys did. Sticking your neck out means getting your head cut off, and nobody backs you, anyway, so what’s the point?

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

The Guardians of the World

The Buddha named two qualities he called the guardians of the world: hiri, the inner sense of moral shame that stops us from doing harm, and ottappa, the moral dread of what our harm does to others. Without them, he says, the world falls into confusion and nobody can tell friend from foe.

What strikes me, as a practitioner and a parent trying to raise a decent human, is that neither quality gets transmitted in a chat, no matter how heartfelt. We absorb them from the people around us, through the body, the way we pick up an accent.

A child who watches a parent go red in the face and say “that’s not okay” to someone bigger than them catches something. A child who watches that parent stay quiet catches something too.

“The Talk” for Grown-Ups

If we want our kids to intervene, we have to intervene where they can see us, shaking. We tell them about the times we didn’t and what it cost someone else. When they do the brave thing and pay for it, we back them. That means calling the school, showing up at the meeting, and never once telling them they should have kept their head down. We let them see us lose a friend over it. We let them see us do it when we are scared, when the cost feels too high.

The talk isn’t nothing. It just only works if it is accompanied by courage.

If you see yourself in the parent with the carousel, there’s no shame in starting there. Your kid is watching. Next time something happens in front of them, though, let them watch you speak up, even if your voice shakes.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿 Constant Craving ✨

In Japan the same week is Higan, “the other shore,” and Sōtō temples mark it with services and a turn toward the pāramitās. Both traditions stage a crossing.

Harvest is karma’s own image. Its fruit is vipāka, ripening. All year we have been raising energy and aiming it, and some of it went where we meant it to go. Some went where the culture put it. The equinox is a good time to sort the sheaves. What came in, compassion or craving?

After the equinox the dark half of the year begins. In earth-based traditions, this is the release. We give thanks, dedicate the merit, and let go of that which we cannot hold through winter.

One Moon, Many Waters

I practiced the dharma for over a decade before I started practicing witchcraft. I sat zazen. I took the precepts. I bowed and chanted. I swept the zendō. I studied the teachings and trusted them.

Then I learned to cast a circle. I cleansed a space, marked a boundary, called in the elements, raised energy, aimed it, and let it go. Partway through my initiatory training, I connected the choreography. I had been doing this for years, in another room, under other names.

The first time I cast a circle, my body already knew the affect. I swept the space before I marked the edge, the same stroke I used during soji. My belly dropped the way it dropped on the cushion, that same fall from thought into body.

In my experience, there is Zen before witchcraft, and there is Zen after.

Before, I went through the motions. I kept up. I found the page, bowed on cue, chanted the sutra without losing my place. The service was something I aspired to master.

After witchcraft, the doshi became a sorcerer. The chant an invocation. The bells a working in which energy was raised with intention—a vibration in my hair follicles, a hum at the base of my spine. Nothing in the liturgy had changed. I had. I finally had a word for how the practice was transforming my body, and the word was magic.

Witchcraft gave me a framework, and the framework showed me what the dharma had been doing all along.

What I mean by magic

Often attributed to Dion Fortune, and popularized by Starhawk, I’m defining magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will.” Magic in this essay means a disciplined method for changing the mind and the life that flows from it, with intention as the steering and concentration as the force.

In Pāli, the word vijjā means knowledge. It also means charm or spell. In the suttas, a skeptic uses the word “vijjā” when he dismisses a monk’s power as a mere charm. The Buddha’s own epithet, vijjā-caraṇa-sampanna (accomplished in knowledge and conduct), uses the same word.

The Suttas condemn the lowly arts, such as charms and divination. So, in effect, the tradition sorts vijjā into low and high. The dharma considers itself high vijjā or “high magic.”

It is my experience that the dharma applies spellcraft—which very much surrounded the Buddha in fifth-century BCE India—and aims it at the ending of craving, which the Buddha found to be the root of suffering. Whether spellcraft or his understanding of craving came first, the two fit together. If magic is the art of changing consciousness at will, then Buddhism is a school of magic. It teaches us to trace results to sources, raise energy, aim it, and let it go. And it asks us to test all of it in our own lives. Come and see.

The Buddha believed in magic

The suttas describe psychic powers as real fruits of deep concentration. Moggallāna is named foremost among the monks in psychic power. The Buddha performs the Twin Miracle at Sāvatthī. The canon treats these powers as part of the world. Then the Buddha asks us to spend very little time on them.

In the Kevaddha Sutta, a householder asks him to have a monk perform a wonder so the people of Nālandā will grow more devout. The Buddha refuses three times. He names three kinds of wonder: the wonder of magical power, the wonder of reading minds, and the wonder of instruction. He sees danger in the first two. A bystander cannot tell power from trick. A display asks people to trust a performer, and that is a fragile foundation for a liberatory path.

The wonder of instruction can be tested by the person doing it. No skeptic can easily explain away a change in their own experience of reality.

So the tradition holds two kinds of magic. One moves things in the world—abundance, protection, weather, flight. The other changes the one who works it—concentration, ethical transformation, the ending of craving. Buddhism grants us both, but puts its weight on the second.

In Ancient Greek philosophy the Neoplatonists gave us two words for this. Theurgy (theourgia, god-work) is work aimed unification, and it changes the one doing it. Iamblichus argued that the embodied soul cannot think its way home, so it needs ritual, hymn, and invocation to rise. Thaumaturgy (thaumatourgia, wonder-work) is work aimed at the outer conditions. It changes the weather, the fortune, the harvest.

The suttas draw a clear line between the two. The wonder of magical power and the wonder of mind-reading are thaumaturgic. The wonder of instruction changes the practitioner. The Buddha demotes the first two, and he teaches the third. His weighting sits squarely on the theurgic side.

The parallel bends at the aim. Theurgy reaches for union. What the two philosophical frameworks share is the claim that disciplined ritual practice changes the practitioner.

Scripture holds that line more cleanly than history did. Sam van Schaik’s Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages traces what the line looked like once it left scripture. Monks healed. Monks divined. Monks made rain. Monks cursed.

The historical record is full of thaumaturgy done in the Buddha’s name, running alongside centuries of monastics who sat, chanted, and pursued the ending of craving as their own aim. The division holds in the texts. In practice, it blurs. A monastic could serve a village with protective chanting by morning, and sit in silence by night. The wonder of magical power served the people in the village. The wonder of instruction stayed the center, the thing the whole life was built around.

Emptiness is the permission

Nāgārjuna makes the argument in the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way—for whoever can hold emptiness, he says, everything becomes possible. If things had fixed natures, nothing could change, and no path could exist. Emptiness makes us workable.

This is where the dharma taught me witchcraft.

Emptiness reads to me as an invitation. We can concentrate and steady the mind. We can raise the energies we intend, like compassion. We can notice the energies we are raising without intending them, like craving. Then once we have the awareness, we can choose to do more of the first and less of the second.

That is a backward trace from result to source, and it is the shape of the Four Noble Truths. Dukkha is the result. Craving is the source. The path changes which source is active. The Buddha said that intention, cetanā, is karma. Intention sets the direction. Just like in magic.

Energy is the fuel

The Buddha named energy as one of the seven factors of awakening, alongside rapture, tranquility, and concentration. The jhānas describe rapture soaking the whole body like water through a ball of bath powder. In one Sutta, the Buddha locates the world, its arising, and its ending in this fathom-long body.

But what are we doing with this energy once we cultivate (ie “raise”) it? The energy serves something beyond itself. Another Sutta compares the stages of purification to a relay of chariots. Each one carries you to the next, and none of them is the destination. Rapture settles into tranquility. Tranquility deepens into concentration. Concentration supports seeing things as they are, and that sight loosens craving. By the third jhāna, the tradition has already built the release of the powerful experience into the map.

People get trapped in the powerful experience anyway. Zen calls the visions and sensations of practice makyō, “devil’s realm” or “realm of demons.” The Pāli word upādāna means both fuel and clinging. The same energy that fuels the path becomes fuel for self-making when we grasp it. And what determines whether we stay or keep going is the purity of our aim—our intention.

Dōgen would remind us that sitting is already awakening. Practice and realization are one. I hold the fuel model alongside that. The aim is present in the sitting, and the sitting cultivates the aim.

The same lightning

Concentration supplies force. Intention supplies direction. The tradition names both aims. Right concentration is concentration supported by the other seven path factors. Wrong concentration, micchā-samādhi, is its mirror. One faculty, aimed two ways.

Picture ngöndro done at an altar, but instead of Guru Rinpoche, we do it holding a photograph of Jeff Bezos. And instead of bodhicitta, we do a devotional hymn to wealth accumulation. The repetition and the devotion would train the mind on accumulation. We would supercharge greed. Karma theory predicts where the bolt lands first: in the mind. Greed ripens as more craving. The tradition’s image for it is the hungry ghost.

Vajrayana teachers might very well say that practice is no longer ngöndro, because the name refers to the structure. The real practice opens with refuge and bodhicitta before any accumulation begins. Vajrayana also has wealth practices, such as Jambhala, performed inside that same container so that prosperity serves giving. The Suttas trace wealth back to generosity. Same tools, different rite. Vajra means both thunderbolt and diamond. Same lightning, different target.

The sorcerer on the stairs

A lot of witchcraft is initiatory. Both to protect the practitioner and the practice. The Buddha addressed secrecy directly, near the end of his life. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, he tells Ānanda he has taught without the closed fist of a teacher who keeps something back, no esoteric doctrine held for an inner circle. The path itself was always public. Ehipassiko. Come and see.

The teaching was open. The power was not. Tantric practice requires empowerment given by a qualified teacher, and samaya, vows binding student to teacher and to the practice itself, vows the tradition treats as dangerous to break. Sōtō dharma transmission passes mind to mind inside a lineage bond built over years, not a text anyone can read and take. Liberation is free. But the ability to cultivate, contain, and shape the power is trained.

American dharma culture wants the transmission without the years. We want the energy without the vow. We take a technique built inside a relationship of trust and repetition, and we practice it alone, on an app, in a weekend, and call it a productivity hack. The Dharma asks us to carry it the way it was built to be carried, inside a bond, inside a body that has done the training to hold the power the techniques raise.

Think of Mickey in Fantasia. The sorcerer goes up to bed. Mickey puts on the hat, lifts his hands, and the broom wakes and starts hauling water. He knows how to begin the working. But he is not ready to hold it, direct it, or end it. He falls asleep while the energy runs, and he wakes to a flooded workshop. He takes an axe to the broom, and every splinter stands up as a new broom carrying more water. Force applied to a working we do not understand multiplies it.

Luckily for Mickey he had a teacher. What he was missing was the training that would have taught him completion. Raising and releasing are one craft, and the releasing (or letting go) is the part we learn from proximity to someone who has done it a thousand times. Many of us have less than Mickey. We have the hat and no sorcerer on the stairs. Skip the practice container, and we are left holding power we do not know how to aim, or how to let go.

Every container fills

Now bring that into the world we live in. In a capitalist society, the default fill is accumulation. Nobody has to put Bezos on the altar. The culture pours in optimizing and achieving before we arrive.

Chögyam Trungpa called it spiritual materialism in the 1970s. Ron Purser argues in McMindfulness that corporate mindfulness trains workers to tolerate stress and raise output, which strengthens the system producing the stress. David Loy makes the structural case: greed, hatred, and delusion can be institutionalized in an economy and can live outside a single mind.

The Buddha never had a “pure” container, either. The sangha grew inside a merchant economy. Money entering the dharma was an ordinary fact of its life. The tradition’s worry has always been what fills the practice. Right livelihood is a path factor, so economics sits inside the path. One Sutta traces a kingdom’s collapse to a ruler who fails to provide for the poor.

The counterexamples are communities that run on dāna and refuse to sell attainment. They show the container can be filled on purpose. Every container fills. We choose whether we fill it or the market does.

The spell

Here is the whole school in a single working. Zazen, ngöndro or another dharma form is the spellwork.

1. Cleanse the space. In Sōtō, soji keeps the zendō clean. Ngöndro has prostrations and Vajrasattva purification. The inner version sets the five hindrances aside for the session.

2. Cast the circle. We take refuge and the precepts. We bow in and place our palms together. The sīmā is the consecrated boundary inside which a community’s ritual acts are valid. The word maṇḍala means circle.

3. Call in energy. We invoke the Buddhas and the lineage. We chant. Paritta, the protective recitations, belong here too.

4. Set the intention. We state the aim before we raise anything. Energy raised before the aim is set flows to whatever the culture has already put in the container.

5. Do the work and raise the energy. We sit. Energy, bliss, and concentration build. In ngöndro, mantra and accumulation repetition builds energy and force.

6. Direct the energy. We turn it toward awakening through bodhicitta and dedicate the merit.

7. Release. Deity yoga dissolves the visualization into emptiness. Sōtō calls the release mushotoku, no-gaining mind. We let go of the merit and do not hold it.

8. Close the circle. The closing chant, the bows, and the return to ordinary tasks ground the work.

Direction gets set twice: as intention at the opening and as dedication at the close. The power runs wherever we aim it.

Where this leaves us

Buddhism is a school of magic. It hands us a technology that traces results to sources, raises energy, aims it, and releases it. The technology runs on any aim. The Buddha asked us to aim it at the ending of craving, the one aim that ends samsara.

Vijjā holds both meanings in a single word, knowledge and spell. Witchcraft helped me hear these echoes in contemporary practice.

We are all raising energy already, every day, in a culture that fills our containers for us. The practice asks us to notice what we are raising. Then choose wisely.

In spiritual friendship,

🧿Alexandra ✨

List of References

Pāli Canon

• Kevaddha Sutta

• Sāmaññaphala Sutta

• Brahmajāla Sutta

• Mahāparinibbāna Sutta

• Rathavinīta Sutta

• Cūḷakammavibhaṅga Sutta

• Rohitassa Sutta

• Nibbedhika Sutta

• Cakkavatti-sīhanāda Sutta

Mahayana and Greek philosophy

• Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way)

• Iamblichus, De Mysteriis (On the Mysteries)

• Cicero, De Legibus

• Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Modern scholarship and commentary

• Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages

• Ronald E. Purser, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

• David R. Loy, “The Three Poisons, Institutionalized,” HuffPost, November 19, 2013

• David R. Loy, The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory

• Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

Film

• Fantasia, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” set to Paul Dukas’s L’Apprenti sorcier

I’ve been losing my shit IRL.

In the year and a half since “Trump: Part Deux,” I’ve been trying to hold a balance between the energetic frequency I think a co-regulating environment for an infant requires, and the urgent call to do something. Mothering a little human means my body has to be in the home more than usual, so the something has been hyper local.

I’ve been volunteering at a food bank because I’m scared about food security. I’ve been harassing the Democratic nominee in my current congressional race because there’s no sufficient opposition to the Trump regime in the federal government and my vote feels like the only lever I have left to pull.

I’ve been doing immigrant solidarity work because Main Street is starting to feel like 1940s Germany, or 1940s America, if we’re being honest with ourselves. And I’ve been working with kalyanamitra on a Buddhists for Palestine coalition, because if you’ve read my work you know I’ve been quite disappointed in how our mahasangha has responded to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

So writing eludes me. Because IRL work takes priority when time and energy are finite. And because my nervous system is flooded, and it’s hard to think straight, let alone write, in that state.

But I woke up really sad about it all this morning. And I guess that makes me want to say hi, with or without anything specific to write about.

Who Are We?

I grew up amongst the very wealthy, very white Chicago ruling class, and I was indoctrinated into that worldview young enough that I didn’t have language for what it was until much later. It never sat right with me. But deconstructing it has been slow and tedious, not unlike leaving a cult you were born into, I’d imagine.

And I think part of why it took me so long is that the worldview I was raised in required me to believe the people running things were, at worst, misguided. Flawed but well-intentioned. Playing the same game everyone plays, just better. I was given a seat close enough to power that it was in my interest to believe that.

This year that belief collapsed considerably faster than the slow tedious version, and what replaced it is the view that the world is run by organized crime. Including, or especially, our beloved Yankee Doodle Dandy.

And I notice that this is a harder thing to say out loud than it should be, given how the pieces actually fit, and I think that’s because saying it means admitting the people I was raised to admire, the people whose approval used to matter to me, are not aberrations from the system. They are the system.

I think some of these syndicates have existed for centuries and some are newcomers. Every so often the power dynamics shift, or a new player enters, and the balance moves. In the last forty-ish years, I think a network grew in power and influence across American governance, finance, and the military-industrial complex, and it’s the one Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Leon Black, Les Wexner, and Donald Trump have all been part of.

It’s important to remember that crime networks cooperate when it suits them, so these same people are enmeshed with the CIA crime network, the MI6 crime network, the Mossad crime network, probably Russian and Japanese syndicates too. For the sake of brevity, I think it’s safe to assume they work together on some things and against each other on others, and at no point does the wellbeing of people like us cross their minds.

I believe Epstein, Wexner, Trump, Black, Kushner, and the rest have historically been middle management at best. But for reasons seen and unseen, I think that’s changing, and Jared Kushner in particular is making his move to become a boss. We shouldn’t forget the tech oligarchy either, many of whom have their own ties to old money and old crime, and all of it has to be contextualized against a global dynamic where China, Russia, Iran, and a few other O.G. baddies are getting their groove back.

None of these are the good guys. I want to be clear about that, because I don’t want to be read as rooting for a team. But China is the oldest continuous civilization in the world, and Russia, whatever Americans like to tell ourselves, won World War II, and both have spent the last fifty years, badly and often violently, getting their own houses in order, while ours has been sold out from under us by the CIA and the kleptocracy.

I believe this sea change is going to be especially hard on those of us born in post-WWII America. A lot of us are fattened, domesticated animals, and we’re about to get thrown into the wilderness. The food bank shift and the emails to my congressional nominee don’t undo forty years of being fed well. I know what that fattening feels like from the inside, which is exactly why I recognize it now for what it is instead of what I was told it was.

It’s not, of course, this simple. I know what I don’t know. But thinking of it as organized crime has clarified things for me, and all the places where there seemed to be a gap between what I’d been told the world is like and what I’m seeing with my own eyes, suddenly make sense.

Which is all to say that in this moment of profound powerlessness, this dark night of the soul, the only thing that has made sense from the place of my bodhisattva vows is to respond to the need closest to me. That has meant less writing and more activity.

So I am trying to do my part in my little corner of the world, hoping that if everyone who isn’t an evil piece of shit does their part too, maybe we push back. But I’m not optimistic. The Kool-Aid is made and people are lining up, and I’m not sure we’re up for the fight.

Or as James Baldwin put it in The Price of the Ticket: “I really do believe that we can all become better than we are. I know we can. But the price is enormous, and people are not yet willing to pay it.”

My husband tells me to be patient, that people are full of surprises. I try to believe him, at least for my own mental health. And I do see so many people around me doing so much. But it’s not enough. Not nearly enough. This is why I woke up sad.

All this to say, dear friends: I haven’t been writing much because I’ve been freaked out, doing whatever I can to try to stop the bleeding, sometimes bold about it and sometimes meek. It has taken a lot out of me, and I don’t know that I’d have anything more to say about it even if I had the energy.

If I could open up your head and pour James Baldwin into it, I would. But I can't. So I'll say it the way I see it: we are in very big trouble, and unless we find the courage, post haste, to put it all on the table, we are unlikely to reach the other side.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿 Constant Craving ✨

Safe territory. Vikings and peasants. I love that for us.

But there is this teeny tiny percentage of our ancestry that goes back to the before the American Revolution. And after years of happily tracing our Swedish roots, she finally got around to it.

But before I tell you what she found, I want to tell you about fourth grade.

I was obsessed with Native Americans. We went to Arizona a lot. My dad had work in Phoenix, and we tagged along during spring breaks, hitting a lot of Navajo tourist sites while he worked. I was wearing turquoise studs and doing dioramas for school about where all the tribes lived pre-contact. I was reading Island of the Blue Dolphins. I was watching The Last of the Mohicans.

I didn’t want to be Madeleine Stowe (although I did want her hair, iykyk), I wanted to be the girl version of Daniel Day Lewis’s character, Hawkeye, a white man raised as a Mohican.

I wrote several drafts of a piece of fan fiction about being a pioneer girl who met a Native American boy and ran away with him to join his tribe. I briefly took something my mom mentioned offhand and spun it into a whole mythology about having Cherokee heritage (the way a lot of settler families do).

I didn’t understand the psychology at the time, obviously. I was nine. But looking back, I think something in me already knew. Not consciously. But children pick up on things, on the wrongness underneath the official story, on the gap between what adults say happened and what evidence suggests happened.

Fantasy is how kids metabolize what they can’t yet name. I didn’t want to be on the side I was on. I didn’t have the language for complicity, but I felt it anyway, and I tried to write myself out of it.

It wasn’t until recently that I understood how deep that ancestral complicity actually goes.

According to my DNA results (which I deeply regret submitting) I am 50% Greek and 46% Swedish, both from 20th century immigration. I have leaned on that my entire adult life as a kind of alibi. My people came here recently. My people didn’t do this. It let me hold my politics (anti-racist, anti-empire, anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchy, pro-land back) without too much uncomfortable arithmetic.

But I recently learned buried in that 4% was Brigadier General William Russell. Born 1735 in Culpeper County, Virginia. Died 1793. Buried first on his family estate, then reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery in 1943, because apparently that’s what this country does with men like him. We polish ‘em up and put them somewhere prestigious.

He is my seventh great-grandfather.

The Genocidal Enslaver

Let me tell you what ol’ Bill did with his time on earth.

He was “granted” 20,000 acres of stolen land (land that belonged to the Monacan, the Shaawanwaki (Shawnee), the Aniyvwiya (Cherokee), and others) and he built a life on it. A large, prosperous life, almost certainly built on the labor of people he enslaved.

We know he operated salt works in Saltville, Virginia after the Revolutionary War. The salt industry in western Virginia routinely used enslaved labor, people hired out from eastern Virginia plantations to do work so dangerous that purchasing them outright wasn’t considered cost-effective. We don’t yet know the names of the people he enslaved. They are findable.

In 1773, Grandpappy Russell joined Daniel Boone’s expedition to push into Kentucky, which was land the Shaawanwaki (Shawnee), the Lenape (Delaware), the Mingo, and the Aniyvwiya (Cherokee) had been defending for years against exactly this kind of incursion.

On October 9 or 10 (historical records very), just south of the Cumberland Gap, Shaawanwaki, Lenape, and Mingo warriors attacked a scouting party. They had decided, in the words of the historical record, to “send a message of their opposition to settlement.”

History remembers Russell’s teenage son Henry (who was killed in the attack) as a victim. But imho he was a victim of his father, who brought him along as an invader, and then got him killed. The people who killed him were merely defending their home, their land, their people. But “history” doesn’t remember their names.

William Russell spent the next two decades making them pay for his son’s death.

He fought at the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, the culminating engagement of Lord Dunmore’s War, which ended with the Shaawanwaki forced to cede their hunting rights south of the Ohio River. Rights they had held for generations.

He fought through the Revolutionary War, rising to Brigadier General, corresponding with George Washington, present at Yorktown. Another son, William Russell III, continued the campaign fighting against Native nations in 1791, 1794, and at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811.

The father has a Virginia county named for him. The son has a Kentucky county. The cartography of this country is a monument to men like them.

The Aniyvwiya leader Tsi’yu-gunsini (Dragging Canoe) saw all of this coming. When speculators tried to purchase Aniyvwiya land at Sycamore Shoals in 1775, he stood up and told them: “You have bought a fair land, but there is a cloud hanging over it. You will find its settlement dark and bloody.”

He fought for nearly twenty years to make good on that warning. He was a man trying to save his nation.

Beyond the Land Acknowledgement

Here is the part where the urge arises to pivot to my own experience. The shock of discovery. The guilt. The complicated relationship with heritage.

But Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, writes that the United States was not an accidentally genocidal project, it was the point. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples was not a side effect of nation-building. It was the architecture. William Russell was not an aberration. He was a load-bearing wall.

, in My Grandmother’s Hands, writes about the way racial trauma lives in the body, and asks white people specifically to stop processing our discomfort in public as if the processing itself is the work. It isn’t. The confession, the essay, the land acknowledgment at the top of the meeting, none of it moves land. None of it restores sovereignty. None of it nourishes a child on a reservation in Oklahoma where my ancestor’s campaigns helped deposit her people two centuries ago.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist and the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, writes about reciprocity as a moral framework older than any nation-state. The natural world, she argues, operates on the logic of gift and return. You don’t just take. You ask what is owed. You give back. You restore. Western settler culture, she writes, is organized almost entirely around taking (and around the legal, military, and genealogical infrastructure that makes the taking look like something else).

Nathan Young, a Lenape artist and scholar created nkwiluntàmën, an immersive sound walk installed at William Penn’s reconstructed estate on the Delaware River. The title translates as “I long for it; I am lonesome for it (such as the sound of a drum).” Young’s work walks listeners through the riverfront grounds amplifying Indigenous sonic traditions that survived his tribe’s diaspora across North America.

The Lenape are still making art on the land their ancestors never stopped claiming.

So right now, as I reflect on this 250th anniversary of America’s so-called “independence,” and despite every urge to naval gaze, I am trying to return my attention to what must be returned.

I live in New York’s Muhheakantuck (Hudson) river valley, the name means “the waters that are never still.” I looked up our address at native-land.ca. I live on Lenape (Delaware), Wappinger, and Schaghticoke land.

The Lenape, whose name means simply “the people,” or “the real people,” were among the first Native nations to encounter European colonizers, and among the most systematically dispossessed. The early Delaware did not understand land to be something that could be sold. The land belonged to the Creator, and the Lenape were only using it to shelter and feed their people.

When Europeans arrived and needed somewhere to live, the Lenape shared it. The Europeans gave token gifts, and in their own minds, those gifts were a purchase price. That misunderstanding, (which was not really a misunderstanding, because the Europeans knew exactly what they were doing) set in motion a legal and military machine that would not stop for two hundred years.

The Lenape signed the first treaty with the newly formed United States in 1778. Between 1778 and 1830, Lenape governing bodies were party to over 15 treaties with the United States, each of which moved them further from their homeland, from Ohio to Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, and eventually Oklahoma.

Every treaty was eventually broken or forced into renegotiation. Today the federally recognized Lenape nations (the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and the Delaware Nation in Anadarko, Oklahoma) are headquartered nearly 1,500 miles from the Hudson Valley where I am sitting right now. None of the three federally recognized Lenape tribes are currently located in their original homeland. They are trying to get back. The Delaware Tribe calls their ancestral territory sacred ground. They are actively working to reconnect with these lands.

The descendants of the same Lenape whose warriors were at Cumberland Gap in 1773 when Henry Russell was killed. Who were only there because settlers like his father kept coming, kept taking, kept naming things after themselves.

The Wappinger people lived along the eastern bank of the Muhheakantuck for thousands of years before Dutch colonizers arrived in the 1600s. They were not conquered so much as gradually absorbed, displaced, and dispersed through a combination of war, disease, fraudulent land sales, and the slow violence of erasure. Their descendants are present today in the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin and in Mohican communities, still carrying Wappinger lineage and culture forward.

The Schaghticoke, whose name, Pishgachtigok, means “the mingling of waters,” are perhaps the most immediate and urgent case of ongoing dispossession in my own backyard. They have lived continuously in Connecticut and the Hudson Valley since time before memory. They never left.

Despite never leaving, despite continuous presence on their ancestral land, the Schaghticoke Tribal Nation has been denied federal recognition (a recognition they briefly held in 2004 before it was rescinded under pressure from Connecticut state officials and wealthy landowners). They are still here. They are still fighting.

Federal recognition would restore legal rights to land their ancestors never vacated. For those of us who live in New York or Connecticut and who believe in land back as anything other than a bumper sticker, the Schaghticoke’s ongoing recognition fight is the most concrete place to put that belief.

The Shaawanwaki (Shawnee), now headquartered in Miami, Oklahoma after centuries of forced removal from the Ohio Valley, are a federally recognized nation still fighting for land and sovereignty. The Shawnee Tribe maintains strong ties to its ancestral homeland in the greater middle Ohio River Valley, a region dotted with Shawnee settlements, sacred sites, and burial grounds. They have been fighting in courts and legislatures for two centuries.

All of these nations have made clear, through their own words, their own websites, their own legislative testimony, that they don’t need my settler guilt. They need material support, votes, voices on specific legislation, and a willingness to show up when asked. I haven’t done enough of that.

From the River to the Sea

And here is the thing. If I am for Palestinian liberation and the Right of Return, which I am. If I believe Israeli settler-colonialism is settler-colonialism—not a special case, not a complexity that puts it outside the category, not a “conflict” with two equally valid sides. Which I do. I have said this out loud, in writing, with my name on it. Then, settler-colonialism is settler-colonialism.

The Lenape were removed by treaty fraud, land theft, and military violence so that settlers could farm, build, and name things after themselves. Palestinians are being removed by treaty fraud, land theft, and military violence so that settlers can farm, build, and name things after themselves.

The mechanism is the same. The justifications are the same. The people doing it believe, in both cases, that history and God are on their side.

I don’t accept that logic in Palestine. I won’t get to accept it here.

Guilt is private, self-referential, it circles back to the person feeling it. What I owe is what I’ve demanded of settlers in Palestine: material solidarity. Specific legislation named and supported. Dollars to land back organizations and indigenous-led political campaigns the way I’ve sent dollars to PCRF and UNRWA. Showing up when Schaghticoke and Lenape organizers ask settlers to show up, the way I’ve shown up for Palestinian-led movements.

The land under my house is not a metaphor. Neither is Gaza. I’ve been consistent about one of them. I have been derelict about the other.

More Than One Debt

It’s hard to skillfully write about two such heavy topics in one piece. And I hope this is to be continued if the feedback I get is that it is constructive …

But the people who boiled salt in Saltville, whose names I don’t yet know, whose descendants are findable if I look hard enough at the Library of Virginia’s records, at Virginia Untold, at the freedom records, there’s debt there, too.

They built the wealth that became the land grants that became the Russell counties that became the genealogy that became my 4%.

What do I do about that? Maybe I can start with the names. Then the land. Then what their descendants say they actually want and need, not what makes me feel good without material repair.

My gut is that reparations and land back are not just about money and land (although they are about that, too), they are about decolonizing myself and re-centering the land upon which I live. But I’m not sure.

“Not knowing is most intimate,” as Zennies say. “Beginners mind.”

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿Alexandra✨

One is because I have community here who will understand the implications of what I’m reporting. The other is because I am dealing with serious people, and the more public support I have, the safer I will feel.

The short version: I have been critical of the Cait Conley campaign because as a former journalist I have a nose for bad sportsmanship. It seemed deeply suspicious to me that an outsider would pop up out of nowhere in a congressional primary that was otherwise local candidates with community ties, arrive with serious funding from AIPAC-adjacent donors, and then crush the candidates who actually have track records of service to this community.

The idea that progressive candidates can’t win is verifiably false. And while NY-17 is not NYC, Conley clearly has an agenda behind her that is not homegrown. And I have a problem with that.

So after she won the primary last Tuesday, I started organizing to build a progressive bloc to hold her accountable to voters.

I don’t want Mike Lawler to win. Mike Lawler is a greasy scumbag of the shiniest-suited order. But I’m also not going to settle for a candidate who was handpicked by special and foreign interests and then buy into their messaging that they are the most electable candidate—as though we are simply expected to accept genocide and AI surveillance as the new normal.

That being said, I wasn’t looking for a scandal. I was just looking for solidarity.

Well, a scandal found me.

Full story below. If you don’t live here you may not immediately get why this matters. But if you do live here, I hope it clicks. This is bigger than one candidate or one election. This is how the system works to control discourse and deliver pre-approved politicians to voters who think they have a choice.

Please share. Please comment. Please support me in exposing how the donor class uses propoganda to pick our politicians for us.

And if you are local to NY-17, please sign the pledge at BabiesNotBombsNY17.com.

Believe it or not, but I still want Conley to beat Lawler. I just won’t sacrifice Palestinian or immigrant babies on the altar of her ambition or the Democratic establishment’s stranglehold on political leadership.

The stakes are just too high.

What Happened

The administrator of NY-17’s congressional Facebook group just restricted my access and classified Palestinian civilian deaths as spam.

Zero notice. No warning. No explanation. So I went to his Facebook page to contact him directly, to talk neighbor-to-neighbor and try to understand what was going on. I was absolutely shook by what I saw.

This is a Greater Israel map. A biblical territorial vision depicting Israeli expansion into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the West Bank, and Gaza. It includes the term “Amalec”—the same term that Benjamin Netanyahu used in 2023 to justify the military assault on Gaza, which the UN’s Independent Commission of Inquiry cited as evidence of genocidal intent.

As UNC religion scholar Motti Inbari told NPR in 2023, the biblical commandment is “to completely destroy all of ‘Amalek’—including babies, including their property, including the animals—everything.”

The concept of ‘Amalec’ is invoked by religious nationalists to frame the indigenous peoples of the Levant—Palestinians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians—as the eternal enemy that must be destroyed.

But this man, whose cover photo depicts the expansion of Israeli territory into five sovereign nations through what international law defines as war crimes, is deciding what we are allowed to discuss in a shared community group.

So I asked him about it.

“With respect to my support for Israel, it will not be an issue in this election as both candidates more or less have identical positions,” he said. “If you want to discuss issues with Israel v Hamas, there are thousands of other venues for you to do that.”

Facebook group search is wonky, so it just may be buried, but it appears that my posts have been deleted. Luckily I took a screen grab of my “second strike,” the so-called spam that got me restricted. I was responding to a post in which Steve asked the community what issues matter to NY-17 voters.

I’ve pasted the rules in their entirety at the bottom of the page. But it appears Steve restricted my access because this comment was a violation of rule #4–No Spam.

Interestingly, the rules don’t mention Palestine, anywhere. Huh. Why wouldn’t they want people to know they are suppressing that particular topic?

“When you joined the group, you agreed to follow the rules,” Mr. Epstein said. “If you don’t want to follow the rules, you don’t have to stay in the group.”

His rules. His narrative. No accountability.

The Mechanisms of Narrative Control

This is not the bias of one man. This is a mechanism. I know this because I too am a media professional, Steve, and I want to make sure everyone else sees what is happening here.

This playbook works precisely because most people don’t know what to look for.

Propaganda doesn’t usually look like propaganda. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t come with a villain twirling a mustache. It comes dressed as common sense, community standards, and neutral moderation. The most effective information control is the kind the audience never notices—because they’ve been misled to believe there is none.

Communications scholars call it “manufactured consent” to describe how institutions shape what a community believes is the acceptable range of opinion, not by lying to them, but by controlling what information they’re allowed to encounter in the first place.

You don’t tell people what to think. You control what they think about.

There’s a related concept called “agenda setting,” the documented power of media gatekeepers to determine not what people believe, but what questions they even ask.

The person who controls the agenda controls the conversation.

Steve Epstein taught communications at Columbia University. He knows these concepts. They are not abstract to him. They are his professional toolkit.

Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And honestly it is not even subtle.

STEP ONE: Capture the dominant community space, but present it as neutral ✅

Find or create a forum where your target community gathers (this is easy enough to do with a small Facebook Ads budget). Make it look organic. Make it feel like a neutral public square. In NY-17, that’s a Facebook group with nearly 30,000 members who joined to discuss their congressional race. Appoint yourself and allies as administrators. Nobody voted for you. Nobody consented to your editorial framework. You are not transparent about your biases. You’re just there, at the center of the conversation, before anyone thought to ask why.

STEP TWO: Write intentionally vague rules so they can mean whatever the administrators need them to mean ✅

This is the critical infrastructure move. The rules must appear reasonable—no harassment, no spam, stay on topic. But “spam” and “on topic” must remain undefined enough that administrators can apply them selectively.

The vagueness is not accidental. It provides the cover of plausible deniability for every act of suppression. You’re not censoring. You’re just enforcing community standards.

STEP THREE: Quietly restrict members asking inconvenient questions ✅

Don’t ban them outright, which creates martyrs and generates screenshots. Instead, use the platform’s built-in moderation tools to require post approval for specific members. They can still see the group. They think they can still participate. They write their posts and submit them and wait. And wait. The posts never appear. Eventually they give up and go away.

This is what communications scholars call “censorship by proxy,” achieving the effect of censorship while maintaining the appearance of an open forum.

It is quiet. It is deniable. It is effective.

STEP FOUR: Define the acceptable conversation based on your political ideology ✅

Both candidates support Israel. Therefore Israel is not a relevant issue in this race. Therefore any discussion of Palestinian civilian deaths—confirmed as genocide by the United Nations—is by definition off-topic. Therefore it is spam.

The Overton window, which is the term for the range of ideas a community considers acceptable to discuss, has been moved. Not by argument. Not by persuasion. By administrative fiat. By one man with a Greater Israel map as his cover photo deciding what 30,000 of his neighbors are allowed to talk about.

When I told Mr. Epstein I didn’t see how I had broken any rules, he told me: “We consider talking on issues that are irrelevant to the outcome of the election in New York 17 CD to be a form of Spam.”

Let me translate that out of administrator-speak.

An issue that 77% of Democrats care about? Irrelevant.

An issue that is making and breaking congressional campaigns across New York right now? Irrelevant.

An issue that has produced a UN finding of genocide, an ICJ ruling of plausible genocidal acts, and the largest progressive primary upsets in New York history? Irrelevant.

Tens of thousands of children dead? Spam.

Chilling.

There is nothing in the group’s written rules that says Palestine cannot be discussed. The rule I broke does not exist in writing. It exists in Steve Epstein’s personal support for Israel.

This is not a community standard. This is a man’s ideology dressed up as one. And it is being enforced on 30,000 of our neighbors by a former Assistant Professor of Communications at Columbia University and former VP of Multimedia at Simon & Schuster—a man who has spent his entire career studying, teaching, and practicing exactly how to control a narrative.

He knows what he’s doing. He told me so himself. Unfortunately for Steve, so do I.

Now zoom out with me. Because this is where it gets important.

Democratic Majority for Israel PAC, an organization founded explicitly because polling showed Democrats and young voters were moving away from unconditional support for Israel, endorsed Cait Conley for NY-17 as part of their 2026 Majority Project.

This is the same organization that spent over $2 million attacking Bernie Sanders, crushed Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated progressive after progressive who dared to condition military aid to Israel, and exists for one explicit purpose: to keep the Democratic Party pro-Israel against the direction of its own base.

It is my opinion that Cait Conley’s campaign is following the same script as John Fetterman.

The candidate is approved by the PAC. The money follows. The narrative gets locked down. And the voters are handed a choice that was made for them months earlier by people whose primary loyalty is to a foreign interests.

And our very own grassroots, local candidates are crushed.

Then, in the dominant Facebook group where NY-17 voters think they are having a free and fair discourse, Palestinian civilian deaths are classified as spam.

NY-17 voters, whose majority views on Palestine are being suppressed in their own community forum, deserve to know the full picture of what is happening in this race.

• 77% of Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide.

• 84% of Americans support a ceasefire.

• 65% of Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis.

These are not fringe positions. These are democratic majority positions. And they are being suppressed by a man whose personal brand is advocating for Israel’s siege on Palestine and Lebanon to expand to more sovereign nations, which has been explicitly condemned by the UN, the ICJ, and just about every human rights organization on earth.

Here’s what we can do about it:

• If you are a member of the NY-17th Congressional group — share this post there. Tag your neighbors. Tag your friends in the group. Make it impossible to ignore.

• Demand that this administrator be relieved from his moderation powers.

• Demand that new admins be established, people with genuine editorial integrity.

• Demand that the group rules be applied objectively and transparently to everyone.

• Demand full disclosure on how the admins have enforced their personal political views through obfuscation during the primary.

And ask yourself the hardest question: In a House race where an AIPAC-adjacent lobby handpicked the candidate specifically to counter the Democratic base’s growing support for Palestinian rights, and the dominant voter forum is run by someone who has classified Palestinian civilian deaths as spam — who benefits from this arrangement? How did it come to be, and what is the cost in human life.

A final word on how I am showing up in this fight.

I practice nonviolent confrontation. I believe that how we fight is inseparable from what we are fighting for. What I am targeting is not a person. It is a pattern. It is a structure. It is a set of choices made by the administrators of a community space that tens of thousands of our neighbors thought was unbiased.

Those choices have consequences for democratic discourse in this district and I am naming them publicly because the public deserves to know.

I hold no hatred toward the individuals involved. It mostly just makes me sad for them that they appear to endorse a genocide that is intentionally targeting babies.

But I am holding them accountable. The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote that the most powerful form of action is one that comes from a place of clarity rather than anger.

I am angry, you can ask my husband, but I am choosing to let the facts speak rather than the fury.

The receipts are real. The pattern is real. The stakes are real.

As for the other two moderators—I have been in conversation with them. They have been formal and polite, then radio silent. A little more careful than our friend, Steve.

But I can’t help wondering whether they endorse their colleague’s views and the way he has been enforcing them in our shared community space.

Because (it is my opinion that) these people would rather lose to Mike Lawler than lose their stranglehold on Palestinian discourse in NY-17. They’d rather let America fall into the hands of MAGA than surrender their stranglehold on a narrative that serves a genocidal agenda.

And that makes me wonder where exactly their loyalties lie.

I have questions about the involvement in shaping the narrative around Cait Conley’s so-far unconditional fealty to Israel. And I have questions for Colonel Conley herself. But we will get to all of that.

This is not easy for me. I am afraid.

I have seen what Israeli extremists do to people who threaten their master plan. And I have my own family to protect.

So please spread the word. This only works if we all stand together.

NY-17 democratic voters who don’t want to fund genocide anymore have been played. And I stumbled upon the receipts.

I’m just shocked by how brazen they are about it—Icarus, but make it genocide.

In spiritual solidarity,
🧿Alexandra Cain, M.Div🧿

I have been putting this off. Not because I didn’t know it needed to be done, but because I am incredibly conflict avoidant, and also because I kept hoping I was wrong.

I kept giving it one more week, one more news cycle, one more atrocity that maybe this time would be the thing that moved you. And I think that hope was, in its own way, a form of magical thinking that I need to stop practicing.

So. Here it is.

This is a goodbye letter. Not to everyone. If you are reading this and you have been in the streets, in your elected officials’ offices, on the phone with your legislators, showing up to mutual aid distributions, donating to resistance funds, boycotting, refusing, organizing, then you know that this is not addressed to you. You can keep reading, but this is not about you.

This is for the people in my life who have said nothing, done nothing, shown no curiosity about the suffering of other people, and continued on as if we are not in a crisis.

This is not a drill. We are in a crisis.

People like to wonder what they would have done. Would you have hidden Jews in your attic? Would you have marched across the bridge in Selma? Would you have refused to sign the loyalty oath, refused to point to your Japanese neighbor, refused to look away?

It is one of the more popular forms of American moral fantasy, this retrospective courage, this imagined self who would have been on the right side of history when history was happening.

I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it: you are finding out right now what you are made of. This is the moment you have been hypothetically brave in, and let me tell you—you ain’t shit.

The Price

It has cost me to maintain a relationship with you. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from sitting across from someone you have known for years, someone you have loved, someone who has been kind to you, someone who once showed up for you in a real way, and pretending that their disinterest in what is happening to other people is not something you noticed.

Pretending that it’s fine. Pretending that the gap between what you understand to be true and what they are willing to look at is not widening every single week into something you can no longer step across.

I have been pretending for a long time. And I am tired.

Letting go of you—and there are a lot of you, which is really, really sad—is also a relief. The performance of normalcy is exhausting in a way that the anger never is. Anger is at least honest.

What I have been doing in relationship with you is not honest. I have been editing myself, softening my urgency, letting the subject change, accepting the explanation that you’re just really busy or you try not to follow the news because it’s too depressing, as if the people the news is about have the option to find it too depressing and look away.

This is not a guilt trip. This is just me telling you the truth, maybe for the first time: I am reorganizing my life around people who are oriented toward collective care. That reorganization means a lot of relationships are ending, and this is how I am ending them. Efficiently. With “reply all” because I don’t have the time or energy to have 1:1 conversations with all of you. There’s just too many.

Are You Stupid?

ICE is conducting mass kidnapping operations across the country, including raids in churches, schools, and hospitals. Families are being separated. People with no criminal record, people who have lived here for decades, people who are American citizens, are being detained and disappeared into a system with almost no legal recourse and almost no transparency.

This is Nazi shit.

Children are being taken from their parents. In your city. Maybe in your neighborhood, that is if you haven’t totally isolated yourself from Black and brown people, which many of you have.

The genocide in Gaza continues. More than fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed, the majority of them women and children. The infrastructure of an entire civilization—hospitals, universities, archives, bakeries, water systems—has been systematically destroyed.

The United States government has funded and armed this campaign. The bombs falling on Gaza and Tehran and Lebanon are ours. The vetoes at the Security Council are ours. The silence of most American politicians, including the ones you treated as heroes three years ago, is ours.

We are not bystanders to this. We are its sponsors.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to the administrative infrastructure of the federal government and used it to dismantle regulatory agencies, fire federal workers en masse, and consolidate a level of private power over public systems that has no precedent in American history.

This is the stated project, carried out in public, narrated in real time. DOGE was neither a department nor efficient; it was a mechanism for transferring public resources to private interests while eliminating the civil servants whose job it is to slow that process down.

Project 2026, the Heritage Foundation document that many people dismiss as fringe, is now functioning as a governing blueprint. It calls for the explicit dismantling of the administrative state, the reorientation of federal law enforcement toward political enemies, and the subordination of independent institutions to executive authority.

Last week, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, the last meaningful federal protection against racially discriminatory voting maps. Within twenty-four hours, Trump called Tennessee’s governor and told him to redraw the state’s congressional districts.

Within a week, the Tennessee legislature had passed a new map—in a special session, over the screaming objections of Democratic lawmakers and protesters who filled the capitol and were forcibly removed by state troopers—that dismantles the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, diluting Black votes so thoroughly that Tennessee may send zero Democrats to Congress next year. Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina are moving to do the same.

This affects all of us.

Memphis has had a majority-Black congressional district for the better part of a century. It took the Supreme Court, a phone call from the White House, and eight days to end it.

Are You a Coward?

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from the Birmingham city jail in 1963, in a letter addressed to eight white Alabama clergymen who had called his demonstrations “unwise and untimely.”

He was not writing to the Klan. He was writing to the people who agreed with him, in principle, about the goal. People who thought something should probably be done, just not quite like that, and maybe not right now, and certainly not by disrupting the peace. And what he said to them, he could say to you right now:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

Stokely Carmichael, writing three years later, asked a question that I am now asking you:

“Can whites, particularly liberal whites, condemn themselves? Can they stop blaming [Black and brown people], and blame their own system? Are they capable of the shame which might become a revolutionary emotion? We have found that they usually cannot.”

And Malcolm X said “the worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negroes and calling himself a liberal.”

He was describing a specific mechanism, the way progressive people neutralize movements we claim to support by substituting our own comfort for other people’s survival, by managing the terms of resistance rather than joining it, by making ourselves the audience for a struggle we should be fighting.

I am not calling you a liberal in the political-party sense, necessarily. I am calling you a moderate in the moral sense. Someone who agrees, in principle, that things are bad. Someone who, when pressed, will say of course you care about immigrants, about the dismantling of democratic institutions, yet who has done nothing, or so close to nothing that the difference is not legible from where I am standing.

Or Are You Both?

You are a Good German. I mean that in the precise historical sense. You have made the calculation, consciously or not, that your own comfort, your own stability, your own sense of normalcy is worth more than the cost of justice. And that calculation has a name in history, and the name is not a good one.

There is no path to liberation that doesn’t cost anything. But you would rather be a dog who gets scraps from the master’s table than a wolf who protects the pack.

So stop calling me. I’m not calling back. Stop texting me. I’m not texting back. I am not trying to be mean, just honest, which is the thing I have been withholding from you for longer than I should have.

My time and energy are finite. I am putting what I have toward people who understand that this moment is not optional, that witness without action is not witness, that caring about the world means doing something to stop harm.

There are people I am letting go of who I genuinely love and I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to seem tougher than I am. Loving someone and being unable to stay close to them because of who they are choosing to be in a crisis is a loss that I am willing to grieve.

But I am also relieved. The labor of pretending that your disengagement from what is happening is something I can accommodate, that it is a personal choice I can respect the way I respect someone’s preference for tea over coffee.

That labor is over. I don’t have to do it anymore. And I find, turning toward the people who are actually in this, that there is more room than I thought. More room for honesty. More room for anger that doesn’t have to be managed. More room for the kind of love that is load-bearing, that can hold the weight of what is actually happening.

You know who you are. I knew too, and I stayed longer than I should have. I am sorry for that because it was not honest and you deserved my honesty even when it was uncomfortable. Here it is now, late but real.

I care about this world. I care about the people in it who are suffering, I care about the people who are fighting, and I care about what we leave behind when we are gone. I care enough to do something about it.

I am not interested in a life organized around looking away. And I am not interested, anymore, in relationships that require me to look away in order to maintain them.

I hope you change your mind. If you do, know that the door is always open to comrades.

In Spiritual Solidarity,

🧿 Alexandra ✨​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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