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San Francisco Chronicle
21 hours ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Posting about the L.A. protests? Apparently that can get you banned from Facebook
Apparently, acknowledging the existence of violence can get you kicked off Facebook. Rebecca Solnit 's account on Meta's social media network has been suspended, the San Francisco author and activist posted to Bluesky on Monday, June 10. 'Facebook decided to suspend my account because of a piece (below) I wrote Monday about violence which in no way advocates for it (but does point out who is violent in the current ruckus),' Solnit wrote. She included a screenshot of Facebook's explanation of its decision, which reads, 'Your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity.' Solnit did not explain how, beyond timing, she believed that the essay in question, 'Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence,' written on her independent site Meditations in an Emergency, was the reason for her ouster. Meta did not immediately respond to the Chronicle's request for comment. 'I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration,' her piece begins, referring to the clashes in Los Angeles between protesters of President Donald Trump's immigration policies and the California National Guard deployed by Trump against city and state officials' wishes. 'All they can do is punish and incite, and I hope that some of the protesters are telling them they're violating their mission and maybe the law,' the essay continues. 'We are escalating because they are escalating.' The 'Men Explain Things to Me' author goes on to question longtime right-wing and media narratives that stereotype protesters as violent while giving law enforcement a pass for much more harm to people and property. 'One thing to remember is that they'll claim we're violent no matter what; the justification for this ongoing attack on immigrants and people who resemble immigrants in being brown is the idea that America is suffering an invasion and in essence only a certain kind of white person belongs here,' she writes. The piece never advocates meeting fire with fire. Instead, it argues for a defiant yet nonviolent response. 'I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents,' she writes. Solnit concludes by enumerating the kinds of violence the Trump administration has perpetrated — against the environment, against the First Amendment, against women, against his personal enemies, against the very notion of truth. 'It is up to us to defeat that agenda,' she writes. Solnit said she appealed the suspension. On Wednesday, June 11, she shared a screenshot of Facebook's response saying it decided to disable her account: 'It still doesn't follow our Community Standards on account integrity. You cannot request another review of this decision.' Solnit noted that she doesn't think a Meta higher-up has it in for her, despite the popularity of her account. She cited 'inane algorithms that often delete posts' as the likeliest explanation. (In April, the Chronicle reported on Meta's rejection of an ad promoting a Northern California Pride festival.) Even so, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cozied up to the Trump administration, dining with the president at Mar-a-Lago and appointing Trump ally Dana White to his company's board. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund. Meta's Community Standards on its account integrity page state that the company reserves the right to restrict or disable accounts that risk 'imminent harm to individual or public safety.' Solnit is the author of more than 30 books, including 'Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas' and the children's book 'Cinderella Liberator,' which Marin Shakespeare Company
Boston Globe
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
How to stay hopeful in trying times
Despite a president who seems determined to trample the government, economy, and environment, Solnit remains as hopeful as she was in 2004. She still thinks the progressive left is much too prone to doom and gloom. She still thinks that those who supposedly have no power end up changing the world again and again. She still thinks we as a society have gained more ground on human rights and climate issues than we've lost. In an interview with me this month, she said, 'You can change the laws, but you can't change people's minds as easily. The right is using political power to make up for what they lack: cultural power. A lot of what they want to do and are doing is wildly unpopular. People support climate action. People support reproductive rights.' Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Solnit is one of the country's most versatile writers — she's tackled everything from sexism and violence against women ('Men Explain Things to Me') to the history of walking ('Wanderlust') to the advent of technological change in the American West ('River of Shadows'). The now 63-year-old is the author of more than 20 books and countless essays published over three decades. Haymarket Books Her latest compilation of essays embraces the unpredictability of change while acknowledging the fraught nature of the current moment, when many fear American democracy hangs in the balance. 'We cannot know what will be the spark that catches fire,' she says. 'But we make the future in the present. The future depends on how we show up, or fail to show up, today.' This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You've written about so much — women's rights, the environment, civil liberties — that seems to be under assault right now. But you aren't despairing. Why? There's an essay in the book called 'Despair Is a Luxury.' Giving up is breaking solidarity with the people who are most impacted — the poor, disabled, immigrants. We can't just stand aside. But also despair, in its own strange way, is a form of false confidence. It's a sense that the future has already been decided and there's nothing we can do about it. In fact, the future is something we make in the present. We can learn from the past about how change works, how power works, where civil society movements and amazing individuals from Rachel Carson to Greta Thunberg have been able to intervene and change the world. And so despair, pessimism, and cynicism are a false sense of inevitability about the future. People do not like uncertainty. But I feel that uncertainty and possibility are related. So I do not despair. Advertisement In 'Despair Is a Luxury,' you also say that too often we scorn people who are hopeful. Why is it so easy to dismiss them as naive or Pollyanna-ish? You know, despair is like a black leather jacket. Everybody thinks they look cool in it. Hope is a pink dress nobody wants to wear in public. But that pink dress is quite sophisticated, because hope is not the same thing as optimism. It does not assume good things will happen. It just says good things may be possible. But we have to actually show up and make them happen. Legislation doesn't pass by itself. Immigrant rights don't get defended without our participation. Climate progress all started with organizing and activism. It is cynicism that is naive — which I've written about before. Cynics are very bought into the status quo idea that power resides among a handful of elites — famous, powerful, wealthy people who hold office. But the historical record shows us that those who are not supposed to have power have changed the world over and over again. To think that they can continue to do so is not naive. How have your views on how progress happens changed over the decades that you've been a writer and activist? I think that at first I didn't really have a theory of change. My first book ['Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era,' published in 1991] was about the visual artists who were part of beat culture in California during the Cold War. They taught me how people change the world. These artists were not very well known, but they were huge influences on transforming culture. A second book ['Savage Dreams,' originally published in 1994] was about the nuclear and Indian wars. For that book, I went to Yosemite, which had been a place where terrible representational genocide had happened: The existence of Native people had been written out by Ansel Adams and John Muir, and others — wilderness was a place where man is only a visitor. Advertisement I got to see that change. When I came back to Yosemite after publishing 'Savage Dreams,' I was like, ''Wow, these problems I wrote about, they're not resolved, we're not in utopia or paradise, but there have been huge shifts in how the National Park Service represents indigenous people.' Feminism is another example. At various points in my life, people have announced that feminism failed. People do not understand the mind-blowing transformation, not just of centuries but millennia of patriarchy that just in my lifetime have been changed so profoundly. The fact that it's not all perfect and finished isn't cause for despair — why should we complete something in one lifetime? I took heart from one of the essays in the book, 'Feminism Has Just Begun,' because I do think that for women of my generation (I'm a millennial), it can be easy to fixate on the backlash. When I read that essay, I was struck by just how much the norms for women have changed for the better. And as you say in that essay, there is some progress that can't be undone. Sure, states can outlaw abortion, but they can't take away the belief among the majority of Americans that women have a right to it. Advertisement People on the left often don't recognize our victories, let alone bask in them. And I think the whole MAGA-Trump backlash and the versions of it happening around the world are essentially saying, 'You all changed the world profoundly in terms of marriage equality, rights for queer and trans people, rights for people of color, immigrant rights, disability rights, women's rights.' And what they're actually saying to us is that we have been very successful. We have changed the world a lot. The backlash is that they don't like what we did and want to change it back. But I don't think that people are going to easily surrender what they've gained. People are looking for ways to hold on to hope — how, on a practical level, can the average person do that? I'm sad because I missed a bunch of Related : You can lay the flammable material for the bonfire, you can pile up the wood and kindling, but it's the lightning strike that's going to set it ablaze. I watched those George Floyd protests. I watched Occupy Wall Street. I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall. I watched a bunch of extraordinary moments that nobody saw coming, and suddenly the world was different. So pile up your fuel. Find common ground. We now have the possibility to form an unprecedented coalition. Suddenly people who love Advertisement Christine Mehta can be reached at
Telegraph
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Alec Baldwin is in trouble for ‘manterrupting' his wife – but somebody had to
As the team grinds into pre-production for a new series of Only Connect, my mind as always starts grouping everything around me in sets of four. You know how that happens? If you do too many crosswords, all the number plates of passing cars turn into anagrams? If you play too much Scrabble, you can't read emails without involuntarily scoring the words? If you don't know what I mean, Only Connect is probably not the show for you. Or, if you do, you might enjoy this puzzle: what connects 'Spreading', 'Scaping', 'Splaining' and… ready for the fourth giveaway clue? 'Terrupting'. That's right: you can put 'man' in front of all of them to complete a zeitgeisty modern coinage. 'Manspreading' was invented to describe the way that some men sprawl in seats, particularly on public transport, legs akimbo to take up as much space as possible. 'Manscaping' refers to cosmetic trimming of body hair in the nether regions (I do apologise if you're reading this over breakfast, especially if you're having vermicelli). And 'mansplaining' is the original: credited to Rebecca Solnit, author of the book Men Explain Things to Me, it describes a particularly male way of slowly telling women how everything works. (Men talk to women like they're idiots, women talk about men like they're idiots, mutatis mutandis.) I had never heard 'manterrupting' until last week, although – before a hero leaps in mid-sentence to parse it for me – I reckon I can decipher what it means. It came up over and over again after a controversial red-carpet interview with the actor Alec Baldwin and his wife Hilaria. Did you hear about this? The Baldwins are doing a reality TV show together, a fly-on-the-wall look at their life and many children. (Voice in head: 'All we need now for an Only Connect question is three more things that Alec Baldwin has in common with Jacob Rees-Mogg. Has Jacob Rees-Mogg confessed to 'a white-hot cocaine problem'? Has Jacob Rees-Mogg had a long, steamy affair with Kim Basinger? Did Alec Baldwin campaign for British Acts of Parliament to continue being printed on vellum? Keep thinking, keep thinking…') At the opening night for a new Planet Hollywood, the Baldwins were asked about their series. She answered, he joined in and she snapped: 'No! When I'm talking you're not talking!' The awkward footage went viral and the Baldwins have spent the intervening time posting damage-limitation videos on TikTok and Instagram to emphasise that he 'manterrupted' her, he's very sorry and everyone's fine. Now, the press shrieks that Alec Baldwin has been brought humiliatingly to heel, his wife has got him by the short and manscaped, the marriage is on the rocks. @extra_tv Alec and Hilaria Baldwin on if we'll see a Season 2 of their family reality show! 📺 #alecbaldwin #hilariabaldwin #thebaldwins #tlc ♬ original sound - ExtraTV Intrigued by all this gossip, I paid £3.99 for Discovery+ in order to watch an episode of The Baldwins. My verdict is: this might be the most boring programme I've ever seen, but they aren't unhappily married. Why would they be? He's a Hollywood star with a house in the Hamptons, she's a hot yoga instructor 26 years younger, everyone's happy. Idly, I remember the photo I once saw in Vanity Fair of the busty Playboy centrefold Anna Nicole Smith with her 89-year-old billionaire husband J. Howard Marshall in a jewellery shop, captioned: 'J Howard relaxes in his wheelchair as Anna picks out gems.' What a contented sentence that was. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Alec Baldwin (@alecbaldwininsta) No criticism intended, by the way. Of course Alec Baldwin's money and fame increase his sex appeal; that's no shallower than his own liking for his wife's youth and bendiness. Besides, contentedness is not necessarily in the eye of the beholder. Anna Nicole Smith was left nothing in that lecherous old billionaire's will and died from a drug overdose some years later. Alec and Hilaria filmed their series throughout the aftermath of a disaster on a Western he was making, where he shot dead a young woman cinematographer (and mother of a small boy) with a faulty prop gun that turned fatal. 'I've never been through anything remotely like this in my entire life,' says Alec. Well, one would think not. I found it weird enough just typing it out in a sentence. So we can assume they're tormented, although they've overcome it sufficiently to film themselves giggling as they squirt pink icing onto one of their indistinguishable children's birthday cakes, which is not perhaps what you or I might have done under the circumstances. Problem is, Alec Baldwin is a bit special and his wife really isn't. I mean… you know, we're all special in the eyes of the Lord and our children. But special on camera is a different story. Alec Baldwin is a unique character with an astonishing face, powerful charisma and funny bones; anyone who's seen 30 Rock knows that, never mind the Hollywood blockbusters he made before. Hilaria is like someone you might greet politely on the next rowing machine at the gym. She's fine. Ordinary, pretty and fine. Everything that's wrong with the reality show comes down to her talking too much. Not as a wife! Not as a woman! But as a voice on camera, sheesh, put a sock in it. It's all so, so, so boring. The idea of Mrs Baldwin as a co-star with equal box-office appeal, shutting the old man up on a red carpet so she can expound at length… I'm afraid it's not terribly good for women. It's not what the concepts of 'mansplaining' and 'manterrupting' were invented for. Say what you like about Meghan Markle; at least in her marriage she is the more sparkling performer. God spare us from the Hilaria and Prince Harry show.
