To get a sense for this, consider the fates of Taylor Lorenz, Boots Riley, and Zohran Mamdani: three figures with large footprints on the Left who’ve recently come to realize that hell is other Leftists, to adapt the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.

Lorenz, a journalist-influencer hybrid — a kind of reverse Joe Rogan for people who never took their masks off — championed extreme Covid lockdowns; fangirled after Luigi Mangione, the alleged insurance-boss assassin; and left The Washington Post after the paper investigated her for sharing an Instagram post calling then-President Joe Biden a war criminal. Filmmaker and musician Riley’s latest movie, I Love Boosters, is such a work of agitprop that even an outlet called Communist Revolution described as “communist propaganda” — and “weak sauce” at that. Mamdani, of course, is the self-avowed democratic socialist governing America’s largest city. None of the three, in short, could plausibly be mistaken for a centrist.

Yet all three have been hauled before the People’s Court of Posting: a stateless, leaderless online tribunal whose function is to prosecute everyone — no matter how radical — for insufficient radicalism, invariably ruling that lo, the accused comes up short. It’s more proof that whatever Stephen Miller is currently cooking up to do to “radical-Left terrorism” from inside the Trump administration, it isn’t, right now, the most effective force degrading the American Left. The Left is doing that to itself.

In July, Lorenz claimed that “33,000 people are canceling me” after she criticized Minnesota’s AI nudification law, which prohibits the use of technology for faking sexual images of people. This week, she drew more backlash after discussing how she uses generative AI to work more productively. Reasonable people can debate whether journalists should use such tools, but posters in a Left-leaning subreddit called her “deeply unwell mentally” or claimed, “either she’s in a psychosis, or she’s been bought.” Lorenz then complained that the online Left spends its time “dog-piling everyone who doesn’t comport with their extremely narrow social media-driven worldview,” calling the culture “absolutely deranged” and its practitioners guilty of “no moral consistency on any level” and a willingness to “lie all day about anyone they don’t like.”

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Her realization has impeccable comic timing. It was only last year, when Mamdani rode the subway without a mask during his mayoral campaign, that she accused “a lot of DSA leftists” of hating disabled people, women and LGBTQ people — an extraordinary moral indictment to build out of one politician’s naked face, especially years after universal masking had ceased to be a remotely plausible public policy. Now she has discovered the downside of ruthless purity testing: administer it often enough and, eventually, somebody administers it to you.

Just ask Boots Riley, who has been an outspoken communist since before many of his ultra-Left online trolls were born. He fronted the radical hip-hop group The Coup through the Clinton years and spent a memorable evening on Politically Incorrect a quarter-century ago patiently explaining Marxism to a smirking Bill Maher. When a clip of that appearance resurfaced this week, Riley observed that the old Right-wing gotcha — if you make money under capitalism while opposing capitalism, you are a hypocrite — was now being repeated by “supposed Left online people.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In one discussion of Riley’s films, a critic argued that he “does not have to make a movie that costs 20 million dollars” — a reference to I Love Boosters — if he really opposes capitalism, dismissed his work as a “million-dollar vanity project funded by the billionaires [Riley] claim[s] to hate,” and concluded that anyone who repeatedly makes choices that perpetuate capitalism is, whatever he calls himself, a capitalist.

This is a wonderfully efficient definition of capitalism, because it makes every person currently alive guilty of it. If Riley proves that longevity confers no immunity from such intramural attacks, Mamdani demonstrates that neither does victory. Conservatives regularly roast the New York City mayor, but some of the heaviest fire still comes from socialists for whom gaining power represents less a triumph than a dangerous ideological compromise.

A recent feature essay in The Drift on New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is a nuanced account of a socialist organization’s growing pains in power. But it also doubles as a field guide to how the ultra-Left cannibalizes its own successes.

NYC-DSA boasts 15,000 members and genuine victories: a Big Apple mayor elected from among their own ranks, a rent freeze instituted, and a near-sweep by DSA candidates in the June Democratic primaries. Even so, as French documents, much of the chapter’s energy still gets consumed by warfare waged “in Signal chats, in polemics posted on niche websites, and, inevitably, on X.”

A leadership reshuffle got branded, seriously, a “coup.” A dispute over home-health policy occasioned comparisons to slavery. A national leader of the dominant Groundwork caucus dismissed his internal critics with a line that deserves to be engraved somewhere, describing “an antagonism that attracts the cynical, the burnt-out, the oppositionally defiant, and the unsatisfiable” — arguably the most accurate description of Left Twitter ever.

DSA’s own Liberation Caucus, a — sigh — Marxist-Leninist-Maoist faction operating inside the very organization that helped elect him, published one member’s description of Mamdani as “ZIOhran”; another called him “a traitor and an opportunist” over his perceived moderation on policing and Israel. The Trotskyist paper Workers Vanguard ran a piece headlined, with admirable bluntness, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani!,” accusing the mayor of backing “scabherder” Gov. Kathy Hochul during a recent nurses’ strike, and closing with: “Expel Mamdani! Socialists stand with the workers and oppressed, not scabherders and pigs!”

This isn’t an argument against criticizing politicians, artists, or journalists merely because they belong to the same broad political family. A movement that can’t criticize its leaders soon becomes a fan club. The problem is what happens when every honest disagreement over tactics, language, art, or policy becomes a referendum on personal character. The defendant is never merely mistaken but corrupt; never simply compromised but bought; never insufficiently radical but secretly reactionary. The overriding impulse is the avoidance of contamination.

I have experienced the smaller, less glamorous version of this as someone who writes occasionally for Jacobin, a premier Left outlet. Of course, no journalist is above criticism, but nothing matches the venom my own occasional writing generates from my fellow progressives. I’ve been called fascist, racist, Zionist, reactionary, and, most damningly of all in certain corners of the internet, a Jacobin writer. The abuse rarely engages with anything I have actually written, and it rarely tries to persuade anyone; it’s ambient, repetitive and exhausting. It’s a kind of ideological carbon monoxide that doesn’t kill anyone but saps and smothers energy and genuine critical thought.

It’s the kind of noxious atmosphere that helps explain why Bluesky is dying. Conceived as the progressive rescue boat from Elon Musk’s X, it increasingly resembles a lifeboat whose passengers spend their days deciding whom they will cannibalize first. Slate conceded that “the best Bluesky can replicate is a hellish, inescapable, never-ending version of 2016.” By June, the platform’s mobile application commanded 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide, a 27% tumble from its previous year, even as the total number of active participants has withered by over 50% since the high-water mark following the election.

The platform did not invent the Left’s appetite for schism, but it has distilled it into something close to its purest form: a politics conducted almost entirely through denunciation, in which the easiest way to demonstrate your virtue is to expose someone else’s insufficient supply. That may provide a brief dopamine hit, but it cannot build a durable coalition. Any movement large enough to matter will necessarily contain hypocrites, eccentrics, sell-outs, moderates and people who sometimes say stupid things online. It will also contain people who disagree.

Nor is this an exclusively American disease. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched Your Party last year amid hundreds of thousands of expressions of interest from voters desperate for an alternative to Labour. A year later, thanks to vicious infighting, Your Party became No One’s Party. The Greens initially appeared to be the beneficiaries, but they, too, have already demonstrated the Left’s remarkable capacity to turn political momentum into an internal disciplinary hearing.

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To be fair, the far Right suffers from a nearly identical affliction. MAGA’s online fringe hunts RINOs (“Republicans in Name Only”), fantasizes about Maoist-style purges of liberal institutions, and insists that Nazi jokes remain jokes even as the jokers enter Republican politics and win jobs in the administration. Extremely online politics, Left and Right alike, increasingly resembles two rival cults, each certain the other represents the real existential threat, while both spend the overwhelming majority of their energy excommunicating their own. The American far-Right influencer Laura Loomer is now claiming credit for Friday’s ICE deportation of the British far-Right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos — which is taking intra-party cancel culture to a wild new level.

None of which means Stephen Miller’s threats to progressives are empty theater. The White House consigliere really did vow, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” a “vast domestic terror movement.” It is worth remembering, too, as that grim anniversary approaches, that eight Prairieland defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison after an anti-ICE protest turned violent. An actual crackdown is afoot, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone who cherishes civil liberties.

But if the Trumpians were smart, they would turn their detention centers into a convention of likeminded radicals with free Wi-Fi. What would ensue would be not unlike Sartre in No Exit, in which three sinners are put in a locked room waiting for the instruments of torture, only to realize none was coming; they themselves were each other’s affliction. So it goes for the likes of Lorenz, Riley, and Mamdani.

Within hours, tributes began to circulate. On Reddit, strangers tried to figure out what had happened, with some assuming it was related to his bout with “long Covid”, while others believed, reasonably under the circumstances, it was suicide (YB didn’t reply to my requests for comment). On YouTube, podcasters eulogized Lee. And across X, the platform where he spent so much of his last five years, the reactions carried a stunned grief. 

I expected to feel ambivalent. I had known Lee only through a couple of antagonistic exchanges online this year. In our final exchange in August, I blocked him after I refused to debate him about Covid on his show, Struggle Session. But I could only muster sadness and pity for him. The “Zero Covid” or “Covid cautious” community he helped sustain had hardened into something like an emotional pandemic, long after the biological one had faded into the background of American life.

To understand that movement, we have to return to 2020.

The institutional failures of the early pandemic are well documented: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s infamous mask flip-flop; the agency’s fixation on surface transmission; missteps on testing; mixed messages about risk; and a possible coverup of the origins of the novel coronavirus. For many Americans, the CDC’s credibility cracked. For people already predisposed to distrust institutions — especially on the far Left and Right — it shattered.

Into that breach stepped the so-called People’s CDC, a self-appointed, grassroots alternative. It was a coalition of activist scientists, public-health researchers, and highly online progressives, united by the belief that only a bottom-up, morally pure movement could save the marginalized. They were united by a shared belief that the official CDC no longer “followed the science” and had been corrupted by MAGA and capitalist institutions, which demanded everyone go back to work to shore up the corporate bottom line. The People’s CDC began issuing biweekly “risk maps” that almost always seemed to point toward continued caution, regardless of the data. 

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Even after vaccines arrived, even as hospitalizations fell, even as scientists updated their understanding of risk, the People’s CDC preserved the emotional realities of early 2021: masks were always necessary, indoor gatherings were inherently suspect, and any attempt to resume normal everyday social life was problematic. The group wanted the United States to be on full lockdown like China, even as the Middle Kingdom abandoned its hard-line Zero Covid policies. For many, this alternative CDC filled an emotional void or offered clarity during a bewildering moment. For others, it became something more — an identity.

The Zero Covid movement’s nerve center is a 32,000-member-strong subreddit called ZeroCovidCommunity. The members are convinced that the pandemic never truly ended, that the emergency has become a permanent condition. The radical edge of this community codified itself into what some observers half-jokingly called COVIDTELPRO, a quasi-ironic name evoking the FBI’s secret surveillance program of the 1960s. This group primarily targets Left-wing organizers, journalists, union members, and anyone else who dares to propose a future that includes socializing, bars, or maskless joy. The result is a constant churn of denunciations, loyalty tests, and ritualistic online shaming of those who don’t wear N95 masks in public.  

I encountered them firsthand. In February, I wrote a brief essay urging young adults — Gen Z, in particular — to revisit offline social life, to resist the isolation that had become endemic. I intended to push against the extreme safety-ism that had metastasized among the Left and young people since 2020. Humans are inherently social animals, as Aristotle taught, and meeting others face-to-face is a fundamental aspect of physical, mental, and even political health. But in the eyes of Zero Covid activists, I had committed an inexcusable offense — telling people to get a life. 

One of the most persistent of the Covid-cautious commentators was Leslie Lee. He had a career long before his activism swallowed him. He taught high-school English, wrote for the Huffington Post and other progressive outlets, and co-hosted a number of Lefty podcasts. 

In the late 2010s, Lee was sharp, blunt, funny, and often pugnacious — an online personality who knew how to provoke. Then Covid struck; for him, the “long” variety. On his GoFundMe page, he described brain fog, excruciating migraines, constant fatigue — all of which made his once-fluid creative process painfully slow: “one show every month or two,” he admitted. What he did have energy for, at least publicly, was venting endlessly about “Covid deniers” like me. Once Lee put me in his crosshairs as the enemy on X, I received hundreds of angry tweets from those in the movement — including from Seventies actress Morgan Fairchild and the forever-masked influencer-journalist Taylor Lorenz, arguably Zero Covid’s biggest icon. 

What surprised me most during the weeks-long harassment wasn’t the volume; it was the emotional intensity. My opponents posted as if they lived in a perpetual emergency, and I was part of the problem. Many of these people were polite in private over direct messages or phone calls, including Lorenz. But in public, they wanted a pound of flesh from me, a groveling apology, even as they threatened real-life harm. The rhetoric kept escalating. Disagreement meant harm. Harm became violence. Violence turned to genocide. I was an “ableist” and eventually accused of being — yes — Hitler for the immunocompromised. One wrote: “People like you make it impossible for me to exist in public spaces.” 

I was far from the only one on the receiving end. Activists told me they were tired of every event photo being ammunition for the Covid-cautious to scream bloody murder at the sight of unmasked faces. A national newspaper columnist contacted me privately to say she had endured 18 straight months of being called “a murderer” and worse for her positions on lockdowns and school closures. “I just want you to know you aren’t alone,” she wrote.

As political journalist David Weigel has observed, these online crusades have been disastrous for the Left. Progressive spaces — activist meetings, book talks, union gatherings — became some of the last places in America still requiring masks, vaccine cards, or elaborate safety rituals years after the broader public abandoned them. Many simply stopped showing up, and a movement already known for its internal fragmentation became more physically and emotionally atomized. A rally in 2024 or 2025 featuring a sea of N95s doesn’t project seriousness; instead, it signals an inward-facing subculture that pillories dissent. 

Yet the Zero Covid crowd viewed this online invective as necessary and themselves as noble martyrs burdened to save the world from a crisis that everyone else had forgotten. Another prominent community member, Alice Wong, embodied such thinking. Wong, who coincidentally also tragically died this month, was a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, best known as the founder of the Disability Visibility Project. She reportedly died of an infection in a California hospital at the age of 51, not long after her Teen Vogue disability column got canceled. 

Just as segments of too-online progressive spaces once espoused that black women were inherently magical (Remember #BlackGirlMagic?), or that autism imbues people with superhuman powers, Wong called herself an “oracle” due to her experience with muscular dystrophy. She co-founded the Society of Disabled Oracles, which framed disabled people as holy priests possessing what she called prophetic perception: an ability to sense power dynamics others can’t see, and to perceive hidden knowledge from the past or the future. “Disability is a generative force. It’s magic,” reads a banner on the group’s site.

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This might all sound like a harmless New Age-y fantasy, but the reality is that these delusions do not appear to be making anyone happy. On ZeroCovidCommunity, where Wong was revered as a visionary, you can see the emotional consequences of this cosmology laid bare. A recent thread titled “Does anyone else struggle with life feeling…” reads like a collective diary of people trapped in a state of self-victimization.

The responses are chilling. Posters describe losing friends, losing hobbies, losing whole years. A few confess they no longer feel connected to their own bodies — that masking and hypervigilance have rewired how they relate to themselves and to others. One admits that the mask has become a psychological crutch — not for safety, but because it provides “a barrier between me and other people”, a permission structure for avoidance. Some say the pandemic ruined their 20s or 30s; and now the Zero Covid community has become the only place that recognizes their pain. But recognition is not the same as healing. 

The pattern becomes clear: the Covid-cautious online community didn’t merely attract people with existing vulnerabilities. It amplified their fear, rewarded their withdrawal, endowed their anxiety with moral weight, and continues to tell them they are righteous for feeling this way, that they are saving countless lives. It is a feedback loop between individual fragility and a worldview that says fragility is wisdom. 

Lee and Wong deserve our sympathy, as do many of the Zero Covid die-hards. But it is difficult to read their words without feeling the weight of what the movement has done — perhaps not maliciously, but inevitably. A political identity built around a permanent emergency can’t shepherd people out of an emergency. It can’t guide them back to the world. It can only freeze them in the moment when everything first went wrong, and prevent them from re-entering a world they no longer trust — with devastating consequences for well being.