New Friends Jour­nal arti­cle on some of the Quak­er groups leav­ing Twitter/X this week, fol­low­ing Friends World Com­mit­tee’s Mon­day announce­ment.

There’s been a lit­tle push­back, on X and Red­dit, along the lines that Quak­ers should be rep­re­sent­ed every­where. Our arti­cle quotes Alis­tair McIn­tosh, who post­ed on X:

I pre­fer it when Quak­ers bring an alter­na­tive pres­ence to con­flict zones. Has God not already got suf­fi­cient angels in heav­en? Can we not, as our 1947 Nobel Peace Prize cita­tion quotes it, act “to build up in a spir­it of love what has been destroyed in a spir­it of hatred.”

I get it but I don’t think the metaphor holds. No one is trapped on a social network. 

One prob­lem with this line of rea­son­ing is that it fails to take into account the time and resources that it takes to be on a social plat­form. Face­book, X, Threads, Bluesky, Dis­cord, Tik­tok, Telegram, What­sApp, Red­dit, Mastodon… There are so many social net­works and you can’t be every­where. As a pub­lish­er, you have to choose where you place your atten­tion. X has shot itself in the foot time and time again since Musk came in. He has no idea how to run a social network.

The qual­i­ty of dis­course at X had turned to shit. Much of the audi­ence is gone. Posts with links are down­grad­ed in the algo­rithm, giv­ing pub­lish­ers lit­tle incen­tive to stay. For most pub­lish­ers, the main pur­pose of social net­works is to get peo­ple to their web­sites (hope­ful­ly to sign up for email lists). X is fol­low­ing the lead of Meta (Face­book, Threads, Insta­gram), whose net­works have become increas­ing­ly use­less as they’ve down­grad­ed posts with links.

Many pubs are report­ing they’re now get­ting more refer­ral vis­i­tors from Bluesky than X, even with few­er fol­low­ers. For me, this announce­ment is less about pol­i­tics than it is a recog­ni­tion that X isn’t Twit­ter and that the enshit­ti­fi­ca­tion of the net­work is such that it’s no longer worth our lim­it­ed resources or attention.

When Friends World Com­mit­tee’s World Office came to us and said that a bunch of Quak­er orgs were orga­niz­ing to leave X en masse, I respond­ed with a shrug. It has­n’t felt worth it to stay on X. This is as good a time as ever to leave. Friends Jour­nal has been on Bluesky for over a year and the dis­course is sim­ply better. 

Neiman Lab is a great group that stud­ies jour­nal­ism and they’ve come out with a “Pre­dic­tions for Jour­nal­ism, 2025″ list. Whit­ney Phillips has a great entry, “Religious-sounding lan­guage will be every­where in 2025” that looks at the cur­rent vocab­u­lary being pro­mot­ed by so-called Chris­t­ian Nationalists:

this lan­guage often cen­ters, instead, on hatred of an amal­ga­mat­ed, shape-shifting, ulti­mate­ly invent­ed lib­er­al dev­il that maps, as con­ve­nient, onto “the left,” the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, “elites” some­how aligned with Marx­ism, and what Project 2025 describes as “the Great Awok­en­ing.” Spread­ing the Chris­t­ian faith isn’t the point; fight­ing the lib­er­al dev­il is. This dev­il is ulti­mate­ly sec­u­lar, based on things like DEI ini­tia­tives and the exis­tence of trans peo­ple, and is also the quasi-religious antag­o­nist in a decades-old cos­mic show­down between the ulti­mate good of “real” Amer­i­ca and the ulti­mate evil of left­ists hell-bent on tear­ing it asunder.

Much of the world­view of these groups has lit­tle resem­blance to the humil­i­ty and meek­ness of Jesus’s Ser­mon on the Mount and I appre­ci­ate Phillip­s’s fram­ing of it as “religious-sounding.” The nom­i­na­tion of the emi­nent­ly unqual­i­fied train wreck that is Pete Hegseth has brought some of this to the fore­front. A lot of the vit­ri­ol is based on clas­sic anti­se­mit­ic tropes; the absolute­ly bizarroworld claim that pets being eat­en could have been lift­ed right out of the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion. “Reli­gious free­dom” is a ral­ly­ing cry, and while I agree that it’s always a chal­lenge to bal­ance per­son­al reli­gious with civic norms, a lot of the com­plaints are rather pet­ty. Some of these folks have latched onto Quak­er fig­ures, espe­cial­ly William Penn, to the point where I feel I need to fact check sources when­ev­er I read any­thing about him any more.

It’s also very much the case that some of the peo­ple with deeply Chris­t­ian world­views are very decent, well-meaning peo­ple who would nev­er think to do harm. Part of our work is to try to dis­en­tan­gle this all as best we could. This is far from the first time bad actors have sought to weaponize Jesus’s faith.

Hat tip Julie Pey­ton on Bluesky.

It’s been a long bat­tle to see what might replace Twit­ter for a lot of us. One option of course is X, Musk’s rebrand but it’s seen the biggest col­lapse of social media since Friend­ster. Threads looked promis­ing but it’s Face­book and its algo­rithms favor click­bait and pun­ish links, espe­cial­ly polit­i­cal ones. Bluesky seems to have final­ly past a thresh­old in the last week: it past the 15 mil­lion user mark on Wednes­day and is one of the top apps in the iPhone App Store. 

This week Isaac (aka cat­shashi­mi) has put togeth­er a Quak­er Starter Pack. These are meant to be curat­ed list of peo­ple who new­com­ers might want to fol­low. And I’ve start­ed a Quak­ers list, which is more of a fire­hose of every­one I know with Quak­er connections. 

Trump is back. He won clean­ly and quick­ly this time, report­ed­ly final­ly win­ning the pop­u­lar vote. I think a lot of this is the glob­al back­lash against incum­ben­cy fol­low­ing the dis­lo­ca­tions and infla­tion of Covid but it’s also yet anoth­er data point in the twenty-first cen­tu­ry rise of strongmen.

The future is pret­ty clear. Trump has been telling us what he’ll do and there’s lit­tle rea­son to think he won’t do it. With Con­gress, the Sen­ate, and the Supreme Court under his con­trol and the GOP in full alle­giance, there’s noth­ing to stop Trump from reshap­ing the Unit­ed States in his image. Sup­pres­sion of polit­i­cal oppo­nents, the dis­man­tling of the reg­u­la­to­ry state, and a pull­back from inter­na­tion­al secu­ri­ty agree­ments will all be imme­di­ate actions. Ukraine is screwed. The Mid­dle East is like­ly to get even worse, as if that’s pos­si­ble. The Jan­u­ary 6 insur­rec­tion­ists will be par­doned and embold­ened to focus their atten­tion on who­ev­er they deem to be domes­tic trai­tors. Lim­its on the police or mil­i­tary will be lift­ed. We’re going to get our own Russia-like class of unreg­u­lat­ed oli­garchs, with Musk first in line. There’s like­ly to be some sur­pris­es — mem­bers of Trump’s whis­per­ing class some­times have dif­fer­ent goals and he him­self not sys­tem­at­ic enough to always fol­low through on his stat­ed log­ic. But the big pic­ture is clear. And the effects will be rip­pling for decades.

This time we know what we’ll get. Trump’s shown us over and over that he’s a crook, a liar, a misog­y­nist, a racist, and an lover of strong­men. Vot­ers have seen that and decid­ed this is what they want. As things start to fall apart they’ll blame oth­ers for the col­laps­es. It’s all as pre­dictable as it is sad. 

Dave Karpf’s “What the future looks like from here” seems pret­ty spot on:

What I find myself star­ing at is the future. What will these next few years look like? Where, prag­mat­i­cal­ly, can we go from here? And the answers are all pret­ty bleak.

This is, effec­tive­ly, the end of the Amer­i­can Cen­tu­ry. We’ll still have an impor­tant glob­al role, because the dol­lar is still the world­wide reserve cur­ren­cy and also we have nuclear weapons and a mas­sive mil­i­tary. But we’re going to aban­don Ukraine and NATO. The inter­na­tion­al insti­tu­tions that we built in the last cen­tu­ry — inter­na­tion­al insti­tu­tions that gave the Unit­ed States a first-among-equals advan­tage — will all with­er away.

David Hunter’s “There is hope” talks a lot about trust­ing our­selves and one anoth­er and set­tling in for the long haul.

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trust­ing your own eyes and gut, as well as build­ing pro­tec­tion from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized. 

This also means being trust­wor­thy — not just with infor­ma­tion, but with emo­tions. That way you can acknowl­edge what you know and admit the parts that are uncer­tain fears nag­ging at you. 

I hope you all take care of your­selves. It’s going to be a long ride. Remem­ber to love your neigh­bors no mat­ter who they vot­ed for. We’re all hurt, com­pli­cat­ed peo­ple. Give grace, be the mod­el of love you want to see in the world.