Dear Boston Globe: You Are Far Worse Than Calla Walsh
The story of “Cambridge’s best” turning into a radical isn’t one of foreign influence or lack of guidance. Calla Walsh’s radicalization can be pinned on one thing, and one thing alone: the genocide in Palestine.
By T. E. Moon
credit: D. Everett
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who are oppressing them.
— Assata Shakur
There is a factory in Merrimack, New Hampshire, operated by Elbit Systems. It sits nestled in the sanitized banality of an American office park, surrounded by polite landscaping and the dull hum of commuter traffic. This charming slice of tranquility manufactures the thermal imaging and targeting programs that serve as the nervous system for the United States’ combat drones and fighter jets.
When a missile turns a crowded civilian tent in Gaza or a residential block in Beirut into a smoking crater of ash, twisted metal, and shattered bone, it is the technology built just off some New England highway that guides the deadly payload to its target. The blood is drawn thousands of miles away, but the blade is sharpened in our own quiet suburbs, funded by our own tax dollars.
It does not take an exceptional humanitarian inclination to feel visceral disgust when presented with these facts–to look at that machinery and realize that the only sane, proportionate response seems to be to break it, seize it, destroy it. It is an act of basic moral hygiene. You cannot petition a slaughterhouse. You cannot draft a polite resolution to the gears of the American war machine and ask them to find their conscience while they are actively crushing civilizations older than the English language.
But when someone actually does it—when Calla Walsh and her comrades, allegedly, forced this physical reality into the light rather than politely waving a cardboard sign from an approved free-speech zone—the apologists of the empire suffer a collective nervous breakdown. These “journalists” have spent years manufacturing consent for perhaps the most horrific crime of the 21st century, the genocide in Palestine, and steadfastly ignored (or even openly supported) the carnage funded in the halls of Congress and manufactured by firms like Elbit. Faced with a rejection of the imperialist apologetics, the professional media class recoiled from reality. Instead, they argue, Calla Walsh must be strapped to a therapist’s couch and analyzed as a mere deviation from the norm. By treating Walsh’s consciousness as pathology, the American news media is able to deem their refusal to call a genocide a genocide, somehow, ‘healthy.’
They go further: these jackals are eager to paint Walsh as the natural conclusion of American progressive thought, screaming to their readers that she is the inevitable endpoint of the growing and radicalizing left. For all their proud ignorance, these journalists are absolutely correct to fear the underlying math of the situation. They are right to realize that a system built on perpetual war, economic cannibalism, and the ground bones of children under the guise of designated enemies will be met with resistance, more resistance, radicalizing and energizing resistance.
The empire is breeding its own gravediggers. That terrifying reality is why these hit pieces on figures like Calla Walsh are ceaselessly churned out by the incestuous class of elites posing as journalists. Engorged on patronage, elite connections, and the lure of a promotion, they idle their time speculating on why an innocent white girl from Massachusetts would surrender a life of privilege for the sake of a bunch of scary, brown terrorists. After all, as these inquisitive journalists muse, they know what choices they have, and which they would make! It is obvious to all but them that these pieces serve and protect the establishment.
How could such a tragedy have happened? Cambridge's best, lost to the Ayatollahs and the Communists! The Islamo-Leftist United Front, which surely threatens us all!
The Free Press finds its answers exactly where you would expect: in the gutter of reactionary fan fiction and McCarthyite paranoia. Is it because her parents spoiled her? They are effete intellectuals (probably gay, potentially even socialist), and weakly disciplined children are prone to grow into sworn enemies of the American Empire. Is it because she was indoctrinated by the public schooling system? I remember reading something about drag queens in public libraries; I am sure it has something to do with that. Did the Hezbollah-aligned revolutionary militants in the teachers' union finally get their hooks into her? The wise Jay Solomon offers all this and more for your consideration–look what happens when you indulge the progressives!
To the Free Press, it is impossible that Walsh’s actions are driven by genuine political conviction. It must be the paycheck, and the intoxicating sense of importance she receives from foreign governments in exchange for repeating their propaganda on Twitter and Substack. It must be the money and the prestige, the North Star and compass for the journalistic class. They cannot process that someone might look at the machinery of the empire, see the blood pooling under the doors, and choose to throw their own body on the gears, without needing to be motivated by a foreign handler cutting them a check. The humanistic revolt against such needless death is not a consideration for even a moment.
If the Free Press is a reactionary circus, the Boston Globe is a grotesque autopsy of a future that never belonged to them. This is where the suffocating arrogance of centrist objectivity reveals its true face. The right-wing press wants to drone strike Walsh; the liberal press, in their cosmopolitan brilliance, wishes to appear inquisitive, launching a sophisticated professional investigation in a bid to “understand” where they went wrong with her.
The Boston Globe kicks around the origins of Walsh’s radicalization not as a genuine political transformation, but as a spiraling human resources grievance. In this theory, her trajectory is a failure of Democratic “talent pipelines,” a failure of “campaign work culture,” a failure of a political “incentive structure.” They quote political strategists mourning her as a “rising political star” who tragically veered off track, as if the highest possible aspiration of any bright, young, morally conscious mind should be to spin bullshit for the next Kennedy or to write fundraising emails for the next Markey.
The Globe leans heavily on the clinical language of therapy to patronizingly disarm her politics. Behind their paywall, you’ll find a psychology professor stepping in to diagnose her as part of a “tragically uninspired generation” who essentially “took it out” on politicians because of climate anxiety and a bleak economy. It is unalloyed liberal paternalism. They treat a revolutionary turn as a mental health crisis or a middle-management failure. Why? The answer is in front of your faces: to avoid asking why an entire generation of youth might be “tragically uninspired” or (God Forbid!) blame their political leadership for the crisis the entire world is currently engulfed in.
Why? So that, instead of engaging in mass political work, you, too, believe what they believe. That, if only some Senator had offered a better internship program, if only the progressive NGOs had provided a more robust networking environment, Calla Walsh wouldn't be cheering for the collapse of the US government. That there is nothing wrong with mass starvation or bombing schoolchildren—the real issue at hand is climbing the white-collar ladder.
The two papers operate as twin jaws of the same imperial trap. The Free Press criminalizes her to frighten the public; the Globe pathologizes her to comfort the elite. Both narratives serve the exact same function: to prevent the American people from confronting the subject of her protest.
The Globe quotes former colleagues begging her, “You can walk away from all this. You can still come home.” Home to what? A desk job managing the optics of a dying empire while cashing checks from the very people authorizing the airstrikes? Would she then meet your criteria for success? Calla Walsh was not “failed” by the Democratic Party; she saw exactly what it was doing and decided she wanted no part in the butchery.
As Walsh herself so cleanly articulated, her principles “were always far more radical than what could be expressed in an electoral campaign.”
Never does it enter their myopic, warped, and frustrated minds that perhaps American society, despite its profound decay, is still capable of producing people who take their role in history seriously. They cannot imagine America the Beautiful producing an honest-to-God revolutionary strictly because of the horrific crimes it commits at home and across the globe.
I have noticed an eagerness among some comrades to belittle Walsh for her perceived failings. What, exactly, have the rest of us done? Walsh was arrested trying to perform direct, physical action against a military contractor producing weapons for Israel. She has moved deep into the line of fire, openly endangering herself to the malicious power and influence of the Israel lobby, an entity famed for targeting their political opponents without warning or mercy. She gave up a comfortable, pre-packaged life of prestige for the terrifying reality of what she believed was right. What more can you ask of someone?
Calla Walsh looked at a machine designed to incinerate children and decided to devote her life to seeing its destruction through to the end. This is a profoundly heroic act. When Marx watched the workers of Paris rise up against impossible odds to form the Commune, he did not scold them for bad tactics or poor timing. He stood in awe, declaring that they were “storming heaven.”
If her actions echo the isolated, urban guerrilla tactics of decades past, or if she finds greater solidarity in the resistance of foreign militias than in the American working class, the blame does not lie with her. The blame lies squarely on us. It lies on an American Left that has spent the last half-century writing think-pieces, circulating petitions, and waiting for the Democrats to develop a conscience, entirely failing to build a militant, domestic political pole capable of constituting a communist force and actually threatening the empire.
Calla Walsh has not abandoned the American working class. The organized Left has simply failed to forge a mass politics that mobilizes both her and the working class as a whole.
If she acts alone, it is only because we have left her alone. If she acts outside the bounds of mass movement politics, it is because there is no mass movement politics currently willing to match her moral clarity with concrete momentum. She has been told by every institution in this country that there is no home for her fury.
We do not need Calla Walsh to temper her radicalism. We need a political movement capable of weaponizing it.
We need a politics that does not view the vandalism of Elbit Systems as an isolated tragedy or a localized crime, but as the spark for a broader, coordinated conflict. The master’s house will not be dismantled by the master’s tools, but it must be dismantled by the hands that live inside it. The American working class cannot flee the imperial core; we live in the belly of the beast. And if the beast is to be gutted, it must be gutted from the inside. America cannot be treated as an oppositional vessel to be sunk by a well-placed torpedo, but as our own ship, to be captured by a rousing mutiny by her own crew.
Our task now is not to critique Calla Walsh from the safety of the sidelines. Our task is to build a political home that can finally harness her fire, synthesizing bravery into systemic victory. The masses make history, and if the horrors are to end, they must make history in America. We must struggle here, against the factory in Merrimack and a thousand others like it, because the world to be won depends entirely on our triumph. It cannot come from anywhere else but here.
When that day comes, and the machine is finally broken by the hands of the people, Calla Walsh will certainly be welcomed back as a hero.
I look forward to it.
