“How can I amplify your voice?”

Do you really want to help your disabled friend, your Hispanic friend, your otherwise BIPOC friend, your Palestinian friend, your Jewish friend, your neurodivergent friend, your queer friend, your unhoused friend…

That’s the question. That is what you ask them.

And it’ll usually be something like sharing their mutual aid requests. I have never once had a successful online fundraiser, because I share the link everywhere I can possibly promote it, and then it dies. No shares means you reach no one and raise no funds. If someone you know as well as an acquaintance and know they’re honestly in need shares a personal fundraiser link, sharing it, whenever they share it, with a little “this is a good guy going through a rough patch, I’ve been watching this as it happens to them and they’re really doing a,b, and c, could you please spread the word about their fundraiser so they can get a leg up?”

This is literally the minimum. It’s completely free, and takes no more than a minute from your day. And it is the most helpful thing you can do. And yet, we’ve gotten so weird about fundraising that some white trash bitch can call an autistic child a terrible slur, and raise thousands upon thousands of dollars in an online fundraiser because of her “free speech,” but someone fundraising for medical support can be completely ignored by people in their actual, offline life who claim to care about them.

Medicaid is going away in a year for a lot of vulnerable disabled Americans, myself included. If you don’t want to perpetuate a literal genocide, you’re going to want to get comfortable with sharing your friends’ mutual aid requests so they can find donors.

It will also look like sharing factual evidence and own voices media of people telling their stories and stating their needs (like this blog). If the friend you’re supporting isn’t up to assembling you a reading list, you need to educate yourself on where you obtain factual evidence and reliable own voices reporting. Again, barest minimum, find the subreddit on the topic, and start a thread with your questions. And actually consume the resources they give you, don’t have your AI cliffs notes it for you.

Back in my Water Protector days, we had a speaker at a rally we put on who started his talk with three quick facts about the topic we were educating/protesting about. He had the crowd repeat them once or twice. And then he told them “now you have the facts, and you can share them with anyone.” And then he had them all pull out their phones and put the quick facts in a status update on their Facebook. Congratulations, you just did a actually useful act of resistance. You did it en masse, and you reached a lot of social circles with needed information.

Easily the best rally speech I have ever hard.

“I can’t be silent!” doesn’t mean posting anti-Trump AI slop. It means amplifying truth and educating people around you in real ways.

Do better.