Last week, I wrote about the despair that arises when a person looks at an apparent groundswell of popular, online support and then sees no evidence of change in the real world. The feeling, something akin to abandonment, is nothing new—the wider world rarely cares enough—but social media, with its endless echo chambers, creates the illusion that everyone agrees on the righteousness of your cause, which, in turn, intensifies the anger you feel when nothing gets done.
We see this mismatch everywhere now: in 2020, when millions marched for George Floyd; later that same year, among a very different crowd and with a very different cause, when many Trump supporters insisted that the election had been stolen; or again today, as thousands of protesters block highways and disrupt mass transit to demand a ceasefire in Gaza but wake up to more reports of bombings.
I became interested in the activist Wayne Hsiung because he seemed to offer a counterexample or, at least, a compelling anomaly. Hsiung, who previously taught law at Northwestern, came to my attention in 2020, when he ran for mayor of Berkeley, California, where I live. Although Hsiung presented a sober platform when it came to issues such as affordable housing and policing, he also proposed ideas that were way out there, even for Berkeley: a five-block radius, or “Green District,” where, among other things, meat would not be consumed or sold, in the hope that the entire city would eventually go green; a future in which Berkeley was a haven for both local and international activists. He won twenty-four per cent of the vote, placing second among the candidates.
Hsiung co-founded an animal-rights group called Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), which is well known in the Bay Area for its open rescues and for a string of strident, wildly public, and often humorous demonstrations. During the 2022 N.B.A. playoffs, for example, a DxE protester sitting courtside at a Minnesota Timberwolves game wore a referee’s uniform under a heavy coat. At the start of the third quarter, she ran out onto the court to “eject” Glen Taylor, the majority owner of the Timberwolves at the time, who had made part of his fortune in factory farming. She was quickly tackled by security and taken away.
Last Friday, the state of Wisconsin dropped all criminal charges against Hsiung and two other animal-rights activists who had broken into Ridglan Farms, a facility that breeds beagles for animal-testing laboratories, in 2017. The three activists conducted what’s known as an open rescue, taking three dogs who, they said, had been tortured; they brought them to a veterinarian, then set them up with permanent homes. The activists did not conceal their identities. (Elizabeth Barber has written about open rescue both for this publication and for Harper’s.)
After the charges were dropped, Hsiung expressed “profound disappointment” that he no longer faced up to sixteen years in prison. (He has already been convicted of three felonies related to his activism, all of which are being appealed.) “There are incredibly important legal and moral issues that need to be addressed,” he said in court. Those issues include whether people have “the freedom of conscience to help animals when they’re suffering” and whether animals are sentient beings or simply “things.” In a pretrial filing on behalf of one of Hsiung’s co-defendants, Paul Picklesimer, Hsiung’s attorneys laid out the overarching question: “If someone is actively harming an animal they ‘own,’ does the law permit a third party to intervene and stop that abuse?” They pointed out that, in many cases, the law allows for people to break a car window to help an overheating dog, for instance. So why would the same justification not apply to a facility like Ridglan Farms, where puppies are bred and kept in what Hsiung and his co-defendants say are intolerable conditions? (Ridglan Farms disputes such characterizations.)
My interest in Hsiung and DxE isn’t born out of a shared personal conviction about animal cruelty—I eat meat, if not quite unrepentantly, then without too much guilt—but out of a growing suspicion that the gap between social-media outrage and the actual change it creates is a potentially fatal problem for all dissent in America. In the summer of 2020, I could not shake the sense that the expressed politics of what was happening in the streets, whether through the calls for defunding the police or the abolition of the carceral state, had been tacked on, almost as afterthoughts, to what had become a popular rebellion against not only police brutality but COVID policies and white-collar hiring practices and whatever else could get shoehorned into the moment. The politics, in other words, were secondary to the spectacle. My fear is that this peculiar arrangement—a never-ending reel of floating, disembodied dissent with vague messaging—will become an end unto itself, divorced from the world offline, an unreal expression of perpetual, slightly out-of-focus rage.
There’s a good argument to be made—it’s one I in fact have made—that large street demonstrations are the best way to combat the despair many of us feel about political impossibility. We see people who think like us and realize how many of us there are. But DxE’s referee protest, Hsiung’s mayoral run, and, most strikingly, the legal strategy of open rescue seem to come from an entirely different political perspective—precisely because animal-rights activism does not, for the most part, have the ability to bring millions of people into the streets. It does not have a nostalgic and lionized history of good and necessary change. What it did have was a sense of community—some DxE members in Berkeley actually lived in a house together—and a highly visible form of political action that has always felt provocative, because it entails an unusual amount of personal risk for the protester. When someone is facing multiple felonies for what they believe in, you tend to take them a bit more seriously.
A few weeks ago, Hsiung agreed to meet me in person, then again for a series of Zoom interviews. We met at a local vegan sandwich joint called the Butcher’s Son that specializes in the types of fake meat that turn everything into a salty, crumbly sludge. (We both ordered fake fried chicken.) Even at forty-two, Hsiung, who is slightly built and wears glasses, could easily pass for any of Berkeley’s thousands of Asian American graduate students.
The Ridglan case marked the second time in the past six months that Hsiung has faced charges for rescuing animals from what he sees as inhumane conditions. In November, he was convicted on felony conspiracy to trespass and two counts of misdemeanor trespass, and sentenced to time served plus two years’ probation for his involvement in two separate open rescues, with hundreds of fellow-activists, at chicken and bird farms in Sonoma County. He plans on participating in more animal rescues until he can get a court to declare that “animals are persons under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.” As Hsiung sees it, animals are sentient beings with “joys, desires, fears, anxieties, social relationships, complex histories,” and, therefore, deserve legal protections. For the animal-rights movement, even a consideration of this idea from a lower court would constitute a landmark case. If it is legal to liberate an animal in distress, then all captive animals held under similar conditions could potentially be liberated.
Hsiung and I talked, at length, about the demands of unpopular protest. He’s been thinking about the problem for a long time. Back in 2007, he wrote a piece titled “Boycott Veganism,” in which he made the case that the animal-rights movement was too focussed on lecturing people about what they ate; this was unproductive, he argued, because it turned away potential sympathizers who felt like they were being personally judged on every single thing they put in their stomachs. Hsiung ultimately did not publish the article—for one thing, he decided that its tone was too hectoring—but he stands by the belief that a political movement cannot be based on guilt trips over an individual’s consumer choices. He also said that, although he respects the work that PETA has done in the past, a “sense of gravitas” has often been missing from the animal-rights movement.