@daniforrest.bsky.social
Writer. Cultural critic. Curious, not neutral. No interest in authoritarian vibes, false balance, or algorithmic obedience. Childless cat lady. F*cks are scarce and intentionally deployed.
At some point it stops being about facts and becomes a question of identity. Tribe. Who feels safe where. You can’t compete with someone’s need to belong. But you can decide whether you’ll disappear just to “keep the peace.”
daniforrest.substack.com/p/theres-roo...
Staying human in a brutal culture costs something. Maybe ease. Maybe invitations. Maybe even belonging. But edge is not the same thing as strength.
New essay: The Courage to Stay Human.
Who are you becoming while you watch this?
daniforrest.substack.com/p/the-courag...
Breaking from collective denial isn’t dramatic. It’s costly. You lose ease. You lose comfort. But you keep your center.
The question isn’t what they’re doing.
It’s what you’re willing to normalize.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-loyal...
Systems built on cruelty can’t survive scrutiny. So they don’t just defend the cruelty — they discredit the people who name it. If YOUR pain is the problem, they never have to face the harm. Deflection substitutes for debate.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-syste...
Authoritarianism doesn’t begin “out there.” It rises when unexamined power in our personal lives gets projected onto others. What we refuse to look at eventually looks back at us.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/the-shadow...
Moral clarity isn’t radical. It just threatens systems built on denial. Truth that stops serving power gets labeled “divisive.”
open.substack.com/pub/daniforr...
This week offered two visions of power: restraint, and discomfort with being watched. When truth becomes inconvenient, legitimacy gives way to force.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-truth...
“Coffee and donuts” in the middle of a protest isn’t naïve. It’s a strategy some generations understand instinctively.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-the-c...
This is what a legitimacy crisis looks like: harm is no longer hidden, truth is managed, and silence becomes policy.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/this-is-wh...
There are moments when “there are two sides to this” stops being thoughtful and starts being dangerous. We’re in one of those moments.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-both-...
This isn’t mass panic— it’s pattern recognition. Our bodies know when the guardrails are failing long before institutions will admit it.
“Waiting it out” isn’t a legit response when the paradigm is crashing in real time.
open.substack.com/pub/daniforr...
The middle class is being misread. The bargain is broken, cruelty is visible, and people who understand systems are paying attention. Ideology is useless once clarity sets in. I wrote more here:
daniforrest.substack.com/p/theyre-und...
There is no viable middle ground left. When state violence is praised instead of investigated, neutrality becomes not only complicity but also collaboration. I wrote more about why this moment matters here:
daniforrest.substack.com/p/the-end-of...
Five years after January 6, the feeling I keep coming back to isn’t shock — it’s breach. Systems we’ve relied on feel ruptured. Relationships feel strained. The confusion is exhausting. Naming that—and staying present with it—matters.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/after-the-...
When you hook and then fight something enormous that’s lived a long time in the deep, it thrashes. The danger is real—but thrashing isn’t necessarily victory. It’s strain. Collapse is a choice, but so is clarity.
open.substack.com/pub/daniforr...
As we head toward a new year, I wanted to name something I keep seeing: how appeals to process and majority are used to shut down moral speech. Naming harm isn’t a refusal to act. It’s often the first act there is. Essay here ⬇️
daniforrest.substack.com/p/youre-in-t...
Not every year ends with clarity or optimism. Some just end with less noise. Fewer illusions. And the quiet courage to keep going anyway.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/what-im-ca...
2025 wasn’t just chaos. It was training.
Not for survival, but for recognition.
What broke me wasn’t 🍊. It was
realizing what he activated—the need that too many people have for someone to be beneath them so that they can feel okay.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/the-boot-c...
I don’t know how to say “Happy Holidays” without it feeling phony this year. If you’re feeling heavy, disconnected, or just getting through the day — that counts. Staying human right now is an active choice. Thank you—for being here.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/what-i-can...
2025 stripped away a lot of my illusions about this country. What surprised me wasn’t the damage—it was how many people refused to look away, refused to normalize, and kept choosing care over convenience. That’s what I’m holding onto.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/what-2025-...
Winter doesn’t ask us to perform joy.
It asks for restraint, honesty, and the courage not to look away.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/on-grief-w...
This collective grief is disintegration — the necessary undoing before anything honest can reorganize. If you feel stripped down, quieter, less willing to perform, you’re not failing.
Something false is losing its grip.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/collective...
This moment wasn’t about politics as much as it was about co-regulation. Some attempts to hijack collective grief fail because shared humanity still interrupts the narrative. That’s worth paying attention to.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-trage...
When everything feels like it’s moving both fast and not at all, staying human becomes work. I don’t feel like celebrating. I do feel like choosing community, local care, and honesty over pretending.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/sunday-ser...
We don’t fix harm by pretending it’s normal. So many people defend the familiar because the truth feels destabilizing. But familiar isn’t safe. And calling harm “just how it is” doesn’t heal us—it traps us. Naming it is the first act of freedom.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/why-we-san...
It’s easy to proclaim faith while ignoring harm. It’s harder to notice the ways we use it to justify cruelty, turn a blind eye, or sanctify power. Yet that’s exactly the work this strange, heartbreaking holiday season asks of us—as a nation.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/sunday-ser...
When politics becomes a disturbing force that shapes the people closest to us, it hits a deeper nerve. Especially when those people are family, or elders, or part of our history. The personal and political aren’t separate anymore. They never really were.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/living-in-...
The women too—what is ICE doing with them?? 😳
06.12.2025 06:57 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0
We’re being told to fix what the government is breaking on purpose.
“Civic duty?” More like moral outsourcing. A nation cannot function when power pushes the burden downhill and then diagnoses outrage as “overreaction.”
daniforrest.substack.com/p/the-cruelt...
We’re living in a gaslit nation. Every day we’re told not to feel what we feel, not to name what we see, not to react to what is plainly happening in front of us. Feeling heartbroken is a flex in a country asking us to forget how to be human.
daniforrest.substack.com/p/when-the-w...