Purge… or Embrace? The Tension That Can Make or Break a Movement

Defectors, co-opters, and how to tell the difference.

Actor James Cromwell and I collaborated with Rick Pitman, the owner of one of the nation’s largest poultry farms, on a massive turkey rescue in 2018.

One of my greatest successes as an animal advocate came from collaborating with an animal killer.

Rick Pitman was not a natural ally. As the owner of Pitman Family Farms, he was Enemy #1 to the grassroots movement. Across the Western United States, his Mary’s Free Range Chicken products were one of the biggest perpetrators of so-called humanewashing. And his company collaborated with state and federal prosecutors in racketeering charges against me that could have landed me in prison for decades. Yet beginning in 2018, Pitman became not just an ally but a personal friend. And our collaboration has led to incredible victories for animal rights, including the freeing of 100+ birds whisked to sanctuary just days before slaughter on Thanksgiving of 2018.

What was the secret to our success? We balanced the tension between two of the fundamental forces of social movements. Movements are driven by two competing forces: the drive to embrace defectors, and the drive to purge co-opters. The first force seeks to expand the pie and reach new people, especially those who previously supported the status quo (defectors). The second force prevents it from being infiltrated by people secretly seeking to defend the status quo (co-opters).

These two forces often come into conflict. Effective movements must balance the tension between these two forces: recruit defectors but only to the extent that it does not allow co-opters to compromise the movement’s vision and integrity.

I’ve seen this tension firsthand. When we started Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) in 2013, we wanted to create a movement that would grow (which most vegans agreed with) but also one that would redefine itself to include non-vegans (which most vegans did not). This came to a head when, in 2018, I invited Rick Pitman to the Animal Liberation Western Convergence. I was excited to have a prominent defector join the ALWC, even if his support for our vision was limited. But many in our leadership team felt uneasy about his inclusion; supporters on social media turned on me, accusing me of betraying the cause. They saw Pitman as someone who was morally compromised.

Media swarmed Rick when he joined animal rights activists in 2018.

The critics had a point. Co-optation has been a major problem for social movements. The environmental movement, for example, was a rapidly-growing force in the 1970s–using ambitious direct action to seize the nation’s attention. Then corporate foundations entered the space. These co-opters helped to reshape a powerful grassroots movement into a greenwashing platform for companies like McDonald’s and Walmart. Real political change was stalled. It was not until the rise of mass climate protest in the 2010s that the movement became an effective force again. A drive to purge co-opters might have prevented the environmental movement from being captured.

And yet there is evidence on the other side of this debate, too. Erica Chenoweth at Harvard analyzed 323 cases of social movements and found that embracing defectors has been crucial for success. No one is more credible, in critiquing a system, than someone who was once part of it. The Civil Rights Movement won when it embraced a racist Southern politician — Lyndon B. Johnson, who was once infamous for keeping a snake in his trunk to scare Black people — to join its fight for equal rights.

But how does one balance the drive to embrace defectors with the need to purge co-opters? It’s first worth noting that grassroots movements are very quick to purge co-opters but rarely embrace defectors. This is because power in the grassroots comes from moral authority, and there is little moral authority to be gained by working with defectors. Defectors are, by definition, morally compromised. Grassroots movements are thus biased towards purges, even of people who truly want to help.

Many saw Lyndon Johnson, a politician with racist roots in the Deep South, as an enemy of civil rights. Dr. King saw him as a potential ally.

The solution to this bias is to distinguish defectors and co-opters. And there is, in fact, a simple two-part test that can help determine the difference between the two.

1. Is the potential ally offering support without demanding changes to the movement’s vision and strategy?

2. Is the potential ally offering support that causes division in the existing regime’s pillars of support?

If the answer to these questions is “Yes,” then you are probably not dealing with a co-opter.

With respect to the first question, a new ally who doesn’t ask for any changes to a movement cannot effectively co-opt it. The problem with the environmental movement’s partnership with McDonald’s and Walmart was that these new allies demanded an end to grassroots protest.

With respect to the second question, a new ally who causes infighting within the regime is doing the work of a defector, intentionally or otherwise. One of the reasons I was confident in Rick Pitman’s support for our work is that the rest of the industry, along with its government allies, hated it. It undermined their attempts to prosecute us and led to one of the most important legal victories in animal rights history.

Effective movements need to apply tests like these to balance the tension between the drive to purge and the drive to embrace. But progressive movements have mostly failed to do this. From Black Lives Matter to MeToo, they are too often relentlessly focused on purging co-opters without much thought put into recruiting defectors.

A notable instance of this occurred just a few days ago on social media. One of the most well-known defenders of Israel on X, a former Columbia professor named Shai Davidai, posted that “we need to talk about hunger in Gaza” and that “Israel must now be at the forefront of saving the innocent civilians of Gaza.” It was a shock to many, including me, as Davidai’s statements directly contradicted the public stance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has claimed that there is no starvation in Gaza.

Let’s apply the defector test. Davidai’s support did not come with any conditions that Free Palestine activists change their tactics or demands; it was offered freely. And his statement triggered infighting among supporters of the Israeli regime. One prominent supporter of Israel accused Davidai of being a “very sad man” and “supporting Hamas and terror.” Others argued about whether Davidai had become a “useful idiot.” In short, Davidai seemed a promising case of potential defection; an effective movement would harness this by trumpeting that even a devoted ally of the Israeli government was turning against it.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Davidai was hit with even more hate from Free Palestine activists than from Netanyahu supporters. One posted, “you know it's bad when Davidai is feigning concern for palestinian civilians.” Another called him a “shameless liar” and “failed propagandist.” There were, of course, things about Davidai’s statement that many in the pro-Palestine movement would not agree with, e.g., his allegation that Hamas (rather than Israel) was the root cause of the famine. (The New York Times, citing sources in the Israeli military, says there is “no proof” that Hamas has stolen aid.) But I was struck by the near total absence of Free Palestine activists reaching out to Davidai to recruit him to their cause. That seems a clear mistake.

And Davidai is not the only example of the drive to purge overwhelming the drive to embrace. Cory Booker recently posted in support of Palestine only to be widely mocked by left-wing influencers, including one who wrote “Never forgive these monsters." When the prominent Jewish publisher Bari Weiss published a piece about “the hunger crisis” in Gaza, an activist and professor at the University of Toronto wrote in reply “TOO LATE BITCH. You are off to The Hague [for criminal prosecution].” Even seemingly strong supporters of Free Palestine, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), have spent time fending off attempts to purge them from the movement. Check out AOC getting into a shouting match with protesters last year for her failure to call the invasion of Gaza a genocide.

Of course, there is an argument for the approach taken by the people attacking Booker, Weiss, and AOC. The drive to purge co-opters is a necessary force for a movement to survive, akin to the immune system in the human body. But just like the immune system, which can cause fatal disorders when it gets out of control, the drive to purge can go haywire.

Effective movements learn when purging must yield to embracing. It is possible someone like Shai Davidai is an enemy of Free Palestine, seeking to co-opt its movement. But if we don’t bother looking, we may miss something important:

Maybe he’s not an enemy at all. Maybe he’s our most important future ally.

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Have you witnessed the tension between purging and embracing newcomers in your communities? How did it affect you? Share an example in the comments!