Isra Hirsi, the Teen Activist Whose Social Media Was a Light in the Darkness

Illustration: Angelica Alzona/GMG

It’s been a tough year for young Black leftists. Our preferred presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, was no match against President-elect Joe Biden during the Democratic primary. We witnessed the need for Medicare-for-all become more pressing than ever as the covid-19 pandemic caused widespread job loss and eye-watering medical bills. And our calls to defund the police following a summer of high-profile police brutality have been used as a scapegoat by the Democratic party and our own elders for losing local and statewide elections.

There have been some victories on the electoral side: incoming Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY)—both Black, both left-of-center—will soon join Congress, but they’re already getting pushback from members of their own party, most recently for having the gall not to stan House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Bush got plenty of love when she wore a mask bearing Breonna Taylor’s name, but as soon as she supported defunding the very system that led to Taylor’s death, she was immediately dogpiled by liberals on Twitter and demonized as a Sanders drone and corrupted by The Squad.

We have to keep on trucking—organizing, educating ourselves and others and calling out injustices as we see them. But we need levity and catharsis too, and one of the most surprising sources of that for me this past year has come from a clever 17-year-old girl, Isra Hirsi.

Hirsi is a climate organizer, a skeptic of electoral politics, and an unabashed Marxist. She’s also the eldest daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). But as much as Hirsi loves her mother—as evidenced by social media—she’s made it clear that she’s her own person, with her own politics, and her own goals. She’s not too online these days, perhaps because she’s busy applying for college and because, as she told Teen Vogue in October, having a platform is a major stressor. But her TikTok videos are fucking hilarious and her occasional tweets are a great little escape from the bleakness of my Twitter timeline, which, these days, is largely comprised of leftists and media goons subtweeting each other and a smattering of decent memes.

Hirsi doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at her mom, Rep. Omar, which is hilarious in its own right. A TikTok featuring Hirsi arguing with a wall with the caption “me trying to radicalize my liberal politician mother” comes to mind, as does their banter on Twitter.