On Sunday, February 25, a US Air Force serviceman lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, in protest of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza and US support for it. Twenty-five-year-old Aaron Bushnell declared that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” before self-immolating. He succumbed to his injuries the same day.

Bushnell’s extreme act of protest followed months of elites dismissing growing antiwar opinion in the US as Israel’s assault became increasingly horrific; it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and that the US government is complicit. Bushnell, like many other young people around the United States, had been inundated for months with the brutal images, videos, and stories coming out of Gaza — of residential blocks leveled, hospital patients massacred, hungry Palestinians shot dead trying to get access to aid, a ten-year-old boy starving to death.

Two days after Bushnell’s death, some voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary engaged in a much more prosaic act of dissent. In the weeks leading up to the February 27 primary, disaffected voters organized a movement to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary, instead of for Joe Biden. The effort, dubbed Listen to Michigan, won over 100,000 votes, 13 percent of the primary vote share.