I was so keen to hear everyone else’s that I forgot to put my own! In no particular order:

• Mick Lynch (standing up to the system)
• Yanis Varoufakis (for a new system and for insight into the current one)
• Edward Snowden (for his principles and courage and lifting the lid)
• Satish Kumar (for his wholism and his ability to inspire with hope and goodness)
• Tyson Fury (in his almost mythical resurrection against Deontay Wilder and his retelling of the fight. Someone needs to use it as narration for animated film for children.
• Will edit if more come to mind!

Europeans

Anyone who is still doing the right thing and not in it for money or themselves. Which is fucking rare as shit these days.

Raymond Hill, the uBlock Origin guy

Any garbage man that picks up my trash. Any sanitation engineer that cleans my sewage.

The transgender population, especially transgender youth. If one group’s rights can be stripped away, then any group’s can. They are the front line soldiers against the spread of fascism.

Elon musk.

Jk. Im not sure I even have an answer. I think it’s game over.

For me personally, Cory Doctorow. Here’s an inspiring talk by him.

Mick Lynch and Shawn Fain

Shawn Fain

Stephen Hawking.

He has influenced how physicists look at the world, and they in turn have taught us how to see the world, and nearly everybody believes what he has told (even though some of the topics do not fit with newer observations anymore, but still nobody has come up with really better explanations).

Kind of on the tail end of their careers, but Senator Ron Wyden on privacy/surveillance, and Bernie Sanders on most stuff. Good question for a thread.

Scientists and other rationalists. If you wanted to be dramatic, their fight to save ourselves and the planet would be against the inertia of "common wisdom", the resistance of wanting to disregard the unknown or unpleasant, everyone for whom the truth (to the best of our knowledge) is economically inconvenient with the considerable economic and societal power they wield. They are not good odds.

Richard Stallman

Open source software maintainers, thanklessly (and often without pay) maintaining infrastructure without which the global economy would collapse immediately

Actually, I’m pretty sure the main character of real life is a girl I know. Unfortunately, revealing infos about her at this point might he harmful to the plot.

The kids protesting on campuses right now.

EMS ; chronically underpaid and overstressed.

When a cop complains about the terrible things they see on their job, they are talking about the stuff the saw watching EMS work.

Alexandra Elbakyan (Scihub) has probably done more for scientific progress than anyone alive.

Bernie Sanders would be my first thought

Greta Tintin Thunberg

Still Noam Chomsky, David Graeber (rip). Prof Michael Hudson, Prof Danny Dorling, Grace Blakely, Michael Sheen, Mick Lynch, Dianne Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexi Sayle, Rutger Bergman, Thic Naht Han (rip), Matieu Ricard, bob Marley, , and the countless comrades on the front lines of the fight for equality And protection of the environment

Honourable mentions:

Jolyon Maugham, Aaron Bastani, Marcus rashford, burning spear, Peter Geohagan, Ian hislop, chuck D, killah Mike .

Paul Hogan

not in any specific order:

SPI, the foundation supporting debian and arch projects.

boeing whistleblowers, and anybody willing to step up against these kinds of corpo shenanigans.

people who wear masks.

stephen colbert, john oliver and their news team

lemmy posters

Teachers. It is such a widely known trope that teachers are overworked and underpaid. So many that want to pursue teaching now enter the market, understanding that they will likely need a second job at some point. Although internet kudos do little to actually address the problem, my respect goes to the teachers.

Mothers. For raising up kids.