My draft SDA May newsletter

Dear Comrades,

This month's newsletter is going to be hard to read because I will be touching on concepts such as ignorance and mental health in the domain of elections, and how politicians abuse both of these to get themselves elected.

I know that a lot of people will be turned off by these words, but we can't have Socialism or a better society if we don't acknowledge the drift that has made our society what it is today.

What can I do for everyone on these lists to start talking to each other? We now have more than 1,309 verified people across 105 counties with five or more members.

The silence on these listserves is deafening, as if there are no issues affecting any of you across the United States. My job is to rock the boat, even inside SDA.

This tells me one of two things: either you are someone who doesn't believe in Socialism but signed up to watch what we are cooking, or you are extremely shy. My goal is not to accumulate people on a list and brag about it. My goal is to get people talking to each other and solving problems in their communities.

It doesn't matter what the problem is. The goal is to work together to solve it. But for that to happen, you must start using the listserves to organize, and you must write your ideas down on a piece of paper. Don't worry about whether they are perfect or not; we'll help you turn those ideas into a final draft document.

The goal of SDA is to build a “floor of support” for Socialists, but many people believe that doing so requires a tremendous amount of work. It doesn’t, but it does require teamwork and independence. This judge explains the principle of democracy to the Board of Elections after we pushed the limits of what was traditionally done.

The number of examples throughout these newsletters is tremendous because they represent the aggregation of our collective work over time. We learn, and we document what we learn. What you leave in the reports section may be revisited two or three years later to help build a narrative of change.

Silence is NOT good news, and I know that there is plenty happening in your counties that could be improved and that you have ideas for making better.

I have a lot of apprehension about writing this newsletter, but if I don't write it, nothing will change. What I write may be construed as hurtful by certain people, but that is not the intent. I can't apologize for writing it either; otherwise, why would I have written it? What I am writing is based on years of observation, but until now I was incapable of describing it in terms of political activism.

Before we delve into the heaviest section of this month's draft newsletter, I encourage you to listen to and reflect on the lyrics of Pink Floyd's song "Money" as we enter a very dark place in American politics.

This was the sort of moral quandary that Pink Floyd’s songwriter Roger Waters debated as he was writing the tune. Speaking to The Observer in 1993 on the 20th anniversary of The Dark Side of the Moon, Waters said, “Money interested me enormously. I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is it and I have to decide whether I’m really a socialist or not.’ I’m still keen on a general welfare society, but I became a capitalist. You have to accept it. I remember coveting a Bentley like crazy. The only way to get something like that was through rock or the football pools. I very much wanted all that material stuff.” - https://americansongwriter.com/behind-the-meaning-of-the-subversive-pink-floyd-song-money

Civic Education

This is the most difficult part to write, and I will say it directly, without filters, because we have a serious civic education problem in this country. However, teaching civics is only one part of the problem, and it is not the answer to everything.

When I write these newsletters, I try to read the few questions and comments shared on the local county listserves, but the civic education portion is the hardest to deal with because it touches on two concepts that are at the core of the ego: knowledge and its opposite, ignorance; and confidence.

I met Paperboy Love Prince in 2020 as I was sliding from the Peak of Ignorance of the Dunning-Kruger Effect into the Valley of Despair, while Paperboy Love Prince was climbing into the Peak of Ignorance.

$5,000 a month for a political consultant was the quote Paperboy Love Prince were given to mount a congressional race, and the alternative I proposed was investing in political education through experimentation a few hours a week.

This is the knowledge I am trying to share with America through Rep My Block, and I hope you will help me share it regardless of political persuasion—Republicans, Democrats, MAGA supporters, or Communists.

My knowledge was acquired from Liberal Democrat Benjamin Yee (for those who took the SDA onboarding Zoom training, he is the Benjamin Yee featured in the Democratic Party animation).

He was shut out of the 2019 Democratic Party debate for not raising enough money, but his platform was centered on civic education and highlighting the problem.

Unlike me, he is not as bombastic as I am.

Ben Yee tries to fit in and avoid upsetting anyone. When he discovered the County Committee, he rose to quickly become Secretary of the Democratic Party, but he continued to apply a litmus test to those who were allowed in.

When I built the Rep My Block system that Paperboy Love Prince used, I removed myself from the process and allowed anyone to use it because it is not my job to decide who should be on the ballot to remove people from the voter’s choice.

The choice of who represents the voters should belong to the voters themselves, not to the Democratic and Republican parties colluding with one another.

In 2021, Paperboy and I decided to push the envelope and encourage more people to participate in the ballot access process, and that is when we encountered our first batch of ignorant voters.

PhDs do get offended when I tell them they are ignorant when it comes to civic education. The reason I target PhDs is because they operate at the boundary between established knowledge and the unknown, constantly pushing that boundary forward.

In most people’s minds, civic education is so basic that it seems impossible for a trailblazer in their field to be ignorant of something so fundamental.

The pursuit of knowledge embodied by a PhD is the natural nemesis of corruption.

Many politicians surround themselves with very intense people who may be struggling with mental health issues in order to drive away anyone who questions their judgment, including PhDs.

PhDs tend to be part of the middle class, so politicians organize galas where the poor are shut out and PhDs can feel that they have influenced the politician.

The people who get elected are often surrounded by young interns who shield them from citizen activists who may be struggling with mental health challenges, to the point of creating a rift between educated middle-class America and the volunteers on the ground.

One way to avoid this difficult discussion is to create a wall defined by money—and not just a little money, but the kind of money that becomes a cancer in society.

A $500 gala dinner is one way to separate the “crazy” from the “sane.” But in doing so, you also separate the upper middle class from the lower middle class and end up with a Congress in Washington, D.C., composed largely of millionaires.

And the underlying logic is that someone with money cannot be ignorant.

Civics is a basic subject taught to 12-year-olds, and that is the knowledge that people carry with them all the way through their PhD. Yet nowhere in the study of bio-engineering, literature, medicine, or most other disciplines is civics part of the curriculum.

Try telling an M.D., a Ph.D., or anyone with a bachelor’s degree that they are ignorant. It is not an easy conversation. I have said it publicly, and people quite understandably dislike hearing it, but there is no other word that adequately conveys the failure of civic education in high school.

To understand civics, you need to combine election law with tax law. To understand civics, you must understand 26 U.S. Code § 501. The “501” is the same 501 found in 501(c)(3).

All of this can sound scary. We cannot teach a 12-year-old the tax code, free speech law, and every other aspect of civic life.

The only place where many of the tools needed to understand civics are taught is in the legal profession, and much of the civics that should be learned in 12th grade is instead taught to practicing lawyers through continuing education credits.

How can anyone expect someone with a GED working three jobs and a Ph.D. to come together and write a manifesto?

That is what the SDA listserve is about. You will need to take a chance and simply send an email while keeping your expectations focused on your county.

I know it is scary, and that is why I share my own stories, so that you can feel confident that we can change the United States together, one step at a time.

But that first step is sending a welcome email to your county listserv. I know that it is a difficult moment, but you can do it. All of the SDA tools are designed to slowly guide you toward a politics where money is not the driving force, but rather the ability to work together across social classes.

The goal is to make politics boring like on these pictures. We are all middle class, we all come from ordinary families, and we are all talking to one another.

The goal of the SDA membership is not for everyone to run for office, but rather for people to prepare and groom Socialist candidates over time as a team.

Being boring does not mean that we cannot be outrageous, and we welcome outrageous comrades, as long as they are not hurtful to others. SDA's goal is to ensure that one person's ambition never outweighs the collective interests of everyone else.

In 2021, we decided to bring this knowledge to the people by using the system to place well-known New Yorkers on the ballot.

I spent the whole day outside John Oliver’s building on a frigid day in February collecting signatures to nominate him to the Democratic Party.

The petition is clear: “I do hereby designate the following named persons as candidates for the nomination,” which, in plain English, translates to: “I nominate.”

At the Board of Elections hearing on the Jay-Z, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and John Oliver petitions, the election lawyer representing the candidates who stood to be displaced from the ballot accused me of misrepresenting people, which of course sounds serious.

As you can see from these two stories, these candidates got caught trying to play the electoral system, and that is what they accused us of doing.

Situations like these can create fear among legitimate candidates and activists who genuinely want to change things for the better but are reluctant to go right up to the line because they fear crossing it.

To win, one often has to go all the way to the line without crossing it. That reality can discourage many sincere candidates from participating.

Our goal at SDA is to get to the line and never cross it. But once you are standing at the line, it is always easy to take one step too far.

These people crossed the line because of greed.

There should be nothing scary about remaining on the line, and that is why Paperboy and I try outrageous ideas.

As you may have realized, I save my thoughts for the last day of the month, which allows me to calm down after all the month's excitement.

Otherwise, I would be bombarding you with small, seemingly meaningless details that, when put together one after another, are helping to change the face of America.

Regarding John Oliver, he never showed up, and I tell that story here: https://theochino.medium.com/is-john-oliver-an-hypocrite-by-commodifying-our-anger-1ab5cf17368f.

SDA trains people to manage the right amount of outrage so that being an activist at home does not turn into a neighborhood quarrel.

SDA was created in the pursuit of bringing peace around the world, but as you can see, it always starts at home, and it can be scary to step on your neighbors' toes:

Every revolution starts at home

The Caucuses

Before I delve into the details, those of you who live in red districts or red states are among the most important people for the SDA project to succeed.

The goal of SDA is to create caucuses within the Democratic Party, and in red states, that is often the easiest place to get it done. You do not need to ask permission—you simply do it.

In red states, the Center for New Liberalism, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Blue Dogs are often found within the Republican Party.

A Democrat is a Democrat, so whether you live in a rural or urban part of the United States, you are still a Democrat.

The best part of being an SDA member in a red state is that you can combine an SDA salon with your local Democratic Party county meeting.

In a red state, all you need to do is visit the local Democratic club and join it. You do not need to tell people that you are a Socialist; I will deal with that from New York.

But for me to know who is where, I need everyone to become a card-carrying SDA member. That is the only way I can connect two people living in the same county: https://socialists.us/direct/calculate/join.

Running for Office

SDA is a caucus that trains people to run for office and provides the tools and materials needed to create the conditions for winning the trust of our fellow citizens so that they elect us to various positions.

Running for office is not a solitary endeavor, but in the United States I have come to realize that there is an industry that generates billions of dollars and is not essential to winning elections.

It exists largely to sustain an ecosystem of consultants, printers, and television and radio advertising.

To remove money from politics, we need to provide voters with what they crave most: trusted information.

At the end of the day, voters do not care about most of the noise surrounding a campaign. They care about having reliable information when deciding who to vote for.

The consultants know that, and that is why they have spent years demonizing me in New York City. I tell the story here:

We need to meet Linda where she is at

They have called me every name in the book, both to my face and behind my back. Yet, at the end of the day, the information on Rep My Block is simply information provided and uploaded by the campaigns themselves.

Rep My Block

What needs to be done is to document races across the United States. I work with both Republicans and Democrats, and that allows me to tell Republicans to take it down a notch when it comes to trashing the left.

Rep My Block was built as a tool to organize ballot access for candidates, but since we already have all of the candidates’ information, why not make it available to every voter and member of the media, just as The Green Papers has done for decades?

I have been working with local Republicans in my district, as shown by the hat.

It’s the same hat. Not an identical hat, but my Republican counterpart and I shared the very same hat.

My Republican counterpart and I are both victims of a housing scheme perpetrated in New York City, and instead of letting our political differences get the better of us, we chose to work together on the issues that affect us both.

Putting it in practice in my district

Since 2020, I have said that the only way we win elections is by working within our neighborhoods and building teams.

John Oliver did an entire episode on how misinformation spreads through diaspora communities, but this is not only true of diasporas—it is true of human beings in general. It worked for Sarah Palin when she first ran in Alaska.

The flyer below associates me with José Francisco Peña Gómez, the Socialist International Vice President and former Mayor of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, one of the most influential figures in Dominican political history: https://www.socialistinternational.org/news-events/in-memoriam/article/jose-francisco-pena-gomez-1937-1998-1639.

DSA left the Socialist International to join Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’s Progressive International, so they lost the use of the word “comrade.”

SDA comrades Paperboy Love Prince and Michael Hano experimented with running for Congress in 2020 and 2022, and all their knowledge is being channeled into my campaign. The knowledge I will acquire will then be passed on to yours.

The same rules apply in your counties, which is why it is important that we document every step we take.

I can tell you to take it easy, but I know that’s impossible.

That moment will come when someone is elected the same way Yusuf Dikeç won his silver medal in Paris.

By documenting what works and what doesn’t, each campaign leaves behind knowledge that makes the next one stronger. What we learn today will help the people who come after us tomorrow.

He won his medal through patience, discipline, and years of preparation that most people never see. The same applies to us.

The press has spoken.

A few days ago, Zohran Mamdani endorsed the Justice Democrat in my district. I find the whole situation interesting because the discussion is taking place entirely outside the framework of what an election should be about.

It should not matter that the candidate he endorsed is a carpetbagger who moved into the district only recently, or that the incumbent is a congressman whom many critics accuse of protecting his own interests above all else.

My mother’s family has been in this neighborhood since 1950, and I moved to where I live today when I was three months old. In 1981, when the murder rate in the neighborhood was around 300 a year, my mother made the decision to send me back to France, where schools were free and of excellent quality. I returned to New York in 2001.

Never mind that for 25 years I have participated in and organized within the neighborhood as a Socialist. During all that time, I never encountered either of the other two candidates in any effort related to building or strengthening the community.

What we need today are candidates willing to do what Benjamin Yee, Paperboy Love Prince, and I are doing: educating people about how deeply flawed, manipulated, and weaponized our representative system has become.

And we in the United States are not so different from voters elsewhere in the world. The difference is that in France, I can see how the reduced influence of money allows ordinary citizens like me or Corinne to participate in the political system in the way civics classes in the United States teach it is supposed to work.

I should not be!

Take a chance, and give me your feedback on all these newsletter on this County Listserve. Just reply with your feedback however you think, but on the listserve and not the comment section.