On Wednesday, January 29th, 2025, Connecticut DSA’s Labor Working Group gathered at New Britain’s “Assembly Room” for their first Labor Happy Hour of the year. The Assembly Room looks more upscale at the outset with a chic white façade and a 20s style bar, but the prices are much more modest. Fitting for the working-class muckraker who wants to be ethical while still enjoying life’s comforts.

Thorn West: Issue No. 226

City Politics

• As many criticize the city’s lack of wildfire preparedness in advance of the Santa Ana winds, Mayor Karen Bass has today fired LAFD chief Kristin Crowley. The LA Times covers the firing in the context of a “sense of disarray that has enveloped City Hall.”

• Children’s Hospital Los Angeles stopped offering several forms of gender-affirming care, in response to a Trump administration executive order threatening the funding of any medical institution that provided this care to transgendered youths. The hospital has now partially reversed that decision, following weekly protests.

Housing Rights

• The LA City Council postponed voting on a motion that would offer eviction protections to Angelenos economically impacted by the wildfires. It will revisit the issue in March. A similar measure did pass at the County Board of Supervisors. That motion applies countywide, but only protects those who specifically lost work. Tenants in Maui, devastated by wildfires in 2023, suffered a variety of cascading displacements, despite the passage of stronger tenant protections than LA is considering.

• The California FAIR Plan, a state-administered fund that provides fire insurance to property owners in high-risk areas, has run out of money in the aftermath of the wildfires. This triggers a condition that allows the fund to collect an additional $1 billion from insurers. Half of this cost may be passed onto consumers, with the state’s approval.

Education

• This week, a Los Angeles Unified School District policy went into effect that bans student phone use during school hours.

• The Trump administration’s terrorization of immigrant communities is depressing school attendance, per CalMatters.

Police Violence and Community Resistance

• A member of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department Civilian Oversight Commission has resigned, amid a conflict pitting the oversight body against county attorneys, LASD, and the State Attorney General’s office.

• In San Francisco, an effort to bolster recruitment to the Police Department has failed, as a growing percentage of cadets are dropping out of the police academy.

Transportation

• A long-awaited discussion about how Los Angeles will implement Measure HLA was delayed; the City Council’s Transportation Committee has been drawn into the efforts to block an affordable housing development, and ran out of time.

• The Trump administration has signaled that it will sabotage a California high speed rail project. At Union Station, a press conference by the U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was shouted down by project advocates.

The post County Passes Some Eviction Protections in Response to Wildfires + Mayor Fires LAFD Chief appeared first on The Thorn West.

Our annual Madison Area DSA Chapter Convention is Saturday, March 15 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Madison Labor Temple. Please RSVP as soon as possible! (Masks will be required and provided; lunch will be available to those who RSVP by March 4th.)

At Convention, we’ll take a look back at the past year, and members in good standing will make important decisions about the direction of the upcoming year.

The 2025 About the MADSA Convention Guide has everything you need to know about our Convention.

We’re asking members to submit resolutions, bylaw amendments, working group reports and charters, and executive committee and community accountability committee nominations by March 4th.

If you have questions or want to team up with other folks on resolutions, join #2025-convention in the Slack.

Solidarity from the Convention Committee! 

Now, at Stonewall we are watching our own undoing.

At our monument, a hollow has been carved into history—a deliberate emptiness where our stories used to live. Where Marsha’s name once stood proud, teaching generations that we have always existed, that we have always fought, that we have always loved and been loved. Now there is only silence.

They think we don’t notice when they chip away at our memories, stone by stone. That we won’t feel the weight of each erasure, each redaction, each carelessly crafted omission. But we feel every cut. We see our elders’ names fade like ghosts from the walls they built with their own hands. We watch as they try to orphan us from our own history.

Every time they try to erase us, we write ourselves back into existence—in permanent ink, in unshakeable community, in unwavering solidarity.

But they have forgotten something crucial: We are still here. We are still telling our stories. In basements and bookstores, in community centers and living rooms, in whispered conversations and shouted protests. Every time they try to erase us, we write ourselves back into existence—in permanent ink, in unshakeable community, in unwavering solidarity.

There is a bitter irony in attempting to sanitize a monument that exists precisely because people refused to accept such violent marginalization. Stonewall stands as testament to the power of collective rage, to a moment when the marginalized said “enough” and transformed their pain into action, to a moment that showed their oppressors they knew how weak the chains really were. It commemorates not polite requests for dignity, but the throwing of bricks, the breaking of barriers, the raw and necessary fury of people who had been pushed too far. Those who now seek to edit this history, to remove some of its participants from the record, seem to miss the fundamental lesson of what they’re trying to erase: that oppressed people will not quietly accept their own erasure, that solidarity is stronger than state power, and that the very actions they’re commemorating prove the futility of their sanitization effort. They seek to remove transgender people from the story of a riot that began, in part, because society tried to deny transgender people’s right to exist—a historical echo that would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This is why we must act now, together. Not just transgender people, but all who understand that when they come for one community’s history, they pave the way to erase others. Every activist, every ally, every person who believes in truth and dignity must stand together.

What can we do? We document. We archive. We create underground histories and public demonstrations. We build networks of resistance that transcend individual identity. We teach our children not just about Stonewall, but about every attempt at oppression and how we fought back. We turn their acts of erasure into fuel for our collective memory and action.

Most importantly, we recognize that this is not just about preserving history—it’s about protecting our future. When they try to erase transgender people from Stonewall, they are trying to erase the possibility of transgender youth seeing themselves in history, of understanding their place in a long line of resistance and triumph.

Let this attempt at erasure be the spark that ignites our collective resistance. Let every blank space they create become a canvas for our truth.

Let this attempt at erasure be the spark that ignites our collective resistance. Let every blank space they create become a canvas for our truth. Let every silence they impose become a chorus of our voices. Together, we will not just preserve our history—we will make it impossible to erase.

The time for passive observation is over. We must act with the urgency of people watching their own existence being questioned, with the determination of communities who refuse to be written out of history, and with the solidarity of those who understand that an injury to one is an injury to all.

Who will join us in ensuring that our stories survive? Who will stand with us in turning this moment of erasure into an era of unprecedented visibility and power? Our history is not just words on a monument—it lives in our actions, in our unity, and in our unwavering commitment to truth and justice.

The future is watching. What will we show them?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.

At this time, we have witnessed what many have known was coming for decades: The death knell of American democracy. When Lyndon Baines Johnson gave this now-forgotten speech it was in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and at the beginning of his great society program to eradicate poverty throughout America - perhaps the most ambitious welfare program since the New Deal as well as the height of the American civil rights movement.

How did we end up here? We now find ourselves in a world where basic social security and long-accepted federal grants are under threat. The long-held compromises of democracy have been stripped away until all that remains is a mere facade of legitimacy that now is coming apart. We find ourselves on the path of Eastern Europe's authoritarians in Belarus and Russia. Far from the premier standard of democracy we once held ourselves up to, we can no longer keep up the illusion as oligarchs ascend openly in power and the media is reduced to mere mouthpieces of their nightmarish commands as we teeter ever further over the abyss. Many fear the Rubicon will be crossed soon when it has already. Our answer for how we got here lies in the speech of LBJ's successor;

And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans, I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace.

We find ourselves here not because of the silent majority as Nixon conjured to justify his policy in Vietnam, but instead because of what I like to call the "silenced majority". These Americans have long been ignored by either party due to their prior irrelevance in their eyes. They were discarded to the side with the implementation of NAFTA and the failure of American Industry to maintain its competitive edge on the global market, a by-product of Neo-liberalism's failure. You only need to look at the ghost towns of the midwest. For these people, what remains of the American dream but abandoned homes and once lively streets? Where is their savior or their salvation?

In came Bernie Sanders, a champion of progressivism and left-wing populism with a reputation as an honest figure, a rarity in our politics. Out of left field, he overnight became a challenge to Clinton despite having been dismissed for decades as a figure who only represented the leftward fringes. He spoke of hope, healthcare, and revival. He presented a constructive revolution to rebuild democracy and revitalize those forgotten communities. Sanders experienced a groundswell of support among democratic voters, and he was ignored following his loss in the DNC primaries in 2016 despite securing 43% of the vote. The common refrain in the media is that it was nothing but hype and youthful energy now expelled, citing his lower showing in 2020. But this is a mere excuse to avoid reckoning with what Sanders had tapped into - something much larger and much more uncomfortable than the Democratic party was ever willing to give voice to. Yes, Sanders ran again in 2020 and won 26% of the vote, but that only showed there remained a sizable base captivated by his message. So, where did the remainder go? Simple: they stayed home. Who wanted to stand up for Clinton, an ally of the massive corporations? Who wanted to stand up for the very establishment and the oligarchs they wanted out?

Bernie was an independent, an outsider who spoke to these forgotten communities and provided a chance for the revival of liberal democracy and the American dream in their eyes, and he was shot down by the establishment and their calls for normalcy. His reforms and calls for change were ignored. Meanwhile, in the Republican primaries, a billionaire businessman by the name of Donald Trump took the forefront of the American populist movement, mobilized them, and called for a destructive revolution against “Wokeness, NAFTA, and the Establishment” which had ignored them. And with their hope for a positive revolution underneath Bernie, these working-class communities threw in their lot with Trump. A base of the forgotten, ignored by the parties, who cared little for the partisanship of the democrats and republicans. A base Bernie could easily have appealed to. Trump gave them not a voice for change but a voice for revenge against the institutions that had wronged them. So fell the Grachii and so now rises Caesar.

Who cares for healthcare when you can't access it? Who cares for flying when you've never been on a plane? Who cares for honesty and integrity when the ones who had it are gone? And who cares for democracy when it never cared for you? We are indeed witnessing the end of at least the old American democracy as the democrats remain hesitant to do what must be done to delay if not stop these changes. They have become too accustomed to power and their tradition of liberalism to recognize they must let go of their old norms to preserve it and their supporters.

I expect the Democrats to fail to learn from these experiences, just as Kamala Harris learned nothing from Biden's failures, and as we have come to see the previous status quo is no longer viable as a point of return. Far from the days of LBJ and Kennedy, the democrats have only fallen further into the control of corporations, consistently prioritizing money, and their re-election, over the people they represent. They regard their role of political dominance as natural now even when it is not. It lies upon us as socialists to pick up the Promethean Torch of Democracy from where it has been forgotten and raise it higher than ever before. The people must reclaim their voice so that we can have a true functional democracy rather than a 2-party diarchy or a populist dictatorship. We as Americans, should never again have to fear for their livelihoods or our communities. We can restore democracy and the American dream but one better and stronger than before. Not as the founding fathers envisioned, but as we were promised as children. Only through that idealized America achieved through socialism may we triumph.

It is thus in my eyes necessary to launch a new crusade against fascism, bigotry, prejudice, corruption, and poverty. An honest one, a just one, and a peaceful one, but one that nonetheless is a new and more radical change than anything before it. We now live in abnormal times and the old norms are no longer sustainable. There is a struggle before us from which we cannot back down and we cannot surrender. The leaders that people trusted to defend their rights have shown that they will do nothing in the face of this crisis, and all that remains for the people are each other.

We are the red embers of democracy which refuse to go out. We are the embers of this great flame of democracy that must be rekindled higher and brighter than ever before.