Salt Lake DSA is proud to announce our endorsement of chapter member and mayoral candidate Michael Valentine for the role of Salt Lake City mayor, with 88.5% of voting members voting in favor of endorsement. We strongly encourage our members and supporters living in Salt Lake City to rank Michael Valentine as their #1 choice in this ranked choice election and to share this announcement with their friends and family. 

Michael joined our chapter in June of this year on the invitation of a member and after speaking at our local convention in May, and he has been an active member since. While he is known for his work in fighting to save the Utah Pantages theater, Michael’s activism goes beyond one building. Michael has stood in solidarity with Salt Lake’s union workers by gathering signatures and standing on the picket line with our chapter in support of Starbucks and UPS workers, he’s been gracious in letting us use his cider shop for chapter events, and he’s been on the streets with the community fighting for the international working class against police repression and Israeli apartheid. Michael understands that the issues facing Salt Lake City are all symptoms of capitalism, and he knows how to organize with socialist principles in order to enact positive change for the most marginalized Salt Lakers. He is the embodiment of democratic socialist values, and we are more than lucky to have him as a chapter member and mayoral candidate. 

Throughout this mayoral race, Michael has consistently shown not only through his words, but also his actions, that he is the only candidate that understands the needs and struggles of working class Salt Lakers. He’s the only candidate who is a renter, he’s the only candidate who isn’t a millionaire, he’s the only candidate who has experienced homelessness, and he’s the only candidate that speaks up for the community, even if it’s politically unpopular. We know he’s the only candidate serious about curing homelessness, reforming the SLCPD, bettering the living conditions of the working class and saving the Great Salt Lake.

Voting ends on November 21st, and the last day to register is Monday, November 13th. Vote Michael Valentine in as the first DSA member and first socialist mayor in Salt Lake City!

The post Salt Lake DSA Endorses Michael Valentine for Salt Lake City Mayor first appeared on Salt Lake DSA.

Don’t be fooled: failed politicians and Proud Boys tried to spread antisemitic bile at Harvard. DSA anti-fascists won’t let them

On November 11, 2023, several members of Boston DSA, a mix of non-Jews and Jews, disrupted Shiva Ayyadurai’s antisemitic, “anti-Zionist” rally in Harvard Square. As the flier advertising it made clear, this was no rally in support of Palestinians or anti-Zionism, but a rally to support Shiva’s particular brand of conspiracy theory and the idea of Jews as all-controlling oppressors of working people.

We carried signs reading “Antisemitism is the Anti-Zionism of Fools” (a play on the old quote “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools”), “Pro-Palestine, Pro-Jewish, Antifascist” and others. We did this because we find antisemitism repellent, and we find it repellent that Shiva would co-opt the suffering and death of Palestinians for his own ends in this manner. And, we did this to send a message, in deed and not just word, that principled anti-Zionists oppose antisemitism. Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim members of the Harvard and Cambridge communities—indeed, all members—did not deserve Shiva’s spectacle, or the stress and fear that they may have felt as a result of the rally fliers. Indeed, some passers-by thanked us for helping them understand what was happening. Several people who had simply heard about a Palestine rally in Harvard Square spoke to us and were upset and disappointed about the true nature of Shiva’s rally.

We are all experienced antifascists, and we understand the difference between principled anti-Zionism and antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. John Medlar, a well-known Proud Boy who tried to crash a Drag Queen Story Hour in Fall River last year, was Shiva’s livestreamer. Another rallygoer told us that he too was a Proud Boy and a friend of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and called a member of our group a “homo.” One of us, a Jewish survivor of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, was wearing Palestine colors with a Star of David necklace, and was asked multiple times by Shiva’s rallygoer fans what was around their neck. Another of us was told by a rallygoer that 60% of Congress has dual citizenship with Israel, a variant on a longstanding antisemitic myth. Several told us that vaccines are a “globalist” (a dogwhistle for Jewish) population control plot. In no way is any of this Palestine solidarity or helpful to the people being murdered in Gaza.

We encourage readers to attend rallies for Palestine and a ceasefire that are sponsored by legitimate coalitions and organizations such as the Boston Coalition for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, and to contact their representatives in support of the Ceasefire Now resolution. Unfortunately, right now, with the increased attention to Palestinians’ oppression and many new people in the movement, the antisemitic far right will do what it often does, and try to inject its ideas into the movement through spreading them to well-meaning people (some of them new activists, English language learners, and/or people new to North American cultural contexts) who don’t realize the full implications of certain framings, terms, or images. If you see a friend repeating things that seem off (like suggesting that Americans need to be freed from Israeli dominance, or that Israelis or Jews are “unbelievers” in some way, or using Jewish symbols like the menorah to signify something bad, or using the neo-Nazi phrase “Zionist Occupied Government”), talk to them about it! That’s how we build healthy movements.

No to antisemitism, no to anti-Palestinian hatred, no to Islamophobia, no to fascism!

We repeat here the points from the educational fliers that we distributed on site:

We are supporters of a ceasefire in Israel/Palestine. Many of us are longtime Palestine solidarity activists. We oppose antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian hatred, and fascism.

The rally we are here to oppose claims to be an anti-Zionism, pro-worker rally. However fliers advertising it intertwined the Star of David with a dollar sign as the chain in a pair of handcuffs, accusing “Zionists” of enslaving workers throughout the world. The use of a plain Star of David in this way is unambiguously antisemitic.

While Zionism is an ideology and there is nothing intrinsically antisemitic in anti-Zionism, there is a long and unfortunate history of antisemites using “Zionist” and “Zionism” as antisemitic dog whistles, dating back to Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby in the 1950s.

Shiva Ayyadurai, who called the rally that we are here to oppose, has spoken at several far-right rallies in the Boston area since 2017, speaking alongside notorious figures such as the violent neo-Nazi/former Proud Boy Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman, Proud Boy and convicted 1/6/21 Capitol attack leader Joe Biggs and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson. For more on this era of fascist activity in Boston, see this 2019 piece.

One of the local rallies he spoke at was the 2018 Proud Boys rally in Concord, MA. The Proud Boys have become well-known as one of the groups that led the attack on the Capitol on 1/6/21. Massachusetts Proud Boy John Medlar is a long-time collaborator of Shiva’s.

Shiva is a conspiracy theorist who testified at “election audit” hearings to claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump

We find it grotesque that Shiva is co-opting Palestinian suffering and death in this opportunistic, antisemitic way. As principled anti-Zionists, ceasefire supporters, antifascists, we say no.

Six months ago, President Biden ended the pandemic state of emergency and declared COVID over. From the way government officials and the media are – or more accurately, aren’t – talking about the pandemic, it might seem one has no choice but to believe that Biden was right.

Except that the pandemic is not over. By what metric was Biden measuring? Hospitalizations? Deaths? For the week ending September 16, the U.S. had >20,000 covid hospitalizations and >1500 covid deaths (over half the deaths on 9/11). These are both likely significant underestimates due to inadequate case testing, counting, and reporting across the capitalist world. Indeed, these inadequacies are often exacerbated by active suppression – for example, in the UK, an email was recently leaked in which hospital workers were directed by hospital administration not to test for COVID if presenting with symptoms, because it might result in workers “remaining home longer.”

Certainly Biden’s declaration wasn’t based on heartening new evidence about disability from long COVID, which, contrary to popular media coverage, scientific studies have consistently shown is both common (at a well-established incidence rate of at least 10% for each case of COVID) and debilitating (a recent study showed that many people with long COVID report a worse quality of life than people with Stage IV lung cancer). And recent data suggests that long COVID may even be more common in vaccinated people who had mild cases and were infected since the emergence of Omicron.

So why Biden’s declaration, and why aren’t we hearing about any of this?

The start of the COVID pandemic brought both a clarifying look at the failures of capitalism and a hint at how things could be different. From very early in the pandemic, we have known what interventions would be effective, and could even end the pandemic altogether: distribution and mandating of effective masks, contact tracing to understand disease spread, and quarantines in the case of actual or suspected COVID cases with guaranteed paid time off. Some countries, in particular China and other countries that have previously had to manage epidemics, implemented some or all of these interventions from the very start of the pandemic.

Unfortunately, many of these measures require political will and a government willing to intervene for people’s wellbeing; we have neither in the United States, where institutions are utterly at the command of capital and ordinary people are deservedly skeptical of those institutions. To instate these measures adequately would necessitate the nationalization of key industries, the complete transformation of our tattered welfare state (both of which we call for in the DSA national platform), and a willingness to take bold action to stop right-wing misinformation. These propositions would be utterly unthinkable to America’s capitalists, who fought tooth and nail the meager stimulus checks, rent forgiveness, and brief extension of unemployment benefits, all of which were simply too inconvenient and unprofitable to keep up. 

This is the root of the current messaging and media strategy. If it’s unprofitable and inconvenient for capital to actually address and stop the pandemic, then it becomes necessary to convince people to live with it – to continue working and spending, to keep the ever-important economy chugging along, with no regard for the number of lives sacrificed at its altar.

Despite posturing as “pro-science” while Trump was in charge of managing the pandemic, the Democrats have quickly adopted a stance of soft pandemic denialism that does nothing to substantively address, or even really acknowledge, the issue. Rather than acknowledge that adequate pandemic precautions are only possible at a societal level and act accordingly, they tell the working class that they may keep themselves safe as a matter of personal choice. This is reminiscent of the Democrats’ soft climate denialism, in which they adopt rhetoric that climate change is real while catastrophically failing to acknowledge the gravity of the situation or the radical measures necessary to adequately address it, instead shifting the burden of responsibility to people’s individual choices to recycle or bike to work.

It’s no coincidence that we have one of the highest death rates of any country in the world, at 3,331 deaths per million people for the entire pandemic – a death rate of 0.33% of the entire population. By contrast, China, a country both larger and more densely populated than the U.S., has a death rate of 85 deaths per million. Of course, COVID deaths in the U.S. are not evenly distributed throughout the population. Like many other societal inequities, COVID and its outcomes disproportionately affect poor people, people of color (especially Black, indigenous, and Latino people), people with disabilities, and other marginalized people.

In DSA, we recognize both the social inequities revealed by the pandemic and the new world it reveals and necessitates. We also recognize that we cannot follow in the footsteps of the Republicans or the Democrats, both of whom have communicated clearly that under capitalism, human life has no value except that which it is able to produce for the ruling class. We are fighting for a radically transformed world in which profits don’t necessitate the unchecked spread of a pandemic, and we must reflect that world, to the greatest degree possible, in how we organize now.

To that end, NC Triangle DSA has written and passed a resolution creating a pandemic policy that uses layers of protection – including mandated masking, air filtration, testing, vaccinations, case reporting, and staying home when sick – to keep our events as COVID safe as possible. We welcome all the most vulnerable at our meetings, and we want you to know that we will help keep you safe. We are fighting for a world where all of us can be safe, healthy, and liberated – but to do that, we must build a mass movement. Join us in our fight for a better world!

It’s been quite a few months since we last updated everyone on the work we’re doing here at Syracuse DSA – Mutual Aid Committee! We’ve been quite busy with several different projects, so here’s a look into just what’s been going on, what’s on the horizon, and how you can get involved!

Sonny’s Free Store

We’ve now successfully hosted our free store (lovingly named in honor of founding member and former chair, Sonny Fantacone) at several local events. At its core, a free store demonstrates the basics of what we as democratic socialists believe people and communities can do to provide for one another. If we are more willing to give of ourselves and our excess to our fellow humans instead of to landfills, then our society as a whole will prosper. To that end, we accept donations of food, clothing, and other goods  and, when we have enough and the opportunity presents itself, we set up a “Free Store”!

At our past free stores, we’ve primarily offered clothing, but at our recent CNY Pride Free Store, we noticed that the few books we brought flew off the shelves immediately! In order to better respond to this apparent community need, we sourced more reading material for our booth at the Westcott Cultural Street Fair. With the assistance of our newest co-chair, Amelia, we’ve also been able to work in tandem with Onondaga Food Rescue Network through the Syracuse-Onondaga Food Systems Alliance (SOFSA), which allowed us to introduce both non-perishable items and fresh, local produce to our offerings. We got a lot of questions about where our storefront was located during the Westcott Street Fair, so our members are now looking into the possibility of doing pop-up store fronts all across the city, in the hopes of  making our free stores more accessible to those in need. 

Additionally, we will be fundraising at this year’s Plowshares event for both future iterations of Sonny’s Free Store, as well as for another project we have on deck for next year, thanks to some help from Philly DSA and a couple of enterprising scientists in California (more to come on this project later!). 

If you’d like more information about our future projects, want to donate funds (and maybe buy some DSA swag?), or would like to come check out some of the amazing artists and activists from the surrounding area, come visit us at Plowshares! 

And if you’re interested in donating to our free store, have questions about when/where our next one will be, would like to have us at your event, or anything else about working with Syracuse DSA Mutual Aid, please feel free to contact us at: syrdsa.mutualaid@gmail.com

Mutual Aid Bags

Something else we’ve been working on over the past several months are our first round of Mutual Aid (MA) Bags. MA bags are reusable grocery bags that we fill with things like bottled water, single serving cereals, non-perishable snacks, first aid supplies, feminine & general hygiene products ,  combs for hair, and other staple items. We also try to include at least one “non-essential” in each bag as well—things like re-usable water bottles, sunglasses, perfume, tea, and coffee. For our first round, we successfully collected enough materials to create 22 MA bags and determined that the best way to distribute these bags would be for members to store a handful in their cars, handing them out as they come across folks in need.

We’re looking to expand this project by working with other local organizations doing similar community outreach, thereby enabling us to create further rounds of MA bags that fit the specific needs of diverse groups of Syracuse residents. At the same time, we’re hoping to pull together enough donations to do a round of bags to provide “Thanksgiving Dinner”-style MA bags to around a dozen needy families, as well as a possible pop-up store front for families or individuals that may be struggling during the holiday season.

If you would like to donate non-perishable items for traditional holiday dinners, inexpensive toys, children’s books, inexpensive gifts for adults, or any other items that might go into these holiday MA bags/free store, please contact us at: syrdsa.mutualaid@gmail.com

Check out a comprehensive list of items we’re looking for at the bottom of this post!

Care, Not Cops

In the wake of multiple deadly police encounters in Syracuse this past year, our chapter decided that we need a space within our local organization to organize around issues of policing and police accountability. We firmly believe that most emergency calls do not require an armed police response, and we should instead pursue non-violent alternatives for addressing things like mental health crises or domestic disturbances. We also need to better hold cops accountable for their misdeeds, and doing that starts with engaging the community in dialogue to determine how we can build these better alternatives to police response, together.

We focused on the idea that “we keep us safe” and came up with the name Care Not Cops. The goal is to create resource lists of individuals, organizations, and programs that a person in crisis can call for assistance in place of calling the cops. 

As many of us know, having several officers respond with guns drawn often escalates many of these already tense situations, often leading to tragic consequences. In the past year alone, there have been multiple instances of officer-involved shootings, all of which must be investigated by the Attorney General’s office as per a law that was established on April 1st, 2021. At the time, advocates argued that this would improve police accountability. However, since its inception, the law has often served as a stall tactic rather than as a legitimate means of holding out of control officers truly accountable for overstepping the bounds of their legal responsibilities. Over the past 6 months alone there have been at least two notable cases where body-worn camera footage was either withheld from the public (even after internal investigations were concluded) or cameras were never activated prior to (or during) the incident. Shockingly, investigations carried out by the AG’s office found no wrongdoing in either case. 

Unavailable camera footage is just one of the worrisome details in these cases and going into all of the gritty details would require a long update in and of itself. For now, we’ll say that due to Syracuse’s history of policing, as well as its history of racial & social inequity, many of our members feel it is necessary to begin working on expanding the space for abolitionist organizing, starting with promoting better alternatives to call during an emergency than cops. 

To that end, we have an available resource called the 911 Alternative Sheet that we are always updating and expanding. If you have any suggestions for resources that you think should be listed, please reach out to us at: syrdsa.mutualaid@gmail.com

Items needed for Holiday Mutual Aid bags/Pop-up Store Front

• Inexpensive children’s toys
• Children’s books/coloring books
  • Crayons, markers, colored pencils, watercolor paints and brushes
• Inexpensive gifts for adults
• Hats, gloves, mittens, scarves, socks, balaclavas, etc. for kids and adults
• Small blankets
• Small craft kits
  • Craft paper, construction paper, plain writing paper, etc.
  • Tape, glue sticks, white glue
  • Yarns, threads, crochet hooks, knitting needles and other common crafting items that can be used by folks to make their own holiday gifts.
• Common holiday decorations
• Holiday greeting cards & envelopes
  • Stamps for mailing cards
• Non-perishable items for holiday dinners
  • Stuffing mix
  • Canned vegetables
  • Quick bread/Cake mix
  • Gravy mix
  • Canned berries/other canned fruit
  • Instant mashed potatoes
  • Powdered milk

The post Come See What We’re Up To At Mutual Aid! appeared first on Syracuse DSA.