jaffe i write things on the internet a lot of the time sometimes in actual print publications i even wrote a book once and my book was about social movement since the two thousand and eight financial crisis and one of those things is that there is a renewed interest in socialism in left politics in protest that is aimed at changing the shape and power structure of our economy writ large and the internet plays a role in that what particular role it plays and that we are going to hash out entirely on this stage in an hour and fifteen minutes and after that we will have come up with all of the definitive answers that's not true at all i used to have to argue with people that we were in a moment of renewed left protests and also to have to argue with people that social media was a significant factor in both our lives generally and politics in particular i don't really have to make those arguments anymore but now we get into a different set of arguments about whether and how social media is good bad stressful useful and whether we should all quit facebook because mark zuckerberg is going to use all our data to become supreme dictator of the country and we're not going to talk about russia unless anybody who wants to quote lenin well hey malcolm got us started with the communist revolution so i'm gonna start off here you missed it you missed it it started last panel i want to start off by asking my panelists here to introduce themselves for just a couple minutes talk about who they are what they do and how the internet does and does not play a role in that and then i will have some questions and then hopefully some of you will have some questions too so um i am going to make emma  someone else did and i've also worked as a community organizer and i'll be graduating from law school in a couple of weeks so i'll be moving to a more boring job but i m especially interested in social media i've run social media for a number of nonprofits and other sort of organizing projects and i'm a big believer in the power of social media and i think the democratic socialists of america in particular have kind of proven the power of social media for bringing about socialism in this country  so yeah i'm excited to get into that stuff everybody my name is kevin board and i'm the director of a group called mh action which stands for manufactured housing action so manufactured housing is basically the new terminology for trailer parks right so folks that own their homes but rent the land that their homes sit on and so i'm sure you are like why is someone who deals with trailer parks talking about the internet tonight so there's been this huge shift in trailer park sector for about fifteen years so there's a bunch of lads on wall street that all know a bunch of us are searching around for affordable housing and no bunch of us are getting pushed out of urban cores like new york city or san francisco or the bay area and investors over that time period have basically said wow like all these folks are getting pushed out urban cores there's when you get outside and exurban in rural america there's these things called trailer parks that are usually owned and operated by mom and pops so guess what now is the time to gobble them up and basically consolidate this sector so fast forward to two thousand and eighteen and heath when you think about the manufactured housing sector overall there's about two nine million home sites in trailer parks across the country about six hundred and eighty to seven hundred and twenty thousand of those folks are now writing a rent check to a corporate landlord and you know you can imagine what happens when capitalism runs amok in any neighborhood right rents go up community maintenance goes down and so we really formulated mhm auction is a way to counteract that like you know we want to run some corporate accountability campaigns which of course we know have has like a steel ceiling you're not going to get these chaps on wall street you know might get them to act a little bit nicer but not that nice sure so and then we also run like local and policy state level campaigns to basically get their train of predatory equity off the tracks and then we also are like hey we're in extra ribbon in rural america and you know even though folks are coming through the door to participate in mhm action on a housing and security issue that they're facing we're also talking to folks about immigrant and you know retirement security campaigns and other public programs that we really do need to invest in and really we we zuckerberg helped build our organization in a way or it's somewhat shy about saying that because basically when you think about these chaps on wall street that have built out these investment portfolios they all spot they all splashed up on the web and they're like look how much how many communities i own and so we basically take those communities figure out a way to do targeted ads and outreach based on the zip codes or where those communities are located have those families basically come on to community calls and talk about their situation and then get involved in our organization so really like a lot of our initial outreach to recruit people into the organization to participate and you know social and economic justice campaign literally starts online so thanks for having me here and excited to get some good questions from the c everyone i'm shuja i'm an internet user and yeah once in a while but i'm probably the least qualified person on this panel in terms of being an organizer extremely online yeah that's that's that's the perspective i'm here represent is is the you know a total pathological obsession with the internet i'm also an editor at a magazine called viewpoint and i think my experience with the internet as an organizing tool was mainly been in terms of trying to you know establish channels of communication of dialogue of discussion of commentary in a way that's independent viewpoint magazine is totally run by unpaid people who are just doing it you know for ideological convictions and so it's kind of been entirely it's entirely taking place online which is something that couldn't really happen before i think i think irving house said one of one of the and that's what i'm here to represent get in fights we're gonna fight so i asked you to start off by talking about your work but the first question i want to ask you is the sort of big one is if we are seeing a renewed interest in the left in sort of far left politics in socialism and how has the internet how is social media being a part of that you know small question but you know i don't know it's like a lot of my formative organizing careers was was it based in idaho super progressive bastion in the country and like i do think that so it's like they're like we're writing this check to this corporate landlord like who is this person like they totally suck like you know what are we gonna do and you know there's that initial like anger like generally moves people in our organization for about four to six months and then if they don't see any resulting solutions produced out of that anger they tend to just peel off so think you know the role of how do you then spin out an ideology quickly enough especially when you're just getting some random contact from someone either from far west utah or rehoboth beach delaware you know humboldt county california it's like i think you know what we're trying to figure out it's like okay so we bring in folks they're pissed off we can get them on community calls you can get them motivated around like a very you know elinsky like campaign but we do have to figure out i don't know if we've really figured out like how do you then pivot to like a broader deeper ideology that actually like starts to question stuff like the commodification of real estate what does that mean and so we are starting to play around with that stuff much more and you know it's been a little bit of a mixed bag like i think generally what's been happening to with our membership base when we do that is you know a big chunk of our membership base or senior women and you know when we start asking these i think there's some some level of like oh gosh if we talk about ideology or if we start to like have calls about this like our membership base is gonna dwindle it's actually like it's grown quicker so i think folks are hungry for it they realize that you know these like frat boys on wall street who really don't offer any value whatsoever to society like shouldn't that some level maybe be around this is being recorded so all right we can can we edit that part out just in case our organization gets sued at the end of this one but i do think like there is a role for like pushing out like ideology clarify is that is the question about the who is how has how is social media the internet useful to this sort of growth of the left that we've seen  and for those of you who are familiar with dsa i'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that the majority of our membership finds out about us through the internet particularly through  people and i think that's been largely the kind of social media that we put out we are also kind of targeting a population that's very pissed off but it's a zing it in sarcasm and irony and memes and i don't think that's the only way that social media can be used but it is one particularly effective way i i also did a training with the the n double a cp where they talked about using social media particularly to reach out to communities of color and i think the difference between what that social media looks like with a large sort of focus on what media is compatible with mobile phones for example which low income and people of color tend to use mobile phones more than laptops or computers attacks us the  internet just sort of things like that and the one thing about dsa is while it may be limited demographically as it's been incredibly successful in terms of just  numbers because people work you know to five zero they get off work and they're they're pissed they hate their job they hate their situation they were promised a sort of at least bearable life that they didn't wind up getting and we make jokes about it and we say hey those people who are saying oh we can fix that or you know tell me how you feel about your student loan  and that's a very a message that a lot of people are receptive to  one i guess one of the things that makes me think about is that that the the internet doesn't just you know affect one ideological segment i mean it's made i mean if we think of the left as a subculture which at this point  in in the magnitude of american politics it has been the internet has kind of delocalized subcultures so that people you know who are in maybe isolated in their local communities can connect to people in other places and so these these can build partly in the real world through the internet partly just on the internet the most obvious example actually i think is  not on the left at all it's it's the alt right and maybe you know kind of a political groups that that do political stuff like anonymous or whatever yeah so that's that's i guess there's there's two different ways that this is taking place one is what's what's taking place online and the other is how the internet serves as a way of a channel to make things happen in in the the meet space of get back to this question of who then is reached and how right because i think we've all you've all touched on that in a certain way of how do we think about what who is going to be reached one of the reasons i asked kevin to be on this panel is because you're reaching people who we don't think of as the ones brought into the left by social media but that obviously is a different audience than people who listen to chapo traphouse and so how do we think about who we're reaching and how to broaden how to actually break this idea of the leftist subculture but make it something that's broader and how can the internet who for us is pretty straightforward right so i think i've covered that all right that piece already so it's folks that are in trailer parks period folks that are seeing their trailer park be bought out by a multi state corporation that's another kind of defining criteria and then i think you know there's a lot of talk on the laughter in like progressive movements about scale and and a lot of the times we think about that in terms of like actual sheer numbers like how many folks marched or mobilized on like the climate justice work you know these kind of big fancy pictures of thousands and thousands of people marching in the streets which is great but i think when we think about the use of the internet with how we're building work and mh action like i think scales it has to be geographic i mean we're still mostly operating within the parameters of the american system which makes senator and wyoming just as powerful as a senator in california right so like i think when we're thinking sometimes when we think about the who i think we sometimes forget about the where and if there were all read like the books about where things were you know in the past century or so it's like you know the wobblies were blowing up the territorial governor in idaho back in the day and folks were spilling milk trucks in rural parts of iowa and folks in north dakota founded a bank you know and it's not to say like yeah that there's a lot of scary parts that happen around that that type of movements in america which completely like disregarded issues of race and gender which we can't we have to struggle with and embrace obviously especially with the current administration but i do think yeah i like the who for us is pretty easily defin within the context of the community that they live in and then it becomes more about like well how does using the internet actually foment not only social movements but real community does it actually pull people offline and to into having those community potlucks where you can talk about like have some popular education training modules where you dive into these issues around housing a a human right or retirement security or immigration so i do think yeah i think sometimes we think about the who a little bit too much and forget about  the where and i think also when we think about organization like you know a lot of community organizations you know we generally do still rely on paid staff to do a lot of our coaching we have just we have three staff so we're gonna keep it pretty sleek partially because i don't like the supervise people ever even though they're nice it is not one of my inherent skill sets and so i think like but on the positive side like i think like if we try to like staff up an organization like mhm action it just wouldn't work it would be administrative liam possible to finance like you like just the mileage reimbursements alone would crush our budget and so like i think we do really have to think about like how we gonna like break what the right has always defined is like a stranglehold on rural and exurban politics which i actually think once you get out there it's like their base is kind of thin from a real person perspective like i think like a lot of folks like yes there is the power of the alt right they've figured out this internet stuff pretty well but once you start like kicking up some dust and exurban america like there's there's more of us out there and i think we give ourselves credit for um i just want to build off some of the things you said because i think a lot of  area of virginia now and it's wild there dsa chapters and i hope i don't screw this up i believe in all fifty states now at this point and maybe forty nine and you know places like anchorage and idaho and you know that in and of itself is pretty cool but i i think what's even more cool is just being able to reach out to these chapters which are usually very small you know it's like three or four people and there's one poor woman in that chapter who's like please help me i'm trying to inject some feminism into this into this brofist they're great guys but thing and i know and so being able to share resources in that sort of way i think is made possible through social media not just the ability to cross distances but the fact that people feel comfortable reaching out to us in the first place because i think one thing that dsa does far far better than the majority of leftist organizations on the internet is that we're really personable and funny and nice to talk to we're mean you know we're mean to some of the libs but you know and you groups you know they essentially are just tweeting out their what they write in their newspapers which you know is all well and good to have some of that content but you know when i you know when i'm treating stuff it's like you know cute animal pictures and like you can't meet us animals communist animals and selfies and you know treating about how i drank too much coffee that day you know and these things that make people form a personal connection with me so that they're more receptive to when i go on like fifty tweet rant about a federal job guarantee and i think it's that model that is going to be what's going to be really effective for leftist organizing both now and so there was something you said kevin about how when you talk about who you also have to talk about where i think that's pretty key especially when you think about what what are the democrats keep fuckin up you know every time they lose about the way people access the internet that among lower income people usually is is on their phones rather than other computers which is a different interface it's a different experience a you know laptops are kind of the college campus way of connecting of plugging in and and phones are not just in the us but like all over the world in third world or in the global south people are when they're connecting to the internet it's through its through smartphones so i think there's kind of like a cognitive gap here because we tend to think of social media particularly twitter i mean everyone's on facebook but twitter where i you know a lot of these the dsa membership is coming in and so on it's a very small percentage of the population that uses it technically but at the same time it's a more accessible  than you know the traditional kind of channels of media so i yeah i mean that's something i guess to capitalize on which you know obviously the democrats have figured out how to do and i think we're starting to but we're obviously we've got a long way to go so when talking about beckon yeah there's something you said that made me think about this which is it it is a small not a you know not a majority of people in the unit in the united states let alone the world are on twitter but i think one thing that's kind of deceptive about social media in general is we tend to look at you commenting things like that and you know for the majority of my posts and the majority of post on official dsa accounts that we use that's about five percent of  impressions which are just people who look at the tweet and you know when i talked to people who come to dsa meetings i asked them how did you find out about this meeting and it's almost always facebook or twitter or whatever and you i'll you know maybe later i'll ask what do you think about you know this recent drama that's going on on the internet and they're like what the fuck are you talking about because they don't you know that's not when when we talk about who is using social media we also have to talk about like how much time they're spending on it and what they're using it for and you know while i am proud to be an extremely online person most people are not extremely online people in that same sort of way and i think that we need to keep that in mind when we're planning outreach strategies and plugging people into the last um so when we're thinking about who we are reaching and who we're not reaching and especially this question of space there tend to be spaces that you know the left will sort of seed and think that they aren't there so is again why i think that talking to kevin and talking about mh action and talking about groups outside of new york i guess we're in queens i was about to say brooklyn but we're in queens right now so new york city broadly um i think that's really important one of the things that that kevin mentioned was the alt right being very good at the internet and sort of the famous claim but i forget who it was that the alt right shit posted trump into the white house i don't think they can really take credit for that but they certainly helped and yet they're sort of in disarray right now so thinking of the growth of the alt right as this thing that you know spawned from reddit forums and chan how does the left sort of compete with that intervene in it  what is the what are the pitfalls of sort of trying to win some of that audience over emma i see you're smiling but i'm gonna make sure you i go first on this one things one i mean in terms of the the greater effect i guess of the alright or the right wing kind of tendency within within online discourse i mean it seems like they had such an effect like because obviously you know their guy won the election but i mean that there's already a lot of an existing power structure there that they're they're using that they're writing you know it's it's it's it's not like i mean you know everybody in the republican party is behind trump at this point it's not like they just invented him on reddit you know i think that one of the reasons they have been somewhat successful one of the things they do that we don't do is i think they're very promiscuous they're very kind of unprincipled they don't really care you know they willing to work with people who are not really ideologically convinced of the same principles who just want to fuck shit up you know that's why you know i mean anonymous i think is entirely made up of totally apolitical people who just like get their kicks from you know transgressing whatever is considered to be proper which probably in their communities you know or given their context as you know young middle class white guys is is like the liberal you know consensus so defying that is what gives them a thrill but they don't actually care you know and so i think the the right is kind of harnessed that substance and and the question of whether we should be trying to do that i don't know it's very you know it's really certainly playing with fire because if you're working with people who don't actually believe in what they're doing that could go any direction and at the same time you know there are there are a lot of people who i think would be receptive to our program who just haven't heard it and and you know riding those waves let's the let's the all right get there first i don't know exactly how to approach that without you know empowering  people who are working against us but it's something to think about i think it might be something that's necessary to work out so yeah i i have some i guess mixed feelings about this and as much as you know i think one of the reasons why the  disarray right now and it brought joy to my marxist heart to see i think the southern poverty law center a really good article about this talking about how the alright is  sentially falling apart because of a class division that they are unable to reconcile because of their far right politics um and i think the lesson from that for us is we shouldn't fall prey to the same thing and i think you know i i have i'll admit i've been one of the people who is somewhat defensively said well actually d is majority work in class which it is but it's a very particular segment of the working class and i'm not i have no illusions about that and when we're talking about you know what we want the left as a whole to be an who we need to bring in you know not to be real old fashioned but it's you know it's class struggle y'all like and you know contrary to what some people think like i mean just going just you know i i live in crown heights a neighborhood in brooklyn right now and you know just go on the on the train and crown heights or even more so in like brownsville or east new york or hunts point and you they're looking at they're looking at like memes on instagram and you know the difference between the sort of content that i'm looking at in the sort of content that they're looking at is my content is you know about like marks and is about dsa and their content is about like the kardashians or it's about you know the experience of being a black person facing so much police violence and you know some of its political and some of it is not and we need to look at what that social media is and engage with that social media because one of the problems with social media being owned by these giant corporations is it's very profitable for them to sequester us so that we're only preaching to the choir and so we have to recognize that that is a thing and break out of that mold this is something that like i think the right has really pulled off is that they've harnessed this anti elitist tendency which makes no sense that should be you know that that's that's the side we represent and i don't know what when at what point like hatred of the rich stopped being like a universally accepted value but it really should be you know that should be everyone can relate to that right i mean you know that's what rich yeah well good that's but you know that's that's the type of energy that's coming out of like those you know everybody's everybody's aunts and uncles are posting these memes on facebook right of vaguely kind of reactionary and yet anti elitist sentiments right you know that's the that's where you know our kind of propaganda should be taking place and i don't know i don't know why it's not kevin laughter i mean sometimes with when i think about how mhm action lives online and when we encounter you know when you do like a post with a story from say one of our senior women leaders from humb county and then that gets reacted maybe poorly by some folks from a right wing bent it's hard sometimes to understand like what is the difference between the outer  being loud and the alt right being the manifestation of a very effective base building campaign that went for forty years so i think like that is i think the crux for us that mhm action is like you know we we're really trying to find like folks who you have followers like that just aren't that aren't just people that can prove like oh look i have two opposable thumbs and i've shared this thing aren't i like aren't i clever you know so i think there's like i think it's hard to know if like some of the alt rights disarray is just because like they're potentially forgetting that like oh yeah this thing is built on a very effective base building strategy that went school district by frickin school district across the country and pushed out an ideology and remember that most organizing is done face to face and in block clubs and in communities and then out of that they had this giant base that then got hooked up with the internet right so it's like i think like we can't we also have to be careful not to be like in some ways like bamboozled by truly how effective social media can be in especially places  america where like internet basically coverage sucks right like you can't like getting connected as you know hard enough as it is for folks especially low income folks especially folks in trailer parks so i think like i don't know always i don't know i feel like we get less concern is that our leadership team is less concerned about like how they're being responded to by what folks they consider also just maybe all right online crazies and like how they're actually trying to redevelop their community in a way that looks different than what it does now which could look like oh like what's the juxtaposition of corporate ownership in their mind is what they want to talk about they want to talk about community land trust's and you know cooperative ownership and like i think like folks are hungry for that conversation and in some ways like i think that the alt right has done a good job to get people to react to the playground that they're very effective in which feels like it's just about anger racism and being as loud as possible and i think that's why yeah i think that's the struggle with knowing how good our pickup is sometimes on the left on the internet because i feel like like even when we are recruiting organizers to or like we think of like our organizers life on the internet is just another tool in the toolbox like we're not going to hire anybody like you could be a great twitter person but if you can't like social media and all of these things um one of the things that probably the thing is the question of moving from sort of online to offline right we saw this with the movement for black lives you would see in sort of real time things like the uprising in ferguson moving from people tweeting about something to okay i'm going there and that kind of thing happened very organically very quickly but when we're thinking about organizing another thing that's been very successful at this is the recent teacher strikes which everybody that i've talked to has sort of cited facebook groups as one of the places that things were starting they're also starting of course in the actually existing teachers unions but those is actually showing up to a protest actually going to interrupt ben carson say i'm not gonna sign a yeah i mean what we try to do is in some ways we try to get people offline offline as quickly off online as quickly as possible and i haven't seen that correctly so we try like in some ways it's like we'll reach out folks online and through facebook and stuff like that and then it's like you know what you should really do is you should have a community call and do a local leadership training on these issues and here's like a training module or like will bring another leader from another state to come in and talk to them about their issues so some of like i feel like the online world for us it it works in the initial outreach point but then it but then the real magic happens like in the local trailer park which you know it's interesting because i guess the thing about you know the thing that this panel kind of like made me think about is like when you think about these communities it's like everybody shares the same driveway to get to their house so they all kind of know each other so and maybe that's like also the cool thing about like what's happening with the teachers unions right now it's just like they don't you know they're all in the same building together they just know each other they're getting to know each other and they you know their their gripes are similar and they're their hopes and aspirations are pretty similar and then that kind of feeds  feeds their movement and i guess i'd be curious like how the dsa chapters work because i think for mhm action that's like really where we're finding the folks that then could be folks with followers like you know we can  quickly delineate if they're just someone reaching out to us online saying hey i'm really pissed i want to get involved and then we realize they live in a community with seven hundred people and no one else can stand them we generally don't work with them right so it's like trying to figure out like who where are those communities people into that space as quickly as possible yeah i think it's a i think part of the difference is that we're we're different groups with different objectives and as much as  that you know you're part of an organizing group that i assume works usually on one or two campaigns that sort of like the central focus and is based on community organizing wh tsa where we're our objective is to have a mass movement so for us you know sheer numbers really is important whereas with you know coming from a community organizing background you know if i'm trying to win a particular campaign to change a particular policy i would rather have ten good organizers than five hundred people any any day of the week but you know with tsa i would rather have the five hundred people because you know part of it is electoral strategy you know that for us we need to get out the vote you know that's a big part of the work that we do but it's also just about changing discourse political discourse more broadly so things like social media allow us to you know have conversations with people that they can then replicate sort of in their own irl lives and try to engage with people that they don't deal with on the internet and  i've heard that being a success for a lot of people in dsa which is really awesome but of course none of that matters if we can't get those people into the streets so there is still that level of you know we have to get people to be offline as well i guess what my difference is is it's not getting them from online to offline but getting them to be you know it's what's unusual about the about the teachers strikes is that it's it's a type of politics that's unrelated to the american political system you know it's it's taking place at the site of labor which is kind you're you you are in the middle of nowhere and you're a young person who's interested in left politics and you know you can go on twitter and like say mean things to you know high ranking democrats or whatever and that's great like absolutely you should do that we should all do that we should have let's plan i mean there's no there's no reason not to do that but i'm gonna do that right now but  but but then what do you do you know in your town you know it's just like if you're if you get into punk rock or something and you're to tell where there's no shows what do you do you don't know what to do so what are records on the internet well that's that's still online you know that's that's the that's the what you're limited to i'm thinking about you know in the kind of the meme approach is actually i think an old one like i was thinking about the forms of propaganda that used to be used the labor movement and they weren't just you know leaflets and so on because not everybody could read in the workforce so i think one of the you know the major outlets was songs marching songs union songs which were you know all set to two hymns so that everyone knew the tune and could already sing along i mean that's a meme you know but that's also something that is tied to an action which is going on strike or going on a march  which you know as screenshots or not so there's there's a kind of inherent gap there that i don't know i mean it kind of suggests that  there needs to be a really kind of boringly conventional and traditional accompaniment to this this kind of online activity which is just building uh you know labor power  n local communities so i have a few more questions but i want to make sure that i leave time for all of y'all so i'm gonna ask one more and then if nobody has questions i can ask more but so i wanted to wrap up a little bit by asking how does the the owners of the means of production in this case play into this right when we're talking about organizing using facebook and twitter and everything else to organize these are things that as  and so how do you think about what to put on social media what to keep off of social media i put everything on there i have no filter and you know one of the things that lenin talks about in that piece is the the need for a national newspaper as an area by which there can be discourse and and the whole point is that the the party actually owns the newspaper so it doesn't depend on you know other outlets that can limit or censor their speech and it gives people a chance to fiercely struggle it out and i was talking with someone else in dsa preparing for this panel and we were both kind of laughing about how some some folks in dsa think that like it you know internal political struggles are too public and too personal and you know if you look at some of these old issues of pravda or really anything that lenin writes i mean he he just loves these sort of he name calling he just like loves to call people names and i'm not suggesting we do that per se but i do think that as a democratic principle actually that we need to  have all sorts of political disagreements even some of the more personal or some more internal we need those to be in public so that people can see that they're happening and people can engage with them and of course there are limits to that  but i think as a general principle i lean towards you know get it out into the public sometimes that means the internet sometimes that means bringing it up during a meeting or having a in person debate  as long as it gets out into the public i mean i would say our content really focuses on three things  so it's really hmm so there's one segment of our content that is like look at this bad dude on wall street and look what he's doing to people and some of those like villains are great like one of the  interacted with was this guy by the name of sam zell i don't know if people know sam's oh it's like yeah yeah so sam zell he like literally looks like a bond villain he's seventy years old bald he's got a little like that little thing  the employees pension fund so this guy was literally the guy that owned the most trailer parks in america up until last year and so he was like you know the usual raising rents decreasing community maintenance so we have we pushed a lot of content out there on folks like him that are just like look this guy he's a jerk look what he's doing we should do something about it mm hmm and then the second thing that we really focus on are like the the personal stories of our the folks that we're relating to which a lot of our base right now are senior women which is also awesome because it's just like you know don't fuck with nana right it's just like so it's like so when you when you post that against like sam zell it's like you know he's screwing over grandma like let's get them so it's like yeah people are really like thinking about yeah you know that's our second piece of content and the third piece of content which really is about like our brothers and sisters that are organizing and very kick ass ways and urban centers right like the same the only difference between the corporate owners in trailer parks and the folks that have taken over brooklyn and every neighborhood in new york city at this point black zone or whoever is like they're the names of the company are different companies are different so the third thing that we post is we really do lift up a lot of the stories and work that who we view as our brothers and sisters in the housing justice movement and urban locales because i do think that people see the third thing about the shared fate between rural and exurban america and folks in in cities so i don't we don't really filter our content we spend most of our time just making sure that our content really reflect the story that we're trying to oh i'm thinking about the example that emma brought up of the you know of the party owning the the newspaper and i'm thinking what what would that look like today especially what would that look like online i don't know it wouldn't because well i mean it might in the sense that it's it's not owned by anyone but it's you know i mean viewpoints not a not a source for up to the minute news  that you know that does take a lot of resources to produce which we know we don't have but i mean the ethic of like you know the kind of starry eyed first wave of internet rhetoric was all about that right about i mean blogging is supposed to be that ideal is cellphone self published and theoretically you're supposed to you know it's supposed to be open to everybody you know obviously in practice these things are end up emma spoke to my question a little bit but here's here's my thing right so i am a pretty far leftist and i've actually only lived in notoriously liberal cities but every time i've come kind of encountered a local socialist group on either coast and even in the middle i've been turned off by two things number one is the ones i have encountered at least have been blindingly white and there's also a lot of sublimated and even overt misogyny like shut up about your feminism girl we'll get to that after the revolution so i'm kind of wondering like when and where and how and who within the socialist movement or movement gonna deal with us like when a socialism gonna get for real intersectional like not just dropping the term like someone pointed out on twitter but like actually getting down with the theory and the spirit behind it because i just i don't think that you can take a one note approach any more today i don't know i would love to hear about who's dealing with that and who's challenging that within the movement because personally it's kind of kept me off of yeah i i think that that concern is a big part of why i think we should have be having internal debates be as public and sometimes as personal as possible because you know that's that's historically i think it's um oh gosh jane mitchell may be true essay about the socialist movement in the united kingdom sort of promoting these very sort of traditional family values and categorizing the concerns of women in particular as being personal issues and therefore oh you can't talk about you know the personal issues of the group or the personal issues of the movement in public we have to you know bring those inside so we can silence you and not actually listen to you and all that sort of thing so i think it's i think it's a unfortunately it's a constant struggle but as a marxist i believe we have to work with the material conditions that were presented i know that the socialists the us socialist movement  world socialist movement is actually not majority white not even close but the u s socialist movement is and so i think that it's important to constantly be working and criticizing women issues of women's liberation of course but also on intersectionality and sort of offshoots of intersectionality like the idea of reproductive justice which is looking and we are like maybe one percent of dsa in new york city so we've got a long ways to go but we've been really successful at making sure that our voices get h even if we are a minority we're a minority with a lot of power in the organization dsa has supported intersectionality and every productive justice lens since two thousand and thirteen  o it's there's a lot to there's a lot left to fight for but there's good reason to have hope there's i think a prevailing dichotomy in the way people talk about this stuff all around which is you know the conversation becomes something like you know is the revolutionary class the working class or is it something else now because of the variety of struggles that we recognize a taking place well you know i think it's gonna be like in ten years or so the working class in america is going to be primarily people of color it already is yeah so it's you know this isn't a dichotomy this is this is a simultaneous condition  so i think i think it's really important to reject that to not let people make that a either or yeah would just add that i want to ban the term white working class the working class has never been all white it will never be all white it will be less white and the the worst thing that we can do is continue to seed this terrible frame because it's wrong and it doesn't help and like i've been to like the carrier plant in indiana which trump made a speech at and it was about fifty to sixty percent people of color worked there and a majority women work at that plant so you know that's the realities of the working class today and anybody who thinks that like we can't talk about race and we can't talk about gender because it'll offend the working class doesn't actually know what the working class looks like and in regards to social media i think it's really one of the great things about social media is being able to put out visual content in particular of course we think about memes but also just sharing like videos i think what the teacher strikes in particular the videos i don't even realize how many people watch these facebook live videos until the teacher strike started happening and i was like holy shit many people watch these videos and i think it's really important for us to think about what the content we're putting out there looks like because you know some people may dismiss that as oh that's just you know that's like very like corporate diversity public relations tears up no no we need to share with people what the truth is and the truth of the working class is that again its majority of people of color and you know it has been half women since forever for black lives and ferguson but one of the things that i found troubling and specifically with the comparison between the socialist movements in trailer parks versus combating gentrification in brooklyn is the way in which the comparison and the use of these as mechanics elides the very real cultural nature of these two movements right so it's not one thing to say that we should do what the movement for black lives did moving from online to offline and that works for everybody that comes from a culture of meeting and the wise and church basements to rec thing well not necessarily rec things but engage in particularly kinds of social change so my question is and it kind of dovetails a with the first question ask one how do you get over the overwhelming whiteness of your spaces and two how do you get over the overwhelming whiteness and potential for co opting mechanisms for organizing online because if we're gonna be real about this it's not that you're discovering anything new you're catching up to the stuff that folks of color have been doing since we got access to mobile twitter how do you how do you address those critique s while simultaneously bringing in folks of color which is like three questions in one but yeah i mean i think there's also a tension about like rural america's all white so you know beyond the tension of like this terminology around w class it's just like oh every trailer park in america is just full of white people so you know we when we think about our base at mhm action yeah i think historically yes trailer parks like when he did like the american housing survey in two thousand and ten it was like ninety percent of trailer folks living in trailer parks were white folks and that still shows up for us these days but that those demographics just like the rest of the country it's at least in our interpretation is mmh i can be coming more beautiful it's much more diverse now and so we're you know it it's a super huge struggle for us because sometimes like we'll be organizing in some communities that have been  majority white for a lot of years and some of their initial definition of the trailer park going bad is because those people are moving in it's just like holy shit like we've got a lot of work to do here you know so i think yeah it's a huge tension and i think were we're not saying were doing organizing any better or different than anybody were just responding to on a condition that is now present that wasn't present fifteen years ago for these a lot of these communities and it it's real struggle for us on i mean what's clear for us on how we can rate how we can raise and lift up race issues for our folks because it's clear about who the owners are like you know every single one of the chairmanships of these corporate companies are they look like me definitely there are all white guys all of them to a to a to company so like we we have to raise race and gender and that formula that way and that you know it's really i think our first i think doorway we've been able to walk through successfully as an organization as the be that man fact guy when you're working in the community organizing space so like we're we've gone down that road and you know we also i think when some folks look at us that i'm h action it's like oh yeah you're in trailer parks trial right like that's a really offensive statement for a number of our leaders like jesse martinez and carmen rodriguez in florida and mateo rebecky who is our new organizer so like sometimes we get pigeonhole that mhm action like oh you work in trailer parks like you're a white guy you must be all w like that like a number of people would take pretty significant offense to that and any of our membership meetings so we it is it all sweetness and light like what we're doing no it's hard it's messy it's like you know i think but what we have found is that you know how we're trying to pivot as quickly as possible like if we find a community where it's like they're clearly organizing because they want to keep it insular to skin color of light tones like we're not going there like it's we're not gonna we're gonna have to like at some level just be like oh my gosh these are just folks that don't want to see don't have an analysis don't want to see their community change for the better it's not it's not time so i think you know do we have it figure i will be the first to admit that mh action is like there's days where i'm like oh my gosh this could fall apart tomorrow but i do feel like folks are definitely coming to us saying okay something is happening it's making us housing and secure how do we figure this out and i think a lot of folks in that are organizing in urban centers led by organizers and communities of color they want us out there organizing in these trailer parks because they know a lot of the political power especially for instance in new york state the thing that's making the biggest hiccup to strengthen and improve rent laws are because of these like whacky up state senators and and representatives right and assembly members so i think at some level like we're not saying that we've learned how to organize you city folk should organize as effectively as us like they're coming to us saying like oh my gosh can you help build the base and what would it look like to build a base in accra new york and in plattsburgh so we can shake up the statehouse in a way that actually delivers real victories long term for our folks in these neighborhoods that were organizing in so they see like i think we're trying to also be as respons possible to folks that are doing very specific requests of our organization given the geographic space that we take  there was a really important point that came up here which is that for a lot of communities of color the practice of politics is extremely different than the the kind of assumed traditional politics in america it's it's a day to day practice you know if you're dealing with police violence if you're dealing with you know kind of the more subtle practices of discrimination in everyday life and you know people do have these existing these pre existing models for for fighting back and you know that's absolutely the the model to to learn from and to support and to amplify and i think that's that's you know the first priority for for organizing socialist group so that people of color within dsa could have their own spaces to talk about these issues and more so just to have spaces where they could  bring people of color who are interested in socialism and aren't smacked in the face by this giant crowd of white people that comes up and the sort of the second thing in as much as like what should or what do are white what does our white membership do is essentially showing up you know when folks are murdered by the police and the communities that some of our  members are you know part of the gentrification of we need to go out there and we need to commit you know now calling on people of color in our neighborhoods we you know need to  example table outside of rikers and provide just basic mutual aid support to the families who are visiting their loved ones in rikers just providing them how coffee and some food and and just you know ear if they just need to like vent about what's going on in their lives and it's you know that way where we show that our commitment is genuine and then also show that we recognize this as an issue and we're willing  to create spaces specifically for by and for people of color to work out these issues i just wanted to follow up someone made the comment that protests and political is that those strategies are necessarily different because they have to be and so white allies are however you want to frame that conversation their protests and their political engagement has to be different it can't be the same because we're dealing with an entirely different set of cultural practices which is sort of informed the way that people of color have traditionally organized organized so i think that there is there is some difference and we have to sort of thing that but like it often seems in practice that people cluster around you know certain individuals we have you know the fact that the internet the internet is somewhat structureless but that means we have to be wary of the tyranny of structuralist nurse to reference joe freeman i guess  so i guess the question i have is what do you see as the i guess the pros and cons of technology and mass communication and the information age  about do they can they be used to break down hierarchy without creating a new one or you know what are the pros and cons i guess  i think i mean i think we've focused on the pros so far so maybe i'll focus on the cons now i think obviously there is a tendency towards depersonalization that takes place when you interact on the internet and you know it affects all of our mental health on a regular basis i think strangely the the worst app for your mental health is instagram yeah apparently i guess because it makes people think that everyone's else's life is a lot more fun than their own it sounds fun i don't know i haven't either  okay thanks but yeah i think i think that especially when there's conflict around organizational matters you know i do think these things  can can become amplified past the point that they would otherwise have been if it's taking place online you know people tend to forget that the characters on a screener  human person that said i think the nature of the i don't know of the medium and i i mean i i think that emma was talking about how it's actually really important to not suppress these these disagreements in this dialogue so it's a question of you know navigating that and i think i think it's something we've been coming back to is is making sure that there is a kind of parallel between what happens online on what happens in real life  otherwise you know it just devolves into into the shit post cue and go a little bit negative too even though i'm a very positive person generally so i think a lot of my negativity about the internet come  capitalism has successfully kodama commodified are very means of socially interacting with one another capitalists want us to be as extremely online as possible because when we talk in person you know at least probably with mass surveillance we'll eventually get there but currently they're generally not making money off of us just talking in person whereas when we talk on twitter or when we talk on facebook  they are they can monitor at the very bare minimum they can monitor the data from those interactions and so that to marketing firms and all sorts of other institutions  so again we need to be aware of that we need to think about building our own platforms that aren't within that sort of structure and we need to not abandon entirely having conversations and person it so we've talked a little bit about kind of the alt right and difference between organizing on the on the right side organizing on the more progressive side and just thinking about in two thousand and sixteen kind of as in for more information is coming out about like really intense micro targeting by the trump campaign and really playing on people's vulnerabilities and anxieties i would just be curious to know and and i think there's also the sense that there's something about that that's  wrong and then there's the sense on the on the left that there is this need to organize online to kind of figure out political strategy online and i would just be curious to know and there's also like i think this idea and kind of conflict on the left of like oh they go low we go high to just kind of know like how are those tensions bearing out in the kind of progressive online organizing that you all are engaged  well i think part of the reason why the alt right is in disarray besides the class divisions i mentioned earlier is because anti fur made them scared to show their faces anywhere so the whole idea of they go low we go high i think is entirely broken and to sort of echo what malcolm said during the last panel i think we are going into an era where unfortunately there's going to be a lot more violence  and we need to be ready and willing to not only defend our communities but also to use things like social media and other ways of shaping the discourse to push back on these ideas i think  a in particular has been successful at this we're you know the democrats are saying oh we need to go to the right you know we need to endorse you know candidates who maybe are against abortion and so dsa responds to that by saying oh we're gonna pass a resolution where no dsa chapter is allowed to endorse candidates who are against abortion period and i think that's the sort  of framing and messaging that the left needs right now is combative and fierce because i think when people are scared and anxious that's what they want to hear they want to know that we're going to fight for them yeah i mean interesting question for said mhm action because we do very you know clearly how we build our base is very pretty micro targeted right you're a person that lives in this type of community that has been bought out by some dude on wall street but i also think like this whole like this whole like big ol owego high it's almost like oh like going low on in the political world is like a new thing like that's been like seems like that's been going on for a long time like so it's hard it's more intriguing to me i think it's like what do we wanna fight about like an hour we fighting about like the right things and are we having the right conversations like i really appreciate a number of the points from the audience tonight it's like it's like it's messy out there it's more messy now because social media has like overlaid this has made our society much louder in some ways and in some ways the folks that are the loudest in a lot of ways are like you know the kind of the biggest bullies or assholes out there just tend to also be loud online so i don't know i don't want to get i feel like we don't want to get caught up at mhm action too much about like they go low they go high it's more like like we got a we shit tomorrow oh like people are going homeless all over the country it's a massive housing crisis right now and yeah it's it's gonna suck when we were moving out these campaigns we're gonna take hits and people are gonna like shit post us which is such a new term i'm gonna use that a lot next week it's gonna make me hip as a gen  think like you know it's like whatever people take sometimes it's hard to delineate between like yeah people are taking shots cuz we're building legitimate power like you know to shake up some policies that i'll make people be able to stay in their home that's cool versus like what's folks like going low like in a very mean violent way i'm actually less concerned about what folks are saying to us online sometimes  way more concerned about like you know just actually have physical violence of of organizing yeah i mean i think the the the problem with the going low and going  high metaphor is that it presumes that were meeting on equal footing that we're meeting on neutral territory and we're not things are where we've been dragged down to the lowest depths when we when we enter the political arena you know where we're dealing with a context of you know institutional exploitation of you know extreme violence from from the from the state of mass incarceration of you know it's already pretty low so you don't you know we don't we don't need to go high we need to go left i'm gonna steal the mic back for moderators privilege because that question combined with the other questions that were brought up made me think about something that didn't really happen online as much although i guess we all saw the videos as charlottesville which didn't just happen once again but repeatedly over and over again this summer there were kkk marches and there were white supremacist the unites the right you know all of the neo nazis showing up in one place and the thing that really has and in response to that was a big coalition of people who showed up in a bunch of different ways so you had clergy you had cornel west and reverend say ku and other people you know doing the like go high sort of  and both of those two particular people said after the fact that you know anti fuss a of my life because let me tell you the neo nazis did not give a damn about beating up some black men and clergy collars and you had to have people showing up in different ways and in different roles in that space the picture that went around of corey long who is the care worker who you know was famously sort of photographed with a making a makeshift flamethrower to scare off the white guy with a i don't think well there were definitely white guys with guns in any case and like all of that is to say that like yeah it's scary out there and there are we are going to have to show up in in a lot of different ways that require really really trusting each other and and being willing in some cases to put your body on the line and that as a first step requires building trust and getting off the internet and that's how we're gonna close the p extremely online socialism get off the internet go eat pizza all right