Long Island Red Rose

April/May 2025

"I've never read Marx's Capital, but I've got the marks of capital all over my body."

― "Big Bill" Haywood

Democrats Blame Minorities (Again)

Democrats convened to complain once again that identity politics had barred them from political success. In a February strategy meeting, center-left group “Third Way” members raced to discover how Democrats could help even fewer Americans. Republicans meanwhile continue fighting the culture war with the bloodthirsty appetite of manic crusaders. 

What Democrats see as a problem with identity politics remains an issue with lacking any identity at all. Like a quiet kid bullied by the cool kids' table, Democrats are constantly maligned by a glut of sing-song rumors. Every time a furry goes to class in a fur-suit or a transgender person breathes in this country, Fox will run a seven day news cycle on how Democrats caused it. Democratic defense has been to chirp “did not!” from the corner of the class.

Meanwhile, Republicans make use of their power by engaging in identity politics. Nassau County Executive, Bruce Blakeman, signed an anti-trans executive order last month. This harmed the right for sports groups to decide their membership based on their standards. It’s an action sure to hurt a single-digit number of trans athletes in the county, dozens of their teammates, and waste the time of hundreds of women who will need to validate their gender with paperwork.

Taxpayer dollars support Victoria Lagreca in defending this order in court. Over the past several years, she claims that at least four North American athletes suffered harm in incidents involving transgender women in women's sports. Injuries? During sports games? Inconceivable.

But this is just one issue in a barrage of wasteful cultural expeditions, ranging from anti-DEI, anti-Critical Race Theory, immigrants eating cats, and marijuana making one violent! These fabricated concerns are the same.

This moment will be remembered as one event in a lineage of politicians inventing hysteria to seize power and combat imaginary threats. Democrats’ narcissistic obsession with their branding misses the point; Republicans’ goal is to sensationalize unwinnable ideological battles so they can present themselves as the protectors of common sense.

If Democrats accept Republican framing like they did with immigration, they won’t just lose a group of bleeding-heart activists. With fingers in every major social media outlet, Republicans are primed to instigate fear and demand control in ways Orwell could not have dreamt of. Dems need a counter-narrative and an engagement plan now, but they’re too busy cutting off their limbs to fit into a box already snuggly filled by Republicans.

The Democratic strategy needs to stop “virtue signaling” and start genuinely reflecting its values. It should prioritize discussions about housing, health care, and income. However, it needs to show strength. The Republican Party will interpret every concession as an admission of guilt and will leverage its influence to construct a narrative against the left. They will claim that they need power to protect Americans from left-wing physical, emotional, and spiritual attacks. If Democrats yield rather than dismantle that narrative, Americans will once again vote out of anger and fear, resulting in a loss for them.

Remember this: People are brainwashed every day, but they only need to be disillusioned once. Figure out what works and use it.

Luigi Mangione, The Death Penalty as a Mechanism of Class Warfare, and Bourgeois Academics in Death Penalty Discourse

By Kallen

On April 1, the Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi, in an act befitting the holiday and newest experiment in government overreach, ordered that federal prosecutors shall endeavor to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, convicted of the alleged murder of Brian Thompson, the then-CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on Dec. 4, 2024.

On April 25, Mangione pleaded “not guilty” in response to alleged federal murder charges filed about a week earlier. It should concern anyone that the Attorney General is presuming guilt before innocence of Brian Thompson and not who stands accused, a right ostensibly upheld by the various legal mores of the Constitution and other laws currently being broken down by an administration that does not recognize the rule of law. Her statement starts with her characterizing the alleged act as a “murder” before any definitive investigation can even be done. 

As seen from the “perp walk” that the equally fascistic Eric Adams administration gave Magione, the elites see Mangione as an obstacle toward their campaign of false consciousness and an opportunity to set in the American conscience an example of a callous killer, presuming the death of a billionaire to be worse than the immeasurable amount of harm and death caused by the capitalist mode of production. This is manufacturing consent in motion, a prime example of the rehabilitative process of billionaires. 

Bondi’s statement continues to characterize the incident as an act of political violence. Her statement contradicts the fact that the administration's current actions are not only political but also extremely violent. 

It is an act of political violence to demand that an active bribery and political corruption case against Eric Adams be dismissed so that the inherently violent goals of immigration “control” may be effectuated. Without even a hint of self-awareness, Bondi does not appear to acknowledge that by taking her current actions, Mangione, and by extension all death row inmates and general prisoners, are, by definition, political prisoners and, subject to the conditions of death row and incarceration, are exposed to a form of political violence. Now she has risked prejudicing Mangione to a grand jury, denying him due process and yet a broad opportunity for appeal. In short: political violence.

Though this is not the start of death penalty charges against Mangione (those started on Dec. 19, 2024), conclusory and nontransparent as they are, these charges are filed, which means trouble for anyone sentenced under this administration, as Trump seeks to expand his death penalty policy.

The policy is mythology; deterrence is pure fallacy and speculation, in a Žižekian sense: ideology. The assumption that the death penalty brings justice to victims is nonsense, and only the sleazy car salespeople of our time, like Dennis Prager, claim that the death penalty provides closure; they glibly claim to be the smiling, concerned, “empathetic” representatives of the desires of every American family.

Although closure as a concept is conjecture and empirically contested, it has all but failed to vanish from the rationale of retentionists, even more so than the more honest but significantly worse-looking “retribution” rationale. The branding of the death penalty from its standard origins of a system based on revenge to one of altruistic intentions and “righteous” justice is a dirty trick by reactionaries done to gaslight vulnerable victims. 

Their act relies on emotion, not facts, which don't support it. A key factor in doing this is controlling a victim’s family’s healing and narrative, claiming it as their own, and convincing the families that the privatization of their trauma for political gain is in their best interest. Far from being representatives and bringers of closure, they show themselves as opportunists.

It is justice in the American sense to equate justice with pain and punishment, and then claim that only pain is the metric to measure it, a principle upheld in Campbell v. Wood. 

Isaac Ehrlich, the first researcher to try presenting a deterrence link in the discourse, has been the only consistent defender of his findings, which have been roundly criticized to the point of being discredited entirely. 

Ehrlich, like Dudley Sharp, Michael Conklin, and John McAdams, spreads the same false claims. This is a variant of bourgeois, reactionary academics who step in to defend the system when it’s under criticism. I see them as part of a reserve force of bourgeois defenders, always ready to excuse the capitalist class and justify actions others might see as criminal, using complicated arguments. We reject that.

This is an obvious attack against Mangione. The death penalty is an institution in which class warfare underpins its administration. These disingenuous sects of the bourgeoisie will sacrifice as much human capital as it takes to decay the meaning and administration of real, transformative justice and ensure the monopoly of state-sanctioned violence remains unchallenged. They will force your head through the guillotine, and their true business is murder.

Bondi’s statement stands as nothing more than a blatant, retaliatory form of class warfare seeking to continue to shield oligarchs and attempt to intimidate working-class individuals with the classist arm of the law. It is clear from the rest of the memorandum that the administration seeks to deprive “illegal aliens” of the right to proper counsel, ostensibly afforded to citizens who are no better treated than non-citizens, so that they are executed quickly with impunity. That is the administration’s newest two-minute hate and attempts to legitimize the existence of law enforcement for more disappearances and violent deportations.

Bondi’s statement and the memorandum are incoherent documents of so-called “justice” that evade a consistent material definition. I do not write here to speak of justice in long-form theory. I speak about what justice is, and this is not it. 

I do not consider the expansion of the death penalty to target immigrants' justice. Nor do I consider a racially biased system filled with bureaucracy and all costs with no benefit and an appallingly high rate of wrongful convictions to be one worth keeping. 

I do not consider the Attorney General going over the heads of Americans slowly abandoning the system and damning her constituents to be any form of justice and why the statement “nearly every state” is doing all the legwork. Neither should you. 

Given everything that’s happened in Mangione’s case, a fair system would throw it out on a technicality and rule Pam Bondi’s reckless statement unconstitutional. But we can’t count on that, so we must keep fighting to end the death penalty and push for real justice for the working class.

It’s Time to Let Go

No more sugarcoating it: the Democratic Party must die. As long as it exists, it will always stand in the way of social and economic progress. It is not something that can be reformed, nor should we waste our energy trying.

If it wasn’t obvious after the first several months of Donald Trump’s second term, let me spell it out:

The Democrats do not care about you.

The Democrats will not become a party of the left.

The Democrats will never save us.

The battle we face—dismantling capitalism—cannot be won through passive, half-hearted electoralism. It will never be won by pleading with a party designed to suppress us.

The 2024 election made it clear: we have no real political power in our current state. Faced with energizing working-class voters or preserving their grip on the status quo, the Democrats chose the latter.

The DNC absorbs progressives, social democrats, and even self-described democratic socialists—either breaking them into obedient party loyalists or sidelining them into irrelevance. Yet liberals still tell us to be grateful, to fall in line, and to vote for whatever warmongering corporate ghoul they put forward next.

Enough. Liberals don’t want us—so why are we still here?

Take Bernie Sanders: A decade ago, he opened the door to anti-capitalist politics for millions, including me. But instead of building something new, he remains tethered to the Democratic Party, clinging to a dream that will never come true. If there’s one lesson to take from his experience, it’s that we need to have pride in ourselves.

Maybe we won’t ever win elections with a united, independent left. But we’re not winning anything now. As cliché as it is to reference Marx here, we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Eugene V. Debs, one of America’s greatest socialists, got over three percent of the popular vote four times between 1904 and 1920—once while in jail. He wasn’t running as a Democrat or Republican, but with the now-defunct Socialist Party of America.

And before you say, “But Debs didn’t win,”—yes, he didn’t. But imagine if a socialist candidate today pulled three percent of the vote. That would be a bigger victory for our movement than anything we’ve had in years.

If electoral politics is the path forward, we need to stop expecting change from a party that has repeatedly shown it doesn’t value us and build power on our own.

The Democratic Party is, and always will be, a capitalist party. It exists to preserve and grow capital no matter the price. This alone makes the idea of a “leftist Tea Party” movement impossible. We’re not fighting for a balanced budget—we’re fighting for our survival through economic revolution. These people would rather let the world burn than fail to accumulate maximum profit rates—why are we still trying to work with them?

When push comes to shove—on workers’ rights, gender, race, immigration, or any other issue—the Democratic Party will always side with capital. We’ve seen it countless times. In 2020, they abandoned the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, they let Trump return without a fight and then blamed us. They have failed us at every turn.

It has never been about us, the working class. We know this. Yet we stay in this miserable relationship, begging them to listen.

It’s time to walk away.

We have two choices: continue begging liberals to let us in or forge our path. Maybe it leads nowhere. But we’ve lost nothing by leaving. We are at rock bottom—why are we still trying to appease those actively making our lives worse?

Stop donating. Stop supporting them.

It’s time to let go.

Reading Recommendations

Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire

Have you ever heard the adage that fascism is just the violence of imperialism set loose on the people of the imperial core? Well, this is where that comes from.

Martinican author Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism lays out the barbarity of Europe’s domination of the rest of the world in the 20th century and how it poisons both the oppressed and oppressor. Just as relevant today, Césaire demonstrates how imperialist brutality inevitably boomerangs and returns home, a reality we see playing out every day in this sick, sick country.

Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco

“Fascist” as an allegation gets thrown around a lot these days, and for good reason. Still, its precise definition eludes most people. Fascism has always been a “you know it when you see it” kind of situation, but Umberto Eco got as close as anybody ever has to putting a bow on it. 

It’s a breezy essay. Go ahead and read through the 14-point outline of fascism that Eco provides. Tell me he doesn’t hit just about every last one.