The Tennessee Star has obtained secret audio and video recording from a June 28 meeting by the far-left Democratic Socialist of America in Middle Tennessee (DS), and its plans to organize in the upcoming weeks and months.
The group is currently working on a campaign called Quilt, which describes Tennessee Republicans as “fascists,” while spewing other typical left-wing melodrama.
According to the Quilt website:
As transgender people lose their rights, all our rights become threatened. This state is becoming the base for fascists across the right-wing spectrum. More become emboldened by their successes and the lack of cohesion among the working class. We have a duty to organize and expand our fight. We know that we do not yet have all the answers as we do not even know all the questions or needs of our community. We cannot prescribe a solution other than to organize. We must go out among the people [and] learn what they need. While this campaign aims at organizing queer and trans workers, we must address those who are not in those communities to also rise up in solidarity.
The Quilt folks passed around buttons, one of which said “Death Before Detransition.”
The DSA meeting was held at Nashville Faith Meeting, a Quaker meeting space which describes itself as “a faith community called together to listen for and carry out what God/the Divine would have us do, individually and together.”
“We believe that we are all called to ministry,” Nashville Faith Meeting’s website says. “We do not have a pastor or paid clergy. We believe that gifts of the Spirit are given for the good of the community and strive to recognize, affirm, and encourage expression of those gifts in each of us, regardless of gender expression, racial or ethnic identity, sexual orientation, background, abilities, or history.”
During the meeting, the group shared its extreme agenda.
“The ultimate goal is class power building and all of that sort of stuff,” one female member of the group said. “So we’re trying to build a coalition of people to start meeting each others’ needs and start meeting more people.”
“The ultimate goal is full communism, but…” the woman said, trailing off her sentence with an enthusiastic laugh.
In differentiating the DSA’s goals from that of other leftists, the woman focused on organization instead of intellectualism.
“There’s a lot of avenues, there are currently organizing meetings happening hybrid – in south Nashville and Zoom – so once we’re through this big launch event we’re going to be turning our attention to like, smaller skill shares, social events, smaller instructional things where we wanna, like share knowledge, and teach skills and things like that with each other,” she said. “We’re trying not to do that leftist, ‘I’ve read all the books so I’ll just prescribe knowledge for people.'”
Later, a transgender person spoke, saying that Quilt is organizing because he feels left out of the organizing scene, even in other leftist groups. He said:
So, one of the things Quilt is working on right now is providing access to a lot of trainings and stuff like that. Because we need to have the skills in order to organize, to protect ourselves, to work towards a better future. So we have a few different [trainings] here. I’m gonna talk first about organizing training. So organizing, uh, is kind of what we’re doing here. Getting people together to talk about issues, to formulate strategies, to solve them, to build an organized force together, because we don’t have the cash, but we do have the people power.
So in August – the second Saturday in August – I and some other organizers are going to be hosting an organizer training. So this is for labor organizing, housing organizing, all these sorts of things.
A female speaker then took the microphone, and said she will hold a tailoring seminar, because “clothes are not made for people with bodies, and particularly with bodies that they don’t think … is a marketable audience.”
She also said she would be hosting an August group reading event focused on “lesbian-centered readings.”
“A lot of lesbian history was lost,” she said. “Or not lost, but buried. And telling women’s stories throughout history, and people who are lesbians but not women, all of those stories are essential to our survival.”
A third DSA member said she would be putting together a basic medic training, which will be held July 29. Another member said he is organizing a self-defense training.
Other organizational training will focus on topics like queer history for the DSA members to beef up their “political knowledge.”
“I want to emphasize this as hard and as often as I can,” one member said. “That the political education – understanding the world around you and your place in it is absolutely and totally essential if you want to equip yourself to make any change whatsoever. Do not let anyone tell you that it is inaccessible or unnecessary, because it is the most necessary part of doing what we’re doing. The first step in deciding to build a cupboard is to f****** figure out what a cupboard is made of.”
“So if we want to build a revolution, we’re going to have to figure out how to do that, and there are people out there that have the answers that we can access.”
The Star also obtained some video recordings of the training, which show mostly mask-wearing DSA members scheming among themselves.
Listen to the audio clips, Part One and Part Two:
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Pete D’Abrosca is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter.
Background Photo “Tennessee Capitol” by Andre Porter (imagN Images). CC BY-SA 3.0.
Because somebody needs to present dissenting views from an otherwise one-sided right-wing bias that this news source gives. While I have you on the line, if we are really serious about fighting communism or fascism, then we need to root out the causes that enable communism to flourish: racial injustice; class injustice; mindless militarism disguised as patriotism; mindless phobia against gender minorities like trans, lesbians, gays, and bi’s. The only time that communism really had any strength at all in this country was during the early 1930’s at the height of the Great Depression during the waning months of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Administration. During this time, both Republicans and Democrats continued to ignore racism and economic injustice, thus opening the door for Communists to fill in the political vacuum or void. Only when Roosevelt instituted social justice programs like the New Deal did the Communists finally lose their luster in the U.S., never to recover it again until very recently.