Release Date: March 17, 2026

Hello Comrades,

Welcome to the brand new, very exciting relaunch of the Sonoran socialist. We have a beautiful new masthead you see at the top of the page (thank you to our new comms coordinator Noah J for drawing it!) and a more collaborative setup that will allow us to increase the variety of information we share with you.

This week, we have the first instalment of our new Features section from our Features Editor Benjamin M: A how-to-manual on finding impactful details in data dumps, like the massive trove of Epstein Files on the DOJ website. We are trying to make the newsletter more collaborative, allowing the voices and views of all our members to have a place to be heard by everyone in the chapter. We’re also moving to publishing Mondays.

What’s Next After RTA Next?

Last week, RTA Next (Propositions 418 and 419), the county’s plan for transportation spending over the next decade, passed with over 60% of Pima County voters.

Tucson DSA joined a coalition of local organizations in opposing the propositions. The RTA Next plan fails to focus on the priorities that matter most for Tucsonans, spending money to widen roads instead of investing in safety improvements, mass transit, and a more pedestrian-friendly city. We agree with Council Member Miranda Schubert that it takes money away from Tucson taxpayers to spend on our regional neighbors who should be paying for their own improvements.

While the overall county vote went against us, our campaign helped engage Tucsonans in wider discussions about our city’s transportation future. Right now, RTA Next is only a plan. In the years to come, there will be opportunities for those of us who care about our city to stay involved by monitoring progress, demanding transparency and accountability on projects, and showing up to public forums and other opportunities for input. Let’s get to work.

1. Join us at our Community Meeting before No Kings at Reid Park on March 28

We are proud to join the coalition of activists in Tucson and throughout the country that will be coming out on March 28 for the latest No Kings Protests, held next Saturday in Reid Park at 11 a.m. This is an opportunity to unite a popular front, continue to show the country and world that Americans are unhappy, and stand side-by-side with other activist allies.

Instead of our usual general meeting this month, we will be hosting a community meeting before the protest, 10 a.m., at the Bandshell at Reid Park. While our general meetings include votes on chapter business, this will mostly be a chance to gather in solidarity before joining the rest of our allies in the wider protest.

The U.S. regime continues to ruthlessly oppress immigrant communities, start new illegal wars in Venezuela and Iran, and wreck Americans’ ability to afford basic necessities like gas and healthcare. Then, there’s the mounting evidence that the president is involved in an international pedophilia ring.

2. Read Marx in March!

For this month’s book club, we’ll be reading selections from Karl Marx. We’ll reading four short essays: Wage Labour and Capital (1847), Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1848), Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and Conspectus of Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy (1874).

Whether you’ve never read a word of Marx, or if you’ve written an entire dissertation on his work, we’d love for you to join us at our book club meeting on Sunday, March 29 at 5 p.m. (location TBD). As usual, we’ll use the readings as jumping off points for a deeper discussion and fun hangout (with snacks!), so it’s okay if you don’t finish everything.

To solidify our Marx for March tradition, the book club has also discussed the possibility of setting up a year-long assignment to read Book I of Marx’s Das Kapital and discussing it by next March. Many people (including me) are intimidated by the length and difficulty of Marx’s most famous work, so having a whole year to read the first part should hopefully make it doable for newbies.

In addition, the time has come to pick a book for April. We have four books suggested from various members, and a poll coming up on Discord this week to choose, so check the #book-club channel on the Discord for more updates!

3. Take over the Pima County Democratic Party

Look, none of us like the Democratic Party. We know how much it consistently fails to meet the moment, reaching towards the right at every step in a way that undermines its ability to support or receive support from the American working class. I’m sure that antipathy towards the party that supposedly represents the left wing of politics in this country is part of why you’re interested in DSA.

That being said, we now have a good opportunity to influence the Democratic Party here in Pima County and in Arizona with minimal effort. With party primaries coming up, the state Democratic Party has literally thousands of open spots for precinct committeepeople, including hundreds of them in Tucson. These are small positions, with little official responsibility besides voting on intra-party decisions and leadership. But that’s what makes them a great opportunity.

The vast majority of precinct captain positions are currently empty. In Pima County alone, only 608 Democratic PC seats are currently held out of 2181 total seats. That means that 1573 PC seats are currently vacant.

Filling over a handful of them means that we can influence the Arizona Democratic Party on issues we care about, like how presidential primaries work in the state (a great way to prepare for 2028), party fundraising, and internal party leadership here in Pima County. Hopefully, with a little bit of participation, we can make the Arizona Democratic Party less frustrating, and open it up to more candidates we support in the future.

The process of standing for election for one of these entry-level positions is easy, especially since you will almost definitely be running unopposed. You need to secure ten signatures in your precinct, and fill out some paperwork. I myself am planning to do this so I can vote on Pima County Dems decisions.

The deadline for filing is coming up a week from now, on March 23. If people are interested afterwards, it shouldn’t be too hard to get you appointed (again, most of these spots are wide open) anyway, but it’s easier to get a handful of us in office through the normal process.

If you are interested, say so on the #electoral-socialists-in-office channel, respond to this email, or email Alex Kack, Pima County Dems Director (and “green shirt guy” from the classic viral clip), who has expressed support for more socialists taking over these positions and can help you through the process.

4. Join the Electoral and Socialists in Office Committee in person on March 21

If you’re interested in any sort of electoral work, including the above opportunity to take over the Dems or developing DSA strategy for upcoming elections, come to our second in-person meeting of Tucson DSA Electoral and Socialists in Office Committee. We will meet on Saturday, March 21st at 3pm at the Global Justice Center.

The invited speakers are Alexandra Wright and Ethan Rigel. Both are campaign managers who have previously worked for DSA-endorsed candidates. They’ll help us understand what it takes to run a socialist for local office. The agenda includes report backs from our working groups, a discussion of the RTA Next vote results, and setting our committee’s electoral goals for the coming years.

5. Come to our social on Thursday

In addition to all the other stuff going on, we have a good old-fashioned get together on Thursday at 6 p.m. at Slow Body. Come hang out!

Features

As mentioned above, we are trying out a brand-new section of the newsletter to include something different from the usual news of the week. We want to hear from you, and other people within the chapter, about what you are interested in, so we can get more opinions, more viewpoints, and more vital information to our readers. If you are interested in contributing something, contact our brand new features editor Benjamin M on Discord @DesertFox.

This week, for our first ever Sonoran Socialist feature, Benjamin himself is here to provide a detailed how-to guide on how to actually find important information in the messy and inscrutable Epstein files library on the Justice Department's website. Benjamin did so himself to expose details about a top academic paleontologist who had been friends with Jeffrey Epstein and involved in his misdeeds.

"Diving into the Tranches: A Guide to Sorting Dirty Laundry Using Your Computer" | Benjamin M

Congratulations on your decision to become an antifascist researcher! You might have arrived at this point because you stumbled across a white supremacist account on the internet; maybe some sort of putrid groyper posting on your university Facebook page or community subreddit. Also possible: a neo-Nazi group has just been the target of a data leak and ties to your city have been revealed. It could be that such a group is planning a march or rally near you and your gut instinct is that your neighbors need to know who is coming and what they stand for. Maybe, just maybe, a prominent member (or members) of your professional community have appeared in the latest batch of the Epstein files. (In addition to his abhorrent crimes, Epstein turns out to have also been hugely influential in global far-right politics in the last decade of his life.)

The core of antifascism is community defense. Many forms of information-gathering actions that aim to characterize far-right danger to a community (be it past, present, or potential) can be included under the broad umbrella of ‘antifascist research’. If undertaking this kind of labor appeals to you, or if you have otherwise found yourself in a position compelled to take action, I would like to share some wisdom on how to make your efforts successful.

I give you: the A. N. T. I. F. A. method.

1. Archive.

As soon as you realize that you have important information on your hands, it’s time to start saving offline copies. In many lines of work, archiving is the final step, but for this type of research it is absolutely critical to do it first. The old adage that “once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever” isn’t strictly true; yes, copies of an embarrassing photo may unwillingly resurface in random places on the web for years, but original posts don’t always last and are quite prone to disappearing. Don’t exit your tab without taking a screenshot, copying the link, and/or starting a download. At this stage, you’re going to want to pick where your data backup will live. Many people will opt for something like Google docs for free storage and easy collaboration. If you do so, make sure to make regular offline backups of your Docs file. In my professional work, I need to be able to text search thousands of PDFs at once and very meticulously cite my curated documents. Therefore, I make use of a citation manager, in my case a paid version of a program called Zotero.

2. Notetake.

Now that you’re browsing your documents and saving copies, you will naturally be making note of what you see. Before you go too deep, it’s time to start actually writing down these notes. Digital is best, because notes that are typed up can be read and searched by third parties far more easily than handwritten notes. However, if you are old school and prefer jotting down on physical notecards and tacking them to your conspiracy board, I would suggest complementing that with voice dictating your notes into a digital format of some kind. That way, you at least have the benefit of text search when your notes start to really balloon.

3. Timeline.

By this stage, your notes are piling up. You may be feeling in over your head now. Where do you even begin making sense of all this information? The easiest thing to do, and the natural place to start, is to arrange your documents and notes in chronological order. If you are building a profile of actions or establishing a pattern of behavior, you need to know the order that these events took place. This can help you better discern cause and effect, as well as characterize the direction these developments are taking.

4. Index.

Chances are, you’ve learned more than a handful of names and noted some important events or locations. Parallel to your timeline, you will need to keep a running list of narrative-critical names, events, and other relevant information (like a glossary of defined terms if there is niche vocabulary at play) so that these details are not lost at a later date when they are not fresh in your mind.

5. Fellowship.

If you’ve made it this far, it’s clear that there is significance to the data you’ve assembled, and chances are you can look ahead and see how much more work is yet to come. Your eyes are probably getting sore, too, and the toll on your mental health is piling up. Yours is not a light task, and sometimes you may choose to share the burden by inviting others to aid you. An absolutely critical skill that any researcher needs is knowing how to pace yourself, and knowing when it’s time to collaborate so that the burden can be shared. While you are not sharing your findings publicly at this stage, this is also where you need to make a final decision on anonymity. It is not always safe to be caught undertaking this type of work; it can put a target on your back. Be intentional about whether anyone knows that you are behind your dossier, even your close friends, because you should assume that if even one person knows your identity is tied to it, you have to prepare for the (even slim) chance that you are doxxed to the opposition.

6. Apprise.

I’ll fess up to cracking open a thesaurus for this one. To apprise is to report one’s findings; to inform. If you’ve gone through all this effort, chances are good you didn’t do it for fun. You want to warn someone of danger, or to pass along documented and delineated evidence of harm or potential harm. How you choose to go about this is strongly informed by your fellowship. Can someone pick up the torch from you and make it more complete? Has your project reached maturity, or is an IRL event fast approaching? Whatever the case, the final step of this method is to package your notes and data archive into a format that can be shared with others. I also suggest writing a short-form summary to get the most important parts across.

Revolutionary Quote of the Week

“If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

- Marjane Satrapi, French-Iranian Cartoonist, Author of Persepolis

I have a vivid memory of a certain headline from America’s favorite satirical news source, The Onion: “Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran’” from March of 2005. It’s not that this is the funniest headline the Onion ever wrote (that laurel goes to “Top Theoretical Physicists, R&B Singers Meet To Debate Meaning Of Forever”), but, as a 13-year-old, I recall it being one of the first times I’d seen someone make fun of the obvious and nonsensical bloodlust for Iran that pervades American politics.

Politicians have been talking about the urgent need to "bomb Iran" for over 40 years, whether it be through giving weapons to Saddam Hussein to fight the country in the Iran-Iraq War of the early 1980s, or Bibi Netanyahu’s 30-year warning that Iran could have a nuclear bomb any minute now, or the anger among the US foreign policy establishment towards Obama’s attempts at a detente. We all like to imagine that we are immune to propaganda, but it’s impossible to hear decades of warmongering from US politics and media, demanding we attack this country on the other side of the world, without some of it seeping through. We see it in the frustrating lack-of-response from Democrats in Congress, putting out statements that can only criticize the president’s lawless and violent actions after long-winded denunciations of Iran and a wish that they’d had a chance to vote in favor of it.

So this week, let us remember that, without having to love Iran’s theocratic government or its treatment of the Iranian people, we do not have to hate the Iranians. Iran is a country of over 90 million people, and most of those people, as world-celebrated Iranian expat Marjane Satrapi says, are more different from their awful government than they are from me or you.

As a writer who left the country in the years following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Satrapi’s 2003 graphic novel Persepolis has often been the entry-point for many westerners’ (including my) understanding of the Iranian revolution and the changes that the country underwent during and after the overthrow of the Shah. She is no friend of the Ayatollah or the Islamic Republic’s theocratic government, but she reminds us, as American and Israeli bombs fall on Iran’s population centers, that we should not be enemies. The Iranian people deserve better, and we deserve better than being expected to cheer as our country murders them.

Of all the many crimes of the US empire, one that often frustrates me most is that our country both kills innocent people all over the world and then it has the audacity to demand I support that killing. War implicates all of us, insisting that those who stand on humanitarian grounds in favor of peace are traitors. War tells us that we should hate the people who we kill. I refuse to do that. We are all together as part of the human species, and our government’s ill-advised misadventures that lead to death and the mangling of the global economies should not convince us that we do not love our Iranian comrades, because we do.

Or, as actor Javier Bardem so eloquently put it at the Oscars Sunday evening: “No to war. And free Palestine.”

Don’t let them convince you to hate,

The Sonoran Socialist