Reposted from Carter Moon. Subscribe to his Substack here!

Los Angeles was declared the most generous city by GoFundMe for this year. It’s a fairly grim honor; we’ve experienced horrific wildfire damage and brutal ICE raids, and there were entire weeks this year where it felt like every other post on Instagram was a GoFundMe link asking for support for a family that had just experienced unimaginable loss. The GoFundMe economy in general is such a reflection of our threadbare social safety net for times of crisis. Many of the families who lost their homes in the fires had recently had their home insurance cancelled, leaving them with no path to rebuilding. The LA Tenants Union has been leading a fight to pass an eviction moratorium for immigrants impacted by the ICE raids, but so far the county has only offered a $30 million fund for landlords to apply for on behalf of their tenants who’ve been impacted. And so the GoFundMes keep whizzing by, day after day, as families still struggle to make ends meet.

I want to zoom out to a national scale, where it does feel like things are going to get substantially worse next year. I don’t do this to be a doomer, but just to spell out how much destruction has been wrought in 12 months, because I don’t think we can start to dig ourselves out of this hole until we confront the entirety of what we’re up against.

RFK Jr. is going to get thousands of people, a majority of them children, killed by his vaccine conspiracy bullshit. This is almost nothing compared to Elon’s gutting of the government earlier this year, which is going to make everything more dysfunctional; he’s already responsible for the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. The gutting of the government and the overall fucked economy Trump has created has forced 300,000 Black women out of the workforce. The immigration raids already resulted in 30 deaths in ICE detention this year, the highest in 20 years, with many more dying outside the US when people were deported to other countries. The economy is essentially tech monopolists passing billions in AI “investment” back and forth to create the illusion of growth while Americans are completely drowning to keep up with basic expenses every day. We have gone ass-backwards on any moderate progress in reducing carbon emissions. It’s increasingly obvious that elites in both political parties thought they were never going to get caught being pedophile best friends with Epstein. The genocide in Gaza promises to most likely only get worse, “ceasefire” be damned. And we’re going to war with Venezuela, pretty transparently for oil and conquest of the Americas.

I’ll stop there. I spell all this out just to say that if you feel reality coming apart at the seams every day, you’re correct to! The rapid ascension of fascism does indeed mean an acceleration of death-making politics in a way that is physically sickening to witness day by day. This is fucking hard. The Rolling Stone article that Asawin Suebsaeng wrote on the day of Trump’s inauguration remains incredibly on point a year later: “Everyone Who Was Supposed To Protect You From This Failed Miserably.”

But I want to emphasize again that you can see examples of how much people all agree this is fucked up and not okay. Rapid response groups have trained thousands of people to track and confront ICE agents across the LA region. It’s not just LA that mobilized against ICE, it’s been in any American city they showed up in. The raids are insanely unpopular with a broad swath of the public. Juries keep refusing to convict people who confront immigration agents. We have heroes like Memo Torres from L.A. Taco doing brave, yeoman work of documenting ICE raids day by day, not only making sure communities are kept informed in the here and now, but also creating an essential historical record of what’s been done. Even as our legal system, our media institutions, and universities have largely twisted themselves into knots to bend the knee to Trump, every day people have seen through the bullshit and rejected masked, kitted-out thugs patrolling their streets.

As much as I initially viewed the No Kings marches and Fight Oligarchy rallies with skepticism, I do ultimately think they demonstrate a window of opportunity. If you believe in any kind of mass politics for revolutionary change, you can’t dismiss seven million people getting in the streets in one day. I don’t think Sanders or AOC are the magic bullet that will solve this crisis, but I do think the language of oligarchy and the articulation of a politics that encourages solidarity with the mass of working people against the elites that are ruining life for all of us is a step in the right direction. This fascinating conversation with a broad spectrum of left-liberals on the podcast the Dig was super clarifying to me, and it gave me a lot of hope. Approval ratings for the Democrats are at historic lows, which might sound depressing given how evil the Republicans are, but I see it as an enormous opportunity to transform the average liberal voter and push them significantly to the left.

Let’s be real, there’s a lot of signs that Trump’s legitimacy is collapsing. Even Fox News had to publish a poll showing Trump disastrously underwater with Republicans. The party broke from him in congress pretty dramatically to release the Epstein files, which seems to be the issue that could finally be the thing ol’ Donny Trump can’t wriggle out of. Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene are jumping ship, probably to try to reformulate an even more overtly fascist vanguard, but it still shows dramatic weakness in the MAGA coalition. All of their influencers are locked in nasty knife fights with each other. Our crises will not be resolved just by getting the dang Cheeto out of the White House, but it’s important to take heart that these assholes are already losing their legitimacy after just a year.

And I’d be remiss not to mention just how much Zohran’s win has also signaled a better path forward. He won by mobilizing 100,000 volunteers to knock one million doors. As someone who’s done a good amount of door-knocking campaigns over the years, these numbers are astronomical. To be able to achieve any of his ambitious goals, he’s going to have to keep his base relentlessly mobilized, but that appears to be their plan. I also think there’s going to have to be tons of ambitious organizing that’s completely independent of the mayor, like we’re seeing with the Pinnacle Tenants Union, which is organizing 40 buildings of rent-stabilized tenants against their shared mega-landlord. Maybe equally importantly, Zohran showed the world that it’s possible to win by talking to regular people about the pain they’re experiencing and reflecting the world they want back to them. That doesn’t have to apply solely to electoral campaigns, it’s a lesson to take for any kind of organizing.

Ultimately, all I can wrap my head around is what’s happening in LA. There are a lot of crises looming for this city that I think are going to get more dire next year. The city is in a severe budget deficit; Mayor Bass submitted a budget that would have cut thousands of city jobs, only saved by some truly heroic budget-balancing by the city council. However, that budget is going to continually be constrained, and austerity measures are going to squeeze people in really bad ways. A huge part of this budgetary crisis lies in the fact that LAPD has cost the city $400 million in liability payouts since 2019, a huge portion of that money coming from civil rights violations and payouts for murdering innocent people. Considering how brutally they treated protesters and journalists this summer, firing 2,000 rounds of ammunition in a single day at one point, we should expect at least another $100 million in settlements from their reckless, violent response. The city is also currently reforming its charter for the first time in 30 years; our corruption has gotten so bad, so endemic, and so embarrassing that we have to re-write our city constitution if we ever want to have something resembling a representative city democracy again.

All this is why I’ve devoted so much energy to LA politics, particularly my friend Rev. Rae’s campaign for mayor. I believe our crises are solvable if we build the political and social will to solve them. If we can show the country that what Mamdani did wasn’t a fluke but genuinely the future of politics, it will be worth all the headaches and struggles we’re up against for the next year. We have no other choice than to transform society for ourselves; the stakes are too high not to.

We’re either going to look back at 2025 as the tipping point where people dug deep and forced a political revolution to take place in this country, or we’ll look back at it as the point where we tipped into the fascist void for good. I hope I’ve laid out the case that there’s a lot of evidence that we might turn things around, but it’s going to take everyone giving it their all. We can’t afford to let off the gas; all of us have to find a steadfast willpower that’s never been activated in our lifetimes. Roll up your sleeves, talk to your neighbors: We have a world to win next year.