by Carter Moon, reposted from his Substack

This Monday, I was very proud to see the campaign launch ad for my friend Rev. Rae Huang go live. I wrote and produced this ad, but the real credit for how spectacular it is goes to my friends Strack Azar and Dylan McGale,who directed the Hell out of it, and to Sten Olson, a very gifted Director of Photography. Pretty much everyone donated their time and talents on this; most of our very modest budget went to equipment rentals and similar expenses. It was a labor of love and a mad dash to get it out in just over a month. When I pitched to Strack and Dylan that we should do this, I said we needed to show that LA could produce videos at an even higher level than Mamdani’s videos: This is LA, baby! We’re the home of moving pictures!

Let’s step back to two months ago when my neighbor Rae asked me to brunch. I knew she needed me to nudge her to run for mayor, and to be honest, I had a pit in my stomach. Rae and I have been building a coalition together here on the Westside and organizing together closely for the last couple of years. If anyone was going to convince her that now was the time to do this, it was probably going to be me. Our current mayor is so entrenched in the Democratic machine in California, and while she’s definitely had her share of scandals, she’s not Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo. It was going to be an enormous lift to make a campaign like this even begin to be taken seriously by anyone. I also knew if we did this it was going to upend my entire life.

But as we talked I realized that there was more of a shot here than it seemed. The left-progressive movement has been steadily building in LA since the 2020 election of urban planner and homelessness outreach advocate Nithya Raman. Since then, three more left-progressives endorsed by DSA have gotten onto the council; they now control four of the fifteen seats. Most exciting, to me, was the election of Kenneth Mejia, who openly ran on challenging the legitimacy of the egregious overspending by the LAPD at the expense of everything else in the city. Mejia won 240,374 votes, the most for any candidate in LA history. The takeover of the LA power structure by people who aren’t bought by lobbyists, cops, and real estate developers has been in motion for a long time. I knew if Rae were to run for mayor, she would be building off of a ton of incredible wins that have already happened.

The electorate has shifted dramatically to the left in LA overall since 2020—pundits who try to tell you otherwise are lying. Not only do grassroots progressives with ties to labor keep winning city council seats, but we’ve also seen people consistently vote to divert money away from our gang-infested sheriffs, to tax luxury real estate sales to support those experiencing homelessness and prevent evictions, and to pay more sales tax to help homeless people. Bernie Sanders substantially won LA county in the 2020 Democratic primary. Yes, there’s been some setbacks and defeats; the progressive District Attorney George Gascon who won in 2020 got his clock cleaned after one term by the reactionary Nathan Hochman, and in my own backyard the DSA-endorsed civil rights attorney Erin Darling got beaten by crypto-MAGA freak Traci Park. Even so, it’s pretty clear when you look at our local elections that people here aren’t afraid of democratic socialism and that they want their tax dollars to help the people who really need it. Somebody clearly needs to fill in this gap in city politics, to match the momentum that’s been building here for the last decade, and that person might as well be my nextdoor neighbor.

Even so, this campaign is a moon shot. Rae’s well known in housing justice circles, but completely unknown to regular Angelenos. She has never run for office before. She doesn’t have any kind of personal wealth to rely on while she campaigns. But the thing I’ve steadily realized as I’ve been part of helping Rae get this thing off the ground has been how remarkably wealthy she is in relationships. She’s a presbyterian pastor, but her ministry is based in fighting for dignified housing for the poor. She has a pastor’s ability to bring people together, to move people to action through a moral calling to justice. Even as an atheist, my heart is moved every time I hear her speak; she represents the best of what Christianity can be. In the past couple of months, I’ve been stunned how many people have been willing to put in hours and hours of unpaid work to make this campaign a reality, and it’s largely thanks to her deep connections to very capable community organizers. There are brilliant people all across this city working very hard to address the existential crises we’re facing, and they’re largely being ignored by the current mayor.

The thing that I think traditional machine politics can’t understand is that people actually want to participate in democracy. They want to feel like their ideas and energy are shaping a society that’s more egalitarian and fair. I think part of why Rae was motivated to run was simply because we can both tell there’s a desperate need for people to pour their energy into a campaign that makes them feel hope for the future. We are living in such an intense moment of isolation and despair. People have to have an outlet for their grief and their rage. Even if we crash and burn, this campaign will be a success if we organize people to learn how to flex their political action muscles and they become more deeply involved in the various social movements across this city. In just our first week of announcing that we’re launching this campaign, we’ve seen 200 people sign up to volunteer. I’m quickly getting acquainted with the exuberant and chaotic enthusiasm of zoomer activists, which has been incredibly refreshing. (You can sign up to join us here!)

Of course, this campaign wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for Zohran. His ability to steadfastly overcome every obstacle thrown at him and mobilize 100,000 volunteers demonstrates that people are ready for unapologetic social democratic politics based on universal public goods. As Naomi Klein said on the night of Zohran’s election: “This is replicable … His campaign wasn’t just anti-fascist, but the antithesis of fascism, in the sense that fascists want uniformity, conformity, and hierarchy. This is a love letter to the most unruly city in the world. It’s a celebration of linguistic, cultural, faith, racial diversity, generational diversity.” That is precisely the campaign we’re trying to build. We are trying to show that Zohran is not a unique, once-in-a-generation political talent (although in many ways he is), but rather a representation of the new type of politics that people are yearning to make real. The only antidote to fascism is expansive solidarity.

Let’s be real, we just saw Katie Wilson win in Seattle on a similar platform and messaging as Zohran. Brandon Johnson has had a fraught relationship with left activists in Chicago, but he is still a democratic socialist who came up through the teachers union to win office. This country has a long tradition of municipal socialism, as I’ve written about. I see what’s happening right now with the rediscovery of an American tradition that goes back decades. We can do this; it’s already been done.

I believe in the power of simply telling the truth and speaking the world you want into existence. I believe that naming this regime as fascist and ICE as the modern Gestapo matters. I believe we have a duty to keep reminding people that almost seven people a day continue to die on LA’s streets until that’s no longer true. We can assert that there are social housing alternatives to for-profit housing production until a majority of people demand that it becomes real. We can say that Angelenos deserve fast and free rapid transit and can build the coalition to make it so. The city we deserve is ours to build.

I helped Rae write her speech that she delivered in front of city hall to announce her campaign. This line sums up our thesis for this campaign perfectly: “The courage I see in everyday people is what gives me the courage to run. And so I stand before you today determined to reflect what I see in the working people of this city every single day.”