Daniel Sullivan's Crashout Letter

Problems in the District #

1. The general members program #

When Alpharius was no longer involved on campus, and Rick became the chair of the labor unit, Alpharius, who is the second most senior cadre in the district, was somewhat at loose ends. There had been talk at the national level of doing more with general members, so at my suggestion, we put Alpharius in charge of general members. It went badly from the start.

The first thing is that Tom asked him to reach out to the general members people in Chicago and see how they ran their program, since Tom felt that was a good one. Alpharius flatly refused to do that. He had heard the Chicago GM program wasn’t good at all. He said he was going to reach out to Minneapolis, instead, since he thought their program was better.Alpharius did in fact speak to the DO from Chicago. The DO from Chicago viewed GM as a program to engage people in FRSO’s periphery, and potentially recruitm GMs as cadre. The DO from Chicago admitted their GM program is not very developed and encouraged Alpharius to speak to Minneapolis, who had a much more developed GM program. I don’t know whether he ever reached out to either of them. If he did, he didn’t report that. In any case, it’s pretty clear that the GM program he runs, which consists of period virtual studies of History of the CPSU (B), is not how general members programs are run anywhere else in the country, and for good reason.The people who were showing up to GM events wanted to study the History of the CPSU(B). Tom Burke and Dan told Dallas to stop the theory studies, and the GMs stopped showing up.

Several of us also struggled with Alpharius in a district meeting over his ideas of who was and wasn’t a general member. At this time, he was not willing to admit people to his general member program until they had completed a study of the program with Rick. And he wanted participation requirements for them. I remember at this time Alpharius saying during a meeting something to the effect of, “But aren’t I supposed to be in charge of general members?” This showed an extremely weak understanding of democratic centralism, particularly in the second most senior cadre in the district.

I think during most of the time that Alpharius has had GMs, there has been about one person who showed up to his meetings, and if that person came to anything other than the meetings, it was because other people either invited the person in the GM chat or directly prodded Alpharius to do so.

The trouble was that we really had no one else to put on GMs for a long time. The students were off in Arlington. The antiwar unit was running actions at a frantic rate, and had mostly very new cadre. And the police crimes and immigration units were really quite weak. Dan recognizes the pracitical limitations in developing the GM program, but by some sorcery fails to recognize he, as the DO, is responsible for these problems, and instead tries to blame Alpharius.

Eventually, and after some hurdles, we assigned Wizard to back Alpharius up with general members. The two of them brought a proposal to our conference. The proposal was on the whole extremely positive, reflecting a level of energy we had not seen for the program before, some real creativity, and some good ideas. However, it also contained, once again, a requirement that GMs participate in at least two meetings a month, in frank defiance of our national rules for general members./There are no national rules for general members./ Furthermore, and even worse, in the course of discussion at the conference, Alpharius made it clear that he did not want ttoo many GMs recruited as cadre because it would weaken the GM program.No. Alpharius was arguing that Dan has a mindset of recruiting anyone who is a warm body, and that we should allow the general members program to exist without viewing every person who fills out a sign up sheet as a prospective cadre.

Now, we organized the extremely successful action in Denton. People loved it. Jo took point and MCed, and a number of people reached out to Jo to thank them for organizing the action. Jo is an open FRSO member, and the event was a wonderful boost for our organization.

This puts me in mind of 2020, and the picture of Jennifer hanging in the NAARTPR office. That was taken at a rally in early June. We held the rally at Civic Garden Park, though I think it was still called Belo Garden back then. I remember the police were calling on the radio as the thousands assembled at the park. They stopped at 5,000, but whether that was all the people or whether they just stopped counting, I don’t know.

I had a clipboard, and I went through the crowd, signing people up for NAARPR. I was the only one doing that, and I had trouble convincing people that I was part of the group staging the event, because I was white, and everybody up on the hill was either black or brown.

Those people were never called and never invited to a NAARPR meeting because for months NAARPR would not hold meetings.

This is one of the reasons that in spite of the incredible work we did in 2020, NAARPR recruited no cadre and actually only one, single NAARPR member. Think about that. Compare that to the UTA encampment or the Dallas City Hall campaign, and the results we got from those. And while those were two great campaigns that I’m proud to have helped with, they were nowhere near the scale of the central role we played in 2020 in the George Floyd Uprising.

You can hold all the amazing events you want, but if you don’t do the basic work of organizing – tabling, calling people, holding meetings – you will get nothing out of that.

So, someone needs to be in charge of that, and able to make decisions about calling people, holding meetings, etc., etc., without having to wait on a DC meeting. And that someone has to be enthusiastic about recruiting specifically cadre. Or we will lose out.

2. People on the District Committee who frankly don’t belong there #

1. Alpharius

He has run the GM program, in the way described above. He became the subject of some jokes about how rare it was for him to come to district meetings or the NAARPR office in general. But that’s not all.

Late last year, Rick complained to me about Alpharius’s level of participation in the unit and the mass group as well. He said he was getting ready to make a “formal criticism” and asked me to talk to Alpharius. I did talk to Alpharius, and he told me straight up that there was nothing more he could really do, because of his work situation. I don’t moralize about that, of course; he has to eat. But he was doing an inadequate job of running the GM program and an inadequate job as a unit member.Again Dan paradoxically recognizes the practical obstacles and then limits his diagnosis to individual failings.

And then, in addition to that, there is the problem of money.

In talking to our new treasurer, I found out that Alpharius hasn’t paid dues in over a year. This was even more extraordinary to me for a couple of reasons. One is that when Glen joined, Rick initially set his dues at $5 until they could figure out what the real number should be – probably about $20 – and Alpharius complained to a series of people about that. He called Kai at 3 am. He called Tom. And he apparently also called Tequila Sunset. He never raised the issue with either me or the district committee. But this level of consternation was purportedly due to the undercollection of dues from Glen, in the amount of $15 a month for a month or two, although Alpharius himself hadn’t paid a penny in more than a year.

When we began to roll out unit financial secretaries, I talked to Rick about Alpharius. There was an issue last year that was briefly mentioned in one of the chats but basically passed over: Alpharius had set up the Go Fund Me for the district trip to the DNC. I paid out of pocket for almost every expense we incurred, which came to something like $1,500. And so, eventually, the Go Fund Me, which was not nearly that much, was supposed to be handed over to me to partly repay those costs. When I reached out to Alpharius about that, his response was that he could get me the money next Friday, because that was his pay day. I don’t like to make a big issue about money, and he did pay it back, but pretty clearly he had spent some of the organization’s money on his personal expenses and then had to repay it. So, I said to Rick that I thought, considering that, he wasn’t a good choice for financial secretary.

Eventually, Rick made him financial secretary anyway, because Alpharius wanted the position, and as Rick explained it to me, as some sort of peace making between the two of them.

There are many positive things to say about Alpharius. I have considered him a friend for a long time, and his mother is certainly also a friend. If we are talking about who is a mass organizer, at one time, at least, Alpharius was certainly a mass organizer. He led a number of really great campaigns at UTA, building up PSU, and recruiting a few cadre, in spite of a lot of challenged that people today might not be that familiar with. He was also part of the struggle in 2020, and I remember very distinctly him yelling RUN and pointing back behind city hall when the first “poom poom” sounded and I didn’t yet realize what that was.

But: Alpharius over the last year has hardly come to district meetings. He has played no real role in the Palestine movement, nor in any Nat Lib campaign.Why would he? He is a labor organizer. Not to say the movements are not connected, but as a member of the labor unit, his domain is labor. His role in his own unit has been inadequate. He has not paid dues. His running of the GM program has not been useful. And worst of all, he is actively interfering with the project of recruiting cadre in Denton.???

He has been open about the fact that the recent burst of energy from him is in an effort to cling on to his position on the DC. That is not the reason we want for him to be active. We want him to be active because he is committed to building our organization and liberating the working class and oppresed nations.

There is no reason for him to be on the DC.

1. Kyra

Kyra is never hear. She attended less than half the district meetings in 2024, and we never knew whether to expect her for a unit meeting either. Despite her lack of involvement in the district, she remains a key leader of it.

3. Rick’s Temper, Fragility, Ego, Grandiosity, and Manipulation #

Rick is a key leader in our district and has made a huge contribution to building it up to what it is today. He’s one of three cadre who have a large influence on the work outside of their own unit, the other two being myself and Jo. His role has been tremendously positive.

But there are also some big issues.

He has played a central role in recruitment. Sometimes, that hasn’t been the best thing. Although he complained a lot last year about being overstretched, any time there was the slightest delay in scheduling a study, he would jump in and take on the study. This slowed the process of the units taking over the study process, which ultimately is what needs to happen. Our organization is fundamentally based on units, and recruitment needs to be a collective process, not depending on one cadre. Though some people rate his running of studies very positively, others, including Kyra, have said that at times people are passed through studies who clearly don’t actually understand the material that has just been discussed.

But however that is, it has contributed to a big ego. At the national emergency conference, he told the entire room he had “personally recruited” 30 people. This list would necessarily be everyone he did studies with. Of course, he knows that recruiting people is not merely doing studies, and that studies are the end of the process and not the beginning. He must also surely know that often the most difficult part of the recruitment process is winning someone over to the idea of becoming a cadre, such that they would be willing to take on studies in the first place. Studies may take two months or a few months. Recruitment can take a lot longer than that.Rick never implied that his going through the recruitment studies with people encompassed the totality of recruitment.

When Rick says he “personally recruited” William, Elle, Wizard, and Justin (he/him), or any of the students who have been recruited, he ignores the work the unit did in winning these people over to the party. Recruitment is essentially a collective process, and there can be hardly anyone he recruited for whom others didn’t also play a big role. But in saying he “personally recruited” them, he centers himself and downplays the role of his comrades.

If this was all, it wouldn’t be much to worry about, but of course it’s part of a bigger pattern. For example, a couple of weeks ago, he announced that he should be in charge of all red events because he was the most punctual person on the DC.Rick did not do this. This is Dan’s interperation of Rick criticizing Dan for his lack of punctuality. Even if that were true, it wouldn’t be a workable basis for organizing, since eventually there would be more work than any cadre, even he, could do. And so, like in the case of units being slower than he wanted to begin studies, the key remains to move other people forward, and not to play at being a supercadre.

This ego and grandiosity was also on display in connection with our conference. The conference idea originated as a forum for us to discuss Trump’s second term and our response to it. We added some useful things to it, such as discussions about our sex assault policy and the campaign method. But he was also part of trying to turn it into some sort of analog to FRSO national congresses, which was grandiose and unnecessary. He also not only took over drafting the agenda, but didn’t even give anyone else edit access to the agenda, and of course insisted on running much of the agenda himself. Rick took the initiative to draft the agenda, and presented it to the District Committee several times for review and amendment. He volunteered to run the agenda an no one objected. Also, in the resolutions section, we ultimately considered four resolutions. Three were Rick’s resolutions, none of which actually firmly decided anything. It would have been better for him to let other people talk.

Most seriously, during the conference, when I read from the district report that we were moving recruitment back to being the responsibility of units, he contradicted me and said that there is now a recruitment commission. Neither the district nor the district committee has agreed on the formation of a recruitment commission. Creating a commission without the decision of either of those bodies is a serious violation of democratic centralism. Stocking it with whomever he pleases, without any broader process either in the district or the district committee, verges on factionalism.Rick made a group chat of people who were interested in conducting the recruitment process with prospective cadre, not a “commission.” But according to Dan, group chats are “factionalism” and a “serious violation of democratic centralism.”

On the whole, he has definitely taken on the idea that recruitment is now and permanently something he needs to have a strong degree of control over. This causes him to push more DC involvement in recruitment than is necessary, and adds a bureaucratic layer to the process.

As for his temper and fragility, we have all experienced that. An example is when he reported in the DC chat that a certain cadre was having family issues, and said that he thought the DC needed to pay more attention to people’s family issues and the like. Kyra responded that she thought we needed to respect people’s privacy. He blew up, posted something to the effect that people needed to understand what a big deal the DC was and was going to become as the group grew, and then declared that he didn’t want to talk about it any further. This isn’t unusual behavior from him. It’s hard to see how we can function as a committee if one person blows up on being contradicted, even mildly, and the declares the topic off limits.This part has kernels of truth, though exaggerated. It was a faux pas that several members of the DC called out. Rick didn’t “blow up,” but he did get defensive, shut down, and refuse to discuss further. He later admitted he was wrong, but the reflexive shutting down of criticism is a common pattern with Rick.

As for his manipulation: I remember the time he told me, with tears in his eyes, how his wife had left him because she found out he was texting other women. A week or two ago, he raged at me in a meeting, explaining how his wife had left him because Sydney and I had given him too much work. In both cases, these emotions gave every sign of being genuine. In fact, his wife left him because he cheated, and she was willing to take him back, but he declined because he wanted to consider his other options. Does it matter that he cheated? I don’t think so. But it matters that he lied and manipulated his comrades, including telling a false story about it, with a full show of appropriate emotion, in a political meeting.We won’t get into the details of Rick’s personal relationships, but while it may be a stretch to say his wife left him because he was given too much work, it is true that Rick was chronically overworked in FRSO. This is, again, a consequence of disorganization.

4. The DC’s unwillingness to collectively solve real problems #

A simple example of this is Xavi’s criticism of me last meeting. I had shown Xavi messages from Wizard saying that he was frustrated with Alpharius and having trouble getting Alpharius to respond. Xavi told me at the time that he was hearing the opposite from Alpharius. And then he criticized me in the meeting for even telling him about the messages.

Problems in our work are not simply interpersonal problems. When people can hash them out directly with one another, that’s great. But when there is a persistent problem, it needs to be resolved collectively. Obviously there’s no way to resolve a problem collectively unless the collective knows what is going on with the problem.

Another really stunning example is when I said what criticized Tequila Sunset in the DC meeting, including saying that Sydney had lost confidence in him as a unit chair, and Alpharius’s response was that that sounded like something I needed to talk to Tequila Sunset about.

This is liberalism, and so long as the DC insists on practicing it, the DC can’t solve its problems.Projection.

5. The Greater Kangaroo problem #

The phrase greater kangaroo is something that Rick put on the conference agenda as the people who would greet the district. It’s taken from the silly name of our chat, of course. It would be a mistake to think of this as a chance phrase, for the reasons I set out above about ego and grandiosity.

But the problem is larger than that. In general, people on the DC tend to view themselves as expert organizers, precisely because they are ON the DC, like a lawyer who gets elected judge, puts on a robe, and suddenly thinks he’s a legal scholar.

People have gotten on the DC a lot of ways, and not always because of some great success as organizers. In particular, people who have had most of their organization history in the Police Crimes unit may have not learned very good lessons. This is an issue because of course half the district committee is in the police crimes unit.

6. The sick unit #

The PC unit has existed since 2018, so for about 6 1/2 years. Technically, during that time, it has recruited three cadre. But even that number is deceptive. One of those cadre was someone who joined our group off the internet, ready to go, and we assigned that person to PC. Another was a person whom we knew through student work, but recruited and put into PC work instead. In those 6 1/2 years, PC has recruited as far as I know only one cadre from the work: Kawana.

It has had strong opportunities, and once even led a huge struggle. But it hasn’t recruited.

Early in 2024, it fumbled in a huge way. When Tamera and others in the Palestine movement were talking about organizing against Stop Cop City, some cadre in the Palestine movement pointed them toward NAARPR. Tamera and William actually attended a NAARPR meeting and asked NAARPR to take on SCC as a campaign. NAARPR told them no. Sydney Loving who is on the SC specifically told them no.

I only found this out a couple of months ago. Somehow or other, in spite of everything that had gone on with SCC since, this information had not been shared with the wider district.

In the early days of SCC, before Tamera’s opportunist turn, there would be twenty people out canvassing against Prop F. All of that could have been NAARPR led and NAARPR run. Could it have? NAARPR Dallas was practically two people.

Lenin once said, “When fate casts you a dagger, grasp it by the handle.” In this case, it was not fate but anti-war comrades that cast a dagger to the PC unit. And the PC unit took a look at the dagger, saw it was a little sharp – not sharp like the George Floyd Rebellion, but a little sharp – and declared it too dangerous to touch.

When we debriefed this in the unit towards the end of the year, there were a couple of points raised about this. One was that the unit was very small and weak. I countered that the unit was weak in 2020 as well.The unit’s weakness in 2020 was counterbalanced by all the other units in the district dropping their work to support the police crimes unit. Tequila Sunset’s response was to suggest we were wrong to lead the struggles in 2020 that we did.Tequila Sunset never said this. Kyra brought up that we had a political fight within SCC, but that if we had done all that through NAARPR, the fight would have been in NAARPR itself. However, we of course won that fight, even when it was in Tamera’s house, and it’s hard to believe it would have been very tough in our own house. The unit did not reach out to the rest of the district for advice or for help, which would certainly have been forthcoming.Tequila Sunset, in fact, had proposed regular meetings to coordinate the cadre across units in FRSO Dallas who were involved in SCC. Dan felt that wouldn’t be a good use of time.

We lost an opportunity offered to us on a silver platter to lead an important struggle which a dozen or more good activists wanted to be involved in. Instead, we continued a little bit with the Dynell Lane campaign, which never got any mass traction – for whatever reason – and then jumped over into SCC anyway.

This fumble was however part of a larger pattern of timidity. For example, Tequila Sunset began the summation of immigration work by saying, “It was a mistake to try to do immigration work.“We started an immigration unit at a point when the police crimes unit was already weak. The error was that we were spreading manpower that was already stretched even thinner. Further, of the three cadre who were co-opted to the immigration unit, the only spanish speaker was Dan, a white man. Furthermore, during the struggle within SCC, several cadre, including Tequila Sunset and Kyra both, were largely unwilling to confront Tamera, even as she pushed Justin out of the facilitation committee.There was a fundamental disagreement in the unit of how we would relate to the coalition. The unit had repeatedly agreed that we would not be confrontational in the coalition. Dan was confrontational and complained we weren’t backing him up, after we had decided already we were not going to. He was extremely invested in ensuring the coalition didn’t just have FRSO participation, but that it must be /led by FRSO./

Until 2024, the unit had also basically never done outreach.There was no one to do outreach. This was a point of huge frustration for several people, including Rick, over the course of years. In 2024, we started to do outreach, but that still depended very heavily on two cadre, Jose and myself. Mainly we tabled at Pan African’s Ubuntu Markets. Early this year, I pushed to table at an Ubuntu Market, and the only person who said he could make it was Xavi. Xavi got there ahead of me, and when I got there I was like, “Oh, there’s no market today, I guess.” Xavi hadn’t realized because he’d never been to an Ubuntu Market.

There are other problems in the unit which might be on their way to being fixed. For example, we decided in the DC that NAARPR would change its campaign from Dynell Lane to SCC. This decision was apparently never even communicated to mass members, which caused problems when I unwittingly talked about changing the main campaign FROM SCC, assuming mass members had been told about the change in the beginning.

Maybe that would work better today, though, frankly, it has been a big struggle to get Tequila Sunset to include “campaign” as a category in mass meetings.

7. NAARPR finances #

I have to say, first of all, how great it is to have the NAARPR office. And it turns out that NAARPR still has a lot of money in its bank account or bank accounts, so that we can continue to have the office for a while yet. As I understand it, NAARPR’s bank account stands at about $35,000. This was a source of real stress for me and for a lot of other people because we had an idea the lease was coming up at some point, but didn’t know when and had no idea about renewing it or anything else.

Until this year, literally the only person who knew how much NAARPR had in the bank at any point was Kyra.Kyra was the treasurer. The only other active NAARPR Dallas member was Tequila Sunset, who was the chair, and intentionally delegated finances to Kyra.

And at some point, the amounts must have been very large. NAARPR paid up front for a year lease at something like $1,000 a month, so that’s $12,000. Then there have been lights, some plane flights, and other expenses. And then we paid out at least $20,000 from our protest defense fund – I don’t know the exact amount.

That looks like about $70,000, but possibly more, that has gone through the NAARPR bank account. Most of that money was apparently raised in 2020, but some came from a grant. Kyra had to right a report on the grant recently and submit the report. No one in the group except Kyra has seen that report, and no one knew ie was being prepared. Kyra was apparently really stressed about it, but didn’t reach out to anyone for help.

NAARPR also has some number of continuing donors. I don’t know how many, who they are, or how much they give each month.

At the moment, only Kyra has access to the money, but she is planning to transfer access to someone else, I think Tequila Sunset and Jose. Whether that has been definitely decided, and if so by whom, I don’t honestly know.

The office is great. Maybe it was the best possible choice of office. Maybe it wasn’t. There are obviously defects to it, and a larger office would be better. Whether there was a realistic alternative, I think only Kyra knows. I certainly wasn’t consulted, and I’m not sure anyone else was either. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the lease, and I don’t know the name of the landlord. I’m not sure if maybe Tequila Sunset does or not.The office was discussed thoroughly by the members of the unit, who essentially constituted the entire membership of NAARPR Dallas at the time.

The least that can be said about this is that this is an absolute refusal by Kyra to work collectively, or to make organizational resources available to the organization.NAARPR Dallas’ organizational resources were indeed made available to NAARPR Dallas. Dan is complaining that the independent financial resources of a mass organization are not being suboordinated to FRSO - specifically, to him as DO.

But at this point, an audit of NAARPR is very obviously necessary.