The San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club, a local Democratic club of some 50 members, announced on Wednesday that it was withdrawing from the San Francisco Democratic Party, claiming that the local party failed to support the Latinx community.
The group is the second club in San Francisco to depart from the party organ, which is made up of elected members and governs a network of dozens of Democratic clubs. The Rose Pak Asian American Club dropped out on Jan. 22, citing distrust among monolingual Chinese seniors towards Democrat-endorsed candidates during the 2024 election cycle.
“The San Francisco Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to prioritize or even acknowledge critical issues facing Latinos,” read a statement put out by the Latinx Democratic Club on Wednesday.
Specifically, the group claimed that the local Democratic Party “refused to author or support resolutions condemning recent national attacks on birthright citizenship and constitutional rights” for Latinx and immigrant communities.
It is unclear what the group is referring to. In February, the party passed a resolution “opposing Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda for San Francisco” and naming the “immigrant community.”
“I wish them well,” San Francisco Democratic Party chair Nancy Tung wrote simply.
The Latinx Club has recently faced scandal. The club’s president Kevin Ortiz took a leave of absence last July days after a San Francisco Chronicle story detailed allegations of sexual misconduct back in 2021; no charges were filed against Ortiz, who maintained his innocence.
The club’s co-president at the time, Deldelp Medina, resigned a day after the Chronicle’s coverage. The club announced Ortiz’s return on Jan. 6, saying an internal investigation did not support the allegations against him.
Back in 2022, nine of 11 members of the club’s board resigned, referencing a “pattern of abusive behavior” from Ortiz. The Latinx Club, in response, denied the allegations and said “these attacks only harm the Latino community.”
The group, in its letter leaving the local Democratic Party, also criticized the fact that only one Latino, John Avalos, currently serves on the Democratic County Central Committee, even though 16 percent of San Francisco’s population is Latinx. Those positions are elected in a citywide vote, however, not appointed by any official.
The group also condemned the fact that Tung appointed Eric Kingsbury, instead of a person of color, to fill in the seat left behind by former District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who was elected to the State Assembly. Stefani is also white.
“She did not make the decision with equity in mind,” said Michael Rouppet, the club’s co-vice president of political affairs, of Kingsbury’s appointment.
Rouppet said two other local Democratic clubs had reached out to talk about leaving the local Democratic Party, too.
“The membership feels strongly about this, and voted nearly unanimously to step away from the San Francisco Democratic Party,” Rouppet said.
“We are reclaiming our space outside a local party that has failed us, and will charter under separate Democratic party entities,” the club wrote in their announcement.
I would expect a club run by a predator to be more at home in the GOP, honestly.
Serious historical q: how did S.F. end up with these clubs that (as far as I know) other large blue cities don’t have, or at least don’t care to report on in their dailies? Did the other cities have and then lose them? Have they always been a unique S.F. thing? …?
Identity politics “trumps” class politics, in the sense that symbolic concessions to ascriptive identity obfuscate and occlude the eternal, omnipresent, unilateral, top-down class war that must never be acknowledged.
In step with the liberal abandonmnet of the working classes over the forty-five or so years, the ruling class that owns virtually all mass media and their endowments funding think tanks, foundations, and higher education have swapped in race, sex, etc, as the basis of political identity, and banished class affiliation from political considerations. QUI BONO?
As the great thinker Adolph Reed, Jr, observed, liberals are perfectly comfortable with extreme economic inequality as long as the demographic compostion of class moves towards the approximate demographic composition of ascriptive identity (race, sex, etc). So, for example, extreme poverty among blacks is not a real problem as long as you have an occasional Obama or Oprah.
Economic measures that help the poor and check the power and wealth of the ruling class are off the table. Democrats are always “fighting for” you, but rarely actually doing anything to help the lower economic classes. Bill Clinton, et al, kicked the working classes to the curb. and Trump scooped them up. From near-total control of the three branches of govt to feckless irrelevance within several generations. The Democrat’s abandonment of lower economic classes is the biggest own goal in political history. QUI BONO?
The rebuttable presumption is that if you’re running an ethnicity grift, that you’re probably using it to cover for crimes while devaluing the currency for authentic campaigns against systemic oppression moving forward and not bothering to deliver to those that the grift purports to benefit now.
I think the “democrats abandoned the working class” is a nice FOX news sound bite…yelled at 120 decibels 24/7 but it is not exactly correct.
In both tax policy and health care policy, democrats have done a lot to push back on republican policies that hurt the working class.
Would it have been better to go further? Yes. But the votes were not there. Democrats have gotten zero republican votes on anything consequential since 1994. What could the democrats have done they did not do.
And while I am apoplectic about biden’s incompetence that cost us 2024 (opening the border, Afghanistan withdraw, under supporting the Ukrainians, not openly going after some of the far left crazy shit) what he did economically (supporting re-industrialization in the us and a transition to clean energy) was all good. It was designed expressly to help working class voters.
Unfortunately, it had too many “buy American” requirements to have an immediate impact, and once again the environmental rules slowed down getting shovels in the ground (same issue with the high speed rail in CA – biggest mistake was not saying anyone who lost a CEQA suit against it would get the death penalty).
But the biggest fault was that Joe was just gone. He did not sales job, because he was so decrepit and aged he was incapable of a sales job.
When the president spends 4 years hiding from the press and public, not countering the attacks, what FOX was selling became gospel.
I’d really appreciate some additional reporting on the San Francisco Democratic Party and its affiliated clubs. I’ve been reading about these organizations in Mission Local since I moved here in 2021, but I continue to be confused by how opaque local politics are in SF. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that any registered Democrat who resides in SF is part of the “San Francisco Democratic Party”, but perhaps I’m mistaken? I also assumed that the affiliated clubs were fairly representative of various interest groups within the city, but the Latinx Club has 50 members? If that’s correct and not a typo (not throwing shade, just seems like a small number), then exactly why is this news, since this club only represents the interests of 50 people?
Because they engage with other clubs, organize community programming, and do Get Out The Vote efforts to boost participation in our elections. I am part of the Eastern Neighborhoods Democratic Club and while we are larger than the SFLDC, we do similar programming that brings in thousands of people who are not members to get informed about local politics and (hopefully) vote.
It sounds like they are mad because the DNC wasn’t racist enough. They seem to hate white people with a passion. Very sad that they are so race-obsessed; its not good for anyone.
Paco, almost by definition, any “club” that purports to represent and promote a single race is engaged in trying to secure a relative advantage for that race over other races for no reason other than the historical and biological accident of ethnicity.
Racially oriented clubs are a manifestation of division rather than diversity, and of exclusion rather than inclusion.
Counterpoint: Most of these clubs are there to reduce the discrimination against their members by the dominant culture.
Local, no doubt they will clam that. But identity politics is also about classifying according to stereotypes rather than treating people as individuals, and that isn’t always helpful.
The use of Latinx in the name of this silly group reveals its far left toxic agenda. They’re notorious for hate mongering against Biden and Kamala because they won’t defund the police or Israel
Any day that a group of people who call themselves LatinX leave the Democratic Party is a good day.
It is a deeply pin-headed term invented by crazy radical academics that is deeply unpopular…
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/latinx-awareness-has-doubled-among-u-s-hispanics-since-2019-but-only-4-percent-use-it/
75% of Hispanics hate it. It suggests the same things as putting your pronouns into every conversation, doing land acknowledgments, or interjecting systemic racism into everything.
It yells “we are for they/them, not for you”
And oh, the casual argument that a brown person must replace a brown person…
That kind of tokenism worked really well for us in 2024.
Nothing says “tone-deaf cultural imperialist hypocrite” and “trump-enabling tool” more than Anglophones imposing their linguistic gender issues on a Latin language 🤣
Nobody is “imposing” anything. But people are entitled to use the term of their choice for a given ethnicity. And to prefer to not co-mingle the concepts of gender and race. And not to get caught up with linguistic distortions like “latina” or “latinx”.
So for me the simple term “Hispanic” is appropriate and gender-neutral.
Amateur mafioso wannabe Ortiz is in no place to be commenting on other people or groups actions. Wild they’re keeping this serial harasser around.
When a club experiences a scandal like the allegations of sexual assault leveled at their leader Kevin Ortiz, it’s almost impossible to recover from that. The damage is internal, with leadership and members unsure how to proceed, but it’s also external, as allied clubs are hesitant to continue working with the club in question. I would not be surprised if the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club disappears altogether. It’s sad that they burn the bridges as they leave. Ortiz must really feel the pressure.
“The Latinx Club has recently faced scandal.” 50 members? it is not a big deal here in SF. But why others are staying in the party is puzzling: they are cowering, staying quiet, are responsible for this mess after their election debacle, their Palestinians issues, etc, staying quiet except when it is easy like today, having a field day with the latest blunders of the Daltons brothers who now control this country.
As we learned from the ousting of Max Carter-Oberstone from the Police Commission, the only people that the governing elites allow anywhere near close to participating politically are those who they control by city funding or who who have political aspirations that force them to play ball. Independent citizens are marginalized.
These clubs are most often stepping stones to political advancement. Many of the luminaries in the LDC have had aspirations, like Ortiz and Jacobo, and a previous Planning Commissioner, appointed supervisor Christina Olague was also in the LDC leadership.
These clubs are so insular and small that they thrive by imposing exclusion criteria on regular San Franciscans and are rewarded for “keeping a lid on things” with access and the occasional sinecure
The general approach is if you disagree with or criticize one of these clubs, then you are painted as hating the demographic that the club claims to represent.
It is that kind of tactical devaluation of the currency of “identity politics” that the Democrat Party is abandoning. The break we see here is that cheap individual centered identity politics remains the bread and butter of the clubs, an approach which has had no perceptible impact on improving the lot of said demographic.
Socialists and Communists are finally leaving the Democratic Party!
How are the Democrats ever going to win the White House without the votes from the 7 people who use the word “Latinx?”
What if JD Vance wins the next election by 6 votes? Who’ll be sorry then? The Latinxes?
Better to focus on the Latinos who are increasingly large in number and big fans of Trump, as it turns out. For every Latinx there are a hundred thousand Latinos and they’re conservative Catholics who listen to Spanish talk radio far more right wing than anything the Republicans could dream up.
I’m a proud Latina. I can’t get with that LatinX Crap!! Another label from the white man. What the hell is LatinX? Really. How does it identify Mexican’s, Guatemalans etc. we’re Hispanic, Latino whatever, but this Latin X. NO. Some college kids make this up or what? I hated that word when it came out and I still do. What’s the X for??! Latinos have enough problems without classifying us as X. I’m very opposed to this “X”born and raised in San Francisco’s mission district never heard of no LatinX crap growing up take that shove it up the white man’s ass! Very disappointed that we have allowed ourselves to be labeled that way. Get rid of that “X”!!!
At this point, the S.F. Democratic Party leadership controlled by a bunch of yimby’s and oligarchs.
A huge amount of non subsidized driven by the market housing yimbism would be a really good thing for lower earning workers (avoiding the ter working class because it is too loaded). Bring it on.
Trickle-down housing policies don’t work. All you get are $3 million condos.
Better that than PSL morons and trust funders.