Grassroots Organizing & the “20% Solution” to Support it Can Save Our Future
Donald Trump clearly believes the 2026 mid-term election---like the 2024 Presidential---has already been bought for him by Elon Musk, Peter Theil and the “Epstein Class” billionaires.
Only one thing stands in their way---grassroots organizing and a “20% solution” to fund it.
Musk and his uber-rich evil-doers mean to drown the mid-terms in satanic cash. Musk has pledged $200,000,000. But with his $1,000,000,000,000, that’s probably a vast understatement.
Much of the Epstein Class may not like, admire or trust Donald Trump in any way. But he plugs them into the public trough. Their return on investment is gargantuan.
So the tech bros buy media by the billions. They raise the cost per minute of air time far beyond the reach of most progressive candidates, no matter how much grassroots cash they can scrape together
Musk’s DOGE attack on our financial, personal data, regulatory agencies and other core governmental assets buys his ilk immeasurable personal wealth. Musk’s Nazi salutes, master race psychosis and outright joy in chain-sawing millions of working families into poverty paint his innards with the forever poisons of modern American conservatism: cruelty and greed.
The Trump cult’s psychotic assault on everything sane and decent sends one message: the public may hate Trump and his billionaire elite. But those hideous monsters are damn sure they have enough power and money to seize our elections, now and forever.
Thus we brace for the Fukushima-scale tsunami of fascist cash, official violence and AI rigging to sink November’s vote count.
No US President has ever been more deeply hated than Donald Trump. No single American has ever unleashed a comparable wave of global contempt.
To this cash and vigilante blitzkrieg the Roberts Supreme Court has now added a lethal weapon of AI mass destruction.
With its 9/25/26 unsigned order, the Supremes have greenlighted Trump’s use of Social Security and other governmental data to manipulate the voter rolls. Musk’s DOGE has long since pilfered those files, giving MAGA the means to do untold AI damage to the already vulnerable voter rolls.
Alongside his huge cash media buys, and terror ICE/FBI/MAGA terror assault on polling stations, Trump can now use the regime’s Social Security and other electronic data to manipulate who gets the ballot.
Only one force can defeat all this: an overwhelming grassroots turnout, which can only be funded in defiance of both Trump and the mainstream corporate Democrats.
A key might be the “20%” solution.
Hundreds of millions in desperate grassroots dollars now flow into the campaigns of committed, trustworthy progressive candidates.
But they can only win by putting dedicated people on the ground in the public squares and neighborhoods where hyper-expensive media buys don’t really matter...but where $20/hour and some quick cash for public events can make all the difference.
The mainstream Democratic Party’s inability to beat Trump’s fascism lies in its failure to organize at the grassroots and speak to their issues.
The six-figure advisors who run the party machine too often feed off hyper-expensive media buys from which they reap Trump-style commissions.
There’s no such payback for grassroots campaigning, where the party elite fears the deepening rage of a hard-core working class progressive constituency.
The corporate Dems have also polluted their “brand” with insane , corrupt-support for nuclear power, the ultimate uninsured anti-democracy planet killer beloved by the billionaire class. Atomic reactors have utterly failed in the marketplace and as a viable reliable energy source. Meantime Trump means to kill the wind, solar and battery-driven Solartopian revolution that can define our democratic future with proven cheap, safe, clean power set to provide us all with millions of good jobs (www.solartopia.org).
Nobody in public life who supports nuke power can claim to be a true “progressive."
Organizing and winning with that Solartopian pitchfork army is way cheaper than consultant-driven media buys. We can’t begin to match Musk’s billions in media buys... which are also set to terrorize the polls and use AI to steal our data.
So our support for progressive candidates must therefore go directly to the good folks on the ground, to fund what Communities United’s Ray McClendon calls “relational organizing.”
What’s left of our country can only be saved with “credible messages from trusted messengers” working to protect the voter rolls, turnout the vote, neutralize the vigilantes, audit the vote count.
To fund all this means designating at least 20% of every dollar we send to progressive candidates for use in grassroots organizing.
We ask all candidates claiming to be pro-democracy to set aside at least $5 out of every $25 to fund the kind of organizing that will reach the electorate where they really live...to help guarantee they get and cast the ballots that are their right, to work with those who’ll actually count them, to protect the auditors who will certify the next Congress.
Above all we need to fund and protect the grassroots movement that can stand up to Trump if/when he declares martial law, as so much of the Epstein Class wants him to do.
There’s no guarantee the candidates we choose will follow the 20% mandate. But there are already functioning organizations we can directly support to support the grassroots uprising without which we lose our future. (www.usgrassroots.org)
The candidates we need already know that it’s essential to force the corporate Dems to ally with and fund the grassroots movement needed to defeat this Trump/Musk fascist putsch.
We also need candidates to take the “no concession” pledge, refusing to concede elections that are obviously stolen. That includes the sad retreats of Gore 2000, Kerry 2004, Clinton 2016, Harris 2024.
We all know the 2026 vote count will be rife with billionaire-funded corruption. We must have candidates willing to demand every vote be fairly cast and counted before they leave the battlefield.
Meantime, a fifth of every donation going straight to grassroots organizing may seem an arbitrary number, and far too small. But let’s start there....
So we’ll see you in the neighborhoods.... NOW!
Harvey Wasserman’s History of the US, introduced by Howard Zinn, & Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, arise most Mondays, 2-4pm PT (https://grassrootsep.org) at the GREEP zoom, which focuses on election and ecological protection. So does The Solartopia Show at the Pacifica Affiliate Network (www.pacificanetwork.org).