"Where did that energy go?"
A great question posed by new contributor Asa Reyes
In today’s post: some notes on the council meeting coming up vis-a-vis the government’s ongoing retreat from all social obligations minus police and surveillance, some notes from my trip to the byzantine hall of mirrors that is the Massachusetts State House, a great guest piece from Asa Reyes on the need for better queer organizing in this city (which you can jump straight to via the standalone version in our “guest pieces” section), an excerpt of a recent piece of mine in “Welcome To Hell World” on new details released in the unfolding saga of Enrique Delgado Garcia’s brutal death, some notes of a miscellaneous variety.
Straight to business, folks. No horsing around—they could push the button any minute now, after all. Can’t have that happen with a newsletter on the vine. Can’t go out on a great gust of nuclear wind without asking you all for $5 one last time.
Stuff coming up:
The WRA has update on about the Denholm building at its Tuesday meeting. Could get a bit contentious. A recent Telegram article sets the stage for a showdown: “Delays over Denholm building razing, development frustrate City Hall.”
The members of the Worcester Redevelopment Authority are wondering the same thing, sharing their frustrations in recent meetings. The Menkiti Group, the would-be developer, has sought extensions for the project. The authority sees a wavering commitment amid the tweaking of plans. There was a recent proposal for the authority to cover the costs and carry out the building’s demolition.
Another meeting on the Vernon Street bridge redesign efforts on Thursday at the library, entitled “Sharing History, Changing the Future. 10 a.m. to noon in the Saxe Room. I heard a worrisome rumor from a source I trust that any federal money that was once attached to that project is long gone, making the whole thing a moot point. Hope that’s not true of course but I’m inclined, given who told me and the uhhhh state of things to believe it.
And of course the city council meeting Tuesday night.
The city council meeting on Tuesday has an impossibly stuffed agenda, ensuring several important things are short-shrifted in order to give equal weight and attention to dozens of unimportant things. Like this...
...which I’m sure he and others plan to spend their full 10 minutes talking about.
The resolution conveniently appears on the same agenda that the annual list of top earners also appears, a matter of actual importance. As is the case every single year, the top 100 earners are almost exclusively police officers. You’ll notice just by scanning the third column from the left that something is going on here.
Doubtful Bergman or Toomey or anyone besides Khrystian King will have anything to say at all about that, our little police city-state hiding in plain sight. Punishment bureaucracy standing next to the spigot, guzzling from the hose, with a gun pointed at the social safety net lying on the ground screaming out for water. Later in the agenda our new district 5 councilor Jose Rivera asks the manager, via an order, to lean on the SMOC homeless shelter to tidy up the premises. It’s the only order on the agenda that addresses homelessness in any way. The cuts to Community Health Link we reported on via the podcast earlier this week—55 positions!—were apparently not of much concern to councilors, convinced as they are homelessness is the result of “the towns” trucking in their unwanted for us to “deal with.”
Speaking of, here’s a clip from the public safety subcommittee meeting on Wednesday showing Kate Toomey callously dismiss the idea that the $1 million plus we spend on Shotspotter every year would be better spent on social workers. Then Police Chief Paul Saucier vaguely suggests plans for more surveillance expenditures, such as... drumroll please... automatic drone deployments for Shotspotter activations!
Toomey:
So, you know, some of the things that we’ve heard before, some of the arguments about, you know, well, we’d be spending money elsewhere on social workers and things like that, but I, for me, what you’ve said here, it sounds like this money well spent because we’re saving lives, we’re being visible in the community, and it’s actually, uh faster responses.
She asks “so what are we looking at?” a question that sounds meaningless but considerably better than what she meant, which was “ok Chief now do a commercial for it.” Saucier, a veteran of these faux inquiries, doesn’t miss a beat:
They actually have the technology now where when a shot spotter alert goes off, you can have a drone respond within 30 seconds to where that gun was fired. And that’s out there now. This is actually available.
Oh goodie I love it when there’s a drone overhead within 30 seconds doing automated surveillance of anything it can fit in its camera sending that information to any number of databases we’re not privy to—gotta protect that intellectual property!—after a famously accurate and also completely automated gunshot detection software dispatches it. It’ll probably be able to detect anyone carrying a blanket, and may even be able to yell at said person for existing where they happen to be at that moment.
In David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”—a good book for fans of moral clarity slicing through weaponized ambiguity like the knife on an episode of “Is It Cake?” when it’s in fact cake... you can borrow it from my personal library if you’d like— he writes of the “brutal withdrawal of the state from all social obligations (except surveillance and policing).”
In keeping with the theme, the city council will also consider two proposals from the city manager’s office to weaken the city’s climate resiliency.
In one report, he asks for a “pause” on what are colloquially known around City Hall as “stretch code,” a set of requirements for clean energy infrastructure in new construction.
Due to the recency of the Specialized Stretch Code in Massachusetts, it is difficult to draw definitive conclusions relative to the cost- benefit analysis between the Stretch Code and the Specialized Stretch Code because aggregate data are still limited. The best available information shows an average of 2- 4% additional upfront costs.
This whopping two to four percent increase is hitting the developers of “high rise apartment buildings” the hardest, per the report. A famously needy set, the developers of high rise apartment buildings. Some of them are paying up to $1 million to comply. Can you believe it? Of course, one such high rise is also paying $1.6 million to get out of building any affordable units (payment in lieu option of the inclusionary zoning ordinance). So maybe it’s not really all that burdensome for these hedge funds that build these things? “Available incentives to offset those costs are modest, and under threat,” Batista writes. Oh well in that case...
Here’s the stretch code report. I went spelunking for it on the city’s insane website so you don’t have to. It will pass with at least eight votes if they bother to vote on it.
In another report, he’ll ask the council to go along with his thinking that we shouldn’t allow people to have chickens, after some three (?) years of considering the idea, at the behest of a group of community members who doggedly organized to get it this far... making them say no out loud...
From the report:
While raising chickens has its benefits, from providing fresh eggs and fertilizer for gardens to acting as engaging pets, the commissioner found that unfortunately they are outweighed by the negative impacts.
For example: the majority of properties in the city do not have the necessary amount of space to follow best practices for healthy coop size; there are legitimate nuisance
concerns related to odor, waste, noise, pests and rodents; chickens carry communicable diseases that spread to humans; and it would be difficult to equitably enforce provisions for chicken keeping across the city.
Pests and rodents? In a city!?
That will also pass with at least eight votes if and when.
Oh and right at the end where it’s easy to miss: a $25 million loan order so we can satisfy the $35 million we owe Holden per court order in poop disposal fee recoupment.
Pretty grim! I will be doing something else while the council spends five hours working through this cruel document. Whatever it ends up being, it’ll be time better spent.
A Byzantine Hall Of Mirrors
Spent all of Wednesday in the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts State House, mostly mumbling to myself about how it was a byzantine hall of mirrors and as such a visual metaphor. But in between doing that I had a few great conversations with a few of our state delegates. I was one of about 15 or so local journalists doing so, under the direction and guidance of Free Press Action, a great group of media activists and watchdogs who’ve accomplished impressive things around the country. In particular, their “New Jersey Model,” a civic media consortium they got signed into law by the New Jersey State Legislature a few years ago. The consortium works sort of the way public broadcasting does. The state funds an umbrella organization of sorts which then disperses the money via direct grants to the grassroots local media organizations that need it.
We were there to “plant the seeds” for a similar piece of legislation we hope to have introduced and, insh’allah, passed, in the next year or two. Of all the loose talking points I came up with throughout the day, the one that seemed to resonate most widely went a little like this: With local journalism diminished to its current sorry state, the primary source of local news for most people has become whatever “townie facebook group” their community has—and they all have at least one—and those groups are breeding grounds for reactionary panic, bad information, inscrutable dramas over nothing, and tired culture war bullshit. A sort of fascist scobie, if you’ll allow an extended metaphor, fermenting at record speed as its microbes feed on the potent sociological mix found in these groups: incoherent politics of a few different strains, social relations developed in high school, and a polity not so large as to render users completely anonymous but not so small as to rule out complete strangers. It’s as if everyone in the same grocery store at a given time were encouraged to shout what they were thinking, scoring points for how amusing others find their rants or retorts. Crazy making. Real relationship destroying. A cancer on the civic life of a community.
I didn’t say all that out loud of course, but I could see every person’s face light up with the image of it as soon as I said “townie facebook group.” Everyone knew exactly what I meant by it.
It was bad enough when Facebook and Google figured out how to hoover up all but the table scraps of the digital advertising game (the figure hovers around 80 percent of all digital advertising revenue, by some measures), making the transition from print to digital sisyphean for local dailies—always and to this day the largest employers of local journalists—thus priming them for hostile takeover by vulture capital firms. But to then drop a bit of poison into every community’s well? Criminal! And in a way no one knows or particularly cares about, except for the people bound by the traditions of “objectivity” to never make the case out loud. So it goes!
Direct reader support has worked well for me so far, as I approach the six year anniversary of this newsletter (wild!). I’m pulling $50,000 a year, which is cause for insane gratitude and an accomplishment of course, but at the end of the day is just on the low end of a ‘decent’ salary for one employee. While I’d like to think I could eventually get into the “two salaries” range, the pace of growth keeps that ambition a long term one. That there aren’t many people who could “pull off” what I have does not bode well for the future. Something has to change, and that change won’t be found in the free market. To look at it on a long arc, the freer the market has gotten, the more effective it has become in dismantling the institution of journalism. If a democratic state hopes to survive it would do well to fund the institution that brought it to life.
How could we possibly still care about the dangers of state funded media when we’ve seen what the opposite does to it?
Anyway, please subscribe! Haha. I’ll keep this ship running as long as I can possibly manage. That’s a promise.
Up next is the best reason to do so I can think of. Here we have a well articulated community perspective and call to action hitting an audience it likely wouldn’t without this platform.
Worcester Queers Must Organize
By Asa Reyes
(Standalone version of this piece here)
“The people who are trying to do something for all of us and not men and women that belong to a white, middle-class, white club” — Sylvia Rivera
On Trans Day Of Visibility, the IOF, continuing its genocidal campaign, killed six more Palestinians in Gaza, including a father and son. It was March 31. The same night in so-called Worcester Massachusetts, a city which failed to pass even a symbolic ceasefire resolution in 2024, the City Council continued its facade of LGBT* allyship by highlighting the same white trans women already approved by the white club. One of whom held an event earlier in the year to end the “trans military ban” with Seth Moulton (just in time for the draft!). Moulton is a senatorial candidate who after Kamala lost her presidential bid made headlines blaming the loss on democrats’ support of trans people, not their support of the genocide.
“The queer liberation struggle cannot be disentangled from the anti-imperialist struggle. They are fundamentally connected.” — Sa’ed Atshan
Early last year the city blocked an investigation into transphobia in the administration, quietly shelved the DOJ report detailing racist brutality and rape in the WPD, and voted against a ceasefire resolution for Gaza. The Mayor does what he usually does in giving away keys to the city to chosen “leaders” of a group and hoping it all blows over. And since 2025 (and much, much longer), it has. He and the council got away with it because we are not organized. Taking a step back, many queer people are part of projects doing good work like WooFridges, Solidarity Outreach Survival, Food Not Bombs, LUCE and others. This shouldn’t change: trans and queerphobia can’t be eradicated until we first combat the hate against “addicts,” “prostitutes,” and “criminals.” As queer and trans people many of us are struggling with addiction, homelessness and doing sex work to survive. Many of us know in larger leftist organizations, trans people are an afterthought, especially trans people of color and transfeminine people. We are supporting other movements as we should, and leading ones we are also members of, but only we can lead our own liberation. We don’t need protection but the political and material capability to do so ourselves.
“’It’s not my pride, it’s their pride. It’s your pride, not mine. You haven’t given me mine yet.’ I have nothing to be proud of except that I’ve helped liberate gays around the world. I have so many children and I’m still sitting on the back of the bus, still struggling to get kids into proper housing, and to get them education, to get them off drugs” — Sylvia Rivera
Seemingly the only ones organized among us are careerists who are going for positions for themselves, more interested in their personal branding or consulting company than building that capability.
In September 2025 after the city fumbled in even its symbolic performance of allyship, including raising the wrong flag, the local Pride coalition chose to step away from the city’s usual flag raising ceremony. This followed the Juneteenth Festival Committee decision earlier in the year after the city previously took the flag down before the 19th. Instead of solidarity with other queer, trans and Black organizers among us, some of the same opportunists we see again and again became the LGBT symbol for the city administration. Holding a separate Pride flag raising with the same city council that refused accountability, refused to support police victims or take even a symbolic stand against the genocide. The same queer leader who ran for mayor in ‘23 by joining the centrist “white, middle-class, white club” establishment including the very councilor who was dehumanizing trans people last year (and surely before), requiring the investigation in the first place.
In early 2025 back to the calls for the investigation we saw more of this queer “leadership.” After a Vietnamese non binary councilor revealed they were called “it” by another councilor, not in the cool nonbinary way, the city scrambled to respond. Mayor Petty, doing the only thing he knows, gave a key to the city to the same white trans woman, again. She would then go on to make a public statement with her consultant company letterhead calling out the only local online queer exchange group for being “unwilling to allow different opinions” while queers organized around transphobic attacks. One wonders how these same queer “leaders” would have responded to Sylvia Rivera at Liberation Day 1973 where she fought for her right to speak against a heavily white, cis and upper class audience.
On the night of the vote the same white woman called in as the only trans person in opposition to the investigation and the sanctuary resolution, proclaiming Joe Petty as “one of the good ones”, someone who has always shown up for our community (for photo shoots sure). During this Joe Petty deadnamed and misgendered her in his thanks for her comment. After weeks of meetings packed with hundreds of queers, the city council led by Joe Petty fawned their support for the LGBT but refused the substantive investigation into their own behavior, opting instead to only pass the symbolic resolution.
Where did that energy go? There aren’t more organized queers to come out of it. After another electoral cycle of queer people and allies devoting their time to democrat campaigns we still got a more conservative council, and the same school committee. Campaign messaging sells the idea that if they just replace their opponent they can make things right. Too much focus is put on the player who said a slur, instead of the system that allows dehumanization across the board. Later on when the DOJ report broke detailing abuse and rape of sex workers from the WPD, where were the same queers? Black and brown trans people especially are pushed into sex work, yet this does not impact all queer people the same; solidarity with sex workers is not a priority in our movement. What’s more, some of our feminist movements harbor sex worker exclusionary sentiments, which inevitably harms trans and gender non conforming people as our movements are inextricably linked.
“I’ve been trying to get up here all day, for your gay brothers and your gay sisters in jail! They’re writing me every motherfuckin’ week and ask for your help, and you all don’t do a god damn thing for them.” — Sylvia Rivera
Backlash through co-optation to the countercultural Black, queer and feminist liberation movements became obvious in the 1980’s. By the 2000’s the non-profit industrial complex and its lawyers were able to frame marriage as the goal, instead of a target. Marriage became something queers aspired to, instead of seeing it as an avenue for colonial control. Institutional monogamy found another way to quell the threat we are to the capitalist patriarchy. Assimilation became the foundation of the LGBT rights movement.
“We can no longer let people like the Empire State Pride Agenda, the HRC in Washington, speak for us” — Sylvia Rivera
From our origins of Black drag kings and queens, Black transsexual sex workers throwing bricks at pigs, our movement has been co-opted. Identity politics, Rainbow Capitalism, Bioessentialism, Pinkwashing, white respectability and disposability politics, and the non profit industrial complex have disarmed us. Many even in close affinity still can’t deal with their own white supremacy and transmisogyny, Black and brown transsexual women are pushed out of the very movements we helped create.
These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”. —Porpentine, Hot Allostatic Load
The state of our movement is in shambles. Queers are wrapped up in non profits, candidates that don’t care about them, or organizations more interested in using us as political tools to win their campaigns or increase membership. “Protect the dolls” has become a catchy phrase for social media bios or t-shirts while queer, especially Black and brown, trans youth are still struggling with high rates of homelessness, addiction and HIV. With little options, many of us pushed into sex work to live. While HIV research is being cut, trans people are being forced to detransition in prison, trans women are being v-coded, trans people are being attacked in every state in the country, and in most countries across the world.
“The degree to which any movement is progressive or revolutionary is measured by its independence from the rulers of the society it seeks to change” — Leslie Feinberg
We don’t claim to have all the answers, but we know this isn’t working. Queers can not simply attend more city council meetings, vote more or get trans faces in high places. Queer people, especially trans people of color, need to organize together, look at and address our movement problems, and seriously work on developing a revolutionary strategy. “Just do something” has not been enough and won’t be. When our so-called leaders don’t depend on the strategy working, it doesn’t have to. If metrics for funding are the goal and not revolution, and our humanity is used for campaigning, we will always be struggling for basic rights through piecemeal reforms, and struggling to survive.
“You can’t build a revolution with no education” — Fred Hampton
The urgency put on us is what requires us to seriously reflect, study, and strategize. The situation is not too urgent to study, the situation is too urgent for us to continue wasting our time making the same mistakes that our movement has made over and over again. Mistakes that we can avoid if we learn from the revolutionaries before us. Studying past movements needs to be seen as a serious way to develop strategy and win, not a distraction or chore.
Without education, people will accept anything. Without education, what you’ll have is neo-colonialism instead of colonialism like you have now. Without education, people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, you know what I mean? You might get people caught up in an emotionalist movement, might get them because they’re poor and they want something and then if they’re not educated, they’ll want more and before you know it, they’ll be capitalists and we’ll have Negro imperialism. — Fred Hampton
If any of this speaks to you and you are interested in organizing for protection and power of queer people in Worcester, join us, a collection of angry queers that want to destroy the club, not join it.
To get involved, reach out us at WooTRAN@protonmail.com. Ally looking to support? Here’s two incarcerated trans women you can support now: https://catracha.noblogs.org/jaia-and-gia/
Asa Reyes is a Worcester based anti-zionist and transfeminist organizer, currently a hotline operator for LUCE, leading Zero Fare WRTA and organizing trans prisoner support. Last year managed multiple city council and school committee campaigns, and part of organizing the trans sanctuary city resolution. She is the founder of the transfeminist blog Catracha.
Pulled from a bad first draft of “Full Metal Jacket”
In case you missed it I had a piece run in Welcome To Hell World a few days ago about the Worcester Superior Court arraignments of state police officers charged in the brutal killing of Enrique Delgado Garcia.
The circumstances of Enrique Delgado Garcia’s death read as though they were ripped from a rough draft of Full Metal Jacket. I don’t mean to make a joke here. I’m more serious than I’ve been in some time. An idea Kubrick would have found too loud for his most on-the-nose polemic on American militarism is now, some 50 years later, a non-fiction story in American policing.
That story draft never makes the evening news. No one is reliably informing the American people that “we live under a regime many magnitudes more repressive than it was the last time it was seriously tested, some 80 years ago.” No one is reporting on how the cops’ union said out loud on Wednesday that they plan to use this story to pin the administration into submission. Did you catch it up there earlier? In that line I quoted about how “our association looks forward to the department issuing a public statement in support of these members”? It was as if to say you will be punished should you stand in the way of the escalation of our barbarism.
Read the rest over on Welcome To Hell World Dot Com.
My piece appeared in an edition alongside a great one from Nathan Munn, “There is no end of history: A myopic arrogance destined to age poorly.” Munn is a writer I became aware of and also came to admire from his earlier work in Hell World and the equally cool and related outlet Flaming Hydra.
Someone recently remarked that using generative AI is functionally similar to gambling: you spend a token, pull the lever, hope you get the desired result, then do it again. This sick process is a microexpression of the AI economy writ large. It’s also analogous to the American/Israeli non-strategic brutality in Iran and, at the highest level, represents the gaping void at the heart of our late-stage militarized gamified capitalist reality, where AI and war, enthusiastic oppression, out-of-control gambling, and the death of thinking all overlap and blur into a hellscape of pain and confusion. Observers have pointed out that there are so many ways for it all to go wrong that it eventually will have to go wrong.
Hell World consistently puts out some of the best writing on the internet, from a diverse and talented roster of writers I’m honored to be a part of. It’s been a must read of mine for years, if you can’t tell by the way I have and continue to rip it off. Definitely worth a subscribe and throwing Luke some money if you can!
Odds and ends
One more request for support before I go!
David Webb posted a video he acquired somehow of District 3 Councilor John Fresolo walking up to some people working on a car in their driveway and yelling at them for doing so. I watched about three seconds of it and said “no way jose” on allowing Fresolo any more of my mental energy. But still… Yikes. Not what the mayor likes to call “decorum.”
A funny thread on the Worcester subreddit that asks whether Pat’s Towing’s longstanding obvious scam is a scam or not. Jury’s out! Is Pats towing running scams in Worcester? : r/WorcesterMA
Re surveillance tech in the hands of municipal police officers: How exactly does remotely spying on kids practicing gymnastics make them safer? - YouTube
Incredible photo of our very own Shaun Connolly in the Boston Globe writeup of Matt Shearer’s Wilbur show. ‘A new frontier’: With his first live show, WBZ NewsRadio’s Matt Shearer brings viral TikToks to The Wilbur stage - The Boston Globe
RIP to Grace Carmark, a longtime housing advocate in Worcester who died recently. I didn’t know her but know a few very smart and effective housing advocates she had a hand in coaching. RIP.
Lastly, “who left their venison roast on a hiking trail?”
aaaaand the coolest live set I’ve ever seen?! Bet your ass I’m catching them in Boston in a few weeks. Coolest band in the game right now.