Home of the AC GOP HQ

(Copy of Google Maps location)

On MacArthur Boulevard you'll find a row of quaint storefronts. Coffee shops, burger joints, martial arts studios, and insurance agencies. Elbowing in the middle, at # 1039, is the headquarters of the Alameda County Republican Party.

How did this happen? In the belly of the East Bay, where liberal and progressive politics dominate, how did the GOP set up shop to sell American fascism? Well, let's find out.

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The exact founding date for the Alameda County Republican Central Committee isn't public. Filings show that it was registered with the FEC on July 26, 2004. The location on 1039 MacArthur Boulevard has been its mailing address every year since. Given San Leandro's history as a redlining sundown town surrounded by a suburban wall of White Supremacy, patrolled by racist police, with cross-burnings still going on as recently as 1989, the choice starts to make sense.

The current chair of the organization is Jeanne Solnordal, who owns a property management company in the Oakland-Piedmont area. She's never held elected office, but she's sure lost a few times trying, from Piedmont City Council to State Assembly and State Senate. The rest of their board and membership is hidden. But based on their financial statements, they take a lot of money from special interests in the real estate industry, law enforcement, as well as the state and national GOP organizations.

The Alameda County Republican Party's "guiding principles" are allegedly: individual liberty, individual prosperity, and individual security. They don't seem to care much about community or solidarity, let alone justice. It's also unclear how they square those principles with the Trump regime's efforts to criminalize free speech, attack transgender people, destroy the economy with illegal tarrifs, and kidnap our immigrant neighbors.

The group meets monthly in private. They work closely with Republican groups seeded throughout the East Bay, including the East Bay Republican Club, the Tri-Valley Republicans, and the Alameda Conservative Republican Patriots. What little information they do publicize seems to show mostly White crowds dining on dry Cobb salad and listening to presentations from astroturf organizations like the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. (The rest of their social media is filled with laughter at immigrants attacked by ICE, praise for bigots like Charlie Kirk, and other Republican red meat.)

On their website, they say, "Powered by People Like You." And right below are two rows of blank photo boxes. The irony is so loud, it's screaming.

(Section of AC GOP website)

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You might ask, so what? Who cares? Isn't this just your opinion? What harm can they do? And it's a free country, right? If it bothers you so much, why don't you just ignore it? Those are all reasonable arguments.

Well, if I might break Godwin's Law a little bit here: imagine you're sitting at a table with 9 people and suddenly someone with a swastika joins you. Nobody says anything. Nobody does anything. Everyone continues on with their business. At that point, you don't have a table with 9 people and 1 Nazi, you have a table of 10 Nazis.

Put it another way, if a Nazi bar opened up in town, how would you feel about that? What if nobody tried to get rid of the Nazi bar? What if people acted like the Nazi bar was just a normal part of neighborhood, even if they never went there?

I'm not saying the Republican party are a bunch of Nazis... Yet. But they're trying very hard to become them.

Meanwhile, San Leandro actually did have a Nazi bar - back when The Manor was a local base for the Ku Klux Klan. And nobody did anything about it back then either.

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There are many reasonable arguments to tolerate terrible people. We live in a society, after all. But you cannot tolerate intolerance. You cannot have a truce with people whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the very society that allows for peaceful, mutual coexistence in the first place. No matter how reasonable or respectable they pretend to be. Democracy is a frog swimming in a river and fascism is a scorpion riding on its back, stinging even as everyone drowns. They'll always and inevitably seek conflict and cruelty to secure their own power and control over others.

There can be no peace with fascists. And the Republican party are, without a doubt, fascists.

(AC GOP Public Group Photo)

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I don't know whether San Leandro is ready to kick out the Republican party peddling fascism in our community. I don't know whether a coordinated campaign to drive them out would even be successful.

There was an historic red-shift across the country in the 2024 election, including here. More people than ever before voted for a candidate who we know raped children. More people than ever before voted for a candidate who advocated destroying our democracy and our wrecking our economy. (Even accurately reporting what the Republican party is now doing will get you accused of "Trump Derangement Syndrome." A perjorative designed to silence criticism of the regime and pathologize democratic resistance.)

Unfortunately, there's never been any documented attempt to protest the Alameda County Republican Party here before, and San Leandro itself has never chosen to fight back until very recently. 

Eventually we'll have to make a choice though. Which side are we going to be on? Fascism or democracy? The people or the plutocrats? Liberty or oppression? Justice or injustice? These aren't abstract ideas. They're why millions of people are now starving. They're why so many children aren't receiving an education. They're why tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs. They're why the gap between the rich and rest of us has become a chasm, with millions struggling to survive.

They're why we need to build a better San Leandro for everyone.

Take note and take care.

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CASL, AEJIS.