Laurel Ho, one of the most committed conservatives in Southern California, reposted this photo on Facebook today.
It brought back a lot of memories and invited some reflection.
Let's start with the photo itself.
This was taken in early 2018 at Tom and Cindy Greene's home in Culver City, CA.
Robert Herrerra of New York State is standing to the left of me, and Harim Uzziel Vargas, although everyone knew him by Uzziel, is on my other side.
In late 2017, Harim found out about Robert Herrera via social media, and they connected for a few days, then Robert started visiting Los Angeles and getting involved in Trump events.
The story with Harim is a lot longer. I first found him on Facebook in 2016, and I was really surprised to see a guy who was not just Hispanic, but Jewish, a cholo type, and he was a big Trump supporter!
Quite a combination, to put it mildly.
We friended each other on Facebook, although he would share with me later on that he saw the stuff I was doing with We the People Rising, fighting illegal immigration while protesting in city council meetings and other government board meetings throughout Southern California.
The first time we met in person was in late January 2017, when we counter-protested the Soros-funded protests at LAX, raising hell about President Trump's travel ban, in which Trump used the exact same countries that President Obama had targeted in his own travel ban.
We were surrounded, clearly outnumbered by the anti-Trump fanatics crowding the sidewalks and even the streets, all throughout LAX. We persevered, and then we held our own Trump rally at LAX airport the next year.
Harim and I, along with the many members of We the People Rising, started connecting and congregating around more Trump events. We spoke out at the LA County Board of Supervisors when they were taking aggressive steps to counter the first Trump administration's lawful efforts to curtail illegal immigration into our country. Our social media presence group, and lots of people reached out to us, wanting to get involved.
It was a great time, for sure!
More people started coalescing around us in Los Angeles County after our protest at LAX. There were lots of people that I connected with, including Harim's friends, as well as other contacts who were active in the Trump movement, going to the rallies and protests throughout the city of Los Angeles. Lots of Trump supporters gathered together on March 25, 2017, marching all the way to Trump's star near Hollywood and Vine in Hollywood.
But what happened to the movement? What happened to the whole LA County for Trump organization?
The first thing that comes to mind, at least for me, is that I started focusing on specific efforts, like shutting down SB 54, the sanctuary state law. The CA state legislature shoved that awful policy onto the state despite widespread outrage and opposition to the law.
The protests went from confronting bad city councils which were embracing policies to protect illegal aliens, to city councils that were taking a stand against illegal immigration and calling on the state or the federal government to do something about SB 54. Many of those protests started up in early 2018, and then the larger group of us started travelling all over Southern California, calling on city councils to register their opposition to the law or to ignore compliance with the law.
During this time, Robert and Harim started behaving badly.
In early 2018, Harim and I coordinated with other Trump supporters to set up a protest outside of US Senator Dianne Feinstein's office, so that we could pre-empt Islamic militant Linda Sarsour from taking up space in front of the office. We beat her to the location, and we force Sarsour and her hateful leftists to protest across the street. At that meeting, I remember talking with Harim about the growing anti-Semitism from some of the Trump "supporters" who were also going to our events. It was becoming a noticeable problem.
And one of the most notorious examples of this was Robert Herrera himself. He started bashing Jews and talking up all the hollow anti-Jewish talking points, claiming that "The Jews" control the media, academia, etc.
When I showed Harim all the stuff that he had been posting, and I then shared it with other members of our "LA County for Trump" coalition, we distanced ourselves from him, and he ended up disappearing for good.
Things fell apart with Harim when he started getting into arguments and fights with other Trump supporters in Southern California. He had quite a temper, and he also had a drinking problem. A number of times, he went on YouTube or Facebook Live and would have an alcohol-induced meltdown.
The last time we talked, or rather texted, to each other was in mid-2018. He was posting some negative comments on my Instagram account, saying that certain people were not part of "LA County for Trump." Another lady in our larger team commented: "Can we stop with all the drama?"
I texted Harim privately, and I told him to refrain from attacking fellow Trump supporters on my social media. He got really upset, telling me that he had always been there for me, and that I should stand by him when he has a problem with someone. That is a game I choose not to play. He didn't like that, so he cut me off.
He ended up cutting off a lot of people in the LA County for Trump movement.
From that point on, I was more focused on results, even if it meant getting different cities to take a stance against SB 54. I travelled to more cities throughout Southern California. I got really tired of the rallies and the protests just for the sake of sharing my views. I wanted to accomplish policy goals.
Also, during an eighth month period, from late November 2017 to 2018, I was travelling to other places. I went to North State (Siskiyou County) twice, and I went to Arizona twice in 2018. I was doing more stuff, but I also ran into another problem: money. I had left my marketing job in March 2017, and then I was working as an independent journalist and activist. People were donating money to pay for my trips and other Trump-related activities, and I also spent whatever money I saved.
Finally, I got hired by MassResistance to be a full-time activist director in July, 2018 and I have been doing that ever since. My new job had me focusing a lot more on organizing parents and other activists around the country to fight the LGBT agenda. I even started working with legislators in different states to pass pro-family legislation.
As you can imagine, I didn't have much time to do Trump-related stuff anymore. The last time I did any activism connected with We the People Rising was in May, 2019. By then, I felt that the repeated appearances at town halls and local government meetings had really run its course. Many of the activists I had been working with were not committed to growing the team or getting clear goals in place to accomplish, so I put aside all off the volumteer activism and focused on MassResistance.
So, for what it's worth, that's the story of what happened to LA County for Trump, certainly as far as I'm concerned.
