Slog AM: Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson Not Buying Starbucks Coffee, We Really Don’t Need the Release of the Epstein Files, Trump Plans a ‘US Economy Is Just Too Great’ Tour

Let’s get this straight. Seattle’s next mayor, Katie Wilson, is not a socialist, as a number of headlines claim. She is a democratic socialist. The difference between the two political programs is easy to explain. The goal of democratic socialism is to construct institutions and policies that counter the failures of capitalism: billionaires, the destruction of the environment, poverty, low wages, and so on. The goal of socialism is to abolish the capitalist class altogether.

To Go a Little Deeper: Marxism, another term you’ll hear thrown around about our progressive leaders, is not socialism because it’s descriptive. A Marxist only says what capitalism is, how it works, how it reproduces, and why it divides its form of society into classes. Now, Keynesianism (named after the celebrated Depression-era British economist John Maynard Keynes) is prescriptive. It provides solutions to market failures, which were painfully evident in the 1930s.  Combine Keynesianism with Marxism, and you get social democracy. Combine Marxism with socialism and you are on the way to communism. But the world has yet to produce a communist society. What has appeared instead are forms of capitalism. The Soviet Union, for example, never abolished the class structure (called by Marx “the relations of production”) generated by market forces (“the means of production”). It simply replaced the capitalist with either experts (engineers, managers, and so on) or a party. I hope that clears this up.

One more thing. The Stranger‘s former news editor, Josh Feit, put it this way on Facebook: “For those calling Katie Wilson a socialist, please note that in 2019, your bogeyman Kshama Sawant derided Wilson as the leader of Seattle’s liberal faction. In her inimitable 1930s lingo, Sawant called the Wilsonites: ‘the Katie Wilson-dominated liberal activist layer.'”

Yesterday, mayor-elect Katie Wilson wasted no time joining a protest organized by Starbucks union members. It happened outside of the closed Starbucks Reserve Roastery on the corner of Minor Street and Pike Street. Wilson also told the union members, who are demanding a fair contract from the Seattle-based corporation, that she’s “not buying Starbucks.” New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani also wasted no time “urging people not to patronize the iconic coffee chain while baristas remain on strike.” This, of course, is something Bruce Harrell or Andrew Cuomo would have ever done. Standing with workers. It’s just not their cup of tea. It’s also why they lost.

My forever lovely Kate Bush (one of the queens of the 80s), do your hear that? It’s the real rain. It fell all night. It’s falling this morning, which is universally grey. And what happens “every time it rains” just like this? Kate Bush: “You’re just in reach, when you and sleep escape me.” Today will be wet. Tomorrow, not so wet.   

Look, we no longer need the Epstein Files. Let the Department of Justice keep them. Why? Because we already know the man sitting in the White House was in deep with the creep. The emails released by both parties this week, the photos that are all over the web, the birthday card—what more do you want? It’s all there. If the press had pictures and videos of Obama partying with the pimp (Jeffrey Epstein was not a “financier”), that would have been enough to destroy his career and initiate an official investigation. But with Donald (White Skin Matters) Trump, we keep needing more files, more letters, more pictures. But to insist that the matter can only be settled by the files is to give them a power that’s metaphysical and even mystical. But in truth, it’s more like a dog biting a rock.

Is this dark warning, offered by Rep. Thomas Massie of the members of his party, the GOP, of any value? “[If] you vote to cover up for pedophiles, you’ve got cover in a Republican primary. But I would remind my colleagues that this vote is gonna be on your record for longer than Trump is gonna be president. And what are you gonna do in 2028 and 2030 when you’re in a debate either with a Republican or a Democrat and they say, ‘How can we trust you? You covered up for a pedophile back in 2025.'” And so the question is not whether Trump is a pedophile or not. The question is, in Massie’s context: Did you vote to withhold or release the files. This again gives the files too much importance. The game is already up. You—Massie and your Grand Old Party—are already providing cover for the man we well know is in the files.

My god. The awfulness of this man is really on another level:

To combat all the evidence from the Epstein Files showing that Donald Trump raped children, the White House’s strategy is to show pictures of Trump on occasions when he wasn’t raping children. 👀 [image or embed]

— The Sgt Joker (@thesgtjoker.bsky.social) November 13, 2025 at 7:03 PM

Trump’s plan to deal with an issue that got Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson elected, the affordability crisis? Hit the road and hold rallies on the government’s dime. The public can, apparently, eat and pay bills with just his hot air: prices are the lowest they have ever been in the whole history of the world, I’m great, Biden bad, this is a golden age.

Dig this. Trump recently denounced a National Museum of African Art exhibit, “From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson,” that had Drexciya, a Detroit techno duo, at its center. The administration saw it as anti-White and pro-Black. But who is Drexciya? In the 90s, their electro music created an “underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant women who had been thrown overboard or jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage.” Let’s end Slog AM in this underwater world that the White House hates so much.