The Rise of Megan Romer
I tangled with her in 2021, after the AFL-CIO’s president elevated her in their joint attack on independent contractors.
A little more than a week ago, Fox News aired an interview with Megan Romer. She’s a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. All the things she confirmed about the organization’s goals—abolishing the U.S. Senate, prisons, borders and more—have kept the clip in wide circulation.
Here’s that interview in full:
The backlash began almost immediately after that interview aired, with prominent people on both sides of the political aisle labeling Romer’s ideas insane, asinine and dangerous.
What I say to all of you who just realized Romer exists is this: Welcome to the fun house.
Independent contractors like me have been familiar with Romer and her tribe’s thinking for about a half dozen years now, ever since the Democratic Socialists of America joined forces with major unions for the first time on a national campaign. Their goal was to try and pass legislation that would have restricted all kinds of independent contractors nationwide.
That’s right. If you’re wondering how somebody with ideas like Romer’s rose to a position that she’s being interviewed on a popular Sunday political news show, look no further than the unionists who helped to build her profile, in particular the AFL-CIO.
It was the AFL-CIO’s president, in 2021, who personally helped to elevate Romer and lend her credibility, injecting her and her ideas into the mainstream of American politics in a way that directly targeted independent contractors like me.
Good Morning, Comrade
To understand why the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Socialists of America joined forces to target us freelancers in 2021, you have to realize where things stood at that time on the independent-contractor policy battle.
California, in 2019, had passed Assembly Bill 5. By early 2020, it was well into the process of decimating all kinds of independent contractors’ incomes and careers in that state. This widespread chaos and suffering was a feature, not a bug, for socialists and unionists, who had been brainstorming all kinds of radical ideas to limit the number of independent contractors in the workforce so they could try to add more unionized employees.
The freelance busters thought passage of California’s law would be the start of a blue-state wave of similar legislation. A New York legislator introduced a copycat bill, as did New Jersey’s Senate president. Since I live in New Jersey and earn my living as an independent contractor, this was a big problem for me. I helped organize and lead a grassroots army of independent contractors who stopped that bill from advancing in late 2019 and early 2020. New York legislators saw all the public outrage in New Jersey, and the New York bill then languished, as did a similar bill that had been promised in Illinois.
With the state-level rollout of these freelance-busting bills at a halt, news reports began to appear in 2020 about pressure in Congress to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It’s a bill that would have pushed California-style, freelance-busting ABC Test regulatory language into federal labor law.
By early 2021, our grassroots movement had grown so big nationwide that it was causing headaches about passing the PRO Act in Washington, D.C., too.
This is when the Democratic Socialists of America, and Megan Romer specifically, became a big part of my day.
In spring 2021, a website appeared. It was called Freelancers for the PRO Act. The people associated with it, calling themselves freelance writers, were unknown to any of us long-timers in the national freelance-writing community. And if you clicked around a bit, you eventually came to a page that showed who had built the site: the Democratic Socialists of America, who called passing the PRO Act their highest national priority.
They had simultaneously created a handle on Twitter, since that was a platform where our grassroots opposition was strong. (Yes, it was still called Twitter back then.) The Democratic Socialists tried to co-opt our grassroots campaign on social media much the same way Romer, in the recent Fox News interview, described trying to co-opt the Democratic Party’s ballot lines. Back in 2021, the socialists put our grassroots hashtag, #FightForFreelancers, right into their Twitter bio:
Note the date when that Twitter handle was created: March 2021.
At that same time, a flurry of articles started showing up almost daily in The New Republic and other media outlets. This burst of coverage elevated the Democratic Socialist voices and planted a media narrative that there was disagreement within the freelance community about the PRO Act.
There was no actual clash of beliefs within the freelancing community. We all wanted freelancing to remain fully legal and unimpeded. The American Society of Journalists and Authors, which is the biggest organization of nonfiction freelance writers in America, had outright sued the State of California over Assembly Bill 5.
But the Democratic Socialists of America—in a sudden campaign where Megan Romer was prominent—were showing up in the media and trying to make it seem as if there was a clash of beliefs in the freelance community.
At the same time, Richard Trumka, then head of the AFL-CIO, hosted a YouTube town hall to try and push this Democratic Socialist campaign further into the mainstream.
The top-billed town hall guest who ostensibly spoke for freelancers alongside the AFL-CIO’s Trumka was, you guessed it, Megan Romer. She appeared on a panel with people such as Rafael Espinal (who has since gone on to work for Democratic Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City) and David Bacon (also affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America).
It took us real freelancers a hot minute back in 2021 to figure out what the heck all of this was. None of us had ever been on the receiving end of a campaign like this one, let alone a campaign that one of America’s biggest Big Labor forces was amplifying.
We ultimately did the reporting that the media should have done on its own, and we showed editors that these so-called freelance writers did not seem to have any bylines, anywhere—which made it awfully hard for them to claim that they were freelancers at all.
I also personally got into some exchanges with Megan Romer on Twitter at that time. It appears that she has since deleted all of her posts and replies, but you can still see my replies to her and the socialists’ handle from March 2021:
And then, as if by magic, all the media coverage and the socialists’ campaign stopped. It just vanished in the press, stopped functioning on social media, and went dark everywhere.
The federal PRO Act, like the New Jersey bill that would have copied California’s freelance-busting Assembly Bill 5, ultimately did not become law. Instead, we all found ourselves on the receiving end of President Biden’s independent-contractor rule, which led us to sue in federal court.
President Biden’s acting labor secretary at the time, Julie Su, also now works for Mayor Mamdani in New York City.
Welcome to the Fun House, Prof G
I was thinking about all of this over the weekend, when I listened to Friday’s episode of the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. Prof G was particularly upset about Mayor Mamdani having doxxed him, and quite a lot of other New York City property owners, by releasing a list of names who might be subject to the city’s pied-à-terre tax on second homes.
Galloway described what Mayor Mamdani did, in essence, as creating a hit list of people who have a net worth that is above average. And specifically about publishing this list, Galloway asked, incredulously:
“He’s implying we’ve done something wrong because we’re successful?”
That’s not quite right, Professor Galloway. These socialists don’t despise you only because you’re successful. Rich people are not their only target.
Their goal is to take down all of us who are hardworking and entrepreneurial in the way we think. Their platform promises followers: “You work as much as you are able and no more than needed.” One of their clearly stated goals from political candidates in the current campaign cycle is to have every single working person in a union. They want no independent contractors to remain at all.
Their quest is to destroy capitalism from top to bottom, along with tearing down our government. They plan to rebuild it in ways that Romer just detailed for the world to see.
It’s a vision of a nation where none of us—not you, not me, not anyone—will ever be able to succeed by working on our own terms again.
And these socialists are still getting big help from Big Labor. The AFL-CIO is continuing to advance and escalate the attack on independent contractors right now in my home state of New Jersey, where a California-style ABC Test rule for independent contractors is looming to take effect October 1.
Nobody has yet doxxed us here in New Jersey, but we know how it feels to be unfairly characterized, since public comments supporting this rule did cite source material that equates independent contractors with the crimes of workplace violence and human trafficking. And yes, New Jersey is the same state where the Democrat serving as Senate President in 2019 compared us to Russian disinformation agents for having the audacity to speak what the government itself now admits was the truth about this madness.
Nobody should be surprised by the words and actions of Megan Romer, Zohran Mamdani, the AFL-CIO or any of the rest of this tribe. These extremists have shown us all who they really are for many, many years now.
Believe them. And do what we’ve been doing: everything you can think of to stop them.