People who want to fight fascism have to actually fight it and not be consumed by timeline wars, leftist influencer rage bait, and the clear manipulation of these spaces by outside forces Another way out: Those who won’t fight power will fight each other is a story from Prism , a BIPOC-led nonprofit news outlet that centers the people…
Page B1From§Eachthe milkman edition — 29 September 2026
Bichotte Hermelyn rewrites the rules to keep her seat, then walks away from it.
As it ran on the front
Cook Political Report moved fifteen competitive races toward Democrats this month and put a House majority within reach on paper. The moderates running in those very races have kept Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez off their stages since the shift, calculating that a shared podium costs more votes than it buys. Former Obama aides told Fox News the donors are still holding the checkbook shut, burned by 2024. New polling out this week has the party imagining a majority it has not yet tried to spend for. That was the frame Brooklyn walked into.
The rule change that kept Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn in the Brooklyn Democratic chairmanship died September 29, of its own redundancy. It was born in a last-minute vote of the Kings County Democratic Party — the county's paperwork gives no date for the vote itself, only that it came late and it came through — and it existed for a single function: hold the chair against a socialist wing trying to take it. The New York Post reported the mechanism and the outcome in the same dispatch: the rule passed, and then its author announced she won't seek another term anyway. The wing never got the floor fight the rule was built to prevent. This is not complicated; it is penny-ante paperwork with a chairmanship attached, and the only shame in it is how well it worked.…
…(cont) Eight days earlier, Senator Gary Peters had shown the plainer route to the same door. Having said in January 2025 he would not seek a third term, he spent September 21 announcing where he's going next — the Washington Examiner had the item — a chair vacated on schedule, no rule required to get there.
Thirteen days before today's report, a Prism essay warned that people who mean to fight power keep finding it easier to fight each other. Brooklyn didn't need the warning tested; the rule change did the fighting before the two sides met.
In February 2013, Cuba's Raúl Castro paired his own exit announcement with a push to cap everyone else's future terms, the New York Times reported. Brooklyn's chair skipped that ambition. She changed the rule only long enough to answer a challenge that, it turns out, never had to show up.
Survived by: the vacancy the rule was built to prevent, now arriving anyway; a socialist wing still short a floor fight it was promised; a county party that will pick a chair twice in one cycle. Preceded in death by nothing — the chairmanship itself remains occupied, on schedule, past its own argument for staying.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the next rule change carry a date before the vote it changes, not after.
“She rewrote the bylaws to beat a fight that was already lost before it started, then quit the fight anyway — that's not strategy, that's a chair burning the ladder on her way down so nobody can say who really pushed her off it. The socialist wing didn't win this one; they just showed up to an empty room the rule already cleared out. Watch who the county party runs next — that's who the paperwork was actually protecting.”
“Look, party chairs update their own bylaws all the time, that's just internal governance, nothing to see here — the timing is a coincidence of the calendar, not the challenge. She had every right to secure the chairmanship before stepping back from it, which, okay, does sound like she rewrote the rules specifically to avoid the vote she was about to lose. That's not — I didn't say that.”
Earlier in this story
- Cook Political Report projects a Democratic majority; the party's own strategists say donors won't fund it. By Sal · the wee small hours edition, 29 September 2026
- Democrats shift 15 House races into their column, then leave the Bronx off the trail. By Sal · the late evening edition, 28 September 2026
The receipts
The shock announcement comes after she pushed through a last-minute rule change in an attempt to stay in power as the new, lefty socialist wing of the party fought to take the reins.
· Gary Peters announces what’s next after his final term in the Senate from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
· President of Cuba Raúl Castro announces he will not seek another term as president when his current one expires in 2018. He also states he will seek to put term limits and age caps for political offic from the morgue, 25 Feb 2013
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.