Frankie Santos Fritz, a Metro DC DSA member and candidate for Greenbelt City Council, recently joined the MDC Dispatch on September 19, 2025, to discuss his candidacy, local history, and the future of democracy. Santos Fritz is running on a platform to strengthen collective bargaining, protect renters and build toward progressive taxation in Maryland.
We wanted to get his thoughts on Greenbelt, the DC occupation, the state of the Democratic Party and much more... this interview transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity. You can listen to this interview of Metro DC DSA's Youtube channel here.
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TONY S: Hello, Frankie. How are you doing?
FRANKIE SANTOS FRITZ: Looking forward to today's conversation. It's been a good campaign. I get to meet a lot of exciting people and do conversations like this one. Very excited to be here.
TONY: Tell us a little bit about yourself and about your campaign.
FRANKIE: I am running for Greenbelt City Council in the November 4 election. If you know anyone who lives in the city of Greenbelt, Maryland, please encourage them to vote and please let them know that if they aren't registered to vote, they have to register to vote in a city election by October 6. So that is the deadline. Make sure your friends are registered, and make sure they turn out and vote on or before November 4.
I have been a community organizer, since I moved to the DMV for college about 12 years ago, on a variety of different campaigns. My first campaign was on fossil fuel divestment, but I also did campus labor organizing and general labor organizing. I have worked in the labor movement as a staffer and on numerous election campaigns as well. Currently, I am a policy staffer in local government. I work on public safety and housing policy.
The way the state of the country is right now, we really need to get more people involved in our political process. In the last election, only one in six of my neighbors who were eligible to vote voted. But we know that all of our neighbors are being impacted by the attacks of the Trump administration. Neighbors like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, one town over in Beltsville. His family sought justice for him and continues to seek justice for him at the Greenbelt courthouse right in our city, right here, so it is a very local story. Kilmar is only one year older than I am. He is 31, he has three kids, and he was kidnapped by ICE and deported to El Salvador, but he was actually kidnapped at the local IKEA here.
TONY: Really?
FRANKIE: Yeah, about a 12-minute drive from my house.
TONY: I've been there.
FRANKIE: These are incredibly personal stories. He is a member of CASA. I have been endorsed by the political arm of CASA, CASA In Action, because we have a shared vision that we need to be a welcoming community for immigrants and build an economy that works for all working people. These are also local issues that impact us locally.
I live right off of the Baltimore–Washington Parkway in Greenbelt, which runs through our city. Now Baltimore and Washington are facing increasing federal threats of occupation. Obviously, DC is being occupied — and I have long been a supporter of DC statehood — but now, those same tactics that were tested in LA, tested in DC, are now being threatened to Baltimore. That would basically put almost all of the metro areas in Maryland under occupation. That is a terrifying precedent for what a president can do if we allow him to, and if we don't fight back.
And really, a lot of our neighbors are not participating in these local elections. We do not know how many more of these elections we are going to have if we are not organized to fight back. I can't tell my neighbors I know what the future Greenbelt is going to look like if I wait two more years to run. We can't wait much longer to be getting people engaged, using every platform we can to be talking about what's going wrong in our country and how we need to get organized to fight back.
TONY: On that topic, because you mentioned the occupation of DC, we all feel a great sense of rage and disappointment at the city government in DC. What do you think local leaders should be doing right now to prevent the tragedy of DC, of our local leaders completely abandoning the public? What can people with a conscience do if they are local officials and facing this kind of occupation?
FRANKIE: The number one place where people in Greenbelt go to work when they leave the city is Washington, DC. So, it really is our economy. We have a lot of federal jobs here, but we also have a lot of federal employees here who commute into DC, and obviously they are our friends and neighbors. I can't tell you how many of my neighbors, like me, lived in DC before moving out to Greenbelt, or Silver Spring, or wherever. A lot of people come to the region via DC and then move outwards into the suburbs, but we still have a deep emotional connection to Washington, DC.
Obviously, there's a lot of blame to go around, but I do think of the lack of a consistent message from local government. They are not acting as if they are all on the same team. Mayor Bowser is very much trying to accommodate President Trump, and, I think, doing so tactically, as well. I think she is frustrated with the progressives on council, and she realizes she can use this as a cudgel against them, saying, "Oh, we all need to unite around me, the mayor," in the face of these attacks while also giving the president the ideological ammunition he needs to say that crime is out of control — which is not true — and that DC is somehow one of the most dangerous places on Earth — it's not.
Giving in to those narratives was the first victory for the occupation — not challenging those narratives in the media when the media echoes those narratives. The local government has a responsibility to actually talk about the truth, the facts on the ground, what is going right, what is getting better. We did see a lot of violence after COVID, understandably. It was a very disruptive time, but that has almost entirely subsided. We have made a lot of progress, but there is a lot of work to be done. When DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb is trying to sue the president for illegal breaches of power but the mayor is basically accommodating the president, that is not real leadership.
We all need to be on the same page. We need to be speaking with one message. Sometimes, it might take some time to figure out what that message is. But it seems clear to me that President Trump has successfully played the local officials against one another in a way that he is trying to do in New York City, too. There are some ostensibly strong Democrats who are taking the bait. I am glad that my Senator, Chris Van Hollen, called out New York leaders for not stepping in and endorsing Zohran Mamdani.
There is a great interview on The Dig about the architecture of fascism, the police state and how it responds to our current moment, and to what degree colonialism looks like our current situation. DC is a federal colony. They can't administer it federally. They don't understand. Congresspeople don't know anything about DC. The president knows nothing about DC, besides taking his limo one block to a steakhouse. That's the extent of DC, and then driving through DC to get to his golf course in Virginia. He doesn't know DC. Without local cooperation, they don't really have the expertise to do this.
And I think we have a mayor who is much more interested in protecting her title rather than fighting back. I think the mayor is probably afraid that one day she won't be mayor and that Trump could have her removed or abolish the city government. Well, we can't act as though any level of compliance is going to get Donald Trump to work with us and to act in the interests of our region. He is diametrically opposed to our region, and we can't accommodate him.
TONY: What I don't get is, accommodating him has never worked. Newsom was trying to accommodate him in a way, and then the National Guard got sent there. Pritzker refused to accommodate him, and there are no National Guards being federalized in Illinois, so I find that very interesting. I try to ask the Newsom defenders about that one. They don't like it.
FRANKIE: And you look at the sheer number of cities he's threatening, right? He really just doesn't have the capacity.
TONY: I really don't understand how Bowser thinks that people will be happy that she's capitulated or will somehow be on her side if she tries to use the occupation to take on the progressives. I cannot understand the calculations going on in some of these people's heads.
TONY: I know Greenbelt is a unique place. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it and its history and what attracted you to it?
FRANKIE: I'm deeply enamored with the history of Greenbelt. I've been studying it since I first heard about the city, really. People in the Metro DC area, if you ride WMATA, the Metro Rail system, at the end of the Green Line, you'll hear about Greenbelt. But I knew about as much about Greenbelt as I knew about Shady Grove or Franconia-Springfield. Those are just names.
TONY: Metro stations.
FRANKIE: Terminal metro stations. So you hear the name when you're riding the lines, but you don't really think much of it.
And then I heard that there was a planned community built during the New Deal as a federal relief project and operated as working-class housing and what we would now call social housing, for many decades. And then it was privatized, but the neighbors came together and bought it out as a cooperative.
Today, it is still Maryland's oldest and largest housing cooperative with over 1,400 units. I'm happy to be a member of that cooperative, but back then I actually didn't put together that it was the same Greenbelt as the one at the end of the Green Line on the Metro. Once I found that out, I knew I had to visit. I organized a group with some friends. There's a little museum you can do, learn about the history and the construction of the city.
The cooperative housed about 13,000 people, during the New Deal — a lot of these folks were unhoused, a lot of these folks were suffering from disease, because it had been several years into the Great Depression, five years into the Great Depression. A lot of people had suffered. The federal government said, “we're going to put you back to work, we're going to get you medical treatment, and then we're going to ship you out, and we're going to build this federal community 13 miles from the White House.” That's not far today, but back then, it was all wooded. This was mostly farmland. DC was a much smaller city. The region was far less populated than it is now.
I always knew it was the kind of place I wanted to live in. Not only do they have a housing cooperative but still, to this day, there's a series of cooperatives, some of which trace their history back to the founding in 1937 of economic cooperatives, membership cooperatives, like a cooperative cafe and a cooperative supermarket. We have a tool library in the city center. We have a not-for-profit movie theater, supported by the community. In Greenbelt, you can be a member of six or seven credit unions, cooperatives, housing cooperatives, and grocery stores. And none of these are run for profit. They are run by the members for the benefit of the community.
Greenbelt was seen as the left wing of the New Deal. It was ferociously attacked, as you would imagine it would be — an experiment that working people didn't need to live in substandard housing, that they could live in spacious, beautiful housing in walkable, beautiful neighborhoods. A lot of that infrastructure is still in place today. We have done a good job of preserving that, and that makes up the core of what we call Greenbelt Center, or Old Greenbelt.
It's a vibrant community with a rich history. It has a unique architectural style, a lot of art deco and some Bauhaus-inspired architecture for the architecture folks. I know a lot of folks love to walk through and just look at the buildings. There is a lot of public art as well. Artists were put to work to create public art for the city during the New Deal as well. It was an experiment of what you could do with the political will to make people's lives better and model a community that is not rooted just in profitability, but is rooted in a high quality of life and community.
TONY: Wow. That makes me happy... and sad at the same time.
FRANKIE: Yeah, the path not chosen, in a lot of ways. We tried it out and we said, “no, why don't we build a bunch of exurban, sprawling single-family homes, Levittowns.” Greenbelt is cited as one of the first suburbs, because we were before World War II. Suburbs took some parts of that, like larger homes, and made them worse, made it hyper-capitalistic, and gave us the suburban landscape that a lot of people are still frustrated with today.
TONY: So what are the biggest challenges that Greenbelt is facing, and what are you interested in achieving if you win the city council race?
FRANKIE: I think you have to foreground, once again, the federal attacks on our neighbors, whether our immigrant neighbors, our LGBTQ+ neighbors. Those attacks have been terrifying to folks.
And especially because our economy is heavily dependent upon federal jobs. A lot of our folks are employed at NASA, which is based in Greenbelt, just outside the city limits. The USDA has the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, which has been doing incredible research for at least 90, if not 100 years. It piloted a lot of technology that has improved our agricultural system, a lot of research that wasn't being done by the private sector.
Now Trump wants to break it up into several smaller research centers and deposit them across the country. That would cause all the folks here to either have to move to Minnesota or Oklahoma or wherever in the country, when they wanted to come to this facility that had been open for 90-plus years that has received a lot of investment. We're just going to shut it down.
And other facilities: obviously, we have folks who work in Social Security. We have folks who work in any federal agency you can imagine, just because of our proximity to Washington, DC, and that is the strong basis of our economy. We need to diversify our economy. We need to create more opportunities for local wealth building and economic prosperity for working-class people.
And unfortunately, we can no longer rely upon the federal government, which was once seen as a gateway to the middle class — getting a federal job, especially for women and Black and brown folks who oftentimes were passed over for opportunities in the private sector. The federal government was one of the first sectors to integrate and give opportunities to folks. Trump now attacks those people as DEI hires when, if you actually look at the facts, many of these folks are the most highly educated people in this country.
If you look at federal employees, we have some of the smartest people. One of my neighbors here in Greenbelt, she works at NASA and is a published author on the ionosphere of the sun. I don't even know what that entails. I don't know what NASA is researching, day-to-day, when it comes to the sun, because it's so far out of my scope as a humanities major, but I'm glad someone is doing that. We need to know if there are developments on the sun that could impact agricultural productivity. You would think that would be something the government would want to know about. Even the private sector benefits from that knowledge, but they don't want to pay for it directly.
TONY: One thing I think I've seen missing from the conversation, especially around federal workers, is that many contractors are federal workers in everything but name. You carry a federal badge, you go to the building every day. Sometimes, if it's a uniform job, you are literally wearing a uniform but working for a private company, making them private profits. It makes me angry because I think a lot of people do want to serve, but all that private contracting lets capital owners skim off the top. And it prevents unionization and lets them hire and fire as they want to.
I'd like to see more worker solidarity between contractors and federal workers, because for a long time, fed was seen as the safe job. But really, we all should have been asking, why are we hiring contractors in the first place? These people should be employees. They are employees. In fact, when these contracts change hands, the employees often move companies to stay at the federal department that they're at.
FRANKIE: Or train their replacement. It is privatization by another name. Skimming off the top is exactly the right framing. It is a combination of Reaganomics. Reagan never shrank the government. He just changed what it did, he moved things around, and then a lot of folks got rich off of those changes.
TONY: And tricked everybody into thinking it was cheaper and more efficient...
FRANKIE: Trump wants to give $50,000 hiring bonuses to hire more ICE agents, and he wants to close, right here in Greenbelt, the visitor center at NASA Goddard. Once again, these folks who call themselves, supposedly, pro-family and all that: don’t you want young people to dream about getting into science and technology? To think that maybe they could do something other than build bombs, that they could help research space or help expand humanity's knowledge? Closing the visitor center is such a cruel and unnecessary decision. It doesn't save money in any meaningful sense.
But it's about his priority. He wants to shift the focus away from the government doing public research that brings a lot of value to a lot of people. I think most Americans, myself included, have taken it for granted that it would always just be there. Like, "Oh, of course, the government's going to fund research. That's not partisan!" But the dismantling of the health systems under RFK or dismantling of scientific knowledge on the climate or our planet at NOAA — these are the people watching out for asteroids barreling towards Earth. These are important things, and there's no private incentive to do them. There's no profitability in it.
There is an important public role in scientific knowledge, but he doesn't want that. He wants to loot our government so he can fund tax cuts for billionaires like himself, have his stormtrooper army of ICE agents turning ICE into the largest law enforcement federal agency in the country by several fold, and make sure all of our cities are operating in fear, because he doesn't see the cities as his constituents. He sees them as people to be controlled and disciplined. That is the role he is trying to enforce with these actions.
It's important that, as Greenbelters, we call that out and we start organizing within our city. Once we have organized our city, we can show other cities how to organize, and build a coalition of communities across this country to push back.
TONY: Everyone is threatened by these cuts that are coming down. We know these cuts are unpopular, but the Democrats are even more unpopular. Have the Democrats even promised to fight back against Trump's cuts?
FRANKIE: Implicitly, they were saying that we can figure something out. You can argue the first Trump election was a fluke, but the second one wasn't. At a certain point, they just ran out of answers. People voted to get Trump out in 2020 because they wanted to go back to "normal," and "normal" never came.
If you look at how much our buying power has been cut since COVID, how much more prices have gone up, I have seen estimates like 20% of our buying power disappeared in five years. Think about what impact that has to people. Imagine you have been saving your whole life, and then, in the blink of an eye, 20% of your savings were just taken off the top. What answer did the Democrats have for that? They didn't have one. And I think that is why Zohran was so successful. He lasered in on that — that folks realize that they are getting ripped off. The Democrats should be kicking his ass right now, right? He should be absolutely fearful for his political career, but he is consolidating his political power in a way we have never seen a president do in recent memory.
TONY: Well, it is because opposition is not enough. What maybe went over some of our heads in 2016 was that just because someone was trashing Trump did not mean they were actually on your side. I could not really see how sinister it all was until after the Democrats came back to power. I think, fortunately, more people than just me notice that, and I sense this deep rage in people voting in primaries next year. There just need to be genuine candidates. That is why I am so glad that people are running directly from the DSA ranks.
On that, can you talk about your time in the DSA, and why you think it's so important for fighting Trump and structuring a real alternative to the Republicans?
FRANKIE: Absolutely. I joined DSA after Trump won. I had heard a bit about them beforehand. They were one of the first groups and most vocal groups to endorse Bernie early on and unapologetically call themselves socialists. But after Trump won, I realized that in the movements I cared about — the labor movement, the climate movement — we were fighting tooth and nail on these really narrow campaigns. We were fighting incremental campaigns under Obama and sometimes making headway. We made a lot of headway to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. That was a big issue during the latter years of the Obama administration. I was concerned about unionizing workplaces. Some victories were slowly starting to be won in the final years of the Obama administration, and then all that work just went up in smoke.
Donald Trump ran on opposing all the things we had worked so hard to win. People promised us — the Democrats had promised us — "Don't worry, he can never win," and I think we all deluded ourselves into thinking that. But he actually ran, in 2016, a very successful populist campaign, and he was able to win, I think, mostly on the despair of the electorate.
Things had gotten really bad across the country. After the 2008 recession, those were the first times that, for multiple years in a row, US life expectancy went down, pointing to a really dire situation. The few threads that we were hanging on to before the recession were snapping. There is an overarching system that is causing this much violence and harm in our communities. I didn't have the language for it at the time, but democracy can't survive if the average voter's living standards continue to go down, because people, at a certain point, are going to lose faith in popular government, in electoral participation. They are going to vote for the nihilistic candidate or not vote at all, because it's like, "what is the government doing for me? Why does it matter?"
If you are an activist on one or two issues, maybe you continue to vote, but most people aren't activists, most people are trying to survive. And so I realized that we could no longer fight single issue campaigns. If we looked at mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, if we looked at climate change, if we looked at Palestine, if we looked at all these issues, we could no longer be fighting these issues separately.
I think that DSA represented the best attempt to bring all of these movements under one tent and organize politically. A party, not like a Democratic Party or Republican Party, but an actual organization with a shared political goal, and those goals are set democratically.
I long considered myself a socialist, but I realized that you can only call yourself a socialist for so long without joining an organization, because you can't be an individualistic socialist. It is a contradiction in terms. Sometimes that means you have to figure out how to persuade your comrades in your organization to work on your priority, because we can't do everything all at once, but sometimes we need to make a plan together. We need to be able to debate that plan.
There's this term that I find powerful. It comes from the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci. And it's called "the organic intellectual." It is not "organic" as in, like, a farmer's market "organic." It is organic as in "organizational." That people develop skills by being part of an organization. You learn how to run an organization, how to fundraise for an organization, how to recruit. These are skills that need to be learned and taught.
DSA is bringing back that spirit of the organic intellectual. People are learning how to use working-class democracy to achieve political objectives. As we scale that up, I think we can make a huge change in this country quickly, and I think Zohran Mamdani is the number one example of that. You can go from being a relatively fringe group, but if you build cohesive collective power across an entire city, you can call people to action. They mobilized 50,000 volunteers, and I was one of them. I went up there twice to canvass for him. It was some of the best canvassing, besides for myself, that I've ever done.
So, I think DSA is probably one of my favorite organizations I've ever been a part of, because it makes me feel like I am part of a collective that can get things done. Here in Metro DC, I was involved in a bunch of different fights, but the most exciting one was the fight for rent stabilization in Montgomery County and Prince George's County, where I had served as the chair of both branches. When I lived in Montgomery County, I had served a term as chair, and then in Prince George's County, I just finished up a term as chair, as well. We fought for rent stabilization, and when we started, there were no votes for rent stabilization on the Montgomery County Council.
TONY: Didn’t you found both of those branches, by the way?
FRANKIE: I was involved in the founding of the Prince George's branch, but I was still living in Montgomery County, and I definitely brought my experience as a founder of the MoCo branch. I was in a lot of the early meetings helping them draft their bylaws. That's why you'll notice a lot of similarities between the Montgomery County and Prince George's County bylaws. I was trying to help folks understand and learn from our mistakes. When you are starting a new organization, a lot of times you are trying to build the perfect organization from scratch. And you can't do it, because if you have an organization with no people, it doesn't matter how nice your bylaws are.
A lot of folks spend too much time thinking, “Do I know enough? Do I have enough information to be an organizer?” And the answer is: you need to know more about your neighbors. That is more important than a perfect grasp of history and knowledge. I think that you will understand history and theory more once you go out and do the work. I think we actually do it backwards. A lot of people think, "All right, we need to give people theory and then they can do praxis." The two give order to one another. You need to have a grasp on what your neighbors care about before you can get them to join an organization, before you can actually debate what that organization can do. It is cyclical or dialectical, if you want to get Marxian about it.
It matters that you are getting out there and knocking on doors, because you find out what works when you are talking to real people. You might have something you really care about at your job that none of your coworkers care about. But if you want to form a union, you need to understand: what are the concerns that unite 60% to 80% of your coworkers? Because that is what is going to get people out of bed to knock on doors, to make phone calls, to sign union cards. That is what is really important, and I think in DSA, we are slowly learning, rediscovering a working-class democracy that had been missing for so long in this country.
TONY: I used to feel like the Democratic Party had the potential for organizing real change until about 2012. It seemed like the national party just decided to bribe everybody and stop organizing instead. I have definitely gotten more of the collective action and grassroots feel from the DSA. It feels like just the DSA, some small community groups and the occasional union are the only ones doing real local organizing...
FRANKIE: If you are a union leader or a small town mayor, it can be a hard job sometimes. To be a union leader in the face of all these attacks coming from the federal government can be difficult, and sometimes you just want to make sure the union that you have been a member of for 20 years keeps the lights on. But it is important that you have a mix of perspectives and that you are bringing up new leaders after you. I think a lot of folks do fear democracy, including in local government.
So many of these local elections, up in Gaithersburg where Omodamola Williams is running for council, here in Greenbelt, the vast majority of people don't even know there is an election. And unfortunately, who benefits? It is the incumbents. The incumbents don't want to run. It is hard to run for reelection. It's hard to take questions from people who don't like you, but that is part of the process.
So I understand why you want to take the shortcuts, but see where it has gotten us? Suddenly, you realize you don't have a pulse on what is going on in your area, in your organization, or in your union, or in your city. All of a sudden you don't know how to get people organized against Trump. I was in a meeting recently with some labor leaders, retired federal employees, other employees, and Greenbelt neighbors. People in the room were asking the labor leaders, "Why aren't you doing a general strike?" They had never really contemplated that, because they were told it was illegal. A lot of what the government is doing right now used to be illegal.
TONY: What the companies are doing is illegal. They break the law and dump sewage on you and then tell you that you are doing illegal things when you call an unauthorized strike.
FRANKIE: The law is being wielded against organizers and working people. If there is ever any accountability, it is rarely against the people actually causing the vast majority of our problems. I understand on one level you don't want your union to get busted by the federal government. On the other hand, we are in a place where the federal government does not care about labor law. They think labor law itself is unconstitutional. If they do bust your union, did you actually have the organizing relationships to call a general strike, and organize against illegal retaliation by the federal government?
But there's such a fire in the rank-and-file members of our community, retired members, even workers who are just fed up. And I think people are begging for leadership. I will say, if you're living in a city where less than 30% of your neighbors voted, that is a city ripe for new leadership. If no one ran against your union president in 20 years, that is a union that might need new leadership. If you have a tenant association, and they don't do anything, working people are angry and looking for leadership. They are looking for tangible actions they can take to fight back in their daily lives and to save what remains of our institutions in this country.
Now is the time to really consider running for something — whether it's a union office, or being part of an organization, or running for local office — to make those connections with your neighbors, because obviously other people aren't doing it. We need to change how we think, that there are some people who lead us and then there is everyone else. That cannot be the way we organize. We need to get everyone at the table, and that is going to require a lot of people to step up.
But we can't wait any longer. We need to be developing these skills, we need to be cultivating this analysis in everyone, and we need to be bringing people into organizations, like DSA, that are democratic and are unapologetically fighting for the working class.
TONY: What the companies are doing is illegal. They break the law and dump sewage on you and then tell you that you are doing illegal things when you call an unauthorized strike.
FRANKIE: Get organized, join an organization. Please support my campaign as well. If you're inspired, if you know folks who live in Greenbelt, let them know. We have a really great shot at winning this election. The reception has been amazing. So many people have just thanked me for running. A lot of people have given up on politics, but a lot of people thanked me for running, just to say, "Thank you for trying, thank you for believing in the community, thank you for offering your time."
It's because we need new leadership, and I think communities across the country are ready for new leadership. Like the story of Zohran Mamdani's campaign. We need more good stories like that, of people fighting back, of people saying that we don't need to bend the knee to the Andrew Cuomos or the Donald Trumps of the world, that they don't actually own this country. That working people, when organized, we can do a lot. So support my campaign, at frankieforgreenbelt.org, and then join an organization.
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Join Frankie’s campaign at frankeforgreenbelt.org.
Tony S is the host of MDC Dispatch, the chapter’s regular video news program, which you can watch at Metro DC DSA’s YouTube channel, as well as his own channel, Red Cyber Dragon on YouTube and Red Cyber Dragon on Twitch.
