Remembering David Cobb 1962-2026
October 3, 2026
David Cobb with John Barry, Lusty Beg, Co. Fermanagh, Ireland, November 2024 (photo by Joe Guinan)
On Labor Day we learned the shattering news that we had lost David Keith Cobb, our friend, collaborator and newly appointed Democracy Collaborative fellow. TDC President Joe Guinan was invited to give a tribute at the Memorial for David held at the Arcata Playhouse in Humboldt County, California on October 3. The text of his contribution is below.
My name is Joe Guinan, I’m President of The Democracy Collaborative.
David was one of us – quite literally, in that he had just in August joined TDC as a fellow, having worked with us for several years on economic system change.
On behalf of Neil McInroy, Stephanie McHenry, Ben Sellers, Erel Onojobi and many others, we at TDC mourn his passing and miss all that we were going to do together.
He was loved in our organization.
He was loved in my house, too.
I first met David only a few years back, in 2022 or 2023, introduced by Ben Manski.
At first we didn’t quite know what to make of each other.
Who was this great big bluff in-your-face Texan who spoke in a Gulf Coast drawl but quoted Marx and Gramsci?
For his part, I think he wondered who I was, this slightly aloof think tanker whose politics he still needed to figure out.
But we stuck with each other.
One way in which I won him over was by taking him on a trip to the North of Ireland, to West Belfast, where I let him see for himself the politics of Irish Republican Socialism that was one of the crucibles in which my politics was forged.
We visited our comrades at Trademark Belfast, a worker cooperative in Belfast but also the anti-sectarian unit of the Irish trade union movement, they are the people who are called it when it all kicks off on the shop floor in a factory to do conflict resolution and workplace training. They have also worked for peace and the ceasefire and disarmament of paramilitary groups not just in the North of Ireland but as far afield as Colombia.
Next David and I went up the Springfield Road to Glór na Móna, the community based Irish language and youth organization building a different future on the Ballymurphy Housing estate.
We took a black cab taxi tour of the city given by a former Irish Republican prisoner and self-taught historian – one of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals if ever there was one.
David was captivated – as I’d hoped he would be, knowing that as well as a proud poor kid from Texas he was also proud of his Irish and Scots heritage, a lineage of rebels against the empire.
David Cobb at Scoil Chois Claí on Árainn Mhór, County Donegal, in April 2026
David was captivated by Belfast, but he also captivated the people he met there in turn – and we’ll hear from some of them in just a moment.
So the trick worked. And David became one of the people I was working with most closely and intensively over the past few years.
He was a friend and a comrade as well as a colleague.
He was loved in my house – and not just by me.
One of the recent times he visited was right after the outbreak of the Iran war, and my partner is Iranian. He listened as Newsha talked about the complexities of how she felt about the war and later she told me she really felt seen by David – as another human being, not just through the lens of politics. He was so good in that way.
I had counted on having him, as a thought partner and collaborator, for years to come.
I am still heartbroken and confused that he is gone, and somehow feel that I must have let him down.
I thought we were having the deep conversations we needed to have about fascism and climate collapse and repression and war.
But there must have been a deeper conversation that he still needed and that we didn’t get to.
I last saw him in August, just a couple of weeks before he died.
He and Johanna Epke and Kali Akuno and I met up in New Orleans to talk deep strategy and planning.
After we adjourned he and I went for dinner. He wanted a muffaletta sandwich and a bowl of gumbo, so we went to Napoleon House – and of course, David got deep into conversation with the people at the next table.
We walked the empty French Quarter and could see the ominous signs of the coming economic recession. And we talked about that, too.
We said goodbye back at the hotel. And I still can’t believe that that’s the last time I’ll ever see him.
He had a beautiful big heart and a big brain to match. He taught me a lot even as he was still learning himself, right to the end.
I will miss him so much, and I know we will all carry him with us, in our hearts and in our bones, as we face a colder and darker world without David in it.
One of the things we did together was help get some resources to our friends in Belfast, thanks to the People’s Network for Land and Liberation. They will be put to good use building a better world well into the future.
David used to say of the brilliant young people he met there on his multiple visits that “They understand the assignment.”
David Cobb and Ruthi Engelke hold the banner at a commemoration of the Ballymurphy Massacre
I know that Ciaran and Feargal would have liked to have been here with us in person, but let me tell you why they are not and what our friends at Glór na Móna are doing today.
For those of you who follow international affairs, you might have seen that there is a standoff in the North of Ireland today, at somewhere called the Garvaghy Road, which has long been a flashpoint in the Troubles.
The Orange Order wants to march down Garvaghy Road and the residents and local community are having none of it.
What’s the Orange Order? Well, think of the Ku Klux Klan, but dressed in suits and bowler hats and orange sashes. They are Protestant supremacists, racists, Unionists and imperialists, and they are the face of fascism as a ruling class project.
And the local community has said no. ¡No pasarán! They shall not pass!
Because in the past when that march has gone ahead there has been violence and children have died in a house fire, and the community isn’t going to allow it to happen again.
And so today Glór na Móna is standing with them, linking arms, using their bodies to block the road.
And I can just see David with a tear in his eye and his chest swelling up with pride at what his friends are doing.
Because if David Cobb was anything, he was an anti-fascist, in the tradition of physical force anti-fascism, and so am I — and we are going to need a lot more of that in the difficult times ahead.
So now let’s hear from Glór na Móna themselves in West Belfast about how David Cobb touched them.
A memorial website for David Keith Cobb has been created here.