Bridges Over Bombs: The Fight Against Foreign Wars w/ Austin Dyches

In this in-depth interview, host Carlos Childs engages with, veteran and democratic socialist candidate Austin Dyches to discuss his military service, foreign policy views, and the urgent need for systemic change in the US. Topics include US imperialism, Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, immigration, and the role of veterans in activism. In this intriguing interview, Austin Dyches shares his insights on American politics, systemic racism, the Democratic Party's challenges, and the fight for leftist change. 

Austin Dyches:

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What's up, you all? What's up, you all? Welcome to the Left Handed Leftist. You all, um, I just realized I haven't done one of these, you know, before the show starts monologues in a minute, and I think I'm gonna get back into doing them. But without further ado, let me go ahead into it. That we are having a really, really, really good conversation for you all today. Um, I'm gonna be talking with a congressional candidate who's running in Maryland's third district. Uh, we're gonna be talking about foreign policy, we're gonna be talking about Palestine, Cuba, Israel, Venezuela, we're gonna talk about ICE, we're gonna be talking about can the Democratic Party actually be moved left? And you all, before we get into it, let me go ahead and introduce who our candidate is. I will be talking with Austin Dykes. He is a veteran and a congressional candidate in Merlin's third district. And one thing I do want to give a huge apology to Austin Dykes because it was uh multiple times with this podcast, I actually called him uh by the wrong last last name. So I do just want to say my apologies off the bat for that. And then one other thing I do want to say is that you all, before we get into the episode, please remember this is a podcast. So we need your support by liking, sharing, pitting that subscribe button, rating us five stars, do all the things that keep our podcast going and our podcast thriving, you all. We're hitting some really, really, really good milestones. So let's keep it going. And don't forget to hit that notification bell so that every Wednesday you can get notified of a new episode that comes out. So without further ado, you all, let's get into it. So, what's up, what's up, you all? Austin Dichus, what's up? So glad to have you here. How's it going?

SPEAKER_01 1:45

It's going all right.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Thanks so much, Carlos.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Appreciate you having me on.

SPEAKER_00 1:47

Of course, of course. We need to highlight more actual leftist candidates and more progressive people because you would think in the state of Maryland, we're like leftist, progressive blue. We're really not. We're very moderate, conservative blue. So so glad to have you here.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Yeah, yeah. So for the viewers who do not know who you are, do you mind just telling people real quick who you are and what you're running for?

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. So for those at home, my name is Austin Dykes. I'm running for Maryland's third congressional district. I'm a veteran, a father. I'm a progressive Democrat. I consider myself a Democratic Socialist, and I'm running on a platform of universal health care, abolishing ICE, ending the wars in Israel, ending foreign aid to Israel, bringing that money home and rebuilding America and what I would hope is a positive Green New Deal for America. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Okay, that was that was incredible already. I mean, go ahead, wrap it up. We called it a day. We did everything. You checked all the boxes. No.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

No, no, don't.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

You gotta hold me accountable. Hold your people dig in. No, definitely, definitely. So let's go ahead and get into a first first thing I I do want to kind of uh get into is the foreign foreign affairs. And you mentioned that you are a veteran um who was uh in in the military. Can you kind of talk about what you did um with it in the military and then we can get it get into um Palestine, Iran, and stuff like that?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Sure, yeah. Um, I wasn't someone who had originally considered myself the military type, even though I was raised very conservatively. So I was raised in a conservative household from in Oklahoma and Texas. My father worked for Halliburton and oil companies my whole life. So we were literally, you know, in West Texas, uh as conservative as you get. But one of the things that I had always felt strongly about my whole family was that, you know, the call to serve, to serve our country, to to, and for me, I so my brother had served, had joined the army first. So he was in the 101st Airborne, he went to Afghanistan and actually got hurt there, is okay, but came home and uh continued his military career. He's retired from it now. But at the time, I was actually in my first year of law school. So I was attending the Oklahoma City University School of Law because I'd always sort of, you know, I I love law, I love legal studies. And so I finished my one L year and my brother had joined, and he was like, hey, you know, it's something that you gotta do or whatever. And I said, okay, I did feel strongly at that time that I did want to serve. So ISIS was actually a big, you know, that was when ISIS was was hot and heavy a little later on as the war continued. And so my experience was a little different in that I went in kind of knowing I went in as an older person, knowing what I wanted to do. And so I, in the army, I served as what's called a human intelligence collector, which is essentially a an interrogator or someone who goes out and does military source operations to talk to locals and figure out where someone might be hiding. So that's what I was trained to do. However, I never actually did that overseas because I was here in Maryland at Fort Meade, things work a little bit differently. And they said uh I had shown some interest in computers and networking, and so I actually became a digital forensic analyst. So I became a counterintelligence digital forensic uh, you know, special investigator, where so our job was to collect media devices from people we thought might be, you know, helping the Russians or the Chinese or some other folks, and we would get those devices, and then my job was to look through them. And that's what I did. So later on, I did that for the Defense Intelligence Agency as well. So after my service, I got out and for DIA deployed to Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom for the ISIS ISIS K mission. So that's kind of what I was involved in very early on. But one of the things that I think is so important as a distinction between what we think is going to happen and what actually happens. And as someone who has seen the whole cycle and been through the whole cycle of wanting to do the right thing, signing up to do the right thing, realizing that you as an individual cannot affect this machine in the way that you thought you might have, and that everything that you sort of imagined was either propaganda lie or told in a way that that didn't tell you the full story. And so when I, as I was the kind of person, I was the liberal in my family. I was the, I was the lefty, right? They were like, oh, Austin, he thinks people should have rights. Exactly. And so even in the in the military, I came into it from a what can I do? You know, I hate to say what can I do from the inside because it's so hubristic, but I think we need to address the fact that for a cishat white man in the United States, the the call, you know, what what we think we're supposed to do is so strong. And what I want to tell people about that is that I would never hold it against service members for serving, but I do think that veterans have to own our place in imperialism and understand that while you may not have understood what exactly you were getting into at the time, you know better now. And now that you know better, it's very, very important that we speak out. And so that's why I'm such an anti-war advocate. I have seen very closely, you know, people harmed by these policies. I have watched um, you know, I you have to do things where that are difficult. And at the end of the day, when our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast, you know, guardians come home, you don't want it to say, well, well, did you know that ISIS was mostly the remnants of the Saddam's army and that was Rumsfeld? You know, do you want to, it's hard to have the the knowledge that maybe it was just for the shareholders, maybe it was for Israel, maybe it was actually not what we had assumed. And or maybe the world is a complicated place where two things can be true at once. You can have a, you know, someone like uh an ISIS or a Taliban who do awful things, but you have to recognize the context in which that is in. Why are we there? Why did we go? What are we doing here? And, you know, and I think that that policy and that kind of like the way of viewing the world, we've got to, as a society, as a country, start viewing our defense as defense. I don't think anyone would look, you know, many of my friends who look at somewhere like China as someone who could say there are some policies that we can take from there, right? There are very good things that we think that they're doing and we can learn from that. And one of those things is their military, right? They have a strong national defense, and yet you don't see them invading other countries. You don't see them, you know, like they're they're in their territorial waters, but they're not over here, right? Mind their business for the most part. Right. And so, but we're there. And so what I would what I would advocate for as a leftist, I need to be very careful because I um am not for a uh you know, a massive military for no reason. I believe in a strong national defense, but if the Pentagon cannot account for $1.7 trillion, it needs to be audited and that budget needs to be slashed. And I think whereas I highly disagree, you know, as someone who wants to represent one of the largest federal workforces in the country here in Maryland 3, I represent people that were harmed by Doge. And no one, not, no one that I have spoken to has ever said, we don't think that there's waste, fraud, and abuse in places. We don't think that there's bloat. But the idea that you would, you know, not that you would allow children to come in with their algorithms and slash jobs of professionals and families who've been here for decades and worked with researchers and scientists, that's not improving our national security. That's not helping anything. But it goes so much further than that. I would talk about if you want to talk about real national security, how about we feed people? If you want to talk about real national security, how about we house people? How about we, you know, rebuild our infrastructure so that people can get to work on time? You know, a strong, a strong working class is a strong national defense, you know, like these things help themselves. Capitalism, you know, is a parasite in the defense industry just as it is in every other industry. The profit-seeking motive whereby I heard someone say it once in a way that stuck with me and is that, you know, I work for a defense contract. I'm, you know, I can't, I work for a small cybersecurity defense contractor in Columbia, right? That's part of that machine. And the reason that we, the reason that my company exists is because the government can't hire scientists. I work in a highly technical area where these people with, you know, these PhDs and these scientists that the government wants to hire, they simply can't afford to hire based on their current pay scales. But it's so instead of doing that, they hire, they have these companies that will hire them and pay them more money or the an amount that's equitable to the commercials level so they won't leave. But all of that is to say there are inefficiencies everywhere, right? These inefficiencies can be addressed. But overall, I think as a veteran, we have to see this and say, you know, it's it's great that we understand it. But what I I do not, I'm not uh I don't get behind Democrats who run veterans as a war hawk and say, if you're a Democrat and you repeat the lie that Iran is trying to take over the Middle East, or you repeat the lie that we had anything else to do in Afghanistan or Iraq than what we were doing, those are not positions that a progressive candidate should hold. And I would advocate strongly against him. So, you know, one of the things we've got to it goes all the way down. You know, my working in the oil or my father working in the oil industry for so long, I remember him telling me when I was very young that if oil ever gets around over $100 a barrel, it's very, very bad. And he's like, Austin, it's gonna get really bad. And it's done that a couple times, you know, in the last 15, 20 years, and it's been hard every single time. But again, more wars, more costs, gas prices go up. We're sitting in a, we're we're looming at a recession. I'm a millennial, you know, this is my third recession, fourth war, you know, whatever the number, the tally is. And so kind of wrapping up, it's not just myself who's a veteran. It's everyone since 9-11. I feel like the whole country has become a veteran in some way because we've been so militarized. Our whole society, you know, after 9-11, when Toby Keith went from singing about being a cowboy to shock and awe, I remember the the sort of it was a bad term. We all knew it was like, you know, my friends and I in high school at the time were thinking, this is so jingoistic. We're not down with this, you know, we don't care about this sort of thing. I remember them talking about, we were so upset at the time because the Patriot Act was was hadn't even been enacted yet. It was still being debated. They were obviously going to enact it, but part of it was that the the Bush administration was gonna be able to go in and, you know, back in the day when you went to the library, the librarian pulled out the stack of cards and you pulled your card out and you signed it, right? And well, they were gonna be able to look through that and see what you had checked out at the library. And I just remember our friends, I think they can't do that. You know, first of all, rest in peace, the Dewey Decimal system, the greatest system ever invented. But but we were just thinking they can't do that. And then, you know, fast forward 25 years, we have ice in the streets, and you know, like they can and they will and they will continue to do that. So, as someone who has been on the front end of the war on terror, someone who was motivated to join and then realized I understand now why the world is the way it is. You know, I went in thinking, what can we do better? Because I was under the impression that the United States, for the la better or for worse, was trying to do the right thing. And unfortunately, because both the Democrats and the Republicans are uniparty in their foreign policy, they were neither party was trying to do the right thing. They were trying to do the profitable thing at the expense of all of us. And so for me, a lot of about a lot of about running is like I said, one of the things about being raised in Oklahoma, Texas, or whatever is that you are raised on values that we take care of one another, right? You take care of your neighbors. It is, you can maybe you can place it in um a chauvinistic framework, but it is worthwhile to say that if we can help one another, we should. And I've never had anyone explain to me why the golden rule doesn't stand. And, you know, the real problem for everyone else is that I still believe it. So, you know, that's gonna be that's gonna be a problem for y'all because I'm sorry, but I have not been convinced that we shouldn't take care of one another. You know, I've I've been deprogramming myself from the mindset of of thinking that meritocracy is real and that, you know, somehow I, you know, I have lots to say about lots of different issues, but all of that is a, you know, it's kind of a growth process from a place of being, hey, I want to join the military, to standing on the other side of it 20 years later and looking at the world and looking at the United States and seeing our place in it and saying, what was this? What did what did we do and how did this make any of us safer? And the answer is it didn't.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

No, you're definitely right. I mean, I mean, for the longest time the military has been used to basically rain rain terror throughout the world and kind of really put the US as this, as this, we always say sh shining shining star on the heel, but but really we're we're a huge bully to the other countries to kind of make you say, like either, either comply or get destroyed. With that though, what was that kind of awakening moment for you for someone who went in for what seems like all the right intentions? What was that moment that you had that you thought, like, wow, like we're the bad guys in this?

SPEAKER_01 15:00

I can say there's been a there's been it's been a lot of little moments, you know. And I think one of the things that's difficult about it is that you have to confront your cognitive dissonance and you have to confront it feels bad. It feels bad to confront these ideas. And for me, it was engaging with a lot of my own community. So I'm a DSA member, right? And engaging with my fellow DSA members and them saying, Austin, that was messed up, or I don't agree that you did that. And and having, you know, the having the capacity to reflect and say, what can I learn, you know, without being defensive? What can I say that I agree with? What can I say that I can think about? And but I remember so very specifically being in the intelligence community, we very how do I say this? We've been tracking this the cycle of radicalization for people who get radicalized a long time, you know, like we know how that happens. We actually used to joke that we would we were radicalizing ourselves, you know, we would be watching the propaganda inside of, you know, in inside of our spaces or whatever, and be like, oh, you know, he's watch out or getting, but I want to say something true about that, which is that where there's a where there's a joke, there's a kernel of truth, and that the the more exposure that one has to the internal workings and the real dirty, bloody dealings of the United States, you have to make a that choice whether you're going to push down that that voice inside your head that says, I don't know if this is right, this doesn't seem right, or whether you're going to lean into it, wrap yourself in the flag and say, you know, I'm doing this for all the right reasons and I sleep well at night and no one can tell me otherwise. Because I find that those are a lot of you either have people who are, you know, have the capacity to internalize that, or they don't, you know. And what I would, what I would, you know, what's hard about this, I want to tell everybody that, you know, it's unfortunate that we have a government that's making the people who work in the security industry feel like they're doing something wrong because we have been the bullies, right? We have been. And unfortunately, someone posted the other day, it said, you know, how many beautiful, kind people have I killed just with my tax dollars? You know, and I just thought, so when you asked the question of what turned me or radicalized me, it was a slow process, but seeing our actions, and you know, one of the things that I used to do as a digital media examiner was I had looked through hundreds and millions of images, difficult images of bombings and and folks who have been injured overseas. And one of the things that, and these these are all on terrorists' hard drives, right? These are all on terrorist media. I'm looking at their propaganda from their phones.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

But one of the things I realized is that, okay, it's propaganda, but do you who, you know, who bombed that little girl in that photo? They didn't. You know what I mean? We did. And or Israel did, or one of our proxies did. You know, and so as you continue to see the harm, you have to look at it and either address the reality that this is happening and that we need to see this for what it is, or it's not. And for me, that even meant taking a look back at history. I've been a vote blue no matter who guy my whole life. I voted for gore. You know what I mean? Clinton was my first vote, actually. Wow. Yeah, back in Oklahoma. But, you know, we voted for all of these people, and I cried when Obama was elected. I was so excited. And then he bailed out the banks, drone strike a hundred million people, and deported the rest of them, you know? And I have to look back on that and say, that's what radicalized me. Going through the 2008 crisis where my friends and I couldn't find jobs right out of college, that that was like the canary in the coal mine, that the rest of our lives were gonna be difficult because we didn't have elected officials who were willing to go to bat for us, even, you know, and what I didn't understand at the time is that that was never going to happen because the fiscal policy and the foreign policy for the Dems and the Republicans are the same. But the, but I was hoping, you know, I had a lot of hope that there was gonna be some change. You and a lot of people. And I, you know, like I really did, and I really believed it. And I think that's why one of the reasons my campaign is not a, you know, like this, the the truly cringe worthy Mallory McMurrell video that just came out. That is not this campaign. I am so far removed from that fake joy. My joy is the joy of passionate expression, and we are going to grind these Republicans into the dust of history. Like I am no, we are no longer coming from because we've recognized that we can no longer ask. We can no longer beg and plead and say, Centrist Democrats, Republicans, please give us some crumbs, please. And now as a father, I am no longer willing to say, hey, my children, I'm sure that Sarah Elforth will throw you some crumbs eventually, you know, like as long as Israel gets paid. And that's just something I'm no longer willing to accept. I'm no longer willing to accept the idea that we have to bomb children, that we have to do these foreign wars. Oh, and that's I I got sidetracked, but what I was going to say earlier is that someone phrased it to me that the defense industry doesn't cost, you know, a bajillion dollars a year. It requires a bajillion dollars a year. And so no matter, you know, you see how easily Lockheed Martin put out a statement saying we we we're ready as President Trump, we're ready to bomb, we're ready to go to war for you. That is not, I don't know what society we live in, you know. And and what you have to recognize about America is that we are so warlike. We are actually very warlike people. I had no idea. I just thought we were all, I just thought we all played football and we fought, you know, and we we we don't like outsiders, you know. I didn't realize that I was being trained to be a warrior for the hierarchy, the patriarchal hierarchy that I was getting integrated into. And so it goes to all of that, you know. Like I'm I try to step back and see the superstructure for what it is and say, um, whether it's why these things are affecting us, what what has been the root cause of all of our pain? You know, because for a long time I was searching, I love reading, I love I love learning, and I was looking for a long time at what's been, you know, is there some secret that we didn't know? Like, why isn't there peace? You know, why isn't there happiness? Why can't why are we not building beautiful buildings? Why are we not why do our children not go to school in fresh air and sunlight? And and the answer is the life. Yeah, and the answer is just capitalism, right? The answer is just capitalism and profit motive seeking and settler colonialism and all of these things that continue to affect us. The continu, you know, there like as I've kind of continued like just unraveling all the things I was taught in my mind, it's been this journey of just accepting what I can, trying to move forward and then using that and saying, I've been there, look at me in as an example of someone who drank the Kool-Aid because I was raised that way. And then I thought I was doing the right thing. And I realized at some point that I I even was, you know, I, as someone, and I think a lot of people feel, well, I'm doing all I can. What do you what more do you want from me? Because it's hard. It's hard to say, yes, I will, I will internalize that. It takes effort to say yes, maybe I was incorrect about that. And so I think it's incumbent upon us now, as all veterans, if you're if you have accepted your place in, you know, American imperialism, that it's very important that you stand up and speak out and say, this is not who we are. Maybe, maybe June 6th, 1944, D-Day, we did it. We did a great job. Good job, everybody. Pat yourselves on the back, but we ain't we ain't that anymore. You know, like since then we've invaded Vietnam, we've invaded, we've genocided Korea, 20 years of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, you know, we've um, and that's just that's this the overt stuff, you know, and that's not talking about meddling in people's elections and you know, and and real politic and actually the things that we do that that affect the material world for for folks. And so if you're not willing to address that and take that on in Congress, then there's not going to be a real chance for change. You're not going to be able to affect the policy you need to. And that's why a lot of people get onto me and say, awesome, why are you always attacking the Democrats? And I feel like I'm I'm not. I'm, you know, I'm swinging for the fences at the Republicans, and these Democrats keep jumping in the way, like, no, we'll save you. You know, and I'm like, why? Why? Like they don't, you know, and so for example, even like my opponent, Sarah Elfritz, she doesn't actually want universal health care. Like, and I don't understand why. And like, and I just like I want to like from I'm like, explain it to me like I'm a child.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

I can explain it in like a little simpler way is a lot of times it's the health insurance companies who who pad their bank accounts to say, like, no, you're not gonna do this. But I also have a bigger conspiracy of it, is that if everyone was provided health care health care, that means you have a lot of people who have more free time to advocate for themselves and more time to actually get involved civically. And I think overall, most elected officials would rather low voters voter turnout, low voter engagement, people not really being involved. Because once you get people involved, then you get more people supporting left ear candidates or people actually caring, caring about the issues rather than just treating politics, unfortunately, like football. Like this is my team, this is your team, let's just fight it out.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

Absolutely. And and I think, you know, you'll any candidate will tell you the most difficult questions come from local, your local folks who show up and they've been following this idea, they've been following this story since before you were born. And you're not gonna have the perfect answer. And it is difficult, you know, it is difficult to go in front of constituents and not know what they're going to ask you. And I think we can see that Sarah Elfred doesn't hold town hall, she holds town three questions, and I'm gone, you know. And that because it's not easy. And when you don't have the answers that people want, you don't want to answer those questions. And like you said, we've made it about team sports because that's easier to control. That narrative is much easier to control if you allow anyone to, you know, to vote. And I mean, Chuck Schumer does not want every Democrat to vote, you know, like so they have a vested interest in keeping the playing field just narrow enough so that they can keep that uh rotating villain strategy and just control the narrative, just so, you know. And I so absolutely I think that getting having that representation there that actually is willing to get out and and be wrong. I think the part of the people we are we are we live in this, you know, a clip society now, right? So you get clipped, you're gonna you're gonna get clipped, it's gonna have a bajillion views. And so no one wants to say I I was wrong or I made a mistake. But I will say, like, I apologized online for voting for Kamala. And I know that that was not people were not happy about that because I think it was a mistake. I never again, and my policy at this point, and it's the policy of every leftist progressive I know, is that these centrists are going to once again try and run someone like Gavin Newsome, and I'm simply not doing it. If you want to earn the vote of the people, get run someone the people will vote for, you know, release the autopsy or stop talking. We know why you lost, we know what happened, you know. If you and it was simply, like you said, one of those things where if you say like we should have universal health care or we should stop a genocide, I don't like anyone, anyone that doesn't just say, I agree, needs to be checked out, right? Because there's no moral, you know, you can equivalent your way out of it or you can justify it any way you want. But for me, all I hear, everything passed, we're committing, you know, we are committing a genocide is just dribble. And I think that that's weak. And I think that we need to stand against that and just say, no, we support universal healthcare. But again, it's their vested interest, just like you said. The only thing that makes sense is that they have some kind of interest in not saying that. And I don't know how they sleep at night. I don't know how you can sit there and say, and what even gets me is that they sell out for so little, you know?

SPEAKER_00 26:36

That's the thing. That's the thing. You look at other countries when they like how the US talks about other countries are so corrupt and look at their oligarchs and all that. I always say, yes, they are corrupt, but at least we can say they're like they're being being corrupt for like gold mansions and palaces and all that. Yeah, yeah. People get corrupt for like campaign five like campaign money. I'm like something you can't even use on yourself.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

Like an R an R V, bro. An RV, an RV, I'm like a plane ride. Come on, a fancy dinner somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

That's what I'm like, this is the worst, worst thing. So with that, let's kind of go. Well, before we go into the whole campaign finance of it all, I do want to get your thoughts on the uh genocide that is currently going on in Palestine, the um annexation of the West Bank, but also talk about the broader. I I even struggle to call it a war because it doesn't really feel like a war. It kind of feels like a hostile takeover. Are you someone who believes in a one-state solution, two-state solution? What do you want to see at the end of all this?

SPEAKER_01 27:39

I I want I want to see what the Palestinian people want to see. So at first I want to, you know, center their voices, but what I believe should happen is that we need a one-state solution. I do not believe in, I no longer believe in a two-state solution. I think that is a J Street lie meant to funnel anger back into support for Israel. Israel is not only committing a genocide, they need to be sanctioned and they need to be held accountable for their crimes. Benjamin Netanyahu needs to see The Hague. And the people who have, you know, perpetrated these crimes need to be held accountable before the International Criminal Court. So the Palestinian people have a right to their land. The Nakba happened way before October 7th, and this this occupation has been ongoing. Just to get it out there as soon as possible, I will not condemn Hamas.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Can you tell some people why? Because a lot of people, a lot of people hearing that are gonna say, oh my gosh, that's what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to say, I condemn Hamas. Where I'll give you my take first is that Hamas, I hate that that we kind of talk about them as if they are this like terrorist organization. They are the official government of the Palestinian people in Gaza. So it is like we should talk about them as we talk about any other government. They're they're a government just like the Israeli has has a government too. So we should talk about them in that way. But for your own self, can you kind of talk about why you do not condemn Hamas?

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Yeah, absolutely. First, just like you said, Hamas is a is a governmental organization. Now, I think what people what they're thinking when they say Hamas is they're thinking about they're really saying, do you could condemn the Al-Qassam Brigades, right? And and my answer is still no. And I'll tell you why. Um, I recognize that they're deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, and I fully accept that. That's fine. But I do, uh I will not condemn a people who are resisting their murder. I will not condemn a people who are resisting their genocide. I don't care who it is, it's not about whether they're Palestinian or Israeli, whether they're Sudanese or Congolese. If you are resisting your own destruction, you have the full right and authority to do that. And um, and further, if you look at what the con you know, the composition of the Al-Qassam Brigades, mostly orphans from by Israel. So you're talking about an army of essentially orphaned children whose parents were murdered by the state of Israel, and you're asking me to condemn that. And I'm telling you right now, you can clutch your pearls all the way to hell, but I will not do it. I will stand up for these people who are fighting for themselves. I will condemn Israel for conducting terrorist attacks, for conducting terrorism against the West Bank, against the people of Gaza, against the people of southern Lebanon, against the people of Syria. You know, when you brag about, I know a lot about terrorism, let me tell you. And when you put plastic explosives into pagers and put that into a civilian population and let them explode, that's terrorism. Uh, you can, and so, and I I find any United States politician that accepts the a golden pager as a gift from anyone, just the most disgusting thing that I think I've ever seen in my life. And that kind of uh I don't know if it's like, you know, when I was, and I'll I don't want to backtrack too much, but I was raised as a as a Southern Baptist, as a full Baptist in Oklahoma, you know what I mean? Like, and it took me some time. By the time I was in high school, I wasn't really involved. I was kind of like, I'm not sure about this. Um, but Zionism and and is so prevalent even in like Southern American states, like the evangelical churches that I attended to, or the, you know, the campuses or whatever they called them when they got smart, um, were you know, you would have like special shops that just sold religious iconography and things like that. And there would be like, you know, everything was in Hebrew, and and the Jewish people were set aside as this like special sect of Christianity, you know, like somehow they were like the original Christians in a way because of Judaism, but but but also people were pretty anti-Semitic too, you know. They would actually say things that were not, and so it was very confusing. And but we put this special like idea, and I don't know if our politicians have been, you know, I don't know what's happened, why they have such loyalty to this state, but looking at it on the surface, you can just see that it's clearly wrong. And you see, you know, videos of settlers beating Palestinians. And I mean, I watched uh I watched the um the voice of Hen Rajab the other day, and I mean I cried my eyes out. Like, you cannot, we cannot account for this, you know. We this cannot, if I'm in a position of power to stop this, like Austin, what would you do? I would park the US Abraham Lincoln five feet off the shore of Palestine and say, enough, enough. And so I would be someone, you know, I support any state's right to exist that can exist peacefully with its neighbors, but I do not support the right of a genocidal apartheid state to exist in any form while it's you know conducting a genocide on its neighbors and and you know, uh unilaterally acting with aggression. So that's where I will be a vote against any kind of until the day that the genocide stops, until the day that there is truth and reconciliation, that you know, Palestinians are able to return their land, not another dime. Not another dime, you know.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Thank you for that. No, no, that's amazing. And I think it's even more powerful for you to say that because you are a uh veteran. So you come from the military, and a lot of times we we we on the left, speaking broadly, we kind of look look at veterans as like, okay, y'all are like too far gone, but you need veterans who are like able to call it out and and speak to other veterans who may be maybe not too far gone, but gone a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:00

One kind of thing as we're closing out the military part is what are your thoughts on what's going on with Cuba, Venezuela, as we see right now, right now right now the US has basically shut off like support that uh Cuba could be getting throughout throughout the world. They're they're going through uh blackouts. We had actual um uh brigades of um uh basically humanitarians throughout the world go to Cuba, delivering aid. Uh some people were actually arrested, like uh Chris Smalls, one of the um I saw him union leaders, things like that. What are your thoughts on what's going on? And just how would how would you kind of try to move forward?

SPEAKER_01 33:35

Yeah, I I was very uh saddened to see Chris Smalls get arrested, uh, because it seemed like no one else did, you know, on the way back. So I was tracking uh all the influencers, Hassan and everybody else coming back and uh are doing their thing. Well, first of all, with Cuba, uh we should absolutely end the embargo today. We should end the embargo yesterday. There's no reason to embargo this nation, there's no reason to blockade this nation. We've been starving these people for 40, 50 years now for no reason whatsoever, except red scare. You know, the pervasive red scare continues to haunt America, and Republicans and Democrats have used that in order to justify this action against these. And so I would absolutely I would end in the blockade. I would, you know, there I would go so far, the same with anyone in our territorial waters. We these should be you said earlier about going, you know, removing like Venezuela and Cuba, and it made me think about how we've changed from our soft power stance to a hard power stance and how devastating that is for all of us. And but it does, it does illuminate the contradictions a little bit more in showing that whereas before Cuba was blockaded, we just weren't that aware of it. We weren't, but now we have people who are advocating for the destruction of a small island, and it's like, no, that's not who we are, that's not what anyone ever advocated for. Even, even my, you know, the aunt and uncle still living out in Oklahoma somewhere who are certain that Che Guevara is still alive and still runs Cuba, you know, or whatever, you know, and Castro is still there, even they say this is unnecessary, right? Why are we doing this to these people? And I again have never heard a justification for why we should be doing that. It's just a we are punishing them the same way we punish Haiti for having the gall to stand up for themselves and having the gall to throw off their colonial chains. I believe that is why we punish Cuba. And with Venezuela, Venezuela, I think, is the clearest example of foreign policy failure where this is the act of a nation that does not have the requisite authority anymore to be able to pass off its violence as justice. Instead of being able to say, well, the the Venezuelan people were under duress and we helped them and now they're liberated, we simply say, no, we're just killing their, we're, you know, capturing their leader, killing his guard and taking them out. We own your stuff now. But that degrades our power. That shows that we are that paper tiger, that we can do some things, but why did we have to do that? We had to do that because Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the in the world. And China is beating us to Sunday with every single piece of renewable energy. And so now we're stuck in the situation where we actually have to run foreign wars of aggression to fulfill our need for hydrocarbons. So instead of changing our trajectory early on, like China was forced to do, we simply refused to do it and said, well, just, you know, take over someone else's oil. At some point, like you see with Iran right now, we're getting a bloody nose, right? We're getting a bloody nose. We're having to take a step back. We are, I don't even know what we're negotiating anymore. It's like, no, you closed the street. No, I closed it. No, I closed it first. You know, like I don't even understand what you know. It was clear to everyone that they had no justification, they had no clear incentive in the beginning, but now we just have to do it because we are beholden to the state of Israel who funds or has compramot on our politicians or something to which they feel compelled that we must go out and you know, actually spend blood and treasure for these, this, this folly, right? It doesn't, I don't there are lots of people that I talk to every single day deep within the in the intelligence community who are like, what are we doing? What are we doing? Yeah. No, no, and there are certainly people that are like, you know, who have said, no, that's fine. They they're, you know, they're gonna they're gonna get a nuclear weapon. Oh, okay, sure, you know, fine. But but a lot of folks, especially the intelligence a little bit different, we're supposed to be the ones who know better. And that's something that, you know, intelligence was always interesting to me because I wanted to be the one that was in the room when the decision was made. I wanted to be there to say we have a moral compass, we have a bedrock of principles, we can make the right decisions. And what is true is that those all of those facts are still known, but now we don't have anyone in place to stop Trump. We don't have anyone in place who will actually be a voice of reason. Or if they are, they're immediately removed by Pete Hexeth. You know, so so all of that is to say that you know, there is no justification for war with Iran. I want a I want peace with Iran. I want us to have strategic partnerships with Iran. You know, like it doesn't make any sense. Show me a country in the world and tell me why we shouldn't have a partnership with them. You know, like I I look forward to your I look forward to your submissions and why we shouldn't, because I I don't think that that's the case. I think it's time, past time we live and live in a world of peace. China is beating us. If you want national security, Chinese is beating us in every uh department, including with their Belt and Road Initiative, which are, again, giving low-cost loans to the you know African nations, where when America comes in, we, the IMF and the World Bank, we impose austerity, right? And we have these high interest rates, and you have to give your resources over to BP. Whereas China is saying here's a low interest rate, and we're building your roads for you because they're trying, they understand that they're trying to open up the international market, right? They're they're you know, trade, I want to say trade maxing, they're trade maxing, right? But they're they're really doing their thing. And but we're not, we don't have the foresight as a nation to say, well, we should be doing this. Why aren't we competing in that same market? If you're such a capitalist, why are you not competing in this market instead of trying to bomb the third world?

SPEAKER_00 38:58

No, you're definitely right. And kind of final thoughts with this is that it's scary that the intelligence community is looking at it and say, what are we doing? Because to a point, it starts to feel as if our country's and not really country, but the politicians' beholdenness to Israel is like it feels like it's attached to the campaign finance of it all. But but then it also feels like it's something deeper than that too, because even before APAC was even discussed, they were still beholden to this country. It's just been ignoring, ignoring, ignoring, which is just just insane. So it's definitely like a breath of fresh air that that you can call it out and feel free to call it out too, and not one of these kind of scared pol politicians, because even the sad thing here in Maryland, seeing seeing people challenge current incumbents or challenge people, how many people are are scared to talk about it, who feel like, oh, maybe I can just run as like left on everything but this. Yeah, which I think is really a destructive thing. It kind of shows where where people's morals are. But as we kind of change topics here, let's talk about immigration because because you mentioned getting getting ice, ice out. So I definitely want to want to hear more in your thoughts on that. But I kind of want to talk about real quick is how the conversation around ice has has changed. And me as a black person, I kind of feel like the conversation ice is taking a weird turn because you hear people talk about how, oh my gosh, ice killing people in the streets is is wrong. But then Chuck Schumer said it, said it once, which another horrible person. But Chuck Schumer said that ICE officers need to be trained like our police officers are. But I look at that and say, police officers kill more people than iCE. So where do you kind of see that dynamic of how ICE is acting, police is acting, but overall just our kind of our system of authoritarianism towards our own people?

SPEAKER_01 40:48

Yeah, I I am I am devastated. I I drive to work every day down um 70, right? And and 20 and 32. I see, I see more cops now than I've seen in so many years. And I I essentially feel like we live in a police state at this point. Um, someone said it to me, uh, and I and I it it hurt me deeply, and I so I knew it was true, uh, that right now white people are feeling the effects of police, like black people have been feeling the effects of police for a long time. And I think there's a certain truth to that that it is more visible to your your average white voter now in the suburb who's upset about it. And I, first of all, immigration, I just want to say this first, we love our immigrants. Second, immigrants make America strong and we want more of it. The next part is I was so disappointed that Kamala and the Democrats ran with the lie that we were being invaded. And the reason that that lie worked is because there was some truth to it. Not that we were being invaded by this horde. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, and I wanted to say that we haven't discussed, is that let's not just discount racism and Islamophobia and all this too, you know, as that ramped up. But I think for a lot of people, they saw that the immigration, illegal immigration numbers were climbing, and then there was a convenient lie to sell all this to them. And so they just ate it up, and then Democrats tried to run on it. But the truth is there was a surge in immigration from 2022 to 2024 during COVID, right? So we had a push-pull effect on immigration that happened at the time where four nations were undergoing terrible economic hardship. Haiti, Venezuela, I'm gonna forget the other two right now. I want to say Argentina, but I'll come back to it. And then on the on the R side, we had the great resignation, we had people dying from COVID, and we had people retiring. And so you look at the numbers and they do spike up. They actually do absolutely spike up for two years or so. And then afterwards, when COVID dies down, people return to work, the numbers return back to normal. So did we have a bump? Yes. Did it return back to normal? Absolutely. But when I saw Democrats running and saying we should build a border wall and we need to militarize the CBP and we need to have ICE enforcement, and I Obama increased ICE, you know, like Joe Biden increased the budget. Like I watched them increase the budget, and it was it caused me a certain level of discomfort at the time. But I being a liberal, I was like, oh well, it must be, you know, Democrats doing it. You know, like I guess that's you know, so and now I just say they're just as bad. You know, like I have to look at it and say the material reality reality here is that it was bad then, it's bad now. Immigration is a paperwork issue. It doesn't need to be an in a militarized enforcement issue. The programs uh to encourage people to come to courts have like a 96% success rate. People want to be legally documented. No one wants to be hiding in the shadows, no one wants to go to the store wondering if ICE is going to pick them up. I see people working all the time, and I think, what must it be like to go to your job every day and wonder if today's the day you're going to Seacot? And I'm just livid that we have we live in a society where some portion of the American public has deemed that is okay. And I was speaking to people actually in Frederick, Maryland, yesterday evening, or no, Saturday evening on the street, handing out some pamphlets and stuff and just talking to them about uh their district and someone who's running there. And you still have people who are buying, I would say, let's abolish ice. And they'll say, Well, we can't, you know, because the immigrants they'll they'll come in, they'll and they'll say, Well, you know, they, you know, the previous immigrants had to work really hard and now, but now these new ones aren't. And I was like, I think that's just racism. One. And two, no one is ever saying that we don't, that we shouldn't have a proper enforcement system, but we should also just have a proper immigration system. If it takes 10 years to get through the immigration process, that's not an immigration system. That's a system that wants you to come here illegally to work for nothing for corporations who benefit from that. I mean, it's never been clear to me why we're not holding corporations responsible who hire undocumented immigrants. I'm I'm wondering when that answer is coming from someone. And I've realized now that it's just not. And so that's why, Austin, why are you running? Because of all this, because of all of this, because if you don't have, and it's like you said, you could be good on a lot of things, but if you're bad on something like Israel, if you're bad on something like healthcare, it speaks to where your heart's at. It speaks to what you really care about because these are things that benefit other people that might not benefit me, you know. Like these are things that I want for the next generation. And I think we I want to live in a society where strong guys are gentle guys, we take care of one another and we love one another, and we don't tolerate like I'm you know, I've I'm not tolerating, I'm not saying trans people or black people. That's it's we. It's we, you know, like I'm done. I am done pretending like we're not a family, and I'm done it's like everyone's saying, Well, why is the left defending Hassan? Because we're all done pretending that we don't like this. We're we're done pretending that you get to decide what's good for us and what's what we can like and what we can't like, and who we're going to love and who we're going to protect and who we're what we're going to defend. So if you have garbage policies, I'm going to call them out. I'm not beholden to Chuck's humor. You know, I like my I live in a little townhouse. I like it. You know, I like my little cozy space. I don't need to live in the governor's mansion. I can't be blackmailed. Like you could tell me I'm cringe. I'm a millennial. I was born cringe, you know, like that's my birthright. So what do you got? You know, and I think that's the benefit of running as a progressive. That's the benefit of running as someone who actually cares about is that we can go after them, you know, because even if someone said to me the other day, like, well, you're not going to get elected, and so and it's you're going to fail. And I thought to myself, it's so beautiful. I could literally die, and socialism is still going to win. You know what I mean? Like, because we have an idea, because we are more than the sum of our parts, right? Like each of us, like, and that's why I believe that politicians should not be celebrities. They should be vessels for policy. And that's it. Like, either put the policy in the bag, little bro. Like, either vote for the way you're supposed to be voting or vote them out. Because I don't have any time. Like, my daughter doesn't know Chuck Schumer, doesn't care, you know, but she does know that they won't vote for women's, they won't codify row. All right. You had a supermajority and you didn't codify row. And so that's it's we're done. I'm sorry, this conversation's over. Get them out, pack the court, pack the pack it all. We're done. And then, like, though, so there's the other thing is there's no amount of like parliamentarian hijinks that I will not get up to to make Republicans' lives miserable. Like, why are we not fighting back? Why are we not making their lives absolutely terrible? Like, Cash Patel wants to take his girlfriend on a plane trip to Las Vegas or whatever, requisition the fuel. Not today, my guy. You know what I mean? Like, we know what these people do for a living. We can hold quorum calls, we can make them read the bills, we can make them stand on the floor and make their lives uncomfortable. Yeah, the problem is we've got a party in there currently that's not willing to be uncomfortable. We have the party, the leadership and the Democrats that are not willing to upset that status quo, because I don't even want to talk about Chuck Schumer's latest video that, you know, like and about Palestine, not Palestinians not believing the Torah. Like, okay, I just have to take a deep breath, you know, and be like, we obviously have people that are literally insane and they need to be removed from power before they kill us all. And so that's why, whether it's Democrat, Republican, you know, if you're a if you're essentially a neocon who is not invested in the people of the United States or is invested in war against others for religious reasons of some kind. I'm a secular man, but I welcome all religions in our country. Everyone's welcome here, but we do not go to war over religion and things like that. That's not something that America does. Like we're a progressive society of people who care about one another and want to take care of our world. I was there. We got rid of CFCs. All right. Millennium Millennials did that. There was a hole in the ozone. We closed it. Okay. And then what happened? Everything went to heck. But it can be better. And people will care about that. You know, we can have a society that cares about our earth and takes care of one another and looks at how we treat one another, right? And not just says it. I'm so sick of, I'm so sick of Democrats telling the thing that telling people they care about minorities. I'm sick of them telling about they care about black people, if they care about Asian people. Until the election's over.

SPEAKER_00 48:47

Until they're not that we go back to not care.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

But it's just, they never like they'll they'll pander, but why don't you go on record and say, what I like to say, I I tweeted this because it was fire. But the only thing that Hillary Clinton should have pulled out of that purse is reparations. You know what I mean? Instead of trying to pander and say, Well, I'm like this. Here's some some it's just racism is really what it is. And it's just white chauvinism, right? It's it's just white, like, oh, well, we're gonna take, well, don't worry, we'll take care of you. And you know, as a well, I know we're kind of getting very into race now, but I I love it because I'm glad you technically, yeah. No, I think I think that America, you know, the more I have invested myself into the idea of America and especially living here, one of the there is no America without black people. The idea of America doesn't exist without our original sin of slavery and the the the you know the dichotomy of trying of saying you live, you want a a new society while, you know, using the the blood of of others to to enact that. We've never recovered from that. And and that's there's not a re and when I say recovery, I mean what I people oftentimes don't address how intertwined that still is. When we talk about systemic racism, it's just part, I mean, that's just like we're talking about surface level, right? Our whole society is built on this, right? And everything we do touches it. And it's the same way I tell my, you know, some of my friends will say, like, well, every what what do we do? Like, we work for this company or that company. And it's like, I know it's hard because everything we touch is covered in blood. Everything in America, you know, we we started on genocide. Manifest destiny was just genocide. And I think about the that picture with the skulls every time, the buffalo skulls, you know, and the guy standing next to it. And as someone who grew up in Oklahoma, the native experience and the indigenous experience was really strong. And, you know, the trail of tears was still talked about as if it happened just, you know, a few generations ago, because it was just a few generations ago. And so the idea that, you know, we can disconnect ourselves from this, you know, I believe a lot in class, and I believe in intersectionality, in such that we have to recognize that class affects minorities, the violence of the state affects minorities in a much different way. And so being cognizant of that, and but all of this is, you know, it's all connected one big piece. And I think that's what, if I could tell anyone anything, is that it's capitalism, it's patriarchy, it's colonialism. Step back and you see the full picture for what America has been and what it could be. We can't dismantle this unless we say we're going to have truth and reconciliation. We can't dismantle this structure unless we say we recognize this is the case. We recognize that there is systemic racism, we recognize that there are endemic problems of poverty within all subclasses, right? And so, but no one is willing to address this. No one is, and again, if a Democrat wants to support black people, $25 minimum wage, because you know what? That supports white people too. Again, universality and all of these things is what matters. Like, why are we not the working class is all of us, the working class bridges all of these boundaries. And so why are they not advocating for that? Why are they refusing?

SPEAKER_00 51:46

No, you're exactly right. And it's one, one, I'm so glad that that you kind of segue there to it without me doing it. But like, I'm glad that you mentioned so I do just want to kind of like like real quick nail this down. Are you a supporter of um reparations? Yes, sir. Wonderful, wonderful. Because you're right. It's a lot of people who talk about, oh, we support black black people. The one thing I always hate is that when when when politicians talk about black people, the only thing they talk about is voting rights and um the legal justice system, and that's it. As if we do not face the same economic crisis that everyone else faces. Like when it comes to home um uh people having having homes, we don't face the same problems, housing, all this different stuff. As we segue into some different actually, now that we're kind of in the conversation about the whole Democratic Party, I kind of have had a question since we started, kind of around you you talk a lot about the Republican Party being awful and and also centrist Democrats being being being awful too, which in my mind makes up the majority of politicians who who are Democrats. Do you think the Democratic Party can actually be reformed or changed? Or do you think we're gonna need an outside party? Because you look at Kamala Harris's um present presidential run, even even some of the kind of left-wing things that she ran on in 2020, she she uh changed on. The Democratic Party has has kind of turned their back on the uh trans community. The Democratic Party has kind of ostracized black men to say that this is this is this is your fault. Immigration has changed. Health healthcare, Democratic Party really doesn't even talk about universal healthcare now. They really only only talk about a public option under Biden who have uh the cancellation of student loans isn't even brought up now. Some of the the most basic things that kind of Bernie Sanders established, we no longer talk about it. Do you think there is even a way to, or also before that, we even saw when progressives, democratic socialists, the uh squad, how however you want to call them, had a slim majority in the House that they could have forced a vote to at least started started to get whether it that was a um universal health care vote, get a key uh uh uh seats or on different committees, actually wield some power. We saw the actual left saying say uh no, but then two years later, the Republicans did it and got out of that um a new speaker, committee seats, changed their whole that their whole game. And then the big thing that LC said to that is oh, if we did that, we would lose so much power within the Democratic Party and we would uh be be out of favor when you can look at the party, it doesn't even favor them at all. Do you think the party can actually be changed?

SPEAKER_01 54:23

I don't know. I'll be honest, I don't know. And so I think that what we're there is such corruption within the Democratic Party right now. I have to work, just to be perfectly real, I have to work within the context of the battlefield I'm given. And I do not believe a third party is viable right now, because it would be if we would if AOC or Bernie, whom I both support and love, would break off and start that third party. But I think you'd have to have that kind of momentum. I don't think just someone just starting a third party who was, you know, who didn't have any name recognition, I don't think would be a viable strategy. But as we've seen in the UK, this has happened before, right? The Greens broke off saying, okay, fine, then we'll just go do our own thing. And now they're the most popular party there, right? They're surging. And that's what will happen here. And that what the issue is whether the Democrats are either going to splinter and we're gonna, you know, they will splinter off and the old guard will have to leave. So I'm coming at this as a people keep calling me the Democratic Tea Party, right? It's sort of like that, I guess, right? But we are a you know, I've done my reading, so I like the I prefer a vanguard term, but you know, so like we're I like that. If we're if we're the vanguard into the Democratic Party to say, and it is essentially entryism, right? We're entryists to say we are because the Democratic Party is whatever we say it is. The Democratic Party is whatever I say it is. It is, if I run as a Democrat and I say I'm a Democrat, I'm a Democrat and my policies are Democratic. So the idea that what Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Corey Booker think are the Democratic morals and values, that's just what they think. That's not what I think, and that's not what the people of America think. So, and right now the disparity between what the media and the DNC wants us to like and what the American people actually actually want and like is very different. So either they can get on board or they will be forced out. But either way, we're either going to have a um, you know, ship of theseus democratic party where we just replace them individually, or we will have, you know, have it all at once if they want to fight about it. But what I think the most important thing to let them know is that we are willing, ready, looking forward to the fight. We know you're gonna fight. We know you're gonna kick and scream, we know you're gonna call us anti-Semitic, we know you're gonna call us fascists, we know you don't know what that term means, and we don't care. We're not asking for your permission and we're running anyway. So you can gnash your teeth and cry all you want, but here we are, and we're voting, and we're giving people universal health care, and we're giving people free school lunches, and we're gonna take care of Americans, and we're stopping aid to Israel. Because I, it's wild to me we don't have high-speed rail. Again, one of these things that are just so simple and so straightforward, and everyone's for it. But, you know, we don't have the other the other portion of it is we don't really have labor militancy in America either. You know, unions have been essentially gutted and now opt it. Exactly, and overtaken. Now you've got the rank and file are typically somewhat progressive, but the what I didn't realize running this was on me, I learned a valuable lesson. Unions, union leadership is wildly moderate and they are very corporate-based, and you're not getting any kind of help from there. But we have to build that social consciousness up in America. We've got to build, you know, we have to build a socialist society before we're gonna get a society that looks socialist. We have to build socialist people, right? We have to come at it from a new angle and say, these are the values that we care about. I don't care about waging war in Iran. I care about having schools and people taken care of. And I want every person to be loved and feel take, you know, feel loved. And and so we've also realized that we're never going to get that by asking. We're never going to because, like you said, as soon as the they find it convenient, they ditch those, you know, like and I don't I would even say that I don't think Kamala ran very left at all. I think she kind of started middle and ran right. You know, I we get a the pundits also say, like, oh, she she she supported trans people or she ran too far to the left. And I'm like, she was talking about the most lethal military and how and transnational border gangs and all this. And I was like, what democratic party is this? And so I have seen personally just the slide to the right. And, you know, I would love to have a Democratic Party that's all united against our fight against the right, but that's just not the system that the right has set up, is that they've, you know, they've taken over part of the Democratic Party as well. And so we've got to root that out before we can really do much against them because we'll keep fighting the right. We know they're wrong, we know their policies are hurtful and harmful. But, you know, when you have people that are actively blocking and, you know, these ops like Mallory McMahon, like people actively trying to take away votes from the progressive candidates who support the will of the people, this is something that we've got to root out from the party, root and stem. And I think Zionism and the Israel lobby speaks a lot to that. I think that it's gonna go a long way. And it it's like it's like anything. It's like I say with um like gun control. Let's see how we do when everyone's fed and housed, you know, and and healthy and happy and don't live in broken homes. And because, you know, let's try that first. And instead of letting them tell us that that's not possible, instead of telling us that we have to have war and we have to, you know, we can't pay for one another, we can't pay for people to go to college. And how do we expect to win against any of these people if if if winning is your goal, but you're not willing to build? I mean, because society builds people, right? Society makes these. We produce engineers, we produce doctors and scientists and lawyers and all of these things that can help us, but we're so far past that we're willing to sacrifice whole divisions of our economic industrial class to satisfy the whims of a few billionaires. We're not, you know, we're not secure. It's actually very insecure. And I feel, and maybe that's you know, I someone who's further to the left of me could be like, there's your, there's your conservatism creeping up, where I'm like, I feel insecure, right? Where I feel threatened just by how how sketchy everything is, how shaky all of our all of our systems are being tested. And we've got to have people to stand up to it and say, we're not voting for this, and we're going to hold you accountable. It's not just that. And here's what I'd say about AOC. I love AOC. She says things sometimes, I'm like, why are you saying this? You know, like any friend, I would counsel her to, I think she has some good political instincts and some missteps, right? And I think that her her team gives her that advice, and I and I think she she fights back too, you know, she does not like being called out, and nobody does. But you know what? I'll hold her accountable too. You know what? Because I I don't think that no one is above reproach. And I would ask my friends the same way that I asked them to tell me when I've made a mistake. I would ask that the same of my peers in Congress. Like, I can't wait to get in there and be like, Ro, I love what you're doing. But what's up with this crypto stuff? You know what I mean? Like, come on. So, like these are conversations, but we can hold them accountable and say, all right. And I think we've got that. We've got a beachhead. The squad has uh allowed progressives to have a small hold in Congress. I want to vote with Summer Lee 100% of the time. I want to be Illan Omar's top guy. You know, like I want to be, I want to be with them there too. But we're rolling in the tanks. You know what I mean? Like, we're not coming in to say, oh, we're gonna hold space and we're gonna do bodies and spaces. We're no more, you will not find me interpretive dancing outside of the Kennedy Center. I am going to be holding these people accountable and making their lives miserable on the floor and holding up every single bill and holding up every single appropriation and every single judge and every appointment and everything that we could be doing and we should be doing. I was actually thinking the other day that I need to have someone on my staff called like the parliamentarian or like the parliamentary like black wizard, you know, or some like battle mage, right? Like someone whose sole job is to just figure out what are the ways in which we can make their lives difficult if they will not acquiesce to our demands, right? Because why are we allowing them? My daughter's not getting any younger, and I do not want her to grow up in a world where she could be assaulted and then her accuser gets let off. I am, I'm sorry, but I am ready to bring in the new woke era. I'm a feminist, I'm a veteran, and y'all are all in trouble because we're taking care of people. You know what I mean? Like we care for each other and we're standing up. And I just think it's we're gonna fight. And like we we know a fight's coming. And I think people have been rallying around us because that we need fighters. And it's not just me. You know, there's Ethan, there's Jakeia, there's all sorts of people running in Maryland who are who are fighters, who are progressives, who are ready to do this, but they're not getting any support from the DNC. You know, we're obviously getting nothing but other stuff and without airing out all the strategies. You know, it's a it's a dog fight, you know, it's a knife fight in a phone booth to try and get past these primaries because the establishment does not want progressive people coming in here saying that, yes, we actually do want universal healthcare. Because again, that doesn't, we can't have, well, we actually can have universal health care and war with Iran. But I will say it differently. I will say we don't need one and we desperately need the other.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:53

Yeah. I mean, the way, the way capitalism looks at it, all the military contractors look at it, if we have universal healthcare, that takes money away from us. But then also, I've always said one of the biggest reasons that we do not have universal free, free uh college or universal healthcare is because the military doesn't want that. But most people do not need to rely on the military to take care of their basic needs. A lot of people wouldn't go into the military. If I could go to college for free and not have to pay for it, I don't need to go possibly die in a war that isn't profiting me or isn't even helping keep our country safe. I would just go to college. I would just get healthcare. Absolutely. But with that, uh, two to three three more questions here is one, you did a lot about kind of fighting back against your party, the Republicans, all that with uh with an Austin Dykes in Congress vote for Hakeem Jeffries. Okay. Oh wow. Okay, that was that was a fast answer. There wasn't even a okay. It is a podcast that I did with with with a candidate running for Congress. I will not name this person because I actually didn't air the podcast because it just went kind of kind of weirdly. Who gave me like a run? There's supposed to be like a progressive candidate, and they gave me a runaround, like, well, I need to have a conversation with them, and then we need to talk. And I'm always thinking, like, Hakeem Jeffries does not care about having a conversation with you when you get into Congress to get your vote. It's uh either you're gonna support me or you're not.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:18

And that's the way that we have as progressives, you know, what I would say is we need to start playing the same game. Hakeem doesn't do anything for free. He put, you know, he's gonna smile on camera, but this, these are killers, right? These are cutthroats. We're politicians, right? Don't don't get it twisted. And like the idea that, like, again, uh it might show that this person, thankfully, you know, we don't want to lead them to the slaughter. You know, like if they're if they don't understand what they're walking into, then maybe it's for the best. But the idea that you shouldn't have these stances or, you know, you trade political capital in exchange for other things and you can hold people accountable for that to get what you want. That's what politics is about. But what Democrats have done and what the you know, the people in Congress now, they pre-negotiate, right? This, like you said, they say, well, I have to have a conversation. What's there to have a conversation about? Have you not been following politics? Have you not know where he stands?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:08

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:08

And I think, you know, my therapist, God bless her, says, when people tell you who they are, believe them. And so when you see, and so I don't, most of the time, I don't even really look at what I mean. I I, you know, I monitor the situation constantly. So I'm always seeing what people put out. But I I look at what's a spreadsheet called the Democrat left tracker, and I just look at where exactly they have voted. It's a great spreadsheet. I think if you Google it, you'll go to uh it's like a Reddit post and it has every single vote listed, what they care about or you know, what they actually vote for, has them ranked, right? And so for me, that helps you make decisions about who I want to support. Like, for example, and I'll I'll just lay it out plainly like AOC, I think is the like something like seventh or eighth best voting Democrat. Rokana is like two above her or one percent above her. And so really it's a it's a math question, right? So if we're gonna run AOC for president, people are like, oh, pro run or AOC run. Okay. If someone has this much popularity and they vote with us 97% of the time, I think that's pretty good. Whereas if they someone like Sarah Elfret, she votes, you know, 47% of the time with the Republicans. You know, she voted to thank, you know, Charlie voted to thank ICE. She voted to honor the life and legacy of Charlie Kirk, you know, like and and I'm and to me, when I see that, I'm thinking, you're not even willing to sit, you're not even willing to say Charlie Kirk was a bigot. Like if you're not willing to say Charlie, you know, that we don't support Charlie Kirk and you guys are all nuts, like get get get over it. But what are we doing? Not that we anyone supports political violence, but to say what the administration has tried to do with this has been completely outrageous. And so when you have someone who's willing to support that, why are we allowing people to give them these little to just ease out our rights, you know, just to kind of continue this backslide into authoritarianism and fascism where we don't have the actual rights. I mean, there's National Guard troops in DC right now and everyone's acting like it's normal. You know, like has ICE left the airports yet? Haven't heard about that in a little while, but I'm guessing no one's talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:04

I I recently had to go on a work trip. They're still walking around like it's nothing, talking to people, as if it's it's so weird in the United States that the smallest, the biggest things can happen as if ICE just being out day to day and people just start seeing it as like a normal thing. You give it a few weeks, people normalize it. Where to me personally, I don't know if having a Democratic president come back, if we're gonna see a scale back of ICE, or is it or is it gonna be, hey, ICE is already like this, let's just go ahead and keep it. Because a lot of times we see when Democrats get in office, they don't normally set things back to even where they used to be. They just kind of put this as like this is the new status quo. We just will try, I won't even say try try our best not to make it worse. We won't be blatant with making it worse. We'll do it undercover. But I kind of do want to segue into two last topics. One is probably a real quick one. Do you support the release of the Epstein files? But also, do you support the actual like wealthy billionaires, millionaires who are in it also being being brought to uh justice as well?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:10

There should be public show trials. Like these people, like they have no idea how much we are going to like not only that, we're gonna open up the file, we're gonna open up the files, we're gonna open up the banks, right? Because all of this has a connection. The fact that, you know, I I want to see who's connected to all of this finance, financial power, all of these levers. If there's someone that's profiting, whether it's in the Epstein files or whether it's trading stocks on Palantir, or if you're profiting off death and misery, I want to know about it and you are gone. And I'm telling you, like, my goal as a leftist is to build power. And my clear my goal is to build and use that power. One of the things that I am not going to do is hold my power back and say, oh, well, we we got to wait for the right time. We are going to use it. We're going to use it viciously, we're going to enact our agenda ruthlessly. And part of that will be holding all those. Those billionaires are going to throw up every roadblock over in the sun to try and stop that stuff from coming out, including buying our politicians. I mean, the fact that Pam Bonding was watching what you know congressional people were looking at in order to hold it against him later. Why isn't crime should be held up, you know, like judges and lawyers need to start filing criminal charges against these people yesterday. And so I still believe, I believe women. I believe Me Too still exists for me, right? Like we believe women, we take care of those that we love. And that includes holding men accountable. I don't care how rich and powerful you are. If you've hurt someone, if you've abused others, like you should go to prison.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:33

Wonderful, wonderful. And I know I said uh last too, but you you actually make me think about things too. So no, this is definitely a great conversation. One, it's kind of about AI and surveillance. As someone who's worked in the intelligence uh community for foreign affairs, what are your thoughts on currently how we see groups like Palantir, these these big massive companies come in and kind of buying up these surveillance state and really turning, I hate to say turning the the US into a surveillance state, because we think back to, as you were talking about, the uh the uh CIA was hacking people's phones with the uh the uh Patriot Act. So, where do you see things as far as AI surveillance state is concerned?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:16

I I think we're in a very critical juncture that we have to address AI and data centers immediately. So for me, as far as uh the surveillance portion of it goes, we are actually in a crisis. We are sliding further and further into a police state where, like you said earlier, not only do we have the police everywhere, but now we've got surveillance technology that is monitoring everyone. So I'm a big tech dude, I've seen it, I use uh I've used AI before, and it's very, very powerful. How I feel about AI in general is that it's a tool. And what we have to do is we have to regulate it. Like any other tool, utility, we can't allow it to just to be used and raise our energy prices and and destroy our environment. But that's the that's the uh environmental portion of it, the surveillance portion of it is I want every flock camera destroyed. I want Palantir dismantled piece by piece, and Alex Carp should be sent to Seacot. Like this is a war criminal. So these people, uh Palmer Lucky and Enduro and Peter Thiel and everyone to, again, these people who are profiting, what they've decided in their mind is that they can't see the end of capitalism, that they can see the end of America. And so what they've decided in their mind is they're going to take over these techno-feudal states that once we balkanize and everything, you know, falls apart, that they will control. And they've said it plainly before. Peter Thiel said, if you can't control them through voting, we need to control them through other means, right? And AI is another tool by doing that. So what's happening now is that it's not just a it's a um a new unique novel to approach things, but it's also being used to, you know, surveil us, to monitor us, to tailor everything to us. And so that one of the more dangerous things is that we can't let the internet like tailor our world, shape our world for us. You know, it it we it atomizes us in such a way that we're all sitting in our apartments already. We're all disparate, right? We're all kind of out there in the world, not building the communities that we need to build. And AI is just another one of those problems where it surveils us, it burns up our resources, all for the benefit of a few shareholders and corporations and the defense industry that gets some sort of benefit from it. But for me, I would dismantle all of this stuff. Uh, we need to have protections for United States citizens that says, you know, just because there's a you don't have an expectation of privacy while you're out in public doesn't mean that you can track my face. And that's one of the things that people are so I've been hearing a lot online, like why are why aren't there more protests? Why aren't you don't see as many Palestinian protests anymore? And uh first of all, you do if you go to the where you know they are. But secondly, anyone who has decided not to show up, can you blame them? They can track you from your house to the protest. They can track everything that's on your phone when you get there. I'm telling you right now, don't take your phone to a protest, okay, folks? Right? Or if you do, get rid of face ID entirely. But that's that's my digital forensic side. They're tracking all of this to such a degree, and not just the government, but Facebook, you know, Meta, Google, all of these companies that are now allowed to track that they make government contracts. They can government contracts the government incentivizes them to track because the government then gets to use that data to surveil you. So it's this again, what is I'm I'm I think of the uh description of cap or fascism in some way, the the merging of the corporate and government state where where they are the same thing now. So yeah, to your point, I I'm devastated that we live in a surveillance world now where and I would say that to same, you know, I like to say that China is doing a lot of good things. I would say the same thing about their surveillance state. You know, I would say the exact same thing that I want Americans to be free. I want us to feel like a free people, I want us to be strong in our beliefs. And what you see uh with things like free speech is that as a nation gets more uh becomes more under duress from economic instability or or stability from the world, that starts to get clamped down on. And you can see that happening in the United States. I believe that the freedom of speech is really for me one of our number one things. I think it is maybe the thing. Because if you go anywhere else, you go to Great Britain or somewhere, Great Britain, you go to England or whatever. Sorry, it's 2026. I'm I'm old. If you go to England, you know, you can't say free Palestine. You can't say from the river to the sea or you get arrested. And for me, that is anathema to being an American, to being an American citizen who considers himself free, that we do have the right and the ability to speak our mind, so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, right? It's not hate speech or something. But to simply advocate for your point and then to to be to be arrested or or thrown, you know, to be surveilled, followed, bullied by the police, these are all chilling effects on our democracy, which if we don't fight back, we're just gonna keep sliding and keep sliding. And like you said, people get normalized ice in the airport, they'll normalize the National Guard, they'll normalize checkpoints, they'll normalize, oh, I just have to give my ID. Oh, I snow, it's no big deal. I just got to give them my ID. And that's not that's I don't know like the, you know, it was the band of brothers and easy day, those boys are rolling in their graves, you know. Like we fought against this, we fought for this. And so I would say to all my more conservative friends out there, you don't like this. You know, grandpappy didn't raise you to be no bootlicker. You know what I mean? Like, what is this? We used to fight cops. Remember the Battle of Blair Mountain. Like we used to take care of one another, but now something else has happened to where we're all so scared and so kept on the ropes all the time. But economic instability, we feel like we can't fight back. We don't, we're all tired and we're scared of our neighbors. And you know, it just breeds this continual division strife that we can't get past. And so I've got to break through that. We've got to break through the cycle and say, enough is enough with the corporations, enough get the money out of our government, get the foreign influence out. Let's do what's right for the American people, whether you're Republican, Democrat, brother. Everybody's getting health care. I don't care if you're the most racist bigot I've ever seen. Your kids are getting free health care, they're gonna learn how to read and they're gonna go to a good school. And that's it. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:49

And through and through society taking care of you, hopefully we can make people a lot less racist, a lot less bigoted, a lot less horrible. And I think a lot of people would be because then it's like, well, I can't blame my neighbors for why I don't have X, Y, and Z, because I have X, Y, and Z. So it's not something I have to hate you for.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:03

And my in my yeah, exactly. And my neighbors take care of me. You know, my neighbors have what I have. We don't, you know, and I building that community, and I think that's just like we said, we're never gonna have a socialist society if we don't build socialist people. And that means advocating for being good to one another. It means advocating for things that take so when your politicians say I want you know things to be more affordable, we've got to say, but make it more affordable by giving us $25 an hour minimum wage or make it more affordable by capping prices at the grocery store, right? Instead of saying, instead of telling me you can't do that because socialism or something, like I don't, you know what I mean? Like, do something.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:38

Well, it's a old that's an old line. I mean, that's an old line by socialism.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:43

You know, it's uh, you know, the we are still the most propagandized people on earth. I mean, I I grew up and I just think about it now, how my my god, I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about, you know, ocealism. I didn't know anything, I didn't even know about our own history. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't know who that was. I knew some version of him that did not exist. You know what I mean? And no, you're right. And that's the truth. All these people, people often ask me about Austin's like, I don't know, you talk a lot about race and stuff. And I I I live in a place that has a lot of race issues, you know. Like, but one of the things that I've found is that when I I keep going, well, I I we we got one. That's not true. We got one. John Brown was a good one. But the go back and look at our revolutionary history in the United States, and you know who's been doing it? Black people. And specifically black women. And you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:29

Like we I look at black women have carried revolutions, the movement on their backs, even though even though a lot of people hype up, and rightfully so. The Malcolm X's, the Martin Luther Kings, the all the civil rights heroes and stuff, the John Lewis's. It was a lot of black women in the background doing a lot of this work.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:49

I think about you know, the Chicago Free Food Pantry, right? And Black Panthers, they can go out and hold their guns and stuff, but someone's at home making that food. And someone's at home getting up and making schedules and doing all the hard, dirty work. And that's something that, you know, as a DSA member, we talk about this like you you want to like be revolutionary or whatever, but sure, you can do that fun stuff. But can you sit in a meeting for 45 minutes with no agenda? You know, can you can you do the horror the, you know, with people that you might not even like, right? People that you might not even like really care for, but you're all working together. And but I think that's what we look back at history and we say, I wasn't taught that history. I wasn't taught that these were revolutionary heroes because that would be dangerous, because that would tell me that they were actually fighting for my rights. And so what I realized later on is that my people are oppressed, all of us, you know, in the same like I can be part of the same revolutionary struggle that they were a part of. And you know, I look back at all the things that I was told about welfare queens, and it makes me so mad. You know what I mean? Like, let's talk about real racism, let's talk about casual racism in the United States. All the things that I was casually told that, you know, that were racist. And like, and I look back on it now and I think, do you know why? Like, I want to talk about this black joy. White people are so afraid of black joy, and I was afraid for a long time too, because what do you do with it? I was taught that we're all stoic, we keep our emotions bottled up inside, and we we don't ask for help. We're all cowboys, and you know, you don't ask your, you you take care of your neighbor, but you don't ask for help from your neighbor because that would make you less than or something. And I look at all of the, you know, in the black community, I see community and I see people taking care of each other because they have had to do that, because they've had to, they lived under a system, duh, for so long, which is violent, in which the violence towards them has been exacerbated, to where they have formed communities, they formed organizations that take care of business now. Now white America is standing around saying, damn, we really need a community, y'all. Like we got to get a community. Where's our village? Where's our and there you see this all the time on like social media, white people like, oh, where's the village? What are we gonna do? And it's like, okay, okay, we need to like take a step back, look at look at people who have been doing this for a hot minute and say, let's talk. You know, like we are all affected by this, we're all under the same. And I and I want that to be the prevailing attitude going forward is that I want a rainbow coal, I want to, I want the rainbow coalition back. I want us to be able to fight together for a society that cares about people. We're not always going to agree, but we can have it better. You know, we simply can. And and I'm just not accepting anyone's again, whether it's racism, bigotry, homophobia, the transphobia, whatever you want, that's a small attitude. Those are the old ways. Those are what small men think. We are not small men. We are going to take this torch forward. We're going to say enough is enough. We carry all of us forward. We're, like you said, we're not even reparations, it's only the first part of it. We got to have whole truth and reconciliation. We got to hold people accountable. There's probably still people that are benefiting from that money. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:43

Like definitely corporations that are benefiting from that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:46

Right? So, like there's there's more to discuss, and we can't be afraid uh to have these conversations because we don't think it's gonna, the wind's not gonna blow our way. You know, I'm going to say things that not every black person is going to agree with. I'm gonna say things that not every white person is going to agree with. But my I'm if I have any kind of moral compass, I should be able to say, what can I do better? How can I improve? If I said something that was inappropriate, I know that I'm not the kind of person that would do that intentionally. What can I do better? Right. And so we that's a I want our politicians to do that. I want them to ask themselves that question. I want them to say, how can we, you know, how can we fight? Who are we going to elect to represent us who will actually fight? And that means having the courage to say things that are tough, to say things that your friends and family don't want to hear, that your neighbors don't want to hear, that that, you know, people have told us all this campaign the whole time that, you know, we're, again, we're we're anti-Semitic. We have we've been called racist, we've been called, you know, anti-uh reverse racist. I've been called, you know, like anything under the sun, you're gonna get it. And it's like, all we're gonna do is keep moving forward, keep saying who we are with love, with passion, and say we are holding you all accountable. You can kick and scream if you want. We love our brothers and sisters, we love our neighbors, and and that's it. You know, no amount of you begging me to not, to not uh give to show empathy is going to have me not show empathy. If that's if I'm a dictator of any kind, it's of it's of empathy. It's that you will you will acquiesce to this.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:08

I love that. I love that. I love that. Austin, one of my final questions always like to ask people is when you get elected into Congress, we want to speak it into fruition.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:19

What are two bills that you want to sponsor?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:22

Absolutely. Uh well, I would co-sponsor for sure Medicare for All with Bernie and Jaya Paul. And then one of the things that I would also, there's um AOC has sponsored a Housing for All Act. And I think housing is so important. We have not just, you know, there are a million homeless people, million people go to sleep every night on the streets, right? And it's not just a housing issue, it's a logistics issue. But right now, we don't have in government the capability to build more housing because of something called the Faircloth Amendment. So the Homes Act is something that will repeal the Faircloth Amendment and allow us to phase in governmental housing. Because I believe that, you know, if a government can't take care of the basic necessities of its people, what good is it? Right. Housing is included in that. And we need to start building, right? This, and I would say this about any infrastructure project, whether it's the key bridge or whether it's housing, the public-private partnership framework, the P3 framework that we've all been love working on, has got to go. The government needs to build this. The government needs to be funded, it needs to have strong mechanisms so that if you build public housing, it's going to go, it's not going to be maintained well if you don't pay to maintain it, if you don't put in the services. And so it's not just about housing or healthcare, it's about all the services that come in. Like you said, like when we're building a community, a community needs a whole lot of services to come in. And we need people to fill those roles, right? And so I want to build housing, add community services, and put people in America to work, right? There are more jobs to do in this country than there are people to do them. There are parks that need clean, there are houses that need built, there are people that need to manage that stuff, there are people that need to drive trucks to do that for us. And we could have all of these things, but you know, the Homes Act, Medicare for All, repealing student loan debt. And then there are two bills to uh one to abolish ICE, one to hold ICE accountable for any crimes that they've committed. I would support both of those. You know, I'm trying to think of anything I would support right off the bat, but I want to hit it like FDR. You know what I mean? Like I want to hit it like we're we're signing bills because the other thing is because of my position as a a new member who is unfortunately for the leadership going to go after them first. They we are going to have a put them on record, right? What we're going to do is put forth bills, no matter what they are, and force a vote. We're going to get it out of parliament, we're going to get it out of committee. We're going to force a vote on it. We're going to get people to say on camera, why won't they support it? Why won't they do it? Because every single second, it's like the Democrats not voting on the War Powers resolution before they went on break. You allowed this person to walk out of Congress and just say, well, we're, you know, we don't know if it's going to pass yet. Put their names, put your name next to the line or get out of Congress. Like put your name next to it or get out. Because the people don't need someone. What good is it someone who won't make a decision?

SPEAKER_00 1:25:03

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:03

Right? Either way. And and so it's not just about one person or one idea. It's about the whole thing and kind of coming at it from our a progressive perspective, but a pro, you know, a perspective where we I love people, you know, I love and care for people. And that means I'm willing to, and unfortunately, I was raised to fight for them too. So that means that we're gonna fight for them and we're gonna, we're not gonna let people hurt others that we love. So my tribe is coming, you know, and we're here. So that's that's where like my whole philosophy as far as building political power, but you know, we're not in this just to take people out or burn the system down or whatever. We're this is about growing a coalition because that's where the base is. The base is progressive. 45% of Democrats in their 30 call themselves socialists, not democratic socialists, socialists. Just socialists. You know, like that's a large turn from even five years ago, right? That's that's all coming. We can see this, you know, the the sea changes there, but America, we're a progressive nation. We say we're progressive. We say we want to do the right thing. So let's do the right thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:02

You're right. And the people, the, the people are progressive and leftists. It's just the politicians who are bought out by the corporations who stop them from doing that. Austin Dykes, this has been honestly probably one of my favorite podcasts I've done. Like, it's been amazing. You you really have like honestly, in a world that we're living in now, when like it seems like the left is on like the back step so far. This has actually been been something that kind of motivated me and feel like there's another left, another leftist movement coming. And I'm really so glad to see you at the forefront of it here in here in here in Merlin. So can you please tell people how they can get involved, involved with your campaign, stay up to date, donate all the great things.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:43

Oh well, first of all, let me say thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. I love love talking to anyone about it. And that's what I tell people. It's like, just get me in front of someone and I'll start to yap. Because I believe that this is, we're on the right side of history. I know we are, and I because I know that kindness is contagious and and we are in a place where we are ready to move forward. We know who we are. We don't have any in, you know, there's no question in our hearts about what this movement is about. So that's why we will do our best to fight off the challenges as they come, but I am fully convinced that we will be successful, whether in my campaign or some other campaign, we will continue to fight this fight. So, in order to help and learn more about me, you can find uh all that at um www.austinformaryland.com. You can spell it any way you want, MD or Maryland all the way out. You can find me on Instagram and X under Austin Dykes. And I'd be happy to, for any volunteers, we have a volunteer sign-up. We have a Discord. So come in, chat, tell us what you think. Uh if you're in Maryland, please come out and support. We'd love to have your support. We're in the district. We're going to Anna Rundel County next week. On the 20s, I do want to say we're having a late campaign kickoff and fundraising event at Backwater Books in Ellicott City. So it's a bibliop upstairs. There's like a nice little bar and drinks, and then you've got a store. Library downstairs. So it's a fantastic venue. Highly recommend if you're in Ellicate City, check it out. But we'll be there Monday, April 27th at 6:30 p.m. We're having a kickoff. So come out, say hi. Uh, we're gonna do cards and button makings, and lots of progressive candidates are gonna be out there to just sort of talk about their feelings and the progressive movement as a whole, excuse me, as a whole now, and how we're all very excited. You know, it's been it's been a hard 10 years, you know, it's been a hard while where we felt that there's been very little hope. And so we've looked around and said, no one's coming to save us. We're him, we're them. You know what I mean? Like, so so it's it's gonna do it, and we but we can't do that without all of your help. So, Carlos, thank you to your you and all your listeners. I so appreciate the opportunity and thank you for inviting me out.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:43

Of course, of course. And you all please remember this is a podcast. So please like, share, subscribe, follow, do all the cool things that keep this podcast going. And remember to hit that notifications button so that you can stay up to date on every new episode that we drop. And full episodes, remember, you all come out every Wednesday. Again, Austin Dykes, thank you so much. This has been incredible. And see you next time. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:07

See you next time.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:08

Awesome.