 Hi folks, I'm here with Liam O'Mara, who is running in California's 42nd Congressional District. He has advanced to the general election after making it into the top two back in March, and he is here to talk about his campaign. Liam, welcome. Thank you. Happy to be here. Yeah. So you have such an interesting background. So you are a professor of Middle East history, and you were running against a Republican named Ken Calvert. I've never heard of him. And there's a reason for that. Before coming on, you described him as a ghost. So I want to get to all of that, but first, let us know who you are and why you decided to run for Congress. Oh, let's see. So kind of a big one. The short answer to that is I have a diverse background. I come from a solidly working class family. I'm actually the first person in my family with a college degree, and I didn't go to college right away. I did not expect to. In fact, I didn't even take the SATs in high school. I had no possibility of going to college. And at age 30, I found a way to jump into it. So after that, I mean, I'd had experience already working as a fourth generation long showman in the Port of LA. I worked as a fry cook. I drove trucks. I carried a class A driver's license for 20 years. But I jumped into college and then went straight through to a PhD. So for the last dozen years, I've been teaching at colleges. And I genuinely love that as a job because I feel like I'm giving something back and engaging with people. But I have to look my students in the eyes and tell them things are screwed for you, that things are going downhill. After 40 years of decline in the real economy under neoliberalism, despite all the media lying about the economy, we can talk about that if you want. But the real economy has been shrinking steadily for 40 years. My generation is the first one in American history not to do better than the one before. The millennials are worse off than me, Gen Z is worse off than the millennials. We are in steady decline as a society. And frankly, I'm pissed. And I'm pissed not only as a worker, I'm pissed as someone who understands why this is happening and wants to shake things up and get people talking about the real issues again so we can push back against it. Yeah, I like that you said that because if you're not pissed right now, then I feel like you're not paying attention. And I get that that's kind of a cliche, but it really is true. There's so much going on. There's so much at stake. And I think that everyone in their own way is kind of stepping up and for you to be like the first member of your family to go to college, that's incredible. And now, you know, for me, I was also the same person, same in my family, the first to go to college. And you know, for you now to want to run for Congress. It's awesome to see that, you know, you're willing to step up and fight because that really is difficult. Like to run for Congress is it's a self sacrifice, I feel like. And so anyone who's running, I think is really they're doing a lot, especially if you're running for the right reasons. And you really are. So you have a really robust platform you were endorsed by Andrew Yang, Ted Lu. You kind of check all the boxes. So if you like our regular viewer of the humanist report, then I think that you are like the ideal candidate. You explain Medicare for all so well. And I love that, like to find a candidate that goes beyond just the generic endorsement of Medicare for all is very valuable because this is such a complex topic and really winning hearts and minds is crucial to me. So you know, when it comes to Medicare for all, how would you, you know, deter people from being afraid of this socialist boogeyman? Like how do you explain this to constituents? Yeah. So first off, there's, there are two things about my immediate background that really help with dealing with issues like this. For one thing, I'm a policy wonk by nature. If I want to talk about an issue, I dive into it. I read stacks of books. I mean, I mean, the joke about me is I mean, my house is nothing but cats and books. I have 34 bookcases and three cats wandering around. So I'm pretty much a nerd about that stuff. But I also, for a living, explain complex ideas to people in a way that's, that's useful. So I'm accustomed to like breaking things down and, and putting it across and I've tried to bring that into the campaign. And I think again, myself having working roots and not being a particularly pretentious ivory tower type, I can just sit there over beers and chat about these issues and try to break them down for people. I actually have a number of people that have joined the campaign as major supporters who had been Republicans their whole lives and just sat down with me and like, dude, I'm a Democrat. Like this makes sense. And for Medicare, it's, it's tricky because our incumbent actually is running ads, calling it a government takeover of healthcare, which is frankly, bullshit. It's not at all. Medicare actually gives you more consumer choice and more freedom, far more so than we have now. The key issue that you can have to explain to people, I mean, there's a few things you can come at it with shifts in the framing because people, especially coming from like the left or the liberal perspective on things like Medicare, they'll approach it from a moral standpoint. We need to ensure everyone that's just a crime that people are going without insurance and Republicans just don't give a damn. It doesn't matter to them. But what could matter are the issues of freedom and cost. If you tell somebody, say for example, a lot of people get their employer, insurance from their employer, right? Now when they get the job, they get told, this is your salary and these are your benefits. Together, that's a compensation package. If we write this legislation correctly, then what happens when the employer is no longer paying $17,000 a year for your insurance and instead paying $1,500 or $2,000 or something like that in to an overall kitty and then you're paying a little bit in here if you're paying like $1,500 to $2,000 a year there, there's an extra $12 or $13,000 just sitting around. It's part of your compensation package. Medicare for all would be the largest raise in pay for the middle class and more than a generation. You tell somebody that you're going to get to keep an extra $12,000 of your own money and you pique a conservative's interest. And then from there, you go on to explain that, well, this would leave all the doctors still private, all the healthcare providers are still private, they're all still doing their own thing, but you can now go to any of them. So I'd be like, Mike's like, hey, Liam, you got to check out this doctor I've got, he's fantastic and I'm like, well, he's out of network, I can't go and I don't have that ability now because they're all these limited networks and if you take that away and it's a single insurance provider, not only do I have the freedom to go anywhere and seek any care at all, you write it again such that it's just rubber stamping things. So the person making the decisions about your healthcare are you and your physician, period. It infuriated me, sorry, I'm rambling a bit here, but it infuriated me in 2008 to hear like people like Sarah Palin on the right like freaking out about the ACA like, ah, death panels, they'll decide to kill grandma and I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? We already have death panels. They're called for-profit insurance companies and they're going to look at, well, this test is going to cost me $10,000, there's no way I'm giving them that MRI. They're going to just die of brain cancer, I don't care. They make those decisions already. If you take the profit motive out, then the only choice there really is the physician's choice. You don't have to make money off of somebody. So it's not a government takeover of healthcare, it's replacing the corrupt insurance industry, which is a parasitic middleman that does nothing for anybody. No one loves their insurance, they love their provider and the ability to go to their provider. You give them a gold-plated insurance plan from the state and it does the same thing. And just, the last point I'd make on this that I bring up in the area, too, is the question of cost. And from there, you can make a simple actuarial argument. You've got a whole bunch of different insurance companies, each with x number of people in them, and you have to balance out the sicker with the healthier, so you have to raise the rates higher on the healthier people in order to make up for the cost for the sicker people, right? Put everyone in the same risk pool. Everyone's in the same risk pool. That lowers the cost massively for the entire country. So when people are throwing out this crap about how do we afford Medicare for all, I'm just like, it's a simple arithmetic issue. We're already paying twice as much as it would cost. Like we're already paying for it, we're just not getting it. Yeah, and I feel like if you explain this to someone who doesn't know about all of this, there's like this light bulb moment that goes off because I've convinced many people just in my personal life to support Medicare for all. My mom has done that and she's not necessarily someone who follows politics as closely as I do, but it's just such a common sense position and we shouldn't even have to really further make our case because I feel like we've already won the argument and most Americans agree with us. But just to like further educate people about this, I think it really is important and people have to understand that we're missing out like in comparison with other developed countries. We are getting a really raw deal and that's so unfair. It should make everyone angry. Every single time they pay their insurance bill to a private insurance company, they should be mad. I am and I think that we've gotten people to wake up. It's just a matter of really driving public opinion even further towards where we are. So I feel like you're a great candidate at doing something like this, like explaining to people why the Republican Party, they don't even have a plan. I mean, Democrats, they don't support Medicare for all for the most part. I think that's starting to change in the house, but not necessarily with senators. But in your district, you are running against a Republican. His name is Ken Calvert. So I want to know about it because I'm sure that you are convincing people who you talk to constituents as much as you can during a pandemic. But how close is this district to flipping and what's been the success rate of converting people who have been supporting this individual because I've never heard of him. And you've described him as a ghost. And I find that interesting. He just seems like a seat warmer in Congress. He's not doing anything. So can you talk about him? Yeah, honestly, it's infuriating how difficult it is to get national attention on this district. And one of the things that I've worked hardest to do during this run is to raise the national profile of the district because this is difficult. And it really complicates the fundraising. And a lot of districts that are similarly purple demographically, you can easily raise a million dollars for an opponent to go against and take out one of these Republicans. Here, everyone just assumes it's going to stay safely Republican. It has a Republican voting history for Calvert, at least, but also relatively low turnout. And it's absolutely purple demographically. The key issue is getting somebody who can appeal to those voters to bring in the people who don't normally vote and then to pick up those swing voters. The fact that a lot of people voted for Trump because he was running as a populist helps in this area. I mean, the answer to a right populist is a left populist. I'm talking about kitchen table economics, working class issues. And that picks up a lot of support. Calvert, on the other hand, doesn't really run on his record, doesn't offer solutions to anything. He's like a no man. And actually, he's taken our campaign a lot more seriously than really any challenger he's had in ages. He ran. He did mailers attacking me in the primary, mailers attacking me in the general here with some of the most hyperbolic claims. But in the primary, it was funny. It was like columns of yes and no and red and green. And no one told him red, like green light because he put me in the yes and him in the no for red. But it was like, yeah, Medicare for all, green, new deal, impeachment of Trump. Oh, Lema. And but he offers no solutions of his own. It's always just no, no, no. The only thing he's running on right now is the police. He's running on manipulating fear that somehow votes for Democrats or a vote for anarchy and chaos. And he's calling me like, he's literally calling me a terrorist that I want to burn Riverside to the ground and just the most crazy hyperbolic stuff. But he doesn't actually do anything. In 28 years in the House, he has never chaired a committee. He's often chaired subcommittees and appropriations. And largely because his single biggest donors are all in the military industrial complex. His biggest donors Lockheed Martin. He takes in just scads of cash from defense contractors. So of course he's voted for every single use of force. And for a whole range of deeply authoritarian stuff like warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. I mean, just crazy stuff. But he doesn't actually do anything to help the economy out here. In fact, quite the opposite. His background before he got into Congress was real estate. And he has continued to make millions in Congress by knowing something was going to be done by the government, buying a chunk of land, and then flipping it while doing nothing to it, which is just crazy. I mean, it's deeply corrupt. But he makes all kinds of cash off of real estate. So of course he's very cozy with housing developments out here. My community is filled with, my district's filled with bedroom communities. Commuters that come out of LA and Orange County because we're right across the mountains from LA and Orange County. So the land is a bit cheaper out here. People move out here and then commute, right? So the traffic goes to the roof. We have the worst air quality in the state because of the amount of traffic that pours in there with more than a third of the population have been commuted out for work. And his big solution is to every now and then secure a little bit of cash as a rider for a new off-ramp. Look, I'm helping with traffic. I built a new off-ramp. Meanwhile, he's benefiting from all the housing developments that come in. It's just inertia that keeps him in. It's just the amount of money he can take in. He's 98% funded by corporations. That's insane. And really, to sit there and not do anything, to just effectively occupy that seat and still get elected to be in Congress for 28 years, I mean, this is why Congress has such a high disapproval rate. It's because of people like him. I mean, I'm sure he's not the only ghost. There's a lot of people like that who are just basically warming that seat. But it's time for people to wake up and stop just voting out of complacency. I mean, voting in and of itself is important because we have such a low turnout in this country. But if you're voting, make that count. And that's what I think is really important about all of these types of grassroots funded campaigns like yours, because you all really focus on getting out new voters who haven't voted. You mobilize people who stay home because they've never been talked to. I speak with candidates, and I'm sure this is true for you as well, who people have told them, you're the first candidate who's ever contacted me in my entire life. Because nobody reaches out to me. The incumbent doesn't reach out to me. They don't hold town halls. I don't know what I need. I mean, a lot of the issues that we saw was with the CARES Act. A lot of small businesses didn't know how to get access to the loans that were passed with that law. And lawmakers theoretically should be helping them with that to boast about what they just did, delivered to their constituents, and you see nothing. So it's a combination of corruption, but also laziness. Mostly corruption, I think, but laziness as well. And people like Calvert, they're part of the problem. And it's nice to see him actually a little bit afraid. But to call you a terrorist, I mean, if we thought that Trump was being hyperbolic in calling Joe Biden basically a conservative, a socialist, to call you a terrorist is like, that's so beyond the pale that I don't know how they make these types of arguments with a straight face. And I don't know who this appeals to. The people in this district, there's no way that that's resonating with them. Have you seen anything with regard to that? Yeah, I mean, it's not a majority for sure. But there is a pretty nativist and relatively extreme subset of the population that he's appealing to with some pretty bold dog whistles. Yeah. I mean, the one where he called me, well, he's done it more than once, but the one where he called me a terrorist, he actually tied me to a local professor here. He works at UC Riverside, Riza Aslan, who's a well-known scholar of religion. And literally, like me, a scholar who studies these ideas. But because he has a Muslim name, we're both violent extremists who want to destroy the country. And you should be terrified that I know people like this. Are you kidding me? But there are people who are genuinely afraid of that. We had the Black Lives Matter stuff was really starting to show up, and there was a number of rallies in the area. One of them, and this is relatively small, but there was a small rally in the northern part of the district in Norco. And people were just out marching with peaceful signs. And a bunch of guys showed up in SS t-shirts, literally like the Nazi white supremacists type stuff, and started pushing people and trying to intimidate them. That's a part of his base. It's not all of it. It's not even a big part of it, but it is a part of his base. And he throws them red meat every now and then in order to keep them excited and willing to vote in the same way that Trump does. Trump depends upon the votes of white supremacists, which is why he's so loved to call them out. Because even though it's clearly not majority of the country, they are voting for him. So it is a fact. Yeah. And I'm sure that they're using the fact that you're a college professor as part of their narrative. Because over the past half decade, they've been trying to demonize college students for being SJWs and all these liberal professors. And there's PragerU to try to de-convert all of these people who are going to college and getting radicalized, apparently. So I mean, it's like they create this narrative, but it's not founded in reality. And it sucks that it still works on some people. Not everyone, as you said. But the fact that it has any legs whatsoever, at least legs to convince people, that is a little bit soul-crushing, I'm not going to lie. But the fact that we are starting to make a little bit of progress in terms of getting people to think in a more common sense way, that is a good sign. Although I feel like progress isn't happening fast enough. The internet is the greatest democratization of information ever. It puts so much at our fingertips to correct our ideas. And instead, we end up drifting off to the most inane websites, like any monkey you can put up a website. And people have just passed around the craziest stuff. So it's basically given a lot of really terrible conspiracies new life. So yeah, I'm apparently part of this Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy America or whatever they've got. It's crazy stuff. It is. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that point about the internet because I've made this point before too, that we as human beings, for the first time ever, have access to seemingly an infinite amount of information at our fingertips with our phones. But what do we do? We go find our little niche conspiratorial communities and we just find other people who think about crazy things like us. It's frustrating. But in terms of what you would do if you get elected to Congress, I have a question that's super broad, but I always like to ask this of people running for Congress because there's no real playbook that's been written. First of all, how have you been able to adapt campaigning from a pre-COVID world into a mid-COVID world? And second of all, what do you think it would take to actually stop the spread of COVID-19? Because a lot of people, I think, rightfully expect us to deal with this for at least another year, if not multiple years. So how do you adapt right now as someone who's campaigning? And then when you actually get to Congress, what do we actually do that would stop COVID-19, put this behind us? Because it took, I believe, three years for the world to get over the Spanish flu give or take. So are we looking at that type of a situation? I know this is super difficult for you to gauge, but I'm just curious, as a lawmaker, what you think you can do to accelerate the mitigation of the spread of this virus. Honestly, that is by far the easier part of the question. This is not rocket science. This is not difficult. Countries all around the world have dealt with this. I mean, Taiwan had what? Less than half a dozen people die. South Korea, a little over 300. I mean, even places that spiked massively like Italy shot way up and then plateaued and fell. And we continue to get worse and worse without really ever reigning this in. And a good part of the reason is that we did not act quickly enough from the beginning and decisions taken by the federal government forced the states to respond, often with blunt measures like full shutdowns. We could have dealt with this without ever having to shut down at all. But instead of acting for several months, the Trump administration was focused on denying that there was a problem. Instead, they should have pointed up a bunch of cash, given it to businesses to adapt their processes to do things safely and then convince the public to wear their damn masks. If we had done that from the beginning, this would not have spread the way it was, did. Masks, contact tracing, proper social distancing measures, that would have been all we needed to do. Instead, they let it spread wildly around the country, continue to deny it. Huge numbers of people still refuse to practice social distancing or mask wearing, including the president and his administration, which we've just seen as had some delayed consequences, but it finally did hit close to home for them. But it's just, it's been deeply destructive to the country as a whole. I mean, we have almost a quarter of the world's deaths in the U.S. with what, 4% of the population? It's just insane. This was mismanaged, and it was mismanaged at the federal level, and people are instead deflecting and blaming the state so they want to attack the New York's government and California's government for, again, these blunt measures that were only forced on them by incompetence. And it's not just the Trump administration. I blame Congress for this overwhelmingly. If Congress had gotten its together and passed some kind of like, okay, I think of the way that a lot of these other countries did it. We gave more unemployment insurance and a one-time stimulus check. Well, that assumes a lot of people lose their jobs. If you lose your job, it's hard to get another one. Tons of jobs will be automated away or replaced afterwards. It creates all kinds of trickle-down costs for the businesses, for individuals. Most countries hit hard by this, used wage subsidies. They simply paid for people to stay home or to work fewer hours. The government stepped up and provided that cash so the businesses weren't hurt. We let a bunch of businesses go out of business. We let millions of people lose their jobs. Both of those were completely preventable. And our incumbent is a good part of that. He likes to claim that he did something about it. He actually voted against the oversight and the spending that would have helped a bunch of small businesses. So he allowed a bunch of massive corporations and even megachurches to just rob the kitty and take that money that could have gone to mom and pop businesses in our district. Okay, so this gets me really angry because 200,000 deaths and the worst economic situation since the Great Depression was completely preventable. Our campaign adapted pretty quickly. I have to say I'm grateful to have such a young and nimble campaign staff that we saw the situation. We shifted over to a digital infrastructure immediately and stopped doing in-person events. We started doing weekly town halls through Zoom and then live streaming them to every possible platform so that hundreds of people could watch them on whatever they had. We started a whole lot more aggressive phone banking and text banking. Everyone in the district has heard from us and one way or the other by now, people we don't have phone numbers for they get postcards or whatever. But we're calling, text banking, emailing, tons of advertising and social media, reaching out on radio, everything that we possibly can to get our message out to people even because we can't be out there knock indoors anymore or holding rallies. So you don't get to see that but they can't escape, we're here at least. If we'd had even a fraction of the cash that the incumbent sucks in from the military industrial complex, this would have been no contest. This district is absolutely flippable but it's hard to raise the money to compete with his television ads and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, people, oftentimes, they vote based on name recognition and who they know which is why in these types of house races and even state house races, the person who wins oftentimes is the individual with the most cash. Although a sign of hope for me at least is the fact that we are seeing a lot more success with these types of grassroots campaigns, especially in this election cycle with Kassim Rashid, Jamal Bowman. And that is really encouraging because before it seemed as if like these behemoths in Congress, like there was no way you could defeat them but now we're actually seeing, they're not invincible, it just is a matter of doing the right things, campaigning in the right way, reaching out to enough people to flip it. So here's the thing, before we get to your pitch to viewers as to why they should definitely donate and help volunteer, I wanna ask you a really big picture question that I've been thinking a lot about lately and I don't necessarily believe that there's a right or wrong answer to it specifically but like we really are at a strange time, a dark time in American politics where we're seeing polarization that hasn't been this bad since the Civil War. We're seeing climate catastrophe, money in politics is a huge issue. We see one party that's, I mean, so fanatical and off the spectrum that I don't think they're redeemable Republicans of course and then we see Democrats who are just kind of following them to the right and there's been some gains. You know, we've shifted the Overton window a little bit back to the left with AOC and Bernie Sanders but there's still a lot that needs to be done and I feel like as a new member of Congress you're going to have your work cut out for you. So I wanna ask you just in general, what is something that you think would actually solve all these problems? Like is it a one size fits all solution? Is it just like getting rid of capitalism or is it like a series of reforms like the New Deal? Like in your opinion, what do you think would put us back on track? Because I don't know what the, like the single answer to this is. Like I'm inclined to say, you know, if we reigned in capitalism, preferably abolished it in my opinion, that would help but not necessarily immediately. There's just, there's a lot. So I just kind of wanna pick your brain about this because I feel like you have probably thought about this as well. Yeah. And actually it's a relatively complex answer because it's a complex problem. So I'm only gonna like scratch the surface here. Right, right. But the key thing is, okay, so you mentioned the question of like capitalism at all and abolish capitalism honestly just isn't a thing that we can really realistically do but it can in the sense that we evolve toward these systems and we evolve away from them. People forget that it took centuries for the current capitalist system to evolve. Yeah. A little bit at a time incrementally. It built up into its current shape. Someone didn't just come up and say, I have invented capitalism. The world economy changed. It's a very long-term process and we are moving away from it a little bit at a time. And I think one of the things that might help is maybe a bit of a paradigm shift. If we start thinking a little bit differently here because a lot of the terminology that we use, especially when people throw around terms like capitalism and socialism and of course, Calvert is calling me a radical socialist, whatever. I don't use these terms really either of them to think about the way I wanna look at the economy because it's basically getting stuck in a 19th century argument that doesn't really fit where we're going. We are on the cusp, we're actively engaged in another industrial revolution right now. And it is going to be a much more dramatic one even than the last ones. And the industrial revolutions are what gave us the fight between capitalism and socialism. I mean, the massive abuses in the first industrialization period led directly to the creation of so many radical alternatives. But we're approaching a point where technologically, at least, we could have a post-scarcity society between automation and artificial intelligence and the biotech revolution and everything that's kind of coming along the way in this century. We really should be working 20 hour weeks at best already. And what frustrates me is that right-wing economists for two centuries kept saying that automation would keep decreasing the number of hours we worked and improve our lives and hasn't. I mean, John Stuart Mill in the early 19th century, John Maynard Keynes in the middle of the 20th century, everyone was like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna be, the biggest problem is gonna be the rise of a leisure economy of people just sitting around doing nothing. And instead we're working 50, 60 hour weeks, just to get by with tons of pointless BS jobs. And that's deliberate. We have to break that paradigm and get thinking about where we could go instead. Ultimately, a Star Trek future is possible, but we have to change the way that we're thinking about this and stop playing out the old battles and falling into these old rhetorical traps. Yeah, I like that. That'd be one thing that I'd like to point to, in terms of like one thing that I could really do. So new member of Congress, what would I do? I'm gonna shake people up. I'm gonna be the exact opposite of our current ghost representative. I'm gonna be on the floor of the house making speeches and trying to show up on C-SPAN. I'm gonna be doing interviews in the media. I'm gonna be pushing the conversation and getting us talking about the fundamental issues and what we need to do to address this stuff so that we can head into a future that's better for Americans instead of one where every generation does worse. I don't wanna see us falling steadily into ban a republic. I mean, we're literally, I mean, and this is one of the reasons that like, especially on the left, like accelerationism bothers me. If we tune out from the system, if we don't get involved, if we're not voting and pushing back against these terrible candidates and getting better people in there, we will become an outright fascist dictatorship. The right in this country has already been thoroughly captured by the ideology of neo-fascism. It is what they're talking about. They're not conservatives anymore. They use the term conservatism, conservative, but they're not. Almost no one in the Republican caucus in Congress is a conservative anymore. The ones who were have been retiring steadily over the last 15 years. This fundamentally changed. And because of that, if we are not paying attention, if we are not focused on the future, if we are not putting good people in, this will become a dictatorship. Yeah, yeah. And I always say that, not every single democracy lives forever. We may have always known democracy in the United States, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to always exist. And I really like that you said, a paradigm shift is what's needed because I feel like we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift. Like the fact that we're talking about these types of left-wing ideas, even Medicare for all on national television in and of itself, I think is a signal that times are starting to change, maybe just a little bit. And so, it's not just a matter of, we passed the bill through Congress saying, capitalism is abolished. Like it doesn't work that way. But I think that the way that you described it as, almost like a pendulum where we swing back in the opposite direction. Because we've really moved away from the thinking that got us the new deal. And back then, I'm sure that Americans felt the same way we feel right now before the damn burst and the floodgates opened up and we got the new deal. I do feel like we are kind of on the verge of a paradigm shift. And I think that you sang that actually gives me hope in the fact that you'd be in Congress fighting for that, fighting for a better world. I mean, I'm sold, I'm sold. Anyone who's watching, I know it's sold. So what can we do to get you elected to Congress? The election is coming up super fast. It's honestly scary. So what can we do with less than a month away to make sure you beat him? I would say we have to overall, both right now and in general, be supporting campaigns like this when all across the country. You mentioned the new deal. I mean, Democrats, populists, leftists used to be extremely popular all across this country. We used to dominate farm country. We walked away from it because we don't talk about those issues anymore. It's not like they were any less socially conservative back then than they are now. Same people, but our issue is resonated if we talk about them. I'm gonna talk about issues that do matter to people. If we can amplify those messages, we could win all across this country. What could work in this district can work in Kansas and Nebraska. So yeah, I would encourage anybody, this late in the game, there's not a whole lot left to do in terms of volunteering. I mean, tons of people have been making calls and texts forever here. So anything that you can do to support us because every dollar that goes in goes into our advertising budget. It's more time that we can be on radio. It's more time that we can hit people with social media ads and get that name recognition out there. And just one thing, I mean, it affects my race, but literally all of them, we have to get past this learned helplessness where you face someone who's got, oh yeah, he can write a $100,000 check, I can't. So there's nothing I can do, right? If you've got five bucks, you can help. The price of a coffee a month given to progressive campaigns across this country, especially running in these swing districts, this is how we change the country. You put 200 squad members in there and anything is possible. We can reorient this entire country and this economy and catch up to the rest of the rich world. It just drives me nuts that we're in steady decline here. So yeah, my website is liamomera.org, the most generically Irish name ever, L-I-A-M-O-M-A-R-A.org. And then I'm super active on social media and whatnot. So it's pretty easy to find like donation links, more information on the issues. If you wanna reach out and contact us, you can absolutely do that. All right, well yeah, I'm fired up. I love that you use the word learned helplessness because that is something that I feel like I'm even guilty of at some times where there's a big race that comes up and we lose it, we being the left, and then I feel so deflated. And then you just kind of feel like, oh, well, the next one's gonna be bad. And then we end up getting a victory surprisingly. Like, I love that. Like you are kind of like calling for a shift in the mindset of people on the left. And I think that's super important. Like I agree we should never ever accept accelerationism because as much as people are demoralized and they want to see like a revolution, we're a lot closer towards a fascist dictatorship. Than a socialist revolution. So we need to keep pushing for a better world. And candidates like you, like you drive that point home, which is why like this is so important. So I'm rooting for you. You've got me sold. We'll be watching closely. Hope to have you back on when you were a member of Congress. That'd be awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much.