 Hello everyone, I'm here with Shahid Butar who is running against Nancy Pelosi in California's 12th congressional district. He's taking on a political behemoth and he is here to talk about his campaign. Shahid, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, figurino. Yeah, I'm really excited. The minute that I found out there was going to be a challenger to Nancy Pelosi, I got on board immediately. And then when I started to learn about your policy positions, then it was even sweeter because you're a true progressive and you don't just call yourself a progressive like you actually walk the walk. So I looked over your platform before I went on the air, Medicare for all, you know, ending US militarism. This is a very robust platform. And there's a lot of people running who are progressive around the country. But your campaign is very unique because you're taking on someone that is going to be very, very difficult to unseat. So can you explain why you chose to challenge Nancy Pelosi and why you think you're qualified to defeat her? Why you could be the one who could actually take her out, even if many have ran against her before? Yeah, I appreciate the question. So the simple reason why I'm running against Speaker Pelosi is because she's my representative in Washington. I live in San Francisco. If I'm going to run for Congress, she's the person I would particularly need to take on hand, because frankly, I have spent 20 years as an advocate watching our concerns in the intersectional movement for justice. That is to say the immigrant rights movement, the movement for black lives, the peace and justice movement, the Occupy movement, the movement to relieve student debt, the movement for climate justice. I've watched all of our movements, various concerns fall on, unfortunately, deaf ears in Nancy Pelosi's and being the speaker of the House wielding as much influence as she has and watching her defer to our kleptocrat in chief on issue after issue from impeachment, to fiscal austerity rules, to funding as concentration camps, to supporting as foreign policy. It is frankly intolerable to me. And in 2018, when I ran against Pelosi from the left and got more votes than anyone challenging her from the left in a primary in 10 years, despite entering very late in the cycle against a very crowded field of people who describe themselves as progressive, having achieved that result in three months without media attention in 2018, I'm very confident of at least taking second place in the top two primary in March 2020, which will position me to then challenge Speaker Pelosi in November. And the reason I'm quite confident that we'll win in November 2020 and Speaker Pelosi's career and end the bipartisan consensus on corporate rule. These are stakes much bigger than a single congressional seat. The reason I'm sure we're going to win is because, well, for several reasons. The first, the field is tilting at our favor and the wind is at our back, if only due to generational transition. We've already seen the early tremors of a political earthquake that is only starting to unfold and we haven't yet seen the half of it. Bernie's race in 2016 and the remarkable demonstration that he showed that across the electorate is a deep and broad support, not just for progressive policies, but for socialist policies. I don't describe myself as a progressive, I describe myself as a democratic socialist. And it's because I recognize that not only are education and emergency medical care human rights, but so are housing and food and a meaningful opportunity to compete with everyone else, right? Clean air and water are human rights that we denigrate constantly. So there's a little bit there. My 20-year history of fighting at the vanguard to establish and defend and advance the left is one reason I think I'm going to take this seat in 2020. And finally, as much faith as I have in our campaign, I have a great deal of faith in my neighbors and the people of San Francisco. And I think the people of San Francisco are more committed to our communities than they are to corporations. And because we're running to put people before profit, I think they'll be with us. And this is why I absolutely have faith in you because what you described that you were able to accomplish in 2018 with no media coverage is remarkable. And you also didn't have any indie media coverage. Like a lot of candidates, they'll go on these shows like the Humanist Report and they'll promote their campaigns. But your campaign, I didn't even know that you were running. So the fact that you still did that good with zero media coverage whatsoever, it really shows that you are a force in politics. And if anyone's going to take out Nancy Pelosi, I think we're looking at them right now. So let me ask you this, because this is what I really like about you. We see Nancy Pelosi and she says we're a capitalist party. That's just the way it is. But then you're running unapologetically as a democratic socialist. And I find that so refreshing. So let's say you take out Nancy Pelosi. This is your first year in Congress. There's so many issues. You've listed a number of issues that you know, we need to address immediately. But if you had to prioritize a couple of issues, let's say like two or three, what do you think you'd focus on within that first year? Because if I were a lawmaker, I wouldn't even know where to begin, because there's so much. So just from a personal level, what do you think you would try to focus on? There is indeed so much in your right to raise it. My early priorities would be to dial up oversight. And for instance, if I'm able to get on a committee that would have some jurisdiction over ICE and CBP, the DHS committee, there's a huge need, frankly, to scrutinize the executive branch and its serial ongoing seemingly mounting human rights abuses. With respect to the legislative agenda, I think one area that's very ripe, a bill that we could frankly move very early in the next Congress would be a bipartisan measure to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act. That's going to have support from Republicans. It's going to have support from Democrats by moving that we're going to both establish a civil rights imperative, which is to say one crucial step forward in dismantling the prison industrial slavery complex. We're going to protect generations of young people and low income people and people of color across the country from being railroaded into pretextual crimes. Here in California, we're lucky enough to have legal access to cannabis. That's not the case in most of the country and it's still a pretext in many parts of the country for people to find themselves sucked into the gaping maw of our criminal and justice system. Another area that I think is important, at least to start the work on, I don't think I'm going to get the bill passed in a first term, but I certainly want to get a bill introduced to introduce 18-year staggered terms for Supreme Court justices. There's a lot of people who are talking increasingly about packing the court and as a constitutional lawyer who's been concerned about the court's politicization since I was in law school in the early 2000s under the Bush administration, I wrote 10 years ago under Obama a proposal for 18-year staggered terms on the Supreme Court to address the court's established political bias. It's pro-corporate bias, for instance. Here's the important part without reintroducing another bias. That's the danger of a court packing plan. A court packing plan might smell nice to progressives for the moment because we've lost the court to fascists, but replacing one bias for another only undermines the independence of the judiciary and the independence of the judiciary is a crux on which liberty rests. I want to make sure that the older, longest-serving justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, aside, but to cycle people off the bench, that would change the incentives in the nominations process. It would diminish the incentives for stealth nominees, for younger nominees. It would allow people to still establish expertise on the bench and allow for new blood to come so that every generation is not beholden to the stale consensus of two generations past. Yeah, and I absolutely love that plan. I've previously advocated for a court packing plan, but as I hear arguments like this, it does sound more appealing because something has to be done. I think a lot of people would agree that we can't just allow the next generation to be dominated by a fascistic pro-corporate court. That's unacceptable. So I do like this plan. I think it's well-reasoned. I think it could be something that would potentially pass. Now, one thing that I really wanted to get your take on was this narrative that you are battling because anytime I post a video about Nancy Pelosi, I just did this week and I talked about the way that she capitulated to Mitch McConnell when it comes to immigration. The pushback that I get is people don't even want to hear the argument. I saw someone on Twitter say, I'm not even willing to hear anyone criticizing Nancy Pelosi. She's a progressive and she, you know, one person brought to my attention, look, she was campaigning for your rights as a gay man before you were born. So how can you say she's not a progressive? So let me ask you this. How do you go against that narrative that is so ingrained in people because people think Nancy Pelosi, she's from San Francisco, she is just by definition a progressive. What do you do to differentiate yourself in this situation? Because I see it, I see how different you are. But how do you get other people to see it? Because this is something that I'm finding really difficult to accomplish. I appreciate the question and you're right. This is one of our central challenges, particularly for low information voters who don't pay that much attention and they only get their news from broadcast network news. And so they see Pelosi cited as the seeming antithesis to Trump. And so they presume that she's acting in opposition. And I share with those people basically information. There's a both a critique of the incumbent and a sort of positive rationale, right, for why my voice is a better one for our district to be represented in Washington. Just to focus on the first, I have to remind people often who don't pay a lot of attention that for better or worse, and I wish that this were not the case, the Speaker of the House has been complicit with our criminal administration in Washington on, for instance, imposing conservative fiscal austerity rules, constraining the progressive majority in the House from pursuing social spending into the deficit to meet the needs of the American people. The Speaker of the House is unfortunately complicit with our criminal administration in Washington by refusing to initiate articles of impeachment. She swore an oath. Every member of Congress swears an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And the biggest threat to our Constitution, indeed the biggest threat to our Republic, to working American families, to future generations, to peace around the world is our criminal president. And for the Speaker of the House, to for two years bang the drum of supposed resistance among her supporters and then fail to show up now that she has the opportunity as the Speaker to pursue executive accountability in my mind is unconscionable. It is disqualifying. It is the abdication of a constitutional responsibility. Moreover, Speaker Pelosi, for better or worse, supports our criminal administration's foreign policy from Venezuela, where he wants to execute a right-wing resource extraction coup, to Palestine, where he supports human rights abuses, right? And the use of our military industrial complex to foment and expand those human rights abuses. This nonsense at the border, the idea that Speaker Pelosi would sign the bill, would stump for the bill to give President Trump billions of dollars to build concentration camps. And the only human rights protection we get is a verbal assurance from the Vice President that the next time they kill a child, they'll let us know within two days. That is thin gruel to accept for billions of taxpayer dollars. It's unacceptable. Those are some of the critiques of the incumbent. I could get into her funding Bush's wars and sweeping CIA torture under the rug and being complicit in an era of mass incarceration that's laid waste to communities across the country. But I don't want to beat the donkey that I hope is dead when next year we replace the bipartisan consensus on corporate rule with, instead, a new vision for the Democratic Party that places human rights before profit, that places human rights before the interests of fossil fuel extraction companies, that places human rights before the interests of the military industrial complex, that places human rights before the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex and health insurance companies. And ultimately, the reason I present a sharp distinction with the speaker is that some of my earliest political acts were organizing demonstrations to try to stop wars that she was voting to fund. I've done a ton of work creatively as an organizer in the courts trying to seek executive accountability for CIA torture that she facilitated by failing to raise the alarm when she was read into it as the speaker of the house last time a decade ago. A particularly crucial distinction for our districts here in San Francisco were one of the mechas of the LGBTQ communities around the world, frankly. And when I was fresh out of law school as a cis-hetero Muslim lawyer, I was fighting for marriage equality for LGBT couples in the state of New York in 2004. This was almost a decade before Pelosi showed up to even acknowledge the rights of her constituents, my neighbors. And I think the fact that I was fighting in the courts for rights a decade before she even deigned to acknowledge them on the eve, mind you, of a right-wing Supreme Court enshrining those rights for all of us, I think that's a very revealing distinction. And my client at the time, Jason West, who is the mayor of New Paltz, New York, describes those moments as there weren't a lot of people willing to stand with him. And certainly the Democratic Party leadership was not willing to stand with him. Speaker Pelosi did not stand with him. I stood with him and his constituents long before she chose to. And I think that that distinction is revealing to people of the district. And I think that as we make the case over the next year, both for why Speaker Pelosi has been quite disappointing in her supposed resistance and unfortunately effective in her advancement of the Trump administration's policies and also the history I've had of resistance for real, building the last object of the party establishing rights that at some point people long thought were impossible. I've helped make the impossible real before and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Yeah. And everything that you say is completely irrefutable. You don't just make a good case as to why Nancy Pelosi isn't a true progressive or even really that left wing, but you also simultaneously are building this really strong case for yourself as to why you absolutely are the correct representative for that position. Now, one thing I want to ask you is because you lay out this case very articulately and perfectly, I think, do you see people being actually receptive when you talk to them? Like, do you notice cognitive dissonance or are they actually responding well to that? Yeah. The other reason I'm sure I'm going to win the seat in November 2020 is we win any crowd I have a chance to get in front of. And in public outreach, people on the street understand what is happening here. First, a lot of San Franciscans pay a lot of attention and many of them have been long over Speaker Pelosi. I think the complaints about her relative conservatism date back to the Bush administration when she was funding Bush's wars. You know, the last candidate to challenge her who does as well as I did in a primary and frankly beat me by a little bit, a significant amount actually was Cindy Sheehan. She was a gold star mother who had lost a son in Iraq and she ran against Pelosi, raising this issue of Speaker Pelosi's fidelity to the military industrial complex instead of the peace and justice movement for which this city has historically been more known. And while on the one hand, Cindy didn't break through, a lot of people in this district have long been very concerned about Speaker Pelosi's co-optation of our city's voice in Washington. What's kept her in office for 30 years is vast troves of corporate capital and she will still have access to that. But one thing that's very different in 2019 and 2020 that in years before, frankly, is that the electorate is woke. People have grown increasingly alarmed. And while the Trump administration's litany of crimes and serial human rights abuses might be the thing that forced them to wake up, I think in the context of people coming to greater awareness about their own lives and the broader context of our society, the historical arc of justice and whether it's bending in our favor or against us, I think increasingly as people do investigate policy issues, they discover just how unfortunately conservative Speaker Pelosi has been. And as someone who's long but long before running this race, you know, I was dedicated to building the left edge of the movement in some respects, the fact that that I am even running for Congress often surprises me the idea that I am now representing the voice of an entire generation. And I do think millennials being the most progressive generation our republic has ever known. They are solidly behind me. In addition to many boomers and certainly people in my generation who have a critique of the failures of the corporate paradigm that's preceded us, the idea that I am now firmly wearing an entire generation is frankly surprising. When I see Bernie in 2016 touch this nerve across the country, and I'm watching this being like, oh, okay, we're not alone apparently. And then witnessing Representative Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 score a tremendous upset against a very firmly entrenched incumbent. Those things were very hard to overlook and recognizing that the field here in San Francisco that preceded me in 2018 didn't have my depth of history and the movement and expertise across issues from marriage equality to campaign finance reform to privacy in the context of government surveillance to due process in the face of detention, torture, drone strikes, my history of work organizing particularly resistance to profiling by law enforcement authorities at the local and the state level and the federal level. These were a few things that inclined me to jump in. And I think that as I make the case to people here in San Francisco, everyone frankly is very receptive. And I'll be clear about this. If Bernie or Liz Warren are at the top of the ticket in 2020, I win the seat period. I'll have a harder road to climb to the extent one of the centrists are in that slot. But if it is a progressive, if it is a left-wing populist on the ticket in 2020, I'm absolutely confident that with the combined force of that campaign's GOTV operations plus the campaign that we're building now, our ground games are stronger already than it ever got last year. And we still have another, you know, over a year before the general election in November 2020. I have a great deal of confidence that we're going to surprise a lot of people and help continue the generational earthquake that's going to transform our political system over the next five years. That's encouraging. And as you speak, I am a believer. Now, let's fast forward into the future. Let's assume you dethrone Nancy Pelosi. And I mean, that's going to send shockwaves through the entire country. But we can anticipate exactly what's going to happen. I already know that there's going to be a Fox News segment where they say Nancy Pelosi, you know, apparently she's too conservative for the Democrats. And now there's this new guy that's even more liberal. So we already know what the right-wingers and Fox News and right-wing propagandists are going to do. But I think that people within the Democratic Party, they're going to use that example of Fox News against you in order to try to marginalize you within Congress and say, look, this guy is in a representative. So my question is, how do you fight back against the forces within your own party that desperately don't want you to get the message across? They don't want to change the status quo. They want to maintain this capitalistic system where people are exploited and voices aren't represented. How do you push back? Because this is my thing. I don't know how I would respond if one, I need power in Congress because I'm aware of the fact that leadership can strip me of committee appointments. But at the same time, I also need to push back because if I don't, then I'll also be taken advantage of. So how do you respond to the establishment? What do you think is the correct approach? Super thoughtful question. I have a lot of different interests, you know, in addition to politics and music, I DJ, I'm a martial artist as well. That's awesome. In a couple of different martial artists, there are principles, martial arts, I should say, there are principles around deflection and evasion simultaneous with attack. This is one like thing that characterizes Kung Fu or Kapa Ueda. I practice Kapa Ueda and a lot of strikes in Kapa Ueda are also evasions. And all that is to say, just like Judo or Aikido, there are opportunities to use the other sides force and momentum against them. So I want to focus on the first part of your question, which is to say, what happens when Fox News brings me back on again. I've been on Fox News nationally before. In 2005, I was the principal or one of the spokespeople for the counter-inaugural demonstrations that were responding to President Bush's second term. And so I was on Hannity Incombs in January 2005, and I made a fool of Sean Hannity on his own show, particularly because, frankly, if you speak to conservatives, even in the middle of the country and the South, in terms that they can understand, they agree with us, right? The key is not to call it socialism. The key is to call it your right to get your aging parents to a doctor without having to go homeless, getting them there. And there's another piece here. I'm not just a socialist. I'm a democratic socialist. I have a lot of things to say about how the democracy is threatened short of socialism. We have restraints on voting rights and attacks on the franchise. We have a crumbling independence of the judiciary and the capacity to defend individual rights threatened by political majorities. We have rising executive secrecy, impeding the right of the press and the public to understand how our government is using our tax dollars and conducting its business. And we have mounting surveillance that inhibits dissent. So at least among four different dimensions, our democracy is being attacked by a bipartisan consensus. And emphasizing those issues, that is very appealing, particularly to the libertarian wing of the right wing. So Trumpies come in a lot of different flavors, and a lot of them are simply iconic lasts who understand that they're being fleeced and bought a bunch of snake oil. So if you go in there speaking the truth, you can speak to their very legitimate concerns about how the bipartisan consensus to put Wall Street before Main Street for the last generation has led to all of us not only being fleeced, but raced off of either or both of two cliffs, either climate catastrophe on the one hand or rising fascism attempting to consolidate itself on the other. I think many people on the right end of the spectrum share those concerns. So I just want to push back and say, I think I can co-opt some of those fora that we would expect otherwise to demagogue people like me. And we've seen that happen before. Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez, they've been very effective co-opting those right wing fora. I mean, frankly, I think the reason that AOC is known today by an acronym is because for six months before they figured out that she's an unassailable target, the right wing made her a viral sensation. They went after her on every news cycle. And it just turns out that their base was with her. And all Americans are with her, frankly. I mean, she is the future. We, democratic socialists, are the future. And we're just waiting for the rest of the political system to figure it out. And I think as we make the case and we present to voters the choice between, do you want your aging parents or your kids to be able to get to a doctor without you having to risk bankruptcy? Do you think that human beings should have a right to housing and food? Or would you rather squander those resources on missiles and nuclear weapons programs and fighter planes that don't even meet the security needs of our country's future? Right? Wasteful, fraudulent corporate boondoggles that leave your own children impoverished. Do you want a viable future for our species on this planet or not? I think these are questions that when presented in sharp terms that recognize the complicity of corporate Democrats that we can speak to the populace on both sides of the spectrum. One key here, and I do want to make this explicit, is I am both more partisan, pardon me, more progressive and less partisan than Pelosi. In other words, the attempt to defend Democrats is part of the reason why we've seen the country slide to the right. If we articulate bold principles that our own state most treasured values, the inclusion of the tired poor huddled masses yearning to be free, the peace, equality, liberty, values that we're all taught to believe in if we boldly defend those values, especially in a time of crisis like the one we live in now, I think we will pull Americans with us. And I take very seriously both the responsibility and the opportunity as an immigrant to remind other Americans what makes our country great and has made our country great. And it's not the promises of a tyrant in the White House. It is the inclusion of people from all over the world. It is these principles. That's what makes America great. And I'm very excited to breathe new life into them and to defend them, you know, not just as an advocate in our communities, but in Congress as well. I don't think you're going to have anyone who watches this who's a regular viewer, not going to be convinced. So tell us what we can do if we want to support you because I'm assuming a lot of people are very excited. And they want to help you get Nancy Pelosi out not just because we want to defeat Nancy Pelosi, but we want to elect you because you've got a plan for everything in the true sense, you know, not in the not in the false sense. So what can we do to support you? Where can we go? And how can we support your campaign if we don't live in that district in California? Appreciate the question. So you can visit us online at www.shawhid4change.us. That's S-H-A-H-I-D-F-O-R-C-H-A-N-G-E. U.S. You can make a donation there. Campaign contributions help level the playing field. I am confronting the most prolific fundraiser in Congress. And so I certainly have a hard target and any support would be really helpful. We have 1,400 supporters from around the country. It's a very humbling experience to see so many people pitching in to enable this campaign. And so you'll be in very good company. Folks can also sign up to volunteer. That can include if you're in the Bay Area any number of opportunities to join us in street outreach, dropping lit, canvassing. And even if you're not in the Bay Area, there are also any number of volunteer opportunities from data entry. There's a whole set of research opportunities. We have social media teams that are supporting us. So if you're inspired by what you're hearing and you want to help end the bipartisan consensus on corporate rule, we'd welcome you to reach us at www.shawhid4change.us or on any of the major social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at www.shawhid4change. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the program, Shahid. I will be watching very closely because I've got a really good feeling about you. And I think a lot of other people do as well. I think now is going to be the time that, you know, we get someone in that position in that district who is actually going to truly represent the people, not just there, but across the country because, you know, this point that I like to make is even if you don't live in that particular district, if Shahid won't be your representative per se, what he does will affect you because Ilhan Omar, she just co-sponsored or she sponsored actually a bill that would cancel all student loan debt, Pramila Jayapal in Washington. She sponsored Medicare for All. These are things that affect all of us. So it's not just about that one district. This is a national movement and if you could participate in any way, chip in a buck or two, you are helping the cause. So Shahid, thank you so much. We will be following very closely. You're very kind. Thanks so much for having me on. I'll leave no stone unturned and I hope to talk to you again soon. Absolutely. Absolutely.