 So, as most of you hopefully know by now, Shahid Butar and Nancy Pelosi's primary opponent has advanced to the general election in November. So California has a top two primary system to where Democrats and Republicans all basically compete in the same open primary and the top two candidates with the highest vote totals advanced to the general election. Shahid Butar is facing off against Nancy Pelosi and I will admit this is going to be a really tough race to beat. But is it impossible? No, I don't think it's impossible. But still, even though she has one of the most serious primary challenges she's had in decades, she's not taking it seriously and this isn't necessarily something that is uncommon. Usually if a Democrat incumbent is facing a primary challenger who's actually really strong, you know, they choose to not debate them or even acknowledge their existence unless their internal polls show that they're kind of in trouble. You know, it's why Joe Crowley back in 2018 finally chose to acknowledge Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's existence and debate her because the numbers didn't look too good for him and it scared him. And Nancy Pelosi currently is in the phase of this campaign where she just pretends like he doesn't exist. But regardless if her internal poll numbers show her beating him or not, it shouldn't matter. Like if you are facing a primary challenge, you have to debate your primary opponent, right? Nancy absolutely destroyed her primary opponent, but she still debated her because that's what you have to do in a democracy, right? You're not entitled to your seat in Congress. You have to allow your constituents to hear alternative voices. I don't care if it's someone who I support or not. I mean, Ro Khanna, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders, if you have a primary opponent, you should be required to at least debate them three times. But that's not what we get. You have to basically twist their arms to get them to agree to a debate. And the fact that we even have to do this in a democracy is infuriating. But here we are. Now, Shea Hidbutar is trying to get Nancy Pelosi to agree to a debate and he tweeted out, San Francisco deserves a real representation in Congress. At the very least, Nancy Pelosi should show up for a debate. It's been 30 years since her last one. And he also links to a sprout petition that you can sign. It has over 2000 signatures where you can kind of maybe put a little bit of pressure on Nancy Pelosi to debate. But again, I will say that it's preposterous that we have to do this. There needs to be some type of requirement or law to where if you're facing a primary opponent that reaches a certain threshold, if they're a serious challenge to you, then you have to debate them, especially in these top two primary states. There's no excuse. In Washington state, in California, if you have a top two primary system and one of two candidates will win in a general election, they should be required to debate. It doesn't matter if it's two Democrats or a Democrat versus a Republican. A debate should be mandatory. It shouldn't be based on whether or not an incumbent will agree to it because that's absurd. That's not democratic. So I would encourage you to sign that petition. I think that petitions can be useful. But more importantly, you have to tweet to Nancy Pelosi, call her office, actually put real pressure on her because if she has an option to just ignore Shea Hidbutar, then she will. So the point is we have to do what we can to help Shea Hidbutar. I mean, like, this is going to be a hard race, but it's worthwhile because Shea Hid is a phenomenal candidate. Like, putting Nancy Pelosi aside, Shea Hidbutar alone is someone who we desperately need in Congress because unlike a lot of the elites like Nancy Pelosi who you see in Congress, he's a normal person. He's a normal person who has dealt with struggle, right? Who has actually faced adversity in life and wasn't handed everything with a silver spoon. And to kind of show you that, he put out an ad in March which really speaks to the world of difference that we see between him and Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi is someone who has two, you know, $12,000 refrigerators stocked full of ice cream in her home, in her mansion, one of many mansions, I'm assuming, whereas Shea Hidbutar actually had to fight for every single thing that he has. So take a look at this ad and we'll talk a little bit more about him when we come back. If you've always had a roof over your head and you know it's going to be there, it's really frankly, I think impossible to relate to people who've had to be exposed to the elements. Just the struggle not to be exposed to the rain, the cold, the sleet, what have you. That in itself is an all-consuming endeavor. I thankfully haven't had to deal with that for large chunks of my life. When I was 17 to 19, I had a taste of it and I know that that's, yeah, I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody. I thought everything was fine until I was 16 and my parents informed me we were losing the home to foreclosure. It felt like my world crumbling. It was losing my friends because I wouldn't be around them anymore. I was losing the place that I knew. It was putting all of my worldly belongings in boxes and frankly losing most of them. I still wonder occasionally about my high school yearbooks and whatever happened to them. It also was the beginning of what for me became having to leave college the first time. Smile shot, I'm just taking pictures of your school. I had all the student aid that I could get because my parents had lost their house and weren't able to really contribute anything. I couldn't make the expected contribution for the fall semester. The first message from the university was don't worry about it, we'll figure it out. But I love you. I want you desperately in school. By the middle of the semester it was, okay, this isn't gonna work. But by that point I'd been in the dorms for half the semester so I ended up on the hook to the University of Chicago for $10,000 on top of my student loans as I was losing that place to live. I have friends that I'm very grateful for sheltering me from the most brutal aspects of being unhoused. You know, I only really a couple times was outside but mostly, you know, I had a roof over my head. I had a couple friends in the dorms who had let me in. I stayed on people's couches. This one particularly died, I couldn't get in. I do remember there's snow on the ground. You know, I wasn't quite dressed for it. I had a coat but it's not like I definitely wasn't like layered up to be out all night, you know. And you know, I spent that night basically on buses. It gave me opportunities to understand what desperation is like and what people go through. I see here in San Francisco people grapple with being unhoused and having inhabited very briefly that experience, I know how quickly it could crack someone's psyche. I lost my hope as a young person on the South Side of Chicago and frankly, I think of it as a stroke of remarkable fortune that I was able to get back into a position where I could be not only secure with a roof over my head but secure with job opportunities, learning opportunities. I think that in the past, there's been this presumption in the United States that if you're unhoused or if you're unsuccessful, somehow it's your fault. That's never been true and it's particularly untrue as wealth gets siphoned up to the 0.1%. More and more Americans are in a position where even if they have a roof over, they're not sure if it's gonna stay there. They're not sure how to keep it. We have plenty of housing for everybody and the fact that we let apartments go empty so that they aren't available for people to live in, I think that that's just a foolish choice. In my mind, making sure that everybody has housing isn't just serving the people who are unhoused. It isn't just serving the people who are housing insecure. It serves our communities because it means that our communities and our country can benefit from all of the contributions that everyone has to offer. And the idea that we have made housing such a market-driven commodity instead of a human right is just a reflection of our mislead priorities as a society. It's one of the things I wanna help correct. That is a powerful ad. And Shea Hadbutar is a phenomenal candidate. Now, what I usually say is in these types of races, I think that the insurgent lefty candidate is going to win so long as enough people hear about him or her. But in this instance, I think that name recognition is important. But Nancy Pelosi almost has this cult of personality around her where you have these resistance liberals just so infatuated with her because they think that she's effective fighting against Donald Trump's agenda when she's not at all. Clapping at Donald Trump sarcastically or tearing up his speech or whatever, that is not something that actually affects meaningful change. Actually allowing progressive policies to be voted on, challenging him in a meaningful way, it's more than this type of political theater that amounts to nothing. And you have to try to break the hold and break this type of trance that centrists are in this infatuation that they have with establishment Democrats. So even if people know about the option in Shea Hadbutar, I still think a lot of them would opt for Nancy Pelosi specifically because they kind of worship her and see her as the anti-lefty, anti-progressive who's just holding the center because that's what she said she has to do. So this race I think requires an extra effort to the left. That's the point. Not to discourage you, that's not why I'm bringing this up, but it requires us to go beyond like the traditional primary race where we can't just phone bank and canvas for Shea Hadbutar, even though that's crucial, but we actually have to do a little bit more to change hearts and minds because anytime you're going after this type of political behemoth like Nancy Pelosi or Joe Crowley, it requires a lot. And having extended conversations with people in that district who will be casting a vote in November, that is absolutely crucial. So if you live in that district, you have to get out and do everything in your power to elect Shea Hadbutar. And those of us who don't live in that district, we can still phone bank, but we have to donate to Shea Hadbutar and support efforts like this where we sign petitions and spread the word about what he's trying to do because this is a really difficult race to achieve. And if we're gonna be successful, which is possible, we have to fight like we've never fought before, fight harder than we fought for Bernie Sanders. So that's all I'll say. She's got to debate him. And I think that the more pressure that we put on her, the better off we'll be at ousting her. The better and more stronger a candidate Shea Hadbutar will be if he knows that we have his back. So I'll leave that there. This is an important race and we have to watch everything that is happening here and try to bolster the message that Shea Had is trying to get across. The Humanist Report is fake news. Mike only cares about crazy Bernie and his wacky socialist ideas. Sad, very sad. I'm unsubscribing.