Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Virgil Interviews Julia Salazar, LIVE!

Episode Date: July 10, 2018

On July 3rd, Virgil interviewed candidate for New York State Senate Julia Salazar in front of a sold out crowd at Brooklyn's Starr Bar. They discuss housing and justice reform, and how her potential Democratic Socialist caucus of one might begin transforming New York State government. more on her campaign here: https://salazarforsenate.com/​ Donate to Julia’s campaign: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/largesons Donate to Chapo’s campaign: http://chapotraphouse.com/book

So, without further ado, I want to introduce our two guests having a conversation tonight. First, he is a member of, is it a membership organization? I'm not sure, Chapo Trap House? I don't know if you pay dues or what, but Chapo Trap House. They are coming out with a book, The Chapo Guide to Revolution, a Manifesto Against Facts, Logic and Reason, Mr. Virgil Texas is in the house. And then second, I want to introduce you to somebody who inspires me every day. This woman is the best of the best.

She's going to take them out running for state senate in district 18, Julia Salazar. Thanks everyone. Thanks for coming out tonight on such short notice. You want to get into it? Can everyone hear me? New York's 18th senate district contains most of Williamsburg, a big part of Greenpoint, Cypress Hills, some of Bed-Stuy and almost all of Bushwick. Spanish is spoken in about half the households, about a third of the district's residents

are foreign born, and I'm guessing some of the recent newcomers come from such exotic locales as New Jersey and the Midwest. Since 2003, the area has been represented in the state senate by Martin DeLon. DeLon was previously a member of the city council during his tenure. He voted for vacancy decontrol, which allows landlords to charge whatever they want should a rent-stabilized apartment become vacant. A rash of evictions followed. His district lost one in five rent-stabilized apartments in the past decade.

At the time of the vote, the median rent in Bushwick was $500 a month. Now it's a lot more than that. DeLon has said if he had known it would have had an impact on his district, he would have voted against it. Despite his change of heart, DeLon helped kill legislation to end vacancy decontrol the last time the Democrats controlled the state senate. Part of that may be due to the over $200,000 he has received from the real estate industry and anti-tenant groups.

DeLon has one son currently enrolled in a prep school called the New York State Assembly. DeLon was also an ally of the political boss and serial sexual harasser Vita Lopez. Steering $800,000, Lopez's non-profit comes slush fund, which Lopez used to buy and launder influence. And although DeLon once said that the members of the independent Democratic conference, the group of turncoat Democrats who gave control of the state senate to Republicans, should be kicked out of the party, the IDC spent over $8,000 on Lopez's 2016 re-election campaign. That year, a Latina socialist community organizer named Debbie Medina received 40% of the vote

against the long-time incumbent in the September primary, which was decided by fewer than 2,000 votes. My first question to you is, how does Julius Alazar get to 50%? Sorry, to 15% you said? 50, 50. I clearly said 50. Okay, okay. Definitely.

All right. It's going to be hostile. Yeah. This is a hostile interview. Now, but also, yes, in 2016, it was DeLon who faced a challenger from Debbie Medina. Vita Lopez was already dead. He died in 2015, but he was, but the ghost of Vita Lopez still haunts Bushwick and Brooklyn via.

Okay. All right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. Via the DeLons. You're not supposed to know this, but I need to know this. So yes, the DeLon family, the senator who I'm challenging, his son, who also represents

me in the State Assembly, both of them do in our healthy, normal democracy, and they are vestiges of the Vita Lopez political machine. And the way that we get to 50% is actually, despite popular belief, will be from rejecting all donations from for-profit real estate developers, from corporations, and running a truly grassroots campaign in the 18th District. We've already mobilized hundreds of volunteers. We're actually well on our way to our fundraising goal via largely $27 donations on average, just small donations, a truly grassroots campaign.

And Debbie Medina was a Democratic Socialist candidate, also a Latina attendant organizer from South Williamsburg, who ran with integrity and ran a really strong campaign, but lacked... This was 2016 and the summer of 2016, so it was before the presidential election, and before, I would say, socialism was really normalized on the national level, before DSA got the incredible boost in membership that it got, and at the same time, Debbie Medina still was able to run a strong campaign against Martin Delan. She got more than 40% of the vote, and that was without the infrastructure that we have, and not in the very supportive political climate that we now have in North Brooklyn.

People have been organizing against Delan since before he was even in the state Senate for decades, people in this community, and they demonstrated in 2016, even before in 2014, that they are ready for a true Democratic Socialist working class candidate to unseat Delan and to finally bring their voices to Albany. You started your campaign about a couple months ago, yeah? There are a dozen or so people at your launch event. You initially thought you might raise 50,000 over the course of it. This week, you are getting national media profiles, live podcast interviews with future

bestselling authors, and endorsement by Cynthia Nixon, and comparisons to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Did you think you would get here so quickly? I did not expect the momentum that would be transferred largely from Alexandria's campaign and from the end of the congressional primaries to happen as quickly as it did, that as minutes or within an hour after Alexandria's massive upset of Joe Crowley was announced last Tuesday night, it has been less than a week, but immediately we received a surge in grassroots donations and also in people signing up to volunteer every day since then, people have been coming out to the office and talking about how inspired they are to continue this, because they recognize

that this is a movement. It is never a candidate, it is not a couple of candidates, but that this is a movement in a wave that is not only sweeping through Brooklyn, but across the U.S., it is a socialist movement to elect people to office who will finally fight for the working class. How did the Nixon endorsement come about? Did you know her before last week? I definitely did not personally know Cynthia Nixon before yesterday, where she met me in my friend's bar in Bushwick, but I was familiar with her advocacy actually long before she

even considered running for governor, because I am a member of the UAW and was involved in an academic workers campaign at Barnard and Columbia fighting for a union, and Cynthia Nixon before it was cool, before it was popular, came out and supported the academic workers in their fight to unionize publicly. I have watched her for a long time be a true advocate for people both in my district and all over New York, so that was how I knew Cynthia Nixon beforehand, but I did not know her personally, and I was really, really proud to receive her endorsement yesterday and also to endorse her.

She's a deeply inspiring candidate. She continues to take positions that not only are, I guess, considered radical, even though they're just common sense positions, saying we need to abolish ICE, saying that everyone, regardless of their immigration status or what they can afford, should be able to see the doctor and take their kids to the doctor, that we should have, you know, expand the rent stabilization program, have universal rent control across New York state. These are common sense policies, but they've been considered radical. They're moving Cuomo to the left for sure, and I'm really proud to stand with Cynthia

Nixon in supporting all of these policies. They are radical like in the good way. Yeah, for sure. No, radical. Yeah, that's good, but... The next thing I... Capital G, good. Yeah.

The next thing I just have written is the word biography. There's, I don't know, a picture of Kitty Kelly, so let's hear it. My biography? No, Ronald Reagan's. Come on. My autobiography. Sure. So, my family immigrated to the U.S. from Columbia when I was a little kid.

I was raised by a single mom and a working class family, and I started actually working in a grocery store, bagging groceries when I was 14. I worked through high school in the service industry, and because of, I think, my mother's experience, she had a chip on her shoulder while I was growing up and developed some bootstraps, reactionary, conservative politics that I felt a lot of dissonance about growing up and seeing that the policies that I was familiar with or the politics I was familiar with in my home were counter-intuitive based on just the fact that we were living on social security checks and that my lived experience was, it totally ran against that, and so I

ended up going to college, uptown, and I was a domestic worker through college. I took care of two kids, worked for a family throughout college. I cleaned apartments to supplement that income, and through that lived experience I developed a class consciousness that has remained with me, and I became a socialist and an activist and an organizer. I actually, my earliest organizing experience was organizing my neighbors and my roommates in the building that we lived in. We lived in this building that was managed by an abusive management company who refused

to adequately heat the building in the winter, refused to make urgent repairs that some of the families in the building had been waiting years for, and finally we said we are going to withhold our rent until you make the repairs, and finally after three months they noticed that we weren't paying rent. I noticed that I was not paying rent for that three months, so it was astonishing that it took that long, but finally they noticed, we went to housing court with them. We actually won concessions, we won a small victory against the management company. We didn't have to pay back the withheld rent, etc., they had to make repairs, but then we

also were displaced. We didn't live in a rent stabilized unit, etc., we were forced out. It was a moment for me that just exemplified that we need systemic changes in order to address these systemic problems. Ever since then I have been organizing in my free time, then professionally, now still as a candidate. That's a good segue. Let's take some time to talk about housing.

Let me be blunt. Is there a housing crisis in Brooklyn today? In fact, there is. There is a housing crisis that is affecting every inch of our district, which by the way, so we're in Bushwick now, it includes much of Green Point, most of Williamsburg, all of Bushwick, and all of Cyprus Hills of East New York. It's shaped like a claw across North Brooklyn. What it is, everyone is affected by the housing crisis.

Thousands of families are being displaced from their homes every year because of a lack of regulation and policies that the incumbent, the current state senator, has failed to oppose. Earlier it was mentioned that a long time ago he supported vacancy, decontrol. He claimed that he didn't know, also he claimed at the time that he didn't know the effect that it would have on his district. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he had received an enormous amount of money more than any state senator from real estate developers. These are the decisions that he made in the 16 years since then.

He's failed to correct his course. As a result, we still have these policies like vacancy, decontrol, like eviction bonuses that reward landlords and management companies that incentivize tenant harassment and the destabilization of apartments, the deregulation that is making North Brooklyn extremely unaffordable. It doesn't have to be this way. Next year the rent laws expire. Very two years we elect a new state senator, but we absolutely can't afford to wait. There are more than 300,000 people in this district.

It's overwhelmingly working class. It's overwhelmingly people of color, people who are disproportionately affected by these terrible policies. We need someone in Albany who will finally bring their voices to Albany and fight for systemic change and change the rent laws. Dilan sponsored New York's law of law protections for tenants living in illegal commercial or industrial spaces. What do you make of that legislation?

It is complicated because there were people who thought at the time that they were on the right side of the fight, who I think were working class and were families, but the consequences of that have been terrible for people who lived in, especially in Green Point and Williamsburg. Part of this movement, including upzoning, is that people are still suffering from the consequences of we need- Upzoning? Yes. Could you just define that for the audience?

Not for me, I know what it is. Do you want to define it? No. I'm interviewing you, so I think it would be appropriate for you to find it. So for example, Bushwick is being threatened in this way right now. What's the best way to- I want to define this in terms that aren't terribly wonky. It's going to threaten the amount of affordable housing and consistent with the character of the neighborhood housing that is able to remain in the neighborhoods of North Brooklyn is

the best way that I can put it. It will allow developers to have more control over land use, over the kinds of, like, overconstruction. It's definitely going to make it more difficult, especially under the current laws, for people to be able to afford to live in these areas. That was the effect, even though many people didn't anticipate that, that was the effect in Green Point and in Williamsburg. People thought, okay, it'll actually make it easier for us to live in these converted buildings, but what it actually did was it inhibited the development of truly affordable

housing and also people's ability to stay in their homes. It's those big, ugly cubes you see every other block when you walk around. Yes. Okay, yeah. That's a better way of putting it. Right. So it allows developers to build really hideous, gentrifying eyesores in our neighborhoods. Yeah.

I used to live over by Flushing and Wilson, and it was my favorite apartment. It was very small. It was this house that was kind of set out behind a shop, and I walked by it a couple weeks ago. It's brazed, totally raised, just an empty field. Wow. You used to live on the empty field. I didn't live in the field.

No, there was a building in the field. Yeah, yeah, sure. There's a building in the field. Yeah, you lived in a, that's like Peak Warehouse, Bushwick. And one day I was, there's an alley, at least it's a street, one day I was walking through it, and there are these garbage, these big rubber trash cans there, and I looked in one, and it was teeming with rats, like, 30 of them, just scurrying about, clearly trapped in the rubber-made trash bin, and they couldn't get out.

And I don't, and then I came back like an hour later, and I walked by, and it was gone. And to this day, it haunts me, trying to figure out what became of the rats. Teeming. Yeah, teeming with them. And well, for what, I mean, the immediate question is, why were they there? How did they get there? So someone must have put them there, or a bunch of rat eggs in there that then hatch. But then I guess that person took it somewhere else.

Yeah, I don't know, they sold it to a snake owner, or they dumped it in just another block, which is what I would have done. I don't know how to respond to that. It wasn't a question, it was more of a comment. To show you that I'm concerned about what's happening to the neighborhood. You know, I'm assuming that's the thing that the Yimbees want, the yes and my backyard people, the very bougie people who think that housing scarcity may be fixed by just building your way out of it.

And I remember right after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected, everybody's favorite pundit, Maddie Glacias, said, I'm going to convince her to support upsoning. Could he convince you to become a Yimbee? A Yimbee? A Yimbee. A young Yimbee. No, I can barely explain it, it's just a mishmash of weirdo libertarians. Got it, no, I don't think Maddie Glacias could convince me of anything, but definitely not

to. Certainly not to become a Yimbee, yeah, I don't know, I don't know what the case is that he is making for it, actually. I don't know what the, you know, Vox liberal case is for upsonings, especially people who live in Washington, D.C. Well, the argument they make is, and yeah, it is basically just like always that kind of person, like a tech person in San Francisco, the argument they make is it's a basic supply and demand.

We have the demand, if we want to put rents down, here's what you do, here's what you do, you increase the supply. So that's upsetting, I mean, that's tearing down, you know, two family house homes and putting up the six story cubes. Sure. Yeah, I mean, housing is a human right, right, people should be able to, I think so, people should be able to stay in their homes and families shouldn't be displaced, it's important to be able to provide affordable housing and not to target people, actually even people

who are newly still, you know, moving to the neighborhood, it isn't their fault that they can't afford to live wherever they live before, perhaps, or that developers are able to operate without restrictions in the neighborhood. However, I don't think that it should just be about supply and demand, that there needs to be more regulation in order to make, and frankly, in the form of rent stabilization, and ending policies, like, again, like vacancy decontrol, that incentivize landlords to harass tenants and to displace people. So basically, I just think that, you know, it isn't just a matter of people being able

to move anywhere they would like, I'm actually surprised even to hear this from Madaglacius, or from people who profess to be progressives, it's as though they don't understand the effects that bad housing policy has on tenants. I mean, my understanding is that they advocate for regulation in other sectors, it's, maybe it's not strange to me, I'm sure it has to do with their class interests, but like, it is strange to me that they would draw a line when it comes to housing policy. I mean, I guess they see that, you know, we don't really have a public housing system any more in this country, stop building public housing, so the only way that-

At the federal level. At the federal level, yeah, and the only way you get new units, really, unless there's a state level or a local level investment, is just cutting deals with developers, and you know, that's sort of de Blasio's housing policy. Gentrification, you know, means higher rents, higher costs of living, more evictions and more attention. So how do you balance the needs of newcomers who are also seeking affordable housing while mitigating the strain that they may place on existing communities?

So what is creating that demand, right? It's the development of apartments that are currently sitting vacant, and the rents are set at, you know, just an absurdly high rent, right? But there are a lot of these apartments that are sitting vacant right now. I think that it's important to not treat this demand that we're talking about as though it is inevitable or static, and to keep in mind that these conditions are hurting far more people than they are helping. So I think that we don't need to accommodate the unregulated market, the developers.

When we have a movement of people who, you know, every day I go out in Bushwick and Williamsburg and talk to people who are afraid that they're going to be pushed out of their homes. And these policies are popular with the electorate, right? Like the policies that not only Martin Dillon, but De Blasio, but other mainstream Democrats are supporting are hurting the vast majority of people in the district, and they know this. And so we don't need to capitulate to developers as long as we continue to build the grassroots movement to get people to replace them and get people elected who are finally going to advocate for tenants.

It just doesn't need to be this way. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. That's a good segue to discuss criminal justice reform. Regarding, what, I don't know, it's written down, it's written down. Regarding gentrification, you told the Intercept quote, at the very least new folks need to stop calling the cops.

I agree. And as we've seen in the past few weeks, white people are very much on one. What is your, well, for starters, what is your history with criminal justice activism? How are you approaching this matter? Sure, for the last few years, I've worked as a staff organizer and focused on police accountability, criminal justice or criminal injustice reform, going to, you know, driving buses full of advocates to Albany to end cash bail, to fight for a special prosecutor bill, which would make sure that at the very least the state attorney general's office or an

independent prosecutor would be investigating and prosecuting cases in which civilians are killed by the police across the state. Additionally, fighting for legislation that will make police departments more transparent so that we know the gravity of the problem of police brutality and police misconduct across the state. Unsuccessfully for years, I had fought for the right to no act to be passed through the city council, which will crack down on unconstitutional searches and protect people in their everyday encounters with the police.

So that's been most of my advocacy over the past few years before I decided to run for office. You want to shut down Rikers. You oppose cash bail, two issues that are increasingly becoming mainstream. As well, the broader discussion is slowly turning to things like police and prison abolition. There's a growing desire for a revolutionary change in the way the criminal justice system operates in this country. So my question is twofold, what is your immediate platform for criminal justice reform?

But also, what is your ideal? What is the world that we should work towards? Yeah, so as socialists, as democratic socialists, we need to be working toward a world and to create a world in which everyone is taken care of and that we're taken care of one another. And in terms of criminal justice reform, the reason ending cash bail is important is because we obviously have an enormous amount of people who are behind bars and who are being criminalized at a young age. The Blasio will claim that they've ended broken windows policing in New York City, but it

isn't true because people are still being arrested for riding their bikes on the sidewalk or for having an open container. And it gets them into the system and it affects their entire lives. And it is the reason that so many young people in this district and in our communities are never given a chance, and it's easy to change. There's a lot of legislation that we can pass related to situations in which officers can either just issue a ticket or make an arrest. They need to issue a ticket or just stop criminalizing people for this petty shit.

But additionally, ending cash bail, the existence of cash bail is just a war on poor and working class people in New York. There's no reason for it to continue. It is a popular policy even among, you know, like milquetoast liberals in the state senate. Everyone understands that we need to end cash bail. This is really important, and also I'm concerned that I lost the thread. I think you're good, I think it's good. So anyway, these are policies that I support that would be a top priority for us to pass

in the state senate that are already popular in the state legislature, and that would make just a transformative difference in people's lives in New York. ICE has been taking advantage of the local court system to detain and deport undocumented people, if what, if anything, is the state government doing to stop that, because I don't know, so I'm curious. And what do you want the state government to do to thwart ICE? Yeah, so of course I do support abolishing ICE, but as someone running for state senate, you know, our purview is limited to some extent.

We do need to pass the Liberty Act. This would grant everyone, regardless of their immigration status, but specifically affecting undocumented folks, the ability to have public representation, a public defender in court. Currently this, yeah, it's called the Liberty Act, support it. This prevents people from going to court. It also, including people who are plaintiffs, right, the reality is even as our city legislators will often claim that New York City is a sanctuary city, it isn't, because people still are, you know, ICE agents are still able to corner people, intimidate them outside of courthouses,

and we need to, and we can, pass legislation that will keep ICE out of courts, not only in New York City, but statewide. We need to pass legislation that will allow people, regardless of immigration status, to have access to healthcare. The New York Health Act would not only cover our undocumented neighbors, but also everyone in this room, everyone in New York State. It's common sense, single payer legislation, and also, you know, I mean, there are a lot of things that undocumented immigrants and permanent residents in this country are currently

denied access to, and there is actually a lot that we can do at the state level in New York in order to fix that. So New York does not issue driver's licenses to undocumented people? No. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. If you are undocumented in New York State, you cannot get a driver's license, which for many people has devastating effects on their ability to gain employment, also to have identification, it can be really devastating, and it's totally unnecessary, and there's legislation to change it. You know, and this is kind of tangential, but our hell-raising friends on the West Coast, they are constantly angry at the spineless Democrats in charge there, calling them, you know, Jainist-faced liars, you know, saying, oh, we're a sanctuary city, but then going

behind your back and cooperating with ICE and the DHS, but generally, though, the amount of, you know, decent progressive legislation in the West Coast and California is just light years ahead of what we have here in New York, I mean, I don't know, legal weed is like the most obvious one, but plenty of other things, too. I mean, they have an activist legislature, so what do you think, why do you think we're so far behind? What do you think is the cause of that dysfunction for a state that is essentially as blue as California?

Yeah. So a lot of very progressive legislation has passed through the State Assembly and has long been unable to pass through the State Senate due to a political dynamic in the State Senate that many of you will be familiar with, the independent Democratic caucus, known as the IDC, these were Democrats who were, yes, cannot be considered Democrats, but they were elected by Democratic voters who thought that they were going to represent their interests, and instead they entered into a power sharing agreement with the Republicans in the State Senate that prohibits progressive legislation from passing, and we see time and time again

as like a legislative advocate, I've seen many of the bills that advocates have been pushing for for years fail to pass actually repeatedly through the State Assembly and not pass through the State Senate and therefore never become law and never have a material effect on people's lives in Brooklyn. So yeah, I would say that the difference, the main difference between our ability to bring change in New York despite being ostensibly a blue state and California is that we have the IDC and we have a governor who benefits from it and we have state legislators like the incumbent in this district who directly benefit from it as well.

I know a lot of people on the liberal side of the equation, they also don't like the IDC for obvious reasons and they would support challenges to the IDC legislators, but probably not against a non-IDC incumbent, what would your response be to someone like that? Who would say, wait, we shouldn't have this Democrat on Democrat violence? Right, technically the IDC members are still like registered Democrats, they're terrible, they should all be, they should all lose their primary elections and be ousted from the state legislature, but they are just like Democrats, they're Republicans by another name however you want to put it.

They have failed their constituents and likewise Democrats like Martin DeLon have failed their constituents. He has had more than a decade to change course, there's been, in this district there is a ton of grassroots organizing, community organizing that has been agitating DeLon and pushing him for years telling him exactly what we need and he doesn't listen because he's not accountable to the people who live here. And so I do understand why people think that we only have capacity to challenge IDC incumbents, but I think that they are operating from a vision of scarcity rather than a vision of

abundance and as socialists and as progressives we need to operate from a vision of abundance and we need to expand our political imagination because that has been the failure of the Democratic Party and has allowed the, you know, enabled and empowered the existence of the IDC and also driven the political careers of people like Governor Cuomo. We need to be fighting back against that and saying that, you know, the people who are actually registered Democrats in this district who you are supposed to be representing won't tolerate that. We have a greater political imagination and we need you as our representatives to fight

for the world that we know is possible. And it is so much bigger than just unseating the IDC members, which we need to do, yeah. You're a union member, UAW, right? Were you involved in organizing a leadership in the union or just rank and file? Oh, no, no, I was involved in adjunct workers, sorry, yeah, adjunct workers, academic workers campaign at Barnard College and I'm a member of the UAW. What lessons from that do you take and want to apply to the role of a politician? That's a really good question.

Thank you. I agree. Yeah, I think in labor as well as in community organizing, you know that like inevitably you're going to have to try to like negotiate with people in power when you are not in fact in power, right? But you have more leverage in order to do that and to at the same time protect your red lines to not compromise your values if you build a strong base of people, right? If you just, if you build the movement, the more people that you have, and this is true

in organizing, whether it's in labor organizing or community organizing, in labor organizing, it's what makes the tactic of workers striking so powerful, right? Like you withdraw, you withdraw the power that you do have and your absence is noticed and then it presents an opportunity where you actually hold the power, at least in some very valuable way in order to change the dynamic and to move forward your priorities as a worker, as a movement, and whatever your demands are. You are now in the position to make those demands and to create change. This is getting like super-organizary and movement-y, but the lessons really are that

in the labor movement, actually in community organizing too, whoever is in power under, in the capitalist system, they typically, they have more money than you. Whoever, they might be your boss, they might be a legislator, they might, you know, whoever it is, they have more money than you, but you can defeat them if you have the people power to do it and that actually is something that I've taken from, you know, nearly a decade of community organizing and that it's what this race is about. I want to build on that idea for a moment because when you see kind of progressive insurgents, especially on the national level, on the presidential level, they always get asked this question

of, okay, you've got these big popular ideas that would work really well, but how would you be able to get that through Congress? How would you be able to pass that despite entrenched, you know, through entrenched opposition, through an entranced, you know, far-right Republican majority in one or both houses, or even just right-wing courts? And the go-to answer, and I remember this was Obama's answer for it, and it was, to an extent, Bernie's answer too, that we're, I'm going to build a movement. I'm going to lead people, I'm going to govern with people, and they are going to be my allies

and my pressure group, and they're going to continue the revolution or what have you. We know now Obama did not do that in the slightest. I mean, perhaps Bernie Sanders is more earnest, more sincere about saying that. So my question is then, what role do you see if you were to win or for any similar campaign, what role do you see for the people who got you there? Oh, wow, yeah. For the people who've made this electoral campaign possible, I'm only, wow, yeah, I'm only running for office because people in this community and in this city and in the

movement developed my leadership, and also supported me and encouraged me to run. As a working person, it is very challenging to run for office. We don't, as all of you know, we don't have publicly financed elections. That's what we should be fighting for, but we do not, and so it is, it not only means that the very wealthy have undue influence in our elections, but also that people like me, working people, are generally unable to really engage in the legislative process, and that can even begin with voter suppression. But yeah, I think the role, the continued role needs to be that we continue to develop

the leadership of people from within the movement who are then going to, whether it be Albany or D.C. or City Hall, to represent our interests. I'm a product of this movement and will remain accountable to the movement. Without the movement, we don't have anything. We don't have people who will truly represent our interests in Albany. I'll put a pin on that, get back to it, but regarding the union question, I did have a follow-up for that again. In the wake of the Janus decision, what does the state government need to do to protect

and promote collective bargaining rights? Sure. For one thing, public sector workers in New York state are legally prohibited from striking. Really? Yes. Due to something called the Taylor Law. So this is like a... James Taylor Law.

Can you say it like that? No, so we need to fight to make sure that public sector workers can strike across New York state, especially in a post-Janus world. So that's just one thing. We need to pass the equivalent of... So Sanders actually has legislation at the federal level called the Workplace Democracy Act would make it easier for workers to be able to unionize. And we can and need to pass legislation at the state level in New York that would enable

workers to form a union more easily, the equivalent of the Workplace Democracy Act. And in New York state, we have a really high union density, but that's threatened by Janus, which right to work laws and a right to work decision that will make it very difficult for unions who rely on public sector workers for strength in order to continue to protect those workers and to have a strong labor movement. The Sanders bill, is that card check or a version or a variant of that? What about card check? Is the Sanders bill you mentioned?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's definitely the most important element of it that makes it easier for a critical mass of workers to form a union. Moving on, what should be done about the MTA? Yeah, it's a disaster in North Brooklyn that Eltrane actually runs through almost the entire 18th district. So a lot of people here are going to be affected by the Eltrane shutdown next spring, and it's on everyone's minds.

It's a failure of the state legislature to fully fund the repairs needed in order for the subways to run properly for the MTA to be what it needs to be to accommodate an enormous population growth in the time since the signal system was last updated. We need billions of dollars to fund the repairs needed in order for New Yorkers to be able to live their lives, to get to work for our society to properly function. And we need oversight in order to make sure that that funding is actually going to repair the subways. What about the appointments to the board that oversees the MTA?

Isn't that a big part? I mean, that's what people, that's what I read, that that's a big part of the problem is that these people who live outside of the five boroughs essentially get a blanket veto over anything that impacts the New York City subway system. Yeah, absolutely. I think that any repairs to the subway system, a robust program in order to actually repair the subway needs, when we say that it needs oversight, it's not only how the money is being spent, but part of that is who is making these decisions.

Is it as much as it can possibly be a community-led process, people who have their ear to the ground or not, and we need to fight to make sure that people who are appointed to the board, people who are actually overseeing repairs and who are on the transportation committee in the state senate, et cetera, are actually accountable to the people who use the subway or are actually people who use the subway. Okay, I've got a difficult question. Are you ready for it? Yeah, I guess.

Okay. This year, the United States Congress passed CESTA FOSSA bill that presents a clear danger to the financial security and physical safety of every sex worker in the nation. I would argue that we are in the midst of a bipartisan moral panic that threatens the lives and dignity of sex workers. Now, there are many sincere left perspectives on sex work, but as a socialist feminist, do you consider sex work work? Yeah, absolutely.

Yes. Yes, unequivocally and apologetically, sex workers are workers. They deserve to be protected and have the rights that we demand of all other workers in our society. It's a shame that I think, frankly, due to cultural norms, among other things, and other pressures, legislators have failed to have framed this as though it's an exception, and they treat sex workers as though they're not workers, and we need to change that. Okay, I thought that was hard, but you made me look bad.

You've been an activist, community organizer, and involved in labor. Now you're entering electoral work. There's a vibrant discussion on the left about the value of electoralism, though I did not see many of those who oppose electoralism to be particularly unhappy about what happened in the Bronx in Queens last week. If you're elected, you would probably be a caucus of one democratic socialist in the state Senate, hopefully in the majority party. You know, as Ernest left us, what should our expectations be when engaging in electoral

activity? Win or lose? Interesting. I think with regard to just the comment about caucusing, even though I, as far as I know, there is no other DSA endorsed or candidate currently in the state Senate or running for state Senate in New York, and there is not someone who identifies openly as a democratic socialist, but there are senators within the state Senate who actually consistently vote along the lines of, actually, yeah, just entirely along the lines of DSA members, for example,

but also democratic socialist policies. So I think that it's important to work with those senators, so if it's a question of how do you functionally affect change within the state Senate and past legislation, but if it's how can democratic socialist change electoral politics? I think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last week demonstrated this. People didn't believe that she could possibly defeat Joe Crowley, and she was able to do it via a grassroots campaign. We need to, you know, it's simple, and it is exactly what people want, and we need to

replicate it. And also, people need to understand that it's not just like a single model, it's actually part of this movement that all of you are a part of. We need to keep up the momentum, and it's not just about the candidates, but campaign after campaign. We need to be demonstrating in numbers that we're not going to tolerate the democratic party or any of our legislators making concessions that compromise our well-being and that get in the way of passing policy that we know will affect our lives.

I do understand people's skepticism about electoral politics because, frankly, so much of electoral politics has meant advocating for incremental progress, but that just isn't our philosophy at all, right? We're fighting for the changes that we know that people need and that we know because we're in the communities every day, we know that people support these policies, right? So it's time to just, you know, people thought that Alexandria's campaign wasn't viable because they thought that, you know, talking about abolishing ICE was too radical. That federal jobs guarantee was too radical.

We know this isn't too radical because we talk to people every day and they're like, yeah, of course, this makes perfect sense. So let's do it, right? Let's just do it. Let's get people elected who will actually do it. And hold everyone accountable. I was talking to someone the other day who I used to work with and it was like a casual conversation but they said, like, what can we do to hold you accountable?

And I'm like, do it. Do what you already do to electeds, but you should never have to do it to me, but, like, come over and, like, egg my house if I ever vote against the movement. Just come over and primary the hell out of me. You know, if, like, yeah, we have a strong movement that will hold people accountable. And we also need to be electing people who will represent us. The famously before the election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a debate when asked if she would endorse Joe Crowley if she lost the primary, that she will put that up to the

DSA for a vote. And I mean, I admire that commitment to a movement to a party line. Either she won her primary, she used all of this earned media attention to spread the wealth around, so to speak, to promote your campaign, the campaigns of other socialists like Kaniela Ng and Hawaii. And so my question then is, I guess there's two parts to this, how would you use the privileges and the platform you would have, both as a successful candidate and of the office, to bolster other left activities?

And the second part of that is, how would you use that office to benefit this community in a way that you don't really see anyone else doing? So in this community throughout North Brooklyn, there is a legacy of grassroots organizing, right? People have been protesting outside of Dilan's legislative office in, or, yeah, in his, sorry, his district office in Cypress Hills for, you know, as long as he's been in office. I think that part of it is recognizing that those are the people who need to be informing this, you know, my platform and this campaign, and we need to be using this campaign not

only to seek for the left to take power, take state power, but also to amplify the organizing that people are already doing in the community. That's the short answer. But, yeah, I think that, I mean, I have, I at least have the experience of working with legislators at the city level who brought organizers into the legislative process as difficult as it was, and as much as there was pressure from all sides for them to compromise and to exclude us from the legislative process. It can be done, if it can be done in City Hall, there's absolutely no reason that it

can't be done in the State Senate, and that's what we're going to do. Closing things, closing things out, I've got to ask this, it's like, I hate it. Who do you like in the World Cup? That's so rude. Why? Why? Why is it rude? Because I'm from Columbia.

You're so mean, that's my only answer. Yeah, today wasn't a good day for my team, so clearly you've been watching the World Cup, but, I'm sorry, yeah, I actually don't, I don't know who I'll root for now, but for what it's worth, I haven't been able to watch as much of the World Cup as I would have hoped and as I have before. It's been a really busy time. Well my team, North Korea, didn't even make it, so how do you think I feel? Man, that sucks.

Do you care to close on a remark other than you're so mean to me? I'm sorry, I mean, for what it's worth, there's just like no other answer for that question. I really appreciate you having me on, but also I'm so grateful to be in this movement with all of you, to be able to run a true grassroots campaign, to finally have the opportunity to bring material change to people's lives and transform people's lives through this campaign is the deepest honor, and I hope that you'll join us through September, after September, in making sure that New York is a place that works for all of us. Thank you.

Julia Salazar, candidate for the New York State Senate. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. You did great, you did great.