Yesterday, I had the chance to sit down with
for what turned into one of those conversations that reminds you why this work matters. We covered a lot of ground—from my journey out of manufacturing into the belly of the political beast, to why the left keeps getting its ass kicked, to what it actually takes to build power that lasts.You should watch the whole thing, because there's a lot we unpacked that's worth hearing in full. But here are some of the key points that stuck with me.
From the Factory Floor to the Hill
Look, my story isn't unique, but it's worth telling because it's the story of millions of Americans whose lives got steamrolled by trade deals and corporate greed. As I told Grace:
"I started off in manufacturing. I had a manufacturing plant. I had two of them that were started by my grandfather in the Hills of East Tennessee. NAFTA, CAFTA, you know, permanent trade relations and various other things sort of killed that. We manufactured component parts for furniture and that whole industry died."
What followed was a familiar American tale: pivoting to import/export, culinary school, restaurants where I watched rich people drink expensive wine while working families couldn't afford healthcare. That's when my dad's old saying hit me:
"You should use your talents and energy comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable."
I was doing the exact opposite.
So I started food trucks. And it was during a break between lunch rushes in 2015, listening to Bernie Sanders on the radio, that everything clicked. Here was someone describing exactly what I'd lived—the decimation of entire regions, the opioid crisis, the way corporate power had hollowed out communities like mine.
"He's like describing what I've lived, right? The loss of this industry, the loss of my businesses, the loss of the entire region's economic capacity, the drug addiction that's ravaged not only my community, but my family."
That's when I decided if Bernie ran, I was selling everything and getting on the road. And that's exactly what I did.
The Media Circus and What It Actually Does
Grace and I spent time talking about our experiences in the media ecosystem—her defending Corbyn's economic policies on British TV, me doing the rounds as AOC's communications director. There's this fantasy that if you just make the right argument on the right show, you'll change minds.
But as Grace put it: "The role that you play when you go on a TV show or post a video on social media is not to change minds, it's to give the people who agree with you a sense of, wow, my views are actually being represented, maybe I'm not crazy."
I agreed: "That is the key, right? Is to let people know that there's an alternative path and they aren't crazy and that this is supported by thinking people... For whatever reason, being on TV gives you a little more credibility. Just being inside of that box, right?"
It's absurd, but it's real.
The Corruption of Power
One of the most important things Grace brought up was research on what power does to the human brain. She explained how it "basically made you exhibit traits that are associated generally with narcissism or like an extreme extent psychopathy. You stop believing that you have the capacity to be wrong. You stop being able to hear people contradicting you."
I've seen this firsthand. As I told her: "People that are pulled out of a place that they're accustomed to being in and put into a different position... they conform to what they've seen. So their own internalized expectations of how they're supposed to behave, how they're supposed to think, how they're supposed to sound, and even how they're supposed to use their hands."
You know that politician hand gesture thing? Yeah, that's real and it drives me crazy.
But it goes deeper than gestures. When I got to DC, I met with two Congress members early on - Raul Grijalva and Steve Cohen. And what I got from both of them was this defeated sense, this despair. Steve Cohen told me how much more effective he was as a state leader, but now:
"I'm just one of 435. I've got no voice here. I've got nothing, you know, I can't make a difference."
And I thought, well if you're one of 435 and I'm one of 330 million, what the heck am I going to do? But here's the thing - they wanted to make things better, they just gave up and still held the seat. That's not enough.
Why the Squad Never Really Existed
People ask me about AOC, about why she's "changed." Here's the truth:
"Well, there was no squad. There was no squad. They didn't work together on anything. They, you know, I mean, I had more arguments with squad comms directors about who was going to say what where than anything else."
We never built the infrastructure to protect people like her from the corrupting ecosystem. Justice Democrats was supposed to create cohesion, but as I admitted: "What we missed early on... is how important it was to develop relationships between the candidates early on... We weren't actually bonding them."
The system is designed to isolate politicians. "The cloakroom, you can't get into the cloakroom. Staff can't go in there. That's for members only... It's built to isolate them."
And then there's all the practical stuff. You win an election, now you need two houses, your spouse needs work, your kids need schools. Guess what? The DCCC has got you covered. They become your welcome committee, help you find everything you need. And suddenly you're part of the machine.
Politics Runs on Fear
Here's something most people don't understand about electoral politics, and I told Grace this directly:
"America runs on Dunkin, which is Dunkin Donuts... and politics runs on fear. People in politics are motivated by money and fear. The two things that motivate them. And the money actually is still just a defense against the fear, fear of losing their jobs."
That's why you win power through primaries. The reelection rate for incumbents in America is higher than turnover in European monarchies. That's not democracy—that's oligarchy.
But here's the problem - Bernie and AOC and others believe this is a grassroots thing that needs to come from the bottom. As I told Grace:
"I'm not here to impose my political ideology or political will upon you. This just has to happen and I will wait until it does. And then I will all march with you or whatever."
But you're missing steps because of that reluctance to lead, that reluctance to be out in front. You need to go after the Hakeem Jeffries and the Nancy Pelosis. You need to make them afraid.
Grace had a great way of putting this - it's what she called "a dialectic between the movement and the leaders." As she explained: "You have to have both... the times in history that we've had this relationship and it's worked were basically times when you had strong labor movements and leaders."
The kind of candidates we need are ones who understand how fundamentally broken the system is. As I put it: "The sort of the litmus test that I'm using now is if you're a candidate that doesn't think that we need to impeach Supreme Court justices, then you're probably not going to get there." If you think we can leave institutions like they are and change this country, you're not there yet.
The Healthcare Racket
We talked about healthcare because it's such a perfect example of how broken things are:
"Right now the American healthcare system is projected to cost $77 trillion over the next 10 years. $77 trillion. And it's going to be about 20% of our entire GDP."
This isn't about market efficiency. As I explained: "I don't think, I know these are massively inflated numbers, heart transplants, bypasses, none of this stuff costs what it costs in America anywhere else in the world. It's corruption. It's 30% being spent on administrative middlemen doing nothing."
The solution isn't just single-payer. We need to go back to direct ownership like we had from the 1950s through the 1980s when 53% of Tennessee's hospitals were owned by state and local governments.
Americans Aren't Conservative—They're Pissed
One of my core arguments, and I wrote about this recently, is that "Americans aren't conservative. We're just pissed."
As I told Grace: "You got Matthew Yglesias and a lot of these folks that sort of attribute votes to Donald Trump as meaning something about policy... but Trump's policies are random. You don't know what they're going to be from day to day. This is a completely emotional thing."
Grace nailed the whole thing when she talked about Trump's approach: "He's inflicting short-term pain for the long-term protection of the American empire. And this is actually what the capitalist state is designed to do." She pointed out that Trump knows this, maybe not Trump himself, "certainly the people backing him."
Meanwhile, people are "facing unaccountable power" everywhere they go, and "how do you reclaim that power? You project that agency onto a politician or political movement who says, I am going to mess with the people who have made your life hard. It doesn't even need to be the right people."
The same energy that went into Obama's first campaign, into Bernie's campaigns twice - it's people who want to say screw you to unaccountable power. The tragedy is they've been convinced that immigrants are the enemy instead of the capitalist class actually making their lives miserable.
What Comes Next
Neither Grace nor I have easy answers, but we know the current approach isn't working. You can't build lasting change through individual politicians in an inherently corrupt system. You need movements, infrastructure, and the willingness to cause short-term pain for long-term transformation.
Most importantly, you need to be willing to go to war with your own party when it's captured by corporate interests.
But here's something Grace said that really stuck with me - we can't just build movements around individual politicians because "everything is built to turn you into a commodity, to turn you into the story." Whether it's because you're terrible and they're digging up dirt, or because you're amazing and everyone needs to follow you. As she put it: "We need to be able to make sure those people are accountable and that we don't invest in like a kind of cult of personality, basically, because it ruins the people and it ruins the movement."
Grace also put it perfectly when talking about the anti-authoritarian spirit we need to recover: "Capitalism has come to depend on obedience and hierarchy and doing as you're told. And we need to recover that anti-authoritarian spirit that used to be the core of the left."
That spirit is still alive in places like Appalachia, in immigrant communities. Hell, the immigrants my right-wing neighbors complain about actually embody the values they claim to care about—hard work, family, community, taking risks for a better life.
The conversation reminded me why I got into this work—not to play politics, but to build power for working people. Watch the full thing to hear us dig deeper into all of this. It's the kind of conversation we need more of if we're serious about change instead of just performance.
Share this post