Dear John,

Our campaign is an open challenge to the bipartisan corruption that has enveloped Washington. It might come as no surprise, then, to witness institutions arraying themselves to insulate the machine that we confront, call out, and aim—with your support—to dismantle.

Can you join us today to help level the playing field and enable a legitimate election free from propaganda?

We’ve encountered more examples of electoral illegitimacy then I can frankly count: from the effectively limitless wealth of an oligarch enriching herself at the public’s expense for an entire generation while ducking debates, to being silenced as a general election candidate on seemingly neutral platforms from Wikipedia to YouTube.

Ultimately, the results are policy outcomes favoring capital and corporations, to which Pelosi & her allies are more committed than their constituents.

Few examples of the corruption of our political system, however, alarm me as much as the abdication of press ethics by journalists across the political spectrum. From national corporate news outlets to local “independent” news organizations, reporting on our race has consistently obscured and suppressed facts in favor of corporate Democratic Party narratives.

For example, outlets from the San Francisco Chronicle to 48 Hills in 2020 “reported” orchestrated lies fabricated to mislead voters, suppressing whistleblowers, disregarding evidence, and ignoring conflicts of interests among their sources (and in some cases, even the journalists themselves). It took nearly a year before anyone in the press observed what the SF Bayview described as “a civic lynching” organized by Pelosi’s party patronage network to subvert an election.

To address the bias we encountered in 2020, we’re currently in federal court to hold the Chronicle accountable for publishing racist election disinformation without ever correcting itself. Mark your calendar for March 17 at 1:30pm PT, when we invite you to join us via videoconference for a crucial court hearing.

Those lies were just one example among many. Beyond the disinformation promoted by gullible journalists, even worse are the obvious questions about the incumbent’s policy record that bizarrely went unasked for decades before finally prompting controversy when a rare journalist showed up for work. This pattern—which explains how the long overdue controversy about congressional insider trading finally reached the public after decades of open corruption in broad daylight—is as unfortunate as it has been unfortunately consistent.

Can you stand with us today to help educate voters about the policy record of the incumbent suppressed by press outlets, and the alternatives to it that news organizations also continue to undermine?

Just this morning, Puck News published the latest in a series of articles about our 2022 race, to which Politico and SF Gate both linked. Like its previous articles, the latest from Puck News refers only to wealthy, white, hypothetical “candidates” who are not in fact running for office, including one who affirmatively rejected the possibility in the wake of the article's publication.

The article effectively presented the 2022 election as a given, entirely ignoring the candidates who are actually running in an election that remains nine months away.

A lot can happen in nine months.

It gets worse. Each of the figures named by Politico and Puck News are not only wealthy white aspirants to political power, but their only claim to influence is based on inheritance. Christine Pelosi and Reed Jobs were both born into immense privilege, lacking any policy experience, or qualification beyond the circumstances of their birth.

The last time I checked, the United States still claimed to respect democracy. The open promotion of oligarchy by journalists, however, represents an assault on democratic principles, as well as press ethics.

When the candidates ignored by the press include an immigrant who has won more votes than any previous challenger to the incumbent over the course of her 34-year career, after decades of advocacy forcing policy change in jurisdictions across the United States, the failures of press ethics attain even more disturbing dimensions. The impacts of this kind of propaganda-masquerading-as-news-coverage include corruption, corporate control, and ultimately, white supremacy—not as an ideology easy to observe, but rather as a social condition more difficult to discern.

The ultimate reason I’m running for office is to defend human rights from the ongoing abuses of a corrupt system in Washington. On the way there, I’ve been forced to defend press freedom even while the press has abandoned its own interests, and labor rights even when labor leaders have abandoned the interests of their rank and file.

I’m not afraid of a fight.

But I am vastly outgunned by an oligarch wielding an intergenerational dynasty, a national political party, and the press as weapons against democracy and accountability.

That’s why we need your help today.

Can you stand with us to defend the future from the dynasty and career politicians who have done so much to push it off a cliff? With journalists doing so much to enable establishment narratives and keep the public in the dark about alternatives, we need your help to shine a light on the choices before voters.

After seeing the Puck News and Politico stories this morning, we took the fight to Pelosi during her weekly press conference in Washington. Both on Twitter and within the official livestream, we suggested several questions that journalists have yet to ask, while also sharing an interview from just yesterday with Irami Osei-Frimpong that explored the many dimensions of corruption embodied by the incumbent we're challenging.

We’ll soon announce a 5-point policy plan to address bipartisan corruption in Washington. In the meantime, one political goal would do as much as any of those policy proposals to support the future: removing the agents of the past who continue to dominate Congress.

Thanks for standing with us!

Yours,
Shahid