Thread by @PatRyanUC

It’s going to take time to sort through what happened Tuesday. But I've read a lot of takes the past few days (some good, many bad), and I've had a lot of people ask how I won one of the toughest districts in the country by over 13%.

Here are some thoughts: 🧵

First and foremost, if you're using the words "moderate" or "progressive," you're missing the whole f***ing point. 

It's not ideological. It's about who fights for the people vs. who further empowers and enables the elites.

I called on Biden to step down and gave him hell for failing to secure the border. That doesn’t make me a “moderate.”

I campaigned with AOC and called out big corporations for screwing us over. That doesn’t make me a “progressive.”

I've made clear over and over again to my constituents that I fight FOR them and AGAINST anyone who would do them harm. Period, full stop.

We have an affordability crisis in this country.

We can debate who's to blame, but to ignore both the macro trend of increasing economic inequality and the more immediate crisis caused by the pandemic and inflation is to lose credibility entirely.

I put affordability front and center every day. Most importantly, I told folks exactly who it was that was ripping them off, and I grounded it locally. 

It's the billionaires and big corporations making record-breaking profits while the rest of us struggle.

I called on the CEO of our billion-dollar utility monopoly to resign, and we forced them to pay back customers over $60M. 

I went after the Wall Street speculators driving up the price of housing.

I built a coalition to push my bill to stop Big Pharma from ripping off families.

I went on Fox News – like, a lot – to call out Biden for not doing enough to restore order at the border. 

To be clear, Trump's approach isn't right either. 

But when the system is broken, you call it out and you work to fix it, no matter who is in charge.

And yeah, I rallied with AOC for clean water and climate action. 

100,000 of my constituents get their drinking water from the Hudson River. We have some of the worst lead pipe and PFAS crises in the entire country in the Hudson Valley.

If you want to call me a lefty for thinking my community deserves to drink clean water, go ahead. 

If you want to say I'm a progressive for saying polluters should pay to clean up their mess, feel free. 

I don't give a sh*t about labels. I care about delivering for my constituents and my community.

It's not enough to throw these seemingly disparate policies at people. We must articulate a unifying principle, and clearly tell folks who’s at fault. 

For me, it was Freedom. and Patriotism. And the fault lies with the same elites, in both parties, who've run this country for far too long.

Economic freedom – because no teacher, firefighter, or police officer should be paying more in taxes than Jeff Bezos. 

Freedom from gun violence – because, regardless of what the NRA says, the weapons I carried in combat don’t belong in our schools or on our streets.

Reproductive freedom – because I served 27 months in combat abroad and didn’t come back to watch freedom be ripped away from women here at home by an unelected, extremist court and their far-right allies in Congress.

The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water. 

The freedom to marry who you love. 
 
The freedom to worship how you want.

The freedom to make your voice heard in our democracy. 

The freedom to live as who you are, wherever you are. 

The list goes on.

And through it all, a love for my community. A love for our country. An undying and passionate patriotism, the belief that this is the greatest country in the history of the world, that those freedoms are worth fighting for.

And that they always will be.