Latest / Breaking The Meta / East Texas Deserves Better: A Dairy Farm Kid Challenges Congress | Dax Alexander for TX-01
Transcript
- Breaking The Meta: Hello everyone and welcome to Breaking the Meta. My name is Mike Winson. Today we are sitting down with Dax Alexander who is running for Texas's first district, U.S. District 1 in Texas. Hello Dax, how are you doing? Dax: Yes, sir. Doing great. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Breaking The Meta: Great to have you. one of the, mean, obviously we wanted to bring Dax on because he's a progressive candidate, which is great. But even more so for those of you that are listening at the time of this recording, ⁓ are about a week out from the Texas primaries where ⁓ ⁓ is in a runoff now. So ⁓ and one other person are now have, what is it, eight weeks? Yeah. Dax: Give or take, yeah. May 26th. Breaking The Meta: May 26, they're doing a runoff and we didn't get a chance to get Dax in before. So we're gonna see what we can do to help get him across that line for the runoff. ⁓ Dax: Yeah, don't call it a finish line because we're still just trying to get to go to November. That's the real finish line, right? Breaking The Meta: Exactly, ⁓ So let's start off by giving us a little background just on who you are and why you decided to run in the first place. Dax: So my name is Dax Alexander. I am a product of East Texas, born and raised here. ⁓ Actually born right here in Tyler, one of the local hospitals. Grew up down the road in Martins Mill. And if you're not from Texas or from East Texas, you're going to have no idea where that is. ⁓ It's a tiny little town, had a very rural upbringing, ⁓ literally grew up on a dairy farm. Went to college and the amount of people that asked me if cow tipping was real or if I had ever been cow tipping was unreal. Breaking The Meta: You There you go. Well, is it? Okay. Dax: It is not, you cannot tip a cow. I would love to see someone actually try. It would be the most entertaining thing, but, but yeah, I had a very, very typical rural upbringing out here. ⁓ cause I grew up in Martins mill, but just South of Canton. ⁓ if you've heard of it, you probably know someone in high school or school that plays basketball. They've got a pretty good team out there. That's why a lot of people, even in the district haven't heard of it, you know? So, but if someone has, they've got like a niece or nephew or grandkid or kid or something like that that plays on the team. But. Breaking The Meta: I'm sure plenty of people have tried. You Dax: You know, that upbringing contributed a lot to how I am, who I am, obviously. We didn't grow up with much. This is a very, very small family operation. So when I say dairy farm, you know, we're not talking big factory farms. We're talking my dad and my granddad on a couple, like, you know, a few hundred acres, like maybe, maybe two. And so, you know, we didn't have a lot. So I grew up, you know, watched a lot of PBS. We didn't have cable growing up. So like when I read about the cuts to the PBS programs, like the funding cuts, that really affected me. That's something that. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: I mean, that's something that kept me entertained and like kept me edgy. you know, honestly, educated me a little bit growing up. That's a wonderful resource that, uh, just doesn't really make any sense to me while we're attacking. Went to college, UT Tyler, uh, went to college on a Pell grant. So, you know, that's another, another program that we've had funding cuts to that, you know, I was very upset about because that was, alleviated a tremendous burden of my parents really allowed me to have a choice to where I wanted to go to school, allow me to go to school and. Breaking The Meta: Mmm. Dax: really focus on my studies and let my parents not have to sacrifice an unreasonable amount to get me that higher education. ⁓ Because obviously there was still some to pay there. So these funding cuts, they just don't make sense. These are things that just help people. And that's what we should be doing. After graduating UT Tyler, stayed in the East Texas area. I got a degree in computer information systems. So now I work as a software developer. I've done that in various roles ever since graduation, been in the Tyler area or been in the East Texas area in Tyler since then. ⁓ Have you spent a little, a period of time unemployed, you know, looking for another software development job after COVID for during COVID and after COVID. And, and yeah, it's, hard to find a tech job out here in East Texas. I don't know if you've ever tried, but there's not just a whole lot of. Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Dax: software development offices or establishments out here that are fielding lots of jobs. Breaking The Meta: Yeah, I feel like it's hard to find a lot of tech jobs right now anyways, because there's so many. Yeah. Dax: ⁓ yeah, well yeah, generally, ⁓ Yeah, able to work remotely. So that really opened up the amount of jobs I was able to apply for. And the only reason I can do that is because I live in Tyler, some place that has great internet access, right? I've got Fiber at my place. ⁓ Some other places in Tyler, they're kind of rolling out Fiber. ⁓ Past couple years, a lot of places have broadband access in the city. The further out you get, Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Mmm. Dax: from Tyler further out you get in the district further east north south you go. There's less access to that. So you know that's another opportunity that I really think that we could work on so that you know people outside of cities have that same opportunity to find jobs anywhere in the country from from home. That's a that's an amazing quality of life upgrade amazing just amazing way to be able to access opportunities that were priorly that previously were inaccessible to you. So that's you know that's kind of my Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yeah. Dax: My professional, I guess, know, wrap up on that one. Been, I guess, last three years or so have been involved volunteering in politics locally, helped to revitalize a, did a refounding of the local Smith County Young Democrats chapter out here, which is going strong. Started off very small, you know, just our little group of four officers. Now, you know, we've got, you know, we've got 10, 20 people that show up to some things. Breaking The Meta: Mm. There you go. Nice. Dax: I think the actual membership is a little bit longer than that. You know, not everyone can come to everything, but, yeah. So it's been, and that's in the course of like a year, you know, year and a half, maybe, you know, that's been great growth in an area where. So yeah, for those of you that don't know the district we're in, ⁓ so it previously was the second most, I think it was the second most red district in Texas after the redistricting. And I'm not sure how accurate that still is, but breather. We're like top three most red districts in the state. Breaking The Meta: Wow. Mmm. Dax: So to be able to find Democrats, young Democrats out here was just a took a lot of effort, know, we're soup, but it's getting easier, you know, every day, every event, we're able to find more people and have more people come up to us and be like, oh, hey, like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad to see you guys. When's y'all's next meeting? You know, apart from that, I also am involved with the local Smith County Democratic Party, currently serving as the vice chair for that. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: They've served in other clubs, politically active stuff, organizing coalitions also in the area ⁓ this last year or half or so. Since the No Kings movement really started going on, started, had a lot of focus on organizing protest because that really brought out the community in ways that made them visible. It made people more comfortable being a Democrat out here in a place where some people were previously, they've been living here for... Breaking The Meta: Nice. Ahem. Yeah. Yeah. Dax: 10, 20, 30 years, they've seen, they've heard the arguments, they've seen, you know, as elections come and go and the vitriol that gets poured towards Democrats way out here, which can be pretty rough sometimes, to be honest. And, you know, they see these crowds of people gathering on this, in the parks and on the street corners and the number. I think one of our No Kings protests, hit like 1500, 2000 people. People like that, that's, you know, when I started volunteering, we would Breaking The Meta: Wow. Dax: be lucky if we got 10, 20 people to show up to an event and they would come to tell us like, ⁓ my gosh, I didn't even know we had Democrats in East Texas. Wow, good for you. Good for you guys. Way to go. ⁓ So exactly. Yeah, seriously. So that's just been a huge, that's been so wonderful to be a part of and to just witness because growing up here, it really was. I was in that category. I was in that group of people who just didn't even know that Democrats existed in East Texas because Breaking The Meta: That's amazing. Bless your heart. Hmm. Dax: Yeah, for whatever reason or another, weren't as in we weren't as present in this in the community as we really should have been. You know, I'm not going to put the blame on people for not knowing or population issues because you can a one man protest is still a valid protest. You can still get out there and do it even if you don't have the numbers. ⁓ So, you know, that's that's what I've been doing, you volunteer wise out here as for, know, what really what really made me want to run. You know, I saw that. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Dax: When I started, you know, kind of when I started or a little bit before I started volunteering, I guess, ⁓ I started paying. got, you know, graduation, you start paying taxes, you start starting to care a little bit more about who's making decisions with your tax money and where those taxes are going and stuff like that. And started really like kind of dialing in and paying attention to who my representatives were, who represented me in Austin and Washington, ⁓ who sat on my city council, stuff like that, because your local races, depending on what your issue is, sometimes is the closest, most easily accessible and most able to fix the issue that you have. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: But in this instance, ⁓ I noticed that our representative out here that represented East Texas was this guy that went by name of Louie Gohmert. Don't know if you've ever heard of him. If you follow politics out here, you probably have. He served for a good while. But ⁓ also if you follow Congress during that period of time, he was known kind of colloquially in headlines and journalists as the dumbest man in Congress. And like, it just, I hated that. Breaking The Meta: Okay. Dax: I honestly like, yeah, we had, I've kind of got a chip on my shoulder about how people think Southerners have, you know, lower IQs, dumber. You know, I hate the, I hate the stereotypical like dumb Southerner accent and any like humor, you know, comedy thing. just, just kind of gets into my skin a little bit. You know, it's where I'm from. This is, this is where I grew up, where I chose to stay. And then realizing that, you know, we weren't putting our best foot forward, basically, you know, that this guy gets a laughed at by the country for the things he says in Congress. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Yeah? Yeah. Dax: It's like, okay, well, way to reinforce the stereotype guys. So I started really looking for the group of people that were opposing that, that, you know, that wanted to run someone better. And that's kind of how I got involved with volunteering. ⁓ that guy doesn't serve any longer. Now he's, ⁓ replaced by some other Republican who to be fair has a much better reputation than that. The bar was pretty low, but you know, ⁓ but yeah, so this guy, you know, I've got different issues with you could say, ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Mmm. Yeah. Yeah. Dax: I was so personally, you I mentioned my volunteer work with the party earlier. One of the things that I did currently vice chair, but at the time I was basically kind of responsible for trying to find candidates to run for office out here. Hard job to do out here in East Texas. Hard enough to get people to turn out for things even more like put themselves out there and like be a candidate and say, Hey, I'm running. We could not find anyone to run against Nathaniel Moran, the current guy who holds the seat in 2024 ran unopposed. Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. Dax: still put a bunch of signs out, whatever. He's got the money for it, he can afford it. ⁓ Definitely has the money for it. But I felt very, I really felt like we, yeah, me and the community, not the community, we in the party let the community down ⁓ by not giving them a choice. Democracy only works if you have a choice. ⁓ That's kind of one of the things that think Texas is suffering from a little bit is we've forgotten that we have a choice. We've basically been functioning as a one party state. I really felt like we, let the community ⁓ by not giving them a choice. Democracy only works if you have a choice. That's kind of one of the things that think Texas is suffering from a bit is we've forgotten that we have a choice. Breaking The Meta: Ciao. Ciao. Dax: And it's affecting us, ⁓ in a lot of ways and a lot of different government levels, but I you know, felt a lot of, you know, they get shame about not being able to do that. You know, thought that we had a really good chance, you know, to run a good candidate, but we didn't. ⁓ so the going into this next election is kind of very at the forefront of my mind of, Hey, if we can't find someone to do this, like, I'm just going to step up and do it myself. Right. Like someone's going to have to, or we're going to find somebody. So that was very much a priority, you know, going into this election. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: He hosted a town hall locally in Tyler and I went and attended and he, you there's some questions and you can imagine, you know, me being who I am and you know, on your show that I probably didn't agree with a lot, most of what he said, but there's a few things that specifically, yeah, right. Huge shocker. There's a few things specifically that, you know, he got into that just really kind of rubbed me the wrong way. ⁓ One, he wanted to, you he was advertised as a town hall. He really wanted to make the whole thing a PowerPoint presentation. You know, we like. Breaking The Meta: What? Shock. Mm. Dax: did enough interrupting that he eventually conceded and said, all right, we're going to skip the remainder of this presentation. I had 45 minutes of notes left, but we'll go to the question and answer. And this dude had already been talking for like 45 minutes. So he wanted to do like an hour and a half of a two hour session of just PowerPoint presentations. And then take a couple of questions at the end. Breaking The Meta: ⁓ my goodness. So he wanted to Donald Trump's State of the Union. Yeah. Dax: Very much. Just wanted people clapping for them, basically. But we did do a lot of questions, which was appreciated. They actually did change the program and take the questions for us. Good on that. one of the questions that they got into, guess three of them that really wrote me the wrong way. One of them was there was a gentleman there who had some really good figures that he'd researched who was asking questions about funding cuts to local food banks and pantries that served hungry families. Breaking The Meta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mmm. Dax: And basically, you know, the big, beautiful bill had just passed. Moran had been very vocally supportive of this bill. And the question was basically, Hey, this, ⁓ it cut this amount of funding from these programs because they have this amount of, this amount of less and funding. They're able to serve this amount, fewer families in your area. These are your constituents that depend on you to like defend their funding for this. Like, how do you justify that? ⁓ and he just gave this long winded kind of. Asinine answer where he just kind of talked down to us and just told us to be patient that you know The funding is coming back there just got to get rid of all the wasteful funding first and then they can bring back the good funding and the Food bank funding is good funding. It's coming back, but we just have to be patient for it It's like alright a millionaire guy sitting there Exactly, it's like this is the category of people that are that cannot wait. That's why they're getting food from food pantries Breaking The Meta: Right, yeah. right because because people with no food can really be patient. Gosh. Dax: This guy has that doesn't have to worry about where his next meal comes from. And he's telling people who do to just be patient about it. ⁓ came across really tone deaf to me. Like that's not good representation. One of the other things, ⁓ he got asked about his stance on the January six pardons, which had happened kind of closer to that time period a little bit before, and he, he just gave his full support for it. Yeah. Loved the pardons think that they were unjustly treated. They need, they didn't belong in jail at the time. I really didn't like that. Now, think I somehow like it even less, which I didn't know was possible because I think I just saw a headline maybe this week or last that ⁓ one of these guys that got a pardon is now in jail for life or child molestation. Then at the time, don't even think, that's now. think at the time, I think there was five or six of them that had already been brought in back on charges for similar instances. ⁓ That's just why these are not people we should be defending or not people we should be pardoning. And this is something that everyone agrees with. This is Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Dax: universally reprehensible ⁓ threat to society type stuff. Something, I guess the last thing that, kind of really bugged me was he got asked about Doge and how he felt about what Elon was doing and that whole new department. The sureness that this really wasn't anything new. There was just business as usual and just as part of the process of eliminating waste. Now that we look back on that, I think they ended up costing more money somehow. And then there's various accusations from whistleblowers about stolen data. Breaking The Meta: Right. Dax: that we're honestly never gonna get answers on for being realistic. One, because you gotta investigate stuff like that really close to when it happens. No one was interested in looking into it at the time. By the time we get people in office that will be interested in looking at it, the trail's gonna be so muddled that we may never know what's out like, how much data we lost or what was lost to who. Who's using that right now? What's it being used for? ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Probably, yeah. Dax: So yeah, those things all really made me want to run at the time. you know, we kind of think our young Democrats group went out, you know, the next day for like one of our monthly socials and just were sitting down and talked about how upset we all were. And that's kind of where my campaign team came from. That's my young Democrat friends. And this is all of our first times doing this. You know, we don't have, you like I said, that's just my whole volunteer experience. just have the audacity to think that we can. You know, I've worked as a campaign manager before on a... Breaking The Meta: Gotcha. ⁓ Yeah. Dax: House district race, but never been a candidate myself. My campaign team, they've worked on other campaigns before, never ran a campaign on their own. And we are just so incredibly proud of the work that we've done and the support that we've gotten because we made a runoff. We haven't even been doing this for a year. I came into this with no name recognition. We didn't have the funding. We don't have the experience and we were able to get, you know, 7,717 votes, I think, know, last count I saw. Breaking The Meta: Mm. Gotcha. Yeah. Dax: 22 % of the vote against established people who have been in the community longer, who have run for things in the past. ⁓ See, I'm just so proud of the work that we've done. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, that's awesome. ⁓ So what are the pain points of the people in your district? What are the things that most people in East Texas are talking about that they could use your help ⁓ when you get into office? Dax: That's going to vary a lot depending on who and what demographic you're talking to. ⁓ The one thing that I think is affecting all of us the most, and this is, we're not going to be unique in any way out here. know, the same things that are hurting Texas and the rest of the country are hurting us too. It just hurts us more in certain ways because we have less out here. know, affordability. know, everything costs too much. ⁓ A lot of people voted specifically for Trump. ⁓ in the last election because, the last presidential election, because he said he was going to lower prices, you know, he was going to lower prices. He was going to bring stability to the economy, to the global economy. He was going to end wars. ⁓ these are things that people are pissed out about, pissed off about. They've, these are promises that have been broken and it's not like these things have not gone away. The chaos has gotten worse. ⁓ tariffs being implemented on people have hurt small businesses the most. And that's something that I think that we have a lot of out here in East Texas. We have a lot of mom and pop places. It's a very rich tradition of that out here. These guys get hit the hardest by tariffs. Walmart can handle it. ⁓ In fact, places like, you know, big corporations, you know, the big box stores, they're going to have the ability now to sue the government for lost profits, know, profits that I'm not even sure were actually lost because they increased prices on the rest of us to make up for that. Those prices aren't going to go down. They're going to get reimbursed from it out of our taxpayer dollars. ⁓ Pain points, these are things that hurting everybody out here in East Texas, no matter who you are, where you're from, what part of the district you live in, whether it's Texarkana or Tyler. ⁓ That's going to be hurting us the most. Another thing that we have an issue with out here, access to healthcare. Rural area, you I live in Tyler. We've got wonderful hospitals here. They're right down the road from me. ⁓ Great access. Once again, the further you get outside of the city, the further East you go, you know, the more rural area you get to. Breaking The Meta: and Mmm. Dax: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that we don't even have hospitals in some of our counties, right? People live like medical deserts are a real thing out here. ⁓ people who don't have access to transportation, nor do they have anything close as far as medical emergency care. And, and even if they did have access to it, they wouldn't be able to afford it. You know, that's a huge issue. People aren't even, we should be, you know, we should be embracing preventative care where people go. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Mm. Right. Yeah. Dax: Go to the doctor to get checked out so they can catch things that might be not might be a miss might not be going so well Before it actually becomes a problem and you can take preventative measures to help that to help yourself So you don't get sick so you don't give yourself a condition But instead we've got people limping around from work injuries or from from sicknesses and that they know they need help They know they need to go to the doctor But they also know that if they go to the doctor they won't be able to afford rent that month or they won't be able to put food on the table so Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yeah. Dax: Yeah, naturally huge supporter of a universal healthcare option, whatever form that takes, whether that's expanding Medicare, single payer, you know, what have you. There's a lot of different avenues we could go on this, spin some terrific proposals out there that we could work with. Yeah, those are going to be two of the main, you know, pain points, you know, along with the affordability thing, jobs. East Texas is a place that produces some of the best people. I really believe that, you know, some of the greatest people come out of East Texas. I love it here. I love the people here. And way too often those people, they get raised here, they may go to school here, graduate here, then they want to leave East Texas for greener pastures. They want to go to Dallas, Austin, Houston, where the big bucks are, where all the jobs are, where all the people are. ⁓ I want those greener pastures to be right out here in East Texas. That's something that's really important. Breaking The Meta: Have you noticed that with everything that is going on in the country, so with the tariffs, with the war in Iran, just all of the promises that he has made that he has broken over the last year, have you noticed that people in your very red district are almost a little more willing to listen in a way that they may not have before the 2024 election? Dax: Mm-hmm. ⁓ absolutely. Yeah, no, for sure. People are curious. ⁓ They want to know about, know, ⁓ hey, like, so, you know, Democrats. Big thing, big curiosity for people I hear is that Democrats were actually running people. You know, ⁓ we had we had a full slate of candidates. House. Yeah, we had we had four people in one race. had Democrats on every office, you know, up and down the ballot on that one from, you know, governor to local like house races in Austin. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Mm. If you have four people, it's pretty it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Dax: to US Congress, we had four people in a race and we have a runoff. These are things that we're not used to out here. So that makes everyone curious. They want to know about it. And kind of like you just said, they are more willing to listen because they are feeling a little bit disenfranchised. They're feeling a little bit not listened to, like their needs haven't been met. ⁓ Maybe they've been taken advantage of. People out here are really starting to notice that their representatives might not necessarily care what they think. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yeah. Dax: And they may not have cared what they think for a long time. You know, they show up here, they'll, they'll say the right things. They go to Washington and they vote, you know, however, you know, their rich donors tell them to, or however the president tells them to in most cases, you know, I feel like our current representation may as well just be a rubber stamp for whatever the Washington wants. You know, the president will do something ridiculous and, you know, Miranda will put out a statement on Facebook saying how he fully supports it. You know, it's just like clockwork. It's not like. Breaking The Meta: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. and Dax: He doesn't even have to really make the statement. He's not surprising anybody. Like we know you support it. It's okay. Like, you know, we get it. You don't have a backbone, you know, whatever. ⁓ represent the people that you're supposed to represent, you know, represent, make, try to make life better out here for East Texans, you know, war in Iran, not helping us out here in East Texas. ⁓ we're seeing that we've got, you know, anytime that we want to bomb some country that hasn't, you know, that's not an imminent threat to us. Breaking The Meta: Right. Yeah. Dax: that we, there's no one asked how much that cost or in the past, people didn't used to ask how much that cost out here, know, they see, you they went along with it. We've seen it. We've, this is, this isn't new to anybody. You know, we've been in wars in the middle East for probably most of my life. Actually I'm 36. Uh, people are, people were tired of that then, you know, that people who don't want to go into another one, people are asking, you know, how can we afford all of this interventionist activity overseas and not afford healthcare at home? Breaking The Meta: Ahem. Dax: You know, how come we're still paying outrageous prices at the gas station and at the grocery stores, but we're bombing schools in Iran using AI targeting systems that can't tell the difference between a school and a missile site. You know, like that's, that's insanity. These are things that every normal person cares about. They're knowing they're learning these things. They're paying attention because they can't, they can no longer afford not to. And not just people who typically vote red. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Mm. Yeah. Dax: I feel like the bigger resurgence we're going to see is a lot of non-voters because that is the biggest voting demographic in Texas is the non-voting demographic. These are people that are also, just, your typical politics doesn't really affect me. I don't really want to get bogged down. All I hear is people arguing anyway, so both sides sound the same to me. We're not the same and that's becoming more obvious than ever. And so yeah, I think people are really waking up to that fact. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. ⁓ One of the other things that is a pretty constant problem that is brought up by a lot of people that are running or that are voting in regards to our representatives is this idea of accountability or the lack thereof. What, how do you see accountability? How do you see yourself being held accountable by your constituents? Dax: Mm-hmm. You hold your constituents hold their representatives accountable every election. I think that's the biggest tell on that one is you can vote out people who aren't doing a good enough job. I don't think we do a great job of that all the time. That's not the, it's not the best way to do it. Breaking The Meta: No, we don't. I I think night incumbents have a 95 % yeah. Dax: Seriously though, right? Yeah, it's a strong advantage. Yeah, we're bad about that, but I think that's the most, I think that's way the founders intended it, I guess is the way you could say. As far as the personal level accountability, I try to be, know, in my smaller scale, you know, are scales up through the district, but right now I try to maintain a level of accessibility. You know, like I respond to our emails that people write in on the campaign trail. People ask me questions. How do I feel about this? I'll answer. Breaking The Meta: you Dax: Always willing to sit down and talk with anybody about a problem they have. That's a very direct form of accountability. ⁓ I think that's the best way to go about it in terms of, you know, not, you know, not seeing that level of, and also, you know, I mentioned earlier about the town hall thing, you know, that's a great way to, know, for a little bit more broader accountability, you know, host those big events, put yourself out there in public, take those hard questions from people, be there with the crowds, be a part of the community you're meant to represent. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: You can't be held accountable if you just stay in Washington the whole time and never actually go around your district, right? Or if you just, if you fly down to East Texas and then you just go sit in a few boardrooms and talk to some people who have already given you money and you know are your friends and know like you and you you've done some favors for that, that's not accountability. But if you get out there with the people who you actually are affecting and who may be affected most by your decisions, that's how you achieve accountability, I think at this local level. As far as, you know, from the government, ⁓ Congress has just completely abdicated its responsibility for the checks and balances portion of the constitution. You know, the war, know, seeing go bombing people, stealing world leaders. The Epstein files is a bizarre lack of accountability. That's another thing that I think just regular people are really starting to notice because once again, this is something that they campaigned on hard. You know, people, I saw signs. It's like, Hey, vote for Kamala. If you want the Epstein. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: hard. Dax: perpetrators to get away with it. And now we've got an act of Congress that was supposed to release all the files. I don't even know if we've released half of them yet. ⁓ He's referenced 40,000 times in the accessible ones, depending on which Congress person is at access to the unredacted files. think Raskin said that Trump's name is referenced a million times. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. I don't think so. A million. Yep. Dax: No, with no investigations in any of these things, just all brushed under the rug. And even if you ignore Trump's role in that, which you know, you can't, but if you want to just put that aside for the moment, there's obviously a lot of these emails where we've seen the sender is redacted. You know, we need to protect victims. We don't need to be revealing their identities. We do need to have some curation of the way they get released because there is a lot of potential. There's photos in here that are extremely inappropriate and we cannot just be exposing victims. a further time and punishing them like, you know, for, what's happened. But the, gov, this government is doing that, taking that same treatment to all the perpetrators, to the people who are passing around and engaging in the trafficking that are engaging in these illicit acts. And we cannot see who these people are. We don't know who they are because the government is hiding that from us. That's, that's a, that's, that's an accountability that everybody can get on because that's something that that Republicans made a priority during their campaign. That's not something that you can just sweep under the rug and be like, ⁓ well, you know, promises made promises broken, at least things are affordable. No one's saying that, you know, no, like, because things aren't getting better in any way, or form, you know, it's just more chaos more, you know, like the tariffs, the Supreme Court tried to step in and do their role as a check and say, hey, these global tariffs are actually, you know, you can't do that. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Dax: And the president, think maybe waited an hour, held a press conference, said, actually, yes, I am going to continue to do this and deal with it. A set of gas prices rise, they rise. A set of soldiers die in the Middle East, they die. He's very blase about the whole thing. this whole, his early on people around here I know love to talk about, ⁓ I just like him because he's not a politician. He just tells it like he is. Breaking The Meta: Yes you did. Mm-hmm. Dax: Well, people are tired of his lazy, like his tight sleeping. He's falling asleep at events. He's not sounding sharp. He's rambling more and more every speech he gets in front of. People are losing their faith in this guy. They're realizing that he is not delivering on the things that they thought he was going to deliver on. Even, know, immigration, you brought up pain points out here for East Texas. Texas, we're a border state, East Texas may not specifically be on that border, but We are definitely affected by these matters way more than other places in the country. ⁓ you know, he, you know, he promised, you know, we're going to deport all the illegals, ⁓ quote, quote, sorry. ⁓ yes, exactly. Yeah. That's yeah. ⁓ using his words, but yeah, that was a promise that they were making, ⁓ and they've, we saw. Breaking The Meta: undocumented. Dax: We saw what happened with that. You we saw how inept they were, how much chaos that caused. You know, we saw American citizens executed in the street by federal agents and, you know, talk about accountability. Neither one of those agents, you know, faced any investigation, any kind of, ⁓ any justice on that regard. We don't get answers on that one. In one case, they investigated, ⁓ I believe they investigated Renee Goods, surviving partner for domestic terrorism. Breaking The Meta: That's what they started doing, yeah. Dax: ⁓ and the other instance with pretty, they, ⁓ they had the shooter, they escorted them out of the state as quickly as they could because they knew that he might face state charges, but you know, he wasn't going to face federal. So they got him out of there. ⁓ and even by deportation numbers, I don't even like, think Obama still deported more people than Trump did. So he's not even effective at what he said he wanted to be effective at. just made everyone scared. ⁓ you know, Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Dax: been going to a good handful of ICE protests to help organize some of them out here. The 287-G agreements are as present here as they are elsewhere. These have our Hispanic communities. People are scared. ⁓ We've seen ICE pick up people at courthouses going through the established process, ⁓ thinking that they're doing things the right way, to once again quote some of the newscasters on this, but they're being punished for that. So, know, why are you going to go through a process like that if you're just going to get punished for it like anybody else is? That's not benefiting everybody. That's causing more danger to our communities. That's making it easier for people to come in and take advantage of these people. We've got families scared to go to the grocery store, scared to drop their kids off for lunch. Groups of moms coming together with agreements and saying, hey, if I get picked up while my son is in school, will you pick him up from school? Breaking The Meta: Yeah, yeah. yep. And unfortunately, Texas has really been at the forefront of a lot of news when it's come to that with all the different news that has come out about some of the detention facilities in Texas. what is it like? When is it a five-year-old boy was staying in one of them? And Dax: These are things that we shouldn't be dealing with in America. Mm-hmm. Breaking The Meta: There was other news about teenage girls all being separated. Like, it's just, it's really bad. And unfortunately, you guys in Texas are, you may not be dealing with it in the same way that some of these other cities are, but you guys are definitely experiencing a lot of it on a pretty regular basis. Dax: Mm-hmm. Well, yeah, it's further evidence to the fact that these ice crackdowns coming from the government aren't based on any kind of actual necessity of, let's go where these undocumented people are, ⁓ because they're in border states largely, right? Not Minnesota. You know, that's very much a political retribution thing, I think, you know, obviously, because otherwise we'd see a much larger presence than we already do in places like Texas, but we don't because... We're a red state that has not offended the president. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. So obviously, if you congressmen, members of Congress deal not just with local or national level stuff, but also foreign, you know, foreign policy and things like that. In this last year, this president has pretty much destroyed the United States's entire foreign policy in terms of our allies in terms of, you know, leaving the who in terms of what we've done in Venezuela and now Iran. Regardless of what this president and administration thinks, we are no longer at the front of the table, which is where we have been since the end of World War II. How do you see the United States foreign policy moving forward, especially knowing that our allies probably don't even trust that any agreement we make is Dax: Mm-hmm. Breaking The Meta: is binding past the whims of the president. Dax: Well, you know, with whenever you have these agreements that are subject to the whims of the president, ⁓ you have to establish, know, I guess two things. One, you have to get a president in there that gives a damn about, you know, established norms, establish, like respects your relationships with your allies, ⁓ you know, in general, but it's simply, ⁓ the other side of that is these things are not supposed to be subject to the whims of the president, you know, like, like, you know, whenever you make an agreement with a with one of your foreign allies. And then you have an election. This is something that every democracy has. Every country that out there has leadership changes, transition periods. And every time they transition a new leadership, they don't immediately go back and go undo or redo all of their previous agreements that they've made. They don't go renegotiate and everything saying, hey, the last guy I don't think did a good job at this, let's renegotiate. Every single time they change leaders. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yep. Dax: because everyone else realizes that that's just bad for everyone. It's bad for the economy. It's bad for business. It's bad for the people of all of our nations. ⁓ And one important step to getting back to a sense of normal normality, suppose, is, you know, Congress has to really take back the reins on established be taking their role as a form of checks and balances on the executive. know, impeachment has to be an option whenever you've got a president that's just out there disregarding what the Supreme Court says, disregarding, you know, like we're just completely and totally reducing our soft power across the globe by withdrawing from these agreements, by not respecting our allies, by, you know, throwing away established treaties that have worked well. You know, I think one of the big reasons that we're in the situation in Iran is it's a very much a self-created situation by the president. Breaking The Meta: Ahem. Dax: withdrawing from the previous nuclear agreement we had with them, where we were able to have some checks and balances over there. had investigators that were allowed to come in and examine the facilities. was a certain diplomatic relationship that we could work with, that we could discover if things weren't going right and there were levers you could pull to get them back in the way they're supposed to be and punish them if they strayed too far out of it. If they did pursue things, they were not supposed to be pursuing like a weapons grade uranium. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: creating missiles instead of power plants and that sort of thing. They just threw that all away. And then now we have to go in there to make sure that they're not building weapons with military force instead of diplomatic force. We have to get back to where Congress needs to maintain their role in that and say, hey, you can't just do these things willy-nilly. You can't just wake up feeling emotional one day because maybe you skipped lunch and now you want to go invade another country. You don't get to make that decision. Congress gets to make that decision. You don't get to just withdraw from this agreement because you don't like the way that they talked about you in a meeting or because they didn't applaud loud enough at the last UN thing you spoke at. We need to decide on this. We need to, have committees in place that already review these things. Unfortunately, when things like this go through committee review, it's usually after the fact. And then after the fact, they just give their little rubber stamp of approval. say, yep, good job. We support this. Keep it up. That, has to stop. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Right. Yep. Dax: So that would be one way to retain and get back to that sense of actual global cooperation, where we actually are working with our allies to accomplish certain things, whether it be responding to a global emergency or defending each other from an aggressor. ⁓ But yeah, that's going to be something that, unfortunately, I think that's something we can start to solve here domestically. But it's like that old adage about trust, you can work on it for 10 years and destroy it in 10 seconds. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax: It takes a long time to build that trust back and we're just going to have to be committed to the long haul for that one. Breaking The Meta: Absolutely. Yep. Let's do a little bit of future casting. So May 29th, whatever it comes through, May 26th comes through and you win. Congratulations. November 3rd comes around and you win. Surprising everybody. Yep. And then January 2nd comes along and you were sworn in as representative of the Dax: May 26th. Runoff election May 26th. Thank you. like the way that sounds. Breaking The Meta: first district of Texas, what are the first things that you do? Dax: Mm-hmm. going to depend a lot on how the rest of the country goes. Because as a member of Congress, 435 people out there ⁓ can't really do anything. Certain things you cannot do on your own. You know, can't, not going to pass universal health care with the Republican majority, House and Senate. Not going to get those ICE investigations, not going to get justice, not going to get impeachment, you know, depending on how the rest of House and Senate goes. So, you know, first thing we do here, Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Dax: you know, celebrate, be happy. ⁓ Regardless of how the rest of Congress goes, regardless of what happens in Washington, there are still a lot of things you can affect locally here at home. You know, first things first, gonna start trying to get some of that prosperity that I talked about earlier out here. Gonna start trying to negotiate with some businesses, try to get some more jobs brought to the area, try to find out why some of those jobs aren't here in the first place, what these companies' needs are, you know, whether that's a population thing, whether it's an infrastructure thing. Breaking The Meta: Mmm. Dax: You know, maybe they don't come out here because there's not good broadband access. Maybe they don't come out here because of the roads or certain area or delivery routes or for what have you, because each industry is going to have completely different needs. ⁓ and, know, start sitting down with those people and talking about what, know, what we can do to build that relationship, you know, how we can help our farmers out here, what their, what their stresses are. think, ⁓ I think really, you know, honestly, like first things first may just be like a tour of the district saying, Hey, I want to know. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Mmm. Dax: how I best can help you, all right? The hard part's over. We got some representation here that actually cares and actually is motivated to fix things and make things better and start really getting to the nitty gritty with people. How can we help you? What's the best way to do that? ⁓ I think bringing in jobs is gonna be one of the big obvious first ones. And also, you can't just roll over for whatever company wants to bring a factory in, right? Because some of these things are not reciprocal relationships, right? Breaking The Meta: Mm-hmm. Dax: AI data centers, easy example of that one that's high profile right now. If someone wants to, sounds good, let's build this big new fancy state of the art facility in your district. Problem is that creates a decent amount of construction jobs for a short amount of time. And then there might be four or 10 people manning that office for the rest of its duration. That's not really helping, that's not bringing jobs to the area, not long-term jobs that we need. ⁓ In addition, they're draining draining resources from communities. There are huge burdens on the electrical grid, which thanks to a poor governorship that I think is a big problem out here. Our grid is not doing so great. It kind of has a tendency. We're not really sure if it's going to fail every time it gets cold, which is bizarre in one of the most prosperous countries in the world. ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Yeah. And it sounds like you're getting a brand new data center that's going to use double the electricity usage of your entire state, which isn't going to help things at all, is it? Dax: Right, exactly. Yeah, and no, not environmentally friendly, the water that goes through these places sucking water from systems. There's places out here in East Texas that have been carried, the water quality has been compared to the water quality in Flint, Michigan. So these are systems and utilities that we have out here that are already hurting. then we're just trying to put further burden on them. So you can't just let say, ⁓ yes, we want to bring everything in and build everything and do all the things that we have to actually look and see what's best for the people here and how it affects us out here. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Tax for everyone that's listened all the way to this point and heard everything that we've talked about. What are one or two things that no matter what you'd want them to come away with knowing about you and your campaign? Dax: You know, I just I I just really want to make East Texas better I uh, I grew up here. I am NOT in this race because Sorry, excuse me Not in this race cuz you know, I'm trying to make a buck, you know I'm not trying to fund raise a million dollars and pay myself a salary out of this I'm not you know, I'm not promoting. I'm not selling anything. You know, I don't have some like some product line that I'm pushing in the background, right? Apart from just, know, DAX for Congress stuff. ⁓ I don't have some like big online persona or foundation or, you know, there's nothing that I'm really trying to promote out. Like for this, there's no personal thing that I'm getting for this, right? You know, I'm, ⁓ I'm, I'm, I'm donating a lot of money, you know, to this campaign. Definitely not profiting off this. I just, I think that East Texas has a potential that's not being reached. Breaking The Meta: There's no, yeah, there's no ulterior motive. Yeah. Mm. Dax: And I think that a lot of that has to do with our leadership that we're sending to Washington, our leadership that we send to Austin. I think we can be better. We just have to want to, and we have to have the courage to elect candidates that want that as well. And that's honestly, that's the biggest takeaway is I really just want to do good for the, I want to give something back. ⁓ Grew up here, young progressive. I think that it's time for younger people across the country to start stepping up to these leadership roles. ⁓ You know, Chelsea and the district over same thing. You know, we, this, is something that's going, that's going to be across the country and you can either get on board with it or, know, we can keep doing the same old, same old and keep running the, the same, same faces that we've seen before that haven't been affecting change that haven't been getting the job done, or we can choose something new. You know, we can be different, right? And I think that, I think that Texas is ready for that now more than ever. ⁓ so yeah, I guess that would be the most important takeaway. I'd want, want people about the campaign. Breaking The Meta: For anyone that wants to learn more about you and help out or get involved in any way, whether it's volunteering or donations, where can they find? Dax: Dax for Congress. So that's our website, daxforcongress.com. That's what we are on Facebook and Instagram where we're most active, Dax for Congress. If you just pop that into Google, those same things will pop up. So that's really all you need to remember. If you want to find us, please sign up. If you can't volunteer, can't donate, if you just want to ask a question, submit a form, learn something, interact, because I love answering questions, especially if you're in district. Find it out. Tell me what. something that's made you unhappy from your representation recently and what do think we can do better? Yeah, please yeah, DAX4Congress.com. Breaking The Meta: Yep. Yep. And for anyone that happens to be in the first district, remember, you've got to run off that you got to go and vote for because the primaries are where you get to choose what kind of a country you want going forward. That is one of the biggest places to do it. So make sure you get out and and learn. mean, learn about both of the candidates as much as as much as Dax wants you to vote for him in the end. Dax: Absolutely. Breaking The Meta: Get involved, learn about your candidates, both of them, and decide who you think is going to be best for you, for your district, for this country. Dax: And that's really one of the biggest questions we have to ask ourselves is, ⁓ cause you know, getting a Democrat into Congress is going to be a huge upgrade over what we have now. No, whether it's me, my opponent, or anybody else that would have chosen to run for this position, right? Anybody that cares about people would be, you know, a huge step forward. ⁓ The most important question is who can actually do it? Who can go against Moran in November and actually win and deliver votes for Democrats that we have not seen before out here? ⁓ Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dax: And that's why I'm in this race. Cause I really think that me and my team are doing that for people. Breaking The Meta: Yeah. Dax, thank you for coming on here and spending a little bit of time with us, allowing us to get to know you and what you hope to do for the people of your district. Dax: Thank you for having me so much. was real pleasure. Breaking The Meta: Absolutely. And for everyone else that has listened this far, thank you so much for listening. Please hit all those buttons below, like, subscribe, share, all that stuff. It makes it possible for me to keep doing what I do, which is talking to great people like Dax, who want to make change, who aren't taking pack money, who are willing to be held accountable, who want to fight for all of these things that we keep saying, that we've been saying for decades in some cases, that we want to happen. Well, now's the time to put in the work, because if we really want it to happen, there are literally thousands Dax: That's right. Breaking The Meta: of people just like DACs that want to do this, that are trying to do this the right way, that need our support, that need to get through their primaries and then get needed to get voted for in the general election. But if you want change, now's the time to do it. So please watch, share this video, watch and share their videos. Do anything that can give them more visibility, which makes it possible for them to get through and make all the changes that we keep saying we want. ⁓ And again, for those of you that are new to this podcast, just so you know, Breaking the Meta is about having hard conversations when necessary, fighting to break the status quo, and the idea that all people, no matter your race, religion, gender, or identity, get rights, respect, dignity, and safety. Dax, again, thank you for being here, and for everyone else, we'll see you next time on Breaking the Meta. Bye, guys.