Political Solidarity in the U.S. | Jonathan Herzog, Badrun Khan, and Blair Walsingham in Conversation With Darren Sand

Candidates for office and elected officials around the world are bringing RadicalxChange’s ideas to life. On this panel, a group of diverse, young candidates for office will discuss the values that motivate their campaigns and some particular policy proposals they hope to achieve. This wide-ranging conversation will cover the problems posed by concentrations of power (economic and political), technology, and the degradation of democracy. 

Speakers

Jonathan Herzog is a civil rights organizer, legal advocate, and Democratic congressional candidate in New York's 10th District. He has worked hand in hand with the Senior Adviser & Counselor to the Attorney General on New York's first-of-its-kind anti-corruption joint task force. He graduated first in his class at Harvard University, completed his MBA at NYU Stern, and served as co-President of Harvard Law School's student government, where he is a teaching fellow for legal and political philosophy. 

Badrun Khan is a candidate for Congress in New York's 14th District. She is a first-generation immigrant and the eldest daughter of Bengali-born parents who migrated to the U.S. in search of a better life. She is an active presence in schools and service to all in her Queens community and volunteered and served with honor as a member of Community Board 2. 

Darren Sands is the National Politics Reporter for BuzzFeed. In 2014, Darren joined BuzzFeed News as a national politics reporter, covering the White House, the US Congress, and four elections. In addition to profiling Democratic candidates such as Stacey Abrams, Ayanna Pressley, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker, Darren also covered the internal politics of both the Democratic Party and the Black Lives Matter movement and its impact on the 2016 and 2018 elections. In between those years, he wrote one of the few definitive pieces profiling the movement for BuzzFeed in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump's election. Darren’s writing has also appeared in The Boston Globe, Grantland, The New York Times Magazine, Black Enterprise, and Esquire Magazine. He and his wife, Jummy, live in Washington, D.C. 

Blair Walsingham is a Congressional candidate for U.S. House TN District-1 and is committed to putting people before politics. Endorsed by key community and national organizations, including Andrew Yang’s Humanity Forward, Humanity First Party, Black Coffee Justice, and Income Movement, Blair is an Air Force veteran, outdoorswoman, small business owner, and mother who has been named a Gun Sense Candidate by Moms Demand Action. Her campaign is laser-focused on helping the 1st District survive today and thrive tomorrow through policies built on compassion, personal freedom, and common-sense data-driven solutions. Blair walks the walk. She values our traditions, our rights, and contends that true leaders seek to build coalitions of compassion, not walls of divisiveness. In order to balance the effects of big money in politics, Blair is committed to lifting every American out of the despair that arises when faced with economic insecurity. She looks forward to the day when the American dream is not just a dream, but a reality made possible by a Universal Basic Income paid to every citizen as a dividend of the wealth generated by the labor of our ancestors, incredible gains in technology and automation, and the buying and selling of our personal data by private companies.