Equal Rights for All. Privileges for None.

I'm Boris Velasquez. Marine veteran. Indigenous American. National security analyst. Son of immigrants. Progressive candidate running as a Democrat for Maryland's 8th Congressional District.

My mother was a college graduate who left everyone and everything she knew to clean office buildings at night in Virginia so her son could have a future during the day. My father came here with nothing in his pockets and fought his way from homelessness to his American dream. They believed in the promise of America. I spent over twelve years defending that promise in uniform, in federal agencies, and at the highest levels of the national security apparatus.

I have had enough of watching that promise get sold for parts.

Seventy-nine trillion dollars have been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent since 1975. Over half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Forty-two million people need federal assistance just to eat. Our infrastructure is graded a C by the engineers who inspect it. And the oligarchs who caused all of it are no longer bothering to pretend they care about you. They have stopped bothering to hide their intentions and contempt for us. They are coming for your wages, your benefits, your voice, and your obedience. They are stripping collective bargaining rights from nurses and scientists. They are slashing $186 billion from food assistance to fund tax cuts for billionaires. American citizens are dying in the streets of Minneapolis and being called terrorists.

I am not running to resist from behind a podium. I am running to build the coalitions that fight back. With unions. With neighbors. With families. With anyone tired of living under a boot. I am running because the establishment will not save us. The millionaires in Congress gain nothing from changing the system and everything from perpetuating it. We must save ourselves.

I fight for an 80 percent corporate tax on profits over one billion dollars and a 10 percent rate on the first $100,000, a 52 percent tax cut for small businesses. A 90 percent rate on individual income over four million dollars. Fifty percent worker representation on every corporate board. Universal healthcare. Universal childcare. Free public college and vocational school. A constitutional right to vote. A constitutional right to organize. A four-day work week. Full body autonomy. Election Day as a federal holiday. These are not aspirations. These are commitments owed to the People.

I Don't Want Your Money. I Want Your Voice.

I am running this campaign with zero donations and zero PAC money. Not a dollar. This is not a gimmick. This is a strategy and a proof of concept. Citizens United told us that money is speech. I reject that. Ideas are speech. Conviction is speech. A neighbor knocking on a neighbor's door is speech. I refuse to let this campaign be shaped by anyone's wallet, including yours. And I am proving right now, before a single vote is cast, that a candidate can choose people over donors and still compete.

If any district in America can make money irrelevant in politics, it is this one. Maryland's 8th is one of the most educated, most engaged, most patriotic communities in the nation. The people of this district don't need to buy influence. They are the influence.

Do not send me money. Talk. Text your friends. Have the conversation at dinner. Share the idea that moved you. Persuade someone who has given up on politics that this time is different, because this time, a candidate is trusting the People instead of the donors.

Now is the time of the unions. Now is the time of the People. Now is the time to fight.