Antonis Christodoulou Takes on Pete Aguilar | Full Interview [0:00-5:04]

From local office to federal office, Pete Aguilar has ruled over the Inland Empire for two decades. My next guest is attempting to end Aguilar's reign in the Inland Empire. And Tony Christodulu, who I hope I've renounced his name correctly, is here with me now as a congressional candidate for California's 33rd Congressional District. He's here with me now, challenging Pete Aguilar. Thank you so much, Anthony, for coming on the program. Thank you for having me, Cameron. We'll dive deep into your policy platform in a moment, but why run for the seat? So, hello, I'm Anthony Christodulu, I'm a 27-year-old progressive running for Congress right now in California, 33 in the Inland Empire. I was raised by a single mother who would commute two to three hours each way to UCLA. I grew up in Ranch Hill and she would always tell me how you could never, no matter what you do, your education could not be taken away from you. So then I went on to go to UC Irvine to study political science with a pre-law focus and then I went to law school in Washington, DC and graduated in 2025. And then I started being more and more involved in politics, I would pay attention, I would focus on what's going on around me and I use my legal degree to understand the nuances. And I grew frustrated and angry hearing Democrats throughout the board say that we can't afford certain things, we can't have all these things like healthcare, we can't afford to have housing, we can't afford to have education, we can't afford to have livable wages. And I grew very frustrated and at the time I was watching Zauron and other progressives run their campaigns and run successful campaigns that got people my age and others excited to go out and vote because we were voting for something and not just against something. So that invigorated me to learn more about the campaign process and then once I felt prepared I put myself in the running and I'm here right now to challenge the number three Democrat in the house to try and get the party more focused towards the working class people because I feel like they've left them alone and they focus on their donors and their corporate benefactors instead of the working class people. And I want to push this party back towards that. Any Democratic politicians, Democratic party politicians will call themselves progressives, we'll get into your policies in a moment but what does that word mean to you? For me being progressive means being for the working class people. It means being for the youth. It means being for the average American who's just trying to live. I found myself after high school on 27 so the 10 years I've been focused on politics and trying to learn in my adult life. I've been listening to a lot from both sides, Republicans and Democrats and I thought there was a true center to this argument between the two and then I started focusing on what Republicans were saying and I figured out these people don't care about us. These people in the Republican Party were focused on their donors and wealthy benefactors and corporate interests instead of us. So I immediately left and started trying to understand what they were trying to fight for and I started looking at the Democratic Party and when I started doing that I started noticing that Democrats were also being funded by the same people. They were focused on donors, they were focused on these things that weren't making our material conditions better. In fact, they were passing modest reform. And during Biden's presidency, we watched as Democrats, centrist Democrats, like Kirshen Sinema and Joe Manchin were the first barriers to getting infrastructure bill passed where they cut his infrastructure bill in half and then the next and then they cut it again and then Republicans touched it. So being progressive is, in my view, how a lot of us need to focus on governing our society in federal, state and local. Being progressive means we're going to be supporting people when they need it most, providing social programs and making sure our taxes are used in our community and not used to make wealthy people even richer and also not used to form foreign countries and instead funding our own education and funding our own youth in our future. And I think that is the most important thing. Let's go into policies, you want to bring affordable housing to the 33rd district, a lot of young people, not just in the 33rd district, but all throughout California are struggling