The Other Adam Running for Congress in Colorado’s 3rd District

*This is not an endorsement of Adam Withrow or even an endorsement of voting. We are pretty certain that the media won’t create the space to hear from candidates outside of the two-party system.

The Revolutionist: Who is Adam Withrow? What do you do? Why are you in this race?

Adam Withrow: Who am I?  That’s a tough one, and one I don’t know if anyone can really answer it if they actually respect the question.  I’m a primordial force of chaos.  That may sound as though it has ill connotations, but I’m not trying to say I’m any more of one than any other person in the world.  It’s what we are, and I guess being one of us, that’s what I must be, too.  Depending on how you want to slice it, I’m the son of a farmer’s daughter and one of the farm hands.  Another way to say it is I’m the son of a rock and roll drummer who never made it and his original groupie.  Either one will do.

I’m a construction worker who filled out a web form one day, and that web form let me get into a game that has real world consequences. 

On the regular right now, though, I’ve put the construction industry on the back burner.  My wife wanted to get back to work, and we do our best to maintain a single-earner household so that we are the ones raising our kids, and not anyone else.  Nowadays, it’s fair for me to call myself an educator.  There are three branches that I’m pushing into all at the same time.  Number one, I’m my kids’ teacher.  I’m teaching the baby how to talk, sit, crawl, walk, etc, and then I’m taking the older ones through elementary and the beginning of middle school.  Number two, I’m a mountain guide.  I can take a mere mortal and turn them on to their inner potential. It takes a few years, and I use the mountains to do it.  It’s essentially a way to teach people how to create mutual power that can be shared between people in a manner where they can undeniably see it happening.  I don’t make money doing it, but it is a part of my life’s work.  I have fixed broken people by breaking them on the rocks.  Number three, you may have heard of those mushrooms that people have been using to heal themselves.  I help veterans prepare and provide set and setting so they can get the most out of dosage.  I don’t help them get the mushrooms, I help them prepare to use them.  Really, it goes hand in hand with mountain guiding, but there are different needs that people seek to meet and different methods to meet those needs.

I’m in this race for more reasons than I’ll be able to cover without writing a book on the subject.  We can start at the top and work our way back from there.  People have been asking me to do this since I hit the age where I was eligible.  I don’t look at life in terms of personal gain because no individual can truly gain if it is at the expense of others.  I see the quality of life in terms of exactly that.  Life is a single process that contains every living thing, and its quality cannot be measured by the possessions or amenities that are held by a small group of a single organism.  Seeing as how we’re members of the single most destructive amalgamation of humans that this planet has ever known, we’re also the primary cause of the degradation of the quality of life on Earth.  The government is potentially the last line of defense against the corporate pillage and destruction of this planet, but it is currently more interested in protecting the destruction.

When I filed my paperwork with the FEC last year, it was looking like 2024 was going to be the year of the unpopular rematch.  We already see that the presidential headline ticket is composed of two unpopular goons, and our CD3 race was shaping up to be the same thing.  In the red corner, we had Lauren Boebert.  She was…  her.  For better or for worse, she won, and she won again.  In the blue corner, we had Adam Frisch.  He’s a New York millionaire who was looking to buy himself a federal office.  He saw vulnerabilities in a woman, and he decided he’d use his money as leverage against those vulnerabilities to get his way.  When he lost last time, he decided he’d come back with even more money this time.  As a currency trader, he understands that he could use both the inside information and the leverage provided by the US House seat in order to cause major ripples in the values of international currencies.  He’d be able to capitalize on those ripples to make himself and his clients even more money than they already have.  He was a man without a platform, and he was running on the fact that he wasn’t her.

Well, she’s gone now.  She’ll hold that seat until the end of her term, and she’ll take her star power to another district and see how that works over there.  The red corner now has a dog pile of goons all trying to show that their head is deeper up Donal Trump’s ass than the others.  It won’t matter who they pick, they’ll be sycophants for a would-be tyrant who may well be living on Rikers Island by November.

I originally registered to run as a Democrat.  I was thinking that my actual priorities could line up nicely with their ostensible ones.  Quite a few events, party meetings, and one blindly supported genocide later, I realized that they were no better than the Republicans.  I knew that already, and truth be told, I actually didn’t register as a Democrat until after I had already filed with the FEC.  I figured that I could pick Frisch off in the primary and save our district the embarrassment of a rematch between goons.  I left the party because I will not allow myself to be associated with people like that.

I’m in the race because I understand that our current political world is so detached from the reality of life that I think we need a thinking person instead of a puppet.  We’re drifting toward worse and worse forms of authoritarianism toward individuals with greater and greater liberation for large business entities.  Someone has to at least call this shit out on the floor of the US House of Representatives, and that someone can be me.  Someone needs to be able to tell both Democrats and Republicans that their ideas are stupid at best and blatantly corrupt at worst.  Those statements need to be on the Congressional Record even if the legislative trajectory remains the same.

TR: How does your working class background inform your positions?

AW: It’s a combination of that and my educational background in history and philosophy working together that make me think the way I do.  As a working dude, I deal with that situation we all know as real life.  I can look at something like the Dow Jones Industrial Average and see it for what it is.  It’s not worth any more than it ever has been.  The dollar is just worth that much less, and it’s being sucked up into fewer and fewer hands.

There’s nothing quite like breaking your bones on the job or nearly being buried alive and then having some yuppie say, “I’m taking a big risk having you guys out here.”

When I ran my business, I never made a dime more than any of the people I hired.  After overhead, I actually made less.  What that meant is that all of the people in my crews, myself included, all had the same standard of living.  Even doing so, I managed to live well enough to be happy.  I also had some down ass soldiers that were ready to go to the same lengths that I was so see things get done.

I’ve also been in situations where I made someone else a whole lot of money while scraping to get by.  I’ve had to move out of more than one place of residence while having a full-time job because I could no longer afford to stay where I was.  I’ve had to bust out the change jar in order to get what meager rations I could afford while having kids.  I’ve been ripped off by clients who have had more than enough money to pay their bills because they looked down on me as a person whose job actually involved doing real things.

At the same time, I’ve been  given the opportunities to sell my soul and leave everyone I know behind, and I’ve walked away from every single one of them.  There’s a line you can cross where you will be asked to either suffer some indignity or abandon your principles to proceed any further, and I have always chosen to stay down here in the real world.

The life of a working person is not some abstract concept or distant memory for me.  It’s the world I live in right now.  I hear gunshots off of my front porch every couple of days, and just had to change out the exterior door to my basement because we had a psycho squatter down there.  I don’t own my house, and I live in a slum.  The slum I live in is for sale for more than it’s worth, and if it goes, I’m going to have to go, too.  Yes, my wife makes above the individual median income for my area, and so did I when it was my turn, but in a single earner household, we’re below the household median.  We choose for it to be that way, and there is no amount of money that makes it worth it to us to have our kids raised by strangers.  A lot of people are not able to make even that choice, however, and that’s just a part of what has to change.  The majority of the land in cities and towns may be covered in the big houses, but that’s not where the majority of people are living.

It’s not that we don’t want them to have that, and it’s not that we want it for ourselves, it’s that we don’t want to lose what little we do have.  As of now, when the ratchet goes left, it’s just going, “click, click, click,” and nothing is moving but the wrench.  We all already know that it’s gearing up for another turn to the right.

TR: “Aspen Adam Frisch” relocated to Colorado after getting disgustingly rich on Wall St. How long have you been in Colorado?

AW: Pretty much my whole life.  I was born in Iowa, but we moved to Colorado when I was two years old, which was in 1985.  My body was born over there, but my mind was definitely born here.  My biological dad was a rock and roll drummer who grew weed, and Colorado was a better place for rock and roll with looser weed laws (It was still illegal, of course.)  I was actually born as Adam Elbert, but my mom left the love of her life because he didn’t make enough money.  I don’t even remember what his face looked like.  We ended up in Falcon first back when it was a two-street little burg, and then we moved into Colorado Springs.  We lived in a half dozen places there, and then we moved to Walsenburg when I was 12.

I lived with my mom there until I was 17, and then I got kicked out of the house for having girls over.  From there, it was Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, Walsenburg, Trinidad, Manitou Springs, Trinidad, Walsenburg, Manitou Springs, Lake George, Colorado Springs, Lake George, Manitou Springs, Westcliffe, Pueblo, Denver, Crestone, Walsenburg, and back to Pueblo.  I’ve kept up a pretty nomadic existence through my adult life.  Part of that has been because of the instability of the construction industry and the desire to follow opportunities across the horizon, and part of that has been because I don’t want to become a townie of any single location.  There’s something refreshing about the jumping off a cliff feeling of dropping the smoke pellet and vanishing to another locale.

There have been times when I lived in a cinder block shack with no mortar, and there have been times when I’ve lived in a palatial estate with 30-foot aspen ceilings in my living room.  When my first son was about a year and a half old, we actually lived in a US Army GP Medium tent halfway between Westcliffe and Gardner while I was building our house on the other side of the valley.  We never actually moved into that house.  Conditions in the area changed, and we went with the flow.

Needless to say, I’m not really from any one place, but I have a general feel for what life is like in our region.

TR: Clearly capitalism isn’t working out for large percentages of the population, How do we fix this economic system for the majority of workers who are struggling?

AW: Yes, free range capitalism has failed abysmally for the majority of the population.  So has absolute state-run communism.  This is one of the major balancing issues (along with the spectrum of authoritarianism and libertarianism) that are absolutely tearing the world apart.  The question is directed towards economics, so let’s just go at that for now.  We might want to head back over to the question of authoritarianism/libertarianism in a future conversation, though.

Capitalism in the US is hitting its terminal phase.  The worst thing is, it’s not even totally that.  We’ve got a robust safety net and a meaty package of subsidies for the largest industries.  Not only are they devouring the wealth of the people, but they’re protected when their incompetent bungling puts their existence in jeopardy.  Almost all of the largest and most profitable businesses in this country are either propped up by the government or completely dependent on it.  (Lookin’ at you, military industrial complex.)

That much said, we need to stop looking at this in black and white terms. 

There are things that I really enjoy about our current system, and I think they’re worth preserving.  Right now, you really can drop what you’re doing and go do something completely different.  I’ve been a CNA, a cook, a ranch hand, a construction worker, a licensed contractor, a TV producer, an IT tech, a lab worker, an SEO and web designer, a product developer and proto-typer, and even a detention officer.  Some of the time, I’ve even made pretty good money.  That’s a situation that you can’t get with a state-run economy, and we need to remember that.  I had the freedom to jump ship at any time, and the only approval I ever needed was my own.  It’s true that I’ve maintained that by always having next to nothing, and that meant that I’ve never had anything to lose.

On the other hand, exploitation is the name of the game.  Boot lickers and cut throats get ahead.  At a certain point, if you want more than essentially nothing, you’re going to have to abandon your sense of altruism if it goes beyond the hypothetical.  In order to have much of anything, you’re going to have to keep most of what you get for yourself.  For most of us, that’s not really an issue.  I pay enough to live where I do that, I’m not about to leave my door unlocked, and now that I have kids, I’m not going to just let people move in because they’re in tight situations.  It’s not that my sense of compassion has atrophied, it’s that my house is full.  Four kids in a two-bedroom apartment doesn’t really leave room for anyone else.

That’s not unreasonable, or at least I don’t think so.

What is unreasonable is the fact that the lowest tier of wages (and by that, I mean half of the people who work) is far too low to actually live on.  Exploitation is beyond rampant.  The structure of our civilization isn’t shaped like a pyramid, it’s shaped like the Eiffel tower, except that the bottom is a LOT bigger than the top.  We’ve got an entire class of parasites that do no work whatsoever and have the nerve to call us “entitled.”  Ownership is considered more valuable than work.  In any company, there are the people who do the work that actually makes the money, and they are considered completely disposable.  Then there are the people who only make money without producing any, and they are considered highly valuable.

There are a few things we need to do.

First off, we need to establish an acceptable minimum standard of living for people who work.  We need a Federal Living Wage, and we need to tie that wage to the Consumer Price Index.  Setting a wage at any number is always followed by retaliatory price increases.  By tying that wage to the CPI, if the prices go up, the wages go up right along with them.  That will tamp down on price increases in general.

Second, we need to establish what I think of as a “blood clot tax.”  If cash is the blood of our civilization, excessive coagulations of it are the clots.  I’ve never seen a heart attack, or a stroke do anyone any good, and watching these excessive fortunes build up is just like watching blood clots approach the coronary arteries.  Once a person crosses a line of having billions by the dozens, their money has no functional purpose.  It’s like a score on a pinball machine.  They want to tell us that if they couldn’t do that, there’d be no incentive for them to…  To what?  Own?  Make money off of the fact that they have money?  We’ve got people sailing yachts asking us to wait for the trickles they displace so we can have a drink.  Money that is not moving is not money at all.  Let’s give them an incentive to circulate it.  If they’re going to gobble up all of the cash, the government is going to have to take it directly to keep them from starving the populace.  The fact is, as the ranks of the desperate grow, so does the risk of uncontrollable chaos.  The “nice” neighborhoods in our cities and towns will only stand as human shields for so long.  Sooner or later, people will start looking for the real culprits, and all of this can be avoided just by loosening the screws a bit.

Third, we need to seriously set controls on rents that are based on the actual incomes of people in the area.  What used to be considered a shanty is now considered middle class living.  That unto itself isn’t really a problem.  A simple life is a good life.  The problem lies in the fact that more and more people are unable to keep a roof over their heads working the most common jobs in any area.  Homelessness is being criminalized, and at the same time, it’s becoming harder and harder to avoid.

Fourth, we need to strongly disincentivize both house flipping and slum lording.  A home that is not the primary residence of its owner needs to come with a heavy, heavy burden.  Those who buy houses for the sole purpose of making them more expensive need to be stopped.  When a place is purchased, painted, floored, and placed back on the market with no utility or structural improvements and then sold for 2 to 10 times the original price, that is a crime.  People are complaining about higher property taxes while thinking that that sort of business is a good thing.  It’s not.  At the same time, those who purchase homes that may have been affordable only to put them up for rent are equally despicable.  Overall, the price of living indoors is spiraling out of control.  These last 5 years have seen it reach levels that don’t just need to be stopped, they need to be reversed.

Fifth, we need to recognize that the business of medicine is evil.  Profiting from injury and disease is morally wrong.  Yes, doctors, nurses, and support staff need to get paid, but we don’t need the towering edifices of behind the scenes profiteering that currently exist.  It’s not just that we would benefit from a single-payer system.  It’s that we need to remove the apparatus of non-working people who profit from the ownership of the organizations.

There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to waste the space and time on it right now.  If I haven’t pissed you off yet, we can continue the conversation as time goes on.  I fully admit that I’m an ignorant fool, but I’m not the only one…

By repairing our baseline standard of living for working people, we can free up the resources to help the people who can’t work.  If the lowest paid worker of any organization is able to live without subsidies, the money currently spent on food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8, and LIHTC can go to housing and caring for those who have hit rock bottom.  That would allow us as a civilization to sort through the people who are down and out and tailor our help to their real needs.  For the people who are strung out on drugs, we’ll be able to offer pathways toward rehabilitation.  No one wants to be addicted to anything.  Take it from me, I smoke cigarettes.  It sucks.  For the mentally ill, we’ll have the resources to provide the levels of care that balance between what they want and what they need.  For the physically disabled, we will be able to take care of them and provide a dignified standard of living.

No robust and material civilization such as ours should have so many people left behind.

TR: Your candidacy has been portrayed as a ‘joke campaign’ by some, is it?

AW: Let’s start with a few real joke campaigns, and then I’ll let you and your reader’s judge.
First of all, we have a wealthy New Yorker who lives in one of the richest towns in one of the poorest districts in Colorado.  There are more private jets in Aspen than there are affordable housing units in Huerfano County.  He’s running for the party that ostensibly represents the working people, and what he does is make money off of other people’s money.  He’s running for the party that ostensibly represents the environmental movement, and he promises to expand oil and gas drilling in Colorado.  He’s running for the party that ostensibly supports the anti-war movement, and he firmly supports Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.  He’s running for the party that ostensibly supports diversity and inclusion, and he uses racist, xenophobic language to discourage people from going solar.  His major (and almost only) platform is that he’s not Lauren Boebert.  Well, she’s not in the race anymore, and he lost to her already.  I present to you the disgusting joke campaign of Adam Frisch.  What a surprise when a millionaire calls up his millionaire buddies and their connections in the media and raises millions of dollars.  Oh, goody!  A rich guy out to buy himself a federal office.

Next, let’s move on to the Republicans.  First, we had a pretty lady who basically campaigned by putting on tight clothes and wearing a gun.  That worked twice.  Realistically, she was more authentically representative of our population because she actually did do work that required her to work.  Needless to say, though, it was the boobs that pushed her on through.  Now, we have a primary field that goes like this: 

Candidate A:  “I’d happily lick Donald Trump’s boots!” 
Candidate B:  “Oh yeah, well I’d eat the corn from his poop!”
Candidate C:  “Is that all?!?  Well his hand is so far up my ass that when he wiggles his fingers, my mouth moves!”

And so on.  All of them are election deniers that, get this, are running in an election!  Wowie!  And so, I present to you joke campaign version ‘R.’

In light of that, I personally think I’m much less of a joke than the brand name candidates.  I leave it to you to be the judge.  It can be difficult to sort the pepper from the fly shit.

TR: What new ideas has your campaign injected into the race?

AW: To put it in a nutshell, I believe in a future where we don’t have half or more of our population desperately poor.  I believe in an economy that is not based on exploitation.  I believe we do not have to accept massive corporate entities as forces of nature.  I believe that since votes are not for sale, a campaign can be based on ideas instead of mountains of cash.  Fuck paid surrogates, if you dig what it is that I’m getting at, pull that computer out of your pocket and let people know that there’s more than Pepsi and Coke in the game.  I don’t have the cash to put down astroturf.  I can’t even afford to subscribe to the Revolutionist.

The one main policy point that I’d be willing to say is mine is the Federal Living Wage that is tied to the Consumer Price Index.  Oh yeah, and there’s also the ban on net metering offset caps for people who install wind, solar, geothermal, etc., but I don’t know if we’ll get into that here.  Oh yeah, and there’s also the ban on for-profit water speculation.  A lot of the rest has been covered by other people, I just know we’ll need someone to come in swinging to get them to exercise the courage to buck their corporate sponsors and turn the ideas into legislation.

TR: We at the Revolutionist don’t think the issues you bring up are jokes. How do we get more working class people to run for office?

AW: The main thing is to let people know how easy it really is.  If you’re running for federal office, there are two web forms you have to fill out at the FEC’s website, and you’re officially in.  If you register as a major party candidate, the parties themselves will reach out to you and get you moving.  If you’re running for state office, it’s a bit trickier, but the Unity Party of Colorado can help get you on the ballot.  The rule at Unity is that there are no rules.  Choose your own platform, stick to your guns, don’t embarrass them, and you’ll be on the ballot.  They’ll let you run from anywhere on the political spectrum.

Remember this:  It’s a lot of fun to bitch about the government, but if we become the government, we don’t have to bitch.  I want to believe that maybe the elections really are real, and that maybe the results really are legally binding.  If that’s the case, if you run for office and you win, you are in that seat instead of some stooge.  The screws are getting tighter, and the rate of tightening is accelerating.  If you don’t want to be completely pinned down, you gotta jump in and help back them off.

Protesting is cool, but you can tell how well they’re listening when they send in armored battalions in a phalanx of shields and truncheons.  Tear gas, OC, baton thumps, zip ties, and temporary detention without charges (because you didn’t break any laws) are their responses.  Keep it up in the off season, but recognize the responses you’re getting.  If you run for office and get elected, THAT’S when you can be a bit more effective.  Take any of the brow-beaten former visionaries who got in through the major parties and rekindle the revolutionary spirit that was smothered by their affiliations, and there’s a chance that a real coalition can form.

Sit on the sidelines, and you’re just watching a game where we all get played.

TR: Big picture, why fight this ‘David vs Goliath’ battle against Frisch? Why is it important to challenge the powerful in their own arenas?

AW: He’s no Goliath.  He’s a teeny, little twerp who’s hoping he can get his wife to push the beds together without having to spend his own money this time.  He’s a yuppie, and rich by most of our standards, but remember, he’s a broke ass chump for Aspen.  He’s used to living on a paltry $40,000 a month, and some of those guys make that in the time it takes to drop a hat on the ground.  There are a lot of doors that he can’t get through, and he’s hoping to expand his access by becoming a useful idiot for some insidious, evil bastards.  It’s not just Frisch that I’m running against, though I’ve had to deal with him enough that making him lose is just as good as winning for me.  I’m running against almost everyone that’s ever had one of those seats.

I’ll bring up a different question to answer that one.  What makes anyone think that guy or anyone of his ilk is powerful?  I personally don’t give them that.  If that’s what power is, it needs to be abolished.  I see petty, desperate, unhappy little worms who radiate cold shafts of broken glass.  Their actions emanate negativity throughout the planet.  I’m not aware of any truly powerful, truly joyful people who are so needy that they would interfere with the lives of so many. 

The importance is in challenging the existence of power.  No one should have any over others.  Responsibility is what is needed in government.  These people and organizations have destroyed countless lives, and the direction of their actions is headed toward the destruction of nearly all life on this planet.  They kill, maim, detain, incarcerate, pollute, and destroy for profit, and they do so using others as their implements.  This must be stopped.  If the government truly has the capabilities that it seems like it does, it is the means to do so.  It only will if we actually participate, though.


TR: Thank you for putting yourself out there. We wish you the best of luck. Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

AW: Ready for dem but dem no ready for we.