Forward this email. ([link removed])
[link removed]


** “I Never Thought I Would Get Here.”
------------------------------------------------------------

Congressman Ritchie Torres opens up about overcoming poverty, battling mental health, addressing America’s crises, and not enabling our enemies.

January 30, 2025
[link removed]

Congressman Ritchie Torres has fast become one of the most important people in the Democratic Party.

Born to a poor family in the Bronx, Ritchie was raised by a single mother on minimum wage and eventually overcame poverty to reach Capitol Hill and now represents the poorest district in America—New York's 15th.

Over the last year, Ritchie has provided a much needed sanity check on the current state of American politics—both in terms of how we are dealing with our internal challenges and how we are supporting our allies abroad with the larger threats they face.

In this most recent conversation, Congressman Torres joins RDI CEO Uriel Epshtein to discuss overcoming poverty and mental health challenges to reach Capitol Hill, combating some the most urgent crises facing America, the explosion of homelessness in American society, the relationship between mental illness, incarceration, and institutionalization, and how all of that relates to America's great power competition with Russia and China.

Watch the video ([link removed]) , or stay here for an edited transcript of our conversation.

Uriel Epshtein: Your background is incredibly unique. You're an Afro-Latino, LGBTQ, 36-year-old member of Congress. How did you get here?

Ritchie Torres: Well, I never thought I would get here.

I was born and raised in the Bronx. I spent almost all my life in poverty. I was raised by a single mother who had to raise three of us on minimum wage, which in the 1990s was $4.25 an hour. The most formative experience of my life was growing up in public housing. New York City has the largest public housing stock, not only in the country, but in the whole continent of North America. And it has been so chronically underfunded by the federal government that it currently has a capital need of $80 billion. And so I grew up in conditions of mold, mildew, leaks, lead exposure, and without consistent heat and hot water in the winter.

I tell people that my life is something of a metaphor because I ironically grew up right across the street from Trump golf course. And as the golf course was undergoing construction, I kid you not, it actually unleashed a skunk infestation. So I tell people I've been smelling the stench of Donald Trump long before he entered politics.

But as the conditions in my home were getting worse every day, the local government had invested more than a 100 million dollars to construct a golf course, ultimately named after Donald Trump. And I remember wondering at the time, "What does it say about our society that we're willing to put more money into a golf course than into the homes of poor people of color in public housing?" And so that experience of housing inequality in the shadow of Trump golf course inspired me to act and think more politically.

So I became a housing organizer.

And then eventually, at age 24, I took the leap of faith and ran for public office. I had no deep pockets, I had no ties to the Bronx Party machine. I had no membership in a political dynasty, but I was young and energetic, and I spent a whole year doing nothing but knocking on doors. I went into people's homes, I heard their stories. And in a race of about nine candidates, I won my first campaign on the strength of door-to-door, face-to-face campaigning, and I became the youngest elected official in New York City. The rest is history.

Uriel Epshtein: The other piece of your background that's unique is how open you've been about your struggles with depression and mental health. You compared speaking publicly about these issues to coming out about your sexuality.

And you've also noted that you were attacked by a political opponent for being so open about your mental health struggles. What do you think it says about our society's attitude towards mental health that this became a line of political attack?

Ritchie Torres: Historically there's been a stigmatization of mental health in our society. I've been on a mission to affirm that mental illness is nothing of which to be ashamed. We all either have struggles with mental health, or know people in our lives who have struggles with mental health.

I'm also honest and open about my own struggles. Every morning I take an antidepressant, Wellbutrin XL, 150 milligrams, and it enables me to be the best version of myself: a productive person and public servant.

I would not be alive today, let alone a member of the United States Congress, if not for mental health care. And I feel a profound sense of obligation to share my story in order to break the silence, shame, and stigma that often surrounds mental health.

I remember participating in an interview about mental health with three of my colleagues. And I said at the time, the fact that four elected officials are speaking so openly about our struggles with mental illness is a sign of how far we've come. But the fact that it's only four out of 535 is a sign of the distance that we have to travel before the stigma is fully broken.

Uriel Epshtein: And that path isn't exactly clear. After the deinstitutionalization movement began in California in the 1960s, things haven't really gotten better.

The asylums were some pretty horrible places, right? These were the mental health institutions that were shuttered. And I think a lot of us have probably seen the movie “One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest,” which looked at what life was like in some of these places. And yet we've not really come up with an alternative.

And so on the one hand, we shutter these horrible places. On the other hand, you get a lot of these people who are suffering mental health emergencies who just end up on the streets. As a result, we end up with a significant homelessness problem, which puts both those people in danger as well as the people around them.

Given how terrible some of these institutions were and that it was a good thing ultimately to close them, how do we actually get these people the help that they need?

Ritchie Torres: At the core of the most chronic conditions ailing American society, over-incarceration, addiction, mental illness, or homelessness, is a mental health dimension that is often overlooked. And I feel that we as a society have swung the pendulum too far in the direction of deinstitutionalization.

There's no set of people whom we are failing more fundamentally as a society than the severely mentally ill, who are often left to languish on our streets, or our subways, or our jails and our prison systems. It's a moral disgrace. The largest provider of mental healthcare to the severely mentally ill is Rikers Island— the New York City jail system. If that is not an indictment of our society, I'm not sure what would be.

And there's a sense in which deinstitutionalization is a myth, because we're not so much deinstitutionalizing as we are reinstitutionalizing the seriously mentally ill in our jails and prisons. I cannot imagine anything that is more destructive to mental health than imprisonment and over incarceration.

Part of the problem here is federal policy. There's a federal policy known as the IMD exclusion ([link removed]) , which essentially codified deinstitutionalization. It imposes draconian restrictions on the use of federal funds for psychiatric hospitals. And I'm in favor of either reforming or entirely removing the IMD exclusion.

As a society, we have to recognize there are some people whose mental illness is so severe that it requires inpatient psychiatric care. There is nothing progressive or compassionate about allowing those with serious mental illness to languish and die on the streets of New York City or elsewhere in America.

Uriel Epshtein: The challenges that we're facing addressing this mental health crisis, they go far beyond just those with severe mental health issues. We have a loneliness epidemic. We have people who feel like there's nobody out there who will actually support them and care for them.

And that offers some pretty fertile ground for bad actors to start preying on these people, whether that's grifters domestically here in the US, or dictators internationally who want to try to take advantage of these folks and spread disinformation, and try to leverage them against the American Democratic Project.

I wonder the extent to which you've considered or thought about how to address disinformation given how susceptible our society is to it?

Ritchie Torres: I think about disinformation at a macro level and at a micro level. At the macro level of international relations, I see clearly a great power competition between the free world led by the United States, and the axis of anti-Americanism led by the likes of China and Russia. And I'm of the view that we are losing the information war.

We are allowing adversaries like China and Russia to weaponize our own social media platforms against us, to wage disinformation campaigns ([link removed]) , foreign influence operations that are aimed at radicalizing and polarizing American society.

We have ceded the information war zone to our leading foreign adversaries. We're losing the hearts and minds of the Global South. For me, the greatest scandal is not that we're failing, it’s that we're not even trying to fight back.

At the micro level, the technology that lies at the intersection of mental health and disinformation is social media. I've spoken extensively about disinformation in the context of the present war between Israel and Hamas. There's nothing unprecedented about antisemitism. What is unprecedented is the algorithmic amplification of antisemitism on social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter.

If you think of antisemitism as a virus, there are moments when it has been more lethal. Anstisemitism was certainly more lethal during the Holocaust, but it has never been more transmissible than it is in our present moment. And it owes its transmissibility to social media.

Social media has enabled the antisemitic virus to spread on a scale to an extent and at a pace we've never seen before. Social media offers the kind of platforms that 20th century totalitarian regimes could only have dreamt of.

Click here to watch the interview. ([link removed])



** Crazy, Epic, Courage: A Special Discussion with Evan Mawarire
------------------------------------------------------------

RDI Frontline Fellow Evan Mawarire has officially published his first book: Crazy, Epic, Courage: How a 'Nobody' Challenged Brutal Dictators and Moved a Nation ([link removed]) .

From mobilizing millions through the #ThisFlag movement to enduring maximum-security prison for speaking truth to power, Mawarire’s experiences offer profound lessons on finding courage in the face of fear and transforming ordinary voices into a call for extraordinary change. This is more than a story of activism—it’s a testament to the power of hope, the pursuit of freedom, and the impact of one person’s commitment to a cause.

Join us on February 12 at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington DC for a very special book talk with Evan. RSVP here! ([link removed])

The book talk is open to the public, so please feel free to share with your friends and colleagues in the area who might be interested.

Crazy, Epic Courage: A Special Discussion with Evan Mawarire

Date: Wednesday, February 12th

Location: Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, DC | 900 19th Street NW

Time: 5:30 PM EST
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]

Copyright (C) 2025 Renew Democracy Initiative. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.
Our mailing address is:
Renew Democracy Initiative
1230 6th Ave
Floor 16
New York, NY 10020
USA
Want to change how you receive these emails?

You can update your preferences ([link removed]) or unsubscribe ([link removed])
Logo