Big Brother may be watching you, but for whatever comfort it brings, Bre Irish is giving that authoritarian thug the stink eye right back — at least in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley.
One in a wave of democratic socialists running for office, the former legislative aide for U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden has left Capitol Hill and is back home in Corvallis. There, she is establishing herself as an iconoclastic voice in an area where people on the left often want to make change without making waves.
“Mainstream Democratic politics cannot be our only answer to fighting a fascist takeover,” Irish told Street Roots. “They’re not working.”
After working at the national level for eight years, Irish, 30, wants to take the fight from Capitol Hill to Main Street.
“That’s how we protect our communities, by reminding people of their power,” Irish said. “They can change their communities. They can help other people right now. The fight isn’t just on the federal level. It’s here too.”
‘We have no rights over that data’
The Albany City Council voted 4-2 May 27 not to renew its $14,000 contract with the Georgia-based company Flock Safety to provide surveillance cameras on public property.
Flock Safety only provided local police with one camera at First Avenue and Ellsworth Street, but many residents feared it set a bad precedent. The council took no action against surveillance cameras at private businesses, including LPRs (license plate readers).
LPRs are particularly controversial because they could be used as a starting point for collecting people’s personal information.
Irish, a resident of Corvallis, joined Albany residents in calling for restrictions on private cameras at the July 7 City Council meeting. Corvallis City Council has taken no action on surveillance cameras, public or private.
When she worked for Wyden, Irish specialized in education policy. This was during the pandemic when tech companies were vying to enable school districts to provide distance learning. In the process, Irish said, these companies would collect up to 7,000 points of data on a single student.
“A lot of people forget that data is a revenue stream for companies,” she said.
And once people lose control of their personal information, Irish added, there’s no getting it back.
“We have no rights over that data,” she said. “There are no laws on how long companies can keep it. There’s no right to delete. There’s nothing. People, at minimum, need to be aware of what’s being collected on them.”
Meanwhile, Irish said she’s working on some proposed surveillance legislation she plans to present to Corvallis City Council.
‘Give me a good reason why’
The surveillance issue, and people’s passion regarding it, illustrates a potential groundswell of political activism in Linn and Benton counties, Irish said.
Progressive politics, even outside the mainstream, are not new to the area. An unincorporated section of adjacent Polk County is still known as Socialist Valley from a community that formed there in 1895.
Irish grew up in southern Oregon in a Republican family. Her family lost their home in the Great Recession in 2008 and moved to North Dakota. They were homeless for a few months before living in an RV with no running water.
“Because my classmates called me the granola muncher from Oregon, I got into debates,” she said. “I was pretty precocious as a kid and pretty argumentative. I definitely wasn’t the easiest student to have, for sure, because I was always asking why. Give me a good reason why. I want to know more. Why?”
An English teacher had her stand up in front of the class and invited the other students to challenge her in arguments. “I was not beat,” she said.
She fully embraced being a leftist when she attended Sen. Bernie Sanders’ March 25, 2016, rally at the Moda Center in Portland — the one where a bird landed on his podium.
“My brain switched on,” she said.
She met Wyden during a veterans’ parade in Albany in 2017, and he quickly hired her to work in his Eugene office. She was an intern until 2018 and a staff assistant for another year before moving to his Capitol Hill office as a legislative aide. She returned to Oregon as a field representative from 2023 to 2025. She spent a total of eight years and five months on Wyden’s staff.
‘We don’t have to run to the right’
Like many of Wyden’s staffers, Irish was working from home when insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.
“It was one of the most terrifying days of my life,” she remembered. “I still get emotional talking about it. We had no idea where Sen. Wyden was. It was just terrifying and so deeply angering for so many of the congressional staff members.”
It was also a turning point for her politically.
“That fundamentally changed a lot of things for me and how I felt about politics,” Irish said. “I didn’t feel comfortable doing the same old business as usual anymore because the insurrectionists were not. I don’t want to be bipartisan and brag about being bipartisan with people who are fine with destroying the fabric of this country. I wasn’t feeling comfortable in mainstream Democratic politics. I started researching more progressive leftist literature.”
Irish was ebullient earlier this month after fellow democratic socialist Melat Kiros beat long-time incumbent U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary in Colorado’s First Congressional District. In Oregon, the Democratic Socialists of America have endorsed six candidates this year.
And yet more than a dozen moderate House Democrats and congressional candidates have signed the “Promise to America” pledge to oppose left policies and defend capitalism and fiscal responsibility while cracking down on immigrants.
“Everyone was begging for a response to Project 2025 … and nothing,” Irish said on Facebook. “A response to Project 2026? Nothing. But then Democratic Socialists of America candidates win, and now we got this dumb-as-shit Promise to America. It’s a five-alarm fire because the left is winning.”
Mainstream and centrist Democrats just don’t get it, she added. “They don’t understand the festering anger people have toward the Democratic party’s inaction.”
Irish has filed to run for Ward 1 of the Corvallis City Council in November. Although she’s a democratic socialist, the race is nonpartisan. She has lots of plans should she win, including a proposal she’s drafting for a tenants’ bill of rights.
After Zohran Mamdani’s election as the mayor of New York City last November, it looked like democratic socialists might be gaining political ground.
“This has been a really vindicating moment for me personally because I worked for an establishment Democrat,” Irish posted on Facebook following the Colorado primary. “I fought for like two years inside, advocating for Zohran Mamdani, advocating for more left policies that, hey, maybe we should try. I was told time and time again that I didn’t understand, I wasn’t smart enough to understand, that I was foolish, that the left never wins.”
The moral of the story is clear, she added.
“To make people’s lives better, we actually don’t have to compromise with fascists,” she said. “We don’t have to run to the right.”