Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

it was very clear this was a veiled threat, right?

So the elite saying, if you want this job, you just stepped out of line.

They assume that my ambition is positional.

They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat.

And my ambition is way bigger than that.

My ambition is to change this country.

Presidents, come and go.

Senate, House seats, elected officials, come and go.

But single-payer health care is forever.

A living wage is forever.

Workers' rights are forever.

Women's rights, all of that.

The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time.

And we're declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist.

Oh, I think he couldn't have written it unless he was a slave owner, which sounds weird, but that's the very contradiction at the heart of who we are as Americans.

When those men looked out at their fields full of enslaved people,

and said, we are all created equal, they were writing out of we, all the people that didn't look like them, didn't sound like them, didn't have the same kind of money they did, and by getting rid of the vast majority of humanity, women, people of color, black Americans, and so on, they could say, oh yeah, we're all created equal.

But the genius of our age, from their declaration of that to the present and I hope beyond, is recognizing that those principles, even though they had limits on them, don't have to have limits on them for us.

And that's exactly what happened as soon as the declaration comes out.

You have people like Phillis Wheatley, the black poet from Boston, writing to an indigenous preacher saying, those are great principles and we feel the same way.