Senator Cory Booker
Appearances
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
But why do you position that as counter to integrity? Fuck you, politics, righteous rage. I can go from Malcolm X to Medgar Evers. I mean, the people I most, they got upset. You could feel their passion in their heart. And so, yeah, I agree with you. Soundbites. They are making you less safe. They're making your air travel less safe.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
They're making your vulnerability to the next pandemic more possible. They are literally doing things that are taking down the ATF's ability to investigate mass shooters and more. I can tell you they're making your schools less safe, your supermarkets less safe. They are the party that is making this country vulnerable to all different types of crises.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Things like that, that actually hit people home. Wait a minute, my kids are more dangerous when I send them to school, to school shooters. Wait a minute, my healthcare is on the line. Wait a minute, my food prices are going up. I agree with you. It's one of the reasons why I spend so much time digitally creating content. I know what cuts through. That is not contrary.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
ultimately to the idea of virtue and integrity, because what our country needs is not for Dems to win, but for America to win. Exactly. And we have got to begin to call people to not higher ground, lower ground. We've got to call people to get it right about what America stands for and expose these people for what they are.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
They are folks who have authoritarian tendencies that want to tear down our democracy and replace it with strongman government, tear away our fundamental rights, the rights of the press, the rights of free speech, the rights of free assembly. These are the things that Donald Trump attacked in his last
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
term didn't get it right and now he's coming after your basic freedoms from the ability to control your body to your ability to say what you want to and still know that they can't fire you indiscriminately for holding political views different than theirs.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
So we stop him in two fundamental ways. The first, you've said it, what they are doing is illegal. It is violating separation of powers. It is violating civil service laws. It is violating our constitution. And just like, again, I hate pulling from American history, which is black history, is the NAACP legal defense front.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Before he became a Supreme Court justice, we knew that there were these incredible leaders that were fighting in every single way, Thurgood Marshall and others, to beat and win in the courts. That's how we got Brown versus Board of Education.
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Live with Senator Booker
But you're right, that can take months and sometimes even longer, although we're getting a lot of injunctive relief already from birth rate citizenship to Elon's ability to just indiscriminately go into people's private records. But the most powerful way we stop, I've started to see the signs of it happening.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
When a Republican congressperson goes to his districts and holds town hall, districts that Trump won by 20%, and you have a guy stand up and say, I am a veteran, lifelong Republican, and the way he is taking a chainsaw to my resources, my healthcare, my VA benefits is wrong, that's when we start winning. And so activism, I'm sorry, I know this. We've had to march for LGBTQ rights.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
We've had to march for women's rights. We've had to march for civil rights. We've had to march for voting rights. But that's the truth of this country. I remind people, we did not get the Civil Rights Act because one day Strom Thurmond came to the Senate floor and said, I've seen the lie. Let those Negro people have the right to vote. No, we got it because people demanded it.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Change does not come from Washington. It comes to Washington. Look at every major victory we've had for the rights of this country. And so if you think this is going to be easy, history has shown nothing, no right, no privilege in this nation has ever come without sweat, tears, and sometimes, unfortunately, with the beatings we saw of protesters in the past with blood.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And so this is going to be a movement politics. And a movement is what saved our health care in the last Trump administration. We didn't have the votes. Democrats didn't have the votes. But when people came out, the little lobbyists, folks in their wheelchairs, throwing themselves in the gears of government, suddenly we were able to get three votes to stop them from what they're doing.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
I promise you, I promise you the thin, narrow edge they have in the House of Representatives. that thin narrow edge with at least 10 to 12 House members that are Republicans that know their election is in a year, in 18 months from now, a little over 18 months, know that they have to win reelection, their loyalty, their loyalty is to themselves first.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And they will start voting different if they see that their own constituency, including independents and Republicans, are coming after them. So we've all got to get into the movement mentality here, including us. And you said it. You put it on the line. You Dagnab Democrats.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
This is what I'm doing for my caucus now is trying to teach them or get more of them to be communicating in the kind of things that break through the noise. and can be seen, and I'm measuring this, this is maybe too much details, but my caucus and their content creation and their partnerships, you were here for us the morning after in the Senate.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
These partnerships we have with influencers like you has already tens of millions of more views on Democratic senators' content than I saw beforehand, because we're learning the modern tools of communication, activism, and organizing.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
So the only thing I want to say, because too much agreement kills a conversation, because everything you want to say, I want to snap over here.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
But I want to just challenge you on one thing that you said, which is that this is unprecedented. I listened to the stories of my mom and her activists, friends in the civil rights movement. Because remember, my mom went to college in the days that black HBCUs were leading the efforts. Their fears and terror, how they were being terrorized by the FBI,
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
The stories about people like Fred Hampton, where he was arguably murdered in his bed by government agents, what they did to Martin Luther King. This isn't distant past. This is my parents telling me stories of how government agencies were used to suppress and undermine them.
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Live with Senator Booker
My family literally had to get a white couple to pose as them to buy the house I grew up in because the laws of this country were targeting individuals and oppressing their basic rights. So I hear this idea, but I don't forget that
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Use some fighting words. And I agree with you on the short fighting words. And I hear you. I got mad. My staff sees me sometimes walk off an interview and say, if I had one more person to ask me about, oh, the Democratic Party is losing Black men.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And I just want to scream, if the rest of the country voted for Democrats the way that the rates of Black men did, Donald Trump would have lost by 20 points.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
totally and so i i get infuriated about how much historical amnesia we've had every right that we enjoy from labor rights uh uh to civil rights to women's rights and and again i feel like the the african-american leadership in that is often forgotten and what we had to endure but i just want to say that the simplest thing i can say right now begging everybody
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
is to get out of this atomized thinking about what race or gender, what have you, and get back into just understanding how vicious, cruel people work. They first will always target the people that they perceive most vulnerable. They'll come after the trans kids. They'll come after the dreamers, immigrants that have been here all of their life.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
They'll come after their parents who they'll deport and continue to prey upon the ability they have to create an us versus them, an us versus them mentality. And what I'm begging everybody, as much as you and I are different genders, different races, is to get out of the thinking it is not us versus them. It's just us. And when they come after trans kids, stand up.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
When they come after gay people, stand up. When they come after immigrants who aren't violent, who the ones that aren't violent criminals that are being sent to Guantanamo, they have human rights.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
We all can say we share common values about the safety and security of our country, but watch who they target and watch who they go after and realize that as soon as they finish going after them, they're going to come after you. I'm talking to two women. I'm sorry.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
I don't have to remind you that men who think in this way of like, oh, I understand what you're going through because I have a daughter, I have a mother, I have a sister. Screw you. You have a body. If somebody told you, the government told you what you could do with your body, you would be ready to fight.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
You should be ready to fight now because when they're going after women, they're going after you. And so I understand that we segment this world into race and gender and geography. No, I'm trying to get us back to this understanding that this is one nation and we need to put more indivisible back into this one nation under God. And this is why
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
We need to be appealing to and not demonizing Republicans or people that are triple Trumpers or that's not what you did, but demonizing people who are so desperate to have economic security, who are so feel such such betrayal of a country where they know that the American dream their grandparents had isn't working for them.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Yeah, well, I want to I want to, first of all, highlight some of the things you left out. It's not just Fox News. It's the fact that they're trying to erase history in textbooks to not tell the Disney of our history in a way that that supports this idea that somehow there are wretched, hateful, vicious parts of our history that don't make us weaker by telling the truth about us.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
not only it makes us stronger and more aware that hate and racism and bigotry and sexism exists and we we have to do something about it that's why in germany they teach about the holocaust everywhere not just to say this is history happened but that we can't allow it to happen again the battlegrounds for seeing the truth is real and the second thing to say is again
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
You don't have to tell me about the persistence of racism. It infects the lives of so many. I was with a very successful African-American woman who told me literally as she's trying to sell her house, her home, that she had to get all the pictures of black people out because of study after study has shown that the assessments will be lower
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
if you have pictures of black people in your house because of the implicit biases that exist. This is something that every black person knows about these things and needs coping mechanisms with it. But here is the thing that I want you to understand. So I give no harbor to that as a person who's had horrible incidences with the police in my youth, as a person who has been
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
I don't need to go through my own personal pain that so many African-Americans, if not every African-American, has stories about. But this is the most important thing, I think, just to now say to your point. Yes, call out the evil of hatred. Yes, give no space to people who act in ways that are bigoted. That is something we have an obligation to do.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And the person that taught me this, the person that was my mentor in this was John Lewis, who told me in a long drive from Atlanta to Plains, Georgia, when you're going to listen to Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school, told me about the horrors and how many times people forget how many times this man was beaten viciously by overtly racist, violent people.
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Live with Senator Booker
And then he told me about the day in his congressional office that one of the people that beat him came to see him with his grandchild, begging him for his forgiveness. Forgive me. And hearing how vicious the beating was, I looked at John and I said, what did you do? Not knowing, honestly, what I would do in that circumstance.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And John says, I forgave him because at the end of the day, I believe in the power of redemption and that everyone ultimately, if we're going to redeem the soul of this nation, then everyone should have that pathway. And so those two things are not counterintuitive to call out racism, to call out bigotry, and especially not to defend the people who are the targets of bigotry and hatred.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
But we also have to know as a country that when you define someone as a racist and don't give them space to evolve and grow, then we cut all of ourselves out from the benefit of a society that heals and evolves. That is the challenge we have right now, is we are still in a nation where we cannot have real conversations about our history.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
We can't have real conversations about the pain of the present. And it is a bar from us. moving forward to a day where this kind of darkness and this kind of sin and this kind of immorality is a thing of the past.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
No worries. Are you kidding me? No worries whatsoever. I'm just rushed back from the studio. I just did meet the press and am very excited to be here with you.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
So, and I know some people do like long form. So Jack Reed, who's a Senator from Rhode Island, was the chairman of the armed service committees. Now the ranking member for a powerful editorial, literally saying exactly what you said, which is when you change the military,
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from someone who gives independent advice to the president, unfettered advice about the national security and our military readiness. When you change the culture and make those people, people that are instead political sycophants, personal political attendants,
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
You weaken America's safety and security and preparedness, and you assault the culture in our military that has been positive under presidents from both parties. So yes, this hurts our military, but more importantly for all of us who sleep well at night, it hurts the security of our country.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
When you have a president that puts it out, that if you do not agree with me politically, there will be retribution. That undermines the ability for professionals to do their job independent from political concerns.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Well, you guys may have to rush. Can I just tell you the story about my most broken moment of my life? Yes. Without exaggeration, one of the times that I was so overwhelmed by the injustices of the world that I wanted to just give up and check out. And it actually happened when I had lost my first run for mayor and four years to the next election.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And I saw bad things happening by the person in power. And something happened that just broke me. And it was basically I was walking in my neighborhood and gunshots rang out. And I ran through screaming children with an off duty cop behind me to find a teenager with bullet wounds in his chest. And I did everything I could to save his life.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
And it's so gruesome to watch somebody die of gun violence. And I just put my hands in his chest and tried to stop bleeding that seemed like it was coming everywhere until foamy blood started coming out of his mouth. And I'm reaching my hands, thinking if I could clear the passageway, maybe he could breathe again. But I knew that he was dying and ultimately when there was no pulse.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
But the paramedics came and shoved me out of the way when they finally got there, which seemed like an eternity. opened his chest up and tried to revive him, put him in an ambulance. And I'll never forget the police director who worked for the guy who beat me to this day tells me the story of how shaken I looked, traumatized I looked.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
I don't even have a memory of how I got back to my apartment, but I will never forget standing in my bathroom trying to scrub a dead teenager's blood from my hands and looking in the mirror and losing it. I gave up. I was so angry at this country. I felt rage like I had never felt before. Like, how dare we all pledge this oath?
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Live with Senator Booker
We literally put our hands on our heart and we swear this ideal of liberty and justice for all. Where the fuck was the liberty and justice for the children in my community would die with unflinching regularity and nobody seemed to care. It wouldn't even make a headline anymore as black boys were dying at stunning rates. And I just remember feeling such anger and that I was done.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
I'd never had this experience before when you jump in the shower to just try to wash it off. And you turn the water so hot that you just hope that the pain on the outside could somehow numb the pain that you're feeling on the inside. And I was living in these high rise projects at the time.
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Live with Senator Booker
And I remember this sleepless night and getting up really early in the morning and just trying to get out, just trying to get away, just trying to run. And I came down into the lobby of the projects. And when I walked through, I remember this tenant leader, this real hero in my life.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
She was a tenant president of these buildings, and her son was murdered in the lobby of the building I lived in back in the 1980s. And she didn't leave. This elderly woman kept staying in those projects, kept fighting for her community. And as soon as I walked out of the lobby, who was in the courtyard between the two project buildings, but this woman, Ms.
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Live with Senator Booker
Jones, only her and I early in the morning and her back was turned to me. And I felt like I was a hundred feet underwater screaming on the inside, but I didn't say anything, but almost as if she heard my silent screams, she turns around and she sees me. And this woman does exactly what I needed at that point.
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Live with Senator Booker
Feeling so lost, so hurt, so angry, so surrendering to all the magnitude of the hurt and pain that seemed like it wasn't going to stop because nobody gave a damn about us. And what she did was open her arms as an invitation to come to her. And I ran across that courtyard like a little boy. running to his mother.
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Live with Senator Booker
And I'm much bigger than he is, she is, but she wrapped her arms around me and I burst and cried tears of anger and rage and hurt and fear. I was so done with this country. I was so done with my even efforts to try to change things. I felt helpless. And this woman squeezed me and said two words over and over again.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
that became my mantra when I eventually would become mayor and had my toughest days, that sustained me, that I use even now in the Senate when I feel like I'm banging my head against implacable walls of resistance. And these two words have nothing to do with religion, but everything to do with how we got here over impossible odds and unimaginable opposition, how we survived
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
how we made it over, how we overcame. This woman held me and simply said over and over again, stay faithful, stay faithful, stay faithful. So to all your listeners right now who feel like I felt broken, angry, hurt, scared, Do not give up. Do not surrender. We will face defeats, but we can never be defeated. We will be knocked down, but we can't stay there.
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Live with Senator Booker
Faith brought us this far, faith in each other, faith in our dreams and our ideals, faith in a nation. Don't surrender that to them. Don't let them win. Stay strong. Stay resolute. Stay perseverant. I promise you better days are ahead, especially if we keep standing up and speaking up and acting up. Stay faithful.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
No, let me thank you because the way you all are creating community and connection and helping people who just lean on your voices, I am grateful. And more than that, you are challenging people, me as a leader speaking truth to power, but also challenging parts of your community. I talked about redemption before.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
The last thing I'll say is that, you know, King talked about what we have to repent for. And he said, what we have to repent for in our day and age is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.
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Live with Senator Booker
You all with this podcast are just not being silent and you're good people who are acting and inspiring that within the community you've created. So thank you for that.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
Well, I don't mean to add to your sense of freak out, but there is a world order that was established after World War II that we've been enjoying the fruits of for a very long time. And sort of prescient people of both parties understood that the time of individual powers invading other nations just because they're bigger and stronger of the authoritarian style of leadership had to go.
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Live with Senator Booker
And what had to replace that world order is a collection of nations that share ideals that could stop us from ever tumbling back into the kind of fascist totalitarian world where we had these global conflicts. And we've enjoyed that for a long time. But yet what we see with Trump, excuse me, what we see with Putin, who has been talking a lot, not just about Ukraine.
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Live with Senator Booker
Remember, he invaded South Ossetia, he invaded Georgia, he invaded Crimea. There's been a number of nations that he's invaded. And the reason why Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania spend so much money on military defense is because he talks about those countries. We know this from Xi and what he's doing with Taiwan and threatening Taiwan.
IHIP News
Live with Senator Booker
that there is an authoritarian world that wants to go back to might makes right. Now comes Donald Trump, who doesn't understand that in the post-World War II period, we were some of the greatest investors in Japan and Germany, the countries that attacked us, not for some transactional thing like, Germany, we want your critical minerals, Japan, we want a 10% stake in your auto industries. We knew
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Live with Senator Booker
that those countries recovering would help the global economy, which would open up markets for the United States of America, understanding the second and third order effects of peace and global world rules. Now comes Trump. who loves dictators, who loves strong men, who is creating a world that makes Xi and Putin very happy.
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Live with Senator Booker
So when Trump says things like, we want Canada to be the 51st state, we're gonna take Greenland, and a reporter asks them, well, would you pull off the table using economic or military force? And he says, no. He is now doing exactly what these other folks, these totalitarian or authoritarian dictators want. They want a world order where might makes right. And that's what Trump is doing.
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Live with Senator Booker
The awful things he's saying about Zelensky, stunningly shocking things that he started this war straight out of Putin's talking points. the reality that he is now someone that is saying, the only way we'll stay in this is not loyalty to our NATO countries or protection of the world order or protection of the global rules.
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Live with Senator Booker
But the only reason why we'll stay in this is if you give us in a transactional way, rights to your minerals, pay us back. It is a complete rejection of what we have seen since the 1940s through Democrat and Republican presidents and preserving a democratic world order. And now it's a guy who is catering towards dictators, not just in his loving of Putin and influence with Putin,
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Live with Senator Booker
but more even with his own style of governance, which says we are a big, strong America. We're going to make other countries bow to their knees for us. And we're going to threaten to take over the Panama Canal, threaten to take over Greenland, threaten even our most valuable trading partner, Canada, not understanding that we are allies and we do better when we stand together.
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Live with Senator Booker
Well, remember, he was impeached literally for trying to extort Vladimir, support Zelensky in that first contest between the two of them. I understand what you're saying. There is smoke there. We know he just hired Kash Patel as his FBI director. who literally has gotten paid by Russia linked organizations that the Judiciary Committee did not do its due diligence to expose.
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Live with Senator Booker
So there is a lot of problematic influence. And by the way, Russia knows they cannot beat America tank for tank or aircraft carrier for aircraft carrier. The way they go about doing what they do to undermine our democracy is subverting it, is literally finding ways through RT and others to pay people in our country, to put forth Russian propaganda. So everything you're saying is right.
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Live with Senator Booker
I wanna scratch at one thing that you're saying that I hear a lot. is this is what the Republicans would do. Why aren't we doing it? And I think it's really important to play this out. And this gives me an opportunity. I'm one of these believers that we fight.
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Live with Senator Booker
I came up in politics, literally an Oscar nominated documentary about my first big election that then would go on to lose in the Oscars to a movie called March of the Damn Penguins. But I'm a vegetarian, a vegan, actually. But I make an exception now for penguin meat. Morgan Freeman. But that documentary that I was in was called Street Fight.
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Live with Senator Booker
And it covered the tough urban politics that I had to fight my way to beat a powerful machine and finally become mayor and be able to create transformative change. And so I always tell people we have to fight politics. we have to use every tactic available to us. But one of the things I said all the time when I was back in those days is, but we can never become that which we are against.
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Live with Senator Booker
And so I wanna say right now, this is a moment where Democrats need to do so much more than we're doing now, that there is a deficit of leadership, of courage, of creative protest. And I'm not just talking about elected Democrats.
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Live with Senator Booker
I'm saying all of us have a responsibility when our country is on the line, when our way of life is being challenged to step forward and do more, stand more, to hear this Black History Month Watch the incredible leaders, many whose names have faded a bit, like Ida B. Wells, in the middle of the worst imaginable government oppression, the fall of Reconstruction, lynching throughout the South.
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Governmental leaders were being pulled out of their offices, beat and lynched in the streets. and an oppressive totalitarian authoritarian regime was settling into the South. She was one of these truth tellers.
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Live with Senator Booker
She would be seen as a social media influencer today, but what she did is she used pamphlets back then to expose the hypocrisy, to expose the violence, to expose everything that was happening, so much so that they came after her, raided her offices, she had to flee to New York.
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Live with Senator Booker
If you look at the creative protesters of our past about how we got to where we are, they were relentless fighters, but they never allowed themselves to become that which they were against. So the Republicans to me, You're right. There are things that they would do through their propaganda platforms.
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Live with Senator Booker
Fox News is like a state-owned propaganda machine at times with people there that I can't believe the things, the lack of critical examination they have. While we go on MSNBC as Democrats, it's definitely an independent group that, like you guys do, that pokes at us rightfully. That's what the First Amendment was about, the press keeping us in line.
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Live with Senator Booker
I just don't want us to ever compromise our values. And the last example I'll give you of this, is I was running for a stage when I was running for president. I'm about to jump up at a town hall in Iowa. And there was a big guy at the bottom of the stage. I'm a big guy, former tight end for Stanford. And he's like cheering me on as I get closer to him.
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And then right when I see him, he yells at me. He goes, dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face. And I look at him and I go, dude, that's a felony. And I laughed with him and I jumped up on the stage and I said, look, The most courageous, effective activists I've ever seen were the protesters in Alabama. Here we're coming up to the 60th anniversary of the Edmund Pettus Bridge March.
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Live with Senator Booker
And I said, we beat people like Bull Connor, fascist-like, authoritarian, vicious, violent leader, not because we brought bigger fire hoses and bigger dogs that he had, but because we had artists of activism that woke up the conscience of a country and got millions of people who were sitting on the sidelines to get on the field.
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The reason why Birmingham segregation fell was because those bystanders, those people who were sitting back and doing nothing got involved. Thousands of people after their creative protests poured into Birmingham and the city that said segregation would never fell, fell within 12 days. The challenge we have right now in this movement
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Live with Senator Booker
And I'm already seeing it in Republican Congress people, town halls, people starting to come out. I'm already seeing it in the last two weeks, Donald Trump's approval ratings are falling now like a stone.
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Live with Senator Booker
I've already seen it in our ability to save healthcare and our ability even in the early days of this Trump administration to stop them from indiscriminately cutting federal funding for programs like veterans benefits and Medicaid. The biggest challenge we have on the left
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
The commissioner says not having access to critical funds is causing economic hardship for Maine farmers.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
It's so great to be with you, Rachel. Thank you.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
It is essential that we use every procedural lever we have. The Republicans in the Senate are trying to put forth their budget bill to extend the Trump tax cuts and, frankly, extend trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations. And so one of the procedural tools we have is that we can bring up unlimited amounts of amendments.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
So we are going to be here until tomorrow morning, really pulling an all-nighter and into the morning to push forward – amendments that are just common sense to the majority of not just Democrats agree with us, but independents and Republicans. We're going to put things forward about housing, about health care, about no tax cuts for billionaires.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
We're going to be putting a lot of things forward that just make them squirm and have to show us who they are. We've already seen something that usually doesn't happen in these, which is at least one Republican, Susan Collins, breaking to say this is such an abjectly obvious thing that we should do that I'm going to stand with the Democrats on this.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
So tonight is a night for us to expose what this is really about. This is Doge, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. trying to cut money away from vital services for our health care, for our veterans, for our 9-11 responders, for others, whether it's our national parks or other things you've shown.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
This is them trying to cut those things so that they can feed tax cuts to the wealthiest in our nation who do not need our help and the wealthiest corporations who have been making record profits in the last years.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
Well, for me, it is them finally saying or showing what they're all about. Donald Trump repeated over and over again, I'm not going to touch Medicaid. I'm not going to touch Medicare. I'm not going to touch Social Security. But now he is endorsing the legislation that will do just that. They are running to try to do everything they can to distract with misinformation and lies.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
And we've seen Elon Musk put up data after data after data that is just... just completely wrong, misleading, or, frankly, just misinformation about the cuts that they're making. The truth of the matter is, in a little over a month, they have cut some of the most precious things that Americans know and value, from our air safety to our protection from global infectious diseases.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
They're cutting the most valuable staffs that even have letters going out from Republicans, not public, saying, do not do this. This is wrong. And so we are now at this, I think, a turning point in America where more Americans are beginning to see what this is really about. We saw it in his first time in office where the first thing out of the blocks, he tried to take away our health care.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
He tried to take away valued things like, hey, if I have a pre-existing conditions, insurance companies can't stop me from getting health care. And here he is again. doing what made him wildly unpopular, doing what made him one of the most unpopular presidents of the modern era, why he lost the 2020 election, and now we see him doing just the same thing again.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
This is a massive grift and grab of the resources of Americans in order to go to special deals, benefits, and wealth creation for people like the very conflicted Elon Musk, This is the president, before he even got in office, is publishing new meme coins so he can make millions and millions, excuse me, tens of millions of dollars of grift. And so I just find this a moment of truth.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
where we as Americans have to begin to tell folks who are not listening, who don't understand what's happening before it's too late, before they get a massive budget bill passed. And because their margins are so thin, especially in the House, we have the power. We stopped him when he tried to take away health care. We have to stop them on this bill because
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
Even though they don't want it necessarily, even though they have authoritarian tendencies, the reality is we are still a democracy. And in a democracy, the power of the people is greater than the people in power if we use our power. And the most common way people surrender their power is not realizing they have it in the first place.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
Folks need to now, right now, use their voice to condemn what is going on.
The Rachel Maddow Show
From policy to personnel, Trump scores historically low poll numbers
Appreciate you. Thank you so much.