What's up, Utah? How are we doing tonight? Are you all ready to change the world? Are you all ready to change this country? Good, because it starts in places like Salt Lake City. Thank you. It is incredible, incredible to be here tonight with you all. You know, I love you too.
We're actually seeing that our numbers tonight, it looks like we've got 20,000 people here tonight. We've got 5,000 people outside who just want to be part of this moment. So thank you, thank you, thank you all so much.
And I want to thank each and every one of you for taking and making the effort of being here today, for taking the time out of your days in order to show up here tonight, so thank you.
My name is Alexandria. Some of you may know me as AOC.
And we are all here together because we share the frustration and heartache that comes from watching those in power actively tear down or refuse to fight for everyday, working Americans like us.
And we're here because an extreme concentration of power, greed, and corruption is taking over this country like never before. Oligarchy in America.
And we must acknowledge the terrifying moment that we are in right now, and that what we are hearing and seeing with our own eyes is in fact happening.
We are watching as our neighbors, students, and friends are being fired, targeted, and disappeared. It is real.
People we love are being targeted and harassed for being LGBTQ. Our co-workers, U.S. citizens, and immigrants alike are being disappeared off the street.
Educators are being fired for teaching American history accurately. And activists are being detained with no charge or evidence for using their First Amendment rights, especially if they are using them to try to end the war in Gaza.
In fact, the Trump administration admits that it has jailed a young father and husband, Mahmoud Khalil, without any evidence or charge of a crime.
And they admit that they have thrown him in a cell thousands of miles away from his family in New York because he attended a protest and are detaining him for the content of his speech and nothing more than that.
But let's be clear, Utah.
Donald Trump's detention of Mahmoud Khalil for his speech is anti-American. And we demand his release, along with the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, who he is also jailing for writing an op-ed in her school paper.
And we demand this, Utah, because we do have power in this moment.
All of us do, you do, and everyday people do.
And it will never be just institutions and officials alone that uphold our democracy, it will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedoms.
Because we know that a better world is possible, and we are willing to do something about it.
But to get there, we must be honest about how we got to where we are right now. Because this moment didn't come out of nowhere.
It has been a long time coming.
The destruction of our rights and our democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has been building in America for years.
It is not a coincidence that billionaires like Elon Musk dumped billions into this election to elect Donald Trump.
And he sure isn't doing it out of charity. For years, we have known that our political system has slowly but surely become dominated by big money and billionaires. And time after time, we've seen how our government and laws are more responsive to lobbyists than to the will of everyday people.
And we also know that the agenda of dark money to keep wages low and loot our public goods to give to the rich is deeply unpopular with the people of all parties.
But just look at what Republicans have been quietly doing in Congress, voting to advance cuts on hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid and veterans benefits, so that they can take that money and give it to the billionaires in the form of tax cuts and sweetheart deals to companies like SpaceX.
And you know who from Utah voted for that, by the way? Both of your senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis. And Salt Lake City's own House members, Blake Moore and Celeste Maloy. And they know, Utah, that that's not what you want.
They know that it is deeply unpopular. They know that it hurts working families from Utah. But they know that they are not there to serve the working class. They are there to serve themselves and the billionaires who paid them.
But they know, they also know, that the only chance they have to get away with such an unpopular agenda is to stoke deep divisions along race, identity, and culture to keep us fighting and distracted from one another.
And this has been the big money playbook not just now, not just today, but it has been for decades. And that is why Donald Trump is not in aberration.
He is the logical, inevitable conclusion of an American political system dominated by corporate and dark money. And if we are to defeat him, Utah, we must defeat the system that created him.
We are at a crossroads in America. We can either have extreme and growing wealth inequality with the toxic division and corruption that it requires to survive, or we can have a fair economy for working people along with a democracy and freedoms that uphold it.
Oligarchy or democracy, but we cannot have both.
I grew up in a working-class family. My mom cleaned houses and my dad worked to build a small business. My parents worked themselves to the bone so that my brother and I could just have a shot, the American dream.
And for a moment there, it looked like we were going to make it. We had a home, bills were getting a little less stressful to pay, and I was doing well in school. And what may have looked like a modest life to others was a dream come true for us.
But suddenly, when I was a teenager, my dad was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.
And after a long fight, we lost him. And he actually passed away in September of 2008, just as the economy crashed in the Great Recession and millions of jobs across this country vanished.
It felt like the world of our family fell apart as the larger world was falling apart too.
And overnight, my mom was left to figure out how to provide for two kids by herself, put them through school, keep our house, pay off my dad's medical bills, all on a house cleaner salary.
And that's how I became a waitress. Because it was millions of innocent working families who paid the price, while the billionaires and thieves who defrauded our financial system got off richer than ever before.
And not a single one of them went to jail.
And you know what, Utah?
That is the story that Republicans mock. Not mine, but all of ours, when they say a waitress or working person is unqualified to serve in Congress.
But the fact is, many of us are far more qualified to know what real life is actually like than any of them ever will.
And I tell this story not because it is special, but because of how common and normal it is.
While the details may differ, so many of us know what it feels like for life to be one bad day, one bad piece of news, one major setback from everything feeling like it's going to fall apart.
And we don't have to live like this anymore, Utah.
We can make a new world, a better country, where we can fight for the dignity of all people.
And it looks like living wages, Utah.
It looks like stable housing, Utah.
It looks like guaranteed health care, Salt Lake City.
And it looks like respect for all of our differences, no matter who we are or where we come from.
Oligarchy or democracy. And we are here today because we choose democracy. We choose freedom.
And that means that we choose to out-organize the oligarchy. We will do away, and we must do away, with the power of big money.
And that is why, even as a waitress, with a long shot campaign, I decided that day that I would never take money from lobbyists or corporations, and I never will.
And when I got to Congress, I was genuinely shocked by how the place worked. Even having run against dark money in the first place, the everyday influence of corruption was astonishing.
We have somehow conditioned ourselves to believe that it is normal for members of Congress who swore an oath to the people to somehow day-trade individual stocks and make millions with the sensitive information we are entrusted with to serve.
How, I ask you, can anyone possibly make an objective vote on health care, energy, or war when their personal money is tied up in pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, or defense companies' stocks? You can't.
And we saw this play out this week with Trump's corrupt and disastrous tariff scheme.
And I hope that we can see now that Trump's tariff scheme didn't have anything to do with manufacturing like they claimed—it was all about manipulating the markets so he could quietly enrich his friends who bought the tip before reversing it all in the morning. All while our seniors and retirees suffered.
Salt Lake City, this is a matter of fact.
Donald Trump is a criminal. He was found guilty of 34 felony counts. Of course he is lying and manipulating the stock market too.
He makes himself rich, the billionaires who back him rich, and the members of Congress who collude with him rich, but not you or us or any working person in this country.
And to be clear, I don't care what party you are, Democrat or Republican, it doesn't matter how powerful or what positions you have, members of Congress holding and trading individual stock is wrong. It is corrosive, it is destructive, and it must be banned.
And you can run the tape—because I have always held this position whether it was Democrats or Republicans in charge.
And I'll give you another example of something that's shocking when I got to Congress. Just this year, I was named to the Energy and Commerce Committee, this is one of the most powerful committees in all of Congress.
And for years, lobbyists fought to keep me off it. In no small part because I believe in Medicare for All. And because lobbyists don't like what they don't control.
And an interesting thing happened the day that it was announced that I was put on that committee. Our phones and the phones in my office rang off the hook, our inboxes exploded with emails from virtually every corporate lobbyist under the sun.
All of a sudden, they wanted to be friends. But you know what, Salt Lake City?
Because of you all, because of your support, because you all show up, because you allow me to not take a dime in corporate money, you free me to say no.
And we can free others to say no too. I've seen how these groups bully members of Congress: They threaten to take money away or threaten to spend it against them if they don't do what they want. And what they want is for our lives to be as expensive as possible on the lowest possible wage.
And it trickles down to how life feels for working people today.
But I want us to understand that this constant pressure that we feel in our lives, of the water rising up to our throats, the impossibility to afford anything easily, the fear of speaking up or being who we are in public, the bitter divisions driven more by online algorithms than the truth, the crumbling of our rights and protections, understand that this, right now, is what it feels like to be governed by billionaires.
This is what oligarchy feels like. Not someday, right now. The first step is for us to open our eyes.
Because, of course, it is a system that depends on division to enable inequality that will result in a president who is best at dividing us and most skilled at corruption.
And it will also reward the Republicans in Congress who support that agenda, no matter what crimes are committed.
Big money is how we got Donald Trump.
His whole presidency began with launching tools for bribery, meme coins and cryptocurrencies to fleece normal people and move money in the dark, extortion settlements for media companies and law firms who gladly paid the price, removing duly elected officials from the inauguration, even Republican ones, to make room for the unelected billionaires who sat right behind him.
They have one central economic mission: to make billionaires richer at the expense of the United States of America.
And it does not surprise us that their first economic mission has been to target Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, firing our federal workers and cutting benefits for our veterans for hundreds of billions of dollars so they can hand that money off to the wealthiest.
And Utah, I know that it can look or feel impossible sometimes, for the Republicans to be defeated.
But that is not true. It is simply not true.
From the waitress who is now speaking to you today, I can tell you: impossible is nothing. Miracles start with the faith of mustard seeds. And that is what each and every one of you represents today. Small miracles of faith in ourselves, in each other, and in the refusal to give up.
Because we are here for the long haul, Utah. We are here for the school boards and the community associations, for the small business groups and town councils, for public art and gestures of inclusion, and we will build from there until we put the seats in Congress, until we take back the Senate right here in this very state.
So you know what that means. We start working now, we start working small, and we will defeat Celeste Maloy and Blake Moore, and give them the boot, and we will replace them with a brawling Democrat who fights for the working class.
They are out there, maybe you're right here in this stadium today.
Because this, Utah, is the path to guaranteeing healthcare to every American, to establish a living wage, to tackle skyrocketing rents and mortgages, to take on the climate crisis, and establish a country where the American dream is possible for all of us.
So I will end where I began. We might all come from different places, but we share many of the same experiences.
So to all of those who came here today, unsure of whether or not this is where you belong, I want to say that you do.
No matter if you have all the right words to say, no matter your race, religion, gender identity, or status, no matter even if you disagree with me on a couple of things, if you are willing to fight for someone you don't know, you are welcome here.
If you are willing to fight for working people, regardless of who they are, you are welcome here.
Because here, everyone is valued. But, we have to stand together.
We cannot be tempted to turn on our neighbors, or be fooled into thinking that we really are that much different than a trans or queer kid who just wants to be accepted.
We can't be fooled into thinking that we're that much different than a dreamer who strives for a better future and to fulfill the American dream.
Hate is a trap that sinks us all.
And it is standing together—without exception, to reject division—that is the only way that we can win.
So I hope you see that this movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests, but it is about class solidarity. It's about you, the thousands of you who came out today to stand together and say our lives deserve dignity and our work deserves respect.
And so we are here today to make a sacred promise to one another, and that is to take care of each other on our worst days and to share in the successes of our best.
Thank you, Salt Lake City. And now, it is my honor to introduce a friend, a companion, someone who has worked so hard to bring us all together and make today possible. Everyone, please put your hands together for Senator Bernie Sanders.
Every donation helps us mobilize, organize, and fight for the working class in the places that need it most.
Pa'lante,
Alexandria
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