Graham Platner

And

In this moment, frankly, just because of the material reality that people are living in, it is becoming very clear to a lot of folks, whether they're conservative or liberal or whatever you want, or just in the middle and don't even care about politics.

There's becoming a very clear awareness that they are in fact being taken for a ride by people with immense amounts of power and that those who are willing to stand up to that power, those are the people they're gonna look to and support.

And I think they're willing to sort of not care actually about a lot of the culture war stuff, which in my opinion, and I say this often, I think was all invented to keep us all from having the conversation about taxing billionaire wealth and breaking up corporate monopolies.

I think that's why we have to argue about all these culture war issues that in reality, I mean, it keeps us all divided.

But it doesn't reopen the hospital.

And it doesn't change the fact that your rent continues to go up or that the wages that you've been earning continue to stagnate while the prices of goods and services continue to rise.

All the culture war stuff, there's nothing for that.

And we need to be very clear and cogent and

blunt about how we're gonna change it.

And I think if we do that, I do think that there is an opening to do this.

Totally.

And I think they have taken the bait.

And I'll be entirely honest, I think some of them, some of them don't even take the bait, some of them rise to it on purpose because they don't wanna have the other conversation.

There is an element – I see this all the time of more kind of establishment folks who are like, look, I don't want to talk about this, but they make me talk about it.

And now I'm going to talk about how I don't want to talk about it for the next four hours and I'll never talk about raising taxes on billionaires.

And I think there's an element within the party that actually likes this stuff because it gives them this ability to pretend they hate this, but

But it sucks up all the oxygen, so then you never have to get around to the structural or systemic reforms that we have to make.

I do not back away from things.

I think all the wins we've made for justice and equality, we take no steps back from any of this stuff.