James Talarico

I think we also need comprehensive political reform.

I hope my first vote, if I'm elected as US Senator, would be the For the People Act, which is something that's already been introduced.

I'm sure it'll change the details of it.

But a few things that it does is it gets big money out of politics.

It ends Citizens United, which may be the most disastrous policy for our democracy in modern American history.

And then it goes further and it bans things like gerrymandering because gerrymandering is when politicians redraw political lines to benefit themselves.

Democrats do it and Republicans do it.

Not always the same amount, but they both do it because it's not an issue of party, it's an issue of power.

Absolutely.

And I agree that political polarization is a problem.

What I'm trying to get us to realize is how these systems that we're in, a broken political system, a broken media system, a broken social media system, how that exacerbates ideological differences.

Of course, we're all very different people.

We're going to have different opinions.

But these algorithms, these cable news networks, they fan the flames of those disagreements.

And that's why we have such polarized politics, in my opinion.

Yeah, I think that these billionaires, let's, you know, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, the people who increasingly own traditional media and new social media, they have a vested interest in all of us being divided.

Because if we recognize that we are far more alike than we are different, if we realize that we have far more in common, we're going to take power back from them and we're going to bring it back into our communities.

Well, that claim is pretty gut-wrenching given that we've had five of the deadliest mass shootings in American history right here in Texas.

One still haunts me to this day as a former public school teacher, and that's the massacre in Uvalde, Texas in Robb Elementary when we lost 19 babies and two teachers.

Here's where I'll disagree with you on this claim, though.