Sam Forstag

And you got people like the schmucks in power who tell you, you know why you're poor, you know why your life's getting worse.

It's because of the Brown people or the,

And it's not any of those folks.

It's the very small slice of people getting incredibly rich off of all of these broken systems.

And those same people have sunk their claws into Congress and into the halls of power in a way that even when we can pass major good policies like the bipartisan infrastructure law, a disproportionate amount of that money goes to large corporations and not into working people's pockets.

And we should be pissed off about that.

I think broadly, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, I think that somewhere where we have messed up is we got the power of language all backwards.

As a movement, on the left, as Democrats, whatever you want to call it.

And I got a front row seat to this because for the last eight years, I've been fighting wildland fire for six to nine months a year.

And then in between fire seasons, I'd go work for groups like the ACLU of Montana, doing really important work defending our basic constitutional freedoms when the far right made it their mission to...

to attack those things.

And they attack them largely because they don't want you talking about the fact that they're picking our pockets by cutting the top, top income tax rate.

They want you talking about where someone's going pee.

And that's, that's not the role of government at all.

I would offer.

And what I would see is sometimes I got one or two days between a,

a fire season where I just worked a thousand hours of overtime.

And then I'm on a zoom meeting and we spend the first 20 minutes of that zoom meeting doing icebreakers, right.

Or offering our pronouns, which I am perfectly comfortable with and which I think was a healthy part of the movement, but which a lot of the folks that I worked with would not be comfortable with because they, they aren't steeped in that language.

They, you know, perhaps they haven't been through that, you know, they haven't gone to university.