REMARKS AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY: Vice President Harris' Acceptance Speech
Good evening.
To my husband, Doug, thank you for being an incredible partner to me and father to Cole and Ella.
And happy anniversary. I love you so very much.
To Joe Biden—Mr. President. When I think about the path we have traveled together, I am filled with gratitude.
Your record is extraordinary, as history will show.
And your character is inspiring. Doug and I love you and Jill. And I am forever thankful to you both.
And to Coach Tim Walz, you are going to be an incredible Vice President.
And to the delegates and everyone who has put your faith in our campaign—your support is humbling.
America, the path that led me here in recent weeks, was no doubt … unexpected. But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys.
My mother Shyamala Harris had one of her own. I miss her every day. Especially now. And I know she’s looking down tonight. And smiling.
My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California, with an unshakeable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer.
When she finished school, she was supposed to return home to a traditional arranged marriage.
But, as fate would have it, she met my father, Donald Harris, a student from Jamaica. They fell in love and got married, and that act of self-determination made my sister Maya and me.
Growing up, we moved a lot. I will always remember that big Mayflower truck, packed with all our belongings, ready to go: to Illinois, to Wisconsin, and wherever our parents’ jobs took us.
My early memories of my parents together are joyful ones. A home filled with laughter and music. Aretha. Coltrane. And Miles.
At the park, my mother would tell us to stay close. But my father would just smile, and say, “Run, Kamala. Run.” “Don’t be afraid.” “Don’t let anything stop you.”
From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.
But the harmony between my parents did not last.
When I was in elementary school, they split up. And it was mostly my mother who raised us.
Before she could finally afford to buy a home, she rented a small apartment in the East Bay.
In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats.
A beautiful working-class neighborhood of Firefighters, nuses, and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride.
My mother worked long hours.
And, like many working parents, she leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us.
Mrs. Shelton, who ran the daycare below us and became a second mother. Uncle Sherman. Aunt Mary. Uncle Freddy. And Auntie Chris.
None of them, family by blood. And all of them, Family. By love.
Family who taught us how to make gumbo. How to play chess. And sometimes even let us win.
Family who loved us. Believed in us. And told us we could be anything. Do anything.
They instilled in us the values they personified. Community. Faith. And the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated. With kindness. Respect. And compassion.
My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent. And, as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her.
But she never lost her cool. She was tough. Courageous. A trailblazer in the fight for women’s health.
And she taught Maya and me a lesson that Michelle mentioned the other night—She taught us to never complain about injustice. But…do something about it.
She also taught us—Never do anything half-assed. That’s a direct quote.
I grew up immersed in the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement.
My parents had met at a civil rights gathering. And they made sure we learned about civil rights leaders, including lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley.
Those who battled in the courtroom to make real the Promise of America. So, at a young age, I decided I wanted to do that work. I wanted to be a lawyer.
And when it came time to choose – the type of law I would pursue – I reflected on a pivotal moment in my life.
When I was in high school, I started to notice something about my best friend Wanda.
She was sad at school. And there were times she didn’t want to go home.
So, one day, I asked if everything was alright. And she confided in me that she was being sexually abused by her step-father. And I immediately told her she had to come stay with us.
And she did. That is one of the reasons I became a prosecutor.
To protect people like Wanda. Because I believe everyone has a right: To safety. To dignity. And to justice.
As a prosecutor, when I had a case, I charged it not in the name of the victim. But in the name of. “The People.”
For a simple reason. In our system of justice, a harm against any one of us is a harm against all of us.
I would often explain this, to console survivors of crime. To remind them: No one should be made to fight alone. We are all in this together.
Every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: “Kamala Harris, for the People.”
And to be clear: My entire career, I have only had one client. The People.
And so, on behalf of The People, On behalf of every American. Regardless of party. Race. Gender. Or the language your grandmother speaks.
On behalf of my mother and everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey.
On behalf of Americans like the people I grew up with. People who work hard. Chase their dreams. And look out for one another.
On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth.
I accept your nomination for President of the United States of America.
With this election, our nation has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past.
A chance to chart a New Way Forward.
Not as members of any one party or faction. But as Americans.
I know there are people of various political views watching tonight.
And I want you to know: I promise to be a President for all Americans.
You can always trust me to put country above party and self. To hold sacred America’s fundamental principles. From the rule of law. To free and fair elections. To the peaceful transfer of power.
I will be a President who unites us around our highest aspirations. A President who leads. And listens. Who is realistic. Practical. And has common sense. And always fights for the American people.
From the courthouse to the White House, that has been my life’s work.
As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them.
As Attorney General of California, I took on the Big Banks. Delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure. And helped pass a Homeowner Bill of Rights—one of the first of its kind.
I stood up: For veterans and students being scammed by Big for-Profit colleges. For workers who were being cheated out of the wages they were due. For seniors facing elder abuse.
I fought against cartels who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings. Who threaten the security of our border and the safety of our communities.
Those fights were not easy. And neither were the elections that put me in those offices. We were underestimated at every turn. But we never gave up. Because the future is always worth fighting for.
And that’s the fight we are in right now. A fight for America’s future.
Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives. It is one of the most important in the life of our nation.
In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man.
But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.
Consider not only the chaos and calamity when he was in office, but also the gravity of what has happened since he lost the last election.
Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes.
When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.
When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite. He fanned the flames.
And now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans. And separately, found liable for committing sexual abuse.
And consider what he intends to do if we give him power again.
Consider his explicit intent to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol.
His explicit intent to jail journalists. Political opponents. Anyone he sees as the enemy.
His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.
Consider the power he will have— especially after the United States Supreme Court just ruled he would be immune from criminal prosecution.
Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails. How he would use the immense powers of the presidency of the United States. Not to improve your life. Not to strengthen our national security.
But to serve the only client he has ever had: Himself.
And we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in “Project 2025.” Written by his closest advisors. And its sum total is to pull, our country back into the past.
But America, we are not going back.
We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
When insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions.
We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools. We are not going to let him end programs like Head Start that provide preschool and child care.
America, we are not going back. We are charting. A. New. Way. Forward.
Forward—to a future with a strong and growing middle class.
Because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success. And building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.
This is personal for me. The middle class is where I come from. My mother kept a strict budget. We lived within our means. Yet, we wanted for little.
And she expected us to make the most of the opportunities that were available to us. And to be grateful for them. Because opportunity is not available to everyone.
That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy. An opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed. Whether you live in a rural area, small town, or big city.
As President, I will bring together: Labor and workers, Small business owners and entrepreneurs, And American companies.
To create jobs. Grow our economy. And lower the cost of everyday needs. Like health care. Housing. And groceries.
We will: Provide access to capital for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders. We will end America’s housing shortage. And protect Social Security and Medicare.
Compare that to Donald Trump. He doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends. He will give them another round of tax breaks, that will add 5 trillion dollars to the national debt.
All while he intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax—call it, a Trump tax— that would raise prices on middle-class families by almost 4 thousand dollars a year.
Well, instead of a Trump tax hike, we will pass a middle class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.
Friends, I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives. Especially on matters
of heart and home.
But tonight, too many women in America are not able to make those decisions. Let’s be clear about how we got here.
Donald Trump hand-picked members of the United States Supreme Court to take away reproductive freedom. And now he brags about it. His words: Quote –“I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.” End quote.
Over the past two years, I have traveled across our country. And women have told me their stories. Husbands and fathers have shared theirs. Stories of: Women miscarrying in a parking lot…Getting sepsis…Losing the ability to ever have children again…
All—because doctors are afraid of going to jail for caring for their patients. Couples just trying to grow their family…cut off in the middle of IVF treatments. Children who have survived sexual assault, potentially forced to carry the pregnancy to term.
This is what is happening in our country. Because of Donald Trump.
And understand, ---he is not done.
As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would: Limit access to birth control, Ban medication abortion, And enact a nation-wide abortion ban with or without Congress.
And. Get this, he plans to create a National. Anti-Abortion. Coordinator. And force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put. They are. Out. Of. Their. Minds.
And one must ask: Why exactly is it that they don’t trust women?
Well. We. trust. women.
And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into. law.
In this election, many other fundamental freedoms are at stake. The freedom to live safe from gun violence—in our schools, communities, and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others. The freedom to vote.
With this election, We finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. And let me be clear. After decades in law enforcement, I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border.
Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.
The Border Patrol endorsed it.
But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign. So he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal.
Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. Here is my pledge to you: As President, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed. And I will sign it into law.
I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants— And reform our broken immigration system. We can create an earned pathway to citizenship— And secure our border. America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and our values abroad.
As Vice President, I have: confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances, and engaged with our brave troops overseas.
As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families.
And I will always honor, and never disparage, their service and their sacrifice.
I will make sure that: We lead the world into the future on space and Artificial Intelligence. That America—not China—wins The competition for the 21st century. And that we strengthen—not abdicate—our global leadership.
Trump, on the other hand, threatened to abandon NATO. He encouraged Putin to invade our allies. Said Russia could—quote—“do whatever the hell they want.”
Five days before Russia attacked Ukraine, I met with President Zelensky to warn him about Russia’s plan to invade. I helped mobilize a global response—
over 50 countries—to defend against Putin’s aggression. And as President, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.
With respect to the war in Gaza. President Biden and I are working around the clock. Because now is the time to get a hostage deal and ceasefire done.
Let me be clear: I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself. Because the people of Israel must never again face the horror that the terrorist organization Hamas caused on October 7th. Including unspeakable sexual violence and the massacre of young people at a music festival.
At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again. The scale of suffering is heartbreaking.
President Biden and I are working to end this war such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity. Security. Freedom. And self-determination.
And know this: I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists. And I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim-Jong-Un, who are rooting for Trump. Because they know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable—because he wants to be an autocrat.
As President, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals. Because, in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand—and where the United States of America belongs.
Fellow Americans, I love our country with all my heart.
Everywhere I go—in everyone I meet—I see a nation ready to move forward. Ready for the next step, in the incredible journey that is America.
I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation. That inspired the world. That here, in this country, anything is possible. Nothing is out of reach.
An America, where we care for one another, look out for one another, and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed. And that, in unity, there is strength.
Our opponents in this race are out there, every day, denigrating America. Talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach. Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.
America, let us show each other—and the world—who we are. And what we stand for. Freedom. Opportunity. Compassion. Dignity. Fairness. And endless possibilities.
We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world. And on behalf of our children and grandchildren, and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty, we must be worthy of this moment. It is now our turn to do what generations before us have done. Guided by optimism and faith, to fight for this country we love.
To fight for the ideals we cherish.
And to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth. The privilege and pride of being an American.
So, let’s get out there and let’s fight for it.
Let’s get out there and let’s vote for it.
And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.
Thank you. God bless you. May God bless the United States of America.
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Source: Harris for President
President Donald J. Trump
GOP Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech
Republican National Convention
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
July 18, 2024
I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength, and hope. Four months from now, we will have an incredible victory, and we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country.
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Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed.
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The discord and division in our society must be healed. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.
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I am running to be president for ALL of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.
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So tonight, with faith and devotion, I PROUDLY ACCEPT YOUR NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
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Let me begin this evening by expressing my gratitude to the American people for your outpouring of love and support following the assassination attempt at my rally on Saturday.
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As you already know, the assassin’s bullet came within a quarter of an inch of taking my life. So many people have asked me what happened, and therefore, I’ll tell you what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s too painful to tell.
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Despite such a heinous attack, we unite this evening more determined than ever. Our resolve is unbroken, and our purpose is unchanged--to deliver a government that serves the American People.
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Everything I have to give, with all of the energy and fight in my heart and soul, I pledge to our nation tonight.
This election should be about the issues facing our country and how to make America successful, safe, free, and great again.
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In an age when our politics too often divide us, now is the time to remember that we are all fellow citizens—we are one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
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On this journey, I am deeply honored to be joined by my amazing wife, Melania. Thank you, Melania, and thank you also for your beautiful letter to America calling for national unity. It captivated so many.
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I also want to thank my entire family—Don and Kimberly, Ivanka and Jared, Eric and Lara, Tiffany and Michael, Barron, and of course, my ten wonderful grandchildren.
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I am thrilled to have a new friend and partner fighting by my side: the next VICE PRESIDENT of the United States, the current Senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance, and his incredible wife, Usha.
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And a very special thank you to the extraordinary people of Milwaukee and the great state of Wisconsin for hosting this outstanding convention.
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We will Make Wisconsin Great Again, I promise.
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I am here tonight to lay out a vision for the whole nation. To every citizen, whether you are young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or Independent, black or white, Asian or Hispanic, I extend to you a hand of loyalty and friendship.
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Together, we will lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before.
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Under our leadership, the United States will be RESPECTED again. No nation will question our power. No enemy will doubt our might. Our borders will be totally SECURE. Our economy will soar. We will return LAW and ORDER to our streets, PATRIOTISM to our schools, and importantly, we will restore peace, stability, and harmony all throughout the world.
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But to achieve this future, we must first rescue our nation from failed leadership. This will be the most important election in the history of our country.
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Under the current administration, we are a nation in decline.
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We have an INFLATION CRISIS that is making life unaffordable, ravaging the incomes of working and low-income families, and crushing our people.
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We also have an ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION CRISIS – a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.
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Then there is an INTERNATIONAL CRISIS the likes of which the world has seldom seen. War is now raging in Europe and the Middle East, a growing specter of conflict hangs over Taiwan, Korea, the Philippines, and all of Asia, and our planet is teetering on the edge of World War Three, and this will be a war like no other.
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It is time for a CHANGE. We simply cannot sustain four more years of this administration.
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So tonight, I make this pledge to the great People of America.
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I will END the devastating Inflation Crisis immediately, bring down interest rates, and lower the cost of energy—we will DRILL, BABY, DRILL, which will lead to a large-scale decline in prices.
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I will END the Illegal Immigration Crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall, most of which I have already built.
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I will END every single International Crisis that the current administration has created—including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine, and the war caused by the attack on Israel, both of which would never have happened if I were president.
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Together, we will restore VISION, STRENGTH, COMPETENCE, and COMMON SENSE to the Oval Office.
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Just a few short years ago under my presidency, we had the most secure border and the best economy in the history of our country. We had NO inflation, soaring incomes, and the world was at peace.
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But in less than four years, our opponents have turned incredible success into unparalleled tragedy and failure.
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Today, our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs taken. Inflation has wiped out the life savings of our citizens, and forced the Middle Class into a state of depression and despair.
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We cannot, and will not, let this continue. Less than four years ago, we were a great nation, and we will soon be a great nation again.
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With proper leadership, every disaster we are now enduring will be fixed—and fixed quickly.
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So tonight, whether you’ve supported me in the past or not, I hope you will support me in the future, because I will bring back the American Dream.
With great humility, I am asking you to be EXCITED about the future of our country.
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This week, the entire Republican Party has formally adopted an agenda for America’s renewal.
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First, we must get economic relief to our citizens. Starting on Day One, we will drive down prices and Make America AFFORDABLE again!
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Under this administration, groceries are up 50%, gasoline is up 60%, mortgage rates have quadrupled, and you can’t get the money anyway. Total household costs have increased an average of $28,000 per family.
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Republicans have a plan to bring down prices, and bring them down fast. By slashing energy costs, we will in turn reduce the cost of transportation, manufacturing, and all household goods. We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country—we as a nation will make a fortune with oil and gas.
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Next, we will end the ridiculous waste of taxpayer dollars that is fueling the inflation crisis. And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, will be redirected for important projects like roads, bridges, dams, and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New Scam.
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I will END the Electric Vehicle Mandate on Day One—thereby saving the U.S. auto industry from complete obliteration, and saving U.S. customers thousands of dollars per car.
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I will bring auto jobs back to our country, through the proper use of taxes, tariffs, and incentives, and will not allow massive auto manufacturing plants to be built in Mexico, China, or other countries, where they send the product back to the United States, and steal our jobs, creating a hopeless situation for our companies and autoworkers.
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We have long been taken advantage of by other countries, often being considered our allies. We lose jobs and revenue, they gain everything, and wipe out our businesses. I stopped it four years ago, and I will stop it again. We will not let countries come in, take our jobs, and plunder our nation.
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The way they will sell their product in America is to BUILD it in America, and ONLY in America. This will create massive jobs and wealth for our country.
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At the center of our plan for economic relief are massive tax cuts for workers—and that includes NO TAX ON TIPS. That means if you are a restaurant worker, bartender, hospitality worker, caddy, barber, mover, driver, or anyone else who relies on tip income, your tips will be 100% YOURS.
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I gave the biggest tax cut in history, bigger than the Reagan Tax Cuts, but I am going to lower taxes still further.
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By contrast, Democrats have promised to end the Trump Tax Cuts and impose a record-setting $5 trillion tax hike. I am going to LOWER taxes—Democrats are going to RAISE taxes.
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I am going to PROTECT Social Security and Medicare—Democrats are going to DESTROY Social Security and Medicare.
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Under my plan, incomes will skyrocket, inflation will vanish, jobs will come roaring back, and the Middle Class will prosper like never before.
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But no hope or dream we have for America can succeed unless we stop the illegal immigrant invasion at our Southern Border.
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At the heart of the Republican platform is our pledge to end this border nightmare, and to fully restore the sacred and sovereign borders of the United States of America—on Day One.
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Less than four years ago, I handed this administration the strongest border in American history.
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We ended all catch-and-release. Shut down asylum fraud. Stopped human trafficking, and forged historic agreements to keep illegal aliens on foreign soil.
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Under the Trump Administration, if you came in illegally, you were apprehended immediately and deported.
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The current administration terminated every single one of those great Trump policies that I put in place to seal the border.
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They suspended wall construction, ended Remain in Mexico, cancelled our Safe Third agreements, demolished Title 42, implemented nationwide catch-and-release, and took 93 executive actions to throw open our border to the world.
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The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country—they are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—they’re coming from everywhere, and this administration does nothing to stop them.
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They are coming from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and terrorists at levels never seen before.
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Meanwhile, our crime rate is going UP, while crime statistics all over the world are plunging. That’s because they’re delivering their murderers, drug dealers, terrorists, and criminals of all shapes and forms, into the United States.
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We have become a dumping ground for the world, which is laughing at us. They think we’re stupid. They can’t believe what they’re getting away with, but getting away with it they are.
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In Venezuela, crime is down 72 percent. In El Salvador, murders are down 70 percent. The world’s criminals are coming here, to a town near you—and are being sent by their governments, because their governments are smarter than ours.
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Tonight, America, this is my vow: I will not let these killers and criminals into our country. I will keep our sons and daughters safe.
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As we bring security to our streets, we will help bring stability to the world.
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I was the first president in modern times to start NO NEW WARS.
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There was peace in Europe and the Middle East. Under President Bush, Russia invaded Georgia. Under President Obama, Russia took Crimea. Under the current administration, Russia is after all of Ukraine. Under President Trump, Russia took nothing.
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We defeated 100 percent of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, something that was going to take five years, and I did it in two months.
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I stopped the missile launches from North Korea.
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Iran was weak, broke, and wanted to make a deal—they were not spending money on Hamas, Hezbollah or other carriers of terror, and Iran was never going to have a nuclear weapon. Now, they can have one within 90 days, and they have $300 billion dollars to spread terror across the region.
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Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war.
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It began to unravel with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the worst humiliation in the history of our country. 13 heroic U.S. servicemembers were tragically and needlessly killed, 45 others were horrifically wounded, and $85 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment was left behind, along with many American citizens.
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Emboldened by that disaster, Russia invaded Ukraine. Israel endured the worst attack in its history. Now China is circling Taiwan, and Russian warships and nuclear submarines are operating 60 miles off our coasts in Cuba, and the media doesn’t want to talk about it.
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And to the entire world, we want our hostages back—and they better be back before I assume office, or you will be paying a very big price.
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With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness and chaos will be over.
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We will replenish our military, and build an Iron Dome Missile Defense System to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland—and this great Iron Dome will all be MADE IN THE USA.
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We will unleash the power of American innovation—and as we do, we will soon be on the verge of finding the cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many other diseases.
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We will restore and renovate our nation’s once-great cities, making them SAFE, clean, and beautiful again–and that includes our nation’s capital in Washington D.C. We will be proud of our capital again.
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America is on the cusp of a new Golden Age, but we must have the courage to seize it.
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Just a few short days ago, my journey with you nearly ended. And yet here we are tonight, all gathered together, talking about the future, promise, and renewal of America. We live in a world of miracles.
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None of us knows God’s plan, or where life’s adventure will take us. But if the events of last Saturday make anything clear, it is that every single moment we have on earth is a gift from God. We have to make the most of every day for the people and country we love.
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For too long, our nation has settled for too little. You have been told to lower your expectations and to accept less for your families.
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I am here tonight with the opposite message: Your expectations are not big enough. It is time to start expecting and demanding the best leadership in the world, leadership that is bold, dynamic, relentless, and fearless.
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We are Americans. Ambition is our heritage. Greatness is our birthright.
But as long as our energies are spent fighting each other, our destiny will remain out of reach. We must instead take that energy and use it to realize our country’s true potential—and write our own thrilling chapter of the American Story.
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Tonight, I ask for your partnership, for your support, and I am humbly asking for your vote. Every day, I will strive to honor the trust you have placed in me, and I will never let you down.
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To all of the forgotten men and women who have been neglected, abandoned, and left behind, you will be forgotten no longer. We will press forward, and together, we will WIN, WIN, WIN.
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Nothing will sway us. Nothing will slow us. And no one will stop us.
No matter what dangers come our way, no matter what obstacles lie in our path, we will keep striving toward our shared and glorious destiny—and WE WILL NOT FAIL.
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Together, we will SAVE THIS COUNTRY, we will restore the Republic, and we will usher in the rich and wonderful tomorrows that our people truly deserve.
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America’s future will be BIGGER, BETTER, BOLDER, BRIGHTER, HAPPIER, STRONGER, FREER, GREATER, and MORE UNITED than EVER BEFORE!
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Thank you, God Bless You, God Bless Wisconsin, and God Bless the United States of America.
Source: Donald J. Trump for President
Kennedy Welcomes Nicole Shanahan as His Running Mate
OAKLAND, CA—MARCH 26, 2024—Independent Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. today welcomed attorney, tech entrepreneur, and philanthropist Nicole Shanahan to the Kennedy campaign as his vice presidential running mate during a sold-out event in Oakland, California. Shanahan spoke for nearly 30 minutes sharing her excitement and reasons for joining the ticket following a 10-minute video about her life. [see remarks below
]
“There is only one moment in time and one candidate that I would step into this capacity for. That time is now and that candidate is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,” the 38-year-old VP pick said.
“I believe, very strongly, that focusing on the health and well-being of our youth is the key to a strong America. That means honestly looking at the root causes of where childhood development is being sidelined. We have the tools to prioritize American wellness, we just need to use them.”
Kennedy introduced his running mate enthusiastically, describing how he “wanted a VP who will speak for millennials and Gen Z. Someone who cares about healing our children, protecting our environment, restoring our soils, and getting the chemicals out of our food, and who understands how technology will either enslave us or give us a path back to freedom and prosperity.”
“From our first meeting,” Kennedy said, “Nicole’s intellectual capacity left me awestruck. I knew right then I wanted her as my vice president and I knew America was going to fall in love with her.”
Shanahan’s work on behalf of honest governance, racial equality, regenerative agriculture, and children’s and maternal health has put her at the forefront of many of the country’s most urgent needs.
Today’s event reaffirms the key principles of the Kennedy campaign of restoring the middle class, ending the chronic disease epidemic, unwinding the war machine, and unraveling corporate capture of our government agencies.
The Kennedy campaign has launched a robust ballot access plan to ensure the Kennedy/Shanahan ticket is on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Kennedy is already on the ballot in Utah and has collected all the necessary signatures to be on the ballot in New Hampshire and Nevada. In Hawaii, the Hawaii Office of Elections has confirmed Kennedy supporters have collected the required signatures to establish the “We The People” party in Hawaii.
In addition to those states, the campaign is already actively collecting signatures in 17 states and is kicking off its petition gathering this week in 19 additional states that are open and require a vice presidential candidate, which includes Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
Kennedy’s surging support across the country has made the election a three-way race. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows him leading Presidents Biden and Trump nationwide among voters under 35. An NBC poll shows 34% of people saying they could see themselves supporting RFK Jr. Another Quinnipiac Poll discussed on CNN shows Kennedy in a three-way tie with Presidents Biden and Trump among Latinos.
Kennedy leads Presidents Biden and Trump among independents. Independents continue to constitute the largest political bloc in the U.S., with an average of 43% of U.S. adults. In contrast, 27% of U.S. adults identify as Republicans and 27% of U.S. adults identify as Democrats.
Three months ago, Kennedy returned to Philadelphia, the birthplace of the United States, and declared his independence from the “bankrupt two-party system.” He did so with the National Constitution Center behind him and the words “We the People” etched into the building by his side.
“We the people” are the first three words of the U.S. Constitution. These words symbolize that our government draws its power from the people that it was created to serve.
On Oct. 9, Kennedy said, “Like the Founding Fathers declared their independence from the crown more than two centuries ago, today we declare our independence from the corrupting influence of Wall Street and corporate donors that have rigged our economy for the few at the expense of the many.”
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Nicole Shanahan’s Remarks:
Hello everybody and thank you Bobby. It is so good to be here in Oakland.
This city will always have a special place in my heart.
I grew up just a few miles from this very spot. My mother is an immigrant from Guangzhou, China, and my late father was an Irish and German American. I want to tell you a little bit about them and my childhood, so you can understand the source of my politics and convictions.
My mother's first job when she came to the United States in 1983 was as a live-in caretaker to an elderly woman while attending school. By the time I was born, she worked as a secretary at a dental office. My father loved us dearly, but he was a troubled man, plagued by substance abuse, and couldn't really hold onto a job for very long.
From watching my father and his struggles, I learned not to be judgmental. He was doing the best he could. I think of him when I see the statistics on the millions of Americans, the tens of millions, who are addicted or depressed or suffering.
This is one of the real epidemics of our time. It affects nearly every American family. I wish my experience was unusual, but it is not. It has become part of my determination to do something for our country.
Every time my dad lost his job, our family just couldn't cover its expenses. Food, gas, clothing, upkeep…it added up to more than we had. I know a lot of Americans know exactly what that's like, to be just one misfortune away from disaster. I don't think we would have made it without food stamps. My mom worked hard, but without that help it just wouldn't have been possible to hold it together. Later in life, as you probably know, I became very wealthy, but my roots here in Oakland taught me many things. I have never forgotten that the purpose of wealth is to help those in need. And that's something I want to bring back to our politics too.
I went to high school at St. Mary's, also just a few miles from here. In my junior year I had another formative experience that is still a huge part of my political consciousness. I applied for a program to go live with families in El Salvador. In praying with these families and helping them rebuild from the civil war there, I learned what war really is. I learned how it rips lives apart, how it brutalizes children, how it visits unspeakable horror on the innocent. And I also learned of the resilience of the human spirit, and its infinite capacity to heal, to forgive, and to restore. El Salvador is where I came to understand war, but more importantly it is also where I came to understand peace.
That is what inspired me to my first political action. In high school, at the onset of the Iraq War, I became an anti-war activist. I didn't really know how to do it — I printed pamphlets and led a walkout. But I knew in my bones that violence begets more violence. I'd seen what that does to a society. And I didn't want my country, America, the country that I love, to be doing that in the world. So these are two of the political convictions I still hold today. To serve peace, and to help those in poverty. You can understand why I gravitated toward the Democratic Party. Because that was supposed to be the party of peace, the party of compassion. Many Democrats still believe in those ideals, but unfortunately, as an institution, it has lost its way. There is only one anti-war candidate today, one peace candidate, and you won't find him in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. He is an independent. He is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
It is his commitment to peace and to the welfare of hard-working people in America that drew me, as a person of compassion, to his candidacy.
As recently as a year ago, I didn't think much of Bobby Kennedy.
I didn't think much of him, because I didn't know much. All I had was the mainstream media narrative. But then a friend pulled me aside one day and said, "Nicole, please, do me a favor. Just listen to one interview with Bobby Kennedy. Just one."
So I listened to one. Then to another. And another. And I recognized a person who was the exact opposite of the media slander of his character. I saw a person of intelligence, of compassion, and of reason. I saw a fellow lawyer who had committed himself to finding the truth and fighting for the environment and for people. I discovered a person who speaks out on issues that, even though they are critically important to human health and welfare, are consistently ignored by our government. And for the first time in a long time, I felt hope for our democracy.
One of those issues also happens to be a passion of mine and a focus of my philanthropic work - chronic disease. I got into it through my own journey of reproductive health, followed by a steep learning curve of caring for my daughter who has an autism diagnosis. In that journey I discovered that women's fertility is in precipitous decline around the world. We are facing a crisis in reproductive health, and that's embedded in the larger epidemic of chronic disease. Because it has been so personal for me and my daughter, I got deep into the research and consulted some of the best scientists and doctors. Let me share what I found. There are three main causes. One, is the toxic substances in our environment, like endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food, water, and soil, like the pesticide residues, the industrial pollutants, the microplastics, the PFAs, the food additives, and the "forever chemicals" that have contaminated nearly every human cell.
Second is electromagnetic pollution. You don't hear politicians talking much about that either, but it is something we need to look at. As Bobby says, we need to investigate every possible cause of the chronic disease epidemic that is devouring our nation from the inside.
Third, I'm sorry to say, is our own medications. Pharmaceutical medicine has its place, but no single safety study can assess the cumulative impact of one prescription after another after another, one shot after another and another, throughout the course of childhood. Conditions like autism used to be rare. One in ten thousand. Now it is one in 22 here in California. Allergies. Obesity. Anxiety. Depression. Our children are not well.
Our people are not well. And our country will not be strong for very long either if we don't heed this desperate call for attention.
I've spoken to our government agencies about this. I've spoken to senators. I've spoken to governors. They all know something is wrong, but none of them take any kind of action. There is only one candidate for President who takes the chronic disease epidemic seriously. It is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and I will be his ally in making our nation healthy again.
It's not about a new pill. It is not about "finding the cure." We know the cure is cleaning up our environment and providing the basic public goods that are the foundational conditions for health and healing. It is about a shift in our priorities. It is about compassion. Chronic disease, addiction, poverty, depression… this is where Americans are hurting the most. It is time for politicians to listen.
So here is how the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket is going to end the chronic disease epidemic. While Bobby is focused on ending the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, I am going to assemble some of the best technologists and scientists in the world and we will use the latest in AI and computation and examine the health records
databases of our nation and those of other countries who are also on the quest to solve chronic disease. We will find unbiased answers to our most pressing health concerns within weeks and not decades. It is time to move out of the dark ages of medicine. We can solve the mysteries guarded by corporate influence. We can move from bandaid solutions to root causes, and we can end the chronic disease epidemic.
My sense is that most American Moms and dads already know the truth of the matter, and it is long overdue that the duty of care owed to the American family is actually given. We CAN find the answers, conclusively. I have a background in tech, so I tend to think in terms of data. In my tech days, I developed AI-powered software to automate affordable legal services. Well, the CDC and research institutions have the data we need. We can apply technology to figure out what environmental factors are making us sick. We just have to ask the right questions, do the right research, and apply the right tools. We have to rid science of the corporate bias that contaminates it today. Then we can put the chronic disease epidemic into reverse.
Actually, the first political issue to which I applied my tech background was criminal justice. It was across the Bay in San Francisco, where the district attorney's office needed help examining thousands of police records thought to contain evidence of racial bias, wrongful arrests, and patterns of prejudice. I put together a team of computer scientists to develop a computational method to collate all these case records, and design a method for analysis. In short, I got to see the sorry state of criminal justice in our country. It isn't just about policing. It is about the school-to-prison pipeline. It is about a broken and dismally functioning infrastructure. And it is about recidivism. How do we provide alternative paths? How do we make prisons places of rehabilitation not punishment? These questions don't have easy answers, but they ARE the right questions, and Bobby Kennedy is the only Presidential candidate who is asking them.
I'd like to mention one more issue close to my heart. My interest in health and solving climate issues led me into the realm of agriculture. I realized that a nation's health comes down to its soil and the people who work it. Healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food. It is the foundation of a healthy ecosystem and a healthy climate. It is the foundation of a healthy economy. But what politician, besides Bobby Kennedy, do you hear ever talking about soil? I've produced two films on this issue — Common Ground is the latest. I've talked to Congresspeople and Senators, but all I've ever gotten is vague promises that never amount to real change. Republicans and Democrats alike have fallen under the sway of the big agrochemical companies and food conglomerates. They might invoke the ideal of the family farm, but they have betrayed it again and again. So I'm entering politics myself. I've met some of America's most innovative farmers. Their methods rebuild soil, sequester carbon, recharge aquifers, and revitalize the farm economy. We don't have to force anyone to imitate them. All we have to do is change our system of regulation and subsidy to support those methods, instead of extractive corporate agriculture.
I hope you all understand now what has brought me into politics as an independent candidate for vice president. I am leaving the Democratic Party to do it, as Mr. Kennedy has himself. And I want to say two things about that. First, even though I'm leaving the party, I believe I am taking its best ideals and impulses with me. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of compassion and peace. It is supposed to be the party of diplomacy and science. It is supposed to be the party of civil liberties and free speech. And most importantly, the party of the middle class and the American Dream. While I know those ideals still abide within many Democrats, I want to point out that the party has lost its way. In its leadership, in its institutions, it has become interested in elitism, celebrity and winning at all costs, even if that means turning a blind eye on issues they all know to be true. I know because I've been in those circles for the last 8 years and have grown increasingly tired of it. It wasn't until I met Bobby and the people supporting him, that I felt any hope in the outcome of this election.
As I've reexamined my Democratic Party assumptions, I have seen conservative voters with new eyes too. I have met hunters and farmers that are some of the staunchest conservationists I have ever known, who understand ecosystems better than most. I have met mothers protecting their children who are searching every possible avenue for their health. And yet the Republican Party, like the Democratic, is letting them down because the actions of the party are diverting from the values that actually support individual freedom. In fact, the very failure of both parties to do their job to protect their founding values has contributed to the decline of this country in my lifetime. Maybe that's why I see so many Republicans disillusioned with their party as I became disillusioned with mine. If you are one of those disillusioned Republicans, I welcome you to join me, a disillusioned Democrat, here in this new movement to unify and heal America.
This independent movement comes at a time of extreme division in America that threatens to tear this country apart. It is time for a re-alignment. It is time, as Bobby Kennedy says, to focus on our unifying values rather than our divisions. And so, if anyone is listening who never considered an independent candidate, I want to extend the same invitation, the same plea to you that my friend did last year. Please, listen to Bobby Kennedy in his own words. Take a close look at his vision for America. It is a vision that I share too as I back his campaign, and focus the next 7 months of my life getting him on each and every ballot in this country!
The vision we share is a vision of national healing. It is an America that leads the world, no longer through force of arms, but through the power of example. It is an America that wages peace through diplomacy. It is an America that had become the sickest industrialized country on earth and turned it around. It is an America where everyone who works hard can afford a decent life. It is an America where people of all races receive fair and equal treatment under the law. It is an America whose freedoms are the envy of the world. It is an America with honest and transparent government institutions. Can you imagine that — a country whose government doesn't lie to you?
People talk about my age. It is true, I will be the youngest vice president in American history. Let me tell you why so many of us young people have turned away from politics. It's because we lost hope that change would ever come from inside the system. After all, whichever party wins with promises of hope and change, or to drain the swamp, things proceed as normal, declining bit by bit with each passing year. So that's one reason. But the other reason is that we can't stand the phoniness. We can't stand the lies. We can't stand the inauthenticity. And that's why Bobby Kennedy leads in polls among young people, we are hearing our voice in his.
So I come to you today as a former Democrat. I come to you as a woman not quite 40. I come to you as someone who has experienced sickness and health and poverty and wealth. And finally, I come to you as a mother. Most of the philanthropists I work with are women, other mothers. Initially, it was as a mother that I came to support this campaign. I never thought in a million years that I would be running for vice president. No, I joined the many, many groups of mothers who support this candidacy. They are Republicans and Democrats and independents. They read the labels in the supermarket and wonder how to keep their kids healthy. They watch in anguish as their children suffer from chronic disease. They cry silently as their teenagers deal with depression, anxiety, and addiction. They do their best to hold it together. If you ask me who my heroes are, that's who, it's the moms trying to make a normal life for their children in a world that has gone crazy.
As a mother myself, who knows firsthand the challenge of a special needs child, my promise to you is to make this world a little less crazy. I will work with Bobby Kennedy to make America once again a country of peace, a country of compassion, a country that is prosperous and free. This won't happen overnight. But I have seen the miracles that the human spirit can accomplish. I have seen its resilience. I have seen its tremendous capacity to heal. What is possible for the human being is possible also for our nation.
So please join me and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the healing of America.
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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Remarks:
I am honored to accept the Mu-wek-ma Oh-lone Tribe’s endorsement of our campaign, and I appreciate the trust the Chairwoman and the tribal council place in me.
They know the battle for justice and healing for indigenous people has occupied a large part of my energies and of my professional and personal life.
This work will continue when we are in the White House. The Mu-wek-ma Oh-lone Tribe and other tribes unfairly deprived of federal recognition deserve to have their status legitimized.
My father spent a lot of time in Oakland, conducting hearings for the poverty program here in 1967 and campaigning here in 1968.
During his presidential run, he made an unscheduled visit at Oakland’s Taylor Memorial Methodist Church with Willie Brown to meet with NAACP leadership, members of the Black Panther Party, and other local activists.
It was a rancorous meeting, and John Glenn and Rafer Johnson urged my dad to walk out as he weathered insults and threats from some of the crowd.
My dad refused: “This is between them and me. I need to hear them out.”
He heard them out, and the next day virtually all of them signed up to his campaign and the Black Panther Party volunteered as his security detail.
The last time I was in Oakland was when I served on the trial team in the Monsanto case. We tried two cases in this city, and I lived here for several months.
The Monsanto case was my latest in a lifetime of battles to get poisons out of our food and our farms and restore our soils.
The effort has consumed much of my life — I wanted a vice president who shares my passion for wholesome, healthy foods, regenerative agriculture, and good soils, and I found one.
Among other things she has used cutting-edge technology including AI to calculate the catastrophic health consequences of toxins in our soil, air, and water.
Technology has been a lifelong passion of my future vice president.
This is important because I also wanted a VP who shares my indignation about the participation of Big Tech as a partner in the censorship, surveillance, and information warfare that our government is currently waging against the American people.
That is why I’m bringing on someone with deep insider knowledge about how big tech uses AI to manipulate the public. I want a partner with strong ideas about how to reverse this dire threat to our democracy and freedoms. I managed to find a technologist at the forefront of AI. She has spent the last decade relying on neural networks, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge science to identify abuses in our government.
She understands that the health of every American is a national security issue — her work has proven time and again that health drives our economy, that it is the foundation of our mental health, our national happiness, and our ability to lead the world in innovation, prosperity and peace.
I also wanted an athlete who could help me inspire Americans to heal and get them in shape. I'm happy to report that my vice president is an avid surfer who attended school on a softball scholarship.
I wanted someone battle-tested, able to withstand criticism and controversy, and all the defamations and slanders and perjuries that are thrown against anyone who embarks on a presidential campaign.
I wanted an advocate who has seen corruption of our regulatory authorities firsthand and shares my indignation about the way it allows regulated industries to commoditize our landscapes, our food, our wildlife, and our children.
I wanted someone who would honor our traditions as a nation of immigrants and to also understand that — to be a nation — we need secure borders.
I wanted a partner who was a gifted administrator but also possessed the gift of curiosity and an open, inquiring mind, and the confidence to change even her strongest opinions in the face of contrary evidence.
I wanted someone with a spiritual dimension and compassion and idealism, and above all, a deep love for the United States of America.
I found that person in a woman who grew up here in Oakland, the daughter of immigrants, who overcame every daunting obstacle and went on to achieve the American dream.
So that is why I am so proud to introduce you to the next vice president of the United States — my fellow lawyer, a brilliant scientist, technologist, and fierce warrior mom — Nicole Shanahan.
Nicole’s personal story began here in Oakland, the daughter of impoverished immigrants. She grew up on food stamps and welfare in this city, beset by many other unique challenges, all of which she overcame. Her very American journey took her to a career as a patent attorney and as a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and a Stanford University fellow.
Like many of us, Nicole assumed our government was working for our people, that our defense and intelligence agencies wanted peace, that our public health agencies wanted us to be healthy, that the USDA supported wholesome food and family farms, that the EPA would stand up for clean air and clean water, that the Fed wanted a prosperous America, that the Democratic Party was on the side of the middle class, the working poor and Main Street small business owners, that scientists were incorruptible and that science was an exalted search for truth, and that the president would defend free speech.
I used to believe that too. Do you remember those days?
She will tell you that she now understands that the defense agencies work for the military-industrial complex, that health agencies work for Pharma, that USDA works for Big Ag and the processed food cartels, that EPA is in cahoots with the polluters, that scientists can be mercenaries, that government officials sometimes act as censors, and that the Fed works for Wall Street and allows millionaire bankers to prey upon Main Street and American workers.
This is why Nicole and I both left the Democratic Party. Our values haven't changed, the democratic party has.
The things we love are the same. We love our families, our children, and our faith.
We love clean air, clean water, productive soil, and good food. We love the wilderness and our purple mountains’ majesty.
Above all, we love our country. We want America to live up to her highest ideals. We want her to be an exemplary nation again — a global leader in freedom, opportunity, and responsible government. We want America to be a peacemaker and a moral authority.
We want our children to grow up as I did, in a country for which they feel love and pride. We want them to be healthy and to feel safe, and to have every opportunity for dignity, prosperity, and community.
We want them to have confidence in their futures. We want them to have the best education. We want America to be friendly to farmers and entrepreneurs. We want America to honor its veterans and its teachers. We want our scientists to stand up for science, and our government for free speech.
Nicole and I share all these values, and you know what, despite our artificially orchestrated divisions, nearly all Americans share do these values with us.
I am grateful that Nicole has put her self-interest aside and made the momentous and difficult decision to embark with me on this extraordinary crusade to save our country.
I am happy she is a young person, only 38 years old, because I want Nicole to be a champion for the growing number of millennials and Gen Z Americans who have lost faith in their future and pride in our country. Many in her generation have stopped believing that the older people — who have been running our government for so long — understand them or represent their interests.
That older generation that now dominates Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House is the same generation that ran up a $34 trillion debt.
Millennials and Gen Z and their children will shoulder the burden of that debt.
It was my Baby Boom generation that unleashed the epidemic of chronic disease that has made America the sickest country on earth.
The only response to this calamity by government officials is to gaslight us into pretending that it is all normal. Nicole and I both share doubts that the corporate-captured Uniparty can produce leaders capable of imagining a different version of America — a hopeful vision of the future.
We both have doubts that either the Democratic or Republican nominees are capable of dealing with the complexities and fulfilling the great promise of a technology-driven economy.
In the right hands, technology can be America’s salvation. It can give us the path out of debt, chaos, environmental ruin, and chronic disease.
But we both fear that in the wrong hands, technology may turn its power against humanity. We don’t think that President Trump or President Biden understand either the promise or peril of technology sufficiently to direct its trajectory toward light, freedom, healing, and prosperity.
We are now witnessing a dismaying contest between the two oldest presidential candidates in history.
Those two men, during their terms as president, both worked to close our Main Street businesses for a year without scientific evidence or democratic process.
Their policies transferred 4 trillion dollars from the middle class to a new oligarchy of billionaires. Their lockdowns helped create a new billionaire each day for 500 days. Together, they ran up a greater debt burden than all previous presidents combined since George Washington.
They each want us to hate and fear the other guy — but to young Americans, they look like two sides of the same coin. If we vote for either of them again, we can expect — and we will deserve — more of the same: the annihilation of the middle class and the further impoverishment of the working poor, more chronic disease, more environmental destruction, more debt, more war, and fewer constitutional rights.
I’ve asked Nicole to use the platform of the vice presidency to speak for ALL the invisible, voiceless Americans who feel let down by our government. As your vice president, Nicole will represent the working poor who feel forgotten, who sink every day deeper in debt. She is going to fight for all those Americans who know what it’s like to skip meals to pay for gas, and who watch food prices spike ever higher and wonder how they are going to get through the grocery store checkout line.
I want her to stand for the children who are receiving substandard education, and the veterans who are feeding their families at soup kitchens. And the 1.1 million children whose parents served in Afghanistan and Iraq and whose families are silently struggling with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
I want her to represent the mothers who struggle to protect their children from bad chemicals, bad pharmaceuticals, and bad food. As vice president, she will stand between them and Big Ag, Big Pharma, the chemical industry, the processed food industry, and the government regulators who are colluding to poison our kids for profit.
And as vice president, she will stand up with me against the military-industrial complex and the Neocon interventionists and their forever wars.
In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt appointed my grandfather Joseph Kennedy to run his new Securities and Exchange Commission. My grandfather had been a stock manipulator and FDR wanted a chairman who knew the stock market inside and out to reform it.
In a similar vein, Nicole will stand up to Silicon Valley, which she knows inside and out.
And she is going to stand up to Wall Street, the Big Banks, and the larcenous K Street lobbies, the regulatory czars, the unbridled central bank money-printers, and the crony capitalists. These are the actors who have displaced democracy with greed.
Their cupidity drives our corrupt campaign finance system, which is nothing more than a system of legalized bribery. This is the system that put agency capture on steroids and made our government regulators sock puppets to industry.
The corrupt merger of state and corporate power now straddles our nation’s capital like a mythical harpy, sucking the economic, social and moral vitality out of the nation’s polity of free citizens, gorging itself on the bleaching bones of the American middle class.
Nicole is going to help me free our country from that predatory cabal.
Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.
Now let me tell you what Nicole and I are up against, and how we are going to win.
The New York Times estimates a final Democratic Party war chest of $3 billion, allowing it to spend more than any presidential campaign in history. Incidentally, the Republican Party will raise about the same.
Does anybody here think that these big-money donors are giving out of a patriotic impulse? No.
They are investing in the Uniparty because political contributions have a proven return on investment.
The campaign finance system has transformed our government from a model democracy to corporate kleptocracy.
So we are up against powerful financial interests.
We also face a determined campaign to keep us off the ballot by fair means or foul. Evidently, the Democrats have little faith in their candidate’s ability to win the old-fashioned way — in the voting booth.
We will overcome these financial and legal challenges. But I want to talk about another obstacle that is even more important.
It is the obstacle of cynicism. It is the obstacle of fear. It is the deeply ingrained habit of voting for someone you have little passion for, because he is the lesser of two evils.
Because you are so afraid the other guy will win.
Well don’t you want to vote FOR someone, not just against someone? Don’t you want to vote for a candidate and a country you can be proud of?
I know you do, because some 70% of Americans say that they don’t want to choose between President Trump and President Biden.
They don’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils.
They especially don’t want to choose between the two men who brought us a $34 trillion debt, the endless wars, censorship, chronic disease, and the corrupt merger of the state and corporate power.
Republicans and Democrats have taken turns in office for over 30 years now and all these problems have just gotten worse.
That’s why those same polls show my approval ratings far above those of Presidents Trump and Biden.
Both Democratic and Republican parties are looking at those polls and devising ways to keep me off the ballot. They are the ones who are afraid, and so they try to make you afraid too.
Their principal technique is to call me a spoiler and instill fear in Americans that voting for me will get some terrifying candidate elected.
Our campaign is a spoiler all right.
It is a spoiler for President Biden AND for President Trump.
It is a spoiler for the war machine.
It is a spoiler for Wall Street, Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, the corporate media,and all of the corrupt politicians and corporations.
That’s why they are trying to keep us off the ballot and frighten you into choosing between the two tired and unpopular heads of the uniparty.
Millions of Americans will not vote at all if they are not given another choice.
Well, Nicole and I are giving you another choice.
The Democrats and Republicans are trying to divide America. They tell us to hate each other, to mistrust each other, to accuse each other of treason, and to warn us in apocalyptic terms that democracy itself is doomed if the other side wins.
They turn families against each other and neighbors against neighbors.
They are trying to divide America. But Nicole and I will unite America. That is our path to victory. That is how we will win. We will forge an unstoppable coalition of homeless Democrats and homeless Republicans who are ready to look to the universal values that unite us, all those things that I want, that Nicole wants, and that every conscientious American wants too.
If we can persuade enough Americans to vote out of hope rather than of fear, we will win this election in November.
If you want more of the same, vote out of fear.
If you want genuine change, take the risk and join Team Kennedy. Join the new American Revolution.
What that means is to vote from your conscience. From your heart. Vote out of idealism and optimism for this country. Refuse, above all, to vote from fear!
If Nicole and I can get Americans to refuse to vote from fear, we will be in the White House this November.
Nicole and I are running to help heal the symptoms of an ailing America — heal our divisions, heal our economy, heal our mental and spiritual and physical health.
But we cannot do it alone.
We need you.
And now I have a governing partner who will fight for you and your family until the last corporate kickback is banished from our government; the last toxin is cleared from our water, soil, and air; until the last American child gets to live healthy and pursue their own happiness in this land of the free.
I’m confident that there is no American more qualified than Nicole Shanahan to play this role.
So I’m proud to introduce you all to the next V.P. of the United States, Nicole Shanahan.
RFK Jr. Declares Independent Run for President
PHILADELPHIA, PA—OCT. 9—Today in front of thousands of supporters on the lawn of Independence Hall, Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a historic announcement, declaring himself an independent candidate for President of the United States of America.
He joined his voice with all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful, to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
Today, he declared his independence from the corporations that have hijacked both parties and our government.
He declared independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists who now outnumber members of Congress 20 to 1.
He declared independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
In his speech, he noted it is painful to leave a party his family helped found, but he had concluded that there was no other choice in order to make real change for our country.
He declared independence “from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses. If left unchecked, they will commoditize our air, water, food, labor, and children, and turn the American Dream into desperation and dust.”
He declared his independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In his speech, he noted that the independence he is declaring is “more than being independent of the two existing parties. It is also independence from tribal thinking. It is to be free of the reflex of taking sides. Instead of ‘Which side are you on?’ it asks, What do you care about? What do your children need? What are your troubles? Who do you love? Because, our country is never going heal if the only formula is for one half of the population to beat the other in pitched battle.”
Today, I Declared Myself an Independent Candidate for President
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.
OCT 9, 2023
Today, I declared myself an independent candidate for President of the United States of America.
And more than that, I joined my voice with all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful, to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
Today, I declared my independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government to milk us for profit.
I declared independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists who now outnumber members of Congress 20 to 1.
I declared independence from the mercenary media that forever urges us to hate our neighbors and fear our friends.
I declared independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
And finally, I declared independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses. If left unchecked, they will commoditize our air, water, food, labor, and children, and turn the American Dream into desperation and dust.
I declared my independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
How can we guard life when for-profit corporations have captured the public agencies that are supposed to protect us? How can we enjoy liberty when a surveillance state seeks to hide the truth and quash dissent to preserve its power? And how can we pursue happiness when our nation's families are imprisoned by debt and hunger and jobs that will never pay the bills?
And so today I declared my independence from the tyranny of corruption which robs us of affordable lives, belief in our future, and respect for one another. And to do that, I had to declare my independence from the Democratic Party and independence from all parties.
robert f kennedy jr 100923 philadelphia
Read my entire speech below (as prepared):
Thank you, Lewis GrassRope, for that beautiful blessing. Lewis is a tribal elder from the Lower Brule Sioux, the grandson of a signer of the 1876 Fort Laramie treaty.
My father visited South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in May of 1968 and spent the entire day there. A local political operative cautioned him that they mustn’t keep the crowd of 20,000 waiting in Rapid City, commenting that “Indians don’t vote.” My father told him sharply, “You don’t understand your candidate.” When he saw a Sioux family living in the burned-out heap of an automobile, he wept. Word of his tears swept across the reservation and on June 5, Sioux voters turned out in historic numbers and made my father victorious in South Dakota.
On my many trips to Pine Ridge over the decades, the elders always take great pride in recounting that almost 100% of the Sioux vote went to RFK. Only three votes in Pine Ridge were tallied against him. They always end the story by saying, “We are still looking for those guys.”
It is a hopeful sign that we now celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. It shows that we are ready as a nation to tell untold histories and to finally include the dispossessed people who have long languished on the margins.
Today, as corrupt powers have overtaken our government, the ranks of the dispossessed have swelled beyond indigenous and Black people to include tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck in financial desperation. The dispossessed also include the legions of the chronically ill, the addicted, the depressed, and the 80% of the country that can no longer afford a normal middle-class lifestyle.
A rising tide of discontent is swamping our country.
There is danger in this discontent, yet there is also promise.
The danger is that demagogues will hijack it toward fascism. Or, that our rulers will divert it onto an external enemy to start yet another war.
But the biggest danger, which we’ve seen unfold in real-time, is that we will direct our discontent at each other. As Abraham Lincoln observed, quoting Jesus Christ, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” A polarized nation is easy for corrupt powers to manipulate and strip of its wealth, its freedoms, and its dignity.
Those are the dangers, so, what is the promise? The promise is of reunion. We are told that our nation is hopelessly divided. But I’ve found it less divided than it seems.
The most hateful voices are usually the loudest. But quietly, Americans are looking with disgust at the vitriol, the name-calling, and the venom. They want it to end. They want us to get along.
The loud, hateful controversies obscure vast areas of agreement.
Most of us agree that we should take care of our veterans at home and seek peace abroad. We agree that teachers deserve decent salaries, and that housing should be affordable, and that corporations should pay their fair share.
We agree that we want a clean environment and wholesome communities for our kids.
Yet these universal yearnings stand alongside a broad agreement that our nation has lost its way.
Americans are weary of the culture war, the phony slogans of politicians, and the partisan blame game that has us all at each other’s throats.
And people suspect that the divisions are deliberately orchestrated, and that getting us to hate each other is part of the scam.
And they’re fed up with being fooled, and they are ready to take back their power.
There is no other explanation for the enthusiasm I see every day in the people flocking to our campaign. Sometimes it gives me goosebumps. Their minds may tell them the situation is hopeless, that the elites are too entrenched, that the corruption is too deep. But their hearts say otherwise. I know that because I meet scores of people every day, even those in the hardest circumstances, who haven’t given up on America.
I've walked the picket lines In Los Angeles with hotel workers who live in their cars because they can’t afford rent.
I've visited mobile health clinics on the back roads of Georgia, where families get their medical care from traveling nurses in the back of a bus.
I've planted gardens in the food deserts of Watts and Cleveland.
I’ve sat amongst migrant children at the border, and I’ve met social workers and doctors in Yuma who treat these immigrants with kindness and heartbreaking generosity.
I've walked the fields with farmers in Kansas who can't drink from their own pesticide-poisoned wells.
I've sat at kitchen tables in Pennsylvania with parents working every hour God gives them to afford a home of their own, only to get outbid by hedge funds making cash offers.
I've worked out with veterans who served in foreign wars with honor, only to come home to a country bankrupted by those wars.
I've eaten with small business owners who had to board up their dreams as Amazon cashed in.
I've talked with moms from Nevada to New Hampshire, who lie awake at night juggling unpayable bills, choosing between gasoline and groceries. I've met senior citizens who cut their pills in two to stretch out their prescriptions.
I've pulled dead fish from rivers clogged with chemical run-off and I’ve read stories to children devastated by chronic disease.
It can look pretty dark, all these people cycling from despair to rage and back to despair again. This country sits atop a bubbling cauldron of fury. Americans are angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor.
But I’ve also seen hope. I’ve traveled millions of American miles in my career. And, to quote Tennyson, “I am a part of all whom I have met.”
For 40 years Americans across the country have fortified me with their courage and idealism.
But this year, I have witnessed an upwelling of optimism such as I have never seen in my lifetime.
Optimism is not the same as denial. We have to acknowledge the truth. We face a decaying infrastructure, and record levels of addiction, depression, and chronic disease. We face entrenched political corruption and an inequality of wealth not seen in a hundred years.
But the good news is that finally, people are fed up. Something is stirring that says, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
People stop me everywhere I go, at airports and hotels and on the street, and remind me that this country is ready for a history-making change. They are ready to reclaim their freedom and independence.
And that is why I am here today. I am here to declare myself as an independent candidate for President of the United States.
And that’s not all. I am here to join all of you to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government.
We declare independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists.
We declare independence from the mercenary media that fortifies corporate orthodoxies, and urges us to hate our neighbors and fear our friends.
We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses.
We declare our independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776.
How can we guard life when for-profit corporations have captured the public agencies that are supposed to protect us?
How can we enjoy liberty when a surveillance state seeks to hide the truth and quash dissent?
And how can we pursue happiness when debt and low wages imprison so many of our nation’s families?
And so I have come here to declare our independence from the tyranny of corruption which robs us of affordable lives, belief in our future, and respect for each other.
But to do that, I must first declare my own independence. Independence from the Democratic Party and independence from all parties.
I haven’t made this decision lightly. It is painful for me to let go of the party of my uncles, my father, of my grandfather and of both of my great-grandfathers — John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Boston’s first Irish Catholic mayor, and Patrick Kennedy, a Boston ward boss, who together, launched my family’s political dynasty more than a century ago.
But MY sacrifice is nothing compared to the risk our founding fathers took when they signed the Declaration of Independence 247 years ago right over there.
THEY knew that if their revolution failed, every last one of them would be hanged. They chose to place everything on the line.
When John Adams put his pen down after adding his signature to the Declaration, he turned to those present and said, “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, from this day on, I’m with my country.”
I make that same pledge today, so that I may stand before you as every leader should — free of partisan allegiance and backroom deals — a servant only to my conscience, to my creator, and to you.
Today, we are turning a new page in American politics.
There HAVE been independent candidates before. But this time is different. This time, the Independent is going to win.
Three-fourths of Americans believe President Biden is too old to govern effectively. President Trump faces multiple civil and criminal trials. Both have favorability ratings deep in negative territory. That is what two-party politics has given us And that is why we need to pry loose the hammerlock of corrupt power over Washington D.C. and make this nation ours again.
But there is a sacrifice that everyone, including myself, has to make if we are to unite America.
We will have to surrender a kind of political addiction that is at the root of our divisions. It is the addiction to taking sides. Our nation’s renewal begins with listening to each other again — with respect.
Only then will we be able to step outside our tired, stuck debates.
We will ask the questions no one thought to ask. We will discover solutions that were right in front of our face. We will listen, not just to the other side, but to those apart from any side.
In a two-sided conflict, both parties have a kind of mutual dependency. Each depends on the other to define themselves as the good guys, in contrast to the other side, who are, of course, the bad guys. Well, if you are Team Good, then you’ll do anything, however unscrupulous, to defeat Team Evil.
And that’s why we have seen both parties sacrifice their own values — and the canons of democracy — in an all-out battle for power.
In the war against Evil, any means justifies the end. The result is that you become evil yourself. The child obsessed with hating a parent becomes that parent.
As I’ve surrendered my attachment to taking sides, I’ve been able to listen with new ears to people with whom I disagree, and see solutions that would otherwise have been invisible.
I’ll give you an example. Six months ago, I thought that an open border was a humanitarian policy, and that sealing the border meant you were a xenophobe or perhaps even a racist. I was wrong.
How did I learn I was wrong?
It wasn’t just that I listened to the other side. It was when I actually visited the border and listened to the people who weren’t on either side.
My views changed as I spoke to border patrol officers, to local officials, to aid workers, and to the migrants themselves.
I saw that no one party has a monopoly on wisdom, and no simplistic narrative contains the whole truth.
My promise to you as President is that on every issue, I will listen to stakeholders from every side and beyond any side.
I will uphold MY moral convictions absolutely, but I will also hold my opinions lightly.
I will look at the evidence and the arguments, and choose not the easy path, not the established path, but the right path.
In making an independent run for President, I take inspiration from the one other President who was not a member of a political party. That President was George Washington.
In his farewell address, Washington issued a prescient warning about the disastrous potential of party politics.
Inevitably, he said, political parties will be taken over by a “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled” minority who will serve the interests of the party rather than the interests of the nation and “usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Washington’s dire prediction has certainly come true.
I intend to wrest the reins from both parties and return them to the American people.
For years, pundits have been asking, “How do we get young people to engage in politics?” These experts are asking the wrong question.
The problem isn’t the young people. The problem is what my generation has allowed politics to become.
The millennials and Gen Z are repelled by the toxicity, the pettiness, and, more than any of that, by the dishonesty.
They crave authenticity. So no, the problem isn’t the young people. The problem is the politics.
I am committed to inaugurating a politics worthy of their engagement.
I want to share with you a hopeful sign. I am proud to say, my supporters include pro-lifers and pro-choicers.
They include climate activists and climate skeptics.
They include the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
They include people on both sides of our culture war.
Why? Because more and more Americans are beginning to understand, that for the good of the country, one cannot insist on getting one’s way on every issue.
They understand that people can disagree and still respect each other.
You can be pro-choice, and not think that pro-lifers are woman-hating zealots. You can support the Second Amendment, and not think gun control advocates are totalitarians who hate freedom.
This is what I mean by independence. It’s more than being independent of the two existing parties. It is also independence from tribal thinking. It is freedom from the reflex of taking sides.
Instead of “Which side are you on?” I’m going to ask, What do you care about? What do your children need? What is it like to be you? Because, our country is never going heal if the formula is for one-half of the population to beat the other in pitched battle.
I am happy to say, the old political alignments are dissolving.
Right and left have become all mixed up anyhow. It used to be the DEMOCRATIC Party that opposed censorship.
It was the Democratic Party that wanted to rein in the military and the CIA.
It was the Democratic Party that fought corporate influence.
Remember when Wall Street and the big corporations all supported the Republicans?
Who is liberal now, and who is conservative? Who is left and who is right?
These labels make less and less sense. Yet out of habit, we group ourselves around the empty husks of old alignments and threadbare ideologies.
But now that habit is breaking down. That’s why half of the electorate no longer identifies with any political party, and 63% of Americans want an independent to run for President.
The outer structures of the parties still dominate the political landscape, but they’ve hollowed out from within like a building ridden with termites.
What kind of new political structures might emerge from their ruins? What will politics look like when it’s no longer us-versus-them?
American democracy should be more than just picking between two candidates anointed by shadowy institutions.
Big Oil funds the Republicans. Big Tech funds the Democrats. Big Pharma and the military contractors make sure to donate to both.
Instead of two parties, we have a uniparty, a monster with two faces loudly bickering with itself as it lumbers over a cliff.
At the bottom of that cliff lies the destruction of our country.
Neither party has offered meaningful resistance to the endless wars that have sucked dry our wealth.
Neither has done anything to reverse the erosion of the middle class.
Both are powerless to rein in our exploding deficits.
They have contributed equally to the corporate giveaways, the corruption in Washington, and the surveillance state.
Yes, there are good and honest people within both parties, even among their leadership. But the system itself is hopelessly corrupt.
Now let me tell you what an independent Presidency will look like.
Because I am independent of the military contractors, I will be able to pursue a foreign policy of peace and diplomacy.
Because I am independent of wealthy donors, I will be able to close the loopholes and giveaways that bloat our budget.
Because I am independent of Wall Street, I will be able to rescue debtors instead of banks.
Because I am independent of the big polluters, I will be able to clean up our soil, air, and water.
Because I am independent of the corporations, I’ll be able to unravel the capture of our federal agencies.
And because I am independent of the two political parties, I will be able to enact bold policies that are outside the partisan conversation.
Let me be clear though, being independent of the two political parties is not to be their enemy.
Dogmatic opposition is just as much a form of dependency as dogmatic loyalty.
As President, I will work with officials from both parties who join with me in serving the nation rather than their narrow partisan advantage.
Every President enters office talking about uniting the nation and working with people from the other party. None of them ever does. They can’t. They are already on a side.
Well, I’m not going to have that problem. I’m going to build coalitions from both sides of the aisle.
What that means is that members of Congress will start working together across party lines in ways we’ve barely seen for a generation.
I promise you, it is going to be hard to tell whether our administration is right or left.
Is it right or left to support small farms?
Is it right or left to pull back from the brink of hot war with Russia?
Is it right or left to implement a tamper-proof election system that also guarantees that no one is denied a vote?
Locked in their habitual debates, the two parties are often blind to commonsense solutions.
This formula has left them barely able to govern. Practically every year, we verge on default or government shutdown. And that’s just the most obvious example of the paralysis of our two-party system.
The system runs on inertia, year after year, decade after decade. It’s like a runaway bus full of teenagers fighting about who should take the wheel, not realizing that the driver merely follows the GPS set by the crooked insiders and corporate lobbyists.
I’m not just going to take the wheel. I’m going to reboot the GPS. And do you know who is going to set the destination? You are.
Because as I have traveled this great nation, I have listened to your hopes for its future. Together we will set the GPS toward the promise of America that Jonathan Winthrop foresaw from the deck of the ship Arbella in 1630.
He predicted that we would become an exemplary nation, a city on a hill, a lamp to all the other nations of the world.
We came close to fulfilling that vision post World War II, and it lives on today as an ideal.
It is an America with a prosperous middle class, where if you work hard, you can afford a house, take a summer vacation, and put something aside for retirement.
It is an America with an education system that is the envy of the world.
It is an America that treasures and preserves its stunning natural beauty.
It is an America with incorruptible regulatory agencies and dedicated public servants.
It is a bastion of the rights enshrined in its Constitution. And it is a champion of peace and freedom that the whole world looks to for moral leadership.
That is the America that is possible when we declare independence from the deadlocked party establishment.
That’s the America that is possible when we declare independence from the war machine that devours a trillion dollars a year.
That’s the America that’s possible when we stop fighting each other.
And that’s the vision of America I will serve when I become President of the United States.
The media pundits will tell you we have no chance.
They say my only impact will be to draw votes from other candidates.
The Democrats are terrified I’ll spoil the election for President Biden. The Republicans fear I’ll spoil it for President Trump. The truth is — they’re both right!
But only their inside-the-beltway myopia deludes them into thinking we have no chance to win.
I've seen the polls that they won't show you.
I've sat at the kitchen tables they don’t bother to visit.
I’ve shaken hands with tens of thousands of Americans over the past six months. And I can tell you, our campaign has ignited a movement that has been smoldering for years, a movement to reclaim democracy and resurrect the promise of our republic.
That’s the real reason the party elites and the Washington insiders are terrified of my candidacy.
They recognize an authentic challenge to their power when they see one.
There have been anti-establishment candidates before, but none who understand how to get that job done.
Unlike President Trump, I’ve been fighting corporate corruption and suing government agencies for 40 years.
I know how they work and I know how to clean them up.
And unlike any President since 1963, I will stand up to the military-industrial complex.
I will cash in the peace dividend, and bring our troops home with honor. I will rebuild America’s strength from the inside out.
What really terrifies the elites, though, is not me. It is what I represent—a populist movement that defies the left-right division.
I am merely the bowsprit of a ship that will cut through the armadas of corruption, secrecy, and lies.
Except for the small minority of public officials who are actually corrupt, I am no enemy to the people in the two-party establishment, because guess what? They don’t believe in it anymore either.
They don’t believe their own posturing. They don’t believe their own rhetoric.
That’s why so many public figures, Democrats and Republicans alike, have told me confidentially, “I can’t support you publicly, but I really hope you win.”
They, too, want liberation from the system that has captured them.
Isn’t that what we all want? Liberation from the system that robs us of our wealth, our health, our hope, our patriotism, our ideals, and our sense of ourselves as a good and capable people.
Is that kind of freedom possible? Is the healing of our divided nation possible?
If we wait for someone else to liberate us and unite us, then no, it is not possible.
It becomes possible only when we believe it and take action.
People ask me, “Yes, but can you win?” I want to turn the question back to you. Will our movement win?
Will our movement to restore democracy, health, prosperity, freedom, and peace win?
I’m not asking you to make a prediction. I asking you to make a choice. It will happen if and when we the people choose it.
Democracy does not come as a gift when oppressive authorities finally relent.
Democracy comes when the people choose to exercise their power.
And so I ask you today to join me in exercising the sovereign choice of a democratic people. Are we ready to win?
That is what the new Declaration of Independence sounds like. Remember this moment. We've got a year and a month till the election. Let's go take our country back.
God bless you and God bless our soon-to-be Re-United States of America.
Dean Phillips 2024 Announcement Tweet
I am running for President as a Democrat in 2024.
My campaign will be about four main things.
First and foremost, it will be about the economy. We have to make life more affordable for the middle class, which is the issue that voters care about most. We need to bring down the cost of living and make life affordable again.
As part of making life more affordable, we have to celebrate success. America should be the most prosperous country in the world, and we need to be both pro-business and pro-worker to get there.
Second, it will be about safety. If people don’t feel safe in their communities, not much else matters. We have a drug crisis and a mental health crisis in this country; it’s taking a horrible toll on individual as well as their communities. We have to address it.
Third, my campaign will be about the generational change the country wants and policies that invest in our future, our young people.
And finally, it will be about listening to each other to get back to a less divisive political environment. There’s government reform that will help with this too—we need term limits, campaign finance reform, and things like bipartisan cabinets.
I promised my daughters when Trump won in 2016 that I’d stand up and do something about it, so I ran for Congress and am now on my third term.
I didn’t set out to enter this race. But it looks like on our current course, the Democrats will lose and Trump will be our President again. President Biden is a good man and someone I tremendously respect. I understand why other Democrats don’t want to run against him, and why we are here. This is a last-minute campaign, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and courage is an important value to me.
If President Biden is the Democratic nominee, we face an unacceptable risk of Trump being back in the White House. I know this campaign is a long shot, but that is why I think it is important and worth doing.
As I’ve been listening to voters the past few weeks, I’ve been really heartened by the support, and believe we can win both this primary and general election.
People know in their hearts that it’s time for a change. We can do this together. Everyone's Invited!
@deanbphillips
RFK Jr. Declares Independent Run for President
PHILADELPHIA, PA—OCT. 9—Today in front of thousands of supporters on the lawn of Independence Hall, Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a historic announcement, declaring himself an independent candidate for President of the United States of America.
He joined his voice with all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful, to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
Today, he declared his independence from the corporations that have hijacked both parties and our government.
He declared independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists who now outnumber members of Congress 20 to 1.
He declared independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
In his speech, he noted it is painful to leave a party his family helped found, but he had concluded that there was no other choice in order to make real change for our country.
He declared independence “from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses. If left unchecked, they will commoditize our air, water, food, labor, and children, and turn the American Dream into desperation and dust.”
He declared his independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
In his speech, he noted that the independence he is declaring is “more than being independent of the two existing parties. It is also independence from tribal thinking. It is to be free of the reflex of taking sides. Instead of ‘Which side are you on?’ it asks, What do you care about? What do your children need? What are your troubles? Who do you love? Because, our country is never going heal if the only formula is for one half of the population to beat the other in pitched battle.”
Today, I Declared Myself an Independent Candidate for President
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.
OCT 9, 2023
Today, I declared myself an independent candidate for President of the United States of America.
And more than that, I joined my voice with all the people who are fed up and all the people who are hopeful, to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
Today, I declared my independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government to milk us for profit.
I declared independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists who now outnumber members of Congress 20 to 1.
I declared independence from the mercenary media that forever urges us to hate our neighbors and fear our friends.
I declared independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
And finally, I declared independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses. If left unchecked, they will commoditize our air, water, food, labor, and children, and turn the American Dream into desperation and dust.
I declared my independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
How can we guard life when for-profit corporations have captured the public agencies that are supposed to protect us? How can we enjoy liberty when a surveillance state seeks to hide the truth and quash dissent to preserve its power? And how can we pursue happiness when our nation's families are imprisoned by debt and hunger and jobs that will never pay the bills?
And so today I declared my independence from the tyranny of corruption which robs us of affordable lives, belief in our future, and respect for one another. And to do that, I had to declare my independence from the Democratic Party and independence from all parties.
robert f kennedy jr 100923 philadelphia
Read my entire speech below (as prepared):
Thank you, Lewis GrassRope, for that beautiful blessing. Lewis is a tribal elder from the Lower Brule Sioux, the grandson of a signer of the 1876 Fort Laramie treaty.
My father visited South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in May of 1968 and spent the entire day there. A local political operative cautioned him that they mustn’t keep the crowd of 20,000 waiting in Rapid City, commenting that “Indians don’t vote.” My father told him sharply, “You don’t understand your candidate.” When he saw a Sioux family living in the burned-out heap of an automobile, he wept. Word of his tears swept across the reservation and on June 5, Sioux voters turned out in historic numbers and made my father victorious in South Dakota.
On my many trips to Pine Ridge over the decades, the elders always take great pride in recounting that almost 100% of the Sioux vote went to RFK. Only three votes in Pine Ridge were tallied against him. They always end the story by saying, “We are still looking for those guys.”
It is a hopeful sign that we now celebrate Indigenous People’s Day. It shows that we are ready as a nation to tell untold histories and to finally include the dispossessed people who have long languished on the margins.
Today, as corrupt powers have overtaken our government, the ranks of the dispossessed have swelled beyond indigenous and Black people to include tens of millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck in financial desperation. The dispossessed also include the legions of the chronically ill, the addicted, the depressed, and the 80% of the country that can no longer afford a normal middle-class lifestyle.
A rising tide of discontent is swamping our country.
There is danger in this discontent, yet there is also promise.
The danger is that demagogues will hijack it toward fascism. Or, that our rulers will divert it onto an external enemy to start yet another war.
But the biggest danger, which we’ve seen unfold in real-time, is that we will direct our discontent at each other. As Abraham Lincoln observed, quoting Jesus Christ, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” A polarized nation is easy for corrupt powers to manipulate and strip of its wealth, its freedoms, and its dignity.
Those are the dangers, so, what is the promise? The promise is of reunion. We are told that our nation is hopelessly divided. But I’ve found it less divided than it seems.
The most hateful voices are usually the loudest. But quietly, Americans are looking with disgust at the vitriol, the name-calling, and the venom. They want it to end. They want us to get along.
The loud, hateful controversies obscure vast areas of agreement.
Most of us agree that we should take care of our veterans at home and seek peace abroad. We agree that teachers deserve decent salaries, and that housing should be affordable, and that corporations should pay their fair share.
We agree that we want a clean environment and wholesome communities for our kids.
Yet these universal yearnings stand alongside a broad agreement that our nation has lost its way.
Americans are weary of the culture war, the phony slogans of politicians, and the partisan blame game that has us all at each other’s throats.
And people suspect that the divisions are deliberately orchestrated, and that getting us to hate each other is part of the scam.
And they’re fed up with being fooled, and they are ready to take back their power.
There is no other explanation for the enthusiasm I see every day in the people flocking to our campaign. Sometimes it gives me goosebumps. Their minds may tell them the situation is hopeless, that the elites are too entrenched, that the corruption is too deep. But their hearts say otherwise. I know that because I meet scores of people every day, even those in the hardest circumstances, who haven’t given up on America.
I've walked the picket lines In Los Angeles with hotel workers who live in their cars because they can’t afford rent.
I've visited mobile health clinics on the back roads of Georgia, where families get their medical care from traveling nurses in the back of a bus.
I've planted gardens in the food deserts of Watts and Cleveland.
I’ve sat amongst migrant children at the border, and I’ve met social workers and doctors in Yuma who treat these immigrants with kindness and heartbreaking generosity.
I've walked the fields with farmers in Kansas who can't drink from their own pesticide-poisoned wells.
I've sat at kitchen tables in Pennsylvania with parents working every hour God gives them to afford a home of their own, only to get outbid by hedge funds making cash offers.
I've worked out with veterans who served in foreign wars with honor, only to come home to a country bankrupted by those wars.
I've eaten with small business owners who had to board up their dreams as Amazon cashed in.
I've talked with moms from Nevada to New Hampshire, who lie awake at night juggling unpayable bills, choosing between gasoline and groceries. I've met senior citizens who cut their pills in two to stretch out their prescriptions.
I've pulled dead fish from rivers clogged with chemical run-off and I’ve read stories to children devastated by chronic disease.
It can look pretty dark, all these people cycling from despair to rage and back to despair again. This country sits atop a bubbling cauldron of fury. Americans are angry at being left out, left behind, swindled, cheated, and belittled by a smug elite that has rigged the system in its favor.
But I’ve also seen hope. I’ve traveled millions of American miles in my career. And, to quote Tennyson, “I am a part of all whom I have met.”
For 40 years Americans across the country have fortified me with their courage and idealism.
But this year, I have witnessed an upwelling of optimism such as I have never seen in my lifetime.
Optimism is not the same as denial. We have to acknowledge the truth. We face a decaying infrastructure, and record levels of addiction, depression, and chronic disease. We face entrenched political corruption and an inequality of wealth not seen in a hundred years.
But the good news is that finally, people are fed up. Something is stirring that says, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
People stop me everywhere I go, at airports and hotels and on the street, and remind me that this country is ready for a history-making change. They are ready to reclaim their freedom and independence.
And that is why I am here today. I am here to declare myself as an independent candidate for President of the United States.
And that’s not all. I am here to join all of you to make a new Declaration of Independence for our entire nation.
We declare independence from the corporations that have hijacked our government.
We declare independence from Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the military contractors, and their lobbyists.
We declare independence from the mercenary media that fortifies corporate orthodoxies, and urges us to hate our neighbors and fear our friends.
We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and amplify our divisions.
And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties and the corrupt interests that dominate them, and the entire rigged system of rancor and rage, corruption and lies, that has turned government officials into indentured servants of their corporate bosses.
We declare our independence from these corrupting powers because they are incompatible with the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that our original Declaration of Independence invoked in 1776.
How can we guard life when for-profit corporations have captured the public agencies that are supposed to protect us?
How can we enjoy liberty when a surveillance state seeks to hide the truth and quash dissent?
And how can we pursue happiness when debt and low wages imprison so many of our nation’s families?
And so I have come here to declare our independence from the tyranny of corruption which robs us of affordable lives, belief in our future, and respect for each other.
But to do that, I must first declare my own independence. Independence from the Democratic Party and independence from all parties.
I haven’t made this decision lightly. It is painful for me to let go of the party of my uncles, my father, of my grandfather and of both of my great-grandfathers — John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Boston’s first Irish Catholic mayor, and Patrick Kennedy, a Boston ward boss, who together, launched my family’s political dynasty more than a century ago.
But MY sacrifice is nothing compared to the risk our founding fathers took when they signed the Declaration of Independence 247 years ago right over there.
THEY knew that if their revolution failed, every last one of them would be hanged. They chose to place everything on the line.
When John Adams put his pen down after adding his signature to the Declaration, he turned to those present and said, “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, from this day on, I’m with my country.”
I make that same pledge today, so that I may stand before you as every leader should — free of partisan allegiance and backroom deals — a servant only to my conscience, to my creator, and to you.
Today, we are turning a new page in American politics.
There HAVE been independent candidates before. But this time is different. This time, the Independent is going to win.
Three-fourths of Americans believe President Biden is too old to govern effectively. President Trump faces multiple civil and criminal trials. Both have favorability ratings deep in negative territory. That is what two-party politics has given us And that is why we need to pry loose the hammerlock of corrupt power over Washington D.C. and make this nation ours again.
But there is a sacrifice that everyone, including myself, has to make if we are to unite America.
We will have to surrender a kind of political addiction that is at the root of our divisions. It is the addiction to taking sides. Our nation’s renewal begins with listening to each other again — with respect.
Only then will we be able to step outside our tired, stuck debates.
We will ask the questions no one thought to ask. We will discover solutions that were right in front of our face. We will listen, not just to the other side, but to those apart from any side.
In a two-sided conflict, both parties have a kind of mutual dependency. Each depends on the other to define themselves as the good guys, in contrast to the other side, who are, of course, the bad guys. Well, if you are Team Good, then you’ll do anything, however unscrupulous, to defeat Team Evil.
And that’s why we have seen both parties sacrifice their own values — and the canons of democracy — in an all-out battle for power.
In the war against Evil, any means justifies the end. The result is that you become evil yourself. The child obsessed with hating a parent becomes that parent.
As I’ve surrendered my attachment to taking sides, I’ve been able to listen with new ears to people with whom I disagree, and see solutions that would otherwise have been invisible.
I’ll give you an example. Six months ago, I thought that an open border was a humanitarian policy, and that sealing the border meant you were a xenophobe or perhaps even a racist. I was wrong.
How did I learn I was wrong?
It wasn’t just that I listened to the other side. It was when I actually visited the border and listened to the people who weren’t on either side.
My views changed as I spoke to border patrol officers, to local officials, to aid workers, and to the migrants themselves.
I saw that no one party has a monopoly on wisdom, and no simplistic narrative contains the whole truth.
My promise to you as President is that on every issue, I will listen to stakeholders from every side and beyond any side.
I will uphold MY moral convictions absolutely, but I will also hold my opinions lightly.
I will look at the evidence and the arguments, and choose not the easy path, not the established path, but the right path.
In making an independent run for President, I take inspiration from the one other President who was not a member of a political party. That President was George Washington.
In his farewell address, Washington issued a prescient warning about the disastrous potential of party politics.
Inevitably, he said, political parties will be taken over by a “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled” minority who will serve the interests of the party rather than the interests of the nation and “usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Washington’s dire prediction has certainly come true.
I intend to wrest the reins from both parties and return them to the American people.
For years, pundits have been asking, “How do we get young people to engage in politics?” These experts are asking the wrong question.
The problem isn’t the young people. The problem is what my generation has allowed politics to become.
The millennials and Gen Z are repelled by the toxicity, the pettiness, and, more than any of that, by the dishonesty.
They crave authenticity. So no, the problem isn’t the young people. The problem is the politics.
I am committed to inaugurating a politics worthy of their engagement.
I want to share with you a hopeful sign. I am proud to say, my supporters include pro-lifers and pro-choicers.
They include climate activists and climate skeptics.
They include the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
They include people on both sides of our culture war.
Why? Because more and more Americans are beginning to understand, that for the good of the country, one cannot insist on getting one’s way on every issue.
They understand that people can disagree and still respect each other.
You can be pro-choice, and not think that pro-lifers are woman-hating zealots. You can support the Second Amendment, and not think gun control advocates are totalitarians who hate freedom.
This is what I mean by independence. It’s more than being independent of the two existing parties. It is also independence from tribal thinking. It is freedom from the reflex of taking sides.
Instead of “Which side are you on?” I’m going to ask, What do you care about? What do your children need? What is it like to be you? Because, our country is never going heal if the formula is for one-half of the population to beat the other in pitched battle.
I am happy to say, the old political alignments are dissolving.
Right and left have become all mixed up anyhow. It used to be the DEMOCRATIC Party that opposed censorship.
It was the Democratic Party that wanted to rein in the military and the CIA.
It was the Democratic Party that fought corporate influence.
Remember when Wall Street and the big corporations all supported the Republicans?
Who is liberal now, and who is conservative? Who is left and who is right?
These labels make less and less sense. Yet out of habit, we group ourselves around the empty husks of old alignments and threadbare ideologies.
But now that habit is breaking down. That’s why half of the electorate no longer identifies with any political party, and 63% of Americans want an independent to run for President.
The outer structures of the parties still dominate the political landscape, but they’ve hollowed out from within like a building ridden with termites.
What kind of new political structures might emerge from their ruins? What will politics look like when it’s no longer us-versus-them?
American democracy should be more than just picking between two candidates anointed by shadowy institutions.
Big Oil funds the Republicans. Big Tech funds the Democrats. Big Pharma and the military contractors make sure to donate to both.
Instead of two parties, we have a uniparty, a monster with two faces loudly bickering with itself as it lumbers over a cliff.
At the bottom of that cliff lies the destruction of our country.
Neither party has offered meaningful resistance to the endless wars that have sucked dry our wealth.
Neither has done anything to reverse the erosion of the middle class.
Both are powerless to rein in our exploding deficits.
They have contributed equally to the corporate giveaways, the corruption in Washington, and the surveillance state.
Yes, there are good and honest people within both parties, even among their leadership. But the system itself is hopelessly corrupt.
Now let me tell you what an independent Presidency will look like.
Because I am independent of the military contractors, I will be able to pursue a foreign policy of peace and diplomacy.
Because I am independent of wealthy donors, I will be able to close the loopholes and giveaways that bloat our budget.
Because I am independent of Wall Street, I will be able to rescue debtors instead of banks.
Because I am independent of the big polluters, I will be able to clean up our soil, air, and water.
Because I am independent of the corporations, I’ll be able to unravel the capture of our federal agencies.
And because I am independent of the two political parties, I will be able to enact bold policies that are outside the partisan conversation.
Let me be clear though, being independent of the two political parties is not to be their enemy.
Dogmatic opposition is just as much a form of dependency as dogmatic loyalty.
As President, I will work with officials from both parties who join with me in serving the nation rather than their narrow partisan advantage.
Every President enters office talking about uniting the nation and working with people from the other party. None of them ever does. They can’t. They are already on a side.
Well, I’m not going to have that problem. I’m going to build coalitions from both sides of the aisle.
What that means is that members of Congress will start working together across party lines in ways we’ve barely seen for a generation.
I promise you, it is going to be hard to tell whether our administration is right or left.
Is it right or left to support small farms?
Is it right or left to pull back from the brink of hot war with Russia?
Is it right or left to implement a tamper-proof election system that also guarantees that no one is denied a vote?
Locked in their habitual debates, the two parties are often blind to commonsense solutions.
This formula has left them barely able to govern. Practically every year, we verge on default or government shutdown. And that’s just the most obvious example of the paralysis of our two-party system.
The system runs on inertia, year after year, decade after decade. It’s like a runaway bus full of teenagers fighting about who should take the wheel, not realizing that the driver merely follows the GPS set by the crooked insiders and corporate lobbyists.
I’m not just going to take the wheel. I’m going to reboot the GPS. And do you know who is going to set the destination? You are.
Because as I have traveled this great nation, I have listened to your hopes for its future. Together we will set the GPS toward the promise of America that Jonathan Winthrop foresaw from the deck of the ship Arbella in 1630.
He predicted that we would become an exemplary nation, a city on a hill, a lamp to all the other nations of the world.
We came close to fulfilling that vision post World War II, and it lives on today as an ideal.
It is an America with a prosperous middle class, where if you work hard, you can afford a house, take a summer vacation, and put something aside for retirement.
It is an America with an education system that is the envy of the world.
It is an America that treasures and preserves its stunning natural beauty.
It is an America with incorruptible regulatory agencies and dedicated public servants.
It is a bastion of the rights enshrined in its Constitution. And it is a champion of peace and freedom that the whole world looks to for moral leadership.
That is the America that is possible when we declare independence from the deadlocked party establishment.
That’s the America that is possible when we declare independence from the war machine that devours a trillion dollars a year.
That’s the America that’s possible when we stop fighting each other.
And that’s the vision of America I will serve when I become President of the United States.
The media pundits will tell you we have no chance.
They say my only impact will be to draw votes from other candidates.
The Democrats are terrified I’ll spoil the election for President Biden. The Republicans fear I’ll spoil it for President Trump. The truth is — they’re both right!
But only their inside-the-beltway myopia deludes them into thinking we have no chance to win.
I've seen the polls that they won't show you.
I've sat at the kitchen tables they don’t bother to visit.
I’ve shaken hands with tens of thousands of Americans over the past six months. And I can tell you, our campaign has ignited a movement that has been smoldering for years, a movement to reclaim democracy and resurrect the promise of our republic.
That’s the real reason the party elites and the Washington insiders are terrified of my candidacy.
They recognize an authentic challenge to their power when they see one.
There have been anti-establishment candidates before, but none who understand how to get that job done.
Unlike President Trump, I’ve been fighting corporate corruption and suing government agencies for 40 years.
I know how they work and I know how to clean them up.
And unlike any President since 1963, I will stand up to the military-industrial complex.
I will cash in the peace dividend, and bring our troops home with honor. I will rebuild America’s strength from the inside out.
What really terrifies the elites, though, is not me. It is what I represent—a populist movement that defies the left-right division.
I am merely the bowsprit of a ship that will cut through the armadas of corruption, secrecy, and lies.
Except for the small minority of public officials who are actually corrupt, I am no enemy to the people in the two-party establishment, because guess what? They don’t believe in it anymore either.
They don’t believe their own posturing. They don’t believe their own rhetoric.
That’s why so many public figures, Democrats and Republicans alike, have told me confidentially, “I can’t support you publicly, but I really hope you win.”
They, too, want liberation from the system that has captured them.
Isn’t that what we all want? Liberation from the system that robs us of our wealth, our health, our hope, our patriotism, our ideals, and our sense of ourselves as a good and capable people.
Is that kind of freedom possible? Is the healing of our divided nation possible?
If we wait for someone else to liberate us and unite us, then no, it is not possible.
It becomes possible only when we believe it and take action.
People ask me, “Yes, but can you win?” I want to turn the question back to you. Will our movement win?
Will our movement to restore democracy, health, prosperity, freedom, and peace win?
I’m not asking you to make a prediction. I asking you to make a choice. It will happen if and when we the people choose it.
Democracy does not come as a gift when oppressive authorities finally relent.
Democracy comes when the people choose to exercise their power.
And so I ask you today to join me in exercising the sovereign choice of a democratic people. Are we ready to win?
That is what the new Declaration of Independence sounds like. Remember this moment. We've got a year and a month till the election. Let's go take our country back.
God bless you and God bless our soon-to-be Re-United States of America.
Will Hurd Announces 2024 Bid for President
Today, former U.S. Congressman Will Hurd (R-TX) released the following video and statement after filing paperwork formally launching his bid for the Republican nomination for president and announcing his candidacy on CBS Mornings.
“I'm running for president because our country is facing once-in-a-generation problems right now,” Hurd said. “But instead of talking about solutions, we're looking to the past. The Republican Party can and should be the party of the future. We need a forward-looking leader who is willing to tackle the most pressing problems facing our nation. But, in order to accomplish anything, we need to bring people together. Together, we can build a brighter future—one where common sense prevails, where unity triumphs, and where our great nation flourishes.”
Full transcript of Will Hurd 2024 launch video:
The soul of our country is under attack. Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American Dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities, and liberals do nothing.
President Biden can't solve these problems—or won't. And if we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump—who lost the House, the Senate, and the White House—we all know Joe Biden will win again.
Republicans deserve better. America deserves better. It's common sense. Common sense says we're better together. I know it. You know it. There's more that unites us than divides us. And America needs common sense during these complicated times.
I’m Will Hurd, and for the past 20 years, I've been on the front lines of the most pressing fights facing our nation. I hunted down terrorists in the Middle East after 9/11. In Congress, I fought to lower taxes, secure our border, and provide more opportunities for the middle class. I've worked at the highest levels of business to harness technology and innovation for the future of America.
These experiences have shown me that this moment, this election, has never mattered more. That's why I'm running for the Republican nomination for the President of the United States of America.
I envision an America where the economy thrives because we harness technologies like artificial intelligence to grow American jobs, not unemployment. An America where every child, regardless of location or age, has access to a safe, world-class education. An America that acknowledges science, addresses mental health, and is inclusive and understanding.
It's not a given that this vision for America will happen, but it can if we focus on our timeless principles and limitless potential—not self-interested politics. As president, I'll put our American security and prosperity first, and I'll give us the common sense leadership America so desperately needs. I'm Will Hurd. I'm running for President, and I approve this message.
Mike Pence for President Releases Campaign Launch Video, "Best Days"
PENCE FOR PRESIDENT RELEASES CAMPAIGN LAUNCH VIDEO
Mike Pence for President today released its campaign launch video, "Best Days," which highlights Mike Pence's humble roots in the Heartland, traces his years in public service, and introduces Pence's positive vision for the future that will confront the country's current challenges and bring America back. As a former talk radio host, Pence narrates the entirety of the video.
MIKE PENCE: The land of opportunity, beacon of democracy, the shining city on a hill. Land of the free, home of the brave. The United States of America.
As a son of the heartland, grandson of an Irish immigrant, those aren’t just words, my family has lived the American dream.
I had the great honor to serve in Congress, as governor, and as your Vice President, and I’ll always be proud of the progress we made together for a stronger, more prosperous America.
But today, our country is in a lot of trouble. President Joe Biden and the Radical Left have weakened America at home and abroad. The American Dream is being crushed under runaway inflation, wages are dropping, recession is looming, our southern border is under siege, and the enemies of freedom are on the march around the world. And worse still, timeless American values are under assault as never before.
We’re better than this. We can turn this country around. But different times call for different leadership. Today our party and our country need a leader that will appeal, as Lincoln said “to the better angels of our nature.” I have long believed "to whom much is given much will be required," my family and I have been blessed beyond measure with opportunities to serve this nation, it would be easy to stay on the sidelines, but that’s not how I was raised. That’s why today before God and my family, I’m announcing I’m running for President of the United States.
We can bring this country back, we can defend our nation and secure our border, we can revive our economy and put our nation back on a path to a balanced budget, defend our liberties, and give America a new beginning for life.
President Reagan described us as “a shining city on a hill,” and above all he called on Americans to renew optimism and believe in themselves again, to believe in each other. Every time our nation has produced leadership that has called upon this country to do hard things the American people have always risen to the challenge. And we will again. We just need government as good as our people to do it. I believe in the American people and I have faith God is not done with America yet and together we can bring this country back. And the best days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.
God bless you and God bless the United States of America.
Tim Scott Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech, Remarks as Prepared for Delivery, May 22, 2023, North Charleston, South Carolina
Full Prepared Remarks From Tim Scott's Major Announcement
NORTH CHARLESTON, SC - Below are Tim's Scott's full remarks as prepared for delivery:
"I am so happy to be back home in North Charleston.
I am so proud to be an American, aren’t you?
We live in the land where it is possible… for a kid raised in poverty by a single mother in a small apartment… to one day serve in the People’s House… and maybe even the White House.
This is the greatest country on God’s green Earth.
Today, I think back to my grandfather. A man born in 1921 in Salley, South Carolina; in the Deep South.
By the time he was in the third grade, his education was over. He was forced out of school and had to start picking cotton.
But he lived long enough to watch his grandson pick out a seat in Congress. That’s the evolution of the country we live in!
My family went from cotton to Congress in his lifetime. And it was possible because my grandfather had stubborn faith.
He had faith in God… faith in himself… and faith in what America would be.
He looked beyond the pain of his present and saw the promise of the future.
This Black man who struggled through the Jim Crow South believed then what some doubt now: In the goodness of America.
I was seven years old when my parents divorced. We moved in with my grandparents. My mother, my brother and I shared one bedroom in a 700-square-foot rental house.
But my grandfather said: 'Son — you can be bitter, or you can be better. But you can’t be both.'
He chose patriotism over pity. He focused on the windshield of life, not the rear-view mirror.
And today, I am living proof that America is the land of opportunity, not a land of oppression.
This isn’t just my story. It’s all of our stories.
The circumstances may be different, the details may change, but every one of us is here because of an American journey where there were obstacles… that became opportunities.
Pain… that revealed purpose.
If you believe it, say 'Amen'!
But under President Biden, our nation is retreating away from patriotism and faith.
The fewest people in 30 years believe kids today will have better lives than their parents.
And the radical left is pushing us into a culture of grievance instead of a culture of greatness.
My momma worked 16-hour days as a nurse’s aide — changing bedpans and rolling patients.
It was hard work. It was not glamorous.
But those 16-hour days put food on our table. And kept our lights on. They empowered her to move her boys out of a place filled with anger into a home full of love.
My mom’s work ethic taught me there is dignity in all work.
It’s why I know if you are able-bodied, you work! Period.
My momma said we could be victims or victors — and she chose victorious.
But under President Biden, our nation is retreating away from work and dignity.
Millions and millions of people have dropped out of the workforce entirely.
And the share of working-age men choosing to work is the lowest it has ever been.
Now, while my mom was working 16-hour days, I was busy feeling sorry for myself.
My mom was too busy. My father was absent. We didn’t have money for little treats.
I felt disillusioned and angry. I was a challenged young man who felt the weight of life accumulating on my shoulders.
But when I was about 15, I met John Moniz, a Chick-Fil-A operator.
John came into my life when I really needed a mentor. He started teaching me important life principles.
John showed me that having a job was good, but creating jobs would be even better.
He explained that having an income would determine my lifestyle, but creating a profit could change my community.
John taught me that anyone, from anywhere, at any time can succeed beyond their wildest imagination.
But first, I had to take responsibility for myself. He told me in the most loving way possible to look in the mirror and blame myself.
Don’t blame my mom who was working long hours. Don’t blame my dad who wasn’t there.
Because if I saw the problem in the mirror, then I could also see the promise.
I chose personal responsibility over resentment. I became the master of my fate.
But today, the Biden Administration has us retreating away from earned success, aspiration, and accountability.
He wants to make waitresses and mechanics pay the student loans of doctors and lawyers who make six figures.
This Administration has taxed, borrowed, and spent trillions of dollars trying to replace a hand up with handouts. All they bought us was crushing inflation that has devastated families like mine.
Like many poor families, we moved around. I’d been to four different elementary schools by the fourth grade.
My freshman year of high school, I almost failed out. I failed four subjects: English, Spanish, world geography, and civics.
For anyone who doesn’t know, civics is the study of politics. God has a sense of humor.
And after 10 years in the Senate, I know I’m not the only person in Washington D.C. who’s failed civics!
So that’s where I found my unhappy self.
My momma was a tireless encourager — still is. But when she saw those grades, she provided me a very different form of Southern encouragement!
I was thoroughly encouraged from about here, all the way to here.
I went to summer school. I caught up on classes. And I never failed another subject the rest of my life.
I started college on a small football scholarship at a Christian school.
That’s where I learned that Jesus was my life and football was just a game.
I found my true hope in the words of Ephesians 3:20 — in 'Him who is able to do exceedingly, abundantly, beyond all that we ask or imagine.'
And I graduated with my degree in Poli Sci right here from Charleston Southern University. Go Bucs!
I have lived the truth that education is the closest thing to magic in America.
But today, the far left has us retreating away from excellence in our schools.
Extreme liberals are letting Big Labor bosses trap millions of kids in failing schools.
They’re replacing education with indoctrination.
They spent COVID locking students out of the classroom, and now they’re locking kids out of their futures.
And in Biden’s America, crime is on the rise and law enforcement is in retreat. The far left is ending cash bail. They’re demonizing, demoralizing, and de-funding the police.
I grew up in neighborhoods alongside people who ended up incarcerated or in a cemetery. We needed more public safety, not less!
We cannot have innocent people at risk, police officers getting attacked and ambushed, and seniors locked in their homes in fear from sundown until sunup.
Joe Biden and the radical left are attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb.
And that is why I am announcing today that I am running for President of the United States of America!
tim scott 052223 home
They’re attacking our American values; our schools; our economy; our security.
But not on my watch!
I cannot stand by while this is done to America. She has done too much for me.
Our nation, our values, and our people are strong. But our President is weak.
America is not a nation in decline. But under Joe Biden, we have become a nation in retreat.
Retreating from our heritage and our history.
Retreating from personal responsibility and hard work.
Retreating from strength and security.
Even retreating from religious liberty and the worship of God himself.
They say opportunity in America is a myth and faith in America is a fraud.
But the truth of my life disproves their lies!
We are not in decline. We are in a Biden retreat.
So all we need to do is turn around.
On my first day as Commander-in-Chief, the strongest nation on Earth will stop retreating from our own southern border.
If you don’t control your back door, it’s not your house. And if our southern border is unsafe and insecure, it’s not our country.
Hundreds of people on the terrorist watch list are crossing our borders.
Chinese nationals are flooding into Mexico to break in.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing nothing while 70,000-plus Americans lose their lives to fentanyl. Every county in this nation is a border county.
The Left shut down your schools and churches in the name of slowing down a virus. But they won’t secure the border to protect your family from fentanyl.
When I am President, the drug cartels using Chinese labs and Mexican factories to kill Americans will cease to exist.
I will freeze their assets. I’ll build the wall. And I will let the world’s greatest military fight these terrorists — because that’s exactly what they are.
Security needs to start on our borders. But it doesn’t end there.
We have spent decades getting deeper and deeper in debt to the Chinese Communist Party.
Their goal is not just to surpass us. It is to beat us.
Proverbs 22:7 says 'the borrower is slave to the lender.'
It goes beyond just finances, though.
It’s about our supply chains. It’s about medicines, microchips, and critical minerals.
It’s about China buying American farmland, infiltrating our airspace, and tracking our kids.
It’s about President Xi siding with Putin and Iran.
America can win this competition. But Joe Biden can’t.
As President, I will rebuild a military so lethal and powerful that our adversaries will fear us and our allies will respect us.
My father — who is here with us today — and my brothers have 85 years of combined military service between them. When I am President, our servicemembers will have every tool they need, and our veterans will have every resource they deserve.
We will not try to be the world’s police force. But we will always defend our vital national interests and our people.
And we will win the next century by the strength of our economy. China started this new economic Cold War, but America will finish it.
I was a lead author of the Republican tax reform that slashed taxes for families, brought jobs and investment back from overseas, and created Opportunity Zones to inject private dollars into communities that have been left behind. We created high employment, low inflation, and fast wage growth for the working class.
That was one bill. Imagine what we’ll do with an entire agenda.
I will be the President who ramps up research and development, reclaims supply chains, and re-energizes our manufacturing base with Opportunity Zones 2.0 and an entire Made In America agenda.
I see an era of exponential innovation, where America leads the world with new breakthroughs.
Where new medical cures and cheaper drugs are lowering healthcare costs and lengthening our lives.
Where law enforcement has advanced equipment that makes them safer.
Where we have huge, new American factories, creating high-paying American jobs, running on plentiful and cheap American energy.
But America cannot be safe or secure if we sink into cultural quicksand here at home.
As President, I will rebuild and restore every rung of the ladder that helped me climb.
Because I want my American story to pale in comparison to yours.
As President I will motivate, inspire, and require every able-bodied citizen to take responsibility and go to work.
We will back the blue, secure our streets, and finally make it a federal crime to kill, ambush, or assault a cop in this country.
I will lead a revolution for excellence in our schools. Less C.R.T. and more A-B-Cs. I will not rest until every family has a choice, and every parent has a voice, and every child has a chance. And no child is forced to attend a failing school simply because they live in the wrong ZIP code.
And I will be the President who destroys the liberal lie that our country is evil.
Two years ago I spoke to the nation and said America is not a racist country.
We need to stop canceling our Founding Fathers and start celebrating them.
Finally — my grandfather’s stubborn faith was not just faith in the goodness of our nation. It was faith in the goodness of our God Himself.
I will be the President who stops the far left’s assault on our religious liberty. I will preserve one nation, Under God, indivisible — where we honor our Creator and respect every innocent life.
This is who we are! This is what our nation can be!
This is the freest and fairest land. Where you and I can go as high as our character, our grit, and our talent will take us.
I bear witness to that. I testify to that.
That’s why I’m the candidate the far left fears the most.
When I cut your taxes, they called me a prop.
When I re-funded the police, they called me a token.
When I pushed back on President Biden, they even called me the N-word.
I disrupt their narrative. I threaten their control. The truth of my life disproves their lies!
I will proclaim these truths from the highest mountaintop and I will do so from the deepest valley.
I will take our message to the boardroom and I will take it to the classroom.
I will take it to a gymnasium filled with friends and the inner-city church surrounded by skeptics.
I have lived the American dream. I have held the truth, the inalienable truth, that all men and women are created equal! And endowed by our Creator with the right to be free!
Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing.
Victimhood or victory?
Grievance or greatness?
I choose freedom and hope and opportunity.
Will you choose it with me? Will you join me as a messenger of hope, a missionary that the power of our ideas can change our nation again?
I will! God bless these United States of America."
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June 5, 2023
I am running for truth and justice as a presidential candidate for the People’s Party to reintroduce America to the best of itself - fighting to end poverty, mass incarceration, ending wars and ecological collapse, guaranteeing housing, health care, education and living wages for all!
Join the movement at http://CornelWest24.com!!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Dr. Cornel West’s campaign completes the transition to Green Party, gathering steam for a people-powered political rebellion.
Dr. Cornel West announced today that his campaign has completed the transition to the Green Party, with the goal of giving working people, the poor and struggling Americans across the 50 states a real choice that’s of, by and for the people in the 2024 election. The campaign has switched its FEC filing to the Green Party and its infrastructure has been turned over to veterans of Green Party campaigns, including former Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, who is the acting campaign manager. The West campaign plans to leverage the ballot access experience of the Stein/Baraka ticket that was on the ballot in 47 states.
The campaign seeks to unite social movements, independents, labor groups and non-corporate political parties that are free from the stranglehold of billionaires, bankers and party bosses. Volunteers and donations are already pouring into the campaign, signs of a widespread voter rebellion against the two party duopoly that could reach unprecedented heights.
In announcing the move, Dr. West declared “We can end poverty, endless war, cop cities, mass incarceration and ecological collapse, and provide housing, health care, reproductive rights, reparations, education and thriving wages for all. People have had enough of organized greed, institutionalized hatred, and normalized indifference to the lives of poor and working people of all colors. Yet the bipartisan consensus is siphoning trillions of dollars into wars that bring us to the verge of nuclear holocaust and tax giveaways to billionaires already drenched in obscene profits at the expense of struggling workers.
“Meanwhile the parties of war and Wall Street are throwing millions of children back into poverty by allowing the child tax credit expansion to expire; they are stripping 15 million Americans of health care in their failure to extend Covid Medicaid coverage; and they are denying food stamps to untold numbers of the vulnerable unemployed in their use of a debt ceiling crisis, that could have been avoided, to impose austerity on everyday people. And this comes as two thirds of Americans are already living paycheck to paycheck, 40% of renters are economically stressed, young people are mired in hopelessness, and diseases of despair - including addiction, overdoses and depression - are surging, contributing, along with the Covid debacle, to the shocking decline in lifespan in recent years.
“It’s no wonder Americans are abandoning the political parties that have brought us to this crisis. As the corporate parties betray our families and communities, the number of people who consider themselves politically independent is now twice the number identifying as either Democrats or Republicans. The number demanding a choice outside the corporate duopoly is at a record 62%. And a new poll shows the number of Americans who consider voting 3rd party vastly exceeds those who do not.
“We must reintroduce America to the best of itself! In the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edward Said, Luisa Moreno, Chief Joseph, and so many other visionaries, we are demanding a world of justice, truth and love for us all. Let’s do it together.”
Dr. Cornel West Announces the Formation of the Justice for All Party as Part of His 2024 Presidential Campaign and Beyond
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, January 31st, 2024
Cornel West for President
In an effort to directly confront the suppression of voter choice and participation by legacy political parties, Independent candidate for President of the United States, Dr. Cornel West, announced the establishment of the Justice For All Party (JFA). The party will primarily be utilized as a grassroots, people-powered vehicle to secure ballot access in specific states. Additionally, JFA will grow into a larger formation that galvanizes people-powered initiatives to promote transformational change beyond the 2024 election cycle.
Dr. West noted, “The announcement of JFA is both a celebration of the power of grassroots organizing, as well as a proclamation to the derelict duopoly that the era of corporate political parties is coming to a precipitous and welcomed end.” He added, “JFA, first and foremost, provides a mechanism for our grassroots campaign to travel a path of least resistance that will require the fewest number of signatures to attain ballot access in states like North Carolina, Florida, and Washington. The campaign acknowledges the unique political climates of each state and respects the decision-making power of the movement in guiding the party's formation. At the same time, we’re establishing a new political and organizing home for candidates running for office at all levels of government, as well as everyday folk ready to take on myriad systems of oppression that prey on the poor and working class nationwide.”
JFA builds off the foundation and tradition of grassroots political parties like the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, founded under the leadership of Ella Baker, Kwame Ture, and John Hulett, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party under the leadership of Civil Rights titans like Fannie Lou Hamer and the legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Both were formed, in part, to confront racism, classism, and voter suppression of corporate political parties that ignored the immediate needs of poor and working class people and their calls for mutual justice.
“We stand on the shoulders of freedom fighters like Martin Luther King, Joshua Abraham Heshcel, Dorothy Day and so many others who dared to bear witness to an iniquitous political system and directly confront it,” West emphasized. “JFA takes inspiration from these amazing souls and the sage words of Sister Ella Baker who reminded us we are not just fighting for the freedom of Black folk alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit that encompasses all of us; that is the essence of this new political formation that strives to deliver truth, love, and justice for all.”
The Cornel West 2024 campaign will soon release a series of voter information guides to ensure voters are fully informed about the implications of JFA in specific states and how they can get involved in the new formation’s electoral and organizing initiatives. In the meantime, those interested in learning more about the campaign are encouraged to visit www.cornelwest2024.com and the campaign’s various social media handles.
Governor Asa Hutchinson's Formal Announcement for the Presidency of the United States of America
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
Thank you for joining Susan and me on this special day.
This is a day in which our nation’s future . . . and my personal story comes together. Susan has been on this journey with me each step of the way. And Arkansas never had a better first lady.
Bentonville is a big part of my life story. But, so is Gravette where I grew up on a farm and learned the importance of family, faith, and community. I also learned hard work from my dad by cleaning out chicken houses and building fences. And my life story also includes Springdale, where I was inspired by teachers who pushed me to learn and it was in Springdale that my political awareness began with the nation’s divide over the Vietnam War and the struggle for civil rights.
But, let’s come back to Bentonville.
I was born in the old Bentonville Hospital; my first law office was across the square from where we stand today; I tried jury trials in this courthouse; I built Bentonville’s first FM radio station; I served as Bentonville’s City Attorney; and this is where Susan and I started our family and spent some of our happiest years living on 15 acres of rocks and hills west of town in a double-wide mobile home.
It was here on these steps, over 30 years ago, that I announced my run for the United States Senate. At that time Arkansas was a blue state and the Republican Party was pretty much non-existent. I stepped up to take on runaway federal spending; to fight for a strong national defense; to support the life of unborn children; and to unleash the private sector of our economy.
In other words, I ran as a conservative Republican when being a Republican was like having a career-ending handicap.
I continued to fight the establishment and over time . . . we won.
That was the beginning and since then I have been a consistent conservative through my time as leader of the party; in the U.S. Congress and as Governor.
And now, I bring that same vigor to fight another battle and that battle is for the future of our country and the soul of our party.
Today, I am announcing that I am a candidate for President of the United States.
In this campaign for President, I stand alone in terms of my experience, record, and leadership.
From Congress to DEA to Homeland Security, I have served our country in times of crisis.
As Governor of Arkansas, we cut taxes and created record surpluses.
We increased pay for teachers.
We reduced regulations; recruited industry, and the private sector grew by over 100,000 jobs.
My mettle has been tested.
It was tested when I put on a flak jacket and assisted the FBI Hostage Rescue Team in negotiating the surrender of an armed terrorist group.
My mettle was tested after the 9-11 attack when I was responsible for protecting the United States from another act of terrorism on U.S. soil.
And my mettle was tested once more as governor when I demonstrated how we can lead through a pandemic without closing down every business and shutting down schools.
When I had pressure from Washington and the national media to shelter in place, I said “no”.
And the result was that our businesses survived and we had more days of in-classroom instruction during the pandemic than almost any other state. Yes, that’s right . . . we beat Florida!
This campaign is about courage.
It is about making the tough decisions to rebuild our economy; to give peace a chance through America’s strength, and to renew the American spirit of freedom . . .
Opportunity . . .
and the rule of law.
And we’ve got our work cut out for us. Let me offer some solutions.
First, we need to get our economy back on track.
The Biden Administration has turned its back on the American worker. To turn our economy around we have to stop the “break-the-bank” federal spending that has led to high inflation and rising interest rates.
Every hardworking American family gets a double hit from the Biden economy. Their paycheck doesn’t go as far, and they are paying more on car loans and credit card debt because of the high-interest rates.
That is not acceptable.
I have been Chief Executive of our state for 8 years and that means I know how to balance a budget. I did it every single year.
And while I was in Congress, we balanced the federal budget and it is high time we did it again.
And that’s just the beginning of what we must do together to bring out the best of America.
We must secure our Southern border. We need a pro-growth energy policy that is not focused on limits but on production. We should not limit American growth but rather we should unleash our energy producers.
And if America is to be the best; then we cannot yield to China in terms of global leadership.
When the Biden Administration conducted its disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, we left our friends abandoned and our allies confused.
America looked weak and that weakness was seen as an opportunity for Russia to invade Ukraine and then for China to threaten and be aggressive toward Taiwan.
Let me assure you that as President, I will bring out the best of America . . . we will stand with our allies and friends. We will not abandon our friends in times of need.
There are some who want the U.S. to disengage from the world and to isolate ourselves.
Isolationism only leads to weakness and weakness leads to war. Americans want peace and the best way to secure and preserve peace is to have the most prepared military in the world.
Today’s threat is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I join with those who say we do not want an unending war in Ukraine, and the best way to avoid a long war is to help Ukraine win today.
As a nation, we have proven resilient in our democracy and we have endured through times of war and hardship. And I am confident we will even survive through the destructive policies of the Biden administration but the time for change is now. It is time to bring out the best of America.
As a nation, our democracy’s resilience comes from our shared values and it comes from our willingness to sacrifice for the cause of freedom. We need leaders who understand the importance of democracy to our own freedoms and that with God’s blessing, we set an example of liberty throughout the world.
America is democracy’s lighthouse. We must not let the light be dimmed.
If freedom’s light goes out in the United States then other countries will have their freedom shipwrecked on rocky shoals. Our democracy demands America’s best and I will bring out America’s best.
We will do this through leadership, economic growth, and respect for the rule of law.
The Biden Administration has stood on the sidelines and passively watched as rampant crime destroys our cities with smash-and-grab robberies and a flagrant disrespect for human dignity and the rule of law.
This must change.
What separates the United States from the rest of the world is our commitment to justice.
The rule of law is the foundation for peace in our communities. I am the only candidate running for President with a breadth of experience in law enforcement.
I will enforce the law and demand that local prosecutors do the same. Lawbreakers must be held accountable. Restoring respect for the law will not only reduce crime in our country; it will also bring out the best of America.
These are solutions that work for America.
The rule of law also applies to our southern border. I have three words that will work to protect our country from the human suffering that results from an open border. That is “enforce the law”.
I know how to do this because President George W. Bush tapped me to help lead the Department of Homeland Security. Our nation is a land of immigrants who make up the fabric of our democracy. In order to respect those who follow the legal path to come to this country, we must reform our asylum laws; devote more resources to support our border patrol; quickly remove those who come into our country illegally; and go after the cartels who are killing Americans with the deadly drug fentanyl. When fentanyl is the leading cause of death for those 18 to 49 then we are losing our sons and daughters way too soon.
There are a few misguided leaders who say we should defund the FBI. I am here today in support of our law enforcement heroes. The argument to defund police is designed to undermine our rule of law.
We should not defund the FBI, but we do need serious reform to refocus the core functions of our federal law enforcement.
As someone who has worked with all the federal law enforcement agencies, I know what needs to be done. We must make them more focused, more accountable, and successful in protecting our citizens.
The FBI needs to be trimmed down and focused on its number one duty . . . leading our counter-terrorism mission. And when we support our law enforcement and enforce the rule of law we bring out the best of America.
Growing up in these hills, I learned the value of work. I hauled hay; worked in four different factories; sacked groceries; and through college, I was a janitor cleaning campus buildings.
All to pay the bills and to get an education.
In law school, I benefited from the federal student loan program. And, yes, I paid my loan off!
In order to bring out the best of America, we must once again embrace the dignity of work! Our federal government should not reward those who sit at home when they have the ability to work and provide for themselves.
As Governor, I turned down federal assistance that discouraged a return to work. But the Biden Administration paid people more benefits to stay home than they could make working.
This is wrong.
As President, I will open doors for more worker training and better pay and we will require work for able-bodied welfare recipients.
This will grow our manufacturing workforce and we will prove that we can still make things in the United States.
An important solution to this challenge is lifting the penalties for those who want to stay in the workforce after the age of 62.
Right now, if you retire on Social Security, you are penalized for continuing to work. You should be able to both claim social security and work. Remove the penalties and let those who want to work continue to do so without government penalties.
Right now we have nearly 10 million job openings in the U.S. and by making this change we will add millions to the labor pool and increase the income of retirees at the same time. Yes, this will help bring out the best of America!
And when it comes to those who depend upon Social Security and Medicare, I will assure its strength and reliability into the future.
Right now, Social Security is financially stable until 2033. Medicare is stable until 2028. As we have successfully done in the past, I will immediately convene an independent Commission to Assure the Future of Social Security and Medicare.
This Commission will be modeled after the 1983 Commission that was chaired by Alan Greenspan. It led to legislation that successfully extended the life of these vital retirement programs for Americans.
Americans need to have confidence in their future and this action will stabilize and assure the future of a supplemental retirement program Americans depend upon.
As Governor of Arkansas, I expanded access to computer science education. It was a priority of mine and the result was going from 1,100 students who took computer science to over 23,000. We went from 20 certified teachers to over 650 who are certified to teach computer science. We made it required to be offered in our rural schools as well as our urban schools. The result is that Arkansas led the nation in computer science education and made a real difference in the opportunities for young people.
It is critical that we follow this model as a nation if we are going to compete with Communist China. The fact is that U.S. test scores in math and science are falling behind other countries. The top 5 math scoring countries are in Asia and the United States places 11th as a nation in terms of math education. We must do better for our students.
As President, I will expand computer science education into every grade school and high school.
I will focus our higher education to produce more engineers and scientists. And when we do, we can not only compete with China but we will bring out the best of America!
We can once again define America’s future with the genius and creativity of our people.
Too often, our businesses and families are held back by a federal bureaucracy that is out of control, heavy-handed and wasteful. As President, I will reduce the federal civilian workforce by 10%!
You can believe me when I say I will do this because I have done it. In Arkansas, I reduced the state executive workforce by 14%. And there is a lot more room for improvement in Washington.
We will reduce the burden of government; we will lower the federal deficit, and we will unleash the power of the private sector. Our families will have more to spend and save for their children’s future.
Both Democratic and Republican Administrations bear responsibility for our current $31 Trillion national debt. I would like to say we will be “Debt Free in 33”. Well, it might take longer; but we must start.
I am from the heartland of America.
I am the son of Malcolm and Coral Hutchinson who were married during the Great Depression, who served our country during World War II, and who sacrificed to make sure their six children had a chance to live their dreams and to be all that God required of them.
They taught me that we are all equal and we all struggle in life. And because we struggle we need grace and compassion toward others. It is my hope that those farmland values will once again guide our nation and bring us closer together.
And if you look at our history, the United States of America has been challenged in every generation from threats abroad to civil unrest at home. And when we are tested we grow stronger.
We have learned that in times of turmoil, uncertainty, and division, America has always benefited from leaders who challenge us and give us hope. I am confident that America is ready to seek new frontiers; and that we are ready to channel the restless waves of our democracy into more freedom and more prosperity for those who follow after us.
I am running for President because I know that the best of America is ahead of us.
There is behind me, on the Courthouse wall, a statement that is the foundation of our nation: “Sovereignty rests with the people.”
This means that you will decide the direction of our nation.
The fate of the world’s greatest democracy is in your hands.
Thank you and May God Bless the United States of America!
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President Biden and Vice President Harris Announce Reelection Campaign
Biden names Campaign Manager and Campaign Co-Chairs Exactly Four Years After Launching 2020 Bid
Today, President Joe Biden announced his candidacy for President of the United States in the 2024 Presidential Election. In a video released today titled “Freedom,” President Biden harkened back to his 2020 campaign message when he described the country in a battle for the soul of the nation. Today the President said that the battle continues in the face of extreme MAGA Republicans who are focused on taking away Americans’ rights and dividing the country. The President called on all Americans to stand up for our personal freedoms, saying every generation faces a moment when we’ve had to defend democracy, and this election is ours.
Today’s announcement from President Biden comes four years to the day after he announced his 2020 candidacy on a platform of restoring the soul of our nation, rebuilding the backbone of the country – the middle class – and uniting the country.
“When I ran for President four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America – and we still are. The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer,” said President Biden. “I know what I want the answer to be. This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for reelection. I know America and I know we are good and decent people. I know we are still a country that believes in honesty and respect, and treating each other with dignity. We’re a nation where we give hate no safe harbor. We believe that everyone is equal, and that everyone should be given a fair shot to succeed in this country.”
President Biden continued: “Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy, stand up for our personal freedoms, and stand up for our right to vote and our civil rights. This is ours. Let’s finish the job.”
Today, President Biden also announced initial campaign leadership. Congresswoman Lisa Blunt-Rochester, Congressman Jim Clyburn, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Tammy Duckworth, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer will serve as the campaign’s national co-chairs.
Julie Chávez Rodríguez will serve as Campaign Manager and Quentin Fulks will serve as Principal Deputy Campaign Manager. This team forms the backbone of a campaign that will be focused on building and expanding on the coalition that sent President Biden and Vice President Harris to the White House in 2020 with more votes than any Presidential ticket in our country’s history.
“This election is a generational moment for Americans across the country to stand up and fight for our democracy and freedoms. To win this fight, we need strong leadership that can build and expand our broad, diverse coalition from 2020,” said President Biden. “With this team leading the charge, we’ll be able to do just that. Julie and Quentin are trusted, effective leaders that know the stakes of this election and will bring their knowledge and energy to managing a campaign that reaches all Americans. Our campaign co-chairs are hardworking public servants that have dedicated their lives to making Americans’ lives better. I’ve been able to count on each and every one of them throughout my career, especially in the most challenging moments. Together, this team brings the expertise, leadership, and work ethic required to win this election and finish the job for the American people.”
“This is a pivotal moment in our history,” said Vice President Kamala Harris. “For two years we have made transformational investments to build a nation in which everyone can be safe and healthy, find a good job, and retire with dignity. In response, extremists have intensified attacks on basic, foundational freedoms and rights. For example, they want to take away a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. They attack the sacred right to vote and attempt to silence the voice of the people. And they try to block common sense reforms to save lives and keep Americans safe from gun violence. The Republicans running for President want to take our country backwards. We will not let that happen. Just like we did in 2020, we must come together to fight for our democracy, continue to make progress, and make sure all Americans can get ahead and thrive. Joe and I look forward to finishing the job, winning this battle for the soul of the nation, and serving the American people for four more years in the White House.”
Full Transcript of ‘Freedom’ Campaign Launch Video:
“Freedom. Personal freedom is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred.
That’s been the work of my first term: To fight for our Democracy. This shouldn’t be a red or blue issue. To protect our rights. To make sure that everyone in this country is treated equally. And that everyone is given a fair shot at making it.
But around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take those bedrock freedoms away. Cutting social security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy. Dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.
When I ran for President four years ago, I said we are in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are. The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer.
I know what I want the answer to be and I think you do too. This is not a time to be complacent.
That’s why I’m running for re-election.
Because I know America. I know we are good and decent people. And I know we are still a country that believes in honesty and respect, and treating each other with dignity. That we’re a nation where we give hate no safe harbor. And we believe that everyone is equal, and that everyone should be given a fair shot to succeed in this country.
Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights.
And this is our moment.
So if you’re with me, go to JoeBiden.com and sign up. Let’s finish this job, I know we can.
Because this is the United States of America. And there’s nothing we can’t do if we do it together.”
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR. ANNOUNCES RUN FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES TO OVERFLOW, STANDING-ROOM CROWD IN BOSTON
BOSTON, MA—APRIL 19, 2023—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today announced his bid to run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States to an overflow, standing-room-only crowd at the Boston Park Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts.
In his speech, Kennedy emphasized priorities of clean government, civil liberties, peace, and economic revitalization. Above all, he invoked the theme of unity.
"During this campaign and during my administration my objective will be to make as many Americans as possible forget that they are Republicans or Democrats and remember that they are Americans," Kennedy said. "We need to focus on the values we share instead of the issues that divide us."
Strongly committed to civil liberties, Kennedy emphasized the importance of honest government and freedom of speech.
"The government/media strategy of censoring dissonant voices is not only antithetical to our most fundamental values, it is counterproductive in that it fuels the flames of polarization, alienation, and anger,” Kennedy said.
On a related note, he observed that "the blizzard of misinformation that is now inundating our democracy will end only when the government and the media start telling the truth to Americans."
Kennedy was born on January 17, 1954, in Washington, DC, and is the third of 11 children of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. He is the nephew of America’s 35th President, John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy has carried on his family’s legacy of public service by devoting himself to environmental causes and children’s welfare. He struck those themes in his speech, stating, "Good environmental policy is always identical to good economic policy if we measure our economy based on how it produces jobs over the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community."
His reputation as a resolute defender of the environment and children’s health stems from hundreds of successful legal actions. TIME Magazine named Kennedy its “Hero for the Planet” for his leadership in the fight to restore the Hudson River.
Kennedy is an award-winning writer and New York Times’ bestselling author.
Learn more at Kennedy24.com.
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Text of Congressman Kucinich’s introduction of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:
I’m a Kennedy Democrat
Hi, I’m Dennis Kucinich, and I’m a Kennedy Democrat!
What is a Kennedy Democrat?
I found out when my father, Frank J. Kucinich, Senior, a lifetime member of Teamsters Local 407, and father of seven, took me to a Labor rally in Cleveland to see the Democratic nominee, U. S. Senator, John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, speak.
It was my first political event, unforgettable for Senator Kennedy’s ringing testimonial to freedom’s holy light and economic security for all Americans.
And although it was almost 63 years ago, the standard that Senator Kennedy held up on that day, for peace and prosperity, and held high throughout his presidency, was later picked up by his brother, US Senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy.
And that same standard, of an America that is ever evolving and moving along an upward path, the standard of a Kennedy Democrat, is ready to once again be raised, this time by Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s namesake, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What is a Kennedy Democrat?
A Kennedy Democrat fearlessly protects the rights of working men and women.
A Kennedy Democrat protects the Constitution of the United States.
A Kennedy Democrat defends Americans’ Civil Liberties and the rights of all the people.
A Kennedy Democrat believes in the power of diplomacy when the fate not only of the nation, but the earth itself hangs in the balance.
A Kennedy Democrat meets adversity to seek unity.
A Kennedy Democrat is unbought and unbossed.
A Kennedy Democrat puts country ahead of self.
I am a Kennedy Democrat. You are Kennedy Democrats. We are Kennedy Democrats.
Under the dynamic leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., we will restore the Democratic party.
We will work with Republicans and all Americans, in the words of Lincoln to “bind up our nation’s wounds.”
Under the healing leadership of a President Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., we will become a truly re-united states, through faith in America, through good works, and strength through peace.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. understands the trials and tribulations of many Americans. He understands that personal victories occur when one resolves to be a better person, works at it every day, removing self-imposed barriers, and through that spiritual growth becomes ever better equipped to guide our nation’s transformation.
The direction toward a more perfect union begins today, with one individual, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who today aligns his path with that of the United States of America.
When you look at his record as one of the great environmentalists, you come to understand that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the Paul Revere of our times, moving from town to town, warning us when our water is unsafe to drink, warning us when our air is unsafe to breathe, warning us when our food is unsafe to eat, and warning us when pharmaceuticals are unsafe to use and in each case showing the nation the way to a healthier quantity and quality of life.
His life is one of selfless dedication toward public health and the health of the planet.
At a time when powerful interests can use the media to smear a good man who has devoted his life to the public good, it takes an abundance of courage to continue to stand up and speak out.
Today we have a rendezvous with history and destiny.
Just as America called forth John F. Kennedy to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
Just as our nation called forth Senator Robert F. Kennedy, to look into the future and to dream dreams that never were and ask: “Why not?”
So, too, today, we call forth Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to take up the mantle of national leadership, to rally us, to help heal us, to unite us, to show the way towards a peaceful nation and a peaceful world.
Today he begins his determined stand, as must we all if we care to make a difference, mindful of the prescient words of his great father, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who once said:
“Each time a man or a woman stands up for an ideal, acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples can create a current which can sweep down, the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next President of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Marianne Williamson 2024 Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech, March 4, 2023, Washington, D.C.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter," said Martin Luther King, Jr.
What matters today is America, specifically its woundedness and our responsibility to repair it. It’s time for us to help initiate a season of repair.
After years of denial, of the disengagement of some of our best and brightest from the political scene, enough of us are ready now to rise to the occasion. This isn’t a time to whine or give in to despair or personal anger. It’s a time for an awakening.
Our personal thoughts and actions matter. And politics is our collective behavior, no more or less important than our individual concerns. We’re living at a time when we can’t afford to see this as an either/or. We must step up as people and we must also step as citizens.
It’s been said that you can live your life in one of two ways; according to circumstances or according to a vision. We all know the challenging circumstances in America today. What we do now is to create a positive vision for this country that will override the forces of hatred and division that now plague us.
Most of us are upset in some way about what’s happening to America. I remember the look on one young man’s face when he said, “What are we going to do?” with such youthful sincerity. But sometimes in life the first question is not what do I need to do, but what do I need to understand? Americans are drowning in information, but we have far too little understanding.
The key to our deliverance in the present lies in a deeper understanding about some things in our past. We need to understand the American story and where as a generation we fit into it.
Our story began, as an established nation, in 1776. Some very brave men got together and signed a document called the Declaration of Independence. I say they were brave because if the British had won the war, they would have all been executed for treason against the king of England. And what they signed their names to – John Hancock writing his name famously very large so that George III would be sure to see it – were the establishment of principles profoundly enlightened not only for their time but for all time.
These principles are not just enlightened politically – declaring that not only king or aristocracy but rather ALL men have the to right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness; they’re also enlightened morally. They declare that God created all men equal. And that sentence, then as now, forms our national creed. It is that on which we have agreed to agree.
But that is also where things got very gnarly. For while 56 men signed that document, 41 of them were slave owners. Obviously, slavery is a direct contradiction to the right of all men to be free. Just as our freedom defines our national creed, the dichotomy between the principles of the Declaration and slavery forms our national character. This has always been true. We are, in essence, a split mind. From our very beginning we have been filled with people brilliantly and courageously willing to struggle and to sacrifice for the right of all people to be free; yet also filled with powerful forces who, usually for our their economic purposes, have no intention whatsoever of seeing a full actualization of those principles and have proven their willingness to go to violent extremes to make sure they don’t.
That struggle, that dichotomy, is America’s story. It has been with us from the very beginning. American is like a book and every generation writes of its own chapter. Every generation, including our own, lives out that story – the often poignant, often painful, struggle between those whose lives are dedicated to freedom and those who would place their economic interests before the values and humanitarian interests put forth in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. This is not a struggle between left and right. It is a struggle between the powerful and the powerless. Thomas Jefferson himself said, “It is the general tendency of the rich to prey upon the poor.”
A nation has its character defects, just like individuals do. Maturity in a nation, like maturity in an individual, involves recognizing those defects, taking responsibility for them, and ultimately transforming them.
It is true that America has a shadow side, but we shouldn’t forget the extraordinary light that lies at the core of our founding principles. No one ever thought, and no one has ever said, that America has fully embodied the principles on which we purport to stand. But it is every generation’s responsibility to try; to continue the work of creating a more perfect union. Every generation, including ours, lives out the struggle inherent in our national story. And it is important to remember that if we look back at the sweep of American history, we have nothing to be ashamed of. For where we have been wrong, generations before us have risen up to correct our path.
It is simply our turn now.
We responded to slavery with abolition, we responded to the institutional suppression of women with the women’s suffragist movement, we responded to the ravages of the Gilded Age with the New Deal and the Labor movement, and we responded to the evils of segregation with the Civil Rights movement. Our ancestors did those things. They rose up, they corrected the path of this nation in whatever ways they could and at times they brilliantly succeeded. We owe them an extraordinary debt of gratitude. But we owe them more than that right now. We owe it to our ancestors – and more importantly we owe it to our descendants – to rise up in our time as they rose up in theirs.
Today, it’s not a specific institutional reality that counters equality and the God given rights to which we are devoted. It’s not one thing, it’s many things. It’s like an atomizer spray of dysfunction and disrepair. It’s the water in Flint, Michigan and it’s the rivers drying up in the American Southwest. It’s 68,000 people dying of from lack of health care every year and it’s mass incarceration. It’s income and opportunity inequality and the ubiquitous despair of the majority of our citizens shackled by the consequences of an unjust economic order that has gripped this country, laying claim to every aspect of our lives, dominating our government and tearing apart the fabric our nation. It is not an institution - it is an economic mindset.
This mindset is called by many names, from neoliberalism to trickle-down economics, to crony capitalism to hyper capitalism to free market fundamentalism. But whatever we call it, is not the high side of capitalism and it is not a free market. Quite simply it is a racket. A racket so huge and so entrenched that it has gripped this nation for almost fifty years in the vice of economic injustice. It has perpetrated a 50 trillion-dollar theft from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the top one percent. It has literally destroyed America’s middle class. It has denied people health care, education – and most importantly, hope. It has sucked the resources of both money and opportunity into the hands of a few at the expense of the many. It is the people of the United States who have suffered and are suffering the ravages of this mindset. Twenty per cent of us are doing fine, at least for the most part. But that twenty per cent lives on an enchanted island surrounded by a vast sea of economic despair.
We don’t need any more evidence that the system has become deeply, intrinsically corrupt. We can see it in the broken windows, shuttered factories and violent crime in our once thriving communities. We can see it in the hollowed eyes and addiction rattled brokenness of our fellow citizens. We can see it in the mass despair of millions of Americans who work hard all day yet cannot afford a place to live, who were holding on but now find themselves homeless, who are struggling with anxiety born of constant economic uncertainty, who tried their best to get into the game but have found the game so rigged against them. Despite the scandalous scale of despair in our midst, leading politicians barely mention the word poor, barely address the root causes of poverty, so drunk are they on money and power that they are buffered emotionally against the ravages of human suffering.
This situation is America’s current status quo, neoliberalism having burrowed so deeply into the sinews of our nation’s capital, that the function our government is more often than not as a handmaiden to the economic forces that - with their multibillion-dollar donations and corporate lobbyists, in total, three times more than there are legislators in this town - make it little more than a system of legalized bribery.
And that status quo will not disrupt itself.
That is our job. Like generations before us, the people must not serve the political parties, but push and propel the political parties. Emancipation was propelled by abolitionists and enslaved people themselves; women’s rights were secured by suffragists and feminists; worker’s right were won by the Labor movement; and racial justice and desegregation by the civl rights movement. Major political parties did not originate those ideas, they were conduits for the ideas. But the people led in all those cases, and it’s time for the people to lead again.
Just as Franklin Roosevelt led the charge against the power of the first Gilded Age, it is time for us to rise up against the ravages of the Second Gilded Age. For that is what we’re living through now. Our government gives billions of dollars in subsidies to insurance companies, Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Food, Big Ag, Big Chemical companies, and defense contractors of the military industrial complex. It bows down to the most irresponsible demands of gun manufacturers at the expense of the safety of our own children, it continues to support fossil fuel extraction although that literally puts humanity on a collision course with global catastrophe. It is willing to prostitute our national interests kowtowing to a murderous dictator for the sake of oil. This is not at this point a left-right dichotomy. It is a reversion to the aristocratic paradigm from which our ancestors fought, and gave their lives, to be free. The least we can do is pay attention, get real, and get busy. Only we the people can turn this ship around.
And we’re doing that. From the resurgence of the Labor movement to the bravery of environmental activists, from protests against racial and police injustice to the movements for indigenous rights, food security, gender liberty and women’s rights, the American spirit is asserting itself and the American people are rising up. The American people are not the problem. The American people are just fine. But the American people are stymied. In a very real way, the voice of the American people is now muffled, replaced by the power of the corporate matrix that in our time is doing what such forces throughout our history have done: they seek to replace the will of the people, the well-being of the people, the safety of the people and the security of the people, with their own often ill-begotten economic bottom line. It is time for us to do what generations before us have done. It’s time for the people to respond.
We need to take a very serious look at the words of Abraham Lincoln, who when writing about those who died at Gettysburg, said that they gave the last full measure of devotion that a “government of the people, by the people and for the people would not perish from the earth.” It’s time for America to take out a mirror, to look at what has become of us, and realize that it is perishing now. We are not currently functioning as a government of the people, by the people, for the people. We are functioning as a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.
And so the suffering continues. From almost one in four Americans living with medical debt, to 68,000 people who die each year from lack of health care, to 18 million people who cannot afford to fulfill the prescriptions their own doctors give them, to 12 million children who go to bed hungry in America every night, to half of our seniors living on less than $25k a year, the trajectory of despair will not be interrupted until we the people interrupt it. Leaders in Washington, with a few very brave exceptions, are divided into two major categories: those who do not care about that suffering enough to fix it, and those who do not have the spine to do so. I’m running for president with one message: let me in there. I will.
The American revolution is never over. We must constantly, generation after generation, be willing to look at our defects and pull them out at their roots. We should identify the problems in our past, but we should identify with the problem solvers. We must, in the words of Martin Luther king Jr., “conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.” But we must not tarry. For the hour is late, and the task is ours. No one effort, no one election, no one person, will save us now. Ours is an age of collective effort.
But no more pretending. No more half measures. No more pseudo-sophisticated PR from a corporatist elite who would tell us we simply don’t understand, that we should sit down now, that we should sit this out and let the grownups be in charge. They are neither truly sophisticated nor are they grown up. Real grown-ups do not knowingly let a child go hungry.
President Franklin Roosevelt said we wouldn’t have to worry about a fascist takeover as long as democracy delivered on its blessings. It is not delivering on its blessings now, and that is what must change.
We are six inches from the cliff regarding the state of our democracy, the state of our economy, the state of our environment, and the state of the people. We will no longer live the absurdity that only those who drove us into this ditch should possibly be considered qualified to lead us out of it. It is time for them to sit down now and let the people take it from here. We will stand up for our rights: from universal health care, to tuition-free college and tech schools to free child care to paid family and sick leave to a living wage – all considered moderate positions in most advanced democracies - to a 21st century Economic Bill of Rights. We will right the ship of our economic vessel, listing now so far to one side. Let the uncaring minions of a sociopathic economic order be the ones to sit down now. We the people will now stand up.
Today, I request your support. I request your donations and I request your vote. Go to Marianne2024.com and let’s do this. Let’s do all we can to end an aberrational, unjust chapter of American history, to disrupt the system that upholds it, and in our time, as generations before us have so bravely done, bring forth a new beginning. It’s time now. It’s time for us.
I’m Marianne Williamson, and I’m running for the office of president of the United States.
Vivek Ramaswamy 2024 "I'm Running for President of the United States" Announcement Video Transcript
We're in the middle of a national identity crisis.
Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like COVIDISM, climateism, and gender ideology.
We hunger to be part of something bigger than ourselves, yet we cannot even answer the question of what it means to be an American.
Today the woke left preys on that vacuum.
They tell you that your race, your gender, and your sexual orientation govern who you are, what you can achieve and what you're allowed to think.
This is psychological slavery and that has created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America.
And that is why today I am announcing my run for President of the United States.
This isn't just a political campaign, this is a cultural movement to create a new American dream for the next generation.
To me the American dream means you believe in merit and that you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin but on the content of your character and your contributions.
It means you believe the people who we elect to run the government are the ones who actually run the government, not a federal bureaucracy that grows like a National Cancer, that is now metastasizing to the private sector.
It means that the best ideas win, instead of getting censored.
It means you don't have to choose between speaking your mind freely and putting food on the dinner table.
It means you believe these ideals form the backbone of the greatest nation on earth.
That the rest of the world still looks up to as it's example, not the Soviet Union in the last century and not Communist China in this one either.
That is the new American dream.
Ask yourself if you believe in these ideals. I think most of you do.
I think most of you believe your neighbors do too, but you can't be sure because you don't feel free to talk about it anymore.
You might disagree with each other about corporate tax rates or about whether ivermectin treats COVID, but those are details.
We still agree on our nation's most fundamental principles, at least most of us do.
Yet the goal of the ruling party in this country is to convince us that we are divided.
Why? So they can accumulate more power for themselves.
Well, you know what, I have a dream that we can be one people again.
We have obsessed so much over our diversity and our differences that we forgot all the ways we're really just the same as Americans.
Bound together by a common set of ideals that brought together a divided diverse headstrong group of people 250 years ago.
And I believe deep in my bones that those ideals still exist and I am running for president to revive them.
E Pluribus Unum, from many, one.
That is the dream that won the American Revolution.
That is the dream that reunited us after the Civil War.
That is the dream that won us two World Wars and the Cold War.
That is the dream that still gives hope to the free world today.
And if we can revive that dream over fractious group identity, that nobody in the world, not a nation, not a corporation, not a virus is gonna defeat us.
That is what American exceptionalism is all about and that is what we will need to revive to save this great nation.
Nikki Haley 2024 Presidential Campaign Announcement Speech, Remarks as Prepared for Delivery, February 15, 2023, Charleston, South Carolina
Nikki HaleyNikki Haley: "The America I See"
February 15, 2023
Charleston, South Carolina
* AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY *
Nikki Haley Campaign Kickoff
Thank you! It’s a great day in South Carolina!
Thank you all for being here.
I’m so glad to be with the people I love, in the state I love, to talk about saving the country I love.
I have always had a deep belief in America.
But I know America is better than all the division and distractions we have today.
And I’m confident the American people agree…
We’re ready… ready to move past the stale ideas and faded names of the past…
And we are more than ready for a new generation to lead us into the future!
I come here today with a vision of that future.
I see a strong America – full of opportunity, that lifts up everyone, not just a select few.
I see a proud America – confident in who we are, and what we stand for.
And I see America leading the world – in freedom and peace.
But this vision isn’t just mine.
It’s the core of our nation’s history…
and it called to my parents over fifty years ago.
I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants.
My parents left India in search of a better life.
They found it in Bamberg, South Carolina – population, 2,500.
Our little town came to love us, but it wasn’t always easy. We were the only Indian family.
Nobody knew who we were, what we were, or why we were there.
But my parents knew.
And every day, they reminded me, my brothers, and my sister that even on our worst day, we are blessed to live in America.
They were right then – and they’re right now.
My parents came to a country that was gaining strength and growing in confidence.
But that was then.
Now America is falling behind.
Our future is slipping. Our leaders are failing us.
And no one embodies that failure more than Joe Biden.
Right now, in the greatest country in human history, we have too many families paying too much for groceries;
too many mothers searching frantically for baby formula;
and too many children who are so far behind in the classroom, they might never get ahead.
We have too many small businesses who can’t afford rent, and too many big businesses getting taxpayer bailouts.
We have too much crime on our streets – too many drugs flooding our cities – and too few police and border patrol.
And from Joe Biden on down, our leaders put too much trust in big government and too little trust in the American people.
They have us spiraling toward socialism, with a new trillion-dollar spending bill every few months, and a national debt over 30 trillion dollars.
This is not the America that called to my parents…
And make no mistake: This is not the America I will leave to my children!
We must stop socialism, before it’s too late. It’s weakening America from within.
But there’s something else eating away at our national core.
On Biden and Harris’s watch, a self-loathing has swept our country.
It’s in the classroom, the boardroom, and the backrooms of government.
Every day, we’re told America is flawed, rotten, and full of hate. Joe and Kamala even say America is racist.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The American people know better. My immigrant parents know better…
And take it from the first minority female Governor in history: America is not a racist country!
This self-loathing is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.
It’s a symptom of a lack of pride in our country and a lack of trust in our leaders.
And it ignores the values that have sustained America since our founding.
I have traveled around the world and back. I’ve seen what else is out there.
America isn’t perfect. But the principles at America’s core are perfect.
And the American people are not full of hate. We are full of love – and we are sustained by faith.
I always go back to the Book of Joshua:
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged. For God will be with you wherever you go.
Strengthening America -- believing once again in America -- is the only way to defend ourselves from those who want to destroy us.
When America is distracted, the world is less safe…
And today, our enemies think the American era has passed.
They’re wrong. America is not past our prime. It’s just that our politicians are past theirs!
Joe Biden isn’t even leading from behind. He’s not leading at all.
On his watch, a terrorist mob conquered Afghanistan – and killed our troops.
Iran is on the brink of getting the bomb.
North Korea is launching more missiles than ever.
Russia started the biggest war in Europe in 75 years.
And in Communist China, we face the strongest and most disciplined enemy in history.
It is unthinkable that Americans would look at the sky and see a Chinese spy balloon looking back at us.
China’s dictators want to cover the world in communist tyranny. And we’re the only ones who can stop them.
But let me be clear. We won’t win the fight for the 21st Century if we keep trusting politicians from the 20th Century.
America is on a path of doubt, division, and self-destruction. A path of fading patriotism and weakening power.
The stakes are nothing less than our survival.
And you and I and every American is being summoned to take bold action.
And so, I have an announcement to make.
I stand before you as the daughter of immigrants – as a proud wife of a combat veteran – and as the mom of two amazing children…
I’ve served as Governor of the great state of South Carolina – and as America’s ambassador to the United Nations…
And above all else, I’m a grateful American citizen who knows our best days are yet to come, if we unite and fight to save our country.
I have devoted my life to this fight. And I’m just getting started.
For a strong America…
For a proud America…
I am running for President of the United States of America!
When I look to the future, I see America strong once more.
We’ll end inflation and build an economy that works for all, just like we did here in South Carolina.
In the America I see, every child gets a world-class education – because every parent gets to pick their child’s school. And no politician will be able to close those schools ever again!
In the America I see, police know we have their backs – criminals know we have their number – and our streets will be safe again!
In the America I see, we stop the surge of drugs and illegal immigration. That means having a real border and mandatory e-verify, like we got done in South Carolina. Businesses must hire Americans – not illegals!
In the America I see, everyone has full confidence in our elections. Voter ID will be the law of the land – like we did in South Carolina!
The America I see is freer and better for all – because Washington will finally serve the people instead of the political class.
We’ll end corporate welfare and bailouts for big business – and we’ll end the earmarks and pork that fuel big government.
And when it comes to our politicians, we’ll light a fire under them…
Their job is not to say things on TV. Their job is to do things in DC – like solve problems instead of ignoring or creating them!
In the America I see, the permanent politician will finally retire…
We’ll have term limits for Congress – and mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old!
Most of all, I see a strong America because I see a proud America.
Strong and proud – not weak and woke – that’s the America I see!
The America I see will win the fight for the 21st Century.
We’ll have the courage and confidence to defend our values and defeat our enemies.
In this America, the Armed Forces of the United States will be stronger and more capable than ever.
A strong military doesn’t start wars. A strong military prevents wars!
In this America, we’ll start pumping more oil and gas – and stop buying dirty oil from Venezuela.
We’ll stand with our allies – from Israel to Ukraine – and stand up to our enemies – in Iran and Russia.
And in the America I see, Communist China won’t just lose…
Like the Soviet Union before it, Communist China will end up on the ash-heap of history!
Realizing this vision won’t be easy. It will take an unparalleled level of commitment from all of us.
It requires faith and a willingness to move past the status quo.
And it will require doing some things we’ve never done…
Like sending a tough-as-nails woman to the White House.
We need someone who can shake up Washington and the political class.
I’ve done it before – starting right here.
I will always be grateful to the people of South Carolina who took a chance on me.
When I ran against the longest-serving legislator in the state, no one said I had a shot, but together we won.
When I ran for Governor, people said, “Nikki who?” But together, we won.
Then we cut taxes, created thousands of jobs, and revitalized our economy.
Business journals started calling South Carolina the Beast of the Southeast – which I loved!
When President Trump nominated me for Ambassador to the United Nations, people said I didn’t have the experience.
Then I went to work.
I told the world that America would have the backs of our allies, and for those who did not have our backs, we were taking names!
The dictators, murderers, and thieves at the UN didn’t know what hit them.
I’ve been underestimated before. That’s always fun!
And I’ve been shaking up the status quo my entire life.
As I set out on this new journey, I will simply say this…
May the best woman win.
All kidding aside, this is not about identity politics. I don’t believe in that. And I don’t believe in glass ceilings either.
I believe in creating a country where anyone can do anything and achieve their own American Dream.
The college student who’s paying too much, and getting too little from her education…
The young adult, in his first real job, wondering how he’ll ever afford a mortgage or start a family…
The single mom working two jobs and three times harder than everyone else…
The small-town dad, who saw the factory leave town and thinks his future went with it…
I am fighting for all of us – because all of us have to be in this together!
But hear this.
Unity does not come from faint hearts or watered-down compromises. That just leaves everyone wanting more.
Real national unity comes from boldly proclaiming our national purpose and persuading opponents to join us.
My purpose is to save our country from the downward spiral of socialism and defeatism.
I aim to move America upward toward freedom and strength.
I’ll take this message far and wide in the days ahead.
And I have a particular message for my fellow Republicans.
We’ve lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
Our cause is right, but we have failed to win the confidence of a majority of Americans.
Well, that ends today.
If you’re tired of losing, then put your trust in a new generation.
And if you want to win – not just as a party, but as a country – then stand with me!
As my family and I start this journey, we ask for your prayers. And yes, of course, we ask for your vote.
But there’s something else we need even more. Something our country needs above all else…
It’s your spirit and your belief in America.
Look past the failed ideas and leaders in Washington – and find the courage to be part of the solution.
Cast off the fear that our best days are behind us – and join the movement for our country’s renewal.
See the same America I see… and stand for America, together with me.
I’m more confident than ever that we can make this vision real in our time – because that’s what I’ve seen my entire life.
As a brown girl, growing up in a black-and-white world, I saw the promise of America unfold before me.
As the proud wife of a combat veteran, I saw our people’s deep love of freedom, and determination to defend it.
As Governor, I saw our state move beyond hate and violence, and lift up everyone in peace.
And as Ambassador, I saw that America is still the standard.
Where we lead, the world follows. When we speak, the world listens. Who we are, the world wants to be.
I’ll never forget the day, as ambassador, when I stood on the Simon Bolivar bridge between Colombia and Venezuela in South America.
I watched thousands of Venezuelans walk by, holding their babies, in the hot sun for hours, to get the one meal they might have that day. Where they came from, they’d been killing zoo animals for food.
They were fleeing socialism... and yearning for freedom.
When I left the bridge, the families started to gather around me. I didn’t understand why they flocked to someone they’d never met.
And then it hit me.
They didn’t care who I was. They cared where I was from.
In me, they saw America… and in America, they saw hope.
The time has come to renew that spirit and rally our people.
Our moment is now. Our mission is clear.
Let’s save our country and secure our future. And let’s move forward, together, toward our destiny – in a strong and proud America!
Thank you! God bless you! And God bless America!
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Donald J. Trump for President 2024 Announcement Speech Excerpts
Palm Beach, FL -- Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency Tuesday night at Mar-a-Lago.
Please see below for key excerpts from President Trump's speech.
Key excerpts:
President Trump: "The decline of America is being forced upon us by Biden and the radical left lunatics running our government into the ground. This decline is not a fate we must accept."
President Trump: "Together, we will be taking on the most corrupt forces and entrenched interests imaginable... This is not a task for a politician or a conventional candidate. This is a task for a great movement."
President Trump: "This will not be my campaign. This will be our campaign all together. Because the only force strong enough to defeat the massive corruption we are up against is you, the American people."
President Trump: "The radical left Democrats have embraced an extreme ideology of government domination and control. Our approach is the opposite, based on freedom, values, individual responsibility and just plain common sense."
President Trump: "We are going to restore and secure America's borders just like we had them before. We built the wall and now we will add to it."
President Trump: "Every drug dealer during his or her life on average will kill 500 people with the drugs they sell, not to mention the destruction of families. We are going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty."
President Trump: "We will abolish every Biden covid mandate and rehire every patriot who was fired from our military with an apology and full back pay."
President Trump: "I will push a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress. I will ask for a permanent ban on taxpayer funding of campaigns, a lifetime on lobbying by former members of Congress.. a ban on members of Congress trading stocks on insider information"
Donald J. Trump for President 2024 Announcement Video
Hello everybody. I’m pleased to announce that I’m running for President of the United States and together we are going to make our country safe, prosperous, great, and glorious again. Under Joe Biden, we are a nation in decline. But our movement has the power to save America. And we must do that. We can once again build the greatest economy in the history of the world. We can bring back strong borders. We can give our police the support they need and the respect they deserve. And we can restore hope to communities all across our land. This campaign will decide the fate of our entire nation and we must win. I’m asking each of you to join us in this great national effort. Get online, sign-up, donate, take action, volunteer, get organized, talk to your neighbors. Together we will save our country and we will Make America Great Again.