This was posted on Facebook. It is a partial transcript of Governor Pritzker's speech in Southern California. It was posted by Rebecca Solnit, who says he is the next leader of the Democratic Party. What do you think?
--Kim
Ladies, genderqueers, gentlemen, I present the leader of the Democratic Party.
Transcript by Parker Molloy of Pritzker's talk (in part):
Now, let me be clear. The Trump administration and his Republican lackeys in Congress are looking to reverse every single victory this community has won over the last 50 years. And right now, it's drag queens reading books and transgender people serving in the military. Tomorrow, it's your marriage license and your job they want to take. Bending to the whims of a bully will not end his cruelty. It will only embolden him. The response to authoritarianism isn't acquiescence. Bullies respond to one thing, and one thing only, a punch in the face.
But you see, that starts with fully acknowledging what is happening. The meme lords and the minions in the White House are intentionally breaking the American system of government so they can rebuild it in their own image. They've shut down cancer research and HIV prevention. They've eliminated drinking water and clean air regulations and upended the lives of veterans. They've said that a recession that Trump is likely to cause will be worth it, which is an assessment worthy of Trump University.
At its core, what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are doing isn't about efficiencies or cost savings. It's about giving their wealthy friends a tax break and making the middle class and veterans and public school kids pay for it. It's a few idiots trying to figure out how to pull off the scam of their lives.
Meanwhile, the scariest part is that they're using the power of the presidency to try to delight their base by targeting vulnerable people, people they think can't fight back, calling them domestic enemies or claiming they'll ruin American culture. Remember their slogan, "Make America Great Again." Authoritarians target vulnerable minority communities first because they think that if they can conquer those that they deem weak, and they can show everyone else who's boss, which is why we can't sit back right now and wait to see what happens. If we wait, I guarantee you the battle will have already been lost.
Donald Trump cannot take anything from us that we don't choose to give him. He and his henchmen don't want people to realize that. But now is the time for us to wake up. The good news is every day I'm seeing more and more people across this country realize that they don't want to give him much at all.
The question I get asked most right now is, "So what can I do? What can I do?" And I'm going to be blunt about this. Never before in my life have I called for mass activism, but this is the moment. Take to the streets, protest, show up at town halls. Jam the phone lines in Congress, 202-224-3121, and afford not a moment of peace to any elected representatives who are aiding and abetting Musk and Trump's illegal power grab. This is not a drill, folks. This is the real thing.
Seize every megaphone you have. Go online and make a donation to the legal funds fighting Trump, to HRC, and to the candidates for Congress that vow to take this country backward. And don't limit your voice to the traditional political channels. Be like Lucy Welch. When JD Vance went to vacation at the Sugarbush Resort in Warren, Vermont, Lucy, who writes the Sugarbush Daily Snow Report, used her report to defend her diverse and wonderful community, ending by saying, "I am using my relative platform as a snow reporter to be disruptive. What we do or don't do matters."
What we do and don't do matters. It matters right now more than it ever has before. When my future grandkids look back on this moment, I want them to know that my voice was one of the loudest in the room, screaming for justice and fighting against tyranny.
And in the midst of this existential fight, this battle that seems to consume everything, well, let's not take the soul-sucking path of sacrificing the most persecuted for that which we deem to be most popular. I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist. Well, I am. We are. We will.
I know that amidst the ongoing assault on our institutions, it is easy for people to fall into despair about our democratic system. But I love this country too much not to fight for it. You're here tonight because you do too. And when I think about that love, I think back to all the times in our history when our ancestors had to fight back against tyrants and racists and those who couldn't understand that freedom and justice are our foundational promises in this country.
That group of people, that small group of people that got together in Chicago to found this country's first known gay rights organization. Well, it was called Society for Human Rights. It was 1924 and the flicker of light was brief. It only lasted a matter of months before social persecution and criminal prosecution bankrupted the promise of the group's charter. But oh, that flicker ignited something. By whisper and by word of mouth, folks around the country started to catch wind of the idea. And eventually, it ended up in the ears of a man here in California who later said the idea of gay people getting together at all was an eye-opener for him.
Well, that man's name was Harry Hay. And a couple of decades later, he went on to found the Mattachine Society right here in Los Angeles. It was the first sustained gay rights organization in the United States. Harry said that he was first told about the Chicago group as a warning that the idea was too dangerous and nobody should try to pull anything off like that ever again. How lucky the world is that Harry didn't listen.
When we say history repeats itself, it's not because the villains and battles don't evolve with the ages. They do. But the fight itself remains elemental. It's always men who would be king, blaming the suffering of the masses on those who look different or sound different or live differently. And since the dawn of time, the triumph of good over evil has relied on those who believe in empathy and kindness, summoning the steel spine needed to defend those values that by their nature leave us vulnerable to attack. This community knows that. You have lived and breathed this fight for generations. Our hope, our hope lies in this room.
The fact that we are still here today means that we have the faith and courage that we will win the battles that really matter. Now, when I first ran for governor in 2018, I started every single stump speech by saying, and this will tell you why Donald Trump doesn't like me very much. I said at the beginning of every stump speech, everything we care about is under siege by a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic Donald Trump.
And I ended every single speech with a question to the crowd, are you ready for the fight? So here we are again. Everything we care about is under siege. And so I guess I just have one question for all of you tonight. Are you ready for the fight? Are you ready for the fight? HRC, are you ready for the fight? Los Angeles, are you ready for the fight? Let's go get 'em, everybody! Let's go get 'em!
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