Unidentified Speaker (56:35)
Well, you know, I think I share other people's frustrations that our leaders are openly lying to us, they are openly hurting us. And people are incredibly frustrated because it feels like you should see them in handcuffs. And this is not sort of a vague. Well, I don't really like what this person is doing. This is literally taking things like the fourth Amendment and writing a secret memo that says, nevermind, we're just going to throw that out the window. And so part of you just was like, let's fix it now. But the whole point of the way the system was set up is that it's supposed to take time to change things. And Americans elected this administration. Now, it didn't do it by the landslide at all that they keep insisting gave them a mandate. More People voted for somebody other than Donald Trump than voted for him. And they also, I think, voted for something different than he has delivered. That is, from the beginning, beginning of the second campaign, he promised opposite things to opposite groups of people. So by definition, people were going to be unhappy. You can't both have high tariffs and no inflation. You can't both remove all brown people from the United States and only remove the criminals. So from the beginning, he's been doing things that people did not expect him to do. And you can see this in his absolutely cratering approval ratings for issues, as well as for his personal handling, handling of the White House. That being said, it feels frustrating not to be able to just flip a switch and say, make this stop. But what we are seeing, not only with the juries, but with the American people speaking up, not only in the streets, although that's incredibly important, but also by making it clear to their elected officers, not only at the national level, but also at the state and local levels, saying, this is not what we want. And people see people in the streets for sure, but I don't think they understand fully how effective this has been. So, for example, it was the American people speaking up against ICE that made the senators, who have the power of the filibuster, the Democratic senators, made them able to say, no, we're not going to agree to fund DHS again until you have some ICE reforms. That was us that we did that. But similarly, the budget that Trump put forward in 2026, basically the appropriations committees threw out, and the Democrats were not able to restore funding to the levels of 2025, but they were able essentially to get rid of Trump's budget and fund a lot of things that he and the Department of Government Efficiency had tried to cut. And you see these sorts of legislative pushbacks all over the place. And the reason for that is not simply that people in Congress want to keep their jobs, but there is also the very real feature of our system that if you want to get elected in the first place, you need to have a constituency whom you represent. And one of the things that the radical right always did well, especially once it was able to use people like Rush Limbaugh to rally people and get them to complain, is they managed to convince their elected officials that they were the true American voice. If you have 1,000 people calling from the radical right and three people calling from those who are standing on the Constitution, I can tell you which one wins out. We have flipped that script. And people are now speaking out and saying, wait a minute, Here. Why has there not been an investigation of the Good and Preddy killings in Minneapolis? Well, now. Now we're getting those. I have my doubts about how legitimate they're going to be, but at least they're stepping up to the plate. Similarly, you're seeing Tom Homan claiming that the surge into Minneapolis is going to recede. Mind you, that will still leave ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. But that pressure, that everyday pressure, is having an effect. But I would go a step further and say that the more people get involved in their communities and not necessarily doing something, something dramatic like being in the streets, but simply practicing the sort of neighborliness and the sort of community that we are seeing across the country, but is exhibited so fully in Minneapolis, they are reinforcing the idea of a country based on the idea that we're equal, that we help each other out, that our government should reflect that, because the government simply is all of us together. And doing that and including more and more people in that is how you ultimately change the larger shape of state. So not simply in the next election saying we want an Independent or a Democrat in what was a radical right seat, but simply saying we want to change it all. And one of the pieces that I think that Zoran Mamdani has brought to the political conversation, for me anyway, is his emphasis on the fact that a lot of what we want as American citizens is already on the books. It's just that we are not enforcing it. So some of the laws that the people like Dylan are using against the American polity now were designed to be used for us, and we can reclaim that. It's not a question of saying we gotta start from the ground and build it up. We simply have to go back to the legislation that we had in the 1970s, for example, before you got the rise of Reagan and the gutting of all that. And certainly we will need to act and subtract and rebuild going forward, but simply reiterating the principles that have always made this nation great in this moment at the local level and state and national level, and putting increasing pressure on, that certainly has the potential and has in the past worked to create a more just, fair and equal society for everybody. And I feel like that's happening everywhere. Somebody carried a constitution through the streets of Minneapolis yesterday, but people don't always feel that it's working because it's not fixing things today, which is what we would all like to see. Instead, it is turning around this extraordinary large ship of state. And that is happening. We just have to make sure. That that state doesn't get torpedoed before we are able once again to take the wheel of it.
