Fight With Everything We Have

We must fight with everything we have, no matter where we are, and that includes right here in New Orleans, Louisiana tonight in August of the year of our Lord 2025, the future is counting on us alive today. But I want to change the terms of the fight in the first Trump term. We talked about fighting back. We talked about reacting. You're always responding. We talked about a resistance and listen, I get it. There's some romance to the idea of being in the resistance, but I do not want to be about resisting. I want to be about taking this fight to those motherfuckers and winning it everywhere across the country, whatever it takes. Whoever we need to take on, we need to do this. We need to get off the back foot and onto the front foot, away from defense and onto offense, no longer awaiting the punch thrown by these would-be fascists. But throwing our punch first and throwing our punch harder. You with me on this? So that means having the backs of these Texas legislators, that means organizing, yes, here in New Orleans, but it means organizing in Shreveport, in Mike Johnson's district. Imagine if we take that guy down in 2026. Change the world. And how about this? You may not like this, and it may not fit with the ethics and the morals and the instructions to color within the lines that we've long lived by in this country. But my contention is that Democrats for far too long have cared more about being right than being in power. The other side only cares about being in power, and we have to match fire with fire or we will lose power forever. It means continuing to protest and to rally. No kings, hands off, indivisible, the Democratic Party here in Louisiana. This stuff is breaking through. Abraham Lincoln, no lesser light than him. Speech he gives in 1858. He says, Look, there's the power of the presidency. You got the power of the legislatures. You have the power of the courts. But more powerful than all of that is the power of the people. Public sentiment, he said, is everything. With it, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed. You've been showing up in person, getting in front of your fellow citizens and sharing the truth. Being together in meetings like this, face to face, human to human, eyeball to ******* eyeball, is the most profoundly powerful thing that we can do. Nothing exceeds it. Nothing even matches it. Everything else is interference and a poor substitute. So if you see a protest, go to that. If you don't see one, organize one. Get out there on the streets. Meet your fellow Louisianans. Meet your fellow Americans. Meet your fellow human beings where they are. And as we heard earlier, it doesn't matter. No me importa if you're a Republican, a Democrat and independent. You are welcomed in this movement. The broadest possible coalition, a united front for all of America, right? We should be able to do this.