Obama tried to make deals with Republicans, and I don't think he realized he'd have such an insanely opposing Congress.
Saikat Chakrabarti
You have to decide to create the society you want to create, and that's done through politics.
I'm not a fan of people making up lies, and I do feel I owe it to people to know what the truth is.
Not taking corporate money is a core part of the progressive message.
The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all.
What the Bernie campaign showed us was that you could out-raise a well-funded opponent with grassroots donations, and you could out-voter-contact them, too.
When you shoot for big stuff, you stay true to the movement. You fight unapologetically on the inside; that is a very, very powerful way to pass the radical solutions that are necessary to face the radical problems that you have.
The reality is, our problem isn't that more people are voting Republican than Democrat - our problem is most people who would vote Democrat aren't voting.
I like to show my cards and see people's reactions.
Yes, climate change is an existential threat, but there's also kind of this existential issue of why is it that as our society is progressing... things seem to be regressing and getting worse for a large number of people? Why is that happening? How do we fix that?
Progressives think the way to win is mobilizing and convince people to vote for something.
I don't know if it's a uniquely American thing, but I associate it that way. People get excited by this idea of, 'Let's come together and defeat this huge enemy through innovation, by solving this crisis.' I think that's motivating and inspiring.
I am talking about the radical conservatives in the Democratic Party. That's who we need to counter. It's the same across any number of issues - pay-as-you-go, free college, 'Medicare for all.' These are all enormously popular in the party, but they don't pass because of the radical conservatives who are holding the party hostage.
For background, Brand New Congress was created in the summer of 2016 with the goal of recruiting 400 candidates to run for Congress with a national campaign and a clear set of policies they would advocate for. It was an attempt to create, as per the name, a brand new Congress.
It's not at all a secret that I was one of the co-founders of Brand New Congress, and we've never tried to hide our goals.
I co-managed AOC's campaign alongside Vigie Ramos Rios and also was the one that managed the launch of her initial campaign in 2017.
It's fairly common for new members of Congress to hire their former campaign managers onto their official staff.
We need new leaders, period.
There's a whole pipeline for where people recruit current Hill staff from, and it's people who go through a kind of ideological training that's incorrect, I'd say, and so there's a lot of work to do, and Justice Democrats is trying to figure out where it fits.
I don't think people have to be personally racist to enable a racist system.
I think the Right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years. It inoculated us.
People focus on the labels when they are not sure what they mean. What people call socialism these days is Eisenhower Republicanism!
The power of Bernie Sanders was not only in his email list. The centers of power were local groups that formed on Facebook and Reddit.
Bernie is great, but we've got to keep this political revolution going.
My personal belief in doing Brand New Congress is that the movement needs something to focus on that's constructive.
I think people more and more are tired of the party system. People want good candidates and good people to win.
People are realizing that the winning message is the progressive message.
Similar to how 'Abolish ICE' rang the bell on this huge crisis on immigration, unifying around not taking corporate-PAC money gets everybody to pay attention to big money in politics.
Running on corporate-PAC money is a huge liability.
Having presidential candidates say they are supportive of the concept of doing something like the Green New Deal is amazing, but it's not sufficient.
We think climate change is important enough to get its own select committee. It would be in addition to the Energy and Commerce Committee's jurisdiction.
The job of an elected official is to communicate, to talk with constituents, to talk with the people of America, and I think Alexandria is excellent at doing that.
I think Trump uses social media as a way to get to people's lowest common denominator. He uses it to incite fear. He talks about simplistic ideas.
