During a town hall in Centennial, Colorado on Tuesday, Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) and Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) were asked how Democrats can push back on the Trump administration.
00:00I think he gave me a little bit of a segue there in terms of stake in Trumpism, but one of the things that's difficult just as a citizen is to keep track of the plethora of events.
00:12You open the newspaper and there's something else. You go, oh my goodness, I never thought that would happen.
00:18And that whether it's an economic policy, whether it's a medical policy, whether it's how we're treating immigrants in our country, it's just over and over again every day.
00:27And so I'm interested in your advice in terms of the ways that that interested active citizens can be helpful in supporting driving that stake in a way that is meaningful right now while he's in power.
00:44I will keep letting you go first or I'll go first. You know, whatever you want to do.
00:50We're going to work out. I'll just I'll just answer the question. I'm just answering the question.
00:55I don't want him thinking that I'm not quitting the hard part either.
00:59Somewhere in there is a how many elected officials that screw in a light bulb joke.
01:04Yeah, or you are.
01:06All right. Yeah, listen, it does seem unrelenting.
01:12First of all, I'm not surprised by anything they're doing because it's what they said they were going to do.
01:17It's in Project 2025. It's literally written down.
01:21I am astonished by the pace of it. The sheer speed of which it's happening has been shocking to me.
01:29So we don't have the luxury, though, to take passes.
01:38We just don't have the luxury to say, I'm not going to do this one.
01:41I'm not going to do this one. I'm going to focus it.
01:43We have to fight on every front and we have to put speed bumps as many as we can to slow these things down.
01:52Right? We just have to. And we are working so hard.
01:58And so are many of you and many of you that I called out at the beginning to try to fight back and to protect our community.
02:05But this also will not be solved in Washington.
02:11You know, this fix that we're in is not going to be solved by me or Michael or any of the other elected officials.
02:19We have a critical role to play, a very important role to play, and really important jobs in fighting back.
02:26And not just fighting back, but also building something new, have an alternative vision, an idea for people to choose.
02:33But ultimately, this is going to be solved by all of us.
02:37In Washington, in the history of America, Washington has never driven change.
02:43It hasn't. It's set policy. It's responded to things. It's helped change the trajectory.
02:49But real change has always come from the country.
02:52Right? And if we're going to turn around the polarization, the partisanship, the entrenched vitriol that we see growing, the extremism,
03:04it's going to have to be by reinvigorating civic life in America.
03:09This is where I'm going to walk out for a minute.
03:12Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, he talked about, he compared different democracies.
03:20And he said, but in America, it's different. And I'm paraphrasing here.
03:25He said, what is unique about America, that doesn't exist any place else, is the civic life.
03:33That politics and rallying around democracy doesn't revolve around electoral politics or Washington.
03:45It actually exists throughout the country in this fabric of community and civic organizations.
03:50That's how Americans organize themselves.
03:53And for so many years, that's how we did it.
03:56So it's no surprise that as civic life has frayed, organization involvement has frayed,
04:03and we've self-segregated, that our politics have followed.
04:08All right, so my request for all of you is to engage in citizen oversight, because you all need to be our eyes and ears.
04:17We need to know what's happening in our community.
04:19When we're out in Washington, our teams are out in a lot of places, but we're not everywhere.
04:23And we need your eyes and ears to help us see what's happening and how to respond to it.
04:28That's one.
04:29Number two is, if you're not already, run out tonight and join an organization.
04:35A rotary, a parent-teacher association, a local community board.
04:42Get involved and get to know people who you wouldn't otherwise have interaction with,
04:48and engage and let them know who we are as a community, what our values are.
04:53Like that, ultimately, is how we're going to solve it.
04:56Let me just say, I'm so happy this guy is your congressman.
05:05First of all, what they're doing is totally intentional, what he said.
05:10They're flooding the zone and flooding the zone and flooding the zone,
05:13which is what he did before he got elected and what he did the last time that he was elected.
05:17It's different this time, because the last time, he didn't think he was going to win.
05:21Like he was standing there in New York and, what, Hillary Clinton's not the next president?
05:26This time, they had four years to prepare, and they did prepare.
05:29And that's what you're seeing, and that's what we're dealing with.
05:32And it is an avalanche every single day.
05:35And that's a reality that we're all going to have to find a way to deal with.
05:40I will say that I would suspect that all of us would be a little better off if we'd maybe turn the cable television off for an hour or two a day,
05:55rather than watching it if we're watching it all day or for hours and hours and hours.
06:01And I'm telling you, we would be better off, you know, not doom scrolling on our phones all day long.
06:08We would.
06:09Listen, and by the way, if you think I don't understand what that looks like,
06:13know that my mother, Susie Bennett, who was born in 1938 in Warsaw, Poland,
06:20and the year before Hitler invaded, is still alive and spends most of every day, as far as I can tell,
06:28sending me that article, this article, did you see what they said on MSNBC?
06:33It's like, I got it, I got it, I got it.
06:36And then I come to these meetings and we get it again.
06:40And I, and Susie Bennett, you should stop watching all that stuff.
06:45But the other thing that happens, because this is the nature of doom scrolling,
06:52and the nature of, of, of those programs, is that in some ways they're selling advertising.
07:04They, there can, it can create a sense of fatalism and a sense of hopelessness.
07:10And I know there's some people who say, you're naive, don't you know how terrible this is?
07:15As I said, I stipulate to that. This is terrible. This is a terrible reactionary period in our history.
07:23But we have no right to be fatalistic. We have absolutely no right to tell our children that there is no hope.
07:33That would be such a, an abomination of our responsibility, or a compromise of our responsibility as citizens in a country where,
07:44just to take one example of a billion, of John Lewis's willingness to subject his skull to the billy clubs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
07:56not for his sake, but for the sake of democracy. I can assure you that there is no one in this room, I don't even know you,
08:05that has more of a reason to think this country is corrupt than, or that its government is corrupt than John Lewis did.
08:13But that didn't keep him from giving up hope. In fact, he saw it as part of what he had to do to make sure that,
08:20that his generation and the next generation were able to sustain that. And frankly, it's the only way we've ever made any progress.
08:30And that is something we have to do. And I agree totally with Jason that in Colorado, our civic infrastructure has atrophied seriously.
08:43I think a big part of that is these phones and these social media platforms that those guys that were sitting behind President Trump at his inauguration
08:52have inflicted on school children all over our country, it has inflicted on the rest of us.
08:58I think that the collapse of edited content journalism in America is something that we are wrestling with in a very profound way, do you think?
09:08Just one example. Do you really think we'd be having a conversation about whether Canada was going to be our 51st state
09:15if Walter Cronkite were reading us the news at night, every night? I don't think we would. I don't think we would.
09:25And we're not going to bring that analog world back, but Trump has mastered that digital world.
09:31And we have to find a way to rebuild the architecture that Jason was talking about.
09:37There's no other way to do it. And I would add to his list, I guarantee you that there is a kid in this community
09:44who could really use somebody who came once a week to read to them.
09:48I guarantee you there is a senior in an elder care facility who could use somebody to come there and read to them.
10:00My worst nightmare, by the way, as a former Democratic politician, is that someday I'm going to find myself in one of those facilities
10:07and somebody is going to say to someone else, I don't really know, but he used to be a politician, so put on the cable.
10:15You know, and I'm going to be sitting here watching that 24 hours a day because I can't think of anything less constructive in terms of the answer to your question.
10:28And post-COVID, we have lost our ability to, you know, to interact in the way that Jason was talking about.
10:41And we have to rebuild that at the local level and in the state of Colorado, that's what I think.
