Iowa Democratic Steak Fry - Sept. 21, 2019

I’ve been listening to a lot of great candidates here today. I don’t think of myself as running against anyone. I think of myself as running with a lot of really great people. And I’ve heard a lot of plans articulated and I agree with the majority of them. I’m on the left wing of the Democratic Party, there’s no question whether we have, the Democrats, the best plans. But, none of those plans are going to be brought to fruition until and unless we have another plan. That’s what I want to talk to you about today, my plan for defeating Donald Trump. Because if we don’t have a plan for how we’re going to defeat Donald Trump then it’s all just talk. We’re already having too much talk in a vacuum. “Once I’m elected I will do this, once I’m elected I will do that.”

So I want to talk to you about how we are going to do the first thing, that most important thing that we must do. And that ladies and gentlemen, is not just to defeat Donald Trump. We have to do more than defeat Donald Trump, we have to do more than not go over the cliff. We need to get out of the vicinity of the cliff. We need to defeat an ideology. We need to so inspire a new chapter for the Democratic Party and for the United States of America that they can’t come back in ‘22 or ‘24. So we have to think big, think big with me. I don’t know who we’re talking to when we go on and on about how bad Donald Trump is because if you’re talking about people who cannot stand the agenda of Donald Trump, I think it's fair to assume they’re voting for the Democrat. And people who are so excited about Donald Trump are gonna vote for Donald Trump, they’re gonna vote for Donald Trump. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, is that if we have one group that’s just so angry at them to vote for any Democrat and then we put that up against one group that’s so excited then no matter who else is running, they’re gonna vote for Donald Trump that’s way too close for comfort. What we have to do is talk to all those millions of people who did not vote. What we have to do is talk to all those way too many people who voted third party. And we need to talk-- and please hear me here to millions of people who, yes they voted for Donald Trump, but they are disturbed. But, I’ll tell you something, if all we do is talk about how bad Donald Trump is we are shaming them, we are making them wrong and we will not make them inspired to vote for us. We have to have a new chapter in the Democratic Party which is way wider, which is speaking to something much deeper than, “I’m a Democrat and you’re a Republican.” We need to speak to the heart of the matter. We need to speak to those values about which all of us care, not because we’re Democrat or Republican but because we are American.

We have to transform this country not just change policies. If all you do is change presidents, they’ll come back in ‘22, they’ll come back in ‘24. If all we do is change policies then the next president will simply take away the good ones that we got in place. This country needs to transform and this country needs a president and this president should emerge from a party that is ready to go deeper, go soulful, get real, do some truth-telling. Talk not just the truth, every Democrat running is telling the truth, but ladies and gentlemen we need to do more than just talk the truth, we need to say the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And if we talk the whole truth and nothing but the truth, America has some painful truths to look at. America has to look at how many ways we are not behaving like the country that we purport to be. All the ways in which we are not aligned with the principles on which we claim to stand. In a country where the government does more to advocate for those who are already rich so that they can get richer and to advocate less for those who can hardly make it at all/ We’re not even behaving like a democracy, we are behaving like the aristocracy we repudiated in 1776 and we need to repudiate it again.

And we need to face how much unnecessary human suffering has resulted from this. We have to face that there are millions of American children who are living with chronic trauma. Millions of American children and yes they are in Iowa too, who go to schools where they don’t even have the school supplies with which to teach a child to read. And if a child cannot learn to read by the age of eight, then the chances of high school graduation are drastically decreased and the chances of incarceration are drastically increased. The Democratic Party should not be a party that simply normalizes the despair of these children. And if all the Democratic Party is talking about is increased funding for schools and preschools and free college, all of which I agree with. Ladies and gentlemen, we need to get deeper. We have children in this country who are traumatized before preschool. We have hungry children in America who go to school, we have 13 million hungry children in America. We have children who go to classrooms in this country and ask the teacher if they have something to eat for them. We have millions of American children who are experiencing a level of chronic trauma that psychologists say is no less severe than the trauma of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans from war.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need to get real about what’s happening in this country. We need to get real about race in this country. We need to do more about this paternalistic, race-based policy stuff. We need to do more than just having another commission to study it. We need to realize that with 250 years of slavery plus another hundred years of institutionalized violence against black people, it is time to pay a debt that is owed. It is time to pay reparations and it is time to take reparative measures regarding a Native American justice in this country, including the Meskwaki here in Iowa. Because ladies and gentlemen whether you’re a country or you’re an individual, you’re not going to have the future you want unless you’re willing to clean up the past. The Democratic Party needs to be talking about a World War II level mobilization to deal with the urgency of the climate crisis so intense that if we do not take radical action within the next 10 or 15 years, we could be talking about a civilization collapse. We could be talking about food shortages, mass starvation, hundreds possibly of millions of refugees We could be talking about social collapse, the kinds of which we have not been talking about in the modern era. And we need to talk about more than just endless preparation for war. “Bring the boys home” oh come on, that's not a foreign policy, that’s a slogan. We should be talking about waging peace, the Democratic Party should be talking about waging peace, declaring peace. We can’t just deal with the guns and just deal with the military budget. We also need to have a U.S. Department of Peace. We need to have a U.S. Department of Children and Youth. We need to pay reparations, we need to get real in this country about the things that we need to get real about.

Donald Trump has ushered in an era of political theater and we will not be going back. Ladies and gentlemen, he’s not just a politician, he is a phenomenon and the only way we will defeat him is if we create a phenomenon of our own. And a phenomenon of our is not an individual, it is an arousal, it’s an inspiration, it’s a motivation among the American people that will occur with the same-old same-old “this is our plan and this is how we’ll fix it.” We need to have something that is so real and that people all over this country know that's laying it down, that’s telling it like it is and that’s the moral values about which we can all say I’m proud to be an American. I might be a conservative, I might be a liberal, I might have been a Republican, I might have been a Democrat but you know what that woman is right. Ladies and gentlemen, I know what you’ve been told, “Oh Marianne Williamson, she’s not one of them don’t you get it ladies and gentlemen?” But I challenge the idea that only those whose careers have been entrenched for decades in the system that drove us into this ditch can drive us out of it. You see ladies and gentlemen, abolition didn’t come from the government, people rose up and people stepped in. Women’s suffrage didn’t come from the government, people rose up and people stepped in. Civil Rights didn’t come from the government, it started because the people rose up and the people stepped in. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time once again for the people to step in. So next time, I hope you will look at my website, Marianne2020.com and I hope you will consider deep in your heart next time somebody says, “But she could never win,” you might want to think of saying, “Actually, she might be the only one who can.” Thank you very very very much! Not the only one because we’ll make sure the Democrat wins but I got something going on with my conversation. I appreciate it God bless you.