Congressman Kevin McCarthy warns that extreme Democrat policies, including Proposition 47 and AOC's socialist influence, are fueling a potential 2022 "red wave" driven by inflation and border failures. He criticizes Governor Newsom's reactive leadership and President Biden's contradictory stances on China, citing a 300% rise in fentanyl deaths and alleged congressional spy protection. McCarthy advocates for an eight-pillar strategy to secure supply chains and restore American exceptionalism, arguing that unity and freedom, not government dependency or debt-trap diplomacy, will define the next century. [Automatically generated summary]
Everyone thinks, OK, Southern Cal's so bad with homeless.
It's everywhere.
It's in Bakersfield.
It's in every single community.
But what I really was shocked the other day when I came into Southern California, you've almost grown accustomed to seeing homeless under the overpasses, right, and everywhere.
But they have overtaken the beaches, Wilshire Boulevard.
But what was shocking to me is living on the freeway.
It's not a federal issue, but the first thing I did was, I brought a symposium together, my mayor, and I actually flew up Kevin Faulkner out of San Diego.
He was the mayor of San Diego.
It was the only major city in California that actually decreased homelessness.
There's a chance we win, but this is what we should all think about across this country.
Remember what was happening before the recall, that these governors were becoming so empowered that they could tell us whatever we could, they could tell us whether we could go to church, they could tell us where we could eat.
I remember calling Gavin's chief of staff, where he had just put out The restaurants could open based upon square footage who could be in there.
But a church could never go more than a hundred.
So I talked to him.
Well, how do you determine the restaurant?
Well, by square footage.
Well, how do you determine the church?
Well, not by square footage.
Where's the science?
But the only reason he started lifting anything is because of the recalls.
So, what happened was, Democracy at Work.
It's the first time he started waking up, right?
Tell us, we couldn't do anything, but he's at the French Laundry, right?
And the challenge with Gavin is that most people that get into Public service have a philosophy and a principle.
And I admire that.
Even if the person has a different principle and philosophy than I do.
Because you know where you can find common ground, right?
Our government's not designed that one person gets 100% of what they want.
So how do I keep my principles?
How do I find common ground?
And how do you move something forward?
Gavin will change his opinion in a day.
And he does it by a poll.
Where do I need to move here?
Where do I need to go there?
Those are the people who fail in this process.
And what I'm finding in this, he needs, here he is, a Democrat governor of the fifth largest economy in the world, with Democrat majorities on both sides, and he's afraid to lead.
Well, you lose all power when you're not, when you're not leading.
And think about what the Democrats, when they're looking for the presidential future, who's their, who's the leader of the party?
Gavin Newsom and Cuomo?
And what they did in the, what they did during COVID, and we got DeSantis and Kristi Noem, they literally used their principles, not letting the federal government tell them what to do.
I think the recall can pass, and I think it would be eye-opening for whoever could win the race.
And remember, Now that it's qualified, what's the first thing the Democrats did?
Yeah, because they think it's an advantage because now that Biden is in and gave them billions of dollars, Gavin's gonna buy his way out of it, or try to at least, right?
So if you're low income and you have a moving violation, he'll pay for it, right?
Here they are with everything heard about COVID, they got $75 billion surplus.
I mean, it's crazy.
And then he held money back from certain counties?
But anyways, the last recall was about Gray Davis.
And what happened in that process, people at the very beginning, they would pull and say, I don't want to recall the governor, until they found out who would replace him.
So I really think what California is looking at, to get to the recall, it wasn't a bunch of Republicans who signed it, it was Independents, it was Democrats.
And there was a lot down here.
Why?
They're concerned about Homelessness, but really affordability.
Why do you think Democrats can't seem to associate the people that they vote for and the policies they vote for, for the bad stuff that happens?
Like all the people in San Francisco right now that are watching the Neiman Marcus video that we played it on the show and just people running into Walmart and into Walgreens.
I think 17 Walgreens closed in the San Francisco area, just stealing stuff.
And then you've got the DA that won't prosecute.
And then now we've got the former San Francisco DA is now in Los Angeles.
I mean, you get, it's the swamp.
It's a mini swamp that we've got here in California.
But for some reason, people can't seem to realize, oh, if you keep voting in the same party and things keep going wrong, that there's maybe a connection there to the people you're voting in?
So in this last election, with all the wind against us, every single incumbent wins.
But we beat 15 Democrats.
Every Democrat lost to a Republican woman, a Republican minority.
We elected more Republican women than any time in the history of the party.
Okay?
So now, Only two times in the history of the country has the party in power, meaning whoever controlled the White House, lose the White House and gain seats in the House.
1892 and 1992.
And both times they won the majority two years later.
Okay.
31,731 votes.
That's how short we came up from winning the majority.
Out of more than 152 million.
So what really happened, there were about four or five seats, I didn't have enough money to play in, and we lost by less than two points.
People didn't quite see what was happening, the silent majority.
That's why when you talk about, can we win the recall in California?
Yes.
I don't care what the pollsters say, because momentum.
The next election is going to be big, right?
Because all of these things about defunding the police, all these Democrat policies that are now going in place, we're seeing the outcome, the woke-ism, the open border, the inflation.
Where we're going to have the biggest victory?
School boards.
We haven't been paying attention for the last 20 years.
Critical race theory goes against everything Martin Luther King has ever told us.
Don't judge us by the color of our skin.
And now they're embracing it.
Right?
They're going backwards.
And the interesting part here is, okay, Something else is happening, not just an election, and it'll be a national election for Congress.
What history says is the party in power, whoever wins the White House on the first off-year election, loses 27 seats.
We lost 40, Obama lost 63.
And they have a five-seat advantage.
In the last election cycle, we targeted about 50 Democrats, only one retired.
This cycle, already five Democrats have retired, and I'll bet you that gets over ten.
And why they're retiring is because you have redistricting as well, right?
Redistricting doesn't affect the Senate, but it does the House.
Almost every seat unless you go statewide.
And what redistricting tells us is people move, right?
So we've got this amazing Ability, the states, and the Tenth Amendment, right?
They're like pilot projects.
They're like startups, right?
I mean, welfare reform didn't start in Washington, D.C.
It started in Wisconsin.
Some of our best ideas are driven from the bottom up, not from the top down.
And the Democrats love the top down, okay?
So for the first time in the history of the state, California is not gaining a seat, we're losing a seat.
New York, Illinois, who gains?
Florida, Texas.
So what's going to happen here, people are moving based upon the philosophy I believe it's going to be an interesting time because here the Democrats are going to be sitting back.
They realize they're in trouble.
They've been in office for a little while.
Do they want to go have to meet new constituents and explain to them why they defend the message of Maxine Waters?
Or why they aren't standing up to protect our borders?
Or what are they doing economically but creating inflation?
Why are they paying people more money to stay home instead of go back to work?
Why are they making our military woke?
I think that silent majority is going to wake up and I think there's going to be a pretty big swing.
So the number one thing you have to have is the quality of the candidate.
But when I was in elementary school, I watched junior high, Jimmy Carter go on TV Put a sweater on, tell me to turn the heater down, and tell me the best days of America were behind us.
He'd accept mediocrity.
Then watch this other guy go to a podium and say, no pastels, fly the bold colors, and go to that shiny city on the hill.
I knew what he meant, right?
That America is exceptional.
If you come to my office, I want you to come to DC sometime, so I have this portrait of Reagan behind me, it's in color, right?
I have this other portrait that's very big, and it's Lincoln.
And it's in black and white.
The greatest challenge ever to our Constitution was the Civil War.
And at night, if you sat back and what's happening, and you asked these two people to give us advice today, Lincoln would say, believe in the exceptionalism of America.
And this is what makes me mad coming off the 4th of July.
Why wouldn't we celebrate the progress?
We're not perfect, but as we strive for more perfect union.
Lincoln said, Conceived in liberty, and dedicated the proposition that we're all equal.
He goes on to say, but if we fail, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from earth.
We weren't the world power, but he understood the strength of what democracy and republic were, right?
There is no other nation in the world Conceived in liberty and dedicated to all equal.
Maybe Israel, but no other one, right?
Lincoln would also tell us this, right?
As an elected official, don't be afraid of making a tough decision, right?
The whole debate of slavery didn't start in 1850.
It was the creation of our country.
But they thought it was too divided, too divisional, right?
That it would divide us, divide the colonies.
So they said to put it aside.
In doing so, hundreds of thousands of their children died.
We don't have a decision like that today, but our debt, our challenge with China, right?
Are we too afraid as elected official to make a decision that we can lose upon?
But what happens is, you narrow it, you're eventually going to make a decision, but you're going to have fewer options.
And the other thing Lincoln would tell us today is, don't blame other people for your problems.
Think about it.
He gets elected November 1860, but not sworn in until March 1861.
Never once did he blame Buchanan.
He understood where he was.
What was it, seven states left the Union in that short amount of time?
Now Reagan, I have him in color.
And this is something for you, it's for something for every conservative.
And he'd even say it to liberals, right?
If you believe in your philosophy, if you truly believe your philosophy and principles bring people more freedom, don't be angry, be happy.
I get upset that these people say, I'm more conservative because I'm angry.
All that means is less people want to have dinner with you.
Reagan brought Democrats in, right?
People want to know what he was drinking.
Why was he so happy?
You know, he had the 11th commandment.
He didn't tear another Republican down.
He brought humor to it, but he knew his principles.
Have you ever thought for a moment, if you're gonna write another book, we should collaborate on this, what would America look like had Lincoln not been assassinated?
Malice towards none.
Would we ever had Jim Crow laws?
You know how Jim Crow laws came and who authored Jim Crow laws?
The Democrats.
How did they do it?
Because after the Civil War, the South was controlled by Republicans.
White Republicans and black Republicans.
And who'd they elect?
Black Republicans.
Who's the first black American elected to Congress?
It's a portrait in my office, it's who?
Joseph Rainey.
Where was he elected from?
Charleston, South Carolina.
If you study American history, the Civil War started there, right?
He was a slave.
He was elected in 1870.
Do you know when the first black Democrat was elected?
Sixty years later.
But what happened, there got up to 23 black Republicans elected.
So we had a race for the presidency that was close.
So the Democrats cut a deal with the Republicans that we'll go with you that you won if you do one thing.
If you remove the federal troops from the South.
So they removed the federal troops from the South, and you know what happened?
They intimidated now black Americans from voting, who happened to be Republicans.
And the Democrats took over the state houses in the southern states.
And that's where Jim Crow laws were created, based upon Joseph Rainey.
Now you want to know a modern history?
Who's the only black American to get elected to the House and to the Senate?
So it seems fairly obvious to me, and I think probably most of my audience, that most conservatives, let's say, or blue dog Democrats, or basically everyone non-woke, agrees with what you just said there.
We can agree to disagree.
All right, you want this tax rate, I want this tax rate.
Even on abortion, you know, in my book, I make a begrudging pro-choice argument.
Most of my audience is conservative now.
And you know what most people said to me?
Dave, I disagree with you on that, but it's all good.
Or they usually say you'll come around to my opinion soon enough.
But they don't hate me for it.
So the point is that on the right, there is plurality of opinion, but what do you do?
I mean this for you personally, but also professionally, what do you do with a group of people?
AOC is not here to negotiate with you, obviously.
Ilhan Omar is not here to negotiate with you or negotiate what America is.
I mean, one of the things I've been thinking about is that maybe we really, I don't want the country to break up, obviously, but maybe that we really do need parallel economies, sort of linking this back to the big tech argument, and that There will be woke things, and then there will be the rest of us.
And we will build our things, and they will build their things.
And I don't know where the political piece of that fits totally.
Like this whole conversation, almost everything wrong with the country?
Cause I'm hearing you say that and it's like, man, that's what America is about.
That's what life is about.
Purpose and risk and you know, all of those things.
And now we have a government taking it all away.
Just this morning, right before you walked in, I saw this tweet by Biden and it was like, we're going to expand child healthcare from the state and we're going to expand two year college.
And it's exactly what you're saying about Venezuela.
If you ever wanted to brainwash a generation, wouldn't you just keep sending them to state schools and say, be more and more reliant on us?
I mean, to me, this is what it's all about.
More than the big tech part, in a way, and everything else.
Just the expansion of, we'll do everything for you.
Through yellow fever, through the Civil War, through World War I, through World War II, we all met.
It would be important.
Do you think the founders would really think if there was a real challenge, make sure the people at the grocery store go to work, make sure the doctors go to work, make sure the nurses, but you elected officials, no, you go home.
On the money, yeah, so on the budgets and all that, when they just, okay, we're gonna tax these guys, we're gonna spend this, that, like, when you get these documents, when they hand it to you, they show you the big, you know, we all see the big thing of paper and Rand Paul goes through it on Festivus, when do you get it?
You get it five minutes before usually, right?
But like, when they show you these numbers, Like, in your head, are you like, what are these people talking about?
You know what I mean?
Like, what are these numbers?
It's just, I think the average person at this point, they hear about all this stuff, seven trillion, and everyone's just like, it's just made up.
So I go to the Oval Office, first time seeing the President, it's been 100 days.
Mr. President, Vice President, four leaders.
The President asks, can we do a bipartisan infrastructure bill?
Okay.
Some others speak and go, Mr. President, you're asking me?
Let me ask you a question.
So the first question is, can we do a bipartisan?
The answer is yes, we can.
Well, how much money can you spend on it?
No, Mr. President, that's the wrong question.
If you're asking my opinion, you ask, would we work with you to do a bipartisan?
The answer is yes.
Now, what I would think of how to do that, how do you put the structure together, the first thing is we should both sit down and agree, what is infrastructure?
So if it's roads, bridges, airports, broadband, yeah.
Let's decide what infrastructure is, and then we can see what is the need.
Then you could decide what's it cost.
Now, we have these trillions of dollars over here that we appropriated that now you don't need based upon COVID.
Why spend more money?
Why don't you utilize those?
But, if you're asking me what I think bipartisan would be too, we would need some NEPA reform, because some of the biggest challenges you know, you'd say build a road, but it's 10 years later before it gets built, even though it's on the same road.
So let's reform that so things happen right away.
Because, look, the two greatest threats to America are China and the debt.
The debt is gonna give you fewer options of what you can do in the future.
China spends the time just studying America, either stealing from us.
They have a plan for 2049, one world power.
You watch what President Xi has said.
You watch what they have done with their military.
You watch what they've done with their islands.
You watch what they've done with Hong Kong.
You watch what they're saying about Taiwan.
And we should be focused.
And it shouldn't be a Republican plan or a Democrat.
It should be one American plan.
So if the next century is going to be an American century, Let's work on it together.
And infrastructure would be one of them.
But you know what happened?
Even when people came together and made a bipartisan plan, the first thing the president said was, we have a bipartisan plan.
And the same day he said, but I still need six trillion dollars.
So why would you ever work an agreement with him again?
If you write an autobiography, the times you've failed will be the most interesting part of the book.
If you quit when you fail, that's the end of the chapter.
If you pick yourself up, that's the American story.
That's why we buy the book, right?
So the president creates a crisis at the border, not because we did anything, simply because if a historian wrote, if Joe Biden became president and literally did nothing and kept the policies of the past administration, We'd be stronger in America today.
But he made these executive orders simply because he wanted to go the opposite of Trump.
He stopped the wall from being built the moment he was sworn in.
You have a gate in California because of his executive order that opened up, the mechanism broke and they can't fix it so they put a truck there.
It's archaic what they're doing.
How did he handle it?
He first spent the first month With Jin as press secretary, it's not a crisis.
It's not a crisis.
We're setting new records.
We're catching people who are on the terrorist watch list.
We have a 300% increase in drugs that are coming across that are killing people, right?
China has spent their time studying America in every aspect, from stealing from us, from growth of food and others, but they also watched how we fought war.
They watched Desert Storm.
America can move an aircraft carrier 250 miles away from anybody and come in and bomb you.
So what did they spend their time on?
They're building aircraft carriers now, but they spent their time on building a missile to sink an aircraft carrier.
They watch our men and women.
The troops don't fight by just getting on land.
They fight by space.
So they spend a lot of time in space.
Do you know, the other day, China sent three astronauts to space.
Did they go to the International Space Station?
They went to the Chinese space station.
They don't play with the rest of the world.
Do you know China's landed on the moon?
On the back side of the moon.
The dark side of the moon.
It's hard to land there.
We haven't landed there.
China realizes our aircraft carriers.
So what did they do?
They built islands.
What did they do when Barack Obama asked them about them?
We won't weaponize them.
Xi said that.
But what did he do?
He weaponized them.
To push us further away.
The only time our aircraft carriers in recent history were not in the straight there was during COVID.
Just like you started with California, can we win here?
I just created eight pillars to China based upon COVID.
If there's any moment in time to wake up, to study, right?
For the rest of the world to unite.
Once China found they had COVID, what did they do?
They stopped flights, not international flights, domestic flights.
Then they dominated the World Health Organization to lie to the rest of the world.
They hoarded PPE.
Then, as it went forward and the rest of the world had it, what did they do?
Well, they controlled so much mechanism, what they built.
When France needed PPE, even though they sent free to China, China says, we'll sell you some, but you have to have Huawei with you.
They utilize COVID to get more gain within their own technology around the world.
When Australia said they wanted to study where COVID came from, they went and put sanctions, tried to hurt them economically.
They said the first place their nuclear weapon could hit would be Australia.
They tried to intimidate what you would do.
So what America should do is actually lead.
We come from strength.
We should declassify the information so the entire world should know why did three million people in the world die?
And did they need to die?
Why did 600,000 Americans die?
Why did we have to in the process of COVID?
The next thing I would do is end any gain-of-function research.
And end it from this aspect.
Don't give a grant to somebody else because you're going around saying, my government's not giving to China, but I give to you because you give to China, right?
For the rest of the world, when you get to Congress, Republicans and Democrats decide what committees you get.
But there are a couple committees that are totally different.
They're decided by groups and they're voted on, right?
Intel committee is different than any other committee, because members who serve on Intel can only serve for a certain amount of time, but they find out information all the other members can't have, okay?
They're only selected by their leaders.
I select all the Republicans, Pelosi selects all the Democrats.
I am part of what is called the Gang of Eight, right?
The leaders in Intel.
We're provided information, a lot of other people aren't, right?
To know what's going on.
So I can't talk to you about things I know, but on the Intel Committee, this is all public domain we can talk about.
What we know publicly, a Chinese spy, and also remember, Senator Feinstein, we found out later, the driver of more than 10 years was a Chinese spy in Silicon Valley.
They've been in pictures together.
This woman, a Chinese spy, creates a relationship with Swalwell when he's in the city council.
He runs for Congress.
She helps.
She puts interns in his office.
Do you know how difficult it is to get on the intel committee?
When Swalwell was put on the intel committee, they were in the minority, so they had fewer seats.
He was a sophomore getting put on the intel committee?
Every single member asked me for the intel committee.
There's very few openings, right?
There's people highly qualified, there's just not openings for them.
Gets put on.
It's not, then the public says that the FBI came to warn, right?
Okay, so when you say that to Nancy, when you say, Nancy, we got a problem here, there's a spy, et cetera, et cetera, Nancy, just me and you in the room right now, what does she say?
Okay, so the other thing we should look at is after 9-11, We changed the sovereign laws that American, if they got killed, they could sue Saudi Arabia, right?
You got court, Udain court.
Why wouldn't we do that to allow the 600,000 who have died, their family, To sue China, to be able to get accountability.
Do you know where the next Winter Olympics is gonna be held?
When I watched what happened at COVID, it made me start thinking, you know what, we all thought, The world, put China in the WTO, the World Trade Organization, they'll become more democratic.
No they haven't, but they took every advantage.
Why do they get special funding as a developing nation today?
I mean it's crazy.
Why do they get this benefit?
Why would we allow this?
They're competing with us everywhere.
They just put a military base in Africa.
They want to find one in the Atlantic.
This road belt system They are like loan sharks where they take these countries and they give them billions of dollars they can't afford.
They say, we'll build the infrastructure.
But they lie to them.
And they don't create any jobs because they bring the Chinese to build it.
Then they say, you didn't pay it.
I need to take it over.
I need to put the military here to protect my infrastructure.
For the same reasons we started the three communiqués with China to do something about the Soviet Union, why aren't we working a better relationship with India?
They have a bigger population.
They care about America.
They love America.
They love the idea of freedom.
Modi, what he's doing to build his nation, Right?
Why don't we start standing up for freedom around the world?
If we take the American belief and we say when China tells us that you're going to make a new top gun again but you can't have Taiwan on the back, when you have John Cena say in Mandarin that he's a sorry because Taiwan's a country, That's when you're in trouble.
But look at this, okay.
After COVID, we should really start and think our critical minerals, our others, right?
Do we make medicine in America anymore?
Are we too tied to China, the supply chain of what we developed?
And we should think of a supply chain totally different.
We should think of the supply chain in America.
When we started having problems with ventilators and other, what did we do?
We went to our warehouses where government bought these ventilators.
They sat there and when you needed them 25 years later, they weren't ready.
So this is what we should do.
Modernize, right?
We should go to companies.
Because the free market works.
3M builds masks, right?
Let's say 3M, you build a million masks a year, okay?
What the American government's going to do is you're going to build 1.1 million.
We're going to buy 100,000.
You're going to store them.
You know what you're going to do next year?
You're going to put that, and you're going to sell that 100,000, and you're going to make a new one, right?
And we're going to go to all of our allies, and we're going to tell you, you can join in this too, right?
So now you're going to have scale.
So we're not going to have to offshore our business over to China.
We're going to make them in America.
We're going to find critical minerals that we're not going to let them dump so our businesses can't survive.
So if they're tied, if we want to build an electric car but they control the minerals, how are we going to do it?
If we need to make a new weapon but they control the minerals, we could get into conflict but in 60 days are we going to be in trouble because we can't supply ourselves again?
It is a wake-up call for us that we rethink.
It's the same point of maybe that we were before World War II and others, that we got complacent, that we didn't think long term, we thought the world was harmony, right?
We should use the strength position we're in today for the idea of freedom.
America has never gone to conquer another country for the sake of controlling it.
We've only got engagement for freedom, right?
That's different than any other country around us.
There's other people around the world that crave that same thing, that understand that we're more than a country, that we're an idea.
They're getting a benefit over our division and we should wake up.
I'll tell you another story.
You have a lot of story.
Okay, so we went to the 75th anniversary of D-Day.
Very moving.
And we did a codel.
And when I sat and walked those fields, and you look in France, and you look at those headstones, from a Star of David to a cross, but you look at the age, you look at the names.
They must have just got into them and killed on that day, right?
And you pause for a moment and you think, what could we have done before to not let that happen, right?
Let's learn from our mistakes and not get to the point of there.
Well, the challenge of what we watch with China doing and others, why don't we have one policy about this?
So I went to the Democrats and I said, let's create a committee or a task force, equal number of Republicans, equal number of Democrats.
It took me eight months.
And you know what?
They finally said yes.
And then we narrowed it down to how many people could be on it.
And we'd look at every aspect, right?
So we have a plan.
China has a plan, so why don't we have a plan?
How do we make America, you know, from education, from economics, from everything?
We even brought the Washington Post reporter in, and he interviewed, because we're gonna have that article written as soon as we announce it.
The day before, you know what the Democrats did?
They backed away.
They never gave me a reason, but part of the reason I believe they thought, because COVID had hit, that it'd give an advantage to Trump that we were doing something.
That they put politics before country.
Now the one thing I will tell you, if we are successful enough to have the majority, and I have the privilege of being speaker, I'll create that.
I moved forward and created a China task force.
And two-thirds of every bill that we brought out was bipartisan.
So I guess then, well, I guess a bonus last question, which is, this interview strikes me as very hopeful, actually, and we're not getting a lot, we're not getting a lot, no.
Well, I always tell people I'm a world-weary optimist.
I'm an optimist because I don't think I could do, it's probably similar to you, I don't think I could do what I do if I wasn't an optimist, because I have to believe that we can make things better, right?
You know when that took place, Christmas 1776, right?
You know when it was painted?
1850, 1851.
It wasn't painted... Wow, 75 years later.
It wasn't painted by somebody who's there.
There was no iPhone to take a picture.
And he wasn't even an American.
He was a German immigrant who lived in America.
You know why he painted it?
So he went back to Germany, and he wanted Germany to have a revolution based upon the ideas of America.
Now his talent was art.
So he paints this painting, and he gets it historically incorrect, okay?
If you look at the Delaware, it looks like the Rhine, but he's German, right?
He puts Washington in a rowboat.
With 13 people.
13 colonies, right?
But Washington, historians will tell you, crossed in a Durham boat.
He has Washington standing up in the middle of winter in a ceremonial uniform with his hand on his chest.
You look at Washington, my God.
I bet that man has never lost a battle.
But history tells us at that moment, he had never won.
He'd only lost.
Because that was our first victory when we surprised the Hessians.
Now when you look at this painting, don't look at Washington, look at who's in the boat.
The second person he's wearing a beret, he's Scottish.
The person directly across from him in the green jacket rowing in a cadence with him is black.
You come down in the middle of the boat, the person who looked like the strongest rowing the hardest in the red is a woman.
And in the very back is a Native American.
Now, the second-to-last person is a farmer.
And if you look at the farmer, there's a hand across his face.
It's the hand of the thirteenth person nobody sees.
You see, what Immanuel was saying, this young artist, here we are, not a country but an idea, having lost every battle, but willing to risk everything for the idea of freedom on what most people would say is our holiest of night.
Here's a hand when you get it and join us.
That's as true today as it was then.
The water may still be rough.
What we have in front of us may be different challenges than we've seen before.
But if we're all in the boat together, rowing together, from every walk of life, we will win.