Yesterday I rallied a crowd in Atlanta to oppose this Administration’s unprecedented attack on our constitution and the rule of law.

(You can watch my speech here on YouTube.)

Here’s what I said:

Now, Atlanta, this election is nine months away, but the crowds I've seen over the last year at rallies like this one, the crowds every week in people's homes and backyards across our state, as we organize and mobilize toward victory, leave no doubt that Georgia is ready to do our part to save Our Republic again.

Many of you are here because you just can't stand what's being done to our country. You're seeing what I'm seeing, right? The President is posting about the Obamas like a Klansman.

You see our government transformed into a tool of one man's personal vengeance and power and enrichment.

You see the president and his family raking in billions while Americans struggle to make ends meet.

You see prices going up while jobs are getting harder to find.

You see millions lose insurance and local hospitals shut services while the rich get tax cuts.

You see masked federal agents kicking down doors without so much as a warrant from a judge, dragging Americans without cause, demanding papers at police checkpoints, assaulting and even killing Americans with impunity.

From the very top, the American government immediately slanders the citizens it kills as terrorists. You see prison camps growing full of children.

More and more of your neighbors carry their passports to the store in case they're detained based on their accent or the color of their skin.

The Justice Department and now even our intelligence agencies are openly politicized and turned against the president's enemies.

It feels like every day, the depravity deepens, the chaos accelerates.

Maybe you fear whether our Republic now, in our 250th year, can survive. But Atlanta, I'm here to tell you, we will overcome this together.

Some people just happen to live at times and in places where history is made. In Atlanta this year, once again, that's us, and it's not the first time the whole country is counting on us.

So, are you ready to fight? Are you ready to win?

Maybe you’ve felt surrounded by darkness this last year, but the first light of dawn is on the horizon.

Look at Texas. Look at Virginia. Look at New Jersey.

Look here in Georgia, where Democrats just won two statewide races by 25 points.

Look at Minneapolis, where they organized to protect children from being kidnapped at school, where tens of thousands marched in protest, where non-violent civil disobedience forced the tyrant to retreat.

And come November, the people who have been looting this country and desecrating our values are going to feel it.

And here’s the thing: They know it. And they fear it. And that’s why their abuses are becoming more reckless and desperate.

But as long as we don't give in to doubt or despair or division, our victories will be so decisive that no half baked plot hatched in the White House will foil the will of the people.

The power of the Presidency is nothing compared to the power of the American people.

Are you ready to win?

Every day our wave grows taller and our tent grows bigger. All across Georgia, more and more people of every background and belief reject the chaos and corruption.

It's not just Democrats and independents. Republicans take me aside, or they call me on the phone.

They tell me they're afraid of where this President has taken us, and they don't want it to go on.

They tell me they're voting for a Democrat for the first time.

And it's no mystery why. This is the cruelest and most arrogant group of people who have ever ascended to high offices, and their cruelty and their arrogance are matched only by their incompetence.

The President said he brings down prices on day one, instead, his tariffs keep driving prices higher and higher.

Coffee is up 20%. Beef and the power bill, both up 13%. Apples up 10%. I could go on, all in one year.

Unemployment is rising too. Listen to this.

American manufacturing jobs have shrunk nearly every single month since Trump rolled out his tariffs. Last month, more Americans lost their jobs than any January in 17 years.

And while prices are going up and jobs are getting harder to find, they decided to let health insurance premiums double for more than 20 million Americans, including more than a million Georgians.

200,000 Georgians have already lost their insurance.

I heard from a woman in her early 60s who waits tables for a living. She's fighting cancer. She told me she was going to lose her health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy.

Now you remember we were told that MAGA was for the working class in America.

But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the richest cabinet ever. It’s the Epstein class.

They are all the elites they pretend to hate.

The prices are up, jobs are going away, Medicaid and school lunches are slashed. Nursing homes are getting defunded.

If you're Steve Bannon, and your pitch was "Trump: for the forgotten man and woman," how do you sell any of this?

Trump was supposed to fight for the working class. Instead, he's literally closing rural clinics and hospitals to cut taxes for George Soros and Elon Musk.

He was supposed to end the globalist world-police foreign policy. Instead we're doing war for oil and nation-building again, and threatening to conquer Greenland.

He was supposed to drain the swamp. Instead, this is the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it.

Here's what Marjorie Taylor Greene said about MAGA just this week: Marjorie said, "I think people are realizing it was all a lie. What MAGA is really serving in this administration, who they're serving, is their big donors."

Guys, this is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

She said, "The big, big donors that donated all the money and continue to donate to the President's PACs and are donating to the big ballroom, those are the people who get the special favors. They get the government contracts, they get the pardons."

Marjorie, welcome to the resistance.

I think never in the history of corruption has so little effort gone into hiding so much graft.

There’s the pardon factory they’re running out of DOJ — donors and political allies straight to the front of the line.

And then, of course, the President and his family's net worth has increased by billions since he took office.

The President and his sons have been very busy taking money from foreign governments and foreign interests.

There’s Sheikh Tahnoon, national security advisor in the United Arab Emirates, who deposited two billion dollars in Trump’s crypto firm just after the administration granted his government access to the most sensitive American AI chips.

There’s Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto titan under investigation by the SEC, who bought tens of millions of dollars of Trump coins just before his SEC investigation went away.

Dar Global, the real estate fund tied to Saudi royals, has new Trump deals in four countries, and the Governments of Qatar and Oman are investing, too.

But Trump doesn’t just want money from foreign governments. He wants money from the U.S. government, too! So our President is suing the United States for $10 billion dollars.

This is actually a thing he's doing. Did you see this? And if you're thinking, wait a minute, isn't that our tax dollars?

The answer is yes, it is our tax dollars.

Of course, the President isn't just looking out for himself.

He's helping his friends and allies. Like: have you ever heard of a drug lord named Juan Orlando Hernandez?

It's a wild story, because he used to be the president of Honduras.

But a couple years ago, a federal judge here in the United States sentenced him to 45 years for conspiring to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.

He had taken millions from the Sinaloa Cartel and used the Honduran army and police to help them run drugs to America.

And then Donald Trump pardoned a man who helped the cartels make billions of dollars trafficking vast amounts of cocaine into the United States.

Donald Trump freed him because he was Donald Trump's political ally, and because this guy sent a four page letter to Trump saying he was a better president than Biden.

But then they will tell you with a straight face that the raid in Venezuela was about drugs.

See, Maduro should have just sent Trump a check or sponsored the ballroom.

By the way, Maduro's successor in Venezuela seems to have directed half a million to Trump's inauguration. Someone should probably look into that.

The fact is, it pays to be friends with the President. It pays to kiss this President's ass.

If you really need something, you can always just pay the President, whether you're a sheik or a felon or a kingpin or a political donor, there's a buffet of corrupt options to curry favor with this administration.

And yes, Donald Trump cut our health care so people like Elon Musk would pay lower taxes.

But don't forget, he also cut our health care to fund the creation of a huge federal paramilitary force.

Now look, there are still plenty of patriots serving our country in the U.S. government, and decent, hard working folks in federal law enforcement trying to do the right thing, but this ain't that.

And the American people are asking: Why are roving gangs of masked men who looked like they couldn't pass the army physical exam, dressed up like 10 Delta Force operators wearing camouflage and carrying ARs on the streets of American cities, setting up checkpoints to harass commuters, demanding papers, dragging people screaming from their cars and shooting people to death?

They don't have to identify themselves. They don't have to explain why you've been stopped. Film them, and they tell you you've been added to a terrorist watch list.

A Republican congressman running for Senate in Texas said, "When a federal officer gives you instructions, you abide by them and you get to keep your life."

Obey the federal government. Do what they tell us or die?

What happened to don't tread on me? That if you're carrying a firearm, the Trump administration says they have license to kill you.

Are there any principled constitutional conservatives left in the United States? Because it's not just the Department of Homeland Security that’s shredding our Bill of Rights.

The administration is corrupting the Justice Department and even our intelligence agencies, and yes, they are laying the groundwork for mischief in the upcoming elections.

The President said we never need to vote again. Then he said we shouldn't have elections. Now, he says he wants to take over the elections.

And like a scene out of some banana republic, Tulsi Gabbard, the country’s spy chief, comes to Fulton County, Georgia to oversee the seizure of ballots.

Tulsi said the President asked her to go, which means the President is personally managing federal raids on election sites in battleground states, all in service of his obsession with overturning the 2020 election and laying the groundwork for whatever they're plotting this year.

But they made a big mistake. They came to Fulton County, Georgia.

They came to the political and spiritual heart of the civil rights movement.

They came to the doorstep of John Lewis’ congressional district.

And as a result, we are going to mobilize the biggest and most unstoppable turnout in state history.

Look, defeating Donald Trump and his allies is essential, but it's only part of the job ahead, because Donald Trump is a symptom of a deeper disease.

Decades of deepening political corruption, growing inequality of power and wealth — these are the failures of an ancient and visionless political class entrenched in a system built to keep them in office forever.

Members of Congress who just sit idly in their seats, collecting lobbyist checks, trading stocks, saying whatever the polls tell them to.

And on their watch, the national spirit that defeated fascism, that landed men on the moon, that passed civil rights laws, was replaced by a small and selfish politics.

That’s the politics of legalized corruption, defined by corporate PACs and bundlers and lobbyists.

It's a system designed to serve donors and protect companies, and then Citizens United came along with the worst court decision in modern American history, flooding the airwaves with ads paid for by secret donors who banked on both parties.

All of this bent Congress to serve the powerful and forget the people.

And that's why you still pay a fortune for prescriptions.

That's why your insurance company gets to keep an eye on your claim.

That's why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood.

That's why that ambulance costs $3,000 after you just had to get a choking toddler to the hospital.

Our democracy stopped serving the public, and the public lost faith in a system that was failing them.

But it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way.

Everywhere I go, across our state, people tell me they are desperate for change and for new ideas.

The South Georgia farmer whose costs rise and earnings fall each year, whose kids have left the family farm, who's still waiting for federal aid long after the storm.

The student working through college who still needs food stamps to make rent — whose conscience can't stand their tax dollars being used to lock up immigrant children here at home or to kill innocent children in the Middle East.

The young couple expecting their first child — who worry how they’ll afford a crib and a stroller, let alone a first home — and their health insurance just went up a thousand dollars a per month.

There are so many problems we should be solving together. Guaranteeing all Americans great health insurance and great health care no matter our wealth, unleashing an affordable housing boom, saving our family farms, making America the world's human rights figure, it should excite us.

But none of it will be possible if we allow ourselves to forget what America stands for.

See Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, they offer a small, closed, menacing vision of America defined by fear and scarcity and exclusion.

They imitate the blood and soil rhetoric of history's worst regimes.

Immigrants, Donald Trump says, are "poisoning the blood of our country."

Those are the kinds of words used by the most dangerous men in history.

I listened to a speech a few months back by a Senator from Missouri aligned with the President. And what I think I heard him say was that the only real Americans are those descended from the original European settlers.

Now, maybe he forgot the Mayflower itself was full of religious exiles fleeing persecution.

But our heritage isn't limited to that of the pilgrims and those who settled the west.

America's heritage includes the descendants of slaves who won liberation from slavery Georgia in the 11th century.

It includes people from every region and continent who arrived here fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity.

Americans are not a race. We're a people united, not by ethnicity, but by shared convictions, and that is what makes us exceptional.

That the most powerful nation on earth proclaims as its core values that all are created equal with inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no matter how humble our communities, no matter our ancestry, no matter when we arrived on these shores.

George Washington wrote in 1783, "America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions."

That’s a legacy worth protecting.

And I was thinking the other day, what would the founders think if they visited us today?

Well, they would see that slavery had been abolished.

They would see that Americans without land, and then women and then the descendants of slaves, had secured voting rights.

That American leadership in science and discovery had propelled knowledge and technology to unimaginable heights.

They would see that the United States had become the superpower that defeated Nazism and communism.

They would see a pluralistic democracy, people of all colors descended from every point on Earth, stitched together out of many nations into one still the greatest hope for mankind.

They will also learn that of the world's great rich nations, American life expectancy is the lowest, while our childhood poverty, murder and maternal mortality rates are the highest.

They would see a nation that at the height of its wealth and power fell into the very traps they most feared, the dominance of special interests, bitter division between warring political parties and a faithless President exploiting that rot to pursue the absolute power they overthrew.

But they gave us the tools to fix this. They put the power in our hands.

It's up to us, for the United States history is calling the question, what kind of a people are we?

I believe the measure of our success is not how many of the poorest and most vulnerable families we hunt down and shackle and imprison and deport.

The measure of our success is whether each generation achieves greater health and prosperity than the last and whether we live up to the profits for all.

I believe we can lift American children out of poverty.

We can keep our communities safe from violence.

We can make sure every mom and every baby in America gets the best care in the world.

I believe we can reform our corrupt politics.

We can unite the American people to solve big problems and achieve great things again.

I believe we will escape this moral tailspin and recommit ourselves to the values that have powered 250 years of problems.

But none of this is possible without victory this November, and the battle is already on.

So Atlanta, are you ready to work? Are you ready to save the country again?

Thank you so much, Atlanta.

Paid for by Jon Ossoff for Senate

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