Yesterday, I rallied a massive crowd in Athens to organize opposition to the Trump administration and my opponent, Mike Collins.

(You can watch my speech here.)

Here's what I said:

Hello, Athens!

Now Athens, the polls open in one month. One month ‘til early vote. One month ‘til you can cast your ballot to save our Republic. Athens, turn to your neighbor and say, “One month.” Say, “Lock in.” Because Athens, the country's counting on us again.

And the crowds I've seen over the last year at rallies like this one and in backyards and living rooms across our state and the army of volunteers already knocking tens of thousands of doors each week all leave no doubt that Georgia's about to make history again.

Athens, are you ready to win?

Now, I know many of you are here today because you just can't stand what's been done to our country. Our whole government made a corrupt tool of one man's vengeance and power and wealth.

The president’s critics prosecuted or bullied off the airwaves. Prices soar while the president rakes in billions. Cancer patients lose insurance while the rich get another tax cut.

We sink in the quicksand of reckless war as immigrant families are torn apart, and private prisons grow in size and in squalor. The Justice Department and even our intelligence services are twisted to serve the president's vendettas.

But in one month, Athens, we will vote to rebuke him so decisively no president will dare such abuses again for centuries. In one month, we’ll vote to defeat the bigot congressman, Trump puppet Mike Collins.

In one month, our juggernaut Democratic coordinated campaign will get out the vote to elect Josh McLaurin, Penny Brown Reynolds, Tanya Miller, and Democrats up and down the ballot across our state. And Athens, in one month we'll vote to elect a Medicaid-expanding Governor Bottoms and end our state’s health care emergency.

And between now and then, Athens, we need you to work, not for my sake, but for the sake of our state and our country. Because some people just happen to live at times and in places where history is made. And this year, once again, that's us.

Now remember, Trump promised to lower prices on day one. But last week, the broken old man threw a two-day party in Texas, while it costs more than ever to fill up your truck, to stock your fridge, and to power your home. Under the failed President Donald J. Trump, food, diesel, and health care all just hit their all-time highs.

They doubled your insurance premiums and slashed Medicaid to cut taxes for their corporate donors and the ultra-rich.

They made you pay more for everything.

They lied us into war and spent most of the last year covering up for the world's most famous pedophile.

All while the crook president and his crook family raked in billions from all over the world.

He promised to lower prices on day one, and he also promised peace. Instead, the draft-dodging commander-in-chief builds a monument to himself while plunging us deeper into a war he doesn’t know how to end or how to win. The biggest foreign policy debacle since Iraq.

And once again, it’s a war based on lies.

Remember, last year they claimed Iran's nuclear program had been obliterated. Do you remember that? And then this year, they claimed that same nuclear program posed an imminent threat.

Both times lies.

On day four of the war, the president declared victory.

On day 11, Trump said, "The war is very complete."

Day 13, "We won."

Day 21, "Getting very close."

Day 32, "Leaving very soon."

On day 40, the president declared, "Total and complete victory."

And this Wednesday will be day 200.

18 Americans are dead and hundreds wounded. The president calls this “small potatoes.” Iran still has its uranium and its drones and its missiles, and Hormuz is still closed. They drained our stockpiles to achieve nothing. And while Pete Hegseth squanders our military power, his Pentagon funnels your money to the First Family.

Just listen to this: five days after his father was reelected, Prince Don Jr. becomes a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture firm founded by right-wing activists and Trump donors. 1789 Capital then buys a stake in Vulcan Elements, a tiny startup that says it plans to produce the high-tech magnets needed in drones, missiles, and satellites.

And about a month after Don Jr.’s venture firm buys its stake in Vulcan Elements, Pentagon officials learn that Peter Navarro — a convicted criminal, Don Jr.’s close friend, and a top White House official — wants the Pentagon to give your tax dollars to Vulcan Elements. One Pentagon official said, "The call came from the White House: We have to get this done."

And, Athens, to be clear, "getting this done" means funneling your money to the president’s son’s investment.

And so of course, like clockwork, on November 21st, just three months after Don Jr. and his friends bought their stake, Vulcan gets a $620 million taxpayer loan from Pete Hegseth's Pentagon, paid for with your money.

See, while the world burns and you pay more for everything, your tax dollars become the royal family’s wealth.

Because it pays to be a Trump, especially when the whole world knows daddy's a crook.

Half a billion from the Emirati spy chief to the Trump family crypto business, months before the administration granted the Emirates access to our most sensitive AI chips.

$1.6 billion of your money backing the Trump boys' mining interests in Kazakhstan. Jared Kushner on the Saudi payroll while he pretends to lead our Middle East diplomacy. And on and on.

The Mar-a-Lago mafia really has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights. But Athens, corruption in American politics runs a lot deeper than Donald Trump. And, see, I get why people voted for him. Because even before he came on the scene, American politics was coin-operated.

Money goes in, favors come out. It's been running on corporate money, secret money, billionaire money. Both sides.

And when members of Congress aren't fundraising from lobbyists and corporate PACs, they're trying to dodge getting bombed by these Super PACs. Spectacular wealth buys an ever-greater share of power over our national affairs. And this corruption is why nothing works for ordinary people.

It's why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. It's why your insurance company gets away with denying your cancer treatment after you paid your premiums for decades.

So Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target. Yes, the system really is rigged. But he's not unrigging it; he's re-rigging it for himself.

So, how do we unrig American politics? Well first, we follow the money. See, Citizens United was the most destructive Supreme Court decision in modern American history.

And Donald Trump's rise is a symptom of this deeper disease. And I suspect many of you are here because you recognize that our task is not just to contain his wickedness, but to cure the rot that gave rise to it. That this moment, this broken moment, is an opening not for restoration, but for reformation.

Because who really supports allowing unlimited, secret political money to bend the nation’s agenda in darkness?

In Athens or Albany or Columbus or College Park, if I asked anyone — Democrat, independent, Republican, none of the above — if I asked them whether this is how things should work, it doesn't matter who they are, the answer is no.

So let the defenders of secret corporate money in politics come out and defend it. They’ll lose the debate.

And Athens, if it takes a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United, we'll deliver a united Georgia to ratify it.

A united Georgia. Every day our wave grows taller and our tent grows bigger. Because this isn't just a campaign for Democrats. Folks come up to me at airports or on the street. They tell me they’re lifelong Republicans but this year they’re voting for a Democrat for the first time.

Down in Valdosta, the mayor's named Scott James Matheson, a lifelong conservative Republican. We expanded Valdosta's transit system together. We upgraded Moody Air Force Base together.

When Hurricane Helene hit, I called him up in the middle of the night to check on the city. When the storm cleared, I was there alongside him going block by block to help. We served hot meals to folks who had just lost their homes.

And when I got back to Washington, I delivered federal disaster relief for South Georgia. And now I'm honored to have conservative Republican Mayor Matheson's support in this reelection campaign.

See, just about every week I dial up Georgia mayors and pastors and farmers to find out how I can help. And one day, I called up Mayor Julie Smith, just up the road from Valdosta, in Tifton.

Mayor Smith's a Republican, too. She told me the Tifton hospital needed new dialysis equipment. She explained how Tifton's dialysis center serves 12 South Georgia counties, and they just couldn't meet the need.

So I delivered the funds to upgrade that South Georgia clinic, and now it can serve 200 dialysis patients. And Republican Mayor Julie Smith is backing this campaign too.

Up north in Toccoa, then-mayor Gail Fry, another Georgia Republican, told me Toccoa's gas lines were wearing out. And a leak could risk lives. We needed to get moving quick to replace miles of old pipes. So I delivered the funds for Toccoa's new gas lines, and Georgia Republican Gail Fry is backing this campaign too.

Because, see, hurricanes and diabetes and gas leaks don't check party affiliation when they hit. And when it comes to serving Georgia, I don’t either.

But there's another reason so many Republicans are backing our campaign, and it's the bigot Congressman Mike Collins, who's only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman, surrounded at work and at home by neo-Nazis and white nationalists.

See, Brian Kemp was right about Mike. There's a reason Rick Jackson won't commit to campaigning with Mike. Why Brad Raffensperger refuses to endorse him. Why conservative WSB radio host Shelley Wynter called Mike a "bottom feeder."

Why Coach Dooley condemned Mike's "blatant, taxpayer-funded corruption" and said Mike's "disgusting behavior does not represent Georgia values or frankly, any values." Why Erick Erickson said Mike "knowingly hired a sociopath with a criminal record who is alleged to have used your and my tax dollars to subsidize his girlfriend."

There's a reason one of the founders of the Tea Party said this summer, "I cannot in good conscience vote for Mike Collins. He is unfit for office," and warned that Collins would "drag down the whole Republican ticket in Georgia."

And that reason is Mike Collins is a known bigot under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars, widely known for his poor character and low integrity, and unfit for any elected office in the United States. And Athens, now the bigot wants a promotion. But this year we’ll end his political career instead.

An hour up the road from here is St. Mary's Hospital in Lavonia. It's in Mike's district. And they just closed their maternity unit, citing the Medicaid cuts Mike Collins voted for in order to fund tax cuts for the rich.

So now, thanks to Mike Collins, delivering mothers Mike Collins represents have to drive an hour in labor to get to a labor and delivery unit in a state where we've already lost 21 hospitals in 20 years.

Where life expectancy if you're born today in the state of Georgia is shorter than if you were born today in Lebanon. Where, thanks to Donald Trump and Mike Collins and their attacks on the Affordable Care Act, 300,000 Georgians lost their health insurance this year, and a million saw their premiums double.

Now, what could drive a man, even one as spoiled and hateful as the congressman's son, Mike Collins, to cast a vote that closes a labor and delivery unit in his own district or doubles his own constituents' insurance premiums?

It's not just the money that's corrupted our politics. It’s a moral corruption — the cynical indifference of powerful people.

See, my office is known for world-class service. And what amazes me is how surprised people are to be treated well.

Nancy Lancy is 81 years old in Jesup. Her husband died after years of dementia. She was worn out and alone, and now her affairs as a widow were all wrapped up in this bureaucratic labyrinth, from the VA to the IRS and Social Security. So we took care of things for her. And I'll never forget what she said about it. She said, "This was a new experience, to have someone caring about me."

"A new experience, to have someone caring about me."

How has it come to pass that for so many Americans, the experience of genuine care is rare and surprising?

Official indifference and corporate disrespect have become systemic. When millions are just one medical bill, short paycheck, or bad alternator from disaster, you work harder and harder but the treadmill gets faster and steeper and the bills get higher and higher. A 60-hour workweek still needs SNAP, or that bucket list trip is off the table for good.

And then, instead of reading your daughter her favorite book, that precious spare hour after work you're on the phone begging the insurance company to cover the medicine that prevents her seizures. The Army lost the records you need to claim your VA benefits, and it takes a year and twelve calls to fix it.

You report the black mold to your landlord, who doesn't fix the leak, and the ambulance for your toddler's asthma is followed by a $3,000 bill.

And it’s the worst for the most vulnerable.

Maybe you saw my investigation of Georgia foster care. In just four years, hundreds of Georgia children likely sex trafficked while in state care. Many more abused and neglected. Children in the care of the state.

Rachel Aldridge testified about her two-year old daughter, Brooklynn. See, over Rachel's repeated objections, DFCS had placed two-year-old Brooklynn in the care of her father and his girlfriend, despite their criminal histories.

State officials ignored Rachel's pleas. They skipped mandatory background checks. And two months later, Rachel's precious, perfect, irreplaceable two-year old girl was dead.

When she testified before my committee, Rachel said she'd flown on an airplane for the first time in her life just so she could tell senators her story. She begged us, "Please remember Brooklynn."

Tiffani McLean-Camp entered foster care at 15. She testified she was moved 20 times in three years, went eight months without a visit from a caseworker in a locked psychiatric facility where she was forcibly injected with sedatives, and was housed in group homes where staff used drugs, and she was sexually assaulted.

She testified her newborn son spent three weeks in the NICU and the next six weeks of his new life in a homeless shelter because DFCS couldn't find them a placement, while Tiffani went six months after delivery without seeing an OB-GYN.

Listen to this: Georgia DFCS is so broken that when they couldn't find enough placements for kids with special needs, juvenile court judges testified that the DFCS commissioner tried to lock those kids up in jails for children, but the judges refused and reported it to my office.

They tried to put special needs kids in jail.

And then when my investigation brought all this to light, when we held Senate hearings and exposed it all, instead of resigning, or at least leaping into action to fix it, state officials retreated into denial and PR and counterattack. Because foster kids don't have lobbyists, or a Super PAC.

Neither do the women subjected to medical abuse in ICE detention. Neither do the female inmates sexually abused by the warden and the chaplain in their federal prison. Or the young military family neglected by the defense contractor with a fifty-year lease on privatized housing at Ft. Gordon.

But they deserve leaders who see them and expose those who abuse them. And that’s exactly what I’ll keep doing. Because we’re all in this together.

Every day, I think about Congressman Lewis. His portrait hangs right above my desk in my Senate office.

And even in his final moments, he kept reminding us that we all live in one American house. That we all live in one world house. Do you remember? John Lewis called it "the inevitable truth that we're all members of one human family."

And I suspect many of you are here today, because you're so deeply troubled by the pain that so many of our fellow human beings are enduring right now.

The terror of a child watching ICE take away his mother. The despair of a cancer patient losing coverage mid-treatment. The silent panic of a grandmother when she sees the receipt for her groceries and then remembers there's three weeks left until her next Social Security check.

And that ache in your heart, that pit in your stomach, don’t ignore that. Don’t just keep scrolling. Feel it, turn it into action. Because that feeling is what reminds us we're all human, that we're not just one United States, we're one united people. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

That feeling is what spurred thousands to lace up their shoes and march alongside John Lewis. It’s what channeled the Great Depression into retirement security and a minimum wage and it’s what fueled the Georgia patriots who stood up to a tyrannical king in Savannah and at Kettle Creek.

How inspiring, 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.

See, Americans aren’t a race. We're a people. United, not by ethnicity, but by shared convictions and that is what makes us exceptional and a beacon to the world.

And see, this is what small men like Donald Trump and Mike Collins will never understand — that our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas and our aspirations and our care for one other.

Mike Collins, whose office kept some of America's most notorious white supremacists apprised of its efforts supporting a Holocaust denier.

And we've seen some of the record, because some of it leaked, but Mike still refuses to release those communications in full. Mike Collins needs to release every email, every text, every call, every single communication between those white supremacists and his office.

Then there's the ex-staffer posting swastikas and Klan regalia. Did you see that? And the neo-Nazi with a million followers who produces neo-Nazi propaganda at Mike Collins' house while at the same time producing promotional content for Mike Collins' business.

Just stop and think about this for a second. A sitting congressman, currently running for Senate, hosts a neo-Nazi at his house, and that neo-Nazi produces neo-Nazi propaganda from the congressman's house, and the congressman won't — or maybe can't — get the neo-Nazi in his house to stop producing neo-Nazi content from his house while he's running for Senate?

But Athens, a man who won’t take responsibility for what happens under his own roof can't be trusted with our national affairs.

And Mike still refuses to answer whether his business paid the neo-Nazi or he just accepted the Neo-Nazi's service as a gift. The press asked him, and he ran away. He literally ran away from a press conference.

It was Mike Collins, alone, standing in a field. A reporter asks if he paid the Neo-Nazi. Mike won't answer. Another reporter asks if Mike Collins endorses white nationalism. Mike won't answer.

Mike literally gets so scared you can see his hand shaking at the podium, until he flees.

A crumbling little bigot. And the sad spectacle of his collapsing campaign.

But that's not the only question Mike won't answer. Because Mike's like a scandal piñata. Every time you shake him, more misdeeds fall out. And he's not just surrounded by neo-Nazis, he's also under federal investigation for the illegal misuse of tax dollars. And he’s dodging those questions too.

There's the public money he and his chief of staff, who’d been convicted of criminal battery, funneled to a girlfriend. Then there's the thousands and thousands of dollars of “reimbursements,” funded by taxpayers and paid to his staffers with receipts Mike refuses to release.

And rather than come clean, the Office of Congressional Conduct, that’s the nonpartisan body that investigates misconduct by members of Congress, it reports that Mike, "refused to cooperate." They recommended he be subpoenaed and forced to testify. And Mike still refuses to say if he will.

Listen Athens, Mike Collins needs to testify.

See, Georgia deserves so much better than Mike Collins. And America deserves better than Donald Trump.

Just think, 250 years on, what the founders would see if they visited us today. They'd see that slavery had been abolished. They'd see that Americans without land, and then women, and then the descendants of slaves had secured voting rights.

They'd see that our science and technology propelled human knowledge to unimaginable heights and that those thirteen colonies grew into a superpower that defeated the Nazis and communism.

They'd see a pluralist democracy, people descended from every point on Earth, of all colors, stitched together out of many nations into one.

But they'd also see a nation that at the height of its wealth and power fell into the very traps they most feared, consumed by bitter conflict between rival factions captured by special interests, losing touch with that great national spirit that defeated fascism. The spirit that landed men on the moon and passed civil rights laws.

They'd see that we did those great things but then succumbed to a small and self-serving politics, unmoored from fixed moral principles, incapable of inspiration or great national achievement, with no real horizon beyond the next election.

And they'd see that what's required of us now is far, far greater than what that small, self-serving politics can muster.

I've got two little girls at home. Eva's four, and Lila's one, and I'm so grateful to this country for the security and opportunity it affords them. But this isn't the world I want to leave them. Soon enough they'll learn there's now plastic in human blood and breastmilk. That toxic forever chemicals are in half the country's drinking water.

Eva loves animal documentaries, and she'll learn that the butterflies are dying off. She'll learn about the nuclear weapons that still threaten annihilation. She'll ask me why I allowed these things to happen.

And when you step back and consider it, the situation is absurd. This week, we were warned again of existential risk to the human species. Did you see it? And what fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics against the massive stakes of our times.

Tech titans dig bunkers while warning us the new intelligence they're creating risks human extinction. Congress debates youth sports, and the President builds a ballroom. An ancient establishment, barely capable of email, sleepwalks into a technological revolution, while the president dismantles precautions and calls us fools for worrying.

Just listen to this: On day one, Donald Trump rescinded the AI safety order meant to guard against catastrophic risks, including the engineering of bioweapons. Meanwhile Don Jr.'s 1789 Capital bought big money stakes in data centers and AI labs.

Four days before inauguration, the Emirati spy chief committed $500 million dollars to the Trump family crypto business and four months later, the Trump Administration granted the Emirates the right to buy our most sensitive AI chips.

See, a capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people, rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty.

But President Trump is compromised. A capable Congress would engage every committee in investigation and legislation to act swiftly and wisely. Those CEOs would be under oath next week.

But instead the president and the Speaker of the House sit on their hands and hope for the best.

So you see this scenario, and you look at the state of our politics, and it shakes your faith in the future. I understand. But Athens, we can and will reclaim control over our own destiny. We can and will meet our obligations to our children. And that begins with victory this fall.

Because Athens, I refuse to leave my girls a world as dark and dangerous and cruel as this one threatens to become.

And I can’t stop thinking about it. I refuse to accept that Eva and Lila will grow up with artificial friends and teachers in a society where the sick die, not because there’s no cure, but because they have no money. On a poisoned planet, rearming for world war, where human life is cheap and might makes right.

See, when Eva's old enough to ask me why I let this happen, I'm determined to answer truthfully that I didn't.

I'll tell her how the same year she turned five, Georgia overcame every doubt and dirty trick not just to win, but to set a new course for our state and our country and our world.

That our generation didn't shrink from its obligations to hers. That instead, we came together, clear-eyed about the stakes and what was required of us. We protected the sanctity of the vote from those who attacked it.

That we elected those who understood the moment and had the will to meet it. That we restored American leadership toward peace and human rights, guaranteed health care for every citizen.

And mastered technology instead of letting it master us. That we ensured each generation achieves greater health and prosperity than the last and lived up to the promise of equal justice for all.

We can and will do these things, and it starts with victory in Georgia. Because Athens, our power is right there, just waiting for us to pick it up.

And a wave is building. The kind of wave that comes once a generation, when people have been pushed too far and they decide all together, all at once, to say enough is enough.

The polls open in one month, Athens. Are you ready to work? Are you ready to win? Thank you, God bless you, let's get it done together.

Thank you so much Athens.

Paid for by Jon Ossoff for Senate

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