SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, April 15, 2025 (Gephardt Daily) — A crowd of 20,000 packed the University of Utah’s Jon M. Huntsman Center on Sunday night as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lit up the arena with a blistering indictment of Trump-era politics and a rallying cry for systemic change.
“We are all here together because we share the frustration and heartache that comes from watching those in power actively tear down or refuse to fight for everyday working Americans like us,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd.
“An extreme concentration of power, greed and corruption is taking over this country like never before — oligarchy in America — and we must acknowledge the terrifying moments that we are in right now, and that what we are hearing and seeing with our own eyes is, in fact, happening.”
AOC painted a stark picture of what she said reality looks like to millions of Americans these days: “We are watching as our neighbors, students and friends are being fired, targeted and disappeared. It is real. People we love are being targeted and harassed for being LGBTQ. Our coworkers, U.S. citizens and immigrants alike, are being disappeared off the streets. Educators are being fired for teaching American history accurately and actively, and activists are being detained, with no charge or evidence, for using their First Amendment rights — especially if they are using them to try to end the war in Gaza.”
Ocasio-Cortez also didn’t hold back when it came to calling out Utah’s own representatives for allegiance to the Trump administration, tying them to dark money interests she said “loot our public goods” to give to the rich.
“This moment didn’t come out of nowhere,” she said. “The destruction of our rights and our democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has been building in America for years.”
She not only singled out billionaires like Elon Musk for bankrolling Donald Trump’s 2024 bid — “and he sure isn’t doing it out of charity” — she also blasted Utah Republican political leaders for backing tax breaks for corporations, while cutting essential services.
“You know who from Utah voted for that, by the way? Both of your senators, Mike Lee and John Curtis, and Salt Lake City’s own House members, Blake Moore and Celeste Maloy,” she said. “They know that it hurts working families from Utah, but they know that they are not there to serve the working class. They are there to serve themselves and the billionaires who paid them.”
Sanders took the stage next, kiddingly referring to AOC as his daughter, while praising her for her decision to run for Congress despite her humble beginnings and the challenges she faced taking on and ultimately defeating a powerful, well-monied opponent.
“I want to say a word about Alexandria and why what she’s doing is so important. And here’s the story. Six years ago, what were you doing for a living? She was a waitress,” he told the crowd, “but she looked around her, and she saw a society that was fundamentally unjust and, in many ways, ugly to the people in the community in which she lived, New York City. She stood up and took on one of the most powerful people in the House of Representatives, and she started with almost no money, against the guy who had unlimited funds, and she beat him.”
“Now, why do I tell you that story? It’s not just to talk about Alexandria,” Sanders said. “The point that I am making is that in this arena of 15,000 people, there are hundreds of Alexandrias; there are hundreds of Alexs, and Joes, and Marys, and Cynthias. And all across this country, we are going to need people to go outside of their comfort zone — because the establishment, man, they are smart. They are so smart,” he said, shaking his head.
“And one of the smartest things they do, one of the most effective things they do, is to say to all of you, and working people all over America, ‘Hey, we got the money. We got the power. We own it all. You ain’t nothing; nothing you’re gonna do about it.’ And a lot of people sit back and they say, ‘What am I gonna do? Can’t do nothing, alright. My boss is gonna fire me — this, that, and the other thing.’ And that is the mindset we have got to break through,” he said, pointing to the jammed packed arena.
“It’s not AOC, and it’s not Bernie. It is you. You don’t need leaders. We need a mass movement of millions of people.”
“We are living in the most dangerous moments in the modern history of this country, really, especially to the young people. I wish I could not have to tell you that, you know, but it is just simply true. We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control our government.
“That’s why we’re here,” Sanders said. “We do not want a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class. We want a government that represents all of us, not just the one-percent class. We don’t want the richest guy on Earth running all over Washington D.C., throwing tens of thousands of dedicated federal workers out on the street, slashing the Social Security Administration so that elderly, disabled people are going to find it really hard to get the information they need to access Social Security.
“We don’t want Mr. Musk and his friends proposing to lay off 83,000 employees at the Veterans Administration. We believe that the men and women who put their lives on the line to defend this country deserve the highest-quality health care.
“We don’t want Mr. Musk and his friends running around slashing US-AID. You know, some of the proudest things I think we feel, is when we know our government has done things to help the poorest people on Earth; children who would die of preventable diseases. That’s what makes us a great country.
“And what makes all of this stuff even worse is that all of these cuts to Social Security, to the VA, to USA-ID, etc., etc., they are designed to do one thing, and that is to give massive tax breaks to the top 1%, at a time when our healthcare system is already broken. They want to cut Medicaid by $880 billion, they want to cut nutrition programs for hungry kids, so they can give Mr. Musk and the other billionaires a huge tax break.”
“The power of the billionaire class exists not only in the economy. Today, we have an economy with more concentration of ownership than we have ever had in the history of this country. You know what that means? It means that in sector after sector of our economy, a handful of large corporations control what’s produced and how much you pay for those products, and that is why, in many instances, prices are so high.
“But they control not only the economy, they also control our corrupt campaign finance system. I want you to think about it. Want you to think about it for a second and you tell me, and I don’t care if you are a conservative, Republican, a progressive, an independent, moderate, whatever you are, you tell me you think it is appropriate, in this, the longest-standing democracy on Earth, that one man, Mr. Musk, could donate $270 million to elect Trump as president, and then get rewarded by getting the most important and powerful position in government.
“But I have to tell you, it’s not just Musk and Republicans; that corruption exists in the Democratic Party as well. Billionaires in the Democratic side make huge contributions. And there is a reason why; for too many years, and for too many candidates, Democrats have not had the guts to take on powerful special interests.”
“But brothers and sisters, we’re not just fighting oligarchy, we’re fighting a president who undermines our Constitution every day, who threatens our freedom of speech and assembly, and whose agents are rounding up innocent people off the streets, throwing them into unmarked vans and bringing them to detention centers in this country and abroad. That is what takes place in dictatorships, not in America.
“We will not allow them to continue to do that,” Sanders said.
“I find myself trying to remember my history lessons, should have done better in history, but I think back to the founding of this country. And let me tell you, the founding fathers of this country were no dummies. They remember the history, talking about the 1780s, they have just fought a war, an impossibly difficult war, where they defeated the King of England, the most powerful person on the planet.
“Let’s hear it for George Washington,” Sanders said with a laugh.
“But anyhow, these guys had taken on an autocrat, and they sat around, and they said, what did we want in our new country? What we wanted, and what they said is, we don’t want any one person to have all of that power. So they dealt with the Federalist Papers, and all that stuff, and they came up with this kind of brilliant idea of a separation of powers.
“Alright, they said, we’re going to have a legislative branch, Congress, House and Senate; we are going to have an Executive Branch, the president. We’re going to have a judiciary, the Federal courts, and each one will have checks on each other.
“And what I want to tell you, and I don’t need to tell you, I think you’re seeing it every single day. You have a president who is working overtime to take power away from the Congress. You got a president who is working overtime to take power away from the federal courts. Now it is unprecedented.
“You know, no president, no member of Congress wants to see a Supreme Court or any court rule against him or her. We don’t like to see that. I will tell you that we have seen in the last 20 years with the Roberts Court, horrendous decisions on Citizens United and Roe versus Wade, terrible decisions, but we understand that we live in a rule of law.
“What Trump and his friends are doing now, is they’re saying, ‘Oh, a judge ruled against us. A judge said we can’t do something which is unconstitutional. Let us get rid of that judge. Let us impeach that judge.’
“So, in other words, you take power away from Congress. You take power away from the judiciary, and also you got a president who really does not like to be criticized. So, he has sued. I mean this is, again, unprecedented. He has sued ABC, CBS, Meta, the Des Moines Register. The Des Moines Register did a poll he didn’t like — they are suing them. They are investigating, right now, PBS and NPR.
“So you add it all together, and what I would say to Trump, if you cannot take criticism, get out of the political process. This is a democracy, and criticism is an essential part of that democracy.
“And I can remember as a kid, that anybody who was gay, they never talked about it, they never made that public. They suffered in silence and the idea then… and the dream – the idea of gay marriage – was something almost inconceivable.
“My point in saying these things is that over the decades, we have made progress in a number of important areas. We’ve made progress in combating racism, made progress in combating sexism, made progress in combating homophobia.
“But, there is one area where not only have we not made progress, but we have lost ground, and that is the economic struggle facing tens of millions of working families in this country.
“Then, back in 1944, in a State of the Union address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of our very greatest presidents, said something very profound, and in so many words, what he said is, you know, we have a Constitution. It’s a great Constitution; guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc., but what we need to do is incorporate it into our values, the understanding that economic rights are human rights.
“We are the richest country on Earth, and new technologies are going to make us even richer. There is no excuse for children in America going hungry. There is no excuse for elderly people not being able to afford their prescription drugs. There is no excuse for 800,000 people sleeping out on the streets.
“Now what the establishment does, and that is the media and all of the corporate world, they want to tell you that you’re not entitled to anything, that life is a struggle, that it’s dog eat dog, and if you were born poor or working class, tough luck.
“Well, I have a different vision for America, and that is, we have got to end this corrupt campaign finance system. Overturn Citizens United!
“We have got to deal with the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality. We’re not going to give tax breaks to billionaires. We’re going to demand they start paying their fair share of taxes.
“We’re not going to tolerate tens of millions of workers trying to get by on starvation wages. We’re going to raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage.
“All over this country, workers want to join unions because when your in a union you get better wages, better benefits, better working conditions. We’re going to pass legislation that stops corporations from acting illegally against workers who want to join unions.
“A lot of people in Washington are talking about cutting Social Security. We’re not going to cut Social Security. We’re going to expand Social Security. Now some of the young people here may not know it, but not so many years ago, if you had a job, you would often have what’s called a defined bank pension benefit.
“In other words, you worked in part for the benefits that were there when you retired. You know, you got a check every month for a certain amount. We’ve got to bring back defined pension benefits.
“And when we talk about where we want to go as a country, I want everybody here to understand we are the only major country on Earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a human right. This is not a radical idea.
“We are spending twice as much per capita on health care as the people of other nations, and yet, 85 million and many of you here, are uninsured, or under insured, large deductibles.
“Yes, the function of a rational health care system is not to make huge profits for the insurance companies, and the drug companies.
We need a Medicare for all, single-payer program.”
“All over this country, in Vermont, and all over this country, we’ve got a major housing crisis. It’s not just that 800,000 are homeless; 20 million Americans are spending 50% of their limited incomes on housing. That’s crazy.
“Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on the military, let’s build 5 million units of low-income and affordable housing.
“We live in a competitive global economy. We need the best-educated workforce on earth. It is beyond absurd that young people who want to get a higher education or go to trade school, have to go deeply in debt in order to do that.
“Anybody here dealing with student debt, okay, just think about it. We need, we desperately need more doctors, more nurses, more psychologists, more dentists, more construction workers, more plumbers, more electricians. We desperately need them.
“People should not have to go into debt to do the work that America desperately needs. It is not a radical idea. It is not. You know, 100 years ago, working class people said, ‘You know what, we want our kids not to be working in factories or in the fields. We demand public education,’ and we got that.
“But that stops at the 12th grade. The world has changed. We’ve got to make public colleges and universities tuition free.
“We want the best-educated population on earth, from child care to public schools to higher education. That’s what we should be doing now.
“Donald Trump and his geniuses think climate change is a hoax. We know it is an existential threat, and we know we can create millions of good paying jobs, transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel damage, efficiency, of sustainability.
“All right, my point in going through all of those, and there’s a lot more we could discuss, but my point in going through those things is to tell you that economic rights, the right of all of our people, our men, women and children, our older people, our sick people, to live in security and dignity is not a radical idea.
“Far back in 1857, Frederick Douglass – you all remember Frederick Douglass, great abolitionist – that in 1857 they were in the middle, obviously, of this great struggle to end slavery.
“And I want you to hear what he said, because what he said back in 1857 in the fight against slavery is as relevant today as it was then.
“This is what he said. Listen carefully.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
“And these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppressed.
“Pretty relevant today, isn’t it?
“In other words, all that Douglass is saying is, they ain’t gonna give you nothing. They want it all. And unless we stand up together and tell them, sorry, this country believes it belongs to all of us, not just the billionaire class.
“Unless we bring our people together, we will never achieve the goals that we want.
“Now, I am not a mathematician, but I do know that 99% is a hell of a lot larger number than 1%.
“So, if we stand together, and not let them divide us up by the color of our skin, or where we were born, or our sexual orientation; if we stand together, we can defeat Trumpism.
We can defeat authoritarianism, we can defeat oligarchy, we can create a new nation.
“Thank you all, very much.”
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