Video: Susan Platt Interviews Leslie Cockburn on Her “Roar” — Against Trump, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the “Freedom Caucus,” etc.

In her latest video (see below), Susan Platt interviews VA-05 Democratic nominee Leslie Cockburn about “finding her roar.” Here are a few highlights.

• Leslie Cockburn on Donald Trump’s election and his claiming that journalists are the “enemy of the people”: “I certainly started roaring at that point, because that to me was a disgrace; [Trump] crossed a serious line there, because there is no democracy without journalism.”
• Leslie Cockburn on girls being told to let the boys win: “When you say what was the first thing that when we gave you your roar, I think it was the realization that girls were being treated differently from boys…in the sense of you should let him win, you know don’t always win because you’re the girl; that kind of notion of well, eventually the main thing you want to do is find a good husband as opposed to be president of the United States.”
• Leslie Cockburn on the pipeline fight: “We’ve been fighting pipelines for a long time here, but these two particular pipelines I see as completely unnecessary for Virginia. They don’t keep the lights on in Virginia, they are barreling through sustainable farms, whole communities. I am on an absolute soapbox about Buckingham County because the Atlantic Coast Pipeline will include a giant compressor station in the middle of Union Hill, which is an African-American historic community. This is a community where people settled as soon as they could from their own land at the end of the Civil War and some who were freedmen before. Their descendants are still there. This is a tight community, people go off to work elsewhere, they come and retire here. If you have a giant compressor station in the middle of it, it’s spewing toxic chemicals, it is venting methane, which is 25 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and it sounds like a diesel locomotive that’s right next to you seven days a week. So those fighting for people in Union Hill make me roar.”
• Leslie Cockburn on the so-called “Freedom Caucus”: “Speaker John Boehner, Republican, said these guys are anarchists…they are not part of the Republican Party in the sense of getting together with other Republicans. So the whole idea is that is that they really are serious troublemakers and they absolutely vote in a block. And they’ve given over two hundred thousand dollars to my opponent.”

There’s a lot more good stuff in this interview; check it out, below!