Sen. Tim Kaine, campaigning for Leslie Cockburn in Charlottesville on Thursday night (see video below transcript; bolding added by me for emphasis):
“I think more than Leslie vs. Denver or Tim vs. Corey, that’s really still what’s at stake next Tuesday; are we still ‘for all’?” Because we see just in the last month the tragic consequences of a politics that’s not about ‘for all’…
I stood on the front steps of the Fairfax Jewish Community Center three weeks ago defaced with 19 swastikas painted across the front…I stood at a dais in a synagogue in Roanoke Tuesday night in a solidarity service and they talked about the two Roanoke synagogues being defaced with anti-Semitic posters.
Two Mondays ago a guy got a pipe bomb in the mail, George Soros. There are plenty of philanthropists who give plenty of money to politics. George Soros is being uniquely demonized over and over and over again by the other side. Why George Soros? Why not some of the other people giving money? Why is it George Soros? It’s because he’s Jewish and he’s an immigrant. It’s straight, flat-out anti-Semitism that has led people to target him…He got that pipe bomb after incendiary rhetoric against him…
In the middle of last week somebody went to an African-American church in Kentucky, tried to break in the church to kill African Americans. When the door was locked, he went to a Kroger nearby, he killed two African-American senior citizens…one was a grandfather who was shopping, holding hands with his grandson who had to see his grandfather gunned down…
And then on Saturday…and then on Saturday a guy breaking into the Tree of Life…not breaking in, walking in, it was a house of worship…in Pittsburgh, driven by hate toward Jews, driven by hatred because Jewish civic organizations were doing what your civic organizations do – helping migrants and refugees. And he was so perverted by hateful rhetoric preached out about Jewish people and about the spiritual command of helping the stranger in a strange land that he walked in and killed 11 people because of their religion and wounded others, including brave dedicated first responders from Pittsburgh who came and tried to save people.
I mean when these things happen you know I think some of us are like, is this a nightmare? This is not the ‘for all’ nation that we make the pledge to every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Just yesterday the president said that he wants to rewrite the Constitution. Now set aside the fact that I lived in a military dictatorship where the rulers could change the rules at any at the drop of a hat when I was in Hondura….But isn’t it interesting, isn’t it interesting, that out of every clause in the Constitution the one that this president has announced he wants to change by executive fiat is the definition of citizenship in the Fourteenth Amendment. That definition was purchased by the blood of slaves…the reason that they had to put that definition in the Fourteenth Amendment was because of the Dred Scott decision…And when the Civil War was over Congress decided…that they needed to add a definition of citizenship to wipe out that stain on our nation to say that if you are born here it doesn’t matter what your national origin is, it doesn’t matter what your skin color is, if you are born here you are United States citizen. That was purchased by the blood of millions of people. And that this president would pick that one clause of the Constitution and say that should be rewritten, we should go back to the Dred Scott days, that tells you everything you need to know about this person and about the challenges of the moment.”
Also, see below for video of Thursday evening’s rally in Charlottesville with Tom Perriello, Leslie Cockburn and Tim Kaine.
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