Thread by @sethmoulton

I'm giving remarks now at #SCDemWeekend. Follow along here.

During my tours in Iraq, the Marines I led asked me a lot of questions, from big things like what rocket to use to small things like how to send a postcard to their family.

But there was one question that was the hardest: “Sir, why the hell are we risking our lives for this?"

Many Americans are asking a similar question: what does it mean to fight for a country that lets you down? A country whose leaders let you down? The answer today is the same as it was then: we’re fighting to uphold the values our leaders abandoned.

We’re fighting for who we are.

True justice means we don’t have a racist criminal justice system that kills & imprisons black Americans for doing the same things white Americans do every day.

And true justice means we need to start impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, because neither power nor wealth nor skin color nor office should place anyone above the law.

All of us paid more in taxes than Amazon and Netflix COMBINED—and more than Trump has paid in the last 30 years. That’s not capitalism, that’s crony capitalism. That’s not opportunity, it’s oppression.

We need a tax code—and a country—that rewards hard work, not tax evasion.

In the greatest democracy in the world, we shouldn’t have voter suppression, the filibuster, gerrymandering, or the electoral college to tell people their votes don’t count.

It’s time for DC and Puerto Rico to be states, and it’s time for a New Voting Rights Act in America.

It’s when our country lets us down the most that we need to work the hardest—it’s when our values are under assault that we need to fight for them.

It’s time for the generation that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan to take over for the generation who sent us there, and time for the generation who will bear the brunt of our changing climate and economy to take over for the generation who got us here.