Here’s the speech in its entirety. Forgive me if there are errors; I tried to catch them all. This article was originally published by Pjmedia.com
Chris Queen | 5:08 PM on August 23, 2024
I’m sorry to keep everybody waiting. Sixteen months ago, in April of 2023, I launched my campaign for president of the United States. I began this journey as a Democrat, the party of my father, my uncle, the party which I pledged my own allegiance to long before I was old enough to vote.
I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of 6 in 1960, and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution and of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars.
We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy. As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with.
It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money. When it abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president, I left the party to run as an independent.
