Senate candidate Angie Nixon (D), a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member, bragged during her get-out-the-vote rally in Tallahassee, Florida, about getting arrested and highlighted people calling her “radical as hell” in her beliefs.
Nixon, a state representative challenging Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) for her U.S. Senate seat, described herself as a “former single mom and a union organizer,” claiming that she “ran to fight the corruption that’s making our costs rise.”
“Unlike Ashley Moody, I wasn’t appointed as a thank you for my loyalty to a corrupt system. I was elected to fight that corrupt system, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing in the state House,” she said before bragging about getting herself arrested after protesting redistricting efforts in May.
“Y’all know I took out a pink bullhorn and shut those proceedings down. Sometimes you gotta get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Y’all know they arrested me. Shameful,” she said. “And before I was ever elected to public office, I was out there organizing, organizing workers, organizing families, organizing people who had been told over and over and over again that no one in power cared what happened to them.”
“Now I am running for the United States Senate because I’m tired of watching corrupt politicians like Ashley Moody get richer and richer while the rest of us work harder and harder and still struggle just to barely make it,” she continued, contending that her positions are considered “radical” by the other side and downplaying them as simply wanting individuals to make a decent living.
Nixon continued:
If believing that a mother working two jobs should earn enough food to to put food on the table, if that is radical, then she should call me a radical. If believing that a senior who worked their entire life should be able to retire with dignity is radical, then they can call me a radical, or believing that a child with cancer should get the treatment that they need, whether their parents can afford it or not, or believing that no family should go bankrupt because somebody got sick is radical, then call me radical.
Later she added, “They call me radical as hell.”
“I am begging, I am pleading with you all to do more than just cheer for this campaign. This is not my campaign. This is our campaign, and I am asking you all to join this People Power Campaign,” she said, begging those in attendance to “knock doors” and “make phone calls.”
She added, “I need you all to make phone calls. I need you all to text your friends, your family, your, your boyfriends, your girlfriends, your exes, your sneaky links, all of them.”
“We are going to send a working-class union organizer to the United States Senate,” she proclaimed, notably playing down her socialist label during the rally, only saying it once.
“Now Ashley Moody thinks these basic and commonsense things are extreme, radical, even socialist,” she said, seemingly mocking those who oppose socialism. “Someone said because it’s easier to call me names than for her to explain why she keeps voting to make life harder for working people.”
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Notably, Nixon ,who has a portrait of Marxist cop killer Assata Shakur and others in her cafe/bookstore, “Cafe Resistance,” is a member of the DSA and has continually tried to play down her link to socialist policies, despite her alignment with several issues, including universal health care.
Nixon also once blamed a nosebleed on the “trauma” of working with Republicans in the state house.
