Action4Canada - Dallas Brodie： The Risk of Courage

Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) joins Jemele to discuss her experience as a candidate and how she dealt with the fallout from a controversial comment she made about a black woman in a white shirt. She also talks about how she handled the backlash she received from her comments.

00:00:00.000 initially, John, for example, wanted me to say, he said, Dallas, it's the problem that you use

00:00:03.880 the word zero, zero bodies. He said, you shouldn't have used the word zero. I said,

00:00:09.540 zero is a bad, see, this is how silly it got. He says, you should have acknowledged that there

00:00:14.640 has been suffering in your comment. I said, John, but this isn't about that. Everybody's

00:00:19.420 all acknowledged that I'm dealing with a situation of if we can't have truth at the law society,

00:00:24.840 then we are truly doomed. That's the whole center of truth. And I'm talking about the objective truth.

00:00:32.340 And this is precisely what got me into the most trouble was me saying, everybody's saying, well,

00:00:36.500 this is my truth. This is her truth. This is this truth. But there really objectively is only one

00:00:41.440 truth. My shirt is blue and white. You can say you're seeing that it's yellow, but it's not yellow.

00:00:46.900 But if your truth is it's yellow, I won't deny you that. But objectively, it is a blue and white

00:00:51.580 striped shirt. And so I just had to live with it. It got very ugly after that. Once we were sitting

00:00:59.460 as independents, I was shunned in the legislature, literally and completely. The entire conservative

00:01:08.540 caucus was told not to speak to me, look at me, ever refer to me or be caught speaking to me anywhere

00:01:14.800 in the hallways. I've been told this. They were told to literally shun me in every way possible.

00:01:21.580 And I had friends who I loved in that, who still they were so scared, they wouldn't even

00:01:26.680 look at me. And Tara got Tara Armstrong, who decided to leave to and Jordan, it was pretty

00:01:32.420 bad. It was bad. But we, we started finding our feet. And, you know, sometimes there are

00:01:39.600 blessings in disguise. And I decided that I will stand in the truth, the truth. And if I never

00:01:48.800 win again in politics, so be it. But I will not have compromised my principles. And I know

00:01:55.920 my heart. Nothing I said was intended to be racist or mean or cruel. It was the truth.

00:02:02.440 And so I, I just decided I'm going to let the chips fall where they may. I will not compromise

00:02:08.180 on this. Otherwise, I'm just being like all the other politicians that I have personally

00:02:11.840 disliked completely when I watch them fold like a house of cards. Just risk being unpopular

00:02:19.400 at the dinner party. Okay. Just, just risk offending. I've had people say, Dallas, it's so good. You

00:02:24.920 can say it because I can't say it. I'm like, I can't say it either. Like this wasn't fun

00:02:28.300 for me. Like, it's not like I had some special power. It's just that now that I've walked through

00:02:32.760 the fire, it's over now. I feel free and I'm on the other side and I can speak and I'm not

00:02:38.340 afraid at all anymore. It's, it's almost a, it's a trial by fire. And once the media,

00:02:44.400 the Twitter mass, the mobbing, as James Lindsay calls it, the modern, the modern day struggle

00:02:49.620 sessions, there's a whole podcast he's done about this. You, you, you get through it and

00:02:55.200 you're through. Yeah. Say to people, just do it, state your position and you'll find out

00:03:01.380 courage is contagious and other people will come to you and say, thank you for saying that.

00:03:08.340 Thank you.

Action4Canada - September 12, 2025

Dallas Brodie： The Risk of Courage

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