Dallas Brodie： The Risk of Courage
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
157.75009
Summary
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.
Transcript
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initially, John, for example, wanted me to say, he said, Dallas, it's the problem that you use
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the word zero, zero bodies. He said, you shouldn't have used the word zero. I said,
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zero is a bad, see, this is how silly it got. He says, you should have acknowledged that there
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has been suffering in your comment. I said, John, but this isn't about that. Everybody's
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all acknowledged that I'm dealing with a situation of if we can't have truth at the law society,
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then we are truly doomed. That's the whole center of truth. And I'm talking about the objective truth.
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And this is precisely what got me into the most trouble was me saying, everybody's saying, well,
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this is my truth. This is her truth. This is this truth. But there really objectively is only one
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truth. My shirt is blue and white. You can say you're seeing that it's yellow, but it's not yellow.
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But if your truth is it's yellow, I won't deny you that. But objectively, it is a blue and white
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striped shirt. And so I just had to live with it. It got very ugly after that. Once we were sitting
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as independents, I was shunned in the legislature, literally and completely. The entire conservative
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caucus was told not to speak to me, look at me, ever refer to me or be caught speaking to me anywhere
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in the hallways. I've been told this. They were told to literally shun me in every way possible.
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And I had friends who I loved in that, who still they were so scared, they wouldn't even
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look at me. And Tara got Tara Armstrong, who decided to leave to and Jordan, it was pretty
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bad. It was bad. But we, we started finding our feet. And, you know, sometimes there are
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blessings in disguise. And I decided that I will stand in the truth, the truth. And if I never
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win again in politics, so be it. But I will not have compromised my principles. And I know
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my heart. Nothing I said was intended to be racist or mean or cruel. It was the truth.
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And so I, I just decided I'm going to let the chips fall where they may. I will not compromise
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on this. Otherwise, I'm just being like all the other politicians that I have personally
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disliked completely when I watch them fold like a house of cards. Just risk being unpopular
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at the dinner party. Okay. Just, just risk offending. I've had people say, Dallas, it's so good. You
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can say it because I can't say it. I'm like, I can't say it either. Like this wasn't fun
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for me. Like, it's not like I had some special power. It's just that now that I've walked through
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the fire, it's over now. I feel free and I'm on the other side and I can speak and I'm not
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afraid at all anymore. It's, it's almost a, it's a trial by fire. And once the media,
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the Twitter mass, the mobbing, as James Lindsay calls it, the modern, the modern day struggle
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sessions, there's a whole podcast he's done about this. You, you, you get through it and
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you're through. Yeah. Say to people, just do it, state your position and you'll find out
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courage is contagious and other people will come to you and say, thank you for saying that.