Cancel Culture

Floor Speech

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Mr. ROY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Colorado for organizing this important topic of conversation.

I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina for recognizing the law enforcement officers in her home State, much like the rest of our States, who put their lives on the line every single day to defend us, to protect our communities.

This is an important week, obviously, for law enforcement. I think it is germane to the point that my friend from Colorado is making about canceling because this whole notion of canceling isn't just about corporations; it is not just about technology; it is not just about Amazon; it is not just about Twitter and Facebook. It is about canceling the very people who are, like our friend from North Carolina was just talking about, these law enforcement officers--canceling police officers, canceling law enforcement, canceling those who are standing up and defending us every single day.

We hear it. I had a little girl in my home district in Austin who wrote a project for her school in which she was outlining how she was upset about how her father, her dad, who is a police officer, was being treated and how, when he would come home, he was despondent a little bit about the day because our law enforcement officers are being harassed, targeted, criticized, mocked, defunded.

This is purposeful. This is happening every single day. We are literally working to cancel law enforcement.

In Austin, Texas, they defunded police $150 million. Now, we have seen a 50 percent spike in homicides. There are homeless encampments all across the streets. We have 1999 levels of funding for the police department for a city that has grown by leaps and bounds since then.

This canceling of law enforcement leaves us at risk, and it undermines the very security of our communities. But it is real, and it is happening in real-time.

Twenty major cities have cut police budgets. $1.7 billion has been cut from police departments nationwide.

But it is not just law enforcement. We are talking about that here because of my friend from North Carolina. But it is about corporations. We are sitting here in the people's House, in front of the American flag, and our Nation right now is increasingly run by corporations more than the men and women who are in this body.

I mean, think about it. We hardly ever meet. We never amend. We never debate. We never do any actual give-and-take here on the floor. We get up and speechify a little bit.

Meanwhile, corporations are deciding who gets to get their voice heard. Corporations are deciding, by the way, what election laws are warranted in Georgia or Texas, venerable corporations like Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Major League Baseball.

In the United States of America, baseball has been politicized. I can't even watch baseball with my son without having to figure out and worry about how he is going to be viewing America because Major League Baseball has decided it is more important to be woke and move the All- Star Game from 50 percent Black Atlanta to 10 percent Black Denver. Why? So they can go around patting themselves on the back in Colorado while they say: Hey, look at me. I am driving my Subaru, and I have an Apple sticker on my car.

No offense to the gentleman from Colorado.

Is that woke?

Hank Aaron passed away this year. We could have celebrated his life with an All-Star Game in Atlanta, Georgia, and woke corporate Major League Baseball decides it is more important to make a statement about election laws in Georgia, which, by the way, the proposed laws differ very little from the laws in Colorado, as my friend from Colorado knows.

But they wanted to make a statement through their corporate power and their woke corporate boards that are packed with all these elite Harvard Business School and Yale school of business types that are going into these corporate boardrooms and trying to tell us how to live our lives in little ole Texas or Georgia or Colorado. That is what we face with these corporations that are trying to tell us how to live.

I appreciate my friend from Colorado giving us the time to focus on this important issue tonight. We have to reclaim our ability to live free in this country, and we ought to ask ourselves that question more and more: Are we truly free with wide-open borders and half a million apprehensions, $30 trillion in debt, and corporations telling us how to live our lives? Are we truly free in this country? I think we ought to ask that question over and over and over.

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