At a Greeley town hall meeting on Tuesday, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet said social media and the internet destroyed journalism, and it’s time to figure out how to use technology “not to destroy our democracy but to reinforce it and to strengthen it.”
Asked by a member of the audience at the University of Northern Colorado about efforts to combat misinformation and disinformation, Bennet said, “I do know this for a fact: If tonight we ended our day by going home and watching the local news for half an hour and then — this part becomes really hard — and we all watched some version of Walter Cronkite for half an hour, none of this would be happening. None of this. Do you think we would have a president saying he was gonna make Canada the fifty-first state if he had to answer to Walter Cronkite tonight? Do you think that he’d be talking about building hotels in Gaza or about, yeah, the Gulf of America? I mean, and I’m serious about that.”
Bennet said the Walter Cronkite era wasn’t perfect. Still, he lamented the “destruction” of journalism by social media and the resultant loss of a “shared understanding of the facts, some sense of, you know, where the boundaries were in terms of reality.”
Introduced at the event by Greeley Mayor John Gates, Bennet began by saying: “I often have people say to me, what’re we gonna do? What’re we gonna do? And you know, we’re living; this is a democracy, and the one thing we do know is we’re never gonna survive if people aren’t willing to come out like you are tonight to have this conversation.”
He went on to remark, “For too long in this country and, I would say, in Colorado, we’ve had an economy that’s worked really well for the people at the top and hasn’t really worked well for anybody else,” adding, “We’re living in a time where, for a lot of people, the American Dream has seemed out of reach.”
He stated that he believes this feeling that the American Dream is out of reach is one reasons that President Donald Trump was elected.
After wrapping up his brief introductory speech, Bennet opened the floor for questions. People were chosen to ask questions by a drawing of numbers, but, toward the end of the evening, several people yelled out their questions without being chosen.
The first person to ask a question was “a recently retired nurse” who said, “I keep hearing all of these things about Medicaid cuts, Medicare cuts and, being in the healthcare world, I’m really concerned about health care. But I’m really I’m very concerned about our seniors. We cannot afford to have Medicare cuts nor Medicaid, especially for the elder population — they depend on it to live. They can’t be put out on the streets so I just wanna talk about that and one other thing is mental health — you talk about mental health for our young people, we also need to make sure Medicare is providing mental health care services for our elder population.”
Bennet responded, “Absolutely, so let me say on the last point that first I wrote the first bill in Congress that would treat mental health and physical health the same for seniors in this country. We haven’t passed it but I totally agree with you, and when I did a town hall the other day — it was virtual — I was in D.C., there were like 6,000 people that were signed up, and we collected all the questions and the top of the list was Medicaid and cuts to Medicare as well. And that’s because people who have loved ones that are on Medicaid know there’s nowhere else to go. … This is an issue that I hear about everywhere I go across the state and it is, it is clearly, clearly, you know, the plan of the House Republicans to slash Medicaid. We’ll have to see what happens when it gets to the Senate.”
Evans Will “Probably” Vote to Cut Medicaid, Says Bennet
Asked later if he believed the U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) would vote to cut Medicaid, Bennet said, “I think he will probably.” Evans represents the Greeley area.
Evans, who sits on the House committee charged with making $880 billion in cuts required as part of a GOP budget resolution, told CBS4 in Denver this week that he would not cut Medicaid, explaining to the TV station: “To say that those $880 billion are going to come from Medicaid or even from health care is a complete falsehood because the committee has jurisdiction over pretty much the rest of the U.S. economy. So there’s a wide range of places where those cost savings can be found.”
But, as reporter Shaun Boyd pointed out in her CBS4 story, congressional budget staffers say that 93% of the money overseen by Evans’ committee goes to Medicaid, making it impossible to cut $880 billion without making serious cuts to the program.
“I have no confidence at the end of the day that Donald Trump is not gonna cut Medicaid itself, much less Medicaid expansion,” Bennet said during the town hall. “I think, I think that they will and we are gonna have very, very tough choices. We’re gonna have very, very tough choices.”
Bennet, who’s been criticized for not opposing more of Trump’s cabinet nominees, promised the crowd at the town hall that he’d fight Trump broadly if not every time he votes.
“We’re gonna fight for our public employees who are defending us against these terrible wildfires,” Bennet said. “We’re gonna fight for the public employees that I met today who have been thrown out of Rocky Mountain National Park before the season even begins. We’re gonna fight for our kids who have special needs who will be ignored if we don’t have a National Department of Education.”
Bennet was interrupted by someone asking a question about his confirmation votes that was not audible due to lack of a microphone and by someone who began loudly clapping during the question.
“I’m glad you’re here because you look like you might be fifty years younger than the average age,” Bennet responded. … “And by the way that’s your own form of protest, too, so I just said protest is good. I’m not gonna say you can’t; you deserve an answer to that.”
He then went on to explain the reasoning behind some of his confirmation votes, stating, “Marco Rubio got a hundred votes in the Senate. One was from me. I was on the Intelligence Committee with him. I know Marco. He was in the office next to me. You know, there’s a lot of stuff he’s doing that I don’t agree with; there’s a lot of things that he’s done over the years that I don’t agree with. I think that having that long-standing relationship. … might be worth something in terms of trying to deal with this administration, was a reason to vote for him.
“I could have taken the view that I was gonna vote against every single one of them. That was not the view that I took, and so we might disagree about that but that’s the reason why.”
He went on, “[Doug] Burgum I voted for because he is the interior secretary and, and there is obviously a huge amount of federal public land in Colorado.”
He said he has spoken to Burgum about his views of federal public land and, though he didn’t necessarily agree with him, “He did agree to listen to what I said and to understand that Colorado’s view of this stuff looked a lot different from his state’s view of that and that’s why I voted for him.”
Bennet also explained that he voted for Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary “because of the transportation dollars that we were able to get out of the Biden administration.”
Bennet was also asked to help a family whose mother has not been permitted to re-enter the United States, with one of her daughters.
“I understand that you’re an advocate for immigrants and, we just need her home and we just want to know if you’re willing to speak on behalf of immigrants and help our family,” said the family member, in tears.
Bennet got the family’s contact information, as well as information from other people who had asked questions, promising that his team would reach out and try to help.
One attendee, Bob Stack, said he attended the event because, “Number one, town halls are important. Number two, I’m here to recruit people. Number three, I wanted to hear what the senator had to say in person.”
He said he felt that Bennet answered questions, but “he did not give enough specifics.” Stack was recruiting people to join him for a protest on the first Saturday of every month at the Weld Courthouse.
