People will argue with facts. They can't argue with your lived experience.

We came to make a change.

Hey, welcome everybody to our last virtual event of 2025.

So for those of you who do not know us or have not been to an event before, I'm Julie Womack.

This is Julie Collins.

We are the Julees.

And we host most of Red Wine and Blues national virtual events.

And I just want to say that 2025 for our virtual events has been an amazing year.

You guys have shown up in huge numbers to learn about important issues and to get trained on how to effectively

organize in your communities. So anyone who says that people are disengaging from politics

does not know a red, wine, and blue member. That's a fact. When we first started doing our

virtual offense back in 2020, we were so excited the first time that 100 people showed up. But now we regularly

see 700, 800, or even 1,000 people signing up to attend events and even crazier numbers win.

It's Heather Cox Richardson. In fact, in 2025, we had 150,000 attendees at our virtual events.

150,000, y'all, that is huge.

150,000.

I mean, like I said, Julie and I were so excited for 100.

So, but as we close out this year, we do want to recognize that it has been a hard year.

You know, at the state level, at the federal level, there have just been some terrible policies enacted that have really

caused a lot of harm to a lot of people. But we're closing out 2025 with momentum on our side.

The elections were obviously a high point and we continue to see unexpected wins and wild

point swings in these special elections. Absolutely. That's giving us all life.

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