Leadership Quote by Barbara Boxer

Boxer’s line isn’t really about “the Far Right” as an ideology; it’s about collapsing ideology into a supply chain of money. The sentence builds like a courtroom brief: you think you’re debating values, but you’re actually “going up against” a roster of corporate villains with recognizable brand names. Halliburton, in particular, is a post-Iraq War shorthand for the revolving door, war profiteering, and the sense that public policy got outsourced to contractors. Dropping it into the list is a cultural cue: remember who cashed in, remember who paid.

The repetition of “big” does deliberate work. It’s not elegance; it’s emphasis-by-blunt-force, a populist drumbeat meant to make the opposition feel physically larger and harder to defeat, which in turn flatters the listener’s courage for resisting. “Special interests” is the bridge phrase that lets her fuse culture-war antagonists with economic grievance. You don’t have to care about carbon policy to resent being “ripped off.”

The subtext is transactional politics: the Far Right isn’t just wrong, it’s funded. That framing shifts the fight from persuasion to exposure. It also preemptively explains why reform is so difficult: not because the public isn’t ready, but because powerful actors “work so hard” to keep the system tilted. Boxer’s intent is mobilization through indignation, turning complex energy policy and campaign finance into a simple moral story with a clear cast and a clear injury: “us” versus the companies that profit when “we” lose.