Last Monday and Tuesday, Cory Booker broke racist Strom Thurmond’s former record for the longest Senate filibuster by spending 25 hours and 5 minutes criticizing the Trump administration with “the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.” I’m not remotely impressed. To me, that speech was nothing more than 25 hours of political spectacle.

I know what pushback I’ll get on this because they’re the same excuses liberals shore up every time Democrats emerge from hibernation to do the bare minimum or less. “I don’t see you putting your body on the line to stand for 25 hours with no bathroom break and also fasting and dehydrating yourself for a few days. Plus, he broke a symbolic record!”

The difference between Cory Booker and me is that I am a college student, whereas Booker is a senior senator with a base salary of $174,000 to represent his constituents so they themselves don’t have to hold extended, 25-hour-long demonstrations demanding civil liberties and protections. Yet, for the past few years, demonstrating and protesting is exactly what people have been forced to do because the Democratic Party has failed miserably at representing or protecting us. Just shy of hour 20, Booker said it himself: “I confess that I have been imperfect. I confess that I’ve been inadequate to the moment. I confess that the Democratic Party has made terrible mistakes that have given lane to this demagogue.” So no, I will not clap for a man who is merely admitting what we already knew — that he and his party are at least half-responsible for getting us here.

Politics should not be performative. It annoys me to no end to see the same people who admonish celebrities and peers for being “performative activists” turn around and justify performance from someone whose entire job is to materially improve our lives. Politicians are public servants. It is our duty as members of a democracy to make demands of them, not excuses. Democracy doesn’t die when someone like Trump takes office; democracy dies the day Americans stop holding their representatives accountable.

The reason Cory Booker said in his speech, “I hate to tell you we’re doing all that I can think of,” is not because Democrats are powerless to the whims of the fascistic Trump administration. It is because he and the Democratic Party are simply unwilling to do anything else. For 18 months, Americans have been demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel, and at every opportunity, Cory Booker has voted against it. That’s no surprise — Booker has received $877,763 from pro-Israel lobbies over his political career. If the left is interested in “fighting the system,” I hope we know that no act of real resistance will ever be backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars from interest groups and mega-donors or be followed by requesting more money from constituents. No threat to injustice will receive a standing ovation from the power structures it’s meant to be attacking.

So no, I don’t want to hear about constitutional rights from the same man who voted to ban TikTok last year, a move top officials and lobbyists have openly stated was an attempt to quash pro-Palestinian speech. I don’t want to hear about the Civil Rights Movement, MLK, or peace from a man who invited his “friend,” war criminal Yoav Gallant, to his office for a photo-op one month after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Gallant for his crimes against humanity. I don’t want empathy and kindness preached to me by a man who, two days after his speech, voted to send another $8.8 billion in taxpayer dollars of arms to Israel — the same day Israel massacred at least another 100 people in Gaza and a few days after the bodies of over a dozen missing emergency workers assassinated by Israel were found in mass graves.

Any man who regurgitates the words “moral moment” 31 times but can’t once bring up the war crimes Donald Trump and this country are committing in multiple countries right now — because he too supports them — is a morally bankrupt, self-serving hypocrite whose words and promises I will never take seriously.

In his speech, Cory Booker said, “Tell me the wretched truth about America because that speaks to our greatness.” Well, here is the truth: the Democratic Party and its loyalists are so charmed by their own theatrics that they’d rather break a symbolic record (replacing the record of a racist with a genocide supporter) than address any of the real problems with this country. I don’t think I’m being a political purist for refusing to accept anything less than liberation for all people. Rather, I think anybody willing to overlook the American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians just to defend a politician is, at best, indoctrinated, and at worst, genuinely believes the imperialist lie that their life matters more than the lives of those in the Global South. The moment we make concessions on horrors like genocide, we have lost sight of what true liberation means, and our movement becomes meaningless.

To quote American author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates: “We are at a moment right now where people are asking themselves why can’t the Democratic Party defend this assault on democracy… and I would submit to you that if you can’t draw the line at genocide, you probably can’t draw the line at democracy.”