July 10, 2025 - Epoch Times
02:39
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| People often ask me why I persist in fighting against the lawfare against me. | |
| Why not just throw in the towel and cut deals and be done? | |
| And my answer to them has been, I think our country was on the precipice and may still be on the precipice of losing freedoms that we inherited, that our grandfathers and even further back, our founders, pledged their lives and their fortunes and their sacred honor to achieve. | |
| And I'm not willing to let those things be lost for my kids and grandkids without putting up a fight. | |
| When the Georgia indictment was handed down against me, I was teaching a seminar of young recent lost school grads called the John Marshall Fellowship that we run at the Claremont Institute. | |
| And everybody's phone starts buzzing. | |
| And I look down at my phone. | |
| I'm teaching a seminar on the religion clauses. | |
| And I look down at my phone and I pull it out and it says, you've just been indicted in Georgia. | |
| And I put it aside. | |
| But everybody else's phones is buzzing as well. | |
| So I know everybody in the room knows it. | |
| But I continue to teach about the religion clauses. | |
| And at the end of the week, we have a nice fancy dinner and some good wine. | |
| And they roast each other. | |
| And they'll occasionally toast the professors and thank us. | |
| But this was such a monumentally significant thing that happened in the middle of the week, they decide to roast me. | |
| And one of the participants gets up and says, he was teaching us the religion clauses. | |
| All of a sudden, a bunch of jack-booted thugs start rappelling down from the rooftop and barge in and come arrest him and carrying him off sideways in leg shackles. | |
| Now, that didn't happen, of course, but it was funny and drew the laugh. | |
| And then he turned very seriously and he said, what we witnessed there with his commitment to continue to teach what was the subject matter that we were there for demonstrated to us a level of courage that was contagious. | |
| And then he closed with this. | |
| He said, if you think about the last line in our national anthem, the question is not so much whether the flag still waves or flies. | |
| The question is what kind of land it flies over. | |
| Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave? | |
| Or is it the land of the coward and the home of the slave? | |
| And that was just profound. | |
| And I'm not willing to hand off a land of the coward and the home of the slave to my kids and now increasingly my grandkids. | |
| So we fight for something that I think is the fight for our time. | |
| And that is for freedom and liberty, whether pursuing economic interests or noble aspirations of how you conduct your lives in political community. | |
| But it's a fight worth fighting for. | |
| It may be the most important fight worth fighting for. |
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