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Oct. 3, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
36:13
How Intellectual Curiosity Built America | Live at Liberty University | TRUTH Ep. #65
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A nation without its history is like a tree without roots.
It's dead.
That's similar to what Malcolm X said some time ago, and it's going to be the theme of today's podcast, through a deep dive on a part of our founding culture in American history that we don't often talk about.
And it's a little bit different of a kind of episode.
But before we get into it, I first want to say thank you to everybody who's following this podcast, who's listening to this on a weekly basis, for helping propel my recent book, Truths, to the top of the bestseller list.
It was the most successful book on Amazon last week.
It's a New York Times bestseller as well.
And I want to say thank you for making that such a success in not only rolling out this book, but the message of this book.
It's called Truths, The Future of America First.
I'm grateful to those of you who have gotten it for not only reading it, but using the toolkit in this book to help persuade your friends who might have a different point of view.
To be able to rethink their point of view on some of the most contentious questions of our day, from the existence of God, to the modern climate fixation, to transgender ideology, to the importance of the nuclear family, to the arguments for and against the existence of the administrative state.
We cover a lot of chapters in this book on different subject matter, and my number one goal in writing it was to reach as many people as we could with its message.
It's now the second week the book is out, and I'm asking every one of you to not only get a copy for yourself, I appreciate that, go to Amazon, go anywhere, get Truths, The Future of America First.
But more importantly, use this as the toolkit to do what I tried to do during the campaign, to be able to actually talk to the people who disagree with us and even persuade them.
I don't want to be alone in doing that.
I want people across the country doing it with me.
That's what this book is designed to do to give you the toolkit to accomplish that.
So thank you for making it a top bestseller this last week, number one in the country, and I'm proud of it.
Now this week's podcast we're doing something a little bit different because earlier today I gave a speech to about 8,000 people or more in a packed stadium at Liberty University, mostly of the next generation.
And I didn't want to go in there and preach to them about the importance of talking more about American history.
I used it as a chance to talk about American history itself, not about the legal principles of our Constitution, which I talk about in many other occasions, But to talk about the founding culture that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution by people who were not that much older than the people in that stadium in Liberty, people who are younger than even myself today.
That's a history we owe it to ourselves to remember.
We're going to walk through that history today and most importantly by the end talk about what the implications are for us in the year 2024. It's a little different than you might expect in terms of the lessons that we take away.
A lot of them are practical ways that maybe we could even live more fulfilling lives outside of politics.
But I'll let all of you be the judge of that.
That's going to be what we use as this week's podcast, and I hope you're able to spread the message.
And again, thanks for the support, both with the book Truths and with this podcast.
We'll be back again next week.
Wow.
Wow.
It's an honor to be here, Liberty.
Thank you for the warm welcome and give another round of applause to your singers right before you came on stage.
I had a chance to meet them backstage and they're such superstars.
It's great to be here.
I'll tell you what I plan to give you today is a speech about achieving the impossible.
My parents came to this country with no money about 40 years ago.
And for me, I've founded multi-billion dollar companies.
I've written best-selling books.
Last year, at the age of 37, I became the youngest person ever to run for U.S. President as a Republican.
Thank you.
I appreciate that from younger people than me.
At the start of the campaign, nobody knew my name, and by the end of it, I had the honor of having beaten multiple U.S. senators, governors, and a former vice president.
I did that while marrying my lovely wife, Apoorva, who is herself a successful throat surgeon in Ohio, and raising our two sons in Columbus, where we live today.
Love our two boys.
It's exactly the kind of family-centric lifestyle that some people would call weird.
But we think it's actually the way to raise our boys.
I would say, though, that all of that pales in comparison to the one achievement that I thought was truly impossible when I set out to run for president.
And that's that most of you now know how to actually pronounce my name, which I appreciate.
It's Vivek like cake and Ramaswamy like Ramaswamy.
So thank you for that.
But my speech today isn't about me.
It is about all of you.
You're entering your adulthood, I believe, at a truly special moment in American history.
I believe deep in my heart that it's actually going to be your generation that saves our country, but it wouldn't be the first time that that actually happened.
That dates all the way back to 1776. I'm talking about our founding fathers, who were not much older than most of you in the audience today when they founded our nation.
And though I'm talking about our founding fathers, I'll actually start with a quote often attributed to the founder of Dubai.
It goes like this.
My father rode a camel.
I ride a Mercedes.
My son rides a Land Rover.
My grandson is going to ride a Land Rover.
But my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.
Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create easy times.
Easy times create weak men.
And weak men create hard times.
He was the founder of Dubai, but he might as well have been talking to modern America and our own generation.
When our nation was born in 1776, we were a nation of underdogs.
We were a nation of insurgents.
Our founding fathers stood up to the most powerful empire in the world, declared their independence and then somehow turned assertion into reality.
We're a band of rebels who defeated a reigning incumbent of their era, an incumbent that went on to become just another small nation on the other side of an ocean.
But eventually the insurgent becomes the incumbent.
The underdog becomes the favorite.
And then the new incumbent starts to apologize for its own success.
Instead of working even harder to create even more of it.
And eventually that incumbent is then unseated by a new insurgent born on the other side of a different ocean.
Personally, I think that's what many of us remembered, what we sensed when we rallied behind the cry to make America great again several years ago.
But here's what we missed.
In order to make America great again, we have to know the story of what made America great the first time around.
That's the story of our nation.
That's the story of our history, and it's a story that we've forgotten.
It was actually Malcolm X who famously said that a nation without its history is like a tree without roots.
It's dead.
And one of the things I think we've lost in modern history is an aspect of our founding culture That's personally important to me.
It's one that I think we've abandoned in recent years.
And it's one that has nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do with politics, actually.
And one that if we do revive it, it's going to help every one of us lead more prosperous and more meaningful lives.
It's reviving the death of intellectual curiosity in America.
If you think about who are the most intellectually groundbreaking thinkers of the 18th century, They actually weren't our founding fathers.
Most of them were actually on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe.
They were the likes of Locke, Montesquieu.
Montesquieu, Locke, you could talk about David Hume, you could talk about Newton, Leibniz, who led the way in math and physics, Adam Smith in psychology and philosophy.
They were on the other side of the ocean.
And the thing that distinguished our founding fathers, though, wasn't their genius in any one of those disciplines.
They actually weren't the mathematical savants.
They weren't the philosophical savants, but they learned from the people who were.
And what distinguished our founding fathers was their ability to combine those intellectual foundations with a future that simply didn't exist in the old world.
Locke and Leibniz, Newton and Hume, these men were the true geniuses, but the European society into which they were born was different from ours in a big way.
They valued hierarchy and expertise over curiosities.
The monarchs and aristocrats who were supposed to run the government, they ran the government.
The people who were supposed to philosophize about economics and sociology, they philosophized about it.
But they weren't the same people.
And the people who were supposed to make discoveries in math or invent new tools, they were in a different place altogether, another corner to themselves.
Virtually everybody stayed in their lane.
Because you see, the old world, they were reluctant to break boundaries.
They believed that boundaries exist for a reason.
The ruling class exists to rule.
The expert class exists to advise them.
The doctor's guilt exists to treat patients.
The guilt of barristers exists to argue cases in court.
It was a culture that valued expertise over curiosity.
But our founding fathers, they were different.
They didn't believe in those boundaries.
They didn't even believe in acquiescence to expertise.
They believed that no man is confined to the circumstances of his birth or his upbringing, and that each of us is so much more than just a product of what we happen to be doing at a given moment.
For example, you all probably surely know that Benjamin Franklin, he was one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, he was a true Renaissance man.
Who, in addition to founding this country, founded multiple universities and hospitals.
He was also a prolific author, a dabbler in medicines, who discovered a treatment to the common cold.
People don't know that he actually was also an inventor of musical instruments, including one that went on to be used by Mozart and Beethoven.
And some of his devices actually ended up being incredibly practical.
A lightning rod for the home.
Bifocal glasses.
People don't know.
That was invented by Benjamin Franklin.
Even the lightning rod on the top of our homes was derived from breakthroughs made by Benjamin Franklin.
The tool for heating houses was called the Franklin stove.
Came from one of the recent breakthroughs in the field of thermodynamics at the time.
He was the archetype of what we call the Renaissance man.
I think most of you know that.
He was a polymath.
But here's the remarkable part.
He was not the exception, actually.
He was actually the norm at that time.
There were five men who served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence.
And actually all of them were similarly intellectually curious and versatile in their capabilities.
Two of the lesser known ones are two guys by the name of Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman.
Robert Livingston worked with Robert Fulton to build the first steamship.
That was a fundamental building block of the Industrial Revolution as a side project while serving as an ambassador to France.
Roger Sherman, who was also a signatory to the Constitution, was a self-educated attorney who never actually went to college.
He never actually went to law school.
he taught himself the law in the library of his local parish while working as a shoemaker he wanted body of Yale and of course in addition to these guys Franklin, Livingston, Sherman there were of course the two most famous drafters of the Declaration of Independence That's John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Bitter rivals in politics.
More rivalrous than probably any of the politicians you've seen in your lifetime.
Jefferson and Adams, they used to butt heads back then.
But they became friends again in their retirement.
Jefferson's interest, he was more scientific, and Adams was a little bit more the humanities guy.
But they were deeply curious about everything the other ones studied.
And I will tell you, they were unafraid to compete to the end with one another over it.
Intellectually speaking, they were competitors.
One of the famous quotes attributed to John Adams in the letter that he wrote to his wife Abigail was this.
He said, I must study politics and war so that our sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelains.
But that was a bit of a humble brag on his part, actually.
It's true that Adams has studied politics and war, but he also studied math and philosophy.
He also wrote poetry, while also being educated in Greek, Latin, and the other classics.
In fact, a little-known fact about John Adams that I find personally interesting is that after serving as our second president, he immersed himself in Hindu scripture and wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson to say that if he were going to live his life again, he'd have become a scholar of Sanskrit literature even earlier.
The man was a lifelong learner, and so was his great rival Thomas Jefferson.
Think about this.
Jefferson, he was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, not that much older than most of you in this room, younger than I am speaking to you right now.
He was fluent in five languages, capable of reading two more.
Over the course of his life, He wrote nothing short of 16,000 letters.
I think about people today hearing that.
You do the math, you'd say, okay, 16,000 letters, that's like 4,000 words.
I've done that before.
No, I'm not talking about 16,000 letters of the alphabet.
I'm talking about 16,000 letters as in full-length essays.
That's just not something people do in the United States of America today.
So that's basically unheard of by today's standards.
You might wonder...
Was it uncomfortable for him back then because he didn't have a laptop or a cell phone to do it?
It turns out that he was writing them by hand and he invented the swivel chair while writing the Declaration of Independence to make it easier to actually swivel and think at the same time.
The swivel chair you sit in today was invented by Thomas Jefferson.
We're sitting here in Virginia.
He was also an amateur architect who designed the Virginia State Capitol building right here in the state where we're gathered right now designed by none other than Thomas Jefferson.
Both of them, Jefferson and Adams, they had large sums of money to build their own personal libraries to continue their learning.
And in fact, Jefferson himself almost went bankrupt several times over.
It's easy to make fun of him for his taste in wine, but he wasn't just a drinker of wine, he was a scientist of wine too.
Traveled to southern France to learn about wine production and to figure out how to build a homegrown industry right here in the United States.
It was knowledge directed at every step of the way, and the fact that sometimes it left you drunk was, as the French like to say, just an unintended side effect.
But there was something in the water back then.
Maybe it was the wine.
Something in the culture.
That's different than what we have today.
It was a culture that valued education, that valued autodidacts, people who taught themselves, exploration, a fundamental curiosity about how the world works, and an unyielding confidence that even if you weren't an expert in something, you could still figure it out with the right combination of self-education and curiosity.
Compared to nations like France and England, It's true that America was actually pretty provincial at the time.
We were nothing more than a backwater cluster of small towns scattered along an eastern seaboard.
Economically, militarily, geopolitically.
It seemed that we were destined to be nothing more than a tiny footnote in global history.
Yet the people who wrote those footnotes, they were deeply curious about the world they inhabited, about the history to which they contributed, and deeply confident in their ability to change every part of it for the better.
So what's the message for us?
I think we need to revive your generation.
I would say our generations need to revive that special combination of curiosity and self-confidence.
Yes, we want to be a country of people who tinker in their garages.
We want people to write great essays in the evenings while working at an insurance company or a business during the day.
We should expect more of one another as citizens.
We should expect more of ourselves.
We should expect more of our leaders.
Back then presidents who left the White House went on to study ancient works in Latin and Sanskrit.
Today they sign Netflix deals and play around a golf in Martha's Vineyard.
That's easy to say today.
How cool were our founding fathers and then go back to the daily drudgery of our modern technocracy.
But the question for you is, why can't we behave a little bit more like our founding fathers?
Political conservatives like me like to talk a lot about staying true to the political and legal principles of the Constitution and no doubt that's important.
But as Americans, we should also be inspired to stay true to that founding culture of exploration and curiosity.
The irony, thank you, I appreciate that.
I think it's going to take, I'm here for a reason, I think it's going to take people like you, whose best days in life are still yet ahead, to see a nation whose best days are actually still ahead of us.
And the irony is it should be a lot easier for us to do this today than it was for our founders back then.
For starters, the main language of scholarship back in 1776, it wasn't English.
It was French and Latin.
You had to wait weeks or even months to just get a physical copy of a book that you might have wanted to read.
Today, everything's available to us in any language you want.
You're two swipes away on your iPhone from any book you want to read or listen to on demand.
The only thing stopping us is our own incuriosity, our own veneration of somebody else's expertise, and our own lack of self-confidence to build our own.
You might think our founding fathers didn't have the time.
They were too busy fighting this thing called the American Revolution and setting up a new country to afford the luxuries of intellectual curiosity.
But actually the opposite was true.
We were never more curious than when we were fighting for our survival as a country.
That special sauce that allowed America to succeed as an insurgent was that unmitigated curiosity and the totally unjustified confidence of our founding fathers.
And it wasn't just a matter of self-indulgence.
The reason our founding fathers were so curious about the world around them wasn't just to get drunk on it.
It was because they strived to make America, their nation, a better nation.
It wasn't idle interests that moved them.
It was a desire to create a thriving country that would outlive them.
And they made that country great.
They made our nation a magnet for minds that were as curious and courageous as their own.
One of the most important chemists of the 18th century was a man by the name of Joseph Priestley.
He was a British author and a teacher who had some unusual beliefs that were outside the mainstream Anglican thought at the time.
In 1791, a mob looted and razed his home to the ground.
It became unsafe for him to remain in England.
So he moved to Pennsylvania, where he was welcomed with open arms by our own founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin.
It may have been the first example of a brilliant scientist moving to America precisely because we're a free society, a tradition that so many others, including my own mother and father, continued centuries later.
My parents came here for the same reason that Joseph Priestley did.
It's because we're a free society where creative people are able to pursue their dreams however they see fit.
Priestley didn't come to America because we had great universities or funding for his research.
In fact, we had neither of those things back then.
He came here because he had freedom.
Freedom to explore ideas without the fear of being attacked.
Freedom to be himself, including even the freedom to discover who he was.
That is the unspoken part of the American dream.
Not just the freedom to achieve whatever you want, but also the freedom to discover what it is you actually want to achieve.
It's precisely at the moment in our history when we stopped being insurgents and started becoming incumbents, That we ourselves lost that sense of curiosity and confidence.
Why can't we just remain an incumbent and coast for as long as it lasts?
Because pretty soon, then we're on track to become the next Great Britain to somebody else's insurgency.
And if we're being very honest, it's already starting to happen.
The way we remain a magnet for the most curious and ambitious people around the world is actually by cultivating the culture that drew Joseph Priestley here.
The same culture that drew my own parents here.
A culture that prizes free and open debate and inquiry.
A culture that does not force a monolithic cultural ideology on everybody.
A culture that doesn't force you to bow down to what a politically appointed expert says on a given day, but instead gives you the latitude to question dogmas in the pursuit of truth.
That is the greatest thing our founding fathers invented.
It was not a lightning rod.
It was not a stove.
It was a country that offered freedom of thought.
The greatest invention of their era that actually produced all of the other ones.
And that's the invention we risk losing in a country that now focuses on suppressing dissent instead of fostering creativity.
Can we sustain that special combination of curiosity and confidence?
That, I believe, is the defining question of our era.
And it actually starts with all of you.
The next generation of Americans.
You hear some people object to this vision, I hear it, to say that, no, no, we shouldn't make their exclusive North Star of education in this country, curiosity, confidence, no, that's not enough.
We can't just teach our children to be explorers or courageous or confident, but we also have to teach them to be socially just, to rectify the injustices created by the likes of our founding fathers who blindly pursued enlightenment values without actually abiding by the values that they preached.
Well, you know what, I'd argue exactly the opposite.
That intellectual curiosity and courage, combined with a willingness to traverse boundaries that go beyond your preordained area of expertise, beyond your own lane, that's actually the most important building block of empathy.
And empathy is the most important building block of justice.
The arc of the moral universe is long, said Martin Luther King, but it bends towards justice.
And I believe that empathy is the force that causes it to bend.
And I believe that curiosity is the foundation of empathy.
So what's the take-home message from our reflection this morning on our founders?
I'll leave you with a few.
The first is this.
It takes about as much effort to do something really small and to do it really well as it does to do something really big and to do it really well.
And it's your choice how you spend your time on the short time we're all given on this earth.
It's your choice whether you want to do the small thing or the big thing.
There's no right answer to that question, but as somebody who myself ran for U.S. president at the age of 37, I'll tell you that I have my bias on that question.
When the PAC runs in one direction, that's my second piece of advice to you, you run the other way.
That's what our founding fathers did.
Today, calling the other side weird is considered a political insult.
I'm sure a lot of you have heard about how weird Liberty University might be.
I'm sure it's irritating when rival schools mock your beliefs coincidentally by scheduling their Pride Day on the same day that they face Liberty University in football like they did a couple of years ago.
But don't be afraid of being called weird by anybody else.
Our founders would have worn that as a label and a badge of honor.
they ended up winning the American Revolution and as I understand it Liberty ended up beating UMass a couple of years ago too so so we're a little proud of that For most of human history, the idea that you get to express your opinion, no matter what it is, no matter who you are or what your opinion is, that was a truly weird idea.
The idea that we the people get to create a government that is accountable to us rather than the other way around, that was downright strange, but that's what made America great the first time around.
And reviving that is how we're going to make America great again.
Thank you.
And number three.
As the older man in the room with a few gray hairs now starting to show up in the last couple of months, I'll keep giving you guys some of your unsolicited advice.
If you ever find yourself in your time, even here at Liberty, to be the smartest person in the room, here's my advice to you.
Find a different room.
That's what our founding fathers did.
I studied biology.
I went on to work at a financial institution, a hedge fund, then went to law school for fun.
I started a biotech company, a technology company, left all that behind to write a few books and then started an asset management firm before running for president.
Do not make your own identity a product of your occupation.
You are so much bigger than the thing that you happen to be doing at any one given time, and there is no better time to cultivate that sense of adventure and curiosity than right here in your experience at college.
Take an elective you wouldn't have otherwise taken.
Join a club you otherwise wouldn't have considered.
Learn a new instrument.
Go on a service trip, whether that's halfway around the world or as close as Boone, North Carolina, where I understand a team of Liberty students is heading right now to help with hurricane relief, and I'm proud of them for it.
That's how you actually push yourself out of your comfort zone.
And I take inspiration from that.
You know, I get a lot of questions, including from some of you here, about what am I doing next?
Well, that's my final lesson for you, and I'm pretty sure it's one that Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin would affirm if they were here with us today.
Every time, and I did a lot when I was in your seats, every time that I went on planning exactly how my career would go, laying that 10-year plan out, it never went according to that plan, not once.
My advice to you is your plans are silly, okay, and accept that, but your purpose is not.
Find your true purpose and I promise you the plan tends to reveal itself every time.
We have a long-standing tradition that we've forgotten in our country of those who return to public service at every stage of their career, even after having served at even the highest level.
I'll leave you with a story about the first person who led the United States of America who wasn't our founding father, who, perhaps like all of you, took inspiration from them anyway.
That was John Quincy Adams.
He was the son of the second president, John Adams, who I talked about earlier.
He became the president after serving as Secretary of State, but he only served for one term, and by many measures at the time, it wasn't a particularly successful first term either.
That bothered him.
He was an abolitionist.
He didn't get to accomplish everything that he planned to in that one term.
He toiled with it.
He started a nonprofit, entered the private sector, but felt that he had not fulfilled his actual purpose.
And so he did something unprecedented, something that nobody thought you would do after you'd been president.
And it turns out he's the only guy in the last 250 years that's done it.
He went back to serve in Congress after having been a U.S. president.
He was elected to Congress at a moment when the abolition question was the main question in American politics.
He went back with the objective of abolishing slavery in the United States.
Now, at the time he entered Congress, after having been a former U.S. president, there was a gag order.
Believe it or not, they put gag orders on former U.S. presidents then, too.
It was a gag rule that stopped you from saying the word slavery on the Congress floor.
They didn't want to have the debate.
What did he do?
He's a congressman now.
He's been the president.
He's got nothing to lose.
He says the word slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, and intentionally got himself censured.
And then he used his trial to make the case for abolition.
Did that over the two weeks, morning to night.
By the end of his own trial for personally getting kicked out of Congress, he'd actually made the case so beautifully that they ended the gag rule at the end of his trial.
He continued to serve in that Capitol building for another number of years until he was giving a speech right in the middle of the Congress floor when he had a stroke.
They were able to keep him alive for two more days in the congressional chamber upstairs before he finally died in that building where he went back to serve his country.
They came back downstairs to ask for volunteers for who was going to carry out his funeral rites and carry his body out.
And the person who raised his hand was none other than a little-known first-term congressman from the state of Illinois by the name of Abraham Lincoln.
These are the stories of American history that we deserve to revive.
Our children and our grandchildren deserve to hear.
That's the story of American exceptionalism.
So who are we now?
I'll end on a reflection of where we are in the year 2024. Our generation.
I'm a millennial.
You all are part of Gen Z. I'll tell you, I think that so many of us, we are...
Maybe not those in this room, but so many of us outside of this room in our generation, we are lost.
We are starved for purpose and meaning and identity, hungry to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
And yet we cannot even answer what it means to be an American today.
We're hungry to be part of something bigger.
There's a vacuum in our heart, and when that black hole runs that deep, that is when the poison fills the void.
You pick your favorite one, it almost doesn't matter what it is.
Wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, COVIDism, anti-Semitism.
You go straight down the list.
These are symptoms of a deeper void.
And I think we, and I'm not criticizing anybody else even but myself here, we as a conservative movement, we've done a really good job of criticizing the other side for their poison.
We've got to do some of that.
Their vision of race, gender, sexuality, and climate, we reject that.
But now is our time to level up and say we stand for our own vision.
We're not just running from something.
We're running to something.
Individual, family, nation, and God.
Beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for something.
What does it mean to be an American in the year 2024?
It means we believe in the ideals of 1776. It means that we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color, that you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.
That is why we stand against the woke DEI agenda, because we stand for merit.
It means you stand for the rule of law.
And I say this as the kid of legal immigrants to this country.
That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law.
And that is why, if we've had the largest influx of illegals into the United States, it stands to reason that we ought to have the largest mass deportation in American history as well.
That's not racist.
That's not xenophobic.
That's what it means to stand for the rule of law in the United States of America.
It means the people we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not the shadow government of unelected bureaucrats who are really running the show today.
I know many of my fellow conservatives like to talk a lot about those mass deportations of illegal aliens, but I tell them, don't forget about the second mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the Washington, D.C. bureaucracy.
That, too, is how you save a country.
A tale of two mass deportations.
But you see, the thing about these ideals, these are not really Republican ideas or Democrat ideas.
They're certainly not black ideas or white ideas.
They're American ideals that we fought a revolution to secure in our country.
And the question for you is, do you believe those ideals still exist or not?
I actually do.
Not in some fake, cheesy politician way, but in a true way.
I believe those ideals exist, but the only way we're going to revive them is by all of us.
Not just me, not just your leaders at this university, but by all of you.
Starting to speak your mind in the open again.
When you are the only person in a room who believes what you do, I'm asking you, I'm demanding of you to say it.
Say it with a spine.
Say it with conviction.
Say it with respect.
But part of respect is that you respect your neighbor enough to tell him what you actually think.
Not some woke-washed version of it, but the real thing.
That's what we've lost in this country.
We have a culture of fear that has swept across the United States of America like an epidemic.
Fear of losing your job.
Fear of getting a bad grade in school.
Fear of becoming an outcast in your own community.
And that culture of fear Has replaced our culture of free speech in America.
You hear a lot of reflections on certain cable networks these days about threats to our democracy.
You want to hear the best measure of the health of our democracy?
I'll tell you what it is.
It isn't the number of green pieces of paper in your bank account.
It isn't even the number of ballots we cast every November.
These things are important.
But they're not the most important thing.
The best measure of the health of American democracy is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public.
And right now we're doing poorly, but it doesn't have to stay that way.
The way we do it is all of us starting to speak our minds in the open again.
That's what our founding fathers did.
And that's what it's up to us to do in our 1776 moment today.
Speak the truth.
Speak it with conviction.
Don't be afraid to say that God is real.
That there are two genders.
That the climate change agenda is a hoax because fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.
That reverse racism is racism.
That an open border is not a border.
That parents should determine the education of their children.
That the nuclear family is not a bad word.
It is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
Capitalism lifts us up from poverty.
There are three branches of government in the United States, not four.
And the U.S. Constitution is the strongest and greatest guarantor of freedom in U.S. history.
That is the truth.
We fight for the truth.
We stand up for the truth.
That is what won us the American Revolution.
That is what reunited us after the Civil War.
That is what won us two World Wars and the Cold War.
That is what still gives hope to the free world.
And if we can revive that dream...
Over group identity and victimhood and grievance, then nobody in the world, not a nation, not a corporation, not a virus, not China, is going to defeat us.
That is what American exceptionalism is all about, and that is what we will revive to save this great nation.
Thank you all for coming out this morning, Liberty.
God bless you and your families, and may God bless our United States of America.
Do not stop fighting until we get this job done.
This nation is worth saving, and save it we will.
Thank you guys, and God bless.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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