Buenas tardes, señoras y señores.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This is my first time joining Foro Madrid. I am honored. I bring you greetings from The Heritage Foundation and from our president, Kevin Roberts.
You know, I used to criticize Barack Obama for his apology tours. That’s when he’d go around the world apologizing for how bad he thought America had been. Only now, after the United States has exported woke DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] foreign policy and drag shows to embassies around the world, I find myself here desperately wanting to apologize for Barack Obama. And I especially apologize for the Biden-Harris administration.
A pleasure to be in Argentina—a beautiful country. Thank you for your gracious hospitality.
Key Takeaway
I am also grateful to be with so many heroes.
In my brief remarks, I hope to leave you with one clear message: The fate of all our countries is at stake. Those who win the moral case for freedom will determine the outcome.
We have much in common, across heritage and history. And this is the challenge we all now share.
We must win the moral case for freedom to determine the future of the countries we know and love.
I put to you that the Left’s fatal flaw is that it has abandoned the consent of the governed.
I believe the Right’s inherent strength is to care about, to cultivate, to reflect the will of the people.
Conservatives desire a smaller, representative government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing. We don’t mistrust government because it’s a shared human effort, we just think that the proper cooperative unit for daily decisions, and many large ones, is the family.
The entrenched establishments don’t want a constitutionally limited government because it means they lose power and will be held more accountable by the people who put them in power.
Accountability, however, must extend through the entire bureaucracy and all of the administrative state.
Look no further than nearby Brazil for the glaring reminder that human flourishing is never guaranteed. Most of history has been a story of power and tyranny, of poverty and privation.
We who live under the blessings of liberty are not immune to these dangers.
Today, across the West, our founding ideals are under assault like never before, from within our respective nations—as well as without.
Our nations are beset by social, cultural, political, economic, moral, and religious challenges.
In America—in Washington, D.C., specifically—it has become so dysfunctional that it is difficult for serious, good-faith leaders to prioritize these problems, let alone solve them.
The collectivist Left is not merely in competition with the Right; it is in active opposition to the moral, intellectual, and social foundations on which our entire civilization rests.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves here.
We took for granted that others shared our belief—that economic, social, and political freedom are inseparable. Inseparable. The whole yearning of the human spirit.
It is one whole—as Milton Friedman said. Anything that reduces freedom in one part of our lives is likely to affect freedom in other parts.
But not all the enemies of freedom are domestic. We invited one of the greatest foes of freedom onto equal footing on the world stage—Communist China. China not only opposes this in belief and in practice; they actively work to undermine Western values.
They picked up where the Soviet Union left off, and to this day support socialist nations such as Venezuela and Cuba, as they try to export their poisonous worldview more broadly into our hemisphere.
However, let me put it more directly: Communist China is a corrupt regime. China’s government operates without the consent of its people. Nearly 1.5 billion people with no voice. An illegal regime of unelected bureaucrats.
Once we acknowledge that the Chinese Community Party has no claim to moral legitimacy, is it any surprise to understand why they operate in bad faith?
What do domestic and external threats to our way of life have in common? This abandonment of the consent of the governed. It is the Left’s fatal flaw.
As I was preparing these remarks, I was reminded of a short story titled “The Immortal,” by someone you all know very well, Jorge Luis Borges.
In this story, a man achieves immortality on his journey to find the “Immortal City.” The city when he finds it, is a maze—a labyrinth—of senseless passages and staircases, twisting and turning into themselves and dead ends—created by immortal men driven senseless by the monotony of their existence.
In this fable, these immortals read to me like the people we know who seek to build utopia here on earth.
In their embrace of novelty they have lost their understanding of human nature: the pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
This illustrates our challenge. Those self-styled elites who look down on us, like ants in a maze, think that our very existence is senseless, absent their direction. To them our consent is secondary. We are—in others’ words—deplorable.
This is why we, together, viscerally reject global governance. We refuse to give up on who we are, where we are from. We will never dismiss who and what we value.
We here today know we have responsibility to engage our fellow man in the pursuit of and understanding of the truth.
Human history tells us that there will be periods of change and challenge—and the people will look for shelter from the storm. The institutions that traditionally provide that shelter are safe havens and transmitters of knowledge and culture.
However, the institutions that once taught the truth and would cultivate virtues have been captured by Marxist ideology.
In the corporate world, consider how the environmental, social, and governance debate perfectly illustrates this. People spouting Marxist ideas now control too much of the means of production. The largest financial institutions that invest, fund, and dictate how our economies move are pushing this. But it’s not just the economics of it. Because the “E” is how we live. The “S” is what we believe. The “G” is that they get to keep score. It’s all-consuming. And they have a significant head start. But they will lose. Because they are thieves, having stolen our property. And we never gave consent.
Consider the way the forces of diversity, equity, and inclusion demonstrate this. We are told to our face that the once clarion call of meritocratic equal opportunity must give way to socialism’s equal outcomes. And because of the color of our faces, we are told that we cannot oppose this. Those who supposedly know better are our betters. However, they too will lose. Because once someone else mandates you follow their definition of diversity, it is no longer diverse. It fails by its own logic. And we never gave consent.
The consent of the governed is the great clarity we must bring to this debate. This is the only path that allows the people to retain the inherent God-given right to make choices.
We must protect our economic and social freedom to enjoy the very freedom it offers.
The freedom where souls can make their own choices, informed by bishops and rabbis, poets and philosophers.
Consent of the governed and self-government all rest on free speech.
As Aristotle instructs, speech is what makes us political animals. It is what allows for deliberation—refining of ideas, knowing the truth. It is what allows us to choose the good and to self-govern.
And that is why the Left stifles speech. It is dangerous. They can’t control the narrative. There can be no freedom without free speech.
Our imaginations need not be spurred hard to remember what we know from history. If we lose this battle for freedom, we know the injustices, travesties, and indeed horrors that await the people.
The Left are divorced from reality; and we must break the hold they have on the people.
So, yes, the Left’s long march through the institutions has been effective; it weaponizes every lever against anyone resisting its soul-sucking agenda.
This worldview is the antithesis of the good life and undermines the principles of freedom and prosperity that we hold dear.
You know the Left is a poison. And I am delighted to be here with you because I know what you stand for—and we will stand together—not to contain the Left, not to deal with the Left.
We are here to crush the Left.
We are here to suffocate the state.
We are here to restore self-governance.
And The Heritage Foundation is here to commit all our effort and sweat to our partnership with all of you—to win—for the people.
We are optimistic in the face of this complexity.
While the Left’s institutional capture and the media’s complacency present challenges, there is a silver lining.
The Left’s abandonment of persuasion in a democracy where people’s will and their vote still matter—so long as we demand it—offers us this opportunity.
The failure to engage genuinely with the electorate and their reliance on institutional power over public discourse reveals the weakness.
In a democracy, the power ultimately resides with the people, and the Left’s overconfidence can be their downfall.
We must reassert the moral case for freedom.
This case was made long ago, dating back to the Magna Carta in England, but it needs to be reaffirmed. In powerful rhetoric and in bright bold contrast.
We must emphasize the inseparability of liberty and responsibility, as Friedrich Hayek observed.
Responsibility is the reward of freedom. It is what keeps our lives from being trivial, as Charles Murray wrote.
As we make the case for freedom, we must also act.
Our vision of winning must follow a natural sequence.
We must go to the people and listen to where they are. Not where we wish them to be, but where they are.
Understanding that, we must shape public opinion. Across all existing platforms, by creating new platforms, and supporting individuals, like Elon Musk, who put their own personal fortunes and reputation on the line for all of us.
Then, brushfires in the minds of men and women will drive the demand for change.
The deafening chorus will create cultural momentum and political will.
Public policy will follow—and we must sustain those wins against entrenched lobbying, and against moneyed interests.
At the same time we will lead the restoration of seminal institutions and the creation of new ones.
We know how to play this game.
Back home, left to our own devices, the American people rejected colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, fascism, communism, and (today) wokeism.
To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.
We, however, should be proud, not ashamed of America’s and the West’s unique cultures of social equality and ordered liberty. After all, the countries where Marxist elites have won political and economic power are all weaker, poorer, and less free for it.
We must press this advantage.
Ladies and gentlemen, in this generational and civilizational struggle for freedom, we must cover the whole field.
Offense and defense.
We must be both Lionel Messi and Cristian Romero.
In man’s quest for knowledge, we must never forget that certain things are true no matter how far into the past we dig nor how far into the future we dream.
Of course, mankind will discover new things about our past, and we will always innovate toward a better future.
But that happens best in peace and leads to flourishing if we follow the truth: that man is designed for self-governance and the consent of the governed is the only path to legitimacy.
These truths must inform the hierarchy of values we apply to our social fabric.
A Call to Action
As we said at the beginning, this is a battle for the soul of our societies.
Ronald Reagan is often quoted for saying, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”
As Kevin Roberts says, “This is the duty history has put before us and the standard by which our generation of conservatives will be judged. And we should not want it any other way.”
This appeal to the people must come with a balance, of course, that politics not come to dominate their lives.
But when we must be political, let us answer the call.
Remember Aristotle believed man was a “political animal” because we are social creatures with the power of speech and moral reasoning.
Thus, let us be political animals. We shall roar like lions.
Encourage the Argentine people to roar and support [Argentine President Javier] Milei to ignite growth.
Encourage the Spanish people to roar and support [Santiago] Abascal to defend national sovereignty.
Encourage the Italian people to roar and support [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni and restore the family as the building block of society.
Encourage the Brazilian people to roar and support and defend themselves against Alexandre de Moraes.
Encourage the people around the world to roar in support of self-governance.
Encourage the American people to roar and as we have said in recent days, “fight, fight, fight!” for the people.
Onward to freedom!
Thank you.
