JIM: I first met our next
speaker and his lovely wife Penny when I went out to
Claremont many years ago to graduate school. He was the president at the
time of the Claremont Institute. And what I quickly learned about
him is that he's a teacher. It's something that Hillsdale
students learn about him today. He's a teacher. He's always teaching. He didn't teach formal classes
back then, as he does now. But we graduate
students certainly learned a lot from
him, and he always took the time to talk to
us when we had questions. Back in those days, when we
were younger and sillier, we used to kid him that he was
a college professor trapped in a think tank
president's body. Now I guess he's a
college professor in a college president's body. Well, if you come to see
us on the Hillsdale campus, and we hope you do, you'll see
that he hasn't changed a bit. He's still teaching, and he's
now offering formal classes on a variety of subjects. Those subjects include
Aristotle, the Constitution and CS Lewis. And just last fall he taught a
course on totalitarian novels. Some of you may have seen his
essay in the December 2020 issue of Imprimis, where he
discussed one of those novels, George Orwell's 1984. Well, he's still
pushing his students to defend their opinions,
as he did with us, and think them through
more clearly and deeply because the goal of an
education worthy of the name is discovering the
truth about things. And that's not easy. It's been my privilege
and honor to work with him at Hillsdale,
my alma mater, for now more than 20 years. Please welcome him
back to the podium, the 12th president of Hillsdale
College, Larry P. Arnn. [APPLAUSE] LARRY ARNN: Thank you, Jim. How are you? So I want to begin with
two personal things. One is show the picture. Now we're not behind in
our capital campaign, but if we were I would auction
that baby off right now, except my wife sits back there
and she told me I mustn't. That's Charlotte
Theresa, and everybody thinks she's just
like her grandfather. Thank you. That's enough of her. Nobody wants to look at me. I want to tell you some
stories about Rush Limbaugh. Because I've led a weird
life, for different reasons, I've known Mark Levin and
Hugh Hewitt since a long time before they got into radio. And I've met Rush Limbaugh
for the first time in 1984, the year his
career was just taking off. He was in Sacramento,
California, and I had business up there. I'd go, and the cab drivers
were all listening to him and talk about how great he was. And then I ran across
him in a hotel, and I walked up
and shook his hand. And I said, you're dynamite. And he said, well, yes I am. I knew him off and on. Well, I've known him--
that's 36 years ago. He would come and
speak for things that I was hosting at the
Claremont Institute and here. And I found out about him,
so I know him personally pretty well. He's shy. Can you believe that? He's very shy. And he once came to Washington,
DC to speak at a dinner where Newt Gingrich
was speaking. And he asked us to drape off
a little area behind the stage where he could drink Diet Coke
and wait to give his speech. And he sat back. There and they were,
like, 600 people there. And I walked back
there, and I said, Rush, there's 600 people out there
would just love to see you. Why don't you come
have some dinner? He said, no, I'm
drinking my Diet Coke. And he gave a speech, and
he walked back in that room, and he went to his
airplane, and he went home. And next time I saw him, I
said, you're a really weird guy. And he said, I am, am I not? He got to talking
about the college. And this was when? This was 12 years ago. And something about
he liked the college and he knew a lot about it. But it struck his fancy. And we got this huge response. Every time he'd mention
something on the radio, the phones would get jammed up. And then he called
one day, and he said, I want you to
advertise on my show. And he had a big
wait list of people to advertise on his show,
and I happened to know that. So I knew it was
kind of an honor, but I thought it
was an odd idea. Let's advertise a college
on the Rush Limbaugh Show. And I said, OK,
I'll think about it. And then he sent Craig Kitchin,
who's his number one producer-- will be grieving today-- out to Hillsdale twice. And both times he
sat all afternoon through an Aristotle class. I was teaching it. He said, I want to get a sense
of what this college is about. And I said, OK
well, come with me. And I thought that was a
remarkable demonstration of patience on the man. And I didn't do
anything about it. And then in this first week that
Obama was elected president, he said to a bunch
of people, you've got to stop listening
to Rush Limbaugh. And so I came to the Monday
morning staff meeting, and I said, we're going
to examine this week whether to advertise
on Rush Limbaugh. And John Sweeney
back there said, so the president made
you mad, didn't he? And I said yeah, because
that's the specific thing that the president of United
States is supposed to protect, us listening to and saying
what we want to, right? It's our rights,
and he's an agent of those rights, except not. And that did tick
me off, and that's why we decided to do that. And then, of course,
it went wild. Over the years I would
go see him once a year down in Palm Beach. He lived right on the
coast in Palm Beach. But if you've ever
been there, you know it's a very precious place. And they wouldn't let him do his
radio program out of his house. Violated the zoning. So about five blocks away, sort
of in the more office area, he bought a four story
building and kept it empty. He was the only one in it. And you'd go see him, and
you'd arrive always on Friday as he was finishing his
show, 3:30, I think. And you'd go up. There weren't very
many people there. There were, like, three people
helping him do the show. And Craig Kitchin
was always there. And we would sit and talk for
an hour, and it was just a hoot. And he would always make
fun of me the next Monday. So one day he said-- the
best conversation-- he said, what do you want me to
say about the college? And I said, I want
you to say it's hard. And he said, hard? And he looked at Craig
Kitchin and he said, you know, we've been
in radio for 40 years. Anybody ever ask us
to say that before? I said, yeah, say it's hard. And he said, how hard is it? And I said, well, it's hard. He said, how many people
get above a four point? And I said, we don't do that. And he said, how many
get a four point? And I said at that
time it was seven. He said, seven? That's not many. I said, Rush, seven in 15 years. You know, we've got
great inflation now. That's up to like 20. And we had two in one year the
other day, a couple of years ago. We all felt ashamed
of ourselves. And he said, well, why
don't they get a four point? Is it chemistry? And I said, yeah,
chemistry is hard. Everybody has to take that. Physics, biology, math. Everybody has to take all that. I said, probably the hardest
department to get an A in is the English department,
and if not that, politics. He said, English and
politics are hard? I said, well, Rush, if you
want to understand them, we don't give out many A's. The average kid coming
to Hillsdale College has a 3.92 from high school,
and the average freshman gets a 2.87. We call that chart going
across the years shock and awe. And we recruit by
frightening them to death. We show them that chart in the
recruiting because they're all used to making A's. And they've got to lose that. They've got to not identify
their self-esteem with making A's. And we always have a
bunch that make 3.94. There's a lot of them. But we don't like them getting
all A's all the way through. And he said, tell me how
you make the Constitution course hard. And I said, Rush, the
Constitution of the United States is, according
to James Madison, a picture of the
human soul, also a picture of the
order of nature. And he starts out,
when he talks about it early in The Federalist
Papers, it's like a mechanism. Cancel this out so nobody
gets to nominate and pursue their own interest. But it changes as it goes, and
it becomes simply beautiful. And I quoted those passages
to him in the 49th and 51st Federalist. So then the next
Monday, he's supposed to talk about us for,
I don't know how long, a minute or something. And he very often went
five minutes, six minutes, very long time in radio. This next Monday
he went 20 minutes. And he just told all
about that conversation. And he said at the end, he said,
for the first time in my life, I wish I had gone to college. And I'm going to go visit
Hillsdale College, which he never did. But on the other
hand, we were forever. I mean how many times,
has our call center answered the question, when
is Rush Limbaugh coming? So he was a very bright. He said to me once, he said,
how do you manage a college? And I have some opinions
about how you manage things, mostly from Churchill. The safeguard and
the glory of mankind is that it is easy to
lead and hard to drive. So you don't want
to hire anybody to do anything they
don't want to do. And you don't want
to hire anybody who doesn't understand the goals. You don't hire anybody
who isn't honest. And then after that,
let them do their work and help them when you need to. Once in a while tell
them, no but not often. So I told them that. And then he said
to me, he said, OK. At the end of that conversation,
I was about to leave, he said, would you suggest some
things that I should say? And I said, Rush, you
haven't been listening to me. And he said, how not? And I said, are you
the best at this? And he said, yeah. I said, haven't I just
told you what I hope you can help people understand? He said, yeah. I said, probably you should
figure out how to do that, huh? He's a very interesting guy. He worked. He was rich as Croesus. I don't know what he's
doing with the money. I hope he gives it to us. But he has a family. And he grew up 50 miles
from where I grew up. We played on the same baseball
field and little league a couple times. Not at the same time. And he didn't have to work. He just loved to work. And he worked probably
12 hours a day, three doing the show,
nine getting ready. And he studied, and he would
text me and ask me questions about things going on. Anyway, he was a great man. And in this day
and age, of course, he's been being painted in the
darkest colors in the press. Another thing is
Rush is hilarious. He could be really serious. But then mostly, it
was just hilarious. I didn't listen to
his show very much. I talked to him more than
I listened to his show. But I listened sometimes. Once it became a famous one. He was talking about his
life in his apartment complex in New York before
he moved to Palm Beach. He said he'd go there,
and he'd get settled down for a long evening's work. And he'd order takeout
from, like, five places. He lost a lot of weight
before he died, I mean, years before he died. But he was kind of tubby. And he said that it
became very inconvenient because the takeout guys were
forbidden to come upstairs because they would go
all over the apartment complex or the condo
complex and put menus under everybody's door, and
people thought that was tacky. Rush didn't mind. So it's causing him-- because he says, you know,
I'm in my boxer shorts, and I got to put on my trousers
and go down and get my food. That's just terrible. Until one day I figured it out. He called the-- what do
you call it, the porter? He said, would you please
admit my dinner guest, Raoul? I liked Rush. I can't even remember
what it is now. And of course, that's because
I'm a racist or something. But he did something that
brought a storm down on him. And I can't remember
what it was. But of course, Media
Matters is an outfit that hassles conservatives
in the media, and they managed to
break into our server, and get the email
addresses of the students and the faculty and the
staff, and send everybody an email about how
shameful it was that Hillsdale College would
advertise on Rush Limbaugh. And that's a little
inconvenient. And it didn't cause much
trouble, oddly enough. But then I got a call
from a journalist from The Huffington Post. And I took it, and I
said, what do you want? And she said, are you going
to cancel your advertisements on Rush Limbaugh? I said no, I'm not
going to do that. And she said, why not? I said, because
you're the one asking. [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] One of the most serious
things he ever said. He learned of that. And he lost a couple
of advertisers over that, window
blinds or something. And he looked at me and he
said, that was very noble. And I said, why? And he said, you
didn't run away. And I said, you
know, Rush, we were the kind of people to do
that, would we have been here in the first place? It's a crazy thing, but
it was a good thing to do, because how it works, we think
we have some beautiful things to teach. We think they're world-saving. We think there's
soul-saving, whether they serve the world or not. And we want to teach as
many people as we can. That's in the original articles. All who wish, without regard to
race, sex, or national origin. And that's what the college
was in the Civil War days when it was a very
influential thing, and it's an influential
thing again. And so we want to talk
to a lot of people. And we don't advertise
on The Huffington Post because CNN is not
a good field for us. Why? Because it's not so much just
that people are conservative. That helps. It's that they're
conservative people who are interested to
know serious things. And so because of Rush
Limbaugh, but because of all of the other things we do,
I'm proud to have before me the best audience in America. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] OK. I'm back on my Kathy
Grammer task now. Raheem helped with that. You feel better, Kathy? Yeah, yeah. Well, I have to
say some bad stuff, and then you'll feel
better after that. Kathy likes for me
to manage her mood. By the way, I don't
think your grandchildren are as handsome as mine. What do you think? Wrong. Wrong. We're not going to
reach agreement on that. So here's the bad stuff. What has happened
is revolutionary, and why it has happened
is revolutionary and exceedingly dangerous. The what is the electoral
system of the country is, at least in
part, compromised. And the electoral system is
the fulcrum of everything. It's a simple relationship. We are the sovereign, and we
are outside the government. And the government has
all the power to act. We don't do anything ourselves. We're not the legislature. We're not the executive. We don't judge. We elect people who do it. And that means when those
arrangements were set up, they were sublimely effective. And Madison describes, in
another beautiful place in The Federalist
Papers, the effect of that because every
human use of power should never be
absolute or unchecked. And that includes even
by us, the sovereign. So we can do anything
we want to do, but it's going to
take some time. And that means we have
to think before we act. In that mood, James
Madison is like your mom. Think before you act. All the rules, by the way,
that are worth making, they're all stuff your mom
and dad would have told you when you were a kid. And any other rules can
never be remembered. So that's the thing. The first step in
the Constitution is it delays our direct
control of the government. And it's not that way in
Athens, where the people got in an amphitheater
and voted, and then next week
got in an amphitheater and voted something else. And it's not like
the monarchies, where the king or queen
is the executive branch. We're just the sovereign, and
the government works for us. But it does all the work. Now when those
relationships were set up, they were amazingly stable for
a long time until the Civil War. And then they were restored by
the very great Abraham Lincoln. But part of the reason for
that was the government was about 10% of the
economic activity in the country, 8% or 10%. And most of that was
federal and local. The federal government
was 1% or 2%. Well, now it's put
it all together, and it's pretty much
a top down system now, kind of unified, although
not fully unified, which is an important
strategic fact for the future. It's now over 50%. So you wonder, why are all
these Fortune 500 companies so politically correct? Partly the cause
is their bosses all went to the best colleges,
by which I mean the worst. And part of it is
explained by the fact that the force that
can stand up to them, if there is any in the
world, is the government, and the government is staffed
now by a major bureaucracy. The actual work of the
American government is done by, at the
federal level, about two and 1/2 million
civilian employees, at the state level,
20 some million. But they all follow rules that
are made inside the agencies, not laws anymore
made in the Congress. So the point is
there's this system, and because it's so big,
it's a mighty weight in the election process. And that's been a creeping
problem, big problem and creeping bigger,
for decades now, and I've been
railing against it. Well, now, HR1, first bill
Nancy Pelosi has put in, is going to put
DC in the Senate, and it's going to impose
a national system of vote harvesting. And that means this
stuff that happens, where you don't know where
the ballots come from. Lots of ballots. Nothing wrong with
lots of ballots. It's just something
wrong with not knowing where they come from. And I don't know if
Donald Trump won or not. I don't myself know. But I know how
Michigan was stolen because I have the misfortune
sometimes to live there. And that gets me to the cause. First of all-- and what
are the things to mess with the electoral system? Ballot harvesting, DC
statehood, a new interpretation of voting rights. Voting rights, that's
the 15th Amendment. What was passed was
everybody gets to vote. Well, that's much
embellished now, so that districts are
arranged to figure out who wins on race and other
identity group lines now. And so you could get a kind of
a nationally politically correct constituency, 19 or 20
million illegals about to be legal, probably by
executive order, which is an interesting
phenomenon because one of the causes of the
Revolutionary War and the causes against the
king in the Declaration of Independence is
that he had expanded the territory of
Quebec southwards. And he did that because he
gave Quebec a new constitution, and they didn't kick about it. And it was a
constitution he liked, where he could control it. And then he moved some
American colonists into that Canadian colony. In other words, now it's not
the people choosing the rulers, it's the rulers
choosing the people. So that, too, that illegal
immigration stuff, that just reverses the
relationship perfectly. And I think that's its object. And then anybody
who tries to strike that down, Supreme
Court is living now under a threat of being packed. And that is exactly
like the threat that Franklin
Roosevelt made in 1936. And he probably
would have done it except the court changed its
mind about all his programs and started authorizing them. So that means a massive
political force, which amounts to a rearrangement
of the Constitutional authority and the direction that power
flows, out rather than in. That is far advanced and
maybe complete, I don't know. I'll tell you what
happened in Michigan. We know them. And my general counsel,
Harris Gray, he's been spending time with them. And he gives them
advice for nothing. Doesn't act for them. He's also given advice. He just told me yesterday
the recalcitrant Spengler's restaurant in
Jonesville, Michigan, six miles from the campus,
has refused to close. And Bob has been
helping them out. And I told Bob, I said,
that's controversial. Please do, it but try to
stay out of the paper. And then the next
night Mr. Spengler was on Fox News wearing a
Hillsdale College sweatshirt and thanking Bob
Norton for the help. Now here's the interesting thing
about presidential elections. To understand the Constitutional
system, it's two things. It is a system of
concentrating power more than was possible under
the Articles of Confederation. But also it's a elaborate
system of distributing power out across the land. So first of all, the
federal government has a list of 17 things in
Article I, Section 8 that it's supposed to be able to do. States are not
constrained that way. They can do whatever is
in the police power, which is an old common law power to
act for the general welfare. So the federal
government is meant to be about certain things,
and supreme only on those. An interesting fact, by the
way, is that education is not listed in those 17 things. So the way elections run
are radically decentralized. So states control. And they control
their own elections, except now there are
court cases and stuff that got the federal government
intervening all the time. They control their own. But then for the
Federal elections, each house, the
Senate and the House, is named to be the judge of the
credentials of its own members. And that means if a
state sends a rep, and they think he's
fraudulently elected, they can eject him and
ask for another one. They can't name the other one,
they can ask for another one. That rarely happens,
but it does happen. Presidential elections,
now that means, by the way, that laws were passed. They're old in
Michigan, and they're similar to the way the
election laws work in America, and they're mostly pretty good. But they were passed
by the legislature and signed by the governor. And that means that only another
law passed by the legislature and signed by the governor
could overturn it, except this summer. The attorney general
and the Secretary of State and the governor
began to negotiate changes in the election laws. This is the basic
Michigan election laws, and they can't do that by
themselves, but they did. And the legislature,
a Republican majority, which increased in the last
election in both houses, did nothing. I urged them to. Didn't. The presidential election
is a special case, and there's a big debate about
this in the Constitutional Convention. And of all of the provisions
in the Constitution, this is one of the more clear
because what they wanted was they wanted to generalize
the process of selecting the president and distribute
it all over the country. So the first idea was national
popular vote, James Madison and Governor
Clinton of New York. Strange bedfellows. They didn't get along
very much, mostly. That didn't go anywhere. So then they said the governors
in the states should pick. But the trouble is there
aren't very many governors. And so one could make
deals to get something in exchange for his vote. So they argued that through. And then the next stage
was state legislatures. They're numerous,
enough of them that it's hard to make individual deals. And then they added a
refinement on top of that. And the refinement is exactly
parallel to the ratification process, where the Constitution
was ratified by conventions, by people elected. A ticket, yes or no,
to the Constitution. And they serve that
one function and then they disappeared
forever, which is one of the reasons the
Constitution is not constantly being amended. Well, this, they said,
no, the legislators shall be in control of the
manner of choosing electors. State legislatures. That means not the governor
and not the courts. State legislatures
have control of that. And the only time the
federal government can intervene in that is if
the states send conflicting slates of legislators. And that did not
happen this time from any of the five
Republican-controlled battleground states where
they accepted the results. However, in most of those
states- Michigan for sure, also Pennsylvania,
also Wisconsin, probably the others-- there are two more-- they had watched their
procedures being changed and not done anything about it. What we thought they
should do in the summer was announce that they have
sole control over the selection of the electors. And you're changing it. We reserve the right
to pick our own slate. Now that would have
been a firestorm. All the national press. Somebody who runs
Google would have said something bad about them. And the NBC News
would be displeased. In other words, their
life would be very intense because they actually
have the power to do that. And to do it, when
to do it, was August, before the ballots
started coming in. And they didn't. And I know them, many of them. I think I know why they didn't. It's something you learn if
you go to the right college. What you are depends on
how you live your life. And they needed to do two
things that they didn't do. And it's not just they
neglected two things. These things would only come
if they lived their lives in a certain way. First of all, they
would need to know deeply their responsibilities
and authorities. They take an oath
to pursue them. On the 1776 Commission, I took
an oath to the Constitution. First time I've ever done it. And I'm obliged to that now. It doesn't end
because I got fired. In the past, I was that. This alone is denied
even to God to make what has been not to have been. And all this cancel
stuff, by the way. It is just the most obvious
truth in the world that that cannot be done. And I fear it because
if they start doing it to me in the various
ways they could, then I would have a world of turmoil. But I wouldn't have the fear
that that could be ultimately successful because it
happened, or it didn't. They didn't live
their lives in a way to understand deeply
things like the fact that they are in sole control
of the manner of choosing the electors. What a tremendous
responsibility. What a tremendous power. And they were unaware of it. One member of the
leadership didn't know that the legislature
had the subpoena power. Another one opined
that the governor was the leader of the legislature. And isn't that funny? Everybody here knows
better than that, right? And his argument
was, well, she has the veto power, which basically
gives her 1/3 of the votes. She's the senior legislator. And so there then ensued a
sophomore high school lesson in separation of powers. And that person ran for
office, got elected, is a good person with broadly
correct political opinions, according to my lights. He didn't know basic stuff. It's like a carpenter to
know how to build with wood. And the very best carpenters,
they live their lives in a way so they get really good at that. And it takes a commitment
more than the normal, you see, and they haven't made that. And then the second thing is to
do bold and courageous things, you have to practice. You have to practice
in your mind. Another word for that is worry. Everybody who works for me
all, the vice presidents here, all the ones who are not here,
we basically live our jobs. It's kind of weird. And we like each other
and we love our jobs and we know how to relax. But we practice all the time. What if they do this,
what will we do? What if we do that,
what will we do? Every big step we
take is calculated in light of its effects
upon the dangers that might come upon the college. And that's why the colleges
is the one independent one. We care about it. We give ourselves to it. We study it all the time. And then we think, how
will we comport ourselves when terrible things
happen to us, as they will? And you have to get
your mind around that, and you have to get your
mind around that in advance. If you want to see
how that works, in Book II of
Aristotle's Ethics, there's a riveting
discussion of courage. And in there he explains
what makes a courageous act. And he says that if
you want to see them, look at the battlefield
because there's a lot of them happened
there, because everybody has good reason to be afraid. And the point is, if you do
that if you think about that, what would I do, then when it
comes, it's not new to you. What would I do if the governor
and the Secretary of State and the Attorney General set
out to alter the electoral laws, including the ones
for the presidency, without consulting us? What if doing that,
which they did, they also refused to answer
any questions from us? In Michigan we have
two emergency laws. And I'm coming to think now
that we pass bad laws right after great wars. One of them was passed
in 1946, and it basically lets the governor
declare an emergency and sustain it for a long time. Long. Doesn't say when it ends. And then in the '70s, they
passed a more sane emergency law, the more recent law, then. And in the '70s, it says that
she can declare an emergency. Within 30 days she's got
to go to the legislature and get them to agree. And then they can
extend for 30 days. But every 30 days, she's
got to talk to them. That's the way they work
in all the good states. And that's most of the states. But no. She started out, by the
way, when the pandemic hit, under the 1975 law, the one
where she had to consult. And then she got her
extension, and then they refused an extension. So she immediately went to
the 1945 law, which proves, by the way, that she
knew about the 1975 law. And she just ran
over them for months. And they sue her in the courts. What if, instead, they
just didn't vote any money? She can't spend money without
them appropriating it. They did the other day, in
an act of great boldness, say that they're not going to
act on any of her appointments to commissions if she
doesn't straighten up. And I happen to know,
as of two weeks ago, from election day
until two weeks ago, the governor and
the Attorney General and the Secretary
of State had not answered a single question from
the legislature, not in writing and not verbally. And they won't come and testify. They just flout them. Now what they should
have got, if they'd just done this thing-- she couldn't stop that. The Constitution is
a very clever thing if you know how it works. They could send a
second slate of electors to Washington because
this slate wasn't chosen according to the law. And there's no
power on Earth that could stop them doing that. And all of the presidents
say that when that happens, then the Senate and the House
have got to make a decision. And they didn't do that. They didn't threaten it. And if they'd threatened
it-- or later done it, but threaten it
would be way better-- then they'd say, but
I'll tell you why. If we can devise some
procedures to make sure that these ballots are held
in custody and protected, and that everybody gets
to vote, and everybody gets to vote once, and
nobody gets to vote for them. And those requests would
have had wide public support. They would have been
operating during a fire storm. But the only way you're going to
survive that and get any change is if you use something that
constitutes a real power. And they have a real power,
and that's what it's for. And they don't have
an absolute power. That would be wrong. And the governor doesn't
have an absolute power. That would be wrong,
and wrong for her to pretend that she does. So that means
that, first of all, it's very hard to know
it's to balance were fair. We know that there were
millions stored in warehouses. The location of only one
of the warehouses is known. It was said once by
the Secretary of State that there was nine of them
scattered around the state. And the one that's known,
neighbors report people went in and out all the time. What were they doing? There weren't observers
as far as we know. What that means is that's
a raw assertion of power over the people. And I must say that
was not pointed out by her opposition
in the legislature. And that's what I say
is the worst thing. I say that we didn't stop this
because we weren't ready to. And we weren't ready to
because we don't live right. But that also turns
to a good thing. And that is, isn't it true
that if you get slaughtered, it's better if the
fault isn't you, because then maybe you
can do something about it. How are we doing, Kathy? You feeling better? Yeah. In other words, we don't
have to be Abraham Lincoln. We just have to get better
than these guys to do better. And so I actually
take heart from that, although this is a power
grab of the very first order. And where's it going to go? I'll say my last gloomy thing. Did I tell you about this
Spanish professor I hired? Did I talk about
that last night? It's my favorite
subject right now. This is a guy named
Carano, and he's going to teach Spanish
at Hillsdale College. And if you apply for a
job at Hillsdale College, you won't be applying
for a better job because there isn't one because
it's got all the features. Everybody's smart,
everybody works, everybody is nice to each other. The kids are naughty in
just the right amount, or sometimes a little more. But this guy was a full
professor in his 40s at Venezuela, and a prominent
academic figure there. And he had to run for his life. He left his property behind. He left his job behind. And he got to America because
they were inflating his salary away and he lived
under constant threat about whatever he might say. And so now he's here
and he needs a job because he can't stay if he
doesn't get a really good job. It has to be a permanent job
to look right on the visa. So what it effectively
means is he needs this job. And there are two others
who are also very good. And I drew all that out of him. I get him to tell me-- I try to find out
what do they love. You can always predict
people's behavior if you know what they love. And so got into all that,
and he told me all about it. And of course, my
heart went out to him. And I said, I don't know if
you're going to get this job or not. And I have the power to
give it to him by myself. But I don't do that because
my colleagues are so good, and they have more time to
think about it than I do. And so I do overrule
them once in a while, but not often, and never
before I find out what they're going to do anyway. I said, I don't know
what's going to happen. But I'll make you a promise. I've been running a
one-man immigration service for 40 years. If I see somebody
really worthy, I try to help them become a
citizen of the United States. I will do that for you. And he cried in my office. And my point is that's what it's
like when your country sinks into despotism. It is not a happy thing. So we have to stop that. How? My last point. Come to find out I know a little
bit about Winston Churchill, and he is just the
man for right now. Look what happened
to him in his life. He spent his life foreseeing
and trying to prevent the great world wars. Instead, it was his
fate to fight them. He spent his life
warning about socialism. In the warnings he said,
it'll end the freedom of the British people. It will also end our
ability to feed ourselves. There'll be a collapse. We'll have to depopulate,
partly, the island. Those kind of warnings, all
his, life beginning in 1898 when he was 26 years
old, and continuing right through to his death in '65. But in the 1945
election, they just simply swept the socialists
for the first time. They beat him, or his
party, the war hero. And he was devastated. Do you see? He's in exactly our
position, except worse because I've been
warning about all this all my life,
warning that they're going to rig the electoral
system so you can't get them out. And now it's happened, probably. And I think about him. And see, he had laid the ground. He was also-- how
old was he? '45. He was 72. He'd won glory. Everybody thought he was the
greatest man in the world, even his enemies. And so of course, the
reliable Times of London, worse now, but bad
then, they called it's time for him to retire. He can be the great
world statesman, which he did become, by the way. But now the Conservative
Party needs new blood. And the socialists are
going to get their chance. And he was devastated
by that election. Took him two, three weeks
to get his [? dauber ?] up. And then he says, I stay
till the pub closes, and I fight for my corner. And then he launched
a whole strategy, and it's the one we
have to launch today. He said, we've been
warning about these things that they're going
to do for decades. Now they're going to do them. Now they will be
visible beyond mistake. And so we are going
to oppose them. We're going to call
out what they do. We're going to use that to
persuade the people that we have to change. Now it took seven years because
they won a huge majority and couldn't get him out. But he beat them, soon. And then he gets to be
prime minister again. And I'll give you
one of his arguments. This is the very best. And you know, it's
hard, by the way, to get arguments out these days
because social media and all that. But the truth is, the
alternatives are also easy and cheap. And they don't have a
monopoly on the internet. Here's a great thing. You know about
the browser Brave? Yeah. And they've done something
that I think is really awesome. There's a protocol. I'm about to be a techie
here for a minute. There's a protocol called
Interplanetary File System, IPFS. And the guy who invented
it is from Stanford. He's a young guy. And you can find on YouTube
him giving a talk about it at Stanford. And this file system
is incorporated into the Brave browser now. Now here's what it does. The way the internet works is
to find any piece of information on it, you find the
domain where it is, and then you find the
thing in the domain. And it's the fact that
you get to all the files through a particular domain that
lets Facebook own everything on it, for example,
whereas is what this does is it replicates the file around
the internet in various places, and the file addresses
just to the file. And he says-- because
he's not stupid, this guy. He's very smart. He's a nerdy kind
of engineer guy. But what he says is that
will make the internet freer and harder to censor. And it doesn't take
infrastructure. So right now, these
huge server farms that they deal with
half a continent, well, those belong to
about five companies. If you distribute this way, you
can just go through and around them both. Now it's an
interesting thing to me because that guy gave
a very clever talk because he's dealing
with things that are very sensitive like
Google, the big gorilla, throwing off Parler and throwing
off Trump and throwing off everybody. And Amazon doing the
same, and all of them, and Apple doing the same. Those guys are bad. And he is giving to talk about
how you could get around that. And he does it very gently. I think he ought to
go on to politics. But you can tell
what he's saying. And then our commencement
speaker is Tim Allen this year. Yeah. I said to him, Mr. Allen, you're
the most requested commencement speaker after Clarence Thomas. And he said, Clarence Thomas? I can kick his ass. Commencement is going
to be fun this year. But he says he knows a
bunch of people who are big up in the tech
world, and that they are very disturbed by
what's going on in there, and they want to
find a way out of it. Now that brings me. That's Churchill's point. His point is they're going
to do these things now, and they will be less able
to pretend that they're not what they seem. And people will be persuaded. Or else. By the way, the American people
are ready to be despotized, and that means we're the
walking dead already. But I don't think that. And I'm just going
to close with this. This is one of the prettiest
things about Winston Churchill. I had a lifelong friend, Violet
Bonham Carter, beautiful woman, grandmother of Helena
Bonham Carter, the actress. And they were sweet on each
other for a little while when they were young. And it was before
Churchill figured out how to court a woman. So he would take her out and
they'd memorize noble speeches and poems. He got better when
Clemmy came along. But he memorized with Violet the
poem I'm going to read to you. And that was C 1904, 1903. Got married in 1908. But now it's April 27,
1941, and Britain is alone. Russia and Germany are together. America is aloof. Overwhelming power being
brought to bear on the island. And two months later it
would change because Hitler attacked Stalin then. That was a strategic
mistake he made, but left us with the Cold War afterwards. And so in this darkness-- it's
the lowest point right now-- he recites this
poem on the radio. This is by Arthur Hugh Clough. Say not the struggle
not availeth, the labor and the
wounds are vain, the enemy faints
not nor faileth, and as things have
been, they remain. If hopes were dupes,
fears maybe liars. It may be in yon
smoke concealed. Your comrades chase even now
the fliers, and but for you, possess the field. I'll interrupt to say
when you're in a fight, the pattern is always the
same at the beginning. There's a number of
the enemy, and then there's a larger number,
and there's a larger number. That's always how it starts. And of course, the mind,
full of fear, of course, imagines that the
number is infinite. But what this poem is about
is we don't know the number. We can only hope
and we must hope. He goes on, for while the
tired waves, vainly breaking, seem here no painful inch to
gain, far back, through creeks and inlets making, comes
silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern
windows only when daylight comes, comes
in the light, in front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly. But westward, look,
the land is bright. That was an appeal
to us in the west. After he finished that, he
called Violet Bonham Carter. He didn't talk to her all
that much at that time. And he was a very great man,
and she was an old woman. And he got her on the
phone and said, Violet? And she was bawling. And he said, did
you hear our poem? I'll close with this. That's our poem, too.
