We are living through an awful moment of national hollowness, where the idea of America

is being challenged by an extremism that has risen from Donald Trump's political ambitions.

Donald Trump's narcissism, his pettiness, all of his vices,

have melded together and fused with an incipient fascism. On a seven-year basis, the American people

saw cynicism bloom. They saw a political party completely succumb to a cult of personality.

And they saw their politicians abandon every pretense of principle for power.

And the result is the madness we see all around us.

It is the nihilism of Kevin McCarthy's government shutdown. It is the insanity of Paul Gosar and Matt Giggs and Lauren Bobert and Marjorie Taylor Green.

It is the decay that is happening in real time all around us.

But there are antidotes to it, and there is a choice.

The American people will make the ultimate choice if we are to abandon democracy

or whether we are to renew it or to refresh it. Every generation of Americans is called

to face challenges and struggles and hardships, and to advance a proposition.

That proposition is freedom and liberty, and in the United States, inexorably, over time,

that has been an expanding proposition.

The proposition that all men are created equal, endowed by a creator with inalienable

rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a political proposition, but also

a moral proposition. When the United States was built, when it was founded, when it was

constructed as an idea, there was an understanding in that moment about how important it would be to protect the freedom

of the press, the presses, the places where the newspapers were laid out, printed.

George Washington was smeared during the Revolutionary War by loyalist presses in Manhattan.

His wife was smeared, and George Washington loved Martha Washington, and he didn't appreciate it at all.

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