Welcome to the recent speeches podcast presented by BYU speeches

featuring inspiring new devotional and forums given each week on BYU campus.

Be sure to check out our other podcasts by searching BYU speeches wherever you get your

podcasts or by visiting speeches dot BYU.edu slash podcasts. This devotional address entitled Why America Went Crazy and How You Can Stay Sain

was given on September 24th of 2024 by David French, then a columnist for the New York Times and best-selling

author.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

It's just an incredible honor to be here and I have to say that I'm a huge

football fan a huge college football fan and I think I've watched a certain punt

return ten times in the last few days. And for me personally there's a good news, bad

news aspect of that. The good news is I'm coming to a place where you guys are

happy. The bad news is I cannot possibly compete with that so I have nowhere to go but down on the boring scale

But I'm here to talk to you about what has happened to us as a country and what can we do about it

But before I get to that I want to tell a story from my own time, my own childhood growing up in a small town in Kentucky.

And there was something that was not mentioned in that introduction, and that is that I am a nerd American.

I at one point could almost speak Elvish

that I was such a Lord of the Rings fan.

And to tell you what a good father I am and inculcating this one my children that my

oldest daughter once wrote her diary in Elvish. So as a nerd American I have a lot of stories. Among them when I was in

high school I struck up an arrangement with my best friend from high school that when we were going to new

sci-fi or superhero movies if he bought the costume I'd wear it. So what I

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