Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered at The New Criterion’s gala on May 2, 2024, honoring Ronald S. Lauder with the eleventh Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society.
Right now, we are living through one of the darkest hours in our nation’s history. You see it with your own eyes. We have enemies who want to change and weaken America, with the ultimate aim of destroying our freedom here at home and our place on the world stage—that is, our way of life. If we don’t stop them, they may succeed.
The danger comes from the far Left and from those individuals who are spending fortunes trying to undermine America, as well as foreign countries using these groups to advance their own cause. This is not just an attack on America; this is an attack on Western civilization. Our enemies are not even hiding what they are trying to do; they are wreaking havoc in broad daylight, because no one is stopping them. Why is no one stopping them?
This is what I want to talk to you about tonight: the assault on America’s promise, and why we must defend that promise with all our might.
Let me begin with a story that took place right here in this great city 141 years ago. In December 1883, a young Jewish American woman wrote a poem to help raise money for the base of a statue to be constructed in New York Harbor. Emma Lazarus wanted to explain why this country, this experiment, was different—different from any other country, different from any other idea the world had ever seen.
Her sonnet “The New Colossus” shines today like a beacon of freedom. You will remember its closing lines:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Lazarus’s poem doesn’t simply capture America’s promise; it tells the truth about this country’s history. For 247 years, beginning even before those words were written, America has made good on its promise. Millions of human beings have entered our gates, but they have had to become Americans. They have had to assimilate and become part of our society. And they have had to come into this country legally—but, once citizens, they have the same rights as anyone whose family came here two or three hundred years before.
Among the many millions who came were my grandparents. They saw America as the future, as their future, and felt its promise. Every single one of you has a similar story, perhaps dating back even further, or perhaps you yourself came here. But everyone is here today because of America’s promise: millions have wanted to become Americans, to add their story to America’s story, to help build this great land of ours.
The United States of America was started as an experiment. In the entire history of the world, nothing like it had ever been tried before. Entrusting the country not to a king, a ruling family, or a religious sect, the Founding Fathers believed that every citizen should decide his own destiny, and so they should all participate in their own government. It made no difference if that citizen was a rich merchant or a dirt farmer.
We now take this for granted, but in all of human history such an experiment had never been tried before, much less on such a scale. It is truly a remarkable concept. And let me make one thing perfectly clear: all of this came together in 1776, not 1619. Of course there were flaws, but the Constitution, hammered out in Philadelphia in 1787, created a democratic method to correct them. Those corrections included constitutionally ending slavery in 1865, giving women equal voting rights in 1920, and fulfilling the promise of voting rights for African Americans in 1965.
Did this experiment work? It worked like nothing the world had ever seen—and not just for us. Yes, we created the strongest economy and the highest standard of living in world history, but America has also liberated millions of human beings held captive by totalitarian regimes in other countries, and has helped feed and rebuild entire continents ravaged by war—and unlike any country before, we have done so and then left. We even fed and rebuilt our enemies.
America’s genius, which allows anyone with an idea to try it out, has created scientific and medical advancements that have saved hundreds of millions of lives. It was the American promise that lifted the entire world from the ashes of the World Wars and elevated human beings. It is a promise that we always thought would be as timeless as it was strong—until today.
In our streets, in our great universities, we are watching the unraveling of that promise. For the first time, people are arriving who don’t want to assimilate; they want to turn this land into the places they came from. It is not happening by accident: when protesters shout “Death to America,” do you think they are kidding? Do you think they don’t really mean it? We know the phrase is chanted on the streets of Tehran, but now we hear it in Michigan, we hear it on the Columbia University campus right here in New York City. Right now, they are shouting “From the river to the sea.” Soon the chant will be “From coast to coast.”
And yet many are surprised by the vicious anti-Semitism we are witnessing daily in colleges across the country. As the president of the World Jewish Congress, I have spent much of my adult life defending the Jewish people throughout the world and in Israel, and I am not surprised. I’ve seen this hatred towards Jews, Israel, and America for more than twenty-five years. Like so much else, it is the result of radical and foreign professors indoctrinating students, who are taught to be anti-American as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Christian.
Always remember that anti-Semitism is anti-Americanism. There is absolutely no difference. It is the same hatred of our institutions and our way of life. It may be directed against Jews at the moment, but it is really directed at everyone in this room.
But anti-Semitism is not the only form of the anti-Americanism now rampant. A slew of pernicious forces coming from both outside and within are set on undermining our institutions, disrupting our way of life, and terminating this great experiment. In colleges and universities, they have infiltrated every single department. It’s not just history and sociology that have been distorted, but also law, science, and medicine, even math and engineering.
The destruction of our great public-education system was at least fifty years in the making, as a generation of radical professors from the Vietnam era quickly took over their departments and cut off any opposing views. Remember the name Bill Ayers—the Weather Underground bomber from the 1960s? Ayers became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has had a huge impact on the courses our children take in grade school, not to mention the books they read. With instructors like this, you can’t even call it education; it’s indoctrination. Instead of the bus in the popular kindergarten song, it may as well be the wheels on the tank going round and round.
We see the results of this radicalization beyond our universities. We see it in our news media, in our legal system, in government—we are seeing it everywhere. The anarchy, the lawlessness on our streets is against America. Cancel culture—that is, shouting down anyone with a different view—is against America. Promoting wide-open borders, with no checks on who is coming in, is against America. Supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that pit Americans against other Americans is against America. Dishonest journalism that poses as factual reporting is against America. Dishonest education, education that teaches the history of our great country not as a triumph, but as imperialistic, racist, and evil, is against America. Vilifying success in this land of opportunity is not simply against America—it is also irrational and creates discord. Defunding the police is not just against America; it defies even basic common sense.
All of these notions align with a Marxist ideology that has destroyed other countries, enslaved and killed hundreds of millions of human beings, and not once worked. But Marxism isn’t the only threat—look at where the foreign money is coming from that has been flowing into our universities for decades. Follow the money. Do the sources of these donations share our values?
Europe has already been hobbled by these forces. The United States stands alone as the defender of Western civilization. If our beacon is extinguished, then a darkness will fall upon this earth. Mark my words: climate change will not destroy the earth, but unchecked radicalism certainly will.
There is another, related issue: America is no longer a trusted ally. Henry Kissinger—a good friend of mine, a brilliant man with a wicked sense of irony—once worried that “it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” The entire world has watched us abandon our friends, and this has weakened our standing in the world. It must stop now. We must stand by our friends.
America has always been strongest when we have been united. We have been a two-party system all along, and that has always worked for us. But now we are fighting each other and far from united. Look at it like a marriage. If the husband sues the wife and the wife sues the husband, one thing happens for sure—the family is destroyed. We are destroying our family. One recent president, who got a lot wrong, was nevertheless right when he said that we are not red or blue states, but the United States of America.
We must take back our institutions. Americans must rebuild our country from the ground up, and it has to start in kindergarten: our children must be taught the true and good parts of our history and not the woke history that anti-American teachers are forcing on them today. We have immigration laws, and those laws must be followed and obeyed: immigrants who want to build our country and continue its genius should be welcomed, but they must want to become productive Americans. An absolute meritocracy should be reinstated so our very best and brightest minds can help move us forward, and the color of their skin or their parent’s names should not be relevant, only their skillset. Our great universities must stop accepting foreign money—period—and students who break the law should be not just arrested but expelled.
It is not we who stand to benefit from all this so much as our children and our grandchildren. Just as Americans who came before us did their part, we must now do ours. We often look at our great achievements and assume they were always here. They were not. They had to be created, maintained, and defended by generations before us. Over a million Americans have given their young lives so we could live in peace and security. Over a million Americans never lived to fall in love, have families, and enjoy their freedom. How awful it would be if we simply discarded their sacrifice without even a thought of the precious gift they gave us.
I am an optimist by nature, and I look to other optimists for inspiration. Perhaps our nation’s greatest optimist, Ronald Reagan, pointed to the answer to today’s problem:
American resilience will bring us back and will, no doubt, help us find our way back . . . back to the principles that have made us the greatest experiment and triumph in governance in human history.
I have always seen myself as a bridge-builder. During the last ten years, I have spent a great deal of time in the Middle East, working with many countries toward one goal: to bring these Arab Muslim countries together with the Jewish State of Israel. We have seen amazing progress, and I believe the Abraham Accords are just the beginning; there are other countries that want to join. What happened on October 7 happened for many reasons, but one of the attackers’ goals was to disrupt these peace efforts. We must bear this in mind and make sure that these positive efforts will not be disrupted.
I’d like to end with one more quote from Reagan, spoken as he left the White House to fly back to his home in California after serving in his country’s highest office for eight years:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.
But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. . . .
After two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.
If Reagan saw what is happening today, there would be a tear in his eye, because that shining city on the hill is in danger of losing its luster.
But he would also have unbounded determination to right our great ship. That is now up to all of us. We absolutely must and we will right our ship of state, and send it on its course of destiny.
