Transcript
I know we’ve got 25 days before this election. Y’all are fired up and I think you’ve heard a lot of speakers tonight talking about what’s at stake. I want to share a few stories with you and a few things that I’m most concerned about in the hopes that you take those home as things to reflect on and things that I hope will inspire you and remind you about how much power every single one of you has in your own voice. I will start with one of my favorites, Abraham Lincoln. when he was 28 years old, he gave an iconic speech that people don’t really talk about enough because he wasn’t president at the time, but it’s it’s has been one of the most impactful speeches for me.
It was in Springfield, Illinois, and it was at the lysum, and I’ll give you one line from it, but encourage you to go and look it up. He said, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide. It doesn’t get much more direct than that. As we think about every one of us and our own individual and collective responsibility to carry on the legacy of freedom that our founders envisioned for this great country.
And what better time to do that than now as we head into this election and now as we observe and celebrate 250 years since our country declared its independence. We saw a lot of big celebrations in Washington DC. Maybe some of you were there and a part of them. But along with all of those celebrations, it’s it’s essential that we are cleareyed and take an assessment of where we are and what the next 250 years needs to look like. And in doing that, we need to address the very real and direct threats that we face to our freedom today. these threats to the very vision that our founders had for us.
A free nation where our God-given rights are enshrined in our founding documents where we have a constitution that exists not to grant us rights and powers, but specifically to keep our government in check from overreaching and abusing its power to undermine our freedoms and our liberty. To guarantee our right to speak freely, to guarantee our right to worship as we choose or not at all, to guarantee our right to bear arms, to guarantee our right to privacy and protection from warrantless search and surveillance. So if we want to keep living free in this amazing country that we love, every one of us has to heed Abraham Lincoln’s warning and take that responsibility upon ourselves.
When we look at our constitution and we look at those who who drafted the constitution, they were very intentional in the first three words that they chose in writing the preamble. What is it? We the people. We the people. You got it. But what does we the people mean? It’s more than just three words. It is a reminder and a call to action to every single one of us. To every single one of us, reminding us that the power that this government has comes from us. It’s not the other way around. And that is where our responsibility comes into play. not only to choose who we want to vote for in an election, but once the election passes to ensure that those leaders are carrying out the promises and their responsibility to that oath that they take to the constitution.
Now, when we go back to Philadelphia in 1787, the constitutional convention, uh the the crafters of the constitutional had just wrapped up days and days and days of work behind closed doors. Benjamin Franklin walks out of Independence Hall and he gets stopped by a woman named Elizabeth Powell and she says,”Well, what do we have? A republic or a monarchy?” And Franklin says, “A republic if you can keep it.” If you can keep it, that’s us talking to every single one of us. And so I want to talk a little bit about a few of what I view as the greatest threats that we face imminently.
When we look at how our freedom is eroded, we can look in in where we are now. We can look throughout our generation’s history and generations before. When it happens, it’s usually not something that is just glaring and blatant and in your face. Usually, it’s something that’s traded away bit by bit and eroded slowly here and there. But almost every time you look at each of these examples, we are told, uh, this is in your best interest. We need to take away a little bit of your liberty, a little bit of your freedom because it’s for your own good. It’s for your own safety.
It’s for your own security. How many times did we see this during CO? Over and over again, people were censored because they dared to ask questions or challenge Dr. Fouch’s manufactured lies. We saw how doctors uh whose oath is to do no do no harm, how they were stripped of their board certifications. How in California I heard Ken Paxton talk about uh you know not wanting Texas to become like California. Well, back then California passed a lot of punished doctors who disagreed with the so-called science that apparently only Dr. Fouchy was allowed to define until a federal court blocked that unconstitutional law.
We saw the Biden White House. They censored uh and directed social media companies to censor people who were daring to challenge the Fouchy narrative and daring to put out other information that they found based on their own research. Zuckerberg confirmed this even though no one in the Biden administration has. I remember when they they they created this very shortlived disinformation governance board. You guys remember that? I went back and read Orwell’s book and and the similarities between the disinformation governance board and the ministry of truth were glaring where only the government gets to tell you what is true and what is not.
You guys heard from Riley Gaines earlier where only the government gets to tell you and this is the irony of it. They they created this disinformation board where they they are the ones who get to tell us what is true. But this is the same Biden administration that cannot tell us what a woman is and rejects the objective truth of a difference between a man and a woman. It’s crazy. And what did we hear every step of the way throughout this whole period? We’re looking out for you. We are protecting you. This is for your own health and your own safety. when in many cases the opposite turned out to be true.
We go back to the terrorist attacks on 911. Maybe half the room wasn’t alive, wasn’t with us yet when that happened. But when that happened, in just 45 days, Congress passed the Patriot Act. hundreds and hundreds of pages of new policies, new authorities that gave the government unprecedented surveillance power. Since when does Congress do anything in 45 days? They were able to move so quickly because these provisions were things that the government had wanted to pass for years but couldn’t find that that window that justification to do so. The attack happened on 911 and they took advantage of it.
With those powers, the NSA started secretly collecting phone records on virtually every phone call in America. Every one of us. They know who you called, when you called, and how long that call lasted for. And when they were busted for this, they did this in secret. It was because a senator uh asked then the director of national intelligence under oath, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions of Americans?” And guess what his answer was? No. Not wittingly. He was lying. He knew he was lying and eventually was caught out on it. Later, a federal appeals court ruled that that program went beyond what the law allowed.
Surprise, surprise. The government’s own privacy board, they couldn’t find a single case where this overreaching surveillance on everyone’s phone calls in this country made any difference in stopping a potential terrorist attack. That program’s gone now, but I can tell you from firsthand experience that this massive surveillance state that they built is very much alive and well and it’s growing. But just like after 9/11, as we’ve seen throughout history, war is the most often used tool by those in power to erode our liberty. What’s so incredible, and I see this time and time again as I go back and read the Federalist papers and go back and look again at our founding documents, how how visionary our founders were.
James Madison, the father of our constitution, wrote, “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it compro because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” And he went on to say that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. George Washington in his farewell address he warned us to avoid overgrown military establishments which he called inospicious to liberty. So they were warning us about things that we have seen generation after generation to be proven true. That when we are in a perpetual state of war, it costs us in blood and treasure and in freedom.
And in the meantime, the surveillance state grows more powerful and the war profiteeers get richer. I want to transition and bring it right here close to home. Our Fourth Amendment right to privacy and protection from warrantless surveillance every day is being stripped away in broad daylight. Once again, we’re told, “Give up a little liberty. Give up a little privacy so that we can keep you safe.” How many of you on your drive here noticed cameras taking pictures of your license plate and cars? I’m noticing them more. I didn’t notice them before. Now I’m scanning and I’m keeping an eye out for them.
But we don’t know is the answer. None of us knows. There is an estimated just flock cameras alone and flocks in the news a lot, but there are other businesses that are doing the exact same thing. But it’s estimated they have 13,000 across the state of Texas alone. More than 80,000 nationwide. And when you look at all the other companies that are doing the same thing, it’s no one knows, by the way, how many there are. No government entity knows. No government entity is tracking this. But it’s estimated that there are probably around 300,000 all across the country that are logging where we were, what time we were there, and where we’re going at every step of the way.
And all of that is being fed into this database that law enforcement across the country can search without cause, without a warrant, without any kind of judge getting involved. So when we we look at the fourth amendment, great reminder. It says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause.” And we look at, you know, people like to argue, well, we don’t know if this is unconstitutional or not. what we’re seeing happening now, but in 2018 is the most comparable precedent from the Supreme Court that said tracking a person’s movements over time quote achieves nearperfect surveillance as if it had attached an ankle monitor to them.
Now, that case and that ruling was about cell phone tracking. But a camera network that logs everywhere our car goes over a period of time does that exact same thing. Now, I’ve heard people say, “Well, who cares if you’re following a law? What’s the problem here?” Lindsay Issac’s would disagree. She’s a 23-year-old woman, lives in Florida, and one Saturday last October, she spent the day cooking with her mom at her parents house. She left her parents house that night, went to the store, came home, ate dinner, called her mom and dad to say good night.
And then at 1:00 in the morning that night, police officers knocked on her parents’ door. And what they told her parents is, “Your daughter has been involved in a crash that killed three people.” How many of you have heard about this story? Witnesses of the crash said that the car involved was maroon in color. A flot camera took a picture of Lindsay’s black Dodge Durango two or three miles from the scene of the accident. Now, people who called 911 gave a partial license plate number. They didn’t have the full license plate number. When you look at Lindsay’s car, it was brand new, did not have a single scratch on it, and it was black.
And the car that was involved in the accident was maroon. They arrested her anyway. They not only arrested her, they charged her with three counts of vehicular homicide and they put her in solitary confinement for 86 hours. They did not allow her to postpone. She spent 13 days in jail because of that picture. And she testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee recently and talked personally about her experience. It’s it’s deeply troubling to watch. But in one part of her testimony, she said, “At my lowest point, I did not want to be alive.” Charges were finally dropped.
Lindsay was able to go home. Someone else was charged with the crash. But imagine the trauma. Imagine going through what she went through because of that photograph. Unfortunately, she is not a lone incident or a lone example in this. In Aurora, Colorado, there was a license plate reader that flagged a mom’s SUV as stolen. The stolen vehicle was actually a motorcycle from Montana. But police pulled her over and they took her and her four daughters who were in the car with her, the youngest being six years old, put them face down on the pavement and handcuffed them.
There are too many examples of these kinds of mistaken identities, I guess you could call it. Let’s go to the abuse of power and unchecked power. tremendous opportunity for those like a police officer here in Texas, Katie Texas, who allegedly searched his exartner’s license plate 2,386 times over 11 months, trying to keep track of her, see where she was going, what she was doing, who she was seeing. Now, he was fired and he was indicted with crimes as he should be, but unfortunately, there are many other cases like this. And so as this mass surveillance is going on, who has the authority to run those searches on whom?
Who has access? We don’t really know. Now, the biggest argument for them is that they help law enforcement catch criminals. I know people in law enforcement and I know that this is true. But the Constitution stands. Our founders put these checks and balances on power in place for a reason. to protect us from such abuse. And yes, it can come at a cost. But this is why we cannot we the people cannot accept that we have to choose either liberty or security and must hold those who are charged with upholding the Constitution to the highest standards possible.
Now, the good news in all this is because so many patriots are speaking up about this very concern. We’ve seen huge reforms here in Texas alone, as well as in other counties and states across the country. Governor Abbott pulled state funding for these cameras, specifically citing citizens concerned about Fourth Amendment rights. There are at least 14 cities and counties across Texas who’ve cut their contracts completely with Flock. More than 900 cameras have gone dark. Other counties are putting this to a vote at county council meetings. But it all started with people realizing that if we don’t stand up for ourselves, we will wake up in a world where we no longer have our freedom.
It requires constant vigilance. So even in this example, our work is not over. There are many people who aren’t even aware that this is happening. And Congress is introducing some legislation. We have to remain vigilant. Flock would stand to lose billions of dollars if they were forced out of business because of these reforms. So you can imagine uh the allout uh uh press they are pushing to try to keep the status quo in place. I want to move to what I view as the greatest near and long-term threat to our freedom and western civilization and that is the rapid spread of Islamism.
This political ideology is fundamentally incompatible with our nation’s foundational principles, our core of who we are as Americans and who we are as a country. This political ideology, the the spread of Islamism, their goal is to seek power. They will silence any voices of opposition. This ideology is what continues to fund jihadi terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, Hamas, al-Shabaab, al-Nusra, and many, many more. Their goal is a global caliphate where their Islamist ideology governs. And one of the reasons why we’ve seen this spread over time is because too many leaders and too many of their friends in the propaganda media are afraid.
They minimize this threat even when it’s right in their faces and refuse to call it for what it is. President Obama changing the term Islamist extremism to violent extremism. Why? Because they’re afraid to be called Islamophobic. They’re afraid that if they speak the truth, they will be targeted and attacked and they’ll be called bigots. They refuse to address this reality that Islamism says the law comes from their clerics, not from the people. They preach that speech must be policed to force compliance with Sharia law and Islamist doctrine. And any criticism of Islamism or speech they disagree with, they believe must be silenced and punished.
This is antithetical to freedom. And the explicit truth, the explicit truth that is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights by our creator. Among them, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They refused to recognize that our freedom comes from God and no one else. Our founders understood this absolute truth. It is up to us to live that truth and to use our voices and our energy to defeat those who seek to undermine our God-given rights and freedoms. Because if we do nothing, if we do nothing, we put our head in the sand because people are afraid to be called names.
We will find ourselves waking up in a country where like in the UK it will be illegal for anyone to pray in public aloud or silently unless you are Muslim. If we do nothing if we do nothing we too will be faced with being arrested for what we post on social media. If we do nothing, we too here in the United States will see what has already become become the norm in places like France where the Muslim Brotherhood controls over a hundred mosques, over 200 local associations, and are imposing policies and public schools that require the wearing of burkas.
It’s not too late for us, but we cannot be complacent or naive or afraid about how direct this threat is to the way we live our everyday lives and the country that our children will grow up in. We have to name it. We have to call it for what it is. We have to have the courage to defeat this ideology with our superior ideology that is rooted in our constitution, our declaration of independence. It cannot survive. Our free society cannot survive if it refuses to defend itself. But it also can’t survive if in the name of defending itself, if in the name of safety and security, it gives up the very freedom that it was supposed to protect.
Life is short and every day that we have with breath in our bodies is a blessing. How we choose to spend that time is up to us. I want to share with you a little bit about my first deployment to Iraq. Uh we flew from Kuwait into Iraq January of 2005. It was pitch black, middle of the night, getting close to dawn. I was strapped in a seat in a C130 with all the soldiers in our unit, shoulder-to-shoulder, body armor in hand, uh wearing our body armor, rifle in hand. No one was talking. All we could hear were the propellers. It was pitch black except for the red lights that were in the plane.
And all of a sudden, as we as the plane started to head into land, it started corkcrewing and zigzagging so that it wouldn’t be an easy target for any of the terrorists there who might try to take it down. We landed at our camp, which was about 40 miles north of Baghdad. And the very first night got into our C’s, sleeping bags in a tent, and very quickly the sirens went off, notifying us that a mortar attack was coming. We got up, probably 25 of us in the tent, grabbed our rifles, and ran into the bunkers. This would become almost a daily occurrence for the year that we were deployed there.
The next morning, I got up and walked around the camp, check out our surroundings, and I came to one of the main gates that our security patrols went in and out of every single day. And right next to the gate was a sign that in big block letters read, “Is today the day?” It stopped me in my tracks. And and it it it caused me to to really have that eyeopening moment about the reality of where we were and that reality that any day could be our last. And for too many of our brothers and sisters in uniform, their last day was there. And the loss of every single one of them hit hard.
I turned to God every day for strength and for clarity and understanding and for peace and courage. And I was reminded every day about how short life actually is. That my time could come at any moment. And it caused me to pray and to reflect on what am I doing with my life? Am I making the most of every day that I have? Am I doing all that I can to serve God, to be pleasing to God? I came home from that deployment a little over a year later. The nights were quiet. There were no more sirens and no more mortars. But the the sign that was next to that gate stuck with me because I knew and understood that no matter where I was, no matter where we are, none of us knows when that time will come.
But what we are in control of is what we choose to do with every day that we are blessed with. And today is the day. Today is the day where we make that choice to maximize all of the blessings and tools and abilities that God has given us. And this is what I want to leave you with. Our freedoms are under attack. It is up to us. we the people to stand up and defend them. It is up to us to remind ourselves that we cannot be prosperous without peace. We cannot be free, truly free if we are in a permanent state of war. And we the people are the only ones who can make the change.
It’s easy to fall into a sense of complacency. It’s easy to sit back and say, “You know what? I’m busy. I got a lot going on in my life.” Or maybe for some of you, maybe you think, “Well, I’m too young. I can’t make a difference. I I I’m not even old enough to vote yet, maybe.” And there are others who say like, you know, I’m just not the one. I know someone else will do something. Someone else will step up to the plate. someone else will take action. Dr. Martin Luther King had an answer for that. He said, “The time is always right to do what is right. And today is the day.
Now is the time for every one of us to show up, to vote, to make sure that our elected leaders hear our voices, to pick up the phone and make a phone call, to send an email, make a post on social media. I will tell you from firsthand experience. I understand why it feels like, hey, I’m just one person. My voice won’t make a difference. But I will tell you when we all take that responsibility in ourselves, when I was in Congress, votes were changed in real time because people were lighting up the phones and lighting up X and Instagram and social media.
It makes a difference as we’ve seen with flot cameras, showing up to town halls, showing up to council meetings, holding leaders accountable, not allowing them to take away our freedom in the dark of night because we failed to do our part. Engage in conversation. I think about Charlie Kirk often during these times and how he welcomed those who disagreed with them. He listened to them. He showed them respect. And then if their arguments were weak, he defeated their arguments with the truth. And he did so he did so with love and with compassion even for those who express hatred toward him.
We cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence because it is our lives, our freedom, and our future that’s on the line. It is up to us to find ways that we can serve. And there are so many ways that we can serve. Whether you’re called to run for office, amazing. Whether you’re called to support someone who is, maybe you’re called to to serve in a different way that’s completely outside of the government, and you use your voice to inspire others to step up and be the change. No one is too young or inexperienced. Jonathan Dayton was the youngest de delegate to the constitutional convention.
How many have heard of Jonathan Dayton? One. Okay. I was about to be really impressed. He was 26 years old. 26 years old. James Madison was 25 in 1776 and just 36 when he helped write the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton was barely 30 years old. They put their lives and reputations on the line to lay the foundation for this free republic, but they knew it was fragile. Which is why Franklin said, “A republic if you can keep it.” Is today the day? That is not just a question for people who are deployed into combat zones and war zones in other parts of the world.
It’s a question that we have the privilege of being able to ask ourselves every single day because we don’t know how much time we have. Charlie Kirk didn’t know how much time he had, but God, he made the most of every day that he was with us. We have that same opportunity and that same freedom to choose how we spend our lives. Lincoln told us, “A nation of free people must live through all time or die by suicide.” I say we choose to live free. Today is the day. We have no time to waste. There is 25 days until election day and then the work begins again the day after election.
Stand up. Speak up. Don’t be afraid because we stand on the side of truth, peace, and freedom. And our country needs us now. Thank you so much everyone. God bless you. God bless the United States of America. Thank you.
