SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/monica-crowley-speaks-at-the-freedom-centers-restoration-weekend/;

Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Monica Crowley — political commentator, Fox News contributor, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and host of The Monica Crowley Podcast — spoke recently at the Freedom Center’s annual Restoration Weekend, held November 10-13, 2022 at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, AZ.

Ms. Crowley spoke about the hijacking of America, and how our side now needs leaders who: 1) get it, 2) aren’t in on it, 3) and have the “stones” to confront, stop and destroy it.

Transcript:

Monica Crowley:  Thank you very much, Ned, for that fantastic introduction. I really appreciate it, and I have to say, I thought we’d have more cause for celebration today, but it is so wonderful to be in a room like this with so many fellow patriots who all think the same way and all have the same passion for this country and rescuing her before it’s too late, so it is a true honor and blessing for me to be here with all of you today.

I also want to thank the legendary, iconic David Horowitz. Can we give him a round of applause? David is not here with us, but he spends every waking moment trying to rescue America as relentlessly as the left tries to destroy her. He is a true hero of this republic, and I’m so honored to call him my friend.

I also want to thank Michael Finch and Elizabeth Ruiz, who are also forces of nature. You guys are absolutely amazing for what you do, and everybody at the Horowitz Freedom Center, for putting on this event every year and bringing us all together to celebrate America and strategize on how to bring her back.

I also want to thank all of you for coming every year and for caring enough about your country to make this trip and listen to all of us talk about how we can bring America back, so you’re all heroes of the republic as well.

So I want to — there are a lot of things that I want to cover today, and I want to start with a Tweet that I literally just sent out about an hour ago — also, if you’re not following me on Twitter, you’re missing out, because my Twitter is hot. Here’s what I Tweeted literally, like, about 90 minutes ago, and it already has nearly 5,000 likes. “This is the final stage of the hijacking of America. It’s been underway for decades. Now we need leaders who: 1) get it, 2) aren’t in on it, 3) have the stones — I used a slightly saucier term on my Tweet — have the stones “to confront, stop and destroy it. That’s it.” That is the framing for everything I am going to talk to you about today, okay?

First, let’s take one step back from about four days ago. So going into the midterm election, I was all over Fox News, Fox [indiscernible], my podcast, talking about how this midterm election needed to be more than just a message election. It needed to be more than a red-wave election. It needed to be even more than a red tsunami election. I talked about how this election, for the Democrats, needed to be an extinction-level event. Unfortunately, it didn’t materialize that way, now did it?

So let’s start with a couple of the bright spots, and then I’m going to take you back and up 30,000 feet. The bright spots from Tuesday are really significant and should not be overlooked. Florida, Florida, Florida. I know a lot of you are old enough to remember the year 2000 with Bush v. Gore. Florida was a swing state. It was a purple state. And it all came down to 537 votes in Palm Beach County. A lot of you might remember that. So Florida was the crossroads for the Electoral College for any presidential candidate to get there. So was Ohio. Remember Ohio, with Tim Russert talking about Ohio as a swing state? The good news is that both of those heavyweight states are now deep red states, and that is something to applaud and something to cheer. Ron DeSantis obviously is a juggernaut. He is the most effective and best governor in the country. And for those of you living in Florida, you are blessed. I live in New York, so pray for me. I need your prayers big time. Another four years of Kathy Hochul makes me want to tear my hair out.

So I think if and when Kari Lake prevails in this state — we’re sitting at ground zero right now. I’m going to talk about her in a couple of minutes here, too, in a different context. But when she becomes governor, she’s going to give Ron DeSantis a real run for his money in terms of being the best and most effective, component governor in the country. She’ll be the DeSantis of the West.

When you take a step back, too, and you look at what happened in Florida, DeSantis did almost the impossible. There are 67 counties in the state of Florida; he won all of them but five, and he did, also, another miraculous thing in that he flipped deep blue Miami-Dade County. Astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. And he did it with Latino voters. And I know the left is out there trying to say, well, that’s a separate case because it’s mostly Cuban voters, and I realize the Latino vote is multidimensional, but he did it through competence. He did it by delivering for his people and focusing on that. So flipping those voters in deep blue areas is really a model that I think every Republican candidate from here on out should be emulating, and will.

When you take a step back and look at the national picture, Republicans won the national vote — and I realize there was no federal election, no president at the top of the ticket, but when you look at the overall national vote, Republicans won the national vote by four to five points, which tracked with what the polling was telling us when you looked at the generic ballot polling. It showed Republicans winning by four to six points, and that’s exactly how it fell into line. The difference is that it fell in line not necessarily in the areas that we needed it to fall in line.

Latino vote: 58%. Staggering. Staggering. One of the big untold stories over the last couple of years is the movement of Latino voters toward the GOP. The black vote was 14% for the Republican party. Now, before you say, 14%, that’s nothing — well, in the scheme of things, yeah, out of 100%, but when you’re starting from the black vote at 7% to 9% and now you’re scoring 14% of the black vote, that is huge.

So there are some positive trend lines that are not to be discounted. I know we’re all a little disappointed here, and a little dispirited by the underwhelming nature and disappointing performance overall, especially with the balance in Washington, which is yet to be decided, but don’t overlook the positive trends going on in the country. There are some real silver linings here.

Okay. Now that that’s out of the way, I want to go back to get us to understand how we got to this moment in this country. All of this, and David Horowitz knows this better than anybody because he was trained in it, everything you’re seeing right now, and we are actually living through a neo-Marxist revolution in this country. It’s not fought with guns. It’s not Vladimir Lenin coming off the train at Finland Station. It’s a lot softer and more insidious than that. But make no mistake; that is exactly what this is.

How did we get here? In the 1930s, this actually began as a KGB operation. The KGB in Moscow realized the United States was the existential threat to the Soviet Union, and they hatched a plan to overthrow us. And the plan was to confront the United States in, like, a full frontal way, and when they realized that that wasn’t going to work because our Constitution and our people are so strong and durable, well, they switched gears.

World War II intervened and we were essentially on the same side to defeat Hitler, but then come the 1950s. The KGB decided to switch tactics, and they decided, instead of coming at the U.S. in a full frontal way, the Soviet Union was going to change its approach and defeat us from within. And the way they decided to do it, which was ingenious — they recognized that democracies, because we’re so open, and because our leaders are accountable, that we’re a soft target. And so they came to this country with operatives and they decided that they were going to seize control over the three main pillars of American society and life. They grabbed control of academia, and they started at the university level, and now if you have children or grandchildren, it’s all the way down to the nursery-school level that they’re indoctrinating your children. They started with that. Then, news media, and the culture: movies, television, and music. They infiltrated this country from underneath and grabbed control of these pillars.

And once they had control, they ran with it. Of course, they had millions of what Lenin once called useful idiots, college kids, people who don’t know any better, and people who are, like, easily — have impressions put on their psyche in a very easy kind of way, to be their armies, to amplify exactly what they were doing. And the communists understood that this was a long-term project, okay? They knew that the hijacking of America would not happen overnight. It would be a long-term project over many decades. So what you’re seeing now is sort of the tail end of this slow-motion revolution so as not to attract too much attention over the years. Communists are very patient. They’re very patient until the moment that they’re not, and that’s when the guns come out, and that’s why they want you disarmed.

But it was a very, very smart strategy because the rest of us have spent the last couple of decades working, building our careers, raising our families, and being normal. And we’ve all been asleep at the wheel, except for people like David Horowitz, who’s been blowing the whistle on this for a very long time. He saw it because he was in it.

But now, we are at a tipping point. I use the analogy of a house — I don’t know if any of you have had the misfortunate of having a house beset by termites. I hope you haven’t because it’s a nightmare. But what you notice with an infestation of termites is that a wooden structure looks fine for a really long time, while those termites are burrowing in and eating away at the wooden foundation and all of the wood — they spend years chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. And to the naked eye, that structure looks just fine, until one day it collapses on itself.

That’s what they have been doing, and we are now close to that tipping point where that structure, the structure of the United States of America, is about to collapse in on itself. They are so close to their goal. That’s why they’re not going to change. Did you notice — Biden was asked two days ago at his press conference, he was asked, are you going to change course in any way? He said, no, I’m not going to change a thing. Of course, he’s not going to change a thing.

Guys, Barack Obama was the final push of a smooth, well-dressed, articulate, highly educated, charismatic communist. Those eight years fundamentally transformed the nation — in Obama’s words, not mine. Hillary Clinton was supposed to lock it in for the next eight years. Donald Trump was never supposed to be elected President. They caught — he caught them flatfooted, and they have vowed, never again. That’s why you’re seeing what you’re seeing now; brace yourself for ’24, because never again are they going to be caught unawares, by Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or whomever the nominee is. Forget it. They have their eyes on a much bigger prize.

And so everything you have seen under Biden and the Democrats in Congress is geared toward that goal. They are making up lost time, those four years of lost time under Donald Trump. That’s what they’re doing. Any normal president would have changed course by now, right? Just out of sheer — the desire for sheer political survival. This president hasn’t changed one bit, and neither have the Democrats. Why? Because they’re moving with all deliberate speed toward that ultimate goal.

When Obama said that, when he talked about the fundamental transformation of the nation, nobody stopped to think, what does he mean by that? Nobody stopped to say, hey, what — I mean, I did, and I got a lot of slings and arrows for it. But nobody thought, well, what exactly — what’s the objective here? And now we know. The objective is toward a neo-Marxist kind of state, and I’m going to get to that here in just a second. That means that everybody who stands in their way and represents an existential threat to them and to this grand project needs to be destroyed.

I just did an hour-long with Tucker Carlson for Tucker Carlson Today, and we sat down, and it had occurred to me — this point occurred to me probably about eight weeks ago, and I texted Tucker. I said, this just dawned on me, and I think we need to talk about it. And he wrote me back right away, and he goes, this is brilliant. You need to come to my show and talk about it. The existential threats to the forces in this country that control the actual power — we vote and vote and vote, and nothing changes, why? Because the real power resides with permanent Washington, the deep state, the administrative state. However you want to call it. And they’ve got the propaganda press to amplify their mission. That’s where the real power in this country resides, not with us. Not anymore. And so if you represent that kind of existential threat to their absolute grip on power and their grand project, they will destroy you.

And I thought back to my first boss, President Nixon, with whom I worked in the last years of his life — I was not born when he was elected President, just to be clear. It is the same enemy. The forces that destroyed Richard Nixon are the exact same forces that are trying to destroy Donald Trump. And yes, people die, and they move on, and I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about the institutional enemies of freedom in this country.

Richard Nixon, in his second term, was going to do what Donald Trump began to do, which is smash the stranglehold of power on the entire elite ruling class. He — at that time, there were only three networks. He was going to have Walter Annenberg, who was the richest man in the country at the time, buy ABC, NBC, or CBS to turn it into, like, a Fox News kind of entity so at least we had some balance. He had all of these plans, including reforming the entire executive branch, which Daniel Patrick Moynihan said needs to be done every 20 or 25 years because the corruption and the rot get in, and it’s almost impossible to fix.

Look at what we’re dealing with now: the weaponization of our own government against us is the biggest threat we face. Not China, not Iran. Those are serious threats, don’t get me wrong, but the weaponization of our own government against us is the most existential threat we face. And that’s why Moynihan said, every 20 or 25 years, you need a wholesale reform of the executive branch so you don’t get that kind of corruption and deep, entrenched rot.

And you know the last time we had real reform? Around JFK, 1960. Something like that. So no wonder the corruption is so deep. Went after Nixon, and got his scalp; that emboldened them. And from that point on — now we’ve got a 50-year arc of success of the deep state targeting the people who are genuinely out there fighting for the country, and all of us. Richard Nixon to Donald Trump and every existential threat in between. Think about it. Robert Bork — now that I’m saying it, it’s starting to click, right? Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Ronald Reagan with Iran-Contra. They didn’t get him, but George W. Bush, a war criminal. They had thousands of people in the streets over the Iraq War, remember? Isn’t it all falling into place now that I’m putting it together? The deep state will go after anybody and try to destroy them. They’ve had some successes, some not, but they are relentless. And that includes Kari Lake right here. She is an existential threat to them because she is not afraid of them and can’t be controlled by them, and that’s why they have pulled out all the stops to try to destroy her as well.

So this is what we’re up against here, and this — I mean, look, Trump — I don’t know what he’s going to do. They have thrown the kitchen sink at this man over the last six years to try to stop him. It’s a miracle he is still standing, okay? But they — and when I say kitchen sink, I even mean the pandemic and the global lockdowns. They shut down the global economy to stop one man.

So all of this brings us to today, where we are, and how they’re doing everything to keep their grand project going and stop it from being interrupted. What we saw in 2020, and what we just saw, which I can’t believe, but it’s still happening, but you guys need to understand, there is a difference between votes and ballots, okay? The left has now understood this for quite a while, but our side is still too thick to get it, or at least the leadership, and I’m going to get to the leadership here in a minute. A vote is, you get a ballot, you fill it out, you feed it through the machine, and you put it in the box. That is your vote. Ballots are what come packaged in shrink wrap, as I saw in New York City, a stack, this week, of ballots, that in the shrink wrap are then sent off to Democratic operatives and harvested, either filled out illegally or harvested from nursing homes, rehab facilities, wherever you want. They’re harvested by the tens, if not hundreds of thousands, and then pushed into the system. So the left understands votes versus ballots. Our side hasn’t gotten that yet. Hopefully, now we’ve got it, but two cycles in are inexcusable.

So mass mail-in voting, and I know others over the weekend have been talking about this, but mass mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, ballot curing, early voting. They leveraged this COVID pandemic to slam into place all of these things, and I don’t know what came first, the pandemic or the objective to tilt our elections and stop Donald Trump, among others, or vice versa. I don’t know. But I will say that they leveraged it 100% to gain greater control over our elections.

They’ve also conditioned people to accept these new rules as a convenience. Oh, just mail it in. You don’t have to even leave your home. Not a big deal. They’ve conditioned people throughout the pandemic to think that their freedom is selfish, and now they’ve convinced everybody that mail-in balloting, early voting, is a convenience. Again, this is what we’re up against. This is how they rig elections.

You also need to keep in mind that they on the left have been doing this for decades. This did not just start in 2020 or this election cycle. As I mentioned, I worked with President Nixon during the last years of his life; we often talked about the 1960 Presidential election, Nixon versus JFK. In that particular election, Nixon was leading. He was the sitting Vice President. He was leading. Kennedy was obviously very charismatic. But it came to Nixon’s attention on Election Day, 1960, that the old man Kennedy was orchestrating voter fraud in three areas of the country: Illinois — Illinois used to be a swing state. Hopefully, we’ll get it back there, but — in Illinois, West Virginia, and Texas, with the help of Lyndon Johnson.

On election night, in 1960, Richard Nixon was handed concrete evidence — concrete evidence — of voter and election manipulation and fraud going on in those three locations. Do you know how they did it? Remember those old voting machines where you’d go in and you’d pull the lever, and the curtain would go back, and then you’d go to vote, and you’d pull down the metal levers? Well, in those three areas, here’s how they pulled off the fraud. They rigged the machines so that if you went in and voted for Mr. Kennedy, in the back it would go down for Mr. Kennedy. If you walked in and voted for Mr. Nixon, both levers went down. So every single person walking in was voting for Kennedy even when they weren’t.

Richard Nixon showed that evidence on election night and encouraged them to put a stop to it, stop the counting, and order a recount, Richard Nixon said no. He said, this country is fighting a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and it needs a full-time president. So no, I’m not going to do that, and he fell on his sword. Of course, Richard Nixon gets zero credit for that, like he gets zero credit for most other things, not unlike Donald Trump. All the good that they do. But that selfless act is very important to keep in mind.

But the bigger point here is that they have been rigging and gaming the system for over 60 years. They have elevated it to an art and a science. It doesn’t have to be stealing the election; they’re rigging it in legal ways, and again, other people have talked about this here. But they’ve now brought it into the 21st century, and we are still operating with a 20th-century mentality.

I want to raise another really big existential thing that’s going on here, because I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of years, and I’ve been trying to put words to it, and I’m going to relate it to you now, and again, I’m not sure that I’m going to state it in the most articulate way, but I want to get the concept of this out there.

There may be, in this country now, because of all these decades of indoctrination — do you know, by the way, that in this last election, every age demographic group voted Republican except for voters under 30, who voted for the Democrats by 28 points? So again, this is about getting to the kids and indoctrinating them, okay?

But I really want to make this much bigger point, that we may now have a critical mass of liberal or leftist voters for whom their political ideology is a theology. It’s a religious belief. This is essentially what communism is, right? Communism bans God so that you worship the state. It’s economic Marxism. It’s cultural Marxism. Take control of the economy, take control of the culture. Remember what I said about how they infiltrated, starting in the 1950s, and grabbed control? This is exactly what’s happened.

And what they have always understood — this relates to big tech and free speech and Twitter and all the issues that we’re talking about now — they have always understood, control the language, control the narrative; control the narrative, control behavior; control behavior, control the population. And to that, I would add, take control of the children, control the future. This has all been based on worshipping the state. So of course the logical next step of that is that there are false gods everywhere, from political leaders — Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, thank God that they’ve gone down in flames. But you notice how the left elevates Barack Obama, Stacey Abrams, and Beto O’Rourke as gods. These are false gods in their religion. To the false god of Mother Earth in climate change, right? So this is all about worshipping false gods in the name of worshipping the state.

Also, ask no questions about any of this, or you will pay the price. In previous tyrannies, if you asked any questions, it was off with your head or off to the gulag. Now, it’s get fired or be canceled. This is the modern version of being erased from society.

Now, for the voters who worship at this altar, this religion comes first. They believe it, and they serve it with the fervor of any religion. It’s a passionate, unquestioning, secular faith, is what we’re up against here, okay? This is a deep-seated, emotional belief system for them.

So listen carefully here: While we are over here talking about concrete issues affecting every single American, like every Republican ran on this time, we’re over here talking about the economy, inflation, gas prices, jobs, the open border, the flood of illegals, guns, fentanyl, crime, cities in collapse, mandates — we’re over here having this conversation, and at the same time, the other side is over here not registering any of that because they are in a secular, spiritual rapture, okay?

Some of the world’s worst tyrants have understood the power of infusing politics with religious fervor. And they’ve killed hundreds of millions of people by doing that. This is their way of indoctrinating and controlling the masses, and it’s also a way of keeping a very tight grip on power. Our side is out here talking policy and their side is in a tent revival. We’re not even on the same field. We’re like two ships passing in the night.

And their voters — and if you take away anything that I say today, take this away and learn it and absorb it — their voters, because they treat politics as a theology, will blindly vote against their own rational interests and for the theology regardless of the conditions the theology produces: inflation, gas prices, crime, open border. It doesn’t matter to someone who is following in blind faith to a theology. Again, they will vote against their rational interests in service of their religious political faith, regardless of the consequences that rain down on their own heads. Unfortunately, it affects the rest of us in the country, too. But you need to understand how they’re approaching things. When you’re tearing your hair out, as we were at our table talking about New York and LA, how could people keep voting for this? This is how they keep voting for it, because their mindset, their soul is literally in a completely different place. That’s why traditional campaign appeals to economic or otherwise commonsense reality don’t work. This is a spiritual war.

So what is there to do? I want to leave you with a couple of really positive elements. I know this has been kind of heavy. So let’s end on a couple of positive notes. What can we do? Well, first is recognizing that this is a long battle, and I know we have been through so much, even just in the last three years, with COVID and vaccines and shutdowns and the 2020 election and BLM and Antifa and the country’s just burning down. It is too much for the average psyche to take. It really is. I completely understand that. But we also have to understand that this is a long battle, the way the left has long understood that this is a long battle.

This is not going to be solved with one or two election cycles. And it’s certainly not going to be solved by any particular political savior. We all have to stop looking for political saviors. We want good, effective leaders who can take us to the next step and help us save the country, but in the end, it’s up to us. The left has been at this a long time, and as I said, they are deeply entrenched, so it is going to take all of us over several generations, I think, to really make this commitment, and the hour is already very late. But we need to recognize that.

Number two, we’ve got to get on top of these new election rules. Seventeen states during COVID changed their election rules for those mass mail-in balloting, early voting, drop boxes, ballot harvesting, and the rest. Only nine states have turned back to where they were pre-COVID, so you have all of these states with all of these rules on the books, and the left, very effectively, took Election Day and made it election season, so it’s election season. They have a four- to six-week — depending on where you are — four- to six-week running start on us, sending out ballots, mobilizing their base, and getting the ballots — not the votes — the ballots into the system.

So we all — I don’t know how many of you do, but I always vote on Election Day because I don’t want to give them that running start. But by the time we’re going to the polls on Election Day, it’s almost irrelevant now. Because they have spent the last four to six weeks prior banking hundreds of thousands of votes, long before there are debates. This is why the left is always like, I’ll debate on November 3, right? Because they know — look at Fetterman. I mean, they elected a drooling invalid. Why? Because they had 650,000 votes banked before that debate.

And by the way, the left loves senile, weak, stupid, and infirm candidates. Why? Because they’re more easily controlled. They like malleable puppets. They love Joe Biden. They love John Fetterman. And by the way, Fetterman will be — and I’m going to say it here first — John Fetterman will be a U.S. Senator for a respectable amount of time — I would say, three to six months, and then you are going to have U.S. Senator Gisele Fetterman. Gisele Fetterman is a radical Marxist revolutionary. President Nixon used to say to me, you know, Monica, the male communists that I dealt with, very tough, Brezhnev, Chairman Mao, but the women in communist systems are much harder, much more hardcore than the men ever were. So you’re going to have Madame Mao representing Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate, and that’s going to come sooner rather than later, mark my words.

So we’ve got to get a handle on this. You know, Saul Alinsky said, for the left, one of his many pieces of advice for Marxist revolutionaries, was don’t function in the world as you would like it to be; function in the world as it is, and then change it from within. Again, what the communists have done for decades here. But instead of our side functioning in this world as we would like it to be — oh, everybody’s voting on Election Day. No, that’s not what’s going on. Deal in reality and fix it. And the idea that we have now been through two election cycles and this is still not fixed, and there are people out there blaming Donald Trump for this? Donald Trump has not been in power in two years and somehow this is his fault? No. The people who are at fault here are the Mc leadership, okay? McConnell, McCarthy, and McDaniel. We need to bounce all of them, because if nothing changes there, nothing changes, period.

The second thing we can do is get involved locally. And I know I talked about this last year. Do you know that George Soros, in this last election cycle, Soros spent over $200 million to elect more district attorneys across the country, and do you know, they all won? They all won. So you think crime in America is bad now? Wait. Just wait. But why? Why, Monica? Why are all these people letting out violent criminals? Do you know the history of communism? One of the very first things they do when they seize power is empty all the jails. Why? They want the violent mayhem in the streets. If you’re afraid for your own life, you’re not focused on what they’re doing. They need the violent chaos. That’s what’s going on. So get involved locally.

School boards, in particular, the local offices — a little piece of good news about school boards. There was a red undercurrent in state and local education offices this time. Conservatives flipped school boards in Michigan and Maryland, and also in Minnesota, and this comes on the heels of last year we saw school boards flipping in San Francisco, New York, Illinois, and other deep blue areas. So we are making a lot of progress there. But it needs all of us to get involved at the local level as well.

It’s what Edmund Burke called our “little platoons,” schools, churches, and communities. Used to be the bedrock of American society, right? We need to get back to all of that. Because remember, it’s not a coincidence that they used the virus as an excuse to shut those places. Schools, churches in particular.

The culture, as our friend Andrew Breitbart famously said, “politics is downstream from culture.” So whenever you can support cultural things that are on our side. I put a lot of folks on my podcasts, like Antonio Sabato Jr., who has got a conservative movie studio, conservative books, and documentaries — support them because Hollywood only pays attention to money. Support those things with your wallets and send a huge signal that we have, also, the power to change our culture.

And finally, you know, I mentioned that this is a spiritual war. So my last piece of advice is, no matter what your faith or un-faith is, I would just recommend to everybody that we’re at a really pivotal moment, and to keep God first place. I think — thank you. The other side, as I said, worships the state. We choose to worship God. And I know which side I want to be on. I want to be on his side because he always wins. And he is in the battle with us. But we have to make sure that we keep him central because after all, God is the ultimate warrior for human freedom because he gave us human freedom.

So as President Nixon used to say, buck up. He used to say that to me all the time. Buck up, kiddo. I’ll never forget, when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, I went in to see President Nixon, and I was like, how could this country not vote for a World War II veteran in Bob Dole? How could they have elected this scumbag Bill Clinton? And President Nixon kind of looked at me and he smiled, and he said, Monica — although I can’t do it the way Rich Little can do it, he said, Monica, this country is very strong. We’ve had some good presidents and some not-so-good presidents, and we’ve survived it all. And we will survive Bill Clinton. And he used to tell me to buck up.

So I will tell you to buck up, but the situation 30 years later is worse than it was when Nixon said we will survive it. We are at an existential pivot point right now and we need everybody on deck. So be of good heart, because the founders gave us this beautiful, strong system of human liberty, and we’re not going to be the first generation to let down the Founding Fathers and disappoint them by letting this country slip beneath the waves. No way, no how, and we’re going to do it as happy warriors.

Thank you so much. God bless you, and God bless America. Thank you. Thank you. Very kind of you. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. God bless.