[audience applauding]

Thank you, Stephanie, and thank you all.

It is such an honor to be here with you all and a genuine, genuine pleasure.

Now, my motivation for this afternoon's talk is that liberalism has given humanity the most reliable foundation yet discovered for peace, freedom, and widely shared prosperity, and we are in real danger of losing that foundation.

Over the last ten months, we've seen an executive decree attempting to end birthright citizenship, expansive use of emergency powers bypassing constitutional constraints, threats of military force against longstanding allies, the weaponization of the Department of Justice, the militarization of American cities, masked and unidentified ICE agents raiding homes, businesses, and civic spaces, summary execution of suspected drug traffickers, the deportation of people lawfully within our borders to foreign prisons, and a self-inflicted wound of an unprovoked trade war.

I could, of course, go on.

In addition to these overt threats of the liberal order is the great forgetting, when the principles that sustain a free society become so familiar that they fade from view.

[laughs]