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This is Honestly. Thanks for joining us. So I'm really pleased to introduce Barry Weiss. She is a UATX founding trustee, the editor of Common Sense, and the host of the podcast Honestly. There are nearly 4,000 universities in the U.S. Many of them have billions of dollars in endowments and histories that go back to well before the country's founding.
So you'd be forgiven for thinking that it would be a bit ridiculous to try and compete with those Goliaths. But that's exactly what the new University of Austin, or UATX, is doing. The premise of UATX is simple, and it goes like this. While the brand name schools have the money, they no longer have the mission. They have fundamentally abandoned the point of the university, which is the pursuit of truth.
The good people at UATX, where I'm proud to be on the board, are not waiting for the broken status quo to change. They're not sitting around criticizing or whining. They are doing. Since the school's founding president, Pano Kanellis, announced the project this November in our newsletter, Common Sense, UATX has raised more than $100 million with no alumni network.
Within the first week, the school received more than 3,500 inquiries from professors at other universities. And just a few weeks ago, UATX opened its doors to its first students at its inaugural summer school. I was blown away by the students that I met there, and I was honored to lecture alongside teachers like Neal Ferguson, Kathleen Stock, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Deirdre McCloskey, Rob Henderson, and Thomas Chatterton-Williams.
And today, I wanted to share with all of you the talk that I gave at the old Parkland in Dallas to that first class of UATX students. It's about the broken moment that we're in as a culture and a country, but more, it's about what I think is required of us to meet this moment. I present to you, Barry Weiss. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. This is really exciting.
I'm going to talk today about the un-American revolution that we're living through and what it takes to be part of a new generation of founders that I think this country desperately needs right now. I distinctly remember the first cancellation that I heard about, but we didn't call it that back then. It was 2014.
The school was Brandeis, a school started by Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, founded on the idea of religious freedom and there not being quotas for different groups. A school with the motto truth, even unto its innermost parts. And the school had extended this honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, someone who's teaching you all this week, only to withdraw it.
And this was a scandal at the time. I remember reading pieces about it for weeks. I probably edited several op-eds about it for the Wall Street Journal. And now I look back for nostalgia for those days, because these days that story would last maybe for a morning on Twitter. And that's because now the whole country is a campus. Nowadays, anyone who's anyone, anyone who has anything vaguely interesting or something original to say has been disinvited from somewhere.
Larry Summers from the University of California, Ilya Shapiro at Georgetown, Ben Shapiro, Jane Fonda, James Watson, Michael Moore, George Will, Paul Singer, Bjorn Lomborg, Bruce Gilley, Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Summers, Randall Kennedy. I could stand up here and list names for two hours. Many of those people you are lucky to have here with you this week. Disinvitation or deplatforming.
has become a regular feature of American life, as the politics of censoriousness and forced conformity and ideological obedience have taken hold. Do you see the one about the taco truck canceled for cultural appropriation, or the painter that made the wrong painting, or the novelist that wrote the wrong novel, or the museum curator, or the Oberlin baker, or the Hispanic electric worker, or the dog walker, or the comedian, or the Palestinian caterer?
There are thousands of examples like these, and I know because I am the post office for these people. For each of the examples I just named, each of you can doubtless think of dozens more in your own schools, in your own communities, that have gone totally unreported. I want to suggest to you today that these incidents, they're not discrete little firestorms. They are deeply interconnected.
They're the result of a zealous and profoundly illiberal ideology that has infiltrated our largest companies, our media, our medical schools, our law schools, our hospitals, our government, and of course, universities. It's also infiltrated our friendships, our marriages, our families, and our language. Now, if you're sitting in this magnificent room, you know this better than most people.
And you know it, I suspect, because you're living it. If you're in this room, I imagine you've sat in a classroom or posted on social media or applied to college and felt the pressure to pay lip service or to promote an ideology that you don't believe in. Maybe instead of being taught about how to think and write clearly and rigorously, you've been taught to obsess over immutable characteristics that you have.
Maybe instead of debating ideas openly and honestly, you've been told to toe the party line or keep quiet. It'll be better for your career. Maybe you've watched as a friend or a classmate was shamed for a mistake or a bad joke. Maybe you've watched as people have piled on to someone you know and have worried that you would be next. What I want to suggest to you today is that we're living through a kind of revolution. Now, this revolution is not a physical one.
As my friend Abe Greenwald wrote in Commentary Magazine recently, "It's not being fought within the physical limits of a battlefield. It is instead happening all around us and directly to us. It is redefining our culture, our media. It's giving new shape to our public and private institutions. Indeed, it is remaking the nation before our eyes." In other words, this is a revolution of culture. It's a revolution of ideas.
And for far too long, this revolution has resisted description. The revolution's proponents went from pretending it didn't exist and insisting that anyone who noticed it was wearing a tinfoil hat to the next day declaring that it was here and it was excellent and if you didn't get on board, you were a bigot and probably a bad person. Others have tried to deny its existence because they're scared of its implications or because what's happening on the right is also scary right now. They point to the rise of QAnon.
and the spread of conspiracy theories about stolen elections, and members of Congress who talk casually about Jewish space lasers, and insist that anyone who suggests that the problem is anywhere but on the right is basically abetting the rise of fascism, as if there can't be two bad things happening at once. Now, others pretend to weigh this ideological revolution for more craven reasons, because to see it would be to give up too much status.
To really see it, to really reckon with how far it has won might mean giving up Yale or Harvard or Stanford. But deny it as they might all of these different people, it is very much here. And I think it is happening right under our noses, it is happening to us, and it promises to reshape the country, and indeed I think it already has. Now, this revolution is not an abstraction to me.
What I started to witness many years ago as a student at Columbia University has come to impact my friendships, my relationships, and my career. It is the reason why I am speaking to you here today not as an employee of the New York Times, but as an independent journalist who has had to learn how to become an entrepreneur, building a new media company for our new world.
I'm sure there are people in this room who yearn to be entrepreneurs, who want to be founders. I'm not one of them. I don't own a fleece vest and I don't wear Allbirds and I don't really love San Francisco. And despite what you may hear on social media, I actually am a good soldier. I like being part of an institution. I've got off on telling people I worked for the New York Times and I imagined in certain ways that I would work there forever. Then again, I also imagined
that I would live in a world where I could stand here before you today and say with confidence and clarity, I know where I want to work. I know where I want to live. I know where I want to raise my kids. I know where I want to send them to school. I know where I want to encourage them to apply to college. But the truth is, I don't know any of those things with certainty anymore. Everyone sitting in this room and any American who's truly alive to the moment that we're living in
We don't have the luxury of steady ground. The moment that we're living in requires something different, something seemingly paradoxical. It requires us both to build totally new things, but also in the same moment to conserve very old ones. It is a moment that requires us to look for new allies, but also to strengthen old loyalties. It is a moment that requires us to listen carefully to new voices,
but also to heed old wisdom that is being lost. In many ways, what is required of us, and I think what is required especially of all of you in this room, is what was required of the people whose images hang on the walls of this building. It's what was required of the founding generation that managed to marry the old and the radically new when they came to this country to start a new Jerusalem.
So this afternoon, I want to offer you a very brief overview of the un-American revolution that we're currently living through. And then I want to tell you what I think we can do about it. And by we, I mean the coalition of the sane. I don't know how you guys identify, but if you're in this room, I imagine that you self-identify as a sane person who wants to live in a world where you can disagree with someone without their life being ruined. So let's start there.
And I want to talk about that because I believe that that is necessary in order to preserve the virtues that have made every single one of our lives possible. Okay, so let's start with what this un-American revolution is about. A lot of people want to convince you that you need a PhD or a law degree or dozens of hours of free time to read dense texts by Judith Butler and Kimberly Crenshaw to understand what's going on.
You really don't need to do that, although if you want to do it, enjoy yourselves. What you really need to do is use your eyes and your ears and look at what's actually happening. The ideology that is trying to unseat liberalism in America begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war, and they're in a war with the forces of backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game need to be suspended.
Indeed, this ideology would argue that those tools are not just obstacles to justice. They're tools of oppression. They're the master's tools. And the master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house. So the tools themselves are not just to be replaced. They need to be repudiated. According to this ideology, persuasion, the purpose of argument, is replaced with public shaming.
Moral complexity is replaced with puritanism and moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings. The rule of law is replaced with the rule of the mob. Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment and mercilessness. Debate is replaced with deplatforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought.
Inclusion, a word they love, is replaced with exclusion. And excellence is replaced with equity. In this ideology, disagreement is recast as trauma. Therefore, speech is violence, according to this ideology. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, that's not violence at all. That's justice.
In this ideology, information that doesn't comport with the narrative is recast as disinformation. Its proponents recast as conspiracy theorists. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think. It's about re-educating people in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.
In this ideology, the past cannot be understood in its own terms, but must be judged by the morals and mores of the present. That's why statues of Grant and Lincoln in Washington are being torn down. In this ideology, intentions don't matter very much. It's why William Paris, a lecturer at UCLA, was investigated by the school because he read Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" out loud in class. In this ideology, you're guilty for the sins of your parents.
This is really important. What it says is that you are not you. You're just an avatar. You're an avatar of your race or religion or your class or your abilities. That's why third graders in Cupertino, California were asked to rate themselves in terms of their power and privilege.
In this system, as you all know, I'm not making these up. There are so many more. You are all placed neatly on a spectrum from privileged to oppressed. And we're all ranked on this spectrum according to different categories. We're given an overall score based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are suspicious from the start.
This is why, as one high schooler in New York told me the other day, students in his school are told, "If you are white and male, you're second in line to speak." And that's considered totally normal and a necessary redistribution of power. Victimhood in this ideology confers morality. "I think, therefore I am" is replaced with "I am, therefore I know," or "I am, therefore I'm right." This ideology says there's no thing as neutrality, even under the law.
which is why the very notion of colorblindness must itself be deemed racist. In this ideology, equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as the true measure of fairness. If everyone doesn't finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. So racism is no longer about individual discrimination. It's about any system that allows for disparate outcomes. That is why you see the efforts to get rid of the SAT.
or to get rid of the admissions tests for elite public schools like Stuyvesant in New York or Lowell in San Francisco, schools that for decades have been the engines of opportunity for poor and working-class families to get ahead on their merits, regardless of the lane of their birth. This is why the New York Times classical music critic recently made an argument about why we need to do away with blind auditions for orchestras. Any feature
of human existence that creates disparity of outcome needs to be eradicated. The nuclear family, politeness, even rationality itself have been recast as evidence of white supremacy. And as everyone in this room well knows, in this revolution, skeptics of any part of this ideology are recast as heretics.
Those who don't abide by every single aspect of this creed are tarnished. They're subjected to boycotts. They're work to political litmus tests. The Enlightenment, as the cultural critic Ed Rothstein has put it, has been replaced by the exorcism. And what we call cancel culture is really just the justice system of this revolution. And the goal of these cancellations, it's not merely to punish the person being canceled.
That's sort of unimportant. The goal is to send a message to everyone watching. Step out of line and you can be next. All of this stuff that I'm describing has worked unbelievably well. Don't take my word for it. Look at the polls. A recent Cato study found that 62% of Americans are afraid to voice their true views out loud and in public.
Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse the idea of ousting a colleague for having the wrong opinion about hot-button issues like immigration. And this statistic blows my mind. Nearly 70% of college students admit to a pollster that they want to report a professor if the professor says something they find offensive.
Think about that. A majority of college students in America, according to this survey, think it is a virtue to inform on their professors for wrong-think. How did that become normal? And why have so many people, especially young people, maybe some of your best friends, why have they been drawn to this ideology? Well, all of this, all of these changes have taken place against the backdrop of an incredible shift in American life.
the tearing apart of our social fabric, the loss of religion, the decline of civic organizations, the opioid crisis, the collapse of American industries, the people left behind by globalization, the rise of big tech, successive financial crisis, a toxic public discourse, social media, crushing student debt, an epidemic of loneliness, a crisis of meaning, and has taken place
against a backdrop in which the American dream has felt more like a punchline, in which it seems like our meritocracy is clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others. I became converted because I was ripe for it and because I lived in a disintegrating society that was thrusting for faith. That was Arthur Kessler writing in 1949 about his love affair with communism.
But I think the same could be said of this new revolutionary faith. I became converted because I was ripe for it and because I lived in a disintegrating society that was thrusting for faith. And like other religions at their inception, this one has lit the souls of true believers on fire and they are eager to burn down anything or anyone that stands in their way. So what are we going to do about it? I think we have to get more fundamental.
I think we have to get more foundational. I think we have to get beyond the tired and rotted out ideas about left and right and ask, what are the virtues and the values that have made America and the West the best, the freest, the most enlightened, the most tolerant of minorities, the most open to new ideas, the most innovative country in the history of the world?
The founders that granted us independence from an older tyranny bequeathed to us a set of world-transforming ideas that 250 years later still feel radical. And that is especially so in the last decade. I believe that after the un-American revolution that we're still living through, a new generation of founders will lead us out by revisiting and renewing those bedrock principles.
And I believe that you in this room can and should be among those founders. What does it look like to be a founder in 21st century America? We'll get to that right after a quick break. Stay with us.
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. While the original Declaration of Independence had one call to action, I have 10 for you today, and none of them requires you to enlist in your local militia.
Here's the first one. To be a founder in America today means to reject the politics of resentment and to recognize, I'm going to use that word, our privilege. My dad lost a younger sister to cancer, and he also has multiple sclerosis. So why is he constantly telling me that he's the most privileged man in the world? Because he grew up in a stable home with two parents, because he has meaningful work, because he believes in God.
because he has a community, and because he's married to a person he loves. Above all else, he believes he's the most privileged man in the world because he had the great good fortune to be born in this country. So even with all of our flaws and our failings, even with inflation and polarization and tribalism, anyone who is honest will admit that there is just nowhere better to build a life. Now, saying that right now can feel radical depending on the rooms you tend to live in.
Because grievance and resentment define our current cultural moment. But I think that those things, grievance and resentments, are dead ends. And I think we need to get back to gratitude. The second thing I think you need to be a founder is to defend the rule of law. It is just and right that those who participated in the orgy of violence on the Capitol on January 6th are being punished. It was an attempt to physically intimidate our elected officials. And it's wrong,
when that violence comes smashing through the windows in congressional offices, and it's wrong when it comes outside of the home of Brett Kavanaugh. This kind of violence has become normalized. Why in the summer of 2020 could an organized political faction in Seattle take over a police precinct and an entire neighborhood? How did that happen? Or in Kenosha, burn to the ground an entire business district? To be a founder, to be a builder,
is to absolutely reject such violence as normal and to defend the rule of law. Third, to be a founder means to defend freedom of speech. Free speech is not just a slogan, although I'm sure it's a word you're going to hear a lot this week. Free speech is a tool. It is a tool that is essential for the free exercise of the mind, for the ability to search for truth to begin with.
The only way to get to truth is to have the freedom to think clearly and to speak freely. Without free speech, there is no truth. There is no innovation. There is no ability to persuade or to take risks or to make new things. Free speech has a radical value in most parts of the world, and it's one that has been at the foundation of American success. Free speech doesn't just mean speaking your mind these days, though.
Free speech also means refusing compelled speech. It means refusing to speak on truths either about yourself, your community, your country, or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered to you by the mob. Don't accept the lies that are being genially told to you with a smile. When you're told that Abraham Lincoln's name in a public school is white supremacy, you should reject that. Abraham Lincoln is a hero.
Or when you're told that separating people into racial affinity groups in kindergarten is progressive, you should say no. It's actually a form of segregation. Or when you hear that looting has no victims, you should say that that's untrue. Or that small business owners can cope anyway because they have insurance, you should say that's nonsense. Or when you hear again and again that America's evil, you should say no. It's the last best hope on earth.
And if possible, you should be public and vocal, respectful but vocal, in rejecting claims you know to be false. Cowardice is contagious right now, but so is courage. And your singular example of courage may serve as a means of transmission. Number four, to be a founder means to break your addiction to prestige. Or in other words, worship God more than Yale.
Yale right now is a school where law students scrawl things like, the law is violence and we're the law. We reported on a story last year at the School of Medicine in the Child Study Center where someone gave a talk called, The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind. And all she got was praise. And I don't mean to single Yale out. It could be any of the schools that people pay $80,000 a year to go to. But if you look at what's actually happening in those schools, right, you have to ask yourself, why?
Is it worth it? Why do so many get their sense of self-worth and status through it? Why do we accept the idea that the best and the brightest in this country should be sent into schools where they're told that the West is bad, where they're taught to think of themselves as permanent victims? I'll tell you why people are unable to let go of it. It is because of the status that those places confer. That is why. Now, even if your goal is reform instead of revolution,
Even if you believe that the right way to fight it isn't necessarily starting a new university but reforming the old ones, I believe that fighting the ideology I'm talking about today means being comfortable with getting unpopular with those good old places. It means getting very, very clear on what is essential right now. What is essential right now is not being popular. What is essential right now is not getting likes on whatever social platform you guys like.
Doing the right thing is essential. Telling the truth is essential. Number five, to be a founder in 21st century America means to reject moral relativism. Some cultures are just better than other cultures, and it's okay to say that.
Ibram Kendi says this: "In order to be an anti-racist," and this is a quote, "we have to stop standardizing our own culture and judging other cultures from our standards, because whoever creates the standard becomes the top of the hierarchy." Here's another thing Kendi said: "We need to figure out a way to recognize that when we see cultural difference, all we're seeing is cultural difference." I say that's nonsense.
All people are created equally because all people are created in the image of God. But not all cultures are equally good at protecting human flourishing and human difference. Cultures that force women into burqas or practice female genital mutilation or hang gay people like me from cranes are not better. And I think to be a founder means saying,
What we're building here in a liberal democracy is way harder to do, but it is absolutely better. Number six, to be a founder in 21st century America means to defend witches. Right now in America, very, very good people are being scapegoated. It's true there's not a pyre in the middle of the public square, but there is one online. And these people are being burned as witches.
They're being judged based on their worst moment. They're being hung out to dry, their reputation trashed because of a mistake or a bad joke or a bad thought or maybe just a simple lapse in judgment. David Sabatini is one of the most important scientists in America and he's now collecting unemployment.
The feminist philosophy professor, Kathleen Stock, was pushed out of the University of Sussex because her research on the idea of sex being a real thing and not just a construct offended some students there. Joshua Katz was just pushed out of Princeton, smeared as a racist because he spoke out against anti-racist measures such as institutionalized struggle sessions and race-based compensation for professors.
I could go on like this all day. What is going on is appalling, it is illiberal, and it is morally wrong. And yet too many of us remain silent, including me. Here's what I mean. The issue of gender ideology is one that I really didn't want to touch. It's not even that I was scared so much. I've been canceled so many times over online, I can't really count anymore. But I just didn't think it was worth it. It wasn't my issue. I thought other people could handle it.
And so I watched from the sidelines as women like Abigail Schreier and Helen Joyce and of course J.K. Rowling said crazy things like biological men and biological women shouldn't share a prison cell. Maybe a 14-year-old is too young to decide on whether or not she should be sterilized. Now these women of course weren't thrown on a pyre but they were humiliated, they were threatened and they were slandered.
And it's easy to watch that happen and say, I am not touching that one with a 10-foot pole. You see, a lot of people right now in this country are letting other people fight the fight because they're telling themselves, that's not the right hill for me to die on. But at some point, you run out of hills. Principles are not like money. You don't need to be judicious and stingy about how you spend your integrity and who you spend it on.
I think the more hills you die on, the more people you defend, the more valuable you become because you show your integrity and your credibility. So find more hills to die on. Find more witches to defend, even and maybe especially if those witches are flawed. Number seven, to be a founder in 21st century America means to use your own eyes and ears. To quote John Adams, "Facts are stubborn things."
Use your senses to decipher fact from fiction. The mainstream narrative is the narrative because it's easy to digest and it's addictive. But in actuality, facts are far too stubborn to fit into that narrative so neatly. So do your own research. Be independent-minded, whether it's in the media or on social. Seek out the truth. Don't just rely on what you're watching on cable. One of the things we've learned over the past few years is that
You don't need to become an expert to form your own opinion and to discern the facts. Indeed, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that you should be skeptical of anyone who simply relies on the title expert in front of their name. Look at who has a good track record. Look at who consistently is ahead of the curve and gets things right. Start following them and listening to them. Number eight, to be a founder means to refuse to submit your relationships and your friendships to political litmus tests.
The other day, my wife Nellie got an email from a college friend of hers. And the friend's note was like a missive from the Soviet Union. It demanded that Nellie prove her purity of politics by disavowing me publicly, by disavowing her wife. And I wish I could tell you that this was the first note that she or I has been asked to do something of this nature. It's become a regular feature of our life.
A politics that forces its adherents to put their most intimate relationships to a litmus test is a politics of totalitarianism. I don't know another word to describe it. The beauty of America, unlike so many other times and places, is that it insists that there are whole realms of human life that are located outside of the province of politics, like friendships, like art, like music, like family, and like love. And indeed,
Those are the most important parts of life, not politics. Anyone that suggests otherwise, whether they say it explicitly or dressed up in the language of justice and progress, is not just forgetting what it means to be American. I think they're really forgetting what it means to be a human being. Number nine, to be a founder in 21st century America means to resist nihilism.
That means both the nihilism of the left that says we have to abolish the police because safety is impossible. But it also means resisting the new nihilism that I'm seeing more and more on the right that says decline is inevitable. It's inexorable. America's in the last gasps of empire. This is the nihilism that roots for Putin because in Russia they don't ask for your pronouns. This is the nihilism of saying the Bronze Age was better because men were really men then.
But it's also, and this is from the left, the historical revisionism of somehow romanticizing the Middle Ages because capitalism is so awful. This is the nihilism from either side that wants to go back, depending on your politics, 50 years or 500 years based on some fetishized version of a better time. It's the nihilism of losing perspective. To quote the great Grimes, being a founder doesn't mean killing what you hate.
It means saving what you love. Being a founder doesn't mean killing what you hate. It means saving what you love. There's not enough of the latter going on right now, and there's a lot of the former. And here's my last one, number 10. Above all, to be a founder is to found things. It's to build things new. I begin this list with gratitude, but gratitude doesn't mean settling for the status quo.
It means fighting for a more perfect union. It means fighting to make this the kind of country and culture you want to live in and eventually raise kids in. Gratitude means understanding that the reason we have what we have is because a lot of people before us lived really hard lives and made really tremendous sacrifices and that the least we could do, I don't know, is to maybe try and start a new university.
It's a lot easier than what they had to do. And yet every day I hear from people, people with children at private schools who are being brainwashed, people who run companies where they're scared of their own employees, people who donate to their alma mater even though it betrays their principles, people who are applying to schools and to jobs or to clubs that they know will compromise their integrity but are doing it anyway. It's enough.
All of these people have the ability, every single person has the ability to change the untenable status quo. You have the ability to build new things, and if you don't have financial capital, you have social capital, or political capital, or the ability to sweat. Every single person in this room has the ability to build. As my friend Catherine Boyle recently wrote in Common Sense, "Building is a political philosophy."
But it's a political philosophy that's neither red or blue, progressive or conservative, because it's averse to the political short-termism and zero-sum thinking that permeates our aging institutions that won't protect us in this era. There is no fixed pie when it comes to building. Building is an action. Building is a choice. It's a decision to create and move.
It is shovels in the dirt with a motley crew of doers who get the job done because no one else will. Building right now, she writes, is the only certainty, the only thing we can control. When the projects we believed were Teflon strong are fraying like the history they toppled, the only thing to do is make something new again. We all want certainty, right?
I wanted the world that I was born into to be the world I live in. We wanted to coast on what we knew, that the institutions would remain strong and trustworthy, that the political parties would remain consistent and fixed. I don't think many of us expected the world that we're currently living in. But then again, neither did the people who decided to leave the old world behind and to build the new. Don't forget that more than a dozen of the actual founders of this country
They were under the age of 35. James Madison was 29 years old. So don't tell me that small groups of young people can't transform the world when they made our world. If you're in this room, I think there's a really, really good chance that you're one of our new founders. I can't wait to talk to you. I can't wait to hear your questions. And more than anything else, I can't wait to see what you're going to build. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thanks for listening. If you're interested in learning more about UATX, go visit www.uaustin.org. As always, share this with people in your community. And if you believe in what we're doing, in what we're trying to build, support us by subscribing at commonsense.news. See you soon.