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TRANSCRIPT:

(H/T Karan Allan)

Thank you so much. Thank you. Well thank you so much. Oh I so appreciate that warm introduction, and I tell you what. You are a bold man. You are a bold man.

I am so honored to get to be here and before we get started let me just get through some logistics really quickly first. Got my water. Do I have my straws? I want my straws. And I want them bent, please. Thank you. At least that’s what I read in some of the lamestream media outlets is that I was demanding straws or some ridiculous thing.

So I’m just so glad that we got some of those contractual demands out of the way and finally settled. I think though that my speakers bureau, Washington Speakers Bureau, I think that this was one of the toughest contracts I think that they ever ended up getting to sign. They found it to be one tough event to sort out because it seemed to them that they were negotiating with the entire state of California.

And here you know, the rest of us looking in and kind of following what was going on with some of the shenanigans it looked like, ah, Jerry Brown and friends, come on, this is California, do you not have anything else to do? Goodness gracious. Priorities.

And then though you know, I was expecting quite of few protests, protesters, I thought that, you know, I’d get a little bit of the Ann Coulterism. And I thought hey that would be cool. I love Ann Coulter. And you know, more power to her as she goes on college campuses and she talks about America and American values and principles and what it means to be an American. And I expected a little bit of that, but it’s been nothing but absolute loveliness here in this part of California, and I so appreciate the hospitality. And again I do appreciate your boldness. Thank you for the invitation.

In spite of some of the hoopla leading up to this dinner, I am, as I say, extremely delighted to get to be here and be back in beautiful California, especially Turlock. It’s gorgeous. And relating to so many of you who are the family farmers in this part of the country, I have great respect for you.

In fact, kind of in that same realm, Todd and I, we have a family commercial fishing business, and that too, it’s a business that you want to pass on, generation to generation. And Todd today, he couldn’t be with me, because he headed over to our fishing grounds this morning in Bristol Bay, and that’s where he is. But getting to speak with many of you today and hearing about your entrepreneurial spirit and your work ethic as you are raising your children to help take over some of the family farming business. It’s very impressive, and I’ve learned much about your business, even in this day, and I’ll never call an almond an almond again. I will call it an amon. Yes? But that relationship then and that connection with that family farming business and our own commercial fishing business that has really made a wonderful connection.

And it’s good to be here in the home of the Warriors. I was raised a Warrior too. Wasilla Warriors is our mascot, so I feel that connection. And I was telling Willow about that and happy that my daughter Willow could get to be with me. And yes, my entourage is with me today, the one, the Willow, that’s what I’ve got. So, it’s going to be funny as more of this contract business is being brought to court and with their doing whatever they’re doing as they look at what the demands were to put this event together, I think they’re going to be really surprised that there not really being a there there. There’s not a whole lot of controversy I think involved in this. And I’m just so happy that you stuck with this program, you stuck with this event, and you didn’t cancel on me. I appreciate it very much, you guys. I do.

It’s evident that there is something special here, there is something different, and really I think is made manifest an event like this. I so appreciate it.

The Golden State. Always been nice to be here, always feeling such a connection here, a special place in my heart is California because this is Reagan country, and…yeah! And perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California’s Eureka College* would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State. And it was here that, of course, Reagan became famous as an actor and then distinguished himself as such a good governor and then launched his bid for president. And then, of course, found his final resting place underneath the warm, blue California sky.

And I thought of Reagan as I was preparing for this evening because, of course, speaking at a California university, as I say, I figured that I’d probably have a welcoming committee of a lot of perhaps, angry, demonstrating protesters. Couldn’t help but remember that as governor of California, Reagan too he had his share of confrontations with his state, the college protesters from here. And remember back then, they called him a fascist. They called him an idiot. But the Gipper, he would return the compliment, and he was never one to shy away from confrontation. I read one quote from him, in speaking about these protesters, he said “they look like Tarzan, they walk like Jane, and they smell like Cheetah.” So, maybe not a lot has changed in the last forty years.

Reagan liked to crack a joke or two about the college protests essentially because he recognized what they were protesting was differing views and not wanting to maybe apply freedom of speech to those with whom they perhaps would be disagreeing. But he never failed to stress the importance of the education though that his students in the state, that the students were receiving. And I want to talk about that tonight.

And again it being such an honor to be here. With this organization, associated with one of the most prestigious university systems in the nation and one of the largest in the world. Congratulations on your success and helping prepare our next leaders, the warriors that will be leading this nation. Congratulations on your success.

And such a gorgeous campus, gorgeous.

I’ve certainly been thinking a lot about this topic though, this teaching of the next generation.

I want to talk about our civic education and how it touches upon the ideals of our youth and the ideals of our country. And the topic came up for me some weeks ago when I was presenting a speech in Denver, and I had the privilege following the speech of participating in a Q and A panel with two well respected radio talk show hosts, Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager, both very bold individuals, and I have a lot of respect for both of them. So I was pleased to get to participate.

One question asked by the moderator: “If you could name a single threat to our society, one above all others, what would it be?” And Dennis Prager was the first to answer this question. Now he could have chosen any number of important life or death threats to our country and our culture. He could have said the greatest threat is our exploding national debt and the record-setting deficits because this is where we’re going, we’re putting our country on a path towards insolvency. And that’s immoral, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, it’s a generational theft because we’re stealing opportunity from our children, as we incur these great debts, and we will be an insolvent country if we continue down this road.

So, he could have said that and reminded people that with this debt we’re less safe and we are less free. Or he could have said that the growing threat to our energy security is the number one threat because Washington, and it seems our president, doesn’t understand the inherent link between domestic energy production and our own prosperity, or energy and our freedom, energy and our security. There seems to be that missing link there in Washington not understanding. Or he could have said international terrorism’s attempt to destroy us, both at home and abroad, or to destroy our allies – a consistent strong ally like Israel, a threat to that country. He could have mentioned that.

But instead, Prager looked beyond these immediate threats, and he focused on something that would affect us all forevermore in a longer term sense. His biggest fear he said is that we’re not passing on what it means to be an American to this new generation. And I agreed with his concerns, but I offered a caveat when it was my turn to respond. I had to ask then – recognizing that, yeah, we’re not doing as well as we could, passing on what it means to be an American to the next generation – but then how could it be if we’re not teaching the next generation what it means to be free and how important it is to be free, how then can it be that we have America’s finest with our thousands and thousands of young men and women who are choosing as patriots, my own teenage son being one of them, having chosen, though never having tasted anything but freedom, to join our United States military? Just kind of inherently knowing how important it is to fight for freedom, and to protect our Constitution, to know that America is worth defending.

They enlist then, voluntarily, in our U.S. military to defend freedom. And that is so encouraging. So, how could it be, it can’t be possible that we are losing this next generation, not when you see that proof of that acknowledgment of how important  America is and living that American ideal is when you see who is enlisting in our military. Perhaps these kids, and so many of them are just kids, perhaps they not being able to articulate what it is, that instills in them this inherent belief that they need to protect the blessings of liberty, but they get it. And thank God they get it. And they are willing to lay down their lives for us. And lay it all on the line to sacrifice, to defend and serve something greater than self, to defend the American idea of liberty. Thank God for these kids.

But even considering the example of young people, like our servicewomen and our servicemen, Prager is right. Perhaps it is that we are not properly educating our youth in the exceptional nature of America and our liberty. It’s worrisome because this belief in American exceptionalism is something that every new generation has to make its own if we expect our republic and our liberties to be secure and to live on. For America to survive we’ve got to pass this on to that next generation. And to understand that we have to go back to the beginning of our republic and to the heart of what it means to be an American.

And I do wish that we had a lot of time tonight to talk about a lot of examples that we could give of things we’re doing right, but things that we could be doing better. We don’t have much time but, I want to hit on this. You see most countries are the result of accidents of history, either wars of conquest or peace treaties, things like that. But America is different. We’re not the product of historical accident, but of design. We’re the only country in history that was founded on an ideal. And that ideal is liberty. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And the genius of our founding fathers is that they took that – took what the Declaration of Independence calls the laws of nature and of nature’s God and those laws that, as the Apostle Paul, says are written on our hearts – and these providential forefathers of ours, they designed a Constitution that enshrined them and allowed people to live within them. And it’s an awesome gift given to us in this Declaration of Independence, which really was a declaration of responsibility too, and in our Constitution, including the Bill of Rights.

There’s an anecdote about Margaret Thatcher, who is a big fan of America, she was a good friend of Ronald Reagan’s, remember. She agreed with this enshrinement of God given liberty. It’s said that during a meeting about the British Conservative party’s best course of action to take during an economic crisis in the ‘70s, that she was arguing with some so-called political pragmatist who was arguing in favor of a Third Way between free market capitalism and socialism, and before he was even finished, Margaret Thatcher reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” and she slapped it on the table and she said, “This is what we believe in!” – this “Constitution of Liberty”.

And in that same way every American should and could whenever she or he is challenged to define what America really stands for, that American should be able to pull out a copy of our very own Constitution of liberty and say “This is what we stand for. This is what makes us different.” It’s the very thing that all of our politicians and our men and women in uniform – it is what they swear to uphold and to defend. And it’s the glue that holds us together as Americans as we strive for a more perfect union.

But something seems to be missing, especially it seems like in this last year or two. Something’s missing in this more enlightened day, I guess some people want to consider this day. But here’s the crux of the issue. It’s what Dennis Prager was trying to get at. The Constitution has given us an amazingly valuable governing principles and institutions. That this Constitution provides us with checks and balances and limited government with enumerated powers and an independent judiciary and states rights, as protected under the 10th Amendment.

But though those principles that are enshrined are still the best possible protection against tyranny, they are not enough in and of themselves to assure the survival and success of liberty or the survival of our country. There have been other countries that have sometimes managed to kind of live by essentially the same laws of nature that America has, that we enshrined in our founding documents. Countries have tried to copy our Constitution and our institutions, but if you think about it, not all of them are still free today. But it is human nature to want to be free. The people living in these countries they so want to be free – countries that have tried to copy what it is that America does, but they haven’t been successful.

In all countries, even in the worst tyrannies, you’ll find people courageous enough to stand up for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it is this striving that helped bring down the Berlin Wall, remember, and it made one brave man stare down a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square, and it brought thousands of people onto the streets of Tehran to defy the unelected dictatorship of their country. What a contrast, by the way, between the ultimate sacrifice made about a year ago by the beautiful young Iranian woman Neda Soltan – she was shot through the heart and bleeding to death on the streets of Tehran, while demonstrating for her freedom, and for women’s rights, for equal rights. What a contrast between her and the students or the political operatives anyway maybe, not students necessarily, here, who spent their valuable, precious time diving through dumpsters before this event in order to silence someone with whom they prejudicially thought that maybe they would disagree with. What a waste of resources.

Now a suggestion for those dumpster divers: Instead of trying to tell people to sit down and shut up maybe you tell, spend some time telling people, like our president, to finally stand up and speak out for those like Neda, as she sought her freedom – she was willing to die for it – and to speak about perhaps the brutal, brutal suppression of Iran’s Green Movement, and may it become a Green Revolution. Students and political operatives who have been part of the controversy of this event tonight, goodness gracious, you have a chance to hold America’s leadership to the high ideals on which this country was founded. Please take that opportunity. It really is much more worthy and important than rummaging through garbage bins to reveal to the world perhaps someone’s demand for bendy straws.

Speaking to a couple of new friends that I made on this day, who have come from Iran, as a matter of fact, they have reminded me of America’s opportunity to export our democracy in such a good way. That is so encouraging and so inspiring to me to keep up the good fight.

But, okay, back to the point though, as inspiring as these revolutions are, that these aforementioned revolutions, and as hopeful as the efforts at emulating our successful Constitution may be, in the end we can learn as much though from the failed attempts at copying our institutions as from the successful ones. And again, I wish that we had more time.

One way to get more examples of some of these failed revolutions and what we can learn from them so that we do not repeat the mistakes of other countries in the past is, I’ll do a little advertisement here. If you watch on Fridays, Founders Fridays, Glenn Beck, he highlights much…Founders Fridays, this is my reminder. Yes, the poor man’s version of a teleprompter. That’s one thing you forgot, you didn’t get me a teleprompter. But, yeah, when the media hands you lemons, you make lemonade. Every speech I do I get to do a free advertisement, cause I know you guys are going to pick it up back there. So Glenn Beck’s Founders Fridays. He’ll tell you a lot more about these failed attempts, maybe successful attempts with other countries even in the past.

And historians agree though for example that, one example we hear much about, the German Weimar Republic had the most democratic constitution in the world. Did you know that? In human history. The historians look back and say their constitution was even more democratic than our own. But that same constitution allowed a man named Adolf Hitler to seize power because of some tweaks in the law and some misinterpretations of what the constitution actually said. It allowed, it allowed then Adolf Hitler to seize power and plunge the world into a nightmare period of chaos and war and genocidal murder. These failures like that one show us that freedom doesn’t just depend on institutional guarantees or words written on a document. It is also and above all a question of culture.

And here’s where the university system comes in. To most Americans freedom isn’t just an ideal or words written on a charter of liberty. It is a way of life for most of us. It’s in our lively public debates which give us opportunity to exercise our Constitutional rights to free speech even. And it’s in our free markets which give everyone with an idea and with a willingness to work hard, to really work hard, to make something of themselves in this country. And it’s in our voluntary associations and our culture of most generous voluntary charitable giving. When we see someone having troubles for instance, our instinctive response for most of us it’s not well, “What’s the government going to do about it?” No, our response is, “What can I do to help? How can I jump in there and help?”

It’s this love of freedom and the moral capital that’s generated through these free markets and these free associations that has helped keep our great republican experiment alive for more than two hundred years now. So when we see Washington straying from those ideals, the free market system that has built America into the strongest, the strongest, most generous country on earth it’s why we know we’re on the wrong path right now, and we have to turn some things around.

America may be founded by laws see, but it’s sustained by a morality that’s recognized by so many other countries even. As the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville said America is a great country because America is a good country. And Dennis Prager’s point that night in Denver was that this uniquely American culture of freedom it needs protecting and nurturing and it needs to be carefully handed over from one generation to the next, and Reagan used to speak of this too. So schools, the universities, need to take note of this message I wish. It’s where education does comes in.

President Kennedy once spoke of the “survival and success of liberty.” Well there can be no survival and success of liberty without an education in freedom and the values that made this country great. Values like thrift and perseverance and responsibility and work ethic, reward for honest hard work.

And some might say that there is a contraindication here perhaps. They’d argue that academic freedom is incompatible with our need for a civic education that instills in young people the wisdom and the patriotic grace necessary for the survival and the success of liberty. But I think that they are wrong. I think that they are dangerously wrong. The fact that we allow or should allow for a healthy and free academic debate of all ideas doesn’t mean that we have to believe that all ideas are equally valid. Unfortunately too often that turns into just one small step away from claiming that well there isn’t just one right answer to the question “what is right, what is good or just or true” to saying that there are no right answers to these questions. That’s where relativism comes into play, and that turns into nihilism. And then we find people saying, “Well, then nothing is truth. Therefore, anything goes. Just do it. Everything’s permitted. There’s no truth.” If this cultural relativism is confined merely to a few individuals, the exceptions to the norm, well that’s one thing, but we have seen before what happens when whole sections of society fall into that trap.

Take note of this. Consider that would the brutality of communism have lasted as long as it did if there hadn’t been a large group of people here in the West who were willing to essentially accommodate it for fear of daring to even condemn it? For a long time, folks, it was kind of considered sophisticated to take a position somewhere between freedom and communism. And it took a supposedly an unsophisticated graduate from lowly Eureka College to bring communism to its knees, and he did it by simply calling an evil empire what it was – evil.

There’s an important lesson here for us today. A free republic can only survive if its citizens are willing and able to defend it ideologically and to stand up for its founding principles. And there’s an old conservative joke. It says that an elite liberal is someone who is so broad-minded that they can’t even take their own side in an argument. I think I can apply to some of the college professors I have met.

But you know…but that’s really no joke when we have seen even recently American diplomats apologizing to a communist dictatorship because of one of our sister states here in the good old United States of America – Arizona just trying to enforce an American federal law, to apologize for that.

Or if we get an administration, if we get an administration that unilaterally tries to end a war on terror, not by winning it, but instead by no longer referring to it as a war on terror. As if the evil terrorists will stop attacking us once we proclaim that we just won’t call it terrorists or terrorism anymore. That’s not how we’re going to win this thing.

That is as dangerously naive as the supposedly broad-minded intellectuals who defend repulsive practices like, like female mutilation in some countries, simply because well they claim well that’s part of their culture so we don’t talk about it. We’ll tolerate that. That’s part of their culture. That reminds me of the nineteenth century British general Sir Charles Napier. He was commander-in-chief in India. Years ago, he made a controversial decision to ban the barbaric practice of Suttee. And that’s where Indian men would burn a widow alive by putting her on a funeral platform, a pyre, with her dead husband. When Indian men protested that hey this ritual is just part of our culture. Well Napier answered that if they insisted on exercising that cultural right then he’d introduce them to a British custom. And what he told them was, well, in Britain, when men burn a woman alive, we hang them. So you build your funeral platforms, and we’ll build our gallows. You follow your custom. We’ll follow ours. And needless to say, that terrible crime against women became scarcer and scarcer under Napier’s insistence.

Like him, we too, we have to have the courage of our convictions and taking a stand against evil when confronted with it, and sometimes that means calling evil by its name. For example, regardless of what some politically correct intellectuals say, a terrorist like Osama Bin Laden is not a freedom fighter. He does not fight for freedom; he fights against it. And he, fighting against democracy and all of our ancient liberties, how dare we want to label him anything that has a kind of a positive connotation as being a freedom fighter?

And it’s not just about calling evil, evil. It’s not just about being against something, but it is being for something right. It’s about being unashamed to defend what is good about our culture and in our country. Not thinking that we must apologize for what America stands for. But we must honor our belief in the fundamental rights and the dignity of every innocent human being. And we must celebrate our relentless sunny optimism. Remember that’s what Reagan was known for. That had to of come from California, that sunny optimism. And that pioneering spirit that built this country. It inspired us to cross oceans and carve out a life in the wilderness, and by the sweat of our brow to create and contribute and to build a better life in America.

We must embrace our entrepreneurial drive to build and to produce and to innovate and allow America to remain the world standard bearer for excellence. And we must affirm our willingness to stand up for people across the globe who are yearning to be free. They look to us. We are that beacon of hope for what it means to be free. And truly that is nothing to apologize for.

Now we could spend precious valuable time trying to build some complicated bureaucratically blessed new national civics curriculum I’m sure in all of our schools. But to be honest in the end it all comes down to good old fashioned commonsense. And I know that on a lot of college campuses that ain’t a real cool thing. It’s not real hip to just have some common sense. I know. I know. But ask parents what they want in their child’s education. And they’re probably going to tell you that they don’t care much for all this political stuff. What a parent desires for their child’s education is basic. They want the three Rs and they want true history taught of our country, our laws, our traditions, our arts, and our literature and our heroes and our statesmen. They want true teaching of our geography and biology and getting to know the world in which we live in and the beautiful creatures which we share this planet with. Within science, finding out how things work and unraveling the mysteries of the universe and not shying away from being able to debate differing sides of theories and ideas. And a basic knowledge of right and wrong. That’s what we desire in our children’s education.

And obviously these things aren’t exclusively the purview of universities, but schools and universities do play such a crucial role in educating young people about what it means to be an American. And it is up to the universities to help make sure that our liberties are secured for the next generation.

And you do that by promoting those values on which our free society has been built. And sometimes too by opposing those that undermine it to have the boldness, the courage, like Ham has at this university, to kind of buck the tide, not just go with the flow. As a commercial fisherman I look down there at the run of fish, and I notice only dead fish go with the flow. But someone like Ham [Shirvani, CSU Stanislaus President], not just going along to get along, but not being afraid to kind of shake it up. And to allow that debate of different sides of issues. That’s what’s valuable here on this campus.

Politicians have to do their part too by ensuring the survival of the institutions on which our free society is built. One can’t do one without the other. President Kennedy said “Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.” From Valley Forge to Gettysburg to Omaha Beach, the fate of America has always kind of skirted a precipice. But most of us, we never doubt that there’s been a providential hand that has guided us and is guiding us towards a better future. Education’s highest aim should be instilling in students a sense of this uniquely American predicament – of the fragility of it as well as the greatness of this republican experiment of ours – and an awareness of the survival and the success of liberty depends on them.

And I do believe that America is great because she is good. And that we are a force for good in this world, again not something to apologize for, but something to be proud of. America is truly the exceptional country, and we are in the words of Lincoln, that last best hope on earth. And if we do it right, we remain in the words of the Golden State’s Ronald Reagan, the shining city on a hill, we’re the “abiding alternative to tyranny,” so let us help our young people understand this. Let’s teach the next generation what it means to be American. And you are so on the right track here at CSU. So God bless you.

Thank you for being a part of the solution. God bless you, and God bless America.

*Governor Palin obviously made a slip of the tongue here. Eureka is in Illinois. In fact, she mentioned Eureka College during her speech in Illnois a few months back, so we know she knows where it is, as Adrienne Ross notes here.

6 Responses to “Gov. Palin Discusses Freedom, Education at Stanislaus”

1. Tweets that mention PalinTV » Blog Archive » Gov. Palin Discusses Freedom, Education at Stanislaus -- Topsy.com Says:
   June 26th, 2010 at 11:38 am

   [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sarah Palin Links, pat riccio and Sarah Storm Report, Palin Twibe. Palin Twibe said: via @palintv Gov. Palin Discusses Freedom, Education at Stanislaus http://dlvr.it/23QZQ #palin [...]

2. JoeyMars1 Says:
   June 26th, 2010 at 1:59 pm

   Remarkable speech! She says it all

3. Elektra Says:
   June 27th, 2010 at 10:09 am

   Yes, she does, Joey. And the guys caught on open mic revealed so much in their criticism of this speech. They are extremely shallow and clueless making them, by default, evil; so evil that they can draw no conclusions in her speech. What was it they said? “She didn’t finish one point”?
   I enjoy not hearing “I” at the beginning of every other sentence, but because they have trouble understanding speech that is so unselfish and unifying, they can make no common sense in it. Kind of like her example of people so broad minded that they can’t even take their own side of an argument.
   heh…”I” are the new god.

4. Sarah Palin “Polarizing”. To Whom? « Sarah Palin Information Blog Says:
   June 27th, 2010 at 11:01 am

   [...] talks oil in East Texas June 27, 2010Video Highlights: Gov. Palin at Oil Palace Texas June 27, 2010Gov. Palin Discusses Freedom, Education at Stanislaus June 26, [...]

5. Twitted by heytammybruce Says:
   June 27th, 2010 at 4:30 pm

   [...] This post was Twitted by heytammybruce [...]

6. El discurso de Sarah Palin en Stanislaus University – La izquierda, loca de atar (y II) « CONSERVADOR EN ALASKA Says:
   July 5th, 2010 at 1:04 am

   [...] clic aquí para ver la intervención de Sarah Palin en Stanislaus [...]

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