Ben Sasse

And it did start a little bit pre-Trump because I got elected in 14, took office in 15.

And by the end of 15, I was a little bit in trouble with my party at home for not hating Democrats enough.

And I was like, but I don't.

Like there are 330 million Americans.

I didn't spend time going on the angriest tribal media channels to say that Obama wasn't born in the US.

The conspiracy theory versions of stuff became a really important marker for people to say, I really dislike those other people.

It was like, what I care about is the Ronald Reagan impulse to say,

freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

And you don't pass it along in the bloodstream.

You pass it along because we teach it.

And we haven't been teaching it since sometime between the late 60s and the early 80s.

Our civics experience is in collapse.

And at this point, I would talk about what was happening on college campuses.

It's much worse in the decades since.

But at that point, there was some polling that showed just over 35% of American college kids thought the First Amendment was dangerous.

because you might use your freedom of speech to say something that hurts somebody else's feelings.

The whole dang point of America.

The point of America is that we lay down our weapons outside the tent and you go into the tent and you say, speech cannot be violence and violence is not a form of speech.

What we believe here is that everybody is created in the image of God

They have universal rights like we need to celebrate the American civic tradition together.