in fact, i'm sure you could. but it's a dwindling number of people that will stand up and so, that's why it's on us to do the hard things in in moment and push one more time, except he'll be the 2028 nominee, too, probably. but let's push one more time. [applause] >> all right, you know what? that was so good that as my gift to all of you, i won't tell you why she's wrong and that we're all doomed. all right. thank you very much. thank you for coming out to the show. we really appreciate it. [applause] >> all right. we're through the first quarter, thank you. we'll now break for lunch. just a note when you come back from lunch there will be three panels outside, principles first banner with lincoln on it, feel free to sign that with one of our sharpies, we have sharpies out there, when you

come back from lunch put a pen on the board and we'll get started at 1 p.m. with elissa fair, cassidy and sam. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> all right. if people are standing up,

maybe we can filter back into our seats here and i will introduce the next panel. this next discussion-- and they can make their way onto the stage, our panelists while i'm introducing them. this next discussion, i think, is really important, it's on a lot of people's minds and that the title of the panel is moral leadership in america. principles for state, church, culture and community. you know, i think this is an issue that we've seen increasing in importance, you know, christian communities, faith communities, what has happened to them in the wake of all of this political turmoil that we've had in our country and the way that moral leadership matters, telling the truth matters, and how we form those morals in our country are important. and the panel we have here to discuss it with us here today is really second to none.

this is exactly who you would want talking about these things at a principles first summit. hosting the conversation will be the president of the trinity forum, if you're not aware of that organization, it's a fantastic organization, great printed materials, i encourage you to check them out in all of their literature that they produce, mr. michael weir. the president at the center for christianity and public life, and also, tackling these issues head-on and doing some great work. mona shine of the bulwark, she really needs no introduction, you're all familiar with her. she's been at this a long time and has been focused on social policy and issues of family formation in the united states, has a lot of great thoughts on that. and then, we're delighted to have, i think, for the first time appearance, also, at the summit. mr. robert a george, writer and speaker, you're probably all familiar with him from twitter.

formerly from bloomberg propose, but writes incisive commentary about our culture, the state of american life and i'm thrilled to hear from all of them today. so, thank you. [applause] >> well, thank you very much, great to be with you all. i will confess it's a bit intimidating to have to follow the courage of cassidy, elissa and charlie sikes with a panel on moral philosophy, but here we are and if nothing else, the last few years have proven the incredible importance of this topic. it shows the reason why this topic, moral formation, and moral leadership, preoccupy so many of the best minds throughout history, the historians, the moral philosophers, whether it's plutark, aristotle. it shows why this preoccupies

the minds of the founders and framers, why they wrestled with the federalist papers, what it meant to check and con strain and channel self-interest, to check factions and to cultivate the better angel's of one's nature. george washington in the farewell address talked about the political prosperity and to freedom itself, that moral leadership and moral character in citizens plays. and it's also why we are at such an important and in many ways, unsettling crossroads right now. while it's certainly true throughout history, it's not like we've had one great moral leader after the other, there have been plenty of villains and scoundrels, who have been citizens and moral leaders, but we've retained a sense that a more perfect union is possible

and we as a country have also faced, challenged and overcome some very significant, both moral failings and challenges in our past. right now, we are at a point though of great challenge and peril. on both ideological and partisan polls, there are real challenges to the idea of moral formation and moral leadership, whether it's on the left, where character and morality itself is seen largely as a smoke screen for power plays and virtue and blame are seen more likely to whether you belong to a colonizer class or based on the intersection ever our identities, as well as on the hard right where frankly, evil anilistic leader whose worst tendencies of cruelty, belligerent and disonty have not only been tolerated, but valorized what it means to win

and to show strength. so, what does moral formation and moral leadership mean? what does it look like? how can we cultivate it and what difference does it make? it will be hard to get through all of this, but we certainly have a panel here, i think, who can make a huge dent in kind of our understanding of why this is so important, the attention we should be paying to it and how we can cultivate it for a more perfect union. so, just in starting off, i want to turn to my fellow panelists and michael, perhaps we'll start with you to say, when we speak about moral 0 formation and moral character in our leaders and in our citizens, what are we talking about? how is character formed? >> great, i'm really happy to be here, really happy to be on this panel. i think part of the problem here right at the outset is that in politics morality, the sum of what it means to be

moral has been taken up with having the right positions or the right answers and i think that that -- the way in which that conception of morality alone, the way that that can be misused has become really apparent. so when we talk about formation, and i talk about spiritual formation, in part because of that region, the spirit just refers to our character or our will. formation is about the process by which our will takes on a specific defined character. and everyone has a formation. there's no getting around it. one of the reasons i love the name of this gathering, i love principles first, is because it could just be the organization for the right principles. principles first implies that we want to be the kind of

people who can uphold our principles even when it's difficult, even-- cassidy is a wonderful example, right? she didn't just have the right ideas. a lot of those people have the ideas. a lot of people if you ask them in a survey would say, yeah, rule of law, fantastic. the real test is are we the kind of people who can follow through on our intentions in the moment of crisis. and that's a real issue for us. cf elliott once suggested-- by the way he wasn't positive about this, it was an observation, said that the great human endeavor has been to try to create a system so perfect that people no longer have to be good and that is the political conseit that we have, that we can have the right answers and back them up and

that's why the formation is so critical. >> i want to invite my fellow panelists to jump in. if there are other thoughts, feel free. >> i just want to thank all of you to be here and all the people i was able to greet and talk with last night during the day so far here. it's so gratifying to see you in the flesh. you are, you know, i'm old enough to remember george h.w. bush's expression about the great civil society that was out there. he called it a thousand points of light. ... he called it 1000 points of light. that is what i see in this group and it is unbelievably moving so thank you for being here. [applause] i love what you said, michael.

so i love what you said, michael. i was thinking before this panel i was thinking about moral formation and that it's very important morality is key to a thriving democratic republic and with all. kinds of expressions f this from the founders where, for example, john adams said our constitution was made for a religious and moral people. it is wholly inadequate for the governance of any other. and yet, look, we have to be realistic. the people on the maga side and the people on the far left, they also feel that they are the moral ones. they think we are evil and they will say that very clearly. so kristi noem at cpac said there are two kinds of americans, two kinds of people in this country, she said right now. there are people who love america, and there are people who hate america. and i would like --

[inaudible] i want reflect on this for a moment because it's important to understand i think, or at least try to understand the moral reasoning that can lead people to embrace what we think is one of theof most wicked, evil forcs that has darkened america's doorstep in our lifetimes. and so we have to think about the fact that they argue that the house is on fire. the country is in dire, it's in a dire emergency, and because of that we have to turn to a strong man like trump. and they say after all, if your house were on fire and your neighbor came along with a garden hose, you wouldn't turn his help away because he was a sex offender, right? you would accept the garden hose. you would accept the help. and then you would think in very kindly. now, of course in that analogy

you would thank him but then you wouldn't elect him president of the neighborhood association.f [laughing] that is i think so key to why the maga people always need to say this is an emergency. the country is burning. biden is destroying america. it is, it is all hands on deck, because they know that they have embraced this really morally compromised, horrible leader. and so there is never a time when they can acknowledge that the country is actually just fine. that we are not in any kind of dire emergency. that is the secri

don't know if it is a secret but it is my interpretation for their justification. a great science fiction writer once said "man is not a rational, but a rationalizing creature." and they do rationalize their support for trump, so they need to make the other side seem evil. that is why we have all of this nonsense about the biden crime family. biden is many things. a master criminal, he is not. but, that's the key to their moral universe. whether we can puncture that, whether we can appeal as cherie says to the better angels of their nature, i don't know. certainly not for the maga hard-core, but potentially for

people who are not quite at that level, but who are in the more persuadable category. >> mona, i get what you are saying on the robert line. it is a real honor to be on this panel. i should tell everyone here, i signed up for this conference about seven or eight days ago. then, the next day, i got an email saying would you like to be on a panel? what i am saying is, this could also happen to you. whether that is good or bad is up for you to decide. i would slightly disagree with something mona said. while it's true that maga is

saying the country is on fire, and you said ultimately that they overstated the case that the country is fine, i would say the country is not fine. maga and donald trump are reflections of the fact how far the country has gone off course. right. the thing is though, it is not just that. as you were saying before, this view that we pat ourselves on the back and say we are the somewhat sane middle, those on the left and those on the right that call us evil because either we are not woke enough or not maga enough for them. we cannot rise to the moment

that is required. just in the context of where we have gotten to and where this moment of amorality, i sort of see it in a spectrum of a 25-year, quarter-century kind of decline. just so we can get a little bit of old school here, i would bring up a name that is not been mentioned much so far and that is bill clinton. i think when you go back to that moment of well, it depends on what sex is. it was at that moment where you have the president of the united states that is in a sense putting moral relativism into

the public sphere. and while there was bipartisan consensus at the time that the president had done something wrong, the question was what was the solution about that? republicans thought it was impeachment and democrats said censure and move on and so on. but what ultimately came out of that, the democrats, in almost any other moment in our history, the bipartisan consensus, the pressure would have been strong enough to get the president of the united states to resign. but, what we ended up with was a decision by the democrats and allies in the media and so forth that what he had done was

not so bad that it required resignation, and instead, there was a powering through. the first principle, if you will, at that point was kind of power. how can we push through against these usual ethical and moral barriers that historically would have been enough to move the president out of the way and allow the vice president to take over? instead, the president pushed through. he survived, within the question is -- but then the question is at what cost and what lesson was learned? i think one of the residual lessons is that forget about ethics, forget about actual morality.

the number one principal in politics is power. i think that's a lesson that the maga people have learned. their standardbearer has taken the clinton model and amped it up to 10. cherie: just riffing off of that a little bit. i want to ask you each your thoughts on what has gone awry. part of what i mean about this is not just a political analysis. we will hearken way back, thousands of years to saint augustine who talked about how virtue is largely properly ordering your loves and desires. ordering your values that accords with reality, wise and prudent, as well as love. loving things in the right way. when you think about that, you think something has gone on dion just -- beyond just the

political. the former president does not fill stadiums for people looking forward relishing seeing their enemies humiliated because they want to see a win in the next election. there is something that we the people are starting to value the wrong things. starting to love domination and humiliation of our enemies too much. what has gone on? mona, we can start with you. mona: nice, small topic. there are many things that are tearing us apart. we have a radical change in family structure where many people now are living alone. a record number of people are living alone and record numbers of people are lonely, which is not exactly the same thing in

every case. you have lots of kids growing up with very chaotic home environments, where they not only see their parents split up, but then the parents have new relationships and the kids are shunted around two different homes with different stepsiblings and all of that. we know that is not good for the stability and mental health of the kids raised in those environments. this has been going on for several decades. we also have the rise of the internet and the information silo, which gets mentioned a lot but it is crucial. when i was growing up, people say you are what you eat. i think now, we are what news we consume. new can tell everything you need to know about a random, 70-year-old, single man who lives in central pennsylvania by whether you walk into his house if fox news is on all the time

or something else. people have become so insulated and into their own bespoke realities. they create their own realities and it is unbelievably disruptive of a country that is by its very nature large, pluralistic. we have lots of different communities. huge geographic diversity. religious, racial, every kind of diversity. and we need to be able to have certain things that we agree on. we have to have certain facts that we all except as true so we can compromise with one another and we can say, ok, you like more immigration, we like less immigration, let's meet in the middle. that has become practically impossible in our age of bespoke realities where people on the right don't just think that democrats want more immigration

or have more liberal views about it. they think that democrats have a scheme, a plot run by jews to import more dark skinned people into the country in the great replacement. so, how do you compromise with such a terrible -- [laughter] and so, those are -- it's both a technological challenge that was brought to us by the internet and also by cable television. so, the technological challenge is part of our problem and the social challenge, as i mentioned, with more and more people living alone. let's say this last thing about being lonely and being alone. i cannot prove this, but i think people are more easily led into extremism when they are not living face to face with other humans. and having the ability to bounce off ideas.

get a reality check, right? sam saw something on the internet that says there is a scheme to run an underground railroad from mexico through canada. which by the way was on the internet. when he goes online and puts this in, you get all kinds of people who say yes, we heard that too. you are right, we agree. whereas if he said it to his wife or his live-in lover or whoever, she would say what you talk about? no. that does not sound right. there are fewer and fewer of those in real life sort of reality checks for a lot of americans. i think that is part of life we are seeing that the crazy gets more traction.

michael: the state of our politics is a reflection of the state of our souls. this is the beauty and weakness of democracy. there is no getting around the kind of people we are. if our ultimate principles derived from politics, then our ultimate principles will be subject to circumstances. that is a lot of what we've seen . in 2020, a group of social scientists came up for a framework for thinking about the particular kind of polarization we have today. they called it political sectarianism. they said it is a toxic cocktail of three ingredients. first, a version -- aversion. the tendency to dislike and distrust a political opponent. othering. the tendency to place as other

or essentially different from those who are political partisans. and then the tendency of a misplaced moralization. the elevation of political disagreement to that of good and evil. when that is the fuel of our politics, then all kinds of rationalizations can take place, similar to what robert was talking about. the problem is not that we take politics to seriously, but that we take it seriously and all of the wrong ways. if you think politics is not just about power, then that is what is going to guide your political actions. part of what we need to do is provide a vision for a politics that is not solely about who has the power, who can impose their will? that is a chief challenge because frankly, that is how our

politics has operated for quite some time. we need to have a different source. this is the issue with liberalism onboard from a higher philosophy which is that liberalism allows for decisions that are made on the basis of power. but if that is your only construction of reality, yeah, everything becomes you have one opinion about january 6, i have another. there is a truth. there is a reality. it is not just who thinks january 6 was a bunch of patriots fighting for a fair election. it was a disgraceful affront to democracy. there is an actual reality and we don't need to be insecure just because there's a difference of opinion. we actually need to understand that we can name a truth.

robert: exactly. some of us look at this partly in a political context, but we can also see this moral relativistic aspect in other institutions as well. one that i have been part of for 25 years, the media broadly understood there's a large responsibility as well. as mona said, there has been a collapse of media, partly because of the internet and the siloing of news. but, one of the greatest responsibilities that media traditionally has is to inform and to educate.

now, either yesterday or the day before, i forget when these clips ran. at one of his events, the former president was saying i am going to stand for christians because the other side is coming to take your crosses. the first thing that communists do is try to get rid of these religious symbols and so forth. basically, terrifying the base. meanwhile, you have a guest on msnbc who basically said that christian nationalists believe that our rights come from god and this is what the christian nationalists believe. this is what they are trying to do if they get into power. all you have to do is look at something like the constitution.

it has been in the news. it is something people should be able to read. you can find that it says right there, that the rights come from a creator. it is not a christian nationalists sensibility to believe that. but, when a media entity put that out there, it makes it so much easier for people on the other side to say, well, maybe trump's got a point. maybe they are trying to come after us for our religion, for what we actually believe. that sort of thing is happening from the media. meanwhile, if you are watching the house hearings a few weeks ago and you've got three

intelligent, supposedly intelligent academics who can't find it easy for them to say that, oh, if our student body calls for the death of jews, that might violate our free speech codes. when these supposedly mediating institutions also are not able to either, a, educate correctly or, b, make clear moral statements, it is not surprising that the broader society is collapsing as well. cherie: robert, i want to pick up on one of your points just now which is about our media institutions. our mediating institutions have been one of the chief ways of trying to call forth the better angels of our nature, in terms of being morally formative. institutions can also be morally

d formative -- deformative. i think it is fair to say we are at a point right now where many of our most important and formative institutions are weakened, which are true in the political sphere. congress is significantly weaker than it was just a few years ago. but also in our civic sphere, with families and churches and schools facing their own internal challenges. and, mona, maybe we can start with you. what hope do you see for the renewal and reinvigoration of morally formative institutions? mona: at the risk of getting outside my area of comfort, because i am jewish but i am very interested in what goes on in the christian world, which is far more influential obviously in this country.

there's a great book by tim alberta where he outlines -- yes, applaud that book, fantastic. the corruption of the churches and how they have become really sacrilegious. they have replaced a worship of the united states for god. they have replaced, in many cases, they are elevating donald trump to some sort of godly figure and status. and that is profoundly, obviously dangerous, deforming of our national character. the struggle within the church -- of course, they should be morally forming institutions but a lot of the pastors will say, look, they are watching fox and

the are on the internet 12 hours a day, and i've got them for two hours on sunday. it is no contest. so, people come to church now believing in qanon and that sort of thing and they are impatient with pastors who try to dissuade them. that is a huge problem. an institution, the churc6hes which should be a bulwark, if you will, against the forces of nihilism and baseless hatred and demagoguery are instead elevating it. joining in. giving fuel to the fire. the good news is there is pushback and that there are people w world who are very energetically attempting to roll it back and provide far

models. russell moore, david french, david alberta. we have to give them all the support we can and hope that is somewhat successful. people are drawn ton because it helps you to see the good and it helps you to see what is right. we have to rely on that part of human nature to prevail in the ■4it is a huge struggle to sortf wrap your arms around what's happening in the churches. to you, michael. michael: i will justcertainly, i have a new book out on the spirit of our politics and i some of you may be familiar with

the term moral theism. i introduce t i of political theism, which is supported by beliefs by side or god has a general approval of my behavior in politics because i hold the rand, there has been a development. for number of reasons we will not be able to discussod means,, what it means to be to have christian politics means to have the right answers on a few discrete policythere has been al development that is almost exclusively in theest that what it means to be a christian is to provide mental assessed to a few lines ofst kind of

character possible, so long as you're willing to nod your head yes. that'sou're in . that is fundamentally contrary tohe gospel. to the christian nationalism point, i a hesitant both substantively, but also strategically to point at a group of folks who welcome someone le ■m trump, to tell them that loving your enemies, that stuff from jesus, maybe try that in your personal lifee going to get steamrolled so let me take care of you. i'm really hesitant to say that is christian■b■4[applause] [applause] we really need,we we need to be

careful about what we are willing to give over to donald trump and his branding and his outreach. no, i feel very confident fundamentally saying that if your politics is not oriented towards the good of yourors, it. it is not christian. [applause] >> who needs a golden calf when we have golnak [laughing] i mean, we're running out of time, butlar part of the question is much broader because we also have large, arguably an increasing percentage ofs religious.

it's not just no longer chri y completely secular. if not atheist, maybe agnostic. and wn you h that society that sort ofde decides to stray away from some version of religion, the lessons that religion can still inform on a broader secular society tends to deteriorate. and the common moral language that kept the country going for 250 years or so s"tart foray. we no longer manage in a sense to speak theort of where we are. so what's going on with maga and christianity and so forth is pre fact we can't