A Republic if you can Keep it

Good evening everyone. I've addressed you many times throughout the years and I've held different titles while doing it, CEO of Ethereum, CEO of IOHK, founder of Cardano, and the title I'm most proud of and the one I'm addressing you today is American Citizen. I was born in America. I'm a product of America. I was educated in America.

I'm part of American institutions. I attended American universities. I've traveled to 47 states and I've had the opportunity to meet so many amazing people and the success that I have today in my personal and professional life is a direct result of my upbringing and being part of that culture and tradition. And as an American, I remember the foremost story that we were all told and warned of. Back in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was leaving the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and someone in the crowd shouted at him as he was disembarking and said, Doctor, what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?

And Benjamin Franklin replied, a republic, if you can keep it. This has been a long tradition and a long warning that each administration since Washington on has had to adhere to and somehow find a way to honor. The peaceful transition of power is by definition an American characteristic, regardless of the circumstances. In 1861, our nation was cleaved in two with the election of Abraham Lincoln and despite that, elections were held in 1864 with the very general Lincoln had appointed to run the war for the Union running against him. Despite that, there was still a peaceful continuation of America.

We have seen plagues. We have seen racial chaos. We have seen slavery. We have seen world wars. And despite all these things, we found a way as people to rally together.

What has happened recently, brewing over a multi-decade period, has been a systematic delegitimization of our government. It did not begin in 2020. It did not begin in 2016. Since I have been born, the last republican president who has been legitimately elected, according to many on the left, was George H.W.

Bush in 1988. Since that time period, 2000, 2004, 2016, there have been numerous allegations of election fraud or delegitimacy, ranging from the Supreme Court to other such things. The exact same allegations have been levied on the other side. And today, I witness for the first time in my life, protesters storm the Capitol, the very same Capitol where our founding fathers delivered the State of the Union, the very same Capitol that every law, good or bad, has been made, every declaration of war and major event in our nation's history has now been taken over temporarily by protesters, objecting an election result. We no longer have legitimacy in our institutions.

And this is a direct consequence of many decades of delegitimization, a divided and divisive media, and people no longer being able to understand or listen to each other. These flames were fanned by a totalitarian demagogue who, once he lost an election, instead of choosing to accept that result, even if he had grievances with the process, instead of using his incredible mandate, his charisma, his cult of personality, and enormous resources into something productive, perhaps a constitutional convention, perhaps ballot reform, perhaps massive election reform, he chose instead to try to drive this nation to the brink of a civil war. The incoming president has no mandate. Joe Biden is a president in name only. Half of this country does not believe in him, respect him, or feel that he is capable of leading us in any capacity.

And he must understand that. As he takes the oath of office this month, if he chooses to invest what little power he has procedurally and constitutionally into inflicting upon this nation his brand of wolfmanism that comes from his party, it will only further drive the divisions between the American people to an extent where I believe within my lifetime we will experience a civil war. We cannot agree on basic facts anymore. This is no longer the case where events happen and people take delight or sadness based upon them. This is now the case that events happen and we fundamentally disagree on what happened.

I saw the election. You all saw the election. Yet despite that, many people in this country firmly believe the election was illegitimate, mass fraud occurred without any evidence. And what they did is they chose to accept videos on YouTube, on Twitter, and then when more than 50 court cases were litigated again and again and again, the very lawyers bringing them on were directly asked by judges, is this an election fraud case? Is this the case where crimes have happened?

The lawyers did not have the courage in a court of law because they understood that they would be held accountable to say yes. And nearly all of these cases, except for a few procedural ones, were dismissed in the harshest of possible ways. If you honestly, deep in your body, believe that the election system is corrupt, it is not the solution to give a man who doesn't care about you, us, or our nation power. He won't solve that problem. If you honestly believe our election system is broken and corrupt, then let's get to the heart of the issue.

Demand change in it at the state level where we still have power. And if we can't get it there, then let's band together and form a constitutional convention and change our constitution. The first time in 200 plus years. But let's do that then. If that's what it takes to restore legitimacy in this nation, by storming our capital, something even the Confederacy couldn't accomplish, by burning down all of our institutions, by believing that people who disagree with you politically are evil and desire this nation to be destroyed, we will accomplish nothing but pushing ourselves to a point where we will lose everything we have been given and everything our fathers and forefathers fought so hard for over the past two centuries.

This is our republic, for better or for worse. It only works when we work with it and for it. If we choose to ignore that duty that we as Americans have, regardless of our grievances or the injustices perceived or realized, then we will lose what we were given. And we no longer deserve to rule ourselves or govern ourselves. There are those amongst us who have already decided that we are incapable of self-governance.

And we can see day after day, legislation after legislation, the censorship on social media for fake news, it comes from a cynical belief that you cannot determine what is true and thus your masters must decide for you. If we storm a capital, looking at the allegations of election fraud, one has to wonder in a cynical way, perhaps there's a bit of truth to those statements. This is supposed to be a free country. We are supposed to respect the peaceful transition of power. We're supposed to acknowledge that sometimes elections don't always go the way we expect them to or desire them to.

And what? There's always another election. There's always a tomorrow. There's always another opportunity for us to rise up and do things a little differently. But instead, this time, we have chosen to descend into a madness which we will not recover from if we continue to embrace it.

We cannot live in a nation where half the people hate the other half the people. We cannot live in a nation where we cannot agree on basic things. We cannot live in a nation where everyone professes and claims to be an expert on everything with so much certainty that they're allowed to break up families with so much certainty. That they decide to cast away every institution that they've inherited regardless of the evidence to the contrary. Nothing works if that's the case.

We're at the brink. And this is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue. This is an American issue that each and every American should give a damn about because it's the only thing that we really can give a damn about. And don't for a moment say that some New World Order is in charge. We're in charge until we give it to someone else.

And if you feel that the ballot box is broken, then let's go change it. If you feel that the federal government will not listen, then let's go change it. And we have that power collectively. But we will accomplish nothing with division and violence and an utter lack of empathy. And we will accomplish nothing by investing all of our hopes and dreams in the demagogue of the week, whether it be Trump or Biden.

They offer us nothing but empty promises. They offer us nothing but a trail of broken tears. It's our country. It's not theirs. We're supposed to lead ourselves.

We're supposed to make the decisions about where to go and what to do. And I'm really tired. The last year was the worst year in recent memory for most of us. Over 300,000 people died. Hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed.

Families were broken up. So many people lost loved ones to suicide. Domestic violence was at an all-time high. Marriages were destroyed as a direct consequence of an economic calamity that didn't need to happen. Our government failed us.

And I understand and feel your anger more than you can imagine. I've seen it firsthand, the mistake after mistake after mistake. I spoke with governors in October of U.S. states who didn't even know when vaccines were being distributed to their states or how.

Governors in charge of that distribution were left out of the loop. We saw massive nepotism and corruption, where private companies were given billions of dollars to build drugs with no liability and then told if they were successful, they would be guaranteed billions in profits. And if they were unsuccessful, they'd suffer no consequences. Yet we had the power to just directly take them through the Defense Production Act. We chose not to.

And the consequences of that were deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The consequences of that was a further decay in trust in our institutions. And the people who are now coming into power have absolutely no desire to litigate that past or hold those accountable who harmed us in such egregious ways, because the reality is those who are coming in power were just as complicit. So we have choices to make. Do we continue going down this road?

Do we continue hating each other, not understanding each other, thinking we are so right that we must discard anyone who disagrees with us? Or do we take a step back from the brink and absorb the cold, hard truth that all of the things that have happened are collectively our fault, my fault, your fault? Because after all, this is a government of the people. We voted for this in one way or another. We empowered it through consent, either explicit or implicit, one way or another.

And if we're going to rise up, then rise up in the most productive of ways. Don't focus on your favorite leader who must be removed from power or given power. Don't tear down the monuments of the past or storm the Capitol. Let's talk about how do we rebuild these institutions in a way that they don't make mistakes that they continue to make today. Let's talk about what would be a legitimate system.

Let's talk about how do we avoid voter fraud ever again if you firmly believe it's happening. Let's talk about how people can actually be listened to. Not every single person you disagree with is evil or crazy. They have grievances too. And it wasn't too long ago that we could disagree without being disagreeable.

And now we live in an age of cancel culture. We live in an age of exiling. We live in an age of demonization. That must end. And we, collectively, are the ones who are doing it.

The politicians are crude reflections of our will and our desires. When we descended into a vanity social media culture, then we elected a reality TV star. This is not an accident. This is not a coincidence. We deserve the narcissistic demagogues we've invited in because that's where we've gotten to.

And until we acknowledge that as a society, until we take a step back and be honest with ourselves about our own limitations, our own lacks of knowledge, and embrace expertise, embrace proper thought, we're never going to get out of this. It's only going to get worse. And what? We're very close to the pictures we've seen decades past with the fall of the Berlin Wall or statues falling, where we say, wow, look at that government topple. It wasn't too long ago that the people ruling those governments and the people living within those governments would consider such things to be inconceivable.

I considered, at the beginning of this year, it inconceivable that the seat of legislative power of my country being stormed by random protesters would never happen. It was just something I'd never bet on or consider. And it did. How much more will we tolerate? How much more will we endure?

How much more will you endure before we say enough? And we let go of the partisanship. We let go of the artificial divisions. And we realize that our neighbors are not our enemies. And we realize that people who have different ideas are not our enemies.

And we start listening to each other and trying to find common ground. How much more pain will this country endure before we start rebuilding our institutions in a way so that we do not have to endure this pain? How many more demagogues will we put into power? And how much more egregious behavior will we excuse? Hypocrisy will we excuse and explain away with cynicism?

This is not sports. These aren't the favorite teams of the week. This is your life. This is your children's life. This is my country, too.

And I do not want to see us descend into another civil war. I do not want to see our federal government become so vicious and powerful that because we can't handle our freedoms, it strips them from us and then rules us a dictatorship, as many are already trying to do. We cannot allow this to happen. This must stop. And this is the day that it must stop.

People need to calm down. They need to reflect. And they need to wake up tomorrow and start formulating a plan about how we're going to restore legitimacy in our institutions or build new ones that haven't, how we're going to forgive each other for the sins of the past and move on to higher waters so that we don't get swept away. And to the demagogues who cause these things, to the demagogues who profit from these things, there will be a day of reckoning, if not in this life, then in the next. It is shameful that people desire power so badly that they're willing to do anything necessary to keep it, and when they lose it, to brutally punish all members of society on the way down.

This is not the country that I grew up in, and it's not the country I'd like to live in. I'm an American, and I'll do my best to fix it, and I hope you do, too. The reason I joined my industry, the reason we build the technology we build is because it's a different way of doing things, where you don't need a president, you don't need a dictator, you don't need a glorious leader. It's a new way of doing things where people can work together and find a way collectively, emergently, to solve problems without having to entrust one institution or one person with absolute authority. If we achieve anything, if we can get these types of systems built into America's governance systems, built into our state governance systems, our municipal governance systems, then we have achieved the greatest of things and continued the great experiment that was started with that constitutional convention.

I'd like to keep my republic. I think you would, too, because we've already played out the alternative, and the hundreds of millions of people who have died from starvation, purges, and war can attest to the consequences of failure of democracy and failure of freedom. We do not want to go down this road. This is not a game, and we must not go down this road. We must move on.

A new president is coming into power. Hold him accountable and remind him he does not have a mandate to fundamentally change the fabric of our society, and that the only thing that truly matters is a restoration of trust and faith in institutions. And if we cannot achieve that at the federal level, then we must band together and form a new constitutional convention and do it at home and get 30-plus states on board and rewrite the founding documents so that we can put new leaders in who have that mandate. But if we blindly continue down this path of Armageddon, we will then learn the pain that other nations have learned and we knew in the 19th century. And I don't want to go down that road.

I've always believed in the best in people, and I want to continue believing in the best in people. I know we're deeply flawed. I know that we let each other down from time to time, and I know that we're imperfect. The point of governance and the point of humility and being an adult is recognizing that despite the fact that things can be bad sometimes and we can let people down, we can always tomorrow rise to the occasion and measure up to the challenges and solve the problems so that those who come after us do not have to endure the nightmares that we did. That's a universal truth of wisdom and something that all those who came before us had to learn and do for us to enjoy the lives that we have today.

I'd like to believe that each and every one of you can rise to the occasion, shed off this thinking that's not so productive, and allow us to restore faith in a nation that deserves, because of all the good things it's done, to persist. And not become a nation that doesn't. Thank you.