Cruz: All of that train wreck is what prepared people
for a sunny, optimistic governor from California
who understood the power of freedom.
Knowles: Every conservative of every generation
in this room has known about the threats
from big government.
But there are other threats
to our freedom from other big sorts of entities.
Big Tech, which would be PolitiFact, big corporations,
which are signing up with all
of these radical Left-wing groups and advancing them.
Big, big, big, big. Big is for big bureaucracy,
all of these sorts of things.
The Conservative Movement has come so far.
Think about the growth of the Young America's Foundation.
It's just unbelievable all the people
in this room, all the campuses that you have this on.
The growth of so many conservative organizations.
But now, moving forward,
it seems like the challenges are different.
We're going to have to start changing
some of our language, looking at these
other threats. Where do we go from here?
We're all pretty happy to be together tonight,
but we're a little bit down
after the election, after the inauguration.
Where do we go from here?
Cruz: We go towards truth and light and freedom.
Look, the great thing about eternal truths.
They're always true.
Our ideas work, freedom works, free markets work.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights, free speech,
religious liberty, the fundamental liberties of humanity.
It is right and true and just.
The next two years we're going to see wild-eyed socialists
trying to do enormous damage to this country.
Their policies aren't going to work.
They don't work.
This reminds me an awful lot of the late seventies.
Scott Walker and I are both
almost exactly the same age.
We were both kids in the late seventies.
When Ronald Reagan was elected, I was 10.
When Reagan left the White House, I was 18.
It took Jimmy Carter to give us Reagan.
It took the absolute catastrophe,
the disaster of the Carter years,
it took Jimmy Carter giving away the Panama canal.
Knowles: Yeah, it's funny, that's an issue
that people don't even really think about anymore.
But so much was happening
during those years to set up the Conservative Movement.
Cruz: It took stagflation, enormous economic harm,
misery, gas lines.
It took the military being downgraded
to a level that our hostages
in Iran get taken in captivity for 444 days,
and Carter sends out a military team to try to rescue them,
and it crashes in the desert with no opposing fire.
The absolute calamity.
It took Jimmy Carter putting on a sweater
and saying you know, we live in a world of scarcity.
We don't have the money to heat your homes anymore.
So just put on a sweater and just accept malaise.
Knowles: Malaise. The new normal, you might say.
Cruz: All of that train wreck
is what prepared people for a sunny, optimistic governor
from California who understood the power of freedom.
We're in a moment just like that.
We're in a moment where we will go through some darkness,
but the answer to darkness is always light.
[audience applause]