Thank you for the invitation to be here on this wonderful occasion.

As a long-time member of the Economic Club of New York, I know that it occupies a place of great significance in our nation’s discourse.

For generations, few institutions have done more to shape how we confront the defining questions of the day.

And yet, across all those years, tonight’s gathering is without precedent as we assemble on the eve of an extraordinary moment in our history.

Over the coming days, we will celebrate 250 years of the American story and the proposition with which it began: that a free people answer to no power but their own.

But milestones of this magnitude demand more than ceremony.

They ask something of us. They invite us to reflect on the creation of our country, of course, but no less, on its condition.

Indeed, the most fitting way to honor those who founded this nation is to meet the great challenges of our own time with the same resolve that they brought to theirs.

And in that spirit, under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. Treasury is working to restore economic security as the foundation that allows a nation to fulfill its most basic obligations.

In my remarks before the Economic Club of Dallas, I detailed how the structural vulnerabilities that we allowed to accumulate over time precipitated a drift into dependence.

And last month before the Reagan Library, I noted that under President Trump, America has awoken to the risks we can no longer ignore and is now attuned to the responsibilities we can no longer neglect.

So tonight, I would like to take the next step and describe our strategy for economic statecraft, by which I mean the disciplined use of America’s economic power in service of our sovereignty.

Quietly, and with no great fanfare, President Donald Trump has resurrected the most innovative strategy of his first term.

In fact, I’ve argued that this one measure is the single most creative approach to government reform to advance in a century.

Trump’s executive order creates a new category for federal employment, set to apply to any civil servant who is working on policy and its implementation. It’s a resurrection of a similar executive order from late in his first term — promptly reversed by President Joe Biden — and the finalization of another announced in the earliest days of Trump’s second term.

What this means is rather dramatic. It brings the public sector, or at least part of it, to fit with the usual labor practices of the private sector.

This helps restore some part of people’s government. The people elect a president. The president can control employment in the executive branch rather than be beholden to a permanent civil service class.

This is precisely what the Founders created. It’s something of a wonder how and why that system was ever replaced with something so completely different.

[TTP:  This is a long article, but the information is critical.]

It’s a typical afternoon in Saint-Denis, the narrow streets packed with people whose faces you cannot see.

The women move in niqab, shapes without features, eyes that do not meet yours.

The shop signs are in Arabic, the smell of cumin and lamb fat rises from every doorway, thick and permanent, as if the street itself has been marinated in another world.

From three directions at once, the call to prayer cuts through the air. Al-lahu Akbar. God is great. Come to prayer. Come to salvation.

Even the French police do not enter without backup. Ambulances request escorts before responding to calls. In the lost territories of Marseille, law enforcement officers disguise themselves as Muslims before making arrests.

France’s own intelligence service has mapped 150 such districts across the country. A former senior official of French foreign intelligence put it in numbers: these enclaves exist in 859 cities, and four million people — six percent of France’s entire population — live inside them.

There was a time when Paris was the most romantic city in the world. You could stop on the banks of the Seine at dusk, buy a baguette and a bottle of wine from the corner shop, sit on the stone steps above the water, and feel, without irony, that life was generous, and civilization was real.

The light on the river. The smell of bread. The sound of French — that particular music of a language that assumes beauty is worth the effort.

That Paris is gone. This is the story of how it fell.

This is the story of the fall of France.

I have written about this issue before, but with the midterms approaching, I thought it bears repeating. It’s so very, very important.

STOP saying liberal.

STOP saying woke.

STOP saying progressive, Socialist, or Marxist.

Those words don’t appear on any ballot.

Not anywhere, unless you live in Vermont and Bernie Sanders is running.

The word that appears on election ballots is DEMOCRAT.

We need to be perfectly clear. Those who are causing most all of America’s serious problems are DEMOCRATS.

The vast majority of our political crises and problems are caused by people who either identify as Democrats or vote Democrat.

Once something is branded — whether positive or negative — it sticks. Like Super Glue, that label is hard to shake. Whenever you speak, write, or post, identify our political opponents as DEMOCRATS.

That’s why we must BRAND the Democrat Party as anti-God, anti-America, violent, and the party of Big Government, elite socialists and Marxists: because they are. If we do not define them, they will define themselves, deceitfully.

I think after 60 years of affirmative action, DEI, racial essentialism, and racial fixation—especially in the United States, but also throughout the Western world, in Europe, Australia, and the former British Commonwealth—we are seeing the consequences.

Let me point out that our adversaries, China, Russia, and other places around the globe, don’t have this racial essentialism because they believe it is innate to human nature. And when you encourage it, you get something like Rwanda, what’s going on now in Nigeria, or what happened in the Balkans.

The natural order of men and animals is that birds of a feather flock together. So, why would you encourage that instead of having assimilation, acculturation, and integration?

We’re suffering from tribal fatigue in the Western world.