I was honored to be a speaker, but especially excited to have my first exposure to a remarkable movement taking shape in Europe, one that is wholly dedicated to realizing liberty as the key to the future.

It was liberty that built Europe and liberty that will save it from the authoritarians who are grasping to control its political and economic future.  I saw among those one thousand attendees a strong reason for hope.

The City

It was my first visit to Prague, so please forgive my wild infatuation with this city. It is one of the great cities on the continent and mercifully untouched by war. Its roads and streets are as complex as anything I've encountered outside of Rome: circuitous, irrational, narrow, and paved with bumpy cobblestones guaranteed to make a mess of any dress shoe.

And everywhere you look, you see beauty of a very special sort. You look at 500 years of achievement in building civilization, and you see the integration between the past, present, and future. It is true across all the arts, from the music (here is a solid example of 16th century polyphony from Prague) to the architecture.