Annual Meeting Keynote: Attorney General Miyares
I’m fortunate to have gotten to know Jason Miyares over the past few years, at least from my point of view there was an immediate connection. Both of us being children of parents who escaped lands of tyranny and oppression to find freedom in the USA, this background gives one special appreciation for American exceptionalism. While we live in an imperfect society, which is to be expected since human nature isn’t perfect, we are beyond fortunate to live in the freest and wealthiest society in the history of mankind. I appreciate that every day, and I know Jason does as well.
More so than any other officeholder I have met, our Attorney General believes in and is a living example of the Jeffersonian ideals of individual liberty and merit-based society, a belief that personal freedoms do not emanate from the government or a college administration but from a higher authority. So, while Jason did not take his degrees from the University, he has always been a true Wahoo in spirit.
It is my great honor to introduce to you a very worthy successor to Mr. Jefferson’s legacy to our great Commonwealth, our Attorney General and my good friend, Jason Miyares.
Below is the full transcript of Attorney General Jason Miyares’ recent speech, “Never Apologize for Loving the University,” where he discusses the enduring power of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy at UVA and how DEI continues to undermine these foundational principles.
You know when he invited me to give these remarks, you know Joel and I, we talk, we text, and he said, “Mr. Attorney General, you believe in free speech.” I said, “Of course I do.” He said, “Congratulations, you’re going to go give one.” So here I am.
I’d like to recognize so many important people that are here tonight — Mr. Thomas Neale, obviously founder and former president; Chip Vaughn; Andy McLean; Robert Turner; so many others that have made The Jefferson Council, I think, one of the most important voices for freedom and legacy that you have in the country.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote of Dr. Benjamin Franklin that he cannot be replaced but merely succeeded. I think tonight we would all be remiss if we did not recognize tonight someone whose leadership during darker times helped give us the strength we feel collectively in this room, a gentleman whose tenure on the UVA Board of Visitors set the standard for so many others when Jefferson’s lamp of academic freedom seemed on the brink of flickering out at his very own university.
To everything there is a season, a time for planting and a time for reaping, a time to cast stones and a time to gather stones, and then there is a time for Bert Ellis. To our friend, to my friend Bert Ellis, we are grateful for the fire you’ve given so many others in this pursuit of academic freedom and excellence and protecting and upholding our Jeffersonian values. Thank you for your leadership and your willingness to fight for things worth fighting for at a time few others could or would.
On behalf of a grateful Commonwealth, thank you, Bert.
Listen, this is a different type of speech than I normally give. It’s usually talking about the amazing things that we’ve done in Virginia, my dear friend and partner Governor Youngkin, the Virginia Renaissance we’ve talked about, but this is really talking about something that I think is a jewel of the Commonwealth and addressing of the front lines a greater symptom of what we’re facing nationwide. For Thomas Jefferson and for so many others, the University of Virginia was meant to be one of the grandest experiments of human freedom. To quote him, “The institution of my native state,” he wrote, “the hobby of my old age,” — which I don’t know how many people start universities as a hobby in their old age but only Mr. Jefferson could — “based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind to explore and expose every subject susceptible to its contemplation. For here at this university, we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
That is such an amazing statement. For those of us of the Christian faith tradition, we’re about to go on the Holy Week, and there is a question asked in that week that I think is the most important question those can ask in a society: Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Now we have reached a moment in higher ed where so many students question whether there can be truth. The reality is we have reached a point on so many of our higher ed schools that there is absolutely no objective truth, there’s no concept of natural law. It’s what C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Abolition of Man” — that when truth becomes subjective, what determines what truth is for you personally are your feelings. He wrote that book in 1943, seeing what was already happening in education and predicting where we would end.
We have become the opposite of what our Founding Fathers, who were the products of the Scottish Enlightenment, believed — an illiberal education, an education system that does not value truth and absolutely tries in many ways to discourage even the discussion of ideas that some people might find disagreeable.
Each of our Founding Fathers were fully aware that the American form of government was something utterly unique and fragile and new, was forged upon the ideas that rights were inherent to humankind and not a privilege or a gift of a foreign monarch or a tyrant across the deep sea. Indeed, it was that amazing moment in Philadelphia after they contemplated at Constitution Hall what is now this amazing radical document that birthed forth the new nation. When Benjamin Franklin left Constitution Hall, they asked him, “What kind of government do you have, Mr. Franklin?” And his response was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
We are about to embark on something extraordinary next year — it’s a birthday celebration, it’s America’s birthday, 250 years since our signing of the Declaration of Independence, the greatest experiment in self-government our country and the world has ever seen, and my point has always been in Virginia — and I’ve said this to Governor Youngkin — birthdays should be celebrations, not condemnations.
We have seen that time and time in our nation’s history where we have done extraordinary things for all of our faults — whether it was in the Civil War where Virginia saw the vast majority of bloodshed sacrificed upon this altar of freedom, the First and Second World Wars where American blood and treasure was sacrificed to save the world from Nazi Germany, when President Reagan would liberate an entire continent from the grip of the Soviet Empire without firing a shot and liberating Eastern Europe from the grips of socialism — to leave behind an incredible legacy of free minds, free markets, and a free society that indeed would lift billions of people out of poverty and establish a peace that has endured for nearly eight decades.
Yet we all know that America requires a basic assent to a few simple truths, namely that we are indeed endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. We also know that America is not perfect, but anytime I speak on a college campus, I ask this question: when you look at the United States, the question I ask is this—compared to what? Compared to what?
If you compare us to perfection, we fail time and time again, but if you compare us to every other country on this planet, this country has given more second chances to more people from different races, colors, and creeds than any country that has ever existed in the history of the world, and ladies and gentlemen — it’s not even close.
I travel around Virginia a lot, and sometimes when I’m in rural areas, I get asked, “What kind of name is Miyares anyway?” And I like to say, “Well, it’s a Southern name, it’s a deeply deep deep South.” But the reality is the Miyares family was given that second chance to this remarkable country.
I have often asked students, “Why did my mother come to this country when she first left Cuba, literally homeless and penniless and not knowing where her next meal was going to come from?” She went to Madrid — culturally that would have been a better fit for her, obviously — but she had this unbelievable desire to live in a society, in a country that recognized that our rights cannot be taken away from her.
Our Constitution is the first written constitution in the history of the free world of any society that actually could limit what government could do to you. Think about that — a written constitution that actually limits government’s power. In England and their parliamentary system, it only takes one act of Parliament technically to completely abolish your freedom of speech or your freedom of religion. We acknowledge America is not perfect, but we have since our founding striven for that more perfect union.
But somewhere along the way, we have lost faith in America — to the young people, you have lost faith, so many of your classmates have lost faith in America, and that breaks my heart.
On paper, this generation of young Americans should be the happiest generation in American history. If you measure success by how the world measures success, on paper this generation is the most highly educated generation America has ever seen. On paper, this is the most financially secure generation that America has ever seen. And yet, and yet, this is the most depressed generation America has ever seen, with the highest levels of anxiety and depression and suicide and addiction America has ever witnessed. Why? I would argue some of that is the inability of addressing what is truth.
There was a date recently — I think it’s a red-letter date in American history, and it came by very quickly, most people don’t even recognize what happened, but I thought it was a microcosm date of representing where we are in higher ed — December 4th, 2024. Does anybody know what happened on that day? That was the day that United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of New York.
It wasn’t the fact that he was murdered, because tragically in a city of 8 million people murders happen every day in New York — it was what it said about us, more specifically what it said about America’s college students. There was a poll done by Axios that showed that 81% of America’s college students, after the shooting occurred — after a healthcare CEO who actually came from an impoverished background, who left behind two orphans, who was murdered in broad daylight just going to a conference — 81% of American college students had a negative view of Brian Thompson, and 48% of American college students viewed that his murder was somehow justified.
Pause for a moment—roughly half of America’s future leaders, future elected leaders, future judges, future lawyers, future reporters, almost half said the murder of a CEO in broad daylight was somehow justified.
I was speaking at a Chamber of Commerce event, and I told them to all this group of business leaders, you are standing on a train track with a train coming right towards you and you don’t even see that it’s coming. It’s a fact that there’s an entire generation of young people that will be controlling the levers of power that actually view you, a business leader, as the enemy, and they justified violence simply because they disagreed with how he ran a company.
Those numbers don’t end there — 38% of Americans believe it would be somewhat justified if someone assassinated our current president, while we’re still lacking answers in the last attempt in Pennsylvania. Roughly 13% believe that the assassination of Elon Musk, a private citizen not even in elective office, would somehow be justified. These are college students.
It goes to the question that Plato asked — the two most important questions for civilization: who teaches the children, and what do they teach them?
Instead of a force of argument, too many are instead resorting to the argument of force, and instead of the age of reason, tragically we are rediscovering an age of barbarism that might makes right. That should terrify all of us. Thomas Jefferson was no stranger to such a world, as he swore, as he stated in the letter to Benjamin Rush, “Upon the altar of God, I have an eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Think about that. But right now, we’ve reached a moment in society where we have determined we have nothing to learn from those that have come before us.
A sociologist pointed out that Western civilization, the last really the last 40 years, has arisen something really unique, and you hear on these college campuses terms like Western construct. Have you heard that? I know our college students have heard that’s a Western construct. You know what a Western construct is, that your professors maybe never mention to you, that if you go on almost every continent on the planet — if you go to Africa, if you go to Asia, if you go to Latin America—they revere the wisdom of those that have come before them, they revere the wisdom of their elders. It is only in the United States and Western Europe the last 40 to 50 years where there is this sense that we have nothing to learn from those that have come before us. As G.K. Chesterton noted, if you come upon a fence in the middle of the field, perhaps you should ask first why it is there before you knock it over.
Jefferson wrote this in the Notes on the State of Virginia: “It is error alone which needs the support of government.” Think about this coming out of our what we understood has happened during our COVID lockdowns. Let me repeat this: “It is error alone which needs the support of government; truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion—whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men, men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to such coercion? To produce uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.” Stunning -- this freedom of the human mind that Jefferson so deeply advocated for — on so many of our college campuses has shut down the free marketplace of ideas and instead chosen conformity. Instead of educating future generations on virtue, we are instead choosing to make one half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
We see today on our college campuses graduates that are graduating in two fluent languages — they’re fluent in the language of anti-Semitism and fluent in the language of anti-Americanism. That should give all of us pause. For there is another red-letter date that we have seen in American history and world history was October 7, 2023. The attack that happened in Israel on that day was not just an attack on Israel — the worst terrorist attack on Americans since 9/11 — it was an act of barbarism. I cannot tell you I felt like it quickly became the moral test of our time.
One of the great honors of my life was to be invited by the government of Israel about a month after the attacks for a series of meetings and visits. And on that trip, it was myself, the Attorney General of Argentina, the chief counterterrorism prosecutors of both France, Germany, and Austria — it was a small group of us. I quickly realized that we had a common bond together — each one of us had a citizen that was being held by the barbarians in Hamas. It was a unique tragic club that we were part of. We had meetings — I had the fortunate moment of having to watch, which I did, but some things you can’t unsee — the hours-plus worth of footage, most of which has never been released to the public, of the GoPro cameras, video cameras that Hamas themselves recorded. Hitler tried to hide what he did; they celebrated it. It was truly the face of evil.
And then walking through the streets of Sderot, which is right on the border of Gaza, walking to a burned-out town — and I walked into a little girl’s room. She had her dolls still strewn on the floor, her bed was overturned, she clearly had been trying to hide from these fathers, and in the corner she clearly was cowering in fear — there were still bullet holes and blood on the wall.
She was summarily executed.
Now, I have three daughters — you can imagine that impact on myself. Imagine how surreal it was for me that 24 hours after standing in this little girl’s bedroom to be at JFK International Airport waiting for my connecting flight back home to Virginia, and to look up at the screen and be standing there and seeing college students waving Hamas flags and shouting Hamas slogans. And I realized that on so many of our college campuses, we were failing that moral test.
I will be candid with you — those are some of the most difficult times I’ve had as Attorney General, working with Governor Youngkin on what we saw on these campuses. We made a commitment not to allow our Virginia campuses to turn to what we saw at Columbia. And it was difficult — Virginia Tech, we had worked with the administration there to get 83 students who were arrested in this unlawful assembly. We worked with UVA — difficult at times, and a lot of that considering they’re all my clients. I can’t really speak to you about private conversations — just say there were some hard conversations. We saw time and time again one of the worst things that ever can happen in America — somebody that is simply a college student looking over their fear. Never again means never again means all of us have a duty to be vigilant.
But how did we get here? How did we get to a point that college students are making common cause with some of the worst terrorist actors on the planet? I would say they’ve lost—we are, they have indeed forgotten — they have forgotten our uniqueness, our greatness.
Now, I’m probably going to embarrass my daughter a little bit sharing a story, and I told her I wouldn’t say much, but this is actually an older story so she will forgive me, because it doesn’t just involve her, involves her sister. I’m on the road a lot, and I remember probably about four or five years ago we were having a movie night, and they wanted to see The Lion King. You all seen that — probably never heard an elected official reference Disney before but just bear with me. If you know the story, there’s a great king who dies tragically, and his son runs away to the wilderness, and he has a vision — his son has a vision of his father at a unique moment, a pivotal moment in the hero’s journey. And the father’s vision to his son is this: “You have forgotten — you have forgotten who you really are, so you haven’t become what you’re destined to be.”
I would say so many of our American college students have forgotten who we really are. 99% of every human being that has ever lived on planet Earth did not have the ability of casting a ballot. For 99% of every human being that has ever lived did not have freedom of worship, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. We take for granted what we have in this country. We think as normal as breathing it is abnormal, it is rare, it is unique. So many of our college students have very little grasp that they won life’s lottery by being born in this country. I had a chance to speak at my alma mater’s commencement in December. I pointed out to that group of young people, as you sit here — and I would say that to every young people today — there’s somebody who woke up on this planet just as smart as you, just as talented as you, with just as many hopes, dreams, and aspirations as you, and they would do everything in their power, they would crawl over broken glass, they would tie inner tubes together across a shark-infested waterway, they would tie themselves at the side of an airplane just to be seated exactly where you’re seated right now.
That’s to be an American.
I tell my daughters all the time that gratitude is the most underrated of all human traits. Ingratitude is the ugliest, but gratitude — gosh, that is about the most underrated traits we see in today’s society. Our kids, our students need an education that gives them that sense of gratitude, because you can either build a grievance culture or a gratitude culture. Ask yourself this question: which will cause you to be more successful — to have grievance about the society you’re in, or gratitude, where you wake up every day realizing there are so many people who wish they could be where I am?
One should never have a university that tries to apologize for America. We are a nation, an imperfect one — we have great sins in our past — acknowledge them, learn from them, recognize we are indeed that unique country on the planet.
If you ever doubt me, you have a simple test: go to a naturalization ceremony. One of my earliest memories as a six-year-old boy was my mother walking into the kitchen and asking me, a six-year-old, to teach her the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s one of those moments you have in your life you realize my family’s a little different. I remember as a child watching her take that oath to become a United States citizen.
To this day, it is by far my favorite thing to do as Attorney General—to look to a group of new Americans and say simply, “Welcome home, welcome to freedom.” By the way, it is a bucket-list moment for me to be able to speak at Monticello on July 4th, so if anybody has any sway there, please let me know. I love naturalization ceremonies, but there was one that happened last year, last February, that has stuck with me — 89 new Americans from 47 countries. And the judge did something that I’ve never seen a judge do before. The judge handed, after I gave my remarks and they got sworn in, he handed them a microphone, and he asked them this question: just tell us what today means to you, taking this oath of allegiance as a citizen of a free country.
And it was remarkable. A woman from India noted she’d lived in five different countries and had never felt the level of appreciation she had felt as an Indian-American. But the most amazing moment was this — an elderly man got up from Afghanistan. Now think about this — to the best of my knowledge, none of these new Americans knew this was happening, they didn’t know the judge was going to hand them this microphone — and he had written a letter. His son, because he had broken English, his son read the letter to the court, and the letter went like this: “Dear America, this is the greatest day of my life. I have two children that have served the United States military, and I have told them that their number one job as a parent and future parent is to raise their children to recognize this is indeed the greatest country in the world.” I remember turning to Matt Hall, a staffer who works for me, and I said, “Matt, there are more American flags in this classroom than you ever see on a college campus, and more gratitude you ever see for so many of our professors.”
Perhaps as a country we should teach all of our history — the good and the bad — but indeed those remarkable moments throughout our history in which we have oftentimes crossed the Atlantic, crossed the Pacific, to defend the people from some of the worst tyrannies the world has ever seen, and celebrate it. But in many ways, what we have seen is this attack on classic Western thought, that also wanted to put everybody in different categories and different boxes.
There’s been a lot of discussion with DEI, but one thing I do not appreciate about DEI is the fact it wants to define everybody and everyone by their class or their race or their sex or their gender. Think of that — that cheapens our human experience, because at the end of the day, each one of us are individually created with individual experiences. And we have this moment in this time of illiberal education where we actually view Western civilization — the same civilization that has bred the concept of individual rights and dignity — as somehow not worth studying.
I was talking to Terry, a student here and a veteran at UVA, and he previously been at Morehouse College, and we started talking about it, and I said, “Is that where Dr. King attended?” He said, “Yes.” He just gave me an amazing illustration to share. Dr. King in 1960 actually taught a course at Morehouse College — does anybody know what that was? Western philosophy. And you can look up online his curriculum, and it was all the great thinkers of Western civilization: Socrates, Plato. In fact, if you read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he did with no notes — he was literally in a jail cell — it’s an extraordinary piece of American literature. Who did he appeal to when he appealed to individual rights of dignity? To the great thinkers of Western civilization.
Now think of this moment — Margaret Thatcher said, “All the countries in Europe emerge out of history, but America is the only country to emerge out of a philosophy.” Or as G.K. Chesterton noted, America is the only country in the history of the world to be founded on a creed. What is that creed? I think the American that best encapsulated it is Dr. King, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, referred to those rights, those inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Dr. King referred to that as the promissory note made to every American past, present, and future.
Now who wrote the promissory note? It’s why you’re here today — was a quiet lawyer from who was not a great speaker, he was an incredible thinker — he wrote the birth certificate for a nation. Every time we have reached for equality and progress in this country, who have we appealed to? Rousseau? Confucius? No — it’s Mr. Jefferson.
I mentioned we’re about to celebrate America’s birthday next year. It should be a celebration, not a condemnation. If you go in the gulags of North Korea or Russia or China, so many areas of autocracies, who do they revere and who do they aspire to? Those words, that promissory note Jefferson wrote for free people everywhere.
My uncle Angel Miyares was arrested at Bay of Pigs — in middle of the night, taken away, went to an empty baseball stadium where he suffered the humiliation of a mock execution. What did he appeal to his jailers? That he had inalienable rights of life and liberty that cannot be taken from him.
The great irony is at a time when so many of our college campuses denigrate and ignore Thomas Jefferson as just a dead white guy. It doesn’t matter in today’s age. When so many people woke up this morning on this planet live in an autocracy, they appeal and they revere Jefferson’s ideal. It has been the gold standard that every country has aspired to. That’s why it breaks my heart at Mr. Jefferson’s University that you have this moment where people are ignoring him.
I will be very candid with you. I had a discussion with a very, very senior member of the administration. I told them this: if you remove all ties of Thomas Jefferson to the University of Virginia, what are you? You are the University of Michigan, you’re the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. You are an amazing public institution. But you have something none of them can claim: ties to one of the greatest thinkers in all of human history that literally redefined man’s relationship with government. That should give all of us pause, and we should celebrate it, particularly as we reach this moment of human history.
So I want to end with a sense of gratitude to The Jefferson Council.
My experience has been this — there is not an institution in all of America, public institution, that receives more public dollars that is more resistant to any sense of public accountability than higher ed.
It requires great patriots to band together, to take the arrows, to show the rarest trait you often find in politics, in government, public service, which is courage. By being part of this group, you have shown unbelievable courage.
Thank you for what you have done preserving this jewel of the Commonwealth.
Never, ever, ever apologize for loving this amazing university and the values it is meant to represent. Never stop defending it. Never stop defending the quiet lawyer from Charlottesville who wrote the birth certificate for this nation. Above all else, do not give up, and remember why you love this institution — it’s not the bricks and mortar, but for the students who will share our love for the values you care about. Generations of Virginians yet to be born are counting on you to be that example of success.
I’m proud to be able to tell others across the country what The Jefferson Council was doing to stem the tide and preserve the spirit of freedom here at UVA -- thank you.
Thomas Jefferson referred to the United States of America as the last best hope on Earth — he said that when we’re only 20 years old as a nation. I don’t think anybody in Europe at the time viewed us as having any special promise, but part of Jefferson’s genius is he saw what we could become: an empire of liberty, is how he referenced it. President Lincoln took Jefferson’s words and adopted them — one of my heroes — President Reagan, adopted them still.
So I will end with a quote from my favorite president after Jefferson, President Reagan: “Of all the countries in the world, the United States is the only country in which our national anthem actually ends with a question: ‘Are we still the land of the free and the home of the brave?’” That is a question that has to be answered by every generation. My prayer is always, with your help, that answer will be yes.
Thank you.
