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Garry Kasparov is the founder and chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.
Last Friday, April 17, the Renew Democracy Initiative—which publishes The Next Move—held its fourth annual Heroes of Democracy Gala, celebrating people who take risks for freedom. This year, we honored Senator Mark Kelly, Ambassador John Bolton, Ugandan Opposition Leader Bobi Wine, and former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Chrystia Freeland.
What follows are my remarks from that evening. If you joined us, thank you for your support! If you couldn’t make it, we missed you on Friday. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Standing amid all of this revolutionary pageantry, I have to remind you all: I’m not American.
Shocker, I know.
Many Americans take the past two and a half centuries for granted.
The characters, the drama; it’s all become something approaching Greek mythology. You take for granted the privileges you enjoy. (Apologies for saying you.)
Because of that, it’s often been up to outsiders—visiting admirers of this magnificent republic—to remind you of what makes this nation great.
The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his timeless classic, Democracy in America, that “The greatness of America lies in her ability to repair her faults.”
That was in 1835.
Five generations later, it was Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s great poet and anticommunist dissident-turned-president. Havel told a joint session of the US Congress, that your Constitution and Declaration of Independence, quote, “inspire us all; they inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old.”
“You have one great advantage,” Havel went on to say. “Your journey toward the horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system.”
That was 1990.
What the hell would Havel say about America if he were alive today?
Vaclav Havel was right that in the US, you’ve never experienced totalitarianism—not yet, at least.
In the twentieth century, you defeated, in turn, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet in the process, it seems America suffered a vampire’s bite, for the twin evils of fascism and communism are now coursing through the blood of this nation.
One side of the aisle rallies around men like Tucker Carlson, who glorify Russia’s dictatorship. The other side is deciding whether or not Hasan Piker, a self-identified Marxist who believes America “deserved” 9/11, belongs in the big tent.
This is a deadly infection. You must purge it from the system.
ICYMI: Tune in to the latest episode of the Older/Wiser Podcast
I founded the Renew Democracy Initiative to join in that great tradition, laid down by people like Tocqueville and Havel: to share the insights of those who know the value of freedom so well because they have experienced the opposite.
That was the inspiration for our flagship program, the Frontlines of Freedom, which has connected political dissidents with thousands of students, business leaders, and elected officials. This work brings passion and bloody reality to a conversation around liberty that is too often bogged down by academic jargon.
It is one thing to pore over political science literature, quite another to hear an activist from China, or Russia, Iran, Uganda, or Venezuela recall riot policemen’s batons crashing over the heads of protesters, loved ones kidnapped, futures snuffed out. RDI is on ten campuses already, with plans to expand to many more.
In Ukraine, as you heard today, we’ve delivered $15 million in direct aid. We remain crystal clear in our position that Ukraine must win.
We fight back against the Putin apologists who have worked their way into the Oval Office. And we push our friends too. Many people call themselves pro-Ukraine, while falling for the myth of escalation, fighting with all of the urgency of a fire truck yielding to traffic on its way to a burning building.
RDI is the real deal.
Of course, the war isn’t just being fought with drones and bullets in places like Ukraine. There’s a battle over information too. Last year, we launched The Next Move—our new media platform—to fight back against disinformation and grifters. In just twelve months, our small team has put out over 300 pieces of content. Today, we have over 100,000 followers. More than 800,000 people read The Next Move every month.
In short: RDI is a beacon for the values of liberal democracy. It is a callback to the America I grew up admiring as a young boy in the Soviet Union.
As a chess player competing abroad, I had far more access to the democratic West than the average Soviet. I visited Western Europe and eventually the US, while my neighbors in the USSR would be lucky if they got a holiday to Bulgaria once in their lives.
Once you peel away the Iron Curtain, you can’t turn back. Your perspective is changed forever. When, in 2013, I realized that remaining in Putin’s Russia would mean living out my days in a jail cell—or worse—I knew that my destination would have to be America.
I am not an American. But my children were born and raised here. They are Americans.
Unless I start taking the supplements that Alex Jones is always hawking on Info Wars… I most likely won’t be here at America’s three-hundredth anniversary, when I would be 113 years old.
What we are really fighting for is the America that our children will inherit.
We have a choice to make. We can take the easy way out; we can rest on our laurels and abandon the next generations to false prophets and golden calves. Or, with RDI, we can part the sea, pushing aside MAGA and Marxism, and lead our children and our grandchildren, into a Promised Land of freedom, liberty, and prosperity.
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