Barry Weiss Lecture on American Values

Please welcome on stage the CEO of the Free

Press and editor-in-chief of CBS News,

Barry Weiss.

I wanna begin tonight by thanking you all for attending my

lecture on the Antichrist. For all the media journalists who

are watching this or poring over this transcript, that was a joke.

I only talk about the Antichrist at my secret weekly meeting

supervised by the Mossad in Tel Aviv.

What's not a joke is that I'm deeply grateful to be here in

Berlin with

Mathias Döpfner, a true friend and ally, and with Axel

Springer, a company with morally clear values

and leaders willing to

stand up for them. And obviously, I'm happy to be here with all of you.

Back home, there is a quote widely attributed to

Bismarck,

"God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the

United States of America." Now, who knows if the German chancellor

actually uttered the backhanded compliment.

But I love it, as do so many others, because it gets to a higher

truth about my country, that America is a very lucky

place. It's a lucky place to be born, and it is a lucky

place to end up. It's why people from every corner of the

globe still reach for our shores as a place to build, including

our Frankfurt, Frankfurt-born honoree.

Tonight, I have the pleasure to introduce a man

whose life and whose

character embodies what I think of as the quintessential

American spirit: heretical, driven,

audacious