TED talks make waves. They’re curated, presented, and shared to be thoughtful and provocative. So when the executive director of the ACLU takes to the TED stage in Vancouver, one can’t help but wonder how he’ll deliver a talk that aligns with the ACLU’s mission, and connects with the TED audience’s often objective and scientific view of a complicated world.
But Romero didn’t disappoint, giving a surprising and emotional talk - connecting his love of art history to the current state of affairs. ”We have to contest Trump’s values even as we recognize that our democracy rendered us a president who champions those values” said Romero. He took the TED audience on a tour of a room-sized fresco painted by 14th-century Italian master Ambrogio Lorenzetti.
You can watch the talk and see for yourself:
“Lorenzetti warns us that we must recognize the shadows of tyranny when they float across our political landscape,” said Romero.“The right to protest, the right to assemble freely, the right to petition one’s government. These are not just rights,” Romero told the TED audience. “In the face of avarice, fraud and division, these are obligations.”
The talk drew a passionate and sustained standing ovation from the TED community.
A standing ovation from the TED community.
While a number of attendees I spoke with highlighted the less political talks as their favorites, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero's presentation got some of the biggest applause of the conference thus far. "We have to contest [Trump's] values even as we recognize that our democracy rendered us a president who champions those values," Romero said.
Anthony Romero - the executive director of the ACLU
Steven Levy, writing in Backchannel explained it best: "The TED-sters were hungry to express their displeasure at the US’s new leader. One speaker, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, explicitly skewered Trump — tying headlines of his actions to nightmarish images from a fresco painted in 1339 by the Italian Ambrogio Lorenzetti, called The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. (Guess which side the Trump-y images came from.) The talk got a thunderous ovation, as if a wild animal of political fury had been let off its leash."
TED’s Chris Anderson speaks with the ACLU’s Anthony Romero
“Lorenzetti warns us that we must recognize the shadows of avarice, fraud, division, and even tyranny when they float across our political landscape. Especially when those shadows are cast by political leaders loudly claiming to be the voice of good government,” said Romero in his TED talk. “And we must act.... We must disrupt the amoral accretion of power by those who would betray our values. We the people must stay in the streets. Disruptive, messy, loud —that is what democracy looks like.”