Board of Directors

Eliot S. Berke (President and Chairman of the Board)

Elliot S. Berke founded the Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation in 2008. He serves as Managing Partner of Berke Farah LLP. Prior to founding Berke Farah LLP, Elliot served as a partner and as practice group co-chair at McGuireWoods LLP. He has been named by Washingtonian as one of “Washington’s Best Lawyers” and by Chambers USA as a “Nationwide Best Lawyer” consistently since 2011. His diverse client base consists of federal and state elected and appointed officials, campaign committees, political parties, PACs, corporations, small businesses, trade associations, lobbying firms, public relations firms, nonprofits, artists, and musicians. He represents clients before congressional ethics and oversight committees, the FEC, the DOJ, Inspectors General, and other federal and state departments and agencies and represents musicians on contracts and disputes. Over his career, Elliot has represented presidential candidates, cabinet officials, a Supreme Court Justice, and more than 60 current and former Members of Congress. He has represented the top four leadership positions in the U.S. House of Representatives – Speaker, Majority Leader, Majority Whip, and Conference Chair. He serves as outside counsel to Speaker Emeritus Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and many Committee Chairs and rank and file Members of Congress, as well as the NRCC. He also serves as Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of Georgia, and served in that same role from 2018-2020, as well as Special Assistant Attorney General for the State of Oregon from 2014-2016. He runs election day war rooms for presidential and gubernatorial candidates. He is a frequent speaker on political law, and regularly conducts the ethics training for the Members of Congress and Chief of Staff retreats sponsored by the Congressional Institute (where he also serves as its outside counsel). He is General Counsel & Senior Advisor to the Jack Kemp Foundation as part of his practice. His commentary appears in media outlets including Fox & Friends, Special Report w/Bret Baier, Tucker Carlson Tonight, NBC Nightly News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USAToday, Politico, SALT Talks, and the Washington Post. He was the Republican National Lawyers Association’s Lawyer of the Year in 2021 and was the International Advisory Expert Election Law Lawyer of the Year in 2022.

Elliot is a cum laude graduate of Wake Forest University, where he was a member of the Pi Sigma Alpha and Phi Alpha Theta Honor Societies, and Emory University School of Law, where he served as Executive Articles Editor of the Emory International Law Review. He is active in alumni affairs for his alma mater Wake Forest University and currently serves on the Athletics Advisory Council. From July 2012 through July 2014, he served as the President of the Wake Forest University Alumni Association and served two terms on the College Board of Visitors. He also served as the DC Regional Chair for the most recent capital campaign. He lives in Arlington, Virginia with his two children. He coached CYO basketball for nine years. In his spare time, he plays rhythm guitar in the band the DePlorables.

Michael Connolly (member of Board)

Michael Connolly is currently the Director of the Senate Republican Staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. Prior to that, he served as Communications Director of the Club for Growth in Washington. A D.C.-area native, Connolly has served as speechwriter or spokesman for national conservative leaders for more than a decade. He has worked for Congressmen Henry Hyde, J. Dennis Hastert, and Tom DeLay, Senator Jim DeMint, the RNC, and FEMA, in addition to a stint as a high-school history teacher. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech. Connolly and his wife, Ellen, live in Falls Church, Virginia with their four children.

Brett Shogren (member of Board)

From 1996-2005, Brett Shogren served as a senior Congressional staffer and policy advisor in Washington DC, focusing on national security, foreign affairs, health care, telecommunications and trade policy. He served as the policy director and national security advisor to the House Majority Leader where he was responsible for crafting and managing the congressional legislative agenda for the US House of Representatives. From 2006-2009, Shogren served as Senior Vice President of the Washington Group, one of the leading consulting and advocacy firms in Washington DC. Shogren currently resides in Washington DC where he continues to advise Members of Congress on policy and strategy as a consultant. He is a graduate of Amherst College.

John Meroney (member of Board)

John Meroney is a writer in Los Angeles. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Architectural Digest, The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is completing a book, Rehearsals for a Lead Role: Ronald Reagan in The Hollywood Wars, and is also at work on a documentary feature film on the same subject. Meroney provides the audio commentary, with director Vincent Sherman, for Ronald Reagan: The Signature Collection, a DVD set of several Reagan films, released by Warner Bros. He graduated from Wake Forest University.

Advisory Committee

Lee Edwards

Chairman, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, The Heritage Foundation

The Honorable Edwin Meese III

75th Attorney General of the United States
Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy, The Heritage Foundation

A. Bryant Applegate

Former Special Counsel, U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development


About

“[T]he great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire before the entire world…It was the brightest, most glorious day…the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution – Reagan’s Revolution.”–Natan Sharansky, 2004

On March 8, 1983, Natan Sharansky, a Soviet Jewish Refusnik and champion of human freedom, was a prisoner in a Siberian gulag when President Ronald Reagan uttered the words that marked the beginning of a new era for Sharansky and other dissidents fighting for basic human rights. On that day, in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, President Reagan delivered what was to become known as the “Evil Empire Speech” and in so doing changed the course of history. President Reagan said:

… I urge you to beware the temptation of pride – the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Not since Sir Winston Churchill declared that an Iron Curtain had descended over the Soviet Union and its spheres of influence had a world leader described with such stark, moral clarity the stranglehold Soviet communism had on human freedom. While Churchill exposed the veil descending over the atrocities of the communist regime, President Reagan peeled back that veil to expose the dark truth behind it. In many ways, Churchill’s marked the rhetorical beginning of the Cold War, while President Reagan’s anticipated the beginning of its end.  As Frank Warner would write, “The speech alarmed moderates of the West, delighted millions living under Soviet oppression and set off a global chain reaction that many believe led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin Wall and to freedom for most of Eastern Europe.” Further linking these two speeches and these two men together, President Reagan dedicated Breakthrough, the Cold War Memorial monument designed by Churchill granddaughter Edwina Sandys, on the grounds of Westminister College in 1990.

The Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation was launched in 2009 to properly commemorate the Evil Empire Speech and its importance to human freedom. It will serve as a testament to victims of communism throughout the world. In the years that followed the speech, the Soviets came to the negotiating table, the Berlin Wall came down, the Iron Curtain fell, and the Soviet Empire crumbled. Today, millions of people who once lived under the tyranny of the Soviet Evil Empire live in freedom. But there are millions more who still suffer at the hands of tyranny and who are denied the basic human freedoms of speech, religion, self-determination. This project is therefore designed not just to remember the past but to also bring attention to the injustices of today.

An appropriate and necessary memorial to Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech has been erected at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Yet no acknowledgment exists to date to recognize President Reagan’s Evil Empire Speech in Orlando. It is time to mark the historical significance of President Reagan’s speech, so future generations can understand the need to face down tyranny with liberty and to face down moral relativism with moral clarity.

The Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation has a clearly defined objective: to commemorate the address and its legacy with a statue of the former President with accompanying explanatory material at or near where the address was delivered in Orlando.

The Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation is organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and contributions made to it are deductible for federal income tax purposes. The Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation is not sponsored by, endorsed, or affiliated with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

If you are interested in supporting this important effort, please  donate here or contact Elliot S. Berke, the President of the Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation, at the following address:

Evil Empire Speech Memorial Foundation
c/o Elliot S. Berke
Managing Partner
Berke Farah LLP
701 8th St NW, Suite 620
Washington, DC 20001

info@evilempirespeech.com