OXON HILL, Md. — A “blueprint on how to ruin America” is competing against a “new American sunrise,” Sen. Tim Scott said Thursday.

The South Carolina Republican stepped from behind the podium and walked around before the front row of his audience at The Heritage Foundation’s 50^th anniversary celebration. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

He opened his speech talking about his personal story growing up black in poverty in a Southern state with a bad history on race—and spoke about how his grandfather, even during the era of Jim Crow, believed in America.

“Every rung of the ladder I held onto in order to climb out of my very challenging situation, it seems today, the radical left and [President] Joe Biden are attacking the ladder of success I used to climb,” Scott said. “It is almost as if they created a blueprint of how to ruin America.”

He went on to detail aspects of what appeared to be the Left’s blueprint reaching into education, the economy, and national security. But he said, “there is good news to every story” and predicted “a  new American sunrise, brighter than the one before.”

“We understand that the seeds of greatness, not seeds of grievance, is our future,” Scott said. “If we allow the seeds of greatness to germinate, we start seeing the fruit of the harvest in the next generation.”

Scott has announced an exploratory committee to seek the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Officially in the GOP race are former President Donald Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

“If there was a blueprint on how to ruin America, you would start with patriotism,” he said, explaining:

If you start teaching our kids that you live in an evil country, you should expect patriotism to come down. When you start attacking our religious liberties, the consequence of it is sometimes church attendance drops.

He added that a blueprint to ruin America would “make sure our borders are unsafe, insecure, and wide open, leading to 6.3 million illegal crossings, more than 70,000 Americans losing their lives to fentanyl.”

Scott said the United States should believe Chinese President Xi Jinping, who says China is a rival to the United States.

“A new American sunrise means the strength of our leader is more important that the strength of their leader. Today, we are losing the battle because the weakness of the president of the United States is always more important than the strength of President Xi [JInping] in China,” the South Carolina lawmaker said.

He also spoke about education and how schools are pushing critical race theory, or CRT, and “the 1619 Project,” a New York Times product that pushes the view that the United States was founded upon the arrival of the first slaves on our shores.

“You would start creating a culture of victimhood and sell the narcotic of despair,” Scott said of the blueprint from the left. “You would indoctrinate our kids, not educate our kids. You would spend more time on CRT and less time on ABCs. You would rewrite history to start this country on 1619, and not 1776.”

Scott also outlined how Democratic economic policies hurt the poor.

You would print and spend trillions of dollars in your first two years as president, leading to inflation that exceeds 15%, driving single mothers like the one that raised me to have lower spending power.

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