broader rub sight around the same time as the book, and you will be able to get lots of great content from our team, guest writers and kind of join the community. ♪ and "dot." is also coming up in november? >> guest: that's right. just in time for the holidays. so if you're considering what to get for your tech-assessed friends and family for the holidays, you can now have an adult book and a children's picture book. >> host: and we have been talking here on book tv with new of 33, "dot.complicated" and "dot." both coming up in november. >> guest: thanks. >> when it reached -- we reach a point where you have to have a certain philosophy because of the color of your skin? when did that happen? [applause] a reporter once asked me why did

not talk a lot about race. i said because i am a neurosurgeon. and -- [applause] so i thought that was pretty strange. i said, when i take some into the operating room and get this guy up and pull it down and take off the bones and open, i'm operating on the thing that makes that person who they are. the cover does not make them who they are. when are we going to understand that? [applause] >> surgeon and author dr. ben carson takes your calls, e-mails, facebook comments, and tweets theories three hours live sunday at noon eastern on book tv on c-span2 . >> on july 19th book tv attended the 20th annual eagle forum collegians leadership summit from the heritage foundation in washington d.c. for the next five hours, we bring you several of their presentations from that event. our coverage includes talks from james antle, benjamin wiker, greg autry, jerome corsi, m.

stanton evans, hans von spakovsky, stanley kurtz, william federer, and ryan anderson. we start with james antle, author of "devouring freedom: can big government be stopped?". >> talking about the dangers of centralized control and an overreaching government and how it can have a profound effect on society. now we should ask the question, can big government be stopped? james antle is the author of a new book, "devouring freedom: can big government be stopped?." the editor of daily colonist foundation and senior editor at the american spectator. he is also a contributing editor to the american conservative. he is a frequent guest on television and radio and resides in virginia, so close by. i want you to welcome a james antle, the author of "devouring freedom: can big government be stopped?". [applause]

>> good morning. well, thank you, first of all, eagle forum and heritage foundation to having me -- for having me. a country that often seems to have forgotten. so my book, "devouring freedom: can big government be stopped?," is a book that asks the question , can big government never be stopped. and the focus of it is really, what are the political prospects for limited government? we have talked about limiting the federal government for a very long time, yet we do not seem to, as a movement and the republican party as a political party, have made a lot of headway in that direction. and a couple of summers ago, barack obama promised us a summer of recovery which did not pan out so well, but i think this summer has really been the summer of big government. we have seen through exposures to various leaks, a lot of details emerging about the national surveillance program

and the extent to which ordinary americans are ensnared in that data mining and the surveillance that is supposed to be going on to protect the country. we have seen a lot of the flaws that are inherent in obamacare. we have watched the implementation of the affordable care act sort of greek and moaned. we have seen this trend starting tough run off of the tracks. think we are starting as a country to see what is in store for us as this health care law unfolds. nancy pelosi said that we needed to pass the bill to find out what was in it. the obama administration, jay carney yesterday in a press conference promised that once all the different provisions of the bill hans von spakovsky we were really going to like it. so far that does not seem to be the case. and we are starting to see they are delaying provisions of the law so even as the obama administration is finding out what is in it, they don't seem to like it very much. so that has sort of been a problem, and i think overall

with the sequester and all of the, you know, the horrifying predictions that were made about how the economy was going to collapse if we add the sequester in their plans would not be able to fly and school buildings would all be bulldozed and everybody would lose their jobs. we have sort of not seen many of those dire predictions come to pass. we have seen that maybe the government can survive a little bit of a diet. and so in this summer of big government, i think we need to ask ourselves, is there anything that we can do to sort of begin to roll it back? and the sequester, obviously, while a nice start is certainly completely inadequate to the job of containing massive federal spending. you know, we are talking about even -- number one, we are talking about simply reducing the rate of growth of government, not talking about cutting government when we really talk about the sequester. except for, there are some actual defense cuts.

the only thing that is really being cut in normal terms, as in terms of actual spending less money is actually a constitutional function of the federal government, but the unconstitutional functions of the federal government are not really being cut. even within the confines of how washington define spending cuts, we are talking about really $0.2 on the dollar. and even that is spread out over a very long amount of time. so if we are talking about rolling back big government, it's going to require something a lot more than the sequestered. but before we even can talk about can big government ever be stopped, lot of people want task , what is big government? to we have a big government? i would argue to you that we have a very big federal government. between 1787 in 1987 we never had a federal budget that crossed the trillion dollar threshold. in 1987 we finally had at trillion dollar federal budget. it only took is 15 years -- it

took us 200 years to get to 1,000,000,000,015 after that to get to $2 trillion as a size of the federal government. it only took us to five years after that to get to the first $3 trillion budget. now to where we run budget deficits annually that are a trillion dollars. we have had deficits as large -- almost as large as what the entire federal budget was as recently as when bill clinton was president. i would argue to you that is a pretty big government and is an unhealthy trajectory in government growth. and unfortunately, we crossed all of those trillion and $2,000,000,000,003,000,000,000,0 00 threshold's while we had republican presidents. so there is a lot of work to be done in that area. the second thing that i would measure is how big of a government we have. the size of our national debt. we now have a gross national bad

that is bigger than the united states economy. i would say that that is a sign of a big government. but even the gross national debt bill does not really measure accurately all of the money that we know, all of the promises the federal government has made, it does not have the money to pay. if you look at that we have unfunded liabilities to federal programs, including the major entitlement programs, social security and medicare well in excess of $80 trillion. by some measures our unfunded liabilities are twice the size of the world economy. so i would argue to you, that is a pretty big government. so then, what do we do in terms of returning to the founding fathers' vision of a federal government that was strong enough to protect the united states and defend its interests, but limited in scope, limited by

the constitution, limited in terms of its ambitions and its plans on our lives, money, options, and freedom. because the case that i make end of our freedom is that big government does take your freedom. even legitimate functions of government, even things that government needs to do it costs money, it takes money out of private economy, and it limits your personal choices. some of those limits are necessary for a society to function, but i would argue, as government gets too big, grows to large command becomes too intrusive, the reduction in joyce's becomes unacceptable and beyond what the founders envisioned. also as we have a government that is essentially broke, like the government we have now, it limits a lot of our political options. there are investments that different levels of government would like to make in things ranging from the state level and local level like education that

they cannot make because the public employ -- public employee pensions, their pain retired employees money instead of being able to provide services for the people who live in their communities. and the federal government was starting to see all of the discretionary spending in the federal budget be crowded out by the size of the entitlement programs and by the size of the interest on the national debt. so that limits our political options that we can have through our elected representatives as a free people. i think there are three major things that need to happen before we can start looking at rolling some of this back. the first is, we need to have a limited government political party. right now the republican party has been a rhetorically pro-limited government party. and there are, i know in my book, periods where the republican party has lived up to this rhetoric. the three historical

friends i know are during the truman administration, what they called the do-nothing congress under robert taft, the congress that came in with ronald reagan when he was elected in 1980, and the first year or two of the gingrich congress that came in in 1994. most of you are a little younger than me, quite a bit younger than me, but i always used to joke, the math only had one good album, and the gingrich congress really only had two good years and it can't actually trying to cut government spending. we need if we're going to have limited government in this country a political party that actually advocates limited government. we have a political party that is not shy about advocating for bigger government, and president obama is a very unapologetic in saying that there really are not other institutions in american life that keep us together besides the big federal government. that is obviously not true. there are

community organizations, families. the free market is a thing that we all do together, but that is a vision of government that is embraced by the democratic party. denny's to be something a stance against that. so that brings me to my second point. the second thing that we need is to continue to have people like rand paul and ted crews and likely before he came to heritage and continuing in heritage, jim demint, who are fighting within the republican party to reform the party and told it to the principles of the platforms that it espouses during campaign times and to continue to live up to those principles when it is actually time to govern. i think that is fundamentally important, and that is why the work that groups like heritage action and club for growth, freedom works and young americans for liberty and so many tea party groups throughout the country is doing is so important because we are creating a constituency for limited government within the republican party.

and we are changing the incentives for republican politicians. it is no longer a good career move to be a republican politician who advocates a bigger government. the reason for that is you could actually lose your job in a primary. that is your realistic possibility for politicians to have been safe for many years. they can point to a good grades of some conservative groups scorecards but still when push came to shove and there were major votes at the medicare prescription drug benefit, the $700 billion loss street bailout , some of the votes to block the implementation of obamacare , some of these republicans were nowhere to be found. now there are political incentives for them to live up to their principles because people are holding them accountable. milton friedman, the great free-market economist, said that while it is good to let the right people, thinking they will

change policy and politics by just electing the right people is unrealistic because you are never going to elect enough of the right people. what you need to do is change the political incentives so that the wrong people will find it to be in their best interest to do the right thing. and then the third point that i would raise as, we cannot allow obamacare, the affordable care act, to remain intact. people joke about how the house is 20, 30, going on 40 votes to repeal obamacare. wire they're wasting they're time with this? the repeal bills will not go anywhere. the president will sign them. the president was reelected. you know, why we bothering to do this? well, there's a very good reason as to why we are trying to keep obamacare repealed as a live issue. i think this is a fundamental issue as to whether we will never again return to something like g limert ts

country. obamacare is not going to work. you can already see the administration is kind of conceding this when they are burying a lot of the major enforcement provisions ahead of the midterm elections because they know people are going to lose their jobs as a result of the employer mandate. less delay it until we don't have to face the voters again for a couple of years and let some of the benefits kick in first before the cost. so obamacare is not going to work. and they're not going to be verifying whether people are eligible for the subsidies that obamacare offers, whether their income requirements really meet the standards to receive the subsidies. so the cost of core components of obamacare are going to go up in the next year. so we are going to see the cost curve bend over the long term and a negative way in increased costs. the way the problems with obamacare will be resolved will be one of two ways. there really are only two

choices here. what the democrats and liberals are going to say is everything wrong with the obamacare is a product of what they have allowed to remain in private-sector hands. they're going to say it is the insurance companies which even though they're actually mandating that we all buy the insurance company products, they're going to say it is the remaining private sector components, so we need more government involvement in health care, not less. you know, the government is the only major institution in american life that when it fails in some way the answer is to give it more money and more power. i cannot think of any other institution that when it fails, we say, it needs to have more of our money and more power and more billeted do things to be that is essentially how the federal government works. so it will either move toward much bigger government rolls and health care, toward a single single-payer system like they have in canada and many european countries, or will we will do is we will repeal and reform

obamacare, gradually untangle the web of mandates and regulations and subsidies and begin to promote a genuine free market in health care in this country. there are really -- there really is no third way. obamacare as it exists currently is something of a third way, but it is not a stable situation. it is not going to remain under the current circumstances forever. so if we move in a more free-market direction, we will also see our entitlements move in a more free-market direction. we will see the claims of our federal government on the lives and pocketbooks diminish. if we move in the direction of single payer, if we move in a direction where we look back at the first two years of obamacare as being a good time in terms of private sector and plans and health care, we will never be able to achieve the ends of a level of government political movement. so that is why obamacare is a fundamental, fundamental issue.

and every vote that can happen that points to the structural problems of this law and keeps the idea of reforming and, yes, repealing the slot as of live political issue in is still a worthwhile political exercise, even if it cannot achieve immediate results. you have to wait it -- lay the groundwork for this in no way that we were able to lay the groundwork for repealing the catastrophic health care component of medicare in the late 80's. that bill became such a disaster that even the democrats were willing to vote to repeal it. we have seen that in it -- even the democrats have been willing to vote to repeal the 1099 reporting requirements under obamacare for small businesses. democrats in the senate have been willing to repeal the medical device tax to obamacare. we had more than two dozen democrats vote for provisions that would suspend the individual mandate and codify the delay of the employer

mandate. so i think that this needs to be a fight that we continue to fight. i don't think that we can afford to give up. rolling back and potentially stopping the government. reforming the republican party, having limited government political party in this country, and actually standing up against obamacare. with that, i open the floor to any questions you might have. >> that's wonderful. thank you, again. that was a great talk. [applause] some questions. yes. right there. >> hi. i am spencer. in our fight to limit government more generally, doesn't -- isn't there a role to be played by the courts when it comes to a striking down more laws that exceed the commerce clause?

is that an ace in the hole that we have? is it entirely going to have to be congress? >> it is kind of interesting because the constitution was designed with this idea that we had a limited government of enumerated powers and that interstate commerce actually meant commerce that happens between the states. we somehow redefine that so that basically anything that happens, breathing, existing, you know, even expiring counts as a form of interstate commerce. so we have kind of stood debt on its head. the other part of the constitution we released it on its head is, it is somehow seen as illegitimate for the federal courts to strike down laws that federal laws that are outside of the enumerated powers under the constitution, but it is perfectly okay, usually using the 14th amendment, to strike down state laws that don't touch

on any constitutional provision. i would like to see us move to a point where the composition of the federal judiciary was such that it was more active and restraining the federal government. there are two problems. one, a lot of qualified jurist, because they have resisted for so long judicial activism that the overturning of state laws has become more reluctant to move against federal laws. particularly federal laws that have strong support for have been endured for a large amount of time. so there are reluctant to second-guess congress' in that way. secondly, it has become very difficult to confirm judges who are actually strict constitutionalists. so we have kind of had to find covert ways to get conservative judges confirmed, and then you never really know exactly -- you can know if somebody is a conservative judge based upon

some of their institutional affiliations, but you don't really know what kind they're going to be. i think it would be very difficult to to rollback a big government, primarily or even substantially through the judiciary. and i think that the obamacare case proves that. there certainly were enough republican justices on that court to have a different outcome. clearly that just did not happen. >> you mentioned for good senators that see the value of limited government, but a lot of republicans don't see the value of limited government. those four senators had to win in republican primaries against candidates who saw big government as good. >> that's correct. >> talk about the value of the republican primary. >> i think the most important thing that we are going to ever have a republican party be a true limited government party is to have competitive republican primaries. and the fact that uc so many big government republicans who are afraid of competitive primaries and afraid of state

conventions where conservative activists actually have a voice and are even trying to alter the presidential primary process to make them less competitive, to make the establishment candid it's more favored, i think that just indicates to you how important this is in a fight for the soul of the republican party. not all of these primary challengers are going to win, and even some of the primary challengers -- they always point to the candidacy when their primaries and want to lose the general election. maybe then make ill-advised comments or are just not good candidates, but the fact of the matter is, even in those cases they send a message to the republican establishment that if you just use conservative rhetoric during campaign time your votes don't reflect conservative values when it comes time to govern. it sends a message to those republicans that they need to actually listen to their constituents and they need to be a little scared. when you look in a guy like robert bennett to have been in the senate for several terms. when you look at warren hatch trying to fight to keep his senate seat, although he

ultimately prevailed, when you look at the entire party infrastructure in kentucky mobilizing against rand paul and losing, i think that sends a very large message to other republicans, and i think it has influence the republican leadership. it sent to the republican leadership a message that the tea party is a faction to be reckoned with. >> attending tennessee state university. in listening to everything you said, have a variety of questions about spending and how that might be affected by inflation. but there was one that is scenes like this whole issue in general, not just what you talked about, but including that and everything else seems to come down to something that has some very deep implications. so i ask this question with a great deal of gravity because of the implications. at what point would you say, if ever, that we would go past the point of political finagling and political fighting and start a

real fight to actually perform some liposuction upon the government, going past merely the political process? at what point then how do we go past the pan and into the sort? >> i think one of the things you have to keep in mind is that big government -- the government has grown largely because the american people have been willing to allow it to grow and have actually desired a lot of its gross. many of the biggest federal spending programs are the ones with the most popular support. and i talked in my book about the fact that there are a lot of people who, when asked by pollsters say very sensible things about cutting federal spending. but when they are asked which programs they would like to cut, the programs they want to cut are very small parts of the federal budget. the programs that they want to protect hard huge parts of the federal government. there is a woman who was interviewed by the new york

times, to party activists, and she said -- i don't remember exact words. she basically said, i once bought government an unreformed social security. well, you can't have that. or dick morris before the election said, you know, mitt romney really needs -- and by the way, he correctly predicted the romney presidency, he said that mitt romney's a really start running on government spending. he needs to not talk about medicare, medicaid, social security, or the defense budget. welcome all right. now you just ruled out basically 80 percent of the federal budget. actually, a little bit more than that. so i think, you know, before we talk in sort of revolutionary terms their needs to be a revolution in terms of the public's view of these things. you know, i think we are a long way away from where we can say that this is entirely something that has been imposed on us by,

you know, these far away, distant bureaucrats. i do think there is a substantial element of truth to that, but we have to look within ourselves and look at the voters. the voters are demanding a lot of this. the democratic party became as big a government party as it is because its plants are dependent on government and demand more and more government all the time. >> the last question mentioned several is conservative senators. kentucky, utah, texas. generally the most conservative senators are from conservative states and the most conservative congress -- congressman are from rural districts. realistically the republican party will be senators from purple states and congressman from suburban districts that are elected in a limited government candid it. typically in these more urban or

suburban districts, purple states, you won't have a conservative candid it's winning primaries. how realistic is that to expect a party to truly be taken over by more limited government candid it's? >> sure. that definitely is a major challenge because we have seen really since the rise of the conservative movement with the founding of the national review in 1955 and some events before, we have really only had two movement conservatives nominated for president by the republican party with mary goldwater in 1964 went on to lose and then ronald reagan who went to terms. george w. bush, i have a lot of criticisms of him in my book, was summoned it was influenced by the conservative movement and had conservatives in his administration. he was not really himself a philosophical small government kind of guy. and i agree that a big problem

in terms of actual conservatives winning the republican nomination is the fact : of the conservatives would be qualified or who are seen as qualified to be president come from, you know, rural districts or come from southern states. it becomes more of our regional and cultural bottle in the minds a lot of people. and i think the other problem is that frequently what ends up happening is that the conservative candid who appeals most to grassroots conservatives and the republican primary -- and here i'm just talking about presidential perry's -- tends to be the candidate, the conservative who does not have the organization or money to really go the distance in a fight with the establishment candid. the conservative who is maybe a bit better compete -- better prepared and as more money and better organization and tends to, for whatever reason, not connect as well with the grassroots. so i think those are two problems. i think the key -- and that is

why in "devouring freedom" i talked about the idea of free-market capitalism, republicans and loose states and purple states have to identify other government programs, areas where big government is affecting the voters in those districts and run on those issues. i think you cannot -- i think you can have nationalized principles, but you cannot always nationalize issues. you have to be speaking to issues that actually affect the voters in your district and your state. there are a lot of criticisms i have of some of the more famous blues to republicans we have seemed like guliani and christine wells, but on the core issues that they were running on, even though there were liberal and everything else, on the core issues they emphasized in their campaign, those are conservative issues. ..

>> he has also cowritten several books. his book that is new is called "worshiping the state." please welcome our guest today. [applause] >> thank you so much, folks, for bringing me here once again.

we are talking about how liberalism became a state religion. the title of my book is obviously a little bit in your face. it is rather outlandish at times. it implies that liberals worship the state and second that liberalism itself has become a kind of established religion. this brings us to a not a set of questions. and is this just overblown rhetoric to sell a book. what does it really become our established religion? that liberals somehow do worship the state. we can add on top of this what does it matter? so what does it matter if liberalism is a religion or functions like a religion remap because of that function like

one and if it is in fact a religion, then christians and other opponents can litigate to disestablish it in a world view. and i mean to propose this quite seriously is a new and effective strategy. like-minded folks can turn the tables unlevel secularism by disestablish in as the state impose worldview. in education, and the federal agencies, even in the courts. the success of this kind of endeavor will depend on a well-developed argument showing that liberalism is in fact not only functioning like a religion, but actually is a religion so that its establishment by the federal government violates the first amendment. well that is what worshiping the state doesn't do much longer argument and we can have today.

so i'm providing a quick overview. so we can ask that question. it is liberal secularism, is it a kind of religion. now, that is a strong claim. but it is not one that i'm the first one to make. if you look at the work among others. everyone should tune in. most historically the 20th century political religion of 20th century fascist nazism. it is one of the most secular states once abolished by god, he said, and the government becomes a god.

wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. but above all they will worship the strongest thing in the world. now, the strongest thing in the world now is the modern secular state and that is why this becomes an object of worship and that is why it has become sacred. we can historically trace this of the secular political realm back to the french revolution were you did have a purely secular government that put itself forward with its own religion meant to displace christianity. it is simply a matter that since the french revolution in one form or another, you have these political religions arising. and that is why the term political religion was coined to describe that very phenomenon.

with these political religions, we find that when god is removed and the church is oppressed, then the state becomes the church and the god worshiped. that is what happened in 19th century nationalism and communism and it is all well studied examples of political religion. those are what i call worshiping the state is hard liberalism. but worshiping the state i am focusing on the modern liberalism that you are focusing on. that would be with a socialist leaning democracy in europe and now more and more in america. i turn not soft liberalism.

to that is what we are really going to focus on today. in order to understand, we are going to have to do a history of liberalism. and if there is a history, it's a bigger leukine for history that we need to sort out the confusion that we find. at least the start. it's important to try to provide a clear understanding of what liberalism is in its essence. i trace it back 500 years. not the 1950s, the 500 years. to the founder of modern liberalism. so we need to do a lot of history to understand this at its roots. when we look at this, what we find is a dual movement that defines what liberalism really has been over the centuries in one form or another. simultaneously a rejection of christianity because it occurs within a christian context and

an embracing of this world is the highest good. this material good as our ultimate and only home. liberals today are the intellectual heirs of this twofold desire for freedom. of course, you all know latin, so you know that this means free in latin. this is also the root word in liberalism as well. if you trace it back to its origin it is defined by the dual desire to be free from the burdens of christianity and free from christianity and a desire to be free to enjoy this world and its pleasures without any obstruction. so the liberations from christianity ,-com,-com ma which is kind of new paganism, it is part of the ongoing

secularization we have seen the last two or 300 years. secularization simply means he christianization for the west. it means liberation from christianity. the twofold desire explains why liberals and us feel atheistic and rejecting christianity and feel suddenly hedonistic, immersing themselves in worldly pleasures. so the anti-christian liberalism that you find in political correctness, it is what has occurred after 500 years of a sort of liberal revolution, which began as a rebellion against christianity.

and it's goal defines liberalism's is a positive form. you have to understand not. the desire to remove the church and replace it ends up providing worldly pleasures that gives it structures and beliefs and goals and replacing it with liberalism defining the moral and cultural goals of liberalism. as the liberal state takes over the form and functions of the church, it excludes the actual christian church from having any presence or influence and it uses the power of the state to establish itself as the reigning worldview, that is as the established worldview. just like a religion. olital position, it's

a worldview every bit as expensive as the one entice her place. it functions just like they religion. in our case and establish religion with its own specific dogmas and doctrines and that is its own foundational belief unquestionable and teachings that follow upon him. and that is the origin of political correctness, by the way. therefore it satisfies what scholars call a functionalist definition. we can talk about this in regards to typical beliefs. what is the typical beliefs of liberalism and you will see how extensive it is.

liberals tend to be secular minded if not atheistic. they tend to have a predictable array of moral positions and this comes from the liberation agenda and the quality and interchangeability of homosexual gay marriage, the right to abortion, perhaps even you have euthanasia, that is from life to death. liberals also favor big government and declare it should be secular and secularized. they mean by this that it should hold the basic worldview of secular liberalism and establish it by force of law. that means two things. first that the government should drive religion, especially christianity out of the public

square and into the privatized ghetto on the other side of the great wall of separation. second, that the government should impose the predictable array of moral positions on everyone. and noting also that we have our own cosmological view, the big picture. human nature is self-consciously goblets. that is a reduces human beings to the matter of their bodies and treats them as one more kind of animal in no way distinct from other animals and it provides a distinct view of what life and death are. and that means that liberalism will have a particular way that abuse politics and i call this a soul is your politics. that is it simply defines human nature entirely by the bodily

needs and comforts and pleasures and the avoidance of pain. and it legislates accordingly. those are the typical beliefs it you'll find among liberalism and it should be obvious when covering these things that it presents a full creed. so there is this extensive coverage that defines the natural world by materialism and human nature done by materialism. it defines human good and evil in multiple areas, including sexuality and marriage. and therefore determines what should be illegal and legal.

being that extensive it functions as a religion. people litigate against it because it functions like one. but it also is one and i cannot provide in the time allotted and i have a much longer section, when you look at the origins of soft liberalism and socialism, you find it really was a religion. his self conscience transfer of worship from god and humanity by state power and if you're trying to replace god, you made a lot of power. and if you're trying to replace god, you have to have a big budget and not as wide we are in a fiscal collapse in the west. so that is my sense to squeeze in that last little bit of history there.

we can go right to questions. we hope you have many of them. >> back here? >> thank you, my name is mark rasmussen. religion as it discusses really hard to define. just about everything begins with the definition of what you're sort of talking about. the definitions we are working from our functionalist definitions. is that right? >> could you talk about the best way to approach religion? and yes, that's a great question. first of all, let me say something really surprising. the very notion of religion is actually abetted by modern secularism in an attempt to demote christianity to be one more species of genus. no better or worse than many others. there's actually there is actually a history on the notion of best.

to answer the second part, we talk about religion today because we have been taught to talk about it in different ways. and then you can say, what you mean by religion. well, scholars have had a difficult time winning. it's a great passion, would you die for it? you know, there is a lot. they have trouble to come up with a functionalist view on essentialist view. which means they're actually worshiping the capital. it means they are using this to function like a religion. for the sake of litigating, you're on a less difficult situation to rely on a functionalist account i just looked at it, but why supreme

court affirmed this unanimously that satanism and other different kinds qualify as religious worship protected in state prisons. because they have an overly broad definition. it's broad enough to attach itself to liberalism and therefore it is not an established worldview pushed push by the federal government. so it is strategic rather than exact. because this is a messy world. soon after we have a question from? >> hello, my question is since philosophy is in line with what we believe as conservatives, when you talk about this are you referring to 19th century classic liberalism and what

liberalism means today? >> i was hoping to answer that question and i thank you for it. i gave her $10 to do that. [laughter] no, i didn't. i take that up in my book. but it's even messier than the religion question because it is what is at the foundation of classical liberalism. and by that something you can trace back to john locke. that is why we treat them with great detail in this book. worshiping the state. and i'm just going to tell you that i tried to get conservatives to understand that this is deeply ambiguous and ultimately affirms the same worldview that you're trying to battle by defining human beings as creatures whose desires are just very worldly. that is that he cuts you off and presents a kind of soulless politics in which economics is e ghest defines science.

in doing that he creates one more kind of politics, the result being that conservatives have a difficulty articulating why it is the reality should enter into political decisions. does it contribute to economic life or not. well, that is defining the human being and that is a problem. so i present a long and hard argument of a wake-up call that is deeper than not. >> hello, going back to the two points you have mentioned. the first one about the french revolution. in the second that you are talking about secularism being

an attempt to control the morality. you know, france has had a huge impact from the perspective of the region and it's also continuing these days for a couple of reasons. one being that there is an attempt by the french government to define the liberal moral that will be precisely an attempt to switch to a very secular variety. this account is very strong precisely because it is linked to know traditional perspective

and the second really find the agreed-upon issue. and you would talk about this in this kind of definition, to redesign us. an interaction between religion and the debate. >> yes, that law is the law that the separation of church and state. that is a very important law. and the reason is our first amendment does nothing about the separation of church and state. nothing at all. it was borrowing the french republic separation of church and state that define how it was

and it was actually litigated with the understanding today that is in france. it was an attempt to get the catholic church out of everything. our first amendment says nothing about that. these ideas came over from europe about creating a secular state. and this was done through the liberal takeover of our law studies in america and i go to the takeover of the universities and worshiping the state. it began in the 1860s with importing radical european secular liberalism to the american universities.

because no american university could give you a graduate degree. so what you did if you went to europe in the 1800s, use study got a german university. it is our entire understanding and part of that was in the development of our law schools. that is how our law schools got contaminated. you have to go back to and end of the 1800s to find that out. but one of the things they imported was this terrible idea from this 1905 french republic. >> yes, you know,. >> neither of us were there. okay, that's good. [laughter] >> the unfortunate thing about liberalism is that they are so

intolerant of religion. sumac or lease of certain kinds. they have no problem tolerating any other religions besides christianity. there's a reason for that. why liberals can't understand this. because they have a long history tries to with that other religions is superior to or equal to christianity. that is where the study of religions came from. in doing that, they would look up any religion is equally good as christianity. that is why you get these professors that worship trees and something that they are all not need to be taken out of the public square.

it's not that they are against religion, but they are against christianity and any other religion that will help them in their battle. >> thank you, sir. [applause] >> okay, let's move across the pacific ocean and talk about china for bed. greg is an entrepreneur and educator who focuses on china. he is a senior economist for the american jobs alliance and an economist with the coalition for prosperous america. he cowrote the movie death by china and has also contributed to another book called the coming china war. he's going to talk today on death by china. thank you. [applause] >> as she mentioned i attended

the university of california in orange county california. i get a chance to look at a lot of young people like you i rarely get young people that don't think i'm a crazy nutcase. so i'm glad to have you guys here. i know how to do things and get, so i would like you ought to stand. we are going to do something completely crazy that i never did do. let's say the pledge of allegiance. >> i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america. and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> okay, h that in

elementary school? okay, raise your hand. i want you to think about that. it does matter. i don't agree with hundred% of those things that the previous speaker said. but we have the first amendment that allows us to have this agreement and have an active discussion so that our nation can move forward. each time we do that, we find a way to move forward. this can't this can't happen in a country like china. because despite anything else they may be doing, they are not allowing freedom of speech. so here's a new story about the chinese government acting american corporations.

have you heard of it? anybody? okay so 63198 of these single core unit in the people's liberation army in china. this is a division of the chinese military financed by the chinese government. a company put out a really brilliant report that shows that 70% of this hacking that has been going on for this decade, primarily as coming from this building and this district of shanghai. this is a problem. my estimate was that this is costing america $400 billion per year. it is costing america 1 million lost jobs per year in a time when we cannot afford that at all. jon huntsman, the former ambassador to china did a report

recently and they came up with this. the point is its hundreds of billions of dollars and more than a million jobs. is greater than the impact of 9/11. happens every year and missed on purpose by a foreign military. i personally believe it has a smoldering pile of rubble before i had a chance to ask congress to speak about this problem. that begs the question why. so that brings up where do be best friends with these folks. so we have this thing called the engagement policy. and i come from yorba linda, california. just down the road from the

library. we developed this policy and the goal was that we would see political liberalization. i'm actually kind of a fan. i agree that no one was perfect. but the point was we would have a government that would become more tolerant of these things every respect in our bill of constitutions and bill of rights. that we would develop a market that would create wealth in the united states relationship with china. that we would get geopolitical cooperation from the chinese government and that there would be projects with human rights. there is some sort of progress that is put forth that is the great liberalize or that could bring china poured into the democracy. it's not happening. chart.e you have probably seen

there are a number of private enterprises in china and the blue bar is going downwards and it's the number of state owned enterprises in china. it sounds good. you know, this is part of economic freedom and capitalism. what you're not getting told is that the flat line at the bottom is the average asset size for a private company in china. yes, there are a lot of new vibrant companies run by good business people. they just can't get big because one that is the top is the average controlled by the communist party of china. the people in china are repressed economically by the government. they are being used as a tool to suck american and western dollars into china, which

include all the banks in china. if you go look at the 25 biggest companies in china, everyone every one of them is a state owned enterprise. the biggest retailer in china is a state owned enterprise. it is not the vibrant capitalist economy that you think you see when you go there. you go to shanghai and you see a building. they were receiving tart money from the federal government so they could open plants in china. so that and the joint partnership which the chinese government forces them into his 51% controlled by the shanghai automotive automation corporation. all of the money and technology and know-how. chinese and long-run owner.

this was mandated lester for all lawyers in china. we have to fill the sacred mission with chinese characteristics and i swear my lawyer and her loyalty to the motherland and people in the social system. gee, that doesn't sound like democratic reform to me. but i guess i don't know. but socialism with these characteristics, our first speaker talk about this. china is nationalistic and socialistic. this is a fascist government. so we are supposed to get a great export market. it is part of her trade deficit with china.

this shouldn't happen. this should self-correcting number of different ways. but you don't do business with criminals and expect to get a good deal. for 30 years but transactions have been negative. any moment now something magical is going to happen. and we are going to have this wonderful globalized super capitalistic economy. it is not making us rich. it's making the chinese ridge. we need to be aware of this. would you keep doing the same

strategy and business? i don't know. so this test book written by glenn harvard am who i like very much, he worked for george w. bush in the first administration. so he says that that this can result in ships to africa and then he says, of course, that the market conditions are where the trade is made. so let me show you this video. we have 750,000 people and these

companies are pouring their investment dollars into china. this is an executive is taking us on a two or and listen to what he has to say about why the ipod is made where it is. let's play the audio. >> we are going to try to run this video again. >> we are talking about the free

market. is that the free-market? now. if you do business with the mafia, we have laws against that for good reason. frankly i advocate laws that shift our economic relationship. we get taken advantage of in my free-market friends say that american consumers benefit and it's true. so how long does this last? will i have to pay to protect the environment from this? then it gets shipped off to china. so what do the chinese get? get a factory in productive capacity. billions of dollars in american

capital. i don't think so. we are trying to get over are our very naïve view of how free trade works. so how many of you have been to china? it is beautiful. there are some vibrant things going on there the people there who are my friends talk about. you go there and you see these fabulous things. and they did the whole olympics like hitler did to. and then there is this thing. the play, great. all right. we are all very impressed. show them how you said and look across. it is beautiful.

but borrowing something from our president, they did not build it. as foreign direct investment. guess you build those buildings? when they went bankrupt and fell in decay. and the money you put into this shipped over to china. this regime is more efficient than the american economy and you have to accept this, that we are the ones that were funding it. it's a great little story from my neck of the woods. they were really supported as a green company that was going to create jobs in the united

states. so we will talk about what one of the individuals has had to say. okay, so here is the audio. it takes a moment. >> we are an automotive car company based in los angeles. and we are the first car company is headquartered in downtown los angeles.

we are in california in the bay area. and this card is in washington state and we are the fastest-growing employer in los angeles county. it's a couple of weeks ago we had the mayor of california and the governor of california, mayor antonio villaraigosa talk to many of our politicians and stakeholders from the government affiliates in downtown los angeles. >> this is very interesting.

watch this year. >> we have an american staff that was overseas. >> this is an american making this comment. >> you have 250 employers and employees are not based out of los angeles, california. it is 65%. >> okay, so this car is made by the china corporation.

they bring weapons into certain places, like ak-47s and other things. who would back an organization like that? well, a guy named john bryson. i want you to notice this u.s. and china economic cooperation. if you know anything about this, it tells you who is in charge, literally. now john was appointed commerce secretary by the united states. like having the foxes watch the henhouse. other individuals involved, i

could go on and on. we were supposed to give geopolitical cooperation. i could go through the list that the chinese government supports to undermine the united states. including one who traded a million dollars for elephant ivory. of course their little lap dog, north korea. so yesterday i talked to congressman chris smith who i think is gr t american hero. and paul mentioned that there were is an interesting situation and we stood and talked and the miserable heat. i was happy to do it for people to truly appreciate this. they probably don't share a good relationship with anyone in this

room. but i do respect their right to believe it if they choose to and to go about their business peaceably. while we were there, a group of chinese tourists were walking by the capital to the washington monument and excise. there was an anti-communist protest going on in the teacher began to lead them in a chant to try to overwhelm the speech that the congressman was giving them. the arrogance of bringing children to the united states of america supposedly teaches them what america is about. but then to use the ideology and rhetoric to fight against freedom of religion right there in front of the u.s. capitol and trying to heckle the united states congress is daunting. but they feel very strongly to

tell us how we should be running our country. so when henry kissinger accorded this event in his memoir, this took place in 1972. he said perhaps it is in the national character of americans to be taken by those who are kind and mild. this is a story behind our engagement policy with china. now i am glad to take some questions. >> and wait in went in the back? >> yes, ma'am. >> hello, i'm wondering how america is justifying doing on this business with china but won't do a single bit of business with cuba.

>> i think frankly members of congress have to get reelected and people in the administration has to get appointed to do that. they need great gobs of money from national corporations to get what it is that they want to get. what they want is the ability to exploit the chinese labor market and exploit the lack of any regulation in the environment for workers there in order to drive short-term profits, which they believe is their responsibility to their shareholders. to undermine the long-term prospects for both their country and their nation. that can be achieved in china, so it is a matter of convenience. especially when it comes to syria or any badly behaving country except china. >> what you are saying is that china is not truly free trade. >> correct, it's doing business with criminals and we need to

reevaluate that. we now have 100% free trade and we have reasonable relationships with places like canada that creates mutual wall. but when one party is a criminal regime using slave labor inside prison camps, we can see how that works. and that is a problem. >> and those in the media talk about how china is free? >> absolutely. a lot of folks in the republican hierarchy are so into this that the idea of free trade with any country, regardless of how despicable behavior is, it is justified. we did this before. i think that our guests earlier

will let you know. henry ford was another american businessman. they were enamored with the plants there. but of course the german government nationalized and took away from then, aimed at united states and our allies. you're not doing anyone any good in the long run. >> hello, my name is robin from texas. and my economic development class we read a book called bad samaritans. and it talked about western imperialism kind of imposed their western views on other countries and how they were hard

to make this way. it talks about state owned enterprises and i was just wondering in your opinion is there ever a time when this can be beneficial to get started and then does it ever become private owned or is it ever a good thing or is it always like this. >> excellent question. benjamin franklin started the u.s. postal u.s. postal service and i wrote an editorial about this that got me in a lot of trouble. it basically said that it was degenerating it into unfair competition to private companies like ups and fedex in the delivery of junk mail that nobody wants. some government trucks can take it to a landfill.

for the government to be a primary customer in the industry, after you devise a way for them to step back. there are other cases where the united states government and the transcontinental railroad developed the internet and handed it over to the public. developing a global positioning system. the interstate highway system. there are times when i do believe that the government had a legitimate role. when you see one you will find corruption. >> hello, it would seem from what you touched on, it appears that the united states government has been rather taken by the chinese government for

the statement. why exactly do think that the united states company and government have gone along so willingly with what has been repeatedly talked about? >> because they make money. it is pretty much that simple. a famous bank man was asked why he robbed banks. he said because that is where the money is. so unfortunately we have created an environment whereby the companies, in order to meet their goals and return on investment to shareholders committee must take advantage of this unregulated environment to china. we have the world's highest corporate tax rates and we have a federal income tax and we need

to reform our rules. we need to reform the rules in the united states are the motivations are new technology and manufacturing and capital reinvesting. instead we have created an environment where short-term is all that counts for. part of that is the fcc requirement is recorded in the late 1960s for companies. when we talk about this and they said please go anywhere else and your business. >> one more question. >> hello, i go to college in california. we are in a bad debt crisis in california. when we need jobs in california, why is he giving them to china and second of all especially one working conditions are so bad in

china. >> absolutely. his idea of creating jobs create a business that employs tens of thousands of people in china and undermines the great american industry in order to create 200 jobs. because we only count one side of the ledger. as we are talking about how we don't see the destruction instead of laying a economic landscape to cause long-term prosperity. >> thank you very much. we thank you so much for your insight today. >> our next guest is an outstanding conservative author who wrote a "new york times" bestseller called unsafe for command, which was a major

factor in the success of john kerry in 2004 and he is a prolific author, so he has not won the two books that are knew nudity is going to talk about today. what went wrong, the inside story of the gop debacle and how it can be avoided next time and book number two is bad samaritans, the aclu campaign. please welcome our next author. [applause] [applause] >> thank you very much. i co-authored this and i want to acknowledge my great co-author, john o'neill. i could not have done it without you. i could not have done it without john's assistance. two books i have today are

equally important messages. i want to start with this one on bad samaritans in the subtitle of it is the aclu we beat the winless campaign to erase faith from the public square. in the beginning we traced the history of the aclu because i wanted to make it clear this was not an accidental development. our founding fathers articulated many times do we have lost believe in god. many thought that this involved judeo-christian religion. that we would lose our liberty. and i begin with this thing that we are geniuses, the constitution and why would they think this and how is it that

america has allowed the aclu to make it into a very secular nation. where it is almost a crime to even have an expression of judeo-christian beliefs in school or the public square and the aclu is about to move into the churches to criminalize christianity. the foundation was in radical socialism and the founders, some of the original board members were writing to soviet america. it had its origins in the aclu.

now, the evolution of the aclu is to embrace this principle, some of the members being communists. i documented it fully in the book. we are transforming america into a revolutionized socialized state. to do that, two things had to be accomplished. one includes belief in the judeo-christian god had to be destroyed. and the fundamental family unit had to be destroyed. many are becoming radicalized socialist countries and the aclu talked about the principles going back into the 1920s and

1930s. the. .. portraying the vision in which christians are portrayed as stupid. anyone who would believe in a idea of god creating the world, remember the famous scene where spencer tracy is a lawyer, and brow beating william jennings

bryan on the stand. that never happened in the trial. william jennings bryan won the trial, and the defense of god he gave was very strong, but the popular image that has come out of that, has been one that has persisted in demonizing christians. as i follow the history through, couple of the major attacks going on today -- i want to emphasize this has been a -- the left has waged. the primary attack going on right now today is on the whole agenda of marriage being between a man and a woman and it began with a public relations campaign that the left began running to change the entire notion of relationship between two people, homosexual, lgbt agenda, was as

advanced real a'sing in the 1950s, if someone was portrayed as homosexual, it was terrible, the stigma. but in presenting television shows, presenting hoax osex -- homosexuals in a positive light, desensitizing the american population, got to a point where, in terms of libertarianism, people say if it doesn't hurt me that two men or two women are marry, why should i care? one of the fundamental distinctions between a conservative and a libertarian is that for a true conservative, the moral values, the fiber of the nation, are worth fighting for on original christian judeo-prims. what happens is we get introduced a form of relativism. again, this is a -- going to the social darwinism, the idea that all these ideas ought to be tested. so you can see which one emerges as the best.

as long as they don't hurt me. well, the next frontier in the lgbt lobby, and the arguments that will advance them, a public relations campaign but polygamy or multiple people involved in a marriage, or even pedophilia. it's very hard, once the barriers are broken, once the logic of a judeo-christian faith is broken down, so that people no longer believe in fundamental issues such as sin, or fundamental issues such as redemption, then of course why can't you experiment with all these other forms of sexual activity, and we begin heading towards the kind of paganism that we have done before. ancient rome experimented with this, and we have seen the results of ancient rome. was actually christianity coming

in that returned the paganism in the ancient world. the second, the attack on the family. and the pushing of the abortion agenda, the pushing of the feminist agenda, has been to break down the idea of marriage and a mother, two parents raising a child, with abortion, you move into a period of thinking where sex is just play. fun. experimentation. consequences to sex can be just eliminated. if it involves a child. and we 2010 the -- we get the whole issue of the -- which the democrats exploited, the reproductive rights of a woman. a true conservative would say, wait a minute, what are we talking about? 18-cent condom being paid for by public welfare? is that really what we're talking about here? and the idea of the reproductive freedom includes an idea of the

unborn child having its own right to life. or that abortion has consequences. i can show you many psychologists and psychiatrists working with women who have had abortions, who for the rest of their lives are haunted by the child that was not born. in terms of conservatives, we need to assert these values and bring the values forward. i end the book by saying that the next challenge, once the lgbt agenda achieves, that there is in fact a constitutional right to a homosexual marriage or a lesbian marriage or whatever other marriage is defined as legitimate. then anyone who in a church, a pastor who preaches a biblical judeo-christian interpretation, that anything except a marriage between a man and a woman is a

sin, that pastor will have been committing a hate crime. and the future will be to define these rights as if they were civil rights. in other words, we understand improperly that discrimination by race is a crime. you can't discriminate in the united states for voting, housing, jobs. truly skin color is an irrelevant consideration. but are we going to equally say that male-female, or that marriage and with the idea of raising children, what we're having in the united states is not only an environment in which the catholic church has to ask if it's going to continue operating if it has to provide contraceptive services in its health insurance programs, and abortions, violating the fundamental principles of the religion, we move to a point where it's become freedom from

religion, not freedom of religion. and a secular society in which aclu will be fined to fight for the rights of islam and defend muslims in a context where the aclu would never defend christians on an equal basis. the book is -- both of these books -- this one is partly dedicateed to phyllis schlafly. i also dead okayedded joseph farah, and bill murray, many of you know is the now very strong christian, working to promote christianity throughout the world, but was responsible with his mother for some of the initial cases which got prayer out of the schools. and bill donohue, a catholic

leader, argued decades ago, the fundamental issue of -- was why should women have equal rights. women always had special rights. how is it that we are going to eliminate going into a specialist agenda which ultimately eliminates the family. today in the united states, the number of children being born out of wedlock is terrifying. the number of teenage pregnancies is terrifying. broken families, abortions. a country which, if you look at failure, some of the signs of failure ultimately in life have a child too early in your teenage years. not have a husband and wife together to raise the child. we're producing generations of children in the united states that lack education, lack god, lack values, and are headed toward a future in which their

future will be dependency on a state which has engineered the removal of god, something that thomas jefferson, you know, his wall of separation phrase in the lawyer to the danberry congregation was never meant to mean separation of church and state. it was meant to mean the government cannot come in and interfere with the church. we have come full circle and the aclu has played major part in that. now, in some ways my next book, who i what went wrong." about the election, is a continuation of the same themes. what i'm pointing out is that you must understand that the obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 were game-changers. the republican party, mitt romney -- i spent three weeks as traveling press with mitt romney's campaign, flying on the

romney campaign airplane. the last day of the campaign, mitt romney cam to the back of the press section and said he had not even written a concession speech. he was that confident he was going to win. i asked stuart stevens, one of the chief strategist of the romney campaign, and he was equally confident, and he was. i said, well, why? and the whole idea was that a good message, good campaign message, will beat a ground game anytime. and i said, i'm not so sure of that. that's karl rove thinking or before, 1950s, 1960s. campaign is about a message. what the democrats managed to do is -- it should not be underestimated. i'm a professional political scientist. a ph.d in political science

from harvard, 1972. hive studied voting behavior in presidential elections for decades. the democrats were a game-changer. they have highly effect tithe computer -- effective excite sign theists, political scientists, scientists and psychologists working for them. they even hired a few physicists who were specialists in subatomic movement because of the statistics and the mathematics have some mapping on politics. these were people who are the same google, silicon valley, geniuses, highly funded, also putting hell into the national security administration to be able to take vast amounts of data, all your credit card information, every telephone call you've ever made, every o-mail you

profile you on a microbasis, microtargetting. and then run very sophisticated computer equations. so, for the political scientist running the obama campaign, it wasn't about winning all of the country. it came done to eight states, and in those eight states it came down to cuyahoga county in ohio, and the city. you take the cities out of the united states, you have a very red country. very republican. you put the cities back in, you know, california was out, l.a. and san francisco is very different. it's the same in all across the country. so, comes down to 50,000 votes in cuyahoga county. the democrats had to get, and those included getting the african-american community to respond very actively, and in florida, 50,000 additional hispanic votes.

with techniques so that when the obama campaign e-mailed you, you felt like they were talking to you personally. and the obama campaign playing interest group politics to a level that would have frightened even franklin roosevelt, such that -- i'll make this last point and then take some questions -- is this. obama divided and he has continued to divide, he would be the greatest divider in american history. and the current campaign, for instance, trayvon martin and the race-baiting. eric holder and barack obama know there's no way that george zimmerman would ever be prosecuted under federal equal rights laws. the fbi would be happy to testify and show or be forced to testify and show they investigated zimmerman and he is not a racist. but the point is, this race baiting riles up an interest

group, african-americans and their supporters. gets them in the street. if they're angry, they're intensified in their support for obama. and same thing, the rich don't pay their fair share. obama knows they pay they're fair share. last point. but the point is, if there's riled up, intensified, if they're in the streets, and their support is then manipulated that way, what you have got is not looking at other stories in the news that these very effective media people want to put out. don't have any coverage of the shooting. how about the irs examining tea party groups. block that story out. get everybody talking about trayvon martin. very effective techniques, and the people running the obama campaign -- we're going to have to have -- i dedicated this book

to phyllis for her book in the '60s, a choice, not an echo. the republican party does not run real consecutive choices. the republican party has no future. and that is the major theme, not to underestimate the degree to which the obama people have changed fundamentally and forever the nature of presidential politics. thank you very much. [applause] >> it's great to see you again, dr. corsi. >> thank you. >> thank you for coming here and sharing your -- >> thank you very much. >> -- your two current publications. you have written a wide ranging book that i followed you throughout the years from obama nations to wide ranking tops of israel to obama's birth certificate. it appears to me the paganism world view you mentioned and

antisemitism in my perspective, deception and obama zombie administration has -- we being -- creating this downward spiral of the american culture, from our research and data you gathered and you and mr. ken -- have written a lot of investigative journalism. do you think it is true that you have seen from all your research this trend that has been continuing on this downward spiral, and if so, is there hope for what you call, quote, true conservativeism for 2013? >> yes. also, "america for sale" one of my books closing the lie of global jim free trade with china, can company the themes ts of -- echo the themes of a previous speaker.

the united states -- we have to have a true conservative who can explain to people that do you really want your future defined by food stamps and an obamaphone. the young people sitting in this room, you just gone through college, gotten student loans, you want your future defined by a job far below what you were trained to do? if we decide that the united states economy is just too expensive to employ people, and we go this direction, of having people be constantly manipulated, not realizing the techniques being used to get you not to care, you know. detroit is bankrupt today. detroit is also bankrupt today after decades of socialism. decades of social welfare state. detroit is the future of every american city. when i was a child growing up, american cities were our g treasure. today american cities are a wasteland.

they're a wasteland because of welfare, they're a wasteland because of broken families. the tragedy that's going on in our inare cities and around the country, which will spread to the suburbs, where children are not raised correctly, don't have an education, don't see a future, where the family is broken from the beginning, these tragedies -- someone has to stand up and say this is the lie that began in the new deal. this is the lie of government dependence. don't be satisfied as young people to be told you're not needed. don't be satisfied to be told that somebody in china or anywhere else can do your jobs better than you can do them. but fight for this. and if you listen to the lie, socialism always comes on to help you, and then in the end it imprisons you. and obama is an extension of

fdr. a very intelligent extension, not to be underestimated, with some of the best advice around, political science, computer science. don't think for a minute that the nsa is surveying just terrorists, because you have homeland security saying the tea party is the terrorists. as soon as they have the information, why do you think the left doesn't care? the left knows the nsa isn't watching silicon valley. the left is watching conservatives. every bet as much as the irs targeted conserve -- conservatives. darrell issa is doing a remarkable job in congress. we need to support him, ted cruz, acknowledge that the me-too republicans, the john mccains, lindsey grahams and the mark -- marco rubio, if

that's the republican party conservatives do not need the republican party. [applause] >> hi, joel. >> i am joel gilbert from highway 61 in entertain independent los angeles. i have two questions. given the history of failure of socialism and communism, what this try psychological motivation of today's socialists to still recommend this economic system, and secondly, would you be willing to be interviewed for my new movie? >> i've seen your movies before. be delighted. the appeal of socialism is very strongly seductive. i recommend everyone younger than you read the communeist man

cities stow. promises a worker's paradise, and don't his today to study the millions killed by stalin or in china or indo-china. don't hesitate to interview the people in china or russia who are desperate for freedom. the lie is whenever anyone is telling you, government is going to help you, run from them. and unfortunately, in the schools, the whole indoctrination of the left has been so effective, going back into last century, in the united states, that our schools are dominated by leftist thinking, progressives became progressives increasingly today because communists and socialists didn't want to be called communists and socialists. the agenda is indistinguishable

and the communist party knows it. some of the greatest supporters of obama's policies are the communist newspapers published in the united states. so don't -- the education you're getting and have gotten is so heavily laden with a class analysis, with an attack on republicans, with an attack on capitalism. i it was abraham lincoln. did he mention that lincoln was a republican? how about the civil rights laws that were brought forward in the eisenhower administration by dwight eisenhower, introduced to congress, at a time when the democrats were walking out of a national nominating convention of dixiecrats bat they're were segregationists. don't let the democrats and the socialists write the narrative. a strong, republican,

conservative candidate, not mitt romney, who was a centrist to begin with publish would not let the democrats frame him. that's what point out. the minute the democrats ran commercials on romney saying he was a -- he put people out of work, and romney had to say that's a lie and had to explain why it's a lie and said i'll sue anybody that runs a commercial. if we don't have -- like phyllis schlafly says in the '60s,conservatives who have strong principles, who can articulate those principles and defend them, don't go for the kgb lie that if you oppose obama you're a racist. that's nonsense and has to be articulated as nonsense and has to be confronted. the republican party has stood in this country for equal rights before the democrats became aware of the issue.

>> thank you, dr. corsi. [applause] >> this event take place every year at the hair take foundation in washington, dc and is hosted by the eagle forum, conservative organization founded by phyllis schlafly in 197 2. our coverage from the 20th 20th annual egag -- eagle forum continues. here's m. stanton evans. >> our next speaker is m. stanton evans and one of the great long-time leader0s the covertive movement. he was worked as an editor, journalist, and founded the

national journalism center. he served -- m. stanton evans was chairman of the american conservative union from 1971 top 1977. he has a new book out called, lack luster history. the untold story of senator joe mccarthy and his fight against america's enemies. turning a proper name into a verb is a science of historical significance but the verb to mccarthy is historically inaccurate, mr. evans will tell us. mr. evans? >> thank you very much. very honored to be here. with you folks folks and with p. we go back a few years. goldwater days and even before. and a long road, and in many ways a bumpy one, but one that

has been well worth traveling. and glad to be here with phyllis and you today. as the intro suggests i've been around a while anyway, and now we want conference q & a. >> yes, 15 minutes and then 15 minutes of questions. >> speak from where you are when you question? >> yes. we have mics. >> okay. i say that because i'm a little bit hard of hearing. when you get older, there or two bad things that happen to you. one is, your hearing starts to go. and i forget what the other one is. [laughter] >> probably think of it in a minute. i want to commend you guys for being here. you have heard -- i don't know if you know this, this an all-star team that has spoken to

you at this conference. these are the very best people in congress without any shadow of a doubt, and what you heard is going to, i hope, help you in your own thinking and in your own careers after you leave here. i commend you for being here and putting in these hours on these serious matters. and i'm always -- i teach college, and i tell my students there's more to life than keeping up with the kardashians. [laughter] >> but that is -- keeping up with them is not easy. it takes a while to study to know what they're doing. [laughter] >> i saw kim kardashian had condemned the zimmerman verdict, and she would know about that. her father was an attorney for

o.j. simpson. that is true. that's correct. then -- do you follow katy perry? is she still popular? katy perry said a couple years ago that it was an outrage that health care in america is not free. and i asked my students, is a katy perry concert free? they're not. a friend of mine checked at that time, and a ticket to a katy per perry concert costs $84. i sought, i should be able to go to a katy perry concert for nothing. not that i would go to a katy perry concert but it's the principle of it. so, anyway, i am a bit of a con

temporary didn't con they'rerian. the only time i text is when i'm driving. and so i'm looking at some' -- i have a new book out and they're both about the same thing so nothing wrong with lumping them together a bit. they're got about a period of american history that is very frequently -- in fact almost always misrepresented in the history books you may have read in college or in high school. and i tried to look at the mccarthy era, joe mccarthy, the -- how many of you ever heard of senator mccarthy, mccarthyism? okay. how many ever heard anything good about senator mccarthy?

i see no hands. that's typical. that's not your fault. it's the fault of my generation, for not getting the truth out there. the new book is about other people -- other aspects of the era, the so-called cold war. from your standpoint this might as well be the war of 1812, a long time ago. but it's important to know the history for a couple of reasons. to know it correctly. one is, just to know the truth is important for its own sake. also, because some of the things that happened back then and the way that they are treated today are irrelevant to more recent events. and i think we need to know the history to begin with just to know it, but also to apply it to the present. and one of the things that a

friend of mine told me -- i did not see this myself -- back in 1994, was the 50th anniversary of d-day; you heard about d-day, the land agent normandy, the american troops went ashore in france. that's d-day. 1944. and this has been commemorated on television in 1994. the 50th anniversary. my friend saw this, and was on a tv station in peoria, illinois, or wherever it was, and the young lady reading the teleprompter referred to -- talk about this -- to world war i 1. -- world war 11, which suggested to me that maybe we're not teaching history very well. and also not teaching latin. although you would think that every all these super bowls, we would know something about roman

numerals but apparently not. anyway, what i've tried to do in these two books is to look at what actually happened as opposed to what is in most of the textbooks out there, and one reason that this was possible is that the truth about all this stuff for years was covered up, and to some degree it still is. however, with the passage of time, we have had access to the files of the fbi, the federal bureau of investigation, who were tracking the bad guys, who were trying to do us harm back in the '40s and '50s. this was all covered up at the time but now we have a pretty good picture of what went on. and captured essentially what was going on -- how many of you are seen these bourne movies,

matt damon, and -- or james bond movies, some bad guy trying to -- group of bad guys trying to take over the world, and matt damon stops them. and -- well, back then, unfortunately, we did not have matt damon. back then in the '40s and '50s, and which might have been a blessing. but that another story. and we had plenty of bad guys trying to take over the world, just like in the movies, except it was real. and the main people standing in their way of taking over the world were americans. we were the problem from their standpoint. and so what they did, they said, communists, they were agents of the soviet union, which had a game plan of conquering country after country after country. we were the big barrier to their

success. so that the bad guys were trying to influence what we did, and they infiltrated our government to do this, and to affect our policy, to serve the cause of moscow. and that's what these books are about. they go into these records that are now available from the fbi and elsewhere showing what really happened. things that were not available 50 years ago. there were hundreds of these agents in the u.s. government who were -- some of them very famous. one named alder hess. convicted and sent to prison, soviet agent. but there were many more like him and they did a lot of bad stuff that helped deliver country after country after country to the control of the communists. poland. ewing slav -- yugoslavia.

china. and they were able to affect our policy. that's what these books are in part about. now, can't tell you much more than that except that one of the things that happened at that time was a kind of blindness on the part of the authorities as to what was going on. a denial that -- well, not really a problem. we don't need to worry about it. anybody that complains about it, like joe mccarthy or the house committee on unamerican activities, phyllis schapply or stan evans or whatever, they're witch-hunting. they're just crying out for danger that is nonexistent. we know now that the danger was existent and was very severe. but one of the parts -- one of the aspects of the blindness was a mindset which said that just because someone is a member of the communist party, that -- so

what? just a member of the communist party? mere membership it's called. and obedience to that thought communists were invited into the government, and like an affirmative action program for communists. and where it says, yeah, the problem with government, we don't have enough commune grist it, and they brought in more communist this was particularly intense in world wore eleven when the soviet union was our ally against the nazi. that mindset and blindness exitses today and can be transposed today to the problem of radical islam. >> the problem of the danger our security posed by fanatics who mean to destroy us. these are not communists but equally dangerous in some ways more so in some ways because of

the ability to blow up the world trade center and things of that nature. and there's a blindness towards this, and i can't document this cut i want to give you some examples of the problem. we know there's a big fight about immigration going on now. i'm sure you know this. i'll bet jeff sessions talked about it when he was here. there's a great man, jeff sessions. very proud to know him. and the immigration problem is also a national security problem in addition to other things. and one of the things that resulted in -- of course you guys were just kids when this happened, when the original 9/11 happened, was that all the people who were involved in those bombings were on visas that were issued by our government to let them come into the country. and people said, how can they let these people into the country? well, the answer is because the

mindset was the same as toward the communeis-- -- communist from world war ii. want to read from a visa application in the state department. this is not a joke. most of the people are from saudi arabia and they're asked questions at that time on the visa application process, to find out if they should be admitted, and they all were. and here's some of the questions that were asked. do you seek to enter the united states to engage export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities? how would you answer that? are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization? >> yes, sir, right here. >> you're probably in the tea party. that's where you are. [laughter] >> you wouldn't be in here if you were one of the other kind.

and here's one. have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the nazi government of germany? how old are these people? i was a kid in world war eleven, and this people have to be 90, 100 years old. then -- or have you ever're tase pated in genocide. and then there are boxes, check yes or no. anyway, i go through it -- i -- i said, yeah, expert violation and some terrorism, yes, and, yeah, i'm a member of al qaeda. yes. and participate in persecutions? i was just a kid but i did. and some genocide. but i didn't have any values back then. yes, yes, yes.

i checked yes. as -- and then it says this, if i'm lying, i'm dying. a yes answer does not automatically signify ineligibility for a series visa. if you answerey you may be required to personally an before a con hsu lar office because we need to talk. hello, buy a clue. this is the same mindset of the world war eleven. they're just communist. what's the drama sneer -- drama here? come on in, guys. that's what we're dealing with. and i'll give you one other example. mayor bloomberg of new york -- anything from new york? okay. mayor bloomberg a real person? he looks like a character out of

a tom wolfe novel. in 2010 -- i'm going to wrap it up here -- there's a times square bomber, the guy from pakistan. >> he had a pressure cooker. >> that was in boston? >> no, he hat had ha pressure cooker and didn't go off. >> you learn something every day. what he had didn't work, that's true. he was spotted by an alert hot dog vendor, which proves the security system is really working because that is our first line of defense. hot dog vendors. and maybe put 20,000 hot dog vendors on the mexican border. [laughter] >> maybe they would be able to stop this. anyway, just -- gets to the

airport, tries to fly to dubai, going back to pakistan, and so two days -- i was in new york after that, and he is being interviewed by katie couric, then of cbs, two giant intellects, really coming together, and just -- katie couric says, mayor bloomberg, what do you think motivated this person? why would he drive this car bomb in times square? and try to escape to pakistan? what's going on here. and he says, probably somebody upset about the healthcare bill. and are they having a healthcare problem in pakistan? so there's your mindset. and i could go on and on. but i'll wrap it up now. a little offcolor here. i apologize. sometimes i get a little risque. phyllis knows me too well. this is a story of a family

where there are two sets sets of children. teenage children and younger children. and as happens, you have younger siblings, maybe you know how this works, the younger kids were picking up things from the teenagers and repeating them, trying to be cool. so, some of the stuff they paged up was offcolor, and one morning, the two little kids come downstairs for breakfast and the father is serving breakfast and he says to the little boy, what would you like to have for breakfast? and the little boy says, oh, what the hell. i might as well have some corn flakes. and the father reached out and slaps the kid across the mouth and says i don't want to hear that again in this house. if i hear that again you're going to get worse than this. so never say that again. and he turns to the little girl and says what would you like? she said, you can bet your ass

it won't be corn flakes. the moral of the story is, if something bad happens to you, it's a good idea to -- my time is up. i thank you for yours. [applause] >> a little q & a? >> any questions here? >> dealing with the immigration idea, seem to indicate that perhaps reforming the immigration process would help with some of the issues with the muslims causing terrorism inside the united states, especially since we have terrorists walking in and saying, yes, they're going to be terrorists. a would you say to idea that the federal government crede control of the borders to the visit states? >> i don't know if that idea can

pass constitutional muster, because what we have had is the federal government contending that it is pre-empted the field, and suing arizona, which tried to do this -- and i happen to be from texas so i know something about these matters -- and the states, i'm sure, would do a much better job than the federal government is doing. i don't know if you guys read -- i had a long piece in there yet about -- yesterday about the immigration bell, -- immigration bill, which is a disaster and must be defeated. the state was do a better job than the federal government. anything else? >> any other -- >> no other questions? >> no other questions? oh, yes. >> this might be slightly unrelated. i'm mady from hillsdale college. >> welcome.

>> i have a question. at abraham lincoln. is it okay if i a ask question about that? abraham lincoln. are you up on abraham lincoln? >> no, i'm not. what do you want to -- just a general discussion of abraham lincoln? >> . no when i was younger, i heard that he was a big hero because he freed the slaves, and then when i got into higher education, like, college and high school, they would say he is actually a racist and only did it for political motivations. so i wondered about the accuracy of why that interpretation has changed. >> you have people at hillsdale know more about this than i do. but i think there are some remarks of lincoln on record that reflect such attitudes. i think the general critique of lincoln -- again, i'm from texas, i'm a confederate, and so

we had other issues with president lincoln besides his language. it was more his -- he was a little too pro-active but that's another story all together. >> world war one girl. >> and anybody else? down here. down here. >> i'm spencer, guy to the college of william and mary. how is it different when you're trying to -- when someone has been -- when history has declared someone to be bad, like joe mccarthy, and it's sort of inspirational to side with the underdog and say, maybe he wasn't so bad afterall. but what about people who are overrated in history who we need to bring down to where they belong? like john f. kennedy or martin luther king, people lyonized by the left as prophets prophets as

and nelson mandela. how do we come across as not being mean when we criticize these heroes of the left. >> well, it's a very difficult question, and -- but you're right, there are certain taboos. you just cannot criticize -- take franklin roosevelt. my second book is mostly about president roosevelt and the conferences at the end of the war, and what he did basically giving away half the world to joseph stalin, and i go into that in some detail. well, this is where you don't say this. it's just not said. and jack kennedy and phyllis and i are -- we were there when all that was going on, and in fact some of the stuff happening today in terms of what obama is doing, was done by the kennedys 50 years ago. they're using the irs.

to crack down on conservatives. that was done back then. trying to silence conservatives on radio. that was done back then. trying to stifle conservative opinion in way whatsoever done back then, under kennedy and then lyndon johnson. this is all ignored in the history books. and it needs to be emphasized. all i can say is -- you're talking to somebody -- i know a lot about -- try writing a book about defending joe mccarthy and see how many dinners you get invited to at the "new york times" or how much your books are reviewed at the "new york times" or the "washington post." zero. but that should not stop up, you guys are the hope.

you have -- i don't have that many years left. you have lots of years left to do this stuff. but you need to do it. somebody should do it. now, again, i know about the kardashians. i know that we have to pay attention to what they're doing. and i know you probably don't emphasize that probably enough. but in addition to knowing about the kardashians, or storied wars, ever watched that? but -- in addition to those things, those are good. we need to do this other stuff, and you can do it. you have the years. you have the decades. and i'm hoping you will answer your own question, and the next couple of decades. i guess that's it. thank you all very much. you're a great group. [applause]

>> our next speaker is hans von spakovsky, an attorney and former member of the board of advisers for the federal election commission. a staff member here at heritage foundation, and he has just written a book called: "who's counting: how fraudsterssters d bureaucrats but your vote at riecks. i" anytime a fradulent vote is cast it devalues your vote. [applause] >> well, stan evans is tough to follow. i don't thick have the jokes and stories he has but i am talking bat serious subject. i oftenright rite for "national review" and wrote this book and the whole point was to upset the

left and point out that voter fraud is something that actually does occur. and it's amazing that -- if you google me, you'll find some of the worst stuff you can possibly imagine and it's all because of the fact that when voter fraud cases occur i actually write about them. now, the biggest thing that you all have heard is that even when voter fraud happens, why, it's so rare and it doesn't really do anything. i want to tell you about who cases that you all probably don't know about that affected you and every other single american in this room. now, i don't know if you have read about this but just a little while ago four individuals were convicted by a jury in indiana for engaging in ballot petition fraud. now, why is this important and why does it affect you? well, because the county

democratic party chairman in a particular county in indiana, was convicted of forging the signatures back in 2008 of the petitions that got barack obama qualified to be on the ballot for the democratic may 2008 primary. now, in indiana, like a lot of other states, you have to get a certain number of voter signatures to get on the ballot. in indiana you have to get 500 registered voters from each of the state's congressional districts, and in this particular congressional district, where this county chairman is, they forged page after page of page of the ballot petition. now, the local authorities discovered this. no, in fact some of the local authorities were involved in it. this was discovered by a college student, who got ahold of the petitions and was looking at

them and said, a lot of these signatures look the same. now, why is this important? bus if you go back to may of 2008, remember there was a very hot presidential race going on between hillary clinton and barack obama. at the time of the indiana primary barack obama had 1,490 delegates, hillary clinton had 1,338 delegates so she was very close behind obama, and in fact, she was ahead of him in the super delegates that also go to the democratic convention. now, she barely won the indiana primary. won by 51%. what that meant was that she and obama split the delegates from that state. so it was basically a washout. if instead he had been challenged, and the signature forgery been discovered then, he would not have been on the ballot. can you imagine a fiasco that

would have been if a major democratic candidate wasn't on the ballot in a big state like indiana? hillary clinton had won. gotten all 72 delegates, what would that have done to his campaign? he was not the set nominee at the time. i it was hot race. and this might have been something that stopped his momentum and allowed hillary clinton to become the nominee. we'll never know. but that fraud affected everyone because it potentially helped get barack obama elected. another piece of voter fraud that affected every person in this room is the fact that in 2008, you all may recall, we had one of the closest senate races in the united states history in minnesota. 2.9 million votes were cast, and on election day the republican incumbent, norm coleman, was ahead bay.

-- ahead by a little over 700 votes. the challenger, democratic al franker, former szasz night live comedian. he was on it when i was in high school. he went to court to challenge the race. and after months and months of litigation, after a number of recounts, al franken was declared the winner bay little over 300 votes. what we discovered since then is that the vote -- the winning margin, a little over 300 votes, we now know that between 1200 and 1400 felons illegally voted in the election. so the illegal votes were four times the margin of victory. why did that affect you if you're not from minnesota? because al franken provided the 60th vote that passed obama care in the senate. so if al franken had not won the

race there would be no obamacare legislation that is no the law of the u.s. the point of all this is that we generally have a pretty good election' system but we do have fraud and it does occur, and it's something we have to fight against all the time. that is one of the reasons states have been pushing for voter i.d. laws. it's to stop that from happening. and to tell you how much the left does not like this, there was an article that appeared in a magazine, i'm sure i would never ordinarily recommend that you read, called "mother jones." the most left wing magazine there is. they had an interesting article in january of this year. one of their reporters made it into a meeting that was held in washington, a month after the election. it was held at the offices of the national education association. and at the meeting -- everybody always talks about the vast right-wing conspiracy.

this 'twas the vast left-wing conspiracy having the meeting. three dozen of the most powerful liberal advocacy groups and unions were at the meeting. everybody from the nea to the. a. afl-cio, sear la club, and te whole point of the meeting was how to pool their money and come up with a strategy for their goal, which is to turn the united states into their version of a progressive liberal utopia, and they set out throw objectives. the first objective was to get rid of the filibuster in the senate so they can ram through nominees, including judicial nominees and the second goal was to oppose all sew -- all voter i.d. laws and any other effort to improve the integrity of the election process. what does that tell you about them? it tells you that they are willing to break the rules to

win, and they don't want anyoneny rules in place that will make that more difficult to occur. the point of this is that you're hearing today from lots of people talking to you about the kind of public policy solutions we want for the problems we have. we're not going to be able to put those -- our ideas for solving the problems in place unless we elect the right people to office, and conservatives who offer think that, if everyone follows the rules, don't understand the left believes that it's okay to cheat, because the end justifies the means. so, what i would say to all of you is, if you're not working in a campaign on election day, then go get a job as a precinct worker and work in the polls because having you there is one way of stopping the kind of fraud from happening. if you're not going to do that, volunteer to be be a poll

watcher so you can do that, and in the states where you live, convince your state legislators to do somethings like pass voter i.d. laws. they're very, very important, and i'll be happy to answer questions. ... how do we come back something like that when the courts are so active? like, we have legislation there,

legislation that seemed like it would work and it was overturned by the courts. what is your suggestion for a situation like that? >> and very aware of the pennsylvania situation. and back to my testified in favor of the voter i.d. law. actually, we are winning on this issue. it may not seem like from what you read in newspapers, but the left has lost almost every single court case that they have filed against voter i.d. now, and the pennsylvania case i will tell you that the attorney general's office is doing a really lousy job of litigating that case. i cannot believe some of the stupid things that they have done and the stupid mistakes that they have made, but i can tell you, and they have lost those cases which is why today voter i.d. laws are in place in places like georgia and tennessee and south carolina. the biggest problem in pennsylvania is that nobody there is fighting there really

ludicrous claims being made by the left that there are huge numbers of people without id. that is simply not the case. i have written a number of papers for heritage that point out a complete fallacy of that claim. anybody else? >> hello. i go to the university of dallas. how do you respond to the claim that these voter i.d. laws make it very difficult for people to vote? for example, people who make the argument that they don't have id. >> right. that is a fallacy and a myth perpetuated by the left. and i don't say that as an opinion. i say that from facts. average number of papers for heritage where i went and i got the turnout data from past elections and states that have put in photo id. georgia is a great example.

george's photo id la first became effective in the 2008 presidential election. contrary to the claims that have been made that this is tending to suppress the vote, particularly minority voters, in georgia they had a huge increase in the turnout of black voters in the 2008 election after the photo id law was in place. whenever i say that people say, well, that is because barack obama was on the ballot. well, he was not on the ballot in 2010 when we had the midterm congressional races. as you know, we had a huge republican surge in that election. the number of black voters in georgia went up tremendously again. in fact, the increase in 2008 in georgia was larger than almost any state in the country. the same thing happened in indiana. indiana was one of the for states to put in a photo id law. huge increases in turnout. the data shows that these plans are not true. just like in pennsylvania -- i

think pennsylvania, they are planning something like 600,000 people don't have photo id. they made the exact same claim and the lawsuit filed against the georgian photo id law. georgia keeps stats on the people who go to get a free photo i.d. because they don't already have one. and the number of people who get an id out of the 6 million registered voters amounts to a couple of hundred per year. it's because all of you know, you cannot function in our society today without a photo id. almost everyone has one. anyone who does not can easily get the free one that every state provides. i'm sorry. >> that's all right. thank you. >> hello. i am actually from sage wrote county. i know all about that first case you were talking about. >> but i am sure -- anybody else in this case -- from heard about

that? >> it was on fox once to twice. >> if that had been at the bush campaign that had done that it would have been front-page news in the new york times. >> unfortunately this issue of voter fraud is something i deal with. i work on the congressional campaign in that district. what are some things that campaigns can do to combat voter fraud? we have seen it in our own race. what are some things we can do? >> first of all, you need a really good poll watching program. a lot of candidates running for office just completely neglect that. they work hard at getting their ads out and convince people to vote. they completely neglects having a poll watching program. that is vital. listen, all of you, you have seen the video of the new black panther party guys in philadelphia.

do you know why we have video? there was a student, a college student who was a poll watcher at that polling station. he got out his -- i don't think he had a blackberry like i do, but he had a camera phone. he got it out and took video. we would never have known that happened if the republican in philadelphia had not had a poll watching program in place. the other thing candidates should do is before you run a campaign, before you start doing that, work on being sure that in your particular state and county they're putting in things like voter i.d. and other things that will improve the integrity of the election. >> down in front. >> of lowly college student. >> in indiana. yes. he was also a college student, and that is because i tell you, local authorities are not very

good at finding voter fraud cases. even when they do, often they don't want to prosecute. the reason, particularly local district attorneys is, most are elected. they run in partisan elections. and no matter who they prosecute for voter fraud, they are going to upset half of the electorate because of the party that there are members of. it is often hard to get prosecutions of these cases. >> something that is a little more off the wall. i heard a little bit about in the past the federal government stopping -- and others stopping people from checking photo id at voter stations. that obviously has not been on the news a lot. i'm mostly heard about it through underground channels, if you will. how much of that happens, if you know anything about that? >> the holder justice department has been running a campaign for

the last five years to stop voter i.d. loss. that is why, for example, when south carolina passed a photo id law the justice department objected to it. south carolina had to go to court. they spend three and a half million dollars fighting the holder justice department, and in the and the one. so it is now in place. but they have been doing everything they can to stop that. another example of absurdity of their views, last year the holder justice department went to court in florida to try to stop the floridian government from removing people who were not u.s. citizens from the voter rolls. now, you commit a federal felony if you are not a citizen and register and vote in an american election. florida set up this program, discovering people who were not citizens to illegally voted. holder went to court to say, you can't do that.

fortunately he lost. they got a good federal judge who said it's not a violation of federal law, but that shows you the extent to which they are willing to use their authority and abuse federal law to try to help their election prospects. >> thank you. it's a pleasure. [applause] >> well, he certainly gets you excited about being a poll watcher, but i would say that since next year is a very important election year, as every year is, find a candidate who inspires you and start working in a campaign. nothing you can do better, and there is no better job training networking -- the excitement of working in a campaign. our next speaker is william federer, a historian and writer. have i got the wrong one? you are the next speaker.

[laughter] >> stanley kurtz, i apologize. our next speaker is stanley kurtz. the -- and he is going to talk on "spreading the wealth." a senior fellow at the ethics and public policy center and a former adjunct fellow with the hudson institute with a special interest in america's cultural wars. he writes on family, feminism, religion, homosexuality, affirmative action, and campus political correctness. in 2010 he published a book entitled radical in chief. it was exposing obama's years at columbia university, the years that no one knows anything about. his new book is at 11. welcome, stanley kurtz. [applause] >> well, thank you so much. it is great to be here. this is the second time i have had the privilege.

of what to think philip again for having me here. i always enjoy the events. my topic today is obama's policy toward the suburbs. it is a remarkable issue that just is not covered by the media. something people should know about. i will get to that and the second, but i cannot resist because i have an audience of college students, taking two or three minutes at the beginning to let you know the focus of my work. let me see a show of hands. how many people have heard about the campus fossil fuel divestment movement? has anyone heard of that? there you go. you probably will next year if you have not already. this is a movement where students are trying to get their college endowments to sell off any stocks they hold in fossil fuel companies on the theory that the global warming is going to destroy the world unless we put the fossil fuel industry out of business.

this is something i have been writing about. i want to let you know, you can reach me through any of my pieces at national review online. there is an e-mail link. comments. all you have to do is find it. if there is some kind of conflict that emerges on your campus and you want advice or if something interesting is going on, contact me and i might write about it at national review online. you can search my name and fossil fuel divestment to see this sort of things i have already done. now let's get to the main topic of the day. what i have come here to tell you is that barack obama is not a friend of america's suburbs. in fact in the president obama, if he had his way, suburbs would not exist. i know that my sound hard to believe, but for nearly two decades barack obama has been a huge supporter of a movement whose main goal is to have city governments swallow up and control suburban governments.

the idea here -- and this is -- i don't know if you heard this, but detroit just announced bankruptcy. that is the top story today. cities find a way to grab ahold of that suburban tax money. bring it into the coffers of the city. the bottom line is that barack obama wants to redistribute the wealth of america's suburbs to the city. these radical community organizers who mentored and trained barack obama all those years ago in chicago really did not like the suburbs. in fact, their ultimate goal of -- and i know this sounds crazy, but i will explain what i mean -- was literally to abolish the suburbs. why were obama's radical organizing mentors so upset about the suburbs? well, they plan to the suburbs for the problems of the city. when people move out to the suburbs, they take tax money with them. obama's radical organizing

mentors put on their thinking caps and came up with the theory of strategy for undercutting the economic and political independence of america's suburbs. and out of those strategies came a movement called the regional equity movement, the regional equity movement. sometimes it's just called regionalism for short. you might also -- it goes under different names. you may have heard of the idea of smart growth, another synonym for a set of policies. agenda 21 is a more popular description, but this stuff is not coming from the united nations. this is a homegrown movement that people need to know about and don't. so the obama organizing mentors were out to get the suburbs and came up with a bunch of strategies to start the movement. when i was researching this book that i wrote, "spreading the wealth: how obama is robbing the suburb to pay for cities," the first thing i discovered was

obama himself had been a charter member and supporter of this regional equity movement. it did not stop there. to my amazement i discovered that president obama to this day from the white house and from his administration, is channeling quite a lot of economic and political support to the regional equity movement. in fact, some of the top people are helping to advise in shape administration policies. a lot of regionalist. high positions. including secretary, places like housing and urban development. to some degree slowly lower, the apartment of transportation. so this is an important story in an important theme of the obama administration, but president obama does not highlighted or bring it up and instead of the union address or the news conferences because if we were to talk about regionalism it would be contentious. suburban voters are swing voters in this country, if they got

wind of the fact that the obama administration is pushing regionalist policies which is essentially all about undercutting the suburbs it could be politically damaging. using his executive power you put a number policies in place. one of the things i say in the book, subsidy policies of the most important thing. it's interesting to note that some of the original radical community organizers that mentored obama are still to this day running this movement and advising the president. but if perot, met with jeremiah right to plan how to redistribute wealth there would be a huge scandal. he's not stupid enough to do that, but there's a fellow who is every bit as radical and right who was one of the original organizing trainers of obama who works with and now is the head of this movement. so what other policies that have come out of this? well, one example is something called the sustainable community

initiative. if you have heard of that, raise your hand. i'm amazed. even that many people have heard of the sustainable community initiative. it's not meant, as i have been suggesting, to be heard of too much. for one thing, no one knows what sustainability is. so it sounds rather innocent. another reason people don't follow the sustainable community initiative is much like obamacare even though it has been passed it does not really taken until well into obama second term. this, of course, the president's favorite device for securing reelection. take all the politically controversial parts of the agenda and background them until after the election. what happened under the sustainable community initiative is the federal government channels millions of dollars to regional groups that put out planning grants. it sounds like bureaucratic gobbledygook. regional planning grants.

the people, of course, who obtained these grants are people who backed the policies of the regional equity movement. when these plans begin to roll out and 2013, 2014, 2015, they will give a series of programmatic suggestions for any given metropolitan region for transportation, education, housing. all of this will have the general impact of making it tougher for people in my want to move out to the suburbs to move there and to some degree even pressuring people who live in the suburbs to move back into the city's. how? well, the example of the regional equity movement is portland, ore. where they're literally drawn a development boundary around the metropolitan area. there is literally a boundary. you are not armed -- not allowed to develop a farmland outside. you can't build a highway so that you can create another suburb but we can't create an office park. you can't build the side of the development boundary. there are ways to achieve that

in the defacto way through regulation. these the kind of plans that will come as sustainable communities initiative. another reason people don't focus on it is because technically right now of the plans are voluntary. they don't have the force of law. one of the options is to begin conditioning their receipt of various forms of federal aid on local appearance to the plan. obama could say, well, the one your transportation money, federal education aid, federal housing aid? if you do, you have to knuckle under to what came out in this federally funded plan. we don't know for sure if you will do that, but that's with these community organizing bodies of his have been pressing him to do. if he does that to make it have a truly transforming effect on the country. that's one set of policies, ones that stop people from moving to the suburbs or press people back into the cities. i can give you more detail in questioning, if you like. another aspect is policies that

tend to take people now live in cities and move them out to suburbs. does anyone heard about the controversy between the obama administration, the department of housing and urban development and westchester county? raise your hand? people don't know about it. the obama administration has a very controversial battle going on with westchester's, suburban westchester county. it has promised to export the policies that going on now in westchester to suburbs across the country in the second term. again, no one is paying attention. what is the administration doing? well, they're changing the interpretation of federal housing law in such a way as to pressure westchester county to build a very large amount of low-income housing and its own expense. it's also pressuring westchester county to change its own laws so that right now throughout most

of the country, if your landlord you don't have to accept a tenant who is offering to pay for rent with a government housing voucher. the federal government is trying to force a change in those laws in westchester county. the effect of all of that -- and by the way, no one is alleging, and it is not true that westchester county has been in any way discriminatory, either racially or economically in its housing policies. this is an effort to do a housing affirmative-action, if you know what i'm saying, even an economic affirmative-action. it's trying -- economic integration is a word is used here. penalize communities that don't have housing income at different levels. and so the idea is to take people from the cities and move them out to the suburbs. the only way you can do that is by breaking local control. now, the third aspect of these policies is something called a regional tax base sharing.

at one even asked about that because no one will have heard. it exists right now in one region of the country. minneapolis st. paul metropolitan region. the state legislature in minnesota has forced all the suburbs and the minneapolis st. paul region to kick in a big chunk of their tax receipts to a common regional pot. and then that money gets redistributive by a formula to the city. the cities can't, but the formula for allocating the money in shores that effectively the money is coming out of the coffers of the suburbs and going to the city. now it's a basic principle of american freedom that you get to live where you want to live and govern yourself when you get there. if someone wants to move out of the city and move into a suburb they taxes to that suburban municipality, elect the people who govern the suburb, control their lives is straightforward democratic way. the reason this movement is trying to undercut all of that,

undercut local control so they can grab hold of the suburban tax money and redistribute it. now, pull all the things together i just told you. you have programs that in various ways tried to stop people from moving to the suburbs repress them back into the cities. programs that take people who live in the cities and move them out to the suburbs. if you have programs that redistributes suburban tax money to the city. you put that all together and you have abolished the suburbs. the political boundary of the suburbs will continue to exist, but in all the ways that matter, political and economic independence and democratic control, the suburbs have been gutted, so to speak. and these are effectively the strategies that the organizers have mentored obama came up with all those years ago in chicago. of course they worked with some prestigious academic buddies who are now advising the administration. the initial plan of these

organizers was actually just out right anax the suburbs. that was the way to get the tax money and control. in fact, in this country in the 1900's there were large cities that and next suburbs. that happened more frequently at that time because it was tough to get the infrastructure produced unless a large city did it. eventually state legislators started saying, what is going on? you can't have one city going to the next without the consent of the government? to have to hold an election and get consent. and so when these organizers discovered all that they came up with these alternate strategies for getting the political and economic independence of the suburbs. that's what the regional equity movement is all about, and that is a major theme of the obama administration is policy that does not get talked about will reported on. there is one other aspect of this. how much time do i have?

okay. one other aspect of this. i know phyllis is particularly interested. that is something called the common core. the constitutionally speaking states and localities should have control of schools and school curriculum, school funding. the obama administration has been trying to federalize control of the educational system through something called the common core. in the interesting thing is, this is an important issue in an of itself when it comes to the content of the curriculum. one important aspect of all of this that fits into the theme of regionalism is that the administration hopes after the president -- president has been said that the federal government has a certain level of control over local schools that it might be able to bring pressure to help force a redistribution of suburban education funding to city schools. once you establish national

education standards the left wants to include something called a common resource standards. they will do a measurement of the percentage of tax money that goes -- the amount of tax money that goes in every municipality in the state to the schools. if there is too much disparity they will withhold federal money unless they're is a redistribution of that money. so across a wide series of policies and in ways that don't get discussed there is an attempt to get the political and economic independence of the suburbs and increasingly to nationalize what the constitution made to be done by states and localities. now, is obama really going to follow through with all of this? they're is a lot of this question of flexibility in the extent to which she does this. and my biggest worry when i wrote this book was that if he

got reelected then he would be essentially -- have a free hand and could put in some of these politically explosive policies. the last six months of been difficult for president obama, and it is an open question as to how much you will move forward with some of the most controversial of these policies. however, there is a background on some of these regionalist policies. when bill clinton was in the last two years of a second term he started turning the screws on the state of georgia and used epa judgment against georgia and said, you either have to pay a huge penalty because of this judgment or you have to institute all of these regionalist policies. jordan knuckled under. two years later clinton left office in georgia stopped going along with that. but we could actually see obama freed up yet again after the make your election if he does not push these policies right away because he is politically weak right now. it is at least an issue that

ought to be discussed because potentially it could have a truly transforming effect on the kind of country we live in. yet up to now it has really not been known as discussed. okay. i can take your questions. >> down in front here. >> hi. out of the three things that you mentioned, how this making people go to the suburbs reduce the suburbs? >> well, first of all, it costs a lot of money to build low-income housing at the expense of the suburban sell. so this is a huge tax expense. they're also taking away the powers of zoning and the powers of independent command over their own laws when you say, okay, you have a long now that gives the landlord the flexibility to accept or not accept a section eight vouchers.

we now unilaterally tell you we cannot do that. so the idea here is to somehow -- it's not just -- it's not even necessarily in primarily racial segregation that is the target the what is called economic segregation. you know, the constitution does not recognize -- if people have a certain amount of money income of four houses and live in a certain area, they have the freedom to do that. the goal is to somehow overcome that. in a communist country you just tell people where to live. right now the chinese are forcing people from the rural areas and to cities because the federal government has decided that is what it wants to do. this is an attempt to force the suburbs at their own expense and against their own preference to change their policy. let me speak to the underlying idea. the people in the regional equity movement have just of fundamental misperceptions about something. what they see is people in the inner cities, a crime-ridden, a

poor area. when needed to have middle-class values going to this group of people. we see the people in suburbs have middle-class values. if we somehow find a way to pick people up and move them into the suburbs but it will have middle-class values. i think that misses the point. the real point is the way you get a middle-class values is by saying, i will start saving every day so i can buy their dream home in the suburbs where i can raise my kids and have a long and get married. it is the process that americans go through to fill the american dream, to save that money, get that house with a yard. the easier it is to afford the further out you are. if that process turns you into a middle-class person. the idea that just by plopping someone there without having them go through that process that really changes people is an attempt to help which is not really helping. okay.

>> down here. a question. >> of fellow over there. >> i go to bat the university in minnesota. suburban minneapolis st. paul. >> minneapolis st. paul. >> yeah, unfortunately. i am aware of what is going on there. i heard about it. a 2-part question related first, how is that the federal government works against local municipal governments in enacting these plans. let me know exactly helicon protest this besides just grass-roots letting people know, what local office can i get to the talk and find out more and try to stop this? >> a very good question. i did not even give you the sensationalist part of my book. spreading the wealth. as essential as part was when i talked about, the conferences that have been held at the white house that organized by this fellow, this radical organizing mentor of obama and now runs the regional equity movement. those conferences which were

attended by many, many high administration officials including cabinet secretaries invited local mayors and state senators and state representatives to the white house where they were then lobbied by these experts to build the ideas behind the regional equity movement as well as top officials from the obama administration basically pushing on those officials to pass regional tax base sharing in their state legislature. that is how obama is helping. in fact, i don't know if anyone here is from ohio. anyone from ohio? you can search something called obama's plan for ohio. there is a movement coming out of cleveland trying to mimic what went on in minneapolis st. paul. they got close until the two-party election of 2010 turned everything around. there were looking to bring regional taxpayers sharing to ohio by people in northeast ohio , the cleveland area pushing it through the legislature

that would have been an attempt to get money pulled into cleveland. so the way they're doing it is since obama does not have technical power over the state, he is using his political prestige to help the organizing efforts of the regional equity movement. also potentially depending upon what the sustainable community initiative plan actually says obama might threaten to withhold unless state legislatures began to adopt these policies. as to what you can do, you unfortunately or fortunately live in minnesota. you are in the one place in the world where this already exists. there was talk among some state senators, republican state senators after the republicans took over after the 2010 tea party election, republicans took over the legislature and made noises about dealing this back. they just did not finally have enough votes to do it. minnesota is just too blue of the state now, and so once they got this thing in a decade or

two ago it has been impossible to pull it back. maybe no more about this than i do, but maybe you guys are too young to know this. a crazy wrestler who became the governor of minnesota, jesse ventura. as i understand it, he actually made his name on talk radio in minnesota. one of the things he did was to rail against this regional tax base sherrington. it's very telling that even he could not pull the pack. once they redistribute the wealth and people get benefit from it is very hard. people in the suburbs witness the state senators were talking about repealing it. they're very unhappy, but they just can't peel it back because the state is to blue. the fellow over their had his hand up. >> i will be going to of middle tennessee state university this fall. you mentioned early on in your talk about the agenda 21 and

indicated that these movements by president obama's advisers are not exactly the same but similar. how much of that do you think has been perhaps suggested / pushed / inspired by the u.n. agenda 21? for clarification, what city in oregon had the industry zoning stink? >> portland. also king county in washington, i think it is, which is the seattle county also now has a development boundary. okay. agenda 21. yes. so that was your question? >> political agenda 21. >> right. i actually think agenda 21, while it is bad and the problem, the actual effect of the u.n. is maybe 10 percent of what is going on. 90 percent of what is going on, after all, the predent of the united states is a member of the regional equity movement.

if the u.n. collapsed and went away today, he would still be pushing for these policies, and people don't know about it. this is remarkably widespread, and get it does tend to travel under the radar. all give you another example. anyone here from california? they have these propositions that come up all the time. the last election they have something called -- i believe the number was proposition 21. in the way they do things in california, they're right a proposition that everyone votes yes and no one. it is so long and mind-boggling -- mind-boggling the complex it is kind of like obamacare. the aeration bill. too long for anyone to read and know what is in it. one of the things they hid inside of it was -- not exactly what is going on in minnesota, but the equivalent to our regional tax base sharing program. people did not know that. and i ended up going on talk radio and explaining to people in california what was going on.

between conservatives -- there was a complex coalition, we finally defeated that. the tea party in the east bay broke with some of the more establishment republicans and opposed it because they recognized language in this crazy proposition that reminded them of agenda 21. that was very clever of the tea party. agenda 21 is good if you think of it has mentioning a set of very dangerous policies. sometimes when people use agenda 21, they're using it as a shorthand for a set of policies which helps the two-party to recognize something that other people would not have seen. the real reason that it came about was not because of the united nations. it was because these people in the regional equity movement, some of the people i wrote about in my book were behind the writing of agenda 21. when this controversy broke, the los angeles times made fun of the tea party in the east bay

for thinking that there was a you in a conspiracy behind proposition 21. there were able to use that as a political lever against these people win if -- people in the east bay on the one hand recognize something that was a danger, but if they realized it was really the california regional equity movement, it would have been harder to attack them in that way. on not saying agenda 21 is not important or worth knowing about in its own right, but what i am saying is there is a whole other dimension to this which is bigger than agenda 21 that people don't know about and need to know about. >> a question over here. >> hello. i sent you plenty of e-mails, and we talked about this semester from our little divestment. >> wonderful. >> think you for all of your help with that. i was going to ask. -- >> this is one of the places

with the fossil fuel that as much controversy, the biggest one of fall. i would love to tell you about it, but go ahead. >> i was reading an article about house on detroit's suburbs actually voted to fund the detroit institute of art or something because obviously the city -- people were worried that some of the stuff was going to be sold off and things like that. i was wondering if that is a possibility that you see anywhere else in the country where there are certain things that people in the suburbs want to keep in the cities and the cities with all of their programs better such a problem are eating up all the money that could go that? is there a movement anywhere else in the country to get things on the ballot to vote to basically find other things? >> right. well, i'm a big believer in democracy and that is absolutely nothing wrong if the voters in a particular region say, we make use of museums. pittsburgh is done this with

this is system. we are willing to pay that tax. at like to hear the debate back-and-forth. the problem with regional taxpayers sharing -- and the constitution says that all of the powers that don't explicitly go in this constitution to the federal government devolve upon the state. by tradition states still give tremendous flexibility to localities. local control is really in a sense the basis of our constitutional system, even though it is not technically in the constitution. what the regional equity people do is use this -- you can almost call it a constitutional loophole to get to a place like minnesota. technically a state can do anything it wants. it can dissolve the existence of a local municipality and certainly drive the tax money and give it to someone else. states don't jen it -- generally use that power. if someone wants to propose a tax the suburbanites will pay

that is discussed and debated to support certain city services -- i would have to look at the particular case, but that is very different in the state coming in and breaking all the traditions of local control and ordering the redistribution of funds. increasingly that is what california was trying to do through proposition 21, although they did not want to be open about it because cities all over california are approaching bankruptcy. they're not that far from the streets of detroit and the way they're looking at getting money is to grab from the suburbs which is what they tried to sneak in which is not the right way to do things. openly talking about supporting a zoo in having a public debate and vote is fine with me. >> go ahead. >> hello. i am from the university of missouri columbia, and i am right now working to advocate against and hoping to stop common core. what would you say the ultimate

detriment facing us is? >> well, first of all, i think common core involves a dumbing down, it coming down. and advocates always say, wait a minute. we're raising the standards for a certain number of states. that is true, but the idea is to find a kind of middle ground that you can pull the absolute lowest performers up to but also effectively lowers standards for the rest of the country. it sounds crazy when you tell people. why would anyone want to lower standards? the reason is because -- again, i think of the misplaced idea of equity and fairness. some sense that too many people have a certain amount of money or live in a certain place. we want to change that. how do we do that? if we make everyone get a less high-quality high-school education no one will be able to tell the difference. people start getting randomly distributed at universities. this is a crazy idea of equity.

whereas, if you look at massachusetts, massachusetts which has the best curriculum in the country actually wore metal performers until they adopted this very high-quality curriculum focusing on classic literature, traditional education. and the whole state zoomed up to be the number one performer in the country. it turns out that minority students improved at an even higher rate than more well-to-do students. this was actually the best way to help people who really needed help. demming everyone down artificially to a level where you can't tell the difference between anyone's performance, but by raising everyone's performance in a way that the people who really are doing it. that is what is motivating the common for people. they have this misplaced notion of equity, and i think

massachusetts is the best kind of example. >> thank you so much. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> okay. now we are on to william federer, a historian and writer. his book, america's god and country encyclopedia of quotations sold a half a million copies and is published "what every american needs to know about the qur'an: a history of islam & the united states". welcome, bill. >> thank you. thank you. [applause] i do have my book as the pds file i've given to blake. if you give your e-mail address to her she will e-mail you the book, and i have them out on the table. the book ended dvd. the question is, there is freedom for all religions in america, but is is on just a religion? well, we can answer that by asking you is the perfect muslim obviously mohammad. and so muslims want to be like

muhammed. and so his life goes through three stages. the first in 610 a.d., a religious leader in mecca. he only makes 70 converts in 12 years. he gets chased out of town. and then he goes to a jewish city called medina. the jews let him in but reject his faith. so he goes to the minority neighborhoods and begins to organize a falling. he becomes a political leader. and then mommy's followers get a little pushy, argumentative, and threatening and get chased out for disturbing the peace. and he allows his followers to rob the caravans headed back to mecca in retaliation for being chased out of town. there are two sets of verses envy qur'an which revealed to him in mecca which are more peaceful and religious and those reveal to him in medina which are political and military

. so in 624 a.d., they send 1,000 soldiers to protect the caravan and muhamed with 300 defeats them at the battle of bagram. having been outnumbered three to one, this amazing victory convinces him to be a military leader. he fights in 66 battles in the next eight years before he dies and even used to catapult when he attacked the city. when he was told that the couple was killing innocent women and children, his response was, they are among them. so suicide bombers today say it's okay to kill innocent people because mohammed did. since he is the perfect muslim, muslims today that want to be better want to be like him religiously, politically, militarily. freedom for all religions, but islam is not just a religion because he was not just of political leader -- religious leader. so they send 10,000 soldiers to

medina the stop muhamed from robbing the caravans. mohammed dug trenches around the city. this rendered this superior cavalry of the americans useless. they called those explosive devices that disable tanks, the roadside bombs, digging pot holes and trenches which rendered the cavalry useless. and so he went to the battle and goes back into the city of medina. he has those three jewish tribes that let him in. he gets offended as two of the tribes confiscate property in chase him out of town which set a precedent. when you are we to make treaties until you get strong enough to disregard them. the third jewish tried he battles for 25 days and then chopped off their heads. six are 700 of them. he sells the women and children into slavery. within five years of emigrating to the jewish city of medina there is not a jew left. they were either chased out,

killed, or enslaved. we see this process of elimination within five years of his death every preexisting culture in arabia was wiped out. we see sort of like caesar's three steps, immigrate, increase, eliminate. he immigrates to the city as a religious refugee, increases the number of followers of much the minorities and gets involved politically and eliminates the previous culture neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city, country by country. the 1400 your track record. three springs. there has been an arab spring, turkish spring, and a new arab spring. this trip was a new invention along with swords. this was from the u.s. supreme court building across the street. it has mom it pictured. this is his sword which still exists. we see this lightning expansion of islam.

one of the generals of k-9 was called the drawn sword. undefeated in 100 battles. so we see on the screen there, this is all that was conquered within 23 years of his death. so yemen was a jewish kingdom. jerusalem has been of byzantine city since constant time. syria was completely christian, evangelized by paul. egypt was evangelized by market was christian for six centuries. they used to be 250 catholic diocese. and so this was the largest political military empire in the world. they invade span. in ten years the conquered spain because the muslims had arabian horses. spaniards were still fighting on foot. the killed millions. the pope puts out a plea and they get 30,000 volunteers under

the grandfather of charlemagne, and stops the muslims outside of paris and the year 732 a.d., exactly 100 years after the death of muhammed. this was the largest empire in the world, and it was a military campaign from arabia the paris. it took 700 years to drive them out of spain. then they have slavery. they enslaved 180 million africans, castrate the man and make in unix. they have slavery for eight centuries before america was even discovered. then they began to sell them to the slave merchants the brought in to the new world. they enslaved over a million europeans. entire catholic orders. there would collect dollars in donations and go under a white flight to get your friend back who was captured in north africa anyway, slavery was one of the main ways that islam was financed and it still goes on today.

there's more slavery today than at any other time in the world history. are you still with me? then they attacked constantinople which was the capital of the world. constantan moved the capitol there. greeks were able to drive them back through a military advantage called greek fire, sort of like maple. oil and sawdust. and so this stop the muslims and so the word islam means submission. and the muslim is one that has submitted. and there were able to -- they believe there would be world piece when the world submitted. so it's just the different definition of the world. we think that peace is different groups getting along. they think it's when the whole world submits. and to them world peace means world islam. he divided the world into two halfs, the half that had submitted and i have that is in the process. now the moderate muslims, they

believe the world will submit, but later. maybe at the end of the world. and so far in the distant future, just get a lot. the fundamental muslims think the world will submit now. they are excited and want to help make it happen. a dilemma for us in the west is the more we bend over backwards to show ourselves tolerant, the more the moderate muslims began to rethink so they gravitate from the future, peaceful, moderate camp in the the fundamental camp. our foreign policy has been like a football game. if we can just let them get a first down it will be nice. that doesn't work. that and get a touchdown. that certainly. we keep letting them score and can understand why they're not reciprocating. instead, they're getting excited. the crusades? christians killed people to.

let's let this little bit. if your computer acts up, what do you do? if it really accept you reload the software away it was. so if your religion accept, you go back to the way it was. and so the largest religion in the world as christianity, 33%. the second-largest is islam. let's compare the founders. jesus never killed anybody. mom that killed an estimated 3,000 people. jesus never led armies. never owned slaves. never married. never tortured anyone. it stretched the chief of car out on the ground. it was the last jewish settlement in arabia, and you would not tell where the treasure was hidden, so the kindle the fire on his chest. he still did not tell, so he was be headed. jesus did not lie.

mahomet permitted lying. sacred lying, holy deceit. you are obligated to lie if it can help advances on. so we add a warrior who was captured and forced to renounce. he later escapes and goes back. he said if they make you turn, turn, but don't turn in your heart. in other words, it's okay to deny mohammed to save your skin as long as you don't fight against islam. in other words, it's okay to say you are a muslim until you get elected, but once you're elected everything you do is to help islam. i could go on and on. jesus did not have his apostles rape anyone. in is on the talk about raping the women they took in battle. so then they begin to is made into turkey. it the greeks begs the west for help. the crusades. so they come to the rescue. nine crusades and about 200

years. st. louis said -- led the seventh and eight crusades. they're is a picture of him on his horse. finally when they end the muslims pick up where they left off and get back to invading europe, serbia, and then in 1450 is around constantinople. he sends in his navy and army. they take the church bells from the christian churches and melt them into canon's. the largest in the world at the time. finally the concord in 1453. why is that date important? after constantinople which was the largest church in the world. the muslims turn it into a mosque. there were trade routes. europe trade with india and china. even marco polo when from venice, italy to china and worked for kubla khan. when the muslims sacked constantinople in 1453 it ended

the land trade routes. so that is when the europeans like for a sea route. who? christopher columbus. and in 1492 he set sail the find a sea route. rain and some islands and thinks he's in india so renames the inhabitants indians. we would not call native americans indians if it was not for islam. martin luther started the reformation in 1517 and 1529. 100,000 muslims around vienna, austria. martin luther says the wrath of the lord our god. there is reason to fear. anyway. by miracle they're able to drive the muslims back. john galvin said i hear the sad condition of germany. they controlled the entire mediterranean. it they're pirate admiral, the best the italians have is andre a doria.

they leave to get this last island. 3,000 offenders against 40,000 muslims. a miracle they drive them away on september 11th 1565. the largest battle on the mediterranean sea, 230 ships powered by 15,000 christians under the deck, the last minute the wind changes captain john smith spent five years fighting the muslims in hungary. one of the pilgrim ships was captured. next time you have thanksgiving, and 1625 they sent a ship back to england with 800 pounds of beaver skin. the muslims captured in the english channel, ticket to morocco and so the crew in the slavery. finally 200,000 muslims surround vienna. the polish king comes to the rescue on september 11th. polish forces and germans and

hungarians come to the aid of the austrians. they go into the tents. it was the largest cavalry charge in the world's history. 50,000 guys. big weans. when there were charging down the hill it made this flapping noise. they left their tents in place. so when he goes into the tent he finds these bags of beans, coffee beans and realizes this is a new drink. and shortly thereafter this polish general opens the first be in a coffeehouse. there were not sure if they should drink it because it was the muslim drink. it took a cup of it to pope clement. he tasted it and said this is too good to leave for the muslims. let's baptize it, and then coffee spread across europe. [laughter] the word coffee comes from an arabic word which means infidel. the beans came from ethiopia which was the one african country that state christian.

so the muslims called the christians in ethiopia infidels. it's okay drink it because the pope said so. anyway, we see this trend through history, western civilization has gone from judeo-christian to secular and now is becoming islamic. europe was all catholic and then the protestant reformation and every city had a jewish neighborhood called again no. anyway, judeo-christian. it did not always live up to it and had terrible wars. they had these verses bothering their conscience. then europe goes secular with the french revolution. a prostitute in another game cathedral and said this is the goddess of reason. napoleon spreads the secularism all around your. and so now anything is fine, nothing special about the christian past. so all these you -- knew believes it slams the car into reverse. you can kill your daughter, be

your wife. people thinking, how did we get here? well, you went from drive to neutral and then reverse. we see this trend. the whole to fund the whole movement is to get us to on her car train car from our past so we get into neutral where we don't know where we came from so we are more easily able to be persuaded to go in a new direction. france, 7501 no-go zones around paris. 5 million muslims have completely taken over those neighborhoods. some friends from france. is what i am saying pretty accurate? okay. [inaudible] they see the culture changing. and britain, 12 cities around london are already taken over. birmingham, liverpool, manchester. the number one name for newborns and london is mohammed.

the same thing in brussels, belgium. in italy the largest mosque in europe. in the netherlands for the no-go zones. the number one crime in sweden is rape. muslim immigrant men wait -- raping european women. at a news report in norway, every rape assault in the city of oslo in the last five years of been committed by a person with a non-western background, and norwegian euphemism for muslim. if he saw the lead news a norwegian tourist in dubai was raped and told the police arrested her and put her in jail for a year-and-a-half. so it is a brilliant strategy that we see taking place. they move into the neighborhood as religious muslims and then they transition to political muslims and increase in get involved politically and eliminate the previous culture neighborhood by neighborhood. another is an unholy alliance because the radical left for years as 80 judaeo-christian

expression. the muslims don't like judaeo-christian expression. they see themselves working together against our past. ecb islam and liberalism. so -- >> take some questions. >> we will take some questions. >> i will be going to the state university in the fall. this is an issue i know a fair amount about. i wish i knew more. i wish i could ask you a whole slew of questions, but i'll stick with one. how exactly d.c. law affecting the court system today? and know it is not terribly prevalent but it is becoming more common. >> a very good question. i was just seeing -- speaking in north carolina. i had dinner with the supreme court justice. they want to oppose it as a religious situation. we need to start thinking of it as a political and military system because mohammed was all

three. so as a political military system it is a totalitarian system, no different than communism or nazism. what if the kkk call themselves a religion. you can take over the neighborhood and do your own vigilante justice. what about the mafia, would we let them take over the neighborhood? what if hitler would have called not see as their religion. we cannot let totalitarian political ideologies get a pass by waving a religious flag. does that make sense? and as a matter of fact it ties right in with my next slide. political islam is not okay. in saudi arabia the top of arms and legs every week. we haven't eighth amendment, no cruel and unusual punishment. stonings and beatings and he said cut off the hand of the thief. this is nigeria just with the last couple of months. they have gone in and kill the students in catholic schools. they have acid attacks where they will throw acid in girls' faces if they don't wear burke

this. time magazine, grow had her nose cut off. child wives. this is real law. the guy practices sharia law in his house. a lady had a ministry. she goes to the muslim house. out of the room comes another pregnant mom. they're all pregnant by the same guy. then another guy comes up. yes. i'm in a neighborhood. a muslim bought a whole bunch of houses on the street. he has a wife in each one. he chosen to go sign up for welfare. they're all being paid for by the state. the practice in their house and on the street and then in their neighborhood. then they get a community. since their the ones in charge, they vote muslims into office and begin to have a call to prayer. it takes over a little by little

an example, in morocco the judge ordered a girl to marry her rapist. she committed suicide. anyway, these are political militant muslims. they want to move them into the west. it's important for us to grow up out of navy and realize that islam is not just a religion. it is a political military system. >> any other questions? i think we have a question. >> nicholas. what stopped mohammed from fizzling out, his regime from fizzling out after he died like kendis con and attila the hun? >> one of his father-in-law's, he married a six year-old. and her father takes over. he has wars. after he dies moslems wanted to

lead. and so that was the beginning of enforcing it politically. >> i am an author of some publications about islamic terrorism. my question is simple. you know that now is on the addition of america is going full speed and enjoying great support. will america be islamized? >> it depends on the people right here. politicians -- why are politicians letting mohammed -- islam in? number one, they are ignorant. number two, they are afraid. all they hear about is violence. number three, they are on the take. these muslims will donate lots of money to conservative and liberal candidates. when they get elected everything is great until the phone rings. hey, you know, mohammed, thank you for the donation.

you want me to show up at a fund-raiser? you want permission to build a mosque. and so he said don't forget to bribe the byzantine ambassadors. so why the politicians allow what? they're either ignorant, free, on the take, or the airline c-span2 purpose. >> a question over there. >> why do you think that those with a homosexual agenda would rather side with the arab muslim states then go against the only democracy in the middle east? stone or torture them for being gay, they would rather go up against it? >> this is one of those illusions that uc. the left has, for so long, considered people with traditional values as their enemy that they think, as long as you don't like the judeo-christian heritage, we can be friends. unfortunately the story is there

is no honor among thieves. the use each other, but as long will win out and end up getting rid of the secular people. >> have you ever met a muslim that you liked? >> yap. >> will you talk to us about that? talk to us about the way that muslims who are not politically motivated live. >> they are afraid because as we show weakness we are in power in the violent ones. and judy chaucer is a muslim from syria. his family helped start a couple of mosques in arizona, but the fundamental muslims move in and ostracize them. he speaks out, and now he's blackballed and ostracized. he does not get invited to the white house, on ms in bc. and so it is sending a signal that if you are not part of

their group, you keep your head low. unfortunately, it is our government that is backing the most violent muslims, the muslim brotherhood, whose cool, started in 1928, the goal is to have all one world government. after world war one the ottoman empire fell apart. a secular dictator began to rule these countries in the middle east. they wanted to be friends with britain and america. britain was the most powerful empire in the world history. so there would send their kids to western schools, teaching boys in their countries. everything moves in this direction until the muslim brotherhood started. they said, stop trying to be like the west and began to organize. they read institute fundamental islam. under jimmy carter we pull the rug out from underneath the shaw. our current president. they're dictators, but the

middle east has never had democracies. and so now obama took out khaddafi all on his own. now they are funneling guns to syria to on rebels. the goal is to destabilize these dictatorships and bring in the muslim brotherhood. yes. >> what do you think obama's role with muslims is? if so, do you think he is a muslim himself? >> his affinity is with islam. he gives speeches to praise and exult islam. anyway, as a matter of fact, some of the slides i have, i show people he has been putting on his staff. these are just pictures. you can look at the screen. here we have nancy pelosi, laura bush clinton. now our military girls are

putting on the muslim veil. we have muslim postage stamps. the president vows to the king of saudi arabia. the king of saudi arabia is like the godfather of islam because the two holiest cities and is warmer in that country. he says -- his half-brother has four wives in kenya. he campaigns for muslims. 3,000 muslims. this is encouraging. these are muslims on the president's staff that have connections. you dig back far enough in their connected with the muslim brotherhood. stop his deputy mayor of los angeles, stopped the tracking of terrorists. he was chosen to be put on homeland security. the president is educator in chief to america on islam. the first veiled muslim woman adviser to the president.

gender justice. if you want your husband to be you. hillary clinton, the white -- right hand person. so much so that michele bachmann , all here, they called for an investigation of hillary clinton. and so we see that our foreign policy is helping the muslim brotherhood. rebuilding mosques in 27 countries with your tax dollars. get a load of this. hillary clinton, 2012, meets with the allies see, the organization of islamic corporation, the richest men in the world. she promises that she will find a way to implement their agenda of an anti blasphemy law. they have been working for ten years to get the u.n. to push a resolution to outlaw free-speech insulting islam. hillary does this strange thing appalling defense and security away from benghazi and then it

comes out that the president is friends with more see. and six hours into the attack hillary talked to obama on the phone. no help the scent. the next day she immediately contacts youtube and tells them to a sensor all anti islamic content. $70,000 worth of air time in pakistan. adds blaming this video. what was the goal of that? needed a fast and furious, crisis that they could blame on somebody that would use the first amendment rights. this is a person that provoked it. we need to stop. it's a machiavellian crisis were you create a crisis and use it to push your agenda. needed a crisis that they could blame on free speech so that they could push this u.n. agenda of anti blasphemy laws. anyway. >> go on to the next speaker.

>> again, it is all in the book. it is all on the dvd. if i could share of one minute. a way of explaining this is easy. i did this with a congressman. what does the word like mean? it is a source of elimination. it is also an adjective, the opposite of the word heavy. it's a verb. so the lord light is one word with three meetings. well, islam is one word with rimini, religious, political, and military. it is okay. do i agree? no. as a political system and military system it is absolutely empathetic to the freedoms we have in america. thank you so much. [applause] >> our next speaker is ryan

anderson who researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty here at the heritage foundation. anderson also focuses on justice and moral principles and economic, health care, education, and as expertise in bioethics and natural law. cal authored a book, "what is marriage: men and women - a defense". please welcome ryan anderson. [applause] >> all of the speakers have been so lined up. [inaudible conversations] >> are you right in? >> i am. >> your moment is here. you are on. >> sorry i was late. >> that's a quick. >> how long do i have? >> fifteen minutes of talk

followed by 15 minutes of q&a. >> perfect. that is less prepared for. sorry i was running late. we had a meeting. i will talk about marriage and in particular in terms of what just happened with the supreme court. and so i will do five minutes on what marriage is, why marriage matters, consequences of redefining marriage -- and then i will close with where we go. we have been arguing that marriage exists as a policy matter to unite a man and woman as has been dead wife to be mother and father to let the children produced. based on the fact that they are distinct and complementary and the fact that reproduction requires a man and woman and the reality that children deserve a mother and father. when a baby is born a mother will always be close by. that is a fact of biology. the question is, will a father be closed by? if so, for a long. that is a question of culture.

follow either shape culture in a positive or negative direction. there is no such thing as parenting in the abstract. mother and father in. men and women bring different and distinct gives to the enterprise. children do best with both the mother and father. you can ask yourself all kinds of hypothetical questions. if a parent is in the living room wrestling with the sun, teaching and to be masculine without being violent, to be aggressive without pulling here, biting, or gouging on eyes, which parent is most likely engaged? posted you're saying the father. if there is someone who when newspaper in the is most likely to give you a kiss and put a band-aid on it, it's most likely the mother. stereotypes reveal something true about the human condition. men and women are different and interact with children in distinct ways. that is what we were arguing as far as what marriages. why does it matter as far as policy goes? we argue that government is in a

marriage business, not because he cares about the love lives of consenting adults. if it was just about the romantic feelings, we could get the government out. the reason it is in the bedroom is because the union can produce children. children need about 18 years, on average, an intense care to turn out to be law-abiding productive members of society. the least restrictive and least intrusive way in which government can make sure these highly needy newborns turn into law-abiding productive citizens? we can either have the state raise children themselves. this is pledges idea on the republic. we can have the guardians raise the kids. all we can encourage men and women to commit to each other as has been dead wives to be mother and father. it is a limiting principle. marriages -- it is not just a personal relationship but a relationship that benefits the common good in a way that no other relationship does. we argue that marriage is the least restrictive and course of

way of ensuring this. here is when i normally site president obama. let me see if i actually have that "in my folder and the. here we go. speaking back in 2008 in a speech he gave on fatherhood. we know the statistics that children who grow up without a father or five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely end up in prison. behavioral problems, run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. we now have about two generations of social science evidence of the importance for children being raised by their married, biological mother and father. the statistic, five times more loverly -- more likely to live in poverty, 20 times more likely to end up in prison. just the beginning of the negative outcomes. in this case growing up without a father. there's a reason why the state tries to promote marriage.

what we saw was the breakdown of the culture. this is when child poverty increased. the welfare state increased. the prison population increased. social mobility decreased. everything you can care about if you are in limited government conservative and care about social justice, both liberty and poverty, better served by getting marriage right by having a healthy marriage culture because when it does not happen a liberal proposes a big government solution to pick up the pieces. they will suggest -- you know, what you have is the government trying to fill the role of the father or a boyfriend or husband that leads into the third part of the stock. the consequences. and i said the first thing right up front, you cannot redefined marriage and say that fathers are optional while insisting that fathers are essential. the loss functions as a teacher.

a few redefined marriage to make it a genderless institution you say that two mom's or to dads is the same thing as a mom and dad. the first question is, the pedagogical function, the effectiveness. what we saw with no-fault divorce, to give you a historical parallel was that a lot taught something. up until the introduction of no-fault divorce when you would sue to get out of a marriage by you would claim fault, three historical conditions, abuse, abandonment, and adultery. these were serious reasons to in a marriage. the assumption was that marriage was a permanent relationship. as a result we had divorce rates in single-digit spree after the introduction divorce rates reached almost 50 percent. the lot of something. marriage need not be permanent. it can be a temporary relationship. the consequence was horrendous, especially for children.

divorce does not serve the interest of children. redefining marriage in this direction is similar and makes it more about the desires of adults than the needs of the children to read more about the romantic life of consenting adults and the family life that that serves , the reproductive purpose. that is the first. redefining marriage takes away from a family centric child centric relationship into an adult center. it makes mothers and fathers, men and women interchangeable. the second is that there is no reason why the redefinition would stop here. this came out during oral arguments. and obama appointee ask the attorney in favor of same-sex marriage, if justice and equality demand we redefine marriage to include the same-sex couple, why doesn't justice and equality demand we redefine marriage to include f. ripple which i discovered during research is a 3-person couple.

we came across this term in the new york magazine. doing a profile. the idea is that they are just like a couple, except for a three of them. they share an apartment and a dog and cook breakfast and dinner for each other. all the rest. three people. and the attorney did not have a persuasive response at all. he started talking about tradition and history. you're going to find a much stronger tradition and history for the male female aspect of marriage. the question is, once you say that aspect is irrational and arbitrary, what is so magical about the number to? because the way we arrived at monogamy in western law, the way we got it into american marriage law was that it was one man and one woman because only one man and one woman can unite in the type of act that produces new life. every new life has exactly one mother and one father. near it -- the relationship that unifies those people and

relationships. once you sever the connection, what is left about the number two? why is that magical? the same question can then be asked about permanency, which we already seen with no-fault divorce, but also with sexual exclusivity. historically marriages been as sexually exclusive relationship. you only sleep with your spouse. you cheated and your spouse a few sleepless someone else. many about the romantic lives of consenting adults and has nothing to do with children or childbearing, why shouldn't you sleep with someone other than your spouse, provided your spouse consents? several of the articles have been published in the wake of this. this is something that straight people can learn from gay relationships, the virtues of extramarital affairs provided there is no coercion or deceit. whenever the morality of multi personal union, multi personal relationships, sexually

open relationships or temporary sector relationships, the public policy purpose will be disastrous because the public policy interest in marriages to get men to have as few sexual partners as possible and have those relationships last as long as possible. why? because for every additional sectional -- sexual partner i have and every short-lived sexual relationship i increase the likelihood that i create a fatherless child, fragmented families. so they're trying to get men to commit to women and then stay with that woman for the rest of the life. a wacky idea now, but it served humanity well throughout history , precisely because that relationship can then provide every child relationship with their mother and father. the last consequences will mention has to do with religious liberty. we have already seen in massachusetts, illinois, and right here in washington d.c.

that christian-run adoption agencies have been forced out of the adoption business. the reason why, they applied nondiscrimination law. these groups said we have orphans in our care and want to find them married mothers and fathers. the government said, this is unjust discrimination and we will not give you an adoption lessons. had nothing to do with funding. you can't take government money. in this case it was about funding the licensor. you can't run an adoption agency without a license. part of the regulatory state and you have to be accredited by the regulators. the agencies argue, we have social science on our side that says children do best with a married mom and dad and have this thing known as the first amendment. the government said we don't care. if you want to understand how the current administration thinks, i just think about how they view the hhs mandate. rees said -- liberty only applies in house of worship on

sunday morning of friday afternoon. freedom to worship has replaced a robust conception of religious liberty. just today hobby lobby got an injunction from the tenth circuit court granting their release. the winning in the court of law because the administration does not have a leg to stand on. that is not going to mean that they won't attempt to do this with respect to marriage. if you read through the opinion, the rhetoric used that anyone who thinks that marriage is the union of a man and woman is motivated out of hatred and bigotry. the implications, but does this mean for the evangelical flores to does not want to provide flowers for the same sex wedding with a cake baker or photographer or innkeeper. how many different ways business and industry intersect with wedding ceremonies or marriages and general. will religious liberty, the rights of conscience for those individuals be respected by the government? that is an open question at this

point. with that, i will turn to the decisions. give up brief overview of what happened, i guess, about a month ago with the supreme court. on proposition eight they punted. they said that the citizens who voted twice in the state of california to define marriage did not have standing to defend the law. the only reason they could do this is because the governor instructed the attorney general not to defend that wall when it was challenged. it really is -- the most disconcerting aspect is what it implies for democratic self-government. you have a case where the state supreme court redefined marriage in the state of california so that citizens went back to the ballot box and voted for a constitutional amendment defining marriages between a man and woman which has been challenged in power federal court. when the citizens tried to defend their constitutional amendment because the governor would not in their attorney general would not, they defended it all the way to the supreme

court and the supreme court said, sorry, you don't have standing. that is just really a travesty as far as democratic self-government's goes. when the defense of marriage act, the supreme court said that president clinton, 85 senators, and a couple hundred members of the house representatives only acted out of animus and hatred and bigotry when they passed the defense of marriage act. a uniform federal definition of marriage for federal law and left all 50 states freedom to define marriage for state law that defined marriage in federal law. the course of the only reason congress to this was because they don't like people. it's not true. it has not helped civility if we are trying to have a democratic debate that is civil about the future of marriage. it does not help by labeling your opponent a big. the justice scalia characterized the opinion by saying that justice kennedy had call people who support marriage as it has

always been understood enemies of the human race. so that certainly does not bode well for the future. the precedent that it sets est. marriage laws remain constitutional. there remain free to define marriage how they choose, but the federal government has to treat all state recognized marriage is equally. so if the state redefines marriage, the feds have to recognize that. that is the holding. the rhetoric of the opinion suggests that the court will strike down state marriage if given the opportunity. ..

>> i think what the government is doing is talking about the man and the woman that created the child. so the government could actually force men and women to raise their kids. but if they do it in a noncoercive way, they recognize

the marital relationship and encourage many today. they do this without criminalizing anyone. so often we face to people of the same sex. they can go to a level church and have a wedding ceremony performed. the government redefines marriage and then you have this force of law that goes through all businesses. even when those individuals think otherwise. so i think the coercive aspect of the law for limited government is one men and women don't commit to each other and raise her children.

including the giant tax burden this includes how much of the welfare state that we are paying out of our paycheck. as a result of government programs that try to replace the family. >> hello, i am caring. like you said when it comes to debating most of the time, you are automatically looked at in this way. a lot of us who have had experiences in school where you have an opinion you are automatically looked at by someone who hates homosexuals or

the people. really you are against homosexuality. >> that is the most challenging question. i have to admit. the most challenging question for us. because what we really want to do, i don't want to speak for everyone. but expressing the fact that it is a true statement that historically have been mistreated. marriage is not one of those examples. it is true that we have a history in which gay and lesbian marriages have been marginalized. so how do we communicate that?

the reason that marriage has existed is something that the ancient greeks and romans and christians and muslims -- something they have all been able to talk about in regards to marriage. that kind of thing, that type of an argument without saying this, you want to condemn it as an anti-gay acts. that's unacceptable. that marriage laws are not, how do we talk about it? they are not equal at times. so when we speak out, i think part of it is when you speak out, people in favor of the truth about marriage are also at the forefront so what do you think marriages.

some say i'm in favor of marriage equality. the mullahs are in favor of marriage equality. we want to government to treat all marriages equally. is was treating this unequally and why is it that marriage is monogamous? so we asked the question. so they are not going to let you say history and tradition. why the state cares about that type of relationship and i think

most of them have asked the question but not seriously thought about the question of marriage. they are very concerned with lgb tbytes but they are not concerned about marriage and whether matters for and by government is even in the marriage business in the first place. [inaudible question] you can love people. right? so marital love as a type of love. this love equals love. so there has been this interesting facet of information. i think that it actually belittles other forms of a much

richer tradition of friendship than we do. now we view it as the most intense relationship that you can have in life. and as a result if you're not married, it means you have not yet reached this existence. and it makes your friendships just seem less valuable. we read your diary's journals from prior parts of history, you see that lots of people have really intense friendships that they care about. they have a really intense friendship and it's not sexual. but it is centered on something else this includes the person

that you read book with common reproach or two, we can to try to put all our eggs in one basket in that sense i may say that. >> thank you for coming. what do you say in regards to these arguments. they are really good arguments about solid truths that we have to refer to. it is so hard up like talking to a brick wall trying to convince somebody of truth is they don't believe there is truth to most

people implicitly rejected. see you say the holocaust was wrong and what if hiller says the holocaust wasn't long says the holocaust wasn't on. is there truth to the matter there. just take obvious examples. it is the same thing that happens with abortion right now.

we can ask that person to defend some of things that they are interested in. you know, finishing up my dissertation at the university of notre dame. and we should be grading is according to the merit of the papers and not according to whether or not you like us. i think some of the relatives immediately crumbles. sometimes you just have to say the can't reason with people who won't respond to reason. one thing conservators in general need to do is be better at telling appealing to the motion.

so you realize that some of these are going to put out a business. as a result, everyone else pays a consequence. we are all drinking soda with corn syrup in it. corn was never intended to be a sweetener. the reason lies that we have sugar carrots and corn subsidies. we are trying to gin up the economy here. it's easy to tell the story about the farmer great it is hard to explain why we are all suffering a little bit. >> hello, i am spencer. you touched on the abortion issue and i think that there has

been a point in that debate where we have seen some of the atrocities in philadelphia and even young people where the tide is turning and the pro-life position is coming back after being down in the low popularity area. my question is what do you think will be the corresponding point. incest, open marriages, temporary marriage, i mean, what is going to do? what is the point where the tide turns? >> that is a great question. i think there are a couple of possible things. one is that the sonogram has clearly helped. you can actually see the heart beating and it stops. it is no longer a clump of cells. it's a human being. so what is the equivalent of the sonogram. i think there is a potential for social science to do this. we have some luminary

information and it's not as good as growing up with mom or dad. bobbi lopez has written some articles. the first one is entitled growing up with two moms, the untold child's story. so here's a guy that grew up with two moms. he loves his lesbian mothers, but he realizes he was lacking a father and he cares about that. and that has also grown written about his two kids need a mother. so certain extent is a straight white male, not a good spokesman anything. but someone who can speak powerfully to these stories. it's better to have women. one of the great things is when

they saw that there could be redemption from abortion. so women who had experienced it and then were speaking out about how this works, it became a very powerful witness and in a similar way gays and lesbians were also providing a unique voice there. this has been happening in france. it wasn't just a narrow portion but it included lots of people in the lgb key community. saying that you don't have to posture over the differences. the relationship may be arguments that i made. i think that ought to be part of it. >> thank you, ryan. that was so interesting. [applause] >> thank you.

>> that was booktv's coverage of the 28th annual collegian summit held at the heritage foundation in washington dc. for more information, go to c-span.org. >> on her screen is the author of a best-selling memoir. the second book is coming out. why did you choose to make it a novel? >> well, first of all i wanted to talk about nonfiction. the issues that i am writing about in the new book is about a lot of people. so my experiences going back home is a composite of a lot of things. and i wanted to be able to have the freedom to play around with words and it is

fictionalized. >> what kind of freedom does this give you? >> i think for me there is a room to play with language more. and to actually extend certain things. and maybe traumatize him a little bit more. so in a way, that is really want to do in this novel. when i talked about things that existed before the war. >> what is the title about? >> it is actually a town that is looked at in a fictional way. it is in a remote part of the country where people don't get to hear about it.

these are places that were devastated. starting from scratch so you have to start from that end how do you find a way to sustain your family and live next-door to your neighbor who may have been your enemy during the war? you know, how you weave the fabric back together again. >> your first trip back to sierra leone, what was that like? >> it was very difficult. in the sense that i was going back to a place that i function as a boy soldier and also as a

young adult. it was very difficult to look at the places that brought the difficulties. so we just tried to be a regular person so i really have become a regular person in this way. >> now, have you finished the book? >> yes, i have finished the book. we are looking for a cover.

>> we would have the type that would be the same thing. >> so is this book written more in the tradition of sierra leone rather than a long way gone? >> everything i write is always like this. because for me, you know, i think that when you write about any human experience, you have two choices. or you have a very simple story that people can draw conclusions from.

i would never say that in my book. what i would describe how the audience and people. so the experience of what is happening is supposed to be told. so you have to capture their imagination and bring them to life so they can hear and smell and be part of the experience. so you have to bring them and tap into their imagination to some extent. >> where did the title come from? to the title comes from someone in the book where there is a strong character who is a woman who is based on my grandmother who returns.

it just comes from a particular event or she is telling the story about why people should continue to be hopeful for their life to go forward. >> now you talk in your second book about the war that never ends. you make a mention of the civil war that has really never ended. >> yes. because the physical wounds are the ones that are more visible. and everyone can see that. so all of the things that have happened, those are the things that have taken a much longer time. but all of the things have continued to brew in people and all of these things and that takes a much longer time. >> why that is going on, people are trying to find a way to live

together. because you're going to put your life on hold before you continue living. so it is a very difficult thing and everyone is willing to look at them differently. because as you see, there will always be living in peace and you have to find a way to re-consolidate to some extent. and none is really what i have managed. >> have you reconcile yourself to ms.? >> yes, to some extent. in the sense that there is nothing that i can do to undo what happened. so you learn to live with the memories. because you you're not in charge of what triggers it. what triggers an emotion or flashback or nightmare. i have no control.

it can be the simplest thing. so all i have control over is not reacting in thinking that maybe i am standing on the corner of some street in washington dc, putting it in a different context. that's all i can do. and that is the difficulty of living with the memories of war. as we grow older we find ways to deal with it so we don't pass it on. >> what were the experiences of writing the book and where did you write a? >> when i was writing, i never intended to publish it. we are just trying to find a way to fine tune our thinking. that way i can speak five or 10 minutes. in a sharp and sustained weight

about what i wanted to say. later on it became a book that i wanted to publish. so this was written when i was an undergraduate. this has been written in six countries. i wrote it in the central african republic and i wrote it in italy. everywhere, you know. >> have you grown used to living in the states? >> yes. ago home frequently. i have some american tendencies. and i live between the two cultures because i am part of both cultures. fairly soon i would've lived in sierra leone. so i find myself part of it.

>> how has this changed you and your family because of its success? >> it changed my life completely. so we had a life of it beyond what i had expected. so i really did not understand this. it's a regular kid and i just graduated from college. so when the book came out, a college buddy and i were on the telephone together. and all of a sudden they started getting these calls. several calls a day. and so we realize what was going on.

it was a discovery for me to realize what that really means. also in "the new york times" magazine had a photograph of me on the front cover. i was on the subway in new york and i'm sitting there and everyone openness thing. and i am remaining here and it was interesting. but it changed my life tremendously. >> it is in the end or maybe the beginning of another story. every story begins and ends with a mother and grandmother. >> i believe that strongly so

every story is a beginning. that we have an idea or thought and introducing people to a new practice and a new landscape. women are the ones who give birth to all of us in the world. so every story starts with that. this is actually something that my grandmother felt a great deal about. it affected my moral philosophy. so that is what this is about. >> what is sierra leone like today? >> it is coming along. a lot of development has been

happening slowly. turning back and starting small businesses and people are going back home. but the political climate arrives in terms of the people who can really move this country forward. if someone is really interested in shaping this country to be one of the best in the world, it can be done. so we have to redefine us, this idea of leadership in sierra leone.

but the country is very safe. we have two or three elections right now. >> do you still see a lot of amputees? >> yes, we are still at that point. ..

>> you were watching booktv on c-span2. radiance of tomorrow ishmael beah's second book is coming out in january of 2014. >> there should just be a flow of communication available to everyone in the country. we turn on the lights and we don't even think about it. it's just input into everything we do as a country. communication should be the same thing but a cause we have been a little there is a lot of fog around this issue people have the sense that internet

access is a luxury. what is interesting is electricity was treated as as a luxury too in the early 20th century. people said water everybody needs but electricity only for the rich and it took decades to change the perception of electricity from one thing to the other. we are in this middle point right now where internet access is still viewed as something slightly magical or expensive but talk to someone who is trying to run a business from his home. for him internet access is like like -- he can't even get going without having that reasonably priced connection and now there is no option for it. >> now joining us on booktv from stanford university is a

professor of ethics in society and professor of philosophy here at stanford and she has written this book, why something should not be for sale and the more limits of markets. professor sachs why is a philosophy professor writing about economics? >> good question. well economics involves lots of different dimensions. i think it was gladstone who once said budgets are just matters of arithmetic. they are matters of our values and economics inevitably raises questions of ethics. some of the most obvious questions of ethics concern paired with a minute -- legitimate sea or distribution that the market produces but there are other kinds of questions to. there are questions for example about should you be able to sell your kidney like you sell an apple? what should we think about markets and toxic waste or child labor markets or markets in the

access to information? how should we think about those markets today? are they different -- our sex markets different in kind than other markets? does raise questions of ethics. we can't think about modern markets and their role in social life without thinking about the myriad of goods that markets produce. >> lets take two of those things that you write about. one you write about prostitution. should that be for sale just to answer the question. >> so i don't have an easy way of answering this. i actually think the questions are more complicated. what i try to do in my book is take some intuitive reactions people have to different kinds of markets is so most people reacts differently even if they think prostitution should be legal.

they think there's something different about selling sex and selling apples or cars. they think they're something different about selling organs and they may think there is something different about selling health care. so what i try to do is see whether there are features of the markets that concern us. not about what we should do about them but if there's a way of understanding way we react differently to these markets in other markets. so i developed in my book a theory about that. it's a good of a complex theory. there are four different dimensions that i argue and give rise to concern. and not all markets that are worrying are worrying in the same way. it's like what tolstoy said about happy families, all happy families are the same but unhappy families are unhappy of their own way so the problematic markets differ but they have these core dimensions that are

similar so think about prostitution. a couple of things about prostitution that are important. one is in the way that prostitution exists in our society. it's often especially if you think about street prostitution, people are pretty desperate. often people who are desperate and under the control of other people, a high percentage of streetwalkers are -- so there a lot of features that they normal market, the apple market doesn't have. most people buying and selling apples aren't under the thumb of someone who is controlling them. they have the ability to say no and walk away from the trade. that isn't the case in many instances of prostitution so one thing i look at is could we regulate prostitution to get rid of some of the concerns? would there be other concerns that would still remain even in

a society which got rid of the desperation that drives a lot of people to prostitution. >> those four parameters that you have an very quickly i just want to read those. vulnerability, weaagency extremely rmful tcomes for individuals and extremely harmful outcomes for society. where does prostitution fall in those four parameters? >> the vulnerability of the prostitute would be one of the most important aspects of prostitution. there is some weak agency so again prostitution takes many forms but some prostitutes are very young and some of them are under the control of other people who are making the decisions about what they do, who they speak with and what conditions so they are not transacting in the market on their own behalf. some forms, not all forms of prostitution are like this and

then there is systematic inequalities between men and women in society and the way they are viewed and prostitution may play a role in reinforcing some kinds of images that people have about women. so the instance of rape and violence against prostitutes is many many times higher than the instance of rape and violence against women who are not prostitutes so one question is why is that? that is partly because we are dealing with any illegal activity. some of that might go away if it were legal but some of it is we are dealing with very vulnerablvulnerabl e people in very bad circumstances. >> professor debra satz if we can take that for same parameters and apply it to -- do people have a right if they want to sell a kidney can they do so? >> so it's illegal and on most every country of the world to sell an organ. i think iran is currently the only country in the world where

it's legal to sell an organ. there have been times in other countries where it has been legal and of course there's a big black market so even those illegal in many countries it's not enforced. in the context of the globe when we look at the black market we see a lot of the parameters that i mentioned in place so many people who -- i'll give you a striking example. i had an undergraduate student who wrote and studied people who had sold their kidney in india in a period when kidney selling was legalized for a short period. if you want any found 85 people who had sold their kidneys and one thing he found was a significant number of them didn't know how many kidneys they had so that's very bad information. they didn't understand what the consequences of selling a kidney would be.

in the united states giving up an organ is relatively safe and there are not very bad health consequences. it's possible to live with one kidney. it does have some health consequences but when you have access to clean water and a comfortable life you could be fine. in the context where these people were selling their kidneys in india, there were lots of health consequences which they weren't aware of. all that weak information, a lot of people sold their kidney and the main reason to get out of debt. most people didn't get out of debt and where body parts are available creditors use them as collateral for loans. so that is a third-party effect. that is even if i didn't want to sell my kidney, now i am affected if i'm very poor in trying to get a loan and suddenly the pricing of loans

has change because other people have as collateral that they can put up and if i don't put up my collateral i will be less likely to be an attractive prospect for the creditor. so there has actually been an anthropologist who studied that. and that is a very concerning issue and that tells you something else about markets which is markets often have third party effects on other people. they don't just affect the transactor's but they affect third parties who weren't involving the exchange at all. i will just give you one other example that i think is really shows this. it is child labor. where a society has child labor and it's also illegal in most countries but it's not enforced in the state often doesn't, can't or doesn't want to enforce , often when child labor is widespread adult wages are low because there is more supply of labor and that means if i don't want to send my children to work that my wages are lower

because of the bigger supply and demand, i am going to be less able to keep my child from going into work. so sometimes when you close off the market option you can actually enlarge the options that are open to people. it's not always the case. we have to be careful and we have to be careful when we think about policy and i don't draw a media policy conclusions from anything i write but i'm just trying to analyze analyze what i think is a pretty wide spread said that intuitions that not all markets are the same. >> host: the final question, debra satz. adam smith, karl marx, are we anywhere in the same vicinity when we are talking about markets today? are we unique where what they were writing apart -- about? >> guest: some of their insights are still with us but economics has become a very powerful discipline is a very

abstract discipline so when an economist writes an equation on the blood lord doesn't matter whether it's kidneys or apples that the equation is about. you are getting the properties. what adam smith wrote, he was very concerned about the effects of different kinds of markets. they didn't have equations. there are no equations in the wealth of nations. he worries a lot for some kinds of markets affect people's motivations in ways that might not be compatible with a democratic society so he worries that some markets shape people in one way to think about this is that it's very different if i pay you to hang out with me. it's very different when you hang out with me if we are friends. in fact if ihanging out with mee insulted.

so there is a lot of ways in which engaging with people in markets while again has many fantastic consequences, as a consequence of sometimes driving out to other kinds of motivations that i care about. there is what is called experimental economist duddy a phenomenon called crowding out. so crowding out happens when you pay somebody for doing something that they would have done for free in such a way that once they are paid their full motivation and reason for doing the action changes so actually at stanford years ago they studied little kids and they gave them jelly beans if they read and some kids just read. and then they stopped giving the kids jellybeans for reading and those kids stopped reading because now they thought where youre not giving me the jellybeans i'm not going to reap

existing incentive crowded out the other reason they might have had for reading. a phenomenon we now happens across-the-board and lots of kinds of market situations. that doesn't tell us we shouldn't use markets. it just says we need to make sure they are not market dimensions of life where we are not always thinking about the financial rewards that come from interacting with people. >> debra satz teaches philosophy, teaches ethics at stanford. here is her book. why things -- why something should not be for sale, the moral limits of markets.

this summer booktv has been asking washingtonians legislators and viewers what they're reading and here's what some of you to say. on facebook judy on posted the boys in the boat by daniel james brown, an inspiring read about the university of washington crews when at the olympics in berlin. fantastic.

>> in the fall of this will be published, "wonder women" is the name of the book sex, power and the quest for perfection. the author is debora l. spar who

also has a day job as president of renard college in manhattan. debora l. spar are you a feminist? >> guest: if you asked me that question five years ago i would have said absolutely not. the combination of taking the job i have now and writing this book has made me a die-hard feminist although i think the word itself is a complicated word and i think we can get too caught up on the word itself rather than just thinking about the issues behind them which i and i think most women are still staunchly in favor of. >> host: how do you define feminism and what are we getting caught up in? >> guest: there's a great t-shirt we have floating around barnard in the effect that some of us have the crazy idea that women are equal to men. this is the core of what feminism is about and there is no one that will argue with that anymore these days. >> host: where did you grow up and how did you grow? >> guest: >> guest: i grew up outside of new york city a fairly typical

upper-middle-class whites of bourbon childhood and i grew up in the air when feminism in retrospect was at its hottest and one of the things i write about in this book is that i think when you grow up during an era in some ways you don't buy into that era's arguments because they are older than you are. so by the time i came of age i was born in 1963, so by the time i became a teenager really the fight to feminism felt like the felt like they were over and won so many girls of my era grew up saying i'm not a feminist. thank you very much to all all the women he came before us and i'm delighted i can go to an ivy league college and 11 i can play sports in high school and i'm delighted i had to tell that i don't see the struggles as being something i'm personally invested in because they are over already. >> host: how important was betty friedan's book "the feminine mystique"? >> guest: that cannot be respond. i have zero knowledge of it growing up.

>> host: did your mother read it? >> guest: my mother read it but i don't think it affected her life in a huge way because she was in retrospect already quite liberated. she was a schoolteacher and was very vivacious. i didn't read it in college and i really have only read it much later in life. and was in fact quite shocked to see first of all it's a brilliant book but also how relevant it is in the sites that although women have won legal rights and workplace rights in great numbers since 1960 3a lot of the problems she points who are still problems we are dealing with today. >> host: debora l. spar you started by saying that ever since he you took the job as president of our nard college you have become a die-hard feminist. why? >> guest: i think to be a little clearer i started becoming a feminist although although i wouldn't have used that word earlier in my life when i was at harvard business school and i think what happened

and i've seen this happen to so many women of my age is that as we got older and as we grew into her marriages and grew into our professional lives we started to realize that our lives as women were evolving differently than where the men's lives we saw around us and just to be blunt that women's lives were still harder in many ways a more complicated than their male counterparts particularly if they are women you are trying to do what feminism promised which was balanced family, career, husbands, loves and all the richness of life. >> host: don't men do that? >> guest: i think men do it differently and i think one of the things we haven't really seen yet societally is the repositioning of men's roles but i think men have always, or through modern history been aware of the fact that their primary job is to have a career to bring home the bacon and be the provider for their families and to spend time with their families as the father role that

they feel less of a compulsion to be perfect dads and perfect husbands and devote themselves to their family life is much as to their work life. i think what has befallen women of my generation and younger is what i call in this book that double and triple whammy of expectations that as women we have retained all of the expectations that surround motherhood and white hood and we have added to them all at the expectations of a professional life and an athletic life in all these other things. so we are trying simultaneously to be perfect wives and mothers and perfect career women and i women and i think men have done a better job of not trying to do everything at once. >> host: debora l. spar if you have been born in 53 rather than 63, how different would your life be? >> guest: you know that's a great question and i can't really tell. just looking at women who i see as being like myself for like like myself for 10 years older think i feminism earlier in my

life. if i have been born in 1953 it would have been in college in 1968 which probably would woulde been a little later. it would probably been a more just in time to be in college but women who are in college in the late 60's and early 70's almost inevitably did get caught up in the feminist movement. it's funny only 10 years later when i went to college in the 1980s it was the reagan years in activism was generally dead. >> host: who is helene kaplan? >> guest: helene kaplan is a very amazing woman very well-known and the city of new york. she was one of the first woman to become a lawyer, a partner at one of a major new york law firms. she went back to law school after she attacked her second second child and after she had gotten her children over the primary school years and she has been a real role model for me. she's an amazing woman. >> host: in 1955 the right to two years after graduating with

farmers -- honors from harvard she was there to match you love deeply she and one infant daughter and one slightly older toggling aside suddenly walking with her daughters and husband in central park. she sat down on a bench and began to weep. i was only 24 she recalls and my whole life was ruined. i cried to my husband that is much as a loves my girls i always wanted to be a man. guess code she went back to the alert is still a practicing grandmother and lawyer. >> host: debora l. spar you write about being raised in the the -- >> guest: most remember charlie. it was the same time the charlie's angels hit the airwaves on television so there is a lot of charlie and both the charlie's angels do it and the charlie perfume ads per trade women in a retrospective this fantastical way. they were gorgeous of course and they had careers. they had men in their lives and

one of the hats i remember from charlie perfume the women had a child in a peripheral way because the child was there but the woman was really going to work. i really think that charlie is the perfume ads in the tv show created a subconscious expectation and women of my era that somehow this was the kind of life you would lead, that we would be gorgeous for all of our lives and find men easily and find sexual opportunities easily and we'd have careers in babies and great shoes on the side. i think girls my age really just grew up for the first time in history for assuming that all these things would be ours. >> host: and? >> guest: it didn't turn out to be true because of course it was a television ad and it wasn't true. i think it did create these deep-seated expectations that really have been perpetuated to this day. >> host: this is an autobiography, isn't it? >> guest: the book and the

book ended the book ended up being far more autobiographical than i expected it to be. >> host: is a process like? >> guest: it was hard. i've written several books before. they have been academic books so putting my own life on paper was hard but it was very useful and cathartic in some respects to sort of understand the forces that molded me. >> host: are you giving future students have been hard ammunition when you write this? one of the best best jobs i had at the ymca. i got to spend an inordinate amount of time lounging around the pool in a swimsuit and learned vital lesson for my fellow male swim instructors like how to bake a good hash brown. >> guest: i'm not sure that particular passage is designed to be advisory that we have all been teenagers and their certain things that tend to accompany that stage of life. >> host: do you regret teaching 9-year-olds how to play spin the bottle is right about? >> guest: i'm not sure in

wretches that i would have thought that al qaeda is that al qaeda play spin the bottle but for the record number of them was so brave as to risk a kiss. >> host: debora l. spar what do you want people to take away from "wonder women"? >> guest: i want women in particular young women and older women to walk away from this book with a sigh of relief to be able to say okay, i am not perfect, i'm not a wonder woman but nobody is and i have more power in my own life to make choices that make me happy that bring me joy rather than constantly feeling as i think so many women do both my students and older women that they have to be everything to all people at all times. >> host: former professor at harvard business school president of barnard college. what does the term glass ceiling mean to you? >> guest: the glass ceiling is a great term that captures the sense of frustration that many women feel individually that they have sort of maxed out in their careers but more. may think it does capture what remains true that although women

are 50% of the population, 50% of the ivy league, if you look at the tiptop powers in this country across all sectors women maxed out at somewhere between 15 to 20% of those power position so there is a glass ceiling. whether that's imposed by outside forces or imposed by internal forces is more debatable but at a statistical level women do not hold anything close to 50% of the positions of power in this country or any country. >> host: we have been talking with the president barnard college previewing her new book coming out in the fall of 2013 "wonder women" sex, power and the quest for perfection.

see what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> i am a gracious -- voracious reader and particularly a 4-h is reader of history so this summer i started with two books. one is called revolutionary summer by joe ellison one of my favorite historians. it's a fascinating look at what was happening both from a political perspective and a military perspective in the summer of 1776. what i love about that book is the detail on the battle of new york. i represent new new york and hep the cause was able to propel this ragtag group of the continental army against the mightiest military power on earth, the british and enabled them to lose that battle to win the war. the other book i'm reading is more entertaining and it's called the children of -- children of fortune. it's about the vanderbilt

family. several decades after the commodore died cornelius vanderbilt the extraordinary wealth of that family had largely dissipated so we didn't really have that descendent who is considered one of the richest americans anymore. i'm enjoying now but is it talks about how temporal wealth was and the important of american longevity and good economic policies. pulitzer prize-winning author alice walker presents a collection of personal and political essays letters and poems. ms. walker opines on a range of topics from health care to the obama presidency for about 45 minutes.