[inaudible conversations] >> good evening. [applause] my name is tom campbell at the regulator bookshop and we are -- we are thrilled to welcome nancy

maclean here this evening for this marvelous new book, democracy and change. i have made no secret of just how important i think this book is in my humble opinion. we are doing our best. turn off the air conditioning there? [inaudible conversations] >> okay, okay. my little experience in electoral politics you might now is on the durham city council for eight years in a previous lifetime. [applause] it seemed to me then that one

very important thing in politics is to understand your opponent and understand where they are coming from, what motivates them, what they are really trying to do. and as this book shows i think that our understanding of what is called sometimes the radical right, the libertarian right has been very limited and that there has been a philosophy and a strategy that goes back decades that is behind much of what we see in politics now. so i think there are a few things that can be more important for those of us who don't agree with that kind of politics than to read this book, understand it and i think we'll be in a much better position to

counter the arguments that are being made on the libertarian right. nancy maclean is the william chafe professor of history and political science, right? the public policy at duke university. she taught previously at northwestern university where she served as chair of the department of history and she came to duke university in 2010 and as i said, we are very pleased, very happy to have her here. thank you all for coming. thank you on the c-span for covering this. nancy maclean.

[applause] >> wow, i am so thrilled to see how many of you are here. ever since moving here we have felt such a great community and to reminisce so nice to look at in these of many friends and colleagues and people i haven't not yet. thank you for coming here and also a special thanks to tom who took an interest in this book way back when i was still furiously writing and revising. tom called me or contacted me to set this up so i'm really grateful to be here. it's such a wonderful bookstore. can you hear in the back. zero dear. okay, i'm going to get my big voice on. how about that. can i hold it? [inaudible]

>> i will do my best. can you hear me now? a little bit about how i came to this topic and what i learned and i'm here for me to come a few passages from the book. we will open up your question and comment and such. i am an historian and social movement. i have a particular interest in the u.s. south in 10 years ago i just finished another book in philadelphia when i went into a friends service committee archives and learned about the story i had never heard before even though i am an historian with emphasis on the south and that story was a story in virginia with the aftermath of brown v. board of education for the county in the name of state sovereignty and individual liberty completely shut down the public school system and sent

the white children occupied a school with public money is then left the black children with no schooling for five years because those students could go on strike in 1951 for a school that might be at least a little bit as nice as the one student school and for that act, which then funneled into brown v. board of education, became one of the five cases in brown v. word of education. for that act of resistance from a county leaders to shut down the schools and left the children with no public education for five years. all they had was what social movement organizations could provide like the naacp, american friends service committee and so forth. i was horrified by this committee that i've never heard. i was deeply moved by what happened with the students. i started to research the story and i learned that tuition grants, what we would today be calling vouchers were crucial to

the story of what happened in prince edward county. and when i learned mrs. friedman, print the virginia program led by the entire south and doing and i learned that milton friedman, the chicago trained economist had issued his first for school vouchers in 1955 after the news had been coming up from the south for several years as the most segregation were threatening to shut down public education rather than allow desegregation in defiance of the federal court. so first i thought probably come that milton friedman is part of verse tori. and i kept moving with my school story, which is a kind of a civil rights neoliberalism story you could say. inspiring the footnotes, i learned of a 1959 report by two economists also trained at the university of chicago, james mccovey tannen who had set up a center at the university of virginia in 1956 year they

arrived in september after the general assembly of virginia had passed the laws. i will give you a sense of that report come in the 1959 report in a moment with the reading. i would just say that it will shock me to see two university professors making an economic case for what the arch segregationist for asking, the most radical committed segregation of virginia we are seeking. what really upset me and provoked me intellectually is that these economists were not making their case in racial terms. they were making it in the terms of their discipline. but it was clear that they were opportunistically exploiting the crisis, the tremendous crisis and tragedy unfolding to the south in order to push through their agenda. and in fact, when they said their report to one of the state legislators is one of the leaders of massive resistance, they actually said they are

making a case in terms of economic and their discipline, letting the chips fall where they may. and that haunted me, letting the chips fall where they may. so that puts buchanan and his colleague on my radar. milton friedman was the surprise figured for the many connections he turned out to have, to virginia people pushing for these tax subsidies for private education for segregated schooling for white children who did not want to go to school with black children. then i learned again by chance some political scientist who is a transnational political scientist who also worked on my america, that so many people have heard milton friedman went to chile and advise the dictatorship on how to combat inflation. in fact, the virginia school at james buchanan had a more lasting effect in the buchanan school with the financial icons to tuition.

then we are more interested, like what is going on. so i continue to follow it. and then i moved to north carolina in 2010. at that point, milton friedman was still my focus. what is he doing? what is going on? as you know, something happened in 2010 after the mid-terms and are radicalized republican party wants majorities in both houses of the legislature, suddenly all these things i was reading and this is the man who wrote very abstractly i was trying to understand these obstructions and suddenly it became real, concrete and frightening because it was deemed these ideas play out in what i am sure you all remember and have responded to over the last few years. what i was seeing comes from buchanan and can he only argued that it was a missed date to

focus on the question of who rules. the real question was if you didn't like what was going on in the society, which none of this libertarian you need to focus on the rules then you needed to change the rules in the mid-to break up collective power that you would see in labor unions, civil rights organizations, in the aarp, and a collective group that could make demands on government for tax resources that would lead to transfers of resources. that's the problem. his solution was to alternate the nature of government by radical school change. let's come back to north carolina for this is becoming real to me. what we saw unfold in north carolina after 2010 is radical

changes one after another come extreme gerrymandering with the operation to undermine unions, hostility to post education at all rebels and radical cuts in funding for public education and changes to the governments of public education from a refusal to accept medicaid expansion part of the affordable care even though there was a desperate need among low income people for health care. measures to protect the environment and address global warming could getting rid of the justice that they meant instituting what some call the monster voter suppression law. what i found disturbing and even fright and with that i could see this was an application at james buchanan's ideas of strategy guided by his understanding, his unique understanding of the political process. you really are quite original insight that he won a nobel prize economic sense for him in the teen 86.

driven by -- guided by his ideas and driven by a libertarian morality that says it would be better to let people die from lack of health care if they cannot afford to pay for it on their own to receive it from government. i think it is extremely important for us to understand that it is a coherent ethical system and it is frankly for some people a kind of fanaticism that is shaping our public policy as we gather here. so the bottom-line idea here is that what they really mean by personal responsibility is that you should be on your realm. you should be a self responsible individual and if you fail to pay for your future needs, whether that's health care, retirement security, whether that is your children's college or your own, your failure will

teach other people that they need to conduct their lives differently and start saving from the moment they become sent in. okay, so i want to keep this moving. so i knew i had to get into his private papers and there is a collection of his private papers but i was trying to get in after it couldn't get in in january january 2013. i finally got access to his private archives at george mason. ironically, just as the government shut down led by republicans who are exposed to his ideas and trained in these ideas were engaging in this government shut down in washington and a case about buchanan might have called coercive campaigning. so it was just wanting to go into the archive without unfolding when i come out to the radio. they were everywhere. if you read the book coming out talk about a little bit.

in the papers come i found my hypotheses confirmed in a wave that really took my breath away. one moment i'll describe responding to correspondence about his trip to chile in 1980. he was invited in inmost anti-democratic associated with the pinochet regime in order to advise on the constitution and they translated his work in spanish and give him audiences to give about five public lectures that were reported at the reaching newspaper. he later thanked them for the accuracy of those reports. and this was in 1980. shelley was one of the world's most leading examples of why human rights mobilizations were beginning. the universities before they came. i could go on. the letter that really stopped my heart was he got back -- he wrote a thank you letter to a

man named sergio decastro who was one of the top advisers at pinochet and thank them for the lovely lunch held in his honor. the wine in truly given to mrs. buchanan and something else. not a word about any of this, but just a lovely exchange between friends. i sat coming here are some of his that his life mission was promoting the free society, promoting liberty. how do i get my mind around that? and then i took another key moment when i went upstairs into his personal office and found stacks helter-skelter, a series of letters of blowups that happen after charles cook started investing in george mason university and the fact some of the people connected with the operation engage in what confidential whistleblower identified as illegal act to that he and his violation of the tax code. and so, that was also pretty hard copying.

once i got home, the hundreds and hundreds of documents i copied their input than they are with the published work and other sources, i find laying down pieces of a puzzle is sometimes come it to honest, literally nauseated me when i saw the scope of the operations being guided by the individual, when i started to follow out the career trajectory that lead out of this training center that they established a george mason and saw people coming for this program with all these major to tuitions that the koch donors were just shocky. i saw something else, that the form of government, that these men understood as a deal, that they referred to as liberty mirrored that of mid century virginia minus the segregation. what am i getting at here?

a great political scientist published a book about southern politics and he said that virginia was the most oligarchical state in the south. next to virginia, mississippi is a hotbed of democracy. so virginia, they had of the control that you couldn't imagine, this unified elite and it was almost like kind of that elite made sure that they had their economic liberty and that meant that nobody else had their freedom. so, in the name of liberty, they just extreme voter suppression with the poll tax. they gerrymandered the general assembly so it overrepresented rural conservative districts in urban and suburban communities. they pass laws that prevented workers from organizing and tax labor organizers who came in. it was absurd and broadening the

biggest grower of virginia. he prided immigrants to harvest his apple orchard because again, that was liberty, right? so why should he employ american workers who might have access to the comp to tuition? anyway, as i began to trace the operation built up at george mason university with koch money to apply buchanan's understanding of political economy to a charles cook said when he gave this in 1997 when all this really got going in earnest, he said i want to unleash the kind of force that propels columbus to his discovery. and what was really interesting to me, to his back he also said, since we are greatly outnumbered, the failure to use our technology will essentially lead to continued failure. this is an end countrymen were

three engineering degrees from m.i.t. he's talking about ideas that create a great advantage. what he's doing is harvesting this understanding of political economy developed by buchanan in order to achieve what he wanted. i think you all know that he wants a very audacious radical change in ours to shame. but if you didn't, it's worth knowing if here for market research. he's got that sense of his mission in life. so, koch had the money and he has intellectuals by his own description for some three decades until he found the technology he wanted and he found that a george mason and he turned it into an operational strategy for something that buchanan had long advocated. buchanan spoke about the leviathan when it was very clear to me from everything else i found in his papers and writings, that when he spoke of leviathan on, what he really

meant was doing chain modern democracy, to undermine the power of work power of workaday citizens, to curtail regulations and transparency and ultimately to make changes in state and federal constitutions to lock in what the cause had never been able to get through persuasion and the electoral process. advocating constitutional revolution in the 1970s that he traded in chile, we'll talk more about it in the q&a. i will just say before i go to read a few selections that i honestly believe that what is at stake right now in my book is talking about is the face of the american democratic senate. the kind of government the citizen action, member i am a

student -- the kind of government that citizen actions have demanded at least since the populist movement of the 1890s. this time of all social movements seem to think they could be in silence. whatever activity over here and environmentalists here in civil rights group there. in this world they are coming for every group that looks to the government in order to achieve their vision of social justice, journey to fix the environment. all of those things. this is a unified challenge. i will stop there again and pay more in the q&a. now i want to give you an example of the narrative of selections from the moment that illustrate some of what i just shared. the first collection -- the first selection as an early chapter about the events in the fall of 1958 in virginia as the governor of virginia engaged in what is today around the country being called preemption, using

the power of the state government to prevent localities from doing what their citizens otherwise would like to do. the governor applies these massive resistance caused in 1956 to take away the autonomy of local communities and support other residents the will of a gerrymandered state legislature that was about to segregate in response to a federal court order should be shut down. there is the context. and then goes back to her phrase, letting the chips fall where they may. james buchanan and warren nutter did not put forward to propose solutions for the school crisis until early 1959. when they did, it was as if it pulled down the shades on every window, canceled subscriptions to newspapers and posteriors to harry averts virginia. the economists and their allies

have maintained that the states i've visited the federal government against coercion from outsiders and a stand for liberty. truth they ignored the racism and turned a blind eye to the chronic violation of black citizens, liberty and constitutional rights led to the federal intervention. the voices of 1958 and early 1959 to buy even or narrow exclusionary conflict because they came from one middle-class virginians. from parents in particular were shocked at the actions of state officials and determined to rebuild. most are moderate republicans and democrats of the inning city and suburbs of northern virginia and they spoke powerfully enough over a six-month period to move and explain publicly what their vision of liberty would mean in practice on the most pressing matter of the day, the school

system. in december 1958, different communities but the committee nor fall, the u.s. navy base, charlottesville, home to the university of virginia and the talent of the shenandoah valley announced their intentions to admit a few black students to some previously white schools coming that following september. they were moved to do so not because the white townspeople are at their school boards suddenly converted equal rights under the law even though if you did, but most in the culture of jim crow did not. still, many saw themselves as picture data, law-abiding citizens and so were unwilling to define a court ruling even on the matter of race. several courts have instructed their communities to desegregate without further delay, particularly school subject to naacp lawsuit and they plan to comply. they trigger the implementation

of the 1956 resistance legislation, empowering the governor to shed any white score that plans to commit any black students. this act would deny public education to 13,000 white student throughout the fall of 1958 in these communities from first graders to high school seniors are the reason it was only white schools is because the white students were to enter black schools subject to this federal coercion and those who disagree with it. in july 1958, the week after governor lindsay jay on the junior announced it would close the school of september who before this time had taken little attention to state politics announced she would run for the senate seat held by harry byrd. her name is talk to her believes

oneself. she meant no words in explaining why she was running because senator byrd massive resistance program is designed to close our school she said, dust turning our children more than any other group. that was what moved her as a working mother of five to run for office. but she didn't stop there. the problem was not just whether local communities should be allowed to admit black children to finally white schools. virginia's coming generation she argued, black-and-white needed more and better schooling. that is just the beginning of the changes she was campaigning for. i think i will kind of skim a little bit here because i know what is hot and you are kind of crowded in. i will say a little bit war because i was blown away by this story. it is really there. presiding over an electoral

system she said keep in mind, i believe people everywhere and virginia -- who oppose the political machine that oppresses them. who is the organization protecting? she noted in the u.s. senate, senator byrd was one of the most outspoken centralization of government. yet his political machine she said has been gradually depriving our community and cities that their rights coming out of and getting the school board what they can and cannot do. her campaign motto was virginia's own death always to tyrants. for the state citizens to resist tyranny. i kind of want to read more of that, but i think i will hold back. one thing i do want to tell you in a state in which he even know we are the least united states

in the south, our legislature is talking about putting rights to work in the state constitution so no future generation can change it and give workers the right they enjoy the midcentury. you need to know who encourage him to run for office. he was the president of the virginia afl-cio. she had written a letter to the editor of the newspaper, protesting the school closure is an caught up the house that morning and came over, invited himself over, came over, shook her hand and said we would like you to run for the u.s. senate. and they brought materials. jk supporters. they did everything. the virginia labor movement was back by the mainline protestant church at this time of league of women voters, all of these groups, but it was the labor movement who first came to her aid and that is extremely

important for us to understand at a time of labor strife has been so much under attack. and this story that i want to share with you. the second collection is from 1983 of james buchanan, and is emboldened by the cause enjoyed area. two of the then president ronald reagan has drawn back firm. radical change to social security. if you never read david stockman's book, i couldn't believe it. he basically said what they were trying to do in reagan's first budget and that they should have understand that. they should've gone back. instead, reagan himself did that because they didn't want to hurt

people. and they talked about how he was going to be engaged in mortal combat with people in his own voter base. so, the point i'm leaning from his after reagan had decided to push through the kinds of changes that a libertarian was first seeking and what happened after that. these libertarians seem to have determined that will be needed to achieve their end was to stop being honest with the public. instead of advocating for their goals, they needed to engage in a kind of a crabwalk i'm even advancing misleading claims in order to take territory bit by bit in a manner that cumulatively, yet quietly can begin to alter -- to radically alter american society.

the program on which they tested these strategies. social security is both james buchanan and david stockman hunt observed was the linchpin of the welfare state. the most popular success has made it a target for the far right since its creation in 1935. now inspired by chile's conversion, charles koch turned to buchanan to teach his staff how to craft affairs. the privatization of social security is the top rear of you. they labeled the existing system of social security a ponzi scheme, a word now that is one critic pointed out that the program is fundamentally fraudulent and indeed totally and fundamentally wrong.

in the view of the libertarians, but the cause learned opposing it like they used to vent political suicide because the majority of voters wanted to continue as it was. the professor warned, there is no support for reform among anti-membership groups in the american colony among the older young, the blacks, browns are white. the richer the poor dear the near universal popularity for social security in any attempts to fight it on philosophical grounds openly about opposition was doomed. they taught him more security than sequential and indeed everything deviant and deceptive approach, but one that caused

well. those who seek to undermine must do two things. they must alter beneficiaries under social security viability because that would make the abandonment of the system look more attractive. there is the whole than they have been doing this since i'm quite sure you are aware. step one with public support for the system by making this unreliable and divide and conquer. recipients could be split apart in this way. the first group to find as those already receiving social security benefits. the current recipient in those retirement should be reassured that their benefits would not be

cut. this tactic buchanan referred to, and i quote, paying off existing claims. the reason behind it is that in the age public source analysis of what is virginia school as the citizens most attentive to any change in the system committees for the people who would fight the hardest to preserve it by getting them out of the struggle to preserve the system would be the remaining coalition. the second group consisted of high earners to be to suggest they be taxed at higher rates than others to get their benefits and as an insurance program in the minds of the wealthy and more like that now discredited and unpopular means test income transfers understood as welfare.

and if that message were repeated enough such as the wealthy began to believe that others were not paying their fair share come and they in turn would become less opposed to altering the program. the third group would consist of younger workers. younger people needed to be constantly reminded that their payroll deductions were a tremendous welfare subsidy to the ages. i think if nothing else conveys this tremendous tells us what we are looking at here is not classic conservatism. it does not incite class struggle of young people against their elders can save grandma is a rent seeker. so i do think there's one more thing to add. a few more things.

so this patchwork put quotation marks around reform to make sure the message was clear to those he was advising that reform is not really the endgame. this package has been united before in your support of social security, but the member groups of the coalition that protected social security might be induced by changes to fight against each other. when that happens, the broad ceiling that is upheld the system for half a century might fracture. buchanan's projection to let audiences identify those who would benefit from the social security and turn them into active allies and to other people at the heritage foundation contributed to this discussion with what they called

a strategy for ignorant of social security. the answer to building up the group that would help social security privatization was clear. the right was not again people putting away for their retirements to the contrary. they wanted people to save early and actively as part of the philosophy of personal responsibility. they just wanted to say then taken out of the hands and put into s. as was done in chile than also wanted to and employer contributions to social security as is done in chile. i will stop that section there. the final section and the one i will close on you into my reading kind of shakespearean.

you may have heard some of the former colleagues are up in arms at the portrayal of his idea move forward. here's an interesting fact. the political team and the allies at george mason university pushed buchanan aside when he called what they were doing at george mason university expectation. when push came to shove, top university administrators told the man who became the university's biggest donor over their first noble laureate and they pushed buchanan to the side, too. some of those now complaining loudest about my book with the billionaire over their friends and colleagues while buchanan's papers were left to rot were

beginning to get cold and essentially unattended. few people one of them came to feel profound contempt for charles koch in its operation. he was a libertarian, so this is not like me an outsider talking about this. what i'm about to redo comes from a person who ran the foundation in virginia and he was deeply involved in this cause, but he got more and more disgusted after the turn of the new century after wealthy people are taking over what was supposed to have been a movement of ideas. the conclusion opens with the unheated whistleblowing and then we can go on to the discussion. it is a contradiction in terms

to remain the self-governing intellectual in the private mason janik retribution. messiahs don't entertain doubt. i suspect the change underway if it didn't bother others about themselves, have bothered him about himself. we also know once the people settled then in this corner at george mason university economics apartment of south korea's school of law, maybe the whole university after they settled in and took over at george mason university, broad concern turn into contempt and disgust until he came to despise the team of operatives and their academic enablers who are now as far as rally was concern occupying his campus. he called his former economics colleague a church may send and

now by then the top political strategist a political hack and a man who is very appropriately named. what others never dare to admit, i quote, far too many libertarians have been seduced into providing intellectual ammunition for the autocratic businessman, end quote. it has reached a point he came to believe by 2012 that there was no hope that many of those who were dissipated in the free market would speak out. too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by charles and david koch. in his suggestion that so many having been bought and they never came to campus after 1998 when he was essentially pushed to the side with strategies to a

generation of operatives nor did he play any other to back control i've been able to trace in what is now become koch movement. he continues to accept the honor that they make sure to send his way. in his memoir published 10 years later, he went out of his way to say looking back over his lifetime i have no regrets. buchanan was far too smart not to remember the idealistic young man who was once promised university of virginia president said he would seek to defeat keynesian economics and liberal politics by bringing ideas against the other side. not by training manuals. have you withdrawn after 1998 so he would not have to personally witnessed what his decades of work had brought against?

we don't know. they clearly continue to respect the canon, but not so blindly for he predicted at the 2012 election approach that the libertarian policy shared may well suffer, at least in principle for having to become the instrument of a tyrant. now commenters the cato institute for the approved plan for the libertarian context of america by using the apparatus libertarians have criticized made angry. he thought, and i quote, the scruples concerning the manipulation of scholarship. he wanted the output to a just cause. when a few libertarian board members and staff members raised questions and said we support legalized prostitution.

anyway, when they raised questions, he replaced them with his own people who now included the kind of social conservatives and political party figures who were once anathema to libertarians. in the end, rallies, loyalty drifted apart. he was concerned about cato, not america and certainly not about the majority rule. neither he nor any other insider ever went public with their concerns, nor did anyone else sound the alarm about what the proxy army. thank you. [cheers and applause]

>> can you talk about but was held at george mason to teach all this stuff. >> yes, again the question was about the summer camp held at george mason. and yes, at one point i think charles koch said the problem of the libertarian movement had always been a shortage of talent. so part of the project around the country now, they are investing heavily in creating different schools. we now have the lake forest faculty and students trying to get transparency about ayers. it is an uphill battle on western carolina university. the faculty of duties were overruled by the administration. but in any event, what they do

is create a training institute for high school students, training institutes for teachers. there are training institutes for faculty from different places and there are training institutes for federal judges. so i did actually get into that. i gave a hint of the legal story. buchanan, one of his colleagues with a guy named henry manny who is a crucial entrepreneur in law and economics in george mason law school around not and then he ran the summer camps that at one point by the early 1990s had trained two fifths of all the federal judges in the united states. 40% of all federal judges had been treated to a curriculum. obama had a chance to not put in the number of judges that the numbers are not what they were. this is so serious. these people are dead set to transform our legal system and in buchanan's terms -- yes.

>> what you think it says about the class rule of this country and the so-called liberal opposition that they have been such an abject failure and the fate of all of this? why have the far right wing ideas receive such power? you think there's plenty of money and intellectual ideas. >> i have to say i don't think any of us really understood this, right? hindsight is always 2020. part of the democrats with lots of money in both parties, especially citizens united shaping everything, so what we have is politics will become more accountable to donors. we just saw this play out with health care. why would the republican party

in washington with whom i sent him a 12% of the american people supported because they were answering being pushed by the freedom caucus and they were answering to this donor network, not their constituents. pat buchanan's ideas change the incentives. make it so they are afraid to be primary and entered the donors. i think we've all been remixed and we are led that way by our culture. how many conversations have you all been in the last sure people are talking about politics and is it going to be likely focus on personality and we all have to learn to be canonized by sin that is about the rules and it's about power and the democrats in washington were so focused on washington that they didn't even notice they were losing all of the states. this is the strategy informed by

the political school economy and enforced by the donor network. they now have what is called traffic control. the legislature and the governorship in 25 states. democrats have that. i think they might be starting to wake up. i am not sure, but what i will say is people in places like north carolina, even in kansas, with the party and instituted tax cut and tools are destroyed and states are destroyed, but if people want to see this turnaround, it is incumbent on all of us. everybody has a thousand things to do incumbent on the citizenry, not to wait for somebody else to do it, but to get engaged and make it happen. [applause] >> given the scope of what they are doing, the decades they have been doing it, how is it

competitive? >> i hear you. i think the single most important thing -- the question was given the decades in development of how we combat this. my answer for that is that the most important thing about this book and about the story i tell here is that they are doing this because they understand people don't want what they want and if they tell the truth about what they want, we will recoil and not let it have been. i think the most crucial thing we can do is inform ourselves, make them tell the truth. if they say they want to reform social security come to say do you support the principle of social insurance? challenge them because they have to get out of this language. i made a list at one point of

things that i can follow from this analysis. the main thing is to realize that is a source of tremendous strength, that they understand that the majority knows what is going on in the majority sees what kind of society to bring into being, people would want to solve it. to reach out to one another, to engage, get involved in whatever is in your church. so many ways the network, people are plugged into. we saw in health care, what better conditions do they have? they did it because they didn't like what they were singing and they really responded. >> they are clearly parallels between what buchanan was doing in george mason in what friedman was doing at the university of chicago. do you see any documentation of

collaboration between the schools? >> it's actually quite interesting. buchanan came out of in the first year they talked about the university of virginia at being a colony for the university of chicago. i don't think you like that idea. in this kind of hothouse crucible of what was happening in later chapters they talk about how we than the university was being democratized, the university of virginia. the poll tax tended, gerrymandering and all these different things happening there making virginia inclusive and democratic for the first time it was in that context, in the crucible of that buchanan developed an economy that was focused on the political process that came up with these conclusions i just described. mrs. freedman, not my favorite person, but in some ways what they were doing at the university of chicago was a bit different. buchanan thought he didn't get

adequate recognition by that. there are these kind of tensions, which was promoting these ideas for the world. but i think chicago maintained a different field. maybe it's because i haven't done it deeply enough in the archives. i know someone also be here next year or two years worried about that. yes, that's fair. >> the question was this fox news part of this network? i will say the archival information that i have is mainly from buchanan. i don't know -- i don't know about the origins, but i will say john stossel was definitely part of the libertarian not work. when i was in buchanan's office,

yet a letter from a young woman talking about the program who had done an internship with stossel wood was a convert to this cause. also some of buchanan's colleagues at george mason talk about launching programs about making use of insights from cognitive psychology and its evolutionary biology. so i do think that some of the tribalism we have seen in our society and the efforts to get things, particularly right-wing people that someone because a woman loves a woman, she hates the religion of what to destroy. i do think a lot of that is conscious they exploited and i am on the direct mailing list of another of these groups and i can please some of the stuff they send out is just terrific. it basically says, are you aware at that millions of illegal aliens are about to steal the election. this is the kind of stuff they

are sending out. again, one thing citizens can do is start holding elected officials accountable to the kindness that being used to get people to the polls. i will say something, too. i talked about how this cause is taking advantage of understanding by changing the incentives they can get elected officials, particularly republicans. they have no sense of loyalty to the republican party. they've made that very clear. they've turned it into a delivery vehicle for people who don't agree with them will do what they say or be primary them is their positions. where are the people of courage to say this is wrong? i will not support this health care bill and i don't mean this

off as an adult major donor money. i think that people can put out that kind of voice and create that kind of pressure to change that. that would be one name. yes, sir. how can be accessed differ from organizations like federalist society's or the evangelical to try and make sure the prison states or for that matter, how does this organization differ from those -- >> well, you probably won't be surprised. i'm sorry. the question was how did the koch network of organizations that i describe -- evangelical tools and so forth it at this point i think it probably won't be a surprise when i tell you that i found charles koch was one of the early peep hole

supporting the federalist society and helping the programs that buchanan was in some federalist society event. what i will say again -- both of them are extremely smart. there's no question about their intelligence. there's a danger about the smartest kid in the class, like trump with his tweets. that is the kiss of death. first of all, it does make people look like snobs, like they are condescending to other people, it better. but also it keeps us from understanding how incredibly shrewd. so charles koch, a lot of people said look, this guy inherited his father's business. the deal. what he got from his father, he had increased over a thousand times up to 5000 times.

reengineering disease on trent degrees from m.i.t., always thinking six moves ahead and if people want to defeat this project, others have to start doing that, too. not just plain attention, but instead to keep how do we save our institutions? everyone a favor public schools for how do we enforce steps beyond? all these organizations and i was when it the nausea when tried to find out -- i felt like claire danes. all this stuff. but then i would dig into this stuff and it was just crazy how these people circulating networks and so forth. but the state coffee is connect to to the religious riot in king

philip, north americans for prosperity. it is beyond the normal mind or ability to take it. one more question. i see a sweater. you, sir. [inaudible] >> the financial crisis, yes. first of all, again i think at this point in the story you will not be surprised to know that people involved bring up the financial crisis. phil graham is working with this cause, was a very committed

public choice in the senate when he was pushing for funding and deregulation. his wife wendy graham for the center they created a george mason. all of these people were called in to clean up the financial industry, was there a moment of shame that the idea is going work out? no. just a more aggressive to take advantage of the crisis and dislocation of that financial collapse to move this agenda even harder. so, thank you for that question. ..

[inaudible conversations] >> good evening everyone. welcome to porter square books. thank you for joining us. as you can see visiting film by c-span for the booktv programming so if you could make sure your phone ringtones are turned off. also want to let you know a couple other things with coming up. tomorrow night lisa jewell will be with her mystery i found you. monday next installment in our roundtable series hosted the local literary magazine and will