tv documents america's stories, and on sundays booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including mediacom. >> the world changed in an instant but mediacom was ready. internet traffic soared and we never slow down. schools and businesses when virtual and with powered a new reality because that mediacom we have built to keep you ahead. >> mediacom, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> this is my first time at one of these events in quite some time, since i became president. unfortunately being president puts me on the road quite a bit, and that's a good thing but it keeps me awake oftentimes from events like this. tomorrow i fly to omaha, nebraska. i'll be beating withng the governor, meeting with some members of congress giving a a talk. it's going to be great but the

best part is that i will be able to fly without a face mask for the first time in two years. [applause] >> so in recent months i figured out the best way to deal with that is to bring a few lollipops, a tootsie pop can last you a good 20 minutes. facemask off, face mask on. but anyway, hey,, it's to see, although i haven't been to one of these meetings for a while, i've been with harlan for more than 20 years and to see so many familiar faces and some new faces, and looking directed to see a r full house. uber or lyft our spirits. when people are in the building giving up your free time here on an evening wherere you could be held doing whatever else it tells us were having an impact so thank you so much for being here. and it was wonderful to see. i think of the talk to most of you personally before we started and that really lifted my spirits. for those ofil you who don't knw

or if you are not very familiar with the heartland institute we are a nonprofit organization, a nonpartisan organization. we believe in free markets. we are here sort of lobbyists for freedom. we are advocates of freedom. he will see aren't you lobbyist? we fight for freedom wherever we can. our mission statement is to develop, discover and promote free-market solutions to the problems that confront society. we are mostly known for a work in global warming, writing against alarmism, fighting for sound science and religion but we address a large number of issues. our core product, our core issues over the years have been education, financial, budget issues, school issues, sculptures in particular. of late within particularly active fighting big tech censorship, fighting the great reset of capitalism. that is, what is being imposed upon us and lately esg, and by middle social government agenda.

we have our government relations team out in the state legislatures actively. we have testified. we present testimony and i believe more than 50 occasions here and a first-quarter of 2022. including i believe 20 inn 20 in person testimonies where most of us of the times we've been invited by the legislators themselves to advocate out in support of free-market solutions. we did because of the support of people like you. so thank you once again for all of your support here in person, for those that you donate to the heartland institute, we're putting too many to goo' use. we'll keep doing more for you. with that in mind i'm going to turn the mic over to jim to introduce her speaker. just before dawn what to say one thing. i am a student of history. i loves history, and as much as our sessions here discuss policy and sometimes politics entities will i been especially fired up for the stock for quite some time. our speaker just wrote a book

"dragonslayers. it's as much history as policy andov governance. i purchased the book. i'm not quite through with it yet but have read much of it. it is a compelling narrative. it is a quarter of the speaker as he is a writer we are in for a treat connectore so jim i'm going to turn this over to for more formal introduction but thank you all for being here tonight. it's wonderful to see you. [applause] at works. fantastic i swear we tested all this stuff dozens of times today. you know, it always goes wrong when the cameras goes speaking of cameras. i want to i want to welcome you might have noticed big camera here in the back. these are our friends from c-span. and so they're here to to record this for posterity and it's also on our own live stream on heartland's youtube page heartland tube. so welcome everybody who's watching on the live stream as well. we'll just get right to it here to introduce our fantastic speaker tonight. i think this is the second time maybe the third time larry has

given a presentation here at the heartland institute, but he's a native, arizona. he graduated from arizona state university with a ba in political science. and then he put that degree to use by going on the road with several different rock bands. opening for such 60 70s acts such as steppenwolf he had roughly switched gears again in 1976 and got his ma and from asu in history then a phd from the university of california santa barbara, and he's also taught at the university of dayton for almost 20 years, and he's actually taught every single grade. from 7th through college so that's fantastic. he is the coauthor with michael allen of the new york times. number one bestseller a patriots history of the united states, which is now in its 31st printing with more than a half a million copies in print. that book that book actually remains the best-selling homeschool history tech textbook in america and of as you might know from the title, it's supposed to be a antidote to that. book by howard zinn people's

history the united states in 2019, he founded the wild world of history curriculum website, which is now available and it's a full curriculum for us and world history for grades 11, or i'm sorry eight through 12 providing full lessons with video instruction by larry schweikert himself. his other best-selling books include seven events that made america you can vaccine them right here on this handsomely displayed on this table. all of these are actually pulled from the the mazer library of freedom here at the heartland institute. so we have seven events that made america how trump won which he authored before the election with joel pawlik completed before the 2016 election patriots history of the modern world in two volumes again right here. and then the last time he was here he presented on his book reagan the american president from 2018. he is here tonight to talk to us about his latest bestseller dragon slayers sixth presidents and their war with the swamp police. welcome to the stage larry swiker.

sooner all right. thank you. it's great to be back here, especially in a room dedicated to andrew breitbart. i only had a few occasions to meet andrew. but one of them was he went way out of his way to introduce me to the hollywood community. he brought me out hosted a nice wonderful steak dinner for such people as actor adam baldwin ben shapiro many other people and it was just really nice of him to do that. so i'm always grateful to andrew for kind of leading the way and it's interesting you mentioned the raccoons because in you know, ohio in our home we had a nice big yard with the picket fence and one day the dog was out there just going crazy and there was a raccoon with its head stuck between the fence slaps. and so as i used to tell my students i walked back to the garage. and i got my big shovel.

watch out and i smacked that slap in the fence and freed that raccoon so he could run off of all the kids are all just doing don't tell me you crash the little raccoon. so anyway, hmm for those of you who don't know me everything jim says more or less true. i ended up teaching at the university of dayton in 1985 and i wrote a number of books that are not here tonight because they're boring there are academic books and you know, they make for good footnotes and so forth, but they they don't make for great reading and i wanted to write books that people would read and so around 1999 or so mike allen and i started work on a textbook. we just wanted a book that we could use in our classes. that wasn't horribly biased. and we ended up writing a book that would come to be patriots history the united states and we never thought we would sell it

to a publisher. in fact, we thought it'd be sold out of the back of a van, you know, like with the plastic straws out in california. yes buddy last patriots history the united states but publisher did pick it up and it did very well in 2004 and i went on to write three other books after that and then in 2010, i was on the glenn beck show and you may remember this. this is when glenn beck had an audience a 3.5 million a night means as seven times that of cnn. it's just staggering how many people glenn beck reached and i gave him a copy of patriots history and his response was i know this book do i know this book? well anybody who's read the book knows it's a great book and the proper responses. this is a great book. so i knew he hadn't read the book and so i get a call for days later from glenn at home. he says larry when you're on the show, i hadn't read the book. that's okay glenn. i understand is no no, i always

read the guest book. i read it over the weekend. it's a thousand pages. this is a great book and his endorsement he put it on his desk every night of the show and talked about it three or four or five times a night with little yellow postums in it and immediately went to the top of amazon and then the following week. i got a call from the publisher. i said hey larry, your book's going to be on the new york times list this week. but yeah way to go. yay, and then i get a call a week later and say larry you're good book's gonna be in the top 10 of the new york times. i said, whoo way to go and then i get the call and i can hear him in the background all partying. i can hear the champagne corks popping. whoa. i know what's going on back there right and and they said larry your books gonna be number one on the new york times list i said, right that's good way to go love it. no, you don't get it's gonna be number one on the new york times. i said, no. no, that's great. no, you'a target. it's gonna be costco. it's gonna be in walmart.

i said walmart, our book's gonna be in in walmart. thank you jesus. i meant that i was writing books that that everybody could read which is what what my goal was and so over the years. i've gone on to write a number of these other and we're back a number of these other books and most recently. i started thinking about the swamp obviously in the context of donald trump. he went through in not just 2020, but what he went through through his whole administration in terms of people undercutting him and subverting him and working against him from his own attorney general down. and so i thought you know trump's not the only one. there have been other presidents who've had swamp problems. and so when i started the book, i thought i was looking at six different. presidents was six different stories and as i began to put it together, i realized we're always talking about the same thing all of these swamps were interrelated. so even though i start with

lincoln and the slave swamp really the story starts a little bit before him with the most important american that you probably never heard of and that's martin van buren. martin van buren created the modern-day two-party system that we have now prior to that. we only had one party. and it was called the democratic republicans. i know some of you think yes, that's what we have today. i know but that it really was called the democratic republicans and you actually you know what that the period was called is called the era of good feelings because there was so little animosity but andrew jackson runs for the presidency and 1824 loses in the corrupt. bargain martin van buren decides that he's going to get jackson in the presidency, but the story is a lot deeper. because you see what van buren was really trying to do was to create a political party that could keep a civil war from happening. he would do this by making sure that slavery could not be

attacked even as the northern and midwestern states began to add more and more free soil senators and representatives to congress where sooner or later they would act on slavery. how do we keep this from happening van buren asked and his answer was money. will buy these people off. okay, even if you're an anti-slaver from pennsylvania, we'll give you a government job if you just shut up and follow along with the system. we called it the spoils system or patronage. and as a result and van buren didn't get this because his goal is to keep the federal government small and the states stronger what he had done inadvertently was to create a system in which the federal government began to grow with every single election because you had to give away jobs to get elected and by the way the most powerful job. this is a shock you in 1830 was

the postmaster general the united states. i mean, kid today girl that mommy i be postmastered general. yeah, nobody but back then everybody wanted to be postmaster general. could you had 8,500 jobs that you got to give away. so whoever the president appointed as postmaster general that guy had a lot of power. okay. so here come the wigs and the whig party they're now on the same playing field as the democrats. oh, i forgot to tell you the name of van buren's party is the democrats. so the wigs come along they're on the same playing field. the only way they can compete is to give away more jobs. so in every election, they promised jobs and they promise more jobs and they promised more and so government starts to grow every single election. you know what nobody notices it till 1860. because part of van buren strategy was to make sure that the presidency remained in the hands of someone who was not

hostile to slavery a northern man of southern principles is the way it was worded. all right, and so you either get a democrat or a northern man of southern principles wig in office from 1828 until 1860 and then in 1860 you got a big problem. because you've got a northern man of northern principles who does not approve of slavery in office. and even though lincoln says i will not act on slavery. he can't help it. he's going to act on slavery because he's going to appoint federal marshals. he's going to appoint federal judges who will rule in slave runaway slave cases. he's going to appoint customs commissioners who may allow free blacks off the ships that are docking in southern port he's going to appoint postmasters who are going to allow in abolitionist material. so lincoln's election caused the

civil war that van buren had hoped to avoid because of van buren's own system. lincoln comes in and one of the first things he notices he has all these army of job seekers lining up down the street at the time. he ran the government you ready for this with two secretaries. lincoln ran the whole government with two secretaries and literally people could come inside the white house and they just stand there and form a long line all the way down the block waiting to talk to the president about jobs, you know when he wasn't busy and fighting a war, you know. and so lincoln could not deal with the with the spoils swamp because his first job was to deal with the slave swamp. he kind of needed the spoil swamp to defeat the slave swamp, which he did. he was the only of the six presidents took b completely successful in his goal. he did defeat the slave swamp, but the spoiled swamp was still around and it continued to grow it actually got worse after the

civil war because you had all these veterans who were now claiming benefits by writing their congressman saying i was in the civil war, i need all these benefits and you would think that within 10 years after the civil war the number of veterans claiming benefits from the civil war would decline because like they die that didn't happen it grew as more and more people suddenly had magic memory restoration and they remember they were in the civil war and that they got injured or wounded or whatnot and so the roles begin to grow crazy and and so you literally have thousands thousands of these job seekers descending on washington with each new administration one author of the day said the trains going out of dc would be full and the incoming trains would be full with different people all seeking to take the jobs of those who just left right? well grant didn't do a whole lot about this but the next and neither did hayes but the next guy a guy named james garfield

ran on a program of defeating the spoils swamp. and and he was going to do it. when one small problem he got killed. and you know who killed him a spoils swamper? charles goto shot him and said i am a stalwart. that's a guy who favored the swamp. and now arthur is president and see chester arthur was thought to be very favorable to the spoiled swamp, but he's one of those rare people in washington that when he gets in office he has a change of heart to do the right thing. and he actually begins to attack the spoiled swamp. but arthur had another problem bright's disease and bright's disease kept him from serving a second term. so he's out and the mantle falls to the second of my president's grover, cleveland. and i love cleveland. i look at him as as trump the first first guy to win an election lose an election win an election, right? but cleveland won the popular vote all three times and he

comes in and he takes on the spoiled swamp. i mean hammer and tongue he is in there staying up late at night in the white house reviewing all these claims for veterans benefits from people who weren't veterans and throwing them out and vetoing them saying no, i'm not gonna accept this thing. we kick out thousands and thousands of these and so he finally worked with congress to create something called the pendleton civil service act. and this supposedly reformed the spoil system now, you know what happens in washington when they reform anything it gets worse. and so they reform it and they took about 10% of the total federal employees away from the president put it in the hands of a civil service commission where you would take a test and and however you place that test is what job you would be eligible to serve in. but the unseen ramification of this was that now presidents had so many fewer jobs to personally

give away now they had to give away groups of jobs. to lobbyists to different industries, right and so in our time you'll get a candidate going out to wright patterson air force base in ohio saying i believe in a strong defense and everybody goes yay, and it's all the guys from raytheon and lockheed, you know, and they'll go out to colorado to the environmental protection fun though. i believe in protecting the environment. oh, yeah, because they all know it means money coming into their coffers. so what pendleton really did was it moved giving away of government jobs on a very small level into a very gigantic level and that government growth i talked about all of a sudden it started to increase exponentially. meanwhile, there's another swamp raising its ugly head and that was a trust swamp and the trust swamp consisted of big business combinations. i mean very much like twitter and google and and these kinds of giants today facebook.

and teddy roosevelt was determined to do something about this you all know that. but you may not know that one of his main reasons for wanting to do something about it was that he feared the media. he feared the yellow press would create such a firestorm not just against the big businesses, but against all businesses and he thought he believed this in his heart that he was protecting all business from this mob that would be raised to radicalism by the yellow press now. it's interesting. i like teddy in a lot of ways and i don't like him in a lot of ways you can't help but like some guy who is in a cushy government job assistant secretary the navy war breaks out and he resigns and goes to raise a volunteer cavalry unit that wants to get into action and wants to see combat and not only does he do that but he fights and not only does he fight but he wins and not only does he win but he's awarded the middle of honor.

and then as president, he negotiates a peace between japan and russia and as awarded a real nobel peace prize. can you imagine any modern president receiving both a middle of honor and a nobel peace prize? i can't roosevelt's one big failure. he never ran a business. i'm convinced that had teddy roosevelt because he succeeded in everything else. he did if he had just run a business and i'm not talking about his cattle ranch because that was a that was a fantasy land. that was a playground for him. he had other people run it. he didn't meet payrolls. he didn't worry about laying people off. i'm convinced if he had run a business his antitrust activities would have been different. i don't know how but i think they would have been different. the one trust of course, he does not take on is the media trust which at the time wasn't that big but of course over time in our time. it's gotten to be monstrous.

so government continued to grow agencies continue to grow new agencies such as the fbi and cia were added. and so by john kennedy's time in office. he is confronting a cia swamp and kennedy's problem his task is that he needs to get rid of the cia swamp. but he needs the cia too much to get rid of it. he needs it for for cuba. he needs it for laos. he needs it for vietnam or as lyndon johnson would say vietnam. he needs it for vietnam and you know one time when kennedy comes so i do not buy this notion kennedy is going to get us out of vietnam. funny trendline you have therefrom 1600 to 2000,

that's not the trendline for getting out so kennedy doesn't trust the cia. he feels betrayed by them yet he still needs to use them on many occasions and that's why i consider him the first failure in our group of six because he doesn't do ga anything to bring the cia to heal . ronald reagan of course runs on a three-way pledge. one to defeat the soviet union, to build back the american economy and three to reduce the power and the size of the government. unfortunately for reagan he needs the government, needs the military, needs big business to accomplish the other two so almost like kennedy he finds he needs the agency he needs to get rid of too much to get rid of them. our share one anecdote in my book reagan the american president . david stockton was a true believer in reducing the size of government and they were sending out memos to all the departments.

are you coming on reducing the size of your department? are you coming on reducing your budget? he gets one memo back i found in the archives, this edguy says this is the guy reagan appointed who believed in reagan's agenda. the guy says we already spent all of this year's budget and we spent part of next year's budget to. i really don't think you're going to get around tocutting anything anytime soon . it was an amazing admission that once your in the swamp it's impossible to roll back the swap. by 1984 reagan had pretty much given up on the third plank of his platform promises which was to reduce the size of government and he succeeded in the other two but he pretty much had to give up on the third one to reduce the bureaucracy. one very important thing happens between kennedy and reagan . congress have been appointing and creating thesecommittees , these administrative

agencies and empowering them but once they got in place, congress just let them go. and basically didn't choose any oversight t over any of these bureaucracies or administrative state at all. just let them go. so it then fell to the courts to try and handle these but unfortunately what started to happen was that the court said well, congress has set up this agency.. congress gave us these powers, who are we to say congress is wrong? they basically let the agencies to find their own missions and set up their privatepolice forces . so that was a major change in the bureaucracy and reagan. finally we get to trump and trump came in and basically

all four of the other slots, you get the spoiled swamp, gets the media slump, the cia swap . the deep state swamp and trump's appointees don't help him out whole lot. jeff sessions was probably the worst single appointee in americanhistory, you have to go back a long way to find somebody worse . so trump finds himself undercut at everypoint . he works to get these documents declassified, nothing happens . amanda, she said they would send out memos to the industries and get responses emback and they'd say we're not going to do that for this reason or that reason and you can never fire these people. in the end i have lincoln, cleveland and roosevelt as partial successes and i have kennedy and reagan and trump

as either failures or partial failures in their swap. so with that this is always the best part of the night when we do the q&a because i feel that rock and roll. i go back tothe unhinged larry . we almost burned down the yuma convention center so let's go ahead and open this up forquestions . and i'll take it from there. we have a microphone here. you're not on. there you go. you're on. >> hello larry. >> hi larry. >> this deep state is a behemoth now. >> huge. >> and it we know that t personnel his power. [inaudible] they're going to

do or not do what is required of them by the president. what i'd like you to comment on is starting the high levels of civil service and going down there's a certain culture of people who are hired and the fact that they are rewarded for finding new ways to add a little bit of power and find new things to regulate and control. how hdoes that work and how bad is it? >> it's horrible. what reagan said was the closest into eternal life on this planet was a government agency. and you're absolutely right . you can change out the head of these agencies but how much is that really going to affect the culture? we saw this with the fbi. we had sean hannity tell us it's only a few bad apples at the top but the rank-and-file fbi,they are fine .

their corrupt down to the studs. all the way through o. if any of them were not corrupt they would have stood up and say i'm blowing the whistle i'm going to say this is wrong, this is not accordingto our manual . and i'm going to call out jim called me and all these other guys. that didn't happen. so there is a total culture change that is required in addition to changing of personnel. and i have some suggestions at the end as to how we might accomplish that . >> yes sir. >> thank you larry. the thing that made me during the four years of the trump presidency is every single day there was a scandal. and they would call him communist and everything else. russia,russia, russia . so what was the basic premise of these republicans and

democrats who hated trump, hitting him. was it because he didn't pay his dues and he went from tycoon to president or was it r some people that i talked to who are liberals they can't tell me why they hate trump and it always comes down to the tweets. >> mean tweets. okay, that's a great question. trump represented and i think by far steve bannon is the best single analyst on this entire thing. other people have written about it. the guy is a phenomenal writer and he represented the clash tof the country class versusndthe ruling class . that is to say that the elites inside dc there's a book by charles murray after losing ground it's called coming apart. phenomenal book and in it murray shows that a stone wealth and income and based

on iq and he used school graduation as a proxy for iq. he said you could go through suburbs of washington dc and if you didn't have somebody picking up your laundry for you are getting you the starbucks coffee, you would interact with a single person who wasn't in your income and iq school level. he said on a single block every single person on that block had come out of the ivy league school tthat's got to change. no, asu is no great shakes and the university of montana is nothing fantastic 10 people from those schools would be better than its idiots we have. so you got this week culture that is a problem. now, trump hit other buttons and this button i love to

talk about this one. this is why the jonah goldberg david and chris hayes, these guys are all such trump haters and my theory is this. they never were conservatives. what happened was they would assume a conservative position at cocktail parties and in the heartland institute are young americans or wherever they would go and they would make these conservative speeches up till trump because they knew what was going to change so at the end of the night they could go back to their liberal buddies at the cocktail parties and say it would be nice if rove versus wade was overturned but we know that's never going to happen. and then walk off. and here comes trump. he says no, we are going to actually do the things i

campaigned on. we're going to change this country and that had been like a brick wall because all of a sudden the threat was that policies were actually going to change and they could no longer go in front of these people and pretend to be supporting conservative positions if it meant they were going to have to defend realconservative change so i think that was an issue . >> there was a really surprising to me a decision in florida that ruled against the cdc and the mandates and if you think about how far it was going against the cdc, it seems as though this is as significant decision against the state. what are your thoughts on the significance of that decision? >> today is hitler's birthday but we really need to celebrate yesterday which was freedom day in america.

here's what i would say about that. i would urge you to watch the podcast of robert barnes who was a lawyer and he has been predicting the outcomes of these legal cases most exactly as they turn out and he's said the osha case would be ruled against biden but he said the military would not because for so long there was a precedent. you go into the military, go overseas and you get all these shots so it was going to be hard to overturn that this was huge and you have all these liberals out there m screaming today i judge in florida overturn the will of the people. you mean like roe versus wade? so it was a massive shift. the ground is shifting and not just there, across the board.

desantis today, this guy is a tornado. he's taking on disney and they're saying you guys have existed for 67, 68. you guys have existed for 40 years on the largess of florida taxpayers. you don't pay all the taxes, a total economy in your little reedy creek development place, where going to change all that and the heads are just exploding here . so i do think bannon is right. i don't agree that wwe're going to see all 100 c turnover but i believe we are on the verge of a groundswell and i just tweeted out walls other, that's my twitter. it's a play on my movie other walls to fall. walls other so look me up. i tweeted an article about this groundswell and it's not just here. it's going on across the world. people are risingand look at what happened inhungary . 90 percent . we're at saddam hussein iglevel numbers where kelly and

torture my family, but 90 percent. like saddam hussein numbers and this is of course everywhere across the world i know it's a catchphrase to say are risingup . the international rise of all these people is turning marks on its head because they are rising up for freemarkets . it's astounding. >> yes. >> mark wire mueller, hello larry. >> is too long, sorryyou're done . >> we don't want to make give the microphone to a crazy person like me. you have a new twitter follower, andfollow you if you want to follow me back . quickly i was in springfield this morning. i i spoke for three minutes at the state board of education

and i told them they should get rid of it because it's a wasteful group. with that in mind i was hoping donald trump would have eliminated the department of education. instead he hired betsy devos and nothing really happened. >> when you say nothing happened, that's a win for us . strange as it sounds that's a win. if you put in a whole bunch of bureaucrats and at the end of the four years you can say nothing happened i'd say we won that for your shift . >> i was hoping and i'm a trump supporter and i think he's coming back i was hoping you would get rid of the department of education and why didn't he get rid of the department of education? >> why did he get rid of a dozen departments? he was hamstrung from the beginning.when you come in and she estimated there were 60 maga people in the administration. the president alone appoints 3000 and out of those 3000

you only got 60 maga dedicated people it's going to be hard to change. to actually get rid of an apartment you would have to have a department head was o committed to getting rid of that department and there's going to be that's very hard to do you're going to have to set up a ceo or board who is committed to getting rid of ford automobiles . i think that would have been even a bridge too far for trump to get rid of all whole cabinet level agency . reagan could have done but he didn't have the political clout to do all three of those things. when trump comes in again he's going to have to come in with a breakthrough. a flamethrower. and i mean with with an exterminator right behind them, terminate because y' they're only going to get one more shot at this. if we do it wrong next time we probably aren't going to get another shot. >> yes sir. >> how about present-day?

how would you describe the power structure in washington ? who is running the place >> i do not believe biden is running anything. on mytwitter i have all these nicknames . biden is the rutabaga. and nancy pelosi is botox. mitch mcconnell is yertle. i don't think biden is running anything. i don't think obama is running anything because he's too lazy. i don't think he has the energy, or the time. hewants to play video games andswim . i think it's a, all .ron plane is the one of head of one cabal group. there's green wacky dues out here in charge of another group and you go through east interest group, the education group and they're all vying for biden's mind.

and kind of the last thing that you hear someone at the door who repeats his word salad of nonsense. so that's who's running washington. you have a whole wbunch of republicans who are committed to keeping the swamp in place and they're all bought off by something. most of them by big pharma. if you want to know why we have the taxes it's because we've got people in washington making a ton of money off of big pharma. never once mentioning ivermectin or any of the other diseases. so you've got the rhinos in there and that's why i think the next two elections are absolutelycritical . if the seven trump endorsed senate candidates all we and it might be a stretch but they can do it. if they all win that would change the republican makeup

by 14 percent. that one election by 14 percent. if you bring those seven in and they're committed and they do what they say they're going to do, no guarantees there with doctor oz or jd vance, you never know but they're better than the other guys. if they actually do what they say and they come in you could then see the next exelon of the ted cruises and rick scott's ndand marsha blackburn's moving over on their side and it's an overturned window that begins to pull the whole senate back to the right. and then in 2024 now you've got shot. now you've got seven or eight seats and there's not a seat in the world that's safe. the democrats are justnow figuring this out . political or the hill that alternate the bad news from the democrats this week and they said basically we're looking at a wipeout and we're looking at potentially in 24 a vetoproof majority in both houses.

this is the leftists saying this. so i personallythink we will get somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 seats . but biden needs biden's declining sure. it's not going to change. he's going to keep going down. he's in the 30s and at least two polls now, i 20 by election time 2024, maybeeven lower and that she be a position to like about . >> you said ivermectin and i said this video is going to be banned from you too. we have a question over here. >> good evening, thank you. i was wondering how you might have considered the history of jimmy carter who i think was i consider him to be one of the great the regulators of our time. >> it wasn't harder to deregulate. all that the regulation had been put in place back in the

late part of the nixon administration when youlook at airlines, when you look at trucking, when you look at gas . in my book the reagan the american president i have a chapter on carter called the worst president ever with an asterisk . the bottom until barack obama but now i have to revise it to say until barack obama and joe biden so my nickname for him suis jesus carter because he's so pompous. he's so perfect.i don't consider him to be a very good president. i think he was a disaster and whatever the regulationwas there was not his own, he inherited it . >> i have a question. you know i never try to reduce resources by paying for bureaucrats. >> i get what you're saying. this is actually a suggestion by steve bannon.

as i said i'll give you three measures for hope. first what do we do about the swap? there's one thing we can do. here's bannon suggestion. you buy these people out. buy out their contract and say i'll pay you 20 percent more of your remaining salary to get out ntand retire now it's going to cost a lot of money but it's a one-time investment because once that person isout of the job what do you do ? close the job. universe affect job again and believe me you'd get rid of a lot of washington if you were to buy out these jobs and shut them off. that's suggestion number one. number two, you've got to get the bureaucracy at the deep state. get the administrative state out ofdc and trump started to do this . he began moving some of the management and the interior offices out toall on nebraska . and farmington, i put them

all in farmington new mexico, you'llnever hear from them again . anybody been to farmington? it's a uranium mine. that's all you need to know. farmington is a uranium mine. move these offices out. get them into the interior of america. at the least what that will do is get them around more ordinary americans so that they see the impact s.of their policies. they otdid nothing back in dc. they're fully insulated and complete echo chamber and there's a third thing you've got to do is vote in maga oriented people who will change the system. we can only vote for the people but do what you can do to replace these people with maga candidates. >> go ahead chris. >> not that trump is a nixon trump are but can you give

any insight into the watergate? you certainly seem like you got a deep state operation. the fbi and the whole thing against nixon, what was that about with respect to what we know now about trump? >> that's a great question on watergate. i'm going to give you the answer the most historians would never give you and that's we don't know. the best guess i have is the gitlin explanation that said that john dean found out that the democrats had an address book of a call girl in their possession. and it was his then girlfriend soon-to-be wife maureen dean. her name was in this book. it was dean who authorized the break-in and it was dean

who told them what to look for which is why they're nowhere near the chairman of the democratic party's office. there over in some enyahoo's office in the back part which happens to have that bag i knew where to go. i think dean lied to nixon about it and said it's a national security issue tand they said we got to cover it up. so they went on and got the cia to intervene with the fbi and say this is national security omand then a completely went to hack from there. nixon is not innocent. he obstructed justice. heshould have gone to jail but he was not guilty of the original crime everybody thinks he was guilty of which is ordering the break-in . translate i've seen peccadilloes and some of them can be pretty big. i'd watch out for those big peccadilloes. >> he apparently had directed both of them.

>> he was the go to guy. the first one he did that was perfect. >> it was in the put together. >> just raise your hand. in your book there is this titledragonslayer, six presidents and their world with the swap . may i ask you about the20/20 election ? in 2016 nobody thought trump was when would win. i don't think trump did. >> that's debated and i think you talk to the inner-circle. >> my point being that hillary was going to be the third obama term. the swap is excited, they already had all their plans. then trump wins. trump is p.going to do things that he outlines just a minute ago. puts them to the hinterland for the quick basically.t

so my personal feeling and i think this is shared by a lot of people in this room and this will be sure to get on youtube for sure. i iwant to make sure the algorithm hits it all. >> i could sing and that would guarantee. >> so the 2020 election was a little unusual.nu i would say. but after all that i started to think to myself and i think a lot of people but this way there's no way they're going to allow trump to win. the media was against them, they didn't report on the underlined stuff . the time magazine article about how they fortify the election they saved the country. these people say they saved the country. because if trump had a second term that really the swap is in trouble. we're holding them off, keeping them tied up with this russia collusion stuff. all this stuff. and i always thought to myself there's no way the slump is going to leave this up to the people.

they weren't going to takethe chance that he would get reelected. now, is that a conspiracy theory? is that crazy talk ? >> time magazine said so. laid it all out exactly what they were doing . i wrote in how trump one i finish the book. my part of the book in about october 2016. i said trump is going to win the election with 360 electoral votes. the final vote was what, 320? 300. i said he'd win with at least 100 electoral votes. so i was sure based on the voter registration numbers. in ohio and florida i was sure he was going to win. i really didn't think they could steal it because i thought trump was going to get at least 10 million more votes but guess what, he got 13 more votes than before.

what happened? i'm from arizona. they did an audit whichnobody wants to talk about in terms of the actual findings . they found and i'll give you one data point. 17,000 duplicate ballots. i guarantee you all 17,000 of those were invited but we can't prove it because you can't violate secret ballots. you can't call up somebody and say howdo you vote ? but when you've got 17,000 duplicates and biden wins by 11,000 that's just one metric and there were dozens of other metrics totaling at least 57,000 more votes just in maricopa county. not even in all of arizona and we know this simultaneously in five big cities. how did that happen?but i would say it went even further. i think there was a conspiracy early on if you want to use that term and i'm going to blame mike pence.

i think he convinced trump and i'm a big supporter of federalism. trump was the most federalist present we had since lincoln was his first response to every single issue is this is congress's job. they should fix it. second, this is congress's job. this is congress a job if they don't fix it i will but he always tried to get the right department or the right agency to do their job. he foisted as much as he o could offer on states to get them to do their job so here comes the china virus and i repeat it's not covid. here comes the china virus and pence and his chief of staff go to trump and say this would be a great opportunity. why don't you put control of the administration of the china virus in the hands of the state?

he says sure, that's a good idea. unfortunately you know what this did? no state has the medical wherewithal, the expertise and medical examiner's office and department of health office to compete with the cdc or the nih so what happened? all these state medical saofficers started looking back at the cdc and they think what do you say and doctor fallacy wasright there to tell them exactly what to think . so i think pence plans this. it turned out the power was handed over to doctor fallacy through playing on trump's federalism and if trump had retained the power himself i guarantee after two months he would say this is baloney, we're going to get the country back up and he would have put it in issue to that. would it have been overridden? i don't know. with the legislature have en passed a law, i don't know t what things would not have evolved the way they did and added that layer on all the

other things that you mentioned all these horrible things going on which i think is the things that really stunning him was that tha down economy as a result of the china virus. even withthe fraud you would have beat the fraud if not for the china virus . >> do you think the 2020 election was on the up and up , one do you think the 2020 election was on the up and up and two, how should ron desantis answer this question? >> i do not believe it was only opened up. we have that cases of fraud but chances are overwhelming it benefited joe biden i did i do not believe he got 81 million votes. he didn't get that many votes, i'msorry. that would be my answer . >> is that what the republican candidate should say? >> going to be surprised at, and a times if you stand up.

this is one thing trump thought everybody. if you stand up, just stand up and fight back and desantis has been internalized this thread carry lake in arizona has internalized this. you have a seat on themedia she destroys the media. start standing up and they will back down but you've got to stand up first . no rock 'n roll questions. >> i was going to ask this question before you. how do we especially in illinois and croke county there's a a lot of potential for election fraud.and how do we fight this? ioi was an election judge. i think we need more conservative judges to be involved but what else can we do? it's really very frustrating. >> in a state like illinois your behind enemy lines you're just going to have to fight it out . one foxhole at a time but every foxhole is important

and as many people in the election board as you can and you start working your way back into cook county and before you know it gontyou're going to have all the immediate summers and before you know it some of the interiors of the city and folks, hispanics are coming over to the republican party like you cannot believe and it's one of the most amazing overhangs in political history that the democrats who encourage all these illegals, even illegals who are coming and according to the polling are trending conservative because they come from countries el salvador and guatemala that are hell holes and they want to be part of american life. what's happening is i think we can take these back we're already winning over the hispanic vote. we are very slowly making inroads into the black vote. it's a slog. >> okay, who are you again? >> president of the heartland

institute. >> your program through fire and rain. >> getting back to your book i think you touched on this in your comments. when you said the three that you considered successes or failures and see quickly the first three you examined were successes and the last three were failures. so if you flip them around how successful do you think those first three would have been in the day and age of the last three and how successful would the last 3b if they had the circumstances of the first three what were the circumstances, it wasn't more circumstance or was it more the tactics and battlefield brilliance? >> that's an ahistorical question. the confederates, you get an ar 15's today when the civil war? so look, lincoln was going to be the great president in any age you put him in. he had the courage to make

the right decisions. for them and i think if you put him in the world of the swap he would have probably done better than even cleveland. cleveland was a a much narrower man. was not a big thinker but he was absolutely focused on the task at hand. othe's the guy you want fixing your plumbing. you want grover cleveland fixing your plumbing. tr was very much a man of what ever struck him at the time and it it's the trump phase had struck teddy roosevelt he would have fought back probably even harder than trump and gotten very bluntly and he might have seen each and taken out because he would have fought in a much different way. reagan's style was such that he would have tried conciliation as much as possible but in the end he would have ended up doing the same thing. so you know, you get into these historical questions i feel like panos with the time

ring jumping back and forth in time. that's my best shot. >> anymore questions, raise your hand. >> one of my concerns is that people are so clueless today. after church at the coffee hour i talked to these very successful people, they don't want to talk about anything otherthan their golf game . we live in a retirement village right now. the people that are successful, they don't wantto talk about anything serious . so i'm really concerned and as we know universities today only four percent of the faculty are republicans. >> and only two percent are conservatives. >> and the people that do get newspapers, the chicago tribune has turned left and

left. i'm concerned about how clueless people are. i think the republicans are going to do well but there's only one reason is that when they get gas, inflation. that's the key issue and it's going to defeat democrats and it isn't because people are informed. >> there informed. the pain at the gas pump is a form of information. so let me take your question this way. you're familiar with the declaration of independence and you're familiar with the line jefferson said. i can't put it exactly. as long as these evils are tolerable men will tolerate these evils. and in other words people will not rise out of their comfort level until it gets extremely uncomfortable. which is why i want biden to stay in office for two more years. because i want it to get so

incredibly uncomfortable these people gowe will never put another democrat in office in our entire lives . in terms of retirement village and whatnot, don't forget in 2010 it was the retirees wwho stormed into the tea party. this is one of the problems was that the tea party was an older movement and didn't have a lot of youth in it to kind of take over. so you know, i'm no spring chicken. >> i'm very concerned again. i want trump to win again and get back into the race but he had such poor advisors when he was in the white house. people betrayed him and has it he improved? has he done any better? he seems to be surrounded again with people who might be informing him to do the wrong things. he's endorsing some candidatesthat are really bad . >> i pushed back on that because i would not have advanced sand when he cannot

but the more i looked at him i realized he's too corrupt, you can't let him be part of the swap and the same thing with higgins . doctor oz was far from my favorite candidate but it's what they said about democracy and how democracy is the worst government in the world except for all the others and doctor oz is the best candidate given the others. i'm more impressed with people used the walk the wrong path like harry lake who voted for heobama who now is consistently not only saying the rightthings but pushing back . he's not just saying the right things so you can get donors, are you saying the right thing in front of the tv cameras and that you're going to see vance and oz and some of these other guys form this coterie of maga senators that will be t powerful. there's a lot of things about

a lot of these people i don't like and the thing in tennessee with morgan morgan ortega, that was a bad pick. but people who supported robbie, he had a lot of issues. he was not a voter and so it's always a crap shoot. i could ask anyone of you here and some of you have run companies how many people do you know that you can point to positions that you can absolutely trust and who will carry out your goals and objectives? mostrof us can think of more than three or four people . howmany of those are competent ?my friends, maybe one or two.so you're stuck relying on people's advice who you don't know all that much but they're in the . republican party. supposedly they have your best interests at heart. so who's he getting advice from now? i don't know but i have a feeling as we get closer to

election it's going to be two people. don and eric neand that's the only ones i want him taking advice fromeither than steve bannon . if he behaves. >> got a question over here. >> the question i have larry is if trump were present at the you think would have invaded ukraine? >> not a chance but here's another interesting thought question . maybe and i know we're enduring some horrible stuff and i know what biden is doing is terrible but maybe it's better that trump wasn't in with a lukewarm senate and a lukewarm house. maybe we need to refine these people for another four years so that when they come through, you know the story about gideon and how he was sent down to fight an army and he had 30,000 men and god

said that's too many, get rid of them because they'renot committed . have them draw water out of the lake and they lapped it up, i forget the story . they put in their hands and go, i forget but he gets rid of 27,000 of them. he still got too many. you've got 3000, you need topo get rid of those . the point is an army of lambs led by a lien is far more powerful than an army of lions led by a lamp. and so if we can just, lenin took the soviet union with 20,000 devout followers. a nation of 160 million people, only one third of the americans and look at what they did.be it's not numbers, it's esdedication and willingness to go fight and engage the enemy . and we have the right people in there, it's doable. not saying it's going to happen but it's doable .

>> li don't like the question but i'm going to ask now. >> i don't like the answer. >> a lot of people who i know who are sort of hidden in the media who voted for trump and who supported his positions feel that his ability to be elected is odiminished by his personality. there turned off by his nastiness is the way they put it and worse. my question is what are his prospects for is somebody like desantis or somebody who is a trump follower. >> a trump light. >> whose telegenic. who can tell you wyou know, you don't want to throw tomatoes at him. >> is an old saying you can't have falstaff and evan thin.

you can have jim brown and have a sprinters spring seed. every great person and every person who achieves something great usually does so in spite of a handicap not because of their personal power. moses had a speech impediment and this is the guy you're goingto choose to leave the jews ?so i don't think that aspect of trump is as big a deal as many. i think it's an excuse for a lot of people. this is what i want the pain to continue. i want biden to continue in office andratchet up that pain. i hate selling that saying that for my fellow americans but your alcoholics you need to get to the bottom . before you're going to say i'm drunk and i need to reform. a >>. [inaudible] my thought would

be will the democrats put somebody in there who will be a nice guy and will win votes on that basis? >> it won't work because they are now to staff with inflation. there are the party of war. they're the party of covid and masks and vaccines.look at barracks pulling. trump is beating desantis by 50 points. 50. it's noteven close. he's beating by badly by eight or nine points . was it going to be like in 24? they know that there a teetering on the brink andwhy don't they remove biden ? because nobody, even the democrats. nobody wants harrison there so mark my words if you see harris go watch out, the 25th amendment is coming for joe

until harris goes he saved and some people think he appointed her for that reason but remember this. the next heat has to be confirmed by the house and senate. so it has to be done quickly if they're going to get rid of her and put in somebody like mayor pete . that's the guy they want. that's theguy they want . because acif you're black get back, if you're gay you're okay. mayor pete is the next in line. he has not chance against trump and their increasingly painting themselves into narrower and narrower corners as you see with the disneyland stuff. they're willing to go to the mac for data files for pete's sake.am they need to rename flash mountain groomer mountain or something like that.

>> you triggered a bunch more questions so we have onehere. >> i'm here as long as you need me, i get paid by the hour . >> let's go eight time zones to the east, what do you think buttons are or further east what do you think their swamps are. >> that's a great question. putin is not stupid. he may be a murderer but he's like a mafia boss. he's very smart and who he kills and he i think legitimately saw some of those other regions in the ukraine asthreats . especially as the drumbeat was coming to bring ukraine into the neighbors. that was simply not tolerable for him. does he have people who want to take enough? absolutely. is he going totake them out , if he can, you will. now she has big problems but they have huge environmental inches. they have a declining

birthrate. china is growing and they have a declining birthrate. one person mentioned this to me. how do you think they are to send young men often wore when they spend a generation building up their only sons. are they really going to send on taiwan? they can take taiwan anytime they want to it will not be pleasant. it will cost millions to take taiwan because there's a very narrow landing area. it wouldn't be pleasant. they don't have nearly the semi conductors, i was talking about this today that taiwan. taiwan has a semiconductor chip giant inthe world . and then what happens in japan, the philippines, other countries decide to chip in and start whittling down china's military? i always apply to china owas

applied to russia. china is never as strong. china is never as we. so those two both have serious issues and right now we're actually helping the russians by making their oil more valuable. all of a sudden you make putin the equivalent of crypto currency. it's amazing. >> we have one here. >> i'm commander brown united states navy retired and i just have a question about i watched for example the confirmation on tv. 5347 and i've seen a few elections in my life. we all know it's always 49 percent, 51 percent. 5149 all the time. what is it going to take for this country to have elections where half the people aren't going to stop

at the poend, when do we get to thatpoint . i hope not on hassan hussein ticket like you mentioned earlier . >> the civil war. my gosh lincoln wins with just around 40 percent of the vote. the greatest president next to washington in american history and he only gets 40 percent of the vote. it's the nature of the democracy i think especially our democracy which states as a constitutional republic and madison said you can't get rid of this red he called them fractious and i think it's 10 where he said that you need to have fascism and washington hated parties what you need to have parties. you need to have one faction checking another because this is the way people get their ideas out and yes, it's become significantly corrupt in a lot of ways over time butstill i like conflicts . you only get pearls when you get the chafing.

you let's sharpened steel i don't think we were all meant to stand around and saying goodbye. we were meant to get up there, contest our ideas . always be respectful when the other side wins which is what has not happened about the last 20 years really since reagan gave up being respectful if we want but ketanji brown doesn't know what a biological woman is. [inaudible] >> i'm polish. anyway, i want to thank you for writing the book only because i'm an old man, got a young son and daughter and i've been pretty depressed. knowing that we have gone through wtracks like this before makes me feel that we can go through this crap also . that's the one thing. the second thing is are you goingto work for trump because the guy with your

knowledge has got to work for trump . >> if he asked me on work for him in a minute. i really thought he benefited from benin even though the personalities were very much in conflict. he had leaked problems there but you need people like that around. you need people who can tell you know and you need people who can stand up.i would love to work for trump and i came this close to meeting him two times. one time was right after the io election but before the inauguration. and i asked bennett about this book and trump had just left 30 minutes before. the next time was in 2017 before abandoned retired and he said he had enough for new jersey. i missed shaking hands with ronald reagan by this distance. i was doing an event for ronald reagan n at the western white house but it was over the hill. any of you been to theranch ?

small, right, really small. the whole house is about the size of this room. you can't hold public ntevents there is they just don't have the facility for so they were holding an event another guys ranch over the hill called in concert at the white house. it would have beverly stills of the metropolitan opera was the host and she would host once a month a different musical entertainment guest at the beach boys get the court and this time it was merle haggard and the outlaws. so they aasked the ucf college republicans for volunteers and i volunteered course and being an older student at the time because i spent my time in rock 'n roll. they said going to give you an official job. we want you to drive the celebrities after they've been screened up to the venue so i was in a van with beverly stills and merle haggard and the outlaws.

so i get up there and i'm sitting on i hate mail about here waiting for my next assignment. your comes ronand nancy . i start to get up and i just froze because they had said not too long after the assassination attempt they said we have snipers from all these films. if i tried to get up they'll shoot me and he was gone in a flash and i missed my chance to see from live and reagan once but i did get into the white house president bush and invited him in to talk about the iraq war and history for an hour and a' half. >> doesn't qualify as a rock 'n roll story we're going to get before the end? we have time for one more question and a rock 'n roll story. >> you ended up on a good note but to follow up on that question about the 2024 election, i talked to a number of people, trump supporters and i flipped over

when he came out. >> i was disappointed that didn't occur. but a lot of people i know were converted trump supporters were disappointed. 2in the 2020 election. >> the first debate between him and biden i thought i thought he did horrible job without his tactics. we're just horrible. it turned off a lot of people who might have been, you know thinking about you know, the way i went this guy in the basement who can't think or can i give trump another chance and he just bullied him and then there's january 6th his delayed response, but one of the criticism is is why didn't he

anticipate what was happening at the election? i mean, what was all this to understand all the all the things maricopa county and all i want their lawyers all around the country. why did the republican party? trump's one guy and you know, we do have this thing called a republican national committee. and they could have been hiring lawyers. everybody saw this coming people were talking about why weren't they hiring lawyers and starting lawsuits back in january? why is it always on trump? i mean, you know, he's not superhuman and i think far too often people blame him when in fact we ought to be looking at the rest of the organization. what did you do? what would happen if every single republican senator in congressman on january 6th had stood up and said we think the election was a fraud we want to vet this before we swear in a president and if it's okay, we'll be happy to swear him in we'll swear him in unanimously, but we want to see the check out the fraud for and what we've had

is a lack of of support, especially on the part of the congressional and senate democrats who've just been cowardly just cowardly throughout this i call it patriot day by the way, january 6th is patriot day now january, it's patriot day because a bunch of patriots did what we all should have done which is a recount demand that these things be checked out now. let me let me give you another measure of hope here the judges. okay. well trump didn't do this trump didn't trump did an incredible. he did more in four years than any president in history has done in 40 more not even close and one of the things he did was to point all these judges which you can thank for not having mass on the airplane yesterday. it was a trump judge. okay what bannon told me was that gorsuch? amy connie barrett and kavanaugh were not necessarily selected for social conservative views. their litmus test was their

approach to the deep state and the administrative state and will they help roll back the administrative state and they asked them specifically about the exxon case and and how that was handled. so sometimes if you think kavanaugh isn't voting the right way remember what he's up there .at least in terms of what some had to do. translate please, no encore. and so let me leave you with this because you mentioned this is very important. do not hang your hat folks we are on the precipice of a shattering victory and what they want you to do is think it's not possible,

to think nothings going to happen, to think mean to for this or the other. we are on the verge of an earth shattering event if you stand up and jordan peterson would say stick your chest out. walk with your shoulders back . we lobster are going to retake the world in january 2024. [applause] >> thank everyone for being here with us tonight. if you are inspired by that fantastic talk by larry schweikert he has archives. >> .. >> .. >> if you're enjoying booktv, then sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and

more. booktv, every sunday on c-span c-span2 or anytime online at booktv.org. television for serious readers. >> there are a lot of places to get political information, but only at c-span do you get it straight from the source. no matter where you're from or where you stand on the issues, c-span is america's network. unfiltered, unbiased, word for word. if it happens here or here or here or anywhere that matters, america is watching on c-span. powered by cable. >> you know who our guest speaker is, so i'm not going to opine about his qualifications, credentials and achievements, which are both impressive and far too numerous to mention.