powerful book and taking the time today to talk to us. thank you. i enjoyed it.

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 away oftentimes from events like this tomorrow. i fly to omaha, nebraska. i'll be meeting with the governor meeting with some members of congress giving 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. 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. face mask off face mask off. but anyway, hey, it's wonderful to see although i haven't been here at one of these meetings for a while. of course. i've been with heartland for more than 20 years and to see so

many familiar and some new faces. and looking around here to see a full house. you really lift our spirits when people are in the building giving up your free time here on an evening where you could be home doing whatever else it tells us that we're having an impact. so, thank you so much for being here, and it was wonderful to see i was able to talk with most of you personally here before we started and that really lifted my spirits. for those of you who don't know or if you aren't very familiar with the heartland institute. we are a nonprofit organization. we're a nonpartisan organization. we believe in free markets. we're here as sort of lobbyist for freedom. of course, we're not really lobbyists who are advocates for them. but people say aren't you lobbies what we're lobbies for them we fight for freedom wherever we can our mission statement is to develop discover and promote free market solutions to the problems that come from society. we're mostly known for our work in global warming fighting

against alarmism fighting for sound science and realism, but we address a large number of issues here our core product our core issues over the years have been education financial budget issues school issues school choice in particular and then of late we've been particularly active fighting big tech censorship. fighting the great reset of capitalism that is being sought to be imposed upon us and lately esg environmental social governance agenda. we have our government relations team out in the state legislatures actively. we have testified we've presented testimony and i believe more than 50 occasions here in the first quarter of 2022 including i believe 20 in-person testimonies where most of those times we've been invited by the legislators themselves to advocate on in support of free market solutions, and we do that because of the support of people like you so thank you once again for all of your support here in

person for those of you who donate to the heartland institute. we're putting your money to good use donate more. we'll keep doing more for you with that in mind. i'm going to turn the mic over to jim blakely to introduce our speaker just before i do i just want to say one thing. i am a student of history. i love history and as much as our sessions here discuss policy and sometimes politics in today's world. i've been especially fired up for this talk for quite some time are speaker. just wrote a book dragon slayers. it's as much history as policy and governance. i have i purchased a book. i'm not quite through with it yet, but i've read much of it. it is a compelling narrative if he's a quarter of the speaker as he is a writer. we're in for a treat tonight. so jim i'm gonna turn this over you for more formal introduction. but thank you all for being here tonight. it's wonderful to see you. okay, usually i'm so loud. that 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 don't get it's gonna be 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 government continued to grow. agencies continue to grow. new agencies like the fbi and cia were added so by john kennedy's time in office he's confronting the cia swamp and kennedy's task is he needs to get rid of the cia swamp but he needs the cia too much to get rid of it.

she needs it for a cube of. he needs it for laos. he needs it for vietnam, or as lyndon johnson said, vietnam. one time when kennedy comes into office, 600 americans in south vietnam and when he is assassinated, there were 16,000. i i do not by this notion that kennedy is going to get us out of vietnam. from 600 to 16,000, not a trend lined of getting out so kennedy doesn't trust the cia, he feels betrayed by them, yet he still needs to use them on many occasions. the first failure in our group of 6, he doesn't do anything to bring the cia to heal, ronald reagan runs on a three way pledge, one to defeat the soviet union, 2 to build back the american economy in 3 to reduce the power and size of

government. unfortunately for reagan he needs the government, needs the military, needs big business in order to accomplish the other two and almost like kennedy he finds that he needs the agency he wants to get rid of too much to get rid of it and i will share one anecdote in my book reagan:the american president, david stockman was a true believer in reducing the size of government and they were sending out memos to all the departments, how are you coming on reducing the size of your department, how are you coming on reducing your budget and he gets one memo back i found in the archives, this is a guy reagan appointed who believed in reagan's agenda, we already spent all this year's budget and part of next year's budget so i don't think we are going to get around to cutting anything. an amazing admission that once you are in the swamp it is near

impossible to roll back the swamp. by 1984 reagan had given up on the third point of his platform promise to reduce the size of government and succeeded but pretty much had to give up, the bureaucracy. one important thing happened between kennedy and reagan. congress had been appointing and creating these administrative agencies and empowering them but once they got in place congress just let them go, basically issued any oversight over any of these administrative administrative state at all, just let them go so it fell to the courts to try to handle these but unfortunately what started to

happen was the court said congress set up this agency, congress gave these powers, who are we to say congress is wrong so they let the agencies define their own missions and set up their own private police forces. that was a major change in the bureaucracy between kennedy and reagan. we get to trump and trump came in and basically just all four of the other swamps, the media swamp, the cia swamp, fbi swamp, the deep state swamp and trump's appointees don't help him out a lot. jeff sessions is probably the worst appointee in american history, a long way to find somebody worse than jeff sessions. so trump finds himself undercut at every point. ordered documents to be declassified and nothing happened. amanda millions was on

appointee to the trump state department, she said they would send out memos to the embassies and get responses from the embassy and we are not going to do that for this reason or that reason and could never follow up and fire these people so in the end, i have lincoln, cleveland and roosevelt as successors or partial successes in draining their swamps and kennedy and reagan and trump as either failures or partial failures in draining their swamp. with is that this is always the best part of the night when we do the q and a because i go back to rock 'n' roll larry. this is a flaming drum solo where i almost burn down the human condition so let's just go ahead and open up to questions.

we have a microphone circulating. you are not on. there you go. okay. hi, larry. >> the steep state is a behemoth now, and personalities power and top levels are going to do or not do what is required of them by the president. what i would like you to comment on is starting at 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 does that work and how bad is it? >> it is horrible. what reagan said, the closest thing he has seen to eternal life on this planet was a government agency and you are absolutely right and you can change out the heads of these agencies but how much does that do to affect the culture within? we saw this with the fbi, kept hearing people like sean hannity tell us it is only a few bad apples at the time, rank-and-file fbi are fine, they are corrupt down to the studs. all the way through which if any of them were not corrupt they would have stood up and said i am blowing the whistle and say this is wrong, this is not according to our manual and regulation and i will come out jim comey and mccabe, that didn't happen, there is a total culture change required in

addition to changing of personnel and i have suggestions how we might accomplish that. over here. >> the thing that amazed me in the four years of trump's presidency is every single day there was a scandal and they would call nazi and communist and behead him and everything else, russia russia russia. what was the basic premise of these republicans and democrats that hated trump, hitting him, because he didn't pay his dues and he went from tycoon to president or was it some people i talked to our liberals can't tell me why they hate trump and always come down to tweets. >> a great question. trump represented by far steve bannon is the best single analyst on this entire thing.

other people have written about it, a phenomenal writer -- he represented a clash of the country class versus the ruling class and that is to say the elites inside dc. there is a book by charles murray after losing ground called coming apart, phenomenal book and in it, murray shows based on wealth, income, based on iq and he used school of graduation as a proxy for iq, you could go through suburbs of washington dc and if you didn't have somebody picking up your laundry for you or getting you the starbucks coffee you would never interact with a single person who wasn't in your

income and iq school level. on a single block every single person on that block came out of ivy league school and that has got to change. asu is no great shakes, university of montana nothing fantastic but ten people from those schools would be better than the idiots we have now so you've got this deep culture that is a problem. trump hit other buttons and this button i love to talk about, the jonah goldbergs and david frenches and chris hayes are also so such trump haters and my theory is this, they never were conservative. they never were conservative. what happened was they would assume a conservative position at cocktail parties and in speeches or the heartland institute or young americans

and make conservative sounding speeches up until trump because they knew nothing was going to change. at the end of the night they could go back to their liberal buddies at cocktail parties, be nice if rove we way it was overturned but we know that is never going to happen and walk off and here comes trump who says we are going to do the things i campaigned on, change this country add to that hit like a brick wall because all of a sudden the threat was policies were actually going to change and they were no longer going from these people and pretend to be supporting conservative positions if it meant they had to defend real conservative change so that was an issue too. >> there was a really surprising to me decision in

florida that ruled against the cdc and the mandates. if you think how far the swamp is going the cdc is part of who knew? it seems as though this was a significant decision against the state so what are your thoughts on the significance -- >> today is hitler's birthday but we need to celebrate yesterday which was freedom day in america. here is what i would say about that which i would urge you to watch the podcast of a guy named robert barnes who was a lawyer, he has been predicting the outcomes of these legal cases almost exactly as they turn out and he said the osha case would be ruled against biden, the military case would not because for so long there

was a precedent, military, overseas get all these shot so it is hard to overturn that so this is huge and all these liberal screaming today, judge in florida overturned the will of the people, kind of like rove he waited so it was a massive massive shift, it is shifting and not just across the board, desantis today, this guy is a tornado, he is taking on disney and they are saying you have existed for 67 -- 40 years on the largesse of florida taxpayers, don't pay the taxes you should come have total autonomy in your development, we are going to change that and heads are exploding here. i think bannon is right. i don't agree about a hundred seat turnover but i do believe we are on the verge of a groundswell and i just tweeted

out, walls other, is my twitter, play on my movie other walls to fall so look me up on walls other and i tweeted an article this afternoon about this groundswell and it is not just year, it is going on across the world, people are rising, look what happened in hungary, 90%, saddam hussein level numbers, the ballot says saddam hussein, kill me and torture my family, 90%, this is occurring everywhere across the world. i know it is a catchphrase but they are rising up, the international rise of all these people is turning marks on its head because they are rising up for free market against the communist over system,

astounding. >> identify yourself and don't take too long. >> you are done. >> hold the microphone, don't want to give the microphone to a crazy person like me. you have a new twitter follower if you want to follow me back. i was in springfield this morning and spoke for three in its at the state board of education and said they should get rid of it because it is wasteful. with that in mind i was hoping donald trump would have a limited the federal department of education. nothing really happened. >> when you say nothing happened that is a win for us. strange to sound. if you put in a bunch of bureaucrats and at the end four years nothing happened, we won

that four years. >> i am a trump supporter but i was hoping he would get rid of the department of education and why didn't he get rid of the department of education? >> why shouldn't he get rid of half a dozen department? he was hamstrung from the beginning. when you come in, amanda million estimated 60 amaga people in the administration. as president alone, appoints 3,000, 3,000 and out of those 3,000 you've only got 60 amaga dedicated people. to actually get rid of the department you would have to have a department head committed to get running of that department. very hard to do. you have to set up a ceo committed to getting rid of ford automobiles, the equivalent of that. i think that would be a bridge too far for trump to get rid of

a cabinet level agency. reagan could have done it but didn't have the political clout to do all three of those things. trump has to come in with a flamethrower and i mean an exterminator right behind him because they are only going to get one more shot at this. if we do it wrong next time we are not going to get another shot in our lifetime. >> thank you for tracking through 200 years of history. 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 twitter i have all these nicknames. biden is the rutabaga, nancy pelosi is botoxic, mitch mcconnell is irritable. so anyway 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 -- he wants to play video games and swim so i think it is a cabal. ron klain is the head of one cabal group, there's some green worker to thes in charge of another cabal group and you go through each interest group, they are all vying for biden's mind and the last thing he hears going out the door is what he mumbles when he repeats his word salad of nonsense. so that is who is running washington, you have a whole bunch of rino republicans committed to keeping the swamp in place and they are all bought off by -- most from by big pharma, wonder -- four doses, we've got people in washington making a ton of money off of big pharma, never

once wanted to mention i from actor nor anything that might mediate the disease. you've got the rinos and there and that is why i think the next two elections are critical. if the twee 7 senate candidates, they could do it, if they all win, that would change the republican makeup by 14%. %. if you bring those 7 in and they are committed and to do what they say they are going to do, no guarantees, better than the other guys. if they do what they say and come in, you could then see the next echelon of the ted cruzes and rick scotts and marsha blackburns moving over hard-core on their side and an overturned window who begins to pull the whole senate back to

the right and then in 2,024 you've got a shot, now you've got 7 or 8 seats and if the wave is big enough, there is not a seat in the world that is safe. the democrats are just figuring this out. there is a piece in politico or the hill, they alternate the bad news for the democrats this weekend basically we are looking at a wipeout and looking at potentially in 24 vetoproof majority in both houses. so i personally think we will get somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 seats but it is not going to change, he's in the 30s, three polls, in the high 20s by election time 2,024, may be lower and that should be sufficient to wipe him out. >> you said i from exton and i thought this video will be

banned from youtube, then i remembered everything you say so it will be fine. we have a question over here and question over here. >> good evening, thank you. my name is dan robin. i wondered how -- the history of jimmy carter who i think, i consider him one of the great do regulators of our time. >> it wasn't carter that deregulated. that deregulation has been put in place in the late part of the nixon administration, when you look at trucking and gas. in my book reagan:the american president i have a chapter on carter called the worst president ever with an asterisk , until barack obama, now i say until joe biden and my nickname for him is jesus carter because he is so pompous, so perfect.

i don't consider him a very good protection. i think he was a disaster and whatever deregulation was there was not his doing, he inherited it. >> i have a question. reduce bureaucracies and human resources by continuing to pay them, remains stronger. >> this is a suggestion by steve bannon, three measures for hope here. what do we do about the swamp. this is bannon's suggestion, you buy these people out, you buy out their contracts and say i will pay you 20% more of your remaining salary to get out, retire now, it will cost a lot of money but a 1-time investment. once that person is out of that job what do you do? close the job.

never staff that job again and you could get rid of a lot of washington if you were to buy out these jobs and shut them off, suggestion number one, number 2, you got to get the bureaucracy out of do you of dc, get the administrative state out of dc and trump started to do this. he began moving the bureau of land management and bureau of the interior offices out to, ha, nebraska. i say put them all in farmington, new mexico. anybody been to farmington, it is a uranium mine. that is all you need to know. move these offices out, get -- at the very least what that will do is get them around more ordinary americans so they see the impact of their policies, they see nothing in dc, they

are totally insulated and a complete echo chamber and the furred thing we've got to do is vote and vote in amaga oriented people who will change the system, we can only do what we do, can only vote for the people we are in front of at the time, do what you can do to replace these people with amaga candidates. >> not -- that nixon and trump are equivalent but can you give any insight into the watergate -- you seem like you had a deep state operation, the fbi and the whole thing against nixon, what was that all about with respect to what we know about trump, what happened with trump? >> great question on watergate and i'm going to give you an answer very few historians every give you and that is we don't know. the best guess i have is the

explanation that said john dean found out the democrats had an address book of our call girl in their possession and it was his then girlfriend, soon to be his wife marlene dean, her name was in this book and it was dean who authorized the break-in and dean who told him what to look for which is why they are nowhere near the chairman of the democratic party's office but in some yahoo's office in the back part which happened to have the diary, where to go. dean lied to nixon about it and said this is a national security issue and nixon come we've got to cover it up and they went on, the cia to intervene, saying it is national security and it went to heck from there. nixon is not in osan, he obstructed justice, he should have gone to jail but he was

not guilty of the original crime, ordering the break-in. that is my take on it. i have seen peccadilloes and some of them can be pretty big. i watch out for those big peccadilloes. >> the second one. >> he apparently had directed both of them. >> didn't put together the facts. the first one didn't. >> it was hunt the put together. >> another question, your book is titled "dragonslayers: 6 presients and their war with the swamp". the 2020 election. in 2016 nobody thought trump

would win. new york times -- >> i did. >> i don't think trump did. >> that is debated and depends on who you talk to in his inner circle whether he thought he was going to win. >> my point being hillary was going to be the third obama term. the swamp is excited, they had all their plans and trump wins and trump is going to oppose the swamp and does the things you outlined a minute ago. so my personal feeling shared by a lot of people in this room is sure to get this thing banned from youtube. >> i can saying and that would guarantee it. >> the 2020 election was a little unusual but after all of that i think to myself a lot of people thought there's no way they are going to allow trump to win, the media was against

them, they didn't report on the hunter biden stuff, the time magazine article about how they fortified the election, they saved the country. because if trump had a second term, the swamp is in trouble, it could be drained but they were holding him off, keeping them tied up with the russia collusion stuff, two impeachments and i thought to myself there is no way the swamp was going to leave this up to the people, they weren't going to take the chance that he would get reelected. is that a conspiracy theory? was that crazy talk? >> time magazine came out and laid it all out what they were doing. i wrote in how trump won, i finished the book, my part of the book in october of 2016, trump is going to win the election with 306 electoral votes. the final was 320.

i was off by 6. i said he wins 300 to 320 electoral votes, i was sure based on the voter registration numbers i was seeing in ohio, florida, north carolina 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 and got 13 million more votes than before. what happened? i am from arizona. they did an audit which nobody wants to talk about in terms of the actual findings and found i will give you one shot a point, 17,000 ballots. i guarantee you all 17,000 of those were for biden. but we can't prove it because you can't violate secret ballots, can't call up somebody and say how did you vote? when you got 17,000 duplicates and biden wins by 11,000, that

is one metric and there were dozens of other metrics totaling 57,000 more votes in maricopa county. it was stopped simultaneously in five big cities. how does that happen? i would say it went even further. i would think there was a conspiracy early on. i'm going to blame mike pence. i think my pence was involved in this and i think he convinced trump. i'm a big supporter of federalism, trump was the most federalist president we have had since washington because his first response to every issue is this is congress's job, they should fix it. second time, this is congress's job, third time, this is congress's job, if they don't fix i will put he always tried to get the right department or the right agency to do their

job, foisted as much as he could to states to do their job, here comes the china virus, i refuse to call it covid, and pence and his chief of staff go to trump and say this would be a great opportunity to practice federalism. why don't you put control of this administration, the china virus in the hand of the states in his implication nation, that's a good idea. you know what this did? no state had the medical wherewithal, the expertise and medical examiner's office and department of health to compete with the cdc or the and ih so what happened? all the state medical officers started looking at the cdc. what do you say? doctor fallacy was right there to tell them exactly what to think so i think pence planned 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 after two months, this is baloney, we are not -- we are going to open the country backup and would have issued exec in a borders to that effect. with a have been overridden? i don't know. legislature passed laws, i don't know but i guarantee you things would not have evolved the way they did and added that layer onto all the other things you mentioned that were going on which i think is the thing that sunk him, the down economy as a result of the china virus, even with the squad he would have beat the fraud if not for the china virus. >> the corrupt media do you think the 2,020 election was on the up and up? do you think the 2,020 election was on the up and up and 2, say ron desantis -- answer that question. >> i do not believe it was on the up and up.

we have abundant evidence of fraud and we don't know who it benefited but chances are overwhelming that it benefited biden and i do not believe joe biden got 80 one million votes in here, rwanda, the soviet union, didn't get that many votes, that would be my answer. >> and i think you are going to be surprised at how many times if you stand up, this is one thing trump taught everybody if you just stand up and fight back and desantis has internalized this, terry lake in arizona running for governor has internalized this, you want to see this woman on the media, she destroys the media, you start standing up and they will back down but you got to stand up first. no rock 'n' roll questions. >> i was going to ask this question before you went into this.

in illinois, we call it crook county there is a lot of potential for election fraud. how do we fight this? i was an election judge at the last election and i think we need more conservative judges to be involved but what else can we do? what is frustrating. >> in a state like illinois you are behind enemy lines so you just have to fight it out one foxhole at a time but every foxhole is important, get as many people in the election boards you can, oversee as many and start working your way back into cook county and before you know what you will have all the immediate suburbs and then some of the interior of the city and hispanics are coming over to the republican party like you cannot believe and it is one of the most amazing boomerangs in political history that the democrats who encourage all these illegals even illegals coming in are trending conservative because they come from countries like el salvador

and guatemala that are hellholes and they want part of the american life. what is happening is i think we can take these back, we are winning over of the hispanic vote, slowly making inroads into the black vote, we can do it -- if the fog swamps. >> you are you again? >> james taylor, president of the heartland institute. getting back to your book, one thing that fascinated me, you touched on this and one of your comments, the three you considered successes and 3 you considered failures, sequentially the first three you examine were successes in the last three were failures so if you flip them around how successful with those first 3 have been in the day and age of

the last three and how successful with the last three be if they had the circumstances of the first three? what were the circumstances cute he was it circumstance or tactics and battlefield brilliance? >> that's in ahistorical question. give the confederates ar 15s? did they win the civil war? lincoln was going to be a great president in any age you put him in. he had the courage to make the right decisions, steadfast and to fight for them and if you put him in a war with the swamp he would have done better than even cleveland, cleveland was a much narrower man, was not a big thinker but he was focused on the task at hand. he is the guy you want fixing your plumbing, you want grover cleveland fixing your plumbing, tr was a man of whatever struck him at the time and if the swamp, the trump -- had struck

teddy roosevelt he would have fought back even harder than trump and gotten bloodier and might have been impeached and taken out, removed because he would have fought in a different way. reagan's style was such that he would have tried conciliation but in the end would have done the same thing, we are not going to backed on on essential points of american freedom. you get into historical questions. i feel like santos, jumping back and forth. that is my best shot. >> more questions, raise your hand. >> one of my concerns is people are so clueless today after church at the coffee hour i talked to friends, very successful people, they don't want to talk about anything but

their golf game. we live in a retirement village, people that are successful, they don't want to talk about anything serious so i am really concerned. universities today, only 4% of the faculty are republicans. >> meeting only 2% are conservatives. >> and people who do get newspapers, the chicago tribune, i am concerned how clueless people are. i think republicans are going to do well but only one reason is when they get gas, inflation, that's the key issue and that will defeat democrats and because people are informed they don't like -- >> they are informed, the paint at the gas pump is a form of information. that is a very powerful form so let me take your question this way.

you are familiar with the declaration of independence and the line jefferson said, i can't quote it but as long as evils are tolerable men will tolerate 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 to be so incredibly uncomfortable we will never put another democrat in office in our entire life. in terms of retirement village and whatnot, don't forget in 2010 it was the retirees who stormed into the tea party, this is one of the problems, the tea party was an older movement and didn't have a lot of youth in it to take over so i am no spring chicken and i am pretty active.

>> i'm very concerned. i want to trump to win again and get into the race but he has such poor advisors. when he was in the white house, people around him just betrayed him. has he improved? is he any better now? he seems to to be surrounded people again who might be informing him -- do the wrong thing, he's endorsing some candidates for senate that are really bad. >> i push back on that. i was not a vance fan when he came out but when i began to look at mandel i realized he is too corrupt, you can't let him, he is part of the swamp, same thing with higgins, doctoroh the his far from my favorite candidate but what they said about democracy and democracy is the worst government in the world except for all the others and doctor ours was the best candidate given the others. i'm more impressed with people who used to walk the wrong path

like terry at lake who voted for obama who now is consistently not only saying the right things but pushing back, not just saying the right things in front of donors but are you saying the right things in front of tv cameras so i hope, i think you will see vance and ours and these other guys, blake masters in arizona form a coterie of maga senators that will be very powerful. a lot of things about these people i don't like and the thing in tennessee with morgan ortagus was a bad step a people who supported robbie starbucks, he had a lot of issues, he was not a voter in that district, it is always a crapshoot. i can ask any one of you and some of you have run companies, how many people do you know that you can appoint to positions that you can absolutely trust and will carry

out your goals and objectives? most of us can't point to more than 3 or 4 people. how many of those are competent? my friends, maybe one or 2 so you are stuck relying on people's advice who you don't know all that much but they are in the republican party, supposedly have your best interests at heart, who is he getting advice from now? i don't know but as we get close to the election i think it will be two people, don and eric, the only ones i want him taking advice from other than maybe steve bannon because he can behave. >> question over here. >> question i have is if trump were president do you think putin would've invaded ukraine? >> not a chance.

but here's another interesting thought question. may be and i know we are enduring some horrible stuff and i know what bite me is doing is just terrible, but maybe it is 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 the fire, you know the story about gideon, the bible, how he was sent to fight an army it had 30,000 men, that's too many, they are not committed and gave them a test, have them draw water out of the lake, they lap it up, they put it in their hands and they go, i forget. he gets rid of 27,000 of them and still got too minute, 3000, need to 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

lamb. if we can -- lenin took the soviet union with 20,000 devout followers, a nation of 160 million people, only one third of the americans believed in the cars in the american revolution and look at what they did. it's not numbers, it is dedication and willingness to go fight and engage the enemy. get the right people in their, not saying it is going to happen but it is doable. >> i don't like the question i'm going to ask. >> i don't like the answer. >> a lot of people who i know who are hidden in this area who voted for trump and supported his positions feel that his ability to be elected is

diminished by his personality. they are turned off by his nastiness is the way they put it so my question is what are his prospects, or is somebody like desantis or somebody who is a trump follower, with -- who is telegenic, who can tell you, you don't want to throw tomatoes at him because he said nasty things. >> personal saying, you can have false step and have insanity. you can't have jim brown and have sprinters steve. every great person, every person who achieve something great usually does so in spite of a handicap, not because -- moses had a speech impediment, this is a guy you're going to choose to lead the jews, really?

i don't think that aspect of trump is as big a deal -- i think it is an excuse for a lot of people. this is why i want for payne to continue. i want bite me to continue in office and ratchet up the pain. i hate saying that for my fellow americans but you r alcoholics, you need to get to the bottom before you are going to say i am a drunk and need reform. >> my thought would be will the democrats put somebody in there who will be a nice guy or gal and win votes on that? >> it won't work, because they are too saddled with inflation, they are the party of war, the party of covid and masks and vaccines, all of that, look at the polling, trump is beating desantis and some polls by 50

points, not even close, he is beating biden, sometimes by 8 or 9 points. what will it be like in 24? it will be -- they know they are teetering on the brink, why don't they remove biden? harris. because nobody, even the democrats, nobody wants harris in there and so mark my words, if you see harris go, watch out, the 25th amendment is coming but until harris goes he is safe and some people think he appointed her just for that reason but also remember this, the next vp has to be confirmed by the house and the senate and it has to be done quickly, to get rid of her and put in someone like mayor pete, that is the guy they want. if get back, if you are gay you are okay.

if you are gay, trump is black so mayor pete is next in line, doesn't have a chance against trump and they are increasingly painting themselves in a narrower and narrower corner as you see with the disneyland stuff, they are willing to go to the mat for pedophiles. they need to remain flash mountain groomer mountain or something like that. >> something you triggered, a bunch of questions. >> i'm here as long as you need me. i get paid by the hour. >> let's go twee 8 time zones to the east, what do you think putin's swamps are or the cheese swamps? >> great question. putin is not stupid. he may be a murderer but he's a mafia loss, very smart, he

legitimately saw don bass and some of those other regions as threats, especially as the drumbeat was coming to bring ukraine into nato. that was simply not tolerable for him. does he have people who want to take about your you absolutely. is he going to take them out first? if he can, if he can find them, he will. xi has very big problems and american media doesn't want to talk about this at all but the try calms have huge environmental issues, a declining birth rate, we think china is growing, they have a declining birth rate and one person mentioned this to me, how eager are they to send young men off to war when they spent a generation building up their only sons? send them to be slaughtered on taiwan? they can take taiwan anytime they want to but it will not be pleasant. it will cost millions to take taiwan because there's a very narrow landing area.

i read a thorough analysis of war between taiwan and china. it wasn't be pleasant which they don't have nearly the semi conductors taiwan has. taiwan is semiconductor chip giant in the world and what happens if japan, the philippines, other countries decide to chip in and start whittling down china's military? i always apply to china what was applied to russia. china is never as strong as she looks, never as we because she looks. those two both have serious issues and right now we are helping the russians by making their oil more valuable. you made putin's oil the equivalent of crypto currency, it is amazing. >> one here and one here and one here. >> i am commander brown, united

states navy, retired. i have a question about -- i watched for example the katanji brown confirmation on tv, 53-47 and i have seen a few elections in my life and we all know what is always 49%, 51% all the time. what is it going to take for this country to have elections where half the people aren't pushed off at the other? when are we going to get to that point? hope it is not a saddam hussein ticket like you mentioned earlier. >> look at the civil war, lincoln wins around 40% of the vote. the greatest president next to washington in american history gets 40% of the vote. is the nature of a democracy, especially our democracy which is a constitutional republic, madison said you can't get rid of this.

he called them factions. he said you need to have factions. washington hated parties but you need to have parties, you need to have one faction checking another because this is the way people get their ideas into the public. it has become corrupted in a lot of ways over time but still, i like conflict which you only get pearls when you get to chafing, steel sharpens steel. i don't think we were meant to stand in a circle and sing kumbaya, we were meant to get out and contest our ideas, always be respectful when the other side wins which has not happened in the last 20 years since reagan gave up being respectful when he won but katanji brown doesn't know what a biological woman is so that is great. >> my name is frank. i've got 6 of them.

that is why. i am polish. thank you for writing the book only because i am an old man with a young son and daughter and i have been pretty depressed, knowing we have gone through crap like this before makes me feel we can go through this crap also. the second thing is are you going to work for trump? a guy with your knowledge got to work for trump. >> if he asked me i would work for him in a minute. i really thought he benefited from bannon even though the personalities are very much in conflict and you had some week problems there but you need people like that around, people who can tell you know and people who can stand up to you. i would love to work for trump and i came this close to meeting him two times, one time was right after the election

but before the inauguration, and trump had just left maybe 30 minutes before, the next time was in 2017 just before bannon retired comes the boss here? just headed to new jersey, i missed shaking hands with ronald reagan by this distance. i was doing an event for ronald reagan at the western white house but it was over the hill. have you been to the ranch? really, the whole house is the size of this room, you can't hold public events there because they don't have facilities for it so they were holding an event at another guy's ranch in concert at the white house and the metropolitan opera, the hostess, and she would host once a month a different musical entertainment act and you get the beach boys in the

quartet and it was merle haggard and the outlaws, they asked the college republicans for volunteers and i volunteered and being an older student at the time, spent so much time in rock and roll, they said we will give you a special job, we want you to drive celebrity after they have been screened to the event so i was in a van with beverly sills and merle haggard so i get up there, sitting on a hay bale right about here waiting for my next assignment, in comes ron and nancy and start to get up because they said not long after the assassination we have snipers. i jump up, trying to shoot, they will shoot me and he was gone in a flash. i missed my chance to see trump

and reagan, i got into the white house, president bush invited me to talk about the iraqi war in history for an hour and a half. >> does that qualify as a rock 'n' roll story? >> no. >> then we have time for one more question and a rock 'n' roll story. >> you went on a good note. to follow up on a question about the 2024 election, i talked to a number of people, trump supporters and i flipped over when he came out with the swamp -- >> the lobbyist and k st. never meant the fbi. >> i don't think we know he didn't know how deep it was so that was the switch and i was disappointed about the number of reasons but i talked to people and thought about it myself but 2024, a lot of people i know that were trump

supporters or converted trump supporters were disappointed in the 2020 election and the way he handled it and i can point to a couple things, one is the first debate between him and biden i thought he did a horrible job, his tactics were horrible and turned off a lot of people who might have been thinking do i want this guy in the basement who can't think or do i give trump another chance, and just bleed him and january 6th, his delayed response but one of the criticisms, why didn't he anticipate what was happening at the election -- all the things, maricopa county -- >> why weren't there lawyers around the country, trump is one guy. we have this thing called the republican national committee and they could have been hiring lawyers, everybody saw this coming, people talking about it, why weren't they hired and

starting lawsuits back in january, wise and always on trump, he is 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 have happened if every single republican, senator and congressman on january 6th stood up and said we think the election was a fraud, we want to vent this before we swear in a president and if it is okay we will be happy to swear him in, we will swear him and unanimously but want to check out the fraud first. we had is a lack of support especially on the part of the congressional and senate democrats who have been cowardly. patriot day, january 6th, patriot day, patriot day because a bunch of patriot did what we all should have done which is demand a recount, demand these things be checked out. let me give you another measure of hope here.

the judges, trump didn't do this, trump did an incredible, he did more and four years than any president in history has done in four, not even close and one of the things he did was appoint these judges which you can thank for not having masks on the airplanes yesterday, trump adjudged but what bannon told me was nucor search, amy coheny barrett and brett kavanaugh were not selected for social conservative views, the litmus test was their approach to the deep state and administrative state and will they help rollback the administrative state and asked specifically about the exxon tape. sometimes if you think brett kavanaugh is voting for rightly remember what he is up there to do is deconstruct the deep state in terms of what trump thought he was bringing him in to do.

>> beginning chevron case, not exxon case? >> chevron. let me leave you with this. this is very important. do not hang your head. we are on the precipice of a massive, earth shattering victory. what they want you to his think it is not possible, nothing is going to happen, mean tweets or this or that, i am telling you we are on the verge of an earth shattering event and if you stand up, as jordan peterson would say stick your chest out, walk with your shoulders back, we lobsters are going to retake the world in january of 2024. [applause] >> thank you, everyone, for being here with us tonight.

if you are inspired by that talk by larry schweikart you are free to purchase not just his latest book but the archives at the table on the table, on the side of the room. thank you all for being here, we will be in touch soon for a future events in spring and summer at the heartland institute, thank you and drive safe. .. >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history gave the 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 of change 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 at mediacom we are built to keep you ahead. >> mediacom, along with these television companies, supports c-span2 as a public service. >> best-selling author, political strategist for decades, you've been a poster to our political leaders, our corporate leaders, nonprofits, you have been in the limelight, in the spotlight but all of a sudden you decided to write a book. what prompted you to tell your story? >> and you miss something in my bio. big fan of donna brazile. thank you for anything meeting today. my memoir seems a little odd at 55 because god willing i have decades