we can wrap things up. tevi, this has been a fantastic conversation. thank you. great q&a. great questions from the audience. the book is "the power and the money: the epic clashes between commanders in chief and titans of industry." it's on sale at amazon and all other book sellers. those of you in the audience can use this card here that you should have to get your own company. a few housekeeping notes, on september 19, c.e.i. is hosting our annual julian simon memorial award dinner that will be at the national cathedral. you can sign up for that at cei.org. and we are always doing events like this, both here at our headquarters in d.c. and also on capitol hill and around town. so please keep an eye on cei.org/events. with that, thank you very much for a wonderful event. have a good day. [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] >> book tv is television for serious readers. keep watching for more of the latest nonfiction books. >> ladies and gentlemen, if you would, please join me in welcoming pete hegseth and david goodwin to the reagan presidential foundation. [applause] >> welcome both. >> thank you so much. thank you all for being here. >> some quick biographical stuff first.

pete, as i was noting, you were basketball player in high i don't think you started your career as a commentator. how did you and fox had news ever meet? >> i'd never done tv before in my life, and i had a marine bud nye my sometime he had done tv twice, and he said just lean forward, that's his first tip. makes you look better stature, better posture. lean forward and don't let the host cut you off. 46 times chris matthews cut me off. i was a newbie. i didn't anticipate i'd go into tv. i ran a couple of vets organizations when i cam back from iraq and afghanistan, one

supporting the war fight neither battlefield and then another one fighting for reform at the v.a., which is still an ongoing issue. through that, i ended up doing appearances on tv in different places. a lot of it ended up being fox, fox&f friends. and one day they said, have you ever thought about asking questions instead of answering them. i said i'm happy to try anything one time. the worst i can do is make a fool of myself. it went ok, and that was in early 2015, and then tucker carlson, who was the fox & friends weekend host, took the prime time host, and thank goodness, and then i took his spot on the weekend, and that's where i've been ever since. >> and the rest is history. david, i'm not sure if it was your pen that wrote these words or pete's in the book, because it's co-authored.

but in the forward, there was a note about the fact that when the two of you got together, it felt kind of like indiana jones and his father, and one was sean connery and one was harrison ford. my first question to you is, which one is -- which of you is sean connery and and which of you? >> we'll leave that to the imagination. but i'm older than pete. >> he even looks like sean connery, doesn't he? >> can't pull off the accent. autopsy how did the two of you get together for this book? >> i won't monopolize, i promise. i was at a diner in north carolina, and there was after beautiful young family in the corner who had their two young daughters there in their uniforms. as i do with every diner, i walked around, talked to everybody, and i talked to them, and they were talking about this wonderful school, sand hills christian school in north carolina that they sent their kids to.

i had known about classical christian school, but my interest had peaked. i want to learn more, the school system is broken, what do we do? they said you got to meet this guy, david goodwin. you got to shoot him an email. and so i did. i shot him an email, i said i want to learn more, what do you guys do? and he shot me tons of information. he had already done a lot of writing and research on this topic. and i kept reading it, and i'm reading it, i'm calling him. i call too much, on a regular basis. david, i got a question. can this really be true? is this true? at one point i remember looking at my wife, and i said, babe, she runs, by the way, a lot of the live stuff on "fox nation," and i said we got to make a movie out of this. people need to know what is going on from john dewey to the original pledge of allegiance, which we can get into that, to the bellamy salute, to what the progressives did, the whole story. and what david had done and the

research he'd done, it was a no-brainer. so we got to work on the film. and then eventually the book. but none of this happened, none of this happened without david goodwin and the research and expertise he brings to the topic. [applause] >> now, i bet that just about everyone in this audience has now some familiarity with this whole critical race theory being taught in our nation's schools today, but what i found fascinating in this book is right up front, the two of you make the point that that's just a very recent tip of the iceberg. this problem is really as much as 100 years old. one of you please explain that of the. >> well, it is. what's really an amazing part of the story, the development of the book, we started in march of 2020, which, if you remember,

that's before c.r.t. went front and center. it was before the george floyd riots. it was before even covid. the interest early on was pete and i were thinking this story needs to be told what was happening in the early part of the 20th century, because nobody has told the story. but as we went along, history was unfolding in front of us, and the schools were deeply involved, and pete kept coming back with, hey, what about this? i have this person on tv today. they said this. have you ever looked into this? pretty soon it was a truly collaborative project where pete was writing, he's written most parts of the book that deal with the issues of our day, and what we found out is they fit together like hand and glove. i mean, john dewey no sooner gets through with his work that i researched in columbia university than the frankfurt school shows up. pete had a lot better grasp on that side of things than i did. as a whole, i think the work was

really prof weren't y'all. it wouldn't have come together had it not been the time, the place, and the partnership. >> i mean, the progressives had the targeting of our youngest minds on their mind from the very beginning. they knew they had to remove the one immovable object inside american civic life and in western civilization if their conceals were to ever catch on. and they understood that immovable object was god, was faith, and it was at the center piece of the american classroom since the founding. and they had to replace it, the way we describe it is, to keep the indiana jones analogy going, it's like when you're trying to grab a precious artifact, but it's on a pressure plate. and if you're going to -- if you take that artifact off the pressure plate, at left arm bells go off f. they had removed god immediately 100 years ago, the parents, the culture, the communities, the churches would have revoted.

so they openly wrote in the new reand you other public cases, they openly discussed how do we remove god from the classroom? that's the elm movable object. they ultimately landed on a forgery, which the culture at the time was willing to accept, which effectively was allegiance to the state. it was the flag. it was a new pledge. a pledge of apledgees written by a socialist that didn't say under god when it was originally written. i love the flag. i probably said the pledge of allegiance today at the beginning. i revere it. for them, it was a new idea around which they could get society that was more malleable, nationalism being more malleable than biblical truth, because when you have biblical truth and objective truth, you can't move people off of that. what you'll find when you read this story from the characters is almost to a man and to a

woman, they're atheists, humanists, socialists, and then eventually marxist, who reject biblical truth, who reject the idea of human nature and our fallen nature, simple nature. and once you can change and reject that, then you create a laboratory for societal change inside classrooms, and one of the other things that david discovered through his research, and we write about, is the early progressive studied one of the first successful social movements, which was prohibition. a woman named margaret, what was her name? frances willard, because i always get them mixed up. frances willard, who was a sufferagette, a socialist, said if we can put it into the curriculum of third graders, maybe we start to have a chance. so in the 1970's, third grade crick crumb, anti-alcohol was put into classrooms.

this was before john dewey, horace mann, loose public school associations, but a third grade curriculum is put in. by 1919, what do you have in america? prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcohol. and the progressives said, wait, if you can do that with third grade curriculum, what else can you do with third grade curriculum? and they discovered a word, they knew it, so did our founders. i learned it from david, and we talked about it in the book, which is how you educate and train up the youngest. if you can shape the youngest of minds to have a different understanding of the value of a good life, you change the entire way a society and the civilization looks at what they value. >> as we said, the pledge, one nation, under god, indivisible, would you say that, well, when socialists and those who created the pledge were after what you've described to them, god

essentially is the state, it's not -- >> i mean, yes, originally, but the original pledge written by frances bellamy did not include under god. under god was added by eisenhower when we were fighting the godst communists in the 1950's. the original pledge has no mention of god. to oversimplify it, basically what the progressives did, they said, and it was always under the guise of vocational training for a new economy, but what they did, they replaced a cross and a bible in the classroom with a flag and a pledge. over time, gradually speaking, while saying, ok, we're going start a different type of school over here where, yeah, god is not allowed inside, but we have a pull-out period where you can go to instruction outside of the school, not on school grounds. but we still respect that you have faith in god. so it was always incremental. and then when they moved it to new york, they took a different approach. you should explain the idea of the gary plan, david, because that's one of the things that blew my mind.

they started a school in gary, indiana, that intentionally tried to change the way school works all together, k-12. >> their intentionality was visible because they created the model schools and actually several places around the country, but gary became the center point of it. the thing about gary, anybody who knows the town may know it from the musical or whatever, but it was formed in about 1905. it was a very new city, and they could take the education wherever they wanted to take it. so one of the disciples was the superintendent of that area, and they built the gary plan there in indiana. and its features were things you probably thought were always in school, like bells that ring at the end of the 55-minute period. the seven-period day, the idea of subjects broken up in the social sciences being inserted into it. he talks a lot about the social sciences element. i'll leave that to you later. but this was all packaged up,

and they removed religion, christianity from the classroom by simply putting it in a pull-out period. and where i first encountered the story was when i was reading the back and forth in the editorial pages of the new republic in 1915 and 1918, where they're arguing about how to get god out of the classroom for good. because the ones are saying, if we put it in a pull-out period, we can eventually just drop it. the other side was saying we shouldn't have a pull-out period, especially when you import it back to new york, which is what happened with the gary plan. it was successful, so they imported it back. the modern american experience, especially in high school, was designed in gary, and it was designed without god, it was the first design of that type. >> in the book, you describe in some length this whole woke movement. part of being woke is, hey, you're invading my space, hey,

those words are harmful, all the rest of that. i read this, and i just could not believe when i read it in your book, and that is that the united states, the national archives and record administration, the agency that is the nation's attic, it keeps all of our records and takes care of the constitution of the united states and the declaration of independence, when you access the archives' website, it suggests up in the top right hand corner, there are harmful words in these documents. highway can this possibly be? >> it's true, you go to the website of our national archive for the declaration of independence and the constitution of our united states of america, and there's a trigger warning. of potential violent content. inappropriate content. well, that's the logical extent of the view of the left.

you see, they want to reject, they have rejected the ideas of our founding, and the theories were dedicated to that from the beginning of when they randed on our shores. so david talked about the early progressives, john dewey, other names you'll be introduced to. then you have the critical theorists of the frankfurt school who flee germany. they're all marxist. they flew hitler. they land in new york. and they are welcomed at columbia university, where john dewey had been a professor. what is john dewey, what is columbia at that time, and what is columbia teachers college still today? the preeminent teachers college in the united states of america. and the marxist arrived with a new theory called critical theory. sound familiar? it's the precursor to critical race theory and critical gender theory. and they begin to teach it, and they begin to teach it in the teachers colleges, which means when those teachers go out and

become heads of their departments or other places, they're teaching critical theory. and what is critical theory to your point? critical theory, its premise is to deconstruct effectively western christian civilization. it is criticize all things that lead to the white euro patriarchy capitalist system that must be torn down if we are to advance marxism. they thought in an economic sense, but it soon became a cultural sense, because they knew the class warfare wasn't going to fly in the united states of america. instead, our terrible path of racial injustice was more fertile ground. so the critical theorists eventually landed on critical race theory as the way in which they could indict america from the very beginning. and we call the first chapter of our book the covid 1619 moment.

because covid 19 happens, the zoom classroom comes into all of our homes, and you open up the laptop, and in american history they're teaching 1619 as the new founding date. it's because they have rejected 1776 and the principles thereof, and they're indicting america from the very beginning as being a terrible country. so that type of logic at the academic level, which has now made its way into the k-12, of course it leaves government institutions to say the declaration and the constitution need trigger warnings. because they were written by slave owners. and therefore, they must be cancelled. and we need to find a new founding date, and all the wisdom that they had, despite their flaws, has to be rejected. that was the premise of critical theory from the very beginning. so they used to only teach it in higher education, and now all the teachers that have been through the colleges and handle the accreditation that is now in bed with the unions, and by the

way, i see rebecca here, who's a great friend of ours, was in our film "miseducation of america," she took on the teachers unions in california for 30 years as a teacher much just an amazing individual. [applause] so we've drawn on a lot of wisdom from a lot of people who have been on the front lines and were yelling about it before people were paying attention. and now they are paying attention. but those theories have been embedded into our institutions, and that's how you get to the point where something like that appears on a website. well explained. this is where you have to read this book. really well done. let me pull a quote from your book, and i'd like you to explain it for us. the right has long held the right principles, but the left controls the positions. what do you mean by that?

>> what do i mean mean by that? what i mean is look at local school boards. look at union representation. look at our university. look at, we stand on principles that we know are timeless and believe that they should be timeless and that they do stand on their own, whether they're the brilliance of our founding or the wisdom, the biblical wisdom. and then the left goes ahead and runs for all the positions, takes over all the institutions, and then pushes out all the stuff we thought was timeless and would be there no matter what. if there's one thing you could quality the founders for, it's assuming this type of education would continue, that is how kids would be educated at some level with an understanding of greek and latin and great books and our biblical western civilization narrative. they kind of assumed that would be -- they assumed that would be the waters we swim in. they did not anticipate the critical theorists and what they

did. we are not trying to be pessimistic in this book, but you remember the stuff we covered on fox, parents rising up at school boards. loudoun county, virginia. glenn youngkin gets elected. it is amazing stuff and heartening. i mean that sincerely. those types of actions in today's government schools, that is what we should call them. public schools are government schools. those type of actions as we say in the book, are like charging of machine gun nest with nerf guns. we salute your effort, but we will bury you. what do school boards do to parents 95% of the time? good luck, see you later, next. my mom protested at pta meetings and the school board in the 1980's and 1990's and god bless her. she took me out of those

courses, whether it was the new sex ed quest or self-esteem, which is benign by today's standards but she recognized what it was. guess what happened at an elementary school and middle school? nothing. 99% of those at forest lake still went through the education and got the quest program and now we are on the 95th iteration of that at forest lake high school in conservative minnesota. they control the pipeline of the educational industrial. the textbook, curriculum, accreditations, all hard leftists. we want to disavow people of the idea you can move to a nice zip code or conservative community and everything will be ok. the problem is the pipeline has been federalized and they

control those positions. protesting is good, but we argue it is insufficient. david: if i could add, money involved is the icing on the cake. the biggest investor rival ring the military-industrial complex dollar for dollar. not only is the infrastructure solidly in the hands of the progressives but the money is, too. host: pete, you went to what has to be defined as an elite school for university. but in the book, both of you note that your request was defined not an elite education but rather the best education. what is the difference between the elite education and the best education? you are an expert. pete: by today's standards in

elite education would be princeton, where i went as an undergraduate or harvard, where i went for a masters program. i don't know if you saw on fox and friends recently -- [applause] i did bust open my diploma for harvard and right "return to sender" and sent it back to them live on tv. [applause] our most elite institutions are poisoning the minds of not just our kids but our country. if we hold them up as standard bearers of excellence and gatekeepers of credibility, we continue the cycle of perpetuation. it is not just my so-called elite background. it is probably your alma maters, too. unless you went to hillsdale or liberty or college of the ozarks. i saw one back there. your university is probably dutifully pumping out hard leftists and marxists at a rapid pace.

read your alumni newspaper. go back and take some coursework, peruse the website. by default because we like the sports teams of -- or the nostalgia of drinking beer in college, we pump checks to these institutions. we may as well send it straight to the democrat party. any part of perpetuating that i believe is perpetuating the cycle hurting our country. when i say the best institutions, i'm talking about david's schools. classical christian schools of the k-12 level. my mentor at princeton, robbie george, an amazing conservative constitutional professor. by the way there is a renaissance of conservatives in princeton. many outed conservatives in princeton all because of one man who started an institution. it is phenomenal. he has a quote in our book where he says, they used to be liberal professors who licked their chops at in doctrine in naïve bible clinging kids that showed up to college.

now it is the exact opposite. it is conservative professors, few among them, who licked their chops at undoing the indoctrination of kids who already show up woke and indoctrinated. the problem is not higher education. the problem is k-12. that is the focus of our group -- book. they are consolidating that on k-12. when i talk about a great education, not an elite education, the kids david pumps out our elite students, performers, debaters. they are ready to go into the culture and engage and win. by that definition they are elite. if you mean elite by, pays $50,000 for your kids to be woke, they are not elite. that is what a lot of elite high schools or middle schools look like, pipelines to the ivy league. these are pipelines to timeless wisdom, the type our founders

received, that gave them the ability to debate what they debated 250 years ago and create this republic. i did not get that education and got a standard -- any time talked to david i would say, why can't i go back to one of your schools? i learned almost nothing. if i look back at the social studies i learned, and we all took social studies, i bet we all did, guess what? all disciplines made up by marxists. it used to be geography, philosophy, theology, civics, politics. they deconstructed it to dumb it down to make it all a scientific method that could be explained because there is no more objective truth. we all got a progressive education and did not know it. what david is doing is unearthing a hidden form of education progressives almost

completely buried by the 1970's and is now giving a generation of americans a chance to actually get educated. my seventh grader, who has been in a classical christian school for six years, understands ancient greece and rome that are than i ever will, which means he is engaging with big ideas the founders engaged with as he goes into a culture awash and devoid of that. that is what i would call elite. that is how i would like to redefine it. [applause] host: following on that, perhaps you can launch off from this sentence in your book. you note the problem is not what is being taught in our schools, but what is not being taught in our schools. give some examples of this classical christian education that you think will develop elite thinkers.

david: one of the things we have a tendency to do is take for granted things history gave us so long ago we forgot. the seven liberal arts, the basis of classical christian education, they date back to ancient greece. the principal was, if you were going to form a republic or democracy, you had to prepare your children to think for themselves. if they just listen to whatever doctrine somebody gave them, they would vote for the tyrant, and you go back into tyranny. that was the fear of the greeks and romans and the basis of this country when they built it. that is why we have eagles on our stanchions and other roman artifacts. they were harkening back to this idea a republic requires freethinking people.

the seven liberal arts, the first three i will talk about briefly, grammar, logic and rhetoric. training in how to use language well, how to use logic, and to think well through the study of both formal and informal logic and practice. in practical -- in classical schools we practice thinking. we don't tell kids what to think. we practice the art of good thinking. a different education. it is not a teacher standing in front of 25 kids telling them what to think. they are in tables learning to argue well. the third subject is rhetoric which now is a dirty word because politics shuffled it up, but it was originally the art of understanding the comprehensive whole of a topic and being able to communicate that to people and persuade them to follow you, which is the heart of a democracy, the heart of a republic, to have discourse.

what we are seeing right now is discourses being shut down from every angle because we can't stand to hear things we don't like to hear. host: the solution is not necessarily, if you're a parent trying to figure out, where should i send my child to school, the solution, public schools are the government schools you talked about, which are the real problem. the solution is not necessarily spending $50,000 to send my kid to a private or independent prep school, correct? pete: correct. i would argue most private schools are even worse. and more woke. in fact, a lot of the christian schools and catholic schools are maybe not as bad on the surface, but are still built completely on the progressive model of education.

that is what shook me so much at the beginning working with david. once you dig in -- he likens it to a capsized ship. if you have been living in a capsized ship, you feel that the wall is the floor. but when you tip the capsized ship back up and realize you have been living sideways for 100 years, everything looks different. that is what david's movement has had to do since the 1980's, revive a lost form of education. i would say the darkest days of education in this country was in the 1970's when there was no such thing as classical christian and they almost outlawed homeschool. they tried to outlaw all parochial schooling in oregon. they would still like to if they could. thank goodness for the supreme court and the ruling we just got in maine among others. it has been a good week for our

founders and their structure of government. [applause] and for so many other leaders in this country including ronald reagan who have been fighters for life for generations. it is a beautiful thing. i would say, you have to break down assumptions you have about what education means, especially in a christian context. that is why i think classical christian is so different. what we have tried to do is break down the preconceived notions of classical means outdated, dusty, old, like people have looked at homeschooling. homeschooling means weird or not socialized, which is not the case. if you look at how is -- it is done today and so well, it is amazing what they are doing and homeschooling.

including pods, co-ops, online curriculum and classic christian homeschooling. there are more options today than there have ever been for a great education for your kids and grandkids. david has almost 500 brick-and-mortar classical christian schools across the country in 46 states. there are a bunch here in california, a bunch across the country. we argue for parents and grandparents taking a radical reorientation of your lives and saying, next to your family and your faith, the next step you can take is where you educate your kids, where they spend 16,000 hours between the age of kindergarten and 12th grade. 16,000 hours, the original working title of the book, 16,000 hour war. do you really want to send your kid to 16,000 hours of democrat

camp? [laughter] that is basically what we are doing right now when we send our kids to 90% of the k-12 schools that exist in america today. i would argue you don't want that. even in some articles david uncovered, progressives wrote about that. you would know the quote better than me. what chance does one hour of theistic training on sunday morning have against 40 hours of secular training during the week? who said that? david: charles potter. pete: they knew from the beginning. frankly the christian church, we did it to ourselves as a movement when the church advocated its responsibility on education, david wrote beautifully, there is the social justice arm and the fundamentalist arm. the social justice arm joins with progressives and the fundamentalist arm says we are just here to save souls, which is wonderful, but said we are

not in the school business anymore. what god created at that moment? sunday school -- what got created at that moment? sunday school. we take god out of the schools and send him for one hour on sunday and you see what happens as a result. i would look closely at any elite school, private school, christian school and look at the baseline prerogatives of what they teach and compare it against the liberal arts classical approach david has and i think you'll see a stark difference. david: just real quick, it is exhibit a in what we were talking about with deep educational state where they control accreditation, teacher certification, teacher colleges. it does not matter if you go to a christian high school or an independent prep school, they are all trained in that system. that is the point we are trying to make. the reason we are woke is

because they get the same training as everybody else. the prescription we have in the book is, get out and go a totally different direction. pete: tactical retreat is what we call it. sometimes you are surrounded in this moment, the first moment -- movement is retreat. then we argue for an educational insurgency. a form of warfare of the weak against the strong, small against the big. david started that insurgency through his schools. arizona just had a universal educational tax credit program. it is a beautiful thing. there is movement there. host: we are going to turn it to the audience for questions in a minute, but two trigger words you said pete that reminded us. the reagan foundation and institute, we are blessed in that we are able to give $1 million in college scholarships

each and every year to often between 10 and 20 students. what we are finding is, more and more of those who have risen to the top that become finalists, competitors, are homeschooled. it has been a fascinating thing to watch. before we go to questions from the audience, i wanted to read a quote from michael's father here, president reagan, his goodbye speech in 1989, the president said and informed patriotism is what we want. are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what america is and what she represents in the long history of the world and what it means to be an american? we have got to teach history based not on what is in fashion, but what is important. if we forget what we did, we will not know who we are.

i'm morning of in eradication of the american memory that could result ultimately in an erosion of the american spirit. [applause] david: that was the end. at the beginning of his term he commissioned an educational assessment of america. i can't get this quote right, but it essentially concluded that if a foreign country had done this, we would have called it an act of war. look it up. host: we would like to turn to the audience for questions. a quick primer, if you have a question, raise your hand, but please wait until you get a microphone put in your hands so we can hear your question. we have one right here in the front. >> thank you. pete, because of your occupation

and circles you travel in, do you encounter media from the left and have discussions with them on their positions? do you have a banter and go back and forth or stay two people on the right? how does it work in your profession? pete: just when i talked to juan williams. [laughter] [applause] pete: i would love to. first of all, i get a chance to work with some of the best conservatives in the business. we are chock full of them at fox and i'm grateful for that. the left-wing media is not the most tolerant bunch in the world these days. not only would they not want to have a conversation with me, i would count myself as someone who has gone to pretty left-wing universities. i'm happy to have a conversation with you knowing we disagree,

knowing we will probably come to a different conclusion at the end of the conversation. these days you talk to most members of the media on the left side of the aisle. the only way that conversation will go, they will end by saying you are a racist. that is what it devolves into. an absolute strawman characterization of the opponent as less than human. the private conversations i have with people left of center at fox are wonderful because they are at a place that tolerates. one quick anecdote. i have a bunch of friends who have worked at cnn that are conservatives. every single one of them have gone running for the exits because eventually they are cornered and run out and screamed at and told what horrible human beings they are, especially if they supported trump. find the door or you will sit on

the shelf and never be on tv. i have never met a liberal that works at fox that did not say, this is the most wonderful place i ever worked because we do tolerate. we have discussions on the air and we have it out, but i can ask them about their kids and their life and what you think about this and they will complement me on the book. it can exist when you foster an environment where it exists. the environment at fox is the shared value that america is a good country. [applause] and god is worth celebrating. when you can agree on the basics you configure the other stuff. host: overhear. -- over here. >> thank you for both of you being here. i'm so excited to read your book. it is a little overwhelming to listen. i have three millennial kids that have not had kids yet, but do you have a suggestion as to

how we can communicate besides just giving them the book, or how do we -- also it is a two part question. i would like to be able to communicate that to two of the couples of my kids were trying to have kids, to look at this. but the other side is, what can we do in the audience to help this movement? david: i talked to a gal last week with the same question. she was not sure she would get them to read a book but they did watch the miseducation series and it was very influential for the millennial kids. they had never heard that before so i would commend that on fox. pete: i agree. miseducation of america is a six part series on fox nation.

we tell the abbreviated version of the book in film form and work with a great producer. just did a phenomenal job. if they are not going to want to read it -- i think after watching it they will want to read it. i think ultimately coming up the topic of humility to your kids, which is what i will do to mind some day when they are old enough to understand why we made. i had no idea. you are going to want the best for your kids. maybe i did not know that when i was going through because it was not laid bare in front of me but now you will want to know and i know you want the best for your kids, too. do yourself a favor and before they are five years old read this book. covid really did this, too. being more intentional -- i can say this to californians as someone who has lived a lot in minnesota, a very hopelessly blue state.

being more and more intentional about where you live. meaning the city and county you live in. covid showed us how much more impact local control can have. that is what david's website has, a map where every school that is a classical christian school is on a pin on a map. i would move to a school. that is what my wife and i are doing. it is that important. you can't say here's the biggest problem -- we all pay property taxes. we probably move to a place that is nice because of the schools and we pay those property taxes. that is a hard thing to get past some people, but ultimately, is that sacrifice worth the future of your kids and their souls and the way they view the world? tell them to watch the movie. david: there is another benefit to the movie.

i'm an association of members. we help many independent schools. outside of us, there are other organizations doing classical education, classical conversations in the home school is doing the same thing for homeschoolers. if your kids can afford $8000 a year in tuition homeschooling is an option. other options like pod schools. classical christian education is 2000 years old. nobody owns it. we just have to recover it. host: over here. >> hi. i went through the catholic home school, started my kid with that. he is in college now or graduated. i had a big problem like what you said about progressive plan. it was core curriculum. even though we homeschooled

because we did not have the money to go private, we homeschooled catholic through a school in california. they still had core curriculum that we had to do and i stopped going there. we did our things for his schooling and groups, but when we wanted to go back to school for sports, they would not accept accreditation. he had to go to an alternative school. i was so glad i was able to homeschool because it meant so much to me and he turned out great. he is an eagle scout and all that other stuff we did. that was a big block for me. why do we have to cater to this core curriculum still? one other thing i wanted to mention. lbj decided he did not want to

have school buses for christians and catholics. even though we are public and pay all the taxes for getting kids to the public schools, he eliminated taking kids to christian schools. i would like to turn that around also and turn around the core curriculum thing. how do we do that? pete: the schoolbus thing sounds like a great challenge for the supreme court these days. [laughter] i'm serious. i think the core curriculum is part of how they consolidate control. david, how do you navigate that core curriculum in your schools? david: we don't. pete: when you don't take the king's gold at some level, not that you were, homeschooling is not that, you are right. testing at the high school level requires the core curriculum aspect, that is how they try to box most parents in and it takes

extra effort to do it on your own. that is why i think the next step is and we talk about this in the book, the sat recently stopped testing for reasoning because reasoning is racist. the same guy that took over the sat's who wrote common core, a federalization of standards under the obama administration. what david is linked up with is a classical learning test. an sat for classical christian schools. there are pipelines of curriculum for classical christian schools, accreditations. teachers colleges need to be created. it is an entire ecosystem that has to live parallel to a progressive pipeline that controls every aspect. >> michael i think has a question. >> [indiscernible] i don't know if you are aware

but when he ran for president the first time, one of the main things in his campaign was to get rid of the department of education, put forward by jimmy carter. the one thing he was really upset with after being president eight years, he was never able to get rid of the department of education. i remember one of his great quotes. when we cease to be one nation under god we are a nation gone under. i quote that all the time when i speak to young people. other than that working people get a list of these schools for people who have grandkids now? . my parents sent me to a military academy [laughter] i went to a place we called st. john's alcatraz. [laughter] i was taught by the sisters of mercy. then i went to the jesuits. god was having fun with me from the beginning. where do you get a list? >> i have to give credit to my

wife stormy in the front row. she is a webmaster and has a great tool that can sort by state, city, pins on a map, classicalchristian.org school finder. it will get you there fast. every school has its own page. we are an association of like-minded independent schools. pete: to your point the reason your dad i would believe is so adamant in getting rid of it is because he knew how and why it was created. we break that down in the book as well. a lot of the work rebecca has done focuses on that. unions used to be conservative teacher organizations, taken over by the unionization movement. they turned around and endorse their first presidential candidate in 1976. the teachers union had half the delegates at the 1976 delegation

when they endorsed jimmy carter. when jimmy carter was elected president, he gave a gift to those same powerful teachers unions was -- which was the creation of the federal department of education. organizations openly bragged there would be no department of education without the teachers unions. from the beginning the department of education has been a creation of those teachers unions. politically they have tried to make it impossible for people who understand that to get rid of it because then you are anti-education, which was the problem among other week need republican senators and congressmen of that era who would not make the move. i hope we are at a point because of how corrupt unions are, especially after covid, being against the department of education can be decoupled from being against education. they have corrupted it so much they have created an opportunity to expose it. host: we have time for one last question. >> thank you.

my grandkids are homeschooled, but i started to learn a lot about it. my granddaughter is a sophomore at hillsdale. there was a lot of stuff out there. he provides courses for kids through high school free. he has online courses you can take no charge. it is wonderful. the reach they have is amazing. that college is hard to get into. they have a tremendous student body and code of honor like military academies. you break the code, you are kicked out. one of the codes my granddaughter learned the hard way while still in high school, she lied to her mother. bad mistake. i get the phone call.

nikki said talk to emily. a problem? she lied to me about doing her homework. i called my granddaughter and said lying about your homework, not doing your homework is a problem, you fix a problem, you own it. lying to your mother is a character flaw. you have lost her confidence. never do that again. when hillsdale interviewed her and looked at the code, they said are you missing anything you think should be there? she said yes, don't lie to yourself. and my grandson just made eagle scout this month. david: congratulations. [applause] pete: it is a funny thing i was just talking on a podcast about the book and he was talking about his friend trey gowdy who said, in all my years of prosecuting i have never prosecuted -- he said when he gets a question about education, i've never had to prosecute a

homeschooled kid or an eagle scout. and we have two of them here. that is a testament to parents who have been ahead of the curve and willing to do something for their kids. it is encouraging there are brick-and-mortar and online options to the point we can get to a critical mass pumping out 6% of graduates in this country to be part of a leadership change for the future. host: each of you will have an opportunity to say hi 2-8 and david at the book signing. -- hi to pete and david at the book signing. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> democracy. it is not just an idea, it is a process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few guarding its basic prince bulls. it is where debates unfold, decisions are made in the nation's course is charted. democracy in real-time. this is