LIVE at Reagan Ranch August 2018 Conference

From Young Americans for Freedom: Professor Larry taught at the 2018 annual event for Young America's Foundation http://www.yaf.org/

Young America’s Foundation is committed to ensuring that increasing numbers of young Americans understand and are inspired by the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise, and traditional values.

Transcript

- Hi everyone welcome back, and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to our virtual attendees. Thank you for joining us. If you are live streaming this, but you are not on our website, I encourage you to go yaf.org/virtualpass. That way you can participate, ask some questions. We'll make sure to include them in the Q&A. And also our next speaker has a PowerPoint, so you can download that on the right hand side and follow along and engage more. So I have the privilege of introducing our next speaker for the day Dr. Larry Schweikart. It may be fitting to describe Dr. Schweikart as a jack-of-all-trades. He is a professor of business and economic history and military history, a New York Times bestselling author, a former drummer of a touring rock band, and most recently, a film producer. Dr. Schweikart earned his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science at the Arizona State University. Upon graduating he toured with his band called Goldmine, then joined another band called Rampage opening for groups like Steppenwolf and the James Gang. Leaving the band in the mid-1970s, he returned to Arizona where he re-entered ASU to obtain a teaching certificate, taking a history course that inspired him to become a history professor. He entered the ASU master's program, publishing two national Phi Alpha Theta prize-winning articles in consecutive years. At that point the only time that had ever occurred. Upon receiving the MA, he was admitted to the University of California Santa Barbara right up the road and published yes, and had already published his first book, A History of Banking in Arizona. His doctoral dissertation published as Banking in the American South, was awarded one of the top three economic history dissertations in the United States. In 2004, after almost a decade of research and writing Dr. Schweikart co-authored the best-selling US history book A Patriot's History of the United States. He continued to publish major trade books on national defense, history and the US economy. Since 2009, he has been a film producer. His documentary, Rocking the Wall about rock music's part and bringing down the Iron Curtain appeared on PBS, and his current project Other Walls to Fall, has just been completed. You can look forward to the release of his next book, a biography of President Reagan called Reagan: The American President. That will be out next Father's Day and make sure to follow him on Twitter @LarrySchweikart. Doctor Schweikart is a frequent speaker for YAF and we are so excited to have him back here with us today. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Larry Schweikart.

- Thank you. Hello all, good to be back here in Santa Barbara where I graduated. It was a great event, oh there's the slides what do you know? Okay I'm no longer a professor. I retired in May of 2016 and my wife and I, my two dogs moved to Phoenix, Arizona. There we go oops. How do I go back? There we go. Smaller of the two dogs is Milo, and he made the plane trip with my wife. You see he enjoys the Sun. I drove from Ohio with a friend and my other dog, Stanley, who's pretty hyper so we kind of gave him some drugs to enhance his experiences. You can see right there. Man I'm really big. Even though I was Arizona native, arriving in the summer in Phoenix, I forgot just how hot it can really be there. One day it was about a 115 degrees, and my wife said let's go shopping. So we go to a mall and I forgot to put up one of those window screens and the sun burned a hole through my iPod. You can see the the burn mark up in the corner. You can see that it's Cream Wheels of Fire. Good thing it wasn't Miley Cyrus, because it would have burned her tongue off. Of course in a previous life, I was a rock drummer. That's me in the Jaws t-shirt there. And that's me and my little drum set with a band called Savoy Brown. Yes I'm the only one in that picture not high. In 2004, Mike Allen and I wrote a surprising bestseller, A Patriot's History of the United States, and this book ended up being a number one bestseller. It's kind of an interesting story. When it came out in 2004, it did alright. We got reviewed by some of the real bigs like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. It sold reasonably well but you know nothing crazy. I went on to write other books. And then in 2010, another speaker here at YAF frequently, a guy named Burton Folsom, who was on Glenn Beck at the time suggested to Glenn that he have me on the show. Now Glenn at that time, I know he's not much now. At that time, Glenn Beck had an audience of 3.5 million nightly viewers. That's like seven times the average CNN nightly viewership. So I'm on Beck Show and I give him a copy of Patriot's History and his response was I know the show, I said I know Glenn that's okay. He says no no I read it over the weekend. Well Patriot's History is like a 1000 pages. And so and yellow post-em's in it, you've got to get this book. This is the best history book ever written. All of a sudden sale starts. This was six years after the book first appeared in the New York Times. I can hear that. I know what's going on right? Larry your book's gonna be number one. No I heard that's great. No your book's gonna be in Costco, it's gonna be, because it meant we were reaching ordinary Americans, who is what I wanted to do when I first wrote the book, but it has reached a lot of interesting people. Emmy-winning Christian artists, bottom left is Nick Searcy who just completed directing the movie Gosnell. He was in Three Billboards Outside pf Ebbing, Missouri, and country star Clint Black and you might recogn-- every year, but of course what else would a patriot be reading, but A Patriot's History of the United States? After Patriot's History the publisher suggested I take on some of the debates in our footnotes and that led to this in history. And what I did was I looked at the top 20 US history textbooks that you guys are, some of you are using these now, some of them you'll be using in the next year or two. And I included books like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. First things I know that you as tutors. So I asked what are the pictures? Okay 20th Century, keep that in mind, 20th Century, the most common picture in all of these books in the 20th century, Franklin D Roosevelt. Okay no problem with that. Very important President, did a lot of things, you know got us through World War II. So that's extremely expected. Second most common picture in the 20th century, the atomic bomb. All right once again no problem there. Very reasonable, but what do you think was the third most common image in your textbooks in the 20th century? You think it might be John F Kennedy? Reagan? the moon landing? Martin Luther King jr.? Nope would it surprise you to know that the Ku Klux Klan is the third most common image in the 20th century in these textbooks. Really, okay so you're looking at the section on Lincoln's assassination and you see that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln. And all the textbooks correctly identify Booth as a Confederate. Yes he was an actor but he didn't kill Lincoln because Lincoln gave him a bad review. He kills Lincoln because he's a Confederate. How do you think that all of the textbooks described this guy, Lee Harvey Oswald? A Marine, a former Marine, an ex-Marine. In only one of the 20 textbooks I looked at was he correctly identified as a communist, which is why he killed Kennedy. In fact just a few months ago Oswald showed up in some CIA documents that were released and he was visiting Cuba weeks before he went to kill Kennedy. What do you think he was doing in Cuba? Maybe a little target practice. In my survey of the top 20 textbooks, I found that well not every textbook contains all the lies. Most of them contain more than one. So what's a message that comes out? That America is essentially a racist, oppressive, imperialistic evil nation. Here's a few of the most prominent lies. Number 19, the Rosenbergs were not spies and were wrongfully executed, that's the lie. Jeanne Boydston in a book called Making of America, writes Julius Rosenberg a former member of the Communist Party and his wife Ethel, were convicted in a controversial trial on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage and sentenced to death in April 1951. The controversy over their guilt has continued to the present day. Well no it hasn't. I mean there may be controversy, but their guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt including by their longtime collaborator, a man named Martin Sobel, who late in life admitted that the two passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets, but that doesn't stop the historians. Mark Carnes's book American Destiny says, "Although they were no major spies and the information "they revealed is not important, "the Rosenbergs were executed." Huh? Passing the single biggest secret of the late 1940s to the most deadly weapon in human history to your avowed enemy isn't important? You're not a major spy? What would you have to give away? Nude photos of Demi Lovato? Yet a third textbook one of the worst, John Mack Faragher's Out of Many said, "The government's case against the Rosenbergs "rested on testimony of their supposed accomplices, "some of them coached by the FBI." No the evidence handed over was a schematic of the bomb in Julius Rosenberg's possession. I don't know how you can coach a schematic. Now to many of you the Rosenbergs are kind of murky figures. I mean what importance are they to us today? Not much except the uniformity with which all of these books deal with them, and by the way when the Soviet Union fell and the KGB secrets were released, there were the Rosenbergs front and center as paid KGB agents. None other than former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and we have to believe him right because he's a communist. We always got to believe communists. They always tell the truth right? Nikita Khrushchev said the Rosenbergs provided very significant help in advancing the atomic bomb. Okay how about another one? Lie 41 the transcontinental railroads never would have been built without government? Now this is a book many of you may be using, Bailey and Kennedy the American Pageant. A big blue book, anybody in here using that one? Okay about three or four of you yeah. It is the most popular best-selling textbook in American history. Bailey and Kennedy say of the railroads, "Transcontinental railroad building was so costly "and risky as to require government subsidies." John Bloom another best-selling book called the National Experience agree. Some form of public credit was essential to build the Transcontinentals. Well Houston we have a problem. These books ignore the only transcontinental 100% privately built by a one-eyed Canadian entrepreneur named James J Hill, called the Great Northern. And there's James and I brought his eye with him just in case. When all the subsidized railroads failed in the 1893 crash only the Great Northern kept running. It's worth noting that neither Henry Ford with the automobile, the Wright Brothers with the airplane, Eli Whitney with the cotton gin, Steve Jobs of the personal computer or all rock and roll music none of these had a dime of government support. On the other hand we had a free market where we could enter foreign markets without them placing undue burdens on us. Okay line number 17, Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Again these are things you'll find in all your textbooks. You're probably not all that tuned into Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. In April 1920, they were two anarchists who robbed a factory paymaster in Braintree Massachusetts, killing a guard in the process. They were arrested for that and another robbery, were convicted and given the death penalty for shooting the guard. Historical critics claim they were only executed because they're political activists, not because they actually did the crime. Mark C Carnes and John Garrity say in a book called American Destiny, their trial was a travesty. And Carnes and Garrity linked the execution to "excesses of fundamentalist xenophobes "and of course the Klan." These historians had the Ku Klux Klan on the brain. It makes me wonder if some of them aren't like closet Grand Dragons or something, running around on the weekend. Anyway Jeanne Boydston Making a Nation says the state doctored evidence and witnesses changed testimony but the judge favored the prosecution. Every book implies or states they were innocent based on the fact that they said they were innocent. Nobody would ever do that right? Truth is modern ballistics experts in the 1980s performed new tests on Sacco's gun, included that in fact it was the murder weapon. It wasn't tampered with as historians claimed. He and only he had access to the gun. It matched slugs found at both crimes. Nine witnesses saw Sacco at the scene of the shooting. Four saw Vanzetti there and Sacco had other cartridges of the same make and caliber as those of the murder weapon in his pocket when he was arrested. Thirty years later witnesses who tried to provide an alibi for Sacco and Vanzetti admitted he lied. That didn't stop then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis from proclaiming the duo innocent in 1977. He said all disgrace should be removed from their names. No governor, just add more disgrace to your name. And add a cherry on top in 2005, a letter surfaced from socialist author up in Sinclair who had been a champion of these two in which Sacco and Vanzetti's own attorney admitted yeah in fact they killed the guard. All right one more before we get to Reagan. You might have seen this. It's a very famous image of Chief Iron Eyes Cody. He's known as The Crying Indian for a 1979 public service ad, people start pollution; people can stop it. And he was part of this very important TV ad where he would ride along this beautiful, the mountains are back here and everything's beautiful, and then you look down and there's like garbage everywhere and there's a smokestack pouring out smoke and he finally gets to a road, and he sees this beautiful scene and somebody drives along and throws a bag of McDonald's at his feet and this tear trickles down his face. It's all fake, it's all fake. The tear was glycerin. He is an Italian named Espera Oscar de Corti born 1904 in Capital Louisiana to a family of Sicilian immigrants. He played an Indian a 100 times on TV and films and symbolized the idea that the Indians were the great protectors of the environment. By the way, we're a little, we missed it this year, but I invite you all to next year's Schweikart Earth Day tire burning. You're all required to arrive in a junk auto at least 30 years old, it's smoking like a chimney, and you got to bring one covered dish of nearly any extinct animal or bird, spotted owl stew, snail darter surprise, those are my favorites. And we cap off the evening with our annual race between the Condors and the Bald Eagles through a nearby wind farm. It's great fun so all of you come on down. Anyway the notion that's portrayed in these textbooks is that the Indians were the great protectors, Oops let me back up one, the great protectors of the environment. John Mack Faragher in his book Out of Many says, "The changes whites produced in some areas were nearly "as cataclysmic as those during the Ice Age. "Having killed off the giant herds, ranchers and farmers quickly shifted to cattle." Now if you're an English major you should know what's wrong with that sentence and a new diagram that's having killed off the herds, farmer shifted to cattle, to kill off cattle. Okay anyway, this particular passage lies to you in several ways. It fails to mention, listen closely, the buffalo were almost extinct before the whites got to them. Three separate studies came out in the early 2000s. One from Andrew Eisenberg, a Brown anthropologist Shepherd Kretsch the Third and Dan Flores, a historian at the University of Missoula, Montana. All three agreed that the Indians were hunting the buffalo to extinction before the first whites arrived. They just weren't doing it as fast as Buffalo Bill Cody. Some estimates made in the 1850s suggested that the Indians were harvesting a half a million animals a year. Others think the number is higher. The stench permeated the prairie for miles. I'm gonna say that again. I want you to think about this. The stench permeated the Prairie for miles. What do you have to have to have stench? Bodies, bodies, you got to have an animal there. Okay how many of you have heard this from maybe even your elementary school teacher? Well you know the Indians used all parts of the buffalo. Y'all heard that one? That's true but it doesn't mean what you think. You get the image that the Indians kill a herd of buffalo and they come in like locusts and everything is gone. That's not it. They used the blood for war paint. They used the meat to eat. They used the skin and hides to clothe themselves and to make teepees, but if they didn't need blood at the time they left the blood. They took the meat, they took the hides. If they didn't need hides at the time, they took the meat, took the blood, left the hides. They only took what they needed. That's why people saw carcasses of thousands and thousands of these animals that the Indians left on the prairies. Now why were Indians hunting these animals to extinction before whites got there? Well many tribes believed that the buffalo were infinite. One tribe in Canada thought that the buffalo came from a great lake, but their idea of the buffalo was sort of like your idea of your parents money you know. It like never runs out, it's infinite. What whites did do was accelerate the extinction process, no doubt about that from any quarter. And they nearly completed the job, but here comes the other part nobody tells you about. It was private ranchers and rich white philanthropists who saved the buffalo. JP Morgan purchased 20,000 acres in the West for bison and populated the land with herds. Ranchers bred beefalo, a combination of the cow and buffalo for its meat. Cattleman Charles Goodnight captured buffalo calves in 1878 and developed his own private herd that reached 700 before he gave it to Canada's Wood Buffalo National Park, where today it's now 14000. Other ranchers boasted we supply buffalo for zoos, parks, circuses, and barbecues. This led ranchers to protect other species by breeding them and selling rights to hunt them. For an animal nearly extinct at one point, you are ready for this, there are more buffalo raised today for their meat than exist on all the private zoos and resource areas combined. It's a common theme in the 19th century that textbooks miss. The Robber barons were the friends of wildlife. People such as John D Rockefeller who saved the whales. How did Rockefeller save the whales? Whale oil was what was used to light up rooms prior to Rockefeller. If you wanted to have a room that had any light in it, you used whale oil. Rockefeller produced something called kerosene that was so much cheaper that people started doing away with the whale oil and using kerosene and it nearly drove whaling out of business. Yet how's he portrayed? In the textbooks Standard Oil Company is dripping in blood. Or it's an octopus but I'm convinced when James Cameron finally gets his submersible vehicles down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, we're going to find a giant statue that the whales have made of John D Rockefeller and that they have a pilgrimage there, every year like Muslims do to Mecca where they're worshiping him. But the main focus of all this distortion is Ronald Reagan. When parents asked me how to tell if their kids books are biased, I say go to the index, look up Reagan. It's the pregnancy test of bias. Now Jon Stewart thought that was pretty funny and so he had a clip of me saying that on Fox and then he showed a picture of Reagan pregnant, which I thought was pretty funny. But no matter how fair or reasonable the books are they just go off the cliff when they deal with the Gipper. I have four different lies on Reagan but I only have time for two of them here today. So let's look at two Reagan lies. Number one the Reagan tax cuts caused massive deficits and debt. Textbooks absolutely lie about Reagan in the coverage of the economy. A typical chapter concentrates on how the tax cuts caused the massive deficits of the 1980s. Almost none mention the fact that Reaganomics produced 14 million net new jobs. Now net means more jobs than we lost right? Obamanomics produced 94 million people not even looking for work. How's that for a comparison? In the entire 1980s all the Europeans combined produced zero net new jobs. I think even today Germany would probably trade us Munich and two soccer players to be named later for 14 million net new jobs. Anyway instead of celebrating the fantastic growth of the 80s, rising GNP, rising wages, soaring employment, stable money, low interest rates, what do all of the textbooks harp on? Deficits and national debt. And yet as you can see, the government revenues actually rose under Reagan. That is the amount of money the government, as they used to call it government, government would take in was 40% greater. Why do we have debt and deficits? Because Congress wouldn't stop spending. Congress spent a 100% more than before. So I have asserted that your books are biased. I'm going to absolutely prove it now. This is a chart taken straight out of the American Pageant. The header up there I couldn't fit it in, was called Deficits Over Time, Deficits Over Time. And you can see that in the 1980s under Reagan, it looks like the deficits just went crazy. I mean what was that old man thinking? How could this happen? There's a small problem. Any of you who are economics majors might see this. It says billions of dollars up in the left hand corner. It needs to say billions of real dollars. You see when you're talking about money over time, you have to adjust it for inflation because we always have inflation, you know this story that your parents are saying ah dollar doesn't buy what it used to buy you know. I show my students menus from the 1920s where you could get a steak dinner for a quarter. Whole dinner you know. So you've got to adjust for inflation. So I did that. I got their data and I adjusted it for inflation but even then you know how much you owe is relative to how much you make. I mean if you were to see my MasterCard bill you'd faint. Oh my gosh I could never repay that. To me it's nothing, but if I showed my MasterCard bill to Bill Gates, he'd go what's this pocket change? Put it on a table till it amounts to something. I'm not gonna deal with this. It's not enough money. Okay so I recalculated this chart in terms of GNP. Well is that the same chart? Totally different, but you know these guys are historians maybe they aren't lying. Maybe they just screwed up. Maybe just made a mistake, no that's not it. Another chart, same book same chapter, same topic, Ronald Reagan is an idiot. This is the national debt over time. Now what's a deficit? Deficit is how much we take in this year and how much we spend this year? What's the debt? All those years added together. How much we still owe for all the years in the past? Our national debts just out of sight, it's like 15 trillion dollars or something. I can't even keep it straight anymore. So if you look at this, it looks like Reagan's going crazy there right? They did something very clever. This was deliberate okay? Any of you ever see a Sesame Street thing called three of these things are kind of the same thing? One of these things is not quite the same, and they'll have like a parakeet and a parakeet and a parakeet and a boa constrictor. Susie what's different? Oh Boa constrictor is different. Very good Susie, let's play the Sesame Street game. Depression that's an event. World War Two breaks out, that's an event. Japan surrenders that's an event. Korean War breaks out, that's an event. Vietnam War breaks out, event. Reagan! That's a person. Do you see how clever they are in doing this? This is deliberate. Okay they could have used all people but they didn't. They want you to know that Reagan's an idiot, and that you can't trust him, and he destroyed the economy. So there's my revision. Not even the same chart, not even close. Now again these distortions all come in every book across the board. They don't all have the same chart, but they all have similar charts. Probably the worst distortions of the Reagan record come in the area of his greatest success, the Cold War where the textbooks tried to credit Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War. Come on, Gorby there you go. So line number nine, Mikhail Gorbachev not Ronald Reagan was responsible for ending the Cold War. James West Davidson's book A Nation of Nations says Gorbachev's reform policies not only led to the collapse of the Soviet empire, but the breakup of the Soviet Union itself. See all that military spending under Reagan was not necessary, because good old Gorby's gonna demilitarize the Soviet Union by his self. George Brown Tyndall in America: A Narrative History says Gorbachev backed off Soviet imperial ambitions. Oh I guess he was backing off that's why it took him five years to get out of Afghanistan. I mean seriously anyone who's not Gorby was gonna give up the Soviet empire only had to look at the birthmark on his forehead. Now it's kind of hard to see up there but Gorby has this red birthmark up there on his forehead. And I swear in the Cold War, whenever the Soviets started going after another country that birthmark, took on the map shape of whatever country they were going. You could see he's going after Ukraine, look look, he's going after Crimea check it out. And I can prove this because after the Cold War ended that birthmark nearly disappeared from Gorby. But started coming back when Putin started going after Georgia recently. So you gotta watch Gorby's birthmark. The ever-reliable Ando Goodland says perhaps more important than Reagan, under new younger leadership the Kremlin allowed long-dormant forces of change to drive the Soviet Union to democracy. Now when this picture was taken, Gorbachev was about 56. I'm 67 but when I was 56 I guarantee you nobody ran around the University of Dayton going that young and vibrant Schweikart. He was only young and new leadership because all the other guys were dying off. His predecessors were a million years old. Chernenko then the aptly named Andropov, who dropped off and Brezhnev, who all died in a two year period. Reagan introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1982 and liberals immediately called it Star Wars. Now the reason they called it Star Wars was to ridicule it. Back in my day when you wanted to talk about something being far out you called it Buck Rogers, and here you see some Buck Rogers comic books or Commander Cody. And I especially like the one on the bottom. Commander Cody's weapon is like the Swiss Army knife of space weapons because you can kill an alien and unplug a stopped-up toilet all at the same time. Anyway the media did Reagan a huge favor. Even though he hated the term Star Wars, everyone knew that Reagan was Luke. There's Luke. Thank You Luke. Everyone knew that the old decrepit dictators of the Soviet Union like Brezhnev, wait a minute. It's the same guy. I think he auditioned for the part, and that meant of course that Gorby was Darth Vader, because look at the bottom picture, Darth has that red splotch on his head too. We always see Gorby with a hat on but take his mask off he's different. The fact is Ronald Reagan's Star Wars was just one part of a massive strategy to bankrupt the Soviet Union and it scared the Russians to death because they knew he could do it. We did it in World War two, by building 95,000 tanks in four years. That's one tank every four hours. We built 300,000 airplanes. For two years one of Russia's best fighters was the P39 Aircobra, an American plane. We built a Liberty Ship, a ship in four and a half days from scratch. That's less time takes most of you to write a paper for one of your classes. Four and a half days. Both Gorby and Reagan knew what was possible. Gorbachev knew that with computer technology behind Star Wars, accuracy of this type was possible. That's a cruise missile launched from a thousand miles away and it's about to hit an orange pylon, which I affectionately call the state flower of Ohio because every spring the orange pylons would bloom all over the roads everywhere and you couldn't drive anywhere. They couldn't overcome that. They knew they couldn't overcome that. If you read the liberal textbooks, you'll conclude no American communist ever did anything wrong. All business leaders are corrupt and evil, and Bill Clinton never told a lie. I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I'm convinced when Bill said that he was talking to Monica. I did not have sex with that woman Miss Lewinsky, no, no it's always been me and you baby. This is important stuff. Margaret Thatcher said watch your thoughts because your thoughts become your words. Watch your words because your words become your actions. Watch your actions because your actions become your habits. Watch your habits because your habits become your character, and watch your character because your character becomes your destiny. The left has been trying to steal our destiny by changing our thoughts about our character, by recasting the past. The Bible says it this way. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. We cannot allow these people to speak death to our country, our families, and our schools. Rather we must find the truth, speak it without reservation, even in the face of threats and intimidation and as you all well know, you are seeing those threats and intimidation like frankly I never thought I'd see on an American campus. You are the resistance, not that full fascist organization called Antifa. They are the Brown Shirts. They are Hitler's legions. It will come at a cost to you, but you must stand up to them. Future generations will thank you for that, and who knows maybe someday they'll build a statue to you at the bottom of the Marianas Trench as well. All right thank you I'm open for questions now. Where we going first?

- [Moderator] Hello.

- Hello.

- [Moderator] So we have a question from Lauren through the Virtual Pass from Tuscon Arizona. Her question is what books would you recommend to students who are only exposed to the bias lying textbooks in the classroom?

- Okay what books would I recommend to students? This is a little tricky because it depends on the age level right? I mean very young kids I'd say Rush Limbaugh's books on kids are just fine. As you get older you're going to need things like A Patriot's History is fine. If you're AP level history in high school or college, the in-between area is really tough. That's really tough and I don't have a good answer if you're between say 11th grade and about 4th grade. I don't have a great answer for you. My best answer is always go to the primary source documents and you all know how hard those are to read. Because people wrote in some other language back then, whereto impressive for me. You know but you got to fight your way through it and that's where you need help from parents and teachers but go to the original documents, you can't go wrong, yes sir.

- [Ben] Hello Mr. Schweikart, my name is Ben weary. I'm from Monticello high school in Charlottesville Virginia. I just finished actually AP US history this past year and during the class, both the Mexican American War and the spanish-american war were both kind of painted as examples of American imperialism. So I'm just wondering how is the best way to respond to that claim?

- Well you know it's very important to understand that wars usually don't happen without two people wanting to fight. In the Mexican War, the Mexican government desperately wanted to fight that war. They wanted American territory and they still saw Texas as part of their empire right? So when we were done, this is what I always say, folks when we were done with that war, we occupied Mexico City and Veracruz. We owned Mexico and we gave it back. Take it, don't want it, just take it. Thank you for the food but nevertheless. The only thing we kept was the Philippines and the Philippine would be dependent if we left, they would either be British or German, but they weren't going to be free. So our response was better us than German or British and of course they were given independence in World War II. Too late but name me any other empire, I dare you. Find me another empire in human history anywhere, Romans, Muslims, Chinese, Byzantines, who freed people after they conquered them. Nobody did that. World War II we destroyed the Germans, destroyed the Japanese, here, here's your country back. Let's help you fix it so you get off our back right?

- [Ben] Thank you very much.

- Others, oh feel free. No you got to get the rock-and-roll thing down, yeah it's gotta be Go ahead.

- [Moderator] All righty, this is from Sheila Dumstead from Texas. How do we protect our children from being indoctrinated by liberal propaganda in our public schools?

- Well that's a big, I mean that's, you have to obviously and this is more for parents than it is for you guys. I mean we don't expect you to fight the propaganda battle of what gets in the schools. You have no control over that and it's up to your parents to get on school boards and to look at what it is you're given to read, what people are saying in the classroom. Your job is a little bit different and so I'm just gonna answer a question it hasn't been asked yet, but it's always asked, which is well what do we do in class when like you'd mentioned when somebody stands up and says something that's utterly ridiculous and horrible and nasty? Now my answer to you is very simple. How bad do you need the class? Now if you're in high school right now you don't have that option but very soon you're gonna be in colleges where you have an option to leave that class and my question to you is do you need the class? If you need the class your response to an idiot up there attacking America running down the United States, telling you you're a racist, fascist homophobe is mm-hmm, mm-hmm, write the final exam turn it in, get your angle. By the way you're so full of crap and you leave right? If you don't need the class you might want to consider standing up and saying that's garbage, I'm not gonna sit here and take it and leave. Yes sir.

- [Participant] All right so what you just said about the historians was showing that they were extremely one-sided and very blatantly liberal. And do you think they even are trying because from what you said it just seemed like if they were actually trying to show true history they would do something very different from what they're doing. Do you think they're even trying to provide people with a good education or are they only concerned with indoctrinating people?

- That's a good question, I don't think they sit around in little cabals, how can we mess up Reagan here? What can we say about Reagan? Hillary goes, "Did you call my name?" Every time Hillary would make a speech right entire pods of dolphins would change their course. Same like AutoGlass stock, would just go crazy. Anyway they do it by nature. It's who they are. They don't think they are propagandizing. They think they're giving you an honest view of history but they won't look or even tolerate any other research that challenges their position. In A Patriot's History of the United States check it out. Our last 40 pages are in notes of small type and we include all the people that don't agree with us as well as the ones that do. We went out of our way to search out leftist and liberal studies that made our point. So you couldn't say oh you're only using Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter, no. We're using your own papers against you. So I think it's second nature. It's just who they are. It's in their nature.

- So they're doing it because they've been indoctrinated before?

- That's true, but it gets worse if you aren't allowed in class to challenge them with research. That's when it really gets bad is when you shut down free speech on campuses and no one can ever challenge this, this dominant hierarchy, now you got a real problem. Gulf clap, go ahead.

- [Participant] Hi I'm from Colette Valten. I'm from Manassas, Virginia. I go to Seton School. And my question was I haven't read your book. I'm wondering how much of it is covered on the old feminist ways of how women were able to get the right to vote? And then how it developed into something greater with Planned Parenthood and how was it started when it was small and it grew into just a disaster? How can you help people through history turn the focus from feminism and make that basic foundation of women's rights and turn it towards the Middle East, and how it can fix the problem over there? How can you turn all our crazy media ways in focusing on all the bad parts of our country supposedly? How can you actually make a stand towards what is against women in the Middle East? How can you turn it into something productive?

- We deal with a lot of those issues of course and deal at length with the rise of the feminist movement in the 70s. I would recommend more than A Patriot's History of the United States, that you look at my other book called A Patriot's History of the Modern World Volume II. And that really deals with kind of worldwide the rise of feminism and the answer to your question is that feminism like civil rights went off the rails. It stopped going after its original goal of not oppressing women, of allowing women to have choice whether it's in jobs or in lifestyle histories, whatever it was, and now it turned into a kind of affirmative action where you must radically ensure that women are pushed into outcomes of, equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity, which is a big, big issue, and if you don't know, how many of you know Jordan B Peterson? Yeah I knew you guys would know him. Peterson is awesome, and you need to listen to his talks on this even more than reading what we have to say because he really gets into this. So the movement did change and it's part of, part of controlling the whole dialogue again. You can't address this on most campuses because they will not even listen to the fact that men and women are different. Yeah men and women are different, evil! She's a witch, burn her! So what else?

- [Moderator] So this next question is from Kathleen Weber from Phoenix, Arizona. She asks what do you think it will take for Trump to get reelected?

- What do I think what?

- [Moderator] What do you think it will take for Trump to get reelected?

- Not much. So I'm glad that was asked, whoever you were. I did a book before the election. It was done before the election called How Trump Won? And I tried to sell it to any publisher. Nobody would take it, I went to every pub, nobody would take it. Joel Pollack of Breitbart also had a book on the Trump campaign. He wasn't as convinced Trump was gonna win than I was but he had a book and nobody take his book either. So we kind of both of us quit writing because it was apparent nobody's gonna give us an advance. A week after the election all these publishers are calling, hey you still got that book on How Trump Won? Yeah, yeah that's gonna cost you more now. Well they said we got two of these books. Can we merge them? I said I've never tried that before but I'm willing to try it, so I've worked with Joel and yeah it was easy. So we ended up, he was on the campaign plane with the press in the 2016 campaign and I was with a group of researchers, and analytics in backrooms and running numbers. So we kind of bounced back and forth from the campaign plane to this group. So I tweeted on August 20th, 2015. This was over a year before the election. Trump would win election with between 300 and 320 electoral votes. The final was 306. So I had that a year out, yeah. I had information that no one else was looking at. It was there, they could look at it. They just didn't want to look at it for the same reasons all these idiots today don't want to look at what's right in front of their faces. So one of the things I looked at since the election was voter registration statistics in battleground states, where I could measure them. Long story I can't measure them in every state but I found 10 states where I could measure them, Arizona and Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, states like that. What had changed? I found in every single one of these states the Democrats had lost net numbers to Republicans since the election. I'm talking big numbers. In Pennsylvania Democrats lost 85,000 since the 2016 election. Democrats in Pennsylvania have lost 250,000 off their roll since 2012. Arizona Republicans have gained net 13,000. Every single state except Colorado showed Republicans had gained net since the election. My interpretation of that was, it isn't people don't like Trump. They obviously like Trump because they're re-registering as Republicans or they're getting rid of their Democrat registration. And so based on these numbers, the Trump right now would carry every state he carried in 2016 plus New Hampshire, which I can prove because there was 8000 more Republican votes in 2016 when he lost by a thousand, and probably Minnesota because he only lost Minnesota by 40,000 votes. And Richard Barris, a friend of mine of People's Pundit Daily. That's the only pollster you really should look out for, People's Pundit Daily, he nailed 2016. Barris says that trump should have won Pennsylvania, win it next time pretty easy. So right now as of today I have Trump at 320 electoral votes. Yes ma'am.

- [Ashley] Ashley Mason from Orca Academy High School. My question is are these people that the Liberals were lying about, were they Democrats too or why were they protecting them?

- These people, I'm sorry, say that again.

- [Ashley] All the people in the slideshows that you were saying like liberals lied about, why were they lying about them?

- Okay so like the Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs, were they liberals too? Well they were communists. And liberals never found a communist they didn't like until Soviet Union quit being Soviet Union. Now it's Russia and of course now they hate Russia. They hate pooty-poo but they loved Russia just 20 years ago, I mean they were they're all doing everything they could to make sure the Soviet Union stayed alive. So the answer is yes ideologically they are trying to build up these people including these murderers and try and make it look like they were not murderers.

- [Ashley] Thank you.

- [John] Hi my name is John Perry. I'm from Westlake Village California, and one of the questions I had was last year in my history class, my teacher had us reading a lot of stuff from Howard Zinn's book.

- Of course, People's History.

- [John] Yeah that one and she mentioned your book as well the Patriot's History and she kind of talked like, oh like this book is created in response to this because Howard Zinn is not a patriot somehow but one of the things that stuck out to me was his criticism and a lot of other texts we read about Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards coming to the Americas in 1492, and I just want to know what your opinion would be about them being like were they really white colonialists that killed the natives and slaughtered millions or is there more to it than that?

- First of all we stand up to Zinn in any head-to-head battle, I dare you put us and Zinn together start by checking the sources. Oh wait, Zinn doesn't have any. He doesn't have a single source in there. I give you 40 pages of sources where you can check out where I got the material. Zinn is nothing but opinion. So Columbus we have a section, originally we had a whole lot of what we call sidebars. A little block area where we would discuss a topic. We've only kept one sidebar through all these years and four revisions and that is the sidebar did Columbus kill all of the Indians? Now one of the things you find out is that no one, no one knows how many Native Americans or Indians because I'm a Native American. I was born here. Nobody knows how many Indians were here when Columbus arrived, nobody. And every time they do a new demographic study whether it's Henry Dobbins or somebody else that number gets smaller and smaller and smaller. One time people thought there were 20 million Indians here in North America. Now the number is down to four, maybe five million if you include the Aztecs, but it keeps dropping. That's number one. Number two second thing you find is that the Indians had all of the diseases or most of the diseases that are ascribed to Columbus bringing them before he got there. Increasingly anthropologists and archaeologists are finding bones of Indians who predated Columbus and what are they finding? They're finding they had the same darn diseases that everybody said Columbus killed off the Indians by bringing in these diseases. No they already had them. Now Columbus's personal motives were mixed. He wanted to evangelize he said God, glory, and gold. He wanted to get rich. He wanted to evangelize and he wanted to expand the Spanish Empire because in their view that's what was best. All people at that time, whether it's Zulus or the Incas or the Aztecs they all believed the same thing. Their empire is the best. We're gonna expand it. The Aztecs conquered countless Indian tribes and you know what they did with them? Anyone recall? They have these nice little pyramids, aren't the pyramids beautiful? Yeah you know what they did on top of those pyramids? They took human victims, cut out their hearts while they were alive and kicked them down the side of the pyramid into Lake Ha-Ha-ku. In one week we have a record the Aztecs did this to 85,000 victims. They were killing Indians, other Indians at a rate almost as fast as Hitler killed Jews in the camps without gas. So they all had this idea their Empire's best. We need to expand it. So did Columbus result in a number of unfortunate developments for Indians through the spread of disease? Probably but most diseases were already there. Did the Spaniards enslave Indians? Of course, Indians enslaved other Indians. Zulus enslaved other blacks. I mean Muslims enslaved everybody. It was the way the world worked back then. So my overriding message to you is context, context. What did the world look like back then? Was Columbus doing anything...