Welcome to the Heritage Foundation. We welcome those who are joining us in the heritage. Org website and those who will be viewing us on cspan a book tv in the future. Also welcoming a group called the liberty bells here with us today. Very shy and retiring. For those watching online we remind you that youre welcome to send questions or comments speaking emailing the speaker and we will post the program on the homepage following the presentation for everyones future reference as well. We have copies of the book available for signing and purchase afterwards. Leaving our discussion is becky norton who serves as the Ronald Reagan distinguished fellow. She serves as chairman of the conservative action program, advocates for the heritage ethics and advances energy and resources policy in general. She is also an active board member of the policy organizations she previously serves for external relations and most recently let our restore america project, prior to joining she served as secretary of Natural Resources for the commonwealth of virginia as she served numerous positions in the Reagan White House and at the department of justice and interior. Please join me in welcoming becky. [applause] let me add my words of welcome. Each one of you have braved this cold day in washington, d. C. Im sure this program will be replayed many times. Sometime in the dog days of august being run nobodys going to b believe that i was 15 with the windchill factor of nine when we came together to visit with todd. Were delighted to have todd here at the Heritage Foundation. Its not his first visit but some people ask why you would have a book event on the deplorable guy of making America Great again when you are research and education foundation. Well, the main reason is because todd talks about in his book the importance of having people be involved. Hes going to go into more detail about all of this. Let me just say an educated consumer is the best citizen. Because we are research and education foundation, we do research on the issues that will come before the congress and state legislators in upcoming years. In order to be an effective deplorable, you have to be knowledgeable about the issues were going to be dealing with in our country in the upcoming days and months. As you all know, heritage is based on key principles, individual freedom is the keep principle. The three and a price system. What solves the problems, the needs, the wishes of the american citizens, the Free Enterprise system does. Constitutional governance, wouldnt it be nice to get back to constitutional governance, laws. Traditional values, it is very important when you think about Economic Freedom that you think about what goes in to making Economic Freedom work. Will things that happened within a family, values that you learned about in a family, integrity and hard work, respect and the importance traditional values like religious freedom, the freedom to live life according to what you believe these kind of Cultural Values are enormously important to have Economic Freedom prosper in our country and world. Then a Strong National defense. I mention this because when you hear from todd today you will hear a lot about things american citizen should do and why they need to engage in the battles. My point is that the Heritage Foundation agrees with this and believes that we can be helpful to you and to all of those watching this and reading todds book becoming forms. Be knowledgeable so that you know what you believe and why you believe it. Why are you fighting for these things that todd is going to talk to us about. Then you can go out and make the voice heard in a way that will command respect and the elected leaders will follow the advice of the deplorable school. Todd is here with fox news rad radio, most everyone in america has heard of todd. Hes often on fox news and foxbusiness. The fair and balanced channels. Is the author of four books in his latest one the deplorable sky to making America Great again is what brings them to our podium today. Please welcome todd. Thank you very much. It is an honor to be here at the Heritage Foundation and i have to say Heritage Foundation, you have indeed stayed the course and have been a beacon of light of the conservative movement. I do to want to thank you for coming out on this cold day. Its colder in washington, d. C. Than in new york city where i came from you so thank you for braving the elements as you came out. Before i get into the heart of my remarks i encourage you to follow me and we can make beautiful teats tweets together at todd starnes. I want to share with you about my background before we get into the text of my comments of this afternoon. Im originally from memphis, tennessee. Im also a christian man and my faith labors everything i do in life. One of those people that president obama was talking about who clings to his guns and clings to his religion. Im one of the folks that Hillary Clinton called the deplorable. I am i am not bitter, i am blessed. I live in Brooklyn New York among the indigenous liberal population there, not too far from Hillary Clintons campaign headquarters. I felt that to truly understand the american liberal i needed to live in their natural habitat. Its like being out on a Mission Field because among other things they dont serve too much sweet tea and that not of the woods. I want to tell you about the book before we get any further. A lot of people say when did you start writing the book because it came out a few months ago we actually started working on the project immediately after the election. In hindsight i should have acknowledged mrs. Clinton in my book for giving me the title, the deplorables guide to making America Great again was interesting because we had another title in the event and it was called we are doomed to america, youre dying to the apocalypse. Fortunately we didnt have to worry about that book. Its an amazing place. My neighborhood is populated with a large of vegetarian restaurants and yoga shops and farm to table restaurants. The ones in brooklyn only serve organic eggs harvested by amish midwives. It really is farm to table. This and the only member of the National Rifle association in the zip code. Many view members and the National Rifle assistant you know you get about a pound male month and you also get a really great looking ball cap. Its a blackball cap with the gold letters nra. In my neighborhood on the weekends right outside the local market, all of the liberal avenue us to see groups lineup and are looking for money. You have the planned parenthood, the cream peace and human rights and so on and so forth. And the pita people are the worst. Theyre very aggressive. So is heading to the market and Something Interesting happened. When those liberal groups saw the nra ball cap it was like moses parting the red sea. Except for the pita woman. She caught me coming out i was getting ready to spark a poke but because i was from the south and thats what we do. She stopped me and i had my pork but she says search you love animals and i said only if their deep fry. So they never bothered me after that. So it is what it is so i believe that faith and freedom go handinhand. That concept and idea goes back to the idea of the very founding of our great nation. I tell a story in the book about anand man named oliver hart who is a member of the baptist association. He was the pastor of a church in South Carolina before the founding of our nation. The First Baptist church of charleston. So in charleston its not the First Baptist church is that the ohio state university. Pastor hart was an incredibly effective communicator. He was preaching confidence about freedom and liberty from the pulpit he was a powerful communicator and that restart Founding Fathers. Those that were organizing the army to fight the british to secure freedom and they had an idea. Theyre having trouble in those days trying to round up enough farmers and citizens to fight the british so they dispatched pastor hart into the upstate of the carolinas along with several other ministers. Their job was to recruit an army to fight for freedom. I thought i was interesting that when it came time to fighting for freedom our Founding Fathers came to the church house for help. I believe that is a lesson that we could draw from today in these very difficult days in our nation. For the past eight years we have been told that we are the problem that we are not a christian nation that we are not an exceptional nation. Our traditions and values have been ridiculed and marginalized. We have been mocked by hollywood and dismissed by the academics. We have been bullied and belittled by the sex and gender gender revolutionaries. All that changed on election day with a man who promised to defend religious liberty. The man who promised to make America Great again. I must confess that donald trump was not my first, second, or third choice in the republican primaries. But on election day, he was the only choice. I do believe that Hillary Clintons comments about the basket of deplorables, i believe that was the turning point in the election. It wasnt necessarily the were deplorable. You might remember that moment she speaking to a gathering in new york city and she talked about the homophobic and seen a phobic. She talked about how half of donald Trump Supporters were basket of deplorables. It wasnt that word that i think oster the election. I think it it was the word youre redeemable. She was telling us that people who believe in traditional American Values, people who believe in american sovereignty and people who believe in securing our border, that our belief system is so egregious that we are beyond redemption. I think a lot of people woke up and said wait a second. Something is not right. I believe that was the moment, the turning point that put donald trump in the white house. Many conservatives understood what was at stake on election day. The Supreme Court on the lower courts were in danger of being lost for generations im willing to take the president at his word when he says he is going to defend religious liberty and put conservatives on the courts. Im going to take him at his word. I believe that hes taking steps at the right direction in these early days of his administration. Im encouraged by people like neil gorsuch, but i do have some questions about judge neil gorsuch. Im interested to see how the confirmation hearings will proceed. U. S. Client concern . Republicans have a bad track record when it comes to putting judges on the bench. The democrats dont have this problem. They put a liberal up there and here she stays liberal. The republicans, not sure what happens there gavels go wobbly. You might remember when president eisenhower was asked about some of his worst decisions in his presidency. He said the two worst decisions he made were sitting on the Supreme Court. So im cautiously optimistic but we all have to play a part in holding our president elected leaders accountable when it comes to these decisions. Anything that is pleasing her conservatives we face a very grim landscape of the plane. Over the next few moments i want to share with you the concerns i have regarding the state of American Values and religious liberty. The first is the military. Under the Obama Administration the greatest fighting force on the planet was turned into a petri dish. Just the other day i received an email from an officer at the air force base in san antonio. You may have seen my column on the story. The email told airmen to stop using offensive words and phrases. Among the words and phrases were things like a boy and girl, and colonial. The list goes on and on. There is a training briefing a few years ago that i reported on. Officers were told that the biggest threats of domestic terrorism were not coming from al qaeda or hamas, but coming from roman catholics and evangelical. Why is it they were teaching these young and impressionable men and women thats whats happening on the local First United Methodist Church is a kin to what al qaeda is up to. Another military labeled the American Family association as domestic groups. I have high hopes that general bad dogmatics will rule out the antichristian inside the pentagon. I believe he will do that quickly and i hope so. We have also seen issues involving radical islam and we have seen in our Public School system where islam has been given accommodation christianity has been marginalized. Quite frankly they have been turned into Indoctrination Centers for the left. I believe in a say this in the book that our Public Schools are being used against us. Not all will and not all teachers are bad, there is enough bad schools that is causing a big problem in the country. Weve seen a massive shift in such a short amount of time of whats happening our Public School system. Whats happening our University Campuses that are safe spaces among the perpetually offended generation. The issue of religious liberty is a key component of our book. Religious liberty is the first freedom and i contend that if youre able to chip away and marginalize and diminish religious liberty, first freedom in every other freedom we have is in jeopardy. Just look at the evidence. A study out last year shows 40 of millennials not believe there should be limitation placed on free speech. Look at the attacks. Of those of us who cling to our guidance. And the attempts to take our guns away. Again, i believe that once you go after religious liberty, Everything Else is up for grabs. I wrote a story and ive been following it for quite some time involving the sweet grandmother in washington state. I know we have covered heard on fox news and i write about her in my book. She could be a member of the literary society. She is a sweet, precious grandma and she inherited her father shot from her mother. One day some longtime customers came in and asked if she would provide flowers for their upcoming samesex marriage. She pulled them aside and is gentle and graceful as a whitehaired grandmother could do, she class there hansen told these two young man why she could not do that. She said that it would violate her religious beliefs. Then she provided these young men with several other florist around town who would do a wonderful job with their marriage ceremony. As we know, that was not good enough. You see, in washington state, they expect full and complete compliance. She was brought up on several charges of discrimination. To set an example they decided instead of just going after her business they would go after her personally. So this woman, she loses the court battle she will not only lose her business, she will also lose her home and life savings. Every single thing she had she will lose. This case has been petition to the Supreme Court, again that explains why it is so important that we put conservative justices on the bench. I asked her, and i said why did you just provide the flowers . Nobody would know. Space. She told me over the telephone, i think she was wagging her finger at me. She said young man, who would you rather obey . God or the government . Thats a question many people around this great country have been asked themselves these days. The list of people like her go on and on. Im reminded of a story a few months ago from grand rapids michigan, the vanderbilt family. They own a Meatpacking Company. One day the usda meat inspectors came for a visit. There in the break room and saw religious materials on the counter. One of the usda inspectors became offended by this materials and they summoned to the owner to his office. Can you imagine some of the a government agent summoning up owner to his own office. They told him you would either remove those materials because they are offensive to us or we will remove our meat inspectors. If you know anything about meatpacking business which i did not i have been educated on, if you remove the meat inspectors, the usda inspectors, they have to shut down the business. Fortyfive people wouldve been put out of work. So mr. Vanderbilt did as he was ordered and remove the materials. He has filed a formal complaint. This is why groups Like Alliance defending freedom in the American Family association urging President Trump to sign an executive order protecting religious liberty. Protecting people like the flower shop owner in the Meatpacking Company order. President reagan, my favorite president , i was in Junior High School when he was president. He said freedom is just one generation away from extinction. Last year we came close, very close. Franklin told me for the book that we are at a moral tipping point. I believe that god saw fit to give us a second chance. One of the reason is because of this next generation coming up. A generation of young men and women who are unashamed to stand up for freedom and libe