from events like this. tomorrow i fighter omaha nebraska and i will be meeting with the governor, meeting with members of congress, it's going to be great. the best part is that i will be able to fly without a face mask in the first time in two years. so, in recent months, i figured out the best way to deal with that is to bring a few lollipops, that's a deep of can last you a good 20 minutes. face mask, off, but it's great to see, i haven't been here at one of these meetings for a while, i've been here for more than 20 years, and so many familiar faces, some new faces. looking around here, to see a full house. and when people are here on an evening where you could be home doing whatever else, it tells us that we are having an impact. thank you for being here. it was wonderful to, ceos able to talk with most of you personally here before it started. that really lifted my spirits. and if you weren't very familiar with, this we are non profit organization, were non partisan organization, and we believe in free markets. we are lobbyist for freedom. people are saying that we are lobbyist for freedom. we fight for freedom wherever we can. our mission statement is to develop, discover, and promote free market solutions to the problems of society. were mostly known for our work and global warming, fighting against alarmism, fighting for sound science and real-ism. we address a large number of issues. a core issues over the years, have been education, financial budget issues, school issues. school choice in particular. of, late we've been particularly active fighting big tech censorship, fighting the great reset of capitalism that is being sought to be imposed upon us. and lately esg. environmental social governance agenda. we have our governance relations team out in the state legislatures. we have presented testimony in more than 50 occasions here in the first quarter of 2022. that includes 20 in-person testimonies. where most of those times we have been invited by the legislators themselves to advocate in support of free market solutions. we do that because of the support of people like you. thank you once again for all of your support here in person, for those of you donate, we are putting in money to good use. johnny moore, and with that in, mind i will turn it over to introduce our speaker. i want to say one thing, i'm a student, history i love history. as much as our sessions here discuss policies, and sometimes politics in today's world, i have been especially fired up for this talk for sometime. our speaker just wrote a book, dragons, layers and has a bunch of history, policy, and governance. i've purchased a, book i'm not quite through with it yet, and it is a compelling narrative that a quarter of the speaker tonight. i'm now turn this over to you for more formal introduction, but it's wonderful to see you all. >> a, that works. fantastic. i swear we tested all of the stuff dozens of times today. and it always goes wrong, but i want to welcome you, you may have noticed a big hammer and the back and these are our friends from c-span. they are here to record this for posterity. it's also on hardly into, but welcome everybody who's watching and let's get right to it here introduce our fantastic speaker tonight. it's the second time that a presentation has been given here at the institute. he's a native arizonian any graduated from arizona state university with a b.a. in political science. and then he put that degree use by going on the road with several different rock bands, opening for acts such a step and wealth. he switched gears again in 1976 and got his ph.d. from the university of california china barbara. it was also taught at the university of dayton for almost 20 years and is tight every single grade from seventh through college. . he's the co-author of the number one bestseller patriots, history of the united states which is now in its 31st printing and ordered half 1 million copies in print. that book actually remains the best selling home school history textbook in america. as you might know from the title it is an antidote to that book by harden, a curriculum of u.s. history available for grades eight through 12 providing through lessons with video by larry himself. his other bestselling books include you can see them handsomely displayed on the table all of these variously pulled from the mazer library of freedom here at the heartland institute. how trump won which he offered before the election, with joe pollack before the 2016 election. a patriots history of the modern world, in two volumes. again right here. the last time he was here he presented on his book, reagan the american president from 2018. he is here today to talk to us about his latest bestseller. dragonslayers: six presidents and their war with the swamp. please welcome to the stage, larry schweikart. >> thanks. all right, great to be back here, especially in a room dedicated to breitbart. i only had a few occasions to meet andrew, but one of the occasions was he went way out of his way to introduce me to the hollywood community. he brought me out, hosted a nice wonderful steak dinner for such people as actor adam baldwin, benji pirro, many other people. it was really nice of him to do that. i am always grateful to andrew for kind of leading the way. it's interesting that you mentioned the raccoons. in ohio, in our home, we had a nice big yard with a picket fence. one day the dog was out there just going crazy. there was a raccoon with its had stuck between the sense slats. so i used to tell my students, i walk back to the garage and i got my big shovel and i walked out and i smacked that slap in the fence and free that raccoon so he could run out. the kids are, don't tell me crest a little raccoon. [laughs] anyway, for those of you who don't know me, everything jim said is more or less true. i ended up teaching at the university of dayton in 1985. i wrote a number of books that are not here tonight because they're boring! their academic books, they make for good footnotes and so forth but they don't make for grave reading. i wanted to write books that people would read. so around 1999 or so mike allen and i started work on a textbook. we just wanted a book that we could use in our classes that wasn't horribly biased. we ended up writing a book which would become a patriots history of the united states. we never thought we would sell it to a publisher. in fact, it we sold out of the back of the van like the plastic straws like in california. plastic straws, hey buddy, patriots to the united states. but the publisher did pick it up. it did very well in 2004. i went on to write three other books after that. in 2010 i was on the glen beck show, you may remember this. this is when glen beck had an audience of 3.5 million a night. seven times that of cnn. it's just staggering how many people going back reached. i gave him a copy of pages history. his response was, i know this book. do i know this book? anyone who has read the book knows it's a great book. the proper response is, this is a great book! i knew he hadn't read the book. so i get a call for days later from glenn at home. he says, larry. when you are on the show i haven't read the book. no that's okay i understand. no, i always read the. i read it over the weekend. >> it's 1000 pages. this is a great book! his endorsement, he put it on his desk every night of the show. talked about it three or four or five times a night. little post notes in the. it immediately went to the top of amazon. the following week i got a call from the publisher, hey larry your book is gonna be on the new york times list this week. yeah, a way to go. and then i get a call a week later, year book is gonna be on the top ten of the new york times. and i said way to go. i get the call i can hear them in the background, they can hear the champagne cork popping and i know it's going on back there, right? the layer your book is gonna be number one in the near times left. that's a, that's good. way to go. love it. >> you don't get it's gonna be number one in the near times! i said, that's great. it's gonna be in target. it's gonna be in costco, it's gonna be a walmart. i said walmart? our book is gonna be in walmart? thank you jesus! it meant that i was writing books that everybody can read, which was about my goal was. over the years have gone on to write a number of these books. most recently i started about the swamp. obviously in the context of donald trump and what he went through. not just in 2020 but what he went through during his whole administration. in terms of people undercutting him, subverting him, working against him, from his own attorney general down. i thought, you know trump is not the only one. there have been other presidents who had swamp problems. when i started the book at thought i was looking at six different presidents with six different stories. as i began to put it together, i realize we are talking about the same thing. all of these swamps were inter related. even though i start with lincoln and the slave swamp, really the story start a little bit before him. the most important american that you probably never heard of and that's martin van buren. martin van buren created the modern-day two party system. prior to that we only had one party it was called the democratic republicans. i'm sure some of you think, that we have today. but no it really was, the democratic republicans! actually, you know what's, the period was called? it was called the era of good feelings. there was so little animosity. andrew jackson runs for the presidency in 1824, loses in the corrupt bargain. martin van buren decides he's gonna get jackson into the presidency. story is a lot deeper! you see what van buren was really trying to do was create a political party that would prevent a civil war from happening. he would do this by making sure that slavery could not be attacked, even as the northern and midwestern states began to have more and more free soil senators to congress. sooner or later they would act on slavery. how do we keep this from happening van buren asked? his answer was, money! we will buy these people off. okay? even if you are an anti slavery from pennsylvania, we will give you a government job if you just shut up and follow along with the system. we called the spoils system, or patronage. and the result, then buren did not get this, his goal was to keep the federal government small in the states stronger. what he had done, inadvertently, was create a system in which the federal government began to grow with every single election you had to give away jobs in order to get elected by the way the most powerful job this is gonna shock you in 1830 was a postmaster general of the united states i mean what kid today says mommy mommy, i want to be postmaster general! back then, everyone wanted to be postmaster general. you had 800 -- jobs you had to give away. whoever the president appointed as postmaster general, that i had a lot of power! here come the wigs, the weak party they are now on the same playing field africa to tell you the name of van buren's party with the democrats -- they come along they're on the same playing field the only way they can compete is to give away more jobs in every election they promised of napalm us more jobs. and the government starts to grow every single election you know what's, no one notices it? until 1860 part a van buren strategy was to make sure that the presidency remained in the hands of someone who was not hostile to slavery. a northern man of southern principles was the way it was worded, or a? you either get a democrat, or a northern man of southern principles, a whig in office from 1828 until 1860. and then in 1860 you've got a big problem! you have a northern man, of northern principles, who does not approve of slavery in office. even though lincoln says, i will not act on slavery he can't help it. he is going to act on slavery. he's going to appoint federal marshals, he's going to appoint federal judges who will rule in runaway slave cases. he is going to appoint custom commissioners who may allow free blacks off the ships that are docking in southern ports. he is going to appoint postmasters who are going to allow in abolitionists material. lincoln's election caused the civil war that van buren had hoped to avoid because of van buren's own system. lincoln comes in one of the first things he notices he has an army of job seekers lining up down the street. at the time, he ran the government are you ready for this? with two secretaries. lincoln ran the whole government with two secretaries. literally people could come inside the white house, they were just in there and form a long line all the way down the block waiting to talk to the president about jobs. when he wasn't busy fighting a war, you know? lincoln could not deal with the spoils swamp. his first job was to deal with the slave swamp. he cannot needed the spoils want to defeat the slave swamp. which he did. he was the only of the six presidents to be completely successful and have school. he did defeat the slave swamp. but the spoils swamp was still around, and it continued to grow. it actually got worse. after the civil war, you had all of these veterans who are now claiming benefits by riding the congressman. i was in the civil war! i need all these benefits. you would think that within ten years of the civil war the number of veterans claiming benefits from the civil war would decline because like, they would die. that didn't happen it grew as more and more people suddenly had magic memory restoration. they remember they were in the civil war they got injured and wounded whatnot. so the roles began to grow crazy you literally have thousands and thousands of job seekers descending on washington with each new administration. one author of the day said the trains going out of d.c. would be full, and the incoming trains would be full of different people. all seeking to take the job of those who just left, right? grant did not do a whole lot about this. and neither did hayes but the next guy, a guy named james garfield ran on a program of defeating the spoils swamp. he was going to do it just one small problem, he got killed. do you know who killed him? a spoils swamp or. giles koto shot him, he said i am a stalwart -- a guy who favored the swamp. i killed him, and now arthur's president. chester arthur thought he would be very favorable to the spoils swamp. he is one of those rare people in washington that when he gets in office he has a change of heart to do the right thing! he actually begins to attack the spoils slump. arthur had another problem, writes disease. bryce disease kept him from serving it second term. he's out and the mantle falls to the second of my presidents, grover cleveland i love tree he looks -- the first guy to win an election lose an election and then win an election, right? he won the popular vote all three times. he comes in and he takes on the spoils swamp just hammer in tongue. he is in their staying up late at night at the white house, reviewing all these claims were veteran benefits from people who weren't benefits throwing them out, vetoing them! kicking out thousands and thousands of these. finally he worked with congress to create something called a pendleton civil service act. this supposedly re-formed the spoil system. you know what happens in washington when they reform anything? it gets worse! they reform it, they took about 10% of the total federal employees away from the president, put it in the hands of a civil service commission. take a test and how you do on a would indicate what job you are eligible to serve in. the unseen ramification of this is now presidents had so many fewer jobs to personally give away, now they had to give away groups of jobs to lobbyists. two different industries, right? in our time you'll hear a candidate going out to patterson air force base in ohio saying i believe in this joint offense everyone cheers and all the gas from raytheon, lockheed, you know? he'll go out to colorado to the environmental protection fund and say i believe in protecting the environment been they'll cheer because they know it means money coming into their coffers. wet pendleton really did was it moved giving way german jobs and a very small level into a very gigantic level that government growth that i talked about, all the sudden it starts to increase exponentially. meanwhile, there is another swamp raising its ugly head and that was a trust swamp. the trust want consisted a big business combinations. very much like twitter, google, these kinds of giants today. facebook. teddy roosevelt was determined to do something about this. you will know that, but you may not know that one of the main reasons for wanting to do something about it was that he feared the media. he feared the yellow press would create such a firestorm not just against the big businesses but against all businesses. he thought he believed this in his heart he was protecting all business from this mob that would be raised to radicalism by the yellow press. i like teddy in a lot of ways and i don't like him and a lot of ways. you can't help a like a guy who is in a cushy government job, assistant secretary of the navy. war breaks out and he resigns and goes to raise a volunteer cavalry unit that wants to get into action and wants to see combat! not only does he do that, but he fights. and not only does the fight, to the win. not only did he win but he is awarded the medal of honor. then as president he negotiates a peace between japan and russia. he is awarded a real nobel peace prize. can you imagine any modern president receiving both a medal of honor and a nobel peace prize? i can't. roosevelt one big failure, he never ran a business. i am convinced that had teddy roosevelt, because he succeeded in everything else and he did if, he had just run a business. i'm not talking about his cattle ranch, that was a fantasy land. a playground for him. he had other people running. he didn't meet payroll is, he didn't worry about laying people off. i'm convinced iffy and run a business is antitrust activity would've been different. i'm not sure how but i think it would've been different. the one trust of course he does not take on is the media trust. at the time it wasn't that big. of course overtime, in our time, it has gotten to be monstrous! government continued to grow. agencies continue to grow, new agencies such as the fbi and cia were added. but john kennedy's time in office he is confronting a cia swamp. kennedy's problem, his task is that he needs to get rid of the cia swamp, but he needs the cia two months to get rid of it. he needs it for cuba! he needs it for a laos, he needs it for vietnam! or as lyndon johnson would say, vietnam. one time when kennedy comes into the office there is 600 americans and soften of. when he was assassinated there were 16,000 americans and soften of. i do not buy the notion that kennedy was gonna get us out of vietnam! funny trend line you have us from 616,000. that is not the trend line of getting out. kennedy did not press the cia, he feels betrayed by them, yet he still needs to use them on many occasions. that is why i consider him the first failure in our group of six. he doesn't do anything to bring the cia to heal. ronald reagan of course runs on a three-way pledge. to defeat the soviet union, to build back the american economy, and to reduce the power inside the government. unfortunately for reagan he needs the government. he needs the military, he needs big business in order to accomplish the other two. so almost like kennedy, he finds that he needs the agencies that he wants to get rid of too much to get rid of them. i will share one anecdote from my book, rage in the american president. david stockman was a true believer and reducin