this is my first time at one of these events in quite some time since i became president, unfortunately being president puts me on the road quite a bit and that's a good thing, but it keeps me away oftentimes from events like this tomorrow. i fly to omaha, nebraska. i'll be meeting with the governor meeting with some members of congress giving a talk. it's going to be great, but the best part is that i will be able to fly without a face mask for the first time in two years. so in recent months i figured out the best way to deal with that is to bring a few lollipops a tootsie pop can last you a good 20 minutes. face mask off face mask off. but anyway, hey, it's wonderful to see although i haven't been here at one of these meetings for a while. of course. i've been with heartland for more than 20 years and to see so many familiar and some new faces. and looking around here to see a full house. you really lift our spirits when people are in the building giving up your free time here on an evening where you could be home doing whatever else it tells us that we're having an impact. so, thank you so much for being here, and it was wonderful to see i was able to talk with most of you personally here before we started and that really lifted my spirits. for those of you who don't know or if you aren't very familiar with the heartland institute. we are a nonprofit organization. we're a nonpartisan organization. we believe in free markets. we're here as sort of lobbyist for freedom. of course, we're not really lobbyists who are advocates for them. but people say aren't you lobbies what we're lobbies for them we fight for freedom wherever we can our mission statement is to develop discover and promote free market solutions to the problems that come from society. we're mostly known for our work in global warming fighting against alarmism fighting for sound science and realism, but we address a large number of issues here our core product our core issues over the years have been education financial budget issues school issues school choice in particular and then of late we've been particularly active fighting big tech censorship. fighting the great reset of capitalism that is being sought to be imposed upon us and lately esg environmental social governance agenda. we have our government relations team out in the state legislatures actively. we have testified we've presented testimony and i believe more than 50 occasions here in the first quarter of 2022 including i believe 20 in-person testimonies where most of those times we've been invited by the legislators themselves to advocate on in support of free market solutions, and we do that because of the support of people like you so thank you once again for all of your support here in person for those of you who donate to the heartland institute. we're putting your money to good use donate more. we'll keep doing more for you with that in mind. i'm going to turn the mic over to jim blakely to introduce our speaker just before i do i just want to say one thing. i am a student of history. i love history and as much as our sessions here discuss policy and sometimes politics in today's world. i've been especially fired up for this talk for quite some time are speaker. just wrote a book dragon slayers. it's as much history as policy and governance. i have i purchased a book. i'm not quite through with it yet, but i've read much of it. it is a compelling narrative if he's a quarter of the speaker as he is a writer. we're in for a treat tonight. so jim i'm gonna turn this over you for more formal introduction. but thank you all for being here tonight. it's wonderful to see you. okay, usually i'm so loud. that works. fantastic i swear we tested all this stuff dozens of times today. you know, it always goes wrong when the cameras goes speaking of cameras. i want to i want to welcome you might have noticed big camera here in the back. these are our friends from c-span. and so they're here to to record this for posterity and it's also on our own live stream on heartland's youtube page heartland tube. so welcome everybody who's watching on the live stream as well. we'll just get right to it here to introduce our fantastic speaker tonight. i think this is the second time maybe the third time larry has given a presentation here at the heartland institute, but he's a native, arizona. he graduated from arizona state university with a ba in political science. and then he put that degree to use by going on the road with several different rock bands. opening for such 60 70s acts such as steppenwolf he had roughly switched gears again in 1976 and got his ma and from asu in history then a phd from the university of california santa barbara, and he's also taught at the university of dayton for almost 20 years, and he's actually taught every single grade. from 7th through college so that's fantastic. he is the coauthor with michael allen of the new york times. number one bestseller a patriots history of the united states, which is now in its 31st printing with more than a half a million copies in print. that book that book actually remains the best-selling homeschool history tech textbook in america and of as you might know from the title, it's supposed to be a antidote to that. book by howard zinn people's history the united states in 2019, he founded the wild world of history curriculum website, which is now available and it's a full curriculum for us and world history for grades 11, or i'm sorry eight through 12 providing full lessons with video instruction by larry schweikert himself. his other best-selling books include seven events that made america you can vaccine them right here on this handsomely displayed on this table. all of these are actually pulled from the the mazer library of freedom here at the heartland institute. so we have seven events that made america how trump won which he authored before the election with joel pawlik completed before the 2016 election patriots history of the modern world in two volumes again right here. and then the last time he was here he presented on his book reagan the american president from 2018. he is here tonight to talk to us about his latest bestseller dragon slayers sixth presidents and their war with the swamp police. welcome to the stage larry swiker. sooner all right. thank you. it's great to be back here, especially in a room dedicated to andrew breitbart. i only had a few occasions to meet andrew. but one of them was he went way out of his way to introduce me to the hollywood community. he brought me out hosted a nice wonderful steak dinner for such people as actor adam baldwin ben shapiro many other people and it was just really nice of him to do that. so i'm always grateful to andrew for kind of leading the way and it's interesting you mentioned the raccoons because in you know, ohio in our home we had a nice big yard with the picket fence and one day the dog was out there just going crazy and there was a raccoon with its head stuck between the fence slaps. and so as i used to tell my students i walked back to the garage. and i got my big shovel. watch out and i smacked that slap in the fence and freed that raccoon so he could run off of all the kids are all just doing don't tell me you crash the little raccoon. so anyway, hmm for those of you who don't know me everything jim says more or less true. i ended up teaching at the university of dayton in 1985 and i wrote a number of books that are not here tonight because they're boring there are academic books and you know, they make for good footnotes and so forth, but they they don't make for great reading and i wanted to write books that people would read and so around 1999 or so mike allen and i started work on a textbook. we just wanted a book that we could use in our classes. that wasn't horribly biased. and we ended up writing a book that would come to be patriots history the united states and we never thought we would sell it to a publisher. in fact, we thought it'd be sold out of the back of a van, you know, like with the plastic straws out in california. yes buddy last patriots history the united states but publisher did pick it up and it did very well in 2004 and i went on to write three other books after that and then in 2010, i was on the glenn beck show and you may remember this. this is when glenn beck had an audience a 3.5 million a night means as seven times that of cnn. it's just staggering how many people glenn beck reached and i gave him a copy of patriots history and his response was i know this book do i know this book? well anybody who's read the book knows it's a great book and the proper responses. this is a great book. so i knew he hadn't read the book and so i get a call for days later from glenn at home. he says larry when you're on the show, i hadn't read the book. that's okay glenn. i understand is no no, i always read the guest book. i read it over the weekend. it's a thousand pages. this is a great book and his endorsement he put it on his desk every night of the show and talked about it three or four or five times a night with little yellow postums in it and immediately went to the top of amazon and then the following week. i got a call from the publisher. i said hey larry, your book's going to be on the new york times list this week. but yeah way to go. yay, and then i get a call a week later and say larry you're good book's gonna be in the top 10 of the new york times. i said, whoo way to go and then i get the call and i can hear him in the background all partying. i can hear the champagne corks popping. whoa. i know what's going on back there right and and they said larry your books gonna be number one on the new york times list i said, right that's good way to go love it. no, you don't get it's gonna be number one on the new york times. i said, no. no, that's great. no, you don't get it's gonna be a target. it's gonna be costco. it's gonna be in walmart. i said walmart, our book's gonna be in in walmart. thank you jesus. i meant that i was writing books that that everybody could read which is what what my goal was and so over the years. i've gone on to write a number of these other and we're back a number of these other books and most recently. i started thinking about the swamp obviously in the context of donald trump. he went through in not just 2020, but what he went through through his whole administration in terms of people undercutting him and subverting him and working against him from his own attorney general down. and so i thought you know trump's not the only one. there have been other presidents who've had swamp problems. and so when i started the book, i thought i was looking at six different. presidents was six different stories and as i began to put it together, i realized we're always talking about the same thing all of these swamps were interrelated. so even though i start with lincoln and the slave swamp really the story starts a little bit before him with the most important american that you probably never heard of and that's martin van buren. martin van buren created the modern-day two-party system that we have now prior to that. we only had one party. and it was called the democratic republicans. i know some of you think yes, that's what we have today. i know but that it really was called the democratic republicans and you actually you know what that the period was called is called the era of good feelings because there was so little animosity but andrew jackson runs for the presidency and 1824 loses in the corrupt. bargain martin van buren decides that he's going to get jackson in the presidency, but the story is a lot deeper. because you see what van buren was really trying to do was to create a political party that could keep a civil war from happening. he would do this by making sure that slavery could not be attacked even as the northern and midwestern states began to add more and more free soil senators and representatives to congress where sooner or later they would act on slavery. how do we keep this from happening van buren asked and his answer was money. will buy these people off. okay, even if you're an anti-slaver from pennsylvania, we'll give you a government job if you just shut up and follow along with the system. we called it the spoils system or patronage. and as a result and van buren didn't get this because his goal is to keep the federal government small and the states stronger what he had done inadvertently was to create a system in which the federal government began to grow with every single election because you had to give away jobs to get elected and by the way the most powerful job. this is a shock you in 1830 was the postmaster general the united states. i mean, kid today girl that mommy i be postmastered general. yeah, nobody but back then everybody wanted to be postmaster general. could you had 8,500 jobs that you got to give away. so whoever the president appointed as postmaster general that guy had a lot of power. okay. so here come the wigs and the whig party they're now on the same playing field as the democrats. oh, i forgot to tell you the name of van buren's party is the democrats. so the wigs come along they're on the same playing field. the only way they can compete is to give away more jobs. so in every election, they promised jobs and they promise more jobs and they promised more and so government starts to grow every single election. you know what nobody notices it till 1860. because part of van buren strategy was to make sure that the presidency remained in the hands of someone who was not hostile to slavery a northern man of southern principles is the way it was worded. all right, and so you either get a democrat or a northern man of southern principles wig in office from 1828 until 1860 and then in 1860 you got a big problem. because you've got a northern man of northern principles who does not approve of slavery in office. and even though lincoln says i will not act on slavery. he can't help it. he's going to act on slavery because he's going to appoint federal marshals. he's going to appoint federal judges who will rule in slave runaway slave cases. he's going to appoint customs commissioners who may allow free blacks off the ships that are docking in southern port he's going to appoint postmasters who are going to allow in abolitionist material. so lincoln's election caused the civil war that van buren had hoped to avoid because of van buren's own system. lincoln comes in and one of the first things he notices he has all these army of job seekers lining up down the street at the time. he ran the government you ready for this with two secretaries. lincoln ran the whole government with two secretaries and literally people could come inside the white house and they just stand there and form a long line all the way down the block waiting to talk to the president about jobs, you know when he wasn't busy and fighting a war, you know. and so lincoln could not deal with the with the spoils swamp because his first job was to deal with the slave swamp. he kind of needed the spoil swamp to defeat the slave swamp, which he did. he was the only of the six presidents took b completely successful in his goal. he did defeat the slave swamp, but the spoiled swamp was still around and it continued to grow it actually got worse after the civil war because you had all these veterans who were now claiming benefits by writing their congressman saying i was in the civil war, i need all these benefits and you would think that within 10 years after the civil war the number of veterans claiming benefits from the civil war would decline because like they die that didn't happen it grew as more and more people suddenly had magic memory restoration and they remember they were in the civil war and that they got injured or wounded or whatnot and so the roles begin to grow crazy and and so you literally have thousands thousands of these job seekers descending on washington with each new administration one author of the day said the trains going out of dc would be full and the incoming trains would be full with different people all seeking to take the jobs of those who just left right? well grant didn't do a whole lot about this but the next and neither did hayes but the next guy a guy named james garfield ran on a program of defeating the spoils swamp. and and he was going to do it. when one small problem he got killed. and you know who killed him a spoils swamper? charles goto shot him and said i am a stalwart. that's a guy who favored the swamp. and now arthur is president and see chester arthur was thought to be very favorable to the spoiled swamp, but he's one of those rare people in washington that when he gets in office he has a change of heart to do the right thing. and he actually begins to attack the spoiled swamp. but arthur had another problem bright's disease and bright's disease kept him from serving a second term. so he's out and the mantle falls to the second of my president's grover, cleveland. and i love cleveland. i look at him as as trump the first first guy to win an election lose an election win an election, right? but cleveland won the popular vote all three times and he comes in and he takes on the spoiled swamp. i mean hammer and tongue he is in there staying up late at night in the white house reviewing all these claims for veterans benefits from people who weren't veterans and throwing them out and vetoing them saying no, i'm not gonna accept this thing. we kick out thousands and thousands of these and so he finally worked with congress to create something called the pendleton civil service act. and this supposedly reformed the spoil system now, you know what happens in washington when they reform anything it gets worse. and so they reform it and they took about 10% of the total federal employees away from the president put it in the hands of a civil service commission where you would take a test and and however you place that test is what job you would be eligible to serve in. but the unseen ramification of this was that now presidents had so many fewer jobs to personally give away now they had to give away groups of jobs. to lobbyists to different industries, right and so in our time you'll get a candidate going out to wright patterson air force base in ohio saying i believe in a strong defense and everybody goes yay, and it's all the guys from raytheon and lockheed, you know, and they'll go out to colorado to the environmental protection fun though. i believe in protecting the environment. oh, yeah, because they all know it means money coming into their coffers. so what pendleton really did was it moved giving away of government jobs on a very small level into a very gigantic level and that government growth i talked about all of a sudden it started to increase exponentially. meanwhile, there's another swamp raising its ugly head and that was a trust swamp and the trust swamp consisted of big business combinations. i mean very much like twitter and google and and these kinds of giants today facebook. and teddy roosevelt was determined to do something about this you all know that. but you may not know that one of his main reasons for wanting to do something about it was that he feared the media. he feared the yellow press would create such a firestorm not just against the big businesses, but against all businesses and he thought he believed this in his heart that he was protecting all business from this mob that would be raised to radicalism by the yellow press now. it's interesting. i like teddy in a lot of ways and i don't like him in a lot of ways you can't help but like some guy who is in a cushy government job assistant secretary the navy war breaks out and he resigns and goes to raise a volunteer cavalry unit that wants to get into action and wants to see combat and not only does